Sydney Pollack - Online

By Jerry Roberts

Pollack's talk was officially billed as "Guys 'n' Gals 'n' Girdles: The Drag King Tells All About the Making of Tootsie."

When Sydney Pollack directed Dustin Hoffman to a radically funny twist on the macho image in Tootsie, it was anything but a drag as the cross-dressing classic went on to reap 10 Academy Award nominations and won a statuette for Jessica Lange as best supporting actress. Pollack, who was recently announced as the recipient of the Artists Rights Foundation's John Huston Award, was nominated for best director of Tootsie. He further schooled film-literate devotees on that 1982 comic landmark - a selection this year by the American Film Institute (AFI) as one of the 100 greatest comedies - with an hour-long appearance in July on Laugh & Learn: Comedy 101 Film School.

This E! Online summer-afternoon interview series with directors also featured John Landis, Amy Heckerling and Garry Marshall on separate July dates and the team of Jim Abrahams and David Zucker as well as Dennis Dugan in August. The Pollack talk ranged wide to discussions of other films, such as the director's Oscar-winning best picture, Out of Africa (1985), and his most recent film as a director, Random Hearts, starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas.

AFI professor Jim Hosney conducted the interviews using prepared questions while fielding e-mailed questions from online listeners, watchers and readers. Pollack sat back in a chair on a sound stage at E! Entertainment Networks' Wilshire Boulevard offices in Los Angeles and answered some of Hosney's prepared questions, then began answering the e-mails as they came in. The e-mails were sorted by a team of fast-working typists equipped with a bank of PCs and a printer with a runner off-camera supplying Hosney with the queries as they came in.

The chats afforded Guild members, dubbed "guest teachers" by E!, opportunities to interact with fans and buffs and to impart lessons learned in the business to a wide audience.

Landis discussed National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) while Heckerling's chat was centered on Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Marshall talked about Pretty Woman (1990). Pollack's talk was officially billed as "Guys 'n' Gals 'n' Girdles: The Drag King Tells All About the Making of Tootsie." The web casts consisted mostly of tight head shots on the directors as they talked. A second camera contributed credits cards and cuts to Hosney for questions and reactions.

Hosney opened the talk by mentioning that Tootsie placed second only to Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) on the AFI's list of the 100 greatest comedies. Both, coincidentally or not, are about men dressing up as women - Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis to escape the mob by joining an all-girl band in the Wilder classic, Hoffman to secure a continuing acting gig on an afternoon soap opera.

"I think since the '60s, with all of the revolution that happened then, we sort of were forced to reexamine the perimeters of gender and sexuality," Pollack said. "The year we made Tootsie, I was shocked to see two other movies - Yentl and Victor/Victoria - made the same year. We had three pictures in the same year with men playing women and women playing men. Really, this goes way back to Shakespeare. It's an old gimmick. But it sort of reentered everyone's consciousness somewhere in the '80s, because we all started to make those kinds of movies. Now, Some Like It Hot was way earlier, of course, and was really a great classical comedy based on gender and cross-dressing, not any kind of revolution."

Although Pollack had been an actor as far back as Denis Sanders' War Hunt (1962) with Robert Redford - whom he subsequently directed in seven movies including Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and The Way We Were (1973) - Tootsie put the director back in front of the lens after a long absence. One e-mail recalled his performance as Hoffman's agent.

"I don't ever try to get in front of the camera," Pollack said. "I got in front of the camera for the first time in years with Tootsie because Dustin Hoffman insisted I play that role, to the point where he started sending me flowers, saying, 'Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy.' He got this wild thing in his head that I had to play his agent.

"He used say to me, 'Where are the machine guns?' as there were in Some Like It Hot. You know, the guys [in that film] dress up as women because there are machine guns [threatening them]. To him, the machine guns really are the job threat. There was no other way to get a job. He kept saying that acting is hard enough when you have to make it up, so when you don't have to make it up, then don't make it up. He said, 'If a peer says to me, "You're never going to work again," I'm not gonna put on a dress. If you say to me, "You're never going to work again," then maybe I'll put on a dress.' I said, 'Come on!'

"But he was serious, and so it's his fault I ended up [acting again], which started guys like Robert Altman and Woody Allen calling me. I did Husbands and Wives because I was curious to watch Woody direct, same thing with [Stanley] Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. Directors never get to see other directors work, so part of the reason I did it was to see how other directors work."

Pollack added that Hoffman goaded him into acting. "It wasn't just a suggestion, it was bordering on a temper tantrum," the director averred. "I think I would have been stupid to not make him comfortable in that arena. He kept saying he needed that pressure. That part of the agent, George Fields, was originally to be played by Dabney Coleman. Dustin was very fond of Dabney, but he felt he was a colleague and a peer. He said, 'He's not going to scare me.' Dabney turned out to be great in the other role, and it all worked out. So, I have to give him credit for that."

After casting hurdles, Pollack talked about other problems on Tootsie.

"The most difficult part was figuring out how to keep it from being a one-joke movie," he said. "Because it's a concept: A guy has to become a woman to get a job. You have to make it about something else, so that the visual gags were working toward the larger sense and the telling of a story. Otherwise, it's just one joke over and over. All the work we did was in coming up with something that had a spine or a center to it, so that after the third time of him putting on a girdle you don't get tired. After the same joke, it's not so funny. Finally, we were able to make it without losing the fun of it - to make it feel like it was heading toward something, which is that there was a real change in him.

"There is the line, 'Michael, being a woman has made you weird.' I thought if the line was 'Michael, being a woman has made a man out of you,' then we don't even need it, as it's the point of the film. I had to start with a guy whose area of weakness was going to be strengthened. Don't sacrifice any humor for that, but make sure that every scene is part of that change. He sees in Dabney's behavior toward [Jessica Lange] exactly what he was, the way he treated women. It's the same line, over and over again.

"I thought Bill Murray was magnificent in that section. He really did some amazing stuff in that movie. And some of it was totally improvised. You can't write a party - there's too much impulsive behavior. So, we wrote a bunch of lines for a few situations and had Dustin use those terrible lines on different women. Then I said to Bill, 'Can you say something that sounds profound but also sounds like nonsense?' He said, 'Yeah, sure I can.' I didn't tell the extras about his lines.

"They didn't know what he was. So, he would say something like, 'I want a theater that only plays when it rains.' And the extras didn't know what to do; they didn't know whether to laugh or what. It was perfect. The cameraman and I would die when he said that. He would come up with stuff like, 'Donny and Marie are just as authentic Americans as Indians.' Nobody knew what he was talking about. Little by little, everybody left, until finally he was standing next to his girlfriend. It was great."

Pollack was then asked what drew him into acting in Eyes Wide Shut and what did he think of the movie.

"What drew me to the project was Stanley Kubrick," Pollack answered. "He's a filmmaker I admire enormously. I've never run into a director that didn't learn from his work. He also happened to be a longtime friend. We would have long talks about films for hours and hours. He had enormous curiosity about life; it made me feel good to talk to him. He called and asked me to do it, and I was worried because I had heard stories about how he makes people [who work on his films] into prisoners. He promised me it would be two weeks. It wasn't two weeks, of course; it was more like two months. But I enjoyed it.

"What did I think of the film? It's like an exotic food. You have to get used to it. I think it will wear well. It wasn't what anyone expected, and it didn't do well, except in some countries in Europe. It's very operatic, very stylized, but it solicited arguments everywhere it played. I don't think it's meant to be real. If I had to bet, I'd say that in ten years it'll be taught at film schools, the same way all of his other films are. All of his other films - A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket - created an uproar. But he had a way of making you pay attention, and you're not sure if it's an assault. But his films have been amazing over time - 13 of them, I think, and not one of them hasn't been a classic."

Hosney asked Pollack about his teaching background.

"Well, I couldn't make a living as an actor," Pollack said. "I didn't want to teach, but I wasn't doing well as an actor. I had an invitation from a very good teacher once, who was sort of my guru. His name was Sanford Meisner, and he was a very famous acting teacher. He asked me to come back and be his assistant. It was a way of making a living; I didn't really like teaching. It was a lot of pressure to try and tell everybody how to be better. It was hard.

"I didn't realize I was sort of forming the basis of a directorial technique. Through the teaching, I got jobs for coaching. John Frankenheimer was the first one to bring me to Los Angeles to coach some of his actors. I started in film. With television you would do 30 shows a year. I did all those doctor shows - Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey - and that was my film school."

An e-mail asked, "How are movies now different from movies 25 years ago?"

"The range of films has gotten narrower as the movie industry has gotten pushed economically," Pollack began. "It's narrowed its focus, primarily to target the youth market. The only substantial repeat business is from the youth market. Kids go see movies two or three times instead of once. Expensive films now really require repeat business. Most adults - in their late 20s and older - are not repeat customers.

"As the market has been aimed at a narrower spectrum over the years, a wide variety of films have moved into the independent category. We see the kind of films that you used to be able to make [through the studios] as independent films. Some of the earlier films I made I couldn't make today - I don't think I could make Jeremiah Johnson today.

"You used to be able to make a film for a couple million dollars," Pollack continued. "It was a cottage industry back then, and Warner Bros. and Columbia were small businesses. Now they're small divisions of multinational corporations, who have to give quarterly earnings statements - the same as a repeatable product, like Coca-Cola or a car. Their economics are subject to the same laws that any other repeatable product is. But in movies, you're reinventing the art form every time you make it. You can't just find a recipe and stick with it."

After the show, Pollack said he acquiesced to E!'s request for him to be on the show because "It seemed interesting to me and I'm interested in the internet and I'm an internet nerd."

He said that he uses it more and more and that "soon there will be this standing mouth to feed in terms of content, and I wanted to see how they worked this show. I use the internet now to see locations without going to those locations. It costs a lot of money to take a cameraman and a gaffer and three assistants to scope out a location whereas now I have the capacity to see it on the internet and record and save it as a file."

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