Polanski: A Biography

Books on Roman Polanski, even critical studies, tend to regard the events of his life and the movies he's made as somehow interchangeable on some perhaps Jungian level, as if the two realms informed each other in readily identifiable, quantifiable ways. Within that system of logic, Rosemary's Baby ties directly into the murder of Sharon Tate, and Tess becomes a response to the incident at Jack Nicholson's house involving sodomy with an underage girl.

Following that line of thought inevitably involves viewing Polanski's films through a tightly constricted, inevitably distorted lens, allowing for heightened experiences of them in some respects, if a limited appreciation overall. Surely Hitchcock, another director whose culturally defined psychological profile is read outside his films, carried back into them, and seeps back out again, was processing some sort of issue with blond actresses, dressing Tippie and Grace as if they were his dolls, but Marnie and Rear Window can hardly be described as chapters out of his autobiography, or therapy sessions, especially once you consider that, however extensively he plotted his films in advance, the stories typically began as someone else's script.

Compared to its predecessors, the latest biography on Polanski shows remarkable restraint. Christopher Sandford does a more admirable job keeping everything straight; certainly he does better than Denis Meikle, whose Odd Man Out reads more like a USA Today article than a biography. Polanski's autobiography was more of an entertainment and an evasion than an illumination, serving as a reaction to the continual and intentional confusion between his life and his work. A book by a man as reviled in the press as Polanski has often been might be expected to come across defensively, but as a result, you learn more about the worldliness of young girls who look older than they are and horrible journalists who refuse to discuss anything but murder and rape than you do about the films themselves in any detail approaching critical acuity.

It isn't that the events in Polanski's life are avoided in the Sandford book, or even skimmed over. They're written about at length. But no effort is made to connect said events in any conclusive way to the movies preceding or following them. And the films themselves are discussed on a variety of levels, including circumstances of production, financing, critical reception, and artistic intention. Hearing about events surrounding the production of Tess, you learn that the director's personal affections at the time were for young women and lots of them, that he was particularly interested in Natassia Kinski, that he appeared with Kinski at Cannes to promote the film ahead of its release, declaring, "I've never hidden the fact that I like young girls. I will say again, once and for all, I like very young girls," after which he rolled his eyes in ecstasy and covered his crotch with his hand.

You also learn that the production of Tess was fraught with complications which beset cast and crew from the very first day of filming, when a scene meant to be sunny was scheduled on a day pouring with rain. Natassia was German and hadn't acted much if any, requiring voice lessons and the better part of Polanki's already compromised focus on set. Eleven weeks into production, the film's director of photography took ill and died the same day. The production extended through summer and autumn and into the worst winter France had experienced in the preceding sixty years. Blizzards were involved. Production was incessantly interrupted by the noise of French air force jets and nearby traffic. Stonehenge was rebuilt from scratch. There were myriad delays, stoppages, and distractions. At one point, "Natassia Kinski repeated one short speech twenty-seven times before the sound crew deemed it technically passable." The budget went from 8 million to 12. Add to this the fact that Polanski jumped into the film immediately after arriving in France, a welcome diversion from his recent troubles in America. He'd lost his homes in America and in England. The rape charges were unquestionably on his mind. Being human, and a film director, plenty else besides was, as well.

Reading all this, it's difficult to narrow down the focus of the film to a straightforward commentary relating directly to Polanski's fateful experience at Jack Nicholson's. But the book doesn't join the cult of apologists for its subject either, many of whom excuse some of his more spectacularly shitty behavior as an understandable side effect of genius. Unlike the documentary Wanted and Desired, which approaches Polanski's behavior in LA as more of an indiscretion than a crime, portraying the director as a victim of a publicity-hungry judge, Sandford makes it clear that Ritterband, the judge in question, never in fact promised Polanski would be placed on probation rather than be sentenced to a term if only he confessed guilt and served time at the Chino State Prison for an evaluation period. To the contrary, court documents show Roman saying he fully understood exactly that, whatever he says now. Besides which, one might expect particularly tenacious rancor in cases involving sex with minors and quaaludes. Seeing the director in the kind of detail provided by Sandford, without the excessive bias typically involved, opens the films up to wider interpretation, allowing the reader to review them more comprehensively with a broader spectrum of reference points. Ultimately, the filmmaker and his work are served better by this kind of scrutiny than by the fog-like layers of mysticism which often cling to all things Polanski, obscuring anything but the most reductive analogies.

That kind of diplomacy works in Polanski's favor in other ways. Tate has long been regarded by many as the victim not just of Manson's creepy-crawlies but of her husband's philandering as well. Even when biographers and critics have conceded that the couple had some sort of understanding about Polanski's extra-marital affairs, they seem to imply that Tate was weak and didn't feel she had much of a choice in the matter, that each affair damaged her irreparably, that she was fragile, pining, and needy, all stereotypes applied to women which further served to excoriate Polanski by devaluing Tate. Sandford gives ample enough reason to see Tate as more independent and self-contained. The fact that she made far more than Polanski did at the time of her death has remained relatively unknown. Of the two, she had far more pull in Hollywood. For a Hollywood couple, that means more power in the relationship, not just out of it. Sandford argues that Tate knew about Polanski's affairs and made certain resolutions about them, not all of which were conducted in private or under duress. If anything, she had far more choices than her husband, which isn't to say his affairs didn't sometimes or even often irritate or even deeply upset her; rather, she made whatever decisions she did from a more informed and empowered position than anyone wishes to give women they choose to dismiss as helpless blond bimbos credit for.

JT Leroy: Autobiography As Set Piece

JT Leroy, the subject of the book GIRLBOYGIRL, was a literary phenomenon who turned out never to have existed beyond the imagination of Laura Albert, a middle-aged San Franciscan. A small time James Frey, Leroy began his brief existence through phone calls to various writers whose work might be said to have been sympathetic, if not catalytic, creating imaginative back-story and relationships which provided legitimate worker bees for the propagation of the JT storyline. Writers got JT published. Publication got JT celebrity friends. A movie adaptation of his story followed, with trips to Cannes and Italy and the offices of several producers eager as ever to visualize the emperor's new clothes. Ultimately, JT was exposed in a series of magazine and newspaper articles, the most interesting of them written by Stephen Beachy. Until now, Laura and crew had been relatively silent.

GIRLBOYGIRL is ostensibly the story of Savannah Knoop, Albert's sister-in-law,who was commissioned by Laura to impersonate JT after journalists and others grew impatient with the photo Dennis Cooper had loaned to Leroy for use as himself. The first autobiography to emerge from the JT Leroy conglomerate, GIRLBOYGIRL makes for a nice extension of the JT mythos, showing how adaptable the basic story is, even now that JT Leroy has been exposed as the creation of Laura Albert.

It isn't a bad book. The JT novels themselves weren't either, though many people changed their minds about them once the scam was exposed. GIRLBOYGIRL operates within the same format as SARAH and THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, trading in tell-all vernacular. Like JT, who was said to have been pimped out by his mother to her johns until a therapist saved him by encouraging him to write, Savannah essentially "finds herself" through the course of the story. Like JT, she arranges events like a film, presenting a collection of cinematic vignettes which eschew the mundane in favor of the memorable. These involve her acquaintance with various celebrities: dinner with Gus Van Sant and Mike Pitt, girlboygirl crush on Asia Argento, residence in Carrie Fisher's guest house.

The JT story was something of an ad-lib. Readers completed it using a subtext provided by magazine articles, interviews, and the recommendations and endorsements of other authors and a motley assortment of public figures. The novels were essentially sets upon which JT's fans could play out their fantasies of him; they were endlessly adaptable this way, and their merit was based on the extent of imagination brought to them by their audience and by an awareness of the work their texts evoked: Dennis Cooper, Bruce Benderson, Mary Gaitskill, and others did more than half of JT's work for Albert, providing dimension to an otherwise fairly dimensionless narrative. JT was a familiar character, if one with no real-life analog, recognizable from the figures who populated other novels and stories. The subtext provided texture, reinforcing the idea that Sarah and Heart were poetic representations of a much more complicated, inarticulate universe. They lent a sort of credence and cohesion to the work of the authors they borrowed from as well, encouraging readers to see them as a bigger picture.

GIRLBOYGIRL presents Savannah as a repentant transgressor. Like JT, who hid behind sunglasses and wigs to protect his true identity, Knoop lived vicariously through the disguise. She played out a fantasy of herself, allowing for projection. Like JT, she got lost in the performance, felt trapped, was debased, controlled, and now, freed through writing, might be saved and start over. The book characterizes her situation as an addiction: she suffers not just from the impersonation, but from an eating disorder and aggressive self-hatred. Fittingly, she has body issues to go with her persona dysmorphia. Both are out of her control. The last line of the book compares well against those in other, better known autobiographical tell-alls: I will survive, I have learned, I have been to hell and back, etc.

The hell in question, of course, remains an attractive one, which is, after all, the book's reason for being. Savannah is no less enamored with the celebrities JT met than JT himself was. Whatever the stresses of a double life, she was able to travel, see the world, make some cash, and feel the love, if only for a while. A while is more than most people get, and the accomplishment of the book is its ability to make mountains out of these molehills. Toward this end, it uses the same language JT's own story did: Knoop is humble, she accepts responsibility, she knows what she did was wrong, she can't believe little ole her is actually sitting across from the one and only Gus Van Sant! Her simpleminded adoration of Asia Argento reads as endearing aw-shucks naivete, and Asia's eventual exposure as a selfish, ego-maniacal princess with feelings for no one save herself actually elicits sympathy, as if this would come as a big surprise to anyone who has watched TV in the last twenty years and knows how this very predictable plot operates. Like JT, Savannah is able to present herself as a simple soul so removed from her element, class-wise and otherwise, that the reader would have to be cold-hearted not to pardon her obvious gullibility.

To her credit, she resists the temptation and pressure to demonize Albert, with whom she seems to have remained friends. She touches on some of Albert's controlling qualities, as well as her own personal issues with weight and a chronic sense of inadequacy. Such is the book's achievement that even after reading it you could be excused for failing to see Laura as the manipulator she would truly have to be. The book is reasonably successful in making the whole thing seem more like an ordeal that was over its participants' heads than a juggling act single-handedly kept air borne by Albert for a number of years, through careful, even obsessive plotting, fanatical strategic advances and retreats, hours and hours of phone calls wherein she portrayed another person for hours and months on end, total, tireless vigilance over an assortment of related media, contract negotiations which required, given her assumed name, all kinds of subterfuge and, one would think, legal counsel, a sustained charade with a therapist who never met JT in person. This wasn't something which happened to Albert or Knoop. It was something they worked at. Consider a day in the life of Albert at the time: chocolates to Dennis Cooper, emails to various writers who'd received press and might be able to hook JT up, phone calls to Mary Gaitskill and Bruce Benderson, solicitation of blurbs and endorsements, coaching Savannah on voice and gesture and back story, and the writing, which, given such necessary distractions, must certainly have been like wrestling with a pit bull, as JT once said.

Once you consider how much was left out, you start looking at where room might have been made, and you see that what mattered to Savannah, the celebrities and the attention, matters even more so now. They fuel the book, reactivating the story in alternate combinations. They remain useful magnets, as ever. Had she wanted you to understand, she might have written an account detailing how all this worked and was sustained; a sort of technical manual for a specific kind of publicity machine. Doing so would have sacrificed her bid for sympathy, in which case there would be little point in writing her story in the first place. You begin to see her position only if you break the pattern of imaginative participation and suspended disbelief required by the JT novels themselves. What interests Savannah is continuing the story. This is the next chapter in the franchise, to be followed by documents from Albert and Knoop's half brother and Albert's one-time romantic partner, Geoff Knoop. JT's narrative was always a series, an interactive soap, with installments which didn't always fit but were made to. The characters were and still are Albert, Geoff, Asia, Gus, Cooper, Benderson, Ira Silverberg, et al. The possibilities for elaboration are endless.

The above photo shows Laura Albert (left) after various surgical procedures, and Savannah Knoop (right) as JT Leroy.

The article by Stephen Beachy detailing the "hoax" can be found here:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14718/

Watching Movies:Gena Rowlands in Woody Allen's Another Woman

Auteur Weary

At one time, I basically thought that if my first movie was ever seen, and people appreciated it, I would stop hearing all the things you need, everything you "must have", before you can make one. I didn't understand how anyone would be able to appreciate what we'd done--with practically nothing, with a crew of three, with no gear, no lighting, no catering, no budget--and persist in that line of thought.

Stupidly, I'd imagined never having to deal with that kind of thinking again, having disproved it. So I was pretty surprised at my first festival, where The Way I See Things was spotlighted as a sort of singular accomplishment, and I heard so many directors talking about the Sisyphean struggle they'd had with their very limited budgets of 200, 000 or 500,000--for seven to twenty minute films.

Making the movie, I was determined to keep things simple and flexible. As much as possible, I wanted to create that environment Lynda Barry talks about, that really pure place for creative exploration. All the gear and the people running around and into each other on movie sets seemed so extraneous to me.

How could you be vulnerable, how could you concentrate, with so many strangers ogling at you? When I worked on Forty Shades of Blue in the prop department and I was needed on set, I was instructed not to look the actors in the eye. But it seemed so silly to me. Why should we all have been there in the first place? So a glass needed refilling between scenes; so a lemon needed to be extracted from the glass so that someone in the scene could again squeeze a fresh one. So lights needed to be adjusted or sound needed to be monitored and faces needed to be powdered. That was understandable, given the scale of the production. But why not scale it down?

All of those technical intrusions force the mind into distracting little dead end alleys, and after a while it's hard to get back on track. Why not have your friend hold the boom? An actor can powder his own face. Get all the people off set and you'll hear the sound better, because fewer people will be chattering and it will take no one to keep reminding them to be quiet. Find a setting where you can use natural light. Why do you need a lemon, exactly?

Suggestions like this are heresy among people who consider themselves filmmakers. An image exists in the mind of the auteur and that image has to be cultivated, whatever the obstacle. Anything less is regarded as near to total artistic compromise, as if compromise were the sign of deficient vision.

One of things I enjoyed most was finding places we could walk into and use with very little embellishment, fantasy worlds we could hijack and play-act in. I built the story around those places, rather than look for places which fit some specific, preconceived idea. When we walked into these places they imposed various considerations, presenting us with individual obstacles.

The compromises were liberating because we weren't beholden and could rethink and stay in whatever moment we were inhabiting, responding genuinely to genuinely surprising prompts and challenges, thinking in that moment instead of outside it. Each place determined the tone and direction of the scene at hand in ways which created a strangely compelling sense of authenticity.

This m.o. requires spontaneity and intuition, and I understand how nerve-wracking and fear-inducing those things can be. I spent my own money making The Way I See Things, and I don't have a lot of money to throw around. I understood better than anyone else on set what was at stake and the weight each decision carried. But who better to take those risks?

That's why to some extent the filmmaking process is inherently fucked. You go to other people for money and they want to know what their money is buying them. They want to know they'll get what they're paying for. If they paid for a love story that's what they want. It doesn't matter if a weird chemistry develops between the actors playing the lovers which, if explored, might go in more interesting directions. It doesn't matter what kind of beautiful serendipity might occur on set if you allow it to. If it isn't in the script they approved, it won't happen. Everyone agreed it wouldn't.

That's fine. A movie should have a subject. But there's a lot of room for discovery within any given subject and most of those vistas don't open up until you get to the set and face your limitations. Seizing those limitations as opportunities is a pretty wondrous thing, a specialized kind of high. It keeps the mind working. 300, 000 is so irrelevant in that context. Thinking you need it, then relinquishing that sense of need is totally freeing.

Maya Deren talked about the mindset I experienced at that film festival. If you listen to everything you'll need you'll never make the film, she essentially said. There is no perfect time or place, and the canvas is always wet. You need nothing but a camera. If you think you need tons of money and you don't have it and therefore believe you can't move ahead, what you really don't have enough of is imagination.

Motion Picture as Way Station

Paul Schrader: As we get older - particularly as the whole process of movies and film storytelling gets older - people have different notions of what's necessary dramatically. They start to see a lot of the melodramatic machinery of the past as outdated. Reality television isn't popular for no reason. It's popular because we're tiring of artificial drama, and reality TV seems less artificial.

George Kouvaros: But it also conforms to quite traditional narrative and character arcs. The process of transformation that drives your work seems to be something quite different. I don't know if you could call it melodramatic, but it does seem to be an attempt to represent change - a change in someone's sense of who they are.

Paul Schrader: Like everyone else, I'm becoming less and less interested in the heavy machinery of movies that strike me as being a remnant of the nineteenth century. But that's a whole other subject, one I've been thinking about a lot and trying to write about.

George Kouvaros: This is something that you've spoken about before: the idea that cinema is at a point of change where the kinds of characters that interest you, the existential characters, no longer have a place.

Paul Schrader: Well, I think the point of change is even greater than I thought before. I've been doing a fair amount of research because I agreed to write this book for Faber on the film canon, and I found myself thrown into all this work about the history of the notion of the canon and why it went out of fashion. Film itself, in fact, is one of the things that destroyed the notion of the canon. When people talk about a film canon, it's kind of a contradictory phrase. So, how can you have a film canon? I've been thinking about an argument put forward by Dudley Andrew concerning the transitional nature of cinema. It comes from a seed idea by Walter Benjamin. Andrew's contention is that motion pictures are a way-station in the cavalcade of art history, a stopover en route from nineteenth century written narrative to the twenty-first century world of synthetic images and sound. While this is perhaps a little extreme, it's also very much to the point.

from "Pretending that Life has no Meaning", an interview with Paul Schrader, Sept. 19, 2006

Dream Cast for an Imaginary Movie: Shelley Duvall

Her performance as Millie in Three Women is brilliantly strange and touching, and after seeing behind the scenes footage of the Shining, you know she isn't just playing herself. Now, people like Stephen Soderbergh seem to revere her. If so, how come she gets these trifling little walk ons? See The Underneath: a nurse whose screen time lasts as long as it takes to administer a shot? What a phenomenal, inexcusable waste. Might as well not use her. At least not using her at all doesn't imply an intrinsic ambivalence regarding her abilities.

See Nashville, Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Popeye, The Shining, Bernice Bobs her Hair. See the "Making of" documentary on The Shining DVD, where Kubrick and Nicholson act like school boys on set. They get along swimmingly, while Kubrick has nothing but palpable disdain for Duvall, reducing her to a sniveling, painfully insecure mess, as if that were the only way to get a performance out of a woman. A man you can just drink with. A woman you have to terrorize. And yet in the documentary's interviews Duvall's so smart and engaged, totally aware of the game and her part in it, above it in a fascinating way, that Kubrick ends up looking like the ridiculous one.

Cut Up: Editing as Sculpture

Whenever I talk to people about the making of my first film, The Way I See Things, I'm amazed at how they think movies come together. If a scene is done well they seem to generally assume it was filmed by multiple cameras from various angles simultaneously. It rarely occurs to them that on a small film like the ones I make there's often only one camera, practically no crew, seemingly insurmountable sound interference, and a dearth of good takes from which to choose.

Editing is the most interesting part of production to me, much more so than the actual shoot itself, which always feels like a disaster and a failure to me in the moment, no matter how good the dailies might end up looking later. Editing can be impossible, or feel that way. You very quickly start to understand why people film on sound stages, where everything but the performance can be controlled or at least regulated.

Planes pass in the middle of sentences, leaf blowers speak to each other throughout the neighborhood. The sun passes or the weather more drastically changes by the time you move on to close-ups which must be made to match the master shot. The broom closet you're shooting in allows one set-up, making close-ups a matter of artful fudging.

I enjoy the challenges imposed by these considerations, and appreciate the trade-off of serendipity in place of predictability, but the challenges are most challenging in the editing room, and that's truly where the film comes together. To truly appreciate any film you would need to have a grasp on how editing factors in.

You can literally make or break a performance through editing. You can make an actor more empathetic or less so by your choices, the ones you make and the ones available to you. I've done it. Say an actor can't remember his lines--ever--and he has long monologues through which his character is understood to be brilliant in a practically useless esoteric way. Say the actor can't get these lines right, even when they're read to him from off-camera.

Say you resort to having him put a book in front of his face so that he will appear to be reading, and dub in his lines later so that he can read them from the script, hoping to assemble this material in such a way as to suggest he is reading and talking at the same time. Say he starts to hate you for requiring the sort of professionalism out of him that typically goes without saying or detects how much you loathe him no matter how you try to conceal it in the name of finishing the thing.

What you might be left with is something very different from what you originally conceived. It might even seem counter-intuitive in almost every conceivable way. You study what you have for months, looking for the right juxtapositions. You can't create the actor's character as indicated in the script. You'll have to do it through more expressive means, more abstractly, with the imposition of a subtlety you hadn't anticipated.

Maybe you've heard of the experiment done with a man's face and various insert shots, an exercise meant to illustrate the power of suggestion through editorial inter-cutting. You put a knife after the shot of the man's expressionless mug and the audience perceives homicidal intent. You substitute a puppy, and it's sadness or affection. Throw in bread and it's extreme hunger on the man's mind.

There's truth in that example but the trick is figuring out what to put in: which expression and which insert, not to mention exactly where. The actor in question has given you tone more than technical precision, and more often than not he isn't the exclusive focus of the scene at hand, so not one shot but many must be considered if you intend to achieve any kind of persuasive harmony.

Acting is so sloppy, so random, and so difficult to modulate and get a proper sense of scale on. Editing has its own moments of unexpected serendipity, but it's much more of a science, however intuitive that might be. You can shave and refine with editing. With acting, at least in my experience, everything you do feels so much bigger or smaller than it will ultimately read. The camera conveys the space so much differently than you canpossibly experience it. Editing is hands on, very sculptural, whereas acting, no matter how technically proficient you might be, is much more liquid, a lot more free form.

People seem to believe that a scene, no matter how many cuts, proceeds with the pace of the original shoot, and that's rarely the case. Part of the editing challenge is to figure out what that pace should be. It's very rarely the pace of the scene as you filmed it. You inevitably cut to close-ups for punctuation, poetic and otherwise, and to either abbreviate or expand.

An actor didn't give you the pause you think a line needs. Or the actor with whom he was performing doesn't say the line very convincingly. You can make it more convincing, to some degree, by cutting to an apparently reflective pause, which might in truth simply be a shot of the actor staring off camera between takes, caught unaware. That's another thing about editing. You use whatever you have; whatever it takes.

Editing is so intentional and so integral a part of the filmmaking process, and yet very few people give it the kind of credit it warrants. Even people who understand how essential its contribution is are at a loss when pressed to say exactly how it works or what contribution a specific series of choices makes within an individual film. Editing awards seem weird to me, partly because of that ambiguity, but also because, more specifically, how can you possibly know how good an edit is unless you've seen the raw material?

A horrible movie can be made pretty good with an imaginative editor and a director who knows how to stay out of the way. An excellent script can be shot well and edited so poorly that the script seems to be the source of the problem. An actor can give you everything you need, and yet you don't know how to use it. Ultimately, it will register as the actor's fault, not yours. It's virtually impossible to give a good editor his due, but a better understanding of how he puts together a scene would go a long way.