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By Root 2163 0

“Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” Some have viewed it as her revenge on Hollywood for her mistreatment there; in fact, she offered no explanation about her time in Hollywood, assuming that informed readers would understand her position. What she was really doing was giving her readers a glimpse of what she had learned “out there,” and the essay was Pauline at her stinging best. Taking precise (if unspoken) aim at Don Simpson, she opened fire on the new breed of studio executives—ignorant, uneducated, and unfeeling where movies were concerned, who thought only about box-office grosses, and never about giving an audience something that might prove deeply satisfying. The conglomerates in charge of the studios were painted with the blackest part of her brush: She described them as filled with men who were attracted to the film world because it gave them the opportunity to elevate their status by rubbing shoulders with famous stars and directors. Part of the trouble was that they began to see themselves as genuinely creative people:

Very soon they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed. How bad are the taste and judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven’t grown up in a show-business milieu—they don’t have the background, the instincts, the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years.

She believed the central problem was that the studio heads had “discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking . . . If an executive finances what looks like a perfectly safe, stale piece of material and packs it with stars, and the production costs skyrocket way beyond the guarantees and the picture loses many millions, he won’t be blamed for it—he was playing the game by the same rules as everybody else. If, however, he takes a gamble on a small project that can’t be sold in advance—something that a gifted director really wants to do, with a subtle, not easily summarized theme and no big names in the cast—and it loses just a little money, his neck is on the block.”

It was a loss to American letters that Pauline, away in Hollywood, missed the opportunity to review the most ambitious undertaking of the decade—the movie that was, whether it was intended to be or not, the cumulative event of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Despite the movie’s horrendous production problems—shooting in the Philippines was shut down for some months—Pauline correctly perceived that the film signified the audience’s “readiness for a visionary, climactic, summing-up movie. We felt that the terrible rehash of pop culture couldn’t go on, mustn’t go on—that something new was needed. Coppola must have felt that, too, but he couldn’t supply it.” She was distressed, however, to see that a film with such brilliant isolated sequences was, in her words, “an incoherent mess”; she felt that the director had simply gotten lost. (Robert Getchell recalled that when he and Pauline went to see the movie in Westwood, she held her nose as they walked out of the theater.)

Pauline didn’t get behind James Bridges’s evocative Urban Cowboy, about aimless Texas oil-rig workers who compete to ride a mechanical bull, but she was entranced by Debra Winger, whom she described as having “a quality of flushed transparency. When she necks on the dance floor—and she’s a great smoocher, with puffy lips like a fever blister—her clothes seem to be under her damp skin. (She’s naked all through the movie, though she never takes her clothes off.)” Winger had the kind of sensual, electric presence that Pauline had once loved in the young Jane Fonda.

She again came out powerfully on behalf of Brian De Palma for his latest, Dressed to Kill, a compendium of Hitchcockian themes and takeoffs. There were a few genuinely frightening scenes in Dressed to Kill, but her response to the movie seemed excessive: She found it De Palma’s most sustained piece of work, in which he had “perfected a near-surreal poetic voyeurism