The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Some Dirt in the Talk: Difference between revisions

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{{Byline|last=Mailer|first=Norman|note=This essay appeared in ''[[Existential Errands]]'' (Boston, Little Brown, 1972). It was first published in ''New American Review'', No. 12 (August 1971) and reprinted with small changes a few months later in ''Maidstone: A Mystery'' (New York: New American Library, 1971). Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mai1}}

Testing this brand-new little American product, cutting it, shaping it, serving it to samples of audiences, made for an interesting summer. ''Wild 90'' was not the greatest movie ever made, no sir, and the actors would receive no Academy Awards (because they swore too much) but the picture, taken even at its worst, was a phenomenon. There was something going on in it which did not quite go on in other movies, even movies vastly superior. It had an insane intimacy, agreeable to some, odious to others. The dialogue was sensational. Where was a scriptwriter who wrote dialogue like this?

BUZZ CAMEO: I ain’t gonna get killed here.

TWENTY YEARS (''jeering''): What a mistake. What a mistake. Cameo, he says he can handle Thirty-fourth Street. (''Scream of derision.'') Hah! Thirty-fourth Street he can handle. He can’t handle his own joint.

Yes, where was the scriptwriter? Who was he? And the answer—is that no hat could fit his head, for he did not exist. The dialogue had come out of the native wit of the actors: ''Wild 90'' was a full-length film for which not a line of dialogue was written.

We even got good at it. How close we came to portraying any mobsters of certified class, I do not know, but we had experiences. Drinking our booze and acting for ourselves in the restaurant, we would get good enough upon occasion that the room would seem weightless, and the air ready to spark. There was a tension afterward to judge the value of the moment. We were either getting up a mood which was more accurate and quintessentially witty than anything worked on by actors or game players before about the subject of the Mafia, or we were merely whacked up on booze and the mystery resided in the supernatural properties of grain spirits, their ability to fog all perception of creative value, and inflame the positive judgments of misperception. Say! I conceived the idea it would be fun to get a good cameraman and film a half hour with sound of the three of us sitting around a restaurant table. So we talked about that for a time. And as the winter went by, as Supreme Mix, which is to say, Farbar, Knox, and Mailer, did the Maf Boys on the unphotographed wing a couple of times a week at Charles IV, the picture got discussed with the savor of get-rich-quick schemes worked on in a Brooklyn kitchen, and so showed promise of becoming a project you talk about with too much enjoyment ever to undertake. But we had fun. Night after night. There is a dialogue in the movie which captures a little of the style we had when metaphor was in flower.

BUZZ CAMEO: I’m goin’ down to the Beach.

TWENTY YEARS: You got no feels.

Farbar did not let the movie go. Calling me very early one morning, he pointed out that Mickey Knox was leaving for Rome in ten days. In the following week we had to make the movie if we were ever to make it at all. When he was reminded that we had no photographer, no lights, no set, no properties, nothing but my steadfast promise to immolate a thousand bucks (with five hundred more to burn in reserve), Farbar promised to bring together the rest of the ingredients. (That, gentlemen, presumably, was how the old two-reelers were made.) He arranged a meet with D. A. Pennebaker (of Leacock Pennebaker, inventors of portable sound-film cameras, makers of ''Don’t Look Back''). Pennebaker had four nights free, and he would film us for four nights. Since Knox was still playing Collie Munshin in ''The Deer Park'', we could start only after his performance each evening, which meant acting must begin at midnight. No problem. Those were our drinking hours. Acting and drinking could get together like kissing cousins. There persisted, however, the problem of locating a set. For we had taken on one more ambition. We had decided to try for more than a short film about three hoods disporting in a restaurant, we would rather take off from a contemporary piece of local history in Brooklyn. A year or more ago, the Gallo gang had undertaken a war with Joseph Profaci, by repute a ''don capo'' of Cosa Nostra. For self-protection the Gallos finally holed up in a little building on President Street, while the police put the block under crash surveillance to keep them from getting killed. Well, Supreme Mix knew nothing about the Gallo gang, in fact had no desire to take a page from their material, no, Supreme Mix was looking to be another gang, the three characters created before anyone was reminded of the Gallos. Yes, we would be our own three characters holed up in a loft, down by the beginning of the film from a company of twenty-one men to three men, living alone. That would give us the situation on which we

could improvise. But where could we find an empty loft, and over the weekend? No, we had to settle for a big and empty room in an office building.

But we have to depart from this sketch of a narrative. It does not tell the real history of what was going into ''Wild 90''. That is private, personal, subterranean, and buried in the psyche of the actors and the director. Since this director is an intellectual of sorts he could not engage in a creative act without a set of major theses to support him. While he thought he was merely engaged in a $1,500 junket out to movieland for four nights in a row, he was actually delivering some old and close-to-forgotten experience which had been perhaps more obsessive than he realized, obsessive for years. He had thought he was making the movie as an exercise in a few nuances of a very special brand of Camp, gangster-movies-Camp—he was actually being more serious than he knew, although indeed he was not to discover this until he had spent months cutting the film and had begun to write about these matters. Then he realized that under the bed of the making of Wild 90 were some dusty themes of singular complexity: themes such as Hollywood, acting, existentialism—no less—and the logic of the real disease of the film—no less. Not to mention old wounds of the ego.

BUZZ CAMEO: Twenty years. Twenty years of shit, that’s what you are. You’re twenty years of nothin’. You’re the prince of what?

THE PRINCE: That’s what I’m the prince of, your pickle—your pickle with its dirty little warts. French tickle, Buzz Cam.

''Item: Do you know that back in World War II, a few of us used to walk those Army legs with this thought: someday I’m going to write a book and expose the fugging Army. And yea and lo, that was done, thanks to James Jones.''

''Nonetheless, one will pretend that ''Wild 90'' is good. In fact, the director, prejudiced, blown up with every imperative of self-interest, actually believes that his film contributes to no less than the general weal. So he will proceed to talk about its powers for uplift.''

TWENTY YEARS: There was once a guy an’ he saw a little bird who was half dyin’. He was wounded. Hey, Prince, listen.

TWENTY YEARS: There was a fox an’ he looked over the cow flop an’ said, “Geez, never heard cow shit tweet before.” And he walked over—he trotted over—an’ he saw the bird an’ he gobbled it up. Now the moral is—listen—it may not always be an enemy that puts you in shit, and it may not always be a friend who’s gonna take you out of shit, but if you find yourself in cow shit, never sing. Got it? Never sing. If you ever find yourself in shit, don’t sing.

What did we end up with? A picture about gangsters? Not quite. It is hardly certain there were ever three Italian gangsters like this, or three Irish gangsters, or even two and a half Jewish gangsters. Farbar, Knox, and Mailer had all grown up in Brooklyn, but they were not Italian. Still, nobody grows up in Brooklyn without learning something about Sicily. And that is what comes through in the movie—our idea of the Mob, and that partakes of the noblest spirit of comedy, because twentieth-century reality suddenly appears on the screen. It is not social reality, nor documentary reality, certainly not historical reality, nor even the reality of the Hollywood myth, no, it is a kind of psychological reality—it is our obviously not altogether perfect idea of what this movie should be like—and that proves to be very real, for it is at least evidence on the road to reality. Whereas most movies give indications only of the road to the void.

It seems we have come back to the making of the film only to desert the subject immediately. A further expedition remains to us: the director’s most revolutionary notion about the meaning of the dream and—its country cousin—the art of the novel. Without it, he could not truly describe the critical difference between conventional professional acting and the existential variety presented in ''Wild 90'', nor could he prove his case that the conceivable reason his actors are so good is that they do not have lines to remember.

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