Not much to report from the set today. The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth continues apace; Brad Pitt looks more louche than ever, Scott Caan’s playing his dad, Elizabeth Debicki is making up for Tenet (I liked it), and I’m over here waiting for my scene to begin. Our director, Mr. Fincher, has been shooting “plates” for over six hours. For those not in the biz, not in the know, Mr. Fincher hasn’t lost it. He’s not armed, nor is he harming any fine china. Sometimes, when you’re working on location, things go wrong, problems come up. I was watching Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer the other night, a CinemaScope drama written by William Faulkner from the late-1950s. Joanne Woodward’s brilliant and beautiful as always, but, aside from her, as Eric Roberts writes in his new memoir, “It wasn’t hot, but it certainly was long.”
Three characters get into a car. They start the scene outside, in a real location or out on the backlot somewhere in Hollywood; as soon as they’re seated, they’re in a studio and the background is rear-projected. Rather than go out and put a camera in a car and drive around, filmmakers almost always opted for a stationary car jostled around by grips inside; it wasn’t until 1958 that Orson Welles had Charlton Heston drive around real streets in Touch of Evil that the rule was even broken. I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but it’s what the Fat Man told me, many, many times over lunch at Ma Maison in Los Angeles.
Henry Jaglom died this week. I considered him a friend, if not a confidante; we were closest in the late-1970s and early-1980s, when he was still working with Welles on a number of film projects that would all go unrealized by either. Maybe Henry got around to making something interesting, I don’t know, I never saw any of his movies; I was in them, but I never saw them. They never played in Massachusetts. After enjoying his company as a dining companion (if not Welles, who’d tease me about my “rump” and that I was next on the menu; I didn’t rue his death any more than he liked to see me feathered and living), I kept up with Henry through The New Yorker, The New York Times, Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinéma, and whatever other intellectual bullshit publication would cover the kind of stuff we liked. Experimental, outré, avant.
I worked briefly on one of Henry’s films, 1983’s Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Karen Black was in it, so I was in from the jump, I didn’t care if Henry put me on boom mic. And, in fact, he did, testing my patience as well as my wingspan on more than one occasion. Henry liked to let the camera run, and because he rarely worked from a script, he printed a lot of bullshit. Karen wasn’t too sharp, and he’d goad her on with non-direction like, “Just more.” More of what? She wasn’t doing anything. I heard that Henry’s movie with Tuesday Weld, A Safe Place, was similarly rudderless and painfully boring. I liked the guy, but didn’t have to like his movies or his success. I mean really, what’s a bird go to do to get some feature film financing? I was trying in the 1970s, and then this fuck makes a semi-career out of improvised bullshit that made Robert Altman look like Stanley Kubrick.
Mood. I enjoyed dining with Henry, and, in retrospect, working with him was an experience. It didn’t damage my career, didn’t take up too much of my time, and, now I realize, it was the kind of set that most likely doesn’t exist anymore: loose, carefree, no stress. In other words, the complete opposite of The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth. Perhaps the difference is that we’ll be playing in hundreds of millions of homes on Netflix; Henry could only dream. But I suppose there’s no reason they can’t host Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Maybe a non-zero amount of people won’t turn it off. I’ll be one of them, looking for my name in tiny font at the end of the credit crawl, if there is one—memory serves, but not today.
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