Pauline Kael (49 page)

Pauline thought that for pure movie thrills, the new
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
was “the American movie of the year—a new classic.” She approved of the change of scene, because Kaufman and the screenwriter, W. D. (Rick) Richter, had beautifully captured the strays and eccentric artists that populated San Francisco. What better setting for a movie about the dangers of creeping conformity? She felt that eccentricity was “the San Francisco brand of humanity.... There’s something at stake in this movie: the right of freaks to be freaks—which is much more appealing than the right of ‘normal’ people to be normal.” She also had special praise for Veronica Cartwright, who played the film’s second female lead. Cartwright was an actress whose work Pauline had been following closely for some time. In her review of Cartwright’s 1975 film,
Inserts
, Pauline had compared her to Jeanne Eagels—“a grown-up, quicksilver talent.” Writing about
Invasion
, she observed that Cartwright possessed “such instinct for the camera that even when she isn’t doing anything special, what she’s feeling registers. She doesn’t steal scenes—she gives them an extra comic intensity.”

“Sweetie, you need a publicist—nobody knows you,” Pauline told Kaufman when they met at a Chinese restaurant shortly after the release of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Kaufman declined the idea of a publicity push, but he and Pauline maintained a pleasant friendship for years. “She recognized that
Body Snatchers
was in large part a comedy,” said Kaufman. “Pauline put her finger on it. It’s meant to be playful. We had such a great time making it, and everyone connected with it had a great sense of humor.”

Not long after her review of
Body Snatchers
appeared, Pauline also had the opportunity to meet Cartwright in New York. They had a drink at the Plaza, and Pauline was full of questions and advice on what Cartwright might do next. James Toback joined them briefly, because Pauline wanted him to interview Cartwright for a possible role in an upcoming film. “She was obsessed with James Toback,” Cartwright remembered. “I mean
obsessed
. It was almost motherly. She wanted to make sure a meeting was set up between us, and it was almost like she was trying to guide him through something.”

When Toback left for another appointment, Pauline and Cartwright remained behind to finish their cocktails. Evening was coming on, and Pauline invited Cartwright to attend a screening with her that night. Cartwright, who was having difficulties with her then-boyfriend, thanked her but begged off, mentioning her need to deal with her problems at home. Pauline could not hide her disappointment. “I had the weirdest feeling she was offended,” Cartwright observed. “I don’t know quite what happened, but she never reviewed me after that. She mentioned me, but she never picked me out in anything else. She was determined not to say anything.”

Pauline’s growing sense of dissatisfaction with the films she was seeing took a particularly harsh turn in her treatment of Paul Schrader’s new film,
Hardcore
, starring George C. Scott as a strict Midwestern Calvinist whose daughter disappears on a church youth-group trip to Los Angeles; when a private detective he has hired determines that the girl is appearing in hardcore porn movies, Scott’s character goes out to L.A. to try to find her and bring her home.

Years later, Paul Schrader admitted, “I was never happy with how that ended up. I don’t think the film works. I changed the whole ending—the ending never worked.” Schrader was also upset that the producer, Daniel Melnick, had pulled a casting switch on him. Initially, the part of the hooker who befriends Jake and helps in his quest to find his daughter was to be played by Diana Scarwid. “Danny Melnick didn’t want to fuck her,” Schrader recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not going to put a girl in there that I don’t want to fuck.’ So I put a lightweight actress [Season Hubley] in there against George, and that killed the whole section.”

Pauline found
Hardcore
dreary. To her, Schrader did not exhibit anything close to the true moviemaking fervor of a Phil Kaufman or a Brian De Palma, despite his knack for coming up with “powerful raw ideas for movies.” Schrader had shot
Hardcore
on location in real L.A. porn shops and peep shows, but for Pauline the movie was short on ambience. “Schrader doesn’t enter the world of porno”; she wrote, “he stays on the outside, looking at it coldly, saying ‘These people have nothing to do with me.’” The character of Jake was not developed enough to suit her—there was no indication that he might be tempted or titillated by the world of porn—and the film’s approach to its subject was “cautious and maddeningly opaque.” It was her final paragraph, though, that verged on cruelty:

It was so devastating a critique that it was almost impossible for Schrader not to take it personally. At the time he was already making his next film,
American Gigolo
, and he simply tried to shake off Pauline’s judgment. To others, however, who knew of her history with Schrader, as both friend and mentor, it was astonishing that she could write about him in such a manner.

Her final review of the 1978–79 season was of Walter Hill’s
The Warriors
, which involved a meeting of all New York City’s street gangs to put aside rivalries and organize so they can outnumber the police force three to one and take over the city. Pauline ignored the fact that many of the actors playing the gang members looked like TV commercial actors; she found the film “like visual rock” and “mesmerizing in its intensity. It runs from night until dawn, and most of the action is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There’s a night-blooming psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.” Again, it was a review that suggested that the greatest gift a movie could deliver was a gut-level thrill; matters of construction and detail were of secondary importance.

Pauline’s review of
The Warriors
was significant in that it seemed likely to be the last piece that she would write for
The New Yorker
. She had honestly believed that she would eventually be able to unseat Penelope Gilliatt and take over “The Current Cinema” on a full-time basis, but since Shawn remained stubbornly loyal to Gilliatt, that possibility seemed ever more remote. An even bigger concern was that she had reached the point where she questioned the degree of her own influence with readers. When she began writing regularly for the magazine eleven years earlier, she had wanted to shake up the way
New Yorker
readers thought, to reshape their ideas about which movies were worth seeing. She now believed that she had succeeded only in a partial and limited way. She was particularly piqued that she had not been able to have an effect on the tastes of most of the senior writers and editors at
The New Yorker
, who dutifully continued to attend art films by Fassbinder and Bresson that they thought were good for them, and looked askance at her praise for
Carrie
,
The Fury
, and
The Warriors
. She complained that the only ones at the magazine who listened to her about which movies to see were the young fact-checkers and messengers. There was also a significant sector of New York’s intelligentsia that had never forgiven her for not covering innovative and experimental works and some of the more obscure foreign films. She was beginning to fear that she was, in the words of Alan Jay Lerner, serenading the deaf and searching the eyes of the blind.

At this rather confusing juncture, she was approached by Warren Beatty with an offer of work in Hollywood. Over the years Beatty had occasionally mentioned that he thought her ideas and level of taste could have even greater impact if she were to work in the film industry in some capacity. She had thanked him for his kindness and demurred, but the idea had stayed in the back of her mind. And, as the great eruption of’70s moviemaking had dwindled, she began to wonder if Beatty wasn’t right. Perhaps she might be able to make a difference where it mattered most—by improving the level of what was put into production.

Pauline believed that she understood a lot of the reasons for the decline in film quality. The movie companies, as she told an interviewer, had succeeded in taking “the risk factor out of financing movies, by selling them in advance to TV, international TV, cable, Home Box Office, as well as selling them in advance to theaters.” It was simply easier for the studios to back projects that could be sold ready-made to television—and because of the need to appeal to the general tastes and safe standards of the TV audience, it was harder than ever to get financing for a project with real edge that would have to be substantially edited and partially redubbed for network showings. To Pauline’s way of thinking, Hollywood at its best had succeeded by combining the two qualities that had distinguished
The Godfather
—commerce and art. But now, the businessmen seemed to have inherited the earth.

Beatty presented her with a persuasive argument for heading west: Wouldn’t it be much better, instead of pointing out where movies had gone wrong after they had been made, if she could perform the same function by analyzing the scripts and advising on casting before production began? Pauline pondered the decision for a long time, and when she learned that the first project she would work on was a James Toback picture called
Love and Money
that Beatty’s company was set to make, she became much more interested.
Love and Money
was a noirish drama about a Los Angeles bank employee who becomes involved in financial and political intrigue in Central America. Pauline, believing Toback to be an artist who hadn’t yet been allowed the opportunity to hit his full creative stride, now saw an opportunity to help him. Negotiations between her lawyer, Kenneth Ziffren, and Beatty’s legal team began.

It was not a decision she entered into lightly. Many critics dreamed of going to Hollywood, and most of them, it seemed, had a script tucked away in a drawer, ready to show at the right moment to the stars and directors with whom they came in contact. Some had actually developed serious screenwriting careers, such as Frank S. Nugent,
The New York Times
movie critic from 1936 to 1940, who had gone west and written John Wayne pictures such as
Fort Apache
and
The Quiet Man
. James Agee had worked on an even higher level with the scripts for
The African Queen
and
Night of the Hunter
.

With Penelope Gilliatt still occupying her post for half the year, Pauline did not feel that she owed unwavering loyalty to
The New Yorker
. She had been explicit about her feelings on the matter, and William Shawn had refused to listen—getting rid of Gilliatt seemed something he simply could not and did not want to do. She met with Shawn and told him of her decision. After offering some basic words of caution about the dangers of venturing into the viper’s nest of Hollywood production, he agreed to a leave of absence.

It is surprising that, knowing as much as she did about Hollywood politics, Pauline felt confident in her choice. But she was nearly sixty, aching for a change of pace, and she felt it was then or never. Many of her friends at
The New Yorker
were saddened by her decision—it felt as if an era was ending, and indeed it was, in more ways than one. Around the time she filed her last column, Nora Ephron wrote to tell her how much she would miss reading her. Her old nemesis Ray Stark also contacted her: “Now we can be friends again—I hope.”

A number of people close to her attempted to talk her out of her plan. Whatever problems she had encountered at
The New Yorker
, after all, she had essentially been in the company of gentlemen and gentlewomen—too much so, at times, for her taste and temperament. She believed she had been too tough for
The New Yorker
, and she believed that she was tough enough to withstand anything that Hollywood could hand her. Warren Beatty was famous for being a master manipulator, and several friends warned her that he probably wanted to bring her out to Hollywood to neutralize her. “He wanted to hunt her down, and get her,” observed Paul Schrader. “If she was a twenty-two-year-old starlet, he would get her in one way. If she was a sixty-year-old film critic, he would get her another way.” But Pauline was an enthusiast, and with enthusiasm went a certain naïveté that does not exist in the heart of a true cynic.

On the occasion of her departure, the fact-checking department composed an extended limerick, with numerous jabs at Penelope Gilliatt: