The Screengrab : norman mailer

Ron Silver, 1946 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Silver would move freely from stage to TV to movie roles, including a starring role in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). His peak of national visibility probably came in 1989 and 1990, when he played Jerry Lewis's son in a multi-episode story arc of the cult series Wiseguy; gave the performance of his movie career as the lead in Paul Mazursky's superb movie version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story; stalked Jamie Lee Curtis as a deranged stockbroker turned serial gunman in Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel; starred as a leftish screenwriter navigating the 1950s blacklist era in the British TV film Fellow Traveller; and don a Groucho mustache to play Alan Dershowitz in counterpoint to Jeremy Irons's Oscar-winning turn as Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's torn-from-the-headlines Reversal of Fortune.

Though he continued to work steadily, his days of playing leads in theatrical features that people went to see receded behind him, and he began to enjoy his best opportunities in movies as a campy villain, in such movies as the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop (1994), where he confronted his younger self with a plea that he lay off the candy bars, and The Arrival (2006), where he got to deliver a speech explaining that global warming was part of a plan for an imminent extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. (He parodied this side of his career in the famous Ben Stiller-directed, unaired TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which he played a sinister character named Ron Silver whose acting career was a cover for his principal occupation of serving the conspiracy to install a New World Order.) He made his directing debut with the 1993 TV film Lifepod, a sci-fi variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He returned to the courtroom to play Robert Shapiro in American Tragedy, a 2000 O. J. Simpson docudrama written by Norman Mailer, was hilarious as tennis hustler Bobby Riggs in the TV film When Billie Beat Bobby (2001), convincingly dogged as Angelo Dundee in Michael Mann's The Greatest biopic Ali (2001), and reunited with Lumet for Find Me Guilty (2006), yet another fact-based courtroom drama, for which he was upgraded from lawyer to judge.

Silver also had recurring or regular roles on the TV series Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, Skin, and The West Wing, where he played a political consultant who, over the course of the show, had a political conversion from left to right. Silver himself experienced his own sea change after September 11, 2001, and became a highly public proponent for his changed views, making the rounds of the TV talk shows, appearing at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and blogging for Pajamas Media. He also narrated FahrenHYPE 9/11 (a 2004 documentary response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and co-directing, with Kevin Knoblock, the documentary Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60. His last performance was in the 2008 Distant Runners.

The Rep Report (February 27 - March 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.

SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.

BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Gerard Damiano, 1928-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Gerard Damiano has died, at 80, of complications following a stroke. His major, not-inconsiderable achievement was the creation of what trendspotters in the 1970s called "porno chic," by directing (under the name "Jerry Gerard") the 1972 Deep Throat. That film had modest, mostly unrealized, aspirations, to break the mold in skin flick entertainment value: it had a novel premise--young woman finds that her clitoris is in her throat-- that was inspired by Damiano's discovery of a young leading lady-- Linda Boreman, who he rechristianed "Linda Lovelace"--who, in the words of Nora Ephron, had "no gag reflex whatsoever", and an actor ("Harry Reems", known to his mama as Herbert Streicher) who cavorted like the guy who was voted the funniest member of his high school class doing a bad Groucho impression. Through some combination of a quirk of timing and lucky accidents--as Richard Corliss notes, Lovelace's "inexperience on screen played like freshness, innocence"--Deep Throat caught on big, becoming a cultural phenomenon. At a time when advocates of greater cultural freedom were arguing about nudity and simulated sex on screen, with the 500-pound gorilla (so to speak) of Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris just around the corner, a lot of people began thinking that it might be their duty to pencil in at least one hardcore movie on their schedules, and Deep Throat was the porn movie to see. Another explanation was offered by Norman Mailer in the 2003 documentary Inside Deep Throat: "It was a giggle," Mailer says, "and the worst thing that can be said about Americans as a people is that we'll sell our souls for a giggle." In terms of the ratio of costs (next to nil) to box-office take, there's a pretty good chance that it's the most profitable movie ever made, though hard figures are hard to come by, for the same reason that Damiano would never see any of it: he had gotten his funding from organized crime figures, and it turned out that Mafia bookkeeping made Hollywood bookkeeping look like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

Deep Throat gave Damiano a name, though, and a moment, and he did his best to cash in on them. Actually, "cash in" has more mercenary connotations than Damiano's brief career as a self-styled porn master deserves. It turned out that he had artistic ambitions-- pretentions, even. When Reems saw the script for Damiano's follow-up project, which became The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), he called Damiano out on having ripped off Sartre's No Exit, and in how many conversations between two guys making a porno movie do you suppose that both of them had read No Exit? That film actually holds up much better than Deep Throat, in no small part to the star performance of Georgina Spelvin, a former chorus girl with some soft-core sex films on her resume who had waited until her mid-thirties to make her hardcore starring debut; the lusty enthusiasm with which she went at her role, combined with the fact that she was not still in the full freshness of her youthful beauty, made her a much more effective symbol of pushing past the boundaries of sexual conformity than all of Deep Throat's goofy comedy numbers. Damiano would have another good year in 1976, with the release of the Story of O-flavored Story of Joanna and Let My Puppets Come which--no, seriously, dude, it's got puppets in it. But though he would continue to grind out films into the mid-90s, his dream of a creative, critically respected field of independent porno filmmaking came crashing down as the culture tightened up and the industry became geared to the video market. (For more details, see Boogie Nights.) He leaves behind a wife, former porn actress Paula Mortin, and two kids, Christar and Gerard, Jr.

From Skeet to Scarlett: Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

As you read here earlier today, Vanity Fair has cancelled their Oscar party, but there’s no stopping their annual movie issue. Somewhere amid the hundreds of glossy ads and smelly cologne strips, you’ll find articles on the films of Norman Mailer, the glitzy life of producer Jerry Weintraub and “A Guy’s Guide to Chick Flicks” by the ever-vigilant James Wolcott. The web site offers none of these, but it does feature a slideshow of all the Hollywood Issue covers photographed by Annie Liebovitz. It’s fun to flip back through the years and have a good chuckle at some of Vanity Fair’s picks to click from days gone by (after first pausing briefly to once again admire Scarlett Johannson’s rear flank in the March 2006 edition). For instance, without peeking at the caption, how many of the stars on the 2000 cover can you identify on sight? The “hot new wave” (their words, not ours) of 1998 seems to have panned out for the most part, but are there any pangs of regret for including both Stephen Dorff and Skeet Ulrich in 1996’s "Boy’s Town" lineup?

Probably not. After all, Vanity Fair isn’t in the talent evaluation business; they’ve got a product to move, and apparently putting attractive people on their cover is a time-tested way of doing it. The Hollywood Issue is probably a more accurate barometer of which publicists have the most juice than anything else, so if anything we should be impressed by their batting average over the years. So take heart, Ginnifer Goodwin, Alice Braga, Elizabeth Banks and the rest of you 2008 “Fresh Faces”: all is not necessarily lost.

Peckinpah and the Coens

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Michael Sragow discusses the late, great Sam Peckinpah and finds his imprint on the Coen brothers' violent modern Western, No Country for Old Men. Taking a cue from Paul Seydor, Sragow also links Peckinpah with Norman Mailer "as artists defined by their pursuit of extreme action, their rebellion against official culture and bureaucratized society, and their recognition that the quest for authentic manhood is absolute and never-ending. Their paradoxical linkage of fragility with appetite and strength — so different from the cheap certainty of macho camp — drove Peckinpah to create the most dynamic of all visual lexicons and Mailer to master a dazzling variety of rhetoric in both intimate and epic modes." Although a quick scan of what's playing in theaters today might suggest that neither artist is having much of an influence on current cinema, Sragow believes that "No Country for Old Men renews the legacy of Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies." — Phil Nugent

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

Mailer loved the pulpy immediacy of movies and envied them for their ability to insinuate themselves in modern audience's consciousness and place their stamp on society. At the same time, he deplored the unadventurousness of mainstream Hollywood fare of the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was making his name and finding his voice as a writer. In his novels An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? and also in the great journalistic works in which he cast himself as reporter-hero, Mailer wrote the movies that he thought American filmmakers should have been making: unpredictable, crazy, symbolically charged and determined to grapple with current events and the deeper concerns of the country. Years later, in his awesome The Executioner's Song, he shifted gears and created the ultimate docudrama of post-sixties America, epic in scope, spare in style and altogether emotionally confounding. To read the books and then compare them with the movies that Hollywood did make of The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream is to see just how inadequate Hollywood would have been to make good on Mailer's ideas, even if it had wanted to take him up on it. To see the 1982 TV movie version of The Executioner's Song, starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, and adapted for the small screen by Mailer himself, is to see that Mailer himself had better ideas about what movies ought to be than he had about how to make them.

That was already clear from the movies that Mailer made himself in the sixties — Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). These were edited down from hours and hours of unshaped improvisations with Mailer, who plays the lead in all three, and his actor buddies and various other celebrities taking off from a vague situation (a buncha gangsters hanging out, a buncha cops hanging out. . .) and saying and doing whatever comes into their heads. The proudest moment in all these hours of celluloid comes at the end of Maidstone, in which cast member Rip Torn, feeling unfulfilled at the end of the shoot, attacks a surprised Mailer with a hammer after everyone else thought the film had wrapped; the two men end up tussling on the grass while Mailer's children, with whom he had been shooting home movies with leftover film stock, can be heard crying off-camera.

These movies were based on Mailer's theory about bringing an exciting new level of "reality" to movies, a theory that he explicated in such essays as "Some Dirt in the Talk" and "A Course in Film-Making," and also in his essay on Brando and Last Tango in Paris. When Mailer's long-unavailable films were brought back for a special retrospective screening in New York this past summer, Gerald Howard called Maidstone "a video transmission from the faraway Planet '60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup" and described the agony of waiting so long to see it after reading the "extraordinary essay" about its making. The fact that the film is unwatchable, to Howard, was kind of beside the point. That the essays Mailer wrote about what he was trying to do as a filmmaker are so much more vibrant and intellectually thrilling than what he did, is not just an example of empty hype. They're proof not that he wasn't onto something but that he was a writer, not a filmmaker. The essays will outlast the movies, and some distant future generation may feel disappointed if nobody finally cares enough to preserve the last prints of his beloved eyesores.

Mailer also gave scattered appearances in other people's films, playing Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999). He had a celebrated dust-up on The Dick Cavett Show and once brought his comedy stylings to the set of Gilmore Girls.

He also wrote scripts for TV movies about Robert Hansson and the O.J. Simpson trial, to be directed by his friend Lawrence Schiller. He contributed sound bites to documentary features on James Toback, the romance of Greenwich Village, the exploitation of 9/11, the Ali-Foreman fight, and Deep Throat. He contracted to write and star, with his actress daughter Kate, in an updated version of King Lear (with a Mafia setting, and with Norman to play "Don Learo") that was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard and financed by Golan-Globus productions. Mailer apparently decided that this was too much even for him and fled the set, with his daughter in tow, after one day of shooting, though Godard went ahead and finished the film, or finished something anyway, with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. If Mailer made a public ass of himself and worse on more than one occasion, so did a lot of other people who didn't also manage to dash off The Armies of the Night. You will be missed, sir.

— Phil Nugent