Inaugural conference of the Norman Mailer Society, Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, November 1, 2003, 1:45 p.m. Panel 2 of 3: Mickey Knox, Michael Mailer, and D. A. Pennebaker; Robert F. Lucid, moderator. Transcribed from the session recordings; the Society’s records hold the transcripts. Gaps the transcriber couldn’t hear are marked as they were then. Bios of the speakers are on the conference page.
Lucid: This panel, this afternoon, as you know, is a panel devoted to the idea of “Mailer in Film” which is in one sense a huge subject - the relationship of the writer, quite clearly a writer, not in any sense a filmmaker whose reputation rests upon his identity as a filmmaker. Nevertheless, a figure whose relationship to film as writer is no laughing matter. Something to talk about. I don’t know that we’re going to come at it from a such a lofty point of view, however, the question of the relationship of the contemporary writer to film in some sense, somebody ought to, somebody no doubt already has. What we’re going to do is just come at this from our peculiar points of view. Every one of us , particularly my 3 friends here, have a relationship to the question of Mailer and film, each quite different from the other. And between them quite a lot of light should get flooded on the subject or directed toward the subject anyway. Let me just say or confession that this session today – to say that this session is unrehearsed is to not even begin to cover the way – this is spontaneity itself. You’re not going to meet four fellows who are more well-intentioned than this throughout the whole course of the day. I’m sure of that – if that’s the whole thrust of your lives. So, we’re going to just hand it off to each other as we go along. I’m going to start with the gentleman to my right, Donn Pennebaker. I was on a set with him in 1968 and all his friends then called him Penny – I don’t know if they still do. And that set was the set of “Maidstone”. Let me turn to D.A. Pennebaker. Without trying to give you – you have, all of you, from your programs, small capsule biographies of all of these people already which I had some hand. So, perhaps, insofar as further identity, if necessary, each person will supply it as we go along. Donn?
Pennebaker: As he pointed out, my name is Pennebaker, Donn Pennebaker. I’m seldom called that because it’s a very hard name to explain to phone operators when you don’t have enough money to put in the phone. The fact is that I have had the fortune, misfortune, to make several films with people who did something else very well. Like Larry Rivers or Bob Dylan and I kind of got this fantasy that since I had been relatively uneducated in film – I didn’t go to film school or anything – I just sort of found the art the hard way – I thought that they’d being smarter than I was, that they could easily pick it up and make some kind of an intriguing film. And this was not to be. Larry actually – we made a film called “Tits” which ended up being – he had a press conference, I think, for three people who were the finalists in what he called his “tit contest” and one of them, unbeknownst to her or myself, turned out to be a secretary from our company. So she was very unhappy to be there with me being the judge and filming her [laughter]. The thing with Dylan is he had a very hard time focusing for any length of time on the details that are required when you make a film. So when Norman came and they were doing “Deer Park” I think you guys were arguing in a bar down there where they were running The Three Penny Opera – remember that, that little theater. So Norman said, we’re going to be at a bar – and I went down to the bar and Mickey and Buzz and Norman were all carrying on this kind of quasi-Shakespearian drama at the bar. Only all in what they considered to be Italian kind of phrasing. I don’t know whether it was supposed to be realistic or not, it certainly didn’t fool me for a minute. But anyway the suggestion came up that we all go together and make some kind of a film. And so we did. We made “Wild 90” which – I mean, it was clear to me from the beginning that it was a kind of a conceit of Norman’s that if they did this thing that they were doing at the bar for long enough in a quiet room which was my loft, that some kind of fantastic movie – I think his feeling was that if I was able to make “Don’t Look Back” with Dylan, which is probably as murky and badly photographed a film as you could image, that certainly we could do better if he put his mind to it. And he didn’t have to write the script – he liked that idea, he didn’t having to bother writing. Well, I did it kind of on faith and partly because Norman was a friend. And it was interesting, but it was more – I mean it was interesting to try to do because of full of little problems and things. But what was intriguing to me was as we got the end, and I could see right away it wasn’t supposed to be realistic – it was kind of – I don’t know what it was. But it was cabaret or something without a cabaret to go along with it. But at the end, everybody got wound up with the idea that they were looking into this tube, you know, fastened to a camera, which was kind of like looking into endless mirrors reflecting each other. And the feeling that you were somehow putting yourself into eternity, you know? And Norman got started, and while I was filming him, he made up a poem, right on camera. And I thought, this is fucking fantastic. Because I’d never seen anybody make up a poem in front of a camera before. And I was so intrigued by it that that became the film for me. Now the film later, the sound wasn’t very well recorded, because we were new at laying sound, and he didn’t do it very well. And so it was “echo-ey” or whatever. And the film itself was as bad or worse than “Don’t Look Back” was a far a what they call production value. But Norman was determined, no matter what his lawyers said, to get it put into a theater he felt that he had to have that payoff. So he got one of [Brandt’s] really bottomless theatres on 42nd street to run it. And of course it was a complete disaster and he didn’t talk to me for about a month after this [laughing]. But he looked on it as some kind of failure that we’d sunk the Titanic. So that’s where he started, so I thought I would never hear from him again, there’d be no more films. And I could scratch one more person off my list. Then he came back – two or three times – well before [Rambaugh] cut off his accounts there. But we ended up with “Maidstone” which we often called “Maidenhead” but that was kind of the last of that kind of film, and then I think he went on to get serious with productions which could return some kind of profit. Which I guess you were involved in. No? That’s all I can tell you about that, unless you want to know funny stories which I’m sure you don’t now. Mickey, of course, was in that first film – well, he’s in both the first two films. But one thing I do want to say about the second film, that also ran somewhere. I think he ran it in Los Angeles. And we heard nothing but people trashing that movie. I mean the sound of it was like being under the Youngstown flood, of people just saying how terrible it was. But I noticed since that almost every police film done in Hollywood copies that film. And it’s kind of interesting, before that nobody ever thought to – just the way of getting that kind of fake reality that was funny and people whose characters were very real, into a situation where they were kind of half disguising and half not disguising a police story. And I think it was interesting because before that, I’d never seen anything quite like that. I think that really did start something, but nobody ever gave him the credit for. This is “Beyond The Law.” Yeah.
Lucid: Which came between “Wild 90” and “Maidstone.” Hand off to Mickey, you were in ….
Knox: The thing about Pennebaker is that – matter of fact, when I saw him, I didn’t know him. He was there but he wasn’t. He was there but he wasn’t there. I mean he covered the whole movie, every movie made, everything we said, he was there. But we didn’t know he was there. An extraordinary thing. Anyway, the whole thing started, I think, as Pennebaker told you, every night we used to meet at the bar after the play. And we had a lot of fun. Buzz Farber was a friend of ours, and it was all laughter and jokes and insults and Norman said, “Hey, we got to make a movie, this is just too good. I mean, we’re great.” So, you going to write it? He said, “No. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s three guys, three Mafia guys that go to the mattresses.” I says, what you mean, get laid? He says, “No, no – they’re hiding out.” I didn’t know about that. I didn’t know about mattress – to me, you lie down [laughter] – three guys and three girls – anyway. So we go to the loft and this is after the play – it’s a long play, it’s a three-hour play and man, I tell you, the only thing that saved us was the booze. And the booze, in effect, worked. So we got together and Buzz Farber who had no experience whatsoever – I’d made many movies at that point. And Norman, of course, had done all the lectures but he knew what he was doing. But Buzz, at a certain point, would just go to sleep. So it was Norman and me. Now when the picture got completed and we went to see it, Buzz says, “Where the hell was I?” I said, “You went to sleep.” He said, “Why didn’t you wake me?” I said, “Are you kidding?” Now, in the next picture, “Beyond The Law” he was in every shot. I said, Norman, get your big fucking nose out of the camera – you’re blocking the whole set! He made sure his face was in the camera. A very funny moment in the second picture “Beyond The Law.” We were all detectives this time and Norman had a very heavy, thick Irish accent. With a little Yiddish punched in. At one point he corners Buzz in a telephone booth. And he looked at him, squinted at him, [garbled] and Buzz says, no, what? [garbled] Buzz was a pretty strong fellow who could take care of himself and he got frightened. He literally got scared. He said, Norman – I mean, Lieutenant, what are you saying? [laughter] I started to laugh, I had to leave the set. I couldn’t stay there, it was on camera. Anyway, the first one, it was kind of interesting because as I said Buzz was sort of the third guy in the picture, but he wasn’t really there. And Norman and I, more or less, carried it. And I loved improvisations, I love them. And I studied with a guy called Morris [Karnofsky] who was in a group theatre. And his group used to be mostly improv. And for an actor it’s fantastic because you’re not stuck with somebody else’s dialogue and you’re not stuck with somebody who is imposing anything on the actor. What you’ve got is – okay, Shelley Winters always wanted to be the whore – I don’t know why. But we had to do two or three improvs, then you go up into the corner and you give it a very short line of action. She’s says, I’m a pro, I’m a prostitute. I said, Why. She said, I want to be a prostitute. I said, Okay, what about me? She said, “Well, I don’t know, you don’t want to pay me.” Okay. But then things would work out, matter of fact Karnofsky would start the class by saying, Okay, you and you come up. Here’s a dime, get the dime. What you mean, get the dime? Get the dime! First, you start out very slowly and carefully, as we did in the movies, you say, you’ve got a dime. What kind of dime is it – does it have Lincoln on it, who’s on it? I can’t remember. Then, finally, he would stop it when it got violent. Started to get violent – Give me the goddamned dime, goddamn it! But that’s what happens in improv, you never know what’s going to turn up – it’s pure, pure drama without a writer. Each actor writes his own part. And Norman, I must say, was very inventive. At one point we had a big police dog come on the set. People were invited to join us – his friend, you know the boxer, Jose Torres – I think he brought the dog. And the dog looked vicious, and Norman, boy that didn’t stop him. Norman got down on all fours, looked the dog in the eye and went [sounds of barking] Dog went [small bark] And Norman went [louder bark] . And the dog backed off! [laughter]. Wow! This is going to be some movie! Actually, one in a while, most of the time, we forgot we were Mafia guys. You know, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, Norman and Buzz – and we became Brooklyn kids. Every once in awhile, I’d go, Wait a minute, we’re Mafia guys. And Norman, Yeah, we’re Mafia, right now! Anyway, it went on and on, I told jokes and somebody else told jokes. But the funny thing about that first movie was Buzz’s non-performance, which was very funny. The other pictures were kind of interesting, of course, had a lot of people in it. George Plimpton played the mayor, the ideal casting! I mean Central Casting couldn’t do better than George Plimpton. And he came in, I must say, it was funny. He came in the scene and the noise was incredible. The guys were fighting – the perps, I guess they call them – were fighting each other, screaming at the police, the police were hitting, fights were going, fistfights and George Plimpton – well, this is a very nice run police station, I must say. [laughter]. Are you crazy? Look at them! It was kind of interesting because now we had characters. I mean Mafia is a strange character to play because we don’t really know much about how the Mafia reacts, except for movies. But police detectives, you have a pretty good idea and we would like to be one once in a while, I would think. So that worked much better. Actually, the picture was very interesting. Had a lot of people. And things moved and things were happening like Buzz and Norman. The thing about Norman is that he’s - I write in the book that I’m going to have published about Norman that he created this project and he not only created it, but he was emotive. The really interesting thing – all right, I’m an actor, you know, but Norman was emotive in his reactions. I mean, it’s amazing how his mind works in that although there was no script, his imagination and his way of things permeated the whole scene. I mean, the reason it had some elements of drama and movement was because of Norman, you know. Buzz fell asleep and I, you know, I just do improvisation. But Norman did more than improvisation, he created a way of making movies that I don’t think anyone else – I’m not talking about pictures that are documentaries, you know, that’s something else. I’ve been in many movies that were – I never really worked with a good film director – they had names, but they weren’t really very good. And in some ways, although there was very little directing, Norman created something that very few directors create – it was an atmosphere that’s very hard to create on film. Now on our films it came because there was no real, there was no script to say, now the atmosphere is gloomy. We made it gloomy by instinct. And it was really gloomy or happy or wild. Wild 90 – it came out of Norman’s incredible creative energy, and he was really interested in it. You know Norman, he doesn’t start something half way.
Lucid: Why don’t we shift at this point – coming back to the question of Maidstone I think would be an interesting thing to do. But let’s move to the left a little bit because Michael Mailer whose identity is, clearly generationally, a very different one from the rest of us, is in fact, a person who works with, if I understand, with non-improvisational film. Isn’t that the case that after a long time, Norman made, in the case of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, made a film of an entirely different source. He stayed with film and not always ….
Knox: Well, that had a script and a cast.
Lucid: Oh, absolutely, and he was the director of that, as well. But, Michael, why don’t you bring us – sort of speak up to date moving from improvisational film up to now.
M. Mailer: Sure, just to begin, I had two, I guess, fundamental experiences with my dad in relation to film. The first one I was 4 years old, at the barely conscious age of 4 and I was an unwitting participant in “Maidstone” as Bob pointed out was probably his most advanced improvised film. I had the distinct pleasure of seeing him bite Rip Torn’s ear. The memory still haunts me to this day.
Knox: Remind them, he got hit on the head with a hammer.
Michael Mailer: I mean, he bit Rip Torn’s ear because he had been hit on the head with a hammer. It was incredibly brutal to watch actually. I still have a visual reaction with watching that film. I really can’t – it’s just too bizarre – but most, I guess, substantive experience I had with him was a project that almost got made – “Ringside” – which was a boxing script that I wrote. And, made a decision to bring to him for some creative input – it turned out to be a year and a half of extensive re-writing under his tutelage which was an amazing experience. Our relationship barely withstood the trials and tribulations of that process. But, it really was an amazing experience for me because I really learned how to write a screenplay, or at least advanced in my abilities to write a screenplay. It was sort of like having four years of film school in the process of a year and a half. At one point in time, you know, he said, this might be something I might be interested in directing. And I thought, well, great. It’s obviously a script he knows a lot about. And has had a hand in shaping. The subject matter was something that he knows a great deal about and is dear to his heart. He said, I’ll do it under one condition. And I said, What is that? He said, that Mickey Knox play a role in the film. And I said, Done! And we set about casting the film with some extraordinary actors, actually. At the time we had the film greenlit, the financier had agreed to actually finance it and allow us to start, we ended up with a cast of Mickey, Halle Berry, Brendan Fraser and Martin Landau was the other actor in the film. And we had started pre-production and we’re about two weeks into it when, unfortunately, the plug was pulled. And, you know, to this day, it’s my most heart-breaking experience in the filmmaking business. I just thought it would have been such a great opportunity to have worked with him, having such a close, sort of intimate process which these two gentlemen to my left have had the pleasure of experiencing with him. And it didn’t happen. Maybe, you know, I have to admit, also, that part of me was somewhat relieved because that also could have been the end of our relationship [laughter] had it actually gone into production. But it was, you know, for a period of about a year and a half, it was an incredible learning experience.
Pennebaker: Michael, let me ask you a question. You were one of the two kids with your mother, when the hammer …
Michael Mailer: Yes. Yes.
Pennebaker: I was filming you – yes! I always find out these things years later. It’s always amazing everyone will tell me that they were there, and I didn’t know it then. When you said the plug got pulled, you mean the financing ….?
Michael Mailer: You know, I think they got nervous because at the time it was before – Halle Barry had not yet proved that she was become a star and Brendan Fraser had not yet achieved his stature – and I think they were nervous that Norman’s track record as a director, I think [laughter]. “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” which I think is an underrated film, premiered in my mind the whole sort of Tarrentino craze which is – that exploration of idiosyncrasy and character in a film and put them into real circumstances. And Tarrentino made his name and fortune on just that. If you compare “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” with “Pulp Fiction” you can see a lot of similarities. I don’t know if the film-going public was quite ready for it at the time. I think they got nervous, they saw the track record, an interesting film but a film that’s not too commercially viable. And the cast, you know, which went on to become superstars, had not yet achieved that status. And pulled the plug. It was a bitter experience.
Lucid: It doesn’t surprise me that people got cold financial feet because by that time – what year was that? Actually got started and then got aborted?
Michael Mailer: It was, I believe, around 93. It took place after, obviously, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” had been released which actually showed that Norman could direct a commercial product, if you want to call it that. And could deliver on time. But you know, he still had a reputation that he made and etched in the arena of Hollywood.
Knox: But that was after the film with [Goddard] right?
Michael Mailer: That was after, but the [Goddard] thing was a disaster. Not through any fault of his but Goddard went off and did his own thing, you know.
Discussion
Lucid: You’ve given us little hints, but it is useful to try and invoke for a second a certain totemic identity that you know of and developed in our time with respect to film and especially with respect to money and film. What Michael just said rang a bell with me. The first truth of cinema verite in films was “Wild 90” made in 67 when the verite time was based I guess more or less simultaneously we could run up to [? Park] in 67 at the Theater at the Ridge and these characters would do this after hours. Well, not to dwell on those things, but immediately because of the relative success in terms of Norman’s being excited when “Beyond The Law” got done, but neither of these constituted great financial ventures honestly …. [tape ends]
Lucid: [next side of tape]… on series of sets which were marvelous estates out at the Hamptons donated by more or less marvelous people who liked sort of the idea having a film shot on their place. The reason it happened may be partially due to the previous two enticements of the cinema verite films. But something else that happened in ‘68. ‘68, as you recall if you were around, was a difficult year. And one of the most difficult things took place almost – early in June in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The previous March Martin Luther King had been assassinated and there were other shootings as well. And a funny feeling began to develop, I think, in the culture and it was a feeling of tension with respect to the emergence of violence and in the midst of it, as many of you of course know, was a cinema verite film based upon a vision in the immediately foreseeable future from 1968 of a country which had become absolutely subject to assassination – this country – absolutely subject to assassination. That is to say, any public figure at any given time was as likely to be assassinated as not. And the only way that the almost natural process could be interfered with, at least in politics, was through the Secret Service. So the Secret Service became in this concept a power in the country – a power that wielded the effect of life and death. Norman played the part of a film director on set who is being asked by various strange people to run for president, everybody is running for president in this mythical year. Frank Sinatra is running for president and a whole range of extraordinary people. You get like California now in that sense. It was a bit of a foreshadowing of that though, of course, the assassination is not present in the California scenario. That time that was the fiction and everybody was trying so to say at that time to respond to Kennedy’s death. It was an extraordinary moment because we could see everything – after all, it was an election, we were about to have an election. So it went, that was when Richard Nixon became president. Norman’s reaction to the Kennedy assassination was to make “Maidstone” and to make it in the way that he made it, conceiving it in the way that he conceived it. It was important enough that he took his bankroll – he had a bankroll, not from his books because he spent the money from his books on various things as soon as he got it but he had a secret cache of money. We knew that Norman had been one of the founders of The Village Voice and The Village Voice prospered, it succeeded, as you know. There were shares and he had what I guess was a 1/3 share in the Voice and by 1968 the Voice was really starting to ascend, you know, in terms of its value. And his stock was worth a lot. It was worth, oh, let’s say, less than $400,000 but more than $300,000 so we called it $340,000. I believe that’s actually what it was. And he took it and sunk it in “Maidstone” and actually, of course, thought that it was a safe investment, that it was practically money in the bank [laughter]. And by the time it was through, the next one was shot in 68 in the Hamptons but I don’t think it was cut down and then finally released as a film till about 71, wouldn’t you guess?
Pennebaker: I know that after the – I don’t know what to call it – but the scene with Rip which, and I’d been walking around with Rip and the film was finished, but he’d given a speech to all the people in it saying, what a wonderful job they were about to do on editing it and these people would all be surprised to see how well they would come off. Actually, one of the things that was interesting to me about the film was the casting, again. We had John De Menil acting the part of a spy of some sort and I remember shooting him while his private jet was circling overhead to pick him up and take him back to Texas. And then we had Bob – the guy that owned the island, what was his name? – Gardiner. He had Bob Gardiner as head of the CIA who was perfect. I mean he might as well had been head of the CIA. So he got people out of nowhere who really functioned in a very realistic way and then, of course, he had this huge gaggle of starlet girls from Manhattan who were all out there to become further starlets and that was a whole other area of it. But the people we had as primary movers were people who would be primary movers in a real situation. But when he got – when they finished shooting and I was walking around with Rip and nobody bothered to tell me, that is, Rip didn’t bother to tell me that he’d worked out this elaborate plan, the idea being that nobody ever knew when they were going to be assassinated. And if you intended to assassinate somebody in a movie where you had a camera taking a picture, you couldn’t shoot a gun at them because if he didn’t fall dead, you knew it didn’t work. You couldn’t shoot a bow and arrow. You couldn’t do most of the things that assassins do. So, he’d worked out, based on – he spent some time in the Army, I think – well, it was a special corps of the police – what do they call them? MPs. And he learned how to hit somebody with a hammer.
Knox: You got to learn that? [laughter]
Pennebaker: This is his plan. I found this out years later – he didn’t bother to tell, share this with me at all before. But you hit them and you flatten it out at the last minute and it looked like you were just really squashing them dead, you know. But in fact, it didn’t hurt them at all. I was walking with him and he has this little whistle and he’s whistling and calling hawks, red tails or whatever it is that he’d thought he saw out there. And I was sort of – I don’t know why I had a camera with three loaded magazines, I had no reason to have it, the film was shot, it was all over and everybody was going home and suddenly, I see him run over and take out a hammer out of his pocket. Run over and hit Norman right on the head and you know, my first instinct would have been, should have been, to run over and stop him. But I some how unconsciously I was still in the movie and I filmed it all. I remember focusing carefully, pulling it back, getting the mother and two children. Screaming, I kept thinking, you know, Haskell Wexler had done a film called “Medium Cool” and he brought me the script and in the script he had me be the cameraman. And the cameraman is a person who, if his mother was on fire, would film it for the local news. And I said, Haskell, I can’t believe you would think this of me! I’m insulted by this, I wouldn’t play this part. And he’d already put the name down in the title. So I think if you ever go see “Medium Cool” you’ll see the cameraman is called D.A. Pennebaker. But at the time I thought, you know, I would never do that and here I am doing it. And so it took me maybe 6 months to recover and Norman was furious - for Christ’s sake stop this bastard, he’s killing me! And I’m filming it all carefully and the family is screaming in the corner. It’s a perfect scene, you couldn’t have made a better scene. And for about 6 months afterwards, I sort of mulled it over and thought, what happened to me there, where did I lose it? And then Rip – he came up to Buffalo where I was teaching – and he explained the whole thing. And when I saw it, I realized that I somehow knew that this really was part of the film. And the reason I acted that way because really Norman had everybody in the state of abject fear. And it wasn’t that they were was so much frightened of him but he wielded this authority within that film. When he has a meeting and he’s saying, he’s got everybody dressed up and they’re all in there, and there’s a mob of people, and they’re all held as if they’ve been paralyzed or hypnotized. And I thought, this is the thing that you were talking about – he had this sway over everyone in that film and we couldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop the film because he was somehow at the center of it. Even though I’m watching him be destroyed in front of me – it was a really strange thing. It took me a while to sort of figure – and then afterwards, he said, all right, Rip, fuck you – I’m going to cut you out of the film and you’re not going to be in the film at all. And Rip said, okay, and he had some remarks back. And Norman tried for that 6 months to not have him in the film but the film sagged so badly after an hour and a half that he really needed that. And he finally came to terms with it and later, you know, you kind of learn something about film making that I think drove him into narrative film, I think. The thought of losing these fierce and terrible kind of powers on a group of people, he realized that you had to pay somewhere.
Knox: The fact of the matter is, after he made “Tough Guys Can’t Dance” he told me he loved being a director. He said the power I have over everybody on the set, I’m the boss. He said, I would love to be a director. He said, a little late in my life to start, I’ve got things to write. But he said, I loved it! And he got it from the first pictures that we made. To have a crew, I don’t know how many of you have ever worked on a movie set, but to have a crew and cast and production people – they all depend on the director. He is the main character, the main piece. And you know, I thought about Norman and “Maidstone” I thought about Jack London who lost a lot of money on his boat, didn’t he? Created a boat and Mark Twain and the press – didn’t they go broke over things? And I thought Norman put all this money in “Maidstone” – it’s going to hurt for years. I mean taxes and all of that. So he joined, you know, a pretty good group of writers at losing money.
Lucid: That was what I was getting to, to get back to what Michael was saying about Norman’s reputation to frighten people away – financial reputation. There was something about him that people associated with losing money. And there were other things that they associated with him, too. Of course, I think that Mickey’s parallel was beautiful. Fitzgerald was another one. He had a kind of genius for losing and people ultimately began to see that as one of the most powerful things in an odd way about the – if there’s one thing we love more than winning I suppose it’s losing. We’re so much more familiar with that, you know. He’s apotheosis, the experience in many ways. That would, of course, scare away a normal person with money who’s afraid to lose it. Among other things.
Knox: You know Norman was like a spark plug in these two picture we made. And he really sparked the action. I mean without him there would have been, I think, just nothing. Just like another improvisation. But it’s amazing, this guy, no matter what he does, there’s always that spark, there’s always that flash of fire that sets everything going. We had nothing – go to the mattresses. What are you going to do? What do three guys supposedly know about, what do you talk about? You know, but he made it work. He should have been a director. I don’t man he shouldn’t have been a writer.
Michael Mailer: He actually made an interesting comment to me the other day. He said, if I were coming of age now I probably would have put my energy into filmmaking and not writing. That the visual medium allures has surpassed that of the written word. And you know, were his icons when he was starting out as a writer – Milay, Fitzgerald, Faulkner – you know now, the heroes of today are Coppola and Scorsese and Spielberg, so forth and so on. Fortunately, the written word does not hold the type of power that it used to in his generation. But, I think, this will also explain “Maidstone” because I’m sure a lot of you here haven’t seen it. The premise of the movie was that Norman was playing a character, I think he was a porn director running for president. And he invited about a hundred plus people to his island off of Long Island and I guess when people arrived, correct me if I’m wrong, they would draw either yea or nay cards from a hat and so half the people there were for his presidency and the other half were against it. And so he created this dialectic that kind of dramatically created attention to the film. And some people were so furious about the film and some people took it very seriously. A lot of people took it very seriously. And I think as Donn was pointing out, Rip – at the time, the age of the assassin was so prevalent that Rip thought, you know, well, became the assassin. He felt he was going to save the movie as well by killing the main star on camera.
Pennebaker: It was pretty bloody, it made Norman hungry if nothing else.
Lucid: It was high risk. The whole experience was a high risk experience and they had a cultural context charged with high risk. It was quite serious, actually. At the time, I couldn’t remember how seriously I thought about it. I was there doing the whole shoot – how long did that shoot last?
Pennebaker: About a week and a half. All of the many actors and actresses eager for a claim were all put up in a hotel which has since burned to the ground. But at the time it was Stanford White Hotel – a beautiful hotel, which overlooked the Sound from the dining room. And the nights in those hotels were far more vivid that anything that happened in the day, I can tell you. We should have been filming there, because everybody was just chasing their money all over the place. They were in such a state of animal anxiety that the pheromones were just covering the entire end of the island. But I don’t know if any of you ever saw a film I later did with Norman called “Town Bloody Hall” which was when he confronted, he had to keep his composure through an entire 3 or 4 hour thing in which he was attacked from every side by various members of feminist organizations that were there. One of them being Germaine Greer. They were going to do an anniversary re-showing of that film I think next spring some time. Somebody called me up, they’re going to try to get Norman to come, Germaine is apparently going to come. But when he came to see the film the first time, he came over to my studio and he said as he left, that was the night that Jill Johnson turned my hair white. And I looked up at his hair and it was, in fact, totally white. It had been light brown before that, so it was quite – it was an experience that I think had as much effect on him in terms of filmmaking as anything else he did. Has anybody ever seen this film? It’s an amazing film.
Lucid: We were actually thinking in the Society, there is a certain deterioration taking place in this conversation, isn’t there, in a way? We were actually thinking in terms of the Society of our next meeting. Not just where it would be but how we were going to conceive it. And we thought, I wonder what Germaine Greer is doing these days, you know? Why don’t we have the meeting in Town Hall in New York or not, the conference, but it’s a thought. That’s where this famous meeting took place, one of the first big public feminist meetings, it was 71. And Germaine Greer, Jill Johnson, Diane Trilling and some otherwise anonymous lovely woman who was the head of the New York chapter of NOW.
Pennebaker: Jackie Ceballos
Lucid: Quite so. And they were the four panelists and as a kind of a little touch of irony they went out and got the monster, Norman Mailer, as their moderator. And united they fell upon him. And that’s what this man’s organization filmed that night.
Pennebaker: We filmed it very badly but I think he acquitted himself so well. I can remember moments when I was filming him and I’m listening to him and thinking, now I must ask him what he means by that. And I’m supposed to be just filming it. But he quite caught my imagination in that meeting because everybody there determined that he was the person that they would love to hate. And, in fact, I think the majority of them couldn’t. He acquitted himself so well, so dangerously well, that it really interesting. You never quite knew what he was going to say, but you had a feeling it would be even-handed. It took lots of people – it took their breath away. Of course, everybody was there. It was the intelligentsia of New York having it off in that old theater over there.
Question: Did Robert Altman see “Maidstone” before he made “Nashville.”
Pennebaker: Well, he didn’t ask me about it, but he may have asked Norman, I don’t know. I have no idea.
Question: I wonder if you have other [garbled]
Knox: If there was a director around who would have seen it, it would have been Altman, I think. He would have made a point to have seen it. I say, if there’s any director in Hollywood who would have wanted to see “Maidstone” it would have been Altman. So he might have seen it, he keeps in touch.
Question: [garbled]
Knox: Oh, that’s right, yeah. Altman’s doing a new one called “Paint” that’s got everyone very excited. It’s all going to be about painters in Manhattan. He’s around circulating it now.
Question: Are these movies available in VHS? DVD?
Pennebaker: They’re all sort of available but there isn’t what you’d call a large merchandising plan afoot. It’s curtailed – but they’re all available, you can see them.
Question: On VHS?
Pennebaker: Well, VHS or it’s going to be DVD, that’s the only way anybody’s going to get this stuff together.
Question: [garbled]
Pennebaker: Oh, I don’t know. He was very proud of that and he brought me a copy of it when he finished it. And there was a little problem – he had a longer version and they wouldn’t let the longer version be on TV and he used it in Europe. And he made me look at the long version so I wouldn’t see the short one first. It was a very, it was marvelous thing. I think that was done quite differently. Our thing was like a party, we’re going to have some party, bring some beer. You know, it was as simple as that. And we showed up. I mean he had me dressed up as a policeman and he was telling me what a Protestant policeman I looked like. I have no idea what it was about but I remember at the time, you know, you did whatever he said. If you wanted to be a policeman, you became a policeman.
Question: I once read somewhere that Joan Didion wrote a script.
Pennebaker: Yes, she did. And I don’t know whatever happened.
Male: It’s in the archive.
Lucid: We’ve got the script. Norman vetoed it, he said it was no good.
Question: This may be a little tangential, but Norman as a director. I remember seeing [garbled] and Norris was in it, I think. Just wondered what other directions …
Pennebaker: That was the Harlow film, right? That was marvelous, I remember that. I think it was one of the few times he did an actual play. I know I went to see that with Buzz.
Lucid: [Strong Head] was the film they are talking about. It wasn’t Harlow, it’s Marilyn Monroe. He didn’t, Norman didn’t direct the successful Theater at the Ridge production of “The Deer Park” – a guy name Leo Garrett was the director of that. They were locked in deadly anger and debate every night. But Garrett directed it. I don’t think that there were many stage productions that Norman directed. Mike?
Michael Mailer: Well, Norman did direct last year “Don Juan in Hell” with Gore Vidal. It was – I was there for most of the rehearsals, I played a minor role in it. And I would say that that was Norman at his very limits of his patience with Gore, who was always poking him with little needles reminding him of various things. And then he directed with Steve Mailer in his one-night performance of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” So he still has the urge.
Lucid: In a sense, I suppose Barry’s question is how does this work with Norman Mailer the writer? What the hell is the refraction, you know, that brings it back to the page, that page of his which remains so powerful. That’s a nice question, isn’t it. It obviously works in some ways for him.
Pennebaker: We had a discussion once about the whole difference, well between theater and film. And in a way it was trying to get outside of writing of books. My favorite book of his, of course, I don’t like to usually admit it but it’s the one about the Egyptians. What’s it called – “Ancient Nights?”
Lucid: Ancient Evenings.
Pennebaker: I love that book. And one day he said to me, it’s my tribute to – I don’t know if he really meant it. But the difference between what happens in a theater when a play is on, when an audience is watching something happen on the stage and what happens in the theater when they’re watching it on the flat screen. And you would say, well, it’s like looking at the moon, how big is it? Your mind tells you what to do. But it isn’t, it’s different because – and this is interesting, we’ve thought about it when we did Wild 90, the rationale of trying to do it a certain way. If you shoot a feature film the way it’s shot is everything is scripted. The actors all say their lines and they have chalk marks to hit in certain moments. And the camera is also scripted. It’s told what to do and it does it. And everybody watching it, watches it not as an audience but watches it as the camera, which is already doing what it’s supposed to do. So there are no corners to go around, no surprises that are generated. Whereas in a theater, on the stage, the lines, of course are set, everybody enacts, but they enact to each other and you watch it, not as a camera which is a scripted, but as an audience which is making up your mind every minute. And deciding where to look, who’s got what importance in this scene. And I might be different in any performance of this same play. Well, that energy, the thing that happens at that moment is really what we are trying to do in what is – not my name, somebody else’s – cinema verite. When you’re seeing real people respond to each other, enact with each other and you’re not sure of what they’re going to do and the camera in this case, is an audience because the cameraman doesn’t know what to do. He has no places to go with the camera. He’s watching but he happens to be watching through a camera. And it’s that watching, that energy generated by watching that was interesting to us and we wanted to get into those films. The problem is, it’s very rough. People don’t go to movies to see watching this, they go to see their local celebrity, you know, whoever it is that week or that year. And in general, that’s what drives people into theaters to make a lot of money, to rationale the reason for investing in it. So, I think Norman was going – I don’t’ think he was fooling around with losing. I understand what you’re saying and it’s interesting – that never occurred to me. What he was trying to do, I think, was get around the bullshit that is generated by narrative film because of the way it’s done and get at something which he felt, and I think he was right, that he could predict a kind of political concept. You could predict that people who were celebrities were going to start getting elected to be president. Because celebrity was the coin of our culture. People would trade celebrity for money any day. And so, I think he felt this is an important thing to put out into the republic and have people understand it, but you had to do it in a way that people registered, have the energy of it. You couldn’t do it in a script. You couldn’t put whoever you know, the famous actor of the moment, and have him generate that. And you could see this if you watch a show that HBO does called “K Street” – I don’t know if any of you watch it or not. But they’ve taken two people who were in a film that I did, “The War Room,” they’ve taken James Carvel and Mary Matilin and two or three other people that were all involved in getting Clinton elected president. But now they have them sitting around, they’re doing nothing. That’s the problem with it, they’re not doing anything. They’re talking the talk, they’re acting great, they’re better actors than most of the actors they bring in. But it’s not about anything, there’s no cause or reason for it. So it’s like you’ve taken all the juice and you have this dry duck preserved for you. But it’s too bad because it is interesting that they’re trying to experiment with the quality of “I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” But in order – Norman had it – I don’t know what’s going to be happening next, but you better watch but it’s goddamn well done and it has to do with you. And the idea of …
[tape ends]
The 2003 panels: Mailer and Magazines · Mailer and Film · Working with Mailer