Letters

TRUFFAUT CONFESSIONS

June 1997
Letters
TRUFFAUT CONFESSIONS
June 1997

TRUFFAUT CONFESSIONS

Letters

I must agree with James Wolcott's assessment of the recent state of cinema as a "part of the natural destructive/creative flux" ["Waiting for Godard," April]. As for the current state of film criticism, it must be remembered that the legions of Middle American filmgoers don't read reviews. There are those of us, however, who want to know what a Janet Maslin, Richard Schickel, or Stephen Schiff thought of a particular film. We seek out their opinions even after we've seen the movie. If they find that their work is such drudgery, perhaps they should step aside. Some of us would think we'd died and gone to Heaven if given the chance to fill their exalted shoes.

SHERI A. YOUNG Boston, Massachusetts

JAMES WOLCOTT rightly points out the sorry phenomenon of film critics who borrow from Pauline Kael yet don't have her critical guts. As Wolcott writes, Terrence Rafferty, one of Ms. Kael's successors at The New Yorker, has fallen for a surprisingly high number of clunkers, as if he couldn't resist the rhetorical challenge of elevating them to art. On the other hand, Rafferty's New Yorker colleague Anthony Lane is rarely fooled in the screening room, and can even drop his worldly-wise flippancy to sing about The En- glish Patient. Still, it's hard to picture him (or most critics) getting overheated enough to write 6,000 words about a movie, as Kael did on Bonnie and Clyde.

NATHAN WARD New York, New York

WHEN IT BECOMES necessary for James Wolcott to cite films such as Babe, Clueless, Seven, and Braveheart in order to prove that "the state of movies today is not as mopey or dire as the state of movie criticism itself," we must all stop, take a deep breath, and burst into tears. Remember, we are talking about an art form that has the potential to give its audience another Persona, The 400 Blows, Umberto D, or Manhattan.

Mr. Wolcott is suffering from the film critic's equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome: he's begun to identify with his oppressors.

E. R. MENDELSOHN New York, New York

WOLCOTT WOULD DO well to emulate the writers he attacks, including my husband, Terrence Rafferty, by having a thesis and arguing it. It might be helpful to the reader if he bothered to sustain an argument instead of stringing together a bunch of opinions from on high. At the end of his column, does the reader know: (a) The definition of a Paulette? (b) Whether movie critics are unwilling to write about books? (c) A damned thing about Wolcott's critical criteria except that he likes all things English and blonde actresses? Most important, does anyone, apart from the people he attacks, care?

DIANE RAFFERTY Chappaqua, New York

MAY I LIST a few things—coincidences? I think not—that might give a Vanity Fair reader pause? Re: David Denby. James Wolcott used to talk regularly with and be a close friend of Cathy Schine, now Denby's wife. (I seem to remember that he stopped speaking to her after she married Denby.) Re: Polly Frost (my wife). For several years, Jim talked to her on the phone for an hour a day. She stopped speaking to him in the fall of '94. Re: Elvis Mitchell. Jim used to be best friends with Elvis, until he panned Elvis in The New Yorker.

But I have to admit that I have my own agenda. I'm bugged that I wasn't included in his list of "Paulettes." I mean, I'm probably closer to Pauline Kael than anyone mentioned in his article. I was pleased that Jim made use of a quote from an interview I did with her, though I was miffed that he didn't see fit to cite either me or the magazine it appeared in—The Modern Review. But I guess I can understand why: a mention of The Modern Review might have opened up a hell of a tangle, what with Jim having written about The Modern Review in Vanity Fair, which led me and my wife to write for The Modem Review, and Polly and me to bring Jim's girlfriend Laura Jacobs (we used to have lunch together, the four of us) into The Modern Review. And damned if Laura didn't wind up married to Jim and writing for Vanity Fair! Where, come to think of it, Toby Young, former Modern Review skipper, is currently employed. But you know all this already, don't you?

How exactly can the Paulettes "have one eye and ear cocked to Pauline's opinion" and still make their deadlines, given that Pauline now spends her time in the Berkshires and isn't making it to previews and screenings? May I dwell on the example of my wife? Polly is called a Paulette, someone for whom movie reviewing is a "calling"—yet Polly publishes mainly humor and journalism, and wrote about movies for all of two years.

Why isn't Terry Rafferty included among the Paulettes? Why isn't Denby's fraught relationship with Pauline's influence gone into? What the hell is David Thompson, no Paulette, doing in this article, which otherwise focuses on people who have at one time or another been in Pauline's circle?

Does Wolcott really think movies aren't in a bad period? If so, he needs to do a better job of accounting for the feelings many moviegoers, and many moviemakers, have to the contrary. If he's arguing that high-end reviewers ought to do their jobs in a part-time, sophisticated-yet-breezy way, then he should name some American outlets that have shown a willingness to publish such writing—i.e., he needs to suggest that such an approach to movie reviewing is actually possible.

RAY SAWHILL New York, New York

JAMES WOLCOTT REPLIES: Normally, I wouldn't reply to Ray Sawhill's letter. It's almost sweet, the spectade of him bumbling Mr. Magoo-like through my article and getting everything confounded—whipping up a kooky conspiracy theory about The Modern Review, failing to grasp that the column wasn't about the Paulettes, but about the ongoingfunk in film criticism, of which the Paulettes play only a part, and so on. Unfortunately, he insists on dragging unwitting bystanders into his mental blur. "I seem to remember ... " are the weasel words he uses to introduce the gossip that I stopped speaking to the novelist Cathleen Schine after her marriage to the critic David Denby. No such cutoff occurred; in fact, I met my future wife at a party in their apartment. His factoid about Elvis Mitchell is equally moldy Elvis was understandably upset when I panned his television show Last Cal 1, but we remain good friends. As for the statement that I spoke to Sawhill's wife, Polly Frost, "for an hour a day" over "severalyears," I can only wonder, Where was I during these hundreds of conversations? We had the occasional chat, but that's about it. Perhaps Polly was on the play phone with her "imaginary friend."

It is true that Polly Frost started giving me the Silent Treatment in 1994.1 earned excommunication for mildly dissenting in the general praise for an up-and-coming actress named Karen Sillas, a favorite of Polly's whose screen presence I found wooden and monolithic. Foolish me, I thought that's what critics were supposed to do—criticize, dispute, stir up debate. But thin skin and wounded pride have become a Paulette speciality, as evidenced in the namecalling and personal invective lobbed my way in the longer, unexpurgated versions of Rafferty's and Sawhill's letters (which received splashy coverage in "Page Six" of the New York Post/ When Sawhill asks, "How exactly can the Paulettes 'have one eye and ear cocked to Pauline's opinion' and still make their deadlines, given that Pauline now spends her time in the Berkshires and isn't making it to previews and screenings?" he's being fauxnaif. He knows as well as I do that (a) Kael receives plenty of current film releases on cassette and (b) some Paulettes fax her their copy in advance. There's nothing sinister about this, but it does suggest an umbilical cord that hasn't been cut.

IT is WITH GREAT umbrage that I take umbrage at the insane rantings of your "critic" James Wolcott. As one of the "Paulettes" not named in the piece— Ms. Kael and I go back a ways, to when I spilled a bowl of carrot-ginger soup on her the summer I worked as a busboy at the Boiler Room Cafe in the Berkshires—I can assure you that my colleagues and I take full delight in the movies these days, and are not the Gloomy Guses that Sunny Jim makes us out to be. Rather, it is Wolcott who is the droning, malarial fly in the otherwise vital ointment that is contemporary film criticism.

A little background: I was a great admirer of Wolcott's during his fifSt stint at Vanity Fair. You could even say we were friends: as a student at Wesleyan I wrote to him about twice a week, and though he never wrote back, I could tell that he was incorporating some of my ideas into his pieces. As for Pauline herself, I fell into her fold after I was terminated from the Boiler Room following the soup mishap. I knew where she lived, so I drove to her place, armed with sample copies of my oneman campus publication, Dis Course: A Journal of Enlightened Critique, to make amends. Standing in the doorway, she said, "You have some fucking nerve, kid," which, since she'd said more or less the same thing about Sam Peckinpah, I took to mean she thought I was gifted.

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I broke with Wolcott when he appeared on the short-lived PBS series Edge and admired the feminist-baiting tactics of Norman Mailer. As a strident feminist myself and frequent co-coordinator of "Take Back the Night" marches at Wesleyan, I found this despicable. Needless to say, I terminated my correspondence with Wolcott.

When he says that "movie criticism has become a cultural malady," he ignores the trenchant, brilliant work of the Anthony Lanes and Michael Medveds and Josh Freelantzovitzes out there (visit my homepage and see why I think Albino Alligator freakin' ruled), and discredits the Terrence Raffertys and Mike Sragows. It is Wolcott, the boil on the otherwise sturdy forearm of the critical arm of the writing profession, who is filled with turgid pus.

JOSH FREELANTZOVITZ Brooklyn, New York

April in Hollywood

THANKS TO YOUR brilliant photographers and writers for their contributions to the most spectacular Hollywood issue to date ["Hollywood 1997," April], The coverage was sensational and the photos were glossy and dazzling.

JEFF CARTER Chattanooga, Tennessee

I CAN TOLERATE goddamned near anything, but get real—that last issue was too big to read in bed. So how about this: next time you've got a two-ton issue, send it in two volumes.

DON DONDERO Reno, Nevada

I WAS DELIGHTED to see the composers photograph: I have been a fan of Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein since I was a child, and more recently have come to love the works of Mark Isham and (my favorite) James Horner. Most people never really hear the music that inevitably enhances their emotions during a film. That is how it should be. But the music from these masters stands alone.

DEBORAH YOUNG Kitchener, Ontario

IT WAS NICE to see the batch of women on your cover foldout fully clothed this year.

EVE STAHLBERGER Annandale, New York

YOUR APRIL ISSUE, bloated with chatter about Hollywood and its inhabitants, surely has exhausted the topic for a while. Enough, already!

MIKO DWARKIN Calgary, Alberta

WHY, OH WHY, does Annie Leibovitz's vision of women (and sometimes men!) so often involve taking off all or some of their clothes? Ms. Leibovitz is capable of much, much more—look at her stunning and mesmerizing photograph of Frances McDormand!

SANDRA SASAKI Winnipeg, Manitoba

Meier Time

I WOULD describe Richard Meier as the crown prince of control in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright and his "organic architecture" ["Meier's Moment," by Bob Colacello, April]. It is clear that Meier's buildings are conceived and articulated as artworks for aesthetic delectation rather than buildings which must (also) fulfill some function.

ELLEN B. CUTLER Merrimack, New Hampshire

I'D LIKE TO congratulate Todd Eberle for his magnificent photos of the Getty Center. They truly bring out the sublime quality of this new architectural gem.

JUDY BASS Stoughton, Massachusetts

One last Squeeze

DOMINICK DUNNE'S "Closing Arguments" [April] was a triumph. America is right to criticize O.J.: how can we forget the loss of two lives (Nicole and Ronald) or the suffering of Nicole's two children?

JEAN SCHEID Taos, New Mexico

DOMINICK DUNNE'S (thoroughly enjoyable) rant against O. J. Simpson contained some worrying observations by its author.

First, the Fifth Amendment is not just a refuge for gangsters and the guilty, but, rather, reflects the fundamental principle that it is for the state to prove its case against the accused. Leslie Abramson's exercise of her constitutional right not to incriminate herself is no less legitimate than that of Mr. Dunne's First Amendment right to report on the O.J. trial itself.

Also, Mr. Dunne's condemnation of those who have cashed in on the Simpson debacle is laughably hypocritical. His article contains just the sort of titillating details of the trial which are craved by the public and which only the key figures in the saga can supply. Sensationalist rubbish? Absolutely. Fun to read? Of course!

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ROBERT D. FERGUSON Toronto, Ontario

I MUST COMMEND Dominick Dunne for resisting the urge to take Mr. Simpson's hand when it was offered. A good man should never give in to the temptation of shaking hands with the Devil.

SALLY BREHART Saco, Maine

The Shadow

NICK TOSCHES'S ARTICLE ["The Man Who Kept the Secrets," April] was a knockout. He unearths cyclopean amounts of data through exhaustive research (what Tosches doesn't uncover about his subject is either unknowable or inconsequential) and transmutes same into a powerful, coherent whole—limned in his signature style.

SALLY S. HINSON Charlotte, North Carolina

YOUR STORY on Sidney Korshak concludes: "The only true secrets are those that remain hidden. The only true mysteries, those that can never be solved."

To quote Joan Rivers: "Oh, grow up!"

LESLIE KORSHAK Highland Park, Illinois

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ms. Korshak is Sidney Korshak's first cousin once removed.

CORRECTIONS: In the April issue, the styling creditfor the photograph of Nicole Kidman in the "Hollywood 1997'' portfolio was inadvertently omitted. It was styled by Andre Leon Talley.

In the April "Editor's Letter," Dore Schary's studio affiliation was incorrectly given. He ran MGM from 1948 to 1956.

In "Hollywood on Trial" (April), the reference to the number of members of the Hollywood 19 who are still living was inaccurate. There are three: Richard Collins, Edward Dmytryk, and Ring Lardner Jr.

The caption accompanying the photograph of Robert Daly and Terry Semel in April's "Hollywood 1997" portfolio contained an error resulting from incorrect information provided by Baseline. The distributor of Clear and Present Danger was Paramount.

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