31
ROBERT MITCHUM DIDN’T give a damn what anybody thought about him. He never seemed to be making the slightest effort to be a movie star. But of the stars I met in my early years on the job, he was the most iconic, the most fascinating. That fits into my theory that true movie stars must be established in our minds well before we reach a certain age, perhaps seventeen. Mitchum was embedded in my mind from an early age when one night in the basement I came across a copy of my father’s Confidential magazine and electricity ran through me when I saw a photo of the topless starlet Simone Silva at Cannes, embracing Mitch. He looked pleased but not excited. Perhaps it was his composure that made such an impression.
I met Mitchum for the first time in autumn 1969 in a stone cottage on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, where he was filming Ryan’s Daughter for David Lean. I walked up to the cottage one afternoon with John McHugh and John’s brother Eugene. Mitchum was utterly relaxed. His voice played the famous low laconic melody. His eyes were hooded, his manner lazy. It was his day off. He stretched his legs out long under the coffee table, whirled the ice in his glass, and whistled My heart knows what the wild goose knows. I sensed that Mitchum would not be patient with standard questions. He spoke in streams of consciousness, and that’s how I quoted him. That afternoon and evening, he taught me as Lee Marvin had how I would write interviews in the future. I would not ask formal questions and write down the replies. I would drift with the occasion and observe whatever happened. Because that’s what I did with Mitchum, I think he grew to tolerate me. He didn’t mind me being around, even during unrehearsed moments as when he smoked pot while being driven through Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio in search of a movie location. During a day like that, he never made the slightest suggestion that I shouldn’t quote him in full or mention the pot. He didn’t care.
At some point that first time in Dingle I asked him, “How long you figure you got to live?” His answer was like free verse: “About… oh, about three weeks. I have this rash that grows on my back every twenty-eight days. I was bitten by a rowboat when I was thirteen, in a park in Cleveland, Ohio, and every twenty-eight days a rash appears on my back. I’ve offered my body for science. Meanwhile, I sit here in Dingle and vegetate. I was a young man of twenty-six when I arrived here last month. The days are punctuated by the sighs of my man, Harold, as he waits for the pubs to open. But don’t get me wrong. Usually I’m gay with laughter, fairy footed, dancing about and rejoicing. But this afternoon, well, I just woke up. So I sit here and weep. Finally everyone staggers into town to Tom Ashe’s pub and leaves me here alone weeping. That’s my day.”
Mitchum’s attention drifted. Outside the window, children played in the road. They called to each other in Gaelic. We began talking about some recent movies. “I never saw The Sand Pebbles,” he said. “Of course that was a problem picture out in front, with Steve McQueen in it. You’ve got to realize a Steve McQueen performance just naturally lends itself to monotony.” A melancholy shake of the head. “Steve doesn’t bring too much to the party.”
A silence fell. Mitchum yawned and let his head drop back. He stared up at the ceiling. “No way,” he said. “There’s just no way.” Drawing out the no. “Noooo way.”
He emptied his glass.
“I’ve put away more fucking scotch since I got to Dingle than I’ve put away in my whole life,” he said. “No, there was Vietnam… one day we were out there in the boondocks and I must have had fourteen, no, sixteen cans of beer and the greater part of a bottle of whiskey. And that was at lunch. Then they took me back to base in a helicopter and all the clubs—the officer’s club, the noncom’s club, the enlisted-men’s club—they all said, ‘Come on, Bob, have a drink.’ ‘No way,’ I said. ‘No way. I’m a Mormon bishop. Sure, Bob, we know.’ ”
Mitchum took a fresh glass from his man, Harold. “No way,” he sighed. “I’ve looked into it, and there’s just noooo way. My father was killed when I was three, so I was principally shipped around to relatives. I finally left when I was fourteen. Jumped on a train, came back, left again when I was fifteen, wound up on a chain gang in Savannah, came back, went to California. My first break was working for Hopalong Cassidy, falling off horses. So now I support my favorite charity: myself. That’s where the money goes. My wife, my kids. I have a brother, weighs about 280 pounds. Two sisters, a mother, a stepfather. I think my sisters are religious mystics. They belong to that Baha’i faith. Somebody asked my wife once, What’s your idea of your husband? And she answered: He’s a masturbation image. Well, that’s what we all are. Up there on the screen, our goddamn eyeball is six feet high, the poor bastards who buy tickets think we really amount to something.”
Mitchum stood up and walked over to the window. “Let’s take a walk around the house,” he said.
It was nearly dark outside, cold and damp, the lights of Dingle on the hill across the river. “It’s going to be a good picture,” he said. “I trust Lean. He’s a good director. He’d better be. This is eight goddamn months out of my life. I’ll be here until the last dog dies.” He kicked at the grass, his hands in his pockets, his face neutral.
“Any more questions?” he said.
Are all the rumors about you true?
“Oh, sure, every one. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Make up some more if you want to. They’re all true. Booze, broads, all true.”
What about pot?
“I don’t have any,” he said. “I sit and weep and wait for the weather to change, waiting for my crop to grow.” He leaned over and picked up a flowerpot that was leaning against the side of his cottage. A sickly spindle of twig grew in it. “My crop,” he said. “I’m waiting for my crop to grow. In my hands I hold the hopes of the Dingle Botanical Society.”
The following year, Mitchum and the movie’s publicist, Bailey Selig, came through Chicago to promote the Lean picture. I told him his co-star Trevor Howard had been through town not long before on the same assignment.
“What was he saying?” Mitchum said.
“Something about his wife falling off a mountain,” I said.
Mitchum and Bailey laughed together. “That was Trevor for you,” Mitchum said. “I’ll tell you what really happened. It wasn’t a mountain, it was a ledge. Helen was walking up to my cottage one night. The road turned, and she went straight. We were having a bit of a party at my place. A few drinks, a few laughs. Trevor was in the kitchen making love to a bottle of Chivas Regal. Harold, my stand-in, walked out front of the cottage and came in white as a sheet. He said there was a woman outside with a bloody head and only one shoe. We went out and it was Helen Howard. We got her on the couch and fanned her back to witness, and she said she’d fallen off the ledge. Dead sober she was. Harold had been a medic with the Coldstream Guards. He ascertained Helen had broken her coccyx.”
Mitchum sipped his Pernod. “I went into the kitchen to tell Trevor. ‘Nonsense!’ Trevor said. ‘Pay no attention! I’m the only one who has a coccyx in this family! She pulls these stunts all the time. It’s her way of attracting attention.’ Then Trevor poured himself another Chivas.”
Mitchum shrugged. “Well, as it turned out, for poor Helen it meant a twenty-five-mile ride over the mountains in a Land Rover to the nearest hospital, at Tralee. So I went back into the kitchen and broke the news to Trevor.”
“Right you are, sport,” Trevor said. “Bloody unpleasant trip over the mountain on a rocky road to Tralee in a Land Rover.”
“It’s going to be awfully painful,” Mitchum told Howard. “Poor Helen sitting up in a Land Rover with her injured tailbone.”
“Yes indeed,” Trevor said. “Bloody difficult trip. Sure to be goddamned uncomfortable. No sense in my going!”
The next year, in the autumn of 1971, Mitchum was in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to film Going Home. I was to meet him outside the Sheraton Motor Inn. The sky hung low and wet, and Mitchum hunched his shoulders against it and scooted around to the passenger side of the car. He’d dismissed his union driver and would be driven by his friend Tim Lawless, who claimed he knew where the location was. Tim started the car and guided it down a ramp and onto a highway, turning left, which was, as it turned out, a fateful decision.
“Jesus, what a lousy, crummy day,” Tim said.
“And here it is only two in the afternoon,” Mitchum said. “Reflect on the hours still before us. What time is the call for?”
“They’re looking for you around two thirty, quarter to three,” Tim said. “You got it made.”
“You know the way?” Mitchum said.
“Hell, yes, I know the way,” Tim said. “I was out here yesterday. Sons of bitches, picking locations way the hell the other side of hell and gone.”
“What do we gotta shoot this afternoon? We gotta jam our asses into those little cells again?”
“Those are the smallest cells I’ve ever seen,” Tim said. “Can you imagine pulling solitary in one of those?”
“I did five days of solitary once, when I was a kid,” Mitchum said. “In Texas. Of course, in Texas you might as well be in as out.”
“You did solitary?” Tim said.
“I liked it,” Mitchum said. “You read about Alvin Karpis, up in Canada? They finally let him out after forty years. Son of a bitch walks free, and the guy who put him inside is still sitting there. J. Edgar. Son of a bitch does forty years, the least we could do for him is not have J. Edgar still sitting there when he gets out a lifetime later.”
“Karpis?” Tim said.
“I guess he was a real mean mother at one time,” Mitchum said.
The wipers beat back and forth against the windshield, and on the sidewalks people put their heads down and made short dashes between dry places. We were in Pittsburgh now, and the smoke and fog brought visibility down to maybe a couple of blocks.
“I’m glad we’re shooting inside today,” Tim said.
Mitchum whistled under his breath, and then began to sing softly to himself: “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade…”
“With a hundred and ten cornets in the rear,” Tim sang, banging time against the steering wheel.
“ ‘A hundred and ten’? Is that right?” Tim said after a while.
“All I know is the seventy-six trombones,” Mitchum said. “I don’t have time to keep pace with all the latest developments.”
“How long you been in Pittsburgh?” I asked.
“I was born here,” Mitchum said, “and I intend to make it my home long after U.S. Steel has died and been forgotten. I intend to remain after steel itself has been forgotten. I shall remain, here on the banks of the Yakahoopee River, a greyed eminence. I used to come through here during the Depression. I don’t think the place has ever really and truly recovered.”
He reached in his pocket for a pipe, filled it carefully, and lit up.
“I don’t think we went through a tunnel yesterday,” Tim said.
“Well, we’re going through a tunnel now,” Mitchum said.
“Are you sure we’re supposed to be on Seventy-Nine and not Seventy-Six?” Tim said.
“I think I’m sure,” Mitchum said. “We were either supposed to sing ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’ to remind us to take Seventy-Six or to remind us not to. I’m not sure which.”
“You’re not leading me down the garden path, are you, Bob?” Tim said.
“Route Seventy-Nine,” Mitchum said. “Maybe it was Seventy-Six. Or… Route Thirty?”
“This is the goddamn airport road,” Tim said. “Look there.”
“Steubenville, Ohio,” Mitchum said. “Jesus Christ, Tim, we’re going to Steubenville, Ohio. Maybe it’s just as well. Make a left turn at Steubenville and come back in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike…”
“Ohio’s around here somewhere,” Tim said.
“I’ve always wanted to make a picture in Ohio,” Mitchum said. “Maybe I have. I was bitten by a rowboat once in Cleveland.”
There were three lanes of traffic in both directions, and Tim held grimly to the wheel, trying to spot a sign or an exit or a clue.
“The Vesuvius Crucible,” Mitchum said. “Pull off here, and we’ll ask at the Vesuvius Crucible. If anybody ought to know where they are, the Vesuvius Crucible ought to.”
Tim took the next exit and drove into the parking lot of the Vesuvius Crucible. Mitchum rolled down the window on his side and called to a man inside the office: “Hey, can you tell us how to get to the Allegheny County Workhouse?”
“The what?” the man said.
“The Allegheny County Workhouse,” Mitchum said.
“Hell, they closed that down back here about six months ago,” the man said. “It’s empty now.”
“We just want to visit,” Mitchum said. “Old times’ sake.”
The man came out into the yard, scratching himself thoughtfully. “The Allegheny County Workhouse,” he repeated. “Well, buster, you’re real lost. You turn around here and go right back to downtown Pittsburgh. Take the underpass. When you get to downtown Pittsburgh, ask for directions there.”
“How wide are we off the mark?” Mitchum said.
“Buster,” the man said, “you’re thirty-eight or forty miles away from where you should be.”
“Holy shit,” Mitchum said.
“I’m telling you,” the man said, “they shut the workhouse down back here six, seven months ago. You won’t find anybody there.”
“Thanks just the same,” Mitchum said.
Tim drove back up to the expressway overpass and came down pointed toward Pittsburgh. “We should have taken Route Eight,” he said.
“Sorry about that,” Mitchum said. “There’s the road to Monroeville. Ohio’s around here somewhere.”
“Nice countryside,” Tim said. “You ought to buy it and build yourself a ranch.”
“I could be the biggest rancher in Pittsburgh,” Mitchum said. “Get up in the morning and eat ham and eggs in my embroidered pajamas. Some girl broke into the motel; did you hear about that? With a pair of embroidered PJs?”
“Embroidered?”
“A great big red heart right over the rosette area,” Mitchum said. “I’ve got an idea. Maybe we should hire a cab and have it lead us to the Allegheny County Workhouse.”
“I don’t even think we’re in Allegheny County,” Tim said.
Mitchum hummed “Seventy-Six Trombones” under his breath and filled his pipe again.
“There’s a funny thing about this picture,” Mitchum said. “At the same time I was reading this script, I was also reading a script about a jazz musician in San Francisco. So I ask myself, do I want to play a jazz musician in San Francisco, or do I want to go on location in some god-forsaken corner of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and live in a motel for two months? No way. Noooo way. So these two guys come in, and we have a drink or two, and I sign the contract. On their way out, I say I’ll see them in San Francisco. They looked at me a little funny. Do you know what I did? I signed up for the wrong fucking movie.”
“Here’s Route Eight right now,” Tim said.
“That’s Exit Eight, not Route Eight,” Mitchum said.
“We’re going to be real late,” Tim said.
“They can rehearse,” Mitchum said. “They can practice falling off stairs, tripping over lights, and shouting at each other in the middle of a take.”
The car was back in the tunnel again now. Tim came down through a series of cloverleafs and found himself back on Route 79, headed for the airport.
“I’m lost,” he said. “Baby, I am lost.”
In desperation, he made a U-turn across six lanes of traffic and found himself on an up ramp going in the wrong direction with a cop walking slowly across the street toward him.
Mitchum rolled down his window. “Roll down your window,” he told Tim. “Let’s get a breeze in here.” He shouted to the cop: “Hey, chief! We’re lost! We been forty miles out in the country, and here we are headed right back the same way again.”
“What are you doing making a U-turn against all that traffic?” the cop said. “You could go to jail for that.”
“Hell, chief,” Mitchum said, “that’s where we’re trying to go. We been looking for the Allegheny County Workhouse for the last two hours.”
“They closed that down back here six months ago,” the policeman said.
“We’re shooting a movie out there,” Mitchum said.
“Hey, you’re Robert Mitchum, aren’t you?” the cop said.
Mitchum pulled his dark glasses down on his nose so the cop could see more of his face and said, “We are so lost.”
“I tell you what you do, Bob,” the cop said. “You take this underpass and follow the road that curves off on your left before you get to the bridge.”
“Thanks, chief,” Mitchum said.
Tim drove onto the underpass, followed the road that curved off on the left before he got to the bridge, and groaned.
“We’re back on Route Seventy-Nine heading for the airport,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” Mitchum said. “Screw that cop. Screw that cop and the boat that brought him.”
“Now we gotta go back through the tunnel,” Tim said. “I’m upset. I am really upset.”
On the other side of the tunnel, Tim pulled over next to a state highway department parking lot and backed into it down the exit ramp. A state employee came slowly out of a shed, wiping his hands on a rag and watching Tim’s unorthodox entry.
“Ask that guy,” Mitchum said. “Offer him a certain amount to lead us there with a snowplow.”
Tim got out and received some instructions from the state employee. The instructions required a great deal of arm waving, and their essence seemed to be: Go back that way.
Tim tried it again, back through the tunnel, across the bridge, down the overpass to a red light where a police squad car was stopped in front of their Mercury. Mitchum jumped out of the car and hurried up to the squad car for instructions. He got back just as the light turned green.
“You’ll see a sign up here that says Blawnox,” he said. “That’s what we need. Blawnox.”
“I’m out of gas,” Tim said.
“I got a letter from John Brison today,” Mitchum said. “John’s in Dingle, in Ireland. Where we shot Ryan’s Daughter.”
“I am really upset,” Tim said.
“According to John,” Mitchum said, “they’ve formed a Robert Mitchum Fan Club in Dingle. The membership is largely composed of unwed mothers and their brothers.”
“Where the hell are we?” said Tim.
“That’s what happens when you shoot on location,” Mitchum said. “It’s nothing but a pain in the ass.”
In 1975, I went to talk with Mitchum in his office on Sunset Strip. He had just finished playing Philip Marlowe, a role he was born for, in Farewell, My Lovely.
“They were gonna make Farewell, My Lovely last year,” Mitchum said. “They wanted Richard Burton. He was doing something else. The producer, Elliott Kastner, comes by with Sir Lew Grade, the British tycoon. He has a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt, and a whiter face. ‘I know nothing about motion pictures,’ Sir Lew says. ‘What I know is entertainment: Ferris wheels, pony rides.’ I suggested we buy up the rights to Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell, rerelease it, and go to the beach.
“But, no, they hired a director, Dick Richards, so nervous he can’t hold his legs still. They have all the hide rubbed off them. He started doing TV commercials. He was accustomed to, you know, start the camera, expose a hundred and twenty feet of film, and tell somebody to move the beer bottle half an inch clockwise. He does the same thing with people.”
Mitchum inhaled, exhaled slowly, leaned forward to see into his outer office. “Bring me a Miltown, sweetheart,” he said to his secretary. “Christ, I can’t keep up during this mad, merry social season. Comes the rites of spring, there’s nothing but elections, premieres… why they continue to send all these invitations to me is… thanks, sweetheart…
“The girl on the picture was Charlotte Rampling. She was the chick who dug S and M in The Night Porter. She arrived with an odd entourage, two husbands or something. Or they were friends and she married one of them and he grew a mustache and butched up. She kept exercising her mouth like she was trying to swallow her ear. I played her on the right side because she had two great big blackheads on her left ear, and I was afraid they’d spring out and lodge on my lip.”
It was a lucky chance that got Mitchum into Farewell, My Lovely in the first place. He was on Corsica to play the lead in Preminger’s Rosebud when he was fired, or quit, and came back to Hollywood just as the Marlowe role opened up.
“I might have been able to give Otto some advice on that picture,” Mitchum mused. “I was out there at five thirty one morning, looking at the raw eggs they were describing as breakfast and doing my Otto Preminger imitation, and Otto comes up behind me and starts bellowing.”
The exchange, as Mitchum remembered it, went like this:
Preminger: “You have been drinking with the Corsicans!”
Mitchum: “Who the hell else is there around here to drink with, Otto?”
Preminger: “By the end of the day, you are hopelessly drunk!”
Mitchum: “It’s the end of the day, isn’t it?”
Preminger: “You are drunk now!”
Mitchum: “Now, Otto, how in hell can I be drunk at five thirty in the morning?”
Preminger: “You are through!”
Mitchum: “Taxi!”
The last time I saw Mitchum was in Charlottesville at the 1993 Virginia Film Festival, four years before his death. They were honoring him, they said, “because he embodies the soul of film noir.” That was true, but Mitchum only smiled at it. “We called them B pictures,” he said. “We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the sets, we didn’t have the lights, we didn’t have the time. What we did have were some pretty good stories.” It was my job to be onstage with Mitchum and question him after the screening of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), one of the greatest of all film noirs, the one where Jane Greer tells Mitchum, “You’re no good and neither am I. We were meant for each other.” And where Mitchum, informed that everybody dies sooner or later, replies, “Yes, but if I have to, I’m going to die last.”
Instead of attending the screening we had dinner at a local restaurant, where I learned his wife prudently instructed the bartenders to water his martinis. On the stage after the screening, he lit a Pall Mall to loud applause, blew out smoke, and sighed.
“Making faces and speaking someone else’s lines is not really a cure for cancer, you know. If you can do it with some grace, that’s good luck, but it isn’t an individual triumph; it is about as individual as putting one foot before the other. One of the greatest movie stars was Rin Tin Tin. What the hell. It can’t be too much of a trick.”
“In Out of the Past, you co-starred with Kirk Douglas,” I said. You’ve always been laid back. He was more… laid forward.”
“Well, Kirk was very serious about it. Just before Out of the Past, Bettejane Greer and I saw a picture that came over from Paramount called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Kirk was very interesting in it. So we said, ‘Let’s get him,’ and the studio got him and he’s quite serious about his profession, while I personally take or leave it, you know. I have a come-what-may attitude. And he spent most of his time on the set with a pencil on his chin… which kind of tickled the hell out of Bettejane. But I saw that he was very serious about it. He came to Janie and said, ‘How can I underplay Mitchum?’ She said, ‘Forget it, man. He ain’t playing it; he’s just doing it.’ ”
He wanted to get underneath you somehow? Underact you?
“Yeah. He was an actor. I was a hired man.”
Out of the Past is perhaps the greatest cigarette-smoking movie ever made, with Mitchum and Douglas standing face-to-face and smoking at each other. There’s a scene where Douglas offers Mitchum a smoke and Mitchum holds up his cigarette and says, “Smoking.” It always gets a laugh.
Did you guys have any idea of doing a running gag involving cigarette smoking? I asked.
“No, no.”
Because there’s more cigarette smoking in this movie than in any other movie I’ve ever seen.
“We never thought about it. We just smoked. And I’m not impressed by that because I don’t, honest to God, know that I’ve ever actually seen the film.”
You’ve never seen it?
“I’m sure I have, but it’s been so long that I don’t know.”
I asked him about Night of the Hunter (1955), the great film directed by Charles Laughton, in which he played the sinister preacher with “LOVE” tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and “HATE” on the other.
“Charles called me up,” Mitchum recalled, “and he said, ‘Robert? Charles here. I have had before me since yesterday a script that is a totally unremitting, completely unforgivable, flat-out, total, piece of shit.’ I replied, ‘Present!’ So, we made a date and we went out to dinner and that was it. I wanted to shoot it in West Virginia or Ohio, where it was laid. I knew that sort of country, but the budget made it out of the question. And he cast Shelley Winters and I thought that was a bit odd because she was sort of an urbanite from St. Louis or Kansas City or someplace, and I asked, ‘Why Shelley Winters?’ ‘Because we can get her for twenty-five thousand dollars.’ I said, ‘Okay, man.’ And so we went into it and Charles, along with the scenic designer, had stylized all the scenery. For instance, there’s one shot where the kids are up in the barn loft and they hear him singing, and they look out and across the horizon they see him riding against the sky. Well, that was done on the sound stage with a miniature pony and a midget.”
Are you kidding?
“The scenic design was really incomparable, and Charles was an enormous appreciator, if you understand what I mean. He was like John Huston or people like that. He didn’t tell you what to do or what you’re thinking. Somebody like Cukor would say, ‘Now, he’s thinking this, and this…’ And I would say, ‘Really?’ But Charles would just nerve you up and he would be so appreciative that you did it to please him. Honest to God, you know, you did your really best to try to enchant him and of course it was effective. People always want to know why he never directed another picture. He died, that’s why.”
Mitchum by now had the audience in the palm of his hand. If he had affection for Laughton, there were many film icons he took with a grain of salt. David Lean, for example: “David would sit there in his chair, thinking. Thinking. Sitting. Thinking. For hours. Once on Lawrence of Arabia he was shooting in Jordan and they had to pick up the chair and carry him off in a pickup truck. A war had broken out.”
He wasn’t a spin doctor, turning memories into public relations. Asked how he would compare his work in the 1962 version of Cape Fear with Robert De Niro’s performance in the same role in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake, he said, “I’ve never seen it.”
The Scorsese version?
“Neither one, as a matter of fact.”
Somebody in the audience asked him about Marilyn Monroe, and his face softened.
“I loved her,” he said. “I had known her since she was about fifteen or sixteen years old. My partner on the line at the Lockheed plant in Long Beach was her first husband. That’s when I first met her. And I knew her all the way through. And she was a lovely girl; very, very shy. She had what is now recognized as agoraphobia. She was terrified of going out among people. At that time they just thought she was being difficult. But she had that psychological, psychic fear of appearing among people. That’s why when she appeared in public, she always burlesqued herself. She appeared as you would hope that she would appear. She was a very sweet, loving and loyal, unfortunately loyal, girl. Loyal to people who used her, and a lot who misused her.”
And what about Humphrey Bogart? someone asked. Did you know him?
“Yes, I knew him. Bogey and I were pretty good friends. One time he said to me, ‘You know, the difference between you and me and those other guys is, we’re funny.’ ”
There were a lot of academic types from the University of Virginia in the audience, and one of them asked, “Ah, Mr. Mitchum, given your casual attitude toward film, what do you think of a festival like this that studies film critically and analytically?”
“My what?”
“Your casual attitude…”
“Yeah, yeah, I got the casual part. What was the other part?”
“What do you think of film festivals?”
“They’re freak shows. In any community, if somebody notifies the local TV stations that there’s a giraffe loose in their backyard, the whole populace turns up.”
Mitchum exhaled and looked at the audience as if they were looking at a giraffe.