Feature (Kellow/Kael) | Feature: The Wide Screen Interview

Wide Screen November 9, 2011

Almost a decade after her death, and nearly two decades after she stopped writing, Pauline Kael is still the film critic all other film critics are somehow obliged to have an opinion about. Kael, who wrote enthusiastic and sometimes combative prose about movies for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, is now the subject of a full-length biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Viking), by Brian Kellow, a senior editor at Opera News and previously the biographer of the silver screen’s Bennett family and of Ethel Merman. Kellow’s book sheds light on Kael’s origins, which she often kept obscure, and provides a vivid view of the film scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and of Kael’s place in it, and of the politics played within that scene. Wide Screen spoke with Kellow about his experience writing the book, the surprises Kael’s life held for him, and Kael’s continuing influence and pertinence in the increasingly fragmented world of filmmaking and film criticism today.

WIDE SCREEN: I spoke recently with someone who had been a longtime friend of Kael’s, who told me that the subject of a biography had been broached during her lifetime. And she pooh-poohed it. Rather vociferously. And this person didn’t speak to you for the book, out of, he said, a desire to honor those wishes. But with some notable exceptions, most of the other people who were close to her did speak to you. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have an ego. Do you think her objection to a biography was sincere, or do you think that she held some potentially contradictory ideas relative to her writing and her legacy?

BRIAN KELLOW: I think, as with so many things with Pauline... I think that’s a complicated answer. She definitely hated the idea of anybody poking around in her past, discovering old boyfriends. Or the one husband, as it turned out, not three, as she loved to tell people. I think she was extraordinarily private and discreet about things like that. I think she was also quite discreet where other people were concerned. At the same time she probably wanted her legacy to continue. You have to think that, if you go to the archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, because she scrupulously, meticulously maintained her archive. She had no connection to IU, particularly, I think they just made the best monetary offer. But she saved letters from everybody. She saved letters from fans, readers who just wrote to her at The New Yorker once or twice. It’s all there. And there aren’t a great many letters from her, copies of letters from her, the way some people save letters that they write to others. But she certainly saved, I would say, the lion’s share of the letters she received from anybody of interest.

You are an editor at Opera News. Did being removed from the film critic community prove helpful or a hindrance ?

Helpful. I think it was very important to have a certain distance, a certain steady emotional distance from the subject. I’m a long time student, lover, of film, and this was a huge topic. It’s been very, very important — it’s actually more important than opera is. If I had to rate them.

In terms of gaining access, you could be perceived as Switzerland — a relatively neutral party.

Yeah. Well, I sort of had to be. With any biography, if you’re really going to do a good job — and I hope I have — you discover as you go. You have your ideas, you have your book proposal, you have your thesis. But you’ve got to be open to discovering as you go. And that’s really what I did. It was a constant evolution.

How many years has it been since she stopped writing? More than 20, right?

She stopped in 1991. So it’s exactly 20.

And she died in—

2001.

So it’s 10 years since she died. Twenty years since she stopped writing. Almost a quarter of a century. And yet, if you’re a film critic, you’re expected to have an opinion on Pauline Kael. In a way that you’re not expected to have an opinion on Rex Reed. Or even Andrew Sarris, in a way. It’s a very fraught thing.

I remember a few years ago going up to a panel in Boston at the Coolidge Theater, with Owen Gleiberman, Scott Foundas, Armond White, Phillip Lopate, Stephanie Zacharek, Ty Burr, and so much of it was about the future of film criticism. Everybody had their Pauline story.

Yeah.

And everybody had their Pauline thing. And I did not. So I made a joke. I said yeah, I got the call from Pauline when I was writing for the Voice, but my mom told her I wasn’t home. I got a very nasty email from someone, because I made that joke. Admittedly the person who wrote it was drunk at the time.

Um hmm. Right.

Did you come up against any of that kind of very focused and fierce defensiveness about her? It’s funny, because as you read the book and you see how fiercely she fought for what she believed in and how she stood up for what she believed was right, even when she was clearly not right, she wasn’t a person who needed anyone else to do the defending.

No, absolutely. Well to me it’s very, very funny. You probably read the discussion in The New York Times over the weekend. [A back-and-forth between Times film critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis on both Kael and Kellow’s biography.]

Um hmm.

But that one comment that I think A.O. Scott made that he never quite bought her as a polarizing figure. I don’t think she ever intended herself to be that much of a polarizing figure. I don’t think she ever thought about it that much. She just had this idea about what she believed in and what she thought the movies should do and what the movies should be, and she just went with it, right to the wall.

But yes, in answer to your question, people are incredibly sensitive about her, to this day. So many of the Paulettes are still fighting it out with each other. I’m not going to mention any names. A number of them are still really, really bound up in this relationship that they had with her. Some of them are still jockeying for position with a woman who’s been dead for 10 years, which I think is very strange and a little sad.

It’s interesting, From the account in your book, it seems that if Andrew Sarris hadn’t taken Kael’s writing about his writing so personally, their feud, such as it was, might have gone differently.

Well, yeah. A few people have mentioned in print, she’s not the one that kept bringing it up. It wasn’t really a feud. It was kind of a one-shot out of the cannon. I interviewed him for the book, very nice man. And I felt that I’d been keeping him maybe a little too long. And I finally said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I just have a few more questions, do you mind if we just continue for 10 more minutes?” He said, “No, no, no; let’s get it done. I don’t want to have a conversation about her again!”

Clearly you’d have to say that Kael was powerful. And that she sensed herself as being powerful. She was angriest at Andrew Sarris, not because of his theories but because, for example, he would refuse to champion Last Tango in Paris. She felt she was going to be at the advance of championing these movies she thought were great and everybody had to follow. By the same token, I think today’s film critics look at certain of the more famous anecdotes: Sitting in the back of a limo with Otto Preminger and Andrew Sarris and telling them that Hurry Sundown is a piece of shit. Or Schickel’s account of how she destroyed the ego of David Lean so that he couldn’t work again. Clearly the reality of David Lean’s case has more to do with money than Pauline Kael destroying his ego. So in terms of actual power, does she represent a sort of high-water mark that’s never going to happen again? Or is there a certain amount of just perception involved in this thing? Or do you merely look at the situation and say, well, this was a different era?

Sure. I think that’s the whole point. I think it was a very specific time in movie history and cultural history. It’s not going to come again. That,great dialogue between the audience and the screen that she talked about, it was really happening then, in a way that, to my mind, it has never happened since. Movies don’t have that hold on the culture that they did. I can remember as a college student going to everything. I wanted to see even the stuff that I had a hunch wasn’t going to be very good. I was sort of in Andrew Sarris archival interest mode. And there were a lot of us who felt that way back then. This would have been in the middle, late ’70s. I just think it was a once in a lifetime thing. I think it was painful for her to see — because she was right in the vortex. I think she was right about a lot of the reasons it faded away. America did become much more of a money culture. It still is. And different things were driving the movies.

Sure. A lot of it’s technological. Cinephilia has become kind of privatized. And the conversation as a result is different. It’s migrated to the Internet.

Yep.

Robert Warshow wrote, at the end of the day, you have to admit that a man is in a theater and you are that man. And that was her approach to writing: “the immediate experience.” But some might say she adhered to that idea almost to a fault, citing her ostensible refusal to watch a movie more than once. What I see is not so much a disinclination to watch films more than once, but a passion, almost approaching a mania, to get her immediate response down on paper.

Absolutely. Because she thought that was the truest response.

Let’s talk about that in terms of an actual critical ethos. How do you feel that worked for her in terms of the larger body of work, and what do you think the liabilities for that approach were? It has to be exhausting to write from that perspective so much of the time. Or do you feel like she had so much energy that this was just her default mode?

I think it was. She had an amazing amount of vitality. This was what drove her. The fact that she didn’t have the foundation of theory that a lot of other critics have had is one thing. But I think the great gift of doing criticism the way she did it was to the reader. And of course she was terribly concerned about her reader. The way she wrote for the ear, the way she had to read it out loud because she wanted to make sure it had that certain immediacy, and that certain sexiness and drive and pulse — I think that’s very endearing. I wish that more critics thought about their readership, frankly. That was the great benefit of her doing it the way she did. We picked up on that first rush of excitement, on that initial response.

The other thing you have to say is, it wasn’t like she was 21 years old. She was established; her intellect, her taste level, her aesthetic, whatever you want to say, it had all coalesced very nicely by the time she sat down to write her first movie review. So it wasn’t like she was going to be learning, learning, learning, and grammatically changing her mind about a lot of big things. I first started reading her when I was very, very young. It was like a great performance in the theater, when you feel that the actor or the singer or whoever it happens to be is performing directly to you, speaking directly to you. I felt certain that she was talking right to me. And I’ve never come across that same thing in any other movie critic.

Going through her work over the years, it’s interesting to see how on and off she was in her pronouncements pertaining to what a film said about the zeitgeist. It’s interesting to see her try and balance her own immediate response to a larger social view. And sometimes it’s a little weird. She comes off as weirdly priggish when, in her review of Breathless, where she’s talking about how Michel and Patricia are the youth of the day and they don’t care about anything. And then she’ll seem to be excited about something almost not in spite of but because of an amorality going on there. And also her tendency to cite contemporary music. The whole urge to be current, to say, as James Wolcott related, “David Bowie” and not “John Wayne.” Do you attribute this to the vitality you talked about?

I think she was obsessed with staying current. At the same time there was this other side of her. Her nephew, Bret Wallach, told me that when he was participating in campus demonstrations at Berkeley, she was very much against it. He was stunned because he had always thought of her, I guess, as rebellious Aunt Pauline, constantly giving the finger to the establishment. But she was not in favor of anything that was going to lead you to a point of alienation or isolation. She wanted to be in it. In the vortex, at the vortex. You can see it in a lot of her reviews of early ’70s films, like her comments on Joe and Five Easy Pieces. She doesn’t see the value in this point of view of dropping out and living a life of despair and nothing works and the government’s terrible and what are we going to do, except grow mushrooms and live in the woods. She was not in favor of that at all. She was much more interested in the established order.

How much of a challenge was it finding things about those aspects of her life that she would have preferred to remain undiscussed?

I went to Petaluma, California, where she grew up and saw the house where she had lived initially. And got a sense of the whole area, the chicken farming industry out there. And the political climate. The Jewish community. And I did spend quite a bit of time in California and talking to people that she had worked with at the Berkeley Cinema Guild. They’re still around and they all had vivid memories of that time. And the Berkeley Cinema Guild was the hottest ticket in town. So that was exhilarating. But she did cover her tracks very well in her personal life. I still don’t know what the point was in telling everyone she was married three times. Except I do think she just had this kind of delight in subterfuge and fooling people. But she was married once.

One of the many interesting thing that you learn is that she did not like New York City that much. Where do you think she felt most comfortable?

In the country. Absolutely. She was really very happy when she found that house up in Great Barrington. I know how she felt, because I grew up on a farm on the West Coast and it’s a very funny thing when you come here, and you’ve just gone to whatever school you can manage to afford, and then you’re thrown into this world where everyone — not everyone, but so many people have been on a certain track from the time they were born. They went to the private schools, they went to the prep schools, they went to the Ivy League schools. And they have been moving toward this sort of A-list literary career from the time they could walk. And they’ve got very regimented ideas that go along with that kind of background. And she naturally, instinctively, rebelled against that. She wanted nothing to do with it. There was also a little bit of anger that she was on the outside of all that. But she was proud of her West Coast roots, very proud. To achieve what she did and to attain this great position of power and influence, given her background, is kind of amazing. I don’t think it happens very often.

Now this leads to another interesting point. She never wrote a magnum opus. There’s a lot of critics who try — Vincent Canby wrote a novel; David Denby has written various books; Wolcott, a novel, now a memoir. She never did that. She wrote “Raising Kane,” an extremely problematic long essay.

I didn’t realize how problematic ‘til I started.

Yet she did enjoy this position of power and influence, and the interesting thing is she — I guess the word would be fraternized — with artists and didn’t see any problem with that. Did she consider it her right to make friends with these people and not necessarily go with the standard journalistic disclosure clauses?

It’s usually very, very tricky to fraternize with the people you’re charged with writing about. Because if you know the person well, if you’re extremely fond of the person that you’re writing about, you can start to second guess yourself when that person does something that maybe isn’t so terrific. But in her case — and again, I think she’s a unique case — I don’t think it affected her much. Robert Altman told me she wasn’t in anybody pocket. And she really wasn’t. I don’t find any evidence that she was. I think she was extraordinarily ethical in that respect. But she got a kick out of hanging out with these people. She was stimulated by them. She wanted to talk to them. She wanted to know what they were thinking, what they were thinking about doing, what kind of films they were thinking about making. And she wanted to have some input where that was concerned. But that’s where her incredible streak of naïveté comes in. Then when she did write something bad about Altman or Woody Allen or whoever it happened to be — she went to Woody Allen’s New Year’s Eve parties, for God’s sake — she didn’t understand why they were upset. She had such a bacon slicer of a mind that she did not understand why anybody wouldn’t be able to see “I do what I do for a living, she does what she does for a living, and I shouldn’t take this personally.” Well they always take it personally. It’s impossible not to, if you’ve lived with a project for that long.

In all the people you interviewed for the book, who was the person who most surprised you?

The single most jaw-dropping moment I had in an interview was probably with Veronica Cartwright. That story stopped me cold. Do I need to retell it?

No. People should get the book and read it!

OK. Veronica was being very fair and very honest in her account. She really did have this fascination with Veronica’s talent and style and everything on the screen. And then when she met her, the stardust fell off. Which I think is fascinating. Suddenly she was just a regular person who was having boyfriend problems and she wasn’t nearly as compelling.

Something else I just wanted to mention when you asked me about surprises. The whole thing with Howard Silver and with “Raising Kane” was a huge surprise. And what’s so strange about that to me is that I think for the most part she was a highly ethical person. I think it was very important. I think she was brought up to treat people fairly. I think for the most part she did treat people fairly. And I think she had no patience for boorishness, bad manners, this kind of arrogance that you find so much in the literary world of New York. And that’s what makes that whole episode so odd. It’s an aberration I think. It was upsetting as a biographer. It was really upsetting.

Before we wrap up, let’s actually go back to the beginning and talk about how you came to do the book. When did she become a point of fascination for you?

I was 13. I think Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was the first book that I actually read in the local library when I was growing up in Oregon. And it just took hold of me. This voice just spoke right to me. And I wanted to read more of that.

The film critic of the Oregonian was just a dreadful writer. The adults all around me did nothing but complain about this guy. And when I discovered her, it was — I just didn’t know anybody could write about the movies this way. And so I just kept reading more and more. I think Craig [Seligman] said one time that he committed a lot of them to memory. Well I know I did too. It was that kind of fascination.

And then I met her very briefly twice at lectures that she did. And what struck me both times was how incredibly polite she was. I have this very vivid memory of the first time. We were talking, the two of us, and I was very nervous ‘cause here was Pauline Kael. And I started talking at the same time she did and I was just mortified. And I thought, I just felt myself turn crimson! And I stopped, and she said, no, go ahead. And I remember still to this day how that made me feel. She was lovely about things like that. She really was.

Years later when I came to work at Opera News, we had a series in the magazine called “Going to the Opera With...” And we would take different celebrities from outside the music field to an opera that in some way connected with what they did. I really wanted to invite her to go to an opera, ‘cause I knew she liked opera. And by this time she was retired, she was living in Great Barrington. I got her number somewhere and I called her. And she was very nice. She said, “Oh, honey, thank you so much.” She said, “I’d love to but my Parkinson’s is so bad and it wouldn’t be fair to the people around me.” She said, “I shake like an old washing machine.” And I never forgot. I just love that.

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