My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  Making a picture is always a tremendous strain on a director, who is supposed to be the source of energy. And being the source of energy, he must also be a monument of patience. But I’m so impatient on a set, I always announce at the beginning, so that it’s clear, that no assistant director is allowed to ask for silence, or to talk to sound, and sound is not allowed to say anything except, “Rolling,” after I say, “Camera.” Not another word. So then, after you get through with that, you have to wait for Joe with the hammer, or Jill with the curl—or whatever it is.

  Then, after you’re done with the shooting, you go into the cutting room. And that’s a tremendous nervous strain, too. Editing is the other great pain of being a director, how much of your life is spent in a dark room, not creating, but waiting for someone to do something. Waiting, not for yourself to think of an idea in front of a typewriter or behind a camera, but for other people who do dumb things. And the dumber the thing is, the longer it takes. You advance the film to the place you want, then make the note and hope the cutter understands, and wait till he executes it. Because he has to roll back the film, or he puts it in backwards, or it’s upside down, or there’s a break in the film, and he has to go and find it.

  I hate those great huge rolls of film in stacks of cans. And I have a system, which is, I always make what I call a source, for every scene. Which is another reel that includes every fragment of what I’ve picked out that might be good. Because in a bad take, there may be something I like, so I put all of them on one reel. And before I’m finished with a scene, I always run the source, to be sure I’ve squeezed everything I can out of it. But I have to run through the whole reel to find that one bit, so it takes forever. I spend all my time handling film. The new editing machine, which I’ve seen now, is the greatest step forward since I don’t know what.

  HJ: The flatbed?

  OW: It means that three months’ work can be done in ten days.

  HJ: Why do I fear that something about the creative process will get lost by that expedition? I like to go back and forth, looking over everything again and again.

  OW: I don’t look over everything again and again. You know that I never wait until after I’ve looked at the rushes to begin the editing. I cut them as I’m looking at them. But I suffered agonies spending twelve hours a day on the old machines. Why not spend six? Before, my ratio was, I figure, three days cutting to one day of shooting. Now, at most I would spend a fraction of that on the cutting. What that means is that I no longer have to be the great organist at the console, which drove me nuts. Now I can behave as if I were painting a picture or writing a script or a book. If I want to think, I just stop and think. It liberates you. Frees you from taking months out of your life, just sitting around. Now, I don’t wait for the tool. The tool waits for me.

  (Zsa Zsa Gabor enters.)

  ZSA ZSA GABOR: How are you, darling? How wonderful to see you.

  KIKI: Arf! Arf!

  ZG: Whose dog is that?

  OW: That’s my dog, who bites.

  ZG: No, no. (To Kiki) You bite?

  OW: Yes. Especially Hungarians. How are you?

  ZG: Fine, darling.

  (Zsa Zsa Gabor exits.)

  HJ: I see your point. I’d love to speed up my editing process, especially if I gained more time to think.

  OW: But of course, it’s going to be the end of the director controlling the cutting. Because the cutting will all be done by the time he gets off the set, by the editor. Who will have worked very hard for an hour and a half every day. Then the cutter really will get a credit with a card for himself for great editing. But how will anyone know who edited what? Who made what cut? It’s hard enough to know what’s directing, what’s acting. You really don’t know, in any single instance, whether it’s the actor or the director. But you never can tell that to a critic.

  HJ: I need help with the script of my new movie, which I’m calling Always. I’m going to act and direct, and I always have trouble with that. The first day is insane, every time, because I’m sitting there, in the scene, trying not to be there, so I can see what is going on.

  OW: You have to be able to press a button and become the director for a certain length of time, and then become the actor. Say, “Fuck all the rest of it; now I’m gonna act.”

  HJ: Let me tell you the story line, which is based on my real relationship with my ex, Patrice, who’s going to act in it. Prior to when the movie starts, she has come back from Santa Fe, where she’s been for six months. I’ve called her up and asked her to come back to the house that was our house—now my house—to sign the divorce agreement. In honor of the occasion, I’ve decided to cook her dinner. I don’t know how to cook, and I do something wrong, which results in her getting food poisoning. Either I pick mushrooms from my garden, stupidly, or I leave the fish out too long, or—

  OW: May I stop you right on that point, with food poisoning?

  HJ: Sure.

  OW: Mushrooms are too dangerous. Mushrooms—that’s like life or death. Don’t call it “food poisoning.” She’s told you, over and over again, that she’s terribly allergic to something, and you forgot it, and put it in the stew, where it’s unrecognizable. It could, in a Freudian way, be interpreted as deliberate.

  HJ: So, I surprise her with this lovely dinner that I’ve made myself. She’s pleased, touched. And in the course of our two-person dinner, with elaborate silverware—

  OW: Beautiful napery—it’s obviously not only more than you’d ever do, but more than you could ever conceive of doing. It looks like a page out of “Home” in the Los Angeles Times.

  HJ: With flowers on the table—everything.

  OW: Comme il faut.

  HJ: She’s stunned, and touched and everything. In the course of the dinner, the audience learns a little bit of the background, which is that she left me two years ago, that I was devastated because I thought this marriage would last for the rest of my life. We didn’t break up because of fights or arguments or incompatibility, like most people. It had more to do with today’s world, where women are told, “It’s not enough to be happy, it’s not enough to love somebody. You’ve gotta find out who you are,” and all of that. The point is we really love each other, despite her having done this thing. In the course of the dinner the bell rings. It’s the notary who has to witness the signing of the divorce papers.

  OW: Now, why did you do that? Because that’s essentially gross.

  HJ: Is it poor taste? I wondered. I can prepare her by saying, during dinner, “Listen. We have to sign in front of a witness who is a notary.”

  OW: If you say that right away, it’s all right. As long as it isn’t a surprise. As a surprise, it’s gross. You can’t really have cooked her this marvelous dinner, and then say, “And now we have the man with the notary stamp.”

  HJ: This is exactly what I’m asking you for, so this is marvelous. Thank you, Orson. I hope you don’t mind doing this.

  OW: No, I love it!

  HJ: I own an old Wurlitzer jukebox. I put on a Fred Astaire tune from the thirties, and we dance. And it is during the dance that she starts feeling ill. She has to stop. I take her upstairs to bed—my bed, which was our bed—and put her to sleep there. I quietly tiptoe out and into the cutting room, which is a room around the corner in the upstairs of the house. I am a man who makes documentary films on science and science-allied fields for public broadcasting. And I’m working on a film either on time and memory, or on the relationship between men and women. Or on the chemistry of love, that pseudo-science that tries to investigate the emotional condition.

  OW: What worries me about everything you’ve said just now about the three subjects, is they all sound like they might turn into allegories for your story. And that’s bad. Bad, bad, bad.

  HJ: Perhaps, more than anything else this afternoon, that’s what I have to ask you about. Naturally, I admit I am tempted to use—

  OW: Don’t do it.

  HJ: Not allegorically in an intellectual way, but in an emo—<
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  OW: Not in any way.

  HJ: Too heavy-handed? Too schematic? But stuff about memory, and the past, and time and loss—that’s the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about, and I’m quite obsessed with my childhood, my past, and so on.

  OW: I just don’t know about the documentary.

  HJ: All right, let’s leave that open. I forgot to mention one thing. The very opening of the movie you’re probably gonna hate. Which is, I sit in a chair, in my living room, speaking into the camera. I say I was completely happy, I was positive that I had the best relationship in the world, and there was nothing that I wanted. Then one day she came home from yoga class. And the camera whirls to the door, and Patrice comes in. This is a flashback. I see that she is worried. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” “Something is obviously wrong. You look upset.” I keep probing, which is what actually happened in real life. And she says, “I’m thinking that I don’t know if we can live together anymore.”

  Then the camera comes back to me in a chair—present time—and I say, “After that came the most devastating two years of my life. I cried, I experienced the most incredible pain that could be imagined. Eventually I felt better, I got stronger, I went about my life. And tonight she’s coming over to sign the divorce agreement. I’ve gotta cook her dinner.” I get up and go into the kitchen, and the doorbell rings. That kind of thing. Basically, to try to cover, in perhaps a minute and a half, the whole two years we were together. And bring it from when she says, “I can’t live with you anymore,” to now. Any thoughts on that?

  OW: I don’t like it at all.

  HJ: Why?

  OW: I smell director. I smell director. It’s getting too neat. You’re setting yourself up for a terribly tight, well-constructed piece of clockwork. You see how the whole movie could be like that.

  HJ: Oh, I would hate the whole movie like that.

  OW: So, don’t lead us to expect it. Don’t set us up for something we’re not gonna get, and that looks cleverer than its content. The content should be more important than the ingenuity of the director.

  HJ: I didn’t mean to make the shot too smart. I wanted to take care of the past that way, quickly, in one setup.

  OW: Now, I would suggest that the past—I don’t think this is too precious—the past should have her coming in with a Chinese dinner in buckets—or you doing that. In other words, so we see how they lived. You know, they’re kind of intellectual gypsies. “I went out to the Imperial Palace and got all the stuff you like.” So we’ve seen that the happy past consisted of takeout food. And the dinner and the notarized divorce is, you know, Lubitsch. And I would suggest—only because you asked—that if you do do that dinner, when she is expressing her appreciation and surprise at this effort, that you turn against what you’ve done, and condemn it as a piece of Lubitsch nonsense. So, in effect, you start arguing with her about her appreciation of what you’ve done for her.

  HJ: That’s very good—very, very good.

  OW: Sure. You say, “All I lack is, you know, three fiddles and a cimbalom.”

  HJ: Three fiddle players and a what?

  OW: And a cimbalom.

  HJ: What’s that?

  OW: That’s the thing that—(sings a few notes). Pronounced ZIM-ba-lom. It’s a funny word.

  HJ: But what about my jukebox?

  OW: You shouldn’t say, “I’ve got the jukebox.” She should say, “You’ve got the jukebox.” And she stands there. Not asking you to dance, but with her arms out. So it’s the easiest thing to go and take her …

  HJ: Now, the next day we wake up together in the same bed. I fell asleep next to her, close to her. And she wakes up shocked that I’m there.

  OW: Has it been made clear to us that there’s gonna be no rising magoo in the bed?

  HJ: That there wasn’t any what? Oh, sex, you mean? That would be clear.

  OW: She sits up, maybe, because she’s gotta go to the can. And she says to you, “I know that you fed me”—whatever it is—“papaya,” you know? “It’s all gone, and it wasn’t fun getting rid of it. I’ve told you at least nine hundred and ninety-nine times that I’m allergic to papaya. I think I should go to the office.”

  HJ: She’s just taken a job in Los Angeles at the Yoga Center which, in fact, is where Patrice now lives. She likes it. She feels it’s part of the search.

  OW: The search, the terrible search. Wait a minute. I have an idea. You must let me tell it. It has nothing to do with the plot at this point. It’s an argument for you to give her, somewhere. This great search is mainly being conducted on the West Coast. And it is because people, pioneers, have been fighting their way to get here for one hundred and fifty years. Finally they’re here, and there’s nothing here.

  1985

  23. “I’ve felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb.”

  In which Orson refuses to embrace Henry because he is afraid of catching AIDS. Lear is going forward, but he thinks the political situation in France is unstable. He fears Wind is dated. Cradle is stalled.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: You look troubled? What? No hug?

  ORSON WELLES: If we could figure out a way to hug without kissing, that would be fine.

  HJ: Why no kissing?

  OW: You know, we could have AIDS.

  HJ: Well, neither of us, as far as I know, has AIDS. Is there something I should know about you, Orson?

  OW: They don’t know how it’s transmitted, and saliva is one of the responsible parties.

  HJ: We don’t drool on each other when we kiss.

  OW: I’m not kissing anybody. I’m not even sure about shaking hands. But I can hug you in such a way that we each face in opposite directions.

  HJ: Orson, what is this, a comedy routine?

  OW: I’m deadly serious. I haven’t gone through my life to be felled by some gay plague. We might be carriers. You never know.

  HJ: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. If people are going to start doing that …

  OW: I might be a carrier. For every thousand guys with AIDS, five thousand are carriers who will never have it.

  HJ: Yes, but those are people who have homosexual relationships, the carriers.

  OW: There are 6 percent of the people that have it for which there is no explanation.

  HJ: I’m going to pee.

  OW: Then what are you going to do?

  HJ: Zip up, wash my hands, and come back.

  OW: That’s not good enough. Are you going to touch the knobs?

  HJ: Orson, you’re becoming a fanatic.

  OW: Yes, a fanatic to save my life. Did you touch Kiki?

  HJ: Yes, I petted her.

  OW: I don’t know if dogs can catch it.

  HJ: If dogs could get it, they’d be dying. All gay guys have dogs.

  WAITER: Qu’est-ce que vous aimez manger?

  OW: Rien. I’m not too well. I don’t think I’m going to eat.

  W: Do you want a little turnip soup? Very nice.

  OW: I don’t like soup.

  W: OK, then. Maybe a salad or something mild?

  OW: Never salad in a restaurant … (To HJ) I’m determined never again to eat a salad in a restaurant. Because I’ve watched them in the kitchen, and I’ve been told that’s how you get hepatitis. It’s the dirty-fingers disease. The first courses are only salads. There must be something else they could come up with for a first course. Goddamn nouvelle cuisine; they only think in terms of salad. They make salad out of every goddamn thing in the world—salad of roast beef. What salad generation do you belong to?

  HJ: What?

  OW: This emphasis on greenery, and all that. The ’sixties. The Great Health Movement. Oh, I’m sure it’s done everybody good. And it’s probably good that people don’t drink the way they used to. Everybody was drunk when I was young. It wasn’t fun. It was boring. You just got used to dealing with your drunken friends.

  HJ: I came from a generation where everybody was high all the time.

  OW: Equally bo
ring. Although I think that more middle-class Americans and fewer show-business people are stuffing it up their nose these days.

  HJ: What’s that painting on the wall?

  W: A David Hockney.

  OW: Patrick asked me to do a drawing as well, and I’m ashamed that I didn’t do it. I have a bad hand. For the last three months, I can hardly sign my name. I have this pinched nerve. I got it in Paris, for no reason at all. Agonizing pain. I’m crippled—these two fingers are almost dead. Oh, boy, I’m scared.

  HJ: Chiropractors are good for that.

  OW: Or acupuncture. I got into the hands of a fake acupuncture man in Paris who came with incense. And he said, “What house are you?” And I said, “What house?” And he said, “Astrologically.” I was, already, “Goodbye.” And he wasn’t even Chinese or anything. On the other hand, I also think that there are many areas in medicine where the proper quack is the right fellow to go to. But I have a foolish prejudice against anybody who isn’t a doctor, because my father believed in everyone who wasn’t a doctor. He lived his life by his horoscope, which was done for him by very expensive people. He believed in everything—

  HJ: But science.

  OW: But God, you know? It’s often the people who are not religious who are the most superstitious. There are more clairvoyants in Paris than in any city in the world, four clairvoyants to one doctor, even though the French don’t believe in God. It’s the old Chesterton remark, “If you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything.” It’s true. Because if you don’t believe in God, you will substitute every mystery that is outside of yourself, however nonsensical it may be. And, of course, astrology is so maddening, because it was all laid down at a time when the planets were in another position. An Aries is now actually a Pisces, and so on. I’m old enough to remember when everybody had their palms read, the way they now have their charts done. And in palmistry as practiced in the West for the last two hundred years, every line is different from the old palmistry of the Hindus. The lifeline was here, the love line there, but it’s still supposed to work. The place with the greatest number of believers in this sort of thing is the Soviet Union, supposedly ruled by dialectical materialism. The hunger to believe has not been filled by Lenin, mummified in the Kremlin. The time may come when we’ll be able to live without mystery, but then we’ll have to question whether we’ll still be capable of poetry. It’s pretty hard to imagine—a world or an art without any kind of deception.