Read Online My Lunches with Orson by Peter Biskind - Free Book Online Page A

him a couple times, to watch it happen. Followed him, not went with him. He’d come into Lindy’s—“Mindy’s” to Runyon—and places like that, late at night. And if he’d see anybody, no matter who, he’d grab him, take him out in the street, and beat him up. Meaning: Get out of town. Don’t sit around here—you make the town look bad. I saw him put Charlie Luciano, head first, into a garbage can outside of Reuben’s, at five thirty in the morning.
    HJ: “Lucky” Luciano?
    OW: Yeah. He was never called “Lucky,” except by the press.
    HJ: In my mind, Luciano had forty people around him who would kill anyone who came near him.
    OW: Not Brannigan—they all ran. They all had to go to the men’s room when he came in with a baseball bat. He was just a tough Irishman. He said, “Fuck ’em.”
    HJ: But on the plus side, didn’t Mayer create Thalberg, the greatest producer who ever lived?
    OW: Thalberg was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, a producer made the least contribution, by necessity. The producer didn’t direct, he didn’t act, he didn’t write—so, therefore, all he could do was either (A) mess it up, which he didn’t do very often, or (B) tenderly caress it. Support it. Producers would only go to the set to see that you were on budget, and that you didn’t burn down the scenery. But Mayer made way for the producer system. He created the fellow who decides, who makes the directors’ decisions, which had never existed before.
    HJ: Didn’t the other studio heads interfere with their directors?
    OW: None of the old hustlers did that much harm. If they saw somebody good, they hired him. They tried to screw it up afterwards, but there was still a kind of dialogue between talent and the fellow up there in the front office. They had that old Russian-Jewish respect for the artist. All they did was say what they liked, and what they didn’t like, and argue with you. That’s easy to deal with. And sometimes the talent won. But once you got the educated producer, he has a desk, he’s gotta have a function, he’s gotta do something. He’s not running the studio and counting the money—he’s gotta be creative. That was Thalberg. The director became the fellow whose only job was to say, “Action” and “Cut.” Suddenly, you were “just a director” on a “Thalberg production.” Don’t you see? A role had been created in the world. Just as there used to be no conductor of symphonies.
    HJ: There was no conductor?
    OW: No. The konzertmeister , first violinist, gave the beat. The conductor’s job was invented. Like the theater director, a role that is only 150, 200 years old. Nobody directed plays before then. The stage manager said, “Walk left on that line.” The German, what’s his name, Saxe-Meiningen, invented directing in the theater. And Thalberg invented producing in movies. He persuaded all the writers that they couldn’t write without him, because he was the great man.
    HJ: F. Scott Fitzgerald must have been impressed by him, to make him the model for The Last Tycoon .
    OW: Writers always fell for his shtick, knowing better. Writers are so insecure that when he said, “I don’t write, but I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this,” they just lapped it up. He could cut them off at the knees with all his “genius” stuff, and making them sit for three hours before he allowed them to come in to see him, and all that. By the way, there were better scripts written, on the whole—this is a generalization, but it’s my opinion—even when writers considered that they were slumming by coming out here. Faulkner and everybody. “We’re going out there to get some money.” Still, they did an honest job for that money, because instead of going back to their