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Overview
Peter Bogdanovich, award-winning director, screenwriter, actor and critic, interviews 16 legendary directors over a 15-year period. Their richly illuminating conversations combine to make this a riveting chronicle of Hollywood and picture making. Join him in conversations with:
Robert Aldrich • George Cukor • Allan Dwan • Howard Hanks • Alfred Hitchcock • Chuck Jones • Fritz Lang • Joseph H. Lewis • Sidney Lumet • Leo McCarey • Otto Preminger • Don Siegel • Josef von Sternberg • Frank Tashlin • Edgar G. Ulmer • Raoul Walsh
NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
Praise for Who the Devil Made It
“Illuminating . . . These were (and sometimes are: a few yet breathe) men rooted in history as much as in Hollywood. Their collected memories make the past look fearfully rich beside a present that is poverty-stricken in everything except money.”—The New Yorker
“Bogdanovich is one of America’s finest writers on the cinema. . . . Thank goodness [his] Who the Devil Made It has come along to remind us that films and writing about film were, at one time, focused on the work and not strictly on the bottom line.”—The Boston Globe
“A treasure trove on the craft of directing.”—Newsday
“Monumental . . . The directors’ reminiscences about technique, working methods, sources of ideas, and relationships with actors and studios are thoroughly entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly
“A fine achievement that helps illuminate the art and craft of some remarkable directors . . . There are plenty of revealing anecdotes.”—Kirkus Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307817457 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 864 |
| Sales rank: | 230,361 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
THE LIGHTNING ART
Early in the summer of 1996—exactly 101 years after the first movies were exhibited—Warren Beatty and I were standing around on the lawn of Henry Jaglom’s Santa Monica home watching a bunch of young children at a birthday party (two of them Warren’s, two Henry’s, one mine); we were talking about some of the big changes in the picture business since we had come into it in the late fifties and early sixties. “A lotta things don’t seem to count anymore,” Warren was saying. “John Ford? Who’s he? What? Elia Kazan?” He laughed at the absurdity of it: mentioning Ford, because that late director is still the U.S.A.’s most honored, and I’ve been a kind of biographer of his; and Kazan, because Beatty’s first film was directed by this currently somewhat-out-of-vogue filmmaker at the peak of his considerable success. But there was more on Warren’s mind than “how fleeting is fame,” or the now prevalent Hollywood mind-set in projects and casting called “flavor of the month.” “Jesus,” he said with a certain amazement, “everybody’s dead.”
I knew exactly what he meant, because I’d had the same thought repeatedly; not surprising, since both Warren and I had come into pictures just when the old studio system was in the process of falling apart. We’d been two young men in an old man’s business, and by now nearly all the old men we’d worked with or gotten to know had passed away; and we’d become older men in a younger man’s business that had in its very nature become polarities apart from what we—Warren and Henry and I—had grown up with or joined or rebelled against.
Beatty, Jaglom and I had entered show business—the theatre and television first—as actors. I first met each of them separately, in Manhattan late in the fifties. Both Warren and I studied acting with Stella Adler, and we got acquainted at her studio just as he was breaking through into stage and TV work, then films. This was around the same time I was directing my first professional work off-Broadway—in the same area where Henry was producing his first show. All of us eventually moved permanently to Los Angeles and evolved into successful picture directors. Beatty first became one of the biggest film stars of my generation—and among the savviest producers as well—while Jaglom most admirably and with great integrity followed his own independent star.
As Warren and I glanced at each other in Henry’s garden more than thirty-five years after our first meeting as teenagers, we didn’t have to say much to understand each other and what we had seen go by. Beatty described a vivid memory of his: seeing Jean Renoir, for God’s sake—he is arguably the world’s greatest filmmaker—at my home in 1976 (less than three years before his death) and being terribly moved to see the man frail and in a wheelchair, having known him for years as such a vital force. But when we entered pictures, most of the old masters were still alive and either making films or at least able to talk about how they had been made. That authorial personality we used to look for in the best of movies has virtually disappeared even as a criterion. This book is about how much we all gained; and what we have lost.
In the Beginning, the Question
“Oh, for Chrissake, Bogdanovich!” said John Ford when he was seventy-five and I was twenty-nine. “Can’t you do anything but ask questions?! I mean, Jesus Christ, haven’t you even heard of the declarative sentence?” Luckily, at this point (early 1969), I had known Mr. Ford for about six years—written a magazine article on him, done an interview-book with him and shot a feature documentary about his work, and I understood from his tone, attitude, choice of words and expression that he was not really angry, only somewhat exasperated. Contrary to the image he generally tried to project—a “hard-nosed director,” grizzled, terrifyingly powerful in his calm presence; in his anger, annihilatingly so: all of which was true—Jack Ford nevertheless, I had found out, could be coaxed down memory lane without turning savage or bored. It had to be the right moment, and you couldn’t go on for too long or Ford might notice he wasn’t hating the subject matter and was even enjoying the conversation, at which point he would turn sarcastic or uninterested again.
On the other hand, I must have been pretty wearing with my questions: this came to be one of Mr. Ford’s running jokes about me. The last time I saw him (in June 1973), only two months before he died—when the laconic and silver-haired Howard Hawks (only two years Ford’s junior) and I visited his sickbed and after our hellos—Ford’s first remark to Hawks was: “Howard, does he ask you all those goddam questions, too?” Hawks answered, with a bemused look, “Oh, yeah.” Ford went on: “Jesus Christ! All the time?” “Yup,” Hawks said with a grin. “How do you stand it?” Ford said, and looked over at me with a gruff smile. Under the surface of this exchange was a certain pride between the two of them because I had just directed (and co-produced) three critically successful and popular films in a row (eleven Academy Award nominations between them), and had gone on record with press and public that I’d learned how to make them from asking a lot of questions of other directors, watching hem work, predominantly Ford and Hawks. The truth is that I had given as much credit as I could to these men—exaggerating if that was possible—not only because of the debt I felt, but also because they were at that time considered by many to be dwelling “over the hill,” and this angered and troubled me.
When I first began asking the questions a month or so before my twenty-first birthday, I already had studied acting with Stella Adler for four years, and been involved in about forty professional stage presentations, including one well-reviewed, though commercially unsuccessful, off-Broadway production that I directed. However, based on the example of my artist-father’s thoroughgoing and passionate knowledge of painting and music, I decided that if I really wanted to learn about making pictures—as opposed to theatre—I had better see all the best and most significant ones and, at the same time, reach out to professional artists who had worked in the field, observe them at their jobs if possible and, certainly, ask as many questions on the subject as I could. My great good fortune was that so many of the finest picture makers, the ones who had started it all, were still alive.
By the time my official interviewing concluded about twelve years later, I had become established at the forefront of the “new Hollywood” of the 1970s. My education and apprenticeship (how I looked at everything I did up to that time) clearly had worked: I had learned enough of the craft from the masters and on my own to be able to succeed in the field. But, as Josef von Sternberg said to me while discussing his first great successes of the late twenties and early thirties: “There were a few pages after that …”
Sixteen very different picture makers are interviewed by me in this volume. Their careers encompass virtually the entire history of the movies, from the medium’s beginnings before the start of the twentieth century through its rise, golden age, decline, fall (and resurrection?); this was the main reason for arranging the chapters in chronological order by the directors’ birthdates, which (except in a rare case like Cukor’s) fairly well correspond to the order in which they started in the business.
Of these sixteen, I was able to watch only six at work, only two (Hawks and Hitchcock) over any significant length of time. Each of them had some influence on my life—in certain cases a profound impact—both personally and professionally. There is no way to repay that debt except by sharing their generosity, knowledge and experience, and by helping perpetuate their finest qualities. Because, on the set of a good picture, the director essentially is in charge; and he is each moment’s first audience. A great deal depends on that first reaction—it informs every foot of film. Through the director’s presence, the ultimate quality of the work in front of and behind the camera is affected. This chemistry creates its own particular kind of tension in the work, depending on the personality of the director through which ultimately everything is being filtered.
Over varying periods, eleven of these moviemakers had a great deal of success and power in the film industry; several were household names. Nearly every one commanded a high salary, exercising in some cases a tremendous sway (consciously or not) over the world public: Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh (midteens and twenties; late thirties and forties), Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg (twenties and thirties), Howard Hawks (thirties through sixties), Leo McCarey (thirties and forties), Alfred Hitchcock (thirties through seventies), George Cukor (midthirties through sixties), Otto Preminger (forties into seventies), Robert Aldrich (fifties into seventies), Sidney Lumet (late sixties into nineties). Of the others, Don Siegel had his biggest successes in the last two decades of his career (late sixties to early eighties), while Joseph H. Lewis and Edgar G. Ulmer toiled in near anonymity from the twenties into the sixties trying to make something out of almost nothing. Frank Tashlin, who was an artist-for-hire through all his career—working at the heights of pop culture but a slave to it—had perhaps the most typical director experiences. Chuck Jones, the eminent cartoon director, like Tashlin, was in bondage to his employers from the thirties into the sixties but had a revival after the midseventies which has continued into the nineties.