Patricia Neal in Hud: "I Just Act My Best; That's All I Do, Wherever I Am."

The movie was marketed and is probably best remembered as a Paul Newman vehicle, but the second Patricia Neal starts talking in Hud your attention shifts and the narrative reassembles itself around her so that you see everyone in the story through her eyes. Her screen presence is so striking you wonder why you haven't heard more about her.

She was a "patron" in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, as in Hud and The Fountainhead, she played moral center. It was a role for which she seemed naturally well suited. In Tiffany's she exudes the same gravelly, shop-worn weariness, but applies it toward totally different ends, which is to say she plays high class instead of middle- to low-. The result makes what was virtuous in Hud and Earth seem vaguely tawdry. She still has the sass and everything she says feels ironic but there's no core there and she knows it, and all the sass puts that emptiness in quotation marks. No less calculating in A Face in the Crowd, she's at least trying to hide it from everyone else, exploiting the public's need to deny that empty core through Andy Griffith's podunk charm and street level charisma.

What the tone of her voice says in Hud is that people like Newman's character always get the attention, always charm people, sometimes even annoy or enrage them but always elicit their focus, either way, demanding and receiving the lion's share of the story; Neal knows it and even tells Newman as much, after he attempts to rape her and before she skips town. She's devoted herself totally to his family but she can see the insidious effect his relentless neediness and selfishness is having on his father and his nephew. After she gets on the bus, the father dies and the nephew leaves, too, lending a sense of prophetic wisdom to her character. Paul Newman locks himself in the house, asserting sole ownership of a big empty nothing. Neal's character in Hud is similar to Newman's, seeming at first its equal in smarmy insincerity. Both characters are sarcastic, even caustic. Neither shows much emotion. They play a game with each other this way and seem to be moving toward some sort of alliance, until Newman gets abusive, exposing their differences. He takes what he wants and doesn't much care. She takes what she's given and, remembering her place, pretends not to be bothered. By leaving, she exerts her independence, essentially taking an escape hatch out of the story. She's not about to stay aboard a sinking ship, and in fact when Newman closes himself in at the end, shutting the family home's door on the camera, the gesture is absolutely a termination. Following his story has lead to a dead end. Better to have gotten on the bus with Neal. Newman's smarmy veneer hides nothing but more guile, whereas Neal's is an intricate subterfuge.

Who knows what the personal events of her life had to do with the strength and depth of her performance here and in other films. She was married to writer Roald Dahl for thirty years. Hud was released in 1963. Three years earlier, the couple's infant son sustained permanent brain injuries when his carriage was run over by a New York City taxicab. Two years after this incident, their seven year-old daughter contracted measles and died. Breakfast at Tiffany's came out that year, and for many viewers, news of these tragic events must have infused her performance as a lonely, quietly desperate woman with a sense of authenticity the written role lacked. At 39 she suffered three strokes in one evening. Dahl helped nurse her back to health.

There's no doubt that the easy candor she displayed on screen had roots in her off screen, everyday personality. Speaking in an interview about Truman Capote, she said, "I met him at a couple of parties, but he didn't really talk much to me. He wanted rich ones to talk to..." trailing off in a knowing, good-natured giggle. She adored Lillian Hellman, thought Tennessee Williams was wonderful, found almost everybody delightful, whatever their professional shortcomings (Hellman? A brilliant playwright, but not such a great director). She loved Blake Edwards, the director of Tiffany's. She loved George Peppard, too, or had loved him, the first time they worked together. He wasn't crazy about his character being dominated by a woman. He pitched a hissy fit with Edwards and "I think he got his way, because I had a much better part than it was in the film, but he did not want ME to dominate him. I don't know what was wrong with him." Her, she just "[did] what's written."

Dede Allen on Editing

"All the changes upon changes. A scene is stretched. A scene is too many things. It has too many subtleties. Or too much pathos. Or too much humor. A scene may be replaced by an alternate. Or the scene doesn't work until it's a composite of alternates. Maybe it's cut entirely. And with it gone other scenes don't work. The dialectic of film is that every time you add dimension, it changes what went before and after it to a degree..."

"To find out what isn't working is much harder than putting it together in the first place: changing and reshaping is more difficult. Maybe to get it to work you have to enter the scene differently. Or leave it differently. It's usually not a matter of tempo - or snapping it up. That I can do in my sleep. It's a matter of not playing the right person at the right moment, or hanging on a moment with another character. And that's what you want to emphasize. But then it doesn't work because it undercuts the next moment in the next actor's reaction."

- Dede Allen, 1970, editor of Bonnie and Clyde

Seeing the Invisible

The editor plays an invisible part in a movie. The only people who know what goes on in a cutting room are the editor and the director, anybody else who happens to be there, the flies on the wall. You can't evaluate the work of an editor unless you are there, in the cutting room, because an editor can do wonderful things with a lot of bad footage, or he can perhaps destroy a lot of good footage, or a director may deserve much of the credit for the editing decisions, good or bad. There are all kinds of permutations, and you just can't put your finger on why it's a wonderfully edited movie or who exactly deserves the real credit. I'm in the academy and vote for the Best Editing Oscar every year, but my decisions are based more on intuition than knowledge, and I suspect that's true of the other voting members, too."

- Evan Lottman, editor on Apocalypse Now, Honeysuckle Rose, Sophie's Choice, 1992

(Photo: sequential stills from the tea party dream sequence in John Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate. "The dream sequence was one of the most amazing pieces of virtuosity film editing ever done. According to Frankenheimer, they shot the same scene four times, with four different combinations of circumstance." The Manchurian Candidate: A Photo Study)

Dream Cast for an Imaginary Movie: Kristen Schaal

Some faces are made for cinema. Expressive from nearly any angle, alive in repose, they draw the eye no matter where they are on the screen. Some of the most cinematic faces are made most peripheral by filmmakers, belonging to what Hollywood calls character actors, a term which basically identifies people who have big chemistry on screen but don't fit into a specific, narrowly defined, marketable profile and couldn't carry a picture and therefore are delegated to the background or come in sideways, side-"kicks" like Thelma Ritter, who insinuated herself memorably into many a mise en scene by wisecracking from outside the established perimeters of the two shot.

Kristen Schaal has a face which pulls its own weight amidst what is already an unusually strong ensemble cast of character actors. She plays Mel, the number one fan on Flight of the Conchords, a show which suits her style perfectly. Her role is all about making her fellow characters and the audience uncomfortable and it makes perfect sense she won the Andy Kaufman Comedy Award, because she excels at this kind of comedy. Her baby girl voice works in concert with silver dollar sized eyes to make the most inane bit of dialogue sound remarkably obscene. The shape of her face is straight out of Dust Bowl Dorothea Lange, an impression reinforced by what has started to seem like a trademark bob. Any other hairstyle would seem wrong on her, though that might just increase the effects of her awkward comedy.

She often steals scenes in Flight of the Conchords. She gives the sense something else has happened, insinuating with those eyes and that curled upper lip, which disappears when she smiles, that something lascivious is or might be going on. Her performance has the reckless quality of Sandra Bernhard's performance in Scorcese's King of Comedy. You feel she has nothing to lose and might do anything. If the camera moves a little to the left or right, she might cock-block it, killing its easy seduction game. She might not know what to do with your attention once she gets it, but she's fearless enough to wing it. Her ancestors are Carol Kane, Judy Holliday, Kaufman, Bernhard, and Judy Greer, a distant but related cousin, more aggressive in her sexual energy but just as off kilter in means.

"I find that the actual shooting of a movie is a very painful agonizing process of constant minor disappointments. What you've imagined ideally frequently cannot be achieved with flesh and blood and with real circumstances, so you feel with each scene that you're losing something. And it's a heartbreaking process. Frequently, when I wind up with a thing I feel, 'My God, it's no good at all, it's terrible. It's so far away from what I thought it would be.' But, if you try hard enough, it comes out good enough, and exciting enough."

Rouben Mamoulian

Calpernia Addams in: A Woman's Picture

Recently, I filmed a short here in Memphis, a week-long production with a cast of three and a crew of four. One of the actors was Calpernia Addams, whom I'd first seen on TV, subsequently contacted by email, and eventually met at Outfest in LA. Like many people who meet at film-related events in Los Angeles, we exchanged compliments and expressed what seemed like a genuine interest in working with each other. Following the template, it might have ended there.

I had hopes of including her in one of several possible upcoming projects, but planning those things can go on forever, and it could have been months if not a year before any of the things I had in mind went into production. I'd never written a short, and I don't think I intended to when I started the one we eventually worked on, but I wanted to work together sooner, to capitalize on an enthusiasm we both seemed to have for working in general. That kind of enthusiasm goes a long way on the kind of modestly budgeted films I make. It overcomes a lot of obstacles, placing them within a bigger picture so they seem smaller, less insurmountable. Whatever its genesis, writing the short was a totally freeing experience for me. I'd always begun whatever I wrote with some advance limitation or convoluted restriction meant to guide me. Instead it often ended up stumping me.

For novels, that meant coming in under a certain number of pages. For movies, it meant all kinds of things; that certain events should happen by certain page numbers, that characters should develop in specific ways. I resist the external influence of "how-to" manuals as much as possible, and grumble at conventional storytelling or the impositions of narrative guidelines, but I'm not immune to those pressures, and often end up imposing them myself in a roundabout way. The short had no rules because I went into it with no preconceived ideas or expectations. It could be however long felt right. Nothing had to happen. The characters could be as opaque as I wanted them to be. Consequently, I kept discovering them and learning from them after the script was finished.
The script was what I guess I'd call a vehicle for Calpernia. I openly thought of it that way. I wanted to play around with the old-fashioned, maybe outdated idea of a woman's picture, where the focus is on one woman's arc or movement through a story, and everything revolves around her in some thematic way. Gaslight, A Woman's Face, Mildred Pierce, et al. An added phenomenon of those films was that the personal life of the actresses often informed and augmented the characters they were playing. Calpernia fit the genre's requirements. She's recognized publicly in a way which makes people feel they know her, influencing the way they receive whatever work she does. Physically, she has the look of a classic Hollywood actress, with big, soulful eyes, graceful carriage, and an hourglass figure. She looks very much like pictures I've seen of Loretta Young, and has a similarly dignified air about her.
In some ways, those qualities put her out of step with contemporary fashion; in other ways, they make her seem timeless in a fascinating way. Ingrid, the character she played in our short, shares this dichotomous relationship to her environment: the story suggests that as a child Ingrid was consciously influenced by the women's pictures she watched with her grandmother, and has subsequently modeled herself on the actresses in them as a form of homage and resistance. But there's an inner quality to Calpernia which was equally appropriate to the material, suggesting reserves of strength and determination hidden under an apparently placid reserve. It's a spark she gives off.As an actress, her most interesting qualities are magnified by the camera. In the role of Ingrid, a woman who returns home after ten years to take care of unfinished business with her estranged mother, Calpernia made small adjustments and subtle expressive decisions, all of which paid huge dividends on screen. She has an uncanny sense for the economy of film work, how little is needed, how just a touch registers much more expansively than a wallop. Many actors give you wallops. They're trying to cover all the bases. You keep asking them to simplify. They keep getting broader. They have very little sense of scale, which is a tricky thing for the best performers. Calpernia measured things considerably, creating a complex, insular, intriguing characterization with precisely judged calibrations.

The first day of the shoot took place entirely in the back seat of a rented town car. We circled the neighborhood endlessly, trying to get the right light, the right sound. Finding roads without too many potholes was an afternoon-long endeavor, and by the end of the day, when it came to parked scenes, we had jets to contend with. We'd set up under the Fedex flight path at rush hour, meaning ceaseless interruptions and crazy-making re-takes. The first scene required Calpernia to be very focused. The car approaches Ingrid's childhood neighborhood, a source of panic and dread for her.Calpernia's performance felt too small to me at first. I have trouble gauging people I act beside in a scene, until I see the dailies for the first time and understand better what they're doing, if anything. The changes Calpernia's facial expressions went through were subtle enough I didn't even really see them until we watched the footage. When I did see them, I forgot about them; the shot was disembodied from the scene it will eventually be seamlessly pieced into, but totally compelling, and her face told an entire story on its own, I got so wrapped up in it I forgot about the one I was expecting. The performance was taking place on a more subterranean level, transmitted through the eyes from a place much deeper than her face.

Women's Pictures were often about suffering silently, a personality under duress which eventually transcends some limitation, whether by conquering it or simply persevering. Critic Molly Haskell characterized the genre as being about ordinary women who become extraordinary through sacrifice, choice, affliction, and competition. The story of Ingrid somewhat subverts that format, presenting a female character who is considered extraordinary in various ways from the outset, not least because of her beauty. Eventually, she disproves some of the assumptions leveled at her, proving to be not quite as different from those around her as they've chosen to believe.

In an essay about the woman's picture published in Jump Cut, Deborah H. Holdstein references Sartre's "perfect moment" as an aspiration held by the women of these women's pictures, a drive they have to fulfill society's expectations of them by arriving at a point which embodies their "potential" as ideal citizens of society. Sartre condemned people who sought only to fulfill society's ideal of them, Holdstein says. In doing so, they sacrifice their individuality.

In contrast, Ingrid's individuality was imposed on her in certain ways, and embracing this idea of "difference" and the scrutiny which has come with it has been a trial. She's endured it admirably, but the story hinges on her continual insistence on being ordinary, free from the pressure to conform to an idea of difference. Calpernia brought to the role a remarkably rich and adroit comprehension of how that difference operates beyond the person said to possess it, the effects so-called difference has on other people, how it modifies their behavior and conditions their thinking. Difference has as profound an effect on the people who impose it and come into contact with it. They often just don't see it, because the difference becomes a way for them not to look at themselves very closely. Calpernia expressed this delicate balance wonderfully, complicating the role in ways which would inevitably surprise the audience as much as the characters they were watching.

Ingrid's perfect moment is something she ultimately keeps very private, in direct contrast to the classic woman's picture storyline, where the perfect moment resolves the film like characters walking off into the sunset. Ingrid's moment is something outside of society, a vision she's held onto for herself, the consummation of a relationship she's imagined, not with a man, as was often the case in these movies, but with herself; the actualization of her desired self-image by accessing areas which were designated off limits to her. Her chief resistance involves refusing to be marginalized. There are no "Big Moments" in Calpernia's enactment of Ingrid's resolve and arguable victory. Rather than explaining her perfect moment for the audience she holds it close, behind her eyes, subverting not just the idea of total access to the women in those old films, but the sense that conveying emotion requires a recognizable pattern of transparency. It's a radical revision of the Loretta Young-era star figure, normalizing her character from the outside in, and a fascinating performance to watch, doing quietly, in the space of thirty to forty minutes, what most actors need several hours and a couple of big speeches to accomplish.

[Top photo and third down, Loretta Young; all other stills from the short "Woman's Picture", photography by Sean Davis.]