Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [190]
“Well,” Pauline finally said. “They didn’t ask me. If they had, I would have told them to hire Jim Wolcott.”
“The conversation was over,” said Rickey years later, “and so was our friendship.”
In 1982 Rickey interviewed for a job at Rolling Stone. She had been led to believe that it was as good as hers, when she was suddenly informed that she was out of the running: One of the editors had called Pauline, who pronounced against Rickey. Although Rickey went on to work successfully at The Philadelphia Inquirer, at the time she felt professionally blackballed. “I thought,” she remembered, “I was fine when I was an acolyte. But she didn’t want me as a peer.”
At the end of 1980, Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s epic Western about the conflict between settlers and cattlemen in Johnson County, Wyoming, was released by United Artists—to disastrous reviews. Pauline didn’t find it quite the abomination that many other critics did, but she believed Cimino had gotten so wrapped up in creating a certain atmosphere that he had completely lost sight of his story, which rambled along incoherently. “It’s a movie you want to deface; you want to draw mustaches on it, because there’s no observation in it, no hint of anything resembling direct knowledge—or even intuition—of what people are about,” Pauline wrote. Running nearly three hours and forty minutes, Heaven’s Gate had cost in excess of $36 million—possibly up to $50 million—and the press was quick to paint it as a symbol of the worst excesses of directorial freedom in Hollywood. United Artists withdrew it quickly and cut it by more than an hour, but it flopped again on rerelease. In time, Heaven’s Gate was seen as the final, cataclysmic gasp of the great auteurist period of the past decade, but the process of getting a movie made in Hollywood had been getting more and more complicated for some time. Heaven’s Gate, if anything, became a convenient excuse for the studio heads, who would increasingly refuse to green-light a project unless an entire publicity campaign could be built around one good line—the Don Simpson legacy. The marketing executives were steadily taking over, and now that her bruises were beginning to heal, Pauline was relieved not to have remained in Hollywood.
In March of 1981 she saw Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon. Her chief pleasure was in seeing the screen work of the brilliant playwright John Guare. Like Pauline, Guare had an aversion to the carefully orchestrated “problem” dramas of playwrights such as William Inge, which told the audience, “Little Sheba might not Come Back but don’t worry, we’ll learn from this experience and everything will be all right. I was beginning to see that Great White Way naturalism is to reality what sentimentality is to feeling.”
Pauline loved the ecstatic flow of Guare’s work, and the way in which great ideas, genre spoofs, and free-floating, imagistic dialogue all bumped into one another. “You’re not struck with the usual dramatic apparatus—the expository dialogue and the wire-pulling to get the characters into the planned situations. Instead, you get gags, which prove to be the explanation.” She admitted, “Though I have a better time in the theater at John Guare’s plays than I do at the plays