One of the movies not playing on TCM this Easter Sunday is Rebel Without a Cause. There’s no reason it necessarily should but, technically, it’s an Easter movie since it begins its story on the night of Easter Sunday. That said, I thought of it, nonetheless, because this is Easter Sunday and if it’s Easter, that movie always comes to mind (I’m betting there’s almost no one else alive who has that happen to them). And one of the things that comes to mind whenever I think of Rebel Without a Cause is an interview I read years ago, now available online, with its screenwriter Stewart Stern. And when I think about that interview, I think about a key part of it where they discuss writing credits and how we all cling to myths about the movies and why.
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First, here’s the link to the interview if you want to read it in full. Stewart Stern, the late writer of Rebel Without a Cause, talks at length about the problems he had with writing credits and how Nicolas Ray was the source of most of those problems. Somewhere in there, the interviewer, William Baer, asks him what he thinks about the stories about James Dean being given some latitude when it came to improvising lines. He asks Stern this because he knows before asking, having read the pre-registered screenplay, the one published and registered before the movie was made, that Dean did not, in fact, improvise in the movie, except for one minor line. Stern is, naturally, a bit irritated that people think that and says so. Understandable you might say, since he’s the writer. But I find it rather irritating as well because it’s one of those myths about the movies that is somehow supposed to make things more interesting when, to me, they make things immeasurably duller. It also represents a damn near global misunderstanding of the talents involved in improvisation as opposed to rehearsed acting from a script.
Now, I know I have a few actors who read this, including my online friend and commenter, tdraicer, so I welcome their opinion on this as well. As an actor myself, I find the rigors and discipline of performing a role from memorized lines far more challenging than improvisation by orders of magnitude. Now that’s not to say that improvisation is not a talent because it is and some people have a greater talent for it than others but improvisation allows you to say whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want. Yes, you have to fit it into the character but it still allows for a more natural projection of yourself than taking that famous soliloquy from Hamlet that everyone has read and heard a thousand times over and making that work. I have no doubt that Humphrey Bogart could have walked into a bar and pretended to be a drunken bore and fooled everyone (improvisation) but learning the lines of Fred Dobbs and then creating a character from those specifically written words and making it seem like those words were the words that Bogart just made up in front of the camera, well, that takes a lot more work, a lot more skill, and a hell of a lot more talent.
So why is it that we are constantly so impressed by actors improvising on the set? I don’t know. I have the opposite reaction. I always thought Brando’s performance in Last Tango in Paris was great but when I learned that he improvised a great deal of it I thought, “Oh, never mind.” Someone like Brando getting to sit in front of a camera and just make stuff up is a walk in the park for him. Playing Terry Malloy or Stanley Kowalski strictly as written? That’s a whole different ball game.
But that still isn’t what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is this strange need a lot of people have to be in on a secret and that knowing that secret somehow makes the movie better. “Did you know that Peter Sellers improvised the phone call in Dr. Strangelove?” Yes, I’ve heard that. How does that make the movie better? I’m sure Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott could have improvised with the best of them. Who cares? I mean, I’m not trying to be flippant, I just hate it when you’re told these things like they mean something when they don’t.
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I remember hearing this choice nugget about The Exorcist, and still do, when the movie is brought up: “Did you know it’s based on a real possession?” Again, yes, I’ve heard that. And, no, I don’t care. What I care about is what is in front of me on the screen when I’m watching the movie and I happen to think the movie is very well done. But people bring up the supposed true story aspect as if that somehow legitimizes the movie more than if it were merely a fictional tale (which it is, I mean, come on, who are we even kidding with this?).
Or the “did you know” crud we get about classic movies getting bad reviews. That’s one that still bugs me whenever I hear it precisely because I spent a lot of time at the library in my youth reading old reviews from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, etc. on microfilm and found out firsthand how full of baloney most of those claims are. I remember hearing this one: “Did you know that The Wizard of Oz got bad reviews when it came out?” Guess what? I’ve read the reviews from when it came out. The critics loved it. That whole story is bogus. Or how about this one: “Vertigo, believe it or not, was panned by critics when it was first released.” No, it wasn’t. I’ve read those reviews, too. Here’s what happened there: Like every other well received movie ever made it got some bad reviews as well. One came from Time Magazine and has the line, oft-quoted, that “by the time the cat is out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens.” Well isn’t that clever? Anyway, the other 90 percent or so of the reviews thought it was a masterpiece. The Wizard of Oz also got some bad notices. Again, this happens with almost every good movie in existence. So why do these myths persist? Because we want to feel smarter than the previous generations. “Ha, ha, weren’t they so dumb not to see how good this movie was? What fools!” Only, no, it didn’t happen like that.
Lately, a growing in popularity past time has been letting your friends in on the secret of what this or that movie is “really about.” You know, where there’s a theory as to who the characters represent or what the movie is really trying to tell us. They’re called alternative theories and they are currently all the rage. An entire documentary was done on the different theories about The Shining and everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter has been given the alternate theory treatment by now. But despite the recent popularity, it’s something that’s been around a while. Back when The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover came out, Roger Ebert himself frowned upon the theories of what the story was really saying and who the characters really represented. He said it was more than an “Identikit” movie and he was right. Movies aren’t good because we get to correctly guess what everything secretly stands for. If that’s what you think of art, there’s little hope for you.
It’s fun to point out little things in movies, little tricks that we learned, like an actor improvising a line or a true story being behind the movie or just patting ourselves on the back for being smarter than the last generation. Or maybe the whole movie means something that no one else has figured out but us clever folks who know where to look. But it legitimizes nothing. And it’s a bit dishonest. Movies aren’t about actors wandering in front of a camera and making up their lines as they go. It’s about dozens of very talented and highly skilled people working together. It’s about a screenwriter and a director working with an actor on a set with technicians and designers and directors of photography. And it’s about music and editing and color correction and Foley work. Sure, it’s great that Peter Sellers got to do some improvisation but that’s not what makes his performance great, it’s the full character he played interacting with the other actors, where everyone was sticking to the script, as well as some of the stuff he did on his own. And all the work of all those talented artists and craftspeople isn’t made any better or worse by “knowing” that they improvised, or took their script from real events, or weren’t appreciated until we came along, or were secretly telling us a different story. Movie myths like these can be fun but they don’t legitimize the movie itself. Sometimes I feel like people cling to these myths as a way of avoiding confronting the movie on its own terms. Joel McCrea famously remarks in Ride the High Country, “All I want is to enter my house justified.” Cinema does that every day. No tricks or myths necessary.