Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [171]
“Sweetie, you need a publicist—nobody knows you,” Pauline told Kaufman when they met at a Chinese restaurant shortly after the release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Kaufman declined the idea of a publicity push, but he and Pauline maintained a pleasant friendship for years. “She recognized that Body Snatchers was in large part a comedy,” said Kaufman. “Pauline put her finger on it. It’s meant to be playful. We had such a great time making it, and everyone connected with it had a great sense of humor.”
Not long after her review of Body Snatchers appeared, Pauline also had the opportunity to meet Cartwright in New York. They had a drink at the Plaza, and Pauline was full of questions and advice on what Cartwright might do next. James Toback joined them briefly, because Pauline wanted him to interview Cartwright for a possible role in an upcoming film. “She was obsessed with James Toback,” Cartwright remembered. “I mean obsessed. It was almost motherly. She wanted to make sure a meeting was set up between us, and it was almost like she was trying to guide him through something.”
When Toback left for another appointment, Pauline and Cartwright remained behind to finish their cocktails. Evening was coming on, and Pauline invited Cartwright to attend a screening with her that night. Cartwright, who was having difficulties with her then-boyfriend, thanked her but begged off, mentioning her need to deal with her problems at home. Pauline could not hide her disappointment. “I had the weirdest feeling she was offended,” Cartwright observed. “I don’t know quite what happened, but she never reviewed me after that. She mentioned me, but she never picked me out in anything else. She was determined not to say anything.”
Pauline’s growing sense of dissatisfaction with the films she was seeing took a particularly harsh turn in her treatment of Paul Schrader’s new film, Hardcore, starring George C. Scott as a strict Midwestern Calvinist whose daughter disappears on a church youth-group trip to Los Angeles; when a private detective he has hired determines that the girl is appearing in hardcore porn movies, Scott’s character goes out to L.A. to try to find her and bring her home.
Years later, Paul Schrader admitted, “I was never happy with how that ended up. I don’t think the film works. I changed the whole ending—the ending never worked.” Schrader was also upset that the producer, Daniel Melnick, had pulled a casting switch on him. Initially, the part of the hooker who befriends Jake and helps in his quest to find his daughter was to be played by Diana Scarwid. “Danny Melnick didn’t want to fuck her,” Schrader recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not going to put a girl in there that I don’t want to fuck.’ So I put a lightweight actress [Season Hubley] in there against George, and that killed the whole section.”
Pauline found Hardcore dreary. To her, Schrader did not exhibit anything close to the true moviemaking fervor of a Phil Kaufman or a Brian De Palma, despite his knack for coming up with “powerful raw ideas for movies.” Schrader had shot Hardcore on location in real L.A. porn shops and peep shows, but for Pauline the movie was short on ambience. “Schrader doesn’t enter the world of porno”; she wrote, “he stays on the outside, looking at it coldly, saying ‘These people have nothing to do with me.’” The character of Jake was not developed enough to suit her—there was no indication that he might be tempted or titillated by the world of porn—and the film’s approach to its subject was “cautious and maddeningly opaque.” It was her final paragraph, though, that verged on cruelty:
The possibility also comes to mind that the porno world is Schrader’s metaphor for show business, and that, in some corner of his mind, he is the runaway who became a prostitute. He has sometimes said that he regards working in the movie business as prostitution, and Hardcore looks like a film made by somebody who finds no joy in moviemaking. (Paul Schrader may like the idea of prostituting himself more than he likes making movies.) Several veteran directors