Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [234]
Many of the movies mentioned here I saw in the 1970s, at the Whiteside and State theaters in Corvallis, Oregon, in the company of my friend Cynthia Peterson. Writing this book has brought back many happy movie-going memories.
For constant support, advice, and encouragement, I thank a wonderful group of friends: Ronald Bowers, Clifford Capone, Bob Demyan, Lauren Flanigan, Craig Haladay, Omus and Jessica Hirshbein, Anne Lawrence, John Manis, Arlo Mc-Kinnon, Cheryl McLean, Francesca Mercurio, Steven and Lisa Mercurio, the late Geoff Miller, Eric Myers, David Niedenthal, Patricia O’Connell, Fred Plotkin, Judy Rice, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Helen Sheehy, Michael Slade—and Erik Dahl, whose phone calls are always one of the best parts of the day. And thanks most of all to my partner, Scott Barnes, for his extreme patience and loving presence.
At Opera News, my employer for more than twenty years, I have the pleasure of working with a movie-loving editor in chief, F. Paul Driscoll, who was never too busy with his own deadlines and life to offer insightful comments about my work on the book. Thanks also to editorial production coordinator Elizabeth Dig-gans for her wise judgment and for being the best colleague I’ve ever had, associate editor Louise T. Guinther for her eagle-eyed copyediting, and art director Greg Downer for his help with photos. Thanks also to Oussama Zahr, Adam Wasser-man, Tristan Kraft, Kathy Beekman, Fred Cohn, Susan Albert, and Beth Higgins, for making coming in to work a pleasure, every day.
I am grateful to Viking’s Francesca Belanger, Sharon Gonzalez, and Kyle Davis and to the astute copy editor, John McGhee, for the keen attention they have shown to this project.
The best for last. There are two people who have enhanced my professional life in ways I never imagined possible: my inimitable and irreplaceable agent, Edward Hibbert, and one of New York’s finest—my editor Rick Kot.
Brian Kellow
New York City
April 2011
NOTES
INTRODUCTION:
page ix “too many erotic sequences”: “The World Looks at Films”: Atlas (September 1971).
ix “I certainly did not set out to do a film about incest.... But I began exploring”: The New York Times, March 19, 1989.
ix “not only the prudent, punctilious surface”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (October 23, 1971).
ix “but the volatile and slovenly life underneath”: Ibid.
ix “the only shock is the joke”: Ibid.
x “the Muhammad Ali of film critics”: Author interview with Richard Daniels, January 18, 2010.
x “How many times . . . thirty years”: Pauline Kael, speech at Oregon State University, April 1976.
xi “Definitely her engagement was libidinal”: Author interview with Hal Hinson, July 20, 2009.
xi “I am the most grateful human being in the world”: David Frost interview with Joan Crawford, The David Frost Show, 1970.
CHAPTER ONE
1 “Judith Kael resented her lot”: Author interview with Bret Wallach, September 16, 2009.
1 “who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (November 28, 1983).
3 “affection radiated at about two degrees above absolute zero”: Author interview with Bret Wallach, September 16, 2009.
4 “a community of idealists”: Kenneth L. Kann, Joe Rappaport: Life of a Jewish Radical (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 178.
4 “retained a Jewish identity”: Ibid.
4 “bore an unmistakable resemblance to the shtetl”: Ibid.
5 “the one white Jew in Petaluma”: Ibid.
5 “she loved to eat and cook”: Author interview with Stephanie Zacharek, September 4, 2009.
5 “Such wonderful evenings”: Kenneth L. Kann, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 61.
5 “Yiddish books—the classical writers, history, politics