INTERVIEWER: What did you think of The Loved One?
SOUTHERN: I thought it had great moments. By great moments I mean moments that hadn’t been done cinematically before. As a totality, it seemed pretty shaky and uneven and eccentric.
INTERVIEWER: Have you any idea why?
SOUTHERN: Well, whatever’s good or bad in a movie is finally the responsibility of the director, and Richardson wants to depart completely from whatever he thinks of as the Establishment at any given moment. He has this antislick notion, for example. At the rushes, he would have three takes, and he would choose the take where the camera might shake a little, or light was coming through from the sun or a leak in the camera, because then it makes it look like something other than a slick Hollywood job. And then he feels that a movie shouldn’t be advertised or publicized at all, that the viewers are bound to be disappointed because they’ve been led to expect something, whereas if they’re led to expect nothing, then they think, Well, this is a pleasant surprise!
INTERVIEWER: How were the previews of The Loved One in Hollywood?
SOUTHERN: Everybody blasted it—I mean on those cards that they fill out. But these days they don’t judge so much from what a card says as from how many people fill out the cards. It’s like The Sandpiper—everybody filled out the cards, and said things like, “Liz ought to be horsewhipped!” or “Burton is a fag!” and so on, but they were all filled out.
Speaking of which, we had a good idea about how to improve The Sandpiper, John Calley and I. You open on a penthouse apartment at the Plaza, about eleven in the morning. Liz is sitting there getting her nails, her hair done, and you hear a telephone ring in the background and Burton comes out, in pajamas, robe, shades, terribly hung over—“Listen, Kurt wants to know what we’re going to do about this picture.”
And she says, “What picture?”
And he takes a big drink and says, “You know, the one about the bird.”
And she says, “How much money is involved?”
“A million and a half,” he says.
And she says, “Oh yeah?” and thinks about it for a minute. “Is that the one set in Big Sur?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And then in Paris?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I do have to go to Paris soon, to get some clothes … Why don’t we do it?”
So the movie starts. And you keep cutting back to this principal scene with Liz and Burton talking about it. “For God’s sake,” he’s saying, “why did you get me into this? Don’t you realize I’ve got a reputation as a serious actor?” Et cetera. And then at the very end you have a scene where they’re getting on a plane, and they’ve got the money in a suitcase, and the suitcase opens, and it all blows away. Sort of Sierra Madre style.
INTERVIEWER: You were very lucky to have started in movies with Kubrick and Richardson.
SOUTHERN: It couldn’t have happened any other way. Most directors won’t hire you unless you’ve already done something. Faulkner and Irwin Shaw and Truman Capote could collaborate on a script, and if they submitted it cold, the producers would say, Great, there’s a great idea here. We’ll buy the script. But they wouldn’t think of using those guys to do the second draft. They think of writers in two categories—there are idea men and plot men. They think they need a professional screenwriter who knows the format. They don’t realize that the format is nothing any child couldn’t do, any child with a visual sense, a visual attitude, and a basic familiarity with movies.
Most screenwriters I’ve met are the people least suited to their work, because they have no ear, no notion of human relationships, no notion of psychology at all. They’re just scuffling in the dark, they’re searching. They think it’s a good racket to be in, like shingle salesmen or something—they’ve heard about the pay, and they fast-talk their way into a job by working in talent agencies, submitting scripts, getting personal relationships with producers, directors, actors. Finally somebody carries them in, some actor says, Let’s give Joe here a credit. And then they’re set, they’ve got a credit and are recognized as writers, but it’s like pulling teeth each time they put down a word. It’s a laborious, tedious process for them, because they can’t write. And they’ll work on anything, with absolutely no regard for material. All they ask is, How much money do I get? They never work for less than they worked for on the last one. If they do, they’re finished, it’s downhill all the way.
But these are movies you never hear about unless you happen to look at the newspaper on the one particular day they open. They’re potboilers, like The Cincinnati Kid, for example. There’s one big ad or a small ad, and people are aware of it for about a week, and then it doesn’t exist anymore, except as a credit. That’s why the most prominent writers in Hollywood are people you’ve never heard of. People who write, say, the Doris Day movies. Stanley Shapiro is supposed to be the highest-paid writer. At last report he was getting $350,000 a whack. He writes the Doris Day/Rock Hudson/Cary Grant movies, and he gets a producer’s piece of it, too. They figure he doesn’t miss. All of these pictures are made for one and gross ten—something like that. He’s got a formula, a very simple formula. You have this girl, a career girl, swinging, you know. Really a ball-breaker. She likes the idea of guys wanting to make it with her, but she’s not interested, and then she meets this one guy who doesn’t seem to want to make it with her, he’s amused by her, and so she’s going to get him. Finally she does get him, but instead of becoming a housewife, she continues with her career.
It’s a twist on the old thing where the guy says, I won’t have my wife working, and puts her in the home and dominates her, and she’s ready to be dominated. With this formula, the girl is not dominated—she gets the guy, and she goes on with her career. It’s that simple.
INTERVIEWER: How much does good writing actually matter in a good screenplay? Lillian Hellman, in an interview, suggested that it might be practical to try doing screenplays that were nothing more than outlines. You’d have an outline of where the movie was going, with an ending, but no dialogue, and it would be improvised as it went along.
SOUTHERN: I’m all for improvisation, but you can take off from a better base than just an outline. Have the dialogue as good as you can, and then improvise.
INTERVIEWER: Do actors often add a lot?
SOUTHERN: No. Peter Sellers, for example, is good at improvisations, but by improvisation I mean making lines believable. Improving lines, no. When you have a scene, the scene has to go in a certain direction, because you’ve got all the setups, the locations, and everything. You can’t change the story. You already know where the scene’s going to go.
INTERVIEWER: Where do you work when you’re in Hollywood? Do you write in a writers’ building?
SOUTHERN: You get an office. They put your name on the door, and you get assigned a secretary, even though you have no use for her. You don’t have to show up.
INTERVIEWER: How much of a studio is there nowadays?
SOUTHERN: The old guard has really been falling apart since television came in. Picture-making used to be a science, a formula. Their aim—they tried to get it really neat—was to produce fifty-one pictures a year, one a week, skipping Christmas week. That was it. They had it figured out and they knew exactly how much they were going to get on each picture. Now everything is changed, and they’re no longer sure of what they’re doing. They seem very much out of place.
INTERVIEWER: Is there any sort of fraternity of writers now?
SOUTHERN: No. Studios don’t have contracts with writers anymore, there aren’t any studio writers, so there’s no way they would know each other. Writers out there are hit-and-run people, very transient, one studio one day, another studio the next. There’s no occasion for anything to develop between them.
INTERVIEWER: You’ve lived in Paris, London, New York—how does Hollywood compare?
SOUTHERN: Those three cities seem to me equally different, and I wouldn’t be inclined to compare them, with each o
ther or with Hollywood. Hollywood, that is to say, Los Angeles, is not, of course, a city, and its sinister forces are very oblique. There’s no public transportation system whatever, so the people drive around as though they were living in Des Moines, and it has all the rest of the disadvantages of a small town, only filled with displaced persons. On the other hand, life there has an engaging surrealist quality, an almost exciting grotesqueness.
The cultural scene there in general is sped up, sort of concentrated. Southern California is a mecca for all manner of freakishness, beginning on the most middle-class level—hot-dog stands in the shape of a hot dog. If you go there, you’ll immediately see a carnival, Disneyland aspect that is different from any other place in America.
INTERVIEWER: Is there a noticeably large proportion of beautiful girls there?
SOUTHERN: There are a lot of beautiful girls there because, well, girls who want to be writers come to the Village and girls who want to be actresses go to Hollywood. And not necessarily to be writers or to be actresses, but to be identified with that scene, that action. So you see unusually attractive waitresses, and girls sort of spilled over from the casting office.
INTERVIEWER: How does the casting office function?
SOUTHERN: The casting office is interesting. Each of the studios has a big door saying casting. Girls arrive from Des Moines and go to one of the studios and ask, Where’s the casting office?
“Over there, go in that door.”
They go in, and they think it’s like a personnel department in a department store. They think they’re applying for something, and they fill out a form and they give in their photographs, and these things are put in a file cabinet, and that’s it. In the history of cinema there’s never been a case of anyone being hired to work in pictures through the casting office. The people who work in the casting office have no connection with the industry. Quite Kafk aesque.
INTERVIEWER: You mean the casting office is just there to satisfy the girls?
SOUTHERN: Mainly it’s something they can point out on the bus tour. All the studios now are aiming at these tours. They charge two fifty, and they sell things. They sell film clips, Technicolor, 35mm, about four pieces of film—they’re transparencies, and they’re perforated, and it looks as though they’re cut out of a negative, which is what they’re trying to simulate, but actually there are, say, four frames from different parts of different reels, put together and printed again. They sell these for two dollars or so, and various other souvenirs. At Universal, they claim now that their income from the tours pays the overhead of the studio.
In the beginning, they were authentic. They would take the tourists around to a set and say, “Quiet now, everyone, they’re shooting,” but people would talk and ruin the shot, so the directors and producers were flipping. Finally, Universal set up a thing, up on top of a hill—a corral, with barns and horses and about six guys, a director and an assistant director, and a camera with no film in it. The bus pulls up, and when it’s at a distance of twenty-five yards or so, the guide says, “Say, we’re really in luck! I think they’re about to shoot a scene.” And sure enough, that’s what they do—but it’s all fake.
The interesting thing is that these people on the fake set, since they’re not working in movies, are not even in the union. They’re paid something like two dollars an hour. Except for two guys who are stunt men. The tours happen every forty-five minutes, and it’s the same thing each time. First they stage a fistfight, one of them knocks the other down and gets on a horse, then the other recovers and shoots the first one as he’s riding away, and he falls off the horse. And of course they have this guy acting as the director, for two dollars an hour, not even connected in any way with the movies, and everybody else is just standing around, a fake makeup girl and a fake script girl—the whole thing.
INTERVIEWER: What happens to those girls, those aspiring starlets? Do they sit around in Schwab’s drugstore, or the Brown Derby, or whatever?
SOUTHERN: In the beginning, they come to Hollywood, presumably, with the idea of the action. Then they find out that you can’t even get into any of these buildings without an agent, that there’s no possibility of getting in, that even a lot of the agents can’t get in. Meanwhile a substitute life begins, and they get into the social scene, you know. They’re working as parking attendants, waitresses, doing arbitrary jobs …
INTERVIEWER: Hoping that somebody will see them?
SOUTHERN: Finally they forget about that, but they’re still making the scene. They continue to have some vague peripheral identification with films—like they go to a lot of movies, and they talk about movies and about people they’ve seen on the street, and they read the gossip columns and the movie magazines, but you get the feeling it’s without any real aspiration any longer. It’s the sort of vicariousness a polio person might feel for rodeo.
INTERVIEWER: Was there ever any attempt to put you through the publicity-department mill?
SOUTHERN: Well, they sort of gave up on me. It’s very difficult for me to say no, but it’s not too difficult not to show. They couldn’t understand that. They’d make an appointment with one of the trade papers that they consider really important, hot stuff—and then somebody not even showing up? Shocking! That happened a few times, and then I guess they gave up.
INTERVIEWER: Is working on a screenplay different from writing a book?
SOUTHERN: Well, to begin with, you’re usually working against a deadline—the standard thing for a screenplay job is ten weeks. And first they want to see an outline.
INTERVIEWER: Do they require you to stick to it once you do it?
SOUTHERN: No, no. It’s just a practice that exists. I suppose it has advantages from a producer’s point of view, because a producer can read a ten-page outline and get some kind of feeling for the beginning, middle, and end. It used to be that writers would submit outlines, cold, on speculation, and then, on the basis of an outline, would get a commission to do a fifty-page treatment, and if the treatment was accepted, a commission to do a first draft, and so on. Now the treatment is generally bypassed, although you do see them lying around offices.
INTERVIEWER: Would you rather do adaptations or originals?
SOUTHERN: You can’t set out to do something really original in films. People who say, Let’s do something original, and mean it, have no money to do it with. The ones who have the money say, Let’s do this, with this beginning and this end and these characters. That means you’re working within a framework. If you tried to do an “original” you wouldn’t accept those limitations—it would be like a novel.
When you write a novel or a story, you don’t know where it’s going, and you don’t do it for money, and you don’t do it because someone says, We’ll print it if you do it, and we’ll pay for it. You may do it out of some weird principle, or when you get a surge of some inexplicable feeling, or the way certain people just fall into a habit of getting up, having breakfast, and then starting to write. But you do it because it’s a kick, and so there’s no telling where it will go.
INTERVIEWER: Then you don’t see movies as a substitute for writing fiction?
SOUTHERN: You want to make a comparison between writing a novel and writing a screenplay, but I don’t think there is any at all. As a medium, movies are obviously superior, in the sense that the strongest perceptions are sight and sound, but unless you’re the producer or director you have no control over the final product. In a novel, you do. An editor or publisher can try to persuade you, but you can always say, I won’t make those changes. So on the one hand you have control when you’re writing prose, and on the other hand the cinema is really the greater medium, if only you could use it the way you wanted to.
INTERVIEWER: Even if you were the producer-director, if you were making a so-called commercial film, I wonder whether you could match what you do in writing.
SOUTHERN: The only excuse for writing a novel these days is if it can’t be done as a movie. And there are limitations in movies—n
ot just inherent limitations, but limitations in practice. It’s very difficult to do interior monologues and first-person narratives, for instance. In a book you can have italics, or you can say, “‘Au revoir,’ he said, comma, thinking, ‘Forget it,’” whereas in a movie, what are you going to do? Put it through an echo chamber, or have a close-up to show that, even though his lips aren’t moving, there’s dialogue, so “forget it” must be what he’s thinking? Audiences are simply so unfamiliar with that, the very fact of it would put them off.
It’s like using four-letter words—in a novel they don’t distract the reader, but if you have a four-letter word in a movie, suddenly everyone thinks, Did you hear that? and they lose the thread of what’s happening. Longshoremen don’t talk the way they talked in On the Waterfront, but if you had a realistic conversation, the audience—not to mention the police—would be upset and distracted.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever feel hampered by the pressure of deadlines on a script, or by having a plot already established before you start?
SOUTHERN: With a screenplay, you’ve got to deliver, because at some point the producers make other arrangements. They’ve rented a sound stage, and they’ve hired actors, and so they’ve got to begin on a certain date and finish on a certain date because these actors have other commitments. So they’re going to start shooting, whether it’s your script or not. With a novel, you never have pressure. I mean, who cares? There’s no money involved. What if they’ve given you two thousand dollars? They’re not panicked about that—you can put it off, and put it off, and put it off. They put some weird pressure on you, they try to make you feel bad, saying, Well, it’s a shame you’re not going to make the spring list, ha-ha. With a movie it’s, Man, you’re hanging us up! Everybody’s standing around, waiting for the script.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 35
