RIP ARTHUR PENN

Director Arthur Penn.

The great Arthur Penn has passed away at the age of 88. Below is an interview Jon Zelazny did with Penn some two years back.

THE LEFT HANDED GUN: ARTHUR PENN’S TICKET TO HOLLYWOOD… AND HIS TICKET BACK HOME AS WELL
by Jon Zelazny

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on EightMillionStories.com September 29, 2008.

In the 1960’s, Arthur Penn was one of the most acclaimed directors in the world, best known for his smash hits The Mircale Worker (1962) and Bonnie & Clyde (1967), each of which earned him an Oscar nomination.

He spent his early career directing theater and live television in New York, until he and three of his TV colleagues—producer Fred Coe, writer Leslie Stevens, and fledgling star Paul Newman—went to Hollywood to make a western about Billy the Kid.

Paul Newman takes aim as Billy the Kid, in Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun.

2008 marked the 50th anniversary of The Left Handed Gun, Penn’s now-celebrated feature film debut. We spoke by phone, ironically the day before Paul Newman passed away at age 83. The day after that was Penn’s birthday. He’s now 86.

Happy Birthday!
Arthur Penn: Thank you.

How are you feeling?
Well, considering what birthday it is, not bad.

Have you spent most of your life in New York?All of it. We’ve always lived here, aside from a few brief periods in Hollywood. And when I was on location.

Before we get to The Left Handed Gun, I mentioned in my email that I finally saw your film Mickey One (1965) for the first time last Friday. There were about seventy people at the screening; the programmer asked how many of us had ever seen it before, and about five hands went up. Why has it remained so obscure? Is it true it’s never had a home video release?
Columbia never liked it. I made it for very little—a million dollars—so they could afford to just scrap it. Which is what they wanted to do as soon as they saw it.

Author's Note: "Mickey One" is an experimental feature film about a New York nightclub comic (Warren Beatty) who goes on the lam when he can’t repay his mob debts. He lays low in Chicago, starts working in clubs under the name Mickey One, and falls in love with a nice girl… but his paranoia regarding his past threatens to destroy his new life.

Even Warren Beatty in the lead isn’t enough to justify a home release today?No. Maybe they would now, but I doubt it.

What I’d always read in books was that it was your ode to the French New Wave. There is a feeling of Godard about it, but my first reaction was that it was more in the spirit of Richard Lester, very whimsical and sassy… but as it got darker and darker towards the end, it really reminded me of David Lynch, especially the films I think of as his “dream stories.”
Everybody evaluates Mickey One for their own time. There was no David Lynch at the time I did it.

Paul Newman (L) as Billy the Kid in Penn's debut film, The Left Handed Gun.

Have you seen those works of his? Lost Highway, or Inland Empire? Did it strike you he was working along some of the same lines?
Those are his pictures. They’re his equivalents of Mickey One.

Were you trying to evoke the French New Wave?No. They only called it French New Wave at the time because there was nothing else to compare it to.

The print we saw was gorgeous, by the way, and I think people really enjoyed it. I also like pictures where the director feels free to really experiment, to play with interesting visual ideas. Did you know Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha?No, I never saw it.

It’s a Roger Corman picture, a rip-off of Bonnie & Clyde really, but you can see the young Scorsese just using the opportunity to try every visual trick, and angle, and idea that he can possibly get in. Another one I like is Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey.
Yeah, I saw that one.

When I think of your first three films now—The Left Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker and Mickey One—it’s an amazing progression. Your confidence and dexterity with the medium really leapfrogged with each picture.
Yeah. It was all new to me. I was very captivated by it.

Paul Newman and Lita Milan in a rare romantic moment of The Left Handed Gun. Note the rather Freudian implications of Newman's pistol...

In researching The Left Handed Gun, I saw that you, Fred Coe, Leslie Stevens, and Paul Newman all knew each other from these television dramas in New York. Were all these shows you did free-standing stories?
Yes, they were. The first one I ever did was about a Korean war soldier coming back. That was all live TV. You know… well, you probably don’t know.

The only one of those I ever saw was Requiem For a Heavyweight with Jack Palance. I never saw any of yours. What was a schedule like for one of these shows? Were they all done in studio?Sure. They were live. There was no tape. What we shot went right out on the air. That was television in the early days. I did one every third week for NBC. We’d rehearse them in a hotel ballroom with just the actors, no cameras. We’d plan how we were going to shoot it, and after about seven days of these rehearsals, we’d go into the TV studio. We’d rehearse one day with the cameras, the next day was a final dress rehearsal, and we went on the air that evening. And the pictures that were going out, we cut them ourselves, in the control room. And not only were we choosing the shots, we were choosing how long those shots would last—based on how the actors were performing! That was live TV.

I had to direct like that once in college. It was incredibly difficult.
We did it. Show after show.

It must have been the greatest training ground imaginable.It was wonderful.

I saw you first worked with Paul Newman on a TV drama called The Battler in 1956. When did he first come to your attention?
I saw him on the stage, very early on. In Bus Stop. I knew him from The Actor’s Studio.

And you directed a Leslie Stevens TV script called Invitation to a Gunfighter in 1957. Was that your first western?
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it wasn’t much of a western. It was all done in the studio.

But it had cowboys in it?
(chuckling) Yeah, it had cowboys. Not so many horses!

So who had the idea that you, Fred Coe, Leslie Stevens, and Paul Newman would make this western for Warner Bros.?
Fred had the rights to the play. And he’d talked to Newman about it. And they approached another director, Delbert Mann, but he wasn’t available. Then they went to Bob Mulligan, but there was some falling out there, so then Fred came to me. I said I wanted to rewrite it with Leslie, so that was the deal.

And who was it at Warner Bros. that decided to take a chance on four TV guys from New York?
Jack Warner. Our first day at the studio, he took Fred and me around on a tour of their facilities. And introduced us to his son-in-law, who was starting to produce some TV there. See, they were finally coming around to the idea that the future was in working with TV, not against it. Up until then, they just kept hoping it go away. But it had gotten so popular that it had cut deep into their audience. So they thought, “Well, let’s get some of those television guys to work for us.” That’s how we really got there.

Most Hollywood westerns, before and since, have been made by these very rugged, Western, California kinds of guys. Did anyone think it was funny, you New York theater types coming out to make a western?
Well, the cameraman sure didn’t like me! (laughs) Because I came in with this idea that I was going to make sort of a ditzy Western, y’know? With a different twist to it. And he wanted to drag me into a kind of conventionality. Then I started using camera angles he didn’t want to do. So he put up this clapboard at the head of all these shots. It said, “Photographed Under Protest.”

You’re kidding.
No. That was for the executives, so when they saw the dailies… y’know, he didn’t want them to think he’d lost his touch! But he worked for them. He was under contract to Warner Bros. Everybody was in those days. You worked at one place.

I looked at it again last week. It seems to me the basic idea was to take a '50s juvenile delinquent story and put it in the Old West. Was that about how you saw it?
Yeah. It was also based on the idea that as the West was expanding, there was this yellow journalism back east, where they more or less invented these stories about people just to sell cheap dime novels. So there was this kid named Bill Bonney, who had this bad reputation out west, and they named him Billy the Kid, and wrote up this whole legend about him. Nobody knows what’s really true. They’re pretty sure that one photo of him is authentic, but now it’s come out that it was actually a reversed image. That picture was the sole reason people believed Billy the Kid was left handed, but it turns out that wasn’t really the case.

The iconic photo of the real William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, circa 1880.

I think your staging of that photograph is one of the best scenes in the movie. Now that idea of modern technology intruding on the West became a major element for Sam Peckinpah. He loved putting cars, or other modern inventions, in his westerns to show time was moving on. Did he ever acknowledge you as an inspiration for that?
He did.

Another '50s director I really admire is Anthony Mann, who I think started taking Westerns into riskier psychological terrain: you could make the case that it was the emotionally unstable heroes Jimmy Stewart played for Mann that set the stage for Paul Newman’s really unstable Billy. Was Mann someone you paid attention to at the time?Oh, yeah. I think we were in the same camp. I never met him, but I wish I had. I really admired his work.

I noticed Billy and his buddies are supposed to be around twenty years old, but Newman and the other actors look about thirty. Did anyone say that at the time?
No. Because most of the movie stars back then were fifty or sixty!

So he really did seem like “a kid” to a 1950s audience. I’m going to guess they gave you twenty-five days to shoot the picture?I think it was twenty.

That’s pretty tight. Or did it feel luxurious compared to those TV shows?
Oh, yeah. TV was so frantic, it made this seem like a vacation.

Did Paul Newman enjoy all the rugged playacting you have in westerns that you don’t have in theater? Riding horses, gunplay, all that?
Sure. He was very committed. He’s a real actor.

A cinematic moment that really stands out his murder of Bob the deputy, when the man collapses to the street in slow motion.
It’s actually half slow motion and half fast motion.

L to R: Gene Hackman, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde.

You’d expand on that technique in Bonnie & Clyde, and then it became pretty standard in Hollywood action sequences. Was that an effect you invented yourself?
No, I picked it up from Kurosawa.

That’s right. I forgot he’d done it as well. Did The Left Handed Gun do well?

It didn’t do well at all. The studio didn’t like it. They put it out on the bottom half of a double bill with some stinker, and it didn’t do anything… until it opened in France. A man named Andre Bazin—he was sort of the intellectual father of Cahiers du Cinema—he saw it, and he wrote a very good piece about it. And then other filmmakers looked at it, and picked up on it, and it became a big hit in Europe. It won the Belgian Film Critic’s Prize for the Best First Picture.


The Left Handed Gun trailer.

Warner Bros. had certainly read the script. They knew who was in it. What was it they disliked so much about the finished film?
The unorthodoxy of it. It was simply not what they expected a western to be.

That’s hard to understand fifty years later. Was it the way Newman played the character?
There was that. It was the way it was shot, the way it was written. The Hurd Hatfield character—this journalist who holds Billy up to this god-like position, and then when he’s sort of rejected, ends up betraying Billy—that was a whole new kind of character. That was like Gene Hackman’s character in Unforgiven. I think that character was a steal from Left Handed Gun.

Did you get other film offers after that?
I went back to New York. I got pissed off when Warner Bros. wouldn’t let me edit it. The day we finished, a guy walked up and said, “I’m going to edit your movie.” And there was no court I could appeal to that might change that decision. He was the studio cutter. It was just a disgraceful process because it was so industrialized. Later, the studios lost a lot of that power, in the good period of the late 1960s and early '70s. Now they’ve regained it, and they’re right back where they started.

Are there changes you can still remember wanting to make?The ending. It was supposed to end with Billy dying, when he collapses and rolls off those carts. It looks like slow motion, but it’s not. Instead, they stuck on this ending with Pat Garrett’s wife saying, “We can go home now.” They wanted a happy ending.

Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.

They did love a sunny tack-on back then, didn’t they? So you went back to Broadway, and did The Miracle Worker? And because that play was such a hit, you were able to do it as your next movie?
I did Two For the Seesaw on Broadway first, and that was a big hit too, but Ray Stark bought the movie rights, and he didn’t want any of us involved. And boy, he really fucked up that movie. Hired what’s-his-name to direct… “The hills are alive/With the sound of music… ?”

Robert Wise.
Yeah, Bob Wise. And they got Shirley MacLaine, but it was just a terrible film. So the next hit we had, when they came around for the movie rights, we said, “Hell, no. We’re going to do it, or you can’t have it!” And United Artists agreed. So Bill Gibson, who wrote the play, wrote the screenplay. I directed it, Fred Coe produced it…

…and the rest was history!It’s a pretty damn good movie.

Yeah, I was knocked out when I saw it. I think it’s still one of the best adaptations of a stage play I’ve ever seen. And it holds up so well.
It really does.

One last question: you said at the top that you’ve almost always lived in New York. Was there ever a time—say, following your Oscar nominations—when you felt like you’d really become a Hollywood director? That you were a part of this community?
No. I wasn’t that impressed by those nominations. I didn’t even go to the ceremonies—no, I did go the first time, but not the second or third. Because I was more interested in theater at that time. I thought Hollywood movies were always going to be like the experience I’d had on The Left Handed Gun, which was unpleasant. But The Miracle Worker was fun. And we did it right here in New York. So I never gave any more thought to going back out to Hollywood.