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cinema, including his work as a filmmaker.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08chai | cinema, including his work as a filmmaker.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08chai | ||
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In may 2005, at the time this interview was conducted, I was working as the Program Director for Film at International House Philadelphia, a | |||
non-profit arts center immediately adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania. Earlier that year I had organized a series of films directed by noted | |||
authors which included works by Yukio Mishima, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Susan | |||
Sontag, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett among others. Norman’s | |||
films were central to the series and, with his consent, we were loaned his personal 35mm prints of ''Maidstone'' and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. Around that | |||
time I discussed with Norman the possibility of organizing a broader series, | |||
one that might include all four of the films he directed in addition to the | |||
numerous documentaries made about him: films based on his writing, films | |||
in which he appeared as an actor and films that he helped to inspire. I proposed the idea to my colleagues at Film at Lincoln Center in New York and | |||
they were intrigued, particularly if Mailer might come to present his films. | |||
This expanded series, which was titled “The Mistress & The Muse: The | |||
Films of Norman Mailer” ~the cinema being the mistress tempting Norman | |||
away from his literary muse!, ran for two weeks in July/August 2007 and was | |||
divided between two supporting venues in New York, The Anthology Film | |||
Archives and Film at Lincoln Center, which opened the series with a double bill of ''Maidstone'' and ''Tough Guys'' and concluded the event with Larry | |||
Schiller’s ''The Executioner’s Song'', followed by a post-screening discussion | |||
with director Larry Schiller, Norris Church Mailer, and Roseanna Arquette. | |||
Joined by J. Michael Lennon, film critic and Lincoln Center programmer Kent Jones, and me, Mailer took the stage of Lincoln Center on July 22, 2007, | |||
in between sold-out screenings of ''Tough Guys'' and ''Maidstone'', in order to | |||
take questions from the audience. | |||
In the space of forty-five minutes, Norman managed to eviscerate Jean-Luc Godard as the “second most evil person I’d ever met in my life” (Reagan | |||
being the first), greatly offend at least a half dozen members of the audience | |||
(‘Well, you can find friends... ,” was his reply to one woman’s generally negative comments on the merits of ''Tough Guys''), and unman yours truly after | |||
mumbling out my first question (“Chaiken, you have a voice better suited to | |||
talking to women at 2 a.m. than asking anybody anything from the stage of | |||
Lincoln Center”). Norman also spoke powerfully and eloquently about his | |||
years directing films, the pleasure it had brought him, and the seriousness in | |||
which he endeavored to make them. | |||
The interview contains many of the themes Norman elaborated on that | |||
afternoon in July 2007. It was conducted in Norman’s Brooklyn Heights | |||
apartment on May 11, 2005. Parts of this interview were included in an article I wrote surveying Norman’s directing career for ''Film Comment'' magazine | |||
published in their July/August 2007 issue under the title “The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second.” | |||
'''Chaiken:''' You were a voracious reader as kid. How central was the moviegoing experience for you growing up? | |||
'''Mailer:''' Movies were dessert. I used to read and read and read as a child. I | |||
remember seeing ''Captain Blood'' [1935] with Errol Flynn in a movie theater | |||
that was 10 blocks away from my home in Brooklyn on one of the coldest | |||
winter nights New York ever had.Walking home that night, I got frostbite on | |||
my thighs that lasted for a month. My thighs got discolored it was so cold, | |||
but it was worth it because that movie was so wonderful. That movie probably gave me more pleasure than any I have ever seen. Put it this way, if a | |||
meal at a given time could alter your life—it’s not as easy for a dessert to do | |||
that. But this dessert did. I think ''Captain Blood'' affected me permanently. It’s | |||
a fabulous film. | |||
'''Chaiken:''' After ''The Naked and the Dead'', you went out to Hollywood. Were | |||
there any thoughts back then of possibly giving up writing for a career as a | |||
director? | |||
'''Mailer:''' I went out there with Jean Malaquais who was already my best | |||
friend—or second best friend. We went out there to look around and try to | |||
write scripts. My lawyer Cy Rembar, who at the time didn’t know a lot about | |||
Hollywood, had heard of one agent, a very nice man named George Landy, | |||
but he was a minor agent. He didn’t have clout. So we hung around and | |||
hung around and finally Landy got us a job with Sam Goldwyn to write a | |||
script that was supposed to have been based on Nathanael West’s ''Miss Lonelyhearts''. We got fired about a month after we started working. Deservedly. | |||
Then I decided I was going to make a film myself in Hollywood. I was 26 and | |||
thought I would first become a famous screenwriter, then a director. We | |||
worked and worked and worked to try to get a script going, but simply | |||
couldn’t. This was the script that was going to make Goldwyn sad that he had | |||
fired us. In the end, he was right and we were wrong. The script was dreadful and ultimately never got finished. Malaquais and I, although we remained | |||
great friends, simply couldn’t work together. So I came back to New York | |||
with my metaphorical tail between my legs. Hollywood for me was a failure. A total failure, though I guess what stayed with me was this idea of making movies. | |||
'''Chaiken:''' You were one of the editors of Irving Howe’s ''Dissent'' magazine along with Cinema 16 film society founders Amos and Marcia Vogel in | |||
the Fifties. Did you attend any of the Cinema 16 screenings? | |||
'''Mailer:''' Yeah, I used to go there. That was an interesting place, and I was fascinated with the poetic documentaries Amos used to show. That probably | |||
had a lot of influence on me in one way or another. It wasn’t that I was totally | |||
innocent of documentaries when I started making my own films. It was that | |||
I thought that most documentaries were locked into one essential | |||
difficulty—that very few people can act when they are playing themselves. I | |||
truly believe that half the people alive are natural actors, but when you have | |||
to play yourself it really turns you inside out psychologically. It’s very | |||
unpleasant. If you are playing yourself then you stiffen up. What I found is | |||
that practically everyone who is in a documentary who is playing themselves | |||
is very stiff. So I got the idea, why not use these techniques? I loved the camera techniques in documentary, particularly that of Pennebaker and the | |||
Maysles Brothers, so I thought, “Why not use them for fictional situations?” | |||
The cameramen I worked with loved it because they got to try anything. So yes, I did go to Cinema 16, but don’t ask me what films I saw. I do remember seeing Cassavetes and Maya Deren. | |||
{{Review|state=expanded}} | {{Review|state=expanded}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Author, Auteur: A Conversation with Norman Mailer}} | {{DEFAULTSORT:Author, Auteur: A Conversation with Norman Mailer}} | ||
[[Category:Interviews (MR)]] | [[Category:Interviews (MR)]] |
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