• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 286 0

table, he managed to dissuade him with a sharp, arched look of disapproval. The young men came, like they all did, hoping for a chance to talk to him about the Great Art, but the truth was, he was rarely in much of a mood for such conversations. He was nearing, he knew, the end of a very long career, and his own embrace of change had slowed, his ideas fixed, the difficulty of a new creation more and more daunting. In America, change had come rapidly after the demise of the old penny-pinching studio heads. Too much had changed for those studio heads to follow only their old ways about story and the traditional three-arc narrative. Now there was color to worry about, and saturation to master, and sound overlap to toy with, as well as 65-millimeter handheld cameras, and antireflective optical lenses, and helicopter shots, and automatic zooms—too many tools for even someone like him to get a handle on, to investigate their best uses. And, certainly, too many young mavericks with the willingness to not only try them out but master them, use the tools alone or together in the service of a story that was beyond what had once been acceptable. Things were changing. The old stories seemed like lazy standbys: pickup scripts from the better Broadway shows, or the more successful novels, or the particularly strange human-interest story glanced at by chance in a newspaper during a transatlantic flight just like this one.

When the plane was airborne, the Director settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, trying to sleep. He needed rest after the excitement of his moderate success. A return to form, it was being called, and he tried not to make much of some of the morning articles he’d read, croissant in hand, that stated it was his first unqualified success in twelve years. Twelve years! Unqualified! He’d done several pictures since then, some television, the money pouring in because of his shrewd handling. He didn’t like this tone, the implied judgment, but he knew its root. What he had accomplished twelve years earlier with a motel shower had been simultaneously a high and a low, both what he could never surpass and what others imitated, a distinct point in the history of the entire form. There, twelve years ago, was a marker. There was the new violence. There was the door to the unthinkable. There was the door to the unmentionable.

To be fair, this was said all the time. Five years ago, the handsome Warren Beatty had traded in his own shiny stardom for the crude mask of a criminal, shooting his way into the psyche of an audience who had forever wanted him in only minor variations of the cad, the suave suitor. A year later, Frank Sinatra’s wife cut off all of her hair and headlined as a woman raped by Satan himself. Someone had the nerve to show full blood in the chaos of a gangster shoot-out! Someone had the nerve to show the devil’s eyes! The line could be pushed forward without end, what the human eye could possibly witness without turning away, and already he felt far away from the moment when he had made such a mark. Could he ever make one again?

There was going to be an end point to all these visual high-bars. The Americans—they always crossed the line, not knowing when to stop. They saw no poetry in taking the strange road into the desert, hesitating to go any further. The Director recalled talks in the French cafés about Rossellini and how the Americans devoured the man’s personal indiscretions with Ingrid Bergman, as if the man had never captured the city of Rome at its most desolate and crumbling, his camera swooping into place to order all the chaos with nothing but the vigor of story. Could the Americans ever have pulled off that kind of realism? Could they have offered an elegant answer to Anna Magnani’s frantic run in the street, chasing the military truck that had carted off her fiancé, her arm raised in a futile gesture to halt? The Americans didn’t have an actress who could have tumbled in the street at the sound of machine-gun fire. They had body doubles to save the million-dollar legs.

The Director was heading