Maura Spiegel - Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet would not have been crazy about the idea of a biography. He erased his calendar after events, David Black, a writer and producer who worked with Sidney, observed. This is gonna cause a problem for biographers. In fact, Sidney Lumetpronounced loo-met, with a hard T instead of in the French style, loo-mayleft no diaries, no papers, no correspondence, no archive. His inclination was to keep moving forward and not to look back. Much of the work of this book, of necessity, involved entering the rich worlds Sidney inhabited by collecting memories from those he worked with and those who loved him. He attempted, in his sixties, to write a memoir, but could get no further in the narrative than his early twenties. When he opened the valve, painful memories flooded him; the effort was unsustainable.

Likely he preferred to let the movies speak for him. It wasnt just modestyhe wasnt exactly a modest man. What he valued most was what people did by choice, what they forged and made happen, rather than what befell them or where they fell short. His remarkable book, Making Movies, stands as a testament to this spirit.

He rejected the title auteur, insisting always on the collective nature and the luck factor of producing great work. He preferred the term movie to film, retreating from anything he took to be fancy and unworkmanlike. He believed utterly in the value of working, in putting one foot in front of the other. He took on projects for many different reasons: because he adored a script or an actor, to learn a new aspect of his craft, to pay for a houseor just to be working. And he was hardly unmindful of the unevenness of his output.

He was not immune to praise or criticism, but he did his best to shrug them off equally. That thick skin would prove necessary for so much of his later working life, as Sidney was not canonized, was not lauded, wasnt even fashionable, despite his early successes. Critics complained that he was not edgy enough, and he was tarred with the liberal conscience tag, at a time, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the L word was reviled by both the left and the right. Some said he could never again hit the mark as hed done in the 1970s with Serpico, Network and Dog Day Afternoon, that not only his politics but his cinematic language was out of date. Yet just as quickly as the critics abandoned him, they returned to praise him toward the end of his life, lavishly hailing his final film, Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead, as a return to form by a living treasure.

The fact is, though, Sidney never stopped experimenting. He was constantly working with new actors, new equipment, new genres, and new techniques. Throughout his career he drew upon his earlier experiences in radio, theater, television and film to expand beyond his comfort zones and break new ground as both an artist and a citizen. The proof of how fickle critical opinion can be, and how poorly it provides the measure of any films enduring success, can be found in the ease with which Sidney was branded with that seemingly flattering phrase return to form: Sidneys films had actually begun to receive that backhanded compliment no later than the early 1970s. Serpico, The Verdict, Running on Empty, Q & A, Night Falls on Manhattan and Find Me Guilty were at the times of their release all described as returning to form; indeed, with critics declaring so many returns, one has to wonder in retrospect whether half of Sidneys career might not ultimately be viewed as a return to the other half.

Over the course of fifty-five years, with a directing career spanning forty-three movies and more than seventy-five television episodes, movies, and plays for the small screen, as well as another dozen years before that devoted to acting in theater, radio, and film, Sidney strove to work constantly, to glean as many lessons as possible from past successes and failures in the cause of putting that knowledge into action. Even by his own estimation, some of those experiments failed, but for Sidney every one of them was worth trying, and each contained moments of truth.