Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [172]
It was so devastating a critique that it was almost impossible for Schrader not to take it personally. At the time he was already making his next film, American Gigolo, and he simply tried to shake off Pauline’s judgment. To others, however, who knew of her history with Schrader, as both friend and mentor, it was astonishing that she could write about him in such a manner.
Her final review of the 1978–79 season was of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, which involved a meeting of all New York City’s street gangs to put aside rivalries and organize so they can outnumber the police force three to one and take over the city. Pauline ignored the fact that many of the actors playing the gang members looked like TV commercial actors; she found the film “like visual rock” and “mesmerizing in its intensity. It runs from night until dawn, and most of the action is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There’s a night-blooming psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.” Again, it was a review that suggested that the greatest gift a movie could deliver was a gut-level thrill; matters of construction and detail were of secondary importance.
Pauline’s review of The Warriors was significant in that it seemed likely to be the last piece that she would write for The New Yorker. She had honestly believed that she would eventually be able to unseat Penelope Gilliatt and take over “The Current Cinema” on a full-time basis, but since Shawn remained stubbornly loyal to Gilliatt, that possibility seemed ever more remote. An even bigger concern was that she had reached the point where she questioned the degree of her own influence with readers. When she began writing regularly for the magazine eleven years earlier, she had wanted to shake up the way New Yorker readers thought, to reshape their ideas about which movies were worth seeing. She now believed that she had succeeded only in a partial and limited way. She was particularly piqued that she had not been able to have an effect on the tastes of most of the senior writers and editors at The New Yorker, who dutifully continued to attend art films by Fassbinder and Bresson that they thought were good for them, and looked askance at her praise for Carrie, The Fury, and The Warriors. She complained that the only ones at the magazine who listened to her about which movies to see were the young fact-checkers and messengers. There was also a significant sector of New York’s intelligentsia that had never forgiven her for not covering innovative and experimental works and some of the more obscure foreign films. She was beginning to fear that she was, in the words of Alan Jay Lerner, serenading the deaf and searching the eyes of the blind.
At this rather confusing juncture, she was approached by Warren Beatty with an offer of work in Hollywood. Over the years Beatty had occasionally mentioned that he thought her ideas and level of taste could have even greater impact if she were to work in the film industry in some capacity. She had thanked him for his kindness and demurred, but the idea had stayed in the back of her mind. And, as the great eruption of’70s moviemaking had dwindled, she began to wonder if Beatty wasn’t right. Perhaps she might be able to make a difference where it mattered most—by improving the level of what was put into production.
Pauline believed that she understood a lot of the reasons for the decline in film quality. The movie companies, as she told an interviewer, had succeeded in taking “the risk factor out of financing movies, by selling them in advance to TV, international TV, cable, Home Box Office, as well as selling them in advance to theaters.” It was simply easier for the studios to back projects that could be sold ready-made to television