50 Years for Hackman and Hoffman?

Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman have never worked together until now? Unbelievable. These two guys are national treasures, along with Robert Duvall, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Meryl Streep. What a cast! What would they do? If this be (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it!

[x NYTimes]
The 50-Year Hoffman-Hackman History
By JENNIFER SENIOR

LONG before they'd made the acquaintance of Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols, and long before they'd won enough Oscars and Golden Globes to play a nice game of chess, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were a mismatched pair of struggling, idealistic actors who found solace in each other's company — first in classes at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956, where they played bongos on the roof, and then later in a cold-water flat in Manhattan, where Mr. Hoffman crashed in Mr. Hackman's kitchen until he was banished to the couch of some unwitting dupe named Robert Duvall. Though Mr. Hackman and Mr. Hoffman (now 73 and 66, respectively) have been friends for nearly half a century, they never worked on a film together until "Runaway Jury," the latest installment in the John Grisham franchise. On a recent publicity stop in New Orleans for the film, opening Friday, the two men met with the writer Jennifer Senior to reminisce, gossip and reveal Marlon Brando's secret weapon.

JENNIFER SENIOR When you two met at the Pasadena Playhouse, there must have been something about each other you intuited immediately. What was it?

GENE HACKMAN Yeah, I've thought about that. (Looking at Hoffman) You were a little different. Most of the kids there were right out of high school. I was older. And you were 18 or 19, but the first time I saw you, you were in a, uh, a corduroy vest. And that's all.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN Pants!

HACKMAN But just a corduroy vest. No shirt or anything. And I thought, "This is a weird looking little guy."

HOFFMAN I have no memory of this.

HACKMAN I only went one year ——

HOFFMAN Three months! He got kicked out for not having any talent.

HACKMAN We used to get graded on a scale of 1 to 10 for movement, interpretation, gestures ——

HOFFMAN Attitude.

HACKMAN Attitude.

HOFFMAN Voice projection, which you always failed. So they kicked him out. But I was shocked, because he was still picked to be on their main stage.

HACKMAN But only because I was older, you know? In a play called "The Curious Miss Caraway."

HOFFMAN And guess who starred in it?

HACKMAN Zasu Pitts, a woman from the silent film era.

HOFFMAN And one day, he says to me, "You have to come onstage with me during the daytime. You're not going to believe this." Written on the back of the couches and the stuffed chairs and everything were ——

HACKMAN Zasu Pitts's lines.

HOFFMAN She'd flit over to a certain chair for a certain line . . . (he gets up and demonstrates, as if reading.)

HACKMAN She was about 75, 80 years old.

HOFFMAN Of course, we understand that at our age. Brando has it down pat: he wears a hearing aid that you can't see, and a woman by the name of Caroline, who's off the set, feeds him his lines. Each one. Matthew Broderick told me he didn't know this when he did "The Freshman" with Brando. He told me that on his first day, he was sitting in his dorm on the edge of his bed, and Brando was on the other bed, and they were facing each other, and he was so intimidated — Marlon Brando! So they started the take, and he's talking, and Brando answers, and then he talks some more, and Brando answers, and the camera's rolling, and Brando keeps looking at Matthew, and suddenly, he says: "Caroline? Caroline! Are you eating a tuna fish sandwich right now? Caroline? Because I can't understand what you're saying! Stop eating that tuna fish sandwich!"

HACKMAN (doubled over) Now that's funny.

SENIOR When you two were living together, were you especially competitive with each other? You both had your breakout films in 1967, which probably helped ——

HOFFMAN Do you know why? Did you know that he was Mr. Robinson, originally, in "The Graduate"? And he got fired. That's how he got into "Bonnie and Clyde." Warren found out he was available.

SENIOR Did you land him the role in "The Graduate"?

HOFFMAN No. I had nothing to do with it. I would have done everything in my power to not have him in it. I didn't want to be upstaged.

SENIOR Why were you fired from "The Graduate"?

HACKMAN Probably because I hadn't committed to the character. I just wasn't showing them what could happen.

HOFFMAN Gene believes in holding off for as long as you can before you commit. So that when you commit, it's not a conscious choice; it comes out on its own. And that scares a lot of producers and directors.

HACKMAN We were both jealous of Bobby Duvall, because he got the work very early on, whereas I was in New York seven or eight years before I got a professional job. And you were even longer, right?

HOFFMAN Yes. It's a freak accident that we, all three of us, made it. Gene went on auditions many times and put his 8-by-10 glossy underneath the door, knocked once and ran.

SENIOR Was that effective?

HOFFMAN Yes. It saved him a lot of pain of rejection.

HACKMAN To this day, I do the same relaxation exercises I was taught in acting class in 1956 or whenever it was.

SENIOR What are they?

HOFFMAN Think of your best sexual experience.

SENIOR That's relaxing?

HACKMAN You sit in a chair like that (he composes himself) and you ask yourself: "I've been up for 48 hours. I have to sleep in this chair. Where can I find the best position to be in the chair?" And once you do that, you start examining where you're holding on. Starting at your toes and working right up through your body. And then, when you get up, strangely enough, a lot of those things leave. It's Zen-like.

HOFFMAN There was a book of interviews with women I once read. About the differences between men, women, sex. And this one woman said: "When men have sex, they're built to do it — it's in their DNA. But women have to feel like there's someone there who's going to catch them when they let go." And when you act in a movie, you have to feel that there's someone there who's going to catch you. Because you're not in control in the cutting room. And I think that's what Gene was talking about — we're holding on. We're not going to have an orgasm in front of the camera unless we're relaxed.

(Silence.)

SENIOR O.K. I'm derailed.

HOFFMAN I know. Say the word "orgasm," and everyone's head goes blank.

SENIOR Like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. But O.K. Did you two rehearse with each other? And give each other advice about certain roles?

HOFFMAN We don't see each other that much, and that includes Duvall and everything. You just have different lives. Though there may be some other, visceral reason we don't hang around together, which is that it would take us back to the real truth: I'm still waiting on tables, and he's still moving furniture.

HACKMAN Yeah. Like, "When are they going to find out about us?"

HOFFMAN When we did our scene together in "Runaway Jury," it was the last day of shooting. And one of the things Gene said when we had drinks afterward — do you remember? — was, "Do you always think, after you finish a movie, that no one will ever give you a job again?"

SENIOR Is that right? Your confidence is no better now?

HACKMAN Well, no, but it's kind of like an old friend in a funny way. You just kind of get used to it.

SENIOR Do you think it would have been possible to have the same careers if you were starting out today? Given who gets work and what most scripts are like?

HACKMAN I couldn't have had mine.

HOFFMAN I think . . . I know there are certain actors, I don't want to invade their privacy, who have had really good lives. Regional actors. At the Seattle Rep, say. And you know, that would have been us. And it would have been great.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company

Confessions of a Swooner

Michael Kinsley is one tough-minded dude. He nailed me in this piece. I have been a Swooner since I voted for Goldwater in '64. However, Wesley Clark leaves me cold. I will waste my vote in some other ridiculous way in 2004. If this be (fair & balanced) frivolous voting, so be it!

General Amnesty
Why do liberals swoon for a guy in uniform?
By Michael Kinsley

The notion that liberals disdain people in uniform was always a bit of a myth. Even during Vietnam, concern for the loss of young American lives was probably the anti-war movement's most powerful motivation. Since then, sneery right-wingers have had it both ways about liberals and the military: When liberals oppose military action, conservative voices accuse them of betraying our fighting men and women. When liberals support military action, they are accused of callous indifference to the lives of American soldiers.

But the current liberal swooning over (retired) generals is truly something new. A widespread fantasy among liberals who loathe the Bush administration, for example, is that Colin Powell will resign as secretary of state and "say what he really thinks." This will bring down the whole house of cards, these liberals believe. What he really thinks, they think, is more or less what they really think.

There is not much basis for this belief. Powell is skilled at distancing himself from certain policies without seeming disloyal. But if he really were as opposed to the administration he serves as these liberal fantasists imagine, a resignation at this point would come much too late to have any moral force.

Then there is Gen. Wesley Clark. Much of his support comes from people who think they haven't swooned themselves but believe that others will do so. But most of these people are in a swoon whether they realize it or not. They think that Clark has the best chance of defeating George Bush, and that nothing else matters. Their assessment is based on what seems to me a simple-minded view that you can place all the candidates on a political spectrum, then pick the one who's as far toward the other side as your side can bear, and call it pragmatism.

How pragmatic is it, though, to snub the one candidate who seems to be able to get people's juices flowing—that would be Howard Dean—in favor of one with nothing interesting to say, on the theory that this, plus the uniform stashed in the back of his closet, will make him appealing to people you disagree with? When the odds are against you, as they are for the Democrats in 2004, caution and calculation can be the opposite of pragmatism.

Clark might have been joking when he said he's only a Democrat because Karl Rove, the Bush White House Rasputin, wouldn't return his phone calls. But Clark's serious explanation, in a speech last week to the Democratic National Committee, isn't much better. He says he was appropriately apolitical during his military career, but three years ago "when I left the Army, I looked at the parties and the differences couldn't have been more clear." He is, he says, "pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment, pro-health care, and pro-labor," reciting the party catechism by rote and offering no details. What does it even mean to be "pro-health care"?

So the general got off his horse, gazed at the landscape, and decided to grant the gift of his person to the Democrats. By now he's got the basic philosophy down pat, and he has his people working to flesh out the programmatic stuff. Furthermore, he knows who to go to. He listens to so-and-so, Clark supporters reassure doubters. There is no doubt that a President Clark would have sound, mainstream-liberal policies on all matters, reflecting the best thinking of the finest minds in every field. He may not yet know what he thinks about school vouchers, or Medicare reform, or Israeli settlements in occupied territory. But I know.

Democrats mocked in 2000 when Republicans defended their support of an ignoramus for president by saying that he would surround himself with good advisers. Unlike the incumbent, Wesley Clark is not unable or radically disinclined to master the details of policy. Anyway, a fully stocked larder of policies and positions on issues is a vapid measure of a political candidate. But anyone who wakes up to politics like Rip Van Winkle, and—without troubling to develop any but the most abstract political sentiments—immediately decides that the country needs him as president, clearly thinks highly of himself for reasons that may not be universally apparent.

It is apparent to some, though. Perhaps unfairly, I have this mental image of Wesley Clark spending the past three years in the big-shot bubble. He goes from corporate speech to fancy international conference to dinner in honor of some VIP, possibly him. And everywhere he goes, fine, smart people are telling him, "General, we need a fine, smart guy like you to straighten out this mess the politicians have gotten the country into." He comes to believe it and comes to believe that many other people believe it. He even forgets how many other people may never even have heard of him.

To be fair, Clark has supporters outside the big-shot bubble. He even has enthusiasts, which is more than the other realistic candidates (besides Dean) can say. People may vote for Dick Gephardt, even vote happily. But is there anyone not in his family or on his payroll who lies awake in bed at night, longing for Dick Gephardt to become president?

Wes Clark has a genuine following, especially among younger folks (although there is a rebellion over something-or-other going on this week among Clark's Internet enthusiasts). In a properly functioning democracy—which ours is, barely—everyone is entitled to one youthful political swoon over a candidate who seems to be bucking the system. Mine was for John Anderson in 1980. Others have swooned over Ross Perot or John McCain or Lee Iacocca. The rules entitle the swooner to project his or her views onto the candidate, despite any lack of evidence or even evidence of the opposite. But the rules also insist that the candidate will never win.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Copyright © 2003 Slate

A Bigger Fish Than Rush or Roger!

Tom Terrific caught this Muskie last month. Rants & Raves includes the latter. If this be (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it!

Sapper Is Back (With A Vengeance)!

After a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow, Rants & Raves is back! Note a change in Links in the left (client-side) menu: RantMail! Send your comments, complaints, news, suggestions, rants, raves, or whatever to the proprietor of this Blog. Rants & Raves has a mascot! Alfred E. Newman: What? Me worry? Everyday in everyway, we keep getting better and better! (Apologies to Emile Coue.) Rush Limbaugh is a doper! The local fishwrap wrote a piece in which the locals expressed their sympathy for the fat hatemonger. I WONDER what Limbaugh would have done to Bill Clinton if the situation were reversed. I can just hear the fat slob expressing his compassionate concern for poor Bill Clinton. The Dickster is equating anti-Iraq expressions with treason. W is at a complete loss. He gets his news—not from the media—from the Dickster, Rummy, and Wolfie. Better than Faux News! A briefing from those guys should be accompanied by Send In The Clowns! The Republicans in the Texas Legislature have done more harm to themselves than 10,000 Democrats. Tom DeLay inhaled too many whiffs of Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane as a pest killer in southwest Harris County. That idiot wants to be the House Speaker! What harm can that do? Look what the voters of California have done to themselves! I thought Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh were awful. They are bushleague compared to Roger Hedgecock. Roger Who? Check out Mike Davis' "The Day of the Locust." If this be (fair & balanced) ranting & raving, so be it!

posted October 9, 2003 at 8:34 pm

Tomgram: Mike Davis on Schwarzenegger's victory

If not a quake, then certainly a seismic tremor of significant proportions just struck California. Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and other classics of California life at the edge of the abyss, offers his instant perspective on yesterday's election, considering what it is we don't recall about the recall. In a few weeks, he'll return to the subject with a longer piece of analysis, but in the meantime, unlike the new governor, he's not groping in the dark. Tom


The Day of the Locust
By Mike Davis

The mobs howled again in California, rattling windows on the Potomac. Are the barbarians marching eastward, as they did after the famous tax revolt of the late 1970s, or is this just another West Coast full-moon episode with little national consequence?

The larger meaning of Schwarzenegger's triumph of the will, of course, depends on how you interpret the grievances that provided the recall's extraordinary emotional fuel. But I must warn you that analyzing this election is an adventure in a realm of stupefying paradox and contradiction. All the same, it may tell us a great deal about the emerging landscape of American politics.

The hardcore ideologues of zero government and McKinley-era capitalism are trumpeting the recall as a new populist revolution in the spirit of Howard Jarvis's Proposition 13 in 1978. They echo local Republican claims that a venal Democratic governor, in league with big unions and the welfare classes, was turning off the lights of free enterprise and driving the hardworking middle classes to Arizona with huge, unfair tax increases. Gray Davis, in a word, was the anti-Christ, wrecking California's golden dream on behalf of his selfish constituencies of school teachers, illegal immigrants, and rich Indians. The Terminator, they assure us, has literally saved California from the yawning abyss of "tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend."

From the outside, this seems rather ridiculous. Davis, to begin with, is an autistic centrist in the Democratic Leadership Council mode who has governed California for the last five years as a good Republican. In fiscal policy, as well as in prisons, education, and the lubrication of corporate interests, there has been no significant departure from the paradigm of his predecessor Republican Pete Wilson. Indeed, Davis has been such a raving executioner and prison-builder that crime-and-punishment has disappeared as a right-wing wedge issue.

Moreover, if California's middle classes have any cause to feel raped and pillaged in recent years, clearly the culprits are Arnold's eminence grise, Pete Wilson, who deregulated the utilities to begin with, and the Bushite power cartels like Enron which looted California's consumers during the phony energy crisis of 2000-01. And it is the Bush administration that has told bankrupt state and municipal governments everywhere to "drop dead" while it shovels billions into the black hole it has created in Iraq. Fiscal crisis should be an issue owned by the Democrats.

Strange, then, that almost two-thirds of the voters in the mega-state that supposedly belongs lock, stock, and barrel to the Democrats either endorsed the stealth return of Pete Wilson -- the mind whirring within Arnie's brawn -- or voted for a right-wing quack, Tom McClintock. These are the kinds of election returns you expect to see from GOP bedrock states like Idaho or Wyoming, not from the vaunted Left Coast.

When you peer at the dynamics of recall rage up close, the whole phenomenon becomes stranger still. Here in San Diego, where I live and the recall originated, the Schwarzenegger blitzkrieg seemed to suck anger out of the clear blue sky. This, after all, isn't Youngstown or even Stockton or San Bernardino. Republican voters, as far as I know, are not being evicted en masse from their homes or forced to steal milk for their staving babies.

Far from it, the value of the median family home soared almost $100,000 last year and the area is once again awash with Pentagon dollars. The freeways are clogged with Hummers and other mega-SUVs, while those with luxury lifestyles, carefully tended by armies of brown-skinned laborers, bask in the afterglow of Bush's tax cuts.

Enlistment in Arnie's army of "hell no, we're not going to take it anymore" tax protestors visibly bore little relationship to actual economic pain. Yet, for weeks, suburban San Diego has been contorted into visceral, self-righteous rage over the supposedly satanic regime in Sacramento. Indeed exit polls show that, in San Diego as well as statewide, support for Schwarzenegger increased with income and topped out at the country-club and gated-community level.

So are California's fat cats merely impersonating populist anger? With so little correlation between actual economic hardship (greatest, of course, in pro-Bustamante Latino and Black inner-city neighborhoods and rural valleys), what explains this astonishing mobilization of voter emotion, particularly in affluent white suburbs?

In my microcosm, San Diego, part of the answer could be found at the lower end of the AM dial. At KOGO 600, "San Diego's Radio Mayor," Roger Hedgecock, presides over what, even before the official campaign began), was boastfully labeling itself "Recall Radio." A defrocked former mayor accused of conspiracy and perjury in the 1980s, Hedgecock, who occasionally fills in for Rush Limbaugh on national hate radio, takes credit for the "heavy lifting" that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governor's mansion in Sacramento. Republicans acknowledge that he has been the recall's most influential voice in Southern California.

From 3 to 6 PM, "Roger," as he is universally called by his more than 300,000 regular listeners, rules over afternoon freeway gridlock in a vast radio market that extends as far north as Santa Barbara. Southern California, of course, has the worst traffic congestion in the country and the ever lengthening commutes are a continuous, grinding source of free-floating anger. Hedgecock deftly plays off this afternoon, stuck-in-traffic frustration. He is the angry tribune of white guys in their 4X4 Dodge pickups and Ford Expeditions.

For almost two decades, his major rage has been the Brown Peril, the supposed "Mexican invasion" of California. He was a key instigator of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994 as well as local semi-vigilante protests against border-crossers. On the eve of the recall, he continually warned his listeners that the Mexican threat was now of apocalyptic proportions, given Gray Davis's signing of a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers' licenses.

"This is the end of American democracy, the end of fair elections," he fulminated. "Vast numbers of operatives," he warned, were enlisting newly-ID'd immigrants to cast hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots to keep Davis in power. San Diego, moreover, was facing an "invasion" of trade-unionists from alien Los Angeles who would "tear down pro-recall signs" and generally terrorize neighborhoods. Roger urged locals to defend their homes and resist the hoards of illegals and LA unionists "in the spirit of 1776."

In several weeks of listening to Roger's screeds, punctuated by hallelujahs and amen's from the choir on their cellular phones, the only issue that came remotely close to the same decibel level as illegal immigrants (and "the so-called Chicano community") was a hike in the registration tax on cars. Hedgecock ignored the fact that the automatic escalation of the car tax (2% of its value) had originated in Wilson-era legislation. Instead, he directly connected it to illegal immigrants "whose cost to the state of California is almost exactly the budget deficit." "That's how bad things are, ladies and gentlemen," he intoned constantly. Car taxes and wetbacks were his incessant themes.

The mainstream media has done a poor job of documenting the organization of the recall at the grassroots level where AM voices like Roger's, or his counterpart Eric Hogue's in Sacramento, rouse thousands of mini-Terminators. As a result, there has been an overly respectful legitimation of economic populism in the recall dynamic and only a faint registration of the central role of traditional racist demagoguery and the revival of the Brown Peril rhetoric that made Pete Wilson the most hated figure in the state's Latino neighborhoods. To adapt a rap phrase, "It's all about fear of a brown planet."

Yet, I don't want to suggest that this is a simple repeat of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in the context of a recession and a nationwide crisis of state financing. Arnold Schwarzenegger does add something genuinely novel to the mix. He is not just another actor in politics but an extraordinary lightning rod, both in his movie persona and in real life, for dark, sexualized fantasies about omnipotence.

Pleasure in the humiliation of others -- Schwarzenegger's lifelong compulsion -- is the textbook definition of sadism. It is also the daily ration of right-wing hate radio. As governor he becomes the summation of all smaller sadisms, like those of Roger Hedgecock that in turn manipulate the "reptile within" of millions of outwardly affluent but inwardly tormented commuter-consumers. In their majesty, the predominantly white voters of California's inland empires and gated suburbs have anointed a clinically Hitlerite personality as their personal savior.

The last word about all this should, of course, belong to Nathanael West. In his classic novel The Day of the Locust (1939), he clearly foresaw that fandom was an incipient version of fascism. On the edge of Hollywood's neon plains, he envisioned the unassuageable hungers of California's petty bourgeoisie.

"They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old . . . Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they've been tricked and burn with resentment. .. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies."

Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales.

Copyright © 2003 Mike Davis

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