December 25, 1986

"Good, Stylized Hollywood Film," he says: Mailer Ebullient About His Movie

After having just completed a 41-day shooting schedule in 39 1/2 days, finishing Tough Guys Don't Dance below its $5-million budget, Norman Mailer last Monday was ebullient.

He not only believes he enhanced his chances to direct another film, but he also thinks he made a good movie as well, which is of tantamount importance to Hollywood studio heads.

"This is a stylized Hollywood film," Mailer said, "and I hope its going to be a good one. Even a very good one. There's reason to believe after seeing the dailies that we have some hopes in that direction."

It seems appropriate that Mailer chose Provincetown, a town he fell in love with 44 years ago, as the location for his major motion picture debut as a director.  

"This is a town you can see yourself digging in and fighting for. If I have a small town that I can call my small town, it's Provincetown." Mailer said.

Granted, Mailer's novel of the same name was set in Provincetown and skirts about Provincetown people, which would seem to preclude any further discussion as to where the movie should be filmed.

But Mailer said the movie doesn't adhere that closely to the book and, as a result, could have been filmed elsewhere.

"The book to a degree was about Provincetown," Mailer said. "The movie's not. The movie could've been shot somewhere else. We would've lost a lot of things. We would've lost the beauty of Provincetown, but we wouldn't have lost the essential story.

"The emphasis in the movie is on the story and not the town. And in fact I don't want the people in Provincetown to go to the movie with the idea that this is what I feel about Provincetown. We're telling a very tough and horrific tale. There are a lot of deaths in it and it's a powerful and bloody horror tale."

Mailer is quick to add that the blood and gore have been kept to a minimum for the screen version of his blood-drenched tale.

"Provincetown serves as the backdrop for that mainly because of its beauty. To me there's always something doubly sinister about horrors that occur in beautiful places. But this has nothing to do with my feeling that this is the nature of Provincetown.  If I were to do that kind of movie I'd come here with a low budget and a cameraman using a hand-held camera, and I could throw in a few people in town and probably make a semi-documentary about how a couple of people spend the winter here because that's Provincetown.

But anyone who goes to it and thinks this is going to be the picture about the town that everyone's been waiting for is going to be bitterly disappointed. Strangers will think it has a lot to do with Provincetown, and they'll say where is that beautiful place, and maybe some people will even want to go to Provincetown and visit it because they've seen it in a movie and it intrigued them."

It is obvious that Mailer has been intrigued by Provincetown since that initial visit 44 years ago. He owns Provincetown's only all-brick house, where he wrote Tough Guys Don't Dance.

HIs feelings for Provincetown are obviously strong.  He struggled briefly to find the words to describe them.

"I have a feeling for the place that...my life is tied up in the place. I think if I were to pick up a gun and fight for any town in the world it would probably be Provincetown. This is a town you can see yourself digging in and fighting for.  If I have a small town that I can call my  small town, it's Provincetown."

As a result of his fond regard for Provincetown and its people, Mailer used many locals in his film, often to the chagrin of key staffers on the film.  Using some local extras with little or no professional experience for speaking parts, rather than the professional actors who came down from Boston for many scenes, cost a  lot of time.

Because of their inexperience, repeated takes were the norm, which is costly.  Of course, to Hollywood time is money, and money is not something this film company had in abundance.

But despite some pressure, Mailer had a strong desire to make local residents a part of this film. "I wanted to use townspeople for extras because the making of the movie had much more to do with Provincetown than the final result will. We were in the town using the town's facilities, and we had working relations with a great many people in town. That was one of the pleasures of making the movie.  That part was swell."

Mailer also found moviemaking itself  "swell," but this was not a new revelation. Mailer had discovered the joys of filmmaking back in the late 1960's when he directed and financed three experimental films: Maidstone, Wild 90 and Beyond the Law. All three did nothing to further Mailer's career as a director, much to his dismay.

"If any one of them had been successful, I probably would have spent at least half my time in movies since then. But they weren't successful, and making movies is analogous to being an athlete in a professional sport. If you don't produce in terms of the sport, if you don't have a good year, you don't necessarily get re-hired again. So it isn't that you choose to make movies, unless you're young enough to devote your life to it. You're in a position where you can find work or your can't. I never even tried to find work because I knew when those three movies were all failures economically that no was going to take me on as a director. So I didn't even think about it for many years. But I loved making those three movies. I always wanted to go back to making films."

Mailer got himself in the position to make more films when he hooked up with Tom Luddy, a producer with Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco.

Mailer had been testing the waters in Hollywood to see if any studios would nibble at Tough Guys Don't Dance. Much to his surprise, no one was interested.

"When I wrote Tough Guys I thought this is going to make a good movie. And to my surprise, no one wanted to make a movie out of it. Then I looked at it again, and I said oh golly. I can see why. It's not any easy book to turn into a screenplay. It looks like it's easy, but it isn't."

Mailer told Luddy, an old friend, that he wanted to direct Tough Guys Don't Dance if Luddy could find a financial backer. Luddy found an interested party in Menahem Golan, one of the co-owners of Cannon Films. A deal was struck. In return for writing the screenplay for King Lear for director Jean-Luc Godard, Mailer would write the screenplay and direct Tough Guys Don't Dance.

"Cannon was expanding at that point," Mailer said, "making a lot of films, and taking a lot of chances.  And they took a chance on me."

A chance for which Mailer was extremely grateful. "I get more fun out of making films than I get out of writing. That doesn't mean I'm better at it. It just means that it's more fun."

While Mailer finds the seclusion and narrow mental focus needed for writing difficult, he loved the constant action and fresh challenges intrinsic in filmmaking.

"You're all over the place, and I like that. I've got a mind that has a small competence in 100 subjects. Writing a novel is onerous because you have to concentrate on one field at a time. You have to become an expert on a subject, and that's not always much fun if you have a mind that's like a roulette wheel. I found I was more organized making a movie than I am when I'm writing a novel because of the difficulty of keeping my mind in one place all day long. That kind of concentration is much tougher for me than to concentrate on a new problem every few minutes."

The thought that one of America's most celebrated writers finds little joy in writing seems hard to believe, but Mailer confirmed this, "Writing a novel is a little bit like confining yourself to a jail cell.  It's a spiritual cell, but you're in it.  And it gets onerous over the years.  Now I groan when I pick up a pen and start a new book. I groan. I hate it. Whereas when you're directing you really don't have to face yourself.  You just have to try to keep from making truly grievous mistakes."

Mailer thinks his fling with the movies will prove to be productive in that he won't groan as heavily when he picks up his pen to write his new book.  Ideally, Mailer would like to have the title "director" sitting side by side with "writer" on his moniker, and to have the freedom to finish a book and then move onto directing a film.

"I'd like to direct a movie about every other year," he said.  Because it takes a year out of your life. You really have to give it at least a year. Talk about the ideal situation: it would probably be to write a book one year, direct a movie the next. But directing a movie is an experience. It's probably the most satisfying experience I've ever had in work. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm that good at it.  It just means I enjoy it that much.

I'm like a golfer who shoots in the eighties or low nineties. He's never going to change anyone's mind about golf, but he enjoys it."