Looking Back With the Director of ‘Stunt Man’

Richard Rush looks down on the San Fernando Valley twinkling beneath the King Air airplane. These days, flying to Santa Barbara for the afternoon is a rare treat for the 71-year-old director, who recently gave up his Cessna for health reasons. Flying used to be the perfect hobby, he says. “There are enough life and death concerns to take your mind off work.”

And work has been a mixed bag for Rush. His defining moment, “The Stunt Man,” was his greatest success--and his greatest disappointment.

Now, 20 years after its release, the movie weighs on his mind again. As part of a recently released DVD of the film, Rush co-produced a documentary called “The Sinister Saga of Making the Stunt Man,” which tells the story of a movie that garnered three Academy Award nominations but never found an audience.

The saga in brief: It took nine years for the film, which stars Peter O’Toole and Barbara Hershey, to make it to the big screen. Then, when it did, the studio wasn’t interested in promoting it, or releasing it widely, Rush says, telling a familiar Hollywood story, “and it slipped through the cracks.”

His 1980 film is “a movie about moviemaking and what is crazy about our lives,” Rush says over lunch. “There’s an irresistible metaphor in the movie about our universal paranoia. The [dread] you feel when you realize your secretary had lunch with your boss, and you don’t know what they talked about.”

Growing up, Rush didn’t aspire for a career in Hollywood. His ambitions were loftier: He wanted to be first on the moon. Studying astronomy and physics, however, Rush was felled by math and decided that “science would have to stumble along without me.” After odd jobs in advertising and photography, he began making movies, a process he calls “athletic.”

Directing “is too strenuous an event to attempt to have a heart,” he jokes. “The true meaning of final cut is when they cut you in the chest for the bypass.”

Is he bitter that “The Stunt Man” didn’t soar? “It was difficult at the time,” he says, “but the opportunity was the best thing that ever happened to me ... I feel I got away with a big one.”

From an Expert

Porn star Nina Hartley will be the guest of honor at a Santa Clarita synagogue this month as part of Temple Beth Ami’s adult education series. On Feb. 19, Hartley, who appeared in the film “Boogie Nights” and has starred in more than 570 adult films, offers “Love & Sex in the 21st Century,” a free lecture on the porn industry that also features sex tips for monogamous couples.

Rabbi Mark Blazer said he invited Hartley to participate in the lecture series after meeting her through a mutual friend. Her appearance will broaden his congregation intellectually, he said. “My goal as a rabbi is to push the envelope,” Blazer said. While Temple Beth Ami is located in a conservative community, the members of the reform Jewish congregation are very open-minded, Blazer said, and no one has expressed any concern that Hartley’s presence will be offensive. “Part of Judaism is to engage and learn about as much of the world as we can--not to be closed to the world,” he said. “This is really an opportunity that most people would never have.”

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Speak, Muses

Michael York stands at a podium, surrounded by books, and checks his watch. He looks up, and with Elizabethan grace says to his audience: “Ever at my back, I hear time’s winged chariot.”

On this Thursday night, York is at Book Soup in West Hollywood to read from his new book, “Dispatches From Armageddon: Making the Movie ‘Megiddo.’” And when he takes questions from the audience, the answers are more often than not dispatches from the masters. Does he share the religious beliefs of “Megiddo: Omega Code II’s” funder, Trinity Broadcasting Network in Orange County? “We are drowned in the trivial,” York replies, quoting Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Then he dips into George Bernard Shaw, recalling one of the Irish dramatist’s characters, who said of religions: “The trouble is, I believe in all of them.”

Is there a videotaped version of his long-ago portrayal of Pontius Pilate, someone asks. “Heard melodies are sweet,” says York, taking his script from Keats, “but those unheard are sweeter.”

And why did his 1992 autobiography carry different titles in England (“Travelling Player: An Autobiography”) and in the United States (“Accidentally on Purpose,” Simon & Schuster)? Here, Shaw’s words suffice: “Two countries divided by the same language.”

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Quote/Unquote

“As soon as you start touching physically, you stop fully acting. It’s very personal,” Catherine Deneuve, 58, told the Associated Press on Saturday in describing a kissing scene with actress Fanny Ardant in her new film “8 Femmes.”

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