Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [53]
This new climate had its effects even in movie-critic circles. For years many reviewers at major newspapers and magazines had acceded to studio publicists in exchange for access to the biggest movie stories and star interviews. But during the 1960s a number of critics began to speak out and show a much more independent spirit than had previously been the case. In 1963 Judith Crist, then movie critic of The New York Herald-Tribune, found herself at the center of a major standoff with a leading studio. When she slammed that year’s Easter attraction at Radio City Music Hall—Spencer’s Mountain, a sentimental family drama starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara—in both the daily and Sunday editions of the Herald-Tribune, Warner Bros. retaliated the following Monday by withdrawing an invitation to an upcoming screening and, more crucially, by pulling all of its advertising from the paper. Radio City Music Hall followed suit, and because the theater’s advertising provided income for the newspaper seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, the loss was felt immediately. The Herald-Tribune’s publisher, Jock Whitney, and editor, Jim Bellows, held firm, running an editorial affirming their support for Crist and her right to say what she thought. “The Associated Press picked up the editorial and transmitted it coast to coast,” Crist remembered, “and it made a nice little fuss.”
The message was clear: With the steady collapse of the once-powerful studio system and the immense publicity machine that operated within it, the public was forming a new, closer connection with movie critics. As personalities they were becoming better known via radio and television; starting in 1964, Crist would become a familiar face via her appearances on NBC’s Today Show. Talk show hosts frequently invited Pauline and Andrew Sarris, who were far more in tune with the latest trends in filmmaking, and the new audience it had created, than The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, who increasingly resembled a relic from another era. As the subject matter of movies became more and more provocative, Crowther began to seem more and more out of touch—particularly in his distaste for onscreen violence.
The public’s appetite for writing about film was also growing. Only a few years earlier “film studies” was an all but nonexistent category in book publishing. Now there was a demand for film history, theory, and biography, and for published screenplays. Pauline spent all of her spare time hard at work on her own book project, and although a few friends tried to talk her out of her plan to call it I Lost It at the Movies, she held fast. The title precisely conveyed its tone—wicked, funny, provocative—and, in terms of her own development as a moviegoer, was absolutely to the point.
She had acquired a New York agent, the estimable Robert P. Mills, and in the summer of 1963 he phoned her with the news that I Lost It at the Movies had been accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly Press. She received an advance of $1,500 (a year later, the publisher would increase that sum by an additional $1,000), and that, combined with her Guggenheim money and her genius for managing to survive on very little, permitted her to settle down and finish the book.
Despite her hard work on the manuscript, she was tempted by the occasional plum freelance assignment. One came her way in late August 1963, when Robert B. Silvers, the recently appointed editor of The New York Review of Books,