29
MY SECRET AS an interviewer was that I was actually impressed by the people I interviewed: not only by Bill Clinton, John Wayne, or Sophia Loren, but by Sandra Dee, Stella Stevens, and George Peppard. I am beneath everything else a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance. I become their advocate and find myself in sympathy. I can employ scorched-earth tactics in writing about a bad movie, but I rarely write sharp criticism of actors themselves. If they’re good in a movie, they must have done something right. If they’re bad, it may have been the fault of filming conditions or editing choices. Perhaps they may simply have been bad. I feel reluctant to write in a hurtful way; not always, but usually. I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can’t help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat.
My job involved doing a great many interviews. I was always a little excited by the presence of the subject. As a teenager covering the Champaign County Fair, I stood behind the bandstand in the racetrack infield and interviewed the teenage country singer Brenda Lee, and was terrified. That established my pattern of low-key interviews. I tend not to confront or challenge, and my best technique has been to listen. This turns out to have been a useful strategy, because when you allow people to keep on talking they are likely to say anything.
The best interview I ever wrote was one about Lee Marvin, in Esquire in 1970. I sat in his beach house in Malibu for a long afternoon of drinking, and he said exactly what came into his mind. There was no press agent present and no mental censor at work. He didn’t give a damn. I was a kid he’d never heard of, but that afternoon he gave me the opportunity to write accurately about exactly what it was like to join Lee Marvin for an afternoon of desultory drinking. I took notes. Later, typing them up, they came to resemble dialogue. They weren’t interrupted by questions, because I realized quickly that questions and answers were not going to be happening. Lee was passing time in public.
I took this dialogue, added a spare minimum of exposition, and submitted it to Harold Hayes, who printed it in Esquire. The piece contains no background on Marvin. No autobiography. It isn’t hooked to his latest movie. There is no apparent occasion for it. It is his voice. Some years later, I was rather surprised to be invited to his house outside Tucson for another interview. He was by then married to the high school sweetheart he’d left behind forty years earlier to join the Marines. I wondered why he wanted to see me again. It may have been because he had been giving a performance in Malibu that day of the Esquire interview and my article recognized that and got out of his way. I mentioned the earlier article, saying I was relieved he didn’t “mind” it. His wife said, “Well, I wasn’t there, but it was all true.”
In those days movie stars didn’t move within a cocoon of publicists and “security.” Today’s stars are as well protected as the president. Then it was possible for stars like Charlton Heston, Cliff Robertson, and Clint Eastwood to walk into a place like O’Rourke’s Pub and have a drink and not give a damn. The master of that was Robert Mitchum, who had never given a damn about anything. The “bad publicity” he got for posing at Cannes with a topless actress or being busted for pot only enhanced his aura, because he’d spent no effort in trying to be someone he wasn’t.
The routine in those days was usually for a star to fly into town and meet with the local press. Movies opened differently then. The premiere might be in New York or Los Angeles, and then a film would gradually “go wide,” market by market, with the star traveling a week ahead of it. Then in the 1970s studios started advertising on national television, and it made sense for many movies to open nationally on the same day. The junket was born: The journalists would be flown in to meet the stars.
Early junkets were bacchanals of largesse, and none was ever larger than one in 1970 when Warner Bros. flew planeloads of interviewers to the Bahamas for a week to attend premieres of five of their films. We stayed in luxury, ate and drank like pigs, and were platooned at Sam Peckinpah, Katharine Hepburn, and Kim Novak. Francis and Eleanor Coppola were there with his The Rain People, an art film that was greeted with some bafflement. I sat at an ice cream counter with Coppola and he wondered if he had a future in the business. One great film was shown, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. I thought it was an important act of filmmaking. The general reaction to the film was disbelief and disgust. “I have only one question,” said the lady from Reader’s Digest. “Why was this film ever made?”
Later the studio junket developed into a way of life for “junket whores,” who appeared more or less weekly at luxury hotels. They all knew one another and exchanged family photos. When one had a birthday, there was likely to be a cake or a little celebration arranged by their “friends” the studio publicists. Minor eccentricities were indulged. During one junket a bathroom door flew open in a hospitality suite and revealed two junketeers having sex on the floor.
Junket guests were given swag bags containing the press release, a baseball cap, and a bottle of cheap wine. Soon a Swag Industry came into being, and the swag bag itself might be by Louis Vuitton. Companies lobbied to have their products given to famous people, or even lowly journalists; a new electronic device like the Flip, for example, might be well placed in the hands of a junket whore. High-priced swag was reserved for “talent” (not interviewers). I qualified as “talent” once, at a Friars Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg, and was invited into a backstage swag room and offered resort holidays, designer chocolate, TV sets, cases of wine, computers. A tailor with a measuring tape was eager to size me for a new suit.
The rules for junket whores were informal but well understood. You flew into Vegas, or New York, or London. You saw the movie at a premiere or private screening. If you were “print,” you sat at a round table while publicists rotated stars and filmmakers. Each new occupant of an empty chair was greeted by cries of affection and familiarity. Difficult questions were rare. Everyone was asked, “What did it feel like working with (name of another star in the same movie)?”
Television interviewers found themselves cycled through interview rooms strung along a hotel corridor and connected by umbilicals of cables. Companies sprang up that specialized in doing the AV for junkets. The interviewers, camera operators, and “room directors” would greet one another happily. The stars would come and go; the crews remained. The stars would be perfectly lighted and made up and seated in front of a poster for their movie. Talent would take a chair, also after TV makeup. Questions were limited to three minutes, five in the case of “major markets.” A star could cover six markets in an hour.
Appearing at such junkets was a species of hell for them but was often mandated by their contracts. We all had more fun in the days when TV was disregarded and stars came into town and actually spent time with the newspaper people. Off the top of my head I can tell you of eight times when a movie star and I got more or less drunk together. One night as Peter Cook left with my date, I called after him, “I knew she was a star fucker, but I thought I was the star!”
I flew on the junkets. It was understood to be a part of the newspaper job, “bringing back a star” for the Sunday paper, not unlike the old TV show Bring ’Em Back Alive. In Dallas for the premiere of 9 to 5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the plane home to Chicago I confessed it to Siskel: I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton, and as we spoke I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing or comforting. Gene listened, and said, “Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.” We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time we would refer to it in wonder.
Was accepting a junket a conflict of interest? Was it a form of bribe, to assure a kind interview and a more positive review? Of course it was. In the early days the ethical question didn’t arise because newspapers were eager to get celebrity interviews into print and couldn’t afford to send their writers flying somewhere every weekend. I never gave a bad movie a good review just because I’d been on the junket, and I tried to choose junkets only to movies I thought I might like: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example.
One day Siskel told me, “Our show has gotten too big for us to go on junkets anymore.” “But the paper wants the stories,” I told him. “Let the paper pay its own way. That’s what the Tribune is doing.” Of course he was right. I took no junkets after about 1980, but when I was at the Toronto or Cannes festivals the junkets would come to me, and I did TV for the ABC station in Chicago and wrote pieces for the paper. If I accepted a junket, I split my expenses between the Sun-Times and the TV station. Sometime in the 1990s interviewers started being asked to sign agreements promising to ask no questions in certain areas (politics, marriage, religion, past flops). I refused to sign anything. Since they weren’t paying my expenses, they had no leverage. Curiously, I found I got better interviews that way. Warned that I hadn’t signed an agreement, stars sometimes seemed almost compelled to bring up their forbidden subjects. I got the impression the agreements hadn’t originated with the stars but from the protective publicists.
What the interviewer has to understand is that he is not a friend or a confidant. He has engaged in a superficial process for mutual benefit. In a few cases I have become, if not friends, at least very friendly with actors or directors. I felt bonds with Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Paul Cox, Ramin Bahrani, Errol Morris, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Shirley MacLaine, Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Mike Leigh, Sissy Spacek, Michael Caine, Atom Egoyan, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, Jason Reitman. I am a good friend of Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, whom I met at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1975 and whose El Norte (1983) was the first epic of the American indie film movement. I felt a meeting of the minds with Robert Mitchum, but that was because of who he was, not because of who we were together.
Losing the ability to speak ended my freedom to interview. There are new stars and directors coming up now whom I will never get to know that way. Tilda Swinton, Sofia Coppola, Ellen Page, David Fincher, Colin Firth, Jennifer Lawrence. I’ve never even had a proper conversation with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Edward Norton, Darren Aronofsky, Catherine Keener, or George Clooney. I tried a few interviews using the voice in my computer while tape-recording the answers. I got some good answers, but you couldn’t call those conversations. I tried sending questions by e-mail, but that isn’t conversation, either. I’ve felt better about one other approach: I ask prepared questions and take digital video of the responses, finding that being on camera inspires more conversational frankness. During those interviews I pause to type up follow-through questions. All the same, my last real interview was at Cannes in May 2006, when I talked with William Friedkin, Tracy Letts, and Michael Shannon, the director, writer, and star of Bug. That was a movie I was eager to discuss. Now that is all in the past.