We should all be blessed with an entry into the film industry like Alan J Pakula's: loving parents who send you to a liberal college, then fund you for a few years until you break into the industry and get you your first job through a family contact; then you go to work as an assistant for an agent, Don Hartman - who a year later is appointed head of production at Paramount. But to be fair, Pakula made the most of every opportunity - he worked very hard, seems to have been extremely easy to get along with (the accounts of how nice and gentlemanly he was get a bit wearying over time). It's no surprise he was a success as a producer- it's more surprising he did so well as a director, and became such a good one. Today the trend seems to be for directors to go into producing(eg Lucas, Spielberg, Pollack) - but there have been some people who went the other way: Joe Roth is a recent bad example, but there's also Joe Mankiewicz and Pakula.
I knew a little of Pakula's career (eg his tragic freakish death) but was surprised how much more to it there was:the Hartman connection, for example, his (mostly unsuccessful) forays into Broadway production, the fact To Kill a Mockingbird was only his second film as producer, he was married to Hope Lange for several years in the 60s, the different techniques he used for different actors (esp contrasting Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice with Liza Minnelli in Sterile Cuckoo and Jane Fonda in Klute). This may sound like a self-evident comment, but he really put a lot of care into his films (the good ones, anyway), esp Mockingbird, President's, Sophie's Choice. To make a masterpiece you have to work really, really hard! The care and effort put into these films were such it was no wonder they turned out well and makes you wonder if the real reason why so many films are bad isn't so much that executives are evil but that filmmakers aren't willing to go the extra mile. (Having said that I think a deal of this is because by the time the cameras roll, most filmmakers are usually exhausted with getting the film up in the first place).
Pakula made all sorts of films but for my money his real genius lay with conspiracy thrillers: Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men (he was helped considerably on all three by Gordon Willis), plus to a lesser extent Presumed Innocent. The Pelican Brief was a half-successful attempt to recapture this (though it did well at the box office). The author makes the claim that his other great classic was Sophie's Choice, which I haven't seen - both this and President's Men get two chapters each. (The treatment given to Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Comes a Horseman and Rollover is a lot less.)
The author writes with a great deal of admiration for Pakula and for his films, though he allows a little criticism of the latter (esp Rollover, Dream On) - he makes an argument that Orphans is a bit of an undiscovered classic. He does allow for his subject to have some faults - particularly a fussy nature (seems to have been a bit of a primma donna at times - but what successful director isn't?). Never really went into decline - his last film was a big studio picture for which he was paid $5 million.
I would point out one thing about this book - the author seems overly willing to take people's word for who worked on particular scripts. I know from experience researching this stuff that people often don't realise what they contributed, or think they contributed more than they did. People who rewrite a scene, change a location, think they've made this big change when actually the basic structure hasn't altered. You actually have to read different drafts of the script to make a call. (eg Hitchcock biographer's taking Sam Taylor's word for it that Alec Coppel's script for Vertigo was 'unusable' - when in fact a lot of it was used in the final film). This is particularly noticeable when dealing with the section of the writing of All the President's Men -William Goldman wrote in his chapter on the book some critical comment son Pakula (mainly his inability to make up his mind) and Robert Redford,which seems to have prompted hostility from Robert Redford: Redford says that Goldman's script was trivial and hardly any of it was in the final film except for his decision to throw away the last half of the book and that he and Pakula rewrote it, and that Goldman had a lot of gall accepting his Oscar. Now I've read some early drafts of the script (one admittedly was on the net but it reads like Goldman, another is at AFTRS) and the film seems very close to it, at least the structure. Now Dexter does include a quote from Bob Woodward that he thought the structure of Goldman's script was attached, but he also quotes a lot of Goldman bashing especially on Goldman's overly "light hearted" approach (not seeming to allow that Goldman deliberately took this approach out of fear the audience would get bored). Surely it wouldn't have been too hard just to read a copy of early drafts and make his own judgement? OK,having said all that - Goldman's version of this episode has been allowed to dominate for the part twenty years maybe he was owed a little payback.
Another, more minor error, a related one, is being overly willing to uncritically quote the word of movie stars who have agreed to speak with him (eg Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep). This is particularly noticeable in regards to Robert Redford's comments on Inside Daisy Clover -Redford's character was changed from gay to bisexual with his collaboration, then changed back during filming to being gay, and Redford complains about this because it wasn't what agreed. Something which might have had a teensy-weensy bit to do with this is simply Redford's reluctance to play a homosexual ("does he have to be gay? Can't he be bisexual?") but this isn't mentioned.
I don't want to over emphasise the criticism. This is still a good book, a worthy tribute to a talented filmmaker
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