The faults in our stars

In his wonderful conversational autobiography Cavett, Dick Cavett is asked about his relationship with Johnny Carson, for whom he served as a writer on The Tonight Show. Cavett replies:

I did work for Carson. We didn’t go fishing together on weekends, and I never slept over at his house, the two of us lying awake in our jammies eating the fudge we had made together, talking of our dreams and hopes and fears. But I found him to be cordial and businesslike, and to have himself well in hand as far as the show as concerned…He is not a man who seems to seek close buddies, and, if he were, the staff of his own television show would not be the ideal place to seek them.

It’s a memorable passage, especially the last line, which seems particularly relevant at a time when our talk show hosts seem eager to seem accessible to everybody, and to depict their writing staffs as one big happy family. When asked to comment on the widespread notion that Carson was “cold,” Cavett responds:

I know very little about Johnny’s personal relationships. I have heard that he has been manipulated and screwed more than once by trusted associates, to the point where he is defensively wary to what some find an excessive degree. I see this as a perfectly reasonable response. It is, I suppose, the sort of thing that happens to a person in show business that makes his former friends say, with heavy disapprobation, “Boy, has he changed.”

Cavett could easily let the subject rest there, but something in the question seems to stick in his mind, and he continues:

While I’m at it, I’ll do a short cadenza on the subject of changing. If you are going to survive in show business, the chances are you are going to change or be changed. Whatever your reasons for going into the business, it is safe to admit they form a mixture of talent, ambition, and neurosis. If you are going to succeed and remain successful, you are going to do it at the expense of a number of people who are clamoring to climb the same rope you are climbing. When you suddenly acquire money, hangers-on, well-wishers, and ill-wishers; when you need to make baffling decisions quickly, to do too much in too little time, to try to lead a personal and a professional life when you can’t seem to find the time for either; when you have to kick some people’s fannies and kiss others’ to get to the point where you won’t need to do either any more; when you have to sort out conflicting advice, distinguish between the treacherous and the faithful or the competent and the merely aggressive, suffer fools when time is short and incompetents when you are in a pinch; and when you add to this the one thing that you don’t get in other professions—the need to be constantly fresh and presentable and at your best just at the times when you are bone-weary, snappish, and depressed; when all these things apply, it is possible that you are going to be altered, changed, and sometimes for the worse.

This is one of the best things I’ve ever read about show business, and if anything, it feels even more insightful today, when we collectively have so much invested in the idea that stars have inner lives that are more or less like our own.

It’s often been said that the reason that television actors have trouble crossing over to the movies is that we expect different things from our stars in either medium. One requires a personality that is larger than life, which allows it to survive being projected onto an enormous screen in a darkened theater; the other is a person whom we’d feel comfortable inviting on a regular basis into our living rooms. If that’s true of scripted television that airs once a week, it’s even more true of the talk shows that we’re expected to watch every night. And now that the online content created by such series has become so central to their success, we’re rapidly approaching this trend’s logical culmination: a talk show host has to be someone whose face we’d be comfortable seeing anywhere, at any time. This doesn’t just apply to television, either. As social media is increasingly called upon to supplement the marketing budgets of big movies, actors are obliged to make themselves accessible—on Twitter, on Instagram, as good sports on Saturday Night Live and in viral videos—to an extent that a star of the old studio system of the forties would have found utterly baffling. Deadline’s writeup of Alien: Covenant is typical:

RelishMix…assessed that Alien: Covenant has a strong social media universe…spread across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube views and Instagram followers…The company also adds that Covenant was challenged by a generally inactive cast, with Empire’s Jussie Smollett being the most popular activated star. Danny McBride across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook counts over 250,000. Michael Fassbender is not socially active.

I love the implication that stars these days need to be “activated,” like cell phones, to be fully functional, as well as the tone of disapproval at the fact that Michael Fassbender isn’t socially active. It’s hard to imagine how that would even look: Fassbender’s appeal as an actor emerges largely from his slight sense of reserve, even in showy parts. But in today’s climate, you could also argue that this has hampered his rise as a star.

And Cavett’s cadenza on change gets at an inherent tension in the way we see our stars, which may not be entirely sustainable. In The Way of the Gun, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who knows more than anyone about survival in Hollywood, the character played by James Caan says: “The only thing you can assume about a broken-down old man is that he’s a survivor.” Similarly, the only thing you can assume about a movie star, talk show host, or any other figure in show business whose face you recognize is that he or she possesses superhuman levels of ambition. Luck obviously plays a large role in success, as does talent, but both require a preternatural drive, which is the matrix in which giftedness and good fortune have a chance to do their work. Ambition may not be sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. Yet we persist in believing that stars are accessible and ordinary, when, by definition, they can hardly be other than extraordinary. It’s a myth that emerges from the structural assumptions of social media, a potent advertising tool that demands a kind of perceptual leveling to be effective. I was recently delighted to learn that the notorious feature “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” originated when the editors at Us Magazine had to figure out how to use the cheap paparazzi shots that they could afford to buy on their tiny budget, like a picture of Drew Barrymore picking up a penny. Social media works in much the same way. It creates an illusion of intimacy that is as false as the airbrushed images of the movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age, and it deprives us of some of the distance required for dreams. Whether or not they want to admit it, stars, unlike the rich, truly are different. And I’ll let Cavett have the last word:

Unless you are one of these serene, saintly individuals about whom it can be truly said, “He or she hasn’t changed one bit from the day I knew them in the old house at Elm Street.” This is true mostly of those who have found others to do their dirty work for them. All I’m saying is that your demands and needs change, and if you don’t change with them you don’t survive.

The intelligence community

One of the major dividends of the success of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation is that it marks the return to public consciousness of the screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie, who has a deserved reputation as one of the smartest and most underused men in Hollywood. McQuarrie has been around for a long time: it’s been close to twenty years since he won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects, and more than fifteen since he directed The Way of the Gun, a deeply flawed movie that I haven’t been able to stop watching or thinking about ever since. A fruitful partnership with Tom Cruise, starting with Valkyrie, brought him his first credited scripts in years, and with Jack Reacher and now Rogue Nation, McQuarrie has become hard to avoid. Which is all to our benefit. His commentary track with Bryan Singer on The Usual Suspects may be my favorite of all time, and I go back and listen to it every couple of years just to hear those voices again. And with McQuarrie making the media rounds this week to promote his first unqualified hit, particularly in a remarkably candid interview with Deadline, we’ve got a rich trove of new insights from a man who, like David Mamet or Robert Towne, seemingly can’t open his mouth without shedding light on some unexpected aspect of filmmaking.

McQuarrie’s reputation is inextricably linked to his years in exile, and there are moments when he can’t help sounding like one of the hard-boiled characters in his own movies. In particular, I’m thinking of James Caan’s “adjudicator” in The Way of the Gun, who delivers a line that I’ve never forgotten: “The only thing you can assume about a broken-down old man is that he’s a survivor.” Deadline describes him as “Cruise’s accomplice in problem solving,” which is pretty much how most screenwriters like to see themselves—as the unheralded, pragmatic fixers who parachute in, like Towne famously did for The Godfather, to save troubled productions for a paycheck before moving on. McQuarrie has benefited, as Towne did before him, from falling in with Cruise, a movie star with the soul of a producer whose track record at mounting and executing deliriously complicated projects has attuned him to the value of the creative resource that a talented writer’s brain affords. As McQuarrie describes it, it sounds less like two moguls overseeing a multimillion-dollar production that a huddle between a couple of canny conspirators: “You’re confronted with an obstacle that seems so insurmountable and Tom always says the same thing. If there’s any two people who can figure this out, it’s us. We’re going to figure it out. And, usually we do.”

This is undoubtedly romanticized, and it’s the closest McQuarrie ever comes to sounding like one of the suits that he skewers so expertly elsewhere—including in Rogue Nation itself, in which the venal spies in charge of the intelligence community often play as parodies of studio heads, with their cheerful indifference to the lives or careers that hang on their decisions. (As William Goldman points out in Which Lie Did I Tell?, the scariest sentence that a writer can hear from an executive has to be: “We have a special relationship with Tom Cruise.”) But it’s amply borne out by the film, which, more than any of its predecessors, is emphatically a screenwriter’s movie. It lacks a jaw-dropping set piece to compare with the Burj Khalifa ascent in Ghost Protocol, but it has a distinctly better story and structure, and at its best, it’s a marvel of smart, efficient craftsmanship. A few years ago, I drew a distinction between action that seems to have been worked out on the page and the kind that is assembled in the editing room, and I singled out Ghost Protocol, along with Drive and The International, as among a handful of recent movies that have given us coherent, inventive, written action scenes:

They have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They make memorable use of their locations. They have small setups, payoffs, and surprises along the way…Each is centered on the personalities of the characters involved—indeed, each scene unfolds as a series of logical choices, which is something you’ll never hear said of Transformers. And these are all things that can only be planned at the screenplay stage.

And Rogue Nation honors and elevates that standard. I liked it a lot from start to finish, but the scene that sticks in my mind the most is the extended set piece that unfolds place backstage during a premiere of Turnadot at the Vienna Opera House. We’ve seen this exact scene before—there’s never been an opera performance in an action movie that didn’t end in bloodshed—and I settled into it with a slight sense of resignation, wondering if McQuarrie would be content, as Quantum of Solace was, to merely use his location as an attractive backdrop. I shouldn’t have worried. McQuarrie knows his territory, and even as he structures much of the sequence as an explicit homage to the Albert Hall climax in The Man Who Knew Too Much, he’s determined to show the rest of us how it’s done. The result unspools as an increasingly dazzling series of surprises, reversals, and complications, making inspired use of the setting and of the music itself, and it culminates with a sweet little twist, as Ethan Hunt figures out how to save the Austrian chancellor from no fewer than three assassins. It’s as lovingly hewn and polished as any scene from McQuarrie’s filmography, and it’s only one high point in a film that never takes anything for granted, including the ending, which saw the director and star halting production in an attempt to get it just right. Like just about everything else, it paid off. McQuarrie, like the spies in his movie, spent years as a man without a country. But it’s his nation now.