Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [92]
For years Gilliatt had written striking pieces of fiction, and recently, she also had her eye on a screenwriting career. The instinctively competitive Pauline, who believed that she had put any ambition to do creative writing strictly behind her, could not help but feel that Gilliatt was in danger of outdistancing her by pursuing areas of writing apart from reviewing films.
One of Pauline’s responsibilities, apart from her departmental reviewing, was to provide capsule reviews of the many films that were being shown in repertory and art cinemas around New York. Sally Ann Mock, who worked on the front-of-book “Goings On About Town” section, often found herself in the position of negotiating an uneasy truce between Pauline and Gilliatt. “My personal feeling—more than personally—is that Pauline did not have any respect, particularly, for Penelope,” said Mock. “I ran into several problems with both of them, actually. One would write a blurb, maybe on an older film. In the fall and winter Pauline would write a blurb, and in the spring Penelope would come in and want to rewrite it. And in the fall Pauline would want to rewrite Penelope. I finally said, ‘I can’t do this.’” Gardner Botsford, the editor of “Goings On About Town,” eventually put a stop to this practice. Pauline’s complaints about Gilliatt continued unceasingly—but it would be years before “The Current Cinema” became hers alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the early 1970s the view of New York City as the center of dazzling glamour and chic romanticism—the view that Hollywood had peddled in pictures ranging from The Awful Truth to Breakfast at Tiffany’s—was dead and buried. The New York that now emerged onscreen was a city that was closer to the everyday experience of the people who lived there. The crime rate was high and growing higher, the decades-long decline of Harlem had reached its nadir, and Times Square had become a playground for junkies and hookers. Midnight Cowboy had shown the seedy realities of Manhattan street life and won an Academy Award for Best Picture in the process.
Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the New York of the late ’60s and early ’70s as a completely bleak, fear-ridden place where pleasure was hard to come by. The city was, among other things, a haven for committed movie-lovers, who had an astonishing number of repertory cinemas and art houses from which to choose. In those pre-home-video days, there was plenty of moviegoing activity to be found in all parts of Manhattan. On seedy Avenue B, there was the Charles, where the rats and mice often scurried over the customers’ feet. There was the Bleecker Street Cinema and also Theatre 80 Saint Marks, where the projector was situated behind the screen and customers could sink down in the lumpy seats and lose themselves in scratchy prints of thematically paired double features—two Bette Davis vehicles, Jezebel and In This Our Life, or everyone’s favorite French Revolution bill, A Tale of Two Cities and Marie Antoinette.
Uptown, there was the Regency on Sixty-seventh Street, which once ran Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour for close to one full year. On Broadway between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets was the New Yorker Theater, launched by Pauline’s friends Dan and Toby Talbot. The Talbots had opened the theater on March 17, 1960, with a screening of Olivier’s Henry V and Albert Lamorisse’s short film The Red Balloon. That initial run grossed $10,000, and soon the New Yorker became the most popular place on the West Side to take in first-class foreign-language films and hard-to-find Hollywood classics. The New Yorker later