Life Itself by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Memoir, Film
ISBN: 9780446584982
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

29 THE INTERVIEWER

MY SECRET AS an interviewer was that I was actually impressed by the people I interviewed: not only by Bill Clinton, John Wayne, or Sophia Loren, but by Sandra Dee, Stella Stevens, and George Peppard. I am beneath everything else a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance. I become their advocate and find myself in sympathy. I can employ scorched-earth tactics in writing about a bad movie, but I rarely write sharp criticism of actors themselves. If they’re good in a movie, they must have done something right. If they’re bad, it may have been the fault of filming conditions or editing choices. Perhaps they may simply have been bad. I feel reluctant to write in a hurtful way; not always, but usually. I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can’t help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat.

My job involved doing a great many interviews. I was always a little excited by the presence of the subject. As a teenager covering the Champaign County Fair, I stood behind the bandstand in the racetrack infield and interviewed the teenage country singer Brenda Lee, and was terrified. That established my pattern of low-key interviews. I tend not to confront or challenge, and my best technique has been to listen. This turns out to have been a useful strategy, because when you allow people to keep on talking they are likely to say anything.

The best interview I ever wrote was one about Lee Marvin, in Esquire in 1970. I sat in his beach house in Malibu for a long afternoon of drinking, and he said exactly what came into his mind. There was no press agent present and no mental censor at work. He didn’t give a damn. I was a kid he’d never heard of, but that afternoon he gave me the opportunity to write accurately about exactly what it was like to join Lee Marvin for an afternoon of desultory drinking. I took notes. Later, typing them up, they came to resemble dialogue. They weren’t interrupted by questions, because I realized quickly that questions and answers were not going to be happening. Lee was passing time in public.

I took this dialogue, added a spare minimum of exposition, and submitted it to Harold Hayes, who printed it in Esquire. The piece contains no background on Marvin. No autobiography. It isn’t hooked to his latest movie. There is no apparent occasion for it. It is his voice. Some years later, I was rather surprised to be invited to his house outside Tucson for another interview. He was by then married to the high school sweetheart he’d left behind forty years earlier to join the Marines. I wondered why he wanted to see me again. It may have been because he had been giving a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.