MOVIETONE NEW8 - Parallax View Annex

MOVIETONE
NEW8
( DOUBLE ISSUE NO. 66-67
STROTHER MARTIN t JOHN SAYLES

"'CONTENTS
"
MC)V\ETONt: Nt:W6
Nos. 66-67: March 13,1981
EDITOR
Richard
Entire
T. Jameson
BUSINESS MANAGER
Kathleen Murphy;
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Robert C. Cumbow
Pierre Greenfield
Rick Hermann
Peter Hogue
Robert Horton
Kathleen
contents
Murphy
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE
Steve Caldwell
ASSEMBLY AND MAILING
Carol D. Boyd
copyright © 1981 by
The Seattle Film Society
P.O. Box 17477
Seattle, Washington 98107
206-325-7632
The title "Movietone
News"
is the property of
Twentieth Century- Fox
Movietonews, Inc.
1345 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
a suhsidiary of
Twentieth Century- Fox
Film Corporation,
and is used hy permission,
SEATrLE 1'11.:\1SOCIETY
BOARD OF DI RECTORS, I')HII-H I
Diane Birdsall, Ann Browder, Stev(: Caldwell
Richard Clark, Jim Emerson, Richard Centner
David Hanline,Judith Hennes, Terryle Ilohll
Rohert I·lorton, DiekJarnesotl, Don ~'looJ'(:
IluKh Murphy, Kathleen Murphy,JlIlia Sw•.•.tley
"And then Ijust go ahead and '§...12 ,
writ~ that di-E1!.C?gue" .
John Sayles, writer-direct~r of The Return of the Secaucus 7,
talks a lot of sense about movie-writing, moviemaking
,.,..•. , and movies in general
,t
GoipgJn,sige with Alain Tanner §
AppraisiniCin~ina Dead or Alive, afilm about
the making of Tanner's Jonah
By Michael Tarantino
"I don't like those hard goodbyes" §
A conversation with an irreplaceable man, Strother Alartin
Quickies, §
L'Amour viole, Best Boy, One and Onc"
Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Dites-lui que je l'';limc
ffolkes, The Sea Wolves, Bronco Billy (2), The Island
Ordinary People, Can't Stop the Music, The Black Stallion
The Blue Lagoon, The Shining, Making The Shining
The Hunter, Tom Horn, Violette et Francois
The Big Red One, Used Cars, McVicar, Carny
Honeysuckle Rose, Fame, Coal Miner's Daughter (2)
My Bodyguard, The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, Zulu Dawn
The Changeling, Rough Cut, The Great Santini
Strother
t:()VEI(:
1\1;II,tiu ill
C •.orge Roy Ifill's
SII//'S/'u'
.;;,

In 7980 the Seattle Film
Society prej'ented
ANNIE HALL:/: ASSAULT QN PRECINCT 13*:/: BEN-HUR (1925)
THE BIG CLOCK:/: BLUME LN LOVE:/: CALIFORNIA SPLIT
CAMOUFLAGE* :j:CASEFOR A ROOKIEHANGIylAN*
CHARADE :/:CHINATOWN:/: COl'vlING HOl'vlE
THE CRIMSON KIl'vl0NO:/: THE DARK HORSE:/: DIRTY HARRY
DISHONORED:/: DR, STRANGELOVE:/: EL:/: THE FAR COUNTRY
HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE:/: HARD TIlVIES
HARD TO HANDLE:/: HEARTS OFTHE WEST
HOLLYWOOD'S WILD ANGEL*:/: HOW I WON THE WAR
THE HUMAN FACTOR *:/: INDEPENDENCE*:/: IT'S ALIVE
JET PILOT :/:JOUR DE FETE :/:jUGGERNAUT :/:jULES ANDjlM
THE KILLER IS LOOSE:/: ALESSON IN LOVE:/: THE LINEUP
THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS:/: l'vlANUIT CHEZ l'vlAUD
MAN OF MARBLE*:/: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
THE MIRACLE:/: MURDER BY CONTRACT :/:-DIENIBELUNGEN
NIGHTMARES* :/:NIGHTl'vl0VES :/:NIGHT NURSE
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA:/: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST.
PSYCHO :j:THE RED BADGE OF,QOURAGE
RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND:/: THE RIVER:/: ROUGH STUFF*
SABRINA:/: SAN PIETRO:/: SHOCK CORRIDOR:/: THE SHOOTING
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT:/: SOl'vlE LIKE IT HOT
THE STEEL HELMET:/: STRAy DOC;:/: SUBIDA AL CIELO
TALES OF HOFFMANN:/: TONI:/: TOPAZ:/: TORN CURTAIN
TWO ENGLISH GIRLS:/: UNDERWORLD U,S.A.:/: THE UNINVITED
VOAGE SURPRISE:/: WAGON l'vl{\STER
THE WHOLE TOWN'S TALKING:/: THE WILD BUNCH
* Seattle or JVorthwest Premieres
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"And then I just go ahead and write
that dialogue"
JOHN SAYLES
When it comes to new hope for the American cinema,
filmcrit types are always in the market. New hope in
1980 took the form of a low-budget festival fllm with
the misunderstandable title Return of the Secaucus
7. It wasn't a documentary, wasn't a tribute
to sullen or snarling radicals, wasn't even a wherewere-you-in-
'72 American Graffiti - style slzce of
overpacked nostalgia. What it was was this genial,
2
witty, low-key comedy, with just the Tight /11/11'1, I~I
rue, about a group of friends getting togethn jiil 1111
informal reunion one summer weekend, and lIyi",1'. Iii
get used to the idea of turnzng 30-andju.\1 a /('/'1' Ii/I
comfortably bourgeOIs. The screenplay lcas a IJI'(IIII)','
oslensibly laidback and wide-open, yel ((lTIjidly il".
laded without letting the pozntednes.\ shill£'; thl' 1'1111/.
aelen expertly drawn, no fuSS', and .\0 (leaT/ly il/ili,',.

dualized ( among other things, everyone's dialogue ,hhs
a logic and texture all its own) that for the audience
and for one another they step right out of any assigned
boxes, free to explore a wide range of possibilities.
The result was a droll ensemble portrait shot through
with the cozy vitality the Sixties used to call natural,
without any of the boring unintelligence that so often
went along wit~
it.
The film marked the directorial debut of John
Sayles, hiTl/Jelf age 30 and one of the most solidly
talented writers of contemporary American fiction.
About the time Secaucus 7 went into national release,
Sayle.r accefJted an invitation to meet with a
scriptwriting clan at the University of Washington
and share some of his experzences. f 'irtually all the
Hollywood fJemmnel who graciously and generously
gave of their time to support this course delivered
themselves of frank and cogent remarks about the
realities of the film biz at the dawn of the Eighties;
but even in this company Sayles was conspicuous for
the comprehensiveness and lucidity of his commentary.
He talked for better than two hours, first supplying
a general commentary on his background in film and
the circumstances of Secaucus 7 's making, then
opening the floor for questions. Having never heard
so much good sense about films and filmmaking collected
in one !Jlace before, MOVIETO!\'E NEWS requested
permission to share it with a larger public;
the unassuming writer-director seemed surprised that
anyone would think so highly of his off-the-cuff remarks,
but he agreed. "We'll send you a transcript
so you can check it out." He thought about that a
moment, then said, "No. If I said it, I'll stand by it.
Just go ahead. " And that, ~ith very little editing and
rearranging, is what we did.
I'd always been interested in doing screenwriting,
realized that there weren't too many ways
into it. I didn't want to go out to Los Angeles and
start knocking on people's doors trying to get an
agent, so I went a route that isn't much help to
most people. which is that I wrote two novels and
got them published. I got a literary agent out of
that, and his agency had a deal with a film agency
on the West Coat, so they were automatically rep~
resenting my novels as screen properties. I wrote
a query letter to them saying, "I also write screenplays
"-which I hadn't done at that time-"do
you want to see one?" They said, "Sure, send one,"
so I wrote one and sent it off to them, and they said,
"Sure, we'll represent you." So I moved out to the
West Coast.
After moving there, the agent who I'd got-who
is still my agent, Maggie Fields-said, "Look,
you're not going to get offered too many good
things. People will try not to hold it against you
that you're a novelist, but most of them won't succeed."
I found that to be true. There's a real bad
rap on novelists, especially novelists adapting their
own books, because they tend to want to protect
the book-which isn't always the best thing, for it
to be translated into a film.
What happened was, the first thing I got offered
was a rewrite on Piranha. Piranha had been a project
that had been kicking around for about five years.
A guy named Jeff Schechtman, who was Nixon's
youth advisor, had seen Jaws, said "There's a spinoff
here and if I get to it first I'm gonna make a lot
of money." He had had several scripts written on
it, had Japanese money in it, but never really got it
off the ground. He ended up at Corman's door.
Corman said, "Well, let me test-market the title."
He test-marketed the title, it went through the roof,
and he said, "I gotta Illake this movie!" And he
gave it to me, saying "~eep the title and the idea
of piranhas being loose in North American waters,
and then db whatever you want with it, but do it
so that it seems something like Jaws." And that's
basically all I've ever gotten from him, is a very
. vague concept. With B~ttle beyond the Stars what he
gave me was basically" The SevenSamurai in space."
By that time I was in the Writers' Guild and he
wanted a treatment on it, before I was brought in
on the project, to get a commitment from Orion
to give him half the money to make the picture.
He didn't want to give me the three thousand that
you have to pay a member of the Writers' Guild,
so he paid one of his office staff a hundred dollars
just to put something down on paper that sounded
like The Seven Samurai in space. And that's what he

handed me, and he said, "Ignore. this. This is just
for us to get half the money."
Writing those scripts was a lot of fun. Seeing the
movies after they were done wasn't as much fun.
One of the things you realize screenwriting is that
you're the lowest element on the totem pole. Basically
you're writing-especially in an exploitation
picture-you're writing a blueprint that other people
will try to fill out or try not to fill out, depending
how much they like it. I never met the director
of any of the three pictures that I wrote for Corman
until a week before they were shot, or maybe a
month at the most. Not while I was writing them.
Usually I would get a call from somebody saying,
"Hi, I'm directing your picture, I need help. I'm
4
only getting 600 thousand dollars to shoot
this thing-you have 60 speaking parts. I
can't possibly afford that many people. Can
you help me?" And this is after I'd been
paid-sig!1ed, sealed, and delivered. "Can
you help me out?" And you find that, because
you want the thing to turn out good
-your name is going to be on it unless it's
so terrible that you ask to have your name
taken off-you tend to do free work when
you're first starting out, and say, "Yeah,
sure, I'll try to help you cut down the number
of speaking parts." I got a call on Ball/,'
beyolld the Stars saying, "You have to cut till'
number of Malmori Mutants in half 1)('­
cause we can't afford them; plus the mocklshot
people say you have to have all IIII'
attacks be in multiples of three." For SOI1\1"
reason it was easier for the model-shot IWoo
pie to have attacks if there were three sp;lec"
ships instead of two or four. And what YO'1
realize is that if you don't do it somebod)'
else will; and it's usually not going to 1)1'
a writer, because they'd have to pay a wrilc'l',
Usually on a low-budget picture like 111;11
it's gonna be the second assistant eamel'''­
man, or the receptionist. This is true! IjllSI
did a picture called The Howling that will
be out next year, a werewolf picture; I
walked in and the receptionist on the picture
was the second female lead from Rock',,'
Roll High School.
What you find is that basically you II'Y
to cover yourself, try to help them mak"e tlH'
picture work. Sometimes you can get them to say.
"Y es~this is how much the picture's going to cost ...
I've rarely been able to do that. I've often asked.
"Shall I write this small? What're you gonna spel1tI
on this?" and they say, "Oh, don't worry, YOII
write the thing ~nd then we'll make it." Then,
the week before they
"You have to tailor
start
this
shooting it, they say.
for such-and-such." I
wrote a picture at New World called The Lady ill
Red, which was about the woman who was with
John Dillinger when he was shot. I wrote a script
for a woman who ranges during the picture from
17 to 21. The first person they offered it to was
Angie Dickinson; and she almost took it. Corman
said, "Oh yeah, we can brush it up a little." It

j
would have taken a total rewrite to make it make
any sense at all. :\ngie Dickinson, luckily, realized
that, and realized that a total 1'('\\Tile probably
wasn't going to happen and there she would be,
making a picture about an 11\-year-old \\'oman,
and she's O\Tr 4(),
That experience taught me a lot about the relationship
1)('1\\Ten sereenwriting and budget, and
I \\'as able to use that when I \\Tnt into S"((II/l/I,I /.
I said OK, I'm \\Titing exploitation pietures nO\\,
It's gonna lake me a couple of years at this rate
('Ven to 1)(' writing for major studios, To get to the
point-\\'h;lt I planned to do \\'as to hreak into dir('ctin!.!;
by \\Tiling a screenplay, h;I\'ing sonH'ho(1\­
make it, having it make the studio enough money
so that, like Ihe guy who wrote TIz,. SIIi'i'1 Slim/..
[Colin Iligginsl or the guy \\'ho \\Tote TIz,. Slil/!!,
!Da\'id S, W;lrdl, I'\'('ntuall\- you em bring them
a screenpl;lY th;lt they like and you say, "You can
have it if \'011 lei nll' direct it." :\nd the\' either sa\',
"Sure, y;)\1 m;lde us S2()-million las't time, it\
worth il"-and that's stupid: 'cause you can write
doesn't n1

were things that I was very familiar with from
the inside out, and it would be very easy to shoot
those things. You wouldn't need to wreck cars in
order to do them-you know, pay for the car, for
the insurance or whatever. I wrote in one or two
things that could be considered stunts, cast myself
in the film and did my own stunts, with one guy
who was crazy enough that if I did it he would do
it, too. All those elements were things that I knew
I could get for free or cheap, and I wrote them
into the script.
At the same time, making an independent film,
I didn't want to make something that the studios
would make. It seemed to me, how many times are
you going to get to have that kind of control over a
film? Even if it's very low-budget, I wanted the
budget to be the only thing that limited me. I didn't
wanna have to worry about the elements. Basically
the way that movies are made today, is that
they say, "OK, here's your screenplay and here's
the people that we wanna put in it. Can it make
this much money from a network-TV sale, this
much money from a cable-TV sale, this much from
foreign- TV sale, this much money from foreign
theatrical?" If it makes that much money on paper
before you start it, and if that money is equal to or
greater than the amount that they're going to
spend on the film, they'll make the picture. They
wanna break even on the ancillary rights before
they even start shooting the movie. I didn't wanna
have to worry about that stuff. I was willing to
make basically a very expensive audition piece
-something that I did not expect to be released
and distributed, but something that I would wanna
go see; There's a writer named Mickey Spillane,
who's a lousy writer, but my favorite quote of his
is: "I write the kind of books I like to read. "
I didn't want to make a horror film. I've wntten
'em, I like to see 'em, but I didn't wanna spend a
year or more oi my life making one just to break
into studio movies, which would mean getting
offered other horror films. The guy who directed
Piranha, after he directed Piranha he was offered
several pictures and they were all Swim Team, Orca
II, Jaws 3-PeopleNothing-and he hates the water,
right? It took him about two years to get offered
any kind of picture that wasn't in the water. I didn't
wanna do another horror film, so why do one
in the first place?
Return of the Secaucus 7: Adam Lefevre as J. T.
So basically a lot of what the experience was
about was knowing what I wanted to do with it,
knowing exactly the elements I wanted in it, and
then seeing what things cost, and totally tailoring
a script for. budget. Usually you don't have that
as your startingpoint, a budget as a startingpoint;
but you have other things as startingpoints. If
you're doing a job for somebody else-Piranhabasically
Corman said, "You make the people
whoever you want 'em to be, we have to have a certain
number ... "He didn't specify the number, he
said, "We have to have a certain amount of action
sequences"-meaning carnivorous fish eating people.
And I said, "How's about one attack every 15
minutes?" And he said, "Try for 15." Given that,
I had a structure for the film. You open it, introduce
the piranhas, and if you have one piranha
attack every twelve minutes, it's a 90-minute film,
here's the structure: you have to get them from
piranha attack to piranha attack without making
it totally repetitiou~. And that's hard to do. There's
only so much you can do.
What I'm getting at is that any screenplay that
you start with, you have to- One of the things
that's been the most helpful to me in my writing
is that I've also acted. You take a part on, you say
OK, the writer has given me these lines-especially
in a small part, he's given me six lines: I gotta figure
out who this chaiacter is. And not only do I
have to figure out who this character is, I have to
6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 - - - -
figure out what this character wants within every
scene I appear in. That's helped me in writing, in
that when I write something I very often write with
a large cast, a lot of people; it just seems to turn out
that way. I'm able to go through and look at each
scene and say, Why is this character there? If I was
an actor playing this character-man, woman, or
child-is it consistent? Does this person seem to be
the same person from scene to scene? Does he have
something he wants? And in fact, is he needed?
And very often you'll find out, when you do that,
this character is only here to supply somebody for
the hero to shoot at. If that's his only reason for
being there, you sometimes can find, why not have
another character who only does one thing be that
same character? The thing about acting is that a
lot of what you're dealing with is a very technical
medium, but the human part of it is following each
person who is in it, each actor who is in it, each
character who is in it, and making sure that they're
a reasonably rounded human being. Acting has
been helpful in that it makes you think, OK, I am
this person-what makes me full? what makes me
rounded? what makes my character have some
kind of progression of character, or at least purpose
in this film other than j~st another body?
I heard something I hope wasn't falsely attributed to you,
that you write different versions of a screenplay for different
used, different readers. Do you?
Sure. When you write a script you're writing it for
somebody. When I wrote Secaucus 7 I knew I was
going to direct it. I didn't put any stage directions
in there. I did not write a selling script. In a writing
deal, they have cutoffs. After the first draft they can
cut you off; so the first draft, I try to make it as easy
as _.eo.:>_~ible. for a producer t() read, which means
very small words, no stage directions, keep it clear.
There's a lot of political content to screenwriting;
you're campaigning to get something made, and
made the way you want it made.
How does the treatment fit into the campaign? Do you
find it useful?
A treatment is the worst form in the world. It's
your story boiled down to 20 or 30 pages of really
lousy language. As far as I'm concerned, a treatment
is another opportunity for the producer to
decide not to use you or not to use the movie.
In the case of The Lady in Red, I wanted to do
more than I knew Roger Corman wanted to do
with that script. He basically wanted Bloody Mama
Part Three; I wanted to get into other things about
the Thirties. [Sayles's script was entitled Guns, Sin,
and Bathtub Gin.] So I said, "Roger, I will not
write you a treatment, I'll write you a full draft."
And that way I was able to show him things that,
if I had just said, "I wanna go into this area, I
wanna take her to jail, take her to a sweatshop,"
he'd say, "Oh no, that's beside the poi'nt"; whereas
when I put it in the script he sort of got to liking
the story. So I was able to campaign for the script
that I wanted, and get him to agree that he liked
that, too.
Very often I'll get together with a director when
he comes in and I'll say, "Look, they want this scene
in here, you don't want it in here, I don't want it in
here-I'll write it in here, we'll schedule it so that
it's on a day when you have a lot of other things to
do, and they'll be happy to cut it when the time
comes." Or, depending on the producer, they
won't remember, by the time you make the picture,
that they wanted it in there. So you don't end up
fighting over things that you don't need to fight
over.
Without being devious, you know, a screenplay
is a blueprint and you are trying to convince somebody
to make it the way that you want it made, so
you have to put it in the best form for that. I'll write
a different 'screenplay sometimes for an actor. I'll
write lines for an actor that don't show up in the
regular screenplay because it makes it too long,
but that actor may not have enough lines to know
what his character is about. A couple of times I've
had an actor call me up after he's been cast in
something that I've written, and say, "This character
seems pretty thin." I had this happen with
Bradford Dillman in Piranha: "You know, there's
nothing to this guy." And I said, "Well, I didn't
know who was going to be cast. I wrote a character
that was totally actorproof. They could have gotten
a guy who was the worst actor in the world and he
could have gotten through the script. You' can act
a little"-I didn't say it that way-"I'll write some
more stuff for you." And he ended up getting some
more lines that fleshed out his character, but also
a lot of lines in scenes that I wrote for him that they
eventually cut; but it helped him to know who that
character was. I wasn't going to put it in the script
7

to begin with because if they got a real nonactor
we might have ended up with just a lot more of a
nonactor trying to act.
I thought Piranha worked very well and I wondered how
you set up your story.
The one thing was, you had to ignore the truth
about piranhas somehow. I did a lot of research on
piranhas. They can't live in North American
waters, they'll die in the cold water; so I had
to have a special breed of piranha. Given that
it's the horror film genre, we had to have something
about, oh, you know, breeding mutant
piranhas. One thing that Corman always likes
to have is a certain kind of antiauthoritarian feeling
to his films, because most of the people who go to
them in drive-ins hate their teachers or hate their
bosses or whatever, and that always makes them
feel comfortable. They can honk their horns. So
I just came up with the idea that the Army had
been raising these mutant piranhas to put them
in North Vietnamese waters during the war­
Operation Razorteeth-and they lost their funding.
And then after that, one scientist decided that
he wanted to go on-he's a fish geneticist-because
they're a hardy breed; and he went up there and
kept them alive by stealing dead dogs and cats and
feeding them, and continuing with his research.
Eventually they get into the river, and they can live
in cold water 'cause they're mutants, and they can
live in salt water 'cause they're mutants; and that's
why they're making a sequel where the piranhas
have bred with flying fish. That one I'm not writing
-the Japanese have taken over for Piranha II.
Anyway, that gave me an excuse for a lot of exposition,
so we got the fish geneticlst injured so that
they had to carry him downriver on a raft. That's
the second thing: if there are piranha in the water
and people find out, why don't they just stay out
of the water? That's the main problem with that
script, how to contrived it, 'cause it has to be a
contrivance, so that people keep going in the water
even though they know there are piranhas in there.
Or they don't know. How don't they know if they
don't know? The script that I was given to rewrite,
the guy had gotten it into his head, 'cause he'd read
it somewhere, that piranhas only attacked when
you were bleeding. So there were all these scenes
where people cut themselves shaving, stubbed their
toes, talked about having their periods. My favorite
scene was the one where a bunch of people were
camping around a campfire and a bear attacked
them, mauled them, chased them into the river,
they were eaten by the piranha, and then the fire
got out of control and chased the bear into the river
and the bear got eaten by the piranha. Half the
movie was about how people got cut. And every
time somebody got cut, you knew they were gonna
say, "Oh, I'll go jump in the river!" So I dropped
the idea. They just attacked when they were
hungry. And these were mutant piranha who
were stuck in a pool for a year with this geneticist
fe~ding them cats and dogs, and now they're out
in the river and having a good time, so they'll eat
anything. So I had to structure it so that, OK,
people don't know that there are piranha in the
water. And so I structured it after a trip down the
river on the raft: Huckleberry Fin ....
Another thing that also happens is that, in thc
heat of shooting, especially on a low-budget picture,
people will-if you're not there, which I wasn'\
because they were too cheap to pay my way down
there and put me up and have me work on it, and
I was already paid for the screenplay-when they
run into a technical difficulty, very often they'll
write their way or shoot their way around it, not
remembering that it now makes the script make no
sense at all. I got a call from the Piranha location
saying, "We can't get a raft, Disney won't let us
have theirs-couldn't we have the people going
down the river in a houseboat?" I said, "If they
go down the river in a houseboat there's no danger
from the piranha. How are they gonna fall in?"
-'cause I had set this thing up where the piranha
eat the lashings off the raft and it falls apart.
They said, "Oh." Then they went and found a raft.
If they hadn't called me, which they almost didn't,
they would have put the people in a houseboat,
shot a lot of scenes, and then said, "Uh-oh, they're
in a houseboat-how are the piranha gonna get
after them?" and had to rewrite from there.
All that gets back to the idea of something being
functional. In that kind of picture especially, when
all you want to do is scare people several times
during the movie and have the plot be plausible
enough that they don't just walk out in disgust.
And I think I did that. The picture made about
$14 million domestically, and about fourteen million
overseas. I got ten thousand for it. I wasn't
8 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

_--------------------------------------=====:-"":II-~-"!_,--:;~;----"!-:--"!:~
III
Piranha (1978): Paul Bartel as the camp counselor.
in the Writers' Guild yet. The director and editor
of the picture-he's the same person-got eight
thousand for it. And none of us got any points.
But you have to figure that the fourteen million,
most of that is just Corman test-marketing that
title, and knowing that if you have the title Piranha
and the thing didn't get a real stinker of a word-ofmouth,
he could go to every major city and every
major market, play two weeks, get out of there fast,
and make his money back. Which is what he did.
How did Return of the Secaucus 7 find a distributor?
The distribution of Secaucus 7 came about because
I was able to get the film-when it was still in 16­
millimeter, which I shot it in-into a couple of film
festivals. Through exposure at those festivals-the
Filmex thing in Los Angeles and then the Museum
of Modern Art New Directors Festivalseveral
smaller distributors got interested in it,
and three or four of them started bidding on it.
The bidding was sort of like "We'll give you fiftyfifty
after prints and advertising costs-take it or
leave it." So it wasn't like there was a big price war
going on. I finally went with Specialty Films of
Seattle because they were the only company that
said, "Yes, we will guarantee you that it will open
in ten major cities." The usual thing that happens
with a small film, even with a small specialhandling
type of distributor, is they'll open in
New York and Los Angeles; if it doesn't do any
business there, they say, "We tried. We spent 40
thousand, 50 thousand dollars-you don't want
us to waste more money, do you?" And I felt that
Secaucus 7 was the kind of film that might bomb
9

in New York, just make its money back but no
profit in New York, but it might catch on in Seattle
or Boston or Portland or Vancouver and play
there for half a year, and actually make some
profit; and I wanted to give it that shot. Specialty,
on top of offering me the same sort of cut if the
film made any profit as anybody else was, guaranteed
me that they were gonna at least take that
much of a risk of their own, financial risk; that
they would put out about a hundred thousand
dollars in prints and advertising, and open it in
those ten cities within a certain amount of time.
How much did it cost to transfer the film to 35mm?
$21,000. Today it would cost 22; within a year it'll
cost 30. The process is just getting more expensive.
The people who work in labs just almost went on
strike, and they got a ten percent increase, so all
labor costs- And there is quite a bit of laboL You
know, the guy who does the blowup works on the
thing before it goes through the machine; there's
a lot of hours in there, and that all has gone up
ten percent, so the cost of blowing a film up is
gonna go way up. Plus silver-the cost of the film
stock itself has gone up and is going to continue
to go up.
I paid for it myself. Once it looked like somebody
was going to be interested in the film, I started the
process going, because it takes forever to get anything
out of the lab. But I knew that one of them
[the specialty distributors] when I went with
them would pick up the cost. However, that's part
of prints-and-advertising, and that money has to
be made back before any money that comes in can
be called profit.
When you're going to write a screenplay; do you do outlines
or diagrams or what?
It depends on the script. A couple of the originals
that I've written, I just had a story in my head and
I started writing it. A thing that I'm doing right
now with Triple Play for 20th Century- Fox-it's a
story about- It's set in Trenton, New Jersey, in
1966. It's about a sort of Jewish sorority queen,
a doctor's daughter, who gets involved with an
Italian meatball who wants to become part of
Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. It follows that relationship,
which can exist in high school because they're
both the sort of people who like their lives to be
dramatic, and it follows them from their senior
year in high school to when she goes off to Sarah
Lawrence and really gets hit with the Sixties. It's
set at that time because that was a time when you
could go to high school and be a senior and it was
cool to be a virgin, and the next year in college
it was the most uncool thing that you could do.
She really has to switch herself totally around.
It talks about whether that relationship can survive
or tries to survive when she goes to Sarah Lawrence
and he goes down to Miami and becomes a
dishwasher and tries to meet Frank Sinatra in the
Fontainebleu Hotel and become part of the Rat
Pack.
Given that story, which Amy Robinson of Triple
Play brought me, I said, OK, there's the structure
of it. We have a high school year and we have the
beginning of her freshman year. I'm gonna write a
120-page script. I don't like to-write a huge script
and boil it down. I know that if this thing gets
made, if I direct it, it's gonna be a low-budget
picture; that's the agreement we made. I'm not
going to have the luxury of shooting a whole lot
of footage, a lot of extra scenes, and then carving
a movie out of that in the editing room, which you
can do with something like Apocalypse Now or
Heaven's Gate. I want to go out there and shoot
everything that I write and only write what I'm
gonna shoot. 120 pages, 120 minutes-that gives
you a two-hour movie and you may cut five minutes
from it; that's a good running time for a feature
film, it'll give them the right number of shows
per night, plus I can tell the story in that time.
About half of this film is gonna be the high school
section, half the college section, so you've got 60
pages, say, to do the high school section. What
things do you have to hit on to tell the high school
part of that story? I write down what scenes have
to be in there, then write down what kind of scenes
I need for transition-of time, just to show that
time is passing-and what scenes I need for development
of their character. Usually I come up with
something like 25'or 30 scenes. It's very mathematical,
it's very technical; but once you take that,
and you say OK, I'm gonna have 25 scenes in the
first 60 pages of this movie, you realize that YOll
have about two pages of two-minutes' screentime
for each of these scenes. Then you really start to
look at what's gonna happen. I want a scene here
where she first meets the guy. And I write very
dense movies; a lot of stuff happens at the same

time. 1 want her to meet the guy for the first timehow
can 1 do that and have it only take up a minute
of screentime and have it be something that isn't
just film shorthand, that isn't just two lines and
they meet cute and all this thing.
What 1 do is get an outline like that and 1 fill it
in. And the filling-it-in is where you really get
stuck. You say, How can 1 possibly do the senior
prom and have him be robbing the tuxedo store
and she's going to the prom with somebody else
in five pages? That's where the discipline and also
the visual part of screenwriting- 1 mean, most
critics who write about film talk about the screenplayas
if it's the dialogue: the screenplay was
"good" if they liked the dialogue. When 1 write a
screenplay 1 write pictures, too. 1 usually think,
How would 1 write this movie if it was a silent
movie, and still understand what's going on? And
then 1 add dialogue when it's necessary. That
didn't happen with Secaucus 7 because 1 knew 1
had to write a very verbal movie to be able to afford
to do it. But with most other pictures I say, Here's
what 1 have to show in order to tell the story without
a word of dialogue. For instance, the guy who
directed Piranha and directed The Howling often
tells me, "Write me some 'director's touches'!'"
Which means write him some things that are
totally visual, that he can just shoot because
they're scripted there, and he'll get the credit.
On a screenplay, it's such a technical medium,
and because I've been working with such low
budgets and haven't had the luxury of being able
to write a whole lot of material and sculpt a movie
out of it, I work in a very technical fashion as far
as the structure of the screenplay is concerned.
Then, within each of those two- or three-minute
scenes I try to make it as human as possible.
Has it been more exciting for you to write screenplays and
to follow the making of the films, than to write a novel?
It's not a question of excitement. It's a very different
experience. When you write a book, you're
God: you can write any [uckin' thing you want,
it comes out the way you want. And there's not
enough money in it so you're even tempted to say,
"Yes, I'll change it if you'll only please buy it and
publish it, sir." I've always had the feeling that if
they don't like it they can take a walk-I'll take it
somewhere else or I'll stick it on a shelf with my
fiction. With the movie things I've done, they've
been other people's ideas. I didn't wake up one
morning and say, "I have to write a movie called
Piranha about little fish eating people!" I was hired
to do ajob and I was interested in it and it was fun.
With movies, it's much more political. It's more
like what 1 was saying before about having to campaign
for certain things. Getting a screenplay written
and made the way you want is like getting a
bill through Congress. You start out, you have this
idea, you present it in the best way that you can,
the way that you think it'll get through and still
have the impact on the audience that you want it
to have. And then as you see it go through Congress,
let's say they attach riders to it, they water
it down, they compromise it, and you just hope
that when it comes out the other end the piranhas
haven't gotten to it and it looks something like
what you put in there and has some of the same
feeling. But it can really- When you're just a
screenwriter for hire, which I've been, black can
turn white. You can really start out writing a movie
that you want to be totally unexploitative that
turns out to be a very exploitative movie-and they
may not even change a line of dialogue; and that's
what you have to live with. That's one of the reasons
1 would much rather direct the things that 1
write, or write things for people 1 trust, or who
1 know_
Your characters in Secaucus 7 are very natural; it's as
though you knew them like friends. I'd like to know
how you developed your characters, how you chose them,
and how you made them come alive.
1 don't really remember writing the picture. 1 wrote
that in two weeks. But 1 sort of had the idea in my
head beforehand. 1 wrote a few of the parts for
actors who 1 knew 1 wanted to use. They weren't
those actors, they weren't playing themselves, but
1 said, What can 1 write for David that he would
have fun doing? I'd start writing this character.
What can 1 write for Maggie that she would have
fun doing? Another character. As the story started
to fill out, 1 wanted to balance certain things, so
I'd write another character. And then the trick in
the directing was, 1 wanted to have that great luxury
of the screenwriter, to tell them to say what
I'd written and not paraphrase _it or anything like
that. There was no improvisation in the film. Even
the charades game was totally scripted. Even the

Return of the Secaucus 7: Adam Lefevre (J.T.), John Sayles (Howie), Mark Arnott (Jeff), Gordon Clapp (ChiP), Bruce
MacDonald (Mike), David Strathairn (Ron).
little one-liners and sound effects-not the urns and
ers, but everything was scripted.
The problem was to get actors to realize that it
might not feel like acting, what they were doing,
but it was. What helped in that respect was that
we got a very good crew and the crew was interested
in the story. They weren't interested in just
picking up their checks. They helped the atmosphere
of the filming. They were living with us,
with the actors. They were interested in the acting,
the actors were interested in the technical part.
So it wasn't a question of an actor sitting in a Winnebago
getting a call and then walking in front of
a bunch of technicians whose names he doesn't
really know and trying to act naturally. It was a
situation where you were living with people. You
knew them, 'you would be talking with them one
minute, I'd say _"OK, let's get this thing going,
get in front of the cameras." I'd talk to them and
they'd start behaving almost more than acting.
Most of my directions were to get things morc
relaxed, lower-key, less dramatic-"No acting,
please." There was acting, and only because most
of them were very very good actors could they get
that feeling of making up lines that were totally
scripted. And that's real hard to do-to act in an
almost documentary style when all your training
says, "You have to take the text and bring it alive."
12 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

••
I'm beginning to get an image of you writing like Hunter S.
Thompson. Do you lock yourself up for two weeks with
a bunch of speed? How do you do a screenPlay in only
two weeks)
I don't drink, for one thing. I write fast. Usually
if I don't get something the first draft, I'm in trouble.
I write longhand or type without punctuation
the first draft, and then the only rewriting it gets
before I send it in is when I type it in the final version.
It might take time while I'm writing it to
think it. Before I type it out fimilly, I read it out
loud, even the stage directions. But I just write fast,
and I carry things around in my head before I start
writing. Sometimes I carry things in my head for a
couple of months. I don't have that luxury sometimes
when I'm writing for hire, especially on rewrites.
My first novel I wrote in bus stations, on people's
floors, in about twenty different places. I can tune
out. I can write pretty much anyplace because once
I get into the story, that's as real a place as anywhere
else, so I just sorta tune out where I am and
I get into that story and I carry it around and people
ask me things and I say, "Huh?" / It's never
been a problem for me. Other people have a harder
time or have to take more time. I'm lucky that way.
It meant that I could finish the film within a year
because I was able to juggle three scripts at one
time-that is, do a rewrite on Battle beyond the Stars,
and do Howling and Alligator at the same time,
and a TV-movie to pay for the lab costs. I had this
slightly embarrassing thing of meeting this agent,
and I thought that nobody knew I was doing three
scripts, but it turned out that this agent represented
all three of the directors that I was writing for.
He asked me if I was represented, because he knew
I was making all this money working on three
scripts and he wanted to get in on it.
Could you talk about the TV-movie? How did you come
to do that, and was it different from the world of features?
The made-for-television movie was a thing called
Perfect Match. It was written for Lorimar and CBS
aired it a couple weeks ago. It came on opposite
Jaws and The End, so it didn't get as good a rating
as it should have. It turned out OK.
The producer had read something that I had
written-I don't know what any more. He wanted
to hire me. I had written at that time four features
that were either made or in the process of being
made. He brought me this true story. It was what
is known in TV business as a "crip flick": somebody
spends some time in a hospital during it. In
this case it was ayoung girl who, when she was 16,
gave up her child for adoption; when she turns 32
she develops aplastic anemia and needs a bonemarrow
transplant, has to find her adopted daughter,
and when she finds her the daughter hasn't
been told she's adopted. They brought me that true
story and then they just let me loose.
The main hangup was that CBS wouldn't let
them hire me. It took them three months of negotiating
because I wasn't on their list; I didn't
have a "TVQ," I didn't have a TV credit. CBS
said, "Why don't you use so-and-so, why don't you
use so-and-so?'" The producer was very good; it
was his first TV-movie but he was willing to wait
three months and dicker on with them. He actually
took iI beating-not a beating, but he lost- some of
his points in the film because he wanted me to
write it. And he held out for the actors, too. They
wanted to use people with much more TV-visibility
than he wanted. He held out and it paid off, in both
the script-if I might say so-and the acting.
The other problem was that after I wrote it and
liked it a lot and was off the picture- Lorimar had
promised us that we could set it in San Francisco
so I wrote it specifically for San Francisco, very
specifically. The network said, "We're only going
to give you a million-two to make the picture instead
of a million-six." They had to cut back on
the budget and they said, "You have to shoot it in
Los Angeles. We're not going to let you go up to
San Francisco." I was off doing other projects and
a new producer, a new executive producer, was put
on it at Lorimar, who was the guy who was the
executive producer of Dallas and Knot'sLanding,
who's used to rewriting every script that crosses his
desk. Having to set it now in Los Angeles gave him
the excuse to start rewriting it. There was nothing
I could do about it. There's about 20 percent of it
that I didn't write: about ten percent out of that
20 percent is passable, and the other ten percent
makes me cringe-it's really bad. I was able to talk
the producer and director into cutting some of
those scenes; they had to cut some of it anyway
because of length.
When you're dealing with TV, you're lucky if
anything that you wrote ... I don't know, in all my
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13

meetings with TV, I've found the people much
more impossible than feature people, even people
who make exploitation pictures. The pressure in
TV to conform to network standards in this and
that and the other thing, and not to upset the audience,
and all those kinds of things, is so much
stronger than in a feature. They don't want to
gamble. :v!ore often than not, in low-budget pictures,
those guys are gamblers; they aren't going
to sit over your shoulder. So I had a pretty good
experience with the director and producer [of the
TV -movie] but the network took things out of all
of our hands occasionally.
Do YOIl take Into aC[IJunt that there will be commercial
breaks when you're writing a TV-movie) Do you plan for
that rhythmlcally- "Pllt the break here' '.)
I talked to the director and I said, "Do you want
me to write the commercial breaks or don't you?'.'
and he said, "Naw, don't bother with that, we'll
find 'em." And he found 'em, and they weren't that
bad.
Did YOIlpick liP an)' bad habits from JOllrnallsm that )'ou
had to destroy before you [lJuld learn to write scripts)
I didn't do any journalism until after I had written
scripts. I've done very little. I hate it. There's something
I don't like about going up to people and asking
them questions that I wouldn't ask them if I
was just a person and not a reporter. What I don't
like about it is, they answer me, and I wish they
wouldnt sometimes. I wish they would have sometimes
the integrity, or not be impressed by the
media, enough to say "Fuck offl" This year I went
down to-Atlantic sent me-I'm writing a novel
about Cuban exiles, and so they. sent me down
during the Freedom Flotilla thing. I tried to speak
Spanish, and my Spanish isn't very good; but I
found enough people who could translate and get
the thing across, and I talked to a lot of refugees.
I wrote a piece and they didn't publish it quick
enough and the story got old so they didn't run it.
The other thing that I did, New Republlc sent me
to the Republican Convention. I started interviewing
people, and they were so wary of the news media
that they gave me very political answers, very
.guarded answers; and this was right down to 15-
year-old girls who I was asking, "Why are you
wearing a STOP THE E.R.A. button?" They had been
warned not to talk to reporters, or what to say, so
I couldn't get anything genuine out of people. I
ended up writing the article by walking around and
eavesdropping. I can remember a page or two of
dialogue verbatim for about half an hour. I'd walk
around, hear a conversation, write it down, and so
the whole article is written basically as if I'd had
a tape recorder, and I just edited it. It came out
to be one of the best articles I'd written. J ournalism,
the only bad habits I think that you can get
into is doing it at all, 'cause I don't like it.
Did )'OU use a union crew on Secaucus 7?
No, I couldn't afford a union crew. My literary
agent at that time-who has since quit the business
and gone to be a fish-farmer in Maine-grew up
with a guy who was an assistant sound man for a
small commercial industrial-film outfit in Boston
that had shot a lot of 16 but never done a feature.
I got in contact with them. They hired their rival
three-man team from across town who had also
shot a lot of 16, and they formed our crew: we had
a seven-man crew who had never done a feature
before but had shot a lot of film and were technically
very proficient, and who were willing to
work for about half what they usually would, in
order to have a feature on their list of credits. And
I lucked out: I got really good people.
I cut the film. Since I wasn't looking for the film
to make any money back, one of the best things
that you can ever do-and it's so expensive that
it's hard to recommend it-is write a film, shoot it,
and then get to edit it. You see all the things you
didn't cover as a director. You see all the things
you should have written as a writer. And editing
a film is the closest you get to writing. Editors and
writers are very close together, and when they're
different people, and especially when the studio is
starting to take the movie out of the hands of the
director and the writer, they're usually pretty
much sworn .enemies. Editors can save a director's
ass or a writer's ass, but they can also wreck what
they did.
How could you get the fllm released if It wasn't a union
shoot?
Roger Corman doesn't use a union crew. He sometimes
needs a IA TSE bug, a trade union bug [seal
of the lnternatlonal Association of Theatre and Stage
Employees-here pronounced yotsee], on the picture,
and what he'll do, if the picture's gonna do well
enough to play in a lot of cities where a projectionists'
union is gonna not show it if it doesn't have the
14 !!!!!!

ug on it, he'll buy it. It's a penalty you pay to the
union. The union hierarchy gets the money, and
very often that's all they care about. That's the way
it goes. With my film, the unions were pretty generous
about the fact that the film wouldn't have
been made if you'd had to use union people. They
aren't going to bother you if it doesn't have a
IA TSE bug on it. Once you start bidding upwards
of a million dollars on a project, you are taking
bread out of their mouths; if you're going to spend
a million dollars, you can pay union people to
shoot it and you should. It didn't really present a
problem to me and it hasn't in the distribution of
this film.
My favorite character in Return of the Secaucus 7
was the wise guy who worked at the gas station. Did you
have some particular purpose in mind for him?
What I was interested in with the gas station attendant
was bringing into the film some of my experi.
ences of growing up in a working-class high school
where most of the people didn't go to four-year
colleges, or college at all, and running into those
people later on. A lot of people have had the experience
of having kids, getting married when they
were in high school, got a job right away and had
a couple more kids, and now they're behind the
B-ball. There's a tendency for people who went to
college and people who didn't go to college, who
knew each other back in high school, to think that
they have less in common than they do. I was interested
in having that character be somebody who in
a less realistic film would be used as an object of
fun. I think of Old Boyfriends, theJohn Belushi character,
when the woman [Talia Shire] goes back
and looks up a high school boyfriend who's sort of
a greaseball who put her down in high school and
she's able to make fun of him.
There are those characters-I wasn't interested
in writing that guy. I was more interested in
writing a guy who was very intelligent, who could
have gone to college, didn't choose to, partly likes
what he is doing and is partly bored shitless by it.
Even if he didn't go to college, he has a lot of the
same ambivalences about his life that the people
who did go to college have.
Starting with that, I said, Here's this character,
here's what I want him to represent or be-how
can I work him into the weekend ? Well, he's single.
Do I have somebody among these college friends,
these sort of antiwar-activist friends, who's single,
who he can pick off? In fact, couldn't he be a guy
who, every year, he just sort of hangs around to
pick off a different girl 'cause there's always a different
one who's loose that year? It's new blood in
town. I mean, his line in the film is "All the women
around here are either married or wise to me or
both. " He's sort of like Eddie Haskell. After a while
people get used to your line. So I had the idea, OK,
I'll have him get together with Frances after she's
disappointed at not getting together with a guy
that she's been wanting to get together with for
years, and this is finally her chance, and he gets
snapped up by somebody else. She's loose-how do
I work him into scenes where she's around? how do
I introduce them? His action becomes two things.
Getting together with Frances is one. The other is:
who was his friend among this group when he was
back in high school, and are they going to be able
to get together, or is it just going to be awkward
between them?
And that also provided one of the things that the
character Mike, who was his buddy in high school,
went away to college, is now a teacher, is sort of
avoiding him throughout the weekend-that's one
of the actions of his character: What happens during
their meetings, or nonmeetings? How would
they talk about each other? And then when they
meet, what happens? So basically each of those)
guys and the relationship between them has a progression.
And I say; OK, here's one situation where
Ron [the gas station operator] is going to meet
these guys-what does he say to Mike, or does he
say anything to Mike? So once you have what you
want out of a character as far as function within the
plot, then what you want is a theme out of that character,
what you're trying to express with that char­
;:tcter, th~n I just try to plug it into the action.
Very often I will just say- In-this case, because I
was writing for a budget, I would say, I wanna
have a scene where people jump into Crawford's
Notch, because it's real pretty and I know we can
just go there and climb down the mountain and
jump in the water, and it'll get us out of the interiors.
What can I have happen there? And then I just
put all those people in my mind in that situation
and say, What conversations might happen here?
What characters-I have eight characters, the Secaucus
7 and Ron-what are the possible combina-

tions? That's a lot of what what'sername that
wrote Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, did: Who are
these people and is there someplace they can meet?
What would happen if they meet? Would it be a
passing encounter or would it be a confrontation?
And over the weekend that's basically what I had.
I had a definite progression that I wanted within
the weekend for everybody, and then I just went
back to every single character and said, Where
does this character start out? What is this character
upset about or happy about? Where are they
gonna be at the end of the film? And then you start
plugging them in and seeing where they cross.
It just came to me. It starts very technical like
that, and then once I start writing Ijust- One line
follows another. Edward Albee claims-and he
may well have done this-that he had this idea for
a play named Who's Afraid of Virginia WooIP, and he
wrote the first line, and then he wrote the second
line, and the second line had to be answered, and
then he wrote the third line and built on that. Once
I know the outline of a film, that's pretty much the
way I write. People just start saying things and
then I think of the next thing that's gonna be said
-or done, in the case of a less verbal scene.
Was Secaucus 7 autobiograPhical at all?
No. There's one or two stories in the film that I've
been told, but it's not an autobiographical film. It's
about people I know, or composites of people I
know, but it's sort of like what Tom Stop pard does
with, you know, putting James Joyce and Freud
and somebody else in a room together and writing
a play about them talking. Except I use people who
really do meet, and I just put them together in a
room and have them talk, or do. something.
Do you start with a storyline or do you start with characters
and let them make the story take shape?
In Return of the Secaucus 7 I started with characters,
and the story evolved from the characters: what
can I have these people do that will reveal them
to the audience?
Did you have an end in mind when you started?
No, not at all. That was a situation where I decided
that what the film should do, the experience for the
audience should be to spend a weekend with these
people as they spend a weekend with each other:
If they know these people and recognize them, fine;
maybe they'll know a little more about those peopie
or about themselves. If they don't know them,
maybe they'll be a little more understanding, or
have met people they ordinarily wouldn't nave
given the time of day to.
Whereas with something more plot-oriented, like
my rewrites, like rewriting Piranha or The Howling,
the question is, How do you keep the people in the
river when they know the piranhas are there? And
then what you try to do is either keep the people
out of the way so that they don't have to do anything
that gets in the way of the plot, at the same
time that you're trying to keep them realistic
enough, or a certain shade of realistic. You don',
want people in a movie like Piranha to be too realistic
because it's a fantasy. If anyone of your
friends or anybody you knew was eaten by carnivorous
fish, you would think it was awful and
sort of stomach-turning. Within the world of that
film, you have to write it slightly more broad than
real life, so people can click off the real feelings
about people being eaten alive by fish, and click
into this world of the film. I don't like horror movies
much if- I don't go to see Chainsaw Massam:
or anything like that. There's a limited number or
horror films that I like, because some of them I just
can't click off. Some of them, it either reminds me
of real life or is just gross, past my gross limit.
How do you feel about writing these low-budget films?
Do you see advantages in it, or are you hungry for million,l'
of dollars per budget?
If I had millions of dollars I'd probably make millions
of small films. Part of it is what I'm good at.
I'm not real interested in being a field-marshal. I
recently wrote a thing that isn't going to get made
because of budget-reasoIls, that Steven Spielberg
was going to produce. And he's really good at having
a huge project and is really a good organizer,
and he'd probably be a good administrator-not a
great politician but a good administrator of huge
programs, becal}se the things get made and things
happen. I'm not interested in that or real good at
that. The things that I want to do can be done
more cheaply, and might as well be done more
cheaply. It goes against my grain to see money that
should be going on the screen going up in overhead
and the cocaine budget.
The phase is that I'll probably never be able to
finance a movie myself again. Last Friday I was
audited for 1978 by the IRS and they want the

dough; I owe them a lot of dough. I'll be able to
work something out, but they're gonna watch me
from now on and they're gonna withhold money
from me. At the time I was writing at New World,
Corman wasn't withholding anything, and the IRS
got to him. He used to send me a big check and say,
"You want to report this to the government, go
ahead!" And the IRS got ahold of him and said,
'.'These people are employees, they are not independent
contractors-you have to withhold this
money and send it to us so we can play with it,
not give it to them so they can play with it."
I would like to have that kind of control over a
fiim again. Right now I'm trying to raise a lot of
money, $800,000, to make another independent
feature. Even though I'm involved with studios, /
I'd say about 20 percent of the things I write and /
am interested in doing are things that either th/
studios are interested in doing with me or I'~
interested in doing with the studios. There are
subjects that I would not bring to them because
I just don't think that we could come to something
that they wanted to do that I wanted to do, too;
they'd fuckiLup. I'd like to be able to work in the
studio system and o~tside of it. The only reason
that I'd care to work in the studio system is that
there are some things I want to do that they can
help me do. One of them is keep enough of a profile
that I can raise money on the outside to make other
films. It would be nice if it's not a phase, but it may
well have been a phase, of being able to finance my
own movie and have that kind of control over it.
After that, it's just a lot of politics, like I was saying.
The two writing-directing deals that I'm doing
now- I had one with the Ladd Company when
they hired me right after Secaucus 7 played at Filmex;
my name had been in the trade papers three
times so they decided to jump onto the bandwagon.
I walked into an office. I told them a concept that I
had been shopping around town for about six
months and everybody said, "Yeah, sure, oh great,
let's make a movie about it." I told them about a
two-minute concept for a film and they hired me
to write and direct it. The deal was structured so
that I get to write two drafts and a polish before
they can cut me off. Then they said, "OK, we've
signed a deal, now tell us the story." When I told
the story, they didn't like it. Since that point, it's
been a thing where I write a draft, they don't like it
-they won't say they don't like it, they say that
it "lacks focus" or something vague like that; and
I'm not so hot to do a studio film that I'm going
to write something that I don't like, just so that
I get to direct it. So I hope I'll come up with something
one of these days on one of these drafts that
I like and they like. If I don't, they won't make the
movie, and they'll just cut bait and say, "Well, we
lost some money on that screenplay. Too bad."
And I'll have lost a lot of time and had to fly out to
L.A. and had a lot of meetings. I don't know, I've
gotten to the point where I've done enough things
that I didn't wanna do and I'm hoping that I can
cash in on whatever success Return of the Secaucus 7
has, and do fewer things and more things that I
/want to do. That mayor may not happen. But
directing a movie, even if you have the kind of help
that you get directing a studio movie, where you
don't have to schlep the movie around y~ur own
arm and punch all the sprocket holes yourself and
all those things, is just so much work that I don't
want to spend a year doing something that I finally
won't want to go see.
Would you talk about how you directed the actors in
The Return of the Secaucus 7?
We had one day before we started shooting to read
the script over. I gave each of the main characters
a one-page description of who their character was.
I remember one of them, the guy who played Mike
[Bruce MacDonald], I sort of said, "Mike is everybody's
second-best friend," and the actor came to
me with this long face and said, "How did you
know I've always considered myself everybody's
second-best friend?" I had a couple others like that
when people thought that I knew something about
their secret life and was writing a character for
them. It made me feel good. It made me feel like
the screenplay was touching nerves that I had
hoped I was touching.
Then, as f said before, it was a matter of getting
the actors to act naturally. First thing that I said
was: "None of you have ever been in a film before.
Here's the story: you have to trust me-whether
you want to or not. I'm gonna edit this thirig. One
thing I'll do for you is that, because the most important
thing in this film is the people and whether
you believe them or not, I'll always give you another
take if you don't like what you did. We may not
have enough extra takes to get technical perfection,

The Anarchists'
C'onventwn.
but I'll always allow an extra take if you need it
to feel comfortable with what you did. If we can't
agree on exactly how a scef!e is going to be played,
do it my way first and then we'll do it your way,
I'll give you a couple of takes your way. If f can't
make up my mind how a scene is going to be
played, I'll have you do it two or three different
ways and it's going to be up to me to choose it."
The other thing I was able to tell them is: "I will
always pick the best take for acting"~which often
doesn't happen. I had a couple of shots where,
during the longshot, somebody was talking like this
[turns head one way], and in the closeup they're
talking like this [turns head opposite way]; I'm
willing to have that little jump in your head of
"what happened. there?" because those were the
two best acting takes and I'd made that commitment
to always take that.
Given that they were good actors, I didn't have
time to do a whole lot of rehearsals with them. I

said, "You know who your characters are. You
know what your relationships to the other people
are. Talk among yourselves. When you have a
scene, rehearse it so you know ~he lines. I'll come
to you-we'll be setting up the lights-I'll say,
'What have you got? Do it for me.' If you're 'way
off base we'll work on it some more." Usually they
pretty much knew what they were going to do, and
then it was just a matter of getting them to come
down a little. A lot of them had been on the stage
just a couple weeks before and were still projecting.
You can't project in front of a movie camera when
it's right here. A lot of them were putting more
drama and more acting into it.
I was helped by the fact that they had never been
on camera before: it meant they were looking to
me. Some of the people who gave the best performances
were the people who took the most takes.
I went into the editing room saying God, I hope I
can find something in there! But because they
would listen to me and try it a number of different
ways, say "OK, this feels like absolutely nothing
but I'll do it if you say so," I was able to get a take
that was low-key enough that fit with the other
styles of acting.
The hardest thing in directing a film is that
you're working with many different people and
they work at different rates, different speeds. Some
people, the first two takes, they were fine, then they
started to fade; other people won't get going till
about the fourth take. To get those two people in
the same scene together, you have to monkey
around with how much you rehearse one and
what you tell them. Usually I take one into a
corner and say, " Your objective in this scene
is to make the other guy look at his fly; make the
other guy nervous." I go to the other guy and say,
"Your objective in this scene is to not let this guy
shake you, no matter what he does. Just try to give
him a steely-eyed stare and be so implacable that
he gets nervous." They don't know what the other
person is doing sometimes. It can be slightly manipulative.
I try to be open with the actors, but
sometimes I had to take an actor and slow him
down so that his first two takes became just rehearsal
takes for him, so that his third take is really
his first one and he would not be bored by the fifth
take, which was about when the other fellow would
be getting warmed up. You give them different
startingpoints; it's like handicapping a race. After
the first couple days you know or have to be aware
of how people work.
How long did the shooting take?
25 shooting days-and nights. The bar scene, we
shot 26 straight hours because that was the only
time we had the bar. By the final hour I was- I
couldn't think any more, and we had to change
cameramen because the first cameraman couldn't
handhold any more and was starting to sag. I
couldn't think of ways to block by this point so,
a couple of scenes, I said, "Put 'em in that chair
in front of the wall, lock the camera off, we do the
scene, and I'll figure out some reason for them to
be against that ..yall." I just was very punchy and
we had to get out of that bar. The guy-who-ownedthe-bar's
father was about to get up and we were
yelling "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" at seven o'­
clock in the morning. Any time in that filin when
people look tired they really are tired. All the night
scenes were shot at two or three in the morning;
the red eyes are not makeup.
You live farther away from Hollywood than we do, In
Hoboken, New Jersey-
Yeah, that's about as far away as you can get.
-Can you talk a little bit about how someone can manage
to do that? Do you get an agent you can rely on? How do
you get away with sitting outside Hollywood itself?
I lived in Santa Barbara for two years and used to
commute down there, pretty much at the drop of a
hat. I had a couple bad experiences where a guy
said, "We need ya here tomorrow, yoG\e gonna
start this rewrite"-you'd show up at their office
and they'd say, "Now what was this about?" So
you'd get burned sometimes when you're commuting
like that. In two years I took a lot of meetings.
"Take a meeting": you go in, you have something
you've just done, you talk about that; if you don't
have something you've just done, it's basically just
to meet somebody. It's so that your agent can mention
your name when a project comes up, and they
know you, and they know you're not a lush or
whatever they wanta know.
I've never got a job out of taking a meeting. And
I've taken about 50 of them-usually about six a
day, driving all over L.A. But what that meant was,
people know who I am now. After two years I had
enou,gh credits-I had about seven screen credits-

and I had met enough people so that I know somebody
at every single major studio and most of the
minor studios. I can go away now. The people at
those studios who can read~ I can mail it -to them
or my agent can mail it to 'em. The people who
can't read, I'm not gonna get work from anyway,
so the hell with 'em.
It's a risk. I'm basically looking for projects now
that, if I can direct them, I can direct on the East
Coast. Number one, 'cause I don't like to be away
from home that much, and number two, 'cause the
farther you are from the studio, the more control
you have, the harder it is for them to fuck you up
or interfere or look over your shoulder. Although
they'll always have a person, who make about
$60,000, called "the studio nominee." Now, he's
charged to your overhead, stays in the Holiday Inri,
and if you go over budget he comes to you and says,
"You guys are over budget, cut that out!" and he
calls back to the studio and says, "Those guys are
goin' over budget, I'll watch 'em,'; and he goes
back to the Holiday Inn. You see him at the end
of the shoot and you shake hands and realize that
he just made $60,000-$80,000, and you try to find
out whose nephew he is. Other than that, when
you're on location it's up to you.
I've been lucky. I'm doing these two projects and
I'm commuting. You have to not mind flying,
'cause they will not talk on the phone with you,
they will not read. You have to go in and talk the
story to them. My acting has helped a lot there.
I can go in and have in my head if I wan_t_to pitch
a story to them, a five-minute versiorl, a ten-minute
version, and a IS-minute version. You walk into an
office, you haven't met the person before, right
away by the number of phonecalls they take in the
first five minutes, by the friendliness of the greeting,
by the surroundings, you figure out which version
this person wants to hear. If you can tell the
story in five minutes-which you should be able to
do-and it's persuasive, you may get hired to write
that story. Whereas if you wrote the entire screenplay
and put it in front of them, they'd sorta say,
"What's this?" and they'd send it out to the receptionist
and say, "Break this down for me"-which
means "Give me a two-page synopsis what it's
about." Most producers either can't read or, if they
can, don't have time to read. That's one of the most
discouraging things that you find as a screenwriter,
20
is that most of the people who are in charge of hiring
writers don't read. There are people who make
a living 'cause they're great storytellers-and they
can't write a lick, they can't write dialogue, but
they think up great stories and they tell a great
five-minute version. They get hired for the first
draft; they write a lousy first draft but there's a
germ of a story there; and then they get written
off the picture. And there are people you often see
-they make between fifty and a hundred thousand
dollars a year-and you see "co-story" credit or
"story," but never a whole "screenplay"; they're
useful to the business because they come up with
stories. I'm shitty at stories. I'm pretty good at rewriting,
I'm good at character, but I rarely come
up with just a plot that I can say in a TV Guide two
lines that sets anybody on fire.
Whom do you consider the -'-'laincharacters of Seca ucus 7?
I don't have three or four favorite characters. One
of the things I tried to do in this screenplay was to
write an ensemble movie-write a movie with eight
leads and give them all equal screentime and equal
depth. If I'd sent that script to a studio they'd have
said three things: Number one, "This guy who
wants to be a country-and-western singer, you'll
have to get a real country-and-western singercouldn't
we make him a rock star and hire David
Bowie?" Number two,' "Somebody has to commit
suicide, or some other much more dramatic ending
to this thing." Number three, "Why can't we make
the two who are breaking up either get together or
make that the foreground of the story and make all
this other stuff the background, the milieu in which
their story is played." All three of those things I
didn't wanna do. I wanted to say, This is a movie
about a group of people, the way The Big' Red Om'
is about a group of people going through the war;
this is about a group of people going through this
weekend, and their past. When I was writing the
script I'd say, Who haven't we heard from in a
while? We sorta lost what'sername-how can
we get her back into the action? I didn't want one
character to just serve a function and not have a
thematic purpose. I wanted to really say, I'in playing
Frances or I'm playing Mike as an actor-do I
get cut off at a certain point and not have a full
character? I tried to make sure that all those characters'
bases were covered so that they were pretty
much a full person. Then I felt like the script was
-----"-

said, "You know who your characters are. You
know what your relationships to the other people
are. Talk among yourselves. When you have a
scene, rehearse it so you know ~he lines. I'll come
to you-we'll be setting up the lights-I'll say,
'What have you got? Do it for me.' If you're 'way
off base we'll work on it some more." Usually they
pretty much knew what they were going to do, and
then it was just a mattet of getting them to come
down a little. A lot of them had been on the stage
just a couple weeks before and were still projecting.
You can't project in front of a mo~ie camera when
it's right here. A lot of them were putting more
drama and more acting into it.
I was helped by the fact that they had never been
on camera before: it meant they were looking to
me. Some of the people who gave the best performances
were the people who took the most takes.
I went into the editing room saying God, I hope I
can find something in there! But because they
would listen to me and try it a number of different
ways, say "OK, this feels like absolutely nothing
but I'll do it if you say so," I was able to get a take
that was low-key enough that fit with the other
styles of acting.
The hardest thing in directing a film is that
you're working with many different people and
they work at different rates, different speeds. Some
people, the first two takes, they were fine, then they
started to fade; other people won't get going till
about the fourth take. To get those two people in
the same scene together, you have to monkey
around with how much you rehearse one and
what you tell them. Usually I take one into a
corner and say, "Your objective in this scene
is to make the other guy look at his fly; make the
other guy nervous." I go to the other guy and say,
"Your objective in this scene is to not let this guy
shake you, no matter what he does. Just try to give
him a steely-eyed stare and be so implacable that
he gets nervous." They don't know what the other
person is doing sometimes. It can be slightly manipulative.
I try to be open with the actors, but
sometimes I had to take an actor and slow him
down so that his first two takes became just rehearsal
takes for him, so that his third take is really
his first one and he would not be bored by the fifth
take, which was about when the other fellow would
be getting warmed up. You give them different
startingpoints; it's like handicapping a race. After
the first couple days you know or have to be aware
of how people work.
How long did the shooting take?
25 shooting days-and nights. The bar scene, we
shot 26 straight hours because that was the only
time we had the bar. By the final hour I was- I
couldn't think any more, and we had to change
cameramen because the first cameraman couldn't
handhold any more and was starting to sag. I
couldn't think of ways to block by this point so,
a couple of scenes, I said, "Put 'em in that chair
in front of the wall, lock the camera off, we do the
scene, and I'll figure out some reason for them to
be against that ..yall." I just was very punchy and
we had to get out of that bar. The guy-who-ownedthe-bar's
father was about to get up and we were
yelling "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" at seven o'­
clock in the morning. Any time in that filin when
people look tired they really are tired. All the night
scenes were shot at two or three in the morning;
the red eyes are"-not makeup.
You live farther away from Hollywood than we do, in
Hoboken, New Jersey-
Yeah, that's about as far a way as you can get.
-Can you talk a little bit about how someone can manage
to do that? Do you get an agent you can rely on? How do
you get away with sitting outside Hollywood itself? "
I lived in Santa Barbara for two years and used to
commute down there, pretty much at the drop of a
hat. I had a couple bad experiences where a guy
said, "We need ya here tomorrow, yoG\e gonna
start this rewrite"-you'd show up at their office
and they'd say, "Now what was this about?" So
you'd get burned sometimes when you're commuting
like that. In two years I took a lot of meetings.
"Take a meeting": you go in, you have something
you've just done, you talk about that; if you don't
have something you've just done, it's basically just
to meet somebody, It's so that your agent can mention
your name when a project comes up, and they
know you, and they know you're not a lush or
whatever they wanta know.
I've never got a job out of taking a meeting. And
I've taken about 50 of them-usually about six a
day, driving all over L.A. But what that meant was,
people know who I am now. After two years I had
enou,gh credits-I had about seven screen credits-
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~19

and I had met enough people so that I know somebody
at every single major studio and most of the
minor studios. I can go away now. The people at
those studios who can read~ I can mail it -to them
or my agent can mail it to 'em. The people who
can't read, I'm not gonna get work from anyway,
so the hell with 'em.
It's a risk. I'm basically looking for projects now
that, if I can direct them, I can direct on the East
Coast. Number one, 'cause I don't like to be away
from home that much, and number two, 'cause the
farther you are from the studio, the more control
you have, the harder it is for them to fuck you up
or interfere or look over your shoulder. Although
they'll always have a person, who make about
$60,000, called "the studio nominee." Now, he's
charged to your overhead, stays in the Holiday Inri,
and if you go over budget he comes to you and says,
"You guys are over budget, cut that out!" and he
calls back to the studio and says, "Those guys are
goin' over budget, I'll watch 'em,'; and he goes
back to the Holiday Inn. You see him at the end
of the shoot and you shake hands and realize that
he just made $60,000-$80,000, and you try to find
out whose nephew he is. Other than that, when
you're on location it's up to you.
I've been lucky. I'm doing these two projects and
I'm commuting. You have to not mind flying,
'cause they will not talk on the phone with you,
they will not read. You have to go in and talk the
story to them. My acting has helped a lot there.
I can go in and have in my head if I want to pitch
a story to them, a five-minute version, a ten-minute
version, and a IS-minute version. You walk into an
office, you haven't met the person before, right
away by the number of phonecalls they take in the
first five minutes, by the friendliness of the greeting,
by the surroundings, you figure out which version
this person wants to hear. If you can tell the
story in five minutes-which you should be able to
do-and it's persuasive, you may get hired to write
that story. Whereas if you wrote the entire screenplay
and put it in front of them, they'd sorta say,
"What's this?" and they'd send it out to the receptionist
and say, "Break this down for me"-which
means "Give me a two-page synopsis what it's
about." Most producers either can't read or, if they
can, don't have time to read. That's one of the most
discouraging things that you find as a screenwriter,
20
is that most of the people who are in charge of hiring
writers don't read. There are people who make
a living 'cause they're great storytellers-and they
can't write a lick, they can't write dialogue, but
they think up great stories and they tell a great
five-minute version. They get hired for the first
draft; they write a lousy first draft but there's a
germ of a story there; and then they get written
off the picture. And there are people you often see
-they make between fifty and a hundred thousand
dollars a year-and you see "co-story" credit or
"story," but never a whole "screenplay"; they're
useful to the business because they come up with
stories. I'm shitty at stories. I'm pretty good at rewriting,
I'm good at character, but I rarely come
up with just a plot that I can say in a TV Guide two
lines that sets anybody on fire._
Whom do you consider the main characters of Secaucus 7?
I don't have three or 'tour fa"vorite characters. One
of the things I tried to do in this screenplay was to
write an ensemble movie-write a movie with eight
leads and give them all equal screentime and equal
depth. If I'd sent that script to a studio they'd have
said three things: Number one, "This guy who
wants to be a country-and-western singer, you'll
have to get a real country-and-western singercouldn't
we make him a rock star and hire David
Bowie?" Number twO,""Somebody has to commit
suicide, or some other much more dramatic ending
to this thing." Number three, "Why can't we make
the two who are breaking up either get together or
make that the foreground of the story and make all
this other stuff the background, the milieu in which
their story is played." All three of those things I
didn't wanna do. I wanted to say, This is a movie
about a group of people, the way The BIg" Red One
is about a group of people going through the war;
this is about a group of people going through this
weekend, and their past. When I was writing the
script I'd say, Who haven't we heard from in a
while? We sorta lost what'sername-how can
we get her back into the action? I didn't want one
character to just serve a function and not have a
thematic purpose. I wanted to really say, I'm playing
Frances or I'm playing Mike as an actor-do I
get cut off at a certain point and not have a full
character? I tried to make sure that all those characters'
bases were covered so that they were pretty
much a full person. Then I felt like the script was

done and all I had to do after that was a little polishing
to give the whole thing some thrust.
Now as a director I want to hang onto that control
over the casting of the movie. Usually at New
World the first four names on the marquee are not
the director's choice. The various people who've
put money into the film-New World, Orion, the
Japanese-part of the reason they put money in
was they wanted certain names. The director is
handed those fOUI'people, handed how much they
cost, handed the rest of his acting budget and told
"Get who you can for the other parts-'round up
the usual suspects!'" And that's it. I would like.
to work in situations where I can really pick the
actors.
One of the nice things, one of the reasons you do
a movie when you could have written a novel and
been an enlightened despot-in a movie you're
sometimes just a lousy public servant-at bestand
people don't do what you tell them to, or can't;
and you sometimes get more than a hundred percent.
In writing a book or a story, sometimes you're
really clicking and you get a hundred percent of
what you can put into that story. When you're doing
a movie, usually it comes out to be 25 percent
because of all the various people fighting in other
directions. When you're doing a movie and you
have total control over it, in the creation of the
characters the actors can-if they're good-take
what you wrote on paper and just make it so much
more alive and bring other things to it and bring
out humorous parts that you didn't see in it, and
"you can control that through the editing-you can
get more than 100 percent.
What
is your own acting experience?
Pretty limited. My acting experience on the stage:
I was in a couple of plays my senior year in college.
I was in a couple of plays at the summer theatre
that appears in the movie; I played the Chief in
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Lennie in Of Mice
and Men-large retarded people. My film acting experience
is all in films that I either wrote or directed.
Right now I'm about the only person who'll
hire me. I got to playa morgue attendant in The
Howling because the director said, "Listen, we
can't afford all these actors-do you want to act for
free?" I said, "Sure." He said, "What part do you
want that's a couple pages or less?" So I picked a
part that I knew couldn't be cut; there's a lot of
important information in that scene!
I·didn't study, really. I took one acting class, and
I directed one play; and then I directed a couple
plays in summer stock. So I had directed three or
four plays before I did this thing. As for writing
class, I used to take them because I knew I could
get an A in it. The guy used to grade on the basis
of weight: if you handed in something over five
pages he put it on the scale and you got an A. And
I needed A's just to stay in school, because I 'was
a psych major and I didn't go to my psych classes,
and I needed to keep up a certain average to stay
in school and use the pool tables.
What trend in cinema would you like to see?
It would be nice if it was possible for the economics
of filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition to
change enough so that something like Return of
the Secaucus 7-not like it, but similar in that it's a
picture that somebody thinks should be madewithout
thinking about all these other elements
like how much money it's going to bring back,
could get out to all the people who'd like to see it,
without costing so much. It should be possible for
more people to use the film medium like novelwriting;
even though in novel-writing it's getting
harder and harder to get something published, you
can still do it fairly cheaply-just write the damn
thing. I would like to see that happen. I could give
a shit what the films are about: some of them will
be good, some will be things I'd want to see, some
won't. But I'd like it to be more-accessible than it
is. I don't know if that's going to happen or not.
But as it stands now, something like Secaucus 7,
which is just marginally profitable-if I could get
three dollars or three-fifty for every person in the
country who would like the film, the film would be
profitable; but sometimes getting it to those people
is more expensive than the money that's going to
come back. Try to open it in Des Moines, say: it
may cost $40,000 to really open it, and there may
only be $30,000 worth of people there who want to
see it; so it's not economically feasible forme to get
it to those people. I don't know how to do it; I'm
not in distribution or exhibition. But it would be
nice if there was a way to get it to those $30,000
worth of people without spending 40,000, so that
more films could be made, and more films that take
a risk could be made.

You can look at marquees when you're in Hollywood
andjust say, "That's a deal, that's not a film"
-this element, that element, and this other element,
and that's why that picture got made. Not
because there was a good story that needed telling.
Somebody wanted to make a movie, some director
was around and needed a movie or wanted to be
doing something, and the best thing they got
offered was something that had to have, you know,
~[ichael Douglas, Lino Ventura, and Ed Asner in
it, so somebody was given a script to write, and
told, "You have these stars. Have it look like a
comedy and have a little action in it so we can sell
it in .Iapan ... " A good half or more of the things
that we see onscreen are deals, not pictures. And
that's why they're unsatisfying.
Are deal pictures increasing?
I think they'll stay about the same. The deals will
change but the number of deal pictures, no. It
doesn't matter how many of them come out. Some
will make money and some won't, so the studios
will continue to exist. But within the studio system
there are crafts, there are good people who are producers
and directors and writers, and sometimes
they can get something through. But it is a matter
of getting it through, making your way through the
maze. I talk about independent filmmaking and
people say, "What do independent filmmakers
need?" and I say, "Money." I was recently talking
to somebody who was excited because Robert Redford
is going to start this center where independent
filmmakers can get together and talk. I've been at
these and what they talk about is, "Who gave you
your money? Can I have his phone number?" They
will talk about other things eventually, but that's
the first question: how to make another movie. It's
a problem. I don't know, I'm glad I can write novels
and that I like to, because if all the politicking
and all the work that you- Ten percent of all the
work that went into Secaucus 7 was the actual writing,
directing, editing of it; the rest of it was a lot of
bulls hit to be able to do those things. Whereas,
writing a book, 99 percent of it goes into the writing
of the book and the other one percent is either getting
it sold or not getting it sold. I'm glad I have
another kind of writing to fall back on if the bullshit
gets too thick.
I'd like to hear more about The Howling. Do you have
any particular technique for approaching suspense?
22
The Howling is a novel that Joe Dante, who directed
Piranha, was given. There was already one screenplay
on it. He said, "I'll take the job directing it
if I can have somebody else write the screenplay."
He wanted me to write the second draft; the executive
producer didn't want me because I was in the
Writers' Guild and that meant I cost too much to
do a rewrite. I talked to Joe. I was about to do it,
on the condition that I didn't have to use anything
from the original novel, which sucks; I found it
very offensive. He said, "Fine fine fine. Avco won',
make you do that, they don't understand the novel
either. They just want a werewolf picture." So I
gave him one or two ideas about how to open and
finish the picture. Then I heard about the executive
producer not wanting to hire me. They hired
somebody else. Joe used those ideas of mine because
those ideas will help the picture a lot. He
gave those ideas to the writer, the writer put those
ideas in, wrote a bad draft-not a very good draft,
it was better than the first one-had those ideas
that I gave Joe in it. They didn't like that draft.
Finally the guy said, "OK, we'll hire Sayles"; so
they ended up paying twice as much. They finally
got a screenplay by me, and after I finished the
screenplay and they finished the movie, it goes into
arbitration, which is when the Writers' Guild decides
who's gonna get credit for this movie. Sometimes
something like I Never Promised rou a Rose
Garden had 15 writers on it and they had to take
every single script, every draft, give it to these three
poor suckers from the Writers' Guild who had been
dumb enough to volunteer to be on the arbitration
committee, say "Read these things and tell us who
gets screen credit. " You have to say where an idea
that ends up in the final screenplay existed first.
And since these two ideas that I had given to Joe
were in that other writer's screenplay, he gets cocredit
with me. But basically the screenplay is my
screenplay. What you see on the screen, I wrote.
But the screenplay is Joe Dante, the director,
too. We talked about it. He had ideas that I put
in there. When you collaborate with the director
and things are going well-and they went very well
on this thing- Basically I wrote the screenplay
that's being used on the airplane on the way back
from Los Angeles after I got the job, because it was
OPPOSITE:
Karen Trolt and Alaggle Renzi In
Return of the Secaucus 7.

a rewrite and I knew what the story, the plot of it,
was, and I had talked to Joe about it. It's a pretty
fuzzy separation: I wrote him director's-touches,
but he also handed me a couple lines and situations
that I'll get credit for . We worked together on the
story but basically I wrote it. So that's it as far as
authorship is concerned.
Suspense techniques~I don't know if I have any
suspense techniques. Those are with the director.
I'll sometimes just write a scene and say, "Do
something scary here. I don't know how you're
going to do it, but she's coming out of the house
and she's going to see something and she's:going",
to scream, because we need it at this point. Why
don't you have it be T.c. standing in the woods,
and he's just eaten her underclothing or something
like that? And he's growling and he's scratching
the tree. But I'm not going to tell you how to
shoot it, I don't know who you're going to get to
play T.c., so you're going t~ have to figure it out
yourself." In that case, because I knew who the director
was and I knew what he can do and what
he's good at, I could sometimes just say, "Action
sequence. These things have to happen by the end
of this action sequence. You shoot it-I'm not gonna
go through all that work." In Piranha when I
didn't know who the director was gonna be, I had
a lot of things that said, "Shot 392: woman swimming
the Australian crawl-begins to scream." I
should have had a typewriter with a "begins to
scream" key on it because I used that a lot;
"churning bloody w8.ter" was another one.
The main thing I did with The Howling is- The
book was about a group of werewolves. A woman
who's bummed out by the city-a gardener raped
her or something (really great writing! )-and she
moves out to this country town in California where
everybody says "Howdy, ma'am"-like they really
do in small California towns-and she hears this
howling at night. She says to the sheriff and everyc
body else in town, "Did you hear that howling?"
and they say, "No, we didn't hear it," so immediately
you know that they're werewolves. You've
heard it, you know she's heard it, so if they're lying
about it they must be werewolves. No suspense.
Plus this town is out of the Fifties. So what Joe and
I decided, we're going to make a contemporary
werewolf picture, we have to bring these, werewolves
into the 20th century. Instead of a town,
she goes up to an Esalen-type community-it's
called The Colony-where this doctor who's sort
Oflike Dr. Wayne Dyer has a group of people who
are trying to Cope with Life. What she doesn't realize
is that really it's a place for werewolves trying
to cope with the experience of being a werewolf in
the 20th century.
You take that premise and it can go very campy,
very much like the "Dracula Sucks" picture, what
was it, with George Hamilton, Love at First Biteand
somebody's doing a werewolf picture like that.
You can also take that premise and justplay it totally':straight,
say OK, what would people do if
somebody satd they were a werewolf? They'd say,
"Y o~ 're fuckiri' ~ra~y," or laugh,' And that's' what
happens in this picture, is this woman realizes
these people are werewolves and nobody will believe
her. Same thing as I used in Piranha, but as
realistic, within that fantasy world of that picture,
as I could. The movie will be a little broader than
I wrote (t 'cause Dante's style of directing is a little
broader than I wrote it. That's the whole thing of
meshing. styles, 'When I came and did my one
scene; which lasts about a minute, I hadn't seen
any of the rushes: and did it in the style I'd written
in. My performance is probably gonna seem very
flat; everybody else is doing a much broader performance.
My performance is like doing-a detective
film, a fairly humorous sort of detective film. The
rest of the film is much more like a New World Picture,
where' it's tongue-in-cheek almost all the way
-even though it's very scary at some points.
Can you talk more about the relation of visuals and dialogue
in your writing for the screen?
In Secaucus 7 I wasn't going to be able to make a
visual movie, because of expense, so I said OK,
what is going to be said in this, scene, and what
can I afforc\, in money and time, to do visually that
will accentuate it or at least make it a little interesting
to look at? Whereas with a film like The
Howling, the first part' of the him, instead of a
woman being raped by her gardener, I've made it
about a woman who is tracking down a Hillside
Strangler character. She's a newswoman. Now,
where can 1 put this woman that, without a whole
lot of dialogue, will give you the idea that she's
in danger and from something that sort of makes
you sweat and be nervous? So I sether on Western
Avenue in Los Angeles, which is sort of a porno

district, and she's looking for this character who
keeps calling her up from phones that are marked
with one of those smiley stickers. So right iiway
you hii\T a physiciil thing thiit the audience is looking
for. so that later on in the pict ure \\·hen she
walks into a peepshow booth and she just passes
one of these smiley stickers on the \\',111. the audience
knows something which she doesn't, \\'hich is
that this character has been there.
So I started with this image of this woman who
is a city news anchorperson, 'very pulled-together,
not a wrinkle, wired for sound by the police, trying
to contact this guy who's stiirted to call her, iind
have ii meeting. This image of that woman walking
through the seediest section of town and sticking
out like a sore thumb, and iisking the hookers for
directions, and them siiyi~"\Vhat are you doing
here?" and just giving her looks, without any dialogue.
What has to be s~id to explain who she is
and why she's there? (
The next scene I wanted was a dream sequence
where, after she's bs~n attacked in this porno
booth, she doesn't remember vvhat started to
happen before the cops blew in and shot him.
That would be totally visual. The next scene
after that is her in a psychiatrist's office, and
this guy who runs this community. who has appeared
on her '1'\' show, is telling her to go up
to this Colony. Hasiciilly \\·hat I sholl' there was,
\Vhat does somebody who's totally blown ,I\\'ay
look like in a psvchiatrist's office? So I started
with the image of her in this office with a lot of
space between them, a clock ticking loudly,. with
the sounds of the room being her sounds-because
I didn't know who the actress was going to be,
whether she \\'as going to be great or mediocre or
biid. I wanted there to be something about the
scene that would have the audience feeling the
way she did, because we follow her. she's in every
scene. The striingeness, the look of the room could.
do that. Once you have that. you say. \Vhat's missing?
And that's ~vhat you use the dialogue for.
I'm not from the school that says dialogue is
antifilmic. If you hiive a film that's about people,
dialogue-talking-is how people usually communicate.
Hut that's only one of the ways that you
communiciite with the audience. I usually prefer
to start with what's visual about the scene and
what's directly visceral, and then Siiy, What has
to be expliiined if I can't do it visually? What dialogue
is needed? And then I just go aheiid and
write that diiilogue.
By John Sayles
FICTION
Pride of the Bimbos - novel, 7975
The Anarchists' Convention and Other Stories
- 7978
Union Dues - novel, 7978
Los Gusanos - novel, in progress
FIL:-"IS
Piranha - rewrite, 7978
The Lady in Red - screenPlay, 7978
Battle beyond the Stars - screenplay, 7980
Return of the Seca ucus 7 - screenPlay, direction,
and editing, 7980
The Perfect Match - teleplaJ (made-Jor- n'movie j,
7980
The Howling - screenplay, 7987
Linea - screenPlay and direction, In preparation
Equals - rewrite, 7987
etc., etc., etc.
·25

Going Inside with Tanner
by Michael Tarantino
InYear Alain 2000, Tanner's there is aJonah scene Who in which Will Be old 25 Charles in the
is talking to Marco, a history teacher, about his
days as a train conductor:
I'm going to tell you something: travelling on a train
and conducting a train are two totally different
things"" because of the rails, Do you travel by train
any more? What do you see? The countryside,
which marches by, as it does in the cinema? Myself.
I no longer go to the movies, In the loComoli\(',
the countryside doesn't march by, YOli ~o inside,
Always inside, inside,' inside, II's like a piece oj
music, You go right up to Ihe hOl'izon, lip 10 111

ceives images which have obviously been selected
(they could have been other images) and arranged
(their order could have been different). In a sense,
he is leaping through an album of predetermined
pictures, and it is not he who is turning the pages,
but some 'master of ceremonies,' some 'grand image
maker' ....
Cinema Dead or Alive opens with an interview
with Tanner: "The first thing that one should
think of when writing a film scenario is the rapport
with the spectator. That is to say, it is not a question
of making a film for the spectators who will
see it, for one doesn't know who they are, but of
trying to think of an interlocutor ... :" Tanner argues
that the classic, traditional cinematic form
has exercised "un rapport de domination" with the
spectator.
By examining both the process involved in making
and distributing the film and specific instances
of the filmmaking process, the Zurich Filmcollective
argues for a linear reading of Jonah-one which
proceeds from a particular instant to a final result.
Scene #46, wherein the eight principal characters
come together, is a "crossing" scene, similar in
intent to the moment at the center of Jacques Rivette's
Out One: Spectre when Colin and Frederique
cross paths. However, where Rivette is interested
in the spatial and temporal relationships between
parallel narratives, Tanner is concerned with the
political implications of these survivors of May '68
who are following different roads in its wake. Strategically,
it is the seminal point of Jonah, and the
perfect juncture to initiate an analysis of it.
If Tanner hopes to achieve a relationship with
his audience relatively free of "domination," he
must first establish a mutual code of operation
with his crew. The sequence under discussion is
to be shot in a long take, and the first part of the
day is spent laying tracks and rehearsing the camera
movement. A series of interviews is intercut
with the documentary footage: Cameraman Renato
Berta talks about Tanner preferring sync
sound out of respect for the actor's craft. Jacques
Denis, acting in his third film for Tanner, discusses
the advantages for the actor in working within the
sequence shot as opposed to working with a director
who cuts on every line of dialogue. An airplane
passes overhead before a take; Tanner says, "It's
OK, it's only a small one."
What this section illustrates, above and beyond
any verifiable relationship that Tanner and his
crew may enjoy, is an attempt to reflect the process
in the product. For Tanner, the term "realism"
does not derive from techniques which disguise
the form. Rather, the style must be laid bare, the
signifier and signified operating on parallel levels
of visibility. While the theoretical frame of reference
here includes, of course, Brecht, Eisenstein,
Shklovsky and others, Tanner's aims must also
be seen within the context of commercial filmmaking
in the 1970s. And that is the value of
Cinema Dead or Alive's overall view.
Jonah: Raymond Bussirrfs as Charlfs. lI'ilh .\110/1-.\1/11/1.
We are shown how Jonah implements these
strategies, first by reversing a particular filmic
code, and then by reinterpreting another code by
placing it in an alien context. The first instance
concerns the use of black-and-white. While we
often associate black-and-white with newsreel or
documentary footage, i.e. "the real, '.' Tanner uses
it in Jonah to represent elements of fantasy and
dream. In addition to questioning one's conditioned
reading
also serves to
of a particular type of shot, this
de-familiarize the actual newsreel
footage that appears throughout the film. More
importantly, it establishes a methodology of perception
that must go beyond the immediate response.,
The second instance involves the scene immediately
following the gathering of the eight principals
at the wall, where they childishly play in

the mud. In analyzing this scene, the Filmcollective
cuts among three types of footage: their documentation
(in color) of the scene being shot on
location; an interview with Tanner in which he
talks about traditional montage presenting scenes
in "digest" form; and the actual scene as it appears
(in black-and-white) in Jonah. We see how Tanner
plays with our preconceptions to "open up" a
viewing of the scene. In this instance, in addition
to the opposition of the documentary footage in
color and the black-and-white sequence in the finished
film, one notices that the Jonah scene is edited
in a manner which sets it apart from the overall
]Oxford University Press, trans. Michael Taylor, 1974.
pp. 20-21.
'VVe are reminded, however, that there is a great deal of
important work going on in this area, and Tanner's
position must again be seen in context. Berta puts it in
perspective at the end of the film, when he talks about
the appeal of Tanner's name to a certain public sector,
and how, by working on Tanner's films, he can achieve
the financial freedom to work with directors even farther
from the commercial mainstream like .Jean-Marie
Straub.
'One must mention that, for all its exhaustive interviews
with actors, crew, producer and director, this film makes
curiously little mention of Tanner's co-screenwriter
John Berger.
look of the film. Instead of the sequence shot, we
are given rapid, compressive cuts which synopsize
the scene. The strategy invites a reinterpretation
of the scene, as well as noting the basic way in
which we "digest" images.2
The manner in which Cinema Dead or Alzve constructs
this segment complements the model that is
at the center of Jonah itself. The Filmcollective's
production (as mentioned earlier) is far more successful
as critical analysis than as straightforward
documentary. ] Ultimately, the film echoes old
Charles: it makes us look at Jonah reflexively, not
in the sense that it is a film about filmmaking, but
that it illuminates the frame through which the
viewer may see the film. " ... Yl yself, I no longer go
to the movies any more. In the locomotive, the
countryside doesn't march by. You go inside."
Michael Tarantino is a freelance writer working out of ,\"11'
Jersey. He has been published in Sight and Sound, Take
One and MOVIETONE NEWS, among others.
CINEMA DEAD OR ALIVE
A film by The Zurich Filmcollective:
Urs Graf, Mathias Knauer, Hans Sturm and Felix Singer,
Alain Klarer, Rainer Trinkler, Luc Yersin, Iwan·P.
Schumacher, Anne Cuneo, Beni Lehmann, Andre·Pinkus.
1978. (105 minutes) A New Yorker Films Release.
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The informal photographs of Strother Martin were taken by Tom Keogh. Other pictures in this issue were provided by
the following persons, archives, and corporations: Museum of Modern Art Fi}m Stills Archive (with gratilude, as ever,
for the dlscermng assistance of Afary Corliss)- The Asphalt Jungle, The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, Slap Shot,
The Wild Bunch; New World Pictures-Battle beyond the Stars and Piranha; Paramount Pictures-Ordinary
People; Specialty Films (Dianne Dalrymple)- The Return of the Secaucus 7; Warner Brothers-Bronco Billy.

"~Idon't like those hard goodbyes"
STROTHER
M-ARTIN
STROTHER Seattle Film
MARTIN
Society
thought
wanted
the
to
folks
meet
from
him Just
the
because he had done some Jobs of work for Sam Peckinpah
and they had had Sam to tea a year or so earlier.
Not that that gave him any trouble. Like any other
veteran character actor he had long since got used to
being the face and voice that people marked immediately
without being able to attach a name. Unllke
many other character actors, he had been wrong on
that point for quite a few years-at the very least,
since late 7967, when filmgoers first heard the llne
"What we have here is failure to communicate JJ
out of the mouth of the pusselgutted chain-gang overseer
in Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke. Plenty
of people, not Just film-society types, could be relled on
to look right fond whenever the name Strother Martin
was dropped, and say "Oh yeah, I like him, he's
always good. JJ
When then-SFS President Tom Keogh got wind
of A1artin 's being on location near Issaquah for a
TV-movie, he got right to work trying to arrange the
sort of public reception appropriate to a man who had,
in the phrase of Jimmy Stewart, given us so many
"pieces of time" we would never forget. The shooting
schedule in our neighborhood wac, too brief to permit
that; the company would be gone in a few days and
M qrtin with them. But the actor and his wife dzd
propose that a few people drive out to the Hollday Inn
on the last evening for a drink. The Board of Directors
promptly nominated themselves, and went.
The A1 artins Were having dinner with two other
cast members, A1arJorie Bennett and i1 eg Wylie,
who Joined us for the first part of our chat in an improvised
semi-private diningroom. Bennett, especially
familiar for her work in Robert Aldrzch pictures (she
and A1 artin had both appeared in one-scene roles in
Kiss Me Deadly; her son from What Ever Happened
to Baby Jane?, Victor Buono, was out bulking
in the lobby a few yards away), held forth in her
best sinister-pixie style on everything from Rudolph
Valentino to the fireweed-honey-from-the-sky rztual at
Snoqualmie Falls Lodge. The rest of the company
delightedly deferred to her. Then, after she had retired
for the evening, A1 artin settled down to talk about,
well, Sam Peckinpah, he thought, but we insisted we
were interested in Strother A1artin, too.
The Strother A1artin we met was afellow markedly
different from the variously desperate, deranged, and
depraved characters he had so often essayed. Mostly
he spoke in soft, gracious tones, with a particularity
of reference and inflection consistent with the classical
tastes and sensibillty he frequently evidenced. Every
once in a while, though, when an anecdote required
the quotation of a llne from The Wild Bunch or
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that famillar
backwoodsy twang cut the azr. (He was particularly
proud of the appreciative reception a Harlem
moviehouse audience had given his pronunciation of
"puss)'" while cussing out the hockey team in Slap
Shut.) From time to time he llt a cigarette and got

. " I would like to own the film on the life of Delius
that Ken Russell did for the BBC? Did you see
that? It was done on the PBS stations. Max Adrian
played Dclius. It's Ken Russell's best film, and it's
about one of my favorite subjects. It's a great film;
it's better than Women in Love. I read once that
Glenda Jackson said it was his best film. Such a
wonderful biography. He's meddled with a lot of
composers and he's made me very angry. I didn't
go to see "Tchaikovsky" [The A1usic Lovers] and I
was terribly disappointed in the Mahler film, I just
hated it. But I admire his images and his imagination.
lie sees ..
Yeah, oh God, he sees .
. . . like no one else.
He's fantastic. I didn't go to see The Devlls. I think
I was scared to go see it. Russell can scare the hell
out of you-there's a lot of blood coming up and
you see somebody die instantly, it's terrifying ...
•
about two puffs out of it before 1\1rs. 1\1artin quietly
reached across and stubbed it out.
That was in 1\1arch, 7979. A year later, Strother
1\1artin appeared at a Filmex program, "Characters,"
devoted to the work of peoPle like him; the entirety of
his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid performance
was screened. One hoped that 1\1artzn and
those other colleagues present-Richard Loa was afew
seats away-would be called up to take their bows.
It didn't happen. They signed a few autograph
Within months, both men had passed away.
The following remarks were recorded and transcribed
by Tom Keogh and Lesley Link. As the tape
started to roll, 1\{artin was talking about an unlikely
director ....
I like character actors. I always have. Do you
know Raimu? Have you seen The Baker's ~Vzfi':)
That's one of my favorite things. I liked Wallace
Beery a lot. Slim Summerville. ZaSu Pitts. Got
to meet ivlarjorie Main and had drinks with her,
my wife and I. I would love to have met Marie
Dressler even more. She always looked like she
was right on the edge of a nervous breakdown
but somehow gonna sail through. God' she had
human courage; so heroic.
Where did you get started acting?
Where did I start? I couldn't recite in high school.
I didn't know why I was so pathologically shy.
I didn't know whether it was- I'd just learned
to jerk off and was all torn up about it. Or whether
it was because we were poor; we were despicably
poor when I ~as in high school and I think it was
more that than anything. A lot of actors were
enormously shy. I wasn't in the high school plays.
I didn't know I was going to do that till-
It was the first thing I ever got a B in at the
University of Michigan. It was astounding that
I ever made it there because some of the people
[in my circle] made the electric chair. There was
a lot of dropping-out, a lot of bitterness and hate
in the land because of the Depression. There was
a lot in me: you've seen it on film, I think. And
I hope you see something else: that I'm struggling
30

with that violence that's in me, and maybe that
makes me a candidate for somebody that appreciates
the kind of films that Sam has done.
•
After I did The Wild Bunch, when the offer came
to do Cable Hogue-it was almost right away, two,
three months or so-I told my agent that if he
could get something else I'd just as soon not do
Cable Hogue because I'd had 16 weeks with Sam
and I'd just barely got through that. When my
agent went to see Cable Hogue he-said, "And you
didn't want to do this picture!" Because he liked
me in it very much.
Actually J was in terror of Sam because, I mean,
during those 16 weeks on Wild Bunch he'd chewed
my ass out every line and every shot. I always
thought I could see a little smile around the edge,
I sensed that he liked me, but I wasn't sure. He
never said a compliment to me until once, when
we were going in to loop the picture, he just turned
to me and said, "I thought you were very good in
this picture."
When I saw The Wild Bunch I had no perspective
on it. The first time I saw it, there was so much
violence, I thought they were going to laugh at it,
it seemed grotesque and funny to me. I liked all
the people, but not-it didn't work. Then, over
the years, maybe the third time I had begun to
like it a little, and I've had the experience of going
to a theatre where it's playing, the theatre's filled
with people like Hell's Angels and doctors and
every kind, and the lights come up and people are
reaching out to touch you. Oh that's a nice feeling!
People are saying, "Thank you, man
ever made ... I've seen this 40 times
Best film
" And now
you can look at this Wild Bunch that you've made,
and you're in it. It's my favorite film that r'm in.
I like Cool Hand Luke, but ...
Sam said he was going to make the actors' lives
hell. He especially made my life hell. I want to
tell you a line Sam said. You know he wears those
glasses that you can't see through, those mirrored
glasses. [Looking around the table] I wish I had
spoons, I've done it with spoons. We were doing
the hard gallop at the camera, you know, the big
shot, the whole bounty-hunters-coming-into-thecamera.
My horse would go into a terrific gallop;
as a matter of fact, I'd have to hold it back to keep
it from passing [Robert] Ryan's, because it looks
like I'm taking off. I'm ridin' up there and I'm
holding that son of a bitch, and we did it about
ten or twelve times because we'd ride up to spot
and I'd say "Hold up!" And I'd say, "Mr. Thornton,
it might be an ambush there at the river,"
and then I'd want the horse to go at a nice canter,
dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum, so I'd look like I
knew a horse; and all he'd do is go at a bony trot.
So they gave me spurs, and I kicked that son of a
bitch with all I had because, first of all, Sam is
chewing my ass out every time about the fuckin'
ride and "how disgraceful you look." He went
about ten takes with me, and he'd had enough of
it, and he said, "Mr. Y1artin, would you get down
off your horse? Would you come under the· shade
with me so we don't have a sunstroke? Now, ~1r.
Martin, would you tell me [imaginary spoons lifted
to his eyes] WHY YOU WANT SO :--IUCH TO FUCK UP
THIS PICTURE?" There was an audience that day,
just a few people; I felt pretty awful. There's no
answer; I couldn't say, "I want to fuck it up be-

The Wild Bunch ( /%9): m the !)os.le 1I'lth LCL .lOllI'S, RO/il'rt Ryoli.
cause I hate your guts.-" No, I didn't hate his guts
and I sensed something about him. I just wish
he'd- I sirred him a lot: yessir, rio sir. And Sam's
younger _than me, you know, but I've been told
that I sir bellboys, waiters, whatever. ...
Once, when we were up in the battle, the one
at the very beginning, he was setting me up for
my closeup with the band coming down the street,
on which I open fire, and he says, "Well, we're
going to get some-I want some, I want some, uh,
I don't know, some emotion, uh, out of you. Some
kinda- Show me somethin " for Christ's sakes I"
Somebody like Robert Ryan says, "When I move
over here, when I shove Strother down-" and
Sam says, "SMACK THE SON OF A BITCH DOWN!"
And boy, I went down when Robert Ryan hit me,
and hard. And when I was in this closeup and
I'm revved up, he's treating me with contempt:
"You listen, I'm going to talk you through thIS,
you're listening to the music, I'lljust tell you what
to do in this closeup, I'll just talk you through it."
And I don't know, maybe half-a-dozen insults are
in there someplace, too. I ask him, "Would it be
all right if I winked at L.Q.?" He says [low growl]
"Why don't yo.u kiss him?" I say, "He's too far
away'" So I did the take, and I remember I was
doing it and he says to me, "Kiss your rifle." And
I don't want to do that, that's a goddam cliche.
"KISS THE GODDAM RIFLE!" I felt like- I've seen
that shot, and I like myself in it, I like myself very
much in that shot. It seems to me I've almost gone
down on my rifle in that shot. Sam-that's all
Sam, and I can see my heart going doong! doong'
doong! It was fun to do-afterwards.

I
'~
He can get after you that way, He's a, he's a
marvclous magician, He sees, He's a great wardrobe
man, a great makeup man, He doesn't say
a lot to actors when he's directing, He may start
out by saying, "Will you come over here, we'll do
a number." And then that happens, and then you
go over there and you finish another number, That
gets you started, and he looks at it. And there's
moments when he'~ setting up a new sequence that
a propman gets fired. He might ask for a newspaper:
"Have you got the period newspaper?"
"You said to me, :'\'11'. Peckinpah, that it won't
be needed until next Tuesday." "You do not have
the period newspaper? Get your fuckin' ass out
of here, you're fuckin' fired." He's absolutely
ruthless at that point. He would fire the actors,
I think, but we're established [on film]. And when
you're watching somebody go, you feci a lot of
tension, so he gets a lot of tension. It seems to
me he never quits.
I respect enormously the labor he put in. For
example, he needed a rectal operation w'hile we
were doing The Ihld Bunch. They wanted to put
him in the hospital. But no, they'd give him pain
pills and he'd get through. His ass was bleeding;
I mean, it was a very serious problem, causing him
pain. With that and the pressure and the flu, it
put a crimp in his lovelife. And a lot of us were
hoping he'd be satisfied in the boudoir because
then he'd ease up on us!
When Sam is cooking he's miles above his material.
The things about H:ild Bunch that arc for me
so astounding are in the background all the time.
You see a country being born. You see people,
babies, little children playing; and it looks real.
The word for The Wild Bunch is 'epic'. It was a
flimsy script; I didn't think the script was worth
a crap. There were parts of it when we read it
that we were kind of grinning-"This is a piece of
shit." The part I'm referring to in particular is the
part where the Germans-"Prosit I "-the time
when the son of a bitch's got the goddam woman
being carried through in the coffin, and the wailin'
and keenin' and the looks all over the place. He's
a magician in those sequences.
He told me a funny story on himself, from the
days before he was big stuff. One night after shooting
he was having a drink with Lee 1~/larvin].
And Sam says, "I hate actors." And Lee says,
"All actors do, baby!"
•
Doe.\'Paul .Newman like to have you around} I notice
)'ou turn up in a lot of his pictures.
Yes. he never says so, but he cast me in Butch
Cassidy. I wasn't told until during Slap Shot the
director said ... Back when they were getting
ready to do Butch, George Roy Hill said, "I've
got these three people for Percy Garris: Strother
~lartin-" and Paul said, "Don't go any farther."
But he never mentioned that to me, he never said
"I got you this job." Now if it was John Wayne
[chuckles] he would have said in front of 2,000
people [drawling emphaticall)'] "I gotcha this.fobl" ...
1 liked [Butch Camd)'] because I liked ... Katharine
[Ross] says, "Have you ever thought, Butch,
that if we'd met first, that it might have been you
and {?" And Paul says, "You're riding on my bicycle,
and in some places that's the same as .. ':"
And they were married, the three people were
married; it was a marvelous mfl/age a trois. Paul
said it was a fairy talc, too good to be true. And
at the time it came out, a lot of people would like
to knock Butch Cassidy because it wasn't The Wild
Bunch. It was something else. Paul thought it was
a \Vestern fairy tale, and there were several things
I liked a great deal about it. George Roy Hill has
the capacity to make you glad you're alive.
Did you like Slall Shot?
J liked Slap Shot ver)' much, and that amazed me
because J don '{ much like George Ro)' lIill's oth,r films­
Oh really.
-but I was going to sa)', I was sorr)' it didn '{ have the
success with the general public-
It's done 35 million, but in Hollywood they consider
it like it was a flop. But that's Hollywood,
maybe: if it isn't yours, if it didn't do close to 100
million, it's nothing. But I loved the movie, and
I thought Paul was brilliant; I thought Paul should
have been nominated and I thought Paul should
have won.
It's his best performance. ,r
Oh I thought it was brilliant, just brilliant. I've
seen it seven times and he's just in there all the
way. He's such a nice human being and I like him
very much. He's a mysterious man ...
•
Didyou ever see L. Q. Jones'sfilm [A Boy and
His Dog]?
I was in one-the
for TV .
Satan one, The Brotherhood of Satan

curious about God. But they monkeyed with it
in the editing ....
I think Hard Times would have been a better
film if they'd been a little more generous to me.
That's one of the sad things you go through. I lost
eight sequences. It was one of the best parts I ever
had-I just loved that part, and damn it! Uamesj
Coburn went on the floor, too. They got 25 minutes
of story out of that. Charlie Bronson came
right out in the paper and said, "It's not the movie
we shot!" He said this was seven or eight brutal
fights strung together. What we were all doing
Did he direct that or just produce it?
No, Bernie McEveety directed that. I did the one
film with L.Q. as producer and it got a little
strained between us. We're friends still but ...
Maybe I have a tough time adjusting to ... No,
it was specifically, after I did the film I felt the
door was closed awful hard in saying goodbye
to me as he started to edit. It's not that I had
any contribution, necessarily, to make, but-I
don't like those hard goodbyes.
Sometimes some directors and some producers'll
treat us very kindly when they're doing their thing
with the scissors. Costarring parts have a way of
getting smashed around. Sometimes the design
that you ate giving the character or the storyand
when you have the lead in something you're
giving it a lot of design-where maybe it'll work
only if they leave it your way, but if they turn it
around, twist it around, screw it around ... And
it's your fault! In a film like Ess-Ess-Ess-Ess-Ess
-you know [Sssssss]-a film about changing a boy
into a snake ... That (you'll excuse me) fuckin'
premise is a bit much. You can play so sincere
your nose bleeds and you just can't make it work.
My idea in the thing, for example, they write him
like he's a real hellfire-and-brimstone crackpot,
and I figure he oughta be a Unitarian, or a humanist
of some kind. So I dig up everything I can to
make him into a Unitarian, an atheist who's very
really hard was, all of us supporting players, we
were trying to get Charlie nominated because we
all like him as an actor and we all liked this story.
I couldn't believe they would cut it that bad. The
writer' was the director, so ... Maybe he gets the
word from the top, "Cut it to make it a good programmer,
tha.t's all we want out of it." We don't
have any cont!,ol over it. Sometimes it's pretty
savage; it's scary.
Hard Times is certainly tasty, whatever's left of it.
Yes! Charlie is so brilliant in the fights, and I think
the small bit that's there is nice. That film opens
so well. I understand they had a stuntman to jump
off a boxcar and Charlie said to him, "I can jump
off a boxcar better than that. Which of course he
could. [Laughs] Charlie could do almost anything
.. better.

I
,
t
~.
Have there been movies where you felt more secure from
the beginning about how you were going to look at the
end?
When I was doing Cool Hand Luke I didn't go to see
the dailies, but I heard that I was doing all right
in it. But when I go, I don't have any perspective.
If I like the other people, they'll say "You're lookin'
great, come down and see yourself!" I'll go there
and if I like the other people I guess then I'll say
to myself, well, I guess I'm doing all right. But I
don't like anything I do until usually I get some
time to get over it. I did like myself in Slap Shot
very quickly; I made peace with that one. Usually
it takes five or six years. I thought I was very much
like that character. I looked like me, I talked a lot
like me, and it didn't seem like I was surrounding
him in characterization so much. It really looked
a lot like me-even though he was an old bastard.
I'd like to have seen him say, "Ayih numminate Liberty
Valance fer delegate!" with that tongue.
Oh, that's interesting that you mention that,
because his direction of me, something about
him made me spunky, and when I said that particular
line, "I nominate Liberty Valance," I
said it as loud and as ballsy as I could say it,
which is through my nose. And the guy next
to me went-it just grated on him. And Ford
just went on fiddling around with Eddie 0'Brien
and whatnot. And then: "Strother ... louder! "
-and that was his direction. And I'm going,
You're out of your mind, I just did my loudest.
And ,the next direction after another rehearsal
was:" Strother ... LOUDER!" It was the loudest
I could do the first time I did it! And when my
voice broke, he -printed it. I didn't like myself
that day. I thought, Now there, my voice is shot.
I didn't say that to him.
Most, most fascinating. My experience with
him is the deepest with anybody, I think. I was
playing a sex psychopath and his boring-in on
that area was, well, a marvelous experience that
I consider like ... He asked me questions, asked
me a question or two in the shooting that made
me answer with a certain truthfulness that I think
I would only feel in a certain place like the Sistine
Chapel. He was pretty scary. I looked at him
with his one eye and told him what I thought
, I
~.
f
II
Did John Ford direclyou much while yuu were on
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.;
Yes. His way of directing is to do it for you. And
it's very hard to understand what a 70-year-old
man is meaning when he walks the part [impersonates
a mumbling deep voice, mostl}' gibberish, pantomiming
a handkerchief at the corner of the mouth].
The dirtiest white handkerchief you've ever seen;
the tongue comes down to here-he's got the
longest tongue that you'll ever see. Oh God,
he was unique!

.Firsl SlHfII a!I!lfamn(f. /II .llIhnllllsllln j. The Asphalt Jungle ( /Y5U). (ISa .wirida{ly!1I' a{lInglidl' Slohng II(lydl'll inlhl' /illm/i.
the character was about when he asked me, and
r think r answered him truthfully. He'd keep
saying Lee Van Cleef was going to be mean, and
he'd say that
"Yeah."
"You're a sex psychopath."
•
I said
How did you get involved with this made-for- TV project.)
Well, it's the front part of the year right now and
... In spite of the fact that Sam may say to you
that, oh hell; we cost too much money now
Sam wants us .to do one day's work in any damn
thing he does, and sometimes if he wants you,
he wants you to do it. And the character actor's
struggle for survival is a bitch today. There was
a time when people like me would have been
approached, at least, to be under contract to the
studio and farmed out picture by picture. It's
true that a man like myself does not know after
this movie, this may be the last movie I ever do
in my life. I have no assurance.

They don't really give a shit any more about
who's second. Oh, they care about it, the casting
of it, but they really care-they'll give four million
dollars to a star, but they'll try to get away with
giving me four, uh, dollars. And the difference
between- I'll say it this way: many, many stars
are millionaires and multimillionaires; you cannot
tell me one character actor today that's become
a millionaire, unless he was a regular in a television
series that had been going for eight or ten
years and all those god-excuse me-bastards are
millionaires, if you want to be rich. But there's
no one- Walter Brennan was a millionaire because
they knew his value. I would imagine, well,
he won three Academy Awards, and I know what
his salary was before he died. They wanted him,
they paid $15,000-a week. If they said ten,
Walter said no. $15,000 a week and he went to
work. It established his worth. If you don't get
some sort of respectable salary, boy, you're just
lip the creek. I know an awful lot of character
actors who I think should be making a decent
living, and they forget about us sometimes. There's
no training factor, it's not like a star; they give,
they think in terms of the star, I think, now more
than ever. I'll bear this out. It seems to me, not
that they don't try to do some things like Jaws,
that kind of crap, that makes millions and billions
of dollars or something. But it seems to me today
that they won't do a film like The Dirty Dozen-it's
apt to be The Terrible Two, two stars. There are
no Wild Bunches being made.
They chisel hell out of you. I mean, if I do one
day for Sam, the public, in our culture, sees me
in the film and say, "Strother, he says two words
in the film, he must be on the skids." And they
especially do that in Hollywood. Whereas in
England, when Richard Chamberlain went over
there to do a Hamlet, John Gielgud walks on for
a minute and they don't say "Gielgud's finished."
We got the dumbest thing about that, and it's
all the way across in our culture. For example,
Gloria Grahame was in the play The TIme oj Your
Life, she had won an Academy Award, and everybody
asked me, "She's finished, isn't she?" I'll
make it clearer still, and tell you something that
somebody told me: in France, in Europe, if you
ever were a star, then you always are a star, for
them, whether .you lost it all. They always respect
you.
But I don't want to ... You here, here's a nucleus
of people who, I know, revere film more
than I did. And you have some special feeling
about this artform.-For-me, when it's good, it's
church. For me, The InJormer-I go into that cathedral
with Victor McLaglen, and I know that
I'm an informer, and that makes me think of the
lines from The A1essiah: "Open up ye gates, ye
everlasting doors, and let the Prince of Glory
come in." Ya gotta be there. You're right with
me, too.
NOTE
This issue oj MOVIETONE NEWS was, needlm to point out, origInally intended to have appeared much
earlier-around early Af ay 7980, and then late September, and now it's ... well, let's not get into that.
We merely wanted to note here that some oj the reviews In the Quickies section (beginmng overleaj) have
been overtaken a bit by history. This is not to say that they are "wrong" now-simPly that they were written
in circumstances di.jjerent jrom the present. For the most part, we have decidfd to let these stand as originally
written and typeset. Ajter all, MOVIETONE NEWS is jorever, righe But we also thought the writers,
who were in no wise responsible jar the delay in publication, deserved this note of clan/ication In case they
inadvertently appear more uncharitable or bullheaded than a entlc has the right to be.