Peter Bogdanovich - Who the Hells in It

In pictures, personalities are it, you know. It isnt acting per se as its known in the theater. Youd bring some kid in who just blazed off the screena girl or a fellow would hit you instantly. Thats what we looked forsome photographic quality, some mysterious hidden thing certain people have. The great movie stars learned the technique and a few mannerisms and a few moves and became sort of public idols. They couldnt do anything wrong, if you liked themno matter what they did; it wasnt what they played.

ALLAN DWAN

Actors are like children. They must be coddled, and sometimes, spanked.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

You and your directors! For me, its all about the actingmovies are, you know. Pictures are ultimately about the performances.

ORSON WELLES

Thats the great thing about the movies. After you learnand if youre good and Gawd helps ya and youre lucky enough to have a personality that comes acrossthen what youre doing isyoure giving people little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.

JAMES STEWART

Some thirty years ago, in Rome, Orson Welles and I were having a late-night drink in his suite at the Eden Hotel. We had spent a couple of hours taping our conversation for a book about his career. The tape machine, much to Orsons relief, was off now and stowed by the door. Of course, it was always at those times that Welles made the best comments. He had been going on about one of his favorite heresiesthat directors, and indeed the whole job of directing, were highly overrated. For Orson, motion pictures were essentially about the performances.

When I remarked that a certain film was well directed but not well acted, Welles responded that he couldnt separate those qualities and if it wasnt well acted, then what good was it? Obviously, he said, he agreed that the highest level of great directionwith picturemakers he most admired, like Jean Renoir or John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawkscertainly ranked among the fine arts. But that the average director, even some of the most successful, with long, distinguished careers, did not make the difference that really good performances do.

A little while later Orson cracked a disparaging remark about a popular contemporary stage and film star, ending with, Well, you knowactor! In show-biz circles, particularly among crews and production people, the use of the word actor (said with just the slightest touch of contempt) reads as volumes of recorded experience. It is as much an expletive with or without a preceding goddamn, and contains all the negative aspects behind the currently fashionable diva, but none of the glitter or charm. Actor, which can be hurled like a brick through a window or said under ones breath, carries a rather mundane connotation of a boringly self-involved, humorless and demanding person, often childish and vainin other words, tediously high-maintenance. None of this is ever taken to imply that the actor is not a good one.

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the Graham GreeneCarol ReedAlexander Korda thriller The Third Man (1949), the only movie role Welles ever played without makeup. He also wrote the famous cuckoo clock speech himself.

So I asked Orson, Well, if he thought acting was it in theater or film, how could he so disparage actors, and how did he himself behave when he was acting? After all, he had done a great deal more of it than directing. Welles replied, nodding boisterously once, Actor! We both laughed. Did he mean that when he was acting, he behaved with all the unpleasant connotations behind the pejorative use of Actor!? Orson nodded, beaming, almost proudly. Yupactor! He laughed, loud and long.

This book repeatedly harks back to that essential paradox about actors, male or female. To achieve what they often do so magically and with such humanity, must there always be a childish or a childlike foundation? In order perhaps to preserve some profound sense of innocent vulnerability? Acting does begin with play-acting. There was, in fact, an innocence on some level with all the star-players I met, and almost all actors, young or old. In their varying ways, at various points in their careers, as well, each of the actors in this book has on some level felt an unspoiled, selfless love for the work and the medium itself, whether on stage or screen (see, in particular, the Lillian Gish chapter).