Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (12 page)

"I think it's in your second drawer," Michelle said. "His cap and gown. He got an honorary degree."

Marvin came out of the bedroom with a pair of binoculars. "Look what I found," he said. He went out on the porch and peered into the mist at a thin line of birds floating beyond the surf. "What are they? Coots, or ... are they ducks?"

Marvin's son, Chris, walked into the living room. "Hi, Chris," Marvin said. "Are these coots, or ... ducks?" Chris went out onto the porch and had a look through the binoculars. "Hard to say," Chris said. He put a leash on LaBoo and took him down to the beach for a walk. Marvin fell back into his chair. The grayness of the day settled down again. On the stereo, Johnny Cash was singing "Greensleeves." The beautiful music of "Greensleeves."

"Do you realize," Marvin said, "that he gets three million a year for singing that shit? I walk the line, I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I met him in Nashville. He said, You haven't heard my otherstuff? No, I said, I haven't. He sent us his complete twenty-seven fucking albums. Jesus, Johnny, I like your stuff, but for Christ's sake ..."

Marvin got down on his knees and pulled twenty-seven Johnny Cash albums off a shelf.

"He's embarrassed," Marvin said, "I'm embarrassed. We have nothing to say, really. So he sends me all his albums. I tried to listen to all of them. It look me two weeks."

"How old is Cher?" Michelle said.

"Cher?"

"Yeah."

"We don't know yet," Marvin said. "These glasses are no goddamned good. Where are my glasses?"

"He went out on the porch and stepped on his other glasses," Michelle said. "They didn't break, and he said it was an act of God, telling him not to read any more scripts. So he took the lenses and scaled them into the ocean. Now he can't see."

"Why," Marvin said, "does it take sixty-seven percent of my income to pay the publicist? He says I should take some broad to lunch, right? It costs me thirty-seven dollars to get out of the joint, and then she knocks me. You know what I asked her? I'll bet you've never had an orgasm, have you? I asked her."

"Lee, you didn't say that? Really?"

"I never said anything like that in my life."

Another record dropped on the stereo. "When it comes to `Clair de Lune,"' he said, "I have to go pass water. Tinkle, is the expression. Oh, sweetheart, do you think this day will soon be o'er? I have a hangover. We had fun last night. Went up to the corner, had a few drinks, told a few lies."

He disappeared down the hallway. Chris, a good-looking kid of sixteen or seventeen, came back with LaBoo, who was banished to the porch to dry out. LaBoo squinted in through the window, wet and forlorn. "Poor LaBoo," Michelle said. "It's the second time he's been rejected today."

Marvin returned. "So what have you decided on?" he asked Chris.

"I was looking at a four-door 1956 Mercedes," Chris said.

"Hitler's car?" Marvin said. Whistle. Pop! "Kid, you deserve the best because you're the son of a star. Why don't you get a job?"

"Chris is working at a record store," Michelle said. "He's working for free right now, until the owner of the store makes enough money to pay his employees."

"Jesus Christ," Marvin said.

"I was looking at a BMW," Chris said "It's $2,100. New, it would be three thousand."

"Why not get new?" Marvin said.

"I don't have three thousand."

"But big daddy does."

"Let's order pizza," Michelle said. She picked up the phone and ordered three pizzas, one with anchovies.

"You're pregnant," Marvin said. "She's got to be. Christopher, you're going to be a grandfather."

LaBoo, who had edged into the house through a crack in the door, walked out of the bedroom now with a pair of women's panties in his mouth.

"Christ, LaBoo, keep those panties out of sight," Marvin said. "Last night, she says, Where'dyouget these panties? Idunno, I say. She says, Well they're not mine. I say, Honey, Isure as hell didn't wear them home." Marvin sighed and held his hands palms up in resignation. "The only way to solve a situation with a girl," he said, "is just jump on her and things will work out."

He took the panties from LaBoo and threw them back into the bedroom. "So what do you think?" he asked Chris.

"The BMW has fantastic cornering, Dad," Chris said. "It has really fantastic quality."

Marvin paused at the door to look out at the surf. "Don't be deceived by quality," he said. "Get something you like now, and trade it in later. The car may turn out to have such fantastic quality you'll puke seeing it around so long."

He sighed and sat down in his chair again.

LaBoojumped into his lap.

"LaBoo, you mean black prince," Marvin said, rubbing the dog's head carelessly.

INTRODUCTION

n 1974, I was supposed to join a small group that would fly from Stockholm to the island of Faro and watch Bergman at work on the island where he lived. Because of a ticketing error, I arrived in Stockholm a day late, and missed the opportunity. Bergman had a publicist named Ernie Anderson, who worked through his agent, Paul Kohner. Ernie had only two clients: Bergman and Charles Bronson. Ernie arranged for this visit to the set of Face to Face in 1975, where I finally met Bergman and his professional family: he used the same crew members year after year, from the cinematographer Sven Nykvist to the woman who prepared tea every afternoon. I love what Bergman has to say here about the human face.

Some years later, Bergman had a disagreement with the Swedish tax authorities and left the country. He flew to Los Angeles and asked his agent Kohner to arrange a visit to a Hollywood set.

"Ernie is working on the new Charles Bronson film," Kohner told him. "You want to see that?"

He did. Ingmar Bergman, the high priest of cinematic art, visited the set of Breakheart Pass, a Charles Bronson Western.

"Please explain to me what you are doing," he said to Bronson.

"Well," said Bronson, "this is a scene where I get shot. So I'm wearing these squibs with fake blood under my shirt, and-but you know all this stuff. You're a director."

"No, no, please continue," Bergman said. "This is all new to me."

"You mean you don't use guns in your pictures?"

1975

STOCK HOILM-When he is in Stockholm, Ingmar Bergman lives in a new apartment complex called Karlapan. It's comfortable, not ostenta tious; Bergman doesn't often have friends in because he considers it not a home but a dormitory to sleep in while he's making a film. His wife Ingrid prepares meals there, but if the Bergmans entertain it is more likely to be at his customary table in the Theater Grill, a stately restaurant directly across the street from the back door of the Royal Dramatic Theater. The table is not easily found, or seen; it is behind a large mirrored post, so that Bergman, who can see everyone in the room, is all but invisible.

During the eight or ten weeks it takes him to direct a film, Bergman awakens at a reasonable hour, around eight, and drives to Film House in a little maroon car. Film House is a large modern structure twenty-five minutes' walk from the center of Stockholm, and it houses not only film and television production facilities but also the theater, film, and dance faculties of the University of Stockholm. The building is always filled with discussion and activity, much of it centered around the bar of the Laurel and Hardy Pub on the second level, but when Bergman is in residence to make a film, a certain self-consciousness seems to descend on Film House: it's the same, I was told, as when the pope is in the Vatican.

Bergman parks in a reserved space near the side door of Film House and j oins his actors and technicians for breakfast. It is served in a cluttered little room presided over by the hostess for this picture; for every film he makes, Bergman hires a hostess, and lists her in the credits. Her job is to make coffee and serve afternoon tea and fuss over people in a motherly sort of way. When you are making a picture about the silence of God, or metaphysical anguish, or suicide-as Bergman usually is-it helps if everyone feels right at home and there's a pot of coffee brewing.

The film he is working on today will be called Face to Face, and it is about an attempted suicide by a self-tormented psychiatrist, who will be played by Liv Ullmann. "For some time now," Bergman wrote in a letter to his cast and crew, just before production began, "I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause." His attempt to work it out led to the screenplay for Face to Face, in which the woman will face her terrible dread (common enough in Bergman), will attempt to surrender to it (also nothing new), but then will transcend it, will have a small victory over her darker nature (this hopefulness has only started to emerge in Bergman's work in the past three or four years, since Cries and Whispers, and it is the cause of much speculation among his friends).

Face to Face will be Bergman's thirty-sixth film and it comes in his thirtieth year as a director. His career falls out into a certain pleasing symmetry: after early screenplays, he began directing in 1945 as a very provincial Swedish imitator of the Italian neorealists; he had his first international success in 1955, with Smiles of a Summer Night; in 1965 he began work on Persona, that most profound of modern films; today, he is considered one of the greatest living filmmakers. For Face to Face, he has gathered around him once again, as he does almost every spring and early summer, his basic crew and a group of actors he has used time and again. Only occasionally will there be a new face.

Now they join him for coffee. Liv Ullmann is dressed in an old cotton shirt and a full blue denim skirt; she wears no makeup and her hair is tossed back from her forehead as if to make the declaration that she's been asleep until fifteen minutes ago. Bergman first met her on a street corner talking to her friend Bibi Andersson, just at the moment he was casting Persona. He liked the way they fit together, and cast them together, on the spot. She has since become one of the most important actresses in the world, but here in Film House she is friendly and plain-spoken, more like a den mother than a star. This is her seventh film for Bergman.

Gunnar Bjornstrand, tall and stately in his seventies, gravely considers the room and leafs through his script. He was the squire in The Seventh Seal and the father in Through a Glass Darkly, and is one of the most familiar figures in Bergman's repertory company. He has been ill recently, but he came out of retirement to play Ullmann's grandfather in the new film, and has responded to the work so well that Bergman has expanded the role for him. This is his sixteenth film for Bergman.

Katinka Farago, a robust woman in her thirties, hardly has time for coffee; she wants a moment to speak with Bergman about the next week's production schedule, and he listens and nods as she explains, urgently, her problems. It is the duty of a production manager to have problems; no one has ever met one who did not. Katinka came to Stockholm from Hungary in 1956, a refugee, and got a job as Bergman's script girl. He made her production manager a few years ago, in charge of all the logistics of time, space, and money. This is her seventeenth film with Bergman.

Sven Nykvist photographs Bergman's films. He is a tall, strong, fiftyone, with a beard and a quick smile. He is usually better-dressed than Bergman, but then almost everyone is; "Ingmar," a friend says, "does not spend a hundred dollars a year for personal haberdashery." Nykvist first worked for Bergman on The Naked Night in 1953, and has been with him steadily since The Virgin Spring in 1959. This will be his nineteenth title for Bergman, and the two of them together engineered Bergman's longdelayed transition from black and white to color, unhappily in All These Women and then triumphantly in A Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers.

Nykvist is in demand all over the world, and commands one of the half-dozen highest salaries among cinematographers, but he always leaves his schedule open for Bergman. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," he says, "and then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot-usually about the fifteenth of April. Usually we are the same eighteen people working with him, year after year, one film a year."