PART 1

Interviews and Profiles

INTRODUCTION

In a perfect world, movie critics would perhaps never do interviews. There is a potential conflict involved in talking with someone, even dining with them, even visiting the set of their film, and then writing a review that is intended to be objective. Many papers make a clear distinction between critics and interviewers, and at Cannes when you apply for credentials they ask if you are a "critic" or a "chronicler." I have always been both.

It was a lucky break for me, after all, that the Sun-Times had one person on the movie beat, me. I wrote the reviews and did the interviews. That allowed me to build up a more complete database of reviews than any other critic of the same period, and it also allowed me access to hundreds of directors and other film artists.

From time to time I would grumble about the workload, and indeed the Sun-Times has had many other writers involved in writing interviews, but I never wanted to give it up entirely because I was interested in talking with these people about their work. As the publicity mechanism grew more calculating, the carefree access of earlier years shrank into the Dreaded Hotel Room Interview — three minutes taped for TV in front of a poster of the movie — and these I tended to avoid. What I would not have missed were visits to the sets or locations of Sam Peckinpah, Altman, Jewison, Bergman, Fellini, Carol Reed, Henry Hathaway, dozens of others. I talked with Hitchcock, Astaire, Streep, Groucho, John Wayne, Herzog, Mitchum, both Fondas, two Hustons, Jeanne Moreau, Elizabeth Taylor, Antonioni, Mae West.

My strategy as a writer evolved during some of my early pieces for Esquire. In reaction I suppose to Rex Reed and Tom Wolfe, who did some fancy footwork for the magazine, I developed a deadpan style in which I simply observed my subjects as they spoke and behaved, and commented on them with understatement. The Lee Marvin piece is an example of this approach.

Warren Beatty

INTRODUCTION

Gene Siskel and I hosted a tribute to Warren Beatty in the 1980s at the Toronto Film Festival. Many of those he worked with agreed to appear: Arthur Penn, Robert Towne, Jerzy Kosinski, Jack Nicholson. Beatty himself did not agree to appear. He agreed to sit in the audience next to Diane Keaton and see how the tribute went, and then, when it concluded, he would see how he felt about getting up on the stage. In the event, he did mount to the stage, but to make remarks, not to answer questions.

He is protective of himself. Once I went to interview him and as I waited in a hotel room I was asked by a publicist what I thought about Beatty's new movie. I later discovered that he was sitting on the other side of a door, listening.

In Los Angeles one day I got a message from James Toback, inviting me to visit the set of his new movie Bugsy. I am customarily uninformed about films in production; I don't much read the trades and the press releases, or I would have known that Bugsy was not precisely Toback's film. He wrote it. Barry Levinson was directing it. Warren Beatty was coproducing and starring in it. I arrived at the house, was pointed up the driveway by a production assistant, walked in behind the cameras, and was seen by Beatty:

"Roger. Uh, yeah. Hi. Yeah. How are you?" This was all clearly an evasion of the question he wanted to ask, which was, what in the hell was I doing there? It was a closed set. Toback materialized and my presence was accounted for. How Toback eventually explained his invitation to Beatty is something I have never asked him.

Do I sound critical of Beatty? The fact is that I have enormous admiration for him. He has made some great films. He was personally responsible for the existence of Bonnie and Clyde, and it was his decision to trust Arthur Penn after they had gone down in flames together with their previous film, the underrated Mickey One (1965). It was Beatty who persuaded Jack Warner to give the film a proper release, although several versions exist of the story about how he did that. I am proud that as a new critic I was absolutely right about the greatness of Bonnie and Clyde at a time when much critical opinion was against it.

I don't think Beatty owes me a thing. His job is to make the movies. He can refuse to get up on the stage if he wants to, he can listen to my opinion of his movie before he talks to me, he can suggest a luncheon interview and then take me to a hot dog stand. "I want you to personally experience the best hot dogs in Burbank," he told me. I did.

SEPTEMBER 24, 1967

LONDON — No film in the last 10 years has gotten better reviews in London than Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde, which opened here last week and in Chicago Friday. Beatty had all the reviews clipped out and stuck in a cardboard folder, which was resting on the coffee table in his room at the Gloucester Hotel. He kept pointing to the folder as if it was an exhibit and this was a trial.

"Hard to believe," he said. "Great reviews. Tremendous reviews. One critic called it the best American movie since 'On the Waterfront.' And you know what really hurts?"

He paused, and then continued to pace up and down the yellow carpet.

"What really hurts," he said, "is that one lousy review in the New York Times. Bosley Crowther says your movie is a glorification of violence, a cheap display of sentimental claptrap and that's that. The New York Times has spoken, hallelujah."

So Beatty, who produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde, was getting it off his chest at last. It was the first time he had replied to Crowther's charges, although Arthur Penn, the film's director, had a succinct word or two to pronounce about Crowther last week.

The whole Bonnie and Clyde controversy is something of a rarity in American movie circles. You'd probably have to go back to Psycho to find another Hollywood film that has generated such intense debate. There's a little war going on right now in the little world of movie critics and it's beginning to look as if Crowther is getting the worst of it.

"The man at the New York Times has once again blown his tiny supply of cool," Wilfrid Sheed, Esquire's movie critic, wrote this week....