Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [159]
But the director didn’t forget that Pauline had failed to advocate for Three Women when she was in a powerful position on the Cannes jury. Marthe Keller bumped into him at Elaine’s restaurant in Manhattan not long after, and he refused to speak to her. For Keller, that was the price paid for being a juror: “You have one person who loves you forever, and you have twenty-five people who hate you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Unlike many of her colleagues, who thought it was appropriate to be entertained by press agents and publicists, Pauline maintained a strict code when it came to accepting gifts or even meals out. If she liked and respected the people, she treated them fairly—if not, she could be withering. Marion Billings, who worked on many of Martin Scorsese’s best pictures, was a publicist Pauline particularly admired. They met at a screening for Mean Streets, became friends, and for years had a regular lunch date at Armando’s, an Italian restaurant on West Seventy-sixth Street. Billings would make it clear that she was on an expense account, but Pauline never permitted her to pick up the check. “She respected me because I didn’t lie,” Billings recalled. At one point early in their friendship, Pauline gave her a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, inscribed “For Marion—and there are all those others that out of charity I haven’t mentioned, but which are engraved on our behinds instead of our hearts. Love, Pauline.” Some of the others could try their best to ingratiate themselves with her, but it didn’t work. Sally Ann Mock of The New Yorker remembered one Christmas in the mid-’70s when a steady stream of bottles of liquor and boxes of chocolates was sent to Pauline from various publicists. Mock’s job that holiday season was to pack them all up and send them back.
Michael Sragow, film critic for The Baltimore Sun, among other publications, once observed that 1977 was a pivotal year in the American movie industry—the year when film artistry quite suddenly reached a plateau as a number of changes began to make themselves felt throughout Hollywood. Pauline had guessed wrong about the long-term impact of a couple of the young-lion directors who had burst forth early in the decade, namely Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin. After three spectacular box-office successes in a row—The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon—Bogdanovich suffered three consecutive flops: Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon. Friedkin, after the enormous success of both The French Connection and The Exorcist, came up with the disappointing Sorcerer.
Another factor whose influence Pauline didn’t quite fully appreciate was the enormous box-office (and critical) success of Jaws. The danger it presented was that the blockbuster was now becoming the backbone of the industry—something upon which every studio was beginning to depend. The studios increasingly wanted the safe guarantees of audience polls, demographic studies, and bank-approved stars. Low-budget films that were deemed lacking in mass appeal were routinely denied a big marketing and publicity push and might return only a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office. The studio executives were losing confidence in their ability to build a hit on good, basic story material, making it unlikely that a M*A*S*H or McCabe & Mrs. Miller could get financing. One sign that the producers didn’t really know which direction to go in was the decline of the sort of serious contemporary subjects that had flourished only a few years ago. The great dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had dreamed of now showed every sign of being in jeopardy. The more she talked to her friends about the corrupt, moneygrubbing ways of Hollywood, the more she felt compelled to do something about the situation.
She addressed this state of affairs in an essay she wrote