Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [244]
149 “Were Hepburn and Tracy this good together”: Kael, The New Yorker (November 14, 1970).
149 “to see Streisand”: Ibid.
149 “like thousands of girls”: Ibid.
150 “a good idea in theory, a bad one in practice”: Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 585.
150 “no driving emotional energy”: Kael, The New Yorker (November 21, 1970).
150 “gush made respectable”: Ibid.
150 “a lousy lay”: Brownlow, 586.
151 “We’ll give you color”: Ibid.
151 “The book has been promoted from the start”: Kael, The New Yorker (December 26, 1970).
151 “should bring joy to millions”: New York Daily News, January 12, 1971.
151 “It deals in private passion at a time when we are exhausted from public defeats”: Ibid.
152 “You don’t want to be a minister”: Paul Schrader, Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 291.
152 “some cold chitchat”: Ibid., 292.
153 “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best”: Kael, The New Yorker (January 23, 1971).
153 “free-spirited”: Ibid.
153 “have been so sold on Pop and so saturated with it that they appear to have lost their bearings in the arts”: Ibid.
153 “In most cases, the conglomerates”: Ibid.
153 “they understand that their job is dependent on keeping everybody happy”: Ibid.
154 “I don’t have any doubts about movies being a great art form”: Ibid.
154 “summery richness”: Kael, The New Yorker (March 20, 1971).
154 “no emotional head of steam”: Ibid.
154 “Our desire for grace and seductive opulence is innocent”: Kael, The New Yorker (March 27, 1971).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
156 “You have no say at all”: Patrick McGilligan, Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
157 “I hear you’re pretty good in seminars but boring as a lecturer”: Author interview with Howard Suber, July 28, 2010.
158 “Why would the biggest film critic in America”: Ibid.
158 “all the time, but not as a distinguished visitor”: Author interview with Tom Mankiewicz, December 16, 2008.
159 “bitter experiences”: Howard Suber interview with Sara Mankiewicz, housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
159 “A brand-new bicycle”: Ibid.
160 “to write and produce a work of fiction”: Deposition of Orson Welles, April 1949.
160 “When an actor becomes the role offstage”: Note written by Pauline Kael, housed at the Lilly Library.
161 “Well . . . it’s a trivial point”: Author interview with Howard Suber, July 28, 2010.
161 “Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture”: Pauline Kael, “Onward and Upward with the Arts,” The New Yorker (February 20/27, 1971).
161 “Citizen Kane . . . isn’t a work of special depth”: Ibid.
161 “conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style”: Ibid.
162 “conventional schoolbook explanations for greatness”: Ibid.
162 “to miss what makes it such an American triumph”: Ibid.
162 “never been rivaled in wit and exuberance”: Ibid.
162 “may for a brief period”: Ibid.
162 “When I got into it”: Ibid.
162 “idiotic indiscretion”: Ibid.
163 “Men cheated of their due”: Ibid.
163 “such worship generally doesn’t help”: Ibid.
163 “Welles isn’t in it”: Ibid.
163 “Gothic atmosphere”: Ibid.
163 “I already know what happened”: Author interview with Howard Suber, July 28, 2010.
163 “had been advertised as a one-man show”: Kael, “Onward and Upward,” The New Yorker (February 20/27, 1971).
164 “has lived all his life in a cloud of failure”: Ibid.
164 “98% hustling and 2% moviemaking”: DVD, Citizen Kane, Turner Home Entertainment, 2001.
164 “a first-rate account and I am a better man for having read it”: Letter from Nunnally Johnson to Pauline Kael, March 5, 1971.
164 “the references to Mank’s drinking”: Ibid.
164 “There have always been the Welles idolators”: Author interview with Tom Mankiewicz, December 16, 2008.
164 “a highly intelligent and entertaining study”: The New York Times, October 31, 1971.
164 “superficial and without one quotable line”: Ibid.
164 “he was