sandbox pauline kael and 70s lookback book club thread

Pauline? Paulette? Frenchette? Let's just dance.

http://cotradeco.com/images/vendors/freshette/layout/freshette-brand-masthead.jpg

(xp)because I miss the real PK thread, finished the Wolcott memoir last week and am now reading the Will Hermes book with the Mark Alan Stamaty cover

What did you think of Wolcott, James? I really didn't like it much for a variety of reasons.

Elsewhere, Greil goes off (skip down to a couple of Kael-Wolcott questions towards the end):

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/greil-marcus-on-why-the-doors-still-matter/249697/

Pretty sure that Marcus has influenced me more than any music writer ever. But the idea that Kellow's book is a "hatchet job" completely, totally mystifies me.

I'm up to Altman's Nashville in the bio, and I definitely agree with Marcus that Kellow offers way too much opinion on things as fact. I'm totally love him including the opinions of her peers, but I don't really need the features editor of Opera Times telling me that Pauline Kael really went too far in this review and really knew what she was talking about in that one. As much as the book is underscoring how much her second-person rapture could be, his "but she was wrong" shit is far more artless and grating.

The biographical details are really interesting to me, but if I was a pal of hers who knew most of that stuff, I'd think Kellow's work was worthless, too.

Should be I totally love him including the opinions of her peers

and this is croup, if there's any doubt

Then--no offense--I've got to take your agreement with a large grain of salt...I haven't set up the final details, but I'm supposed to interview Kellow within the next few days. I was counting on using the ILX Kael thread as a great place to mine for stuff to talk about, but unfortunately it looks like I won't be able to access it.

actually, dude, if you're telling me that who I am inherently nullifies my problem with the book, you can stick that "no offense" up your ass.

Charming--thanks.

hey, i'm not stopping you from engaging with critiques of the book rather than dismissing them without any thought whatsoever.

1) The idea that I've dismissed them "without any thought whatsoever" is pretty odd; between the bio, reviews of the bio, the ILX thread, Wolcott's book, and a obsession with Kael that goes back 30 years, it seems like I've been thinking about nothing but Kael the past two months (well, Newt too);

2) I'd explain the difference between taking something with a grain of salt and nullifying something out of existence for you, but I'm sure you can figure that out for yourself.

Proceed apace.

I'm talking about the book, not Kael. You said you were mystified by Marcus calling the book a "hatchet job" while ignoring the more in-depth description of his problem with it that followed. I concurred with his complaint (again describing the reason), and you responded that because I'm who I am my opinion is clouded. If you've already explained before why you think Kellow interrupting the story to pronounce whether Kael was right and wrong about a movie/performance/etc are dandy, I apologize.

I have no problem at all with raising a few specific complaints about the book--I have a few myself. A few specific complaints do not equal a hatchet job. A hatchet job is something entirely different.

he's a friend who thinks her biography is full of unwarranted, unnecessary pronouncements about the quality and ethics of her work, and ignores a lot of positive things about her. does that demystify things a bit for you?

like if you want to play semantics on the phrase "hatchet job," fine. But it's not like he just said it and huffed.

You really are a piece of work. It's been a sincere sensation.

I couldn't recommend the book to anyone who wasn't already familiar with her work - hate to think of anyone being introduced to her work by Kellow's annotated pull quotes - but I'm grateful someone bothered to make the thing, even its hard to believe he's not actually one of the umpteen scribes who never got over that rude thing she said to them once.

Good--if you're civil, I'll engage.

Of course I'd want someone to begin with Kael's own books--that's a given. So I agree that the bio is for someone already familiar with her work; surely that's true of any writer-biography, that you begin with the work itself.

The pull quotes did not bother me. (They also bothered M. Coleman on the ILX thread.) As I posted there, the pull-quotes amounted to a parallel story for me, a great overview, month by month, of that amazing period for American movies. And I can appreciate something I saw Kellow explain in a television interview; that Kael was always very guarded about her personal life, and that past a certain point, there isn't a lot of biography out there beyond the reviews themselves. I mean, I don't know--he doesn't seem like a lazy writer to me, that there was all this stuff that he just couldn't be bothered tracking down, and this would also jibe with Kael's famous line that she never felt she needed to write her memoirs because she already had (in her reviews).

In all honesty--maybe I was enjoying the book too much to notice--I never felt like he was psycho-analyzing her, or passing judgement on her about ethical matters. I know he addressed some things on the second count, but it felt more to me like they were presented in a kind of "For some people..." voice. It never felt like anything close to a harsh book to me; neither did it seem fawning. I thought it struck a reasonable balance.

Civility's earned, dude. Someone should have told you by now that tacking "no offense" to a dickish statement just makes it more offensive.

Example of what I'm talking about on the page I'm bookmarked at.

All of this was unquestionably sincere. But it was too much - Pauline was all but turning Peckinpah into a Christlike figure in the pages of The New Yorker. If Pauline admired the "craziness" in artists, Peckinpah gave it to here in spades. She failed to see that her idolatry of him was a kind of romanticism, that perhaps the executives who tried to keep him on track during the making of a film might possibly have a legitimate point of view as well.

It's a totally gratuitous paragraph, especially considering after the next excerpt he mentions gossip that Peckinpah and Kael were sleeping together. I sympathize with the fact that it must be tough to write about a middle-aged movie reviewer, but maybe he should have written a shorter book, if the alternative was a pointed travelogue.

To quote George Costanza, all right, we're taking it up a notch!

1) Pretty sure you've said yourself on the big Kael thread that you're not the most objective arbiter when it comes to criticism of her--can't access that thread right now, but when it's available again, if I'm wrong about this I'll come back and say so. Until then, to say that I'd want to take your agreement with Marcus with a grain of salt--I didn't need to say "large" on second thought--hardly seems especially aggressive.

2) Suggestion: go easy on "dickish," "up your ass," etc. It's infantile.

3) Having dealt with you on the Kael thread--will never forget when you asked me if I'd even read "Circles and Squares," possibly the single most off-the-mark question I've ever been asked on here--the idea that I'd want to "earn" your civility is pretty funny. I usually take civility as a given, but you remind me that it really exists on a case-by-case basis.

As far as the Peckinpah quote goes, I think you're half right. The first part, I don't care for. The second half--"perhaps the executives who tried to keep him on track during the making of a film might possibly have a legitimate point of view as well"--I think that's more than fair.

the Kellow biography is a hack job, btw.

His approach is "She wrote this Carrie review, and this Bergman review, and some people said this, and she was surprised/hurt by the response." I understand that he would've had no bio to write if he'd just stuck to the insight the rest of us realized long ago: her "real life" paled before her artistic one. But because he's got 300 pages to fill his reductive parallels between her approach and her treatment of, say, Gina looks really specious.

I guess I just read a different book. I like Steven Rubio's short review--a long-distance friend with whom I've shared a fair amount of back-and-forth on Kael.

http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2011/10/pauline-kael-a-life-in-the-dark.html

the insight the rest of us realized long ago: her "real life" paled before her artistic one

Not sure how or when you came to realize this; before Kellow's book I knew very little of her real life.

Let's put it this way: so little of her public life had bubbled to the surface before this book that its reticence about what she did came as a relief. In other words, I'm glad the most complex part of her life consisted of her reviews.

OK, I know I've harassed you guys to answer this question before, but would any of you recommend any particular book of hers as an introduction to her critiques?

By the way, all that sniping above, that's just our interpretive dance of Mitt and Newt tonight.

For me, it's easily Reeling at the top, although I think that's where non- (or lapsed) fans think the hyperbolic part of her took over. I love Deeper into Movies and When the Lights Go Down almost as much. Those are the books where you get to read her on Nashville and The Godfather and Jaws (and Loving, and Made for Each for Other, and Short Eyes, and other things less celebrated today). My only subjective red-flag about the '80s books is that I'm just not, for the most part, as interested in the films she's writing about. If you are, that won't be a problem.

Renata Adler says stick with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I Lost It at the Movies.

Suggestion: go easy on "dickish," "up your ass," etc. It's infantile.

"Gentlemen! You can't swear in here! This is the Pauline Kael thread!"

I Lost It At The Movies is her earliest and most argumentative stuff, so it has a special value. And as Clem says, the '70s books are her most euphoric and the '80s books get a little more workmanlike. If you've got access to all the books, thanks to a college library or whatever, I'd say just start with whatever book has the most movies you care about in it. And the For Keeps collection still makes a good primer, especially if you don't plan on going whole hog through her entire career.

The bio's had me fantasizing about how different her career would have been if instead of William Shawn, there was Twitter.

@realgingerrogers Your agent was right.

NO NO NO NO RT @raltman talking western with redford. RIO BRAVO!

greil's beef w/kellow is unclear. a life in the dark falls somewhere between hagiography and hatchet job IMO

doesn't your second sentence answer your first sentence

please to hear more about james redd and clemenza's reactions to lucking out.

can't decide if i want to read will hermes' book. is there a unifying narrative or thread? the NYT review made it seem kinda scattered, a hodgepodge or "random" as the kids like to say these days

Posting what Marcus said after "hatchet job," cause it seems pretty fleshed out.

I thought it went into areas where a biographer has no business going, which is to say where he was continually judging a writer’s motives and deciding for himself when a writer went too far, said things she shouldn’t have said, crossed imaginary critical boundaries, behaved unethically. If you want to write a polemic, go right ahead. But when you write a biography, where you’re supposed to tell someone else’s story, then that stuff seemed totally out of place to me. And it also seemed that the book was either totally tone-deaf or woefully ignoring all kinds of things that might have made her look better. One can sometimes sense an author getting fed-up with his subject. I imagine Brian Kellow began the book with great empathy and fascination with Pauline Kael, but the deeper he got into his research, the less he liked her or maybe the less he approved of her. That’s the feeling I got reading the book. What begins with affection or fascination turns into animus. You have these incidents where, for instance, where Andrew Sarris can write the most viscous and vile personal attack on Pauline somewhere around 1979 and it virtually goes unmentioned in the book. And so many things of critical importance in terms of her writing and career go unmentioned. And I don’t think he understands Pauline as a writer, as a prose stylist, with an incredible sense of humor and her ability to get that on the page. I don’t think he understands her or cares about her as a writer and her sense of adventure, a sense of getting something right, and to take something small and write social criticism as vivid and pointed and original as anyone was doing in the 1950s, which was so shocking reading her first book, I Lost It at the Movies, the really early pieces. You’ve got a fully formed writer who just can’t wait to get out there and start mixing it up. Who wants to say everything at once and is able to do it. There’s no sense of that in his book. So now you’re going to say, “What do you really think?”

Wolcott's portrait of Kael in his memoir is indelible, and far from condescending.

As for her books, get your hands on For Keeps if you can, followed by one of the seventies volumes and Hooked.

marcus puts limits on the practice of biography that are absurd and possibly self-serving if you consider:

where he was continually judging a writer’s motives and deciding for himself when a writer went too far, said things she shouldn’t have said, crossed imaginary critical boundaries, behaved unethically.

marcus and kael do this constantly in their criticism. so biographers can't express opinions on their subjects? i didn't think kellow's book was all that but greil is in full high dudgeon knuckle-rapping mode here

leave criticism to the real critics, son

except he said If you want to write a polemic, go right ahead. But when you write a biography, where you’re supposed to tell someone else’s story, then that stuff seemed totally out of place to me.

obv is kellow had something interesting to say, he'd be forgiven, but the guy basically just adds "unfortunately, she overrated the performance" or "but she went too far" after an excerpt.

if kellow

yeah i thought that stuff was boring too but it doesn't invalidate the work as biography

obv is kellow had something interesting to sayagreed with greil marcus, he'd be forgiven,

do you still think marcus' beef is unclear, though? whether you think it "invalidates the work as biography" or not, it certainly doesn't help a biography to have the features editor of Opera Times interrupting the story to let us know when he thinks Pauline Kael was right or not.

xpost ok didn't you just say that shit was boring?

when the focus of the biography is the written work having the editor of a piece weigh in isn't an interruption

^isn't necessarily. for the record, i thought kellow's focus on pauline-the-critic rather than pauline-the-person was the book's tragic flaw

hey, if he quoted william shawn i'd have loved it!

Two additional thoughts to last night (I'm an old guy--it takes me a while sometimes):

1) "And this is croup, if there's any doubt"--aren't you essentially saying the same thing I pointed out there, the thing you took such objection to coming from me: my opinions on Kael are well established, so take this as you wish. I don't see what else you could have meant by feeling the need to make it clear who you were.

2) "Like if you want to play semantics on the phrase 'hatchet job,' fine." Calling something a "hatchet job" is just a semantic technicality to you? A hatchet job is pretty much the worst thing a book can be. It's like saying, "If you want to play semantics on the phrase 'serial rapist,' fine."

Your Dr. Strangelove analogy is funny, and I've used the exact same line when someone (i.e., Alfred) gets angry at me for talking crass politics in the political thread. So theoretically, you're right. As a practical matter--whether such behaviour actually makes anyone feel like sticking around and hashing through a disagreement with you--you're dead wrong. (At least for me, so as not to lapse into a Kael "you" generality.)

Deli Llama: I didn't like the Wolcott book for the most basic reason of all--I don't like how he writes. I found him so annoyingly un-Kael like, in how he couches everything up in fanciful, writerly bits of business. I didn't really believe this implicit idea running through the book, either, that he was this innocent observing all these other people jostling for position on the New York food chain. Just a personal, gut reaction, but he struck me as exactly the kind of status-climber he purported to recoil from. (It's been years since I read it, but it reminded of Norman Podhoretz's Making It that way--which I recall as being more open about that sort of thing.) He doesn't condescend to Kael, no, not at all, and I did like the last couple of pages with them in a cab the night of Lennon's assassination. Elsewhere, she seemed more like a presence to me than a flesh-and-blood person...not sure if I'm saying that right; I found his portrayal of her odd.

I agree that Wolcott's metaphor-to-referent ratio gets exhausting. However almost every memoirist I've read can't resist dropping names and reveling in the company he keeps (the last Edmund White memoir is practically a who's-who of the seventies NYROB crowd). One of the exceptions is Henry Adams, obsessed with his "failure."

there are people who think wolcott derived his prose style from kael's

including, as per that atlantic interview, greil marcus. just sayin

i've always enjoyed wolcott's writing but allow that high-octane magazine prose can be hard to take over the course of a book

it's a thin line between callow status-climber and ambitious young person

there are people who think wolcott derived his prose style from kael's

Kael is accused and praised for prizing "sensation"; I'd say Wolcott more fully deserves the accusation/praise.

The one thing about Wolcott's book that mystified me--and I didn't start reading the Voice till '79, so I either never read him there, or have no recollection of doing so now--is I don't know why Kael took to his writing the way she did. If he's imitating her, I'm missing it--they seem like such polar opposites to me (she's a laser beam, he's forever losing the plot in search of clever turns of phrases). Maybe the imitation is more obvious if you go back to the Voice pieces. If his style in Lucking Out could be turned into a film, I envision some kind of whimsical concoction she'd recoil from.

Lengthy double-review of Kael--the first by one those umpteen scribes who never got over that rude thing she said to them once.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/13545504616/citizen-kael-part-i

it's a thin line between callow status-climber and ambitious young person

My favourite Persuaders song ever.

Why did Schickel discuss (at length!) Kael's hanging out with other directors -- even in the cutting room floor -- only to write "But, as I’ve said, I don’t care much about this point"? Oh, I see: so he can write: "Or maybe she just liked people who paid her court."

Man I hope my peers are still bothering to piss on my grave ten years after my death

(I myself did something similar when, in 1986, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in television production, though without the glamorous support she enjoyed.)

That was kind of fun to read in the sense that it was pure "Kael as Stalin" rather than "Kael as Marilyn Monroe meets Stalin"

Writers, politicians, and lots of people get raked over the coals long after their deaths. With someone like Kael, who didn't mince words, and whose personality on the page was as large and as sharp as could be--and whose career consisted of evaluating, criticizing, and praising the work of others--I would think pointedly unflattering reappraisals of her own body of work (and practices) would be a given; she also still has a great deal of worshipful things written about her. I'm sure she'd be quite happy that people still passionately argue about her. Stanley Kauffmann's been (I think, anyway) a great film critic for 50+ years and counting. When he dies, my guess is he'll be more or less forgotten soon after outside of a few thousand devoted readers, and that no one will ever engage in heated exchanges about his writing, his practices, or his place in history. I don't think Kael would take that trade-off (and yes, I'm just guessing and editorializing and offering an opinion for which I have no special background knowledge).

Hey, I said I hope for a similar fate!

All my life, I'll regret I wasn't around for Kael's reign of terror.

I think it's pretty clear that Kael rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Maybe she was very blunt with them about one thing or another, maybe she casually ridiculed or dismissed films and filmmakers about which they had strong personal feelings--I got into it with a writer friend once over that; to paraphrase Lester Bangs in his famous Elvis piece, showing contempt for our objects of veneration can really sting, whether you mean it to or not--or maybe (probably) there was an element of professional jealousy; she got a lot of attention in her day, and even though I think she deserved to, if you were someone who got a lot less, I'm sure that rankled. According to Kellow's book--according to Kael's daughter, I think--she was someone who meant no ill will when she was blunt or dismissive, and she seemed surprised when people took it personally. I believe that; I'm sure everyone has known someone like that in his or her life. So when people like Sarris or Shickel attack Kael, it doesn't alter my opinion of her writing at all--she will always be my favourite film critic. But neither do I have any feelings of "How dare they say that?" They were there, they have a right to air their grievances, and I just take what they write as another perspective on someone who's influenced me greatly and remains endlessly interesting to me.

Wolcott was def writing about TV in the Voice in '80-81, maybe for a couple of years after that. I believe his salient comment on Brideshead Revisited was "Oh, just go ahead and kiss him, you big lug!"

It's not "how dare they say that?" it's "why on earth would you want to be known for saying that?"

people are certainly allowed to look bitter and jealous of the dead

Andrew Sarris isn't "known" for his bitterness towards Kael, anymore than Kael will now be known for her seemingly callous treatment of the guy who did the Raising Kane research--Sarris is known for The American Cinema. Richard Schickel isn't going to be known for anything he writes about Kael or Brian Kellow's book in 2011; he's known for a long career of film criticism and television documentaries on filmmakers. Renata Adler--whose criticisms of Kael were made was Kael was still very much alive--probably is to some degree now known for her review of When the Lights Go Down, but she's also spent the last 40 years writing criticism, essays, and novels. They've had things they wanted to say about Kael. They wrote them. I'm not sure what your post before the previous one means.

"how dare they say that?" suggests that what they did was offensive, but more than that i think it's embarrassing, in part because they've accomplished enough that they don't need to air their contempt to get attention. we'll never know if Kael would have lobbed back at the slams (Well, the ones made while she was alive) if William Shawn hadn't curbed that tendency. But I think she's better off for not engaging in public flame wars once she was established.

And I don't mean to suggest that she's above criticism. But there's an ugliness to a lot of the attacks she's received that I'm not aware folks like Sarris and Schickel expend on other subjects.

and your comparison re: kane is flawed because a) kael didn't attack the researcher, she used his work without credit and b) sarris, adler and schickel are aiming their bile at a popular figure, arguably more popular than them, considering she's got a bio out.

Schickel is an inveterate spleen-venter, his negative reviews are cranky as fuck

also Kael and Sarris are totally known for their rivalry, a notoriety Sarris has done far more to keep alive (did she even acknowledge him after Circles And Squares?) and Adler's review of Kael takes a healthy chunk of her wikipedia page

x-post yeah i'll be honest, he may just be like this all the time.

his beef with Kael stems from her contempt for his boy Clint Eastwood

From what I've read Sarris never forgave Kael; he was still spitting poison when approached for obit purposes in 2001. It's a long time to nurse a grudge.

yeah i knew about the 2001 obit (classy guy), but i didn't know until the book that he was lobbing arrows all through her new yorker stint

adler and schickel are aiming their bile at a popular figure, arguably more popular than them

as somebody once said of rock critics, they're fighting turf wars over territory the size of a postage stamp

I would agree with that. ("That" meaning your post responding to my previous one.) I think one thing that speaks very well of her--I've seen this a couple of places--is that it sounds like she always wished she had some kind of friendship with Sarris. (There was a part in Kellow's book I found moving, where, at some point close to her death, she said something like "He's very good" about Sarris.) So even though I feel like I do understand his lifetime bitterness--a combination of feeling blindsided, and the fact that "Circles and Squares" so eviscerated some of his theories, at a point in his career where he was just starting to get noticed--it seems clear that she put the whole episode behind her very quickly, and that's a good thing.

I still don't understand why you dismiss the criticisms of Sarris, Schickel, and Adler almost wholesale, but obviously we're at an impasse on that.

Adler wrote a lawyer's brief that is shockingly so what.

your comparison re: kane is flawed because a) kael didn't attack the researcher, she used his work without credit

I wasn't comparing the acts themselves, just the idea that this one act (or review) would define a career.

adler says from the get-go in her kael piece that regular reviewing is no job for a thinking person (what "job" is for a thinking person?) so the rest of her piece is gratuitous before we even get to the content. schickel and adler may well have done good work elsewhere (though i've never been impressed by a time movie review), but based on the observatons in their kael pieces I have no reason to believe I'd prefer their worlds to Kael's.

As for Sarris, I haven't read much of his stuff but everything re: kael has just been bile, conjecture and gossip. There's plenty to criticize about her work, and the book's doing a good job of sharing her more embarrassing moments (though looking back at the reviews in full he quotes he's being pretty unkind in his selectivity, sharing her emptier euphoria while ignoring the substance around it). But I don't feel much need to give these guys respect when they're indulging in such blatant hatorade.

of course it wouldn't define a career, but kael definitely would play a nice part in either sarris or adler's biography if they got one.

Bile, conjecture, and gossip? Sarris gives a first-hand account of the first time Kael ever got in touch with him, right after "Circles and Squares." You either believe him or you don't; he's either making something up, or recounting something that actually happened--to him. It's not conjecture or gossip.

i consider telling everyone that this lady who just died once gay-baited you in a limo to be gossip

he's either making something up

Which IS conjecture!

Sarris doesn't have a biography, but I'm pretty sure there was a book where a whole bunch of film writers paid tribute to his influence on them...I'll try to find a link.

If you believe he's making it up. I don't.

i don't either. A guy making up a story about his chosen rival to put in an obituary is just too sad to fathom.

http://books.google.ca/books/about/Citizen_Sarris_American_film_critic.html?id=96RZAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

I find it somewhat odd that you've twice referred to the biography now as a measure of Kael's fame/importance, a book that you seem to agree is a hatchet job.

a critic earning a large hatchet job of a book is a pretty solid measure of their fame/importance

Truce--dinner calls.

and re: "hatchet job." it obviously isn't named PAULINE KAEL: THE MARGARET THATCHER OF THE MOVIES. Kellow definitely tries to equivocate and compliment her, but the narrative he pulls from her reviews and the subjective analysis he offers is regularly unkind, unfair and atypical of a bio of a person who won't be earning many more bios.

I don't know how far you've gotten, but I particularly didn't like insinuations like the one he inserts near the end: she recommend that Stephen Frears cast Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liasions, then praised her performance to the skies; it's like she's a crony capitalist or something.

If there is another kael bio, I hope its written by a woman. Not saying that's a guarantee of quality, but I think the most interesting part of the book is the ways she was ahead and behind of feminism, political awareness, etc in her life and work. That "Sontag & Kael" book got into it a bit, but I'd like to read more from someone who might be a little more sympathetic than Kellow, and doesn't use it to underscore what an unpleasant, tragic figure she was.

only reason i can even imagine another bio is if enough people are dissatisfied by this one

See, the Seligman bio is an example of a judicious biography written by one her so-called Paulettes (i.e. he shows her intellectual limits vis a vis Sontag, even though I still prefer Kael).

one OF her

the book's made me realize more of a connection between her and Lester Bangs, well-read but anti-academic country bumpkins so argumentative, thoughtful and passionate NY had to accept and love-hate them.

and i don't mean "anti-academic" as a compliment, per se. Raising Kane was definitely proof Kael didn't have the temperament and discipline to do that kind of historical analysis, and while it was cruel of Christgau to (allegedly) give Bangs shit for not going to college, there was a definite naivete about the guy that was somewhat his downfall.

xpost

give or take twenty years age difference and enough speed n romilar to kill a horse

bet they would have gotten along all the same

I see many, many links between Kael and Chuck. I would prefer not to go down that road.

I don't feel like typing out a very long passage, but your presentation of the Dangerous Liasions episode (or whatever), Alfred, just isn't accurate. It's on pg. 339--you should look at it again. There's no insinuating whatsoever:

--he recounts that Kael thought Close was miscast, and that she would later change her mind;
--that she and Frears had dinner, where she suggested a bunch of actresses to Mme. de Tourvel, Pfeiffer one of them;
--that she sent a tape of a Pfeiffer film to Frears;
--Pfeiffer got the part;
--and, in Kellow's opinion, Pfeiffer "gave a beautiful performance"

That's it--he recounts a series of events, and then chimes in in a way that supports Kael's judgement. There's no insinuation of anything unethical. Should he not have recounted that Kael had a hand in the casting of Pfeiffer?

the subjective analysis he offers is regularly unkind

This reminds me of Annie Hall, where Annie and Woody having sex four or five times a week is either constantly or hardly ever, depending upon who's doing the counting. You and Greil Marcus and some other people think the book is unkind; just as many people (more, I'd guess, if you took the trouble to wade through all the reviews) think it's very fair. I don't feel the book is unkind at all.

A woman biographer--as long as it's not Renata Adler.

bunch of actresses for

I don't feel like typing out a very long passage, but your presentation of the Dangerous Liasions episode (or whatever), Alfred, just isn't accurate. It's on pg. 339--you should look at it again. There's no insinuating whatsoever:

--he recounts that Kael thought Close was miscast, and that she would later change her mind;
--that she and Frears had dinner, where she suggested a bunch of actresses to Mme. de Tourvel, Pfeiffer one of them;
--that she sent a tape of a Pfeiffer film to Frears;
--Pfeiffer got the part;
--and, in Kellow's opinion, Pfeiffer "gave a beautiful performance"

Other than mentioning Kellow's opinion of Pfeiffer's performance (which is a mirror image of Kael's effusive one), how is this description any different than what I described?

Because Kellow doesn't correctly frame episodes like this, he exposes himself to conclusions like the one I drew. How easily, for example, could Kellow have noted: "If Kael's Hollywood sojourn may have been a failure on her own terms, she at least found a receptive audience from directors who took her casting advice seriously." Instead, the anecdote just sits there, another example of the unfurling-ball-of-yarn approach to narrative (e.g. THIS happened, then THIS happened).

If you drew such a conclusion, then I assume it's because you think there is something wrong about Kael praising an actress whom she herself recommended for the part. Many people would think there's something wrong with that. Now you're criticizing him not for intrusive interruptions, but for laying things out in sequential fashion and not "framing" things correctly.

how is this description any different than what I described?

Well, you didn't really describe much; you just insinuated that there was an insinuation on his part that doesn't exist. (And for what it's worth, he doesn't even mention Kael's own reaction to Pfeiffer's performance, just his own. You could just as easily argue that he's trying to spare her from the insinuation you accuse him of.)

If you drew such a conclusion, then I assume it's because you think there is something wrong about Kael praising an actress whom she herself recommended for the part

I don't know if I've got a problem with it, but Kellow's presentation is affectless. Maybe "insinuation" is the wrong word for what Kellow does. When he judges Kael, he sounds tinny; when he describes events without comment I don't know what kind of reaction he's trying to provoke.

Many people would think there's something wrong with that

Do you?

I've been mulling that over...a bit, yes; but I also realize there's a mountain of evidence that Kael was able to separate her friendships from her reviews, Altman being the best example. This is not quite the same thing, as praising Pfeiffer is in conflict not with a friendship, but with her judgement that she'd be good for the role; to criticize her performance would be to admit (to herself, although not in the review itself) that she was wrong. So even though I do trust Kael, I think it is a bit of a problem.

I should add that I've never seen Dangerous Liasions--not really my kind of film.

I just don't think he's trying to provoke any kind of a reaction there. He's just describing something that happened--he's writing a biography. In the very next lines, he says that "Pauline hailed Pfeiffer's arrival (in The Fabulous Baker Boys) with her usual flair," and then offers an excellent pull-quote from Kael's review. Conceding that there are criticisms in the book, to me it's so clearly the work of a fan.

damn, suddenly Kael, Kellow and Wolcott must be in the GOP primaries.

that she and Frears had dinner, where she suggested a bunch of actresses to Mme. de Tourvel, Pfeiffer one of them;
--that she sent a tape of a Pfeiffer film to Frears;
--Pfeiffer got the part;

and then she praises Pfeiffer to the skies? guys this is textbook example of crossing the line

If she were a reporter? No doubt.

no i think it's ethically inappropriate for a critic too. imagine if you interacted with record companies as a de facto A&R rep and then reviewed your picks. it creates the appearance of conflict of interest if nothing else.

Just wanted to mention one thing that was bothering me: conjecturing and fabricating--making stuff up--are not the same thing. Conjecture: "a conclusion deduced by surmise or guesswork." I don't think you can conjecture about the truth or non-truth of an event you're claiming to have been present for. It either happened, or you're making it up.

no i think it's ethically inappropriate for a critic too. imagine if you interacted with record companies as a de facto A&R rep and then reviewed your picks. it creates the appearance of conflict of interest if nothing else.

Yeah. Her dismissal of Altman's late seventies films mitigates the claim that she was a shill, but unquestionably the Pfeiffer thing bothered me.

imagine if you interacted with record companies as a de facto A&R rep and then reviewed your picks

You could say, I suppose, it would have been like Paul Nelson doing A&R for Mercury and editing the reviews page of Rolling Stone--jobs he held one after another, I think--simultaneously. Having said that, I do find Kael trustworthy on this issue.

obv pauline kael was far from a shill but lapses like the pfeiffer incident suggest egomania clouded her vision

egomania being one of sthe longtime critic's occupational hazzard

Please don't use phrases like "egomania clouded her vision" as I ride the Newt-wave.

between her freelance casting work & the paulette syndrome she sounds like a major league control freak

on the subway i got to the part where he finally compares her to joan crawford

another choice quote from the trip:
"At the New York Film Critics Cirlce voting that year, she had gotten behind Melvin And Howard, her friend Irvin Kirshner's sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and - inexplicably - Dressed To Kill for Best Picture..."

Dude manages to point out her hailing a "friend"'s work and declares another favorite "inexplicable" - despite rather dense explication of her fondness published in the New Yorker - in one sentence fragment.

I understand why Marcus thinks Kellow must have grown to hate Kael as he wrote the book. It's hard to imagine why the guy would have bothered to start if he'd held the opinions he has now all along.

lol, missed that he also makes a connection to crawford in the intro too.

On the one hand, the fact that he thought her love of Dressed to Kill was inexplicable. On the other, a passage like this, right towards the end:

One of the most powerful truths to be gleaned from examining Pauline's life is that it was, throughout its span, a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect. Her highly emotional responses to art were what enabled her to make so indelible a mark as a critic. On the surface, it might seem that any critic does the same thing, but it's doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject. She connected with film the way a great actor is supposed to connect with his text, and she took her readers to places they never could have imagined a mere movie review could transport them.

I can't adequately express how absurd I think it is that you fixate on Kellow's occasional disagreements with her evaluation of certain films as indicating that he had contempt for her in the face of passages like that.

I'm not at the end yet, dude! Not my fault he waits till the sum-up to write three complimentary sentences in a row.

also "a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect" and "doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject" are phrases made a little more loaded by the content of the book.

she often took me to places I didn't think were real.

I love how you conjure up visions of Mommie Dearest with "the part where he finally compares her to joan crawford." The passage in question:

Pauline was well liked by the magazine's support staff--the copy editors, fact-checkers, and messengers who were more or less at her service. Her rapport with them was not unlike Joan Crawford's camaraderie with the crew members on her movies. 'I don't think she had a snobby bone in her body toward such people,' said Menaker. 'But these people were no threat to her. She had a good, common touch, a good, decent comportment with them. There were occasions when I saw her get kind of cross in one way or another, but she very seldom got angry. What she would do is look or act sort of bewildered or flummoxed, and that was a sign of her displeasure.' Most often, Pauline would become aggravated when a fact-checker had unintentionally given away something in a review to a source, but she seldom made an issue of it.

Jesus.

how did I conjure up visions of mommie dearest by merely saying "he compares her to joan crawford" and he doesn't by bringing up how she had camradarie with people who "were no threat to her" (he also says she might have said the same thing Crawford did about Hollywood giving her education and everything she's ever earned).

Then what exactly did you mean by "finally compares her to Joan Crawford"?

if you're saying that by saying "he compares her to joan crawford" one would naturally assume he's suggesting she was a horrible mother, surely Kellow knew what he was doing by making connections twice in a book about a single mom with an obsessive relationship over her daughter. At the very least, he wasn't afraid to make the connection.

But seeing as you're arguing on the one hand that Kellow grew to hate her, and on the other hand you throw in the Joan Crawford line, then to me you're looking for someone who hasn't read the book to conclude that yes, he really must think she was some kind of a witch, he compares to her Joan Crawford. When in fact the two mentions of Crawford are quite innocuous--the one above casts her in a flattering light. (I'll grant that you have a point with the "people who were no threat to her" qualification, but those aren't Kellow's words, they're the words of somebody else.)

Variation on something I asked you on the other thread: are there any criticisms he makes of her anywhere in the book that you don't consider out of bounds, devious, ill-informed, etc.?

either Kellow's a total dope who has no idea why bracketing the story of a single mom who basically kept her daughter locked away till she was in her 30s with any kind of unnecessary comparison to Joan Crawford would be unkind, or he knew the potential effect. the fact that you so quickly harped on the implications makes clear how evident they are.

if you look above, i point out plenty of problems I have with kael, and i'm sure there's a tasteful way to acknowledge them in a biography. But the guy piles it on gratuitously and regularly, and it's not my job to equivocate about it like he does with her.

flipped ahead to the last three pages, and they're so tonally different from the majority of the book that alfred may be right - "hack job" might qualify more than "hatchet"

I mean the Husker Du bio was definitely pro-Husker Du, but the author regularly letting us know which songs were good or bad sure helped make it a shittier book

Again, the idea that he piles it on gratuitously is, I believe, absurd. And--what started this whole thing--I'll again say what I'm pretty sure you have said yourself on the other thread (and which, when we have access, I will try to retrieve--and I promise that I'll admit I'm wrong if no such post exists): that you are not the most objective judge of criticism directed at Kael. And I'm not harshly criticizing you by saying that (or, I believe, by agreeing with you)--I don't consider myselfthe most objective person in the world when it comes to her writing. But I believe I'm a little more objective than you are.

You also, in a couple of your earlier posts, seem to dwell on the fact that he's the editor of an opera magazine, like that makes him unqualified to write the book.

(I haven't read the Husker Du book, but I would very much want to know the author's opinion on specific songs.)

I love that you respond to direct quotes with "well you're biased"

all i said in the previous thread was that I was a "big pauline kael stan". try not to constantly hold against me that I'm an acknowledged fan of her work just because i contradict you.

Which is the direct quote, "hack job" or "hatchet"? I have no idea what you're referring to...We've both quoted stuff from the book. We could trade quotes all day.

yes, we both quoted the book. but only one of us repeatedly refers to a previous statement as proof that that person's opinion is less valid.

"Stan" meaning "fan," right? (Sorry, don't know all the lingo.) I am too. You think the book is written by someone out to get her (or someone who started out with good intentions, and along the way decided he was out to get her). I don't--I think it's a good book about a great writer. That's basically what this amounts to...and I'm not sure we're really getting anywhere.

Read this thread, then watched this whole thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DGEMBaOBSU
and was never bored. Have been contra-Pauline for many years but some of the quotes they trotted up made me warm up to her again. If you watch you will see that Kellow does not hate her and doesn't come across as particularly dopy.

Re Wolcott: there was some great stuff in the beginning especially the dish about the Voice and the girlfriend with platform-shoe throwing tendencies, but his tendency to overreach for the laugh-line at the expense of making sense got a little too much after a while, at least until the High Fidelity denouement when he grew up to be a ballet man and put away childish zings, which was also a little irritating. DIdn't realize until last week that the title of his memoir was supposed to be like a Kael collection.

Talk of Joan Crawford reminds me of Blue Oyster Cult reminds me of Patti Smith reminds me I gotta get back to reading that Will Hermes book which is really kind of amazing.

Thanks, James--that must be the panel Scott Woods told me about. Will be sure to watch it tomorrow night.

(Memo to Phil: "Stan" was an epistolary horrific Eminem song about an obsessive fan hence the coinage which you'd better be aware of lest somebody accuse you of being old and hating hip-hop, even ,,, wait this is a different ilx beef on this thread sorry)

Okay--I know "Stan." (Everybody knows "Stan"...except Mrs. "Stan.") I didn't realize the term was connected to the song. I am old, but I don't hate hip-hop.

(or someone who started out with good intentions, and along the way decided he was out to get her)

you know, since I haven't finished the book, and since the last bit seems so very, very different in perspective from the middle, I'm kind of holding judgment. I see what Marcus is talking about, and can understand where he's coming from, but it's possible Kellow's just going about this kind of artlessly.

I've got to vacate--we've been at this all night! (yes, I know, no one's holding a gun to my head)--but I'll mention again something I said on the other thread. Marcus also disliked--strongly disliked, as I remember it--the Francis Davis interview book. And I was as baffled by that as I am by his contention that Kellow's book is a hatchet job. I understand and respect (heck, envy) that he was friends with her, but there's something there that I'm missing.

<i>I'm kind of holding judgment.</i>

A typo, not a Freudian slip...Anyway, it's a good thing you're withholding judgement.

I have no idea what we're arguing about other than clemenza defending Kellow's right to compare Pauline Kael to Joan Crawford.

Oh--I thought p.p. and I were arguing about the notion that there's something vaguely sinister about such a comparison.

http://www.mediahunter.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/glass-half-full1.jpg

Got halfway through the panel clip this morning--excellent.

Glad you are liking it.

but I don't really need the features editor of Opera Times telling me

Never really understood before how many writers looked at her as THE inspiration for their calling. Maybe that's why they are a little extra touchy if they feel Kellow has not gotten it exactly right, that he is not describing their Pauline.

The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first.

Right, people can be touchy for lots of other reasons. Or not even touchy, they can be exercising cool, merciless logic.

As I say, I'm only halfway through the panel discussion, but I'll mention in fairness that Edelstein--I think it was him; I was listening this morning, not watching--says the same thing that Marcus and a couple of you here say, that he thinks the biography presents a mean portrait of her towards the end that doesn't jibe with his personal experience. But he doesn't discredit the book because of that; he seems to think it's a good book, and at least a couple of the panelists--Paglia, who didn't know Kael, and Toback, who obviously knew her very well--think it's an excellent book. Admittedly, when the author's sitting right beside you, that undoubtedly shapes what you say to some extent.

Read download of first few chapters of BK on PK. When he is just narrating events or quoting P it is good but when he tries to untangle, explain or reverse engineer someone else's motivation or behavior can't tell what the heck is going on. Still seems like it should be worth reading up to the "and then she reviewed" part, which starts at what page exactly?

You're in luck! The rest of the book is 10,000,000 Nights at the Movies.

To paraphrase LBJ, if I've lost James, I've lost the country.

You still have Morbius

The more I get into this (knowing the end), the more "hatchet job" does seem a bit much (if Marcus threw the book down around the '70s period, I understand why he'd assume that, though). The guy obviously still has sympathy for Kael, but his decision to meld review quotes and personal life anecdotes is questionable enough without him constantly throwing in his two cents about whether or not she was right about a film.

It's just a sloppy, arguably hacky way to go about a bio, and I can't imagine an audience that could be satisfied by this book other than people obsessed with cinema enough to be familiar and informed about her work, but who have no doubt she needs to be knocked down a peg. Who else would tolerate or accept him ending a chapter with For all her excitement there was a certain lack of cohesiveness in her review of Prizzi's Honor that she had seldom shown. It seemed overlong, and not quite all of a piece, as if she were so astonished to find a film this good that she was no longer quite sure how to convey her enthusiasm after just a handful of perfectly fine mini-quotes from the review? Who else would take that kind of conjecture on faith? And if you weren't already invested in the subject matter, who would even get this far?

sorry for the rhetorical questions, renata

I guess that's as much as you're going to come around on the book--fair enough. My arguments in this thread have primarily been against two phrases: "hatchet job" and "hackwork." I think of the former as being written out of personal pique or vendetta, with the express purpose of discrediting someone. "Hackwork" to me can mean sloppily researched, poorly written, or written quickly and cavalierly, as a way to cash in on something. I don't believe any of those things even remotely apply to A Life in the Dark. Specific complaints about how much personal opinion Kellow should be allowed to interject, or your problems with the Prizzi's Honor quote (which I didn't give a second thought to when I read the book, undoubtedly because I never gave a second thought to Prizzi's Honor the film), fine. I don't agree, but clearly there seems to something of a split opinion on that element of the book.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

Also: Kellow comes off much better in that round table posted above, better than Camille Paglia, who by the second rambling monologue should have had someone sit on her face.

Didn't mind Camille that much because that's just the way she is and every once in while she would quote something very specific that was interesting and somebody else would pick up on that. Thought Toback repeated himself a lot but I guess he such a key figure in the PK story that it was worth it to hear his eyewitness viewpoint.

You're in luck! The rest of the book is 10,000,000 Nights at the Movies.
Frank Rich review says this part starts when she gets to the New Yorker
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/roaring-at-the-screen-with-pauline-kael.html?pagewanted=all

At this triumphant juncture, a reader should turn to Kael’s full New Yorker reviews rather than Kellow’s year-after-year summaries of them. His narrative bogs down in recaps of movie plots and the juvenile jockeying that attended the annual awards balloting by the New York film critics’ organizations. Mercifully, this chronicle finally gives way to a dishy, if depressing, account of Kael’s decline. If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

I suppose that's true, and if I thought Kellow were a bad writer, I'd agree. I think A Life in the Dark is very well written.

I go both ways with Paglia (I've still only watched half of the panel clip). Sometimes she makes me laugh (with her, not at her), other times I want to run for cover. I saw her speak about her poetry book a few years back. Ages ago, I had a film class with a girl who Paglia reminds me of so much. I remember she got drunk at a professor's party, didn't say a word for the next few weeks of class, and when she finally rejoined the discussion, it was (to coin a phrase) like a hurricane.

As a panel member she was ideal but a Quaalude wouldn't have helped.

*would've

If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

If critics like Rich would stop conflating the decline of American movies and the decline of Kael's prose, they'd stop writing drivel like this. I only notice a decline around 1990 and '91 when the paragraphs get choppier and her theses aren't fully realized (Kellow is partly right when he cites her Goodfellas review as an example).

Surely you would agree that you're in the minority in thinking that her '80s writing is the equal of her '70s (or earlier) writing.

I don't know! Like I wrote, we all agree Hollywood film wasn't as exciting in the eighties, but I can't remember anybody arguing that Kael's prose suffered a commensurate decline.

I guess I just have a hard time completely detaching the writing from the films themselves. I mean, obviously she didn't stop being a great writer--I'm not trying to say that. But for most of the eighties, I'm not as excited by her reviews of (say) Prizzi's Honor or Enemies: A Love Story or My Beautiful Laundrette as I am by those of Godfather II or Nashville or Invasion of the Body Snatchers because the films don't mean nearly as much to me. Now and again--Casualties of War would be the best example for me--we're back in sync. This is why comments of Kellow's like the Prizzi's Honor one above didn't bother me. I didn't even notice.

Saw Chinatown yesterday at the Lightbox, introduced by Adam Nayman, a local critic. The two endings--Towne's vs. Polanski's--came up, and reference was made to Kael's review. This is one time where I think she was completely wrong: her contention that Towne's ending, where Cross gets away with it but Evelyn leaves town, would have been better. Polanski's ending to me is perfect--and I agree with Nayman that it's not Polanski's "gargoyle grin" asserting itself, but rather a very anguished expression of his guilt over Sharon Tate's murder. (Supposedly he always felt guilty for not being there the night of the murder.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/brushing-up-on-roman-polanskis-downbeat-endings/article2271445/print/

funnily enough, I vividly remember Kael writing approvingly that Jack's dopey hitman in Prizzi's Honor played like a cross between Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

Of course, I prefer Prizzi's Honor to the first Godfather film.

thx for reminding me that I need to see Prizzi's Honor

Huston had to explain to a flummoxed Nicholson that it's a comedy.

Something else came up yesterday that I'd never thought about, and I've probably seen Chinatown 15-20 times: Huston saying to Nicholson "Are you sleeping with my daughter" at a time when in real life he was.

Huston supposedly said of P'sH, "Jack, everything you've done is infused with intelligence, and we can't have any of that here."