Harlan Ellison's Watching (21 page)

It was a lean two weeks for screenings, otherwise I wouldn't inflict this one on you; however, a word to the wise might save you a couple of wasted hours of TV watching on 21 February when ABC-TV's
Wednesday Movie of the Week
presents Lee Remick starring in
And No One Could Save Her
.

What hag-demon possesses networks like ABC, or production companies like England's Robert Stigwood Organization, compelling them to proffer such pallid floral bouquets as this, their first cooperative venture into filmed-for-TV movies?

Surely no one connected with this dreary little "thriller" could have held any illusions about the freshness of the plot as concocted by Anthony Skene (a gentleman who ought to have his wits, as well as his pencils, sharpened):

Fern, heiress, has been married six months to Sam, a devilishly handsome broth of an Irish lad, who works for the Boston branch of the London Bank. One day he receives a cable, your father is dying. He splits for Ireland. Fern, who has a history of emotional breakdowns, starts to get twitchy when he doesn't call. Finally she flies to Eire (for no logical reason save the show would have ended after five minutes had she not) to track him down. No records of Sam. He isn't who he said he was. Plot complications ensue—devoid of logic or inevitability but simply programmed out of coincidence at the whim of the plot-manipulators—and finally we discover Sam is some species of Blarney-enriched gigolo, thrown out of prep school for "getting a girl in trouble," womanizing through young manhood, making ends meet by making ends meet with wealthy ladies on tour boats, married already.

That's right, you've got it: marrying Fern, the cable, running off . . . it was all a plot so Sam could get Fern's money when she killed herself out of hysteria and grief at his loss. But when she doesn't (as chancy a piece of plotting as one could wince at witnessing in an adult drama), he decides to do her in himself. Fern is saved. Sam falls to his death. Fadeout.

The definitive statement of this arthritic plot was
Gaslight
, and that was 1944. A hundred thousand potboiler "gothics" and "women's novels" have celebrated it
ad nauseum
. Every hack writer and hack producer who didn't want to spend the location budget for a hack western or hack war epic has redone this story till only the most culturally deprived and cinematically naïve viewer fails to spot it within moments of the opening credits. It is a fool's game, and one even ABC should be above playing . . . at least publicly.

Lee Remick, as Fern, is her usual somnambulistic self, wandering through yet another eminently forgettable nonperformance; Milo O'Shea plays a Dublin attorney named (of course) Dooley with such overblown affectation it becomes more parody than portrayal—a hysterical mismatching of unequal parts Brendan Behan and drunken leprechaun; Jennie Linden, she of
Women in Love
, flashes onscreen too briefly, and has been dealt too mundane a role, to remain long in the memory; everyone else serves as shadows.

There is the stench of corrupted Abbey Players technique throughout, and only the camera lingering lovingly on sites and vistas of Dublin prevents this reviewer from suggesting the lynch rope for all concerned. Yet even the pleasures of watching a travelogue behind Ms. Remick's ghostlike peregrinations is not enough to succor us against the idiot script. It is a waste of time, an utter waste of time.

And to return to the original question,
why
does ABC cast all the way to England for a production company whose ineptitude and banality of product can easily be matched by our own, home-grown
schlock
outfits?

Leave it to the traditionally last-running network to avoid all the talented filmmakers overseas and grasp with both hands the overseas equivalents of the Quinn Martin/Aaron Spelling
dreck
-makers. ABC takes the lead at last . . . in the importation of offscourings.

The Staff
/February 16, 1973

What comes to mind first is: Why should anyone grant an interview?

The answer is a simple one, most of the time: To promote a property. If it's an author, the current book on the stalls. If it's a public figure, it's the career, the image, the upcoming trial, the political position. If it's an actor, the soon-to-be-released film he or she is contractually obligated to hype. If it's a fanatic, clearly it's the need to be seen, to be heard, to be noticed.

But in the case of any of the above who can be termed "together," what is the impetus?

Letting an interview, if it's done properly, can only serve to unveil the inner soul of the celebrity. (Done at the usual level of interviews it remains little more than movie fanmagazine frippery, gossip, press release PR puff bullshit.) And who, among all thinking, feeling celebrities, wishes the soul unveiled? Masochism notwithstanding, it becomes an exercise in futility for interviewer and interviewee.

To do an interview properly, the writer must hang out with the subject for a period of time, to get the feel of lifestyle, to see the subject when he or she exists in unguarded moments, to find a thematic hook on which to hang a piece that will burn with veracity and insight. At least that is the method I've found workable; the
only
method.

For in each interview I've done (and because of the time and outlays of personal energy involved I've purposely done only a few in my seventeen years as a professional) there has come a moment, an instant in time, in which I've been able to see directly to the core of the subject. At least, in my arrogance and pride in craft, I
believe
I've seen that burning core. It came in the high desert beyond Thousand Palms, in 120° heat with Steve McQueen; it came in a noisy nightclub in Texas watching Jackie Wilson perform as I got the key to my piece on Three Dog Night; it was in the death cell at San Quentin when I perceived the parameters of the insane equation called Ronald Fouquet.

But short of such commitments, it seems to me virtually impossible to come back from a subject's world and ambience with anything but superficialities. All one gets is an encounter with the subject's public face. One asks questions one hopes are no more banal and familiar than those asked by a thousand other interviewers on the publicity circuit; one tries to establish a reality with the subject in hopes he or she will identify and reveal something fresh and meaningful; one prays for the moment of unconscious revelation.

In a one-hour luncheon conversation, with a studio publicity man in attendance, nothing can be gained. There is enrichment neither for celebrity nor for interviewer, and hence, no enrichment for readers of the interview.

So the second question is: Why did you go to interview Peter Boyle?

The answer is twofold. First, and quite honestly foremost, I wanted to meet and possibly make friends with Boyle. There are a few people whom one sees from afar, who seem to have a reality, a substance to them that demands acquaintanceship. It's a presumption, of course, on a moral par with calling a studio casting director to introduce you to a beautiful girl you've seen in a film. It's intrusion. But acceptable, within limits, because the studio and the celebrity are seeking promotion. There is a semisquamous give-and-take, a bargaining, an exchange of services.

I, the undersigned, wanted to meet Peter Boyle, for my own selfish needs of friendship.

But the second reason is how I justified it. Boyle—as my review of
Steelyard Blues
accompanying this article reveals—is, in my estimation, one of the finest actors this country has produced in the last twenty years. And so, give-and-take again, I would trade my need to meet Boyle for a (I hoped) informative and revealing piece on a talent worthy of attention.

That is why I went to meet Boyle and Warner Bros. press representative Vernon White for lunch at the Aware Inn, in the Valley.

What came out of that hour is very little.

I hasten to confess the fault was mine, neither Boyle's nor White's. Knowing what I've said above to be true about quick interviews, I should have either advised them I was not going to write a piece on Boyle, or committed the time to following along behind the actor for a day or so, circumstances permitting. But I did neither, and so herewith offer what few perceptions I
did
come up with, hence terming them a "sort of" an interview.

(And being painfully conscious of how me-oriented such half-assed non writing can be, I'm reminded of the terrible and dishonest piece Rex Reed once wrote for
Esquire—
a terrible and dishonest magazine—on Warren Beatty. Reed could not get his interview, was put off, was shunted from PR man to PR man and finally did a hatchet-job on Beatty to the tune of how put-upon he, Reed, had been in H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D. I swear to you I will try to avoid such calumny in this article, but be compassionate.)

The studio limousine was parked at the curb on Ventura Boulevard, the chauffeur pacing up and down, all the signs that this was but one more quick-stop on the flurrying radio and TV interview circuit, to be dispensed with as quickly as possible so the star could be whisked off to his next nameless stop. I was already late for the lunch and I felt no more secure on arrival than a sinner at the Big Gate.

Boyle and White were seated at a table near the window and the introductions were about par: White effusive out of some familiarity with my work and the needs of his job, Boyle pleasant but reserved, waiting to see what
this
encounter held.

We began circling each other.

Boyle doesn't
look
like a bird—he's round and balding and somatotypically Everyman-ish—but his
movements
are birdlike: bright-eyed, beaky, sharp and quick. That was my first impression: that he was avian, hanging miles above the world, tracking the passage of his dinner far below. Subsequent conversation proved it to be a not inaccurate observation on my part; the part of Eagle in
Steelyard Blues
could not have gone to a more perfect player.

Boyle is much more Eagle than ever he was Joe.

I handed each of them a copy of the review of the film. They read it quickly. "You're wrong about the script," Boyle said. "Ninety percent of what you saw on the screen was in that script." That stopped me. I'd gone out on a limb in the review, for the first time suggesting the actors had had more to do with a film's success than the usually unsung writer.

"Even the changes of costume, the human fly business, that Marlon Brando takeoff? That was in the script?" I couldn't be
that
wrong.

"All in the script."

At moments like that I regretted I wasn't a drinker.

"Even the scene where I was dressed as a carpenter, that was in the script." He needn't have rubbed it in. "The walking through the window, even the glass-chewing, that was all written." The man had no mercy. "I did the mugging behind the window and the barking like a dog, but just about everything else you saw the writer gave us." I had visions of rewriting the review to avoid looking like a
schmuck
, at least to myself. Then I looked up from my note pad at Boyle. He was smiling.

Under that scruffy mustache was a gentle smile; and only for a moment did I see where the altered angle of that smile might become the expression of a psychotic racist named Joe or a noble lunatic named Eagle. Boyle meant nothing by the smile, probably didn't even know he was wearing it. He was merely passing time, talking a little small talk, fulfilling his obligation to the company store.

We rambled on together, passing each other in conversation, touching briefly at points where informational-load was transshipped: though the cameras didn't linger on them, the posters in Eagle's room in the nuthouse were Boyle's idea, tokens of the human fly's attitude toward life . . . Meher Baba, a smiling Don't Worry face, the Amazing Spider-Man; the order in which he'd made films since
Joe . . . T. R. Baskin, The Candidate, Steelyard Blues
, and the unreleased
Slither, Dime Box
and
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
; one of his heroes, someone
he
wanted to meet . . . Myron Nelson of Boise, Idaho, a man who rescues wounded birds and befriends them, everything from blind eagles to clawless hawks. I listened hard; time was running away from our hour, and I had the feeling we might never pass this way again.

I asked him about acting. About being Joe and what had followed. He sketched at stories of encounters, of casual horrors with those who had seen him as Joe and admired him, of those who had seen him as Joe and despised him. Of the few who had realized he was simply an actor playing a role. Of the night he had appeared on the Johnny Carson show and come to the realization that he wasn't there to be interviewed as Peter Boyle, the actor, but to perform as Joe, as some kind of primitive entertainment. "It was a shock. For a long time after
Joe
I couldn't play any violent roles. I was offered scripts, some of them excellent, but I couldn't do it. That was a bad time for me. Joe was the pure pre-Fascist man, straight out of Reich's
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
. Did you ever read it?"

I looked back at him, pen poised over note pad. "Is that Wilhelm or Theodor?" He made a little birdlike move with his head and looked at me differently. I think he knew.