|
When I did Ticket, they had me go up 40 pounds, which was a big mistake,
because it screwed up my metabolism. I ballooned up to 195. I did what De
Niro did in Raging Bull, except they shut down production and he had a year
to gain all the weight in. Well, in Ticket to Heaven, I had to play a guy
who became like a concentration camp inmate, over five weeks. I went from
195 to 165 pounds in a period of three weeks. I was doing three pounds a
day. It was risky and bloody stupid, but I was a young actor. I got my
pupils to stay permanently dilated, using some biofeedback techniques I had
learned. I literally made myself this guy, but I did it in only three weeks!
I would never do that again, but you live and learn.
Working with the great Tennessee Williams
So the doors to Hollywood opened. I was completely ignorant. I didn't know
what I'd done wrong (with Paul Mazursky). In fact, I did the same things
with Tennessee Williams around the same time. I was so na?e. When I went to
meet him, I was in a total hysterical state. I mean, here was the real
thing. Having grown up on College Street, you have to understand, all of a
sudden I'm being recognized by people I read and heard about all my life. My
God, I can't believe I'm actually meeting these people! So of course, I'm a
nervous wreck.
I met Tennessee Williams on the Upper East Side in a rundown New
Orleans-style hotel he used to stay at. Somewhere in the 50s or 60s, the
traffic was so bad, I jumped out of the cab and I ran 20 blocks, because I
didn't want to be late. In those days, I was in great shape. How could I
keep the great Tennessee Williams waiting? I arrived huffing and puffing and
discovered that he was having lunch with about 30 other people. He was
sitting, holding court at this lunch and of course, he was well into his
cups. And there was the cr?e de la cr?e of New York and European society.
And here is this shmoe from the west end of Toronto, standing there
sweating. And Tennessee very cordially and very nicely looked up and said
(imitating Williams): "Thank you so much for coming. I've heard many, many
wonderful things about you. Please join us." And he was just so effusive and
incredibly cordial.
I was nervous and I started putting my foot in my mouth continuously. In
those days, I had holes in my jeans and a tremendous sense of inferiority. I
was extremely self-conscious. I used to drink in those years because of it.
So I sat down. Tennessee was very loquacious: He said (imitating Williams):
"I heard many, many fine things about you. I heard that you are a great
actor." Now here is Tennessee Williams saying I'm a great actor! And all I
can say is: "Yes, well, thank you." He says to me: "You've worked with many
of my friends, with many people I know at Stratford, received many fine
reviews from Walter Kerr of The New York Times," and on and on like this.
He's touting me! And then he says: "You worked with Robin Phillips.
Marvelous director! You worked with Maggie Smith. Wonderful actress! And you
worked with my good friend Keith Baxter. Marvelous actor!" And I went: "I
don't think so." (laughter) It just slipped out. And Tennessee went: "What?"
And I said: "I don't think he's such a good actor."
Now, you have to understand, Keith is a perfectly fine actor. With the
arrogance and the ignorance of the kind of background I came from, I felt
compelled to say this to Tennessee. Keith and I had done Anthony and
Cleopatra at Stratford. I played the messenger who gets whipped and a whole
bunch of other roles. Keith played Anthony and in those days, he represented
everything I despised about actors. The booming voice and that sort of
stuff. I was into the Robert De Niro school of acting.
So I figured, how can I lie to Tennessee Williams? Since Anton Chekov, there
has been no greater playwright. He is in the lineage of Moli?e and
Shakespeare. He's God! How can I lie to God? That's how na?e I was. And
Tennessee says: "Keith is a good friend of mine." And Countess so-and-so
looks at me and says (imitating her): "Well, you know, he's a dear friend of
mine as well."
So I'm insulting the shit out of Keith Baxter to these people. And I'm such
an idiot, I stick to my guns. And Tennessee shuts down and starts holding
court with everybody else. Then, bit by bit, I'm totally ostracized from
this group. It was what Tennessee later called "an unsatisfactory lunch."
What was ironic was that the piece I'd been hired for was 27 Wagons of
Cotton, a play from which the movie Baby Doll had been adapted, with Eli
Wallach. But it had been rewritten and combined with a short story of his
called An Unsatisfactory Supper. And there it was, an unsatisfactory lunch,
because I was totally ostracized from the group.
I'm sitting there getting very nervous, wondering what I'd done wrong. I
didn't understand why nobody was talking to me anymore. So after lunch, I
got up and went over to shake Tennessee's hand and he literally walked away
from me and disappeared in his entourage. And I stood there like an idiot. I
didn't understand what I'd done wrong. I couldn't figure it out.
I get into a cab and head back to my apartment in the Village. The phone is
ringing and it's my then-agent Ralph Zimmerman at the Great North Agency.
And Ralph says: "What the hell did you do? Tennessee wants to fire you, for
Christ's sake!" I'd been hired by Harry Rasky, a Canadian who had directed
an Oscar-winning documentary about Tennessee Williams. He had convinced
Tennessee that his plays had been flops since 1972 - since Outcry -- because
they had been directed by homosexuals. What Tennessee needed was a real
red-blooded he-man like himself to direct his plays. Anyway, Tennessee
bought it over stuffed peppers and fell for this nonsense. Harry had never
directed more than a few plays, as far as I know. I'd already done about 15
years of stage. Anyway, Tennessee wanted to fire me. So I thought, well,
maybe it was because of what I thought about his friend Keith Baxter.
Tennessee forgot all about the episode, because he suffered terribly from
the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. It's what killed him, finally.
He really only had a few hours of clarity near the end of his life. The
disease ate him alive. And I think one of the reasons he wanted me was
because I reminded him of his last lover, a Sicilian, who had died of
cancer, maybe AIDS. After that, Tennessee went to pieces, and drank more and
more and more, until he finally went into extinction. Anyway, he didn't fire
me.
So we go off to rehearsals in Atlanta and Tennessee sits in a corner at 8 in
the morning, all hung over. And all these Broadway actors are sitting
around, saying 'I'm starring in this thing.' And we're rehearsing. After a
while, I noticed that Harry isn't doing any blocking. We're just doing
readings. So I catch on that Harry doesn't know what the fuck he's doing and
bit by bit, I start to direct. I notice Tennessee is looking at me with one
eye like a bird. And one day he calls me over and says: "Nick, come over
heah! I want you to change a line heah. I want you to say 'on the bayou',
not 'on the bayoh'. And here, I want you to say 'Dio o Dio'" - which in
Italian means 'God, oh God.' And I said to him, no. (laughter) And he said,
what? And I said: "A Sicilian would never say 'Dio o Dio'; a Roman would say
'Dio o Dio'." Tennessee had spent many years in Rome, but none in Sicily. I
was playing a Sicilian. And he says: "Well, you gotta have him say
somethin' in Eyetalian!" And I said: "Like what? Spaghetti?" And he looked
at me and he cackled. And at that moment, the ice broke and we became
immediate friends.
>From that point on, it was one of the great honors of my life to actually
know him. He appealed to the child in me. He was like a genius-child, a
beautiful spirit, a beautiful boy-girl, because he was both. Inside of him
was the heart of darkness and the heart of light. I always refer to him as
'the devastated heart.' He had the devastated heart of America within him.
He was one of the greats, and he wrote from a place that very few of us can
write from. It's sad. Toward the end, people said Tennessee was a drunken
idiot, but he could unleash a samurai of intellect if he wanted to, even
when he was deep into his cups.
People think of Tennessee Williams as kitsch now. It's not true. He's been
performed that way, but he's not kitsch. He is not easy to perform, because
if you don't work from the deepest part of yourself, you can't do him. It's
no coincidence that Brando and Anna Magnani and Paul Newman and Lee J. Cobb
did Tennessee Williams, because you need great actors to do him. Otherwise,
it can't be done. You can't play Paganini if you're an amateur violin
player. That's all there is to it. Well, you can't do Tennessee Williams
unless you really get it. That's one of the reasons why I think his plays
will die out as time goes on. He did not write actor-proof plays. And with
the exception of Elia Kazan's film of A Street Named Desire, most of the
films that were made from Tennessee Williams' plays do him a great
disservice. I've rarely seen a production of his work that hits it on the
mark. Outcry demands a new kind of acting, not psychological realism, but
magic realism. Tennessee Williams works from an interior landscape, and he
is projecting fantasy lives, but couching it in naturalism, but he's not a
naturalist, because he's a poet.
We got a standing ovation on opening night in Atlanta. That was one of the
great moments of my life - holding Tennessee's hand to a standing ovation.
The play of course went nowhere.
Guided by a bizarre muse
Ticket to Heaven was one of my best performances. That's because of
(director Ralph L. Thomas), who had enough understanding of the process to
allow it to occur and put the camera in the right place. Gilles Carle is a
great filmmaker. So is Bobby Roth, with whom I did Heartbreakers. That was
one of my better performances. Bobby is a serious artist.
That's about it. I've done a lot of performances over the past 10 years and
I always get the same thing: "Jesus Christ, you're the best thing in it!"
Well, often I'm the only thing in it, because there ain't no story or
director or characters. For the most part, I'm one of those unfortunate
actors who knows more than most of the directors and writers that I work
with. I end up rewriting my stuff. I know what I'm doing and I won't
tolerate a lousy script. I won't say, oh well, that's fine, when it's not
right. I know my m?ier, as the French say. That, of course, makes me a very
difficult character and I get hired less and less because of it. We're into
a service industry-type situation and people aren't interested in people
like me any more than they've ever been. But that's okay, because it's
always been that way in my career. So how's business? Bad! Business has
always been bad. So what? You push forward. Avanti, as Mussolini said.
Avanti! What else are you going to do?
You have to have the nervous system of a butterfly and the constitution of a
gorilla to survive in this business. It's a weird combination.
I work steadily, but less so in recent years. Before, when I was younger, I
was primarily hired by television to play the lover, the good-looking guy.
I was considered at one time to be the guy who was going to be the star. I
had that star quality. I met with Spielberg many times over Raiders of the
Lost Ark. I was number one in line for the role of Indiana Jones. (Nick:
What led to Harrison Ford getting the Indy Jones part?) I was offered studio
pictures many times and I turned them down. I was guided by this bizarre
muse. In a sense, I walked away from stardom many years ago - ? la
Christopher Jones - but I continue to make my living at it. I'm a kind of
creative carpenter. That's the way I see myself.
I'm working on a very low budget film right now - A Time of Fear. It's
written and directed by Alan Swyer (Baywatch). Good script. It's the
lowest-budget thing I've ever worked on. My agent called and said - Look,
the SAG strike is on its way. They're going to pay you absolutely nothing,
but it's a good script. I met Alan and loved him. Solomon Burke, the rock 'n
roll singer, is in it. A Time of Fear is going to be like a film noir, if we
ever finish it. Unfortunately, the money ran out. My only problem with the
film is I weigh 300 pounds in it! I've gained 40 pounds in the past year,
because I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic. I'm now in the process of working
off this excess weight. I've gone up and down 40 pounds my entire career.
I'll soon be doing a motorcycle picture. I don't know the movie's title
(Nick: Any new developments on the Hell's Angels movie? Do you now know its
title? Describe your role. Is it a cameo?). Claudio Luca (The Boys of St.
Vincent) is producing. That's going to be shot in Montreal in August. And
then Claudio and I will talk and we'll see if we can develop something. I've
known about Claudio for many years. He's a very talented producer.
Margaret's Museum is first-rate.
I'll be making movies and selling them directly on the Internet through my
new Website (www.nickmancuso.com). I shot a 45-minute film that I'm still
thinking of selling on the Net. I started doing this thing called
MetalTV.com out in Vancouver. I brought in actors once a week, interviewed
them. We started working on characters. This one was based on a true story
that happened in the seventies, where these various hospitals in Canada
began to experiment on schizophrenics with LSD. They drove some of these
guys to suicide.
So I came up with this story about a young schizophrenic who ends up in a
nut house where I'm the doctor. The kid is experimented on, but then he
meets a Russian sailor who helps him escape and introduces him to the city.
We started to develop it with the actors. What I wanted to do was actually
film the process of the making of this film. The interviews with the actors
were filmed. I brought in doctors and nurses in the mental health field and
interviewed them. Then I was going to post all this on the Internet. So the
audience could actually participate in the creation and launching of the
film. I was going to get a group of actors in different cities, so they're
all part of a worldwide theatre Web. I worked on this for about 10 months,
but then I had to go back to LA to make a living.
I'm in the process of forming Vulcania Productions, a company which I hope
will allow me to develop these kinds of projects. If I can keep my focus,
I'll do these films in Canada. For our line of work, the Internet will
change the universe. We'll be able to actually own our own product. That is,
if actors are still working, because within five years, half the stuff
you're gonna watch on TV will be high-definition-TV animation. Sony has
already done it with Brando, apparently.
Writing: Art of a higher order
The writing is a whole other area, the vibration of this other character
within me that I'm very afraid of. I'm afraid that what I'm dealing with is
of a frequency that is so much higher and more difficult to tame. I do a
little bit of writing at a time. Maybe by the time I'm 80, I'll have finally
gotten the book out (College Street Blues).
I wrote a script with Ralph Thomas called Blood Moon, which I like.
Unfortunately, Ralph lost interest in it. It's the story of an actor who
comes back to his home town and is tracked by an old friend, who takes him
out and they start on this wild goose chase in search of their past. They
are looking for this woman with whom they were both in love. It turns out
that the (tracker) is insane and has murdered her and he is luring his old
friend out to kill him. It's about the dreams of the sixties and what
happened to those dreams, and the gigantic betrayals that occurred to get us
to where we are now. This did not happen by accident.
A couple of years ago, I developed a project with a Toronto writer and shot
some of it. [Sal's Big Break with Silvio Oliveiro; script by Mancuso and
Tony Corindia; a comedy about an actor who returns to his old neighborhood
and causes havoc; 45 minutes shot; project is currently on hold.]
I performed my first psychologue here (Hotel Praha) in 1998. This - writing
and directing -- is not something that I'm rushing to do, but I will do it
in time. My old friend Saul Rubinek is now directing. He's a wonderful
director, done some marvelous stuff. He just did Club Land. It's really
beautifully shot. I know I have to follow my bliss, because I'm dead bored
with the acting, for the most part. I just look at it as a survival
mechanism. Especially when I work up here. I wonder if I'll survive the day,
because it's so Wild West. I'm lucky if I don't get exploded or have a
camera fall on me.
When I started out, there was a sense that we were involved in making
something that was out of the ordinary. Filmmaking was not assembly-line and
corporatist, which is what it is now. Ninety nine per cent of what's being
made now is crap, because the guys who took over came out of business school
and see film as a 'product,' and it's not a product.
I haven't been thrilled by the roles I've gotten in well over 20 years.
After Stingray was cancelled, it was a downhill slide. Up until then,
stardom was always a possibility. But there are only so many good roles
available and they go to Pacino or De Niro. That's the only 'stardom'
category I could have gone into back then. Dino De Laurentiis offered me a
role years ago. He said - put yourself in my hands, trust me. And I walked
away, because I wanted to play this other role.
Michelle Pfeiffer and I were up for Against All Odds, opposite Rachel Ward
and Jeff Bridges. But simultaneously, I was offered the role of Buckaroo
Banzai in the W.D. Richter film (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across
the 8th Dimension) and the lead role in Streets of Fire, that Walter Hill
was doing. I told Walter -- hey man, you're looking for Clint Eastwood. I'm
not him. Walter kind of went - what? I was under option at Universal. I
turned down the W.D. Richter, because I was up for Taylor Hackford's Against
All Odds and then I didn't get it. Michelle Pfeiffer ended up flying out to
do Scarface and I flew out to do this piece of shit pilot called Unit 4.
Never went anywhere. I've done tons of stuff like that.
I'm not bitter about this, you understand. I am, however, perplexed. I'm
trying to figure out what it was that I was supposed to do. I believe that I
was given a gift. I don't believe the gift has manifested itself yet. I have
given some performances that are really good. I believe I will give a few
more, provided I can find the material. I think I have to write that
material. Maybe I'll manifest at 60, maybe not at all, but I'll keep
striving.
Calabrians, like myself, are defiant. In 600 BC, we were the Greeks who
founded that area. By 200 BC, the Romans had invaded us. By 150 BC, the
Romans had razed Calabria to the ground, because our allegiances had been to
Carthage. From that point on, we were invaded by the Saracens, the Vikings,
the Normans, the French, the Spaniards, everybody. It's been like that for
about 2,000 years. It does something to your personality after a while. It
creates a certain defiance, you understand. And I'm still defiant. If I see
what I consider to be an injustice, it bugs me a great deal.
The betrayal of sixties ideals
The sixties was a temporary bit of insanity in human history, fueled by
hallucinogenic drugs and various influential thinkers, when people were
trying to create a society that was not modeled on the capitalist ethic and
the idea that human beings are only worth what they can generate. The
sixties was an attempt to bring about a New Eden, which is an old American
idea, because America was founded on this basis. America was the New Eden.
Then it got poisoned and polluted and we came to the end of the road - the
Pacific Ocean.
Shane, the American Outlaw Hero, is moving further and further west. When he
gets to the edge of the world -- which is Californigh-ay -- where's he gonna
go? Straight up. Then you start getting the science-fiction movies. There's
always the search for the new frontier - the New Eden that we're all looking
for, the apocalyptic vision. Well, the sixties was all about that, but in
the middle of Eden, the serpent appeared in the form of the war in Vietnam,
Richard Nixon and the conservative backlash. And of course, the repressive
factions won. We're now in the middle of the great capitalist, corporatist
nightmare that people were talking about back in the sixties. Do you
seriously think we're immortal, that we're going to continue with this
particular social model and not do ourselves in? We're frying the planet.
Why am I talking about this bullshit? Because the function of art is to act
as the antennae of the community, as Ezra Pound said. That is our
responsibility. We're not doing this to become multi-millionaires. That's
not our function. That happens as a side-product. Our purpose was to make
the invisible visible, to incarnate demons and angels for the community to
see, so that they can survive. We're like doctor or healers. That was the
original calling, but now we're pathogenic. We've soured. We've turned.
We're like cancer - runaway life. Life that suddenly goes insane and just
grows and grows and grows. Liver cells go out of control; they start
propagating madly, only they're not liver cells anymore. They're just
homogenized cells. Just like so many of the films that are being made
nowadays. They're not really films. They're just 'stuff.'
Are you drawn to apocalyptic subject matter? You've made quite a few
doomsday-type films lately.
These last few years, I've been writing about it a lot. I'm working on a
piece called In the Domain of the Ordinary, an apocalyptic psychologue.
Hotel Praha was about the fall of Communism, in the guise of a businessman
who loses his love. He wants to go to the funeral but can't get out of his
hotel room, which is the way I staged that. This guy keeps going to the
door, but he can't get out.
In the Domain of the Ordinary is much more fragmented and complicated. It's
more of a musical piece, very minimalist. The message is that the 'Devil's
Country is everywhere and Superior Men are everywhere oppressed!' I'm
getting a computer animator, who will redesign my face, which will be
projected onto a screen, while I perform the piece. It'll be a sinister
alter ego that will speak in a tiny, high-pitched voice.
I'm working with Dennis Patrick -- head of the electronic music department
at U of T, with whom I composed many years ago a series of pieces, one of
which was called In Parentheses. Another was called Winter Tins. And an
unfinished piece was called Glances from a Window. Believe it or not, In
Parentheses and Winter Tins were played at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I
got a letter about eight years ago, signed by nine Danish composers, who
said they were very big fans of my music! I said, what the hell are they
talking about? What music? I'd forgotten. We put this little thing out on
the University of Toronto Press and it ended up in France and Denmark, where
it's played now and again.
It's very bizarre. The music, of course, is Dennis Patrick's. He's a
composer. I wrote all the text and I shaped it with him, the same way I'll
be shaping In the Domain of the Ordinary with him. There's no money in this,
you understand, but I dig this stuff. I'm a child of the sixties. I like
Philip Glass - especially Koyaanisqatsi. Talk about apocalyptic! I thought
it was an amazing piece - the music is so haunting and hypnotic. I'm also
influenced by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Robert Wilson.
As for theatre, I was influenced by Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowsky, Antonin
Artaud and The Living Theatre. There was a whole movement in that direction
and it got very quickly curtailed. That kind of revolutionary theatre was
absolutely cut off. For one thing, it is utterly antithetical to everything
we're living through. It's very disruptive to the status quo. It asks us to
truly question our lives.
(German philosopher) Herbert Marcuse said in One-Dimensional Man that, in a
capitalist system, there is no resistance or antithesis. Anything that is
outside the pale is automatically co-opted, bought and it becomes
fashionable. So every rebellious act is absorbed into the cultural
mainstream. That's exactly what happened to the sixties, which were absorbed
into the greater ethos of the continuing forward march of history.
I admire the Americans tremendously. I admire the Jeffersonian spirit of
America. The Constitution of the United States is one of the great documents
of all time. Its application, however, is a whole other story. A freak of
nature occurred with the American Revolution. A group of enlightened
individuals happened to be there at the founding of a nation. These guys
were deeply influenced by the Ancient Greek's concept of democracy. All of
it was geared toward the idea of liberation from tyranny, because until you
have that, you have nothing. It's not a coincidence that America became the
central womb of creativity for the past 200 years in every science and art.
Why? Because you had a system in place that gave the individual the right to
do that. Of course, it got usurped, pulled away by this other god -- Moloch.
In America, the problem is not failure. The problem is success. In America,
you're shot up into the skies like a signal flare, and just when you're at
the apex, you're shot out of the sky. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau said that: "In America, the fruit rots on the vine before it
matures." And it's just as true now as it was in Rousseau's time.
In Canada, we still have the possibility of creating a better, more liberal
society, if we don't fold ourselves into the American hegemony. I've lived
through the American Nightmare. I moved to Santa Barbara a few years ago.
What finally got me out of Los Feliz were the race riots - 2,500 fires, the
terrible destructive power of that riot, which was actually the first
shooting of a New American Revolution, in which the oppressed classes -
mostly Black and Hispanic - are trying to rise up from the indentured
servitude of the corporatist reality. Now, if you're able to find a job, you
have to work 12 to 14 hours a day to make what you did 25 years ago in an
eight-hour shift. Everybody's in debt. How long will America survive,
combined with all the pollution?
I've been in many American cities and 90% of them are unlivable. The
downtowns look like firebombed craters. When I was in Atlanta working at the
Alliance Theatre, I remember seeing signs that read: "You are in downtown
Atlanta at your own risk." Every Saturday night, outside the window of my
hotel, I'd see some big-assed, beefy cop shooting at some black man running
down the alley. Now, what kind of a life is that? I mean, 27,000 handgun
deaths every year? Canada's cities are still livable, but for how long?
College Street Blues deals with growing up here in Toronto as an immigrant
in the sixties. It's about three immigrant kids. One is Italian, like
myself. One is a Jew. And one is a Yugoslav. They are in a period of total
transition. They are teenagers becoming adults. They are high-school, going
to university. First love, and all that kind of stuff. The 1960s are
becoming the 1970s. At the very end, the central character, Pietro, ends up
hopping a train and heading north. Somebody said to me that this was very
unusual, that Pietro heads north and not south. I said, yes, I know. He
would rather head into the forest, into the night sky.
|
