"The Fabelmans" review, The Age of Movies

Any Spielberg fan knows these beats: an early fascination with cinema; the move to Arizona; a difficult parental dynamic, with a driven father and loving-but-conflicted mother; ambitious 8mm films made with sisters, neighbors, and anyone else willing to lend a hand; a much less pleasant move from Arizona to California; teenage years fueled by creativity, but also impacted by a feeling of outsider status; and, ultimately, the first steps into a world he would eventually dominate. The Fabelmans checks all boxes, but it is not merely Portrait of Spielberg as a Young Man. This is also a warm, moving drama about the need to make art, whatever its cost. Sam (Gabriel LaBelle), the Spielberg stand-in, sees no other option. Filmmaking is not, as his father maintains, “a hobby.” What might be most striking about The Fabelmans is how normal the experiences of young Sam play for the audience. It begins in 1952 as Sam’s parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), bring the boy to his first big-screen movie—fittingly, the widescreen spectacle of enjoyable hokum that is The Greatest Show on Earth. What hits young Sam the hardest is the unforgettable train crash.  

Burt is a complex figure––loving yet stern, and different from Mitzi in almost every way. Burt keeps his emotions inside, whereas Mitzi is all emotion, even when it hurts. Sam carries bits of all traits, sometimes seeming closely linked to his father, other times his mother. It is fascinating to watch Spielberg pull back the curtain on his life as a child, warts and all. The entire family contributes to Sam’s filmmaking, even more so once they move to Arizona. This land of dry heat and desert is ideal for Westerns and war movies, both of which Sam makes with striking ingenuity. By this point the act of moviemaking courses through Sam’s veins. Indeed, as his mother’s brash uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) explains, the need to create art is in Sam’s genes. From this moment on Sam’s world becomes increasingly splintered. His parents face a marriage crisis and Sam discovers that the camera sometimes captures moments meant to be hidden. Things become even thornier when the family uproots once again, this time to California.

It is best not to spoil how the film concludes, but it is both surprisingly subtle and dramatically bold. Spielberg avoids the over-emotional payoff that has often upended the late stages of his recent films. What’s onscreen is only the conclusion of the first part of its protagonist’s life. So, smartly, Spielberg wraps things up with a delightful sequence and a genuinely winning final gag. Every Spielberg feature, from The Sugarland Express to West Side Story, reveals elements of its creator’s passions. Not until now, though, has Spielberg filmed what is essentially a memoir. Sam’s story is universal, but the real emotional pull from The Fabelmans comes from knowing that everything here––the short films created with “spit and glue,” the family strife, even high school bullying––led to an ability to create some of the most successful and beloved movies ever made. Source: slantmagazine.com

When we go to a play or a movie we expect a heightened, stylized language; the dull realism of the streets is unendurably boring. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings. We learn to dread Hollywood “realism” and all that it implies. Maybe you just want to look at people on the screen and know they’re not looking back at you, that they’re not going to turn on you and criticize you. I think violence is objectionable when it makes you identify with the killer. There’s a lot of violence at the beginning of The Grand Illusion, but you’re appalled by it. Whereas in a Clint Eastwood movie, you identify with the guy with the biggest gun, not the victim. That’s a big difference emotionally. I’ve walked out on movies I found hopeless. Harold Pinter’s Betrayal drove me crazy—people talking in these precise phrases over and over again. Fellini’s Casanova drove me out too. I mean, you’re still a human being, even if you are a critic.

I thought the first half of Conspiracy Theory (1997) was terrific, then it fell apart. Movies often start with a fascinating situation that they don’t know how to resolve. Directors are very manipulative people. They have the opportunity to be cruel and domineering, and can’t resist it. The different elements that go into movies—music, cinematography, actors, design—get to you very strongly. That’s why so many educated people disapprove of movies; they’re not used to giving themselves over to that much emotion. They prefer the distance they can keep in legitimate theater. Part of the appeal of movies is the sensuality of the actors and actresses—their faces give us pleasure. The symmetry of their beauty is often very appealing. They’re more beautiful than the people we see in life, and they give us standards of beauty and feeling. 

Their emotions can transform us. Someone like Greta Garbo opened up a generation of moviegoers to a kind of sensuality they didn’t experience elsewhere. There’s something about a great actress on screen that can be extraordinary. Garbo had something else plus beauty. When you watch her in the scene in A Woman of Affairs, where she inhales a bouquet of roses, you think you’ve never seen anyone inhale so completely. It’s not comparable to what goes on the stage. –"The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael" (2011) by Pauline Kael and Sanford Schwartz 

Deeper Into Movies, Numbing the Audience

"I Have Always Depended On The Kindness Of Strangers." —Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) directed by Elia Kazan, based on Tennessee Williams's play (1947)

According to the Department of Psychology from Georgetown University, in a recent study revised on October 26, 2022, findings suggest that highly altruistic individuals believe that others deserve help regardless of their potential moral shortcomings. Results provide preliminary evidence that lower levels of cynicism motivate costly, non-normative altruism toward strangers. Perceiving strangers at baseline as deserving of help may be an important factor, with perceptions of others’ benevolence versus malevolence being particularly influential in various forms of prosociality (Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998). For example, higher levels of generalized interpersonal trust and lower levels of cynicism are associated with more prosocial behavior (Turner & Valentine, 2001). We thus assessed whether altruism toward strangers may be correlated with generally favorable perceptions of others’ benevolence or lack of malevolence using the Belief in Pure Good (BPG) and Belief in Pure Evil (BPE) scales. Beliefs about others’ benevolent versus malevolent goals, intentions, and traits have been linked to self-reported measures of prosociality and antisociality (Webster & Saucier, 2013). We also considered the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs, and belief in pure good is correlated with religiosity and Christian devoutness (Webster & Saucier, 2013). Little is yet known about the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs in extraordinary altruism. One study found that 37% of those who have considered altruistic acts cited spiritual beliefs as a motivation (Henderson et al., 2003). But in another investigation, only 17% of individuals who have actually altruistic cited religious reasons––despite more than half of participants having described themselves as religious (Massey et al., 2011). We predicted that altruists would endorse greater belief in human benevolence and less belief in human malevolence. Given the observed relationship between self-reported empathy and belief in pure good (Webster & Saucier, 2013), we also accounted for empathy in our models. Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Ellen Dowling (who performed as Blanche's sister Stella on Broadway) suggested that Elia Kazan should use the ambiguity evident in the play to their advantage, where Blanche and Stanley alternate roles of protagonist and antagonist. John Timpane, a theater and fine arts critic, in June Schlueter’s Feminist Rereadings of Modern America Drama (1989), posits that reading A Streetcar Named Desire from a feminist perspective actually heightens the ambiguity, deconstructing the audience's responses. As John Timpane notes, ambiguity is not necessarily an artistic failure and may even be intentional in this case: “in a way, ambiguity is a hedge against annihilation.”  

Jessica Tandy was originally slated to play Blanche DuBois, after creating the role on Broadway. The role was given to Vivien Leigh (after Olivia de Havilland refused it) because she had more box-office appeal. John Garfield had turned down the role of Stanley Kowalski because he didn't want to be overshadowed by the female lead, Vivien Leigh. 

Vivien Leigh, who suffered from bipolar disorder in real life, later had difficulties in distinguishing her real life from that of Blanche DuBois. Although Vivien Leigh initially thought Marlon Brando to be crass and affected, and he thought her to be impossibly haughty and prim, both soon became friends and the cast worked together smoothly. Despite giving the definitive portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando said he privately detested the character. Tennessee Williams's letter to Audrey Wood, mid-June 1947: "Both Kazan and me had John Garfield in mind for the part of Stanley Kowalski. Kazan and Garfield went way back to the 30s, in the days of the Group Theatre. But Garfield balked at the idea of coming back for an open-ended run which would keep him out of Los Angeles indefinitely. So although the trade papers announced that Garfield had signed on to play Stanley (in early August), that was not actually the case. Garfield only wanted to do it for four months, a limited run, and he also wanted to be guaranteed the role should it be made into a film. Irene Selznick turned Garfield down, and so they had to, again, look for another Stanley." 

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 25, 1947: "I am willing to accept the bungling of the Garfield deal and the nerve-wracking battle that was waged to secure the right director, but when arbitrary action is taken interfering with my irreductible rights as an author, I’m not going to take it. It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed and I strongly suspect that good management would have signed him. George Beban was flown out here from the Coast and read for me this morning one scene. His body movements were stiff and self-conscious without grace and virility, which the part calls for and it made me more bitterly conscious than ever of how good Garfield would have been. That leaves us with Marlon Brando, of the ones that have been mentioned to date." 

Brando’s feeling that the play was a size too big for him was intensified by the knowledge that John Garfield had been the first choice. He couldn’t get that out of his head, the anxiety that he was second-banana. He would mutter, “They should have gotten John Garfield” in the middle of rehearsals when he was struggling. His insights into the character of Stanley, however, are invaluable. Theatre producer Robert Whitehead said about Brando in the play: "There were no previous models for Brando. His relationship to the poetic reality of Williams was particularly embracing; what Tennessee wrote, in relation to Brando’s sensibility, it all worked." Dakin Williams (Tennessee Williams’ brother): "Blanche is actually Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn’t be necessarily true. As Blanche says in Streetcar, ‘I don’t tell what’s true, I tell what ought to be true.’ And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee." 

"East of Eden" and "Splendor in the Grass" both deal with America's puritanical streak and the latter film, in particular, addresses excessive capitalism, its recklessness and potential to produce destructive consequences. "A Face in the Crowd" questions the American public's gullibility and its fascination with celebrity, fame and power.   

Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando in "On The Waterfront" (1954) directed by Elia Kazan. "On the Waterfront" can be read as Kazan's attempt to account for his willingness to comply with HUAC's demands by having his alter ego, Terry Malloy, move from informing to a metaphorical crucifixion and redemption to becoming a hero figure to his peers. Unfortunately, for Kazan, life didn't imitate art. —"Criticism on A Streetcar Named Desire" (2003) by John S. Bak

"In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business part was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had—zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. They were part of a different America. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. The big change in this country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all. There has always been a megalomaniac potential in moviemaking, and in this period of stupor, when values have been so thoroughly undermined that even the finest directors with the most freedom aren’t sure what they want to do, they often become obsessive and grandiloquent. Perpetually dissatisfied with the footage they’re compulsively piling up, they keep shooting—like mad royalty, adding rooms to the palace. Megalomania and art become the same thing to them. But a lot of people around them are deeply impressed by megalomania. 

We don’t know what we’re reacting to anymore, and, beyond that, it’s becoming just about impossible to sort out the con from the truth because a successful con makes its lies come true in this business. Movies are now being pushed in the school system because the number of paid movie admissions per year is about a fourth of what it used to be. Actually, something has gone terribly wrong with movies. I think it can be said that the public no longer goes to them with much expectation of pleasure. Even college students don’t go to many new movies and often they prefer old movies on television (they say they have a better time watching classic movies). Most movies these days are made (seemingly) for nobody; the proportion of movies that fail commercially is at an all-time high, and they often fail mercilessly sometimes on the opening day of a first-run movie a theater does not sell a single ticket—so that investing money in movies is becoming a fantastic long-shot gamble against public apathy. The problem may lie in the attitudes that permeate new films; even when they’re relatively clever and fast-moving, one is likely to come out depressed rather than refreshed, feeling disagreeable or angry. 

Is this perhaps because the moviemakers don’t have the respect for the audience essential to the creation of satisfying theatrical experiences? Many of the men who have been quickest to take advantage of the flux since the conglomerate takeovers are those with the cunning to exploit the current low mood of the young movie audience (as in Joe) or with the strong, shallow egos to convince the shaken-up studio heads that they know what the youth market will buy. The rising hacks now making deals have taken over some of the coarsest attitudes of the moguls of yore and have left out one vital ingredient of old picturemaking. It used to be understood that no matter how low your estimate of the public intelligence was, how greedily you courted success, or how much you debased your material in order to popularize it, you nevertheless tried to give the audience something. That was the principal excuse for all the story conferences and the restrictions inflicted on the writers and directors by the producers, and even though this excuse was the basis for crippling some talented writers, their excuse wasn’t totally false. It seems a little silly to have to point this out, but the assumption that a movie was supposed to do something for the audience was a sound one. 

The greatest filmmakers—like D.W. Griffith and Jean Renoir—were the men and women who not only wanted to give the audience of their best but had the most to give. This is also, perhaps, the element that, combined with originality and temperament, makes the greatest stars and enables them to last—what links Louis Armstrong and Laurence Olivier and Bette Davis. In the new, fluid movie situation, with some of the obstacles gone, it should be easier for artists to give everything they have; that’s what freedom means in the arts. Working at one’s peak capacity, going beyond one’s known self, giving everything one has, makes show business, from time to time, art. Good hack work could be done under the old system, because even when you worked beneath your full capacity—grinding your teeth in frustration—you could still do an honest job, respectful of the audience’s needs, and some fine American movies were made as plain, honest jobs of hack work. But the American audience outgrew the conventional genre films. The familiar patterns whose unfolding once gave the audience such anticipatory pleasure and such nostalgic satisfaction in the formal closing began instead to turn the new audiences derisive, and so the western heroes became camp figures who grew old (as John Wayne in True Grit) or Freudian-freaky (as in the Burt Kennedy westerns), or escaped to other countries (as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). 

But substituting the clichés of Madison Avenue militancy for the middle-class banalities is a disaster at every level; in Europe a movie like The Strawberry Statement may be considered politically daring, but we here can recognize it for what it is—the twin of that teenage-magazine pitch for the youth market. The old film romances may have been grandiose, but at least they bound us together by reminding us of our common fantasies. Exploitation “message” movies like The Strawberry Statement, the brash, confident Getting Straight, and the Stanley Kramer's political drama R.P.M. are more offensive. No contemporary American subject provided a better test of the new movie freedom than student unrest. It should have been a great subject: the students becoming idealists and trying to put their feelings about justice into practice; the relationship between boredom and activism; and what Angus Wilson wrote: “Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity.” Instead, we’ve been getting glib “statements” and cheap sex jokes, the zoomy shooting and shock cutting of TV commercials, plus a lot of screaming and ketchup on the lenses. 

These movies took the recently developed political consciousness of American students, which was still tentative and searching and necessarily confused, and reduced it to simplicities, overstatements, and lies. In the standard Hollywood vulgarizing tradition, the theme of student revolution was turned into a riot-movie fad, polished off now by Stanley Kramer’s grandstanding liberalism in his R.P.M. Though Anthony Quinn, as an acting college president, is the hero, and the movie is meant to show primarily the Kramer old-warrior-liberal side, the movie, for all its jabber of hating violence, nevertheless heads right toward it, just like Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement. The directors present violence as the students’ only courageous course of action, not because it arises out of the given issues but because of their crudeness as moviegoers—because they want the smash finale of a big-production-number violent confrontation. They change their rhetoric but not their styles: Richard Rush’s carnage in Getting Straight is just like his carnage in the wheeler The Savage Seven.

In an article in the New York Times, Israel Horovitz explained that he didn’t write the screenplay of The Strawberry Statement for radicals. From his ideas (“Isn’t it strange that man could invent wealth but never find a way to spread it around?”), he seems to be a sophistic Andy Hardy. He wrote the movie, he tells us, to radicalize a typical fifteen-year-old girl in his home town. His article could almost be a classic New Left Hollywood parody. How is it that, unlike the writers on the Andy Hardy pictures, who knew they were hacks when they wrote down to the audience, Mr. Horovitz does not know? How is it that Richard Rush and his scriptwriter, Robert Kaufman, do not know that when they reject criticism of Getting Straight by appealing to the court of those “lined up every night in record numbers” they are giving the same old Hollywood answer, and that when they gild it with the information that these queues are composed of “the new generation of moviegoers who have taken film as their own medium, as their personal art form and instrument of communication” they are talking the Hollywood-speak of Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck? Horovitz didn’t appeal to the court of the public, because The Strawberry Statement was a flop, but Rush and Kaufman had a hit, so they claimed that the public knows best.

The avowed aim of most of the new film men is to shatter the complacency of the audience. Michael Sarne, the director of Joanna and Myra Breckinridge, threatens us with more of the same until “some compromise is achieved between the generations and races, classes, and warring factions.” He and the others justify everything in their movies with slick revolutionary catch phrases; they are, they tell us, attacking the bestiality of our time by making brutal movies, attacking the shoddiness of American culture by shoving shoddiness down our throats. Their movies become our punishment, and the worse their movies turn out, the more self-righteously they explain that it was just what we deserved. They’re shaking up Middle America! The press reception at which the announcement was made was Sterling Silliphant’s first in New York since he left the helm of the Twentieth Century-Fox publicity department in 1953. “This time,” he quipped, “I’m on the other side of the fence.” He isn’t; he’s still in the same business, whether he writes publicity or makes movies. Madison Avenue sells attacks on Madison Avenue the same way conglomerate-appointed studio heads grow beards and serve up the terrorist, utopian thinking that they hope will appeal to young ticket buyers.

The movies that are popularly considered the best movies at any given time may or may not be important movies—but they touch a nerve, express a mood that is just coming to a popular consciousness, or present heroes who connect in new ways. They not only reflect what is going on in the country but, sometimes by expressing it and sometimes by distorting it, affect it, too—such movies as The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, On the Waterfront, Morgan!, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider. Movies like these enter the national bloodstream, and, at the moment, the few big movies seem to do so faster than ever before, and more directly—maybe because that “best-educated” generation in history is so nakedly vulnerable to whatever stirs it emotionally. This susceptibility, rather than “visual literacy,” is the distinctive trait of the “film generation”; they go back to re-experience the movies they identify with, re-entering into them with psychodrama. Easy Rider was a mainliner, tapping a vein of glamorous suicidal masochism. At least, Medium Cool and WUSA were honest.

Joe is so slanted to feed the paranoia of youth that at its climax (a reversal of the Sharon Tate case), when the young hippies are massacred by the “straight” adults—the blue-collar bigot Joe and a liberal advertising man—members of the audience respond on cue with cries of “Next time we’ll have guns!” and “We’ll get you first, Joe!” The apprehensiveness that one feels throughout Joe—the sense of violence perpetually about to erupt—makes it effective melodrama but also makes it an anxious, unpleasant experience. I had some doubts about the use of melodramatic techniques on the serious political theme of Costa-Gavras's Z, but the director seemed reasonably responsible; in Joe the manipulation of the audience is so shrewdly, single-mindedly commercial that it’s rather terrifying to sit there and observe how susceptible the young audience is. Since the assassinations, there’s been a general feeling of powerlessness, and what gives Joe some of the validity that the audience reacts to is that so many lies have finally resulted in many young people’s not knowing how to sort things out, not caring, and not believing anything. 

They go numb, like the young girl in Joe looking vaguely for some communal Eden where those without hope can cling to each other, and they accept and prefer their loser self-image, not wanting to believe that anything good can happen to them. They don’t make it happen; they won’t even let it happen. Joe, written by Norman Wexler (another former advertising man), preys on this stoned hopelessness and martyrdom in a congratulatory way, and feeds the customers a series of tawdry cliches about the hypocrisy and rottenness of the straight world. Its message is that it’s all crap. The few new movies that the “film generation” responds to intensely are the most despairing about America. It’s a bad combination." —"Numbing the Audience: Deeper Into Movies" (1973) by Pauline Kael

Tennesse Williams' Ode to Geraldine Page

Unrelenting standards schema is the feeling of pressure that comes from perfectionism, the feeling that nothing is ever good enough, with the constant demand to do more making you feel flawed. A June 2022 study appearing in Personality and Social Psychology compared perfectionism to just working with set goals for excellence, and found surprising results: Perfectionism leads to worse outcomes, not better. In fact, other studies reveal that, not only does perfectionism bring worse results, it also can make you miserable and that your life is lacking in creativity and less fulfilling (Brown and Beck, 2002). Perfectionism means being stuck with standards that are always too high, and anxiously focusing on them. Autism with co-occurring exceptional cognitive ability is often accompanied by severe internalizing symptoms and feelings of inadequacy. There is evidence that suicide risk is partly genetic in nature, with heritability estimates ranging from 17 to 55% Some evidence for potential mechanistic overlap between the biology of suicide and of autism comes from a study that identified mutations in a well-known autism risk gene, NRXN1, as increasing risk for suicide (William et al., 2021). In a general population study (which included autistic individuals) increased polygenic risk for autism was found to be positively associated with suicidal thoughts. Furthermore, autistic children with suicidal thoughts inherit more genetic risk factors for self-harm ideation than expected (Warrier & Baron-Cohen, 2021), lending further evidence to potential shared biological mechanisms between suicide and autism. Unrelenting standards schema begins at the pre-verbal level, as you take in the non-verbal case of attachment, before you are fully comfortable with expressing yourself through talking. This means that perfectionism is felt in the body, as much as it goes along with perfectionist thinking. Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Tennessee Williams admitted: "I write out of love for the South. It once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember—a culture that had grace, elegance, an inbred culture, not a society based on money. I write out of regret for that. I write about the South because I think the war between romanticism and the hostility to it is very sharp there."  Williams, wrote Gore Vidal, "could not possess his own life until he had written about it." Although he was rarely forthcoming about his sexuality, homosexual love was “spiritual champagne” for Williams, and a way to short-circuit depression. About his drinking Williams lied routinely that he was on the wagon when it was clear that liquor had got him licked. The tragedy was that Williams was a liability to anyone who cared about him; ultimately only his writing mattered. Williams was both the protective/destructive Stanley Kowalski, and also the gentle, spiritual but manipulative sensualist Blanche Dubois. As Elia Kazan well understood, "Blanche DuBois is Williams. I saw Blanche as Williams, an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it, because it threatens his life." By 1969, his brother Dakin had him committed to a mental institution, a decision which quite clearly saved the playwright’s life; to show his thanks, Williams wrote Dakin out of his will.

Williams never failed to ask Geraldine Page how things were operating on the stage, both with plays in which she starred and with those he would beg her to read. Page, in a fashion similar to that employed by Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, had an ability to shift the focus of a play toward its leading female character. “She recognized that the women I had written into my plays, and which I had asked her to play, were the center of the play, the scaffolding of the building I had constructed,” Williams said. "She has the mind of a writer, which is the highest compliment I could pay her. She was also unafraid of honesty or silence, two things I always think of when I think of her. She didn’t need approval or find comfort in empty conversations that bond people together. She had an understanding of why we were all gathered together to create theater that I have only found in perhaps two or three other people. I didn’t think of leaning on Gerry’s shoulder or calling her up in the middle of the night for comfort and a few laughs. But I would call her—and I have called her—to remind me of why we do this, why we matter, why we have to get it right. She lives the poetry she cannot write. I write the poetry I cannot live.” 

“I’m a dreamer, I anticipate events, emotions, and I am often disappointed. I could learn so much from her. She took my writer’s dream and melded it with images and feelings of her life. I think of Geraldine Page as the finest, sharpest needle, capable of piercing any dream fabric and creating any number of patterns. She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations, and in that first encounter with her in 1952, she let me know that Summer and Smoke, on Broadway, had been two of her least favorite things: thoughtless and unclear. And I agreed with her. Her emotional intensity has been compared to a singer capable of holding a particular note for an astonishingly long time, leaving an audience on edge, wondering if the artist can survive such a commitment, then marveling when the note ends and a new note is pursued, held, conquered.”

Williams expounded: "We destroy ourselves every day, and then we rebuild. Some of us can survive this damage and use it to good effect—through work or sympathy or charity or awareness. I do not have this ability, and my failure to be a good steward of my talent led to some clashes with Geraldine, who is a fearsome guardian of her mental theater, from which emerge her characters, which are crafted from something I can only call majestic. Hers is a titanic talent; her vision is frightening. She has an incredible intellect, and it is attached to a talent that is something like a ton of dynamite bearing a one-inch wick. It explodes frequently and beautifully, and it is lethal to be stupid in its path.” Writers, Williams explained, “create scratches on pieces of paper. We hope and we dream. We try to locate those moments in our life when things happened and we were left stranded and stunned and wondering and asking ‘Why?’ Geraldine Page poured blood and flesh into my pages—and the pages of others—and left me wondering ‘Why?’ 

Although Williams was also an admirer of Joanne Woodward, “a beautiful Southern belle, equally gifted for stage and film,” none, however, in his estimation, brought the process of thought and intention to the stage as Geraldine Page did, not even Marlon Brando. “I have never doubted the existence of God,” Williams asserted soberly. “I’ve been told that all straight lines in the universe are eventually curved and a curving line may eventually curve back to its beginning, which might be something in the nature of rebirth. After all, high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Williams had once described to Luchino Visconti the effect of watching a young and pliant James Dean dancing and swaying, clad in a robe and bearing scissors, taunting an unyielding yet clearly amused Geraldine Page, her back hard but her eyes eagerly taking in Dean’s allure. Clearly, Williams was jealous of Dean, a paradox due to his homosexuality. But maybe Williams was in love with Page. The play was The Immoralist, based on the novel by André Gide; and to the play’s director, Daniel Mann, Page described, from her reading of Gide’s work, a religion of male beauty to which she nightly converted and submitted. When she looked at James Dean on that stage, he was her God, his body her Eucharist, and her soul empty and ready to be filled with his gifts. Offstage she found Dean to be gifted but undisciplined and spoiled. —Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (2015) by James Grissom

James Dean may not have had the career he had -- he certainly would not have made the pictures he did -- if it had not been for one woman, Geraldine Page. They were both members of the Actors Studio, but they became close in late 1953, when they were cast in The Immoralist, Ruth and Augustus Goetz's adaptation of Andre Gide's novel. From the first day of rehearsal, December 18, 1953, there was trouble. Page and Jourdan clashed, while Dean was rattled by insecurity and fear. "Jimmy was very nervous and frightened," recalled Salem Ludwig, an understudy and the show's Actors Equity Association representative. "He overcame his fear by pretending to be a tough guy. He was young, and this show was a big step in his career." The new director was Daniel Mann, who fixed the staging but failed to recognize Dean's paralyzing terror. The young actor's lack of confidence caused him to act out, demanding attention from those around him. The situation reached a breaking point one day, until Dean finally spun around, retrieved his jacket, and stalked out of the theatre. Rose, who watched the episode unfold from the empty auditorium, decided to fire Dean. There was only one problem. Page wouldn't stand for it. "My mother," Angelica Page said, "told the director and the producer, 'You're letting pure gold walk out of that door. If he's not in this show, I'm not in this show.' She meant what she said, too. If Jimmy was not going to be there on opening night, she wasn't either."

Rose must have believed her: Dean was not fired. But Page still had to make sure Dean didn't quit. "I got a call from Geraldine that Jimmy was in her room," Ludwig recalled. "I went up and there was Jimmy sitting there, furious, ready to kill someone. 'Jimmy, what happened?' I said. 'I didn't want to get in a fight,' he said, 'so now I'm packed and ready to go.' I said, 'You can't do that. Nobody will hire you in the future.' He said, 'I don't care. I'm leaving.' "Then I said, 'Jimmy, there are six blacklisted actors in this show who haven't worked in a long time. If you walk out and the show closes, they're out of a job,'" Ludwig said. "There was a pause. Soon tears started to flow down Jimmy's cheeks and he said, 'I'll do it.'" Dean did well in the Philadelphia tryouts, but he hit his stride in New York previews. Elia Kazan saw the last preview and sought out Dean after the show to offer him a lead role in East of Eden, complete with a Warner Bros. contract. So, on opening night, after turning in a stunning performance, Dean handed Rose his two-week notice. None of this would have happened, of course, if Page had not put her professional reputation on the line and threatened to quit the show if Rose fired Dean. When the conflict with Dean developed, Rose may not have realized the situation had both professional and personal implications for Page. Starting around the time of the first rehearsal and continuing into the play's New York run, she and Dean had been having an affair. The attraction was obvious. Beautiful and captivating, Dean projected a powerful sexual appeal, while, with her classic leading-lady looks, Page radiated her own allure.

As if to create mementos of the affair, Dean made freehand drawings for Page, which he did only for those people about whom he cared deeply. A talented amateur artist, Dean enjoyed drawing informal sketches on the backs of napkins and sheets of paper. Page cherished the drawings, putting them for safe keeping in a small, white envelope on which she wrote: "Please save these masterpieces for me by Mr. James Dean." "According to my mother, their affair went on for three-and-a-half months," Angelica Page said. "In many ways my mother never really got over Jimmy. It was not unusual for me to go to her dressing room through the years, obviously many years after Dean was gone, and find pictures of him taped up on her mirror. My mother never forgot about Jimmy -- never. I believe they were artistic soul mates." In Being James Dean, I note the affair ended when Dean went to California to shoot East of Eden. Dean's talent might have taken him to Hollywood anyway, but if Page had not kept him in The Immoralist he would not have gone there when it did by landing the part in East of Eden. As it happened, not quite 18 months later, he would be dead, having created a small but memorable body of work that has made him an enduring icon. —"The Woman Who Made James Dean a Star" (2016) by Paul Alexander

An Evening With Marilyn, Myth of Support

An Evening With Marilyn is a new novel in German, from actress turned author Maxine Wildner, reimagining the night of Marilyn’s last birthday. Maxine’s prior subjects include Hilde Knef, the German actress who began her Hollywood career alongside Marilyn in 1946. The cover art features a 1953 photo by Gene Kornman. “Marilyn Monroe, the sex symbol of a generation, the abandoned child, the underrated actress who drove her directors mad – two months before her death, Marilyn celebrates her 36th birthday in a New York restaurant. Everyone is there: Billy Wilder, the comedy legend who helped Marilyn achieve her greatest successes; Laurence Olivier, who was voted the greatest actor of the 20th century and with whom she had the worst professional experiences; Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s method acting teacher; Baseball-icon Joe DiMaggio; her schizophrenic mother and even guest of honour JFK might attend. Only Marilyn is late, as usual. As drinks are served, this illustrious group makes the tragic and inexplicable life of Norma Jeane Baker a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe come to life before our eyes. It takes us from the orphanage to a forced marriage and up to the stars in the Hollywood sky. The last birthday of her life turns into an unforgettable night.” 

Marilyn is also the subject of another recent novel by German authors Nadja and Claudia Beinert, part of ‘Inspiring Women,’ a 23-volume series by various authors, with other subjects including Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Maria Callas. Focusing on the origins of her remarkable career, Marilyn and the Hollywood Stars is also available in Spanish and Italian. (The Italian cover features another Gene Kornman photo of Marilyn in her gold lamé dress.) “Los Angeles, 1942: Norma’s childhood is lonely, her refuge in the cinema, where Hollywood actresses are so much more self-confident than she is. In front of the camera, Norma sparkles with vitality, all self-doubt is forgotten. And suddenly she knows: she wants to be in the limelight, that’s the only thing that makes her happy. But first she has to emancipate herself from the prudish rules of her time in order to become who she is today: Marilyn Monroe, the greatest icon in film history.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Tennessee Williams about Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio: “Marilyn was an example of the weak children who seek a guru. Having no proper balance in her life, having no available family, having no understanding of the give-and-take that is daily life, she was drawn toward Mary Baker Eddy, Buddha, Jung, Freud, and finally, the gnomish Lee Strasberg, who specialized in adopting sexually confused women and becoming the seemingly gentle father figure they desired. Strasberg lied to her and told her she was the new Duse; he told her she should play Nina; he told her to investigate O’Neill and Shakespeare. This was all folly, because Marilyn had no understanding of her talent, and it was folly because Strasberg only wanted access to privileges from her fame. Strasberg got what he wanted. At one point the Times headlines read “The bitter battle is over—Marilyn Monroe, a five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch blonde weighing 118 alluringly distributed pounds, has brought Twentieth Century Fox to its knees. It was during Marilyn’s tenure at the Studio, and particularly after her death, that the exodus of the talented began from the Studio." 

Marilyn was also remote, cloying and demanding. She knew her power and she abused it, but in the demonstration of it, the spiral of destruction deepened and intensified. Do not think for a moment that I do not see this in my own behavior and that of others: I am only offering a sobering lesson. When we can’t imagine understanding or loving a God or some other myth of support, we attach ourselves to artistic symbols: the lost soul; the waif; the abused artist. I spoke to Arthur Miller only once about Marilyn, and it was during his exhumation of her [After the Fall, 1964]. I wondered if he was satisfied; I wondered if he had exorcised himself of her spirit, and I wondered if he had expiated his own sins. He told me he thought he could help her, yes, but he also wanted to buck the odds and be the homely, cerebral Jew who got the beauty queen; he wanted to be the bookish, pedantic, shy boy who introduced the beautiful girl to books and plays and ideas. Arthur wanted to be her savior, but he also wanted to be envied; he wanted attention; he wanted to be noticed. It’s fine to cry for Marilyn Monroe. I did, and I still do.” —Follies of God : Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (2015) by James Grissom

Paul Newman: "Joanne Woodward looked like sixty or seventy million bucks"

Joanne Woodward knew that Newman was the right guy for her, but if he refused to divorce his wife, then she'd come to terms that he was definitely wrong for her. So Joanne threw herself into her work, ignoring Newman's pleas for keeping on waiting for his big decision. Joanne gave him a six-month ultimatum, and her absence during this probing time would prove to be the catalyst needed to Newman's divorce from Jackie Witte. If Somebody Up There Likes Me  had made Paul a star, Until They Sail  turned him into a matinee idol. His role as Larry Maddox in The Helen Morgan Story was somewhere between the two. Larry could love up the women as well as the army officer in Until They Sail, but he was an amoral heel. Newman and Ann Blyth play well together and have a particularly good scene when Larry confronts Helen when she comes home drunk. Newman must have felt certain frissons of recognition as the story played out, as Helen drank at first to deal with sorrow and disappointment, then became undeniably addicted to alcohol. Newman was not ready to admit to himself that there were times he relied on liquor for hope and happiness a little too much to be healthy. 

Despite its glossy, melodramatic surface, the picture works as a study of loneliness in the show-business of the 1940s against which even money and success are no barriers. Newman, who by now knew that often the worst kind of loneliness could afflict someone trapped in an unhappy marriage and separated from the one they truly loved, identified more with Helen's character than with Larry's. At least he knew Joanne was too controlled a person to turn to drink the way he and Helen Morgan did. Michael Curtiz was never a man to praise actors unduly; while getting the best out of them, he could give them a hard time in the process. He remembered Newman as thoroughly professional and attentive: “But he wouldn’t take any sass from me or anyone else.” Curtiz recalled Newman saying something along the lines of “if criticism is honest, I’m all for it. But if it’s done just out of meanness, I’ll walk away from it.” Although Larry has romantic feelings for Helen, at the film’s conclusion he seems to undergo a complete character change, picking Helen up at the nuthouse, taking her to her old nightclub where he’s assembled hundreds of her friends, and implying that he’ll never leave her again. Earlier it’s revealed that he even sent dozens of bouquets to her and signed other people’s names to the cards so that she wouldn’t feel forgotten.

Filming another Twentieth Century-Fox loan-out, From the Terrace, Newman had to battle to get Fox to cast Joanne as his wife, just as he’d had to battle to get her the spousal assignment in Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! but at least this was a more dramatic, juicier part. In fact, Woodward as the snobby wife made Newman's ex-wife Jackie at her worst seem sylphlike by comparison. Joanne told reporters that she and Paul could get out all their own frustrations with each other by screaming at each other in character on the set. Once that was done, they could go home and make like turtledoves. Myrna Loy was appearing in a supporting role as Newman’s mother. She recalled returning to Twentieth Century-Fox, where she had made some earlier films, and discovering that her dressing room was bare. “Noticing the tributes stacked in Paul Newman’s dressing room, I realized that I was yesterday news.” But when she walked out on the set, the crew all gave her a standing ovation. They then proceeded to subject Paul to merciless teasing, asking Myrna who that “kid” she was working with was and if she was giving acting lessons on the side now. Paul took all the teasing good-naturedly. Myrna Loy told her biographer, James Kotsilibas-Davis, that “Paul Newman was very sweet about it, displaying none of the cockiness of so many young stars. He gave me a lot to work from as his dissolute mother, a real departure for me. One scene—I’m sitting in front of a mirror telling him to go for his own good—is a stunner. Paul was already a pro.” 

After the artistically bankrupt experience of Exodus (Newman couldn't convince Otto Preminger to sign Joanne on board over Eva Marie Saint), Newman was ready for the stimulating challenge of The Hustler. Eddie Felson, the pool hustler, was maybe his most memorable role. The picture was filmed mostly on location in New York City, to good advantage. The director, Robert Rossen, had a terminal illness and knew that The Hustler  would be his one of his last films. “We had three weeks of rehearsals, using television technique,” Newman said, “where you lay out tape on the floor to mark the sets.” The Hustler emerged as a very suffocating and artistic film, though pool is not exactly the most cinematic of subjects. The atmospheric, moody photography of the film illuminates the bleak, depressing vistas of poolrooms, gin joints, crummy hotel rooms, and seedy bus terminals with startling clarity. Newman is completely convincing as Eddie Felson, a character nothing like Tony Lawrence of The Young Philadelphians. Newman was a winner in his role, and Eddie despite a major moral victory at the film’s conclusion, is pretty much a loser all of the way. In an early scene, after he beats the great Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), he’s so afraid people will think it was a fluke that he self-destructively plays Fats again and again until he’s sick from fatigue and has lost all of the $10,000 he’d won. 

Newman’s acting hides clues to Eddie’s character instead of laying it all out on the line as other actors might do. That’s why the picture is nearly over before we’re sure if Eddie Felson is a good guy or a bad guy or something in between; Newman keeps us guessing about him, never playing it heroically or like Eddie was nothing more than a sleaze. Paul is very convincing when he takes the girl (Piper Laurie) to a fancy restaurant for dinner and looks awkward as hell. Newman’s climactic speech after the girl’s suicide, when in disgust he parts company with Gordon, is also excellent. Actor Don Koll worked on The Hustler and recalled: “There’s a kind of caste system in Hollywood, where stars don’t mingle with bit players,” Koll said. “It just isn’t done. But when we were on location Newman told me that it was a relief to be free of the caste system, that he could mingle with everyone and be his friendly self, because basically he’s a very down-to-earth guy.” Newman received an Academy Award nomination for his work in The Hustler. When Maximilian Schell won for Judgment at Nuremburg, Joanne’s behavior backstage was for some shockingly childish. She refused to congratulate or even speak to Schell and, in her own words, “made a spectacle of myself,” cursing and rudely denouncing the Academy and the voters. When Joan Crawford heard about it, she thought the woman who had been named after her had more serious problems than just bad fashion sense. “The impression was that Paul was a basically nice guy who was run around by the nose by his wife,” Jack Garfein, a television director that Newman had met at the Actors Studio, commented. “Did Paul ever really ask or demand that she sublimate her career or needs in favor of his? Paul was just as disappointed, more so, when he lost the award to Schell, but he was gracious. I think Joanne embarrassed him terribly that night.” 

A. E. Hotchner, novelist and long-time friend of the Newmans, thinks Garfein was wrong. “Paul really was proud, if a bit startled, by her wife's support. Their marriage was one of the few authentic in Hollywood and that stirred envy and much tongue lashing. Paul laughed about Joan Crawford thinking she was more beautiful than Joanne. Geez, Joanne was a truly beautiful woman, she was gorgeous. Paul thought Crawford was a blabbermouth and not so beautiful even in her prime.” As Paul recounted to Stewart Stern: "Joanne gave birth to our first child together, Nell, in 1959, in California. The first time as an adult I remember crying—including when my father died—was when I saw Joanne in the hospital that day, ashen, with a dry mouth and lying on a gurney, headed into an elevator on her way to the delivery room. I was so staggered. Joanne came back from the hospital wearing this bellhop hat and a very stylish dress; she looked like sixty or seventy million bucks. When Lissy was born a couple of years later, I had my camera out and took billions of pictures of her. When I think of those pictures, it reminds me how Joanne handled our babies’ introduction into our home with such class and foresight." 

Newman’s next 1961 film project was Paris Blues, in which he was again teamed with his wife Joanne. Newman and Sidney Poitier played expatriate jazz musicians in Paris who become involved with tourists Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. In Harold Flender’s novel, there was only the black couple, but Hollywood had to add a couple of whites or it was no sailing. The Newmans were attracted by the social consciousness of the piece, although the film is a bit dated about gender politics. Paris Blues was under the auspices of a production company, Pennebaker, set up by the one and only Marlon Brando, who was too occupied with other matters to push his—at that time, not too  considerable—weight around. Newman contemptuosly named him "Don Brando". Brando never took to other actors whom he considered professional rivals, like James Dean, Monty Clift or Paul Newman. 

Newman began filming the adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth a short while afterward Paris Blues. His involvement with the project had begun back in 1959 when he starred in the stage play at Tennessee Williams’s request. Richard Anderson, who’d appeared with Newman in Long Hot Summer, was appearing in The Highest Tree on Broadway at the same time and compared notes with Newman on occasion. “He revealed acting wasn’t his first choice,” Anderson said. “He was really an organization man. Explaining further, he wanted to be attached to the nuts and bolts of the game. It surprised me . . . most actors didn't have other plans.” Apparently even as early as 1959, Newman was thinking of branching out into directing and even other non-acting business pursuits, although it would be some time before any of his plans came to fruition. In the film, Newman comes off as too theatrical and self-aware and, at thirty-six, too old for the part. 

Although he does have his moments, Newman clung for dear life to the guidance Elia Kazan and Geraldine Page gave him and was too afraid to play Chance on the screen. Elia Kazan recounted to James Grissom: "Paul Newman was often unsure of his performance in the play. He never fully trusted himself as Chance Wayne. He gave some rocky performances, and I noticed that when he felt confident about his work, he ran from the theatre and hopped on his motorcycle and was gone. On the nights when he felt he hadn't done so well, he would linger at the stage door. Gerry noticed this and began to bolster him from the stage, through the performance." Tennessee Williams praised his favorite actress, saying to Grissom: "Geraldine Page is a great actress. It wasn't that she simply had talent, she had a genius, a maddening intellect that came with a supernatural vision of people. She pushed me. She made me a better writer and she made my plays better plays. Geraldine Page is all about getting it right, and just above that goal is getting it brilliant, which she does. She's a solitary genius."

The Newmans bought a house in Connecticut not far from A. E. Hotchner and his wife; Newman had become professional friends with Hotchner after he’d appeared on television in The Battler, for which Hotchner wrote the script. Hotchner did not waste time using the proximity to bring further ideas to his famous neighbor. The two men bought a boat and went fishing together, although they drank more beer than they caught fish. Ernest Lehman, who had written the fine scripts for Somebody Up There Likes Me and From the Terrace, had a new story he thought Paul would be interested in, a comedy-thriller entitled The Prize, with German bombshell Elke Sommer. 

Adapting from the novel The Prize by Irving Wallace, Lehman was hoping to create another North by Northwest, the brilliant thriller he had penned for Hitchcock. He even fashioned a scene that was to go one better than the sequence in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant evades pursuers by causing a scene at a fancy auction house. In the new scene, Newman, clad only in a towel, would heckle a speaker at a nudist colony. Edward G. Robinson plays a dual role as Dr. Max Stratman / Prof. Walter Stratman. Director Mark Robson, also of From the Terrace, gave Hitchcock's game a run for his money.

The first film Newman directed, Rachel, Rachel (1968) was inspired by a Margaret Laurence's novel entitled A Jest of God, which won the distinguished Canadian Governor-General’s Award. Joanne’s agent at the time, John Foreman, who had worked at MCA with Newman’s agent Myron McCormack, passed a copy of the book along to Joanne thinking she might be perfect for the role of the heroine, a woman in a small town who longs for love and excitement. Although this was not exactly typecasting, Woodward was often at her best playing characters with which she had nothing in common—something that was also true of Paul Newman. Paul wouldn’t read the novel at first—which was fine as far as Joanne was concerned, because she didn’t think he’d like it—but he agreed to go in with her and buy the film rights. Newman did his best to please Joanne when she got that certain look in her eye that meant she felt passionately about something. By now he often spoke of her “impeccable judgment.” To facilitate matters Newman started a new production company entitled Kayos Productions. Apparently Jodell Productions had met all its commitments, and Ritt’s and Newman’s film interests had gone in different directions. Considering the critical reaction to some of his movies, Newman figured he could probably direct as well as anyone. Besides, he’d gone to Yale to study stage direction, so at least he knew he’d be good with actors. 

The Newmans had been friends with the writer Stewart Stern since he’d written a teleplay Paul had starred in and particularly admired, Thundering Silence. Stern also did the screenplay for The Rack, as well as such notable films as Rebel without a Cause and The Ugly American. He was their first choice to turn A Jest of God into a screenplay. They got in touch with him, and he agreed to take on the project, although there were times when he nearly came to regret it. Stern would meet with Joanne and Paul at their home for story conferences by committee. Stern found that Joanne had her ideas and Paul had his, and what he had to say made little impact. Soon their story conferences metamorphosed into polite disagreements, then arguments, then finally screaming matches. One afternoon the three of them had a quarrel about whether the heroine would “pleasure” herself in bed in the prone position or face-up. Stern told them that, in essence, too many cooks were spoiling the broth and that he would work on the script with Paul or Joanne but not both of them. He stormed out of the house and went home. Now came the difficult part of finding a studio that would be willing to finance the picture. Newman was a megastar at this point, and he could probably have gotten financing for just about anything he starred in, but his wife just wasn’t as bankable. To his amazement and disillusionment, this major movie star found certain executives failing to return his phone calls. 

Newman was told by studio executives that the story was too downbeat, that it wasn’t commercial enough (which it wasn’t), that Joanne Woodward wasn’t a big enough name by then. “How about using another actress?” some inquired, gaining Newman's wrath. Newman knew that his wife’s heart was set on making this picture, and by now he wanted it for her as much as she did. She may have pressured him into getting interested initially, but he loved her and didn’t want her to be disappointed. As Stewart Stern put it with consummate insight born from years of friendship: “He is constantly trying to provide a setting where the world can see what he sees in her.” Also, Kayos Productions was going to wind up with egg on its face if it didn’t get the money to make the picture somewhere. Newman claimed that he decided to direct Rachel, Rachel because he couldn’t get anyone else to do it. Although Rachel, Rachel  is never as devastating as it could have been, it remains a picture of depth and meaning. The best line comes after surgery when the nurse tells her she’s out of danger. “How can I be out of danger if I’m not dead?” Rachel asks her.

Newman’s instincts were right in revising the screenplay and putting together so many rough cuts until it was perfect, for Rachel, Rachel is often poignant and never descends into soap opera as he was afraid it would. It was one portrait of alienation that would flourish in the next decade, with films like Five Easy Pieces or Taxi Driver. Estelle Parsons enjoyed working with Newman and was impressed by the self-effacing attention he gave to Joanne and the other actors. “He wanted to showcase his wife’s talent to maximum advantage, and he succeeded,” she said. Newman and Joanne won Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics’ Award as Best Actress and Best Director. Shortly after Rachel, Rachel was released, Newman got a strange phone call. A woman’s voice said, “You did it beautifully—what is  your name?” The woman was apparently struggling to remember who she had phoned, even though she had placed the call. When a bemused Newman told her his name, she said, “Yes, yes,” and told him it was Patricia Neal, his old co-star from Hud, calling to tell him how much she had loved Rachel, Rachel. Neal had suffered a massive stroke three years earlier and even then still had trouble remembering names of people she knew well. Newman was touched she had taken the trouble to phone him, even if he had as much difficulty expressing it as she did. 

Following the apocalyptical WUSA (1970) with low-brow fanfare like Pocket Money (1972) by Stuart Rosenberg, however, may not have been as screwy as it seemed. It may well have been a calculated attempt to win back those members of the audience—the Moral Majority and Heartland USA types who saw Newman as some kind of commie pinko. No matter how many times Newman was asked, he never gave a satisfactory answer about his reasons to make WUSA or exactly what message he was trying to get across. Robert Stone (the writer of WUSA) didn't get along with director Rosenberg. "My role was cut", explained actress Cloris Leachman, "a lot of stuff was left in the cutting room floor. The studio wasn't interested and Rosenberg gave in." —Sources: "Paul Newman: A Life" (2009) by Lawrence J. Quirk and "Paul Newman: Blue-Eyed Cool" (2022) by James Clarke