Marty Rubin - San Francisco Internal Film Festival History Site - San ...

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MARTY RUBIN: Yeah, Mankiewicz was one of the ones I was most excited by because he was the only old Hollywood director whom I did, who was still left. MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Stanley Donen was that same year, too. MARTY RUBIN: Oh, Stanley Donen! Right, right, right. He comes in a little later. Okay, Mankiewicz was the first one I did so I was quite excited. When I was watching his films, I realized that his films center on these big—I think the term I used at the time was “arias.” These long scenes, like Elizabeth Taylor’s big scene at the end of Suddenly Last Summer, where she describes the death of Sebastian. These big verbal arias that go on and on. You just couldn’t cut them. There was no way. They had their own momentum and their own length. So I ended up selecting very few scenes, but they were very long. Every scene was 15, 20 minutes. So, even though there were fewer films represented it was the longest tribute I ever did. At least, that’s my memory of it. He was good. He was a bit cranky. MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Yes. I was there. I remember that. MARTY RUBIN: Oh, you remember it? You were there? How many of the ones I’ve been talking about did you go to? MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Quite a few. MARTY RUBIN: So you’ve been going to the Festival for a while? MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Yes. Since I first came to San Francisco. I’d say ’74 was the first year I started going. MARTY RUBIN: So you went to the James Wong Howe and the Truman Capote? MARGARITA LANDAZURI: I went to the Jeanne Moreau one that year and then Mankiewicz. That was a favorite. 19
MARTY RUBIN: I’ve read since, that he really soured in his later years and he burned a lot of bridges with old friends, and I can see how that happened. I had this experience with him—and I think Lorena did, too—where he would suddenly just start screaming at you. Just have a paranoid outburst and start tearing you apart. When it first happened, I got a little taken aback, but then he would change and the next time you talked to him, he would be like nothing had happened. He wasn’t the most pleasant person that we dealt with. It was well worth it just to have him there and show those incredible scenes. He could sometimes be a little ornery to deal with, but from the standpoint of material, it was one of the most exciting ones that I did. MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Did you get a sense that some of that had to do—I remember this with him and with some other people—that they felt they were never fully appreciated? MARTY RUBIN: Hmmm. I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with his career was declining… although he’d had a recent hit in Sleuth. Oh, that’s something I remember. Because it was going so long, I had to cut something, and so I decided—probably foolishly—to cut Sleuth because it had just been out and I figured, well, this one, people know, they’re already familiar with it, whereas these other great films from the ’40s and ’50s, they wouldn’t be familiar with. And he got pissed at that. He got really pissed. He first said it was okay when I asked him if I could do it, but then he must have brooded about it and decided he really did want to do it. If you were there, he might have complained about it from the stage. Oh, well! MARGARITA LANDAZURI: And the other director from that year was Stanley Donen. MARTY RUBIN: Another great one to do. As I told him, every scene is going to be a number, whether it’s a literal musical number or just a number in the more general sense. I thought it was a wonderful group of clips. I really had fun doing that one. I don’t remember that much about him. I saw him when he accepted the honorary Oscar, and he was this wonderful character. I don’t remember him being like that when he was at our tribute. He was not as animated. He even seemed a little uptight. The main thing I remember, he was married to Yvette Mimieux at the time, and he was very protective of her. She seemed kind of frail and he was constantly hovering around her and watching over her. That’s the main thing. But I can’t remember anything he actually said or what he looked like on the stage. 20
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Page 11 and 12: great, he’d be great. And they ju
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Page 15 and 16: kind of star presumptiveness at all
Page 17 and 18: MARTY RUBIN: Yeah. There wasn’t a
Page 19: Okay. Here’s a story that my wife
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Page 27 and 28: had screaming girls outside the sta
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Page 33 and 34: MARTY RUBIN: Claude Lelouch, yeah.
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Page 37 and 38: end. And it actually kind of worked
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Marty Rubin - San Francisco Internal Film Festival History Site - San ...

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