Quest for Failure

The two talents are not mutually exclusive. Many great directors were actors at one time, if only in passing: D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Roman Polanski, Larissa Shepitko, John Cassavetes, Elia Kazan, Sam Peckinpah. Coppola and Spielberg both grew up making home movies in which they played the heroes. John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Roger Corman, Francois Truffaut, Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders have each made lighthearted alternate careers as actors. Woody Allen, whose years as a stand-up comedian provided an uncommon wealth of theatrical experience and an extraordinary amount of practice at coping with issues of control, has always been more of a director than an actor; and yet, the older he gets, the more open his own performances grow, the more actor-oriented his movies become--and the more infamous he becomes for re-shooting whole films.

So what is it that goes wrong when actors get the "autonomy" they desire? A sense of the film's proportion gets lost. This happens to every actor who directs, from Chaplin on down. Their attention and sensitivity to character and performance blind them to the larger concerns of story structure. Both Welles and Olivier had to battle this handicap to get out of their own way and overcome self-indulgence. (In later years, Olivier lamented all those gratuitous camera moves he ordered in Hamlet.) Lesser star-directors--Brando on One-Eyed Jacks, Stallone on Rocky III, Beatty on Reds--get tangled in a mesh of narrative distractions and lose compass, shooting drafts of scenes. The result is frequently a showcase of wonderful performances, but it's sloppy storytelling just the same.

Reds is a classic example: it's stirring, memorable, excellent in so many ways, but those long chains of short scenes between John Reed and Louise Bryant so completely bypass the intellectual and political content of their lives together that by the end they feel like barefaced improvisational moments in the relationship of Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Beatty was so deep inside John Reed as an actor that he couldn't sustain any overview-- except by going wildly over budget to the tune of $57 million. And even at that price, one is left to ask: did John Reed give up on the Russian revolution or didn't he? It's an expensive ambiguity.

When a star directs, either the star gets cheated, or the director does. Jack Nicholson is said to have reshot and radically recut The Two Jakes because he discovered--at a preliminary screening--that his own performance was killing the picture. As producer Harold Schneider explained to Boxoffice magazine, Batman opened during the first week of principal photography, and Nicholson--who personally made millions over the course of two weekends--literally couldn't wipe the grin off his face for weeks. A friend of mine who was on the set said there was no way to tell in advance that anything was seriously amiss: Nicholson, an experienced director, exuded confidence; his screen persona and his personal manner were a seamless mesh. He was perfectly organized, with 3×5 cards in his pocket detailing every scene, from the wardrobe to the props to the emotional content. The shoot kept to a well-planned schedule.

And yet when they put the movie together, Nicholson was appalled: he was boring. Jake Gittes is the binding curve of energy around which the movie has to revolve, or it flies apart--especially given that Robert Towne's screenplay is notoriously sprawly. "You can't have overview and then act," was my friend's verdict. To me, the problem is probably more comic, and more profound: nothing could be further from the hungry psyche of a private eye than the self-satisfied bliss of a public figure who's just won cosmic Lotto.

For all those stars who wish they could direct, an old adage comes to mind: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Kevin Costner went over budget on Dances With Wolves and got to reach into his own pocket to cover the debts himself--to the tune of $2 million. He got off easy. John Wayne sank (and lost) $12 million into his beloved The Alamo and was obliged to spend the 1960s making a number of crummy westerns to pay off his debts. Marlon Brando sank $2.5 million into One-Eyed Jacks and managed to keep his shirt, but suffered perhaps a deeper blow: he went in an artist and came out a cynic.

One-Eyed Jacks took three years of Brando's life. He gathered a huge cast and invited everybody to improvise--he even invited them to vote on whether the hero should die in the end. His theory, which he expounded in interview after interview, was that movies were impoverished--and that by improvising he was restoring a freshness worthy of the great silent filmmakers. The movie that resulted is indeed fresh and alive. Brando's own performance is particularly good, because he heeded Laurence Olivier's advice: "Get a stand-in who can act." (He blocked the scenes and rehearsed the cast with a stage actor named Steve Mario playing his own part, and thereby conserved his energies.)

Where he got derailed was by the runaway nature of the project itself--the 12-week shooting schedule escalated to six months; the publicity mills were spinning endless gossip about his self-indulgence. His director's cut ran four hours, and when the studio prevailed upon him to chop it to half that, Brando was cooperative but bitterly traumatized. He began sounding a furious note in his interviews--the same one he's sounding today: "Any pretension I've had of being artistic is now just a long, chilly hope. One-Eyed Jacks is a product, a potboiler--a news item. News makes money, not art. Movies are not art."

Finally, the pressures of being a movie star isolate even the best actors from ordinary life. And even great directors need at least one person close by who can tell them, without risking the friendship, that they're full of shit-or just that they need to throw a little more light on the characters' faces. John Ford had Darryl Zanuck; David Lean had Sam Spiegel. Chaplin, Welles, and Olivier, with their theatrical backgrounds, each developed inner seismographs that registered even the most stifled yawns from the least distinguished of stagehands. But a movie star (as opposed to a gifted actor) is in a triple-bind: the position is so narcissistic by nature that even their best friends fall under the spell of it, and their own issues of self-love get in the way of being entirely honest. It's a rare star who can outwit this puzzle in human relations; and the few who do are always at risk of losing their wits just the same.

Everybody wants to direct. Everybody lusts after the illusion of autonomy (and ask a few Hollywood directors just how illusory it is!). Arnold Schwarzenegger is thus bespeaking the human condition when he says he wants to direct. (It is indeed sobering to realize that a mere technicality in the Constitution is the only thing that prevents this man from saying he wants to be President of the United States.) Entertaining as it is to ponder the difficulties of a Jack Nicholson or a Kevin Costner hemorrhaging money as they cope with the fruits of their super-status, pleasurable as it is to hear Eddie Murphy become humble regarding Harlem Nights ("I'd love to direct again," he told Army Archerd of Variety, "but I'll never, ever direct and star in a movie again"), it's too easy and predictable to say movie stars make self-indulgent directors--it's even a bit of a cheat. The indulged self, after all, is what we love movie stars for. (Don't we? Isn't it our own selves we're indulging in some distant mirror when we adore moving images of particular strangers?)

A screenwriter can direct, and the film can be lousy from every standpoint except story, but at least it will tell a story. No producer in his right mind is going to let a screenwriter direct a lousy script--but actors are another matter. Within the power structure of the industry, they make the rules on a scale writers never do. Before Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy could have walked into Paramount and said, "Fuck it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna make a movie of the phone book, and star all my friends," and they'd have given it to him. They'd have had to. (This may be the only perspective from which to see the merits of Harlem Nights.) And there is the crux of the problem: ponder this topic long enough, and you begin to feel the actors aren't the principal targets for blame--though they often work hard to look foolish. The problem is deeply ingrained in the movie business itself: in the venerating and destructive awe we're conditioned to feel before movie stars, and in the terrible lack of vision at an executive level that makes so many stars want to become directors in the first place.

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F.X. Feeney is a critic and screenwriter whose credits include Roger Corman's upcoming Frankenstein Unbound.

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