Mark Rydell: The Hollywood Interview

Actor/director Mark Rydell.


BULLFIGHTING BUSES WITH JIMMY DEAN, SMASHING COKE BOTTLES WITH ROBERT ALTMAN, BEING ONE-UPPED BY STEVE MCQUEEN and other strange but true stories from the life of Mark Rydell
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

If Hollywood were a hurricane, Mark Rydell would undoubtedly be the eye of the storm. A show business veteran whose 40 plus year career has seen him wear acting, directing and producing hats with equal skill and vigor, Rydell made his initial debut in the world on March 23, 1934 in New York City, the son of a successful stockbroker. An avid jazz fan since childhood, Rydell went on to study at Julliard, Chicago Musical College, and University of Chicago, and remains an accomplished jazz pianist. Rydell trained for the stage at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, later joining the Actors Studio, where his classmates included Martin Landau and James Dean.

Rydell supplemented his Off-Broadway work with a six year stint on the venerable TV soap As the World Turns, making his feature acting debut in Don Siegel's 1956 melodrama Crime in the Streets, with John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo. Rydell wouldn't act again on the big screen for nearly 20 years, until his now-legendary turn as the Coke bottle-wielding Jewish gangster Marty Augustine in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973).

Discovering that directing was his true calling, Rydell made the move to Hollywood. He soon became an accomplished television director for such shows as I Spy, Wild Wild West, Gunsmoke, and Ben Casey, before making an auspicious feature directing debut in 1968 with The Fox, the story of an erotic love triangle based on a D.H. Lawrence novella. When the film copped the Golden Globe for Best Picture, the 34 year-old Rydell instantly found himself on the A-list of hot young directors, next directing the classic period road picture The Reivers (1969) starring Steve McQueen. Rydell's next effort, The Cowboys (1972), was a gritty western notable at the time for being the first film to show icon John Wayne being killed on-screen. Rydell took another change of pace with the character drama Cinderella Liberty (1973) starring James Caan as a world-weary sailor caught in a reluctant romance with a prostitute, played by Marsha Mason. Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) was a genial farce again starring Caan and Elliot Gould as 19th century safe crackers. The Rose (1979) marked the star-making turn of Bette Midler in a stirring drama chronicling the fall of a Janis Joplin-like rock idol during the waning days of the 1960's. On Golden Pond (1980) won Oscars for both Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda (in his last role) in Ernest Thompson's (also an Oscar-winner) heart-tugging family drama, while The River (1984) starred Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek as a farm family faced with impending natural disaster. The film marked Gibson's American film debut and was a smash with critics. Rydell took a hiatus for several years before helming his next film, For the Boys (1991), reuniting him with Caan and Bette Midler, this time playing USO performers whose tours of duty span three wars (WW II, Korea, Vietnam). While the film has its admirers, it was mishandled by its studio, which didn't know how to sell an anti-war picture during the height of post-Gulf war jingoism. Intersection (1994) was a domestic drama starring Richard Gere as a man whose life literally flashes before his eyes during a fateful car accident. Rydell next turned to cable TV to helm one of his most powerful films, Crime of the Century (1996), starring Stephen Rea as wrongly convicted Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The film also featured the late J.T. Walsh in his final role, as well as a crackling script by William Nicholson.

Rydell's latest work is undoubtedly one of his most personal. During his tenure at the Actors Studio, Rydell, Martin Landau and James Dean were inseparable friends. James Dean, premiering on the TNT cable network, deserves to take its place among the best screen biographies ever produced. James Franco heads the cast, doing a remarkable interpretation of Dean as a deeply conflicted, yet brilliantly talented young artist. Unlike many made-for-television films, James Dean avoids the in-your-face histrionics and on-the-nose expository dialogue that has polluted the genre for so long. Award-winning playwright Israel Horovitz delivers an intelligent, knowing screenplay, with Rydell delivering the goods behind the camera with the greatest of care, eliciting wonderfully sensitive performances from his young cast (Rydell also does an amusing cameo as studio boss Jack L. Warner). James Dean is not to be missed by Dean fans, movie buffs, or anyone who ever thought about becoming an actor.

Mark Rydell sat down with Venice recently in his beautiful beachfront home to reflect on his remarkable career as one of Hollywood's most gifted artists and greatest witnesses.

I understand the only person missing in the scenes between Dean and Martin Landau during their Actors' Studio days is you. What were those days like?
Mark Rydell: One of the virtues of doing this picture that I hadn't considered when I started it was the opportunity to revisit a decade that was of real importance to me: the 50's, which is often thought of as being a very sluggish decade, which it wasn't. Even the dark aspects of the decade, like the Army-McCarthy hearings, nuclear testing, energized the decade. It was a very passionate time, almost like the renaissance. All television was live, all in New York, and all the great actors were there: George C. Scott, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman. Great directors were working in television: John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, all directing pieces by great writers: Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling. It was very passionate, very idealistic, it was a time for heroes. And this was the time that Marty Landau, Jimmy Dean and I were pounding the pavement looking for acting jobs, and it was just magical.

You and Landau had more in common of course, both being Jewish kids from New York. Did this kid from Indiana seem like sort of a hayseed initially?
Well, he was very handsome, very charismatic, very peculiar, very unpredictable fellow. He was extremely seductive, and I don't mean just sexually, but after five minutes with Jimmy, you would want to give him everything that you owned. He was irresistible. But he was also very quirky and very difficult. He was passionate about everything. His ambition was second only to my own (laughs). His ambition was a product, in my mind, of the rejection he felt as a child by the death of his mother and the indifference of his father. There was a part of Jimmy that felt worthless, therefore he had to be a high achiever to identify himself. So he pushed himself to excel in everything. That same drive also produced a recklessness in him that seemed to challenge the ordinary limits that we all face, and that's what ultimately killed him.

Rydell on the set of James Dean (2001)

Had he not been in that car accident in 1955, would Dean have survived the 60's and all the excess that it produced?
Based on all the reckless behavior I witnessed, probably not. There's one incident that really sticks in my mind: One night after Jimmy and I acted together in a very prestigious TV show called Omnibus, we were walking home down Madison Avenue, and it was deserted on a Sunday. Jimmy was talking to me about bullfighting, which was one of his passions, and the buses would hurdle by at 40 mph, passing bus stops by because there was no one to pick up. Jimmy sensed a bus coming, and leapt into the street and did a bullfighter's pass with this 20 ton bus, and it practically brushed his shirt, that's how close he was to it. I leapt back ten feet, like any sensible Jewish person, and he laughed uproariously. The reason I tell you that story, is that you ask if he hadn't died in that car accident, would he have lived? I think not. I remember thinking at that moment that Jimmy was not long for this world.

He was like a supernova.
Exactly. Burning fiercely and bound to go out.

The other thing that comes through in the film is that Dean was deeply disturbed in many ways.
Yes, but he was able to take his pain and use it constructively in his work. Other people allow their agonies to defeat them. Jimmy used them as raw materials for his talent.

I thought James Franco, who played Dean in the film, succeeded so brilliantly because he interpreted Dean, instead of trying to imitate him.
It was a conscious objective of ours not to imitate Jimmy, or turn it into a Las Vegas-style, Elvis impersonator show. We wanted to capture the essence of Jimmy, through James Franco's personality. He's a startling young man. There would have been no picture without him. When I sat down with him, the bells went off in my head. He has many of the same qualities as Jimmy Dean. We worked for quite a while on the physicality of the character. Jimmy Dean was very well-coordinated, an athlete. Jimmy Franco was able to find a lot of those things and embrace them. In fact, he became so deeply immersed in Jimmy Dean's skin, that he had trouble shaking it. In order to experience the isolation that we both defined as being part of Jimmy Dean, who always felt very isolated and unconnected, he cut off his parents and his girlfriend for three or four months during the making of this film, risked losing his girlfriend, in fact. That's a very committed and dedicated fellow. He was terrific.

You play Jack Warner in the film. What's it like directing yourself?
I was very reluctant at first to play Jack Warner. I'd never acted before in a film that I directed. A director has to sharpen and hone his judgmental faculties at all times. That's anathema as an actor. If an actor is aware of any of that stuff, to the point where he's aware or judging himself, then he's not acting. What I did was to bring in friends of mine, people like Barry Primus and Jimmy De Stefano, who are actors and directors, to work on the film and be in the scenes with me, so I could turn to them after the take was over and say 'Was I all right?' I had 27 alumni from the Actors Studio in this production.

You actually had an interesting encounter with Jack Warner as a young man.
I was an arrogant young actor who came to California to meet Jack Warner. He had heard about me, run some of my dailies and offered me a three picture deal. Because I was an arrogant young kid I said 'Well, I need script approval.' He said "Get the fuck outta my office!" and that was the end of it! (laughs)

This project had been around for some time, right?
It had been languishing at Warner Bros. since 1992, with people like Brad Pitt, Leonardo de Caprio, Johnny Depp, all attached at one time or another. I think that ultimately they were all afraid to do it, and the studio was particularly afraid to do it, because movies have changed so much, and movies of this quality are rarely financed by studios anymore. They've all gone on to cable television, which along with independent films, has inherited most of the quality material out there, all because of this lunatic weekend box office battle that's become the rule. It's crazy. There's been a real cultural collapse in the last 10-15 years that's probably a direct result of the free market system. The minute you set a standard where the accumulation of dollars is the most significant element in any endeavor, artistic or otherwise, you dehumanize the values of the country, and I think that's what's going on. The standards have so lowered in the effort to win the weekend, that you reduce the picture to its most moronic simplicity. They've lost the mature audience. I pick up a paper today, I don't know what movie to go to.

Let's talk about your background.
I was born in New York. My father was a Wall Street stock broker. I have one sister. We grew up in the Bronx on the Grand Concourse. When I was a kid, I used to sneak out of the house at night to go listen to jazz at all the great clubs of the era: the Three Deuces, the Downbeat. I used to give a few dollars to the doorman out front and he'd go sit me behind the stage curtain and I'd listen to people like Art Tatum. I'd go home about 3 o'clock on the morning, go to sleep, get up a couple hours later and go to school. I found music as a sort of escape from this sort of cultural desert that I lived in. I was born to be an artist. I've lived my entire life that way, and I'm thankful for that, because I think a creative life has many benefits.

After the Actors Studio you joined the cast of the classic soap "As the World Turns."
I did six seasons on that. It paid for my psychoanalysis and kept me sane! (laughs) I was doing off-Broadway plays then, also.

Your first film was Don Siegel's Crime in the Streets, which co-starred John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo.
You know who was the dialogue director on that? Sam Peckinpah! He was a great guy, a wild man. I had originally done Crime in the Streets as a television movie with Cassavetes. It was a terrific film, a great experience for me. John turned out to be one of the great creative minds in our business.

Was Siegel an influence on you as a director?
I guess he must've been because he was the first director that I really studied. Don was a spectacular action director. As a matter of fact, Clint Eastwood asked me to do a picture he did called Coogan's Bluff (1968). I told Clint I didn't know how to do a picture like that, but he should talk to Don Siegel. Clint said "Who's Don Siegel?" And the two of them proceeded to have one of the great partnerships in film. So I got to pay Don back, in a sense.

How did you segueway into directing?
It's a natural evolution in a sense. An actor, in order to achieve his craft properly, has to stay in touch with the child within himself. You have to keep your ability to play, to pretend. As you grow up, the directorial role becomes very attractive because it's much more paternal. I found that I was inclined toward it since I'm a natural leader, anyway, but I've never lost touch with my playfulness, which is why I've continued acting.

You directed over 50 hours of television. Was it a good training ground for features?
Perfect. In those days, anyway. I don't know what it's like now. Now it's probably a good training ground for mediocre features. In my period, everyone aspired to make it excellent. Now they just aspire to make it fast.

Your first feature was The Fox, based on a short story by D.H. Lawrence.
Yeah, I thought the story was a very daring sexual examination of three people. It was a real lucky break for me, winning the Golden Globe for Best Picture on my first feature! It was like a passport that opened all sorts of doors.

Steve McQueen and Rupert Crosse in Rydell's The Reivers (1969).

The Reivers, your next film, is one of the great road pictures of all time. It's star was Steve McQueen. Tell us about him.
He was a remarkable, exciting personality. Very tortured, very tormented, borderline psychotic, I would say. But he was just magic on film. You can't take your eyes off him. He was part of that same period in the Actors Studio, as well, in the class after me. I grew up with Steve. As a matter of fact, I was going with (McQueen's first wife) Neil Adams, and he stole her away from me the night I introduced them! She rode away with him on his motorcycle! (laughs) Steve was magical, no question about it. He had genuine star quality.

Any other stories about McQueen from the set?
A sad one. Rupert Crosse, Steve McQueen and I used to bet each other about smoking every week. We'd put $100 in a pot each week, so there was 300 bucks in the pot at the end of the week, and whoever didn't smoke would get the pot. I won every week and quit smoking. Steve and Rupert both wound up dying of lung cancer, very young. Rupert Crosse was orginally cast in The Last Detail (1973), and then contracted cancer and had to drop out. Steve had the same recklessness in his personality that Jimmy Dean had. The studio was always trying to stop him from riding his motorcycle, but the minute he had a moment of anxiety on the set, he'd jump on his bike and just ride the hell out of it. Fifteen minutes later, he'd come back and he worked his steam off.

John Wayne in Rydell's The Cowboys (1972).

The Cowboys was a terrific, gritty western, and was also the first film in which John Wayne got killed by a bad guy.
Duke was challenged by me in an odd way. He knew Bruce Dern, Roscoe Lee Browne and I were all Actors Studio guys. I hired a crew that was all pony-tailed grass smokers. Of course he wanted all his own people around him, but I wanted this to be a different kind of western. Duke was challenged by the excellence of Bruce Dern, who is one of the great American actors. He and Duke were going to do this scene where they have a terrible fist fight. I remember Duke saying to Bruce "This Actors Studio crap, I could do it too, you know." He said that he and Henry Fonda had been doing that stuff for years. Duke was a major surprise to me. We couldn't have been more polar opposites, emotionally, politically, prejudciously. I was waiting for him to say something anti-Semitic. But despite his positions politically and otherwise, he turned out to be one of the nicest, most generous men I've ever known. I'd walk into a restaurant with him, and he'd never turn anyone away. He'd embrace everybody, was the first person on the set in the morning, the last person to leave at night. He was very dedicated, and a remarkably available human being, unlike many people with whom I agree on many issues, who are awful! So Duke was a big lesson for me in pre-judging.

Let's talk about your return to acting in 1973 as Jewish gangster extraordinaire Marty Augustine in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye.
It was great. Altman is a genius. I have the highest and most profound respect for Bob. We're very good friends. That role was a genuine thrill. That scene where I smash the girl in the face with the Coke bottle has become sort of a cult scene. To this day, people come up and quote that dialogue to me word-for-word and hand me bottles of Coke! (laughs)

When you were on the set, since you were now a filmmaker, were you watching Altman and trying to absorb things from him?
Absolutely. I learned a lot from Bob, but to watch any Altman film is to learn. He has a remarkable sense of theatricality, a remarkable understanding of human behavior and he gives the actors remarkable permission, which is very wise. The best idea you can give an actor is not nearly as good as what the actor can give to you. He encourages exploration and individuality in the acting and I think it produces a level of acting in his pictures that is admirable. To be the kind of rebel that Bob is takes a lot of balls, too.

Cinderella Liberty was a wonderful, and unusual film. Tell us about its genesis.
20th Century Fox sent me Darryl Ponicsan's book Cinderella Liberty, one chapter of which was the story we filmed, of the sailor and the whore with the half-black child. I said, 'I don't want to do a film of the whole book, just this one chapter.' I thought it was interesting that here was this macho sailor who was sick of his male-oriented life and wanted to make a human commitment to a hooker who's resisting any kind of commitment after having been so brutalized. So Darryl Ponicsan, who's a brilliant writer, agreed to do the screenplay of this small section of his book, which was really a book about bureaucracy.

Your casting of Marsha Mason was a daring choice at the time.
Yeah, I discovered Marsha by accident when I was touring the States looking for a naval base to shoot at. Well, the Navy pulled all support for the film when they found out that Jimmy Caan's character wanted to leave the Navy and that his love interest was a prostitute! (laughs) They didn't like that. I have to hand it to Gordon Stulburg, who was head of Fox at the time, who told me to tell the Navy to go screw itself. Anyway, I had Jimmy Caan, and there were many hot actresses who the studio wanted to play the hooker: Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, the list goes on. I was in San Francisco and went to the American Conservatory Theater one night, and there was Marsha Mason playing Nora in A Doll's House, and she knocked me out of my chair. 'There she is,' I thought, 'That's the girl I want for the picture.' The studio thought I was crazy, casting an unknown instead of a star, and cut my budget in half. Within a week after we'd started shooting, they sent me a wire after seeing the dailies, saying that if they could have cast any actress in the world in that part, it would have been Marsha.

Is it fair to say that you're the man who discovered Bette Midler by casting her in The Rose?
I hardly discovered her, although I guess I discovered her for the movies. It's an interesting story. Marvin Worth came to me with what was then called The Janis Joplin Story, many years before we actually made the picture. The studio wanted me to use certain stars to dub in the voice, and I had no interest in that. I wanted to use Bette, who was then singing in the gay baths in New York, where she had a big following. I had seen her and thought she was one of the most astonishing talents I'd ever witnessed. Her ability to reach into herself and the depths of her singing and performing are unparalleled. The studio wasn't interesting in casting Bette, so I left. They went through many directors, and then Bette finally became known, and they called me and said "Okay, you were right." And that took years, years to gestate. I insisted on fictionalizing the story and basing it on Joplin, as opposed to doing a straight biography, because I wanted to be free of Joplin's facts. I wanted to use what I thought was important from her life, but also be able to manufacture more dramatic events for the purpose of the picture, such as her dying on stage as opposed to a Sunset Strip hotel room. The experience with Bette was quite remarkable because she really turned herself inside out and delivered herself to me with no reins, and that's a testimonial to her gift. I've made two pictures with her, and for both she was nominated for an Academy Award, but Hollywood still doesn't know what to do with her. She's not your standard Hollywood type. I think Bette should be protected by an act of Congress, like a natural resource.

Tell us about the experience of On Golden Pond, which brought you together with Katharine Hepburn and two Fondas.
I was so flattered to be asked to do that picture. I think Jane bought the rights to the play in order to resolve her relationship with her dad. She asked Henry who he would like to direct the film, and I was very flattered that he chose me. We didn't know each other prior to that. He just knew my work. I knew Jane because Jane was at the Actors Studio during that period in the 50's, too.

Were you intimidated by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn initially?
I was until the first shot of the picture. Afterwards, we cut, they both turned to me with the innocence of a 19 year-old actor, hungrily, to see if it was all right. That moment was so important to me, to know that I was needed by them. Then I knew it was going to be all right.

Do you always rehearse before you shoot?
Always. For at least two weeks. Around a table, discussing the values of every moment, then once we're all on the same page, so to speak, you have to be clear enough to let what happens happen. I believe in craft and planning. There's nothing like a good accident, but I don't think art is an accident. Art is about choice.

The River was a very underrated film, and was Mel Gibson's first American film.
Yeah, initially I didn't want to cast Mel, because I thought of him as an Australian. He really fought for that part. He came over to my house to read for me. I figured that he'd hired a vocal coach and studied every line in the script, so what I did was, I thought I'd throw him a curve and told him to read from a copy of Time magazine that I had, in the voice of the farmer. Well, it didn't throw him at all. He did it beautifully and I was stunned. Mel's a really terrific guy. There's none of that "star" crap with him. He's a real person. Tom Hanks is that way, too. They have their feet on the ground and aren't deluded by the mechanics of Hollywood.

For the Boys was another change of pace for you. It combined the USO, vaudeville storyline with what the horrors of war were all about beautifully.
I think that picture was misunderstood, and mismarketed. It was intended to be an anti-war film that had a serious message, but had kind of a vaudevillian patina. Like George Bernard Shaw said, "If you want to tell the truth, get them laughing. Then when their mouths are open, put the truth in." So that was my intention, but it was really mishandled by the marketing department at Fox. Barry Diller, whom I have the greatest admiration for as a person and a businessman, I think he made a mistake with this film. He said to me "We can't market the film you gave us as anti-war. The feeling in America now is very patriotic because of the Gulf War. What we have to sell is a Bette Midler musical." I knew that it was a mistake to do that, because you can't lie to the people about what you have, because you're going to disappoint them, and then they're going to stay away from the picture. You have to sell what you have, and they mis-sold the picture, and spent a lot of money doing it. So I think that contributed to it not being as successful as it could have been.

Crime of the Century was a terrific film, and also featured the last performance of J.T. Walsh, a fine actor.
That film was very important to me, because it indicted a certain element of avariciousness and greed and political expediency. The whole contention of the film was that Hauptmann was innocent. J.T. Walsh, what a sad thing that was. He was on his way to becoming one of the great American actors. Early death is one of the saddest aspects of human life.

Do you remember exactly where you were when you heard James Dean had been killed?
I do. Bob Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) was teaching me how to direct. He was doing a television show called Goodyear Playhouse and the name of the piece was A Man is Ten Feet Tall, with Sidney Poitier and Don Murray, and it was later made into a movie called Edge of the City (1957). Bob was one of my first directing teachers, and I was following him around learning camera angles when the word came in that Jimmy had died in a car crash. It was about six o'clock, maybe a little earlier. I remember that moment in the same way I remember where I was standing when I heard about Kennedy's assassination and that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. It was one of those seminal moments.

You just wrapped a part in Woody Allen's newest film. What's Woody like?
Oh he's wonderful, such a fascinating guy. A very skilled writer. He works the exact opposite way that I do: no rehearsal, none! You don't even go over the lines with him. I said 'How can you do that.' He told me, "I'm not such a good director, but I'm a great caster." So what he does, he'll say 'Mark you go over there, do that over there, then come over here, okay? Okay, let's roll!" It produces an atmosphere of excitement, like the theater, because that's it! So you'd better know your dialogue and better be aware, free and improvisational because that's what he gets from this pressure that he consciously, or unconsciously, puts on the actors. I had a great time with him.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Study acting. Much like a conductor should know the limits and range of every instrument in the orchestra, firsthand. A director's major equipment is his insight into acting and behavior. It should be mandatory for every director to act, to experience acting, to know what it's like to create behavior in public in front of 100 people with tape measures and lights and marks on the floor, and create behavior under those circumstances. Most directors who are skilled understand that. Most directors who are unskilled have no idea what acting's about.