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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Critics: Who needs 'em?
In a culture increasingly driven by hype, you do.
By Charles Taylor
[08/18/99]

Television
Basketball diary
Showtime's sorry drama "The Hoop Life" and its young writer want to dramatize the sporting life, but on the court or off, reality is always far more interesting than fiction.
By Robert Wilonsky
[08/18/99]

Movie Review
"Illuminata"
In John Turturro's ambitious and arresting American tragicomedy, the actor-director invents himself an artistic tradition.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/17/99]

Music
Here comes a Nazarene ... looks good in a magazine
On "Juxtapose," the Bristol MC negotiates the tension between B-boy roots and raw, tender soul.
By Michelle Goldberg
[08/17/99]

Theater in black and white
Two Chicago plays -- "Jitney" and "Spinning into Butter" -- tackle racial issues from opposite sides of the tracks.
By David Moberg
[08/16/99]

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From the start, he spotted trends but was never chic. What snagged his interest were the human beings caught up in the trends. Whether he was depicting a lawyer going psychedelic in "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" (1968) or well-heeled married folk sidling toward the Sexual Revolution in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969), he tested the authenticity and resilience of the Los Angeles bourgeoisie without trashing or condemning them.

Show Me the Magic By Paul Mazursky Simon & Schuster 270 pages   Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Early on, some critics, including me, accused him of being too soft for satire. But satire wasn't Mazursky's goal. He was inventing his own loose and novel form of American social comedy. "Toklas" (which Hy Averback directed from a script by Mazursky and Larry Tucker) and "Bob & Carol" (which Mazursky directed from another Tucker-Mazursky script) have aged well both as period pieces and as inspired entertainment.

The last time I interviewed Mazursky, roughly 11 years ago, he admitted, "What struck me then -- and as a native New Yorker I feel qualified to say this -- is that the Eastern heavyweights, so to speak, didn't understand that what I was portraying was real."

Mazursky gained widespread critical and financial acceptance with movies like 1978's "An Unmarried Woman" (which I still think is soft) and his marvelous 1986 remake of Jean Renoir's "Boudu Saved From Drowning": "Down and Out in Beverly Hills." In "Enemies, A Love Story" (1989) he created a sexual tragicomedy that in its assurance and richness may well be his masterpiece.

But the last 10 years have been erratic ones for Mazursky. He hasn't been able to launch several of his dream projects -- including a sequel to "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" -- and the work he has been able to do (including "Scenes From a Mall," with Woody Allen and Bette Midler) lacked his usual bounce and freshness.

He gets a lot of it back in his just-published memoir, "Show Me the Magic." Indeed, one 27-page chapter chronicling his collaboration with Peter Sellers on "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" is the most hair-raising account I've ever read of an actor's mingled genius and insanity. The book reveals the kind of balanced, amused temperament a director needs to sustain a career in contemporary Hollywood. And that's what I started to tell Mazursky when I interviewed him in his Beverly Hills office three weeks ago.

What struck me about "Show Me the Magic" is that, a lot of the time, it's about a director trying to stay sane -- and in an insane environment, that becomes hysterically funny.

This is true.

I mean, a lot of it is about how much craziness you have to accept. For example, the cover has a blurb from Warren Beatty -- "Paul Mazursky knows it all and makes it funny. Reading this book is like talking about a movie of his." But in the book itself he does nothing except delay your projects and put you off.

He knew I was going after him for "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" when Jack Nicholson turned it down, so he said, "You don't want me, you want Jack." And he and Julie Christie were going to do "Blume in Love" and had me waiting for three months. He blames that on her, he says she didn't like it. What's funny is that when he told me he should have done two of the movies I offered him, I sent him something else and he still didn't do it. He asked me to direct a movie once, and I didn't do it.

Look, he's not an intimate friend, but I consider him a friend. He's one of the strangest and shrewdest guys I ever met. Strange only in that he's close to the vest. If you're in a relationship with Warren, he's running it on some level. But he makes you feel nice. He conducts an intimate conversation; he can get into anything in a second. And I've been in two of his movies. I was in -- you should pardon the expression -- "Love Affair," and I was in "Bulworth," which I liked. In "Bulworth," I'm in the fund-raising party the senator's having. There are these two liberal types: Paul Mazursky and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is not an actor or a director but an eminent political humanistic figure in this town. Stanley kept asking me what we were supposed to be doing in the scene. I told him, "They're probably making fun of us; do whatever you want to do." So Stanley fell asleep. And I went over to Warren and said, "Warren, get a shot of him sleeping. It'll be funny." They did get the shot but didn't use it. Warren deserves credit; that's a daring movie.

A lot of the book is about the kind of give and take you're describing in your friendship with Beatty. It's about how much leeway you give people in show biz because temperament is part of the game, part of the fun.

I accept it more from the perspective that writing the book has given me. It's almost 50 years since I acted in "Fear and Desire," for Stanley Kubrick, in 1951. Doing all the things I did since then, I often said, "My God, what's going on?" And it's not just other personalities that make me say that. Basically, you get anxious: Will you ever work again? Then it's, "I have too much work!" Then I'm broke, and I've never borrowed any money before in my life. Then, "I'm rich -- you want to borrow some money?" There's not much in the middle. And I've experienced all of it -- as an actor, a nightclub comic, a writer, a director, a producer. Everyone I know has had a lot of near misses -- movies that were ready to go until something fell out. But the crazy parts usually have to do with personalities, with human beings behaving in ways you never expect them to do. It's a paradox -- it's part of what makes this life nuts, and part of what makes it exciting. You don't think it's possible a guy is going to say, "Unless my pants are lined with silk I can't wear them." I don't think a dauphin would have said that. You take a guy like Woody Allen. We're shooting in Connecticut, and he says, "Why do you want to do another take? You quit now and I could be on the bridge, and taking my bubbly at 6 o'clock." And I like Woody. But he wants to go home and take a bath. It's the last thing on a movie you think you're going to hear.

Fellini was larger than life, but he was so kind and generous that those things didn't quite happen that way. You'd expect them from somebody with an imagination so bizarre and wondrous, but he didn't do any of that.

Next page | Undereducated geniuses: Woody and Stanley never went to college