And I’d spent sixty dollars on a cassette recorder to preserve this tripe. It wasn’t until after I’d left Kit’s place that I’d realized I was carrying none of my normal interviewing tools, so when I’d reached midtown I’d bought a pen and a pad and this cheap little recorder, and all I was recording so far was sex and shit.
Nevertheless, it’s my own conviction that a bad interview is never really the interviewee’s fault. There are two participants in an interview, but only one of them is supposed to be professional. I’ve interviewed actors with an IQ of seven and managed to make them sound at least competent, if not brilliant. It was the Edgarson business that was clouding my mind, with the result that I was permitting Brant to maunder along with virtually no guidance at all.
The setting also encouraged this feckless informality. Brant had a high-floor suite here at the Sherry-Netherland, with windows overlooking Central Park and the Plaza, where the still-falling snow made the world look like a Currier & Ives Christmas card that had inadvertently gone through the washing machine. A tall and slender and mind-crunchingly beautiful girl came into the room from time to time to add another couple of logs to the fire. Brant and I both sipped bourbon over ice as we sat before the crackling flames, and the contrast between this warm beautiful room and the cold snowy aspect of Central Park almost demanded a discursive droning conversational style, in which nothing could get accomplished.
Brant, too, was a problem. An old man now, with liver spots on hands and forehead, with great knobby knuckles and wrists, with that old man’s style of sitting as though he were a sack of rusty machine parts, his best work was behind him and he no longer kept his brain tuned to the sharp clarity that had given the world such films as Meet The Gobs, All These Forgotten and Caper. He was garrulous and relaxed and perfectly content to bend a young stranger’s ear for an hour or so while the snow fell outside and the beautiful girl performed her function of keeping his old body warm.
But something had to be done, if any useful material at all were to come out of this meeting, so finally, after the memoir of the dog Rudolph, I decided my only choice, since Edgarson persisted in distracting me from my job, was bring him into the interview. Maybe he would help us get moving in a more useful direction.
Q: “I’d like to ask you now a more or less specific question of technique, based on a film other than one of yours.”
A: “Somebody else’s picture?”
Q: “Yes. This is a work in progress being done by a young filmmaker here in New York. I’ve seen the completed portion, and I’d like to ask you how you would handle the problem this young filmmaker has set for himself.”
A: “Well, I’m not sure I get the idea what you want here, but let’s give it a try and see what happens.”
Q: “Fine. Now, the hero of this film is being blackmailed in the early part of the picture. But then he gets rid of the evidence against himself, but the blackmailer keeps coming around anyway. He’s bigger than the hero, he threatens to beat him up and so on, he even moves into the hero’s apartment, he still wants his blackmail money even though the evidence is gone. The hero doesn’t want to go to the police, because he’s afraid they’ll get too interested in him and start looking around and maybe find some other evidence. So that’s the situation, as far as this young filmmaker has taken it. The blackmailer is in the hero’s apartment, the hero is trying to decide what to do next. Now, if this was one of your pictures, how would you handle it from there?”
A: “Well, that depends on your story.”
Q: “Well, I think he wants the hero to win in the end.”
A: “Okay. Fine.”
Q: “The question is, where would you yourself take it from there?”
A: “Well, what’s the script say?”
Q: “That doesn’t matter. That’s still open.”
A: “Open? You have to know what happens next.”
Q: “Well, that’s up to you. What would you have happen next?”
A: “I’d follow the script.”
Q: “Well, they’re doing this as they go along.”
A: “They’re crazy. You can’t do anything without a script.”
Q: “Well... They’re working this from an auteur assumption, that it’s up to the director to color and shape the material and so on.”
A: “Yeah, that’s fine, but you got to have the material to start with. You got to have the story. You got to have the script.”
Q: “Well... I thought the director was the dominant influence in film.”
A: “Well, shit, sure the director’s the dominant influence in film. But you still gotta have a script.”
Well, that wasn’t any help. What was I supposed to do, go ask three or four screenwriters for suggestions? Is the director the auteur or what the hell is he?
I did keep trying along in this vein for a few more questions, but they didn’t get me anywhere. So far as I could see, Big John Brant’s career had come down to this; he was the fellow who told the cameraman to point the camera at the people who were talking. And to think how high in the pantheon I’d always placed this man.
The script. Only a hack cares about the goddam script. What I needed was to talk to a real director; Hitchcock, or John Ford, or John Huston, or Howard Hawks. What happens next? That was my question. Sam Fuller would have an answer to that. Roger Corman, even.
Well, it was all hopeless. The interview with Brant meandered along, being of no use personally and damn little professionally, until Miss Fireperson came in a little after twelve with a pointed reminder: “Don’t forget your luncheon appointment, J. T.” So I also wouldn’t be getting lunch. I gathered up my paraphernalia, shook hands, smiled, said some lies, listened to just one more scatological anecdote, and took my departure.
As far as the hotel bar, where I swallowed another of Kit’s Valiums with bourbon and water, ate a handful of peanuts for lunch, and gradually came to a decision. I could no longer spend my life wandering through a snowstorm from one reluctant haven to the next. I had to reclaim my own home. I had to get Edgarson out, and me in, and I had to do it now.
I had one more bourbon to confirm this decision and to warm me for the trek uptown, and then I left the hotel and turned toward home. Since I lived less than ten blocks from here — up four and over five, approximately — and since traffic was utterly snarled by the snow, there was no point trying to find a cab, so I walked. I was dressed warmly enough, except for my shoes, and I simply kept stumping through the slush, irritable but determined.
There’s something both lazy and inexorable about a major snowstorm. No wind, no real storm at all, just billions and billions of wet white smudges floating down like Chinese armies, and after a while there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it should ever stop. Maybe that low gray-black sky contains unlimited quantities of these wet white smudges, maybe they’ll just keep drifting down like this forever. Maybe human fife developed on the wrong planet.