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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Writings on people and places, theater and film, in a portfolio of essays and photographs informing Wes Anderson's film Asteroid City. Featuring eight newly commissioned pieces alongside more than 20 classic essays from the likes of François Truffaut and Jonas Mekas, DO NOT DETONATE explores key influences on celebrated director Wes Anderson's new film Asteroid City. Together they form a detailed, captivating portrait of the mid-century film world and the enduring myths of the American West. Contents: A Conversation Between Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin A Life excerpt – Elia Kazan The Celluloid Brassière – Andy Logan Rainy Day – Lillian Ross The Outskirts: Other Men's Women – Gina Telaroli The Petrified Forest – Jorge Luis Borges Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight – Molly Haskell What Makes a Sad Heart Sing: Some Came Running – Michael Koresky One False Start, Never Wear the Same Dress Twice – Durga Chew-Bose Maigret at the Coroner's excerpt – Georges Simenon Sunbelt Noir: Desert Fury – Imogen Sara Smith The Voyage Down and Out: Inferno – Kent Jones Bad Day Near The River's Edge – Nicolas Saada Watching Fail Safe at the End of the World – K. Austin Collins Black Desert, White Desert – Serge Toubiana Marilyn Monroe and the Loveless World – Jonas Mekas Beyond the Stars – Jeremy Bernstein Coming: Nashville – Pauline Kael Coming Around the Mountain: Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Matt Zoller Seitz Selections from Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary – Bob Balaban Introduction to Small Change: A Film Novel – François Truffaut By The Time I Get to Phoenix – Thora Siemsen My Guy – Hilton Als Wild to the Wild – Sam Shepard
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Contents
In the Orbit of Asteroid City
A Conversation Between Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin
jake: When beginning to discuss this collection, we knew that it would take a different direction than books that accompanied The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch. For The Society of the Crossed Keys, all the writing was by Stefan Zweig, and for An Editor’s Burial, for the most part, David Brendel selected pieces or found original correspondence that illuminated the history of The New Yorker, or were the very specific references for that film.
wes: This one is more about the atmosphere of it. With The French Dispatch, it was made of fictionalized works of journalism based on specific voices that we’re trying to kind of channel. With this one, that’s not remotely the case. This one has some broad inspirations, but it doesn’t have direct sources the way The French Dispatch did.
jake: Right. And you take it further in The French Dispatch, too, with Frances McDormand’s Mavis Gallant character.
wes: I mean, we quote her.
jake: You actually quoted her.
wes: Repeatedly. There are four or five lines that are just direct quotations from her Paris Notebooks. We even went to 10her estate and said, “Look, we want to quote these.” And, it’s funny, the reaction was simply and completely: “We have no legal right to authorize or not. You don’t need our permission. Those quotes fall under ‘fair use.’”
jake: That’s the ideal response from an estate.
wes: On a legal basis, the ideal response. Perhaps one hopes for a bit more, such as: “How interesting! What are you doing? Is there anything more you want from us?” What we got was: “That’s ‘fair use.’ You don’t need to be in touch with us.” Which works, too.
jake: There were characters in past films who are direct inspirations, but here it’s elements that might read as one person, like Scarlett Johansson as Monroe, perhaps another, or a combination.
wes: Yes. I mean, for instance, that character, we think of Marilyn Monroe first. She was a movie star who sort of aspired to be more like the great actors of the stage, and her relationship with The Actors Studio became a part of The Actors Studio, itself; but it was also sort of aspirational for her, and it becomes this sort of power dynamic with Paula Strasberg. There’s a lore around it. There’s Arthur Miller and The Misfits. That brings us out West. It’s the tie to New York City. It’s a room in Gramercy Park, but it’s also a herd of wild horses. What do you call a pack of horses? A herd. Anyway, there they are. We’re in the desert, and it swirls together a number of those things. But also with that character, I think a bit about Kim Stanley, mostly a stage actress. There’s one movie that’s called The Goddess. That’s the one where she plays a movie star, and it sort 11of refers to herself, I guess. Jane Russell also is another. The costumes are Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. There’s a costume taken straight from Rear Window, and there’s another from Vertigo. It’s a swirl of characters with a lot of Marilyn Monroe. I think even though our character talks about being the person you find on the floor of the bathroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills, the person who actually says that is different, if you see what I mean, from the one who does it.
jake: That makes sense. That’s what led me to use the Eve Arnold photographs from the set of The Misfits, of course, but when looking at the dozens of images of her work there were particular ones that really seemed to match up with Asteroid City. This was not something we had discussed previously, and I assume that was not intentional on your part to be so specific in duplicating any of Eve Arnold’s work, however well you may know it. But there it is, a picture of Monroe on the set with a young girl, much like the mother–daughter relationship in the film, or both wearing robes. But these connections were made after seeing the film and looking at more of the photos than I had initially had in mind, my memory of the photos. That was much of the fun of this, discovering things I think neither of us had considered, like a parallel film.
wes: I don’t know if I mentioned this, but Eve Arnold was very good friends with my wife Juman’s mother. There is a shot of Clark Gable running in Nevada right across the room from me. Which does not belong to me. It belongs to them, but I’ve taken it and put it in here. By the way, have you ever 12seen one I saw recently, Sidney Lumet’s Stage Struck? Susan Strasberg. It’s her big role. I mean, she’s in Picnic, but those were kind of her biggest.
jake: Diary of Anne Frank, on stage.
wes: Yes! Only on the stage. And I think those are her biggest things. This is with Henry Fonda, and I would connect our character to this one if I had seen that before we made Asteroid City, but I didn’t.
jake: Right. Well, the way that also connects is we found an amazing photograph by Roy Schatt of Monroe and Susan Strasberg, and the piece by Lillian Ross visiting Strasberg at home. And though you hadn’t mentioned Stage Struck, you had mentioned 12 Angry Men, and we have another Roy Schatt photograph of Lumet directing live television with Lorne Greene. I mean Lorne Greene’s back is to the camera but we’ll take his word for it, and in the photo Lumet is an absolute dead ringer for Adrien Brody in Asteroid City.
wes: Roy Schatt did a lot of pictures of James Dean, right? There’s Dennis Stock and Roy Schatt.
jake: Roy Schatt did the series with Dean that he calls the torn sweater series.
wes: Which we steal directly from, too.
jake: There is a shot of Jason with his feet up just like Dean wearing Converse Jack Purcells.
wes: And with his sweater pulled up over his nose. That’s from that series of photographs.
jake: The first logline for the film that came out was: “Desert Town, 1950, Junior Stargazers.” That was all I knew going into the film other than it had been shot in Spain. But 13everything that surrounds that, particularly having to do with The Actors Studio, takes up as much of the film and really gives us the structure. Were they always going to be part of the same film?
wes: I wanted to do a theater movie, a movie about the 1950s. I was thinking of it like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Something that sort of goes from summer stock and then into the city and gives us a 1950s Broadway story. Paul Newman in a T-shirt in The Actors Studio.
jake: Yes, sitting on the backwards chair, by Eve Arnold. Worth noting this image is in the book, but this is the first time we are discussing it.
wes: Yes. So that was part of the beginning of it. And we had an idea of doing a making-of-the-play that they’re working on. But at that point, the play we were calling “Automat,” and it was going to be set entirely in an automat, and that was going to be the play. At the same time, the other thing that we, Roman and me, were sort of talking about was something kind of Sam Shepard. I love Sam Shepard, I’ve always loved Sam Shepard. Owen and I were really quite fixated on Sam Shepard before we made our first movie together. This guy was a big part of our lives at that time. I remember reading something about him talking about these men who had come back from the Second World War, and they were never the same, these violent and disturbed fathers. What he grew up with. These men who end up out somewhere near Needles or something. I remember him talking in one interview about how his father actually went to see one of the plays in a production somewhere out 14in California, in Fresno, I don’t know where he was, and made a scene. Shouting at the actors. He died, hit by a car, I think trying to get his dog out of the highway in front of a bar.
jake: That’s kind of like Wild to the Wild, with the dog on the tracks…
wes: The dog just leaves, in the end, doesn’t it?
jake: Yes, they’re worried about it getting killed on the tracks. They’re trying to get it off the tracks.
wes: So we shifted out of “Automat” and into the desert. But I do always feel that a movie for me is not one idea. It’s sort of at least two sort of separate things that come together and start to become a movie.
jake: Right. In the interview with Susan Morrison for An Editor’s Burial, you mentioned something similar that Tom Stoppard had said.
wes: Exactly.
jake: I think this film takes that many steps further. It seems the ultimate of that idea. It’s hard for me on one viewing to decide what the primary story is. The opening is from the booth of a live television studio, a Playhouse 90 type studio. From the beginning you’re not where you expect to be.
wes: Yes. “Am I seeing the right movie? I thought it’s in the desert.”
jake: We have this piece from Time magazine from 1957 about Playhouse 90, a great piece on the set of Playhouse 90 when Frankenheimer was directing an episode with Ben Gazzara. It’s just a report from that moment in time.
wes: I love it. 15
jake: I am hoping some of the pieces in the book set the background a bit, I wouldn’t want this to be my asking, “Oh, is that Frankenheimer?” because different characters are amalgams but it’s all a creation on your and Roman’s part.
wes: I’m happy to talk about where they come from, because to me, part of the movie is a bit of a little conversation about some things that we’re interested in sort of historically, and that has a lot to do with the New York stage, and also Hollywood, and so on. At the same time I have the slightest reluctance to make it too much about that aspect of it and to not go somehow into what is this movie actually about? And who these people actually are? Who are these characters aside from who they refer to or who inspired them? Ultimately, I hope somebody has an experience watching the movie where all this stuff that swirls around it is interesting, and enhances it, and informs it. But hopefully the thing itself, the kind of movie it is, we’re aiming for something a bit more in the vein of a poem. That’s sort of our goal. A poetic meditation on something or other. There certainly isn’t a genre that we can put it in.
jake: It all exists in the same orbit as the film, in the spirit of, as you said. All the new writing in the book makes no reference to Asteroid City at all, it all stands independently as criticism, as you wanted. Just that these are films you had said played some role in the conception of the film, but not explaining further than that allows us to find texts and images that illuminate the period, but not being direct references.
wes: What’s underneath it? When you set a movie in this time: what’s the America that we’re trying to write about? 16What emotionally is underneath The Actors Studio? What’s happening to them? Obviously The Actors Studio is a very political theater, a political group, and what happens to these people? Something not very good over the next decade and a half. Things get quite wild in America, at least some of the leadership of America brings this to them. And then also looking at someone like, for instance, Marilyn Monroe to see how this world of people end up and how they get there. Anyway, all of that somehow I feel, was feeding into this. And for me, it’s a reason why, when I started wanting to make movies, this period was the center of everything. We were watching The Godfather and Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma. But, maybe even more: Marlon Brando and James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Kazan. The emotion of this period of movies and their relationship to the stage. This block of movies I’m talking about which maybe sort of begins with Streetcar. Tennessee Williams is a big voice of this urgency and the wounded whatever-it-is of these characters. I remember reading Marlon Brando described in the World Book Encyclopedia in kind of very masculine terms, like a boxer, but it also referred to him having a, quote, poetic face. There’s something in that I think is interesting.
jake: Brando is the most revolutionary thing that happens to performance in the modern era.
wes: And maybe Brando himself only exists with all the combinations of things going on around him. You know, some kind of proto-beatnik or something at that point. And he’s definitely going to be different from the people around him. 17On the farm. But, you know, Brando without Kazan, I don’t know. You have to have Gadge.
jake: This is all happening under a political cloud of the end of the war, paranoia around communism, atomic testing…
wes: The thing they’re doing, to some degree, they’re thinking of it as Russian. We know this is where they are looking.
jake: Going back to the Group Theatre days…
wes: …and they’re becoming communists and then that’s leading to the wildest turmoil and yet somehow the distance between being an actor on stage and a hydrogen bomb is not so far. It’s a very peculiar era and so anyway we seemed to try to put some of it in there. A backdrop of paranoia. I don’t know how often people use a nuclear detonation as a leitmotif.
jake: Yeah, there is a sense of dread that hangs over everything in that period, including the actors. Over all those actors. Going back to Kazan, he is really the person that carries the New York stage to Hollywood, I should say most successfully because Odets was there first, but by taking Brando or Clift or Dean or Monroe along with him, all the people that sort of defined the screen in the late fifties and into the early sixties. Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward are people that were at The Actors Studio. But there is also Tennessee Williams, he seems as crucial a person in this development as anyone.
wes: Our playwright is some mixture of the writers from this period. William Inge and Arthur Miller. But somehow emotionally underneath it, I guess the one that sort of moves us the most is Tennessee Williams, even if our play 18is not a great Tennessee Williams sort of play. We ended up putting him living in something like Truman Capote’s house in Montauk. It does all sort of swirl together.
jake: So you’ve seen the Maysles Brothers’ film With Love from Truman?
wes: Yes!
jake: When they go out and shoot him in Montauk in winter?
wes: Yes. Owen and I, it must have been just before or after we made Rushmore, I somehow got in touch with the Maysles. I wanted to see some of the films, and one in particular I wanted to see was Meet Marlon Brando, and the films weren’t out there at that time.
jake: With Love from Truman, Meet Marlon Brando, and the total masterpiece Showman, about Joseph Levine.
wes: And the Beatles. Somehow we arranged to go over to where they were in those days. It was before they moved uptown. They were in midtown. We went there and they put us into a sort of closet, and we went two days in a row and watched one Maysles film after another. They had a bunch of kids in there, in a great big studio workplace for people, and it was such a great kind of thing to do in New York, to manage to talk your way in.
jake: There are clear references to Spielberg in Asteroid City—and also a familiar, warm feeling, so recognizable, of kids outwitting adults, a military mobilization…
wes: Yes, maybe our quarantine comes partly from real life, where the whole planet was in it; but, yes, maybe almost as much comes from Close Encounters, especially being in quarantine under false pretenses. 19
jake: There’s an element of Spielberg’s “Watch the Skies” films, naturally, with the Junior Stargazer Convention…
wes: I think some of that got brainwashed into me. I wasn’t deliberately trying to do something Spielbergy; but he has so much to do with me waiting in line on Saturday afternoons for three hours to pay $4 for a ticket. All those years. All those two-hour blocks of life.
jake: I know you had Kubrick in mind. But Kubrick himself, his myth or style, perhaps?
wes: I think Jason maybe thought of Kubrick’s speaking voice and what he looked like and his funny mystique. Yes, Kubrick and Spielberg. 2001 is this austere, giant sort of art movie. Maybe the biggest art movie ever made? He tells us a story, but he gives us an experience we don’t necessarily understand every step of the way. He’s puts us in a place where we have never even remotely been. By the time of Close Encounters, Spielberg had already found one of his own totally unique movie-making voices—his Amblin voice, if that sounds right—and that is a place where we have never been (though everything in it is especially familiar).
jake: You mentioned Nashville in connection to Asteroid City—is that film more of an eternal reference for your work?
wes: Nashville is some kind of musing about America at that moment. You know, it’s a free association about the country. It’s also one of those movies where there’s lots of different characters who are all interacting and coming and going around an event, and they’ve all come into one place together. So I guess it’s for those reasons that I bring it up. Beyond that, I don’t really know. The thing I always love 20about Altman, but Nashville in particular, is how he has this approach of getting these ingredients, and he’s seeing what happens to this, maybe add a little something here and push it around there, and then see what happens and what can this person do. And yeah, some of that’s good and some of that’s not so good. We’ll throw some of that into the mix, too. And it’s almost like cooking, his way was really like a bit of a kitchen. Now you guys go write a song and let me hear it and see what you can do. And you go away over here and you guys figure out what’s the story between the two of you. I don’t know what happened between the two of you. Maybe you guys will sort that out and then come back and tell me. And I felt a bit of that during the making of this movie because we had such a big cast and they would do things on their own. The way these kids worked together was very much in line with that. They were becoming their own little unit. And I like that. They’ve grown this together. So I think about Altman, in a way, as relating to the process. In M*A*S*H, there’s something else that is heavier that’s in the mix, too. And it’s sort of not really what’s played, but it’s there. Nashville ends with an assassination and, you know, M*A*S*H every now and then there’s blood all over everybody.
jake: The surgery is very graphic. Pauline Kael, famously and controversially, wrote her rave of Nashville after watching an unfinished cut.
wes: Did she do it because she said to Altman, “Let me write the rave before anybody else has even seen the movie—so it can do its most good”? 21
jake: She had a lot of pride in wanting to see her guys succeed, like Altman and De Palma and Schrader. At that moment, Altman needed a boost. Kael compared the premiere of Last Tango in Paris to the premiere of Rite of Spring. She makes grand pronouncements, and realizes they can benefit the filmmaker. I think that’s a purpose of the review, and it’s a scoop.
wes: Her piece about Bonnie and Clyde, I suppose, that one came late and made a big difference. But here, instead to give it a boost at the beginning. Bonnie and Clyde, what’s sort of radical about it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a genre-type movie. And Nashville, you couldn’t say that about it. I don’t know what movie Nashville is. I can’t imagine that Nashville was a big hit.
jake: I think in that case, yes, she felt it could do the most good. How big of a hit it was I don’t know, but it did well, and it’s as defining a film as you get in the mid-seventies.
wes: Exactly. The thing with Kael is part of her angle is to go to stick pins into the balloon, and it’s not anti-intellectual, that isn’t really the right description, but she’s so anti-pretension that it almost becomes she’s against the intellectuals who will voice their opinions in language that she finds pretentious. And that’s such a big part of her voice, the voice she finds to express her feelings about movies, like it’s a conversation and it’s direct and it’s what you say when you walk out the theater with your mind racing in one direction or another. She loved Godard. She wrote great pieces about Bellocchio and she’s kind of a little bit anti-Fellini at moments. And she loved L’Avventura, which you could just as easily see her 22loathing. In her review of Casualties of War, when she talks about the greatest movies, the movies are Grand Illusion and Shoeshine, although oddly, it’s Grand Illusion, Shoeshine and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which is a good Fred Schepisi movie, but it’s probably not Grand Illusion.
jake: That is true. It was an art-house hit at the time, though.
wes: It’s subjective. It’s her field. It’s her. And she loved Schepisi and she wrote about one Schepisi film after another. An interesting one we may not have seen lately. Is it called Iceman? With Timothy Hutton and John Lone. There are some good Schepisi movies. Six Degrees of Separation also is a really good one, but I think Iceman. I bet that’s good. I probably haven’t seen that movie in thirty years or something. I’m going to order it on Blu-ray right now.
A Life excerpt
Elia Kazan
There was one exception to all my downgrading, and when the dinner bell clanged, I watched him walk down the hill from the cottage above—the living quarters, I’d gathered, of the camp’s elite. Descending like Zeus from Olympus, the other man who’d interviewed me on the top floor of the Forty-eighth Street Theatre didn’t greet those he passed. The camp had made him not more ordinary but more exceptional. He was accompanied by his mistress, priestess to his worship. He seemed anything but anxious about her, walked a little ahead as they strolled toward the dining hall at a pace he set. Apparently Lee Strasberg was still involved in what he’d been studying when the dinner bell had interrupted his work.
In the next few days I was to discover that this unyielding remoteness was habitual with Lee. He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the center of the camp’s activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything in camp revolved around him. Preparing to direct the play that was to open the coming season, as he had the three plays 24of the season before, he would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to their artistic training. He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theater together, made them “permanent.” He did this not only by his superior knowledge but by the threat of his anger.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was sneak-bombed by the Japanese, Admiral Ernest King was quoted: “Well, they’ve got themselves into a war. Now they need a son of a bitch to fight it.” He was speaking of his government and meant himself. Sometimes only a tough, unyielding man can do a job that’s for the good of all. Admiral King was necessary after Pearl Harbor, and Lee Strasberg was necessary that summer in 1933. He enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral would. Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity, and perhaps the only way they could be held together to do their work properly was by the threat of an authority they respected. And feared.
Clearly Lee thought so. He had a gift for anger and a taste for the power it brought him. No one questioned his dominance—he spoke holy writ—his leading role in that summer’s activities, and his right to all power. To win his favor became everyone’s goal. His explosions of temper maintained the discipline of this camp of high-strung people. I came to believe that without their fear of this man, the Group would fly apart, everyone going in different directions instead of to where he was pointing.
I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him.
Lee was making an artistic revolution and knew it. An 25organization such as the Group—then in its second year, which is to say still beginning, still being shaped—lives only by the will of a fanatic and the drive with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He’d studied other revolutions, political and artistic. He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance.
· · · · ·
The next day, Lee put the Group people to work: the classes in the art of acting. Everything he taught was opposite to the instructions I’d listened to at Yale. Two young actresses, apprentices as I was, did a scene. When they were through, they looked to him for judgment. He said nothing. They waited. He stared at them. His face gave no hint of what he thought, but it was forbidding. The two actresses began to come apart; everyone could see they were on the verge of tears. Silence is the cruelest weapon when someone loves you, and Lee knew it. Finally one of them, in a voice that quavered, asked, “Lee, what did you think?” He turned his face away, looked at the other actors present. No one dared comment for fear of saying the wrong thing and having Lee turn on them. Finally, speaking quietly, he asked the stricken actress, “Are you nervous and uncertain now?” “Yes, yes,” one actress said. “More than you were in the scene you played?” Lee asked. “Yes.” “Much more?” “Yes, much more.” “Even though the scene you did was precisely about such nervousness and you’d worked hard to imitate it?” “Oh, I see, I see,” the actress said, getting Lee’s 26point that now they were experiencing the real emotion whereas before they’d been pretending. He wanted the real emotion, insisted on the “agitation of the essence,” as it was called, wouldn’t accept less.
