The Wall Street Journal-20080202-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Morgenstern on Movies- Sketches of Sydney Pollack- How a Genius of Drama Mastered Comedy and Documentary
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080202
WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Morgenstern on Movies: Sketches of Sydney Pollack; How a Genius of Drama Mastered Comedy and Documentary
Full Text (1337 words)Can it be that "Tootsie" is 25 years old? Yes, it can, and the milestone is being marked by a special anniversary edition that hits the DVD shelves and online stores on Tuesday. Along with the movie, which has aged spectacularly well, the new disc includes a mini- documentary about the production that should be seen by anyone who cares about how movies are made. In it, "Tootsie's" director, Sydney Pollack, says, among other intriguing things, "I'm not essentially a comedy director." How, then, did he come to make one of the greatest American comedies? For that matter, how did he come, most recently, to do one of the best documentaries ever made about an artist, "Sketches of Frank Gehry," when he is not essentially -- and was not previously -- a documentary director? The answers flow from the essence of the man.
Over the past four decades he has directed 20 feature films and 25 TV shows, and acted in many more. Sydney came to directing through acting -- I won't be calling him Mr. Pollack because I've known him for much of that time -- so it's no surprise that he has long been considered an actor's director. (And, indeed, an actor's actor, in the strong, forthright tradition of Gregory Peck or even James Cagney.) But the great revelation of the "Tootsie" mini-doc is the extent to which this filmmaker's artistry is supported by meticulous carpentry. A quintessentially American artist in his own right, he's an exceedingly smart, plain-spoken man who worries less about aesthetic theories -- though he's perfectly comfortable with them -- than about keeping his work solidly grounded.
Precisely because he isn't a comedy director, he kept "looking for the meat" in "Tootsie," he says in the documentary -- for the truth of what the characters want, of what they feel they're doing and why they're doing it. It took a lot of looking, through version after version of the script, and a lot of arguing, not to mention some furious fighting, though always about the substance of what was and remains a wondrously complex film. (Dustin Hoffman is astute and triumphantly funny as an actor named Michael Dorsey who, unable to get work, masquerades as an actress named Dorothy Michaels, lands a soap- opera role as a female hospital administrator and, by virtue of the masquerade, eventually becomes a better man.)
Sydney didn't want to act in the film -- he hadn't acted in 20 years -- but Dustin Hoffman convinced him to play Michael's agent, George, because Hoffman wanted the agent to be played by a real authority figure. (In a now-classic scene, Michael, dressed as Dorothy, sits down at George's table in the Russian Tea Room, comes on to him coyly and fools him completely. After that perfect set-up, the scene quickly moves to a perfect pay-off when Michael reveals his identity and the stupefied George says slowly, with feeling, "Oh . . . my God, Michael, I beg you to get some therapy.")
Authority figures are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, where any half- trained director can carry on like an auteur, but Sydney's authority springs from a rare combination of common sense and unforced wisdom -- about his craft, about the world. It's easy to forget -- though just as easy to recall, thanks to DVDs -- how consistently he honored the human core of "Out of Africa," a deeply satisfying drama, produced on an epic scale, that won him an Oscar for his direction. Robert Redford has never been better than in his collaborations with Sydney, who has directed him in seven films, and never more dashing than in the scene in "Out of Africa" where Redford's character, Denys Finch Hatton, takes Meryl Streep's Karen Blixen for a ride in his bright new Gypsy Moth biplane. Not just a ride but a lyrical adventure that fills the screen with Africa's splendors for almost three enchanted minutes.
That's no surprise either, since Sydney has long been a pilot and currently owns a Cessna Citation X, the fastest business jet in the skies. When I talked about him recently with one of his friends, Barbra Streisand -- whom he directed, of course, in "The Way We Were" -- she put his passion for flying in the larger context of what she called "his amazing curiosity about all sorts of things in art and life."
"He's also a very good actor," Streisand said. "To me he's the best thing in 'Michael Clayton.' He always thinks his movies are going to be disasters -- that's a typical kind of actor's mentality -- so I was thrilled to hand him his Oscar for 'Out of Africa.'"
In his DVD commentary track for "The Way We Were," Sydney Pollack says: "The first rule of any love story is you can't make one character attractive at the expense of the other." Yet the first rule about Sydney, and the quality that has put him in the movie pantheon, is that he is, before anything else, a singularly kind, generous man -- and an intuitive one -- who has stayed open, despite the kind of success that can shut people down, to everything and everyone around him.
His intuitions served him well in the documentary he did about his old friend Frank Gehry. "The reason he got caught doing the film in the first place," Gehry recalls, "is that back in 1997 he turned up unannounced at the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He'd been in London and decided to fly over. I saw this crazy guy beating on the windows at the museum -- he was out there with a throwaway drug-store camera in his hand -- so I opened the door and let him in. He took some shots of the building, stayed for the party and flew away. Several weeks later he sent me 10 pictures. At that point they were the best pictures anyone had taken, and they're still amazing to this day. He just caught the building, understood it intuitively. He's not an architecture buff, but he saw it in the way I'd been thinking of it."
In the heady aftermath of the Bilbao opening, documentary filmmakers sought Gehry's cooperation in making a film about him. When the time came for him to decide on a director, one of the people setting up the production tried to help him make his choice by asking who had taken the best pictures of his building.
"Sydney was reluctant," Gehry says. "He kept saying 'I don't know anything about architecture,' but that was fine with me. Then he got caught not just doing the film but being in it. He would come to my house with this little digital camera and shoot me while we were talking, and there'd be the cameraman, Ultan Guilfoyle, filming both of us. And because Sydney was a close friend I just let it all hang out."
"Sketches of Frank Gehry" is far more than the sum of these conversations -- it's a gorgeous evocation of Gehry's work. But it's also a testament to Sydney's instincts, his easy way with conversation -- he's as good a listener as he is a raconteur -- and his understanding of the creative process. In his pragmatic, no-nonsense way, he made a film about creativity that nails its subject with a carpenter's energy and a poet's expansiveness. And all the time he was making it he kept mum.
"He never told me anything," Gehry says. "Never a word about a concept, or an approach. One day he called me and Berta to get together" -- Berta is Gehry's wife -- "and he cooked dinner for us at his house. Then he said, 'I'm going to show you the film.' There was dead silence when it was over. 'You don't like it,' he said. But I was crying because I was so happy."
Which bears out Barbra Streisand's point. Sydney always thinks his movies are going to be disasters.
