Via the comments section of a post on Jeffrey Wells’ site (hat tip: George Prager), a fascinating, and fascinatingly awkward, segment from an early ’70s episode of The Dick Cavett Show, featuring Zabriskie Point stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin.
The duo, when they talk at all, express (if that’s the word for it) strong misgivings about the film and its director, Michelangelo Antonioni. When they clam up, fellows guests Mel Brooks and Rex Reed chime in, and Reed’s interested in knowing what it’s like to work with Antonioni, because according to interviews he’s read, and on that he himself conducted wth the director, Antonioni hates actors, thinks that they’re like cattle, need to be walked through a fence, and so on. “It depends on your personal relationship with him, if you have one,” Frechette responds in a rare moment of gregariousness.
Antonioni made Zabriskie Point at the height of his international fame, and, one gathers, at the height of his own egoism. He insisted on using non-actors in the lead roles, and recruited Helprin and Frechette more or less off of the street on account of what he perceived as their authenticity. (Each individual’s physical beauty surely counted for something as well.) To pluck two inexperienced people literally off the street, put them in a movie and subsequently refuse to engage them on a level that a more seasoned or trained performer might well be able to do without does seem the height of perversity.
In a 1961 interview, Antonioni said, “As a director, I shouldn’t have to consult with actors regarding my conception of the way a scene should be done…[i]nasmuch as I consider an actor as being only one element in a given scene, I regard him as a tree, a wall, or a cloud, that is, as just one element in the overall scene; the attitude or pose of the actor as determined under my direction, cannot help but affect the framing of that scene, and I, not the actor, am the one who can know whether that effect is appropriate or not.” One can see, given Zabriskie Point’s specific milieu and circumstances, how this perspective could create problems…
And of course Reed’s citations recall the notorious Hitchcock quip, which still has legs today, about actors being cattle, which he once tried to clear up by saying he didn’t mean that they were cattle, but they they merely ought to be treated as cattle. Which didn’t much help. The statement still rankles certain actors years after Hitchcock’s death; I recall William H. Macy, not an unintelligent man, expressing a certain amount of glee about participating in Gus Van Sant’s sacrilegious remake of Psycho, explaining it as an act of revenge against Hitchcock for the remark.
One thing Hitchcock and Antonioni had in common is that they were hardcore cineastes—not for a minute did they ever believe that film was some sort of correlative to the theater, an artistic medium in which the performer is almost invariably the driving force rather than a component or “element.” Their cinematic conceptions and constructions are such that the “creative” contributions an actor can make are by definition circumscribed by them. (It occurs to me that, in an admittedly oblique sense, the above notion is the real subject of Antonioni’s 1982 film Identification Of A Woman.)
Now as Hitchcock explained in his interviews with Truffaut, he was not hostile to actors, but did not care much, particularly in the early portion of his career, for the stage performer who clearly regarded doing film work as “slumming,” and it was working with such types that fed the contempt from which the cattle remark rose. Of course Hitchcock had a number of highly successful creative relationships with some of Hollywood’s greatest stars—Bergman, Grant, Kelly, Stewart—and some of his best friends and creative associates were also actors—see Hume Cronyn and Norman Lloyd. And Antonioni, of course, for many years had an intense relationship with actor and muse Monica Vitti. As with everything else, it’s complicated. But it’s clear that Antonioni’s miscalculations with his Zabriskie Point performers are a big component in what’s still problematic about this fascinating film.
Macy’s one of our greatest actors, but he also appeared in Wild Hogs and, subsequently, performed a song about it on ukulele whilst appearing on The View. So this comment of his surprises me not much.
This is one of my favorite Cavett clips. Can you imagine that level of unfiltered honesty in any of today’s TV staged marketing appearances?
TCM just ran a great, full episode of Dick Cavett’s show, where he interviewed Ingmar Bergman (Bibi Andersson joined them for the last segment or two). No interviews play like that now. Charlie Rose is supposed to be like that, but he’s not. He’s not informed when it comes to writers, filmmakers, or other artists, and it’s almost always pretty awkward. They can be good anyway, like his hour-long interview with David Foster Wallace, but that’s only because Wallace was so interesting. Rose didn’t help things.
You just don’t like Charlie Rose ’cause he’s a big ol’ liberal, Bill.
Rose’s show IS the only one that compares… but there is simply nothing like Cavett. He got guests comfortable, amicable, and asked great questions and would engage in entertaining conversation. Like a good host, he always allowed the guest to do the talking. Rose does that, too, but sometimes his questions segue into diatribes.
But still, his is the only interview show on television when it doesn’t feel like the guest is strictly there to plug their latest book/movie/album/whatever, and they actually engage in conversation with the host.
@Ryan – No, Rose is just obnoxious. Or maybe “aggrevating” is better, because I have no personal beef with the guy. But when he’s interviewing artists, he doesn’t seem all that familiar with their work, especially when it comes to writers. I feel like he knows how the artist is broadly perceived by the critics and public, but he has no opinion of his own. And he interrupts people a lot.
Plus, he’s just weird. I was watching another interview he had with Wallace, this time grouped with Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner. This is around the time that “Infinite Jest” came out, and at one point Rose is addressing Wallace, and says, in regards to “Infinite Jest”: “This book is big, bigger even than the internet.” And right there, you can see Wallace and Franzen look at each other, as if to say “What the fuck?”
Charlie Rose is awful. Great guests, terrible host. He cuts off guests right when they’re about to say something, indeed interrupts with pointless “insights” designed to make himself look smart and he just comes across as not that bright. And if he’s a liberal, then I don’t know what.
Cavett could be condescending, but just watch his interview with Orson Welles. It’s like a humble jester in the presence of a beloved King.
And listen to the real conversations, not staged bs that so many “talk” shows pull off these days to get their faces in the Huffington Post.
The best Cavett interview EVER is Cassavettes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. They anarchistically deconstruct the false Vegas-Hollywood show chit-chat to Cavett’s extreme chagrin.
You know, filmmakers who don’t like actors, I kind of wonder what they even showed up for.
Composition.
The classic 1970 Frechette and Halprin TV appearance came on THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW, though they played second fiddle to Abbie Hoffman and his uniquely American shirt. Joe Leydon recalled the show on his blog a few years back:
http://movingpictureblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/rip-merv-griffin-2006.html
@Christian
Man cannot live on composition alone.
I was making a glib insight. Obviously some filmmakers are more interested in visuals more than human content.
Off-topic, I know, but whenever I think of Zabriskie Point, I think of the anecdote John Fahey tells in “How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life”. Antonioni asked him to score the “porno scene”, but the only direction he could offer was some vague rambling about love and death so Fahey just told his musicians to play whatever they felt like. Fahey certainly didn’t think any better of him than Frechette did, calling him a madman, and the whole thing ends in a fistfight over dinner. It may not be wise to put much stock into what Fahey says, considering he himself was messed up on Quaaludes at the time, but I have way more respect for him than I do Antonioni.
I have no idea what Charlie Rose’s politics are, and the reason for that is I find him to be an absolutely colorless interviewer. Whenever he comes to mind I thought of his Simpsons guest shot first.
A guest shot, it should be noted, that wasn’t half as funny as Dick Cavett’s. “You wanna share a cab? I’ve got plenty of anecdotes involving celebrities that involve me in some way.”
A few years ago I made a short parody of The Charlie Rose Show featuring guest star Marlon Brando (this was before Brando died). It’s on youtube if anyone’s interested (Rose naysayers might enjoy it more than his fans, but I don’t think I was too hard on him):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1MhLRO-1tw
I look nothing like Rose, and the makeup job on “Marlon” is mostly white-out streaks in his hair and a pillow under his shirt, but hey, we had fun. The first few seconds are silent because the tin ears at youtube apparently thought my original music was lifted from the show. Hope it gives a chuckle or two. If not, at least the price was right.
Frechette and Halprin were obviously two very lost kids, pretty emblematic of a huge swath of their generation. That they were involved with The Mel Lyman Family does not surprise me at all. Both of them were vacant, in need of someone to tell them what to do and say and that come across in this interview. One of the more fascinating aspects of the 60s and 70s, to me, at least, was that with the breakdown of traditional institutions there came a flood of charlatans and charismatics to fill the void. Filmmaker, Cult Leader/Musician, what’s the difference.
Jbryant – Your Charlie Rose is dead-on.
Thanks, Bill!
Bill: I hate to do it, but.… ROFLMFAO! I honestly can’t say I ever saw that one.
Jbryant, what a hilarious video! Your impression is dead-on and is playful, nice-spirited jabbing. Favorite moment… the brief pause before you said “Welcome”. That was exact!
@@ Jbryant: Very funny stuff, and an excellent Rose impression. I particularly like the way you order the crew to “roll” the clip. And the clip not being there is of course very Count Floyd, and always a great gag.
I myself have been on the Rose program twice, the first time when the very genial Janet Maslin was pinch-hitting for Rose, who was undergoing surgery at the time, the second with The Man himself. Of course I’d go on again in a heartbeat, although that seems like an extremely remote likelihood at this point in time. I understand the objections to his style, but until somebody brings Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360 to television, Rose is gonna kinda be the only game in town.
I remember Wallace as being amusedly and kind of affectionately befuddled by Rose, in a “what is up with that dude?” kind of way.
@Ryan – Here’s the interview. You can fast forward to about 12:25 to get to the point where Rose begins the question that will lead to the Franzen/Wallace reaction. Which, by the way, is subtle, but unmistakable.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6191
@Glenn – I will say this for Rose: in his one-on-one interview with Wallace, Wallace was clearly uncomfortable being on TV, and Rose did a nice job of trying to reassure him that he was doing fine. It’s really a very small moment, but since I watched the interview shortly after Wallace’s death, I actually found it very touching.
Also, Wallace gives one of my favorite answers ever in that interview. Rose asked him to define “post-modernism”, and Wallace said “Man, I don’t know…AFTER modernism.”
Thanks, guys. I’m glad my impression was taken as “nice-spirited” rather than mean-spirited. As exasperated as I can get with Rose sometime, he is just about the only game in town when it comes to longish interviews with interesting people.
Glenn: If I ever put this on DVD, can I make you my quote whore? –
“Very funny stuff, and an excellent Rose impression.” – Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running