Couches of the World

The journey is the destination.

I'll never put on a life jacket again

Steven Spielberg talks to AICN's Harry Knowles about writing Quint's monologue for Jaws (1977).

Steven Spielberg: I owe three people a lot for this speech. You've heard all this, but you've probably never heard it from me. There's a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I've heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn't want a credit and didn't arbitrate for one, but he's the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha's Vineyard to shoot the movie.

I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.

Howard one day said, "Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it's this Indianapolis incident." I said, "Howard, what's that?" And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn't write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.

But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said "Can I take a crack at this speech?" and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.

If you haven't heard of Howard Sackler, he wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955) and didn't take a credit for that, either.

Everything that walked or crawled at one time or another

Schickel: You had a long apprenticeship: all those years on Rawhide and then working in the spaghetti westerns. Think that was good for you?

Eastwood: Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people. Like Orson Welles. He comes right out of the box with a project that everybody's knocked out by, and then all of a sudden it's like... What do I do to follow that?

Schickel: There's a notion that Clint Eastwood, the great American icon, has somehow disappointed a significant portion of his constituency with this movie.

Eastwood: Well, I got a big laugh out of that. These people are always bitching about 'Hollyweird,' and then they start bitching about this film... Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.

Clint interviewed by Richard Shickel, Time, 2005.

Beyond reasonable doubt

INTERVIEWER: What about the more awkward question of writers standing in your way?

BARTHELME: I think deep admirations force you away from the work admired, as well as having the generating influence we've mentioned. Joyce may have done this for Beckett, Márquez may do this for young Latin American writers—force them to do something that is not Márquez.

INTERVIEWER: But hasn't everything been done?

BARTHELME: One can't believe that because it's not profitable. The situation of painting is instructive. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody. Some new attitudes have emerged. What seems clear is that if you exacerbate a problem, make it worse, new solutions are generated.

The great Donald Barthelme interviewed by J.D. O'Hara, The Paris Review.

"I abandoned the album three times before I finished it. It really caused a lot of sweat - and heart-ache, I suppose. At one point I thought that I could never achieve anything more, musically. Not that I'd achieved everything, just that there was nowhere else for me to go, you know?

"It affected everything I did in the end. I found myself saying 'You're just a dilettante. You're not doing anything with the kind of intensity that it deserves'. It was a crisis of confidence that went very deep.

"I use processes - which we'll discuss later - to generate the structures of my music. With this new album, I found that I had to work very very hard to get the results I wanted - the process didn't automatically generate them any more, whereas it used to.

"I used to be led by the work. Something would happen and I'd just follow it. This time it wasn't as easy as that. Things seemed to be going in directions which weren't interesting to me any more - I found myself trying to use a technique which was bound to give a particular class of outputs to give a different class. So I was working against the technique, to some extent.

"I suspect that I've come to the end of a way of working with this record. It's a loss of confidence and I think that comes through - something more like humanity than whimsicality, you know? Not so much tentativeness as reasonable doubt. It's less brash than other things I've done."

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno interviewed by Ian MacDonald, NME, 1977.

Now playing

Binding

Wired's John C Abell says ebooks are not there yet because they can't be used for interior design:

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle?

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Abell's comments reminded me of a 2010 study which aimed to gauge the effect of summer reading on students' academic performance. A philanthropist interviewed about the programme mentioned, albeit anecdotally, the importance of building a physical library:

For a study to be published in Reading Psychology, Richard Allington [a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville] and colleagues selected students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida and, for three consecutive years, gave each child 12 books, from a list the students provided, on the last day of school... Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.

Rebecca Constantino, [a researcher and instructor at the University of California-Irvine] who in 1999 founded Access Books, a group that has given away more than 1 million books, says the cause-and-effect is simple: "When kids own books, they get this sense, 'I'm a reader,' " she says. "It's very powerful when you go to a kid's home and ask him, 'Where is your library?'"

The full report of the study is here. (Pic: The Big Sleep. Based on the book.)

Depending how you see a thing

Movies may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo.

A. O. Scott on movies in the New York Times.