The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (54 page)

Very few men who have worked as directors in British cinema have spoken so penetratingly on the experience of making and watching films as Peter Brook. It is a misfortune for the cinema that it has never overcome his primary commitment to theatre. Yet one obvious reason for that is the way Brook’s persistent interest in the potential of the relationship between performance and audience has found more creative room in the theatre than it could in the British cinema. Only
The Beggar’s Opera
was really made from within the industry, and that hedged by the resort to theatrical heritage and by the prestigious but distracting presence of Olivier as Macheath.
Moderato Cantabile
is a French film, made partly out of a faith in the “denser impression of reality” possible in the new French cinema.
Lord of the Flies
was once intended as a Sam Spiegel production. But big money grew fearful of the project and it was eventually filmed as a low-cost, independent, collaborative venture. Since then, apart from a very short episode in the abortive
Ride of the Valkyries
, Brook’s films have been transpositions of notable theatrical productions. His
King Lear
, with Paul Scofield, is in the dismal tradition of film records of great moments of the theatre—clumsy, rather grubby looking, and serving to expose stage actors as vulnerable showoffs. Not as garish as the film of Olivier’s
Othello
, it is still a sad throw-off from a man who took as much care with the cameras as Brook did on
Moderato Cantabile
. As for the films of
Marat-Sade
and
Tell Me Lies
(from the stage production
US
), they are striking despite the inevitable diminution of an essentially theatrical tension in which the spectator is addressed or threatened from the stage.

In both cases, the films seem inspired by a vigorous intellectual and political concern with the material, rather than an initial conception of it in film terms.
Marat-Sade
has a dazzling lightness in its images, but only as a simpleminded contrast to the community of the insane. Brook’s career still seems like that of an intelligent, creative man interested in cinema but not possessed by it. He responds to exciting material, but appears unable to generate it from within himself or find a way of expressing it in which the form and the content are inseparable. Just as, while at university, he made a film of Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey
that is really an admiration and interpretation of that great work, so his
Lord of the Flies
springs from the wish to bring to the screen a “great modern novel,” whereas the screen reveals it as a pretentious and unconvincing allegory.

That seems like a traditionally British intellectual approach to the cinema, preoccupied by theme and seeing the moving image as simply transport for it. But Brook plainly does appreciate many of the basic qualities of film as a language. In 1963 he gave an interview in which he flatly identified Godard as the most important contemporary director, and recognized the way that improvisation and an easier system of working supported Godard. For instance, he picked on two great British failings: “British films are financed and planned and controlled in such a way that everything goes into this crippling concept of screenplay. And a breakthrough can only come about thoroughly and satisfactorily if the working conditions can be freed, so that smaller crews and lower budgets give people the opportunity to take more time, and to go back on their tracks if necessary, without anyone worrying them”; and “We’ve been prisoners for years of a naive simplification of what realism means hence the British cinema view that it is all a matter of art direction, something to be achieved by being more honest than the Americans in the amount of rain that beats upon a heroine.”

The concern with interior truth, with Godard’s layers of realism, and a sense of the moving image’s creation of it are the qualities so often lacking in British films.
Moderato Cantabile
was a deliberate attempt to escape academicism, and to make a film of a subject that no British money would have supported. Sadly, it is a dull film, despite the sensitive wide-screen exploration of a French provincial town and despite the presence of Jeanne Moreau. It is a story about passion, and although Brook, as director of the actress, may have grasped that, his camera remains polite and staid. The film, in consequence, is ladylike and reticent when it should have been painful.

Albert Brooks
(Einstein), b. Los Angeles, 1947
1979:
Real Life
. 1981:
Modern Romance
. 1985:
Lost in America
. 1991:
Defending Your Life
. 1996:
Mother
. 1999:
The Muse
. 2006:
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
.

It’s a subject for Woody Allen: you have this very smart, anxiety-ridden comedian—the son of a comic, too—who takes the prudent early step of changing his name. Because how can anyone else get away with being Albert Einstein? So he becomes Albert Brooks—as in Brooks Brothers, mainstream. He does stand-up, and he makes a series of funny short films for
Saturday Night Live
. Gradually he gets to make his own features—writing, acting, and directing—which are about a smart, jittery guy who isn’t Albert Einstein. They’re about the way reality turns into living theatre; about failures in love, and anything else; failures in general; guilt; your mother; and whether you deserve a muse. And everyone says, “Oh, kinda like Woody Allen?” So Albert never gets hits or awards and never quite makes his unequivocal knockout film. And the anxiety only grows. Maybe he should have stuck with “Einstein”?

He also turns in nice acting jobs: as the bumptious campaign worker in
Taxi Driver
(76, Martin Scorsese);
Private Benjamin
(80, Howard Zieff);
Unfaithfully Yours
(84, Zieff);
Broadcast News
(87, James L. Brooks);
I’ll Do Anything
(94, Brooks)—in which he’s very funny working for a director named Brooks. It gives you the shakes if you think about it too much. He was good again, with Leelee Sobieski, in
My First Mister
(01, Christine Lahti);
The In-Laws
(03, Andrew Fleming).

James L. Brooks
, b. North Bergen, New Jersey, 1940
1983:
Terms of Endearment
. 1987:
Broadcast News
. 1994:
I’ll Do Anything
. 1997:
As Good As It Gets
. 2010:
How Do You Know?

Jim Brooks is living proof that American television, week after week, can deliver smart, wellwritten, beautifully played comedy series that are devoted to being decent and humane without seeming smug or idiotic. This is an extraordinary achievement, and one to be borne in mind whenever the mood takes us to think the worst of TV. With Allan Burns, three seasons in a row (74–75, 75–76, 76–77—years of turmoil), Brooks won the Emmy for best comedy series as executive producer of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Then, with other collaborators, he did the same thing another three years in a row (78–79, 79–80, 80–81—more years of the same) with
Taxi
. And that’s not all.

He graduated from NYU and joined CBS as a newswriter before becoming a documentary-maker. But by 1969 he was creating the TV series
Room 222
(about a big-city high school) which ran until 1974, and which won more awards for its responsible treatment of problems than it did big ratings. But with the
MTM Show
and
Taxi
, Brooks had the whole package—brilliant entertainment, credible people and situations, a steady source of social responsibility, and very large audiences.

When he moved sideways, into feature films, he took Larry McMurtry’s novel and made a smart hit for which he won the Oscars for script, direction, and best picture. A few years later,
Broadcast News
was only a little less successful while being a tender portrait of the confusion and hypocrisy in doing TV.
I’ll Do Anything
is the least of his movies, but it was a musical once. When test screenings showed that it was failing with audiences, Brooks had the skills (and the freedom) to reedit it. Nevertheless, it is his single large venture to result in disappointment.

In the meantime, for the small screen, he had also helped create
The Associates
(79–80, about the law),
The Tracey Ullman Show
(87–90),
The Simpsons
(89–), and
The Critic
(94–95). Of those,
The Simpsons
was by far the most innovative and adventurous, for it shows the grimy underside to that optimistic world preferred in Brooks’s live-action series.

Brooks has spoken about trying to chart the urge toward decency, a mainstream subject one might suppose, yet one ignored by so much of Hollywood. There is a case to be made, I think, that Brooks remains unknown as a personality—he is a manager of good material, a producer who likes to make things work. He lacks the edge of, say, a Lubitsch or a Buñuel. But, of course, you say—whoever thought that American TV was open to such people? True enough, but then we have to face the fact that mass media may always move in search of a kind of anonymous, benevolent proficiency more suited to politicians than to artists.

He helped produce
Jerry Maguire
(96, Cameron Crowe), and then delivered another very effective social comedy for the big screen,
As
Good As It Gets
, which actually embodied TV ethics (be nicer to one another) and paired a movie star (Jack Nicholson) with a TV star (Helen Hunt). It was a picture like soap in your hands—but, afterwards, you felt cleaner and better.

He produced and cowrote
The Simpsons Movie
(07, David Silverman).

Louise Brooks
(Mary Louise Brooks) (1906–85), b. Cherryvale, Kansas
In her last years, Louise Brooks did all that an often bedridden old woman could manage to secure her enigmatic reputation. She had been a recluse in Rochester, New York, it was said. Her passions were arthritis and emphysema. But she had ended up there largely because of the admiration of James Card, curator of films at Eastman House. And she could still draw men to upstate New York: Kenneth Tynan went there to write an affectionate and very influential essay for
The New Yorker;
Richard Leacock went to film her. And there were others. Before she died,
Lulu in Hollywood
was published (with a William Shawn introduction). That gathering of essays was intelligent, fascinating, cryptic, chilly, and certainly more than most movie stars would think of trying. But reliable, complete, honest? She had once written an autobiography, it was claimed
—Naked On My Goat
—but only bits survived after the book had been thrown into an incinerator—by its author, of course.

After her death, Barry Paris wrote a careful, very useful biography in which lacunae were wonderfully bridged by breathtaking stills. (Brooks made stills that were thirty years ahead of their time.) But Paris was attempting to net a very elusive butterfly, as well as a woman who had brilliant instincts about modern publicity and cult obsession. Actress? Fleetingly. Playactor? Totally. She was also one of the first stars whose creativity was morbid, or self-destructive: she had a hunch that might last better than simple success.

In
The Parade’s Gone By
, Kevin Brownlow told a delicious story of how Louise Brooks regretted the way Lotte Eisner had clarified an early description of her. In the first edition of
Écran Demoniaque
, Eisner had written: “Was Louise Brooks a great artist or only a dazzling creature whose beauty leads the spectator to endow her with complexities of which she herself was unaware?” Years later, Eisner had altered that passage to: “Today we know that Louise Brooks is an astonishing actress endowed with an intelligence beyond compare and not only a dazzling creature.” Yet Brooks had rather preferred the earlier mystery.

She was by then in Rochester, quoting Proust to eager interviewers, still seductive, still difficult, a snob and a gossip, and a connoisseur of her own mystique. She exists in fragments that do not make a tidy whole. Just as she made few films, most of which are seldom seen, so she turned her life into a basis for speculation and conjuring. For example, for years Brooks alleged that she was concealing William Paley as her ex-lover and later patron—yet the cheerfully vain Paley was bursting to be named as one of her conquests. The very rich man was magically the servant to the lost lady.

At the age of fifteen she became a dancer, first with Ruth St. Denis, then in
George White’s Scandals
and the
Ziegfeld Follies
. Paramount saw her and gave her a tiny part in
The Street of Forgotten Men
(25, Herbert Brenon). She made a flurry of comedies in which she was a capricious femme fatale playing with a reserve that unfailingly monopolized attention amid so much mugging:
The American Venus
(26, Frank Tuttle);
A Social Celebrity
(26, Malcolm St. Clair);
It’s the Old Army Game
(26), a W. C. Fields film directed by Edward Sutherland, to whom she was briefly married;
The ShowOff
(26, St. Clair);
Just Another Blonde
(26, Alfred Santell);
Love ’Em and Leave ’Em
(26, Tuttle);
Evening Clothes
(27, Luther Reed);
Rolled Stockings
(27, Richard Rossen);
The City Gone Wild
(27, James Cruze);
Now We’re in the Air
(27, Frank Strayer);
A Girl in Every Port
(28, Howard Hawks); and
Beggars of Life
(28, William Wellman).

There then occurred one of the few instances of an American going to Europe to discover herself. G. W. Pabst saw
A Girl in Every Port
and fixed on Brooks as the actress to play Wedekind’s Lulu in
Pandora’s Box
(29). Paramount objected but, undaunted, Brooks abandoned her contract and went to Germany. She has described the way Pabst protected her from xenophobia and obtained so animated a performance from her. His hunch that this American girl (only twenty-three) might understand the psychological truths of sexual alertness was fulfilled—even if it would be twenty-five years before the performance was fully appreciated. Today, Brooks in close-up gives a sense of vivacious, fatal intimacy that enormously enriches Lulu’s tragedy.
Pandora’s Box
is still among the most erotic films ever made—and it was more than Pabst would ever dare again. Immediately, she played in Pabst’s
Diary of a Lost Girl
(29) and then returned to America.