Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [245]
165 “loaded with error and faulty supposition presented as fact”: Esquire (June 1972).
165 “were to collaborate in writing the prefatory material to the published screenplay”: Ibid.
165 “full credit for whatever use she made of it”: Ibid.
165 “That is 100 percent, whole-cloth lying”: Esquire (June 1972).
165 “vivified the material”: Ibid.
165 “twaddle”: Ibid.
166 “The revisions made by Welles”: Ibid.
167 “How am I going to answer this?”: Author interview with Peter Bogdanovich, September 26, 2009.
167 “Don’t answer”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
168 “I don’t really care much about the story in a film”: Commentary by Robert Altman, DVD, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Warner Bros., 2002.
169 “saddened and disgusted”: Rona Barrett broadcast, Channel 5, June 2, 1971.
169 “rated R, presumably for rotten”: Ibid.
169 “got up and walked out”: Ibid.
169 “McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (July 3, 1971).
169 “so indirect in method”: Ibid.
169 “the theatrical convention that movies have generally clung to”: Ibid.
169 “Will a large enough American public accept”: Ibid.
170 “Seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 2, 1971).
170 “MRS. GRENVILLE: Darling, you keep throwing in your hand”: Penelope Gilliatt, Sunday Bloody Sunday: The Original Screenplay of the John Schlesinger Film (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 89.
171 “Peter Finch’s Dr. Daniel Hirsh”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 2, 1971).
171 “the characters here all are coping”: Ibid.
171 “instantly recognizable as a classic”: Ibid.
171 “lost his stridency”: Ibid.
171 “what few people who write for the screen think to do”: Ibid.
171 “mistake the film for the filmmaker”: Author interview with William Friedkin, May 10, 2008.
172 “bland, barren, gray look”: The Village Voice, February 24, 1972.
172 “It’s a dismal town”: Ibid.
172 “I have visions of Pauline Kael in the year 2001”: Ibid., October 14, 1971.
172 “turn into a bludgeon to beat other filmmakers with”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 9, 1971).
172 “worked-up, raunchy melodrama”: Ibid.
172 “exploitative of human passions and miseries”: Ibid.
172 “a lovingly exact history of American small-town life”: Ibid.
172 “perhaps what TV soap opera would be if it were more honest”: Ibid.
173 “For several decades”: Ibid.
173 “still feeling that they represented something preferable ”: Ibid.
173 “part of the truth of American experience”: Ibid.
173 “Pauline misses the point”: Author interview with Peter Bogdanovich, September 26, 2009.
173 “It would have taken Winchester’73”: Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show (New York: Dial Press, 1966), 204.
173 “If Bogdanovich replaces Hopper”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 9, 1971).
174 “I told him that Pauline had said it was a picture that even Richard Nixon would like”: Author interview with Peter Bogdanovich, September 26, 2009.
174 “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not”: Ibid.
174 “I thought Pauline was deaf to feminism”: Author interview with Karen Durbin, January 12, 2010.
175 “the best high of all”: Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, screenplay of Panic in Needle Park, 1971.
175 “everyone seems to be dressed for a mad ball”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 30, 1971).
175 “It is literally true”: Ibid.
175 “often irrational and horrifying brutal”: Ibid.
175 “extraordinarily well made”: Ibid.
175 “what we once feared mass entertainment might become”: Ibid.
176 “primarily an American Jewish contribution”: Kael, The New Yorker (November 13, 1971).
176 “probably the only successful attempt ”: Ibid.
176 “the Jews as an oppressed people”: Ibid.
176 “self-hatred and self-infatuation”: Ibid.
176 “Younger members of the audience—particularly if they are Jewish”: Ibid.
176 “Thank you for your in depth critique”: Letter from Norman Jewison to Pauline Kael, March 15, 1972.
177 “man in his natural state”: The New York Times, January 4, 1972.
177 “directed toward cuteness at every opportunity”: Life (February 4, 1972).