All great directors are, in some sense, actors. But when actors decide to become directors--watch out.
We will soon see the results of what happened when Kevin Costner marched straight into the wilderness without a compass to direct Dances With Wolves. Jack Nicholson is said to have been so disgusted with his own performance that he madly reworked most of The Two Jakes. Eddie Murphy is still reeling from the effects of his first rodeo ride, directing himself in the critically-slammed box office disappointment Harlem Nights. After throwing his weight around on Scrooged, Bill Murray took the logical next step by directing himself in Quick Change, on which he at least had the brains to bring in a co-director.
Emilio Estevez is following up his directorial debut, the over-the-top big budget student film Wisdom, with Men at Work, and since he's chosen once again not only to direct but to write and star in his film as well, one can only wonder. And the army of big-name stars who say they want to direct grows larger by the day: Jodie Foster, Sean Penn, Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger...
Why? The movie star's path to the director's chair is already strewn with the gassed corpses of such greats as Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Jack Lemmon, and many others. You'd think history alone would put the fear of God in these hopefuls. What's more, you'd expect them to realize that the sheer mental mechanics of shifting from one state of mind (acting) to another (directing) opens up an amazing number of ways to fail.
Robert Redford is convincing proof that good movie stars can be good directors if they just stay out of the films they direct. (He deserved his Oscar for Ordinary People if for no other reason than he got out of the way of a strong story and elicited strong performances from a well-chosen cast.) But staying out of one's own picture isn't that easy: the only way most actors get a shot at directing in the first place is by starring in their own films. Studio heads know all too well that there's a downside to letting an actor loose with $20 million or more to direct a film, and that if the actor stars as well as directs the chances of getting a good movie go down even further; but execs also know that the box office draw of the actor's name is the only insurance they have, so they insist on it anyway. Redford managed to circumvent this Catch-22 by doing two smart things. First, he built up experience, as Warren Beatty did, by forming a production company to handle his own pictures, starting with All the President's Men. Then, he quit acting for three years and laid low, while he searched for the right project. Most actors don't have this luxury.
Just about everybody else, from Eddie Murphy to Clint Eastwood, is basically stuck having to be the face out front. Some make clever compromises. Bill Murray's decision to co-direct his picture follows a lead established by Warren Beatty, who split the directing chores with Buck Henry on Heaven Can Wait--to very positive effect. Emilio Estevez made Robert Wise his executive producer and mentor on Wisdom, though that didn't help much. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed (but did not star in) an episode for HBO's "Tales From the Crypt," and Mel Gibson has spoken of doing the same, in hopes, perhaps, of getting in a little practice before taking the opportunity for major embarrassment.
So, why is it that actors want to become directors?
First, there is a deep psychological imperative at work: for an actor, to direct is to become autonomous--a natural human wish. (Of course, only an actor could think that a director is autonomous.) Louise Brooks once called movie stardom the closest thing to slavery that exists in our century. It's perhaps inescapable that no human being is designed to be just an actor. As Gore Vidal put it, several years before Ronald Reagan's election: "Movie actors are a special breed.. .1 wouldn't want a professional screen actor to be President of the United States, no matter how nice or bright he is, because he's spent his entire life being moved about like a piece of furniture. He's used to being used. That's why all the male actors, almost without exception, become alcoholics. Traditionally, it's not in the male nature-- this is a sexist remark--to be totally passive. The actor feels unmanly. He gets drunk. The women take up needlepoint, and survive. A major female movie star will have created ten miles of tapestry by the time her career is over. I couldn't imagine an actor as president. I could imagine a director. After all, he's a hustler, a liar, a cheat--plainly presidential." Vidal's frame of reference is the golden age of the studio--but his observation still applies. Today, actors either try to direct or (the saner alternative] open a restaurant.
But actors want more than autonomy; they want immortality. And by immortality, I mean three names: Chaplin, Welles, Olivier. Without exception, every would-be actor/director wants to be one of these three guys. Not to make their kind of movie, necessarily, but to attain their level of class and grandeur--their glowing totality. And the irony (not to mention the tragedy and the hilarity) of the situation is that the desire for this transformation, this lunatic ambition to grab it all and be your own godhead, is to a great extent the very energy out of which the best movie history is made. Even Chaplin, Welles, and Olivier wanted to be those three guys.
But the most compelling reason for stars wanting to become directors is also the simplest: the exercise of clout. Moneymen may be terrified of genius, but they understand power. In his first days at Keystone, Charlie Chaplin pleaded with Mack Sennett to be allowed to direct, but Sennett turned a deaf ear. Who was Chaplin? A nobody. He had an international name as a vaudeville star, but he was an unknown quantity at the movies. Sennett let Mabel Normand direct instead--she was a star, her pictures made money. She was also 20 years old and, in Chaplin's opinion, incompetent. His account of her is prophetic of the average star's paralysis before the sheer mechanics of film: He would suggest simple gag ideas but she'd be too overwhelmed to listen. "There's no time," she'd snap. "No time!! Do what you're told!!"
The situation blew up into a screaming fight. Sennett nearly fired Chaplin, and the crew (who all loved Mabel) came close to beating him up. But in one of those dramatic twists one rarely believes in fiction, telegrams suddenly flooded in from New York pleading, "Hurry up with more Chaplin pictures--the demand is enormous!" And the rest is history. Chaplin suddenly had clout to become a director himself, though (true to the eternal nature or this struggle for the most clout) Sennett kept the telegrams hidden for months and thereby forced Chaplin to guarantee the budget for his first film ($1,500) out of his own pocket.
Of course, some of the stars who push hard enough to actually get to direct are powered by the force of imagination. Chaplin had a clear idea of the kind of films he wanted to make--so did Orson Welles, so did Laurence Olivier. It's significant that each of these men entered show business in his early adolescence. In a very positive sense, they each remained adolescents, throughout their careers--they shaped their films to suit their daydreams and simply placed themselves at the center because, well, that's how it looked in their heads. (It should also be noted that each of these men came to film directing only after they'd accumulated more than a decade of theatrical experience apiece.) They were not simply narcissists--they cast themselves in leading roles with unselfconscious simplicity.
Still, you could feel the high cost of their influence when such eternal teenagers as Marlon Brando and Eddie Murphy, citing Chaplin as their hero, tried to live the same daydream: Brando had a few years of theater, and Murphy a few years of "Saturday Night" before a live audience, but on the whole, they were much less protected by conscious craft than the Big Three were. What's more, the average movie production is such a juggernaut anymore that Chaplin himself might be boggled by it.
But, no matter how or why any actor becomes an actor/director, the fact of being an actor is always partly a liability to the activity of being a director. The imperatives of an actor are clear-cut: To be a medium. To be the light, baggage-free vessel of another's intent. To be emotional, to be (in the trance of a creative moment) entirely free of all judgment, good or bad. To be absolutely impressive in turn. To be the adored child. As Kenneth Tynan put it: "On the whole, actors are not the compulsive neurotics we take them for. Many of them... were idolized by their parents. They seek (and will go to any lengths to obtain) the same central position, the same applause, the same devout attention in adult life... No, actors are not crazy, nor are they compensating for emotional neglect. They are simply re-enacting golden childhoods."
Directing is an art form temperamentally opposed to this pursuit. The imperatives aren't childlike but parental: in effect, one's job is to create a golden childhood for somebody else. To be in control at all times, to plan, to be foresightful, to be mindful of time and the psychology of the crew. To field loud phone calls from Dino De Laurentiis at four in the morning. To spend countless days at a stretch making calls to places like Thailand to raise money, arrange locations, order costumes, or simply to track down elusive but highly bankable stars whose agents are getting in the way. To make countless firm decisions in the course of those long calls, each of which will decide forever at least one important facet of the final film. (As Roman Polanski put it, "A movie is a result of all the compromises that are not made.")
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.
_____________
F.X. Feeney is a critic and screenwriter whose credits include Roger Corman's upcoming Frankenstein Unbound.