Talking points

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Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age

At the American Film Institute

Edited with commentaries by George Stevens Jr.

Alfred A. Knopf: 738 pp., $35

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Conversations With

John Schlesinger

Ian Buruma

Random House: 208 pp., $14.95 paper

BASICALLY, movie history is a collection of rumors burnished and rendered pointed and plausible by the passage of time. That is to say, it is an oral history, almost entirely without basis in documented fact. Yes, I know, it is sometimes possible to trace a film’s development by consulting the variant versions of a script as it moves from first draft to final production rewrite. It is also occasionally possible to burrow through a studio’s archive and find the memos that reveal, for example, how certain casting decisions were made or how the final cut was arrived at. But that involves a lot of dusty scholarship by essentially clueless academics searching for manifestations of the old Hollywood system’s “genius” in the crumbling files of the legal department. There’s not much fun in those files -- and not much aesthetic insight, either.

The truth is, whatever “system” is in place is geared to the creation of shambling mediocrity. That’s what bureaucracies do best. What really interests us are the exceptions, the films that over the years claim our continuing interest. We do not like to believe that their greatness is accidental. We need to believe in intentionality, the self-conscious assertion of a ruling sensibility.

That’s why the auteur theory has taken such a firm grip on the popular imagination, despite the fact that movies are a collaborative medium. Somebody has to be in charge of a movie, and that somebody is, almost by default, the director, because he’s the only person present who can place his fingerprints on its every aspect -- shaping the script, choosing the camera placements, taming the actors’ egos and the studio’s meddlesome impulses, overseeing the editing and the mix. Typically, he does not leave much of a paper trail as he conducts this business; what he leaves instead is an aura of mystery, a compound of instinctive decisions and murmured asides, which no one remembers exactly at the end of the day.

It is only toward the end of life, when there is time for the auteur to settle back and get his story straight, that there is some hope of illuminating that mystery. It is then that the cinephiles, questions and recording devices in hand, appear in the aging cineaste‘s life, eager to gather his recollections. I know of no other art form -- not literature, not painting, not music -- that is as reliant on the Q-and-A format as film is for the basic facts about its past.

Not a month goes by without a printed version of these exchanges -- some of them collections of interviews (“Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age”), some of them devoted to a single figure (“Conversations With John Schlesinger”) -- arriving on the reviewer’s doorstep. It is hard for me to be critical of these efforts because I too have conducted such dialogues, for both television programs and books. They provide a valuable addition to the historical record, but I am aware of their shortcomings.

Chief among these is their worked-up quality. Almost universally, the directors like to present themselves as storytellers, servants of clear, emotionally compelling narratives rather than of their own egos. They may or may not be the auteurs of their films, but they are definitely the highly selective auteurs of their own life stories. The balance of power is with them, and they are not shy about using their directorial skills to keep the discussion on a track of their choosing. If you read enough of these, you will encounter the same anecdotes, recycled again and again by the interviewees.

It is true that the conversations George Stevens Jr. has collected in his book are early entrants in this field -- transcripts of a series of seminars held at the American Film Institute in the 1970s -- but still, by this time, a certain air of familiarity hovers over this enterprise. It is greatly to Stevens’ credit, though, that he does not confine himself solely to American directors. I especially like the reminiscences of the cameramen he includes. They are practical magicians, their tech talk slightly incomprehensible at times, but their ability to translate vague visions into concrete and sometimes immortal imagery reminds us forcefully of the medium’s collaborative nature.

It is also good that the book includes filmmakers like Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, who work on a different scale and in a different tradition than their American counterparts. They have less need for heroic exertions and contentious confrontations, and a greater ease with asserting their authorship in less pressured circumstances.

Fellini, for example, argues persuasively for fluidity, which is not to be confused with improvisation. In their shooting, he says, movies take on lives of their own and often begin speaking to him in terms he has not previously thought of. In other words, he begins listening to them, adjusting to their demands. Bergman, on the other hand, listens hardest to his actors, expressing a sympathy for their emotional nakedness that you don’t hear from his American colleagues: “The camera has to be the best friend of the actors and the actors have to be secure with [it].... To be behind the camera is never difficult, but to be in front of the camera is always a challenge -- to be there with your face and your body and all the limitations you have in your soul.... “

These are points one can imagine John Schlesinger agreeing with. This book-length conversation is the work of Ian Buruma, one of our most literate cultural historians and critics. But who knew he was also Schlesinger’s nephew, with, as he says, a special fondness for his “perfect bachelor uncle”? He is not an overawed stranger to his subject, hastily grabbing up enough facts to keep his interview rolling (although the interview was cut short when Schlesinger had a stroke and died in 2003). He brings to his task an intimacy that is unique to this form.

There is much more in Buruma’s book on family matters, and on Schlesinger’s true, somewhat tentative nature, than we would get in a shorter interview. What emerges is a refreshing portrait of a rather innocent, quite insecure man establishing himself in a profession where the premium tends to be on self-confidence. He’s open about his mistakes, and his homosexuality, in a way he might not have been with a stranger. He’s also blunter -- although also forgiving -- about his confrontations with actors like Dirk Bogarde or writers like the impossibly pretentious Frederic Raphael than most directors would be.

His was not a great career, I think, despite the acclaim lavished on “Midnight Cowboy” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” neither of which seems to have aged very well and which sent him off in directions either too lavish for his talents or (in the case of his thrillers) inappropriate to them. He (and Buruma) seem particularly fond of “The Day of the Locust,” despite the miscalculated expansion to near-epic proportions of a novel that depends for its success on being terse. That said, one gains from “Conversations With John Schlesinger” a real sense of just how conditional a filmmaker’s life is -- how dependent it is on the vagaries of finance, casting and those ego eruptions, on set and off, that can upset a director’s best-laid plans. Another way of saying it is that Schlesinger is a figure more contradictory, less clearly defined, than the greater figures of the Stevens anthology. He’s still making himself up in an almost novelistic way, while they’re doing the final polish job on their characters. They’re camera-ready, while he, at roughly the same age, seems still to be working -- entertainingly, sympathetically -- on an early yet very readable draft of his story. *