Trying to get back on the horse, words-wise. I wrote a piece on my Substack about my first press badge, which is really about what life was like in the late 1990s. Famous-person cameo.
14-year-old Eve Babitz – in 1957 – reading the autobiography of Elinor Glyn, she who coined the term “It” in the 1920s, i.e. “he/she has IT”, meaning sex appeal, charisma. The book was a sensation and a Clara Bow vehicle – of the same name – was soon to follow. “It” swept the nation, with all its images of freedom and sexual liberation for women (and, by association, men). The picture was taken by Eve’s mother Mae. Glyn’s autobiography was called Romantic Adventure, and when Babitz was 14 she had already started a memoir – or at least had the idea for one – called I Wouldn’t Raise My Kid in Hollywood (ha!). Also, around the same time, a concerned guidance counselor asked the teenage Babitz, who spent her summers hanging out at the “rough beach” with basically criminal boys on motorcycles and their tough-chick girlfriends, “What are your plans? What are you going to do when you graduate?” Babitz said, “Be an adventuress.”
And she was. Until the adventures ran out, but not before she wrote it all down (Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days Fast Company, Sex & Rage, L.A. Woman, Two by Two, and literally hundreds of essays for magazines ranging from Rolling Stone to Esquire to ‘zines that ran for only two issues).
Look at Eve’s face. She’s young but she already KNOWS.
I wrote about Edward Hopper quite a bit in my Present Tense column at Film Comment, detailing the Hopper-y vibe of Tom Noonan’s great film about urban loneliness, What Happened Was… In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that Karen Sillas’ deep-rose-colored dress might be inspired by this painting. Her apartment is all windows, too, in the movie.
I love the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s work. The insomnia. The urban midnights. The voyeurism. The emptiness. If you’re heartbroken, Hopper is your kindred spirit. I find his paintings very sad, sadness you can wallow in. Many (most?) people do what they can to avoid loneliness. I have never been able to pull it off. All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
Living in a major metropolitan area, you are constantly up against other people’s lives. People have private moments in public. You can peek into people’s windows as you walk by. You give each other privacy as best you can. People can weep on the subway, and nobody freaks out. Everyone clams up, goes into their own private head-space, and the weeping person may as well be in her own room for all the attention she gets. Believe me: having been that weeping person, there’s a comfort in anonymity. There is nothing quite like the freedom to be left alone.
At the same time, there is the sense of being privy to other people’s secrets. There are just so many damn windows. How do other people live? How are they managing?
Sometimes, if you’re alone, and feeling your alone-ness acutely … seeing glimpses of other people living their lives, through windows, connects you to something human. Reminds you you are a human being, you are real. It doesn’t eradicate loneliness. The kind of loneliness I’m talking about can’t be eradicated. I wonder if there are some people who have never felt loneliness like that. Loneliness that literally wakes you up at nights. Like Laing writes in her great book The Lonely City, where Edward Hopper is featured prominently, loneliness like that is like being hungry.
Hopper evokes a world gone by, and yet not all that unlike our own. People are people, no matter the era.
I have been all of these women.
Even when Hopper moves out into the country, the loneliness follows him. Or maybe this is just me projecting. That’s the power of his work. There’s a blankness there somewhere, a nothing-ness, giving great permission to the viewer to place herself into the painting, to see her own life there. Or not. I grew up in a beach town. My first kiss was on a foggy beach. The ocean is the background to most of my childhood memories. So I look at these two, and yes, I wonder what they might be talking about, but I also wonder if they aren’t talking at all, if they are just listening to the sound of the lonely surf breaking on the beach below?
“Maybe I am slightly inhuman … All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” — Edward Hopper
Terrence Malick knew his Hopper, that’s for sure.
So does Tommy Lee Jones.
Only Edward Hopper could turn a gas station into an image piercingly sweet and sad. Pungent and poetic. I don’t feel like analyzing why. These are feelings that hurt, not particularly pleasant, but they’re familiar. I’ve had them since I was very very young, before I understood anything about love and loss. It’s a human-inheritance kind of thing.
As I observed in the article linked at the top: one thing to note about his most famous painting: The diner has no door. No way in, no way out.
Loneliness is not pleasant. People go to mad extremes to avoid being lonely; it’s that excruciating an experience. Loneliness has ruined long stretches of my life. I look back and wish to spare myself. But at least I had some company. Edward Hopper had already been there.
Last year, Allison and I went to the stunning Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. I had been hearing about it for months and watching enviously as friends attended (via their Instagram feeds). Allison and I finally went. And we lost ourselves to the world. What an AMAZING exhibit. Edward Hopper’s New York. It was not just the usual suspects, although I got to see those too. It dug into his early advertising work, lots of that on display – so different! – his sketches – the sketches of “Nighthawks” – and also his relationship with movies/theatres. We wandered around, sometimes together, sometimes alone. There were so many people there, which – after the last couple of years we had – did my heart good. People clustering before famous paintings. Edward Hopper’s paintings are stories. You can “read into” them. I ended up talking with two other women about one of the paintings. We talked about what we saw. We read into the behavior. It was so awesome.
Allison and I both saw some Hopper-in-real-life visuals DURING our time there. We weren’t together when we saw these things, but we both noticed and both took pictures, of the exact same thing. We are kindred spirits. See if you can spot them.
I was so excited I got to see that one. ^^
I got full-body goosebumps when I saw that one in person. ^^
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
With a career as long and diverse as Edward Herrmann’s there is much to discuss. When he died, I wrote a piece for Ebert, focusing on just one moment in Warren Beatty’s Reds, a moment that (in its small way) helps make the whole thing possible.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“What I want to get is … an ‘interior’ form, a form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a pecularity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition of them separate from the poem.” — Hart Crane
It’s his birthday today.
There are good poets. There are major poets. And then there are the ones who disturb the waters, who disrupt, who create new space in their chaotic wake. Walt Whitman. T.S. Eliot. Yeats. And Hart Crane. His life was so short and yet his influence seems to just grow in intensity as the years pass. He was the inspiring force for a whole new generation of writers, each of whom struggled to get out from under his shadow (as Crane struggled to get out of Eliot’s shadow). Tennessee Williams was honest about his feeling of debt to Crane. He used Crane quotations as epigraphs in many of his plays, and dedicated many of his plays to Crane. He kept a picture of Hart Crane over his writing desk for decades. They did not know one another.
Paris Review interview, 2007: Interviewer: Is it possible [Hemingway] showed a generation how to get emotion into a sentence without mentioning emotion? Norman Mailer: Yes, and he did it more than anyone ever had before or after. But he’s a trap. If you’re not careful you end up writing like him. It’s very dangerous to write like Hemingway, but on the other hand it’s almost a rite of passage. I almost wouldn’t trust a young novelist – I won’t speak for the women here, but for a male novelist – who doesn’t imitate Hemingway in his youth.
It’s his birthday today.
A writer challenged Hemingway: Write a story in 6 words. Hemingway was a gambler, a risk-taker, and would never walk away from a challenge. The problem obsessed him. 6-word story … it obsessed him for a couple of days. What he came up with is quite famous (and way better than the milque-toast imitations):
For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Used.
Hemingway said later he thought it was the best thing he ever wrote.
And … maybe he’s not wrong.
Of course I’ve read all his stuff. I like Moveable Feast best of all, although I recognize, of course, the revolution that was his pared-down fictional prose. In acting classes – at least in the ones I took back in the day – it was common for actors to work on Hills Like White Elephants, which is a story – not a play – but it’s mostly dialogue and – crucially – almost no subtext (maybe none at all?) He tells the story and allows you to INFER by the dialogue what is going on, perfect for actors to work on. I think that short story is also at the top of the list of his accomplishments as a writer. I also like the sex “scene” in For Whom the Bell Tolls, something about the earth moving beneath the sleeping bag and/or tent? Sorry, it’s just a sentence but it’s hot as hell. It’s a perfect example of what he did best, when he was really cooking: less is more. It can’t touch the hottest sex scene of all, in James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice:
“I had to have her if I hung for it.
I had her.”
But still, I think you can learn a lot from Hemingway. You have to be careful though.
President Kennedy to the joint session of Congress on May 25 1961:
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Here’s an incredible photo of their approach to the landing spot, taken from the lunar module:
Buzz Aldrin to NASA, after landing on the moon:
“This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”
Neil Armstrong to Mission Control:
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The Walter Cronkite telecast as it all happened gives me goosebumps. Of course I didn’t see it at the time, but it puts you right back there.
From The New York Times article on July 21, 1969:
His first step on the moon came at 10:56:20 P.M., as a television camera outside the craft transmitted his every move to an awed and excited audience of hundreds of millions of people on earth.
Neil Armstrong reporting back as he stepped out onto the moon:
“The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots.”
Buzz Aldrin
And Buzz Aldrin describes what he sees, in my favorite phrase of that momentous day:
“Magnificent desolation.”
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“I recognize that the real pulse of life is transformation, yet I work in a world dominated by men and the things men value, where transformation is not the coinage. It’s not even the language! Winning is everything in Hollywood. The ‘deal’ is everything. I understand the competitive thing because I had a real battle with it as a young woman. Because of my ethnicity, I felt I had to prove I was better – not as good as, but better – than others. Thankfully, it became clear to me that when I compete, I lose my connection to the passion I have for my work. Every once in a while, I come across a man who has the desire to collaborate and be conciliatory. But if I want to continue acting and have the potential for financial prosperity – something that came to me very late in life – I have to live with these competitive values.” — Olympia Dukakis
The quote above comes from an extraordinary interview with Dukakis I came across – which is actually a chapter in the book In Sweet Company: Conversations with Extraordinary Women About Living a Spiritual Life, by Margaret Wolff. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Husband and wife Louis Zorich and Olympia Dukakis in The Seagull, Williamstown Theater Festival
The first thing I thought of when I heard the sad news of Olympia Dukakis’ passing was the compulsive sighs emanating from her Oscar-winning performance in Moonstruck. She would let out these little exhalations of air from time to time, sometimes in conversation, sometimes not, standing at the stove cooking, a mournful short quick sigh. It was a “tic” of the character – we all have “tics” like this – but Dukakis didn’t do it as a “tic”. The character needed to let tension and anxiety. So much was in the sigh. A lifetime was in the sigh.
Only a great actress could pull it off.
The second thing I thought of was an interview she did for a wonderful book called The Actor’s Chekhov (about the company of actors who came to Williamstown Theatre Festival every summer while Nikos Psacharopoulos was artistic director, people like Christopher Walken, Laila Robins, Blythe Danner. It’s a fantastic book, particularly for student actors because these people know how to WORK. It’s one of the best “acting process” books in my entire collection, because none of it is theoretical. It’s ALL practical.
As a young actress, the following passage blew my mind because it showed just how detailed you had to be when going through the script, how you could take NOTHING for granted. You had to be so curious! Don’t be obedient and passive: you must be active as an actor, you must ask questions about every single thing your character says.
This is one of the BEST examples I have ever seen of how to ask questions in the early stages of working with a script.
Listen to how Dukakis tries to figure out why her character says one line in particular. It’s a seemingly banal line, a “nothing” line, filler, just chit-chat. (But, as my very first acting mentor Kimber Wheelock used to drill into our heads: In acting, nothing can be “just”. You aren’t “just” sad. You aren’t “just” walking out of the room. You are sad. You are walking out of a room for a reason. Any time you hear yourself saying the word “just” – and this doesn’t just go for actors – take a second to stop and ask yourself why. You’re lying to yourself somewhere Find the lie, and remove the “just”.) So here, watch how she goes about solving the problem of the moment. You have to know why you’re saying something because once you know the WHY you then know the HOW. Otherwise you’re just being GENERAL. Human beings do this naturally, without thinking. We are SPECIFIC as humans, we aren’t GENERAL. You don’t have to think, “Wait, why am I saying this again?” as a regular human being. But actors do. Actors have to make choices. What seems like a throw-off line is a huge PUZZLE to Dukakis, and it was a problem she needed to solve. Not just for herself but ALSO for the audience. Chekhov wrote a “moment” here – it’s not random, NOTHING is random – so what IS the moment (a) and (b) how do I PLAY that moment?
Olympia Dukakis, along with her acting career, was an acting teacher all her life. You can see here why she was such a great one. I cannot even explain how much the following anecdote influenced me in my own work. Transformative:
Something very interesting happened the first time I did Paulina in The Sea Gull. She comes to them in the third act, and says, “Here are the plums for the journey.” And when I was researching it I thought, why is she giving him plums for the journey? It always seemed like she was a batty person! And then I began reading what it was like to go on a journey then. There was a long time on the train, it was very difficult, the food was very bad, people would get diarrhea, constipation. And when I read that I knew what it was! Bowel movements! So, I mean, I could play that! That’s something that’s a private thing, you don’t announce it to everyone. I mean, if I came up to you and you were going on a trip and I said, “Here’s some Ex-Lax,” I wouldn’t make a big announcement! I would try to be confidential about it. So that helped me with how the moment should be acted. But even then, I thought the audience doesn’t know this, they don’t know that that’s what plums are about. The line should be prunes! An audience will know prunes.
Now the word in the text is plums, there’s no getting around it, the specific literal translation was “plums”. At least that’s what I was told again and again by Kevin McCarthy. Because Kevin had been in that production with Mira Rostova, he considered himself the big Chekhov expert among us. He didn’t think it should be changed. As usual I didn’t go up to Nikos and say, “Listen, I think we should change this, blah blah blah.” I just did it one day in rehearsal. Nikos fell over with laughter! Kevin was apoplectic. But I felt – it’s not the specific word, that’s true, but this is the spirit of it, this is what’s intended, this is what Chekhov wants the audience to know the woman is doing.
Nikos waited till Kevin had given me my scolding and left the room and then he came over and said, “Keep it in.”
Olympia Dukakis came and spoke at my grad school. One of the things she said really struck me. She was 70 years old or something like that, and someone asked her something about becoming famous later in life, and the gist of the question was that since there weren’t as many elderly actresses, it might be easier to become famous later because there was less competition.
Dukakis – nobody’s fool – and actually rather scary in an exciting way – said, with no bitterness, but her tone was like “let me just shred up that illusions for you right now, kiddo”: “Listen, every script that comes to me has been offered to Gena Rowlands first. I get the script and Gena’s fingerprints are all over it. Any role I get it’s only because she’s turned it down.”
The way she said “Gena’s fingerprints” had such a tough hard edge – it was very funny the way she said it. “Lemme guess. Gena turned this one down, right?” In her tone was massive respect for “Gena”. Of COURSE they’re gonna offer it to Gena first. Olympia wasn’t complaining, wasn’t saying “I should be first in line.” She was acknowledging reality: As long as Gena Rowlands is topside, I will always be second choice.
It was a good lesson. As an actor, you can’t trip about things like that. About being a director’s second choice, or third choice, or whatever. Competition never ends, not even when you’re old. You’re never “in the clear”. Be good at what you do. Be grateful Gena turned it down.
No, thank YOU.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Jennifer Finch’s death has really hit me. She has inspired so many but my experience is completely subjective. The sound of L7 was part of the soundtrack of my 20s and 30s. And L7 is never far from me. They’re always on rotation to this day. I just can’t believe it. I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to write much these days. Something seems to have happened to me. I can’t find the words. Here’s her obit in Rolling Stone. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge her passing. She was huge for me. Thank you, Jennifer. You are free now. No more pain.
Jared Padalecki talks a lot about his process (when he’s asked, which is not too often unfortunately). He reads the script over and over again, reciting the lines over and over, as he takes a run, as he drives, as he walks around. He doesn’t just get “familiar” with the lines. My interpretation of this process is that the lines are IN him as a rhythm, he doesn’t need to think about it consciously.
Padalecki started working as a teenager, and absorbed lessons on the job. He was a cute late teenager, floppy hair associated with early-2000s boys. The BANGS. He has spoken about the trend for young American actors at the time: it was all about introspective brooding, inspired in part by Jared Leto on My So-Called Life. Hair/bangs/brooding. Padalecki is many things, but he is not a brooder. He has told funny stories about his initial audition for Sam Winchester in Supernatural, and how he went in there brooding like Jared Leto. This wasn’t the right vibe for Sam at all. Creator Eric Kripke wasn’t keen on Jared. Padalecki’s manager gave Jared the feedback: “Sam is smart. We’re looking for someone who seems smart.” A pretty brutal note, but Jared took the coaching for the callback, abandoned the brooding and came in just as himself. And it shows.
There’s very little difference between the audition and the pilot. There he is, there’s Sam!
The audition I want to see is the “chemistry read” between Jensen Ackles and Jared, but it’s not available. During the filming of the pilot, they commiserated in private: “This is … really good, actually. We might get picked up.” Never could they have guessed the show would be on for the next fifteen years.
In the first half of the first season, Jared was finding his way. Gilmore Girls didn’t really prepare him for Sam Winchester or for long-form season-wide arcs of torment/anguish. Supernatural was dark and emotionally complex, and – at least in the first season – the show was a two-hander. It was a heavy load. He’s in every scene. The characters were, at first, broadly drawn: Dean is the tough wise-cracking older brother (Han Solo), Sam is the intellectual idealistic younger brother (Luke Skywalker).
The brother conflict as presented in the first half of the first season are pretty on the nose, and Jared hits the conflict hard. This is not a criticism. This is an acknowledgement of the challenges in the material, and also acknowledging how young he was. This was new ground: he had to step into this new space, where he had more room to maneuver than he had on Gilmore Girls. Season one, you just watch Jared Padalecki grow as an actor, and it happens really fast. You can actually see him expand in confidence and subtlety as an actor. By “Asylum” you are watching him really step into this new space as an actor.
On the heels of “Asylum” comes “Scarecrow” and “Faith”. These episodes show Sam finding himself and his voice, his own leadership abilities, but it’s happening with the actor too.
As a viewer, “Nightmare” was where I first felt Jared Padalecki step into the role and into his own talent and strengths. In my massive re-cap of “Nightmare”, at one point I said “From here on out it’s the Jared Padalecki Show”. It was a revelation for me. I suddenly SAW him and I SAW what he brought. Most of this has to do with listening: listening is active, and in the power of Padalecki’s listening IS his objective (Sam’s objective). This is esoteric actor stuff but it’s super important when we are trying to understand what an actor is DOing. (My acting teacher at the Actors Studio always said, “The name of the job is ACT-or. Not FEEL-er.”)
The way Jared listens to “Max” in “Nightmare” is so active it’s an object lesson in the concept. I’ve said it so many times it’s probably tiresome but:
All great actors are good listeners. There are no exceptions.
Let’s take a moment to remember Paula, a community member here, a member of the Supernatural fandom, and one of the best Sam-interpreters we had. We miss you, Paula.
Often, Jared’s funniest moments aren his REACTIONS. (This recalls John Wayne’s famous comment: “I’m not an actor. I’m a RE-actor.” Jared is such a great example.) There are moments in Supernatural when something absurd happens and the “button” on it is Jared’s reaction. It’s not schtick. It’s organic. There’s a moment in a later season – I think “Paper Moon” – where Sam and Dean are trapped by a pack of werewolves, who force them at gunpoint to kneel, and Dean says something grandiose and macho, a wisecrack in the face of death, and Jared flashes him a look like, “Oh God that was corny.” It looks involuntary. I would bet it is involuntary. (And perhaps is an example – of which Supernatural has many – where the two talented leads subverted the lines, adding shadings that might not be there in the actual text. Jared laughing at the corniness of the line.)
I think my favorite moment of his in Supernatural comes in Season 6’s “Like a Virgin”. Castiel (Misha Collins) spills the beans about what happened to Sam during the previous whatever months. Sam had no idea. He’s shocked and upset, but he has to pretend like he already knew, mostly so he won’t alarm Castiel. He wants Castiel to keep talking. Tears flood his eyes, but on top of the emotion is this faux-casual expression, placed over the depths which have been STIRRED. Jared plays so many different things, simultaneously, in this small moment. My friend Dan Callahan, who writes about acting, says that so much of good acting is about proportion. A lot of bad or ineffective performances are mostly because the actor gets the proportions wrong. This small moment is in perfect proportion.
Jared is well-known for his advocacy for mental health awareness and is disarmingly open about his own struggles. He has had to advocate for himself to get a handle on his anxiety. When he is able to draw on this in his acting, it’s immensely powerful. (The final section of season 8 in Supernatural, the section in season 7 where he hasn’t slept for weeks and is running on fumes.) This is not to say that art is autobiographical: I really dislike such assumptions. Jared is an ACTOR, and he thinks clearly and deeply about Sam. But when you play the same character for 15 years, it’s hard to separate: they are you, you are them, you have distance, you have no distance – it’s all the same.
In the mid-2000s, Jared did a Christmas movie with Peter O’Toole. At one point, he got overwhelmed by the emotions in a scene and was teared up between takes. O’Toole intervened, telling him to give all that emotion to the character. It belongs onscreen, otherwise it’s just you. This advice from a veteran like O’Toole blew Jared’s mind. You cry real tears, you feel real feelings, but put it all into the story. It’s not about you.
I feel him do that, consciously, in those “sequences” I mentioned in Supernatural. He had to go to a very dark place. It’s difficult to even look at him in the “insomnia” section in Season 7, and the “trials” section at the end of Season 8. By then, he was a veteran actor himself. He knew how to work. He can be incredibly buoyant, and goofy, and his laugh is huge and free and joyful. Emotions come easily to him. He can go deep fast. He’s got easy access to what’s going on down there. A lot of people don’t.
When he broods now, it’s because he’s lived it. My doctor told me once during the period when I was trying to get well, that I was going through life trying to drive with the emergency brake on. I could only go so far, I could only accelerate so much. I had to get the right diagnosis and get treatment before I could finally pick up some momentum. Once you face the monster, once you actually are brave enough to look at it and say “No” to it … you can accelerate. It’s such a good analogy.
We’ve watched that happen with Padalecki, unfolding in real time, evident in his personal appearances as well as in his performance onscreen. But struggle, as it tends to do, has left its mark. It is part of what makes him him as an actor.
