Lucking Out - James Wolcott [46]
Without moving her head, Pauline registers the peripheral blur and whispers, “Spy.”
In those days before blog reviewers who tweet insta-responses in mid-screening, the studios would have little birdies pop into the screening room to report back to headquarters on the critical reactions, as much as could be roughly measured in groans, laughter, irritable fidgeting, and silent pockets of bored indifference. (Sometimes the spy was simply a publicist doing double duty.) Given how much money had been invested in a production, it was understandable that the studio and the distributor didn’t want to fly blind into a wall of hostile reviews. Even unequipped with a special swivel head and night goggles, almost any screening-room informant would have found Pauline an easy “read.” When she was held by a film, her head was raptor-rapt, and the notes she took were few, her hand moving almost independently as if not to break the transmission chain. Laughter would lightly bubble up at the appearance of one of her favorite actors, anticipating that his presence meant we were in for a treat (her grin and George Segal’s grin would almost meet in midair), and the laughter would be sharper, caught off guard by delight, when somebody new shot up the energy, whether it was Jeff Goldblum in Next Stop, Greenwich Village or Shelley Duvall in Nashville. When Pauline fell out of sorts with the film, she would rest her face in her palm and sometimes make a vague gesture at the screen, as if to say, It’s a lost cause, or, They’ve lost their senses. Sometimes, she would give voice to exasperation, as during the screening of Welcome to L.A., when Keith Carradine wrapped a blanket around a naked Geraldine Chaplin and Pauline said, quite distinctly, “That’s the first decent act that’s been performed in this movie.” No matter how dire the movie was, professional obligation semi-dictated that Pauline stick it out for the duration, and of all the screenings I attended with her, the only time we walked out in the middle was during the eighties, the movie in question being Hal Ashby’s inexplicable, unendurable piece of slop Lookin’ to Get Out, remembered today only because it offered the first screen appearance of a little bundle named Angelina Jolie. I’m not quite certain why we bailed on that one, having stuck to the finish of films far worse, but I believe it was because, along with further evidence of Ashby’s decay, Pauline found the artistic deterioration of the film’s star (and Angelina’s father), Jon Voight, so dismaying. She had heralded him for being so sunnily alive and vigorous as the rural teacher in Conrack, and here he was starting to show the self-conscious decay of a Michael Moriarty, whose film career she pretty much destroyed with her scathing mockery of his existential clamminess in Report to the Commissioner.
There was an occasion when I solo ejected from a movie, under what I thought was justifiable provocation, though at that point I might have seized upon any opportunity to devour daylight. The occasion was a special early screening set up for Pauline and her crew of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, a pseudo-Marxist epic of oppression, decadence, and revolt that also revealed to the world Robert De Niro’s penis in its raw, shy state of nature. Gérard Depardieu’s too, though that may have been previously exposed. Given Pauline’s streaking-comet exaltation of Last Tango in Paris, 1900 arrived atop a moving pyramid of lofty expectations, its huge cast and historical canvas suggesting an unholy trinity of Sergei Eisenstein, David Lean, and Luchino Visconti, a lush panorama bursting with cherry reds of downtrodden peasants who seemed to have sprung out of the soil and debauched aristocrats trained at the de Sade Academy of the Performing Arts. Having so publicly and passionately committed to Bertolucci’s carnal vision with her Last Tango rave, Pauline was pulling