Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [102]
In New York Pauline met with John Houseman, Welles’s former partner in the Mercury Theatre, who supported her in her belief that Mankiewicz was Kane’s true hero. She conducted extensive research on various film-history topics that she thought connected with Kane. Unfortunately, she didn’t do a great deal of research on the movie itself—partly because she learned that it had already been done.
At some point in mid-1969, Pauline discovered that Howard Suber, a tenure-track assistant professor in the motion picture department at UCLA, had spent years conducting intensive research of his own on Kane. Suber, in fact, started a graduate seminar devoted exclusively to the picture’s history and influence. The direction and screenplay were closely analyzed, and although Suber failed to entice Orson Welles to visit his classroom, he did succeed in arranging “guest lectures” with Kane’s film editor, Robert Wise; key grip, Ralph Hogg; Welles’s assistant at the Mercury Theatre, Richard Wilson; and the actress Dorothy Comingore, who played Kane’s second wife, the opera singer Susan Alexander. Suber had also gained access to seven drafts of the Kane screenplays, which had previously been under lock and key in the RKO studio files. Missing from the archive was “American,” the title of Mankiewicz’s original, unwieldy first draft, but eventually, Suber tracked that down as well. A pair of noted film scholars, John Kuiper and Richard Dyer MacCann, who were under contract to a small publisher to produce a book on Kane that would feature the shooting script, heard about the excellent work Suber was doing. They contacted him with a proposal to write an essay analyzing the development of the screenplay, which they would publish in their book; a three-way contract was signed, and Suber came up with a polished thirty-one-page essay.
For several years Pauline had been making regular appearances as a guest lecturer at UCLA, at the invitation of her old friend Colin Young, now the film school’s chairman. On one of these visits she met Suber, greeting him with the comment, “I hear you’re pretty good in seminars but boring as a lecturer.” Some months after he had signed his agreement with Kuiper and MacCann, Suber received a telephone call from Pauline. She told him about her contract for a book on Kane, pointing out that Little, Brown had also secured the publishing rights to the script. What was the point in having two books? she asked Suber. She suggested that the two of them each write an essay for Bantam’s book and split the money. She telephoned Kuiper and MacCann, who let Suber out of his contract. When Suber asked Pauline how his agreement with her publishers would work, she replied that she didn’t want to bother them at the moment, but she would contact them when the time was right. He agreed and, enthralled to be working on a project with America’s most celebrated movie critic, was afraid to ask for a contract between them.
Pauline sent Suber a check for a little over $375, telling him it was half of the advance she had been paid, and he turned over his research materials to her. Over the next several months he frequently queried her about formalizing their agreement with the publisher, and she invariably told him not to worry, and to trust her. Suber’s wife warned him that she thought he was being taken advantage of, but he responded, “Why would the biggest film critic in America