RACHEL LUCAS ROCKS

In line with my rant earlier today about history books, and loving David McCullough, here is Rachel Lucas, on the cancellation of a 2-part miniseries about Hitler's early years. The station cancelled it because they were concerned about the few people out there crazy enough to think Hitler is a role model. They would rather punish the normal people in this society who would like to LEARN stuff, because some wackos might mis-understand. And so who suffers? The normal people. Anyway, read Rachel's rant. It's good stuff.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 05:36:00 PM

 
GRATITUDE

Tony Pierce talks about what he is grateful for.

And below that post, check out this photograph. Damn, I want to crawl my way INTO the picture.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 05:30:00 PM

 
Supposed to be a big nor'easter blowing in tonight.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 03:40:00 PM

 
RECLAIMING AMERICAN HISTORY

God. Just read this. I knew there was a reason why I loved David McCullough as an author. In this interview, he takes on the way history books are written today. He attacks the lack of knowledge kids today have of the birth of the nation.

Something must be done. Something must be done. I feel quite frantic about it, and have actually felt this way for quite some time.

My public school education in the 1970s gave me a very good basis of American history. My parents, too, also loved the history of the American revolution, so we grew up hearing the stories of the Boston tea party. Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere's ride was a common bedtime story. We come from a Boston Irish family, so all of those events were very real to us.

Will the stranglehold multiculturalism and the PC-police have over education today EVER END? Is it a phase? Please God, let it pass. It is killing intellectual inquiry in this country.

The whole U-Mass thing wanting to get rid of their Minuteman mascot because it's a "violent image of a white male" makes me CRAZY. CRAZY. These kids are STUPID and uninformed. They're also missing out on so much. An actual education, for one thing.

Notable quotes from Mr. McCullough:

-- "Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual."

-- "History is a story, cause and effect. And if you're going to teach just segments of history - women's issues - these youngsters have almost no sense of cause and effect. They have no sense of what followed what and why, that everything has antecedents and everything has consequences. And they might begin to think that's true of life, too."

-- "And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren't understood; they're not appreciated. And if you don't have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don't mean very much to you. You just think, well, that's the way it is. That's our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn't just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid. It's to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings."

AMEN.

God, please let somebody listen!!

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 02:09:00 PM

 
CROCODILE SAUDI TEARS

I will never forget either. Never.

More on the Saudi response to terror in Riiyadh, and pledges of cooperation:

Dean Esmay

Little Tiny Lies comments on Dean's post

Cold Fury ... Muslims are NOW condemning suicide bombings because Arabs were killed as well, not just Jews. These people are despicable. But I suppose it's a hopeful sign as well.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 01:46:00 PM

 
A NEW POETRY BLOG

Emily Jones (my favorite Hawk Girl) and Stephen have started up a poetry blog. It's right up my alley. If you're a poetry-lover, check it out.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 01:37:00 PM

 
SPEAKING OF DAWSON'S CREEK...

Turns out, I am not alone.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 12:50:00 PM

 
BIG APPLE BLOGGERS

So tonight I travel to Siberia for the Big Apple Blogger Bash. Very much looking forward to it.

Scrolling through the NYC blogs ... getting to know these people. It's fun. Some are already known to me, such as:

Jane Galt (what a writer. Love her blog, and have for quite some time.) I'm linking to a piece of hers I really liked, about Jayson Blair, the Times, and affirmative action. A very clear-headed view.

Brian, the 646 guy, who unfortunately won't be able to attend. He threw the last bash. He just had his one-year blogging anniversary.

I recently discovered God of the Machine. Great blog. Here is how he describes himself. He writes about art, poetry, architecture. I like it a lot.

And then there's Moodlighting. Unfortunately, his permalinks aren't working. His first post is very interesting, about the anti-war stance. "How do you deal with the fact that defending an anti-war stance is essentially defending a corrupt regime?" The post I like best on this page though is his description of meeting his friend at the clock at Grand Central. You have to scroll down a bit, to Tuesday, May 13. First of all: I did not know that the constellations painted on the ceiling of the main terminal at Grand Central were painted backwards, so it is actually painted from the perspective of God. I love that!!! Also: I do love the fact that when they restored the ceiling, they did leave one tiny spot un-restored, so that you could see the difference. Anyway: he really captures what it feels like in that magical space. My writing group meets in the big echoey food court at Grand Central every other week; I love that building being part of my every day life.

Paul Frankenstein. The mere fact that he announces tonight's bash with the walrus poem from Alice in Wonderland is enough for me! I love that. Also: "cheap cold beer" is one of my favorite things.

Anomaly. A very good-looking blog. He has Dean Esmay on his blogroll. As well as Michele and Tony Pierce. I approve! He is a fellow Command Post-er.

Ramblings of a Blue-Collar Slob. Another cool-looking blog, with good posts. Very good posts. I am looking forward to meeting Nick.

Stephen Silver. Another cool discovery. I also want to thank him in person for bringing the following Jon Stewart quote to my attention: "As a fake newsman myself, it’s always encouraging to see the profession catching on...If I can inspire one guy to make up all his sources, well then I’ve done my job." -Jon Stewart, complimenting Jayson Blair. I love Jon Stewart more and more every day.

zeebahtronic What immediately jumped off the page for me? Under "Currently reading", she lists Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. I read that book years ago and I am haunted by it to this day.

Randomness Personified. First of all: I love his post about June Carter Cash. Quotes from various people about her, and then his own thoughts. Very moving.

Lady Crumpet's Armoire. The first post alone (the 40 top books written by women, Brits polled) has made me a fan. Jane Eyre came in second? How can that be? Also, why the hell are the Harry Potter books on there? They're a good romp those books, surely, but it looks odd: Middlemarch. To the Lighthouse. Frankenstein. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Uh ... what?

The famous Alex at Broken Type. Everyone has a blog-crush on Alex. I met him at the last bash. We drank our cocktails beside a precarious stairway.

Ursula, the NY Yoga Girl. I met her at the last bash. She is absolutely fabulous, and that's all I have to say.

Dollhaus. The text is in a column which is so thin that it barely fits two words across. The references to ultimate frisbee make me long for college days on the quadrangle.

The Illuminated Donkey, blogging from Jersey City, 3 miles from me, in view of the famed Pulaski Skyway.

Jahna D'Lish. First of all, if you have a headline "Tea and Cake, or Death" (a quote from the brilliant and HILARIOUS Eddie Izzard), you have my loyalty forever. "Thank you for flying Church of England. Cake or death?" Trust me: in context, it is one of the funniest things you will ever see.

Hands Free. I feel, in looking thru this blog, that I have discovered a gold-mine. Pardon the cliche. Photographs, NYC-street photographs, interesting commentary, rich rich rich.

Pia Wilson. I like the idea of trying to merge two lives together ... the two lives she has within herself.

Gothamist. A plethora of Jayson Blair information.

Navigating the Info Jungle. A ton of great stuff about technology, AOL, new media. Having once worked closely with AOL, all of this stuff is very interesting to me.

Everything New York. Many interesting points, including this one: The Williamsburg Bridge has never gotten the respect it deserves. I laughed when I read that. Yes! That is so weirdly true! Additionally, check out this incredible panoramic photograph from the Worlds Fair in 1939. Woah.

watching expired appliances align Did everybody but me watch the Dawson's Creek finale?? It sure feels like it.


  contact Sheila Link: 5/16/2003 10:44:00 AM

DIARY FRIDAY

 
80 DAYS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Very funny post by Emily Jones about the following CNN special: 80 Days that Changed the World.

I don't think Mickey Mouse should be on there, alongside events like Hitler's beer hall putsch and Black Tuesday. Mickey Mouse changed the world?? Changed the world? Uh. I don't think so.

The Stonewall riots? Prozac?

Grrrr.

But still, there's some good stuff. Tet Offensive, Sputnik, Chinese Cultural Revolution...


TO MY LOYAL READERS
Look through CNN's special. What did they miss? Any event which, in your mind, clearly should be included? If we booted out Mickey Mouse, I Love Lucy, and Princess Diana's death (among other events): what could be added? I know we're missing things.

I'll compile them all and list them here.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/15/2003 04:42:00 PM

 
A RAMBLING DISCOURSE ON STEREOTYPES:
JAYSON BLAIR, OJ SIMPSON, "THE BACHELOR" BITCHES, MALE BASHING

There should be no need for every black person to hang his head in shame because of Jayson Blair's behavior. If you see everything through the filter of race, then you cannot see anything clearly.

I remember those awful pictures of black people jumping up and down for joy when OJ was declared "not guilty"... It seemed to me that the revelers were not gleeful because OJ was acquitted. Not really. They jumped up and down because they themselves had probably received unfair treatment from the LAPD (or wherever they lived) and felt vindicated. A wrong had been righted. That logic seems completely insane to me, but whatever: that was what was operating, because everything had been turned into a racial issue, as opposed to a criminal question: "did he or did he not" kill his wife?

Yes, the LAPD cops have a terribly racist reputation. Black people can be unfairly targeted by racist ignorant cops. However: REALITY CHECK: I am guessing that none of the blacks complaining about racial profiling had ever experienced a white cop planting a bloody glove in their backyard. Vincent Bugliosi, famous prosecutor of the Manson murders, commented on the miscarriage of justice that occurred in the OJ case, and wrote (and I'm paraphrasing): "I've spoken to all of my black friends and colleagues about this, and asked them what they thought. They have all spoken about being pulled over unnecessarily by the LAPD. I always reply: 'Yes. Perhaps you have been harassed and pulled over unfairly. But FRAMED? Have any of you been FRAMED by the cops?" Of course, the answer was always No to that.)

Blacks saw the OJ trial through their own filter of race, their own filter of bad experiencees they have had, and felt that OJ's acquittal was their vindication.

"OJ could not be allowed to pay for that murder, because if he was found to be guilty... then our entire race house of cards would come crumbling down. We cannot bear to have a member of our race pilloried, because it reflects on all of us."

The closer I look at that, the less sense it makes.

All black people are not OJ. OJ is not indicative of all black people. I do not look at OJ's behavior and have any opinion about black people as a whole.

Don't hang your head in shame because Jayson Blair is a bad egg!!!

I watched "The Bachelor" last night. There was a scene at the end where the absolute worst side of women (in general) was on display. They all looked like catty back-stabbing passive-aggressive bitches. Some of them would be bitchy when on camera privately - cutting each other down, mean mean mean, and then be simperingly sweet to each other in person.

The final scene was like an anthropological study. "Watch the female of the species. Notice how her bitchiness grows as each day goes on. Interesting, too: the oldest girl in this flock of females, Christina, who is 30, appears to be the least mature, and most bitchy of them all. Must make a note of that, and look into it further."

I am many things I am not proud of (I can be arrogant, and righteous, I can be way-moody, I can be scared of stupid things, I have a pretty hot temper), but I am not a back-stabber. And I am not petty. I am also not passive-aggressive. If I have a problem with you, you will hear about it. And not 5 months later. I do not give someone the silent treatment. It is not in my nature. I also have many great women friends. There are women who don't like other women, women who secretly do not want other women to do well, women who say "You look gorgeous, Susie" one moment and "Doesn't Susie look awful?" the second poor Susie leaves the room.

I watched last night, cringing at times, taking it personally, feeling like the worst of my sex was on display.

However: just because they're a bunch of back-stabbing straight-haired tank-top-and-tight-jeans-and-highheeled-boots-wearing bitches ... doesn't mean anything about ME, personally. They all look TERRIBLE in terms of their personalities, and also the general lack of self-awareness (well, except for Tina Fabulous who came out of the whole debacle smelling like a rose.) I am sure many men watched the show last night and had their worst thoughts about women confirmed. "Yup. Look at that. All women are back-stabbing money-hungry bitches." I've met guys like that, I've been on a couple of dates with guys like that (it never goes past one date, obviously) ... men who have terrible opinions of women, for whatever reason. Mommy didn't love them enough, whatever. I have no interest in playing psychologist.

This is a rambling post. I haven't written all day.

What I am trying to say is that black journalists and black professionals do not need to hang their heads in shame because Jayson Blair is BLACK. They should hang their heads in shame because he is a dirty JOURNALIST. Or: don't even hang the head in shame! Please, let's stop it with the shame-filled confessional stuff. Just 'fess up that he sucks, that he should never have been allowed to advance, and make sure that your own work is beyond reproach. Do what you can, in your small corner of the profession, to insure that it doesn't happen again. His race is inconsequential. Do not over-identify yourself with your race, or with your gender. It's a stupid thing to do. There are way too many exceptions to every single stereotype to take any of it seriously.

Men who grumble, "Women only care about money" don't know women like me. Men who grumble about women who spend hours shopping, have not met me. I race into a store, try on a pair of pants, fall in love with them, race out, in half an hour's time. The stereotype does not fit. I also am the opposite of cling-y or need-y. I'm too fierce about my own independence to ever try to put boundaries on somebody else. I don't need to be with somebody at all times. I could give a rat's ass if the man I'm interested in needs a couple nights to go out with the boys and whoop it up and revel in testosterone. I don't care if he looks at other women while he is out with his guy friends. Or actually, even if he is with me. If I ever couple up with someone, I am not SUDDENLY not going to find other men attractive. I am not going to SUDDENLY not have a huge lustful crush on Jeff Bridges. I probably will still squeal with excitement when I see that "The Fisher King" is playing on TNT.

So yes, women can be small-minded, petty, and jealous ... but not all women are this way. So you cannot make a blanket statement like that.

At least if you're not interested in the truth.

I am very glad that journalists are going through soul-searching right now, and that the issue of race is being brought up, left and right. It's about time.

I do not make any assumptions about black people, in general, because of Jayson Blair. Jayson Blair was a smarmy conniving liar. And that's IT.

We need more common-sense applied to affirmative action. As it stands now, it sucks eggs.

Two possible conversations involving a hypothetical reporter:
1. Is [hypothetical reporter] good at what he does?
Yes.
Good enough to deserve promotion?
Yes.
Well, all righty- then.

2. Is [hypothetical reporter] good at what he does?
Well ... he's had some problems with accuracy ...
Really? Let me see some documentation of that ...
Here it is ...
Huh. Well, we probably shouldn't put him on the big national case, and we should keep a sharp eye on him.

The fact that that man is black is a big YAWN to me. Doesn't matter at all. And neither should it matter to you.


More:
One other thing on stereotypes: Male-bashing in the media.

It's not just in the media. It is all around me. 10 minutes ago I received an email from a friend of mine, one of those joke emails, called "Men are like..." Here are some of the "jokes":

Men are like ... Laxatives ....They irritate the shit out of you.
Men are like .... Blenders .... You need One, but you're not quite sure why.
Men are like ... Commercials ... You can't believe a word they say.
Men are like ... Lava Lamps ..... Fun to look at, but not very bright.

Who finds this funny? Who would find this funny?

"Fun to look at, BUT NOT VERY BRIGHT"...

Sorry. The smugness of women sometimes is insufferable. I don't see men in that way. I just don't. I listen to the litany of complaints from women with husbands, the treating him like a child, like a buffoon, an idiot, etc. It's incessant. I think: "Jesus, why did you want to hook up with him if you have such contempt for men?"

I can't participate in male-bashing. I won't. I refuse. I know too many brilliant men. Brilliant sensitive stand-up guys. Who have their acts together. I think of my nephew Cashel. I don't want him to grow up feeling shame-faced about his gender. It's just not funny to me.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/15/2003 03:22:00 PM

EXCERPT OF THE DAY

 
STINKY CHEESE

Alex, over at Broken Type, another Big Apple Blogger has a very enjoyable post up at the moment, entitled "New York Cocktail Party". He discusses Stinking Bishop, a cheese offered at the party. He discusses its hyperbolic stinkiness at some length, and with great eloquence. He uses the word "cthulu". Then he closes with some quotes (so FABULOUS) from the cookbook The Playboy Gourmet. Damn. They don't seem to write cook books like they used to. Mouth-watering quotes.

Read on. Good stuff.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/14/2003 05:01:00 PM

 
AMEN

Stephen Rittenberg asks the question: "When did journalists become psychotherapists?" A terrific post. Go read it.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/14/2003 10:42:00 AM

 
STUPID KID NAMES

Benjamin Kepple takes the story of the Chinese couple naming their child Saddam Sars and runs with it. There is a lot that is very very funny in his post (not to mention a nice little link to me -- narcissism lives within this redhead).

But here's the couple of quotes that made me laugh:

I do know that if my parents had done such a thing when I was born, I would have been the object of ridicule and scorn throughout my childhood. Somehow, I don't think I would have enjoyed life as Whip Inflation Now Kepple, Gas Rationing Kepple, or Ford Administration Kepple.

As such, I thank God and all His Saints and Angels that my parents did not consider it a dy-no-MITE! idea to name me Disco Duck Kepple. But of course, they would not have ever considered doing that. My parents were responsible, level-headed people who were too busy working hard to spend hours thinking up cutesy names for their first-born child. Instead, they spent their time looking for open gas stations.

 
HOBOKEN POLITICS

Yesterday was an election day here in the 'boken. City Council members.

Sunday was a rainy day. In the late grey afternoon, I was vacuuming my living room rug, while blasting 'The Eminem Show', when a knock came at my door. I live in a 5th floor walk-up and you can't get into the building unless someone buzzes you in, so needless to say, I thought, "Who the hell is that?" I opened the door and there was a woman, carrying a clipboard. She had short frosted blonde hair, and was wearing violently vivid majenta lipstick.

I am the kind of person who will hang up on telemarketers with nary an "I'm not interested." If you presume to intrude upon my 5th floor walk-up castle, then I have no problem telling you to take a hike. So the second I saw her, everything got very hard inside me.

"How did you get into this building?" I asked.

"Oh, somebody buzzed me in."

She told me that she was running for City Council.

I said, "Now is not a good time, actually."

But somehow, magically, 20 minutes later she was still standing there and I was saying things like: "If you're elected, will you fix the parking situation, because it is completely out of control."

THAT'S a good politician. I opened the door a prickly hermit-crab, and, eventually ... all of that dissolved, and when I closed the door on her, my hands were full of pamphlets, brochures, financial statements. And I have no idea when the shift occurred. I also said to her, as she left, "You know, I have collected all the brochures of all the candidates, and my roommate and I read all of them last night, to get informed. But you are the only one who has come by to see me personally. I will not forget that."

Warning: What follows may be offensive to some people

One of the candidates for City Council is a midget. He is very involved in the Hoboken community, I see him at every event, he knows everybody in town, everybody knows him.

He ran on a platform of "let's clean up City Hall". All of the posters for him showed him and his team standing there smiling, holding brooms.

As all the campaigning intensified in the last couple of weeks, with candidates roaming the streets of Hoboken, buttonholing strangers, nabbing them the second they got off the Path train ... Midget-man and his team would set up a table on Washington Street, with reading materials, buttons to buy (of Midget with a broom), etc. Typical campaigning stuff.

It's just unfortunate that the image of the midget with a broom, a broom 2 feet taller than he is, is not exactly designed to generate confidence. It basically just looks like a goof. The smiling candidate, being towered over by his own broom.

Jen, my roommate, staring at his brochure silently, finally stated, "Whose bright idea was this? Having a 3 foot tall man with a 9 foot tall mop??"

  contact Sheila Link: 5/14/2003 07:58:00 AM

 
NEW AND INTERESTING...

John Hawkins, over at RWN, lists some "up-and-coming blogs". His recommendations are usually so spot-on; he has turned me on to half the people I read.


  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 03:26:00 PM

 
THE SARS HYSTERIA

A friend forwarded this article about media-induced SARS hysteria to me.

Reading it is like that moment in the movie "The Producers" when Gene Wilder is having a jittery nervous breakdown, spazzing out in the corner, and Zero Mostel tosses a glass of water in his face. Gene Wilder freezes. Stunned. Snapped out of it in a flash.

The essay is by Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute.

Repeatedly, SARS is called "killer pneumonia," as if pneumonia normally causes hiccups. Yet 62,000 Americans died of pneumonia in 2001. The SARS stories often invoke the great flu pandemic of 1918-19, which probably killed 40 million people, according to WHO estimates. That's more than ten times as many people daily — among a global population a third the size of today's — as SARS has yet killed.

 
BLACK, WHITE

Good post on CalPundit, looking at "the Blair Affair". He has some very good points:

Blair was an accomplished liar and suckup, and the Times screwed up badly in not noticing earlier that something fishy was going on. (They didn't even notice that none of his expense accounts included plane tickets or hotel bills? Sheesh.) But when Glass did the same thing at the New Republic nobody ran stories suggesting that we ought to be more careful about hiring white guys in the future.

Why is it that when one — one! — black con artist scams the Times he's a black con artist, but when white con artists scam the New Republic, the LA Times, and the Salt Lake City Tribune, they're just — con artists? Funny how that works.

 
LOOKING BACK

Tracked down a piece in Slate by Jack Shafer about Stephen Glass, the hot-shot reporter at The New Republic fired for fabrications. His scandal is even more mind-boggling than Jayson Blair's, in my opinion. Stephen Glass made up entire companies, so that he could then write about completely made-up employees. He basically sat down and wrote fiction. He didn't steal stuff from other reporters, or plagiarize. HE MADE IT ALL UP.

I find this piece interesting, because it is written from the perspective of "Wow. He really had me fooled."

In the days to come, more and more Jayson Blair revelations will come out, the story will unfold. More and more people will share their experiences with Blair, their doubts, whatever.

Shafer writes:

I'm embarrassed to confess that every Glass story passed my stink test when first published in the New Republic. Now, plowing through the big Nexis dump, my hindsight is golden. Glass moved monumental piles of bullshit past me, a vain skeptic.

Colleagues describe Glass as an extraordinarily hard-working and personable 25-year-old who gladly pulled all-nighters to improve his pieces whenever his editors asked him to. He was completely open to criticism. He regularly entertained the staff at editorial meetings with previews of the dish to come in his next piece. It's a testimony to his energy that when editors questioned his hacker piece, he erected a Web site to prove the existence of a nonexistent software company. A layabout would simply have written a true story. When you like somebody, you tend to trust him. (Let this be a lesson to us all.)

 
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

If you have never encountered the Disaffected Muslim, then it is high time you should. "Fatimah" descrbies her blog as "The natterings of an unhappy American Muslim." Pretty much everything she writes is a must-read.

First off, there was her piece a couple of months ago which brought her blog to my attention: "The Distance of Allah From his Creatures." Her archives appear to be disappearing (just like mine ... grrrr), otherwise I would like to it. She's a wonderful writer. I also sense that beneath her articulation of the issues facing Muslims today, there is deep pain.

Anyway, I have to point to two phenomenal pieces up on her blog right now. Run over there and read them right now.

The first one is called Muslim PR, and is the first post on the page. She speaks from the inside of the religion, which gives her voice so much more authority. The first paragraph of the post starts us off:

Muslims sometimes say that doing something or other (such as commit terrorist acts) will give Islam "a bad image" (the way some say it, it seems as if there is no other reason to do or not do something!) For example, the 9/11 attacks gave Islam a "bad image" (to put it lightly). Suicide bombers blowing up buses in Tel Aviv and yelling "Allahu Akbar" give Islam a "bad image" (it's not so much that they're slaughtering women and children, they're "defaming Islam!" and putting the Palestinian cause in disrepute).

*Stop playing the "victim," which only breeds resentment and distrust among other Americans, especially when Muslims screaming jihad were in fact involved in horrific acts against Americans.

*Fully accept American notions of democracy, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion (no death sentences for apostates!) and the secular law as the law to be followed (instead of claiming that since it's "man-made" law, Muslims are not bound to follow it--a sure recipie to have Muslims considered traitors). Also, the first loyalty of American Muslims must be to America, not the "ummah" (the worldwide "nation" of all Muslims), which means no more asking of Imams if it is OK for American Muslim soldiers to fight other Muslims.

*Instead of whining about "racial profiling" and "discrimination" in the wake of 9/11 and other terrorist acts, offer wholehearted cooperation to ferret out the terrorists and their organizations.

*While religious beliefs of Christians (and often Jews) are looked down on and considered to be a mark of unsophistication by some elites, Muslim religious belief is often not seen in this way, instead as a positive expression of their culture.

*Prayer in schools by Christians and Jews is an absolute no-no in US public schools, yet some schools give Muslims special prayer rooms and/or let them off for prayer.

*Any criticism of Islam is attacked as "Islamophobia" or "racism" (even though Muslims are in no way a race) by Muslims, while their own publications criticize, denigrate, and ridicule other religions (such as Christianity and Judaism; Hinduism is also a target).

*One-way "dialogues" in which Christians and Jews are told they must be more accepting and tolerant of Islamic beliefs and practices, while Muslims are NOT told they must accept and tolerate other beliefs, instead they are more likely to be told, or claim, that they are "victims" of the West and Western imperialism (cf. John Esposito's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University).

 
THE BOMBING IN RIYADH

Up-to-date information over at The Command Post.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 12:13:00 PM

 
I'M GOING TO NAME MY BABY "JAYSON BLAIR SCANDAL"

Okay, this post over at a small victory is very funny. A Chinese couple have named their new baby "Saddam Sars", to reflect the current events of the time. Michele takes this idea and runs with it.

If my parents had followed this rule, I might have been named a number of things:

-- Elvis Presley Marries Priscilla O'Malley

-- Six Day War O'Malley

-- 1st Heart Transplant O'Malley

-- Greek Military Coup O'Malley

-- Che Guevara Bites the Dust O'Malley

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 12:11:00 PM

 
"where have all my archives gone..."

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 11:02:00 AM

 
REMAIN CALM ... JUST REMAIN CALM

The Matrix Reloaded opens this week. But just

REMAIN CALM

 
I'VE BEEN DUPED

Thanks to Ann Marie, I now realize that I have been duped. The whole "port-a-potty with dial-up access" thing is a hoax. A blatant hoax.

I wrote about it. I wrote about it as though it were a true story. I have been duped. Well, how the hell should I know? It was one of the main links in Yahoo News!

I wonder if Jayson Blair worked on this story.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 10:49:00 AM

 
IT'S MY BEAR TO CROSS

During college, my friend Luisa, was having a bad day, many problems: papers due, her dog was sick, her love life tempestuous. My friend Mitchell and I had spent the night at Luisa's house, and in the morning, she woke up in a bleak mood, completely overwhelmed, weeping as she made the coffee. She wandered off to her room to get ready to go to school, muttering like a Middle Ages martyr, "It's my bear to cross. It's my bear to cross."

It's awful, I know, but witnessing this spectacle of tragedy put Mitchell and I in a rather riotous mood. We were NOT feeling like Middle Ages martyrs, and so there we sat, watching poor Luisa, serious A student, fabulous gourmet cook, brilliant woman, stagger around like a lunatic, trying to face her day, saying, "It's my BEAR to CROSS". Luisa who is a literate articulate woman. Mitchell and I were desperately holding back shrieks of laughter, as we drank our coffee.

Mitchell murmured to me, barely controlling the hysteria, "Uh ... bear to cross?"

Luisa was in such a dark mood, however, that we were afraid to point this mistake out to her. We feared she might kill us. Later that evening, when she came home, feeling much better, we all made dinner, we drank some wine, we let off some steam. It was then that Mitchell and I launched into imitations of Luisa's "mea culpa" performance-art-piece early that morning. Mitchell shuffled by like a lunatic, moaning, "It's my bear to cross. It's my bear to cross."

Poor Luisa! She refused to believe for a while that she had said "bear to cross", but finally had to accept the fact. She was absolutely helpless with laughter, rolling around on the floor. Begging us to imitate her again. "Do it again! Do it again!"

From that day forward, in my group of friends, none of us EVER says "it's my cross to bear". We always say, "It's my bear to cross."

Anyway:

Speaking of screwing things up inadvertently, check out the memo sent out to the staff of The New York Times from Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Howell Raines, and Gerald Boyd. Looks like the memo "bares" a second look. It also "bares" a spell-check, for God's sake.

Oh well. It's their "bare" to cross.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 10:42:00 AM

 
WOMEN IN COMBAT

Dean Esmay is hosting a fascinating conversation over on his blog about "women in combat". He opened up his comments area, and asked that only women respond to the question: Women in Combat, yes or no?

Great comments. Very thought-provoking.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 10:26:00 AM

 
"COWARDLY"?

I am sure there is some good reason that politicians and public figures uniformly refer to acts of terrorism as "cowardly", but I have to say I don't understand it. It just doesn't seem like the right word. I would never choose that word. I would say "horrific", "terrible", "dastardly", "evil", whatever. But "cowardly"? That seems to let the monsters off way too easily. Again, it seems like it must be in a "Politicians Handbook" somewhere.

"If people are killed through terrorism, if a bomb explodes, we have found that the most effective word to describe such a horror is 'cowardly'."

Do they think that calling the terrorists the name "cowardly" will really insult them? Like: "Ooooh, you're think you're such a big brave terrorist, but y'know what? You're just a coward."

Driving a car into a building and blowing yourself up is a lot of things, I would call it a lot of things, but I would not call it cowardly.

If anyone out there reading this can enlighten me on WHY our public officials insist on that word, I would greatly appreciate it.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 10:11:00 AM

 
LET'S SEE IF THIS WORKS

Just took a quiz: "Which Ultimate Beautiful Woman Are You?" And here is the result ...


You are the mystery woman


Which Ultimate Beautiful Woman are You?
brought to you by Quizilla


Found this quiz via Andrea Harris, who also took the quiz, and found out that she is "Hell's Librarian".


  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 10:10:00 AM

 
JAYSON BLAIR

I came across this short statement, from Roger Simon, via Instapundit, and it got me thinking. On a different level about this Jayson Blair nightmare. Roger Simon gets above it, takes an uber-perspective. He thinks that, in the long run, it is probably a good thing that this has happened.

Something akin to that had been going through my mind last night, as I watched the news, and as I talked with my mom about the Jayson-Blair thing. Perhaps this is just what The New York Times has needed. EVERYBODY needs to keep a watch over their integrity. You can never be too complacent. Individuals cannot, and neither can institutions. Look at Enron. Dishonesty will lose in the end. And you have to be vigilantly honest with yourself.

But even higher up than that, on an even more macro level: I think it is good that this happened (even though it is a nightmare for all involved) because suddenly people are really talking about affirmative action. The taboo-subject is out in the open. All voices are being heard (judging from the parade of talking-heads across cable news last night). There are people for whom affirmative action is an 11th commandment. "Thou shalt not kill." "Thou shalt have diversity in the workplace." And there are those who are calling it into question. I myself believe completely in a meritocratic system. I do not care about diversity in the workplace. At least not as an 11th commandment. What I do care about is effectiveness, competency, and being good at what you do. Race does not matter to me one bit. This goes to what I was talking about yesterday: that this is a matter of character. Stephen Glass, the disgraced reporter at the New Republic was white, and he was a charlatan, a liar, a cheat, a scoundrel. There are some people who cannot help but take the short-cuts to success. It is what they are made of. Black people do not corner this market, and neither do white people. Some people are praised early on for doing the minimum amount of work, or they are praised because they play the shmooze game well ... and from then on, they prefer to project the FACADE of competency. But make no mistake: it is a facade. And because everyone around them buys into that facade, and applauds the facade, they begin to believe their own lies. Jayson Blair probably really believed that he was a hard-working hard-hitting reporter from The New York Times. O.J. probably really believes he is innocent. The human mind is a fascinating thing. Truth is ever-flexible. There is absolutely no deeps a person is unable to plumb ... Self-deception can become a way of life.

But here I'm just talking about the personalities involved. The personality of Jayson Blair. The personality of Stephen Glass. (Why some people do such things ... while other people would NEVER do such a thing... I believe, with all my heart, in a moral compass. And I also believe, with all my heart, that some people do not have such a compass. Ted Bundy comes to mind. And now Jayson Blair.) This situation is WAY bigger than Jayson Blair.

Institutions can also be run on self-deception. Not even "run on self-deception". That's not the right way to put it. LIES are the air that some businesses breathe. Everything is a lie. A self-congratulatory lie. During the Enron scandal, I remember seeing clips from recent company meetings at Enron, a couple of months before the spectacular collapse ... and it was stunning. A room packed full of people, cheering and applauding themselves, puffed up with confidence ... unaware that the wheels of disaster were already well in motion. A company that had become so used to lying, lying to itself, lying to its employees, its shareholders, the public, its accountants ... Lies that grow to that magnitude no longer become lies. It's a life-style. It's bigger than one person. It is the air, the atmosphere. You cannot imagine a way out. You cannot IMAGINE coming clean, because it is too big. Too unweildy. There is NOTHING you can do to stop the deception ... you are helpless in the face of such gargantuan dishonesty.

Jayson Blair created his own personal Enron.

And The New York Times has to come clean. The conversations I have heard over the last couple of days ... batting around in the blog-world, on op-ed columns, on CNN, Fox, MSNBC ... these conversations are almost exhilarating to listen to. Because you know what I feel I am in the presence of? Even with all the disagreeing viewpoints? I feel like finally TRUTH has come into the damn room.

And truth is messy. Truth sometimes don't feel all that good, y'know what I'm saying? Truth means being able to say, "Wow. I have so screwed up here. I am so sorry." Like: taking the fall. Taking your punches. Owning up. That's what's happening here for The New York Times, and I think it's fantastic.


  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 09:51:00 AM

 
WAL-MART'S MAXIM

Benjamin Kepple has a very funny piece up today about Wal-Mart's decision to ban magazines with racy covers, like "Maxim". (Permalink is leading to the wrong thing ... so go to the post entitled: "Kids! It's time for MORE cultural diversity!")

  contact Sheila Link: 5/13/2003 09:31:00 AM

 
REALITY CHECK

As stressed out as I am at this moment, as much as I have on my mind, I do take comfort in the indisputable fact that I am not as stressed out as Jayson Blair right now.

Whatever my stress level might be, it is a damn cakewalk compared to what he must be going through! Every time I try to picture him, I see a sweaty scared wreck of a human, balled up in a corner of his apartment, smashing his cell phones to bits, weeping hysterically. Stamping on his scrapbook of clippings from the New York Times. Jolting with panic every time the phone rings. Screaming out like King Lear: "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!!" Jolting awake in the middle of the night, panicked, the swirling conviction that everyone hates him, that the entire endless Alice-in-Wonderland corridor of doors have all slammed shut specifically to him, in the course of 5 days. And he can blame no one but himself. He writhes about in his sweaty sheets, moaning.

Just imagining the contrast makes me feel like I am doing GREAT, I am the picture of relaxation, I am sinking into a hot bath. Ahhhh. At least I'm not him right now!

  contact Sheila Link: 5/12/2003 05:07:00 PM

 
JAYSON BLAIR, CONTINUED

The gathering storm.

Again: it makes me a feel a bit nauseous. I remember being caught in mini-lies when I was a little kid, and how horrible it felt. How I tortured myself, how scary it was to be "caught out". But THIS!!

But plagiarism is the worst. Plagiarism is absolutely the lowest of the low. Do your own damn work.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/12/2003 12:23:00 PM

 
JAYSON BLAIR

This made for absolutely riveting reading. What must life be like for Jayson Blair right now? It must be a shrieking nightmare! Yuk. Like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from. But it's real. I think he deserves all of the bad waking-up-in-a-cold-sweat moments he gets, by the way, but it doesn't stop me from imagining what it would be like to BE him right now. To be so publicly disgraced.

The image of him hiding out in his Brooklyn apartment, with his laptop, filing dispatches pretending he was in Virginia, his cell phone turned resolutely off ... is ... it makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. The man is clearly a pathological SOMETHING. That behavior is completely and ragingly out of control. Lies upon lies upon lies. How in the world did he think he would get away with it??

It seems to me to come down to a question of character. I don't believe that every single person, when put under extreme pressure, would crack in the same way. (This came to mind when I watched Diane Sawyer's interview with Manson-murderess Leslie Van Houten who kept saying, lucidly, "You weren't there. You don't know what you'd do if you were in that situation.") I think that's a load of crap, to some degree.

Some people, in Jayson Blair's position, work their asses off, openly make mistakes, try to correct them ... try to be the best that they can be. He lied, he cheated, he deceived everybody.

Then there's this quote from the Times piece:

What haunts Mr. Roberts now, he says, is one particular moment when editor and reporter were facing each other in a showdown over the core aim of their profession: truth.

"Look me in the eye and tell me you did what you say you did," Mr. Roberts demanded. Mr. Blair returned his gaze and said he had.

NPR's Melissa Block unearths Howell Raines boasting about the New York Times' affirmative action program to the National Association of Black Journalists two years ago, after specifically mentioning Jayson Blair as an example of the Times' successful recruiting efforts. According to Block, Raines said:

'This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.'

"Better"? More importantly, "more importantly"? ...

 
MORE ABOUT ON THE WATERFRONT

It appears that On the Waterfront was actually released in 1954 (not 1953, like I assumed) ... so either next year is the 50th anniversary, or there will be a celebration for the year it was completed, which was 1953. Regardless. I want to continue my celebration of it. (It's sort of the polar-opposite of celebrating the bomb that was Battlefield Earth.)


Roger Ebert, on On the Waterfront:

-- And look at the famous scene between Terry and his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), in the back seat of a taxi. This is the ``I coulda been a contender'' scene, and it has been parodied endlessly (most memorably by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull). But it still has its power to make us feel Terry's pain, and even the pain of Charley, who has been forced to pull a gun on his brother. Here is Kazan on Brando:

" ... what was extraordinary about his performance, I feel, is the contrast of the tough-guy front and the extreme delicacy and gentle cast of his behavior. What other actor, when his brother draws a pistol to force him to do something shameful, would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress? Who else could read 'Oh, Charley!' in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy and suggests the terrific depth of pain?''

-- Steiger is invaluable to the film, and in the famous taxi conversation, he brings a gentleness to match Brando's: The two brothers are in mourning for the lost love between them.

Schulberg's screenplay straddles two styles--the emerging realism and the stylized gangster picture. To the latter tradition belong lines like "He could sing, but he couldn't fly,'' when the squealer is thrown off the roof. To the former: "You know how the union works? You go to a meeting, you make a motion, the lights go out, then you go out.''

Brando's "contender'' speech is so famous it's hard to see anew, but watch the film again and you feel the reality of the sadness between the two men, and the simple words that express it.

-- On the Waterfront was nominated for 11 Oscars and won eight. Ironically, the other three nominations were all for best supporting actor, where Cobb, Malden and Steiger split the vote. Today the story no longer seems as fresh; both the fight against corruption and the romance fall well within ancient movie conventions. But the acting and the best dialogue passages have an impact that has not dimmed; it is still possible to feel the power of the film and of Brando and Kazan, who changed American movie acting forever.


James Berardinelli's review

-- Over the years, many critics have praised On the Waterfront for having what has been called a nearly perfect screenplay. Written by Budd Schulberg (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by Malcolm Johnson that originally appeared in The New York Sun), the script has the unmistakable ring of truth (despite the altered, upbeat ending). For the most part, it neither proselytizes nor preaches, and deals with its central subject with a candor that many movies of the era lacked. Watching the film today, some fifty years after its initial release, it requires little effort to span the half-century between now and then; Schulberg's screenplay makes it easy to understand the situation, even though the entire political climate has undergone a major upheaval since then.

-- For director Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront represented an opportunity to exorcise, at least by proxy, some personal demons. In 1952, while at the height of his career (he had already made A Streetcar Named Desire and Viva Zapata!), Kazan agreed to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. By naming the names of colleagues associated with the Communist Party, Kazan gave himself a free pass, and was able to proceed unmolested with his own career. He also became one of the most high-profile witnesses to speak and avoid blacklisting. On the Waterfront, which came shortly after this period in Kazan's life, contains scenes in which a man stands before a government body and betrays his former friends and colleagues - because his conscience insists that he must do this thing, no matter how it makes him look to others. One would have to be naïve to ignore the obvious connection between the film's storyline and Kazan's personal life. Whether consciously or subconsciously, Kazan was making a statement in defense of his actions: conscience, not self-interest, motivated him to speak before the Committee. I leave it to each reader to determine whether to accept that argument.

-- During the course of his career (especially the early portion of it), Brando gave some amazing performances, but nothing he did before or after rivals his depiction of Terry Malloy. Two scenes in particular stand out as examples of the actor at his finest: the scene where Terry and Edie walk through a park and he toys with the glove she drops (eventually slipping it onto his own hand), and the powerful one-on-one between Terry and Charley where Brando gives his famous "I coulda been a contender" speech. That scene probably represents the best work ever done by either of its participants (Steiger and Brando).

-- Even with the sterling screenplay, this movie would not have had the same impact without such a capable cast. Steiger in particular deserves more credit than he is often given. He and Brando feed off one another in the film's most memorable scene. Would the delivery of the "contender" line have been as poignant with another actor in Steiger's place?

-- Today, parts of On the Waterfront don't work quite as well as they once did. Some scenes seem contrived or overly familiar. But the anger and passion come through. And the romance - gentle, tenuous, and fragile - works as well now as it always did, perhaps because love (unlike politics) never changes. But the real reason to see On the Waterfront is for Brando. It's only possible to understand his impact on American cinema by observing what he does in On the Waterfront ... The power of the "contender" scene isn't so much in the words as it is in the way they're delivered - the simple pain in Brando's voice is echoed in his eyes and mannerisms. Schulberg may have written the scene, but Brando makes it his own. On the Waterfront may have baggage, but that doesn't prevent it from being one of the great American productions of the mid-20th century.


From the original review for the film in The New York Times, July 29, 1954

-- Journalism may have made these ingredients familiar and certainly more inclusive and multi-dimension, but Mr. Kazan's direction, his outstanding cast and Mr. Schulberg's pithy and punchy dialogue given them distinction and terrific impact. Under the director's expert guidance, Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy is a shatteringly poignant portrait of an amoral, confused, illiterate citizen of the lower depths who is goaded into decency by love, hate and murder. His groping for words, use of the vernacular, care of his beloved pigeons, pugilist's walk and gestures and his discoveries of love and the immensity of the crimes surrounding him are highlights of a beautiful and moving portrayal.

-- Despite its happy ending; its preachments and a somewhat slick approach to some of the facets of dockside strife and tribulations, On the Waterfront is moviemaking of a rare and high order.


From Brian Webster's review at Apollo Guide

-- One scene from On the Waterfront is all you need to see to appreciate the magnificent talent of Marlon Brando – and to regret how he largely wasted his skills in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. The scene – one of the most famous in the history of cinema – pairs Brando with Rod Steiger (no small talent on his own) in the back seat of a New York City taxicab. They’re playing brothers Terry (Brando) and Charley (Steiger) Malloy – both thugs in the employ of Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), a gangster who runs the port from his position as head of the longshoreman’s union. Charley – known to his gangster buddies as Charley the Gent – is more sophisticated and experienced than Terry, who is a failed boxer with limited intellect, but who at least shows signs of possessing a conscience. The scene takes place toward the end of the movie; Terry is guilt-ridden over his peripheral involvement in the arranged death of a respected dockworker who wasn’t co-operating sufficiently with Johnny Friendly. Having met and fallen for the dead man’s sister, Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), Terry now is balking at further co-operation with the gangsters. Both brothers know that the consequence of this decision will be catastrophic, so Charley is trying to talk sense into Terry. But Terry will have none of it; in a stunningly powerful exchange, he mourns how his brother has let him down, and in a semi-articulate yet deeply moving speech, draws the line once and for all. His words – penned by Budd Schulberg – are brilliant in their simple power. But even more impressive is Brando’s delivery. He conveys Terry’s heartbreak and muted anger utterly convincingly. Terry has turned on his moral radar – perhaps for the first time – and he’s sick to death of what he sees. This scene includes Brando’s famous “I coulda bin a contenda” line, but more importantly, it crystallizes what Terry – and the film – are all about.


From the review at Film Freak Central, by Walter Chaw:

-- There is a moment in the middle of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront that stands for me as one of the defining in my love for the movies. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) confesses to his girlfriend Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in the Union execution of her brother, but rather than listen to Terry rehash events with which we're already familiar, a steam whistle drowns him out. The precise way that Terry moves his hands and the expression on Edie's face, growing from a gentle concern to horror, is among the most cinematic moments in the history of the medium. It's breathtaking in its simplicity and subtlety, revolutionary in its presentation and its eye, and exactly the right choice for the film at the right time.

-- Although one would think that time and repetition dulled the power of Brando's much-imitated "I coulda been a contender" speech, rest assured that the sheer weight of melancholy flavouring the pivotal conversation in which it occurs remains undimmed.

-- On the Waterfront represents so many things: the magic that occurs when a brilliant but troubled actor finds a director able to harness and refine his talents (see also Ullman and Bergman, De Niro and Scorsese, Kinski and Herzog); the passion of a personal project expressed with intelligence and passion; and the death knell for the affected progressions and performances favoured by the Hollywood studio system to that point. If the ending now plays a little optimistically, and if Malden's performance briefly crosses that thin line into theatricality a time or two, they are flaws too minor to grate, especially in considering the transcendence of the picture as a whole. On the Waterfront is requisite viewing for any student of the art; it is among the best American films.

From the review by Ted Prigge:

-- Watching Brando is one of the greatest experiences in all of film history, and his Terry Malloy is one of the best performances by an actor ever captured on celluloid.

What's left after On The Waterfront is not just the climactic "I coulda been a contender" scene, but the entire message and feel of the film. Who can forget Terry's cynical motto in the beginning? Or the sight of Brando caring for pigeons on the roof of his building? Or the pain in Rod Steiger's eyes when he pulls a gun on his brother? Or the finale, which is filled with so many emotions that we're not sure how to react to them right away? On the Waterfront is one of the best films I've ever seen, not because it's a complex execution in film surrealism like a Bergman film (which it isn't), but because it's one of those films that can inspire and touch an audience with a unviersal message, move people with an emotional and powerful dramatic storyline, and even get people to forgive anyone who is forced to rat on his friends.


Excerpts of the dialogue from the taxi cab scene:

Charley (Rod Steiger): You don't mean that you're thinkin' of testifyin' against some people that we might know?

Terry (Brando): I'm tellin' ya. I haven't made up my mind yet.

Then Charley tells him that if Terry hasn't made up his mind by the time they get to 437 River Street (which is a non-existent address in Hoboken ... Try to find 437 River Street and you will get very confused.) ... Anyway, so Charley basically says, "Make up your mind by 437 River Street, or there will be serious consequences."

Then Charley pulls a gun on his brother. If for no other reason, you must watch the film to see Brando's reaction to this. It can't be put into words. Suffice it to say, here are his lines (made up on the spot, by Brando, by the way):

Terry: Charley ... Charley ... Oh Charley. Wow.

Charley: How much you weigh, slugger? When you weighed 168 pounds, you were beautiful. You could have been another Billy Conn. That skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.

Terry blames Charley for his misfortunes. Not the manager. Terry was told to lose fights, while he was in his prime as a boxer. He looks back on "the night at the Garden", where he was told to lose the fight. The night where he basically lost all sense of being worth anything. Terry points out to Charley that it wasn't the manager who told him to throw the fight, it was Charley.

Terry: It wasn't him, Charley! It was you. You remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and said: 'Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson.' You remember that? 'This ain't your night.' My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ball park - and whadda I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charley. You should've looked out for me a little bit. You should've taken care of me - just a little bit - so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.

Charley: I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

Terry: You don't understand! I could've had class. I could've been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it ...... It was you, Charley.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/12/2003 10:44:00 AM

 
It's Mother's Day

Facts about my mother:

She roller blades. Sometimes she gets up at 6 am for this.

She gave guitar lessons in the house, during my childhood.

She wanted to be a nun, once.

She met my dad at a sock-hop. They were both 16.

She's an amazing painter. (See the link over to the left.)

She loves being a grandmother.

She loved the book Undaunted Courage. Recommends it to me constantly.

She used to bake her own bread, when we were kids. That smell, to me, encapsulates my entire childhood.

An anecdote: she was in her early teens, and was going swimming at Lake Sunapee. I am not sure if my mother was feeling particularly grown-up, or if she had on a new bathing suit, or what was going on, but someone (was it a boy?) called out to her, "How's the water?" And she called back, "Nippy but delightful!" "Nippy but delightful" is still a catch-phrase in our family.

She used to make all our clothes when we were little kids.

Whenever anything is maybe too sexy, or too fashionable, my mother will call it "jazzy". As in: "Mum, do you like these sandals?" "I think they're a little bit too jazzy." My sisters and I absolutely LOVE the whole "jazzy" thing. We cry with laughter about it. My mother always looks like a million bucks, and is quite jazzy herself. And yet she insists on calling Donna Karan's label (DKNY) "Dinky". "Oh, look, there's a rack of Dinky clothes!" My sister Jean said to me once, "Mum KNOWS it's DKNY, but she doesn't want to seem like she's too jazzy."

Nothing makes her happier than when we are all home, together, around the dinner table.

She's a real estate agent. She basically is familiar with every single house in the state of Rhode Island.

I don't think my mother has ever procrastinated in her entire life.

She doesn't just go to church because it was how she was raised, and she feels she has to. She goes to learn. She takes the sermons to heart. She reflects.

She's actually an athlete, come to think of it. She's very fit. Very active.

She and my dad sit on the couch at night, and talk about their days to each other.

For Christmas, she always buys each of us "an outfit", and wraps each item separately. It's a family joke. I will open the pants. I ooh and ahh. Then I open the shirt, and Mum will interject, "And that will go so nicely with the pants!"

And about those outfits: my mom has great taste. I'll wear said outfit to a party later and have to field a ton of comments: "You look great!" "Great outfit!"

I think there are probably times when she lies awake at night worrying about her children. Are they happy? Are they well?

She and I walk on Narragansett Beach, in Rhode Island, and talk about stuff. Our lives, our struggles, funny stories.

I remember one morning when we all were having breakfast at The Ocean Mist (a mythical fisherman's bar in Galilee, R.I. – my sister Jean waitresses there), the grey waves rolling in. For some reason, we started talking about the Titanic. Mum started telling a story she had heard, and out of nowhere, my mother filled up with feeling. She almost started to sob at the table. My mother isn't a big emotional out-in-public weeper. I saw my mother in a whole new way that day.

I put her through hell during my tortured adolescence. I'm sorry, Mum.

She and I have come a long way in our relationship. Now I can let her worry about me. It doesn't mean I can't take care of myself. It just means that she loves me.

She looks almost exactly like her own mother. The resemblance is uncanny.

When I was 2 or 3, I was splashing about in the shallow end of Lake Sunapee, and fell off my Styrofoam. I sank like a stone. My mother leapt into the lake, fully clothed, to save me.

My mother would do anything for us. Anything.

My mother has her priorities straight.

She is a warm woman. A funny woman. She is realistic. She supports me in whatever I want to do. But going along with the "she has her priorities straight", if I said to her, "Mum, I really want to become a crack-ho" she would have a problem with that.

My mom reads the newspaper. She sends me clippings. Op-eds she think I would like. Also diet and nutrition information.

Here's a funny story about my mother: When I was growing up, one of my best friends was **** . It was a powerful nasty relationships, the kind little girls sometimes have. **** was mean to me. She wouldn't share. She made me tie her shoelaces. She used her power like a mini-duchess. Well, revenge is sweet. **** careened off the rails the second she hit adolescence, began hanging out with an older corrupt crowd, stopped doing well in school, and … I think she dropped out eventually. She married a man 3 times her age. She also got into a lot of trouble with drugs and drinking. My mother, over the years, would send me the "police beat" sections of our local newspaper with items like: "**** was arrested for her third DUI." "**** was dragged by her hair out of the Peace Dale saloon. She was then arrested for disturbing the peace."

My mom goes off and takes watercolor conferences with famous artists, or oil-painting weekends. Then we get to see what she painted, watch how she has grown as an artist.

I talk with her on the phone about 4 times a week.

If something good or exciting happens, she is the first one I call. Well, her and my father. Something very exciting happened last week, with my writing. An agent at William Morris requested to see my stuff. I sent him a packet of my essays, and he also asked if I had anything longer. I have written a short novel. So I sent that to him as well. Now I wait to hear what he thinks of my stuff. The second I got off the phone with the guy, I called my parents. My mom answered. I said, "I just spoke with an agent at William Morris—" Mum started screaming, called out over her shoulder to my dad, "Sheila just talked to an agent! Wait, wait, don't tell me anymore – Bill, pick up the other phone – so you can tell us the story together." So my dad got on the line, my two excited parents, and I told them the story – the voices of both of my parents, excited, moved, thrilled for me, in my ear.

My mother is the kind of mother I someday want to be.

Thanks, Mum, for everything. I thank God for you every day.


  contact Sheila Link: 5/11/2003 06:42:00 PM

 
1953 – 2003 HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, to ON THE WATERFRONT

So this year is the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront. On the Waterfront, as everyone knows, (and if you don't, then you SHOULD, and if you haven't seen that film: then shame on you! Go and rent it NOW) was filmed entirely on location in Hoboken, NJ, where I now live. Hoboken was, obviously, quite a different town in 1953. It was a rough rough place. There were something like 200 unsolved murders in one year, around that time. My friend who works at City Hall in Hoboken told me that. It was an anarchic place, a hard-bitten place, a place of poverty. Right across the river from New York City, but it might as well have been Detroit.

Hoboken is now completely over-crowded, with an average of 3 bars per block, it's being over-built, buildings going up everywhere (but they haven't built more parking lots, so anyone who has a car in Hoboken is completely f***ed, quite frankly.) Hoboken is the kind of place now where, on a Friday night, if you walk down Washington Street, you are bombarded with the mating rituals of early 20-somethings who are drunk. Girls who all look alike (like all the girls on "The Bachelor") strutting down the street in their regulation-black, all shrieking on their cell phones, saying things like, "Well, we waited for you at the Black Bear … where ARE you?" In grating voices, where everything, even statements of fact, come out as questions.

The real Hoboken-ites, the locals, the people who grew up there, have been pushed further and further to the periphery of this town. There is a lot of class resentment.

It's a big Italian town. (Obviously. Frank Sinatra grew up here.) You can still find little off-the-beaten-track Italian restaurants, (you have to venture off Washington Street) where the food is phenomenal, the waiters all clearly were born and raised in Italy proper, and the red wine comes in a basket, and you don't have wine glasses, you have little chunky clear-glass cups.

But the I-have-my-first-job-in-Manhattan-and-daddy-bought-me-an-SUV-for-my-graduation-from-the-Fashion-Institute crowd has taken over. The parking spaces in Hoboken were designed for small cars. The SUVs take up two and a half spaces. God, I hate those vehicles.

Anyway. Tangent over. What I really want to talk about is On the Waterfront. Let me set up the day for you all.

Yesterday, I went into Manhattan to have lunch with an old flame. One of the ubiquitous old flames that drift in and out of Manhattan and want to hang out with me. My relationship with this man only lasted six weeks, and it was a long time ago, but it had a huge impact on both of us. We used to hang out endlessly at diners, all hours of the day or night, drinking coffee, eating stacks of pancakes, and talking about John Cassavetes. We dressed exactly alike. Flannel shirts and corduroy pants. Mod-grunge. It was that kind of relationship. So here he is. In Manhattan. We were trying to decide what we wanted to do, and he said, "Well, seeing as it is you and me, I think we should find a nice diner." So that's what we did. We went to the Moonlight Diner on 23rd and 9th, ate a stack of pancakes, he had an omelet, I had a bagel with cream cheese and lox, we drank bottomless cups of coffee, and talked about Cassavetes. Among other things. It was great. I love it when things don't change. I haven't seen this guy in years, although he did call me on September 12, 2001, to make sure I was okay. I heard from people on that day who I haven't heard from since the first George Bush was president.

It means the world to me that some things stay the same. I would be lost without continuity.

Then he and I took a meandering walk through Chelsea, my arm hooked through his arm, and talked about Dave Eggers, and James Frey (the bonehead I ranted about last week), and our careers, and what we're excited about, and what we're afraid of. He goes back to LA tomorrow. So we said goodbye. It wasn't all that bittersweet, although I had thought it might be.

I made my way back to Hoboken. The day was beautiful. Sunny, bright, but with a crisp wind. The streets of Chelsea were nuts … pedestrians clogging the crosswalks, bicycles zipping through traffic, everybody in their tanktops, and sunglasses.

I got out of the PATH train and started up Washington, when I ran into John, my friend from City Hall. I haven't seen him in a year or so. "Hi, John! How are you? What's up? Blah blah blah…"

He said immediately, "Have you heard of Budd Schulberg?"

Hmmm. Sounds incredibly familiar. I know that name. "Uh … writer, right? Wait a sec … I know that name…"

"He wrote On the Waterfront."

"Oh! Right! Of course!"

"He's in Hoboken right now. For the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront. They're doing a TV special about it, so he's doing a walking tour of all the locations of the movie."

"You're kidding me!"

"He's right around the corner. Want to go join the tour?"

Do I want to go meet Budd Schulberg???

Nah, I got a lot of stuff to do. I have laundry, and I have to go check my emails.

Of course I want to go join Budd Schulberg's walking tour of Hoboken, on the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront!

John and I turned onto 1st Street to go join the crowd. We could see it immediately. There were news cameras, a tall guy holding a massive boom, and reporters clustered around the edges, scribbling into their notebooks. And in the center of it all was this little old man, the man who wrote the screenplay for the movie that changed everything. I cannot imagine my own life without On the Waterfront. It's like Citizen Kane. Or Star Wars. Or Easy Rider. Our world has been irrevocably changed because somebody made those movies.

Budd Schulberg is 89 years old now. He walks with a cane. He looks great, though. He has a shock of white hair, and a warm smiley face. Not too many wrinkles. Just around the eyes. I took one look at his face and got very very moved. I'm moved right now just writing about it. He wrote that script. He was responsible for that script. He is a great man. A great great man.

I saw On the Waterfront in high school, when I first started getting serious about being an actress. My passion was the Actors Studio. The characters of that place were as real to me as my contemporaries. Elia Kazan was real to me. James Dean. Shelley Winters. Harold Clurman. Marlon Brando. I read everything I could get my hands on. I was 15 years old and read Harold Clurman's great book The Fervent Years, about the Group Theater in the 1930s. I read both of Shelley Winters' hilarious autobiographies, which are basically one long name-drop. I read Carroll Baker's autobiography. I watched all of those old movies, wishing I could seep my way into the screen, and be on those sets, live in that time. I watched Rebel without a Cause countless times. I watched Streetcar Named Desire. I was obsessed with East of Eden. I rented Baby Doll. I watched Place in the Sun (one of the greatest movies of all time).

Mike Nichols says that when he is getting ready to shoot a new film, one of the ways he prepares, is to watch Place in the Sun. It is obvious why. You must remind yourself constantly of the greatness of others, and learn from their greatness. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Place in the Sun is generally described as a "perfect film". Not too many films are. There might be a great movie, with one boring extraneous scene. Or some great performances with a so-so script. There might be a great story, with mostly great acting, but one actor who is not so good throws off the whole thing. Standards for perfection are set very high, as they should be. Place in the Sun deserves the moniker "perfect". Mike Nichols wants to be in the company of those who did everything right. He wants to look at Place in the Sun and remind himself of what WORKS on film. A film where every note is in tune, where every element also contains the super-structure of the whole, where every smaller part works together with the larger part, where nothing goes wrong. The music is right, the script is right, the acting is right, the telling of the story is right, the production value is right (and not just right, but part of the theme of the piece), and … above all of that, is the "magic" factor. Which you can never plan for or manufacture. Everything may be in place, everything may look right and perfect, but there is no magic. Everything, while very well done and appropriate, somehow does not add up to a magical whole. This is the Holy Grail for film directors, Mike Nichols included. A Place in the Sun is not only filled with perfectly-tuned elements, but when all of it is added up, you get magic.

Anyone who wants to work in film (actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers) should study that movie. Obsessively. If you do not, then … I would say that you're not as serious about your work as you should be. Mike Nichols taught me that.

All of these anecdotes LIVED in my mind as a hungry ambitious adolescent actress. I didn't care as much about contemporary actors. My real gods were back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Then, when I was 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon while I was babysitting. (I was probably way too young to have seen that movie! I didn't get a lot of it. The sex-change operation thing went completely over my head. But what I did get was the power of Al Pacino's performance.) Now how can I talk about this … I don't need to fear hyperbole, because the impact Dog Day Afternoon had on me was so profound that I truly was a different person after seeing it. It was that big. That film changed my life forever. I was devastated by it. It absolutely destroyed me. My emotions about it were so strong that it rendered me wordless. One indication of how the film affected me is: I actually considered writing a letter to the real character, the guy Al Pacino's character was based on, now in prison. I wanted to write to him. I don't know what I wanted to say, but I just knew I wanted to do something. That character LIVED.

The soul does not grow in a linear step-by-step way. There are events in life that quantum-leap you forward, skipping steps, skipping phases, your soul suddenly expands to three times its former size. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was one of those moments for me. A soul-growth moment. It actually hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Now I look back on it and see that that was a growing pain. My soul had done a quantum-leap, in one evening, and it hurt. I would press down on my chest with my hand, trying to comfort my own heart.

Al Pacino was new to me at that point. I, of course, had not seen The Godfather films. I would have been 10 years old. So I watched his performance in growing … horror. And identification. I could not believe my own eyes. I immediately went out and did a little research on the guy, and learned that he was also from the Actors Studio. I felt myself nod like a wise sage, when I got this information: "Of course that's where he's from. Of course." His background was the same mythical background as my other idols: Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, James Dean.

Dog Day Afternoon marks, for me, the moment when I got serious about acting. As a life-choice. As a life's work. As an art-form. As a craft to devote my entire life to. This was not just having fun in the high school play, and loving applause. This was what I wanted for my future. I wanted, someday, to be able to act like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. And for that, I needed to get my ass to the Actors Studio. I want to do THAT kind of work. It seemed of a piece with Brando in On the Waterfront, James Dean in Rebel, Montgomery Clift in Place in the Sun. It was the same kind of acting. It looked like life. But not in a boring every-day-life kind of way. It looked like life lived large. It was unpredictable acting. It was never about the words being said. It was all about what was going on underneath. It was intensely theatrical. And so real it could clutch at your heart and make it difficult for you to breathe.

I wanted to be in the ranks of those people so badly that it ruined my appetite. I had never before experienced need like that, ambition, ruthless ambition.

Over 15 years later, I got accepted into the master's program at the Actors Studio.

On our first day of orientation, we all sat in a large circular room, where eventually we would have workshops with teachers such as Ellen Burstyn, Marilyn Fried (sister of Marty Fried, a guy who was famous in my mind … a huge character in all of the autobiographies of Actors Studio people from the 1950s), luminaries of the Actors Studio. The adrenaline in that room was so intense that I thought I might have a heart attack. Our dean (James Lipton – or should I say: Will Farrell?) told us he wanted each of us to stand up and tell why we were here. What had led us to this point. What was our path.

When it was my turn, I stood up, and told about babysitting, and watching Dog Day Afternoon.

To me, it was an equation as simple as A to B.

So all of this was racing through my mind as I stared at Budd Schulberg. How much his work meant to me, how much that film meant to me, how formative it was, and how … much a part of me that kind of work is. And there he is: 89 years old, being honored and acknowledged, walking around the streets of Hoboken, telling stories about the shooting of that film. "Yes, and here is where we…"

Everyone clustered around him, leaning in to hear him, he was very soft-spoken.

We were standing on the very corner where they had filmed the famous taxi scene. (Maybe the most famous scene of all time! "I coulda' been a contender. I coulda been somebody." By the way: watch that scene again. People imitate that moment, but they imitate it incorrectly. Brando was a larger genius than can even be understood. When people imitate it, they put the emphasis on "been" in the second part of the line. " I coulda' been a contender. I coulda BEEN somebody." Fine. You could interpret it that way. But that's not what Brando does. Brando speaks the line with this emphasis: "I coulda been SOMEbody." Which is … so much better. I can't explain why. It's a tragic line, the way he says it. It's not about what might have BEEN, it is about the SOMEBODY he never got a chance to be.)

One woman asked Budd, "Did you have any idea when you were filming that scene how incredible it would be? How important it would be?"

Budd, with a warm smile, said immediately, "Absolutely not."

Everybody burst into laughter. The reporters scribbled manically.

Budd said, "You can't. You just can't work that way. You just have to work at getting the job done. We had to move on to the next location right away, after shooting that one, and we didn't have much time, so we just shot it, packed up, and hurried on to the next place."

Unbelievable.

A guy who was in the crowd, an old man, stepped forward and said, "I played the taxi driver in that scene."

The taxi driver has no lines, if you recall. You just see his face, his eyes, looking into the back seat at the family drama unfolding. The town of Hoboken had said to Elia Kazan and crew, "Sure, you can film all over Hoboken if you want, but you have to use locals as extras." And that's what they did. Kazan was one of the first directors to shoot stuff entirely on location, rather than on a movie-lot, he also was one of the first directors to scope out locations beforehand, make friends with the people in the town, and hire up locals to play background. As opposed to hiring aspiring actors to be the background. That is one of the reasons why On the Waterfront still holds so much WEIGHT. All of those dock-workers at the end are real dock-workers. They are not actors. It makes all the difference in the world. The faces of those men … actors, in general, do not have faces that look like that.

So here steps forward this Hoboken local guy, who was not an actor, who Kazan had chosen to be the taxi driver. There he was!

Everyone stood back to beam at him, to smile up at this little old man, who once upon a time, had participated in the filming of that great movie. Budd Schulberg looked at him, and nodded vigorously, remembering.

"You only see the taxi driver's eyes in that scene," Schulberg said. "We wanted it that way. But yes, of course I remember you."

The taxi driver guy had an ear-to-ear smile. I felt like weeping. It was a very powerful moment.

Hoboken has changed so much that the guy who was leading the tour, a guy from City Hall, had to keep reminding us: "Here is where they shot that scene … of course, at that time, the waterfront was all docks … there was no park, or fountain…"

After the walking tour of Hoboken, with Budd Schulberg, I floated home. Mind racing. It was a beautiful gift. To see him, to be in his presence, and to be reminded of that film. I think it's about time I saw it once again.

I immediately took out my multitude of books that reference the filming of that movie. In case any of you are interested in film history, here are some quotes. These are stories which I know by heart, stories I learned when I was 14 years old, taking autobiographies out of the library, learning about how Kazan was as a director, how James Dean played the bongos, how Marlon Brando used to sleep on the set of Streetcar, during its run on Broadway. These thinags are real to me.

So enjoy these excerpts. They are chock-full of great stuff.

I might pull out more, as they come to me.

  contact Sheila Link: 5/11/2003 06:41:00 PM

 
From Elia Kazan's autobiography A Life:

I will not forget Budd Schulberg on the streets of Hoboken and in its dockside bars. And I will never forget "Brownie". Budd was doing research, but not as I'd done research. He was immersing himself in the subject as he would a cause; he'd become a partisan of a rotten union's rebels. By the time I got to the waterfront, the longshoremen we encountered and to whom we talked had accepted Budd as a champion of their side. These men who lived by their muscle and were suspicious of strangers and particularly leery of men wearing the mark of money – for them, all privilege had to be corrupt, trusted Budd and spoke openly to him. The most hard-domed of them all was Arthur Brown, "Brownie." He'd become Budd's constant companion, a walking certificate of acceptance, for all his fellow to see.

Budd was an upper-middle-class kid, raised in a California sun-country "mansion", where servants tended to his every need and he had ever domestic luxury, to the point where he took them for granted. His father, B.P. Schulberg, was head of production at Paramount Pictures, and Budd was a prince of that realm. Brownie was the epitome of the men with the hard hands and the hard faces who walked the west shore of the Hudson River with cargo hooks around their necks, professional tools and weapons of defense as well. In Hoboken these men were Irish or Italian, Catholic, and many of them anti-Semitic from the cradle. How had Budd won this man's perfect acceptance and his affection?

Brownie, at five foot five, was a formidable battler and defiant of the "mob", which crawled all over the edge of the river like flies on a rotting carcass. An outspoken "insoigent", he'd once been brutalized by thugs until senseless, then dumped into the winter's water and left for dead. Somehow he had done the dead man's crawl out of the cold and filthy North River to live again – perhaps the cold revived his senses in time – and was found on the streets the next day by his murderers, as defiant as ever. Along with his fearless swagger, he had a mocking humor, which made "dem hoods" his favorite target. I was sure Brownie had come out of the water laughing, for of all the laughter I've heard in my life, Brownie's was the most irreverent. He became for Budd, and later for me, the symbol of the longshoremen's defiant spirit.

The more serious and concerned men of the waterfront's work gangs had read what Budd had been writing about their struggle, particularly his pieces in Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine. Surprised that they kneew the writer who'd done the articles, they were grateful for Budd's honoring of the "waterfront priest", Father John Corridan, a man who'd made it his parochial duty to support the reform element in the corrupt union. I would come to know and admire Father John as Budd did, and trust him as the longshoremen did.

But my friend Schulberg had simpler bridges to the feelings of the men who worked the docks. For one thing, he was what I am not, a "good drinking man." One drink inebriates me, two drinks put me to sleep. Budd could stand up to a bar and match Hoboken's finest, drink for drink, all night. He called them his "creative drunks"; he would throw down a few, then a few more, so get the fire going, and then his inhibitions would be lifted and his stutter stop. Strong drink brought his deepest sympathies to the surface, and suspicious, often short-tempered longshoremen spoke plainly to him, for they saw that he had genuine concern for every sorry twist of their lives. I envied how Budd ate up detail and I envied his remarkable memory. He could recall whole speeches and every article of apparel his subjects wore. He penetrated into every aspect of this other world of hardship and corruption.

Budd was also a true authority on the longshoremen's favorite sport, the fight game. Bar birds were fascinated to hear the inside dope Budd fed them. He'd even owned a piece of a fighter once and had surprising stories to tell about him. Men would bunch around Budd to hear what he had to say, closer and closer, less and less guarded; they all respected him for what he knew and who he was, a writer who was with them in every way. In time I was there too, gathered in that group and accepted.

I would always remember that this was the way to prepare a screenplay – not to observe at arm's length and scribble notes, but to make yourself one of the people in whom you're interested and to make the essential story of that place and time your cause. My first impression had been that Budd was working cleverly as an investigative reporter, but then I saw that his interest was not a tactic of the trade but passionate and true, and that he saw the grim tragedies and grotesque humor of that place as great stories are seen, with compassion for the victims and devotion to the just.

Budd had made himself more than a writer engaged to prepare for a screenplay. He'd made himself a champion of the humanity on that strip of shore.

It was a great lesson for me, one I would not forget.


  contact Sheila Link: 5/11/2003 06:38:00 PM

 
From Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. Interview questions are in bold. Kazan's answers in plain-text:

It's a prototypical piece of your work, in the sense that you start with a set of very real characters and circumstances and by the time you've finished dramatizing them, you've created a myth.

Zapata is like that, America America too. That's what I think a writer or an artist is – not only a storyteller, but if he's any good, he's a myth-maker. The goal you should strive for is a mythic goal. You take reality, anchor it in the facts and raise it to the level of myth.

Let's talk about how you did that with Waterfront.

One of the big things was Brando himself because he is a supra-realistic actor. I also tried to give the film a pictorial quality that would make it mythic. The camera work was always poetic. Boris Kaufman was a marvelous director of photography, maybe the best I've ever seen.

How did the script come about?

Just work, work, work, work.

Did you start off with an idea?

No, we started off with a real story…I called Schulberg and said, "Let's make a picture about the waterfront." He liked the idea. He was trained as a journalist, so he investigated. He spent time on the waterfront. He spent time at St. Xavier's School, where the priests were involved with the longshoremen's families. The beginning of the reform movement on the waterfront both at the Hudson and Hoboken piers was started there. One day, he [Budd] heard the story of a guy named DiVincenzo, and he met with him. Then he started working on the script. We showed it to Zanuck, and he gave us a lot of criticism. We went back to New York and worked like hell, trying to tighten it up. Then we went back to Zanuck. He was very abrupt. Not interested.

Was the story the same in every version of the script?

Yes, but we never got it well-organized and tight until we got Spiegel. He had a good structural mind and was persistent in those days. He drove Schulberg nuts. We persisted and persisted until we got what I thought was a good script. Even at that I cut out great hunks of it when I shot.

Was the romance between Terry (Brando) and Edie (Eva Marie Saint) part of the real story that Schulberg found in Hoboken?

As far as I know that was a dramatic invention. Schulberg was very affectionate towards women. He talked to them a lot, confided in his wives a lot, a thing which I never did much. I don't confide in anybody. Anyway, it was good. I thought those scenes were marvelous. Her casting was terrific. Her face was terrific.

Since Waterfront is such a classic example of your work, I'd like to go into detail with you as to how you approach each directorial choice, from idea to release print. We've already talked about the script, so let's move on to the cast.

I had a problem right away. The actors had to be in the same league as the scenery. They had to be as real as the Hoboken locations. You rarely get that with actors. I was very close to the Actors Studio then. I not only started it, I was still teaching there. I had guys like Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint and a whole bunch of others. They were more people than they were actors. Rod Steiger looked like somebody in a hurry, that's all. After finding leads who would look like they belonged on the New Jersey waterfront, I had to surround them with bit players who would also look real. The problem, of course, was the Screen Actors Guild. That was murder. I don't know what arrangements we finally made with SAG in the end, but there weren't many of their people around. So I was able to use a lot of real longshoremen. The next problem was getting actors out into the cold, which was not as easy as it sounds. A couple of days I had to go to the hotel and pull Brando out by the hand. It was not only zero degrees on the waterfront, but the north wind was blowing off the Hudson and the actor's faces, therefore, without makeup became like the real thing.

In casting the major roles what were you looking for? What was the essence of Terry Malloy for you?

He wants opposing goals, ambivalence. He was at war within himself. He's the only character that's that way in the whole picture. That was crucial. Brando was that. He had so much shame in him – from God knows what. He had the ability to project the inner struggle of conscience. That's the essence of the story, Terry's inner conflict. It had to genuinely be there in the actor playing the part. Another fellow whom we considered and whom I like and who was ready to accept the part was Frank Sinatra. He would have been brilliant.

Why did you go with Brando?

Partly because I knew him and knew what he could do. I think Frank would have been wonderful, but Brando seemed more vulnerable. There was more self-doubt, more schism, more pain in Brando. With Frank it's in there, but it's deep down and he's been able to cover it up too well.

What do you mean exactly when you say the ability to project inner conflict?

I shouldn't have said "to project" because I don't believe in that. He has the split in him, he is it. I don't know from what. He has a great range of violently contrasting feelings, and that was the essence of the part. Also I had seen Brando box in the cellar of the Barrymore Theater when we were playing Streetcar on Broadway, and I knew he liked fighters and was interested in them. He looked more like a fighter to me than Sinatra. He broke his nose once, right in the middle of the show. Frank had great qualities, too. He was born and brought up in Hoboken. His people were Hoboken people, but Brando had this almost absolute vulnerability. You could almost put your hand inside him when he was tender. He's just so soft; he opens up so much. I really knew he had the love scenes in him. Also, Brando has a great mimetic gift. Almost without knowing it, he imitates people.

Did you always look for the essential quality of the characters in the actors themselves?

Unless the character is somewhere in the actor himself you shouldn't cast him. The person has got to have the essential qualities, the mainstream in him. Otherwise you fake and never get a truly good performance. With the priest played by Karl Malden I was looking for the ability to believe and advocate certain simple, clear values. Karl couldn't stand sophisticated distinctions. I started him off, and I knew him intimately. I still do; he's a close friend of mine. I knew that Karl was that guy. What do priests really know about life? The waterfront priests know more, but they're still dealing in absolute right and absolute wrong. Karl deals that way too. With Rod Steiger you could just smell it. You could look at him and say, "Here is a guy who is going to make it." I just smell the soul and see what the hell is there. Eva Marie Saint was a true-blue girl who didn't think she was pretty, didn't think much of herself. Her role was crucial. If I hadn't found a truly innocent, devoted girl, a girl who had something in her that resembled the simplicity and faith that well-brought-up Catholic girls have, I'd have been in trouble. I'd seen Eva in a play in which I didn't think she was exceptional, but I thought her quality was exactly right for Edie. It turned out I was right. There's always some luck in casting. You make guesses based on your personal, subjective responses to people. Sometimes those guesses turn out good, sometimes they don't. Nevertheless, I think it's crucial to cast people who inside all the fronts and manners and agreeabilities and adaptabilities are like the characters you are casting.

You do the same thing with the smaller roles?

Yes, to whatever degree possible. Like the old actor, John Hamilton, who played Eva Marie Saint's father. I'd known him for a long time from around the street. There was this sense in him of I'm a failure. I'm not going to make it. So much goodness and so much pain.

What if you're talking to people you don't know personally and whose work you don't know?

It gets down to the question of genius as far as I'm concerned.

What was your next step after the cast was set?

I had three readings at the Actors Studio with all the actors who had speaking parts. I made all of my basic, general observations to each of the leading players … I warned them that it was going to be rough on location and cold. Mostly I said general things like no makeup, but I also told each of them what to work on in their part. It was valuable.

Can you tell me more about the process of the reading?

Before each scene I would tell the actors involved the kind of place where I intended to play it, such as a rooftop. Then I would have them read it, just to relate to each other, just to listen to each other. Listening is awfully important in the theatre, but it's even more important in films. More often than not you're photographing a person listening. If a scene is good, what little is being said has an effect on the person listening, particularly in On the Waterfront, where the whole point of Brando's character was that not only was he inarticulate but that he was only semi-conscious, that he was unaware or only partly unaware of the struggle going on inside himself. Listening is more than just hearing the words; it's a total process. You not only listen with your ears but you take in the person's intention. You listen in the deepest sense of the world. It's a total response to the person, not only to what he says, but to what he's trying to do, what he means. I stress that a lot. Very often in my movies you will see people being photographed who are not talking.

Can you describe the process from one reading to the next?

The second reading had to do more with my introduction to what their main objectives were. I would do just enough to get them going on the right track. You don't tell them each station nor all the curves along the way. You don't tell them the ambiguities or the temporary reversals. But you put them on the right track so they're doing the right thing. I would make the reading start casually and then say, "You see, this is what you want and because" and so on.

Would you fit that into the "spine" for them?

I wouldn't do it up front because that is revealed increasingly as it goes along. There are things each day that reconfirm the original goal, the original objective that I set for them. You must never go faster than they are. You never feed them more than they can eat and digest. You should never talk about the significance of the movie. That is the result of all the other factors being right and has nothing to do with their performances. The significance is a result of their performance. Drawing charts is a dangerous thing. It becomes a lesson in logic, everything must fit into that. It can make a performance very mechanical. But you sure as hell better know where you're going.

In other words, you may do it for yourself whether you do it for the actors or not.

I do do it for myself. I used to take copious notes. But I always acted very offhand about that because what you're trying to do is wake up that element in the actor. You reach into him and find the spine in him and arouse that and get him to enjoy playing that. That's very important – get him to enjoy playing that. But if you say the spine is so and so and this is related, and the actors take notes, watch out. As soon as an actor starts to write a lot, you're in trouble. He shouldn't write, eh should just begin to behave the right way, and like behaving that way. For example, when Brando began to enjoy Saint's innocence and find it attractive; instead of putting him off, he began to like it. At the same time it made him feel guilty. His behavior followed automatically without my saying anything. The worst thing you can do is say to an actor, "What you're doing is this and that's right. Now keep doing that." Don't do that. They're doing it already. That's very ticklish. You're dealing with behavior, not cognition. Once you've got it going in the actor it's amazingly solid. They don't lose it. If he or she finds the behavior strain in them awakened, you don't call attention to it. It's very bad to do that. You are careful not to get them to put it into words for themselves. I saw a lot of brilliant guys in the theater when I was a stage manager make great speeches. They should have published the speeches instead of putting the show on. Directors show off a lot, it's a terrible thing. If you could direct a whole movie without a word of direction, you'd be better off because then the actors would be doing it spontaneously. Sometimes, like in the taxi cab scene, which I get so much credit for, I didn't do anything. I read it once, but the scene is so good, the personal intentions in it are so clear, and the actors are so gifted, that I did nothing. The actors knew it all. It's so human and so basic.

Was there any scene you had difficulty with in the reading?

A key scene in which it was essential to get things going right was the one in the pool hall at the beginning. You had to get across the fact that Terry and Johnny Friendly liked each other. It may seem like an insignificant scene, but if you don't get all the relationships going correctly at the outset, the rest of the picture is meaningless. I had to stress over and over again that Johnny likes Terry. He likes his stupidity, he likes the fact that he's agreeable, that he was a fighter. He finds him cute, he likes his inarticulateness. He's physically fond of him, he likes his muscles. That came out very well in the moment when Lee Cobb got a headlock on Brando and horsed around with him. You also have to make it very clear that Terry likes Friendly, too. He's grateful to him. So when the break between them comes, it's a break between two friends.

Do you tell the actors those things at the reading?

Yes, I would tell them quite a bit, but you don't have to tell them too much because when you say the right things, they are very stimulating to a good actor. When you start talking too much, it's usually because you're floundering around and don't know yourself. The values in Waterfront are extremely clear. All I had to do was call these very intelligent men and women's attention to what was already there. I also did another thing. In a hopefully casual way, I took them aside and talked more generally about what the problems were. I did that with Brando, for instance, and he got a tremendous impetus from that.

What do you do with actors that are less trained?

You don't tell them too much up front, or you tell them more indirectly. Actors who are less trained – I don't know why – are usually less complicated people and they're closer to the part inside. What you have to do with them or for them is a process that a trained actor does for himself, which is you have to relate the events in the material to their own life. You're constantly working in indirect ways…In On the Waterfront, once I had made the basic relationships clear in the reading, they were off in the right direction. They were a very imaginative group of actors.

Do you ever play the actors off against each other, using the private things you know about them?

I'm very sly about those things. I'm not ducking your question, but I don't really like to talk about that too much. What I do is talk to the actors about each other, not their acting but their personal lives. I'll bring something up before an actor plays a scene, something seemingly off-handed about the other actor in the scene. For instance if I want Brando to do something, I'll say, "Look how thin Eva Marie is." Or I might call attention to her costume. "She looks perfect today; she looks just like a little Catholic schoolgirl." That may wake him up to something about her. A director doesn't have to do much, but you have to do things that go to the core of the actor's problem. Once I called attention to Steiger's camel hair coat – a brilliant touch which, by the way, Steiger thought up.

When you're working with pros like Brando, Steiger, and Cobb, do you ever run into the difficulty of an actor saying, "Oh, man, don't give me that director shit!"

They've never said that to me, though I imagine they must have felt it at times. Brando might negate something I suggested, but he would not ignore the basic principle I was aiming at. He might not like my idea, but then he would do something else that was better. A director should never feel that he has to win an argument. Not everything you say is going to be right. But hopefully everything you say is going to be stimulating. And if one thing doesn't work, go right back two minutes later with something else. You don't have to win. You don't have to be the boss man.

Can I push your memory and ask you to pick a scene that you recall from On the Waterfront and describe the process of getting the actors to reach the moments you had worked out on your own?

There's a scene where Edie comes across the roof looking for Terry. He has a pole with which he's making the pigeons fly in a certain pattern. There's hardly anything in the text at all. She just wants to talk to him. We know that she's come for a purpose. I made her intention clear to Eva. We also know certain constraints Edie has. I made those clear to her as well. Brando's mystic and mysterious personality helps with that because he's not immediately reachable. I counted on that without calling her attention to it. I made clear to Brando how guilty Terry feels in relationship to Edie. I only had to say it once. It's obvious in the script, and he was very aware of it anyway. I tired, then, to give him something to do that would make Terry not immediately accessible to her without him having to "act" it. So he has a pole and he's guiding the pigeons around. When she walks over and wants to talk to him, he sees that she's there to tell him something important but that it is hard for her to speak. He could avoid the confrontation, which he'd rather do, by talking about hawks and playing with pigeons. I didn't have time to make explicit to Brando that his dialogue about hawks was like telling Edie, "Don't judge a man by what he does in this terrible city, because it's a question of survival here." Brando knows that and if you make it too clear it becomes obvious and corny. The whole scene works off his avoiding a conversation by playing with the birds. As the scene goes along, they move over to the cage and then I point out to her that as he handles the other birds and offers her an egg, things happen.

Actually there's a little boy in the scene as well.

Yes, Terry's able to avoid her further with the little boy. She finds him charming because of the way he plays around with the kid. And when Terry offers the egg, she can feel the sensitivity, the goodness in him. One thing which is bewildering her, which I pointed out only once, is that on the one hand he's rough, dumb, and crude and on the other hand, he's so gentle withal. Brando has that within himself. Again, you don't have to tell him to be both crude and gentle. You've cast the role right so the guy's got it. You don't have to tell her anything either. I directed the scene by using the business that Budd Schulberg had written, which is the offering of the egg, the way he handles the bird – which Brando liked to do – by his lack of shyness with the boy, which contrasted with his shyness with her, and by giving the boy a tough 10-year-old attitude that girls are somehow inferior, and by accentuating the boy's role in the scene. Actually I directed the boy more than I did either of the leads. You have the scene almost doing it for you by the business you've set up. You know very clearly what values you want but when you don't have to stress them you don't.

In a scene like that how do you define Brando's objectives?

My God, you don't have to define them. They're obvious. His objective is that he wants the girl to like him, and he also feels guilty about her brother. If you talk too much about the guilt, you play that which you don't want to play. That was the damnedest movie because I did a lot of talking for a while at the beginning, but I did very little afterwards because the movie sort of played itself.

But clearly the objective can't be to be guilty.

No, I didn't say that. I said he feels that. You have to distinguish between what a character feels and what he's trying to do. What you stress is that you want to get close to her, get together with her, get her to like you. But you don't even stress that too much because it's all in there, and if you stress it too much you take away from the naturalness that Brando had. Really and truly once I set up the business with the pole and the boy and the egg, the scene played itself. Terry's able to stay with Edie, remain at her side and still avoid the confrontation. That's how you get the ambivalence in the scene played out.

This is the kind of scene you see a lot where someone wants something but can't move towards it directly.

The best kind of scene is where what they want – the object – is present. So it's not just a matter of speech. The object, the girl, is there. He wants a look from her, he wants understanding from her, a certain tone of voice. The way to avoid her is there in the business. In other words, where the objects for the actions are there – and they both are there in this case – you've directed the elements of the scene into objects and into objectives. And then it almost plays itself. That's why sometimes in the scenes that are best directed, the actors will say, "You didn't do anything in that scene." But you did. You put that pole there, you chose the roof. You made him put the egg actually in her hand. One of the nice things in the scene is after he gives her the egg and she looks at it. Then I told Eva, "Look at him." I didn't have to tell her what she feels. If I had, she would have tried to show me that he was sweet and you'd get terrible stuff. How can you look at a pigeon's egg and then look at the boy who gave it to you and not play it right? You can't. So you've done the emotional direction by giving the actors physical actions. That's the way I always work. I was brought up as an actor in the Stanislavsky Method. This has to do with objectives, with conscious emotions and objects, objects, objects.

In this scene the objectives got deflected onto objects, and the emotions came out that way. But in the scene in the taxicab, which we'll talk about later, there aren't any external objects for Terry and Charlie to work with.

The objects are each other. What's good is that they can't get away from each other. If you can get a no exit sign on a scene, if the characters have to confront each other, you've probably got a good scene.

Did you know what you wanted from them in the cab scene?

What I wanted was to show the moment when a man suddenly thinks of what he could have been, like everybody does at some point in their lives. I wanted Terry to be reproachful, but gentle. If it were just reproach you'd get, "You son of a bitch, I could have been a champ!" But if you say this to your brother, then you do it mournfully, and it's moving. I did have that much in mind. Brando and I thought so much alike in those days. We were so similar in our tastes and feelings that there were a lot of times when he did what I wanted right off the bat, and often he did it better than I thought it could possibly be. He's a genius. He's the only actor I've ever worked with whom I would say that about. And his genius was profound because it had to do with humanity and not mere brilliance.

You described watching Laurence Olivier work. You said he'd sit there and pick up an ashtray and say, "No, that's not right."

Then he'd pick it up with one hand, pick it up with the other, pick it up with both hands …

What is that kind of precise moment-to-moment external, physical work all about?

Brando never did two takes quite the same because he knew he had to be alive on each take. Olivier's system, in those days at least, was exactly the opposite. In a sense, he was directing himself. If he did the externals correctly, they would mean what he wanted them to mean. Hopefully, if he did them correctly, he would also feel correctly. There is something to the behaviorist kind of approach. I'm explaining something to you, right? If I do it sitting forward, there is some suggestion that I'm anxious for you to understand. If I do it lying back, there's some suggestion that you can take me in an offhand way and that I'm showing off. Or if I squirm around, it suggests that I want to get this interview over with. Every position means something. Once you start to think that way, there are values in it. My problem, being the kind of director that I am and working with the kind of actors I work with, is to put those things in so they influence the actor without his knowing it…To the actor I only stress his objective.

My objective right now is to get you to tell me everything you can about directing. If I were setting it up, I might put you in a different kind of chair.

No, not you might, you do. You control the externals, just as much without my knowing it. The externals are essential. In other words, the form means a lot. I'm a formalist as well as I am the other. I think the ideal director uses both. With a guy like Brando it was easy. And you don't just do it with props. You use everything. For example, remember when he comes back from testifying, he walks down a row of extras and they all snub him? I chose extras that he didn't like. So when he walked by them he played it as if, "The hell with them. I'm glad I did it." That's using the externals.

Let's go back to the specifics of the film. The first scene is the introduction on the dock. There's a very wide shot, which you hold on for a long time.

The point of the introduction is that the whole waterfront, which is wide and enormous, is in the grip of one fist, one little clique, one little clubhouse. I could have put the entire scene inside the office. But I did it this way because it dramatized what I thought was the situation there. So it wasn't casual. It was a specific choice I made.

In the next scene Terry has to set up Joey Doyle. His objective, I suppose in the simplest terms, is to get Joey up on the roof.

No, it's to carry about his boss's orders. Can you see what happens the moment you state it that way – all the feelings that get evoked by your choice of objective? The feeling that he's not himself, a feeling that he belongs to somebody else, a feeling that he wants his boss's approval, a feeling that he's tied up in a situation that he has no choice about. I told Brando the objective, but that alone is not enough. How you dramatize the other elements of the scene is through picturization, and that has to do with the art of cinema rather than the art of directing actors. In the introduction the actors come out of the cabin in single file and walk to a certain point. Terry goes one way and the rest go another. Before they go, Friendly claps Terry on the back. Watch the way Brando walks – he did it himself – in sort of an abashed way, his head down. Next I cut directly to a high-angle shot. Brando is on the ground holding a pigeon and he shouts, "Hey, Joey." The reason I did that was to dramatize that Terry had suddenly made a decision: "I'm going through with it." But I wanted to show that he wasn't comfortable, that he was straining against it. By shooting down on him from a high angle, the point comes across automatically. That's picturization. That's cinema.

I made the mistake of oversimplifying the objective. How do you get beyond the text so that you can conceptualize a scene in a richer way?

Part of it is to leave the instinctive part of yourself alive. Behave like an artist, not like a bookkeeper. Don't be a guy that's right. Don't be a professor, be an artist. You get on the set and you see this little boat house and you say, "Yeah, that's it." I don't know why. Maybe later you'll figure out exactly why you responded that way. And above all don't tell anyone.

I wasn't thinking about telling the actors or even about how you shoot it. Rather, I'm talking about the concept – that this is a scene about Brando acting out orders from his boss as opposed to it being about his getting Joey up on the roof. As you said, it evokes all kinds of feelings.

Don't evoke those feelings. Don't go into complications. Not to the other person or yourself. By the way, one good idea is better than two good ideas. As a matter of fact, one good idea is better than three brilliant ideas. Get it down to one good idea. Don't try to play several things in a scene – things in an actor that are ambivalent – get them objects that suggest it. Or make the scene work in a way that reveals it. Don't try to do two things in every moment. If you want ambivalence, do one thing and then later do an opposite thing. Don't complicate it. Make one strong, simple statement. This is the least ambivalent movie I ever did.

The scene in the taxi. You may not have had to articulate the ambivalences as clearly for yourself, but they were all there.

But one way or another everything's played out. Terry says, "What you did to me. What I could have been." He actually says that, I've done other movies where things were not said at all.

The next scene in Waterfront is when Terry hears the news that Doyle is dead. It's a terribly important moment. It is the first blow of shame to hit Terry. I started on the sneering faces of Two Ton Tony Galento and Tami Mauriello and panned over to Terry. He just stands there. Brando doesn't have to act much because of the contrast between his face and theirs. Again, you set it up so that the sequence of pictures tells the story. The fact that Brando does act brilliantly is gravy. But if a lug had been in his place, we'd still have made the point through the contrast of images. I'm telling my inner story all the time.

When an actor becomes terribly aware of the objective, there may be a tendency to leap at it.

It's worse than a tendency. There's a danger that he'll play it inhumanly – mechanically. You're telling the inner story through external things, which is what directing is. Directing is turning psychology into behavior. If you don't do that, all you have is people walking around feeling…

In the scene in the pool hall where Terry comes in to protest…

He doesn't know what he wants to say, that's another thing that's important. Protest is an intellectual word and suggests knowledge. All Terry wants is to be reassured. I wanted to make him not a bright guy. It's very, very important that someone who's not used to thinking is made to think, who's not used to feeling anything like guilt is made to feel something like guilt. That scene is critical. Another thing that is important is that on that level of humanity people do not know their objectives. Most of us don't know what we're doing untila fter we've done it. Then we may psychoanalyze ourselves. But in life very often we respond angrily or we cajole, we scold, we insist, and it just suddenly comes out of us. Sometimes with actors who are not as good, when they're not giving me what I want, I tell them what it is.

When Terry's sent by the hoods to spy on a union meeting in the church basement, the church is attacked. He grabs Edie and rescues her. That begins their courtship. They walk, he sits on a swing in a children's park, and they talk. In terms of your homework, the justifications …

You've done all that by now because you had a scene between them before. The rest of it is done by the fact that the hoods bang on the windows, that Terry sees her, and you tell him to grab her and pull her out.

Terry and Edie met the day after Joey's murder. There's a scene on the docks, the shape-up. Mac, the foreman, starts giving out assignments. At the end he throws the tags in the air. Everyone races to grab one like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terry and Edie meet over a tag.

It's a big shock to see the sister of someone whose death you've caused…Edie's in physical danger, and he doesn't want her to suffer. Before the hoodlums showed up, his attitude all through the church scene showed that he wasn't impressed with the union leaders or the priest. You also feel that part of his attitude is an act – not an act exactly – but it's the way that character, Terry, was brought up to think. I had to be careful there, because all you had to do was glare at Brando a few times and he got defensive.

Did the problem ever arise where you had to prevent the actors from playing the end of the scene at the beginning?

Always. You always have to be aware of that danger. There has to be a sense of discovery in a scene. The scene is in the script because the character couldn't get to where he is at the end except for that scene happening. Just the fact that he has to pull her out of physical danger there does a lot. Also, he has to handle that girl, touch her. The whole idea – nothing you have to explain to Brando, although I did – was these girls are either whores or they are virgins. A good girl you don't fool around with and the other girls are bums. That doesn't mean the good girls are angels or anything. But they're virgins when they marry. The guys look up to them for that reason. He relates to her in that way. When he can't stand the sight of that decent girl being subjected to phyusical danger, he rescues her. But he's also playing out his guilt. It's like he's making up for what he's done to her brother. I don't remember if I explained that to Brando or not, but it's so obvious it doesn't need much explaining. It's not that the script's obvious, but it's played out very carefully in steps.

But in terms of not playing the end of the scene before you get to it – I'll go back to the scene in the taxicab during which Terry clearly makes a discovery.

A lot of that, Jeff, has to do with starting right. Remember I told you about the first couple of readings? You make them listen a lot. I'm looking at you and I'm listening to you. I'm taking you in. I'm not playing my action. I'll take it off you, see what you've got to say. How do you feel about that?

Just fine. My question is, When does Terry discover that Charlie has been using him, wrecking his life? Does it really happen in the scene, or is Terry just facing up to it and talking about it for the first time?

The conversation is awakened by what happens in the scene. But it's not really a discovery in the scene. That would be false. That he's a failure is always in the bottom of Terry's heart and stomach. By the way, all Brando's behavior and disposition in the first part of the film is that of a man who's a failure, who's scornful of himself. There's a conscious sense of guilt not only from the fact that he helped murder somebody but he also feels guilty with respect to his own potential, which he had betrayed all through his life. It makes the conversion much stronger when you stress that.

Let's go back to the opening courtship scene between Terry and Edie.

I think if he hadn't rescued her from that violence, she wouldn't have walked with him. That's what I mean about the script being well-constructed. But then I had to somehow answer the question as to why she stays with him. Edie knows that from the point of view of propriety and public opinion, she shouldn't. Even though she wants to. He wants to keep her with him, but he doesn't want to exert any force. He wants to approach her gently. That was a time when Brando saved me. Eve dropped her glove by accident, and he picked it up and put it on his own hand. I could never have thought of that. When she reached for her glove, he got there first so she had to stay with him. At the same time, he could play it cool, as though he didn't know he was keeping her. Also, there are all kinds of sexual overtones implicit in the gesture.

How would you state the objectives in that scene?

You can say that you're trying to get her to like you or you're trying to apologize to her. But there's a case, I think, where you find it exists without articulation, because of the circumstances, because of the past, because of who he is and who she is. If they just sense it, you don't have to say it and it's better not to. I'm very leery of stating objectives.

I had to find some way to bring them together and hold them together despite the fact that she would not necessarily like him and would not necessarily like to be seen in his company. I made them walk in a way that reflects that. In the beginning of the scene they're not close to each other. Another thing I did was put it in a playground. The setting returns them to a state of innocence. When the hoods started hitting the windows of the church, it again arouses his shame and guilt. I took them to a place where those kinds of feelings would exist least – in a park, a playground. That's why he sits on the swing.

What did you want the scene to say?

That they are brought together overcoming her reluctance and also his. With Edie there is an object, he is able to express, however indirectly, his shame. In a sense, he confesses to her without ever saying a word. His behavior says, "God, I'm sorry about your brother."

Is that something you would ever say to Brando?

I might have told him, "You want her to know that you're not a monster, that you're sorry about her brother." Often as soon as I would do that, he would cut me off. When he heard enough, he'd walk away. I knew he'd gotten it. It was obvious. And he would start to behave naturally.

Was that scene played as written? It feels so real, as if invented on the spot.

There are two things operating. First, I always try to move actors through scenery not in front of it, so they actually touch things. If they're in front of everything, the scenery might as well be a painted backdrop. And second, Brando does something special. Sometimes it drives you nuts. He never says a line the same way twice. He changes the rhythm so the other person is forced to listen, sometimes frantically, to see what is being said. He is, in a sense, marginally improvising everything. He keeps a certain element – ten percent perhaps – of improvisation in every scene with my encouragement. When he did it too much, as he did in some other people's pictures, he was a pain in the ass. But when we worked together, he kept it within limits and it always gave his scenes a feeling of surprise, of being alive. The other actors felt emboldened to improvise as well. If he said something unusual, they'd answer in kind, and I'd let it go as long as it stayed within the intentions of the scene. All of the scenes are close to "as written" but no scene is exactly as written. What is writing? In movies saying the precise dialogue is usually not that crucial. I try to stick pretty close. I protect everything essential, and usually I protect the text, but if he hit a prop at different times in different takes, I didn't say that on this word you must touch this object.

Edie plays a brief scene with her father then goes back to Terry up on the roof. They do the business that we talked about before with the birds. He invites her for a drink and takes her to a bar. They sit at a table, and he tells her his history. Right in the middle of it he stops and says, "…But what am I runnin' off at the mouth for? What do you care…?"

Brando did that. It was not in the script, and it was not my idea. It's brilliant, a sudden flash of life. He's so in it.

It's a spontaneous articulation of Terry's inner life – the mixed feelings he has and the sense of not being worth much.

Yes, that is it. You hit it on the head. He's full of shame. He's betrayed his whole life.

Why are you smiling?

Because you only got half of it. It's interesting that you got, "What do you care?" There's another part which is …

Of course. He's saying, "Please care."

It's telling that Brando would do that. He was always hoping that people would care about him.

It's the most dead-on kind of flirt.

Yeah, except he did it well and unexpectedly. I don't think even he expected to do it. If a thing like that is planned, it can be terrible. It's very interesting when you reverse your directions in a scene, even for a minute. The whole scene is about his wanting her to care, then he says, "I don't care if you care."

He goes on talking about the dog-eat-dog world, how nobody cares about anybody. They dance, and then a huge guy comes in and tells Brando that Friendly wants him.

What's good about that scene is the end of it when Terry and Edie have to go through a wedding party to get out the door. I don't know why it's good. I don't know why I thought of it. That movie is well-directed. It really is.

We haven't talked about Karl Malden yet. He is, in some ways, a much simpler character than the others.

I believe I got what I wanted. It's been misunderstood a lot. I was born Greek Orthodox, and when we moved to New Rochelle there was no Greek Orthodox church. My father was religious, as some businessmen are. He made me go to Catholic church and catechism school. I hated it. I went to confession once, and I really resented it. I had a lot of dealings with Catholics, and I've always had it in for them a little bit, although I like a lot of Catholic people and have lots of Catholic friends. I thought their religion was simplistic, mechanical, and slightly hypocritical. Anyway, I wanted Father Barry, the priest Malden played, to be a rigidly ethical man who in any circumstance would always tell you what is right. I knew Malden as well as I knew anybody, and he had that quality. Priests are like that in those working-class communities. I would talk to myselkf and say, "That's the way the priest should be." When I got Karl, there wasn't much more directing to do.

It's funny because you said before that you hate cigarettes as a prop.

It doesn't tell much. Eating tells more.

Father Barry smokes all the time.

That's to make him a waterfront priest. The man on whom his character is based smoked a lot and drank a lot of beer.

How did you help out newcomers like Eva Marie Saint on this picture?

You make sure the actor doesn’t feel that he's being judged. You stay on his side of the camera, sometimes physically during rehearsal, but spiritually at all times. You make him feel like a friend who is helping you solve problems, which is in fact what he's doing…

Another thing that is very important is to bring the crew and the actors together. There's usually a terrific barrier between them. Brando was great with that. He liked the crew better than the producer and the other dignitaries. You get the crew and the actors kidding around at lunch on the first day, and by the second day they're all friends working toward the same goals. The director's personality sets the tone for all that. It's one thing I do well.

In Waterfront I have the feeling that maybe even from take to take you would throw a new stimulus into the environment.

I always did that. But when you're shooting in an environment that's functioning irrespective of you, you cannot control everything. Cars drive by. There are noises all around you. You have to try to make an asset out of everything that could possibly be a difficulty.

We're talking about the scene where the sling drops on Dugan and kills him. At the end of the scene Malden makes his "Christ in the shape-up" speech.

That's the most criticized moment in the picture because the body looks as if it's ascending to heaven under the guidance of an officer of the Catholic Church. It looks like some sort of symbolism, and I suppose it inevitably is. No one believes me, but I had no idea when I shot it, that the scene would look symbolic. I was naïve not to think so, but the truth is that's the way you take a dead body out of the hold of a ship. You can't carry it up the narrow steel ladders.

The scene ends with the black guy giving Joey's jacket back to Edie, the one Dugan had been wearing.

Poor working-class people never throw anything away. In cold weather a good warm garment is a valuable thing. And it's a token. He's actually saying, "Here, he'd want you to have this."

That's played in a three-shot; then the black guy walks out, and Terry and Edie stay in the frame. What you are left with most is the confusion and conflict in Terry, though he doesn't seem to be doing anything.

What is so good about that moment is that it makes the audience try to read him just like you're doing now. It's important that the central figures in a drama never be totally clear. You should try and figure them out. When you're casting, talking to an actor and you can't quite figure out what he or she is thinking, it's usually a good sign. It's a quality that all the really good movie actors have. In drama and in life there are many moments when you're bewildered. Bewilderiment is a very dramatic thing – you don't know what will come of it, which way it will turn. All Brando had to do was look at Eva, and she brings out his guilt.

When Terry kisses Edie you feel the utter desperation of a young man in love. It's like he wants to swallow her.

People like Terry Malloy are by prejudice, by training, and by the brutalized society that they are brought up in taught that sex and love are separate. Making love is something you do to a girl, not with a girl. Terry never felt any love for anybody before. He was always on guard, and the macho thing is to put everyone down. What you say is true. Brando's got that quality in him, and also Eva arouses it. She makes you feel tender and concerned about her. You hope she's going to be all right.

Terry is a desperado, a tough. He even says to Father Barry that she's the only good thing that's ever happened to him. She is a repository for his goodness. If she will kiss him, if she will love him, then he must be a good guy.

That's absolutely true. I couldn't say it as well.

Later, Terry is up on the rooftop with his pigeons. A cop is there as well. Terry spots him and says to the kid, "Jimmy, suppose I knew something, say a mug somebody put on somebody … you think I should turn him in?" He says, "A cheese-eater! You're kidding!" Then Terry goes over to the cop, and the cop does a beautiful con job on him, working on him to testify before the Crime Commission. He follows Terry to the pigeon coop and sets up the scene in the taxicab. He says, "Didn't I see you fight in the Garden one night … against a fellow called Wilson…?"

That was a beautiful piece of writing. I get a lot of credit for that scene and the one in the cab, and I had nothing to do with either. One thing which I can take some credit for is that you feel that Terry partly knows he's being conned. That's another ambivalence of Brando's. I saw it and encouraged it. Some other actor would have just played Terry as dopey. Brando never made the character dumber than he was, he never condescended or patronized the character. He's a terrific artist.

Then you cut to a scene where Friendly, surrounded by his cronies, puts Charlie on the spot. He says, in effect, "Go handle your brother." When Charlie says he can't, Friendly replies, "You can't have it both ways."

I set the scene up like a kangaroo court – absolute silence – with Friendly and his thugs just waiting to see what Charlie would do.

The next scene is the famous one in the cab, and you've already disclaimed any responsibility for it.

There was no way to ruin that cab scene. All you had to do was get those two guys saying those lines. The only thing that was added was a sound Brando made, something like, "Oh, Charlie, oh, Charlie." That was really a terrific contribution.

We had a lot of trouble that day because we were supposed to shoot it with rear projection. Sam Spiegel might be good on story construction and script, but as a mechanical producer he was often delinquent. When we got to the set, there was no rear projection equipment. So Boris Kaufman, the cameraman, suggested putting a venetian blind in the back of the cab and shooting straight into the back seat. Then on the sides of the frame, he caught a piece of the windows and had flickering lights going by. Actually it was a blessing because if you had seen the street outside we would have had to have more street noise. But it was a really desperate day. It took most of the morning to solve the goof on the rear projection. Then there was another problem.

Brando was being psychoanalyzed while we were shooting the picture. One of our understandings was that I would let him off at four o'clock so he could go to his analyst. So the last shot I did that day was Rod Steiger's close-up and I read Terry's lines to him. Steiger was good enough to do it, but he never forgave me. He thought I treated Brando better than I did him. I sure as hell did! But it didn't hurt. I knew I would only be on him for a few reactions, and I had promised Brando anyway. Sometimes it's important for a director to withdraw himself a little bit. If you've got the characters going good and then you talk about it, they get to thinking about satisfying you instead of playing the scenes. I was smart enough that day or troubled enough by my technical problems not to do anything. Steiger never got enough credit for something he did brilliantly. Throughout the scene you feel an older brother's concern for his younger brother. At the end of it you feel Charlie's sadness because he feels his brother has condemned himself and that he, himself, has been put in an awful spot. Steiger is very touching in that scene. If he has done anything better, I have not seen it.

In a way it's a shame that it all worked so well because it would have been interesting to ask you how you went about getting that scene.

I think it's more interesting to realize that I didn't do anything. That it was set in motion long before. That they were aware of the elements in the scene, which were that you have to make your brother do something that he doesn't want to do and your brother is in danger. Steiger knew all that without my telling him. And Brando knew everything. How Brando understood that emotion – having to do with his dignity, the fact that he could have been something – I don't know. When he said, "Oh, Charlie", the melancholy and depth of pain were just terrific.

Part of that feeds off the fact that Charlie has pulled a gun. Terry puts his hand on it.

He did it so gently. It looked like he was putting his hand on his brother's arm. That was beautiful. I could never have told him to do something as good as that. They were both tremendously talented.

In the following scene Terry breaks into Edie's apartment. She's cowering on the bed dressed in a white slip.

My wife used to hate those slips. She said, "You keep putting women in white slips. What have you got about white slips?" … Actually I always did like white slips.

Terry slams through the door and she says, "Get away from me." He says, "Edie, I need you to love me. Tell me you love me." She replies, "I didn't say that I didn't love you. I said stay away from me." He kisses her, and while they embrace, there's a call from off screen … He runs out, and she follows him. They discover Charlie's body hanging on a hook.

I wanted to get across the brutalization – he's just meat.

Was it written that way?

No, that was my idea. There was a hook in the wall there. That was some night. The crew was going to leave Spiegel. They called him a Jew bastard to his face. They were a largely Catholic crew, and they couldn't stand Spiegel's chiseling pettiness. They were going to kill him. If it wasn't for me, they were all going to go home…

Was it particularly difficult to work when everyone around you is ready to kill?

No, they were a nice bunch of guys. Also, I felt the same way about Spiegel. That side of him was intolerable. It was a tough picture to do, though, and I don't blame Spiegel as much in retrospect as I did then. After 7 or 8 weeks of that cold, everybody's nerves were on edge.

A number of things are striking in that scene. First, you show Charlie hanging on that hook in an enormous wide shot. He's in the corner of the frame, and as a truck pulls by, the headlights reveal him. You look and think, "Is that what I thought it was?" Secondly, what Terry does when he sees Charlie hanging there is amazing. He barely touches him. He puts his hands on the wall on either side of him and leans toward him but doesn't look at him.

The idea of not taking him down, the fact that there's nothing you could do, really gives you the sense that it's all over.

When Terry lifts him off the hook, he drapes Charlie's hands around his own neck. It's like an embrace.

All that stuff if Brando. He's so full of feeling.

Edie pleads with Terry to get out of town, go inland, get a job on a farm or something. He won't go. "You always said I was a bum. Well, not anymore. Don't worry. I'm not going to shoot anybody. I'm just going to get my rights." All through the picture she'd begged Terry to do the right thing. Now that she's in love with him and he's determined to dowhat is right, she switches over and tells him to watch his own ass, be expedient.

That was part of the intention. She's concerned about him now, so she wants to save him. Remember, Edie was born and raised on the waterfront. She knows he's going to get it. But the more significant part of it is how he changes. What he's done has made a man out of him.

There's one thing that I stress a lot that many authors and directors disagree with me about. They may be right. I may be wrong, and I say that truthfully. I put a great stress on the idea that in a good film or play the protagonist changes. He's not the same at the end as he was at the beginning. Tennessee Williams disagreed strongly. He said it was the "drama" that I'd learned in my lefty days. That it's an emotional correlative of the political notion that, "Now I see." But I do believe that events cause people to change, that heroes are made by events as much as events by heroes, and that in difficulty a person gets stronger, harder and more resolute. I myself have only learned from pain. I never learned anything the other way. So the significant thing to me was that Terry said, "No, I'm going down and get what's coming to me."

This takes us to the last scene in the picture. Terry bellows at Friendly, "I'm glad what I done … I was rattin' on myself all them years and didn't know it, helpin' punks like you against people like Pop and Dugan…"

That's where the parallel people have tried to draw between my HUAC testimony and Terry's falls short. I never felt that. I always felt my situation had values on both sides. I was always wavery about it – informing on your peers is not an easy thing to do. In making Waterfront I drew from what I had been through in my life. It's what any artist does. But I never meant any parallel between Terry and me because the issue in the film is terribly clear. The corrupt union bosses were brutalizing and exploiting their fellows. It wasn't even another class. And they knew they could count on the code of silence to protect them. Terry was right to smash it.

You have mentioned a number of times how much you love Brando as a man and an actor, how his sensibility was so much like yours. He seemed like a perfect extension of you. That scene could have been terribly melodramatic. What makes it work is all the physical and emotional pain revealed by Brando's performance. Despite the fact that the issues are simple, he pays very dearly, and we feel for him.

That's right. I believe in courageous acts, but when you perform courageous acts, you often get the stuffing kicked out of you, and you've got to be ready to take it. You may not come out of the beating the same man. When he yells, "I'm glad what I done" to Friendly. That was an important choice. It made it into a real political act. I made him proclaim it to the world. That was the way I felt.

You had Friendly and his cronies on the same little houseboat where the picture started. Terry's on the gangplank between that house and the pier. Behind him the rest of the workers start to assemble, watching.

In a sense the fate of the waterfront is being decided. By doing it that way Friendly can't back off.

Friendly goads Terry to get him onto his turf, and finally he charges. He and Friendly fight. When Terry starts to win, Friendly calls for his gorillas, and they stomp the hell out of him. You did most of that action off camera around the corner of the house.

You gather that's important, don't you? Not only because it suggests more than showing the violence, but it's shot from the point of view of the jury. The other workers are more than an audience. They're going to make a choice. The victor is going to be the leader of the union.

Edie and Father Barry show up with a couple of longshoremen. Terry's lying there, semi-conscious in a pool of his own blood. Father Barry gives him a snow job, and we watch as Terry makes his decision. He says, "Get me on my feet." His physical acting is superb.

Sensational.



  contact Sheila Link: 5/11/2003 03:30:00 PM

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