Post by Clouseau on Feb 16, 2007 5:39:32 GMT
www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5023&IssueNum=193 [/size][/center]
As this season of insane Oscar foreplay approaches its inevitably unsatisfying climax, making predictions is a dangerous game – especially for film journalists, since mistakes will be on record for all eternity. Still, brave little soldier that I am, I will go out on a limb with a prediction … .
Helen Mirren will win for Best Actress.
OK, that’s about the sturdiest limb in the universe. So I’ll be just a tad more daring … .
Alan Arkin will win Best Supporting Actor.
Much of the smart money has been on Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls, but, as several commentators have already noted, the release of Norbit in the middle of the voting period could cost Murphy dearly. It may not be the sort of movie Oscar voters go out for in droves, but no one with a television could have avoided the barrage of wretched, unfunny, even offensive ads in the run-up to its opening – ads that remind us of everything that’s worst about a sometimes brilliant performer’s work. At the same time that the folks at DreamWorks/Paramount are spending money to promote Murphy’s Oscar chances, they’re spending far more on unintentionally undermining them.
If Murphy is out, then the award is Arkin’s to win. Nearly everyone loved him in Little Miss Sunshine, a film that was itself hard to dislike. And he has 40 years of work, often great, behind him – a factor that, however unfairly, has been known to sway voters. It would also represent an Oscar comeback for Arkin, whose two previous nominations were in the ’60s.
Arkin made a big splash in 1966 as the Soviet sailor in The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, Norman Jewison’s farcical look at Cold War hysteria. It was his first real feature appearance and brought him a Best Actor nod. (Paul Scofield won for A Man for All Seasons, playing Sir Thomas More – a great performance and much closer to the Academy’s tastes.)
It was only two years later that Arkin was nominated again, for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And then a mere 38 years before his next nomination.
It’s the sort of thing that could make an actor crazy. But, during a recent interview, Arkin, 72, seems genuinely unconcerned about his prospects, as we talk about his incredibly long and varied career as director, singer, songwriter, and, most of all, actor.
“I got the script for Little Miss Sunshine maybe a year and a half ago, something like that. I flipped out for it. I thought it was just wonderful,” he tells me. “It’s a great film all the way through – I’m enormously proud of every aspect of it – but one of the things that disarms people is that they hear about this great comedy, and they go in, and the first 10 minutes are terribly depressing. I think people’s first reaction is ‘What are they talking about? This isn’t funny.’ And then slowly the comedy starts, and they get past that judgmental thing that people get into when they’ve heard too much about a movie.”
The film was the big sleeper hit of 2006. I ask him if, when he got the script, he had a clue it would do so well.
“You know what? I’ve never thought about that in my life. It’s either something I want to do, feel compelled to do, for whatever reason … or it’s not,” he says. “I have no idea if something’s going to be successful, and I don’t really care. I just want to be involved in projects that I have some feeling for, if I can possibly find them. And nearly all the actors I know feel the same way. I don’t know what Tom Cruise feels like. He may look at something and say, ‘This could make 150 billion dollars!’ But the actors I hang out with don’t think in those terms.”
While in retrospect it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the part of the irrepressibly frank, smack-shooting Grandpa, he almost didn’t get the part.
“Initially, [directors] Valerie [Faris] and Jonathan [Dayton] didn’t want me,” he says. “It was the best rejection I’ve ever gotten in my life: They thought I was too virile for the part. Man, there’s a rejection I can live with! But then they thought about it and decided that I could probably pull it off anyway … . Even though I am too virile.
“I guess the image initially was somebody kind of rambling and half out of their mind and 85. And I did it rambling and half out of my mind, but younger.”
In any case, he’s not your average grandfather. I asked Arkin if he had a back story for the character. “Yeah, I decided he was a kind of misplaced hippie, who ended up playing saxophone and lousy drums in strip joints, because he liked hanging around the girls. And just went around the country as a half-ass, bad musician. But having a good time until life caught up with him. I don’t know if it comes through, but it tickled me.”
Fresh Off ‘Banana Boat’
Arkin himself started out as a musician. A decade before his film career began, he was lead singer and guitarist for folk trio the Tarriers. “I wanted to act, but, while I was making the rounds, I was singing and playing guitar at meetings and things for like 10 bucks a night. And this group came along that I thought I could make some pocket money with while I was doing auditions.”
The group paved the way for the Kingston Trio and the rest of the pop/folk performers who would appear on the charts throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s. “By a quirk of fate, we got a hit song on our hands” – “The Banana Boat Song” (a.k.a. “Day-O”), which went to No. 4 on the pop charts in 1956 and would later be huge for Harry Belafonte. Arkin is credited as cowriter. “It was really two folk songs,” he explains, “and we revised them and put them together and changed the lyrics.” (Curiously, a later configuration of the Tarriers included Marshall Brickman, who went on to cowrite Manhattan with Woody Allen and subsequently directed Arkin in Simon.)
Despite the Tarriers’ success, it was a digression from Arkin’s real goal. “We were singing at a gig at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, and I looked down at myself one night with my satin pants and my sport shirt open to my navel, and playing the guitar as well as I could, and … . I had thought it might help my acting career, but it was a detour. So I quit the next day and came back and starved in New York for a couple of years.”
After those couple of years, he became a member of the first Second City troupe. The audience, he says, was basically students: In Chicago, the theater was near the University of Chicago, so they got a huge university crowd. In New York, it was about a block away from NYU, and so attracted another huge university crowd, students and teachers. “It was a great and wonderful arena to work in.”
But success changed things for him. “We did an hour-and-a-half special at Second City in Chicago for the Canadian Broadcasting System,” he remembers, “which was great. It took off. I think we were shown all over Canada, and just having that to show people took us to a new level. Then we did a special in New York on the David Suskind show – another hour and a half of us doing our own stuff, and that really put us on the map.” ?
The group’s audience changed. “We started getting a whole different kind of crowd – the mink-coat crowd from upper Park Avenue,” he recalls. “I couldn’t stand it; I was a real snob in those days. I got really pissed off backstage one night, and I said, ‘dern, I hate these people! You mention the name Thomas Mann, you get a laugh. They don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, but you mention a name they’ve never heard of, and you get a laugh.’ So my next scene was with Severn Darden” – best remembered as the Russian spy in The President’s Analyst – “and in it I try on a lot of different clothes for him. I put on this imaginary jacket and ask how I look. ‘You look wonderful,’ he says. ‘You look just like Thomas Mann.’ And the audience went nuts! They went crazy. I got furious.”
The experience of working in improv was profound. “It became part of my philosophy,” Arkin says. “It’s imbued every aspect of my life, not just going on stage. I occasionally teach short seminars in improvisation, and people write us for years afterward, saying that it’s changed their lives. A two- or three-day workshop in improvisation! It’s as exciting as anything I’ve ever been connected with.”
Still, other than another stint with Second City a few years later, he has never returned to live improv. “I was never able to do it unless I’d spent some time working with the people; I’m not able to just jump on stage with a bunch of strangers with any degree of success. There was a very, very strong ensemble feeling in our particular group, and it just felt like I was in a safe haven. We tried a million different things in a million different ways. But I could never do it with people that I didn’t have some kind of special rapport with.”
From Bad Guy to ‘Big Trouble’
Somewhere in those years he made a short film called That’s Me – from a Second City sketch he had done with Andrew Duncan – that was nominated for an Oscar; a few years later a second short, People Soup, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, was also nominated. (Since these nominations are technically given to the shorts’ producers, neither shows up on the Internet Movie Database list of Arkin’s personal nominations.)
His big break on stage was as the lead in Carl Reiner’s autobiographical play, Enter Laughing, which I actually saw during its pre-Broadway previews in Philadelphia and which immediately made me an Arkin fan. After that, he briefly went back to Second City, then appeared in Murray Schisgal’s play Luv, with Mike Nichols directing. It was that production that got him cast in The Russians Are Coming.
His next major film role was about as big a change of pace as possible. He played the coldblooded Harry Roat – the utterly terrifying crook playing cat-and-mouse with a blind Audrey Hepburn – in Wait Until Dark, a part Robert Duvall had done on Broadway. It was his first and last genuine villain.
“I haven’t gotten offered a lot of them,” he says, “and I’ve turned down the ones I have. It wasn’t fun: I didn’t like terrorizing Audrey Hepburn like that.”
In the same period, he began directing both theater and films. He staged a revival of Jules Feiffer’s flop, Little Murders (which later became his feature directorial debut), as well as Neil Simon’s hit The Sunshine Boys. The film version of Little Murders is a semi-forgotten gem, extremely faithful to Feiffer’s play, including three wonderful monologues, delivered perfectly by Arkin, Lou Jacobi, and Donald Sutherland.
Even by today’s standards, Little Murders – about a middle-class family who can only stop their verbal sniping at each other by literally sniping at strangers on the street – is pretty transgressive, but not nearly so transgressive as Fire Sale, the next film Arkin directed. (“Next and last,” he points out.) It was based on a novel by Robert Klane, whose other in-your-face books include Where’s Poppa?, memorably filmed by Carl Reiner, and The Horse Is Dead, which still cries out to be done on screen. (Klane later directed one film himself, the universally loathed disco comedy Thank God It’s Friday.) Fire Sale – whose humor derives primarily from the frustrations of a mute stroke victim, as he desperately tries to communicate – went too far … even for a bad-taste connoisseur like myself.
While his stage work blossomed, his film career was beset with snags and missteps. When Peter Sellers declined to do a third Pink Panther film, Arkin took over his character as the eponymous Inspector Clouseau. When I ask for a comment, Arkin says, “Pass.” I push gently. “It was a big mistake,” is all he’ll say.
I suggest that it must have been really intimidating, even just walking into something like that. “Well, I wasn’t intimidated by anything in those days,” he says. “Afterwards I was intimidated. But not before. There was a pocket of time – about a year – when I thought I could do anything. And it was right in that pocket.”
“So I guess that could be considered a learning period,” I say.
“A very good learning period.”
Not long thereafter, he found himself playing Yossarian in Mike Nichols’s film of Catch-22. Joseph Heller’s novel had been a huge commercial and critical success and was already recognized as a classic: in short, more intimidation … which may or may not explain its famously protracted shooting.
“It was very, very long,” Arkin says, “about eight months.”
But why did it take so long?
“You have to ask Mike that, I didn’t … I had no … I wasn’t … it wasn’t my fault” – he laughs – “but I really don’t know why. It was a tough period in my life for a lot of reasons, so I don’t feel like it’s my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t really know what happened.”
For most of the next decade, flops like Deadhead Miles (1972) and Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975) were mingled with critical hits like Hearts of the West (1975) and commercial hits like The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976). But The In-Laws (1979) marked his first starring role in a big moneymaker in more than a decade. I ask if he’s seen the superfluous 2003 remake, with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas taking over the roles he and Peter Falk made famous.
“No. I didn’t see it. I didn’t need to see it. But I called Peter the day after it came out to congratulate him on his reviews: We got better reviews for the remake, which we weren’t in, than we did for the first one, which we were in.”
Falk and Arkin later reteamed for Big Trouble, a film of which I’m very fond, in contradiction to its general low critical standing. It tried to re-create the chemistry that had made The In-Laws a big hit. In-Laws screenwriter Andrew Bergman was directing, but something happened, and he was replaced by Falk’s buddy John Cassavetes … at least nominally. It’s rumored that Cassavetes simply let his name be used and that afterwards he wasn’t too happy being associated with the result.
As soon as I mention the title, Arkin groans. “Oh, my God. Oh.”
What actually happened on the set? Who directed it?
“It’s a long, turgid story,” Arkin says and declines to comment further.
I press on in the film’s defense. After a slow start, this sort-of-parody of Double Indemnity picks up steam when Falk insists that Arkin have a taste of sardine liqueur. “It’s really funny. Your spit take is a thing of beauty … .”
“That’s the only two minutes in the film I feel good about,” he replies. “I wanted to do the longest spit take in history. Actually, there was another scene there that I worked harder on than anything I’ve ever done in my life, that they cut out of the movie. I worked for about two weeks by myself on one bit that they never used.”
Escape to New Mexico
I wonder, given those kind of experiences, whether he’s ever been tempted to leave the business and do something else.
“What? Like being a checker at Kmart? No. Being a doctor? Going out and being a brain surgeon? No. Acting was like a calling. I decided this was it when I was five. It never occurred to me to do something else. There were times I thought I was in the wrong specific project. But not that I needed to do something else.”
Was his calling specifically movie acting? Rather than acting in general?
“I think subliminally, yes, because most of my experience at that age was from watching movies. So it had to have been movies, although I didn’t have any prejudice about stage. I was very happy to go on stage.”
Were there particular actors who inspired this, who made his jaw drop?
“Oh, yeah. Chaplin, Danny Kaye, and Louis Hayward were my three heroes.”
The first two make sense to me, but Louis Hayward? A star of B-movie swashbucklers, now largely forgotten? I didn’t see that one coming.
“Well, I was five years old,” he shrugs, while demonstrating Louis Hayward swordfighting gestures.
I mention that the ultimate Jewish mother’s dream for my generation was to become Danny Kaye. “This was my own dream,” he says. “My mother wanted me to be an accountant.” Did she feel better about things later? “I think so. But I think she would have been happy all along if I had that in my background, so I had something to fall back on.”
Arkin was born in New York and raised in L.A., but he’s been settled in New Mexico for several years now. “I love it there, because you’re with people of all walks of life all the time … it’s not showbiz-centric. Otherwise you start feeding on yourself, and it’s all you think about, all you talk about. I love my work, but there are other things I’m interested in, and I have an opportunity to just pursue them more comfortably, being away from this environment where people start becoming like hungry dogs. I just can’t deal with it 24 hours a day … . I love hanging out with people that aren’t talking about grosses all the time. Or even about craft. I don’t want to talk about either one of those things 24 hours a day.”
Are there parts he regrets turning down? “Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “Not that I can remember. It’s only ones I’ve taken that I have regrets about.
“I’m happier now than I’ve ever been,” he continues. “I’m having more fun acting than I ever have. The parts are getting easier, which is fine with me; I’m not looking for any huge challenges anymore, and I’m having a good time.”
I ask about one last favorite performance – his portrayal of James Woods’s con-man father in the 1985 Joshua Then and Now. “I love that character,” he says. “If I had to play one character the rest of my life, it would be that character. Except the grandfather [in Little Miss Sunshine] is really, in a lot of ways, an older version of the same guy. So right in that pocket is where I could go spend the rest of my life.”
02-15-07[/quote]
Sunshine Man
He is too virile for his own good. But after 40 years as an actor,
director, and singer, Alan Arkin is still hungry
~ By ANDY KLEIN ~
~ Alan Arkin: 50 years in show biz and still smiling ~
As this season of insane Oscar foreplay approaches its inevitably unsatisfying climax, making predictions is a dangerous game – especially for film journalists, since mistakes will be on record for all eternity. Still, brave little soldier that I am, I will go out on a limb with a prediction … .
Helen Mirren will win for Best Actress.
OK, that’s about the sturdiest limb in the universe. So I’ll be just a tad more daring … .
Alan Arkin will win Best Supporting Actor.
Much of the smart money has been on Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls, but, as several commentators have already noted, the release of Norbit in the middle of the voting period could cost Murphy dearly. It may not be the sort of movie Oscar voters go out for in droves, but no one with a television could have avoided the barrage of wretched, unfunny, even offensive ads in the run-up to its opening – ads that remind us of everything that’s worst about a sometimes brilliant performer’s work. At the same time that the folks at DreamWorks/Paramount are spending money to promote Murphy’s Oscar chances, they’re spending far more on unintentionally undermining them.
If Murphy is out, then the award is Arkin’s to win. Nearly everyone loved him in Little Miss Sunshine, a film that was itself hard to dislike. And he has 40 years of work, often great, behind him – a factor that, however unfairly, has been known to sway voters. It would also represent an Oscar comeback for Arkin, whose two previous nominations were in the ’60s.
Arkin made a big splash in 1966 as the Soviet sailor in The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, Norman Jewison’s farcical look at Cold War hysteria. It was his first real feature appearance and brought him a Best Actor nod. (Paul Scofield won for A Man for All Seasons, playing Sir Thomas More – a great performance and much closer to the Academy’s tastes.)
It was only two years later that Arkin was nominated again, for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And then a mere 38 years before his next nomination.
It’s the sort of thing that could make an actor crazy. But, during a recent interview, Arkin, 72, seems genuinely unconcerned about his prospects, as we talk about his incredibly long and varied career as director, singer, songwriter, and, most of all, actor.
“I got the script for Little Miss Sunshine maybe a year and a half ago, something like that. I flipped out for it. I thought it was just wonderful,” he tells me. “It’s a great film all the way through – I’m enormously proud of every aspect of it – but one of the things that disarms people is that they hear about this great comedy, and they go in, and the first 10 minutes are terribly depressing. I think people’s first reaction is ‘What are they talking about? This isn’t funny.’ And then slowly the comedy starts, and they get past that judgmental thing that people get into when they’ve heard too much about a movie.”
The film was the big sleeper hit of 2006. I ask him if, when he got the script, he had a clue it would do so well.
“You know what? I’ve never thought about that in my life. It’s either something I want to do, feel compelled to do, for whatever reason … or it’s not,” he says. “I have no idea if something’s going to be successful, and I don’t really care. I just want to be involved in projects that I have some feeling for, if I can possibly find them. And nearly all the actors I know feel the same way. I don’t know what Tom Cruise feels like. He may look at something and say, ‘This could make 150 billion dollars!’ But the actors I hang out with don’t think in those terms.”
While in retrospect it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the part of the irrepressibly frank, smack-shooting Grandpa, he almost didn’t get the part.
“Initially, [directors] Valerie [Faris] and Jonathan [Dayton] didn’t want me,” he says. “It was the best rejection I’ve ever gotten in my life: They thought I was too virile for the part. Man, there’s a rejection I can live with! But then they thought about it and decided that I could probably pull it off anyway … . Even though I am too virile.
“I guess the image initially was somebody kind of rambling and half out of their mind and 85. And I did it rambling and half out of my mind, but younger.”
In any case, he’s not your average grandfather. I asked Arkin if he had a back story for the character. “Yeah, I decided he was a kind of misplaced hippie, who ended up playing saxophone and lousy drums in strip joints, because he liked hanging around the girls. And just went around the country as a half-ass, bad musician. But having a good time until life caught up with him. I don’t know if it comes through, but it tickled me.”
Fresh Off ‘Banana Boat’
Arkin himself started out as a musician. A decade before his film career began, he was lead singer and guitarist for folk trio the Tarriers. “I wanted to act, but, while I was making the rounds, I was singing and playing guitar at meetings and things for like 10 bucks a night. And this group came along that I thought I could make some pocket money with while I was doing auditions.”
The group paved the way for the Kingston Trio and the rest of the pop/folk performers who would appear on the charts throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s. “By a quirk of fate, we got a hit song on our hands” – “The Banana Boat Song” (a.k.a. “Day-O”), which went to No. 4 on the pop charts in 1956 and would later be huge for Harry Belafonte. Arkin is credited as cowriter. “It was really two folk songs,” he explains, “and we revised them and put them together and changed the lyrics.” (Curiously, a later configuration of the Tarriers included Marshall Brickman, who went on to cowrite Manhattan with Woody Allen and subsequently directed Arkin in Simon.)
Despite the Tarriers’ success, it was a digression from Arkin’s real goal. “We were singing at a gig at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, and I looked down at myself one night with my satin pants and my sport shirt open to my navel, and playing the guitar as well as I could, and … . I had thought it might help my acting career, but it was a detour. So I quit the next day and came back and starved in New York for a couple of years.”
After those couple of years, he became a member of the first Second City troupe. The audience, he says, was basically students: In Chicago, the theater was near the University of Chicago, so they got a huge university crowd. In New York, it was about a block away from NYU, and so attracted another huge university crowd, students and teachers. “It was a great and wonderful arena to work in.”
But success changed things for him. “We did an hour-and-a-half special at Second City in Chicago for the Canadian Broadcasting System,” he remembers, “which was great. It took off. I think we were shown all over Canada, and just having that to show people took us to a new level. Then we did a special in New York on the David Suskind show – another hour and a half of us doing our own stuff, and that really put us on the map.” ?
The group’s audience changed. “We started getting a whole different kind of crowd – the mink-coat crowd from upper Park Avenue,” he recalls. “I couldn’t stand it; I was a real snob in those days. I got really pissed off backstage one night, and I said, ‘dern, I hate these people! You mention the name Thomas Mann, you get a laugh. They don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, but you mention a name they’ve never heard of, and you get a laugh.’ So my next scene was with Severn Darden” – best remembered as the Russian spy in The President’s Analyst – “and in it I try on a lot of different clothes for him. I put on this imaginary jacket and ask how I look. ‘You look wonderful,’ he says. ‘You look just like Thomas Mann.’ And the audience went nuts! They went crazy. I got furious.”
The experience of working in improv was profound. “It became part of my philosophy,” Arkin says. “It’s imbued every aspect of my life, not just going on stage. I occasionally teach short seminars in improvisation, and people write us for years afterward, saying that it’s changed their lives. A two- or three-day workshop in improvisation! It’s as exciting as anything I’ve ever been connected with.”
Still, other than another stint with Second City a few years later, he has never returned to live improv. “I was never able to do it unless I’d spent some time working with the people; I’m not able to just jump on stage with a bunch of strangers with any degree of success. There was a very, very strong ensemble feeling in our particular group, and it just felt like I was in a safe haven. We tried a million different things in a million different ways. But I could never do it with people that I didn’t have some kind of special rapport with.”
From Bad Guy to ‘Big Trouble’
Somewhere in those years he made a short film called That’s Me – from a Second City sketch he had done with Andrew Duncan – that was nominated for an Oscar; a few years later a second short, People Soup, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, was also nominated. (Since these nominations are technically given to the shorts’ producers, neither shows up on the Internet Movie Database list of Arkin’s personal nominations.)
His big break on stage was as the lead in Carl Reiner’s autobiographical play, Enter Laughing, which I actually saw during its pre-Broadway previews in Philadelphia and which immediately made me an Arkin fan. After that, he briefly went back to Second City, then appeared in Murray Schisgal’s play Luv, with Mike Nichols directing. It was that production that got him cast in The Russians Are Coming.
His next major film role was about as big a change of pace as possible. He played the coldblooded Harry Roat – the utterly terrifying crook playing cat-and-mouse with a blind Audrey Hepburn – in Wait Until Dark, a part Robert Duvall had done on Broadway. It was his first and last genuine villain.
“I haven’t gotten offered a lot of them,” he says, “and I’ve turned down the ones I have. It wasn’t fun: I didn’t like terrorizing Audrey Hepburn like that.”
In the same period, he began directing both theater and films. He staged a revival of Jules Feiffer’s flop, Little Murders (which later became his feature directorial debut), as well as Neil Simon’s hit The Sunshine Boys. The film version of Little Murders is a semi-forgotten gem, extremely faithful to Feiffer’s play, including three wonderful monologues, delivered perfectly by Arkin, Lou Jacobi, and Donald Sutherland.
Even by today’s standards, Little Murders – about a middle-class family who can only stop their verbal sniping at each other by literally sniping at strangers on the street – is pretty transgressive, but not nearly so transgressive as Fire Sale, the next film Arkin directed. (“Next and last,” he points out.) It was based on a novel by Robert Klane, whose other in-your-face books include Where’s Poppa?, memorably filmed by Carl Reiner, and The Horse Is Dead, which still cries out to be done on screen. (Klane later directed one film himself, the universally loathed disco comedy Thank God It’s Friday.) Fire Sale – whose humor derives primarily from the frustrations of a mute stroke victim, as he desperately tries to communicate – went too far … even for a bad-taste connoisseur like myself.
While his stage work blossomed, his film career was beset with snags and missteps. When Peter Sellers declined to do a third Pink Panther film, Arkin took over his character as the eponymous Inspector Clouseau. When I ask for a comment, Arkin says, “Pass.” I push gently. “It was a big mistake,” is all he’ll say.
I suggest that it must have been really intimidating, even just walking into something like that. “Well, I wasn’t intimidated by anything in those days,” he says. “Afterwards I was intimidated. But not before. There was a pocket of time – about a year – when I thought I could do anything. And it was right in that pocket.”
“So I guess that could be considered a learning period,” I say.
“A very good learning period.”
Not long thereafter, he found himself playing Yossarian in Mike Nichols’s film of Catch-22. Joseph Heller’s novel had been a huge commercial and critical success and was already recognized as a classic: in short, more intimidation … which may or may not explain its famously protracted shooting.
“It was very, very long,” Arkin says, “about eight months.”
But why did it take so long?
“You have to ask Mike that, I didn’t … I had no … I wasn’t … it wasn’t my fault” – he laughs – “but I really don’t know why. It was a tough period in my life for a lot of reasons, so I don’t feel like it’s my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t really know what happened.”
For most of the next decade, flops like Deadhead Miles (1972) and Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975) were mingled with critical hits like Hearts of the West (1975) and commercial hits like The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976). But The In-Laws (1979) marked his first starring role in a big moneymaker in more than a decade. I ask if he’s seen the superfluous 2003 remake, with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas taking over the roles he and Peter Falk made famous.
“No. I didn’t see it. I didn’t need to see it. But I called Peter the day after it came out to congratulate him on his reviews: We got better reviews for the remake, which we weren’t in, than we did for the first one, which we were in.”
Falk and Arkin later reteamed for Big Trouble, a film of which I’m very fond, in contradiction to its general low critical standing. It tried to re-create the chemistry that had made The In-Laws a big hit. In-Laws screenwriter Andrew Bergman was directing, but something happened, and he was replaced by Falk’s buddy John Cassavetes … at least nominally. It’s rumored that Cassavetes simply let his name be used and that afterwards he wasn’t too happy being associated with the result.
As soon as I mention the title, Arkin groans. “Oh, my God. Oh.”
What actually happened on the set? Who directed it?
“It’s a long, turgid story,” Arkin says and declines to comment further.
I press on in the film’s defense. After a slow start, this sort-of-parody of Double Indemnity picks up steam when Falk insists that Arkin have a taste of sardine liqueur. “It’s really funny. Your spit take is a thing of beauty … .”
“That’s the only two minutes in the film I feel good about,” he replies. “I wanted to do the longest spit take in history. Actually, there was another scene there that I worked harder on than anything I’ve ever done in my life, that they cut out of the movie. I worked for about two weeks by myself on one bit that they never used.”
Escape to New Mexico
I wonder, given those kind of experiences, whether he’s ever been tempted to leave the business and do something else.
“What? Like being a checker at Kmart? No. Being a doctor? Going out and being a brain surgeon? No. Acting was like a calling. I decided this was it when I was five. It never occurred to me to do something else. There were times I thought I was in the wrong specific project. But not that I needed to do something else.”
Was his calling specifically movie acting? Rather than acting in general?
“I think subliminally, yes, because most of my experience at that age was from watching movies. So it had to have been movies, although I didn’t have any prejudice about stage. I was very happy to go on stage.”
Were there particular actors who inspired this, who made his jaw drop?
“Oh, yeah. Chaplin, Danny Kaye, and Louis Hayward were my three heroes.”
The first two make sense to me, but Louis Hayward? A star of B-movie swashbucklers, now largely forgotten? I didn’t see that one coming.
“Well, I was five years old,” he shrugs, while demonstrating Louis Hayward swordfighting gestures.
I mention that the ultimate Jewish mother’s dream for my generation was to become Danny Kaye. “This was my own dream,” he says. “My mother wanted me to be an accountant.” Did she feel better about things later? “I think so. But I think she would have been happy all along if I had that in my background, so I had something to fall back on.”
Arkin was born in New York and raised in L.A., but he’s been settled in New Mexico for several years now. “I love it there, because you’re with people of all walks of life all the time … it’s not showbiz-centric. Otherwise you start feeding on yourself, and it’s all you think about, all you talk about. I love my work, but there are other things I’m interested in, and I have an opportunity to just pursue them more comfortably, being away from this environment where people start becoming like hungry dogs. I just can’t deal with it 24 hours a day … . I love hanging out with people that aren’t talking about grosses all the time. Or even about craft. I don’t want to talk about either one of those things 24 hours a day.”
Are there parts he regrets turning down? “Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “Not that I can remember. It’s only ones I’ve taken that I have regrets about.
“I’m happier now than I’ve ever been,” he continues. “I’m having more fun acting than I ever have. The parts are getting easier, which is fine with me; I’m not looking for any huge challenges anymore, and I’m having a good time.”
I ask about one last favorite performance – his portrayal of James Woods’s con-man father in the 1985 Joshua Then and Now. “I love that character,” he says. “If I had to play one character the rest of my life, it would be that character. Except the grandfather [in Little Miss Sunshine] is really, in a lot of ways, an older version of the same guy. So right in that pocket is where I could go spend the rest of my life.”
02-15-07[/quote]
