Terry Southern, Interview
The Art of Screenwriting No. 3
The Paris Review No. 200, Spring 2012
Terry Southern was born in 1924 in Alvarado, Texas,
the son of a pharmacist and a dressmaker. He was drafted into the army during
World War II and studied at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. In Paris he became
friends with George Plimpton, H. L. Humes, and Peter Matthiessen, who published his
story “The Accident”
in the first issue of The
Paris Review. Back in the United States, Southern was often associated
with Beat writers like Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg, some of whose attitudes
he may have shared, yet the elegant clarity of his prose—which Norman Mailer
characterized as “mean, coolly deliberate and murderous”—situated him,
aesthetically, as a player in the “Quality Lit Game” he liked to mock.
At the time of this interview (1967),
Southern was famous as the coauthor of Candy, the best-selling
sex novel, and as the screenwriter behind Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar,
antinuke comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Both appeared
in the U.S. in 1964 (a headline in Lifemagazine read “Terry Southern
vs. Smugness”). By 1967 he could be spotted on the cover ofSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
standing between Dylan Thomas and Dion. Gore Vidal called him “the most
profoundly witty writer of our generation.” Lenny Bruce blurbed his books.
Candy (written with Mason Hoffenberg) is loosely based on Candide.
Its heroine is a delicious, perky, generous young woman; the joke is that she
remains impregnably innocent in the face of one grotesque sexual adventure
after another. The book attacks prudery, a particularly Anglo-Saxon vice, and
yet, like Candy herself, its tone is appealingly sweet. The novel was first
published in Paris by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in 1958 (even after the
1960 Lady Chatterley case redefined obscenity, publishers
here were unsure of the novel’s “redeeming social value”).
For Dr. Strangelove, Southern
was hired by Kubrick to make a satire out of a screenplay originally based on
the serious novel Red Alert. The movie takes
us into the war room of a certain President Merkin Muffley, there to reveal a
military culture gone berserk, as its leaders cheerfully prepare for death,
destruction, and the imminent end of the world.
Even before these blockbusters made him a
household name, Southern had attracted a passionate following. His first novel, Flash
and Filigree (1958),
the tale of a persecuted dermatologist, is replete with mad inventions (among
them a TV game show called What’s My Disease?). In The
Magic Christian (1959),
his most brilliant sustained narrative, a billionaire prankster spends a
fortune “making it hot for people,” unearthing hypocrisy as he goes. Southern’s
essays and journalism were esteemed—and imitated—by other writers. “Twirling at
Ole Miss,” a piece of personal reportage published in Esquire in 1962, is especially trenchant and
funny. Its nominal subject is baton twirling; it’s really—or equally—about the
mindlessness of racism in the South. Tom Wolfe called it the founding work of
the New Journalism.
By the time this interview was conducted,
Southern had also worked on Tony Richardson’s film The
Loved One (1965),
based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, and The Cincinnati Kid (1966), a drama about high-stakes
poker, starring Steve McQueen, and had published Red-Dirt
Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967),
a collection of short fiction, journalism, and occasional pieces. He would go
on to write or contribute to the screenplays of Barbarella (1968), Easy
Rider (1969), End
of the Road (1969),
and The Magic Christian(1969). His only other
credited script to make it to the screen, The Telephone (1988), starring Whoopi Goldberg, was
a disaster. By the seventies, alcohol and drug abuse had slowed Southern’s
productivity. He published two more novels, Blue Movie (1970) andTexas Summer (1992), and had a short stint
in the eighties as a writer for Saturday Night Live.
Later, he became a devoted and much-loved teacher of screenwriting at Columbia
University. In 1995, he collapsed on his way to teach a class, and four days
afterward died of respiratory failure.
On the day of our interview—meant to be
the first in a series on the art of screenwriting—we met for lunch at the
Russian Tea Room. The decor, then as now, was Christmas all year round, with
red banquettes, green walls, chandeliers festooned with red Christmas-tree
balls, and so on. Our waitress, a tiny Russian with a coronet of braids and a
name tag that read “Nadia,” took a motherly interest in Southern—a rumpled man,
with a long, beaky nose and a generous mouth—as he squirmed in his seat,
answering questions. Nadia is what I remember best about the lunch, in
particular the way Southern gently put her on (“Do you really think I should
have the borscht, Nadia? If that is your name”), thus deflecting
the spotlight from himself.
After the interview was transcribed, a
copy was given to Southern (according to Paris Review custom) for him to revise as he saw
fit. He never gave it back. Every so often I would ask him, on my own or at the
prompting of George Plimpton, when the interview would be ready. “I’m working
on it,” he would say. “It’s got to be tight and bright.” After a year or two,
Plimpton stopped asking; I continued to question Southern about it but less and
less frequently. When Southern died in 1995, his long-time companion, Gail
Gerber, said to me, as a consolation of sorts, “Well, at least now that interview
can come out.” But the interview—complete with Southern’s clarifications and
emendations—got lost in a pile of papers. It emerged without its title page and
fell into the hands of a Ph.D. student, who mistakenly attributed it to the
biographer Albert Goldman. Since then, short excerpts have appeared, always
under Goldman’s name. Thanks to the steadfast and remedial efforts of
Southern’s son, Nile, the finished text is available here for the first time.
—Maggie
Paley
INTERVIEWER
When and how did you decide to be a
writer?
SOUTHERN
I never “decided” to be a writer. I used
to write a lot, then show it to my friends—one or two of them anyway—with the
idea, more or less, of astonishing or confounding them with the content of the
pages. I knew they had never seen anything like this before—I mean, the
weirdest thing they could possibly have read before was Poe or one of those
little cartoon fuck-books, as they were called, whereas my stuff was much
weirder and more immediate. I used the names of teachers, classmates, et
cetera. These productions were well received by the two or three people—no
girls—who read them, but finally I went too far and alienated one of the
readers, my best friend, by using his sister in a really imaginative piece,
perhaps the best of this period. That slowed me down for a while, in daring,
but finally I learned not to care too much and would write wholly for an
imaginary reader whose tastes were similar to my own.
And this is, of course, is the only way to
work well.
INTERVIEWER
Life magazine claims that you once lived on a barge hauling
rocks from Poughkeepsie to Jones Beach. Is that true?
SOUTHERN
Yes, I lived on a barge. I was captain of
the barge. This is the lowest form of organized labor in the country—except
possibly circus roustabouts—and it comprises winos and layabouts, persons of
such low account they have been kicked out of the longshoreman’s union, and it
pays one dollar per hour. Alex Trocchi got me the post. There was a period when
these positions came into favor with young drug addicts, also persons of
creative bent who needed robot-type jobs—like those people in fire towers,
lighthouses, et cetera—which would not take much time from the real work in
hand. There were few or no duties—just catch the line, actually a big rope,
thrown from the tugboat and put it around the capstan, a stumpy post, and off
you go. Later, release the rope, called “letting go the mainsail” or similar,
and secure to moorings.
George Plimpton can explain barge life to
you, since he used to take young girls out on Trok’s barge and try, as he said,
“to get them.” Suffice it to say that this is a pleasant enough way to spend a
summer, though I wouldn’t really want to be in the position of recommending it.
INTERVIEWER
Was writing movies something you always
wanted to do?
SOUTHERN
Yes, but there was never any possibility
of it. They just weren’t making movies I could have worked on. I did get a
letter one time from Jerry Wald, saying, “I have read your story in Harper’s
Bazaar, and I think you have a very good cinematic quality, would
you be interested in writing for the screen,” and blah blah blah. And then it
went on to say, “Too many serious writers dismiss the potential of the screen
as commercial, however may I point out to you that only recently such
outstanding literary personages as Mr. William Faulkner,” and so on.
I showed this letter to a friend of mine,
Harold Meeske, who said, “Don’t even answer the letter. The thing to do is to
write a screenplay and send it back, like, ‘Am I interested? Dig this!’ ”
I said, “Okay, what’s the story?” and he said, “I’ve got it. This friend of
mine is just coming out of Sing Sing. America’s number-one jewel thief. He’s
getting out Friday, and we’ll write a script based on his adventures. His
name”—well, we’d better leave out his name. He’s making it in Hollywood now, as
a screenwriter.
Anyway, he comes to Harold and Marilyn
Meeske’s. So there was this guy, America’s number-one jewel thief, and he moved
in with them, and I moved in with them, and the four of us worked on this
screenplay, and then we sent it in to Jerry Wald. No response. Nothing. Later I
found out that this letter I’d gotten, although it wasn’t mimeographed, was in
fact a form letter he had sent, you know, to Herbert Gold and Philip
Roth—everybody got one of these letters. That was my first brush with the Film
Capital.
INTERVIEWER
And your next was working in London with
Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove. What was
that like?
SOUTHERN
It was the first time in my life that I’d
gone anywhere with a sense of purpose. I mean, I’d always traveled, I’d made
about ten trips back and forth, but just aimless, with no justification except
having the G.I. Bill and using it as a means to be there. It was the first time
I’d gone anywhere and been paid for it. It was very satisfying, very
interesting, and almost unbelievable to be moving about like that.
Stanley himself is a strange kind of
genius. I’d always had a notion that people in power positions in movies must
be hacks and fools, and it was very impressive to meet someone who wasn’t. He
thinks of himself as a “filmmaker”—his idol is Chaplin—and so he’s down on the
idea of “director.” He would like, and it’s understandable, to have his films
just say, “A Film by Stanley Kubrick.” He tries to cover the whole thing from
beginning to end. Including the designing of the ads. He’s probably the only
American director who works on big-budget pictures who has complete control of
his movies.
INTERVIEWER
Strangelove was originally conceived as a melodrama, not a comedy.
Did you work with Kubrick to restructure the whole thing, or were you able to
just insert the jokes?
SOUTHERN
I knew what he wanted. It was a question
of working together, rewriting each line, and changing the tone.
INTERVIEWER
When you started the project, you’d never written
movie dialogue. You presumably didn’t know anything about how to write a
screenplay.
SOUTHERN
Yes, I knew, because I like movies. And
writing dialogue has always been easy for me.
INTERVIEWER
How much directorial description does a
writer usually put into a screenplay?
SOUTHERN
It depends. If you have a natural
inclination for visualizing, you see it in the way you hope it will be, and you
put that in the script. The petty directors resent that—they think it’s
usurping their prerogative—but the better directors are more open-minded. The
only way I can write is to write it as fully as possible, in as much detail, as
though I were directing it myself and wanted to tell the actor how to do it.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about a movie you’ve
written but somebody else has directed? Do you feel that it’s yours?
SOUTHERN
Oh no, it’s the director’s. As the writer,
you have no power except persuasion. Even a good director resents your
suggestions after a while. He begins to take them too personally. He thinks
he’s being influenced by someone in a lower echelon. Codirecting is good,
because some other guy can carry the ball—in terms of saying, “All right,
action”—and you can still be in there without embarrassing him.
INTERVIEWER
Even as codirector, wouldn’t you need
experience working with actors?
SOUTHERN
I get along very well with actors. They’re
like children. They need to be encouraged and reprimanded enough to know that
you’re interested. You’d think that great actors, like George C. Scott or
Laurence Olivier, would resent direction, but they all depend on it. They’ve
got to have the attention—it’s like dope—but at the same time the attention has
to be convincing, it has to be something that they can acknowledge as real
attention, and they get pretty discriminating, because they get lots of
broadside, blind attention. That’s the thing. If you give them that, you can
enchant them into anything.
INTERVIEWER
What about other things, like camera? Can
you just rely on a cameraman to take care of that?
SOUTHERN
You have to persuade them, too. You say,
What would be interesting from your point of view as a craftsman, an artist?
What would you like to do that you’ve never done, that you haven’t been allowed
to do? Then they set up the shot, and you can look at the thing and actually
see the way it’s going to be, in terms of composition and in terms of movement,
and then you can look ahead and see where the cut will be possible.
I wouldn’t rely on an editor to cut a
movie. He might be a great editor, but still you’ve got to think of it in terms
of your own cuts, just as in writing you would have an abrupt juxtaposition, an
abrupt transition, or an otherwise engaging one or a smooth one. You have to
think of the flow of it.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever considered writing plays?
SOUTHERN
I’ve had to curtail my interest in the
theater, because the limitations are so appalling. I find it too difficult to
rationalize the existence of the whole thing—the unnaturally loud voice to
carry to the gallery, the broad gestures, the clomp-clomp-clomp exits and
entrances, the pretense of the fourth wall. I think if a thing is so weird, so
new, so original that it can’t be done cinematically at the time, like Krapp’s
Last Tape, The Connection, orMarat/Sade, then it’s
justified. I can’t imagine any other reason for not doing it as a movie, unless
you’re going to take advantage of the one thing that doesn’t exist in a movie,
which is a live audience.
You can’t have close-ups in theater, you
can’t have dissolves. A play gets out of the control of the director because it
gets very much into the hands of the actor, and the actor is grooving out there
and can’t be edited. I mean, I dig great moments on the stage, but I think it
should be like that, like Gielgud’s Ages of Man, where he
picks out the cream. Or if you could just have Olivier’s soliloquies. But to
sit through a whole play is like sitting through an entire opera just to hear
one aria.
There’s another aspect of it, which is the
historical moment—like seeing Nureyev doing his grandest grand jeté, or Bird
blowing his ass off—but I think the whole mystique of the theatergoer is really
sick. These first-nighters, they go—to everything. It’s just too romantic.
INTERVIEWER
Some critics seemed to think the movie of The
Loved One, which you wrote for Tony Richardson, strayed too far
from the book. How important is fidelity to the book in a screen adaptation?
SOUTHERN
In the old sense of watering down and
making more palatable by leaving things out—well, of course, that’s terrible.
That should be against the law. But in the case of The
Loved One, or in similar cases, where the intent is to extend,
expand, and deepen and bring up to date, that isn’t a valid criticism.
The Loved One used to be everybody’s favorite book in high school,
but if you read it now, you’ll see that it’s relatively limited. I’m sure that
Evelyn Waugh, if he were a young man writing it now, would write it very
differently. For example, that whole English colony, to which he devotes about
one-third of the book, doesn’t exist any more. You used to have a real group of
people who felt they’d sold out, that Hollywood was an awful place, and they
stuck together, but now the scene itself has become diversified. It’s no longer
the intellectuals versus the old guard. And the English colony has been
assimilated.
INTERVIEWER
What did you think of The
Loved One?
SOUTHERN
I thought it had great moments. By great
moments I mean moments that hadn’t been done cinematically before. As a
totality, it seemed pretty shaky and uneven and eccentric.
INTERVIEWER
Have you any idea why?
SOUTHERN
Well, whatever’s good or bad in a movie is
finally the responsibility of the director, and Richardson wants to depart
completely from whatever he thinks of as the Establishment at any given moment.
He has this antislick notion, for example. At the rushes, he would have three
takes, and he would choose the take where the camera might shake a little, or
light was coming through from the sun or a leak in the camera, because then it
makes it look like something other than a slick Hollywood job. And then he
feels that a movie shouldn’t be advertised or publicized at all, that the
viewers are bound to be disappointed because they’ve been led to expect
something, whereas if they’re led to expect nothing, then they think, Well,
this is a pleasant surprise!
INTERVIEWER
How were the previews of The
Loved One in
Hollywood?
SOUTHERN
Everybody blasted it—I mean on those cards
that they fill out. But these days they don’t judge so much from what a card
says as from how many people fill out the cards. It’s likeThe Sandpiper—everybody
filled out the cards, and said things like, “Liz ought to be horsewhipped!” or
“Burton is a fag!” and so on, but they were all filled out.
Speaking of which, we had a good idea
about how to improve The Sandpiper, John Calley
and I. You open on a penthouse apartment at the Plaza, about eleven in the
morning. Liz is sitting there getting her nails, her hair done, and you hear a
telephone ring in the background and Burton comes out, in pajamas, robe, shades,
terribly hung over—“Listen, Kurt wants to know what we’re going to do about
this picture.”
And she says, “What picture?”
And he takes a big drink and says, “You
know, the one about the bird.”
And she says, “How much money is
involved?”
“A million and a half,” he says.
And she says, “Oh yeah?” and thinks about
it for a minute. “Is that the one set in Big Sur?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And then in Paris?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I do have to go to Paris soon, to
get some clothes . . . Why don’t we do it?”
So the movie starts. And you keep cutting
back to this principal scene with Liz and Burton talking about it. “For God’s
sake,” he’s saying, “why did you get me into this? Don’t you realize I’ve got a
reputation as a serious actor?” Et cetera. And then at the very end you have a
scene where they’re getting on a plane, and they’ve got the money in a
suitcase, and the suitcase opens, and it all blows away. Sort of Sierra
Madre style.
INTERVIEWER
You were very lucky to have started in
movies with Kubrick and Richardson.
SOUTHERN
It couldn’t have happened any other way.
Most directors won’t hire you unless you’ve already done something. Faulkner
and Irwin Shaw and Truman Capote could collaborate on a script, and if they
submitted it cold, the producers would say, Great, there’s a great idea here.
We’ll buy the script. But they wouldn’t think of using those guys to do the
second draft. They think of writers in two categories—there are idea men and
plot men. They think they need a professional screenwriter who knows the
format. They don’t realize that the format is nothing any child couldn’t do,
any child with a visual sense, a visual attitude, and a basic familiarity with
movies.
Most screenwriters I’ve met are the people
least suited to their work, because they have no ear, no notion of human
relationships, no notion of psychology at all. They’re just scuffling in the
dark, they’re searching. They think it’s a good racket to be in, like shingle
salesmen or something—they’ve heard about the pay, and they fast-talk their way
into a job by working in talent agencies, submitting scripts, getting personal
relationships with producers, directors, actors. Finally somebody carries them
in, some actor says, Let’s give Joe here a credit. And then they’re set,
they’ve got a credit and are recognized as writers, but it’s like pulling teeth
each time they put down a word. It’s a laborious, tedious process for them,
because they can’t write. And they’ll work on anything, with absolutely no
regard for material. All they ask is, How much money do I get? They never work
for less than they worked for on the last one. If they do, they’re finished,
it’s downhill all the way.
But these are movies you never hear about
unless you happen to look at the newspaper on the one particular day they open.
They’re potboilers, like The Cincinnati Kid, for
example. There’s one big ad or a small ad, and people are aware of it for about
a week, and then it doesn’t exist anymore, except as a credit. That’s why the
most prominent writers in Hollywood are people you’ve never heard of. People
who write, say, the Doris Day movies. Stanley Shapiro is supposed to be the
highest-paid writer. At last report he was getting $350,000 a whack. He writes
the Doris Day/Rock Hudson/Cary Grant movies, and he gets a producer’s piece of
it, too. They figure he doesn’t miss. All of these pictures are made for one
and gross ten—something like that. He’s got a formula, a very simple formula.
You have this girl, a career girl, swinging, you know. Really a ball-breaker.
She likes the idea of guys wanting to make it with her, but she’s not
interested, and then she meets this one guy who doesn’t seem to want to make it
with her, he’s amused by her, and so she’s going to get him. Finally she does
get him, but instead of becoming a housewife, she continues with her career.
It’s a twist on the old thing where the
guy says, I won’t have my wife working, and puts her in the home and dominates
her, and she’s ready to be dominated. With this formula, the girl is not
dominated—she gets the guy, and she goes on with her career. It’s that simple.
INTERVIEWER
How much does good writing actually matter
in a good screenplay? Lillian Hellman, in an interview, suggested that it might
be practical to try doing screenplays that were nothing more than outlines.
You’d have an outline of where the movie was going, with an ending, but no
dialogue, and it would be improvised as it went along.
SOUTHERN
I’m all for improvisation, but you can
take off from a better base than just an outline. Have the dialogue as good as
you can, and then improvise.
INTERVIEWER
Do actors often add a lot?
SOUTHERN
No. Peter Sellers, for example, is good at
improvisations, but by improvisation I mean making lines believable.
Improving lines, no. When you have a scene, the scene has to go in a certain
direction, because you’ve got all the setups, the locations, and everything.
You can’t change the story. You already know where the scene’s going to go.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you work when you’re in Hollywood?
Do you write in a writers’ building?
SOUTHERN
You get an office. They put your name on
the door, and you get assigned a secretary, even though you have no use for
her. You don’t have to show up.
INTERVIEWER
How much of a studio is there nowadays?
SOUTHERN
The old guard has really been falling
apart since television came in. Picture-making used to be a science, a formula.
Their aim—they tried to get it really neat—was to produce fifty-one pictures a
year, one a week, skipping Christmas week. That was it. They had it figured out
and they knew exactly how much they were going to get on each picture. Now
everything is changed, and they’re no longer sure of what they’re doing. They
seem very much out of place.
INTERVIEWER
Is there any sort of fraternity of writers
now?
SOUTHERN
No. Studios don’t have contracts with
writers anymore, there aren’t any studio writers, so there’s no way they would
know each other. Writers out there are hit-and-run people, very transient, one
studio one day, another studio the next. There’s no occasion for anything to
develop between them.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve lived in Paris, London, New
York—how does Hollywood compare?
SOUTHERN
Those three cities seem to me equally
different, and I wouldn’t be inclined to compare them, with each other or with
Hollywood. Hollywood, that is to say, Los Angeles, is not, of course, a city,
and its sinister forces are very oblique. There’s no public transportation
system whatever, so the people drive around as though they were living in Des
Moines, and it has all the rest of the disadvantages of a small town, only
filled with displaced persons. On the other hand, life there has an engaging
surrealist quality, an almost exciting grotesqueness.
The cultural scene there in general is
sped up, sort of concentrated. Southern California is a mecca for all manner of
freakishness, beginning on the most middle-class level—hot-dog stands in the
shape of a hot dog. If you go there, you’ll immediately see a carnival,
Disneyland aspect that is different from any other place in America.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a noticeably large proportion of
beautiful girls there?
SOUTHERN
There are a lot of beautiful girls there
because, well, girls who want to be writers come to the Village and girls who
want to be actresses go to Hollywood. And not necessarily to be writers or to
be actresses, but to be identified with that scene, that action. So you see
unusually attractive waitresses, and girls sort of spilled over from the
casting office.
INTERVIEWER
How does the casting office function?
SOUTHERN
The casting office is interesting. Each of
the studios has a big door saying casting. Girls arrive from Des Moines and go
to one of the studios and ask, Where’s the casting office?
“Over there, go in that door.”
They go in, and they think it’s like a
personnel department in a department store. They think they’re applying for
something, and they fill out a form and they give in their photographs, and
these things are put in a file cabinet, and that’s it. In the history of cinema
there’s never been a case of anyone being hired to work in pictures through the
casting office. The people who work in the casting office have no connection
with the industry. Quite Kafkaesque.
INTERVIEWER
You mean the casting office is just there
to satisfy the girls?
SOUTHERN
Mainly it’s something they can point out
on the bus tour. All the studios now are aiming at these tours. They charge two
fifty, and they sell things. They sell film clips, Technicolor, 35mm, about
four pieces of film—they’re transparencies, and they’re perforated, and it
looks as though they’re cut out of a negative, which is what they’re trying to
simulate, but actually there are, say, four frames from different parts of
different reels, put together and printed again. They sell these for two dollars
or so, and various other souvenirs. At Universal, they claim now that their
income from the tours pays the overhead of the studio.
In the beginning, they were authentic.
They would take the tourists around to a set and say, “Quiet now, everyone,
they’re shooting,” but people would talk and ruin the shot, so the directors
and producers were flipping. Finally, Universal set up a thing, up on top of a
hill—a corral, with barns and horses and about six guys, a director and an
assistant director, and a camera with no film in it. The bus pulls up, and when
it’s at a distance of twenty-five yards or so, the guide says, “Say, we’re
really in luck! I think they’re about to shoot a scene.” And sure enough,
that’s what they do—but it’s all fake.
The interesting thing is that these people
on the fake set, since they’re not working in movies, are not even in the
union. They’re paid something like two dollars an hour. Except for two guys who
are stunt men. The tours happen every forty-five minutes, and it’s the same thing
each time. First they stage a fistfight, one of them knocks the other down and
gets on a horse, then the other recovers and shoots the first one as he’s
riding away, and he falls off the horse. And of course they have this guy
acting as the director, for two dollars an hour, not even connected in any way
with the movies, and everybody else is just standing around, a fake makeup girl
and a fake script girl—the whole thing.
INTERVIEWER
What happens to those girls, those
aspiring starlets? Do they sit around in Schwab’s drugstore, or the Brown
Derby, or whatever?
SOUTHERN
In the beginning, they come to Hollywood,
presumably, with the idea of the action. Then they find out that you can’t even
get into any of these buildings without an agent, that there’s no possibility
of getting in, that even a lot of the agents can’t get in. Meanwhile a
substitute life begins, and they get into the social scene, you know. They’re
working as parking attendants, waitresses, doing arbitrary jobs . . .
INTERVIEWER
Hoping that somebody will see them?
SOUTHERN
Finally they forget about that, but
they’re still making the scene. They continue to have some vague peripheral
identification with films—like they go to a lot of movies, and they talk about
movies and about people they’ve seen on the street, and they read the gossip
columns and the movie magazines, but you get the feeling it’s without any real
aspiration any longer. It’s the sort of vicariousness a polio person might feel
for rodeo.
INTERVIEWER
Was there ever any attempt to put you
through the publicity-department mill?
SOUTHERN
Well, they sort of gave up on me. It’s
very difficult for me to say no, but it’s not too difficult not to show. They
couldn’t understand that. They’d make an appointment with one of the trade
papers that they consider really important, hot stuff—and then somebody not
even showing up? Shocking! That happened a few times, and then I guess they
gave up.
INTERVIEWER
Is working on a screenplay different from
writing a book?
SOUTHERN
Well, to begin with, you’re usually
working against a deadline—the standard thing for a screenplay job is ten
weeks. And first they want to see an outline.
INTERVIEWER
Do they require you to stick to it once
you do it?
SOUTHERN
No, no. It’s just a practice that exists.
I suppose it has advantages from a producer’s point of view, because a producer
can read a ten-page outline and get some kind of feeling for the beginning,
middle, and end. It used to be that writers would submit outlines, cold, on speculation,
and then, on the basis of an outline, would get a commission to do a fifty-page
treatment, and if the treatment was accepted, a commission to do a first draft,
and so on. Now the treatment is generally bypassed, although you do see them
lying around offices.
INTERVIEWER
Would you rather do adaptations or
originals?
SOUTHERN
You can’t set out to do something really
original in films. People who say, Let’s do something original, and mean it,
have no money to do it with. The ones who have the money say, Let’s do this,
with this beginning and this end and these characters. That means you’re
working within a framework. If you tried to do an “original” you wouldn’t
accept those limitations—it would be like a novel.
When you write a novel or a story, you
don’t know where it’s going, and you don’t do it for money, and you don’t do it
because someone says, We’ll print it if you do it, and we’ll pay for it. You
may do it out of some weird principle, or when you get a surge of some
inexplicable feeling, or the way certain people just fall into a habit of
getting up, having breakfast, and then starting to write. But you do it because
it’s a kick, and so there’s no telling where it will go.
INTERVIEWER
Then you don’t see movies as a substitute
for writing fiction?
SOUTHERN
You want to make a comparison between
writing a novel and writing a screenplay, but I don’t think there is any at
all. As a medium, movies are obviously superior, in the sense that the
strongest perceptions are sight and sound, but unless you’re the producer or
director you have no control over the final product. In a novel, you do. An
editor or publisher can try to persuade you, but you can always say, I won’t
make those changes. So on the one hand you have control when you’re writing
prose, and on the other hand the cinema is really the greater medium, if only
you could use it the way you wanted to.
INTERVIEWER
Even if you were the producer-director, if
you were making a so-called commercial film, I wonder whether you could match
what you do in writing.
SOUTHERN
The only excuse for writing a novel these
days is if it can’t be done as a movie. And there are limitations in
movies—not just inherent limitations, but limitations in practice. It’s very
difficult to do interior monologues and first-person narratives, for instance.
In a book you can have italics, or you can say, “ ‘Au
revoir,’ he said, comma, thinking, ‘Forget it,’ ” whereas
in a movie, what are you going to do? Put it through an echo chamber, or have a
close-up to show that, even though his lips aren’t moving, there’s dialogue, so
“forget it” must be what he’s thinking? Audiences are simply so unfamiliar with
that, the very fact of it would put them off.
It’s like using four-letter words—in a
novel they don’t distract the reader, but if you have a four-letter word in a
movie, suddenly everyone thinks, Did you hear that? and they lose the thread of
what’s happening. Longshoremen don’t talk the way they talked in On
the Waterfront, but if you had a realistic conversation, the
audience—not to mention the police—would be upset and distracted.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever feel hampered by the pressure
of deadlines on a script, or by having a plot already established before you
start?
SOUTHERN
With a screenplay, you’ve got to deliver,
because at some point the producers make other arrangements. They’ve rented a
sound stage, and they’ve hired actors, and so they’ve got to begin on a certain
date and finish on a certain date because these actors have other commitments.
So they’re going to start shooting, whether it’s your script or not. With a
novel, you never have pressure. I mean, who cares? There’s no money involved.
What if they’ve given you two thousand dollars? They’re not panicked about
that—you can put it off, and put it off, and put it off. They put some weird
pressure on you, they try to make you feel bad, saying, Well, it’s a shame
you’re not going to make the spring list, ha-ha. With a movie it’s, Man, you’re
hanging us up! Everybody’s standing around, waiting for the script.
So you feel a fantastic motivation, and
it’s not commercial, even though you may have taken the thing on for commercial
reasons. Because finally there’s this moment when all these people are just
waiting.
INTERVIEWER
So the pressure is good for you?
SOUTHERN
Yes, assuming that it’s a good situation,
where you dig the people and have some kind of a rapport.
INTERVIEWER
When you write a movie, do you write with
particular actors in mind, and does that help or hinder you?
SOUTHERN
That helps a great deal. You’re given
Marlon Brando, and you can already think of him saying a certain line. In a
book you have to create the character. Sometimes a character is more inflexible
than an actor, because an actor has a range. You can imagine Marlon Brando
saying almost anything. Whereas if you create a character, there he is, and you
think of him in a certain way—there are things he cannot say, things he might
say, things he’ll probably say—it’s different.
INTERVIEWER
Your really serious writing—in the sense
that it’s noncomic—is in your short stories. Is that by design?
SOUTHERN
That’s just the way it’s worked out. I
have a lot of longer noncomic things, too. I have this novel called The
Hipsters, of which I’ve written about three hundred pages, which is
a full-on Jean-Christophe. The idea
was to take the development of a man—I mean, beginning in childhood. It’s
introspective, in a completely different tone. Very conventional, very simple.
I don’t know whether I’ll get back to that. It doesn’t really interest me much
any more.
INTERVIEWER
You used to be identified with the Village
hipster scene. How do you feel about that now? Are you still attached to it?
SOUTHERN
No. Those scenes change—like in Paris, the
way it kept switching, from St. Germain to Montmartre to Montparnasse. As soon
as they’re invaded by tourists, the prices go up, it’s impossible to get cheap
places to live, and the people who know what’s happening all move out. Then
what you have left is a kind of deliberate bohemianism. It seems to me that’s
happened in the Village. You’ve got to have cheap rents, places that are
completely undeveloped, like lofts, before a real scene can emerge. Artists
have to have a place to live, cheaply. Now it’s the Lower East Side.
INTERVIEWER
What’s your favorite piece of work that
you’ve ever done?
SOUTHERN
I’ve never thought of it like that. I love
to reread stuff, and occasionally I read something and think, My God, did I
write that? Some of my favorites appeared in The Realist. Then there’s
some stuff in Candy that I like. Or maybe letters, some
letters, never published, and unpublishable, I suppose.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you sometimes sign your letters
with girls’ names?
SOUTHERN
Because the letters are chatty. And
obscene. Signing “Cynthia” or “Paula” after a lot of obscenity makes a curious
juxtaposition. Letter writing is the best writing of all, because it’s the
purest. It’s like writing to yourself, but you’ve got an excuse to do it
because this other person will dig it. And you can transmit information in a
strange way, you can sort of mix things up, so they wonder, Well, is this true?
You say something outlandish, and then you throw in, “John and Mary just ran
away to Hawaii,” and they think ha-ha-ha, but in fact it’s true.
I don’t know why, but I always feel a kind
of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive
or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we
can’t print that. I mean, even The Realist has turned down stuff of mine. I’ve
got a piece there now that they turned down a couple years ago. It’s about
Frank O’Hara, and it’s very weird—not obscene, but it violates a lot of taboos.
That’s the whole history of writing, really, trying to emancipate images and
language. It’s not just a question of four-letter words—you can get away with
that—but of attitude. Great writers like Céline and Henry Miller, they affect
attitudes, weird attitudes. Like Miller, dancing with a girl, and moving her up
against a doorknob. He isn’t really like that, of course. I mean hedoesn’t
do that—he simply felt compelled to have a first-person narrator who could say,
Yeah, got that doorknob up her cunt, because you couldn’t print it, and he felt
you’ve got to be able to print it, even though it’s disgusting.
He’s really quite finicky. He’s no Greg
Corso.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe he was thirty years ago.
SOUTHERN
I don’t think so. The beauty of it is, he
created a first-person narrator and made it very believable. What J. D.
Salinger did, taking a thirteen-year-old, pre-sex kid and making him believable
as a first-person narrator is relatively easy. But when you’ve got a Lucky
Jim-age person, or Henry Miller, then it begins to get dicey,
because you’ve got this sexual thing to deal with. The whole trick is
frankness, candor, directness—and when grown men start being candid and frank
and direct about sex, how far are you going to take it? Well, Miller tried to
take it as far as he could. But this wasn’t self-expression—he had an
obsessive interest in the development of literature, in the idea of being able
to go farther than D. H. Lawrence.
In Candy, I wanted to do
something that hadn’t been done, to go a little farther, but on a different
level—to make it funny rather than disgusting. It’s like a painter looking at a
canvas, and he sees there’s something missing in a certain area, and so he
tries to put it in. No one’s ever written a novel about the relationship
between a girl and her father, for example. I mean, from the girl’s point of
view. Someone like Susan Sontag should devote herself to that.
INTERVIEWER
What about pornography on the screen,
which is in one way the theme of your novel,Blue
Movie? Would that be a next step?
SOUTHERN
Of the things that thrive unjustifiably,
very salient among them are the clandestine—things that are taboo thrive,
almost by definition. These dirty movies are so bad, and so expensive, because
they’re taboo. If you allowed them to be played freely, it would be much easier
to make better ones than exist now, because the bad ones simply couldn’t
survive. And then, when they got better, they wouldn’t be called
pornographic—they’d just either be good or bad. And then you might say, Well,
this is stimulating, or, This is erotic, but there’s no law against eroticism.
It’s stock-in-trade for all filmmakers.
INTERVIEWER
If filmmakers had that freedom, do you
think a movie would have to include eroticism to be considered good?
SOUTHERN
I’ve never seen a good erotic movie, so I
really don’t know. That’s the exploration ofBlue
Movie. The idea is to find out at what point the erotic would
become too much, aesthetically—in the view of the creator, not in the view of
the audience.
For instance, in Les
Amants, the Louis Malle film, there’s that scene where the lovers
are in bed—what we call a “tight two-shot”—nude, from the waist up. He’s on top
of her, and his head goes down, between her breasts, and horizontally out of
the frame. It’s supposed to be very erotic, but I just felt a kind of
mischievousness on the part of the director. On the other hand, I was wondering
what would happen if, instead of letting his head go out of the frame, the
camera followed his head. How far would that go before it was, I don’t know,
embarrassing?
There may be something so personal or
intimate about lovemaking that it’s impossible to do that successfully. In a
novel you can leave just enough to the mind’s eye that the reader will
construct a very personal image. In a movie, I don’t know. If you do it merely
“suggestively,” it’s a cop-out.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about the sudden
popularity of black humor as a genre, something you were doing a long time ago?
SOUTHERN
It’s a sign of the times, isn’t it? Old
values are crumbling.
INTERVIEWER
How does it feel, after years of being a
so-called underground figure, to have “made it?” Are you afraid at all that
money and fame will change your outlook? In other words, will success spoil
Terry Southern?
SOUTHERN
Any feelings of success I may have
experienced came much earlier—in the form of whatever readership I have had in The
Realist, in certain literary magazines, and among friends whose
reactions I valued. These few readers, and not the general public, are what
give meaning to a work. In fact, it is almost axiomatic—the wider the
acceptance of a work, the weaker its quality is bound to be.
As for my outlook, I would certainly
welcome a change there, because it is basically one of discomfort. I’m afraid,
however, that God would have to show his hand, in some way more dramatic than
fame and fortune, before that could happen.
INTERVIEWER
But now you are selling a lot of books, Life magazine writes about you . . .
SOUTHERN
The important thing is to keep in touch
with the youth of whatever culture you’re in. When you lose them, you can
forget it. When they’re no longer surprised or astonished or engaged by what
you say, the ball game is over. If they find it repulsive, or outlandish and
disgusting, that’s all right, or if they love it, that’s all right, but if they
just shrug it off, it’s time to retire. Or rather, you can still write for a
living if you want to, but it’s suicidal if you have any relationship to the
work other than that.
INTERVIEWER
People seem to like the idea of putting
you down, now that you’ve “made it.” It probably happens to everybody, but you
hear them say, Terry Southern, isn’t he a junkie? or, Isn’t he a faggot? or a
God knows what, but I wonder if it’s . . .
SOUTHERN
If it’s true? A junkie fag! A spade junkie
commie fag!
New York writers are very suspicious of
people who spend any time in Los Angeles. Most of them don’t get invited, and
they’re sort of hurt and confused by it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it more difficult to attack
now? If, after all, attacking comes from feeling angry?
SOUTHERN
I’m not interested in attacking, I’m
interested in astonishing. Lenny Bruce was one of the great astonishers, and he
was a very gentle, mild person. He didn’t lead any protest marches or
anything—what was funny to him was the irony of the smugness and so on, and he
deflated it, because it’s funny to see it deflated. Of course he was very
conscious of injustices and absurdities, like any sensitive person, and that
came out as an attack, but it wasn’t his motivation.
It’s different in Europe, where there is,
or used to be, a very definite notion of class conflict. You can set about
illustrating a theme in a more conscious way. Sartre writes that way. He’ll
pick out a subject, like religious hypocrisy, and he’ll write a play to flesh
it out. I think Mailer writes like that. I have never approached writing that
way.
Say I were to witness a scene, some sort
of fracas between a headwaiter and a Negro. There would be something grotesque,
something ironic about it, and the engaging thing in writing about it would be
the grotesqueness, the irony. It wouldn’t be because I thought, This is a
terrible social injustice that should be dramatized and brought to the attention
of the public.
INTERVIEWER
What movie would you make if you could
make any movie?
SOUTHERN
Naked Lunch and A Clockwork Orange.
INTERVIEWER
What about underground movies, do you
think they’re doing something good? If you had the opportunity, would you make
them?
SOUTHERN
There are any number of things that are
inherently cinematic and dramatic and that haven’t yet been fully realized or
exploited. Rather than go to the underground, or the so-called expanded cinema,
I think these things can be done under existing conditions. It’s no good if the
audience just thinks, Oh yeah, this is very curious, very interesting. I’d be
more inclined to work under the prevailing mechanics of moviemaking, using
other people’s money.
INTERVIEWER
You talk about exploring and experimenting
under prevailing conditions. If the studios are in control, will they let that
happen?
SOUTHERN
They’re relenting all the time, because
they’re losing ground. Television is the thing, you see—its existence puts movies
in a position of having to do something different. In five years television
screens will be half the size of a movie screen, they’ll occupy a whole wall.
And people will just sit there. They’re not going to leave the house except to
see something groovy, something that they can’t see at home.
The great future, not for creative
writers, but for professional writers, is in television, because pay television
is going to come in, and that will take the place of the art movies that exist
now, and ordinary television will take the place of what now exists in movies.
In twenty years, the movies that compete with TV and pay TV will have to be
pretty far out. Otherwise people will simply hang with the tube.
INTERVIEWER
If you weren’t a writer and could choose
any job, profession, or career, what would you do and why?
SOUTHERN
If I were not a writer I would prefer
being a psychiatrist-gynecologist. I’m not sure this exists—like eye, ear,
nose, and throat specialist—but I personally think it is a winning combo and would
like to give it a whirl.
INTERVIEWER
If you were given enough money so that you
didn’t have to work or make any commitments and could do whatever you wanted,
where would you live and what would you do?
SOUTHERN
First I would engage a huge but clever and
snakelike “Blowing Machine,” and I would have it loaded with one ton of dog
hair each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It would be brought up East
Seventy-second Street to the very end, where it would poise itself outside
George Plimpton’s house like a great dragon. Then, exactly when Katherine the
Char had finished one room, the powerful, darting snout of the machine would
rise up to the third floor windows and send a terrific blast of dog hair into
the room—a quarter ton per room. I would observe her reaction—I have friends
opposite—with a spyglass, room by room. The entire place would be foot-deep in
dog hair, most of which however has not yet settled and has the effect of an
Arctic blizzard. Then I would drop in—casually, not really noticing her hysteria,
or that anything at all was wrong, just sort of complaining in a vague way,
occasionally brushing at my sleeve, et cetera, speaking with a kind of weary
petulance: “Really, Katherine, I do think you might be more . . . uh,
well, I mean to say . . .” voice trailing away, attention caught by something
else, a picture on the wall: “I say, that is an amusing print—is it new?”
fixing her with a deeply searching look, so there could be no doubt at all as
to my interest in the print. If this didn’t snap her mind I would give her
several hundred thousand dollars—all in pennies. “Mr. Plimpton asked me to give
you this, Katherine—each coin represents the dark seed of his desire for you.”
]
The Paris Review No. 200, Spring 2012
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6126/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-3-terry-southern
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