Cinema : Movie Kings: Huston, Lean, Coppola, Scorsese

While rewriting his script for “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,” John Milius asked John Huston what directing was all about.

“You will confer with generals,” the aging director told the eager young screenwriter. “You will dine at the table with kings and you will sleep with titled women. All this you will do while being dead broke. That’s what being a director is.”

The daft exaggeration of a garrulous old man? From Huston, it’s, if anything, an understatement. His exploits form the core of Lawrence Grobel’s THE HUSTONS (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $24.95; 752 pp.), a sprawling saga that richly details the lives of Huston, his father Walter and her offspring, Anjelica, Tony and Danny.

A gambler, rogue and womanizer of epic proportions (he went through five wives and innumerable mistresses), Huston was fueled by a restless energy that not only produced a staggering body of work (from “The Maltese Falcon” through “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The African Queen,” to “Prizzi’s Honor”) but a treasure-trove of adventures.

Initially intrigued by painting and boxing, Huston turned to writing and directing after watching, awestruck, as Eugene O’Neill rehearsed his father, Walter, in the original production of “Desire Under the Elms.”

This is not to say that Huston approached his art with any great discipline. Toiling as a screenwriter in 1930’s Hollywood, he was a reckless heel, getting caught with another woman by his first wife, totaling his car in a drunken wreck and later killing a woman in another auto accident. He was the kind of guy who took his first $500 book advance, went to bet on a friend’s horse at Saratoga, fell into a crap game before the race--and won $11,000.

In 1941, making his debut as a director, he concocted a gem--”The Maltese Falcon,” whose dark shadows and brooding antiheroics not only made Humphrey Bogart a star but ushered in the era of the film noir. Oscar night found Huston, true to form, sitting with his second wife while blowing kisses to his current mistress, Olivia de Havilland, and winking at Mary Astor, with whom he’d had an affair while making “Falcon.”

Huston went on to greater fame, making movies about his favorite theme--the pursuit of impossible dreams. Grobel does his best to sketch Huston’s cinematic artistry, but he’s far more successful probing his life than his work.

Vacationing in Cuba, Huston challenged Ernest Hemingway to a boxing match. Hemingway blustered: “I’m gonna cool the SOB,” but Huston backed off when told Hemingway had a bad heart.

In Paris, he tried to persuade Jean-Paul Sartre to script a film about Freud. They didn’t hit it off: Huston said Sartre had an eye “like an omelette,” while Sartre told his wife: “(Huston) is not even sad--he’s empty.”

Sartre was not far wrong. Even Lillian Ross, a longtime Huston admirer, wrote in a famous New Yorker profile: “His eyes look watchful, and yet strangely empty of all feeling.” Judging from Grobel’s account, Huston’s boozy escapades--and obsessive philandering--may well have been his antidote to a haunting fear of rejection.

Huston never adequately deciphered his turbulent attachment to his mother, a high-strung woman and frustrated artist who both smothered and rejected him. When Huston, at age 19, challenged a man to a duel in Mexico City, it was broken up by his mother, who suddenly appeared to retrieve her wayward son.

Women loved him. And hated him. And came back for more. He proposed to his second wife, Lesley Black, the first night he met her. She accepted. He married his third wife, Evelyn Keyes, in Las Vegas--24 hours after carousing all night with Ava Gardner. When he died, he was living with a woman whom he’d met when she was working for his fifth wife--as her maid.

“John couldn’t take the suggestion of any kind of rejection without desperately going off and comforting himself with some female conquest,” explained De Havilland, who would gladly have married him if she’d been asked. Another old flame, Maka Czernichew, insists that he despised women, especially weak ones. “He admired strength,” she said. “And everything that would resist him.”

In his later years, Huston was a sad sight. Chilly and distant to his kids, hobbled by emphysema, plagued by financial woes and woozy with drink (his son, Tony, remembers him polishing off eight vodka martinis after dinner), he had the sorrowful air of a toothless lion in winter.

Still, in his last years he somehow summoned the energy to churn out a string of dazzling films, from “The Man Who Would Be King” and “Wise Blood” to “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The Dead.”

What made John Huston so indomitable? When he was nearly 70, he took an acting job in a film directed by Orson Welles. Late one night, he approached Welles, an old friend and rival whose first triumph, “Citizen Kane,” came in the same year as Huston’s “Maltese Falcon.” Huston wanted to know what this new movie was all about.

“It’s about a bastard director who’s full of himself, who catches people and creates and then destroys them,” Welles said. “It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”

In 1964, eager to make a movie out of Carson McCullers’ “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” Huston was given an adaptation of the novel by a young screenwriter--Francis Coppola. Huston promptly hired Christopher Isherwood to write a new version.

Undeterred, Coppola took his salary and bought a Jaguar. He invested the rest of his money in Scopitone, an experimental cine-jukebox that showed three-minute films. The company quickly folded, taking Coppola’s savings with it.

This financial brinksmanship became such an integral part of Coppola’s operating style that after reading ON THE EDGE: The Life & Times of Francis Coppola (William Morrow: $22.95; 512 pp.), Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise’s unauthorized biography, it’s hard to separate Coppola’s cinematic wizardry from his mercurial exploits as a showbiz impresario.

Possessed with grand illusions, indefatigable energy and unfailing chutzpah, Coppola emerges as a brilliant hustler and a gaudy, high-tech dreamer--call him a New Age Col. Tom Parker. As filming began on “One From the Heart,” a disastrous flop, he grandly told the press: “We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the Industrial Revolution look like a small out-of-town tryout.” The next day his much-ballyhooed Zoetrope Films couldn’t make its payroll.

Still, no one can match Coppola’s canny salesmanship--he has the golden tongue of a carny barker. Making “The Cotton Club,” Coppola found himself immersed in a hotbed of on-set intrigue, surrounded by shady characters and back-stabbing schemers. When the film’s money men became concerned that Coppola would run up his customary budget excesses, they sent a Vegas mob-type to scare him into finishing the movie on time.

Undaunted, Coppola gave the mobster his own director’s chair and did such a masterful job of flattering him that the enforcer was soon telling his bosses to leave Coppola alone and let him create. Infuriated by how he was repeatedly outfoxed by Coppola, producer Robert Evans raged: “He makes Elmer Gantry look like Don Knotts.”

Although Coppola refused to cooperate with authors Goodwin and Wise, by relying on a wealth of interviews and media coverage they manage to paint a skillful, if often unflattering, portrait of an incorrigible auteur.

Traditional wisdom views Coppola as an artist whose talents have often been overcome by an obsession with technology. But here he appears as a grandiose, wildly undisciplined showman, convinced he could only be creative in the face of mounting chaos.

Perhaps the best judgment comes from Coppola’s wife, Eleanor. Having endured his erratic genius and wayward affections, she said of their life together: “We travel like a circus family, with Francis on the tightrope and the rest of us holding the ropes.”

Coppola began his career making exploitation fare for Roger Corman, who was also Martin Scorsese’s mentor. Corman’s apprentices learned to work fast and cheap, with one eye always trained on the box-office charts. (One of Coppola’s projects with Corman was “Dementia 13,” so titled because Corman felt it would get the film extra bookings on the 13th of each month.) With blacksploitation films the rage, Corman initially offered to finance Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” a coming-of-age tale set in Little Italy, but only if he’d make it with an all-black cast.

Scorsese found the money elsewhere, and under the spell of gangster films like “The Big Heat” and “The Public Enemy,” made “Mean Streets” an unforgettable modern-day film noir--a psychological thriller filled with emotional turmoil and dazzling visuals that became the signature of Scorsese’s career.

Based on his lectures and interviews, SCORSESE ON SCORSESE, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie (Faber and Faber: $17.95; 170 pp.) offers a lively self-analysis of his career, from early day jobs (he helped edit “Woodstock”) through triumphs (“Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull”) to the tortuous battles he faced making “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Scorsese’s most valued mentor was British film maker Michael Powell, whose “Peeping Tom” was a huge influence on “Taxi Driver.” In his foreword to Scorsese’s book, Powell says great directors must have “the cunning of a fox and the innocence of a child.” The dictum certainly applies to David Lean, who began his career editing Powell films before rising to fame as the director of “Bridge On the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” Even as a rookie film cutter, Lean was an ardent perfectionist, peppering his boss with so many suggestions that Powell recalls their collaboration by saying wryly: “I did what I was told.”

Stephen Silverman’s biography, DAVID LEAN (Harry N. Abrams: $39.95; 208 pp.), is adorned with handsome stills from the imperious director’s epics, but despite Lean’s cooperation, the book offers little insight into the man or his passions. Although Lean was married five times, his wives are dismissed in one paragraph. Lean and O’Toole didn’t speak for 25 years after making “Lawrence,” but Silverman elicits only the vaguest explanation from Lean. (Among the photos is a fascinating photo of a young Albert Finney in T. E. Lawrence togs--he quit the part four days into production, making way for Peter O’Toole, who was recommended to Lean by his old pal, Katharine Hepburn.)

A master storyteller with an uncanny eye for visual composition, Lean was a prickly, taciturn man, who often clashed with his producers (after they won Oscars for “Lawrence,” he got into a fight with Sam Spiegel backstage), taunted his actors and even now rarely shares any credit. He pronounces most of his writers’ scripts “awful.”

His actors return the favor. After making “A Passage to India,” Judy Davis complained that “David has an ego the size of America.” Or as Trevor Howard slyly put it: “By the time David gets round to filming ‘Gandhi,’ Mahatma will have to be played by Katie Hepburn, because she’ll be the only actor still talking to him.”

Lean’s films, like Huston’s, will outlast these conflicts. These two directors watched the modern world grow up first-hand--and were blessed with the vision to chronicle its dramas. As a boy, Lean saw Lindbergh land his Spirit of St. Louis on a grass runway at Croyden Aerodrome; as a film maker, he mythologized England’s imperial history, from the POW camps of Burma to the desert sands of Arabia. Huston, during World War II, joined the Signal Corps, and filmed dog fights with Japanese Zeros over the shoulder of his plane’s waist gunner, who was killed by machine gun fire. He too used history as his canvas, from tales of the Old West to chronicles of beautiful losers and misfit adventurers.

For the moment, Coppola and Scorsese, film school graduates who experienced history in darkened theatres, stand in these men’s shadows. Scorsese jokes that the most action he ever saw was at the Thalia theatre on 96th Street, braving a mob of cineastes to see “Citizen Kane.”

Still, in today’s film world, directors are the men who would be kings, and it’s hard not to take delight in these movie-warrior exploits, whether real or on the screen. As Eugene O’Neill told a boyish John Huston when he worried that the playwright’s actors seemed nervous during rehearsals for “Desire Under the Elms”: “They’re playing but one part apiece--I’m playing them all.”