Back to the Cradle of Conflict

“I don’t know if you noticed, but there were a couple of psychos in the crowd the other day,” says Tim Robbins, referring to a protest scene he staged in New York City for his new movie, “Cradle Will Rock.”

Robbins, who is directing but not appearing in this film, is standing in the middle of 156th Street on the West Side of Manhattan, surrounded by camera crew and equipment.

“They’d run into the shot dressed in period clothes and do all sorts of things,” he says. “One of them was hitting one of the kids. We were having trouble getting the kid to say his dialogue right. And that was why.

“We had a riot scene,” he continues, warming to the task of griping about New York, where he lives part time. “Extras being clubbed by policemen. Stuntmen. Stunt horses. About 300 people. When we looked at the dailies we saw this guy sit down on a park bench while all this is going on and look like this.”

Robbins stretches his arms out and gazes idly right and left, looking profoundly bored.

“Then he picks up a stick, gets up and walks away,” he says. “Every single shot. He was in his own silent movie.”

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“Cradle Will Rock,” scheduled to hit theaters Wednesday, is anything but silent. It is dialogue-heavy and is as loud, brash, and busy as the era it depicts--1930s New York. The cast is extraordinary: Hank Azaria, Ruben Blades, John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Cary Elwes, Philip Baker Hall, Angus Macfadyen, Bill Murray (who plays a ventriloquist), Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, Emily Watson. The film follows a group of artists, financiers, media types and politicos associated with the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration. Among its many characters: Orson Welles, John Houseman, Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Marc Blitzstein.

Marc Blitzstein? The least-known figure in this list, he is nevertheless at the center of the story. Blitzstein was a seminal theater mind who wrote a musical called “The Cradle Will Rock,” which was about a steelworkers’ strike and was to be directed and produced by Welles and Houseman. However, the federal government, fearing labor unrest, pulled the plug, and the local actors’ and musicians’ unions followed suit. The show’s disgruntled actors and audience, turned away at the door, marched up Fifth Avenue to a theater uptown, where Blitzstein proposed to perform the entire piece himself.

“Something happens in the theater,” Robbins says enigmatically. “I don’t want to give away anything. Let’s just say courage was found. The ability and the strength it takes to perform in the face of adversity is demonstrated in there. That’s the central story.”

That could easily describe the making of “Cradle Will Rock.” Shooting a period picture is never easy, especially on a relatively small budget, especially in New York, but, like any director trying to get what he wants--particularly with limited resources--Robbins sometimes created problems of his own. On the day of the march, production designer Richard Hoover was seated on a bench in Madison Square Park, talking about how the director was shooting more of the street than Hoover had dressed.

“I said to him, ‘You know, I’m still doing your movie, but in your movie the shot was over there,’ ” Hoover says. “ ‘The camera wasn’t supposed to be moving the way it is right now. We never discussed that.’ ”

Hoover, who worked with Robbins on “Dead Man Walking,” then adds, “I’m his buddy, except I don’t want to go near him, he’s such a grouch. He’s busy. He’s got a big movie to make.”

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At 156th Street, they are shooting at the Academy of Arts and Letters, which is doubling as a theater. (They also used theaters in upstate New York and New Jersey.) It’s the middle of July and very hot, but the performers are wearing overcoats and there’s “snow” on the ground (actually, Epsom salt) and in the air (potato flakes). Robbins, wearing shorts and sandals, summons a production assistant to bring him mineral water, which he uses to wash the salt off his feet. Then he dons a pair of sneakers.

“Now he’s going to write that Robbins uses mineral water to wash his feet,” Robbins says wryly, conscious of Hollywood excess and the attention paid to it by the media. As he points out, there’s no water to be had here, unless a hydrant were opened, or he retired to a bathroom in the academy or his trailer and stuck his feet in a sink.

Today they are shooting a scene featuring Welles, Houseman and Blitzstein emerging from a theater that is showing a Welles production of “Faustus.” Between scenes, Azaria, who plays Blitzstein and looks sort of ferrety with a thin mustache, slicked-back hair and a threadbare overcoat, entertains Elwes and Robbins with an imitation of an absurdly digressive, free-associating baseball announcer. Elwes is weeping; Robbins, very nearly so.

“At the time that ‘Cradle’ happened, [Blitzstein] was still young enough that his future seemed kind of bright,” says Azaria, who learned to mimic piano-playing for the part. “He was creatively and materially frustrated. At the same time he had incredibly intense and admirable artistic ideals. Although he desperately wanted a commercial success, he refused to pander or dumb it down.”

“Serious composers borrowed or learned from Blitzstein,” Robbins says. “Leonard Bernstein called him the single most important influence on his own composing. When Bernstein wrote ‘West Side Story’ it was maybe 10 years after Blitzstein.”

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The doomed musical wasn’t the end of troubles for Blitzstein, who went on to compose other music with mixed success, and years later he was murdered. The movie doesn’t deal with this, however, because what interested Robbins was the scene in the theater, so he chose to work back from there, incorporating more than a dozen characters and weaving together their stories. There’s something Altman-esque about his ambitions--think “The Player” or “Short Cuts,” both of which Robbins appeared in. Not surprisingly, it took him three years to make all the pieces fit. And then, of course, he had to get financing.

“This was originally set up as part of a deal at Working Title/PolyGram,” Robbins says. “They chose not to finance it. It was their first choice because I have a deal there. I presented them with a budget, and they didn’t want to spend that kind of money, which was really disappointing because I just made them a ton of money with ‘Dead Man Walking.’ This kind of stuff happens all the time, though. Even if you do everything right, if you make money, if you do a good movie, it still doesn’t guarantee you anything.”

“I don’t know why he was surprised that they weren’t going to fork out money,” says his companion, Susan Sarandon, who plays a fascist sympathizer in the film. “The business doesn’t work that way. After he did ‘The Player,’ I think he’d know that. Decisions are not made on the basis of ‘You’ve earned us some money, so let’s take a chance.’ ”

Fortunately for Robbins, Disney’s Joe Roth stepped up. Now Robbins had to find a cast, arguably the most important thing in any movie, especially one like this, which features larger-than-life factual characters. Principal among these is Welles. Robbins says he had a hard time finding the right actor, at one point even considering taking the role himself. (He almost played Nelson Rockefeller because of John Cusack’s scheduling difficulties.) This is not as strange as it might seem, because Robbins was compared to Welles--by Robert Altman--after he wrote the script and co-wrote the songs for, directed and starred in the political satire “Bob Roberts.” Then he found British actor Macfadyen, who plays Welles with the sort of brash, offhand manner that Welles used when he was on screen.

“He was definitely a very egocentric young man,” Macfadyen says. “Probably had to be to do what he did. He seemed to possess this enormous amount of energy. He slept two hours a night. Drank like a fish. Took every drug under the sun. And apparently had quite an active sex life as well.”

Asked if he is a Method actor, Macfadyen laughs and says, “Oh, boy. I did find myself consuming at lunchtime three steaks instead of my usual one. When you do something like that you put out so much energy that you start to consume more food and wine, and your whole attitude becomes one of taking more in just because you’ve got to put more out.”

Given the comparisons to Welles and the presence of Welles in the film, it might have been expected that Robbins would shoot it like a Welles film, full of what critic Pauline Kael called “the candy of shadows and angles and baroque decor.” Instead he drew inspiration from the rapid-fire work of writer-director Preston Sturges.

“I think the critics would have had their knives out,” says Cary Elwes, who plays an effete John Houseman, about the comparisons that would have been made. “But instead he’s gone very much for a Sturges [model]. It’s fast that way. It’s not farce. . . . I thought that was very interesting, Sturges looking at Welles from an original script by Tim.”

Because the events in this picture are politically charged--in addition to Blitzstein’s difficulties with the federal government, Rivera (Blades) wrestles with Rockefeller over the anti-capitalist mural he painted for Rockefeller Center--one might expect this movie to be some sort of tract. In fact, according to Sarandon, “The movie poses the question of: If you’re being supported and being funded, how much do the people who are funding you have to say about what you produce?”

In this sense, it unintentionally anticipates and comments on New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attempt to withhold public funding from the Brooklyn Museum because of a “blasphemous” group show called “Sensation.” But Robbins, who’s outspoken politically but recognizes that politics is the kiss of death at the box office (see “Bulworth” and “Primary Colors”), insists that he’s not making a statement about the strings attached to arts funding.

“It’s broadly entertaining,” Disney’s Roth says. “I thought it was less about a work strike than it was about a group of itinerant workers, in this case actors, who are being stopped from doing their work by authority and take to the street to prove their point. It’s like a movie about the circus. It just happened to be actors. A group of gypsies in the middle of New York who decide to put on a show regardless of the stakes.”

“It’s definitely not an earnest movie,” Robbins says. “And it’s definitely not a political movie or a socially significant movie. It’s hopefully a fast-paced entertainment about certain true things that happened in the theater world and the art world in ‘30s New York.”

So it’s about art?

“Oh, God, nobody would see a movie about art,” he says, laughing. “People who call themselves artists, I don’t know why that bugs me. Isn’t that someone else’s prerogative to call you an artist? Or when someone talks about their art.” He laughs again. “I think it’s a movie about courage, to tell you the truth.” *

John Clark is an occasional contributor to Calendar.