Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [83]
This observation triggered a response from Hill, one that made Pauline cackle with glee when she read it to her friends:
Listen, you miserable bitch, you’ve got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddam right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply don’t have.
I fought the studio to the bloody mat in order to get authentic sound.... The picture was shot 90% on location and when it was over and I didn’t have all the sound I wanted I took some horses and a couple of guys and on my own expense went out into the hills for two days and recorded the kind of sound I wanted myself. And I resent the hell out of a smart ass critic trying to show off their technical acumen and building up their image for their readers by pretending they can tell the “dead sound of a studio,” and that their ear is so marvelously acute that they know that “scarcely any attempt was made to supply outdoor resonances.” . . . You didn’t like the sound, say so, but cut out that bullshit about how you know where it was done and made.
If Pauline considered George Roy Hill a prime example of the kind of middling talent that could flourish in Hollywood, she found Paul Mazursky the kind of original artist she believed the industry should be nurturing. A former actor who had performed with the West Coast edition of the Second City comedy troupe, Mazursky directed his first picture, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—a comedy about two married couples, one relatively open-minded (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood), the other strictly conventional (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon), who decide to face the sexual revolution head on by experimenting with other partners—in 1969. The script was funny without being epigrammatic; the comedy arose from character, as the four people began to pursue their own arousal—physicality with no strings attached. Unlike so many other directors of the time, Mazursky wasn’t concerned with making a long-winded commentary about the corruption of America’s moral values. He didn’t score points off his characters but seemed to love all of them; he treated them satirically, but the satire was warmhearted and generous-spirited.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had the distinction of being the first American picture to open the New York Film Festival. There was tremendous buzz about it, and its ad campaign, featuring the four lead actors in bed together, would become one of the iconic movie images of the time. Those behind the picture were nervous about its reception, to the point of apologizing for it in advance. “Americans talk a lot about marital infidelity,” Mazursky said in the movie’s publicity notes. “But they are secretly shocked by it. I know if I told my wife I had been unfaithful to her . . . that would be the end.” Its producer, Mike Frankovich, told the New York Daily News, “I felt obliged to note that I did not believe the film would have an adverse effect on American morals.” Even Elliott Gould, who had the image of being one of the hippest of young actors, had reservations about accepting the role of Ted. “When it was offered to me, I turned it down,” he admitted. “I was afraid of it. I thought it seemed to be, to some degree, exploitative.”
The film festival audience loved Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, but many of the initial reviews were negative—none more so than Vincent Canby’s in The New York Times. Canby found the film “unpleasant” and populated by characters who were “cheerful but humorless boobs, no more equipped to deal with their sexual liberation than Lucy and Desi and Ozzie and Harriet.”
At 8:30 on the morning Canby’s notice appeared, Mazursky was sitting at home, dejected, when his phone rang. “I read Canby’s review,” Pauline told him. “He’s a schmuck. I loved the movie, and I’m going to give it a great review.” This was the sort of line-crossing that many critics frowned on, but Pauline thought nothing