What can you tell me about your first aborted attempt at making Bone?
Before I secured the services of George Folsey, Sr., I had gathered a bunch of friends together, who were in the movie business making low-budget pictures. I had decided that we would shoot Bone in 16mm. We shot for three days, and when those three days were over, I looked at what we had and realized that it simply wasn’t good enough. If I was going to take this very good script and make a good movie out of it, I needed to do things the proper way. This meant shooting the film in 35mm with the best possible equipment and technicians that were available and affordable. So, we abandoned the 16mm version and recast the part of the housewife, who was originally played by Pippa Scott. [2] Pippa is a perfectly good actress, but her performance didn’t have the comedic edge that I wanted. Joyce Van Pattern, her replacement, clearly had that comedic ability. Joyce’s speaking voice and her whole attitude lent itself to the humorous aspects of the picture and Pippa just didn’t have that. Pippa was the only cast member that was changed before we got the money from Nick Vanoff and went back and started all over again. However, all that unused material appears on the Blue Underground DVD release of Bone for those who are interested in seeing it.
How did the rest of the principal players come together?
Andrew Duggan was a personal friend of mine, who had acted in “The Captive,” one of my episodes of The Defenders. He was also someone I saw socially in Los Angeles on a regular basis. I thought Andy was a wonderful actor, who never got to do the parts that he was capable of doing. He always played authority figures like a general, or the President, or some corporate executive, which never allowed him to display the sheer breadth of his talent and comedic ability. What happens in Hollywood is that people often get typecast in a certain kind of part. They may work all the time and make a nice living, but pretty soon the limitations of what they are called upon to do wears them down and the actor becomes a walking, talking cliché. I thought that Andy deserved better than that, so I wanted him to play the husband from the very beginning. For the part of The Girl who befriends Andy’s character, I had originally auditioned Susan Sarandon. She was very good and, in fact, I would have given her the part if — and it sounds rather odd to say this — my German Shepherd dog had not disagreed. That dog was the most placid animal that ever lived and never acted aggressively with anybody. But as soon as Susan Sarandon entered my house, that dog went out of her mind! She would not stop barking and trying to attack Susan. I had to lock the dog in the back and she never stopped barking all the time Susan was in the house. I figured that something must be wrong with this girl. I mean, why would my dog hate her so much? So, I didn’t give her the part. You could even say that my dog cost me the chance to have Susan Sarandon in my first movie.
How did Jeannie Berlin come to your attention for the role?
We were on a talent hunt for someone to play The Girl and Joyce Van Patten suggested Jeannie, who was the daughter of Elaine May. [3] Joyce mentioned that Jeannie had the same qualities that her mother had. I then interviewed Jeannie and liked what I heard (I particularly liked her voice) and gave her the part. She did a good job, and the very next picture Jeannie did after Bone was The Heartbreak Kid, which earned her an Oscar nomination. As a matter of fact, Elaine May, who was directing The Heartbreak Kid, flew out to Hollywood to see me so she could view the scenes that Jeannie had done in Bone. She was trying to get Jeannie the lead in The Heartbreak Kid, but certain people didn’t want to hire her because they didn’t know her work. Elaine was trying to put her daughter in the movie and she asked me if I would make a copy of the scenes Jeannie was in and send them to the New York office so she could show them to the producers. I did this at my own expense, and, sure enough, they liked what they saw, and Jeannie got the part. I felt good that I was able to help Jeannie move on with her career, but then she was later interviewed in Newsweek magazine and asked about her work in Bone. She said, “Oh, that’s something I’d rather not talk about.” I don’t know why Jeannie said that. I’m sure she regretted it later on, but at that particular time Jeannie was going through a period of unfortunate arrogance. After she did The Heartbreak Kid and received the Oscar nomination, Jeannie got the opportunity to star in a picture at Paramount called Shelia Levine is Dead and Living in New York which was based on a best-selling book. [4] Apparently, she was a monster during the making of that film and attempted to run the whole show, alienating a lot of people in the process. She showed no respect for anybody and suddenly thought she was Barbara Streisand. The picture was a huge flop and Jeannie basically managed to sabotage her career as after that nobody would go near her. All the people she had been abusive to were very happy when that movie was a total failure. I gave Jeannie her start. Unfortunately, she gave herself a finish.
Did you ever see her again?
About a year or two after Shelia Levine failed at the box office, I got a call from her in the middle of the night. She sounded all doped-up and was asking if she could come over to my house and take a shower. I couldn’t understand it, but Jeannie said she had been living on the street for ten days. I had kids and I didn’t want her in the house in that state. I certainly didn’t want to invite her over in the middle of the night to take a shower after the way she had behaved. I wasn’t feeling particularly sympathetic to her anyway. After that, I didn’t hear from Jeannie again for several years. Then I ran into her at the Mayflower Hotel, when I was shooting a picture in New York. [5] Jeannie was going in to interview with Martin Scorsese for a role in The King of Comedy. [6] She called me up later and said, “I didn’t get the part. Somebody called Sandra Bernard got the job.” I thought that was rather ironic since I had also helped Sandra get her start in the business. Sandra used to be my wife’s manicurist and wanted to be a comedian. I actually got the owner of The Improvisation Club to give Sandra her first chance to go on stage as a performer. She’s always been grateful and friendly about that, so it was funny that the part Jeannie was hoping to get went to somebody else I had also helped. I’ve seen Jeannie since then and have taken her to lunch. We are both on a very friendly basis now, which is nice.
Did you storyboard Bone extensively, as a lot of first time directors are inclined to do?
I’ve never storyboarded any movie that I’ve made — ever! It would be the last thing in my mind to do and that’s odd because of the detailed sixty-four-page comic books I conceived and drew as a kid. I was quite accustomed to illustrating an entire story, but, interestingly, it never once occurred to me to draw one of my movies out. This was the case even with regards to some of the more complicated movies I’ve done, like Q — The Winged Serpent and The Stuff, which both involved a lot of special effects.
How fast were you shooting Bone?
I don’t remember how many set-ups I did on an average day. I never think about anything like that. I never count my shots. I just stage the action and then cover it and try to do some innovative camera angles in the scene. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you how many set-ups I had done the previous day even if you’d asked me when I was shooting the picture. I never think about it. Of course, when you do a studio picture that’s all they talk about. They ask you, “Where is your shot list? How many set-ups are you going to do?” That’s why I don’t do studio pictures. That’s not my style of working. I just like to make it all up as I’m shooting.
What was the thinking behind having Bill [Andrew Duggan] make sales pitches to camera in a junkyard crammed with the bloody corpses of accident victims?
At the time I was writing the script, it was very prevalent to have all these pitchmen coming on television at night selling used cars. Most of the late night movies on TV were sponsored by pitchmen, and Los Angeles was the automobile capital of America. I had to find an occupation for this character and decided to make him a car salesman. It seemed like an interesting idea and a means of integrating some of these familiar commercials into the narrative of the picture but do it in a way that maintained
the dreamlike fantasy aspects of the piece.
The scene where Bone attempts to rape Bernadette [Joyce Van Patten] is still quite shocking. What was the atmosphere like on set when you shot that scene?
It was nothing that was particularly provocative. I mean, we knew we were going to do that scene and we just did it. Joyce was a good sport about it and got into the action. Obviously, the whole crew were standing around and there was nothing intimate about the situation. I think the most shocked of anybody on the crew was good old George Folsey and his cohorts from MGM. They were all between seventy-five and eighty years old, and these elderly gentlemen were not used to seeing a Black man mauling a White woman like that. It was certainly nothing that they had ever anticipated shooting in a movie, but they did their job. Nobody in the crew ever said anything to me, but I do think they were a little shocked by it. They were probably thinking, What have I got myself into here?
What was the audience reaction to that scene?
It was exactly what we expected: they were shocked. We put funny lines of dialogue in there, the funny, absurd things that Bone said to the housewife as he was trying to attack her, that I think counterbalanced the scene. At one point he says, “I’m just a big Black buck doing what’s expected of him.” Bone is basically saying that he is adhering to the common thoughts, misconceptions and expectations of the Black man. I thought that while he was saying that line, it took the edge off the intensity and seriousness of what was happening in the scene.
The press-book for Bone presented an “advance think-piece” claiming that the film “is the first time in motion pictures that the subject of a Black rapist has been explored in detail.” Exactly what myths were you trying to explode?
I have always felt that the whole core of racism has a sexual basis. White people have always been afraid that the Black man is more potent than the White man. They are afraid that the Black man is a more ferocious lover, that the Black man is superior physically to the White man at sex just as he usually is in sports. In athletics, there is no question that Black people are more advanced over White people in terms of their speed and power. That’s why most of the great basketball players, football players, and runners are Black. There’s no denying it. So, if that superiority would correlate to sex, then the Black man would be a more sexually potent person and the White woman’s idealised fantasy figure. That is the primary reason that White people would fear Black people and try to subjugate them. It would be the root of racism.
Is that the significance of Bone’s speech about “The Nigger Mystique”?
That was Bone articulating these ideas. There is a perpetual fantasy that is being projected about Black people: that they are more dangerous, more formidable, and, again, more sexually potent and active than White people. They were considered more of a sexual threat but then, as time passed, people became more rational and somebody like Sidney Poitier emerged. Poitier became the acceptable image of the Black man rather than the negative image of some violent, immoral figure. He was intelligent, articulate, and attractive, and was sort of a homogenised Black man. He was the #1 movie star and assisted in relegating the old stereotypical image of the Black shoeshine boy, or the Black porter, or the Black criminal that White people had created. That image faded into the background and a new kind of Black man came along, who was now compatible with White people and didn’t have to be feared. Bone does not look like a contemporary Black man. He looks like a Black man from the 1930s and ‘40s because that was the old image that was feared: the big Black buck. Usually, that image of the Black man has a packet of camel cigarettes stuffed in his shirt pocket and that’s exactly what some people imagine and expect to see. That is not the Black man of Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby. This is a different kind of Black man. This isn’t even the Black man of the rock and roll era that produced figures like Jimi Hendrix that White people have often found attractive and entertaining. No, Bone was the old-fashioned Black man that had just stepped off the plantation. So many times, White people would see a Black man walking towards them and they would cross the street. The very sight of a Black person on a lonely street would be enough to frighten them. I tend to say that even today things are not so very different.
What was the most pertinent lesson you learned in making Bone?
That, again, having total control is what it is all about. I didn’t have anybody looking over my shoulder telling me what to do, or making any suggestions. I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. I thought, Yeah, this is the way I want to make movies. I don’t want to make movies the way I wrote screenplays, where everybody weighs in with their opinion and you have to do rewrites and make changes that pretty soon end up destroying — or at the very least diluting — what I set out to do. Here, I was making a movie which I wrote, directed, produced, controlling every aspect of the production. So, I realized very early on that this was the way I wanted to make my films and I more or less did it that way for the rest of my career. I was totally spoiled by my first directing experience on Bone.
Was the finished film in any way different from the original script?
We added a few things while we were shooting and there were some improvisations with the actors, but it was more or less pretty close to the script. I never went back and compared the completed film with my script. I can’t recall which lines of dialogue were dropped or which moments were added. When it came to putting the movie together in editing, whatever we got, we got, and that was it. Editing a movie is like writing a movie in a way, in that you are taking elements and moments of the story and are moulding and restructuring them in order to find your movie. We didn’t eliminate anything important and pretty much included everything we shot. We just tightened it up a little bit.
Speaking of the editing, I noticed there are a lot of quick cuts in the movie.
I figured that a movie which is, for the most part, shot inside one house with very few extraneous locations, meant I needed to energise the picture and move it along visually. Another reason that there are also a lot of cuts is that I was trying to control the performances. I would speed the performances up by taking out pauses. This helped to create moments of overlapping dialogue that lent the scenes more urgency and kept the pace going as quickly as possible. I could do that by cutting and trimming the scenes, which gave the impression that the actors were performing faster than they actually were. Sometimes I look at the picture now and I think there are too many cuts. On my later movies, I found that some stuff — particularly comedy — works better in two shots or a master shot rather than in a series of quick cuts and close-ups. At the time I was working on Bone, it was my first film and I was trying to do something different. I was experimenting with various things, but I still think it looks good today. In fact, I was delighted with the DVD of Bone put out several years ago. The quality of the transfer and the rich vibrancy of the colours look just great. It really brings out George Folsey’s terrific photography, which in some scenes almost looks three-dimensional. Yaphet comes out looking particularly beautiful. The tone of his skin, the blue-black quality of his skin, looks just remarkable.
The suggestion that Bone is an imaginary presence is reinforced with his mysterious disappearance at the end of the film.
That’s right. He was the wife’s fantasy figure, but he may have also been both the wife and the husband’s fantasy figure. The Black criminal is a fantasy figure of middle class and upper class White people, and the character of Bone embodies that fear. What they feared above all else was the intrusion of a Black man into the sanctity and sanctuary of their homes; allowing this bogeyman to assault their wives and ransack their property. It was a very common bug-a-boo, a popular fantasy-fear. The housewife may have also wanted to destroy her husband and used the figure of Bone to perform that service. Bone simply allowed her to basically kill her husband before vanishing. What is also interesting about that last scene where you see Joyce Van Patten sitting in the sand, blaming this Black man for the crime she herself h
as committed, is how similar it is to the final scene in Last Tango in Paris. In that movie, you have the young Parisian girl, who concocts this whole fantasy story around Marlon Brando’s character whom she has just killed. [7] The girl claims that he is a complete stranger that has attacked her, ignoring the fact that she was using him for sex up in this apartment. The girl fantasises this lie to justify the murder in preparation for the arrival of the police and rehearses her story directly to camera, just as Joyce does in Bone. Those final scenes are exactly the same, but it’s my understanding that Bone was made before Last Tango in Paris.
Larry Cohen Page 13