With real projects so few and far between, I'd have to learn to live with my professional frustration. Sure, anger about the scarcity of directing gigs boiled to the surface sometimes. However, I'd keep writing and take whatever acting work came my way. I didn't give a damn as long as my daughter was out of danger. I'd always see my cup as half full, not half empty.
One day, the writer-director Larry Cohen called from Los Angeles to say he'd created a leading role especially for me in a picture he was shooting in Vermont. It was called A Return to Salem's Lot (1987), based on the Stephen King novel.
"Sam, I want you to play a Nazi-hunter," said Cohen.
"How many weeks?" I asked.
"About three."
"What's the loot?"
"Thirty-eight grand."
"It's a deal. Send me the script."
"Will do."
Larry Cohen was a real pro, honest and warmhearted. He'd earned a lot of dough in the sixties on a successful TV series called Branded, then gone on to write and direct some ballsy pictures like Bone (1972) and The Private Files off. Edgar Hoover (1977) as well as the money-making gore trilogy Its Alive! I'd first met Cohen in the late seventies, at a reception in a swank Los Angeles hotel. He surprised me by explaining that he was living in my old house in Coldwater Canyon. I'd lost track of the big Spanish-style mansion I'd bought in the fifties when I was flush. It'd been sold by my exwife, passing through the hands of a succession of owners. Cohen had acquired it from the actor Clint Walker.
One weekend, Christa and I went over to Coldwater Canyon for lunch with Larry and his wife, Janelle. I wanted to show Christa how I used to live, despite the risk that she might get depressed about the big difference between the Shack and my luxurious villa from the fifties. However, Christa was a good sport and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the big mansion. We also cemented a great friendship with Larry and Janelle.
It was damned cold in Vermont on Cohen's location for Salem's Lot, with several all-night shoots. Many of the younger actors complained about the weather, the food, the accommodations, or whatever. Not me. Being on an American movie set again was simply delightful. Larry and his crew were amazed by my seventy-five-year-old energy. Halfway through the movie, my character gets his foot caught in a bear trap. As I moved quickly around the set puffing on my cigar, I kept forgetting that I was supposed to have a bum foot. The crew had to keep reminding me to limp. As an actor, I tried giving Larry exactly what he wanted. As a fellow director, I tried cheering hirn up when he needed it, staying out of his hair as much as possible.
Another young friend, Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki, asked me to play an American gangster in his movie Helsinki Napoli All Night Long, shooting in Germany in 1987. The pay was okay, the prospect of spending a few weeks in Berlin, appealing. About the same time, Christa got cast as Hemingway's mother in a European TV series entitled The White Whale, shooting near Trieste. Afterward, Christa met me in Berlin. Our pal Barbara Grigor came down from Edinburgh to Paris to look after Samantha while we were away.
A big, likable man, Kaurismaki, like most Finns, drank lots of very cold vodka and never seemed to be affected by it. We'd gotten to know the Finns during our visit to Sodankyla, where Mika and his filmmaker brother, Aki, had launched their Midnight Sun Film Festival, in 1986. Contrary to what people think, the Finns aren't native Scandinavians, but descendants of nomadic tribes of Hungarians who migrated up from the Baltic region. At various times, they've been ruled by Sweden and Russia. Finland gained its independence in the turmoil of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Finns are a proud and decent people, who, as I informed Mika, were the only Europeans to ever pay back their war debt to the States.
With my wooden stake and hammer, I tracked down Nazis-turned-vampires as Van Meer in Larry Cohens A Return to Salem's Lot.
Sodankyla is within the Arctic Circle. Six months out of the year the people there live in darkness, which may explain why they're such ardent movie buffs. For the summer solstice in June, however, the sun never sets. So the Midnight Sun festivalgoers stay up all night, drinking vodka and watching movies. We really enjoyed the atmosphere that inaugural year, as well as the company of the other directors, like Jonathan Demme and Bertrand Tavernier. I was honored to discover that a street in Sodankyla was later renamed for me. Unfortunately, I probably won't ever make it back to Finland and see the sign that says "Samuel Fullerin Katu."
Helsinki Napoli was a delight to make. Mika cast veteran Eddy Constantine as the male lead. Discovered by Edith Piaf, Constantine had been a big star in France in the fifties and sixties. Eddy was a good guy, even if he had a hard time holding his liquor. He'd worked with Christa on Godard's Alphaville (1965). In Berlin, Eddy enjoyed grabbing us at any time day or night to recount tales from his glory days. That got old fast.
Mika's female lead, newcomer Margi Clark, was a lot of fun to be with. Margi looked like a younger version of Janet Leigh. Her boyfriend had been a member of the Sex Pistols. Margi would regale us with hilarious stories about growing up in a poor Catholic family in the suburbs of Liverpool. I loved people who could laugh at misfortune and hardship.
Berlin was both inspiring and disturbing to me. So many accomplished people had worked in the great city, yet Hitler plotted his conquest of Europe there, laying plans for the Final Solution. Every time I saw the wall that cut through the heart of Berlin, I got a pang in my heart. Built in 1961, the wall was a harsh reminder of the cold war, a terrible waste of energy and resources. Both systems that had sustained the wall, capitalism and communism, were terribly flawed. Neither had made the world a peaceful, democratic place. The Soviet Union wasn't the "evil empire" that Reagan called it, but their gulags, censorship, and oppression were horrible. In America, racism, homelessness, illiteracy, violence, and poverty still flourished, making a mockery of our motto "home of the free and the brave." After dinner one night, Christa and I wrote our names on the big, ugly monolithic wall, not imagining that it would come down a few years later, ending years of harsh division.
When we had a break in the shoot, I'd end up in the Cafe Einstein on the Lindengasse, where I'd read the Herald Tribune and jot down ideas for future scenes and dialogue in a small notebook I always kept with me. One weekend, Kaurismaki's people got us a car and a driver so we could visit East Berlin to see the Max Reinhardt Theatre, where great talents like Marlene Dietrich had emerged. When the car drove us to Checkpoint Charley, Christa and I had to separate for passport control. Christa, a Ger man citizen, had to stand in a long line to get through the border check. I was whisked through because they thought I was a well-to-do American businessman. Exasperated, Christa decided then and there to request U.S. citizenship, something she'd put off for too long.
We talked about Ernest Hemingway that day in the car in East Berlin. Christa had been rereading his books in order to play his mother in that TV series. I'd never liked Hemingway, neither the man nor his incessant macho persona. Sure, some of his writing was damn good. However, I'd never forgiven him for badmouthing my outfit, commenting once that the Big Red One acted "as if they'd won the war all by themselves." Nothing could've been further from the truth. What the hell did Hemingway know about fighting on front lines anyway?
The Parisian leftist newspaper Liberation had published an article calling me "the Jewish Hemingway," which hadn't pleased me at all. Pigeonholing an artist with a tag line, especially a religious one, was ludicrous. Would a Catholic author known for fantasy writing enjoy being called "the gentile Kafka"? Another French reporter had once referred to me as "a Jewish John Ford." As much as I loved Ford, that was just as ridiculous an allusion, appealing to simple minds with simplistic notions. The Parisian intelligentsia just didn't know how to get a handle on me, a bang-for-thebuck moviemaker on a self-imposed exile in their country, minding my own business and taking care of my family, far from soulless, guileful Hollywood. French intellectuals were ready to analyze everything into the ground. One writer called me a "prophet without honor." Bullshit! For Chr
issakes, what was all the fuss about? The articles and comments, even the complimentary ones, didn't put any butter on your spinach. The movie business in France, like the one in America, was full of intrigues, cliques, and power games that needed to be avoided at all costs. What it all boiled down to was this: Who was working and who wasn't? Fortunately, I was, even though the gigs were for acting, not directing.
My next job was for Jacques Perrin in a show called Doctors of Mankind, part of a twelve-part TV series about a humanitarian organization of French physicians who donate their services in trouble spots around the world.' Perrin was a wonderful man, one of the finest Frenchmen I'd ever meet, a filmmaker with a genuine democratic spirit and unshakable code of ethics. Perrin had begun his career as an actor and moved into producing, with such accomplished, thought-provoking pictures as Z (1969), State of Siege (1973), The Children of Lumiere (1995), and Microcosmos (1996) to his credit. Perrin's understanding and tolerance were evident. I loved the guy because he put his ideals into action, staying clear of heavyhanded political contrivances and nationalistic generalizations.
Jacques's segment of Doctors of Mankind was set among the boat people of the Philippines. He cast me as a callous ship captain who eventually shows some concern for the miserable conditions of the boat people who live in the harbor where his ship is anchored. The lead was played by Jane Birkin, with whom I got along beautifully in our rehearsals in Paris. Jane had been married to the French singer and cult figure Serge Gainsbourg, who looked to me like the spitting image of the tormented painter Chaim Soutine.Z I'd written an outline for a movie about Soutine, but Gainsbourg wouldn't live long enough for me to get it made.
Returning to the Philippines was always in the back of my mind after I had discovered that island country while making Merrill's Marauders in the early sixties. Christa and I took a long flight from Paris, via Bangkok, to Manila. Cast and crew were then moved to the island of Palawan, where the boat people lived in primitive shelters. It was like a refugee camp in a war zone, living conditions at their worst. The sickly people and undernourished children were pitiful to see. We shot most of the story aboard a freighter anchored in the harbor, but some scenes took place in the boat people's village too. Seeing old ladies and children scavenging for food from garbage dumps in order to survive was revolting. Such hunger left you feeling speechless. The gap between rich and poor in the Philippines was so appallingly wide. It was hard not to get emotional after seeing those abysmal living conditions. I kept thinking of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, begging for a morsel of bread. A century later, a continent away, human beings were clawing and scratching for food like starving animals.
I wondered how in the hell President Corazon Aquino was going to reduce her people's suffering. When I remembered Imelda Marcos and her thousands of pairs of shoes, purchased with some of the millions that the Marcoses had plundered from the Philippine people, those scenes of poverty really made me angry. Jacques Perrin's film tried to show the outside world the distressful truth.
The main reason Perrin's shoot went smoothly was Bernard Lorrain, one of the best production managers I'd ever encountered on a movie set. Lorrain handled actors and extras with respect and kindness, attending to details with expertise while juggling a small budget. I knew I wanted to hire Lorrain on the next picture I'd direct. But then, who knew if I'd ever get the opportunity to direct another movie?
Sons and
Sonsofbitches
54
n 1988, the bad news reached me in Paris that John Cassavetes was very sick. Alexandre Rockwell, a young filmmaker whom John had mentored, came to see me about playing a role in his independent movie, Sons. Alex had written the part especially for John, that of a paralyzed father whose three sons decide to take him for a final, sentimental visit to France. When Alex had finally pieced together the dough to make the picture, John was too ill with cirrhosis of the liver. He told Alex to come see me. I said I'd do it. We dedicated the entire project to John.
Cassavetes and I had first crossed paths in the fifties when I was at Fox. For John, being a terrific actor making good money wasn't enough. He was intent on becoming a director, too, though no one wanted to back his first film, Shadows. In i96i, John bankrolled it himself, making a drama about interracial romance with a cast of unknowns, partially improvised, shot on a i6-mm camera on weekends when his crew got off their regular jobs, edited by John at home over many months of sleepless nights. Talk about balls! After Park Row, I knew how consuming it was to write, direct, and produce a picture and pay for it yourself. Cassavetes couldn't find any other way to tell his yarn. I loved this guy!
Cassavetes's daring and defiance of studio filmmaking got him plenty of attention from critics and from-who else?-the studios. They solicited him to direct a couple of conventional pictures in the early sixties, Too Late Blues (1962), and A Child Is Waiting (1963). Cassavetes was thoroughly dissatisfied with the experience.
"How the hell did you ever tolerate working in the factories, Sammy?" Cassavetes once asked me.
"Zanuck!" I replied.
John understood. I was lucky enough to have stumbled upon producers who loved good stories, mensches whose word was better than a contract, decisionmakers who green-lighted a picture with nothing more than "Okay, let's make it!"
With John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands at the Shack. Cassavetes was an original all the way Gena was a balky lady
Cassavetes went on doing pictures on shoestring budgets that he could control. He'd learned the first law of independence: Keep your budget small so you don't need the studio's goddamned big bucks to make your movie. Cassavetes juggled everything-scripts, technicians, actors, money men-to get those movies done. And what movies! Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), Love Streams (1984). It was beautiful, what John had accomplished by dint of his relentless work, fierce talent, and roguish charm.
John and Gena had been our neighbors in Laurel Canyon for a helluva long time. I didn't spend that much time with Cassavetes, but when I did, there was a lot of kidding around and bawdy jokes. Underneath the highspiritedness, an unspoken complicity kicked in, something raw and solemn that we identified in each other. What we shared, I think, was the same agony that a helluva lot of writer-directors live with, which is having a goddamned shelf chock-full of movie projects that, for whatever reason, just didn't get produced.
Cassavetes died on February 3, 1989. All young filmmakers today who call themselves "independent" owe a tremendous debt to him. I hope they pay it down by tapping into their heart of hearts, taking risks, making the kinds of personal films that John had the talent and courage to do.
No doubt about it, Alexandre Rockwell was one of Cassavetes's cinematic heirs. Tall and charming, as handsome as a young Peter O'Toole, Alex had a gift for storytelling. I came aboard Sons because I was so fond of Alex, even if the money was less than minimal. The shoot kicked off in a New Jersey veteran's hospital where my character is vegetating, unable to walk or speak. My three sons, each sired with a different wife, decide to schlep me to France in a wheelchair for one last family adventure. We went to Paris and ended up shooting in Normandy, where the sons take their old man to revisit his D-day memories.
Hell, that was an independent picture! Talk about shooting a movie on a wing and a prayer; Alex was constantly struggling with money, crew, locations, and actors. The three young men who played my sons begrudged working for a pittance. Though Rockwell's producer promised us all more money when the picture went into profit, we'd never see a penny of those deferments. For me, because of the great chemistry I had with Alex, the shoot was bearable. I remember how the poor guy, beset with so many obstacles, tried to keep us all smiling. Sometimes at the end of the long days, Rockwell needed a little cheering up himself. So I made a point of telling him funny stories about my own calamities directing dirt-cheap pictures. My tales cracked him up, allowing him some blessed relief. After all, the
crap that always happens behind the scenes on a movie set becomes a joke in years to come. Only the movie remains.
Sons turned out to be a damn good picture, as if Cassavetes's spirit had been watching over us during the entire production. The film was invited to festivals all over the world, including Venice and Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilians awarded me the Best Actor Award, even though my character sits almost motionless in a wheelchair throughout the picture, a stroke victim who manages just one line of dialogue. I never dreamed that only a few years later I'd end up a stroke victim myself, playing that character from Sons for real.
Like so many small-budget movies, Sons never got distributed correctly. Alex has gone on to make other lovely movies, like In the Soup (1992), with Steve Buscemi, and Somebody to Love (1994), with Rosie Perez. In the latter, Alex flew me over to LA for one well-paid scene with Perez, playing a feisty, veteran movie producer a la Sam Spiegel who crashes a Rolls on a winding Hollywood street, says a few wise words, and kicks the bucket.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 53