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By Root 2303 0

degree of obeisance, and many of her protégés were often unsure about how much or how little of either to offer. The rules for being in Pauline’s good graces were fluid, and if she felt that someone she had supported or believed in had disappointed her, or was on the wrong track critically, she could suddenly become cold and distant. Certainly it was true that if you were a fellow critic, her approval came fastest if you shared her views on movies. She loved to debate, and she was not easily won over by even a persuasive argument; she seldom conceded that the person arguing against her had illuminated a point she hadn’t previously considered. She was already fond of saying that she never changed her mind about a movie, a position many other critics found all but impossible to accept. Seeing a movie for a second time years later, at a different point in their lives and with more filmgoing experience behind them, they might have a completely different response. Pauline considered such shifts of opinion a sign of basic critical weakness, an indication that the person hadn’t known what he was talking about in the first place.

When it was a matter of mentoring and taking her career advice, many—though not all—of her younger admirers felt that agreeing with her was crucial. One who discovered the price of disagreement was the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, who had first met Pauline in 1967. Schrader came from a strict Protestant background—his parents were staunch members of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan—and he had entered Calvin College, intending to pursue a career as a minister. But a fading movie theater in Grand Rapids had started showing art films, and Schrader had become enamored of Ingmar Bergman’s pictures. Growing up, he had been forbidden to go to the movies at all, and now, as a student, he immersed himself in the art form, running a student-organized film club off campus and reviewing movies for the student newspaper.

During the first night they met, at her West End Avenue apartment, Schrader and Pauline gently argued about movies—she was amused by his worship of Bergman—and drank a good deal, so much so that he wound up spending the night on her living room sofa. The following morning, after she had served him a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, Pauline informed him, “You don’t want to be a minister. You want to be a film critic. We are going to keep in touch.” Given his background, he was highly susceptible to the evangelical streak in Pauline’s personality, and once he was back at college, began sending her reviews he’d written, and she would call him and comment on them. Later she pulled strings with Colin Young to get Schrader into the UCLA film school and used her influence to help him land a reviewing job with the LA Free Press.

During Christmas 1971 Schrader flew from Los Angeles to New York and met with Pauline. By this time she was regularly approached by the arts editors of newspapers around the country who had openings for film critics; a good word from Pauline usually meant that her candidate got the job. She told Schrader about a position in Seattle, but by now he had begun thinking seriously of trying his hand at writing screenplays and told her that he was afraid leaving Los Angeles for Seattle would put an end to that possibility. Pauline coolly replied that she needed an immediate answer, and Schrader gave her one: no. What followed was a lengthy silence and “some cold chitchat.” Schrader flew back to Los Angeles and went to work on his script. It would be years before he and Pauline reconnected.

One of the frustrations Pauline felt at this time was that the screen’s new freedom in tackling both contemporary subjects and contemporary attitudes had given birth to a certain soft-headedness, both in the new audience and among some of the (mostly younger) critics who were writing about the movies. So often, when people rhapsodized about a new film, it was the film’s pose, its attitude, that enchanted them, rather than the actual content and substance.