INT: You said you wish you had acted more. Perhaps would you have rather been an Actor/Director like Woody Allen? Or is that what you're thinking of, or would you have become your own, you know, a player in more of your own films, or--? 

PB: No, I--when I said that, “I wish I'd acted more,” I kind of wish I'd acted more in other peoples' pictures. It would have created more of a career for myself in that area, 'cause I didn't--I was pretty good, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in it, for some reason. Although the two movies that I acted in for myself, and the one movie [THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND] I did for Orson [Orson Welles], I seemed to have an enormous amount of confidence. I don't know that that was real, it may be just acting, but I don't know. I always give the impression I'm not nervous too, which I'm not a lot of the time, but sometimes I am and I look like I'm not. So, I don't know. I just wish I'd acted more. Not necessarily in my own pictures, just other peoples' pictures. TOOTSIE, I was offered the Director's role in TOOTSIE, that Dabney Coleman did, and I wish I'd done that. I was feeling very, very, that was soon after Dorothy [Dorothy Stratten] was killed. In fact, I realized later that was one of the reasons Sydney Pollack offered it to me, was to make me feel better. But I didn't get it, and I also, I don't think I--didn't think I could do it. So I turned that down, I was sorry about that. I turned down the part of the James--who played it finally? Somebody. Part in THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, can't think who played it. [INT: That's also Sydney Pollack.] PB: Yeah, he asked me to do two things with him.

INT: Interesting too, that he's [Sydney Pollack] an Actor/Director, and he's been acting more. 

PB: He acted more later than he did, yeah. I also did a cable thing for him, a series he did called FALLEN ANGELS. I directed one of the episodes. It was a ‘30s [1930s] film noir. [INT: For Showtime?] PB: For Showtime. [INT: Yeah, I remember that.] PB: It was quite a nice little series, and I did one based on a Cornell Woolrich story. And it was one of the best things I've done, I really thought it was very interesting. We shot it in color, but we really painted everything black or white or gray, had all the costumes in black and white or gray, looked like a black and white movie, except the faces and the eyes and the hair. I personalized it. It's a really nice piece. Has one of the--one of the most evocative dissolves I ever did. I'm very big on dissolves, if you use 'em right. And we did this with no money, but we did a dissolve the way Orson Welles did in CITIZEN KANE. You know, he told me how he did--why the dissolves are so beautiful in KANE, it’s 'cause he didn't know that you're-how to do them. So he assumed that they were done the way they were done on the stage, where you could--you bring all the lights down around, like let's say we end up on a close up of me. All the lights around, the ambient light, comes down, and the light on me stays longer and then goes. Then on the incoming shot, over in the corner where my face is gonna be lingering, it's dark. And the rest of the light comes up before that comes up, so it's in reverse, do you follow? Then when you put it in the lab, my face lingers right in the place where you want it to, and the rest of the thing comes up around it, so that it looks like I'm in that other place, you see what I mean? It's a--it's a visual fade out, fade in, and you put it together, it looks gorgeous. He did all the dissolves that way in KANE, 'cause he thought that's the way they were done. Nobody told him that's not the way they're done. So I've done that on two or three occasions. I've created a dissolve like that on purpose. And we did one in this FALLEN ANGLES episode, "A DIME A DANCE," where the killer kills this girl and he's dancing with her. And we did a very slow dissolve of him dancing with her in this empty apartment, and dissolve to a dance hall, and so you actually see him dancing in the dance hall with these other people dancing, and then he disappears. It was very powerful, horrible. And we did that in--well, we didn't do the light fade, but we did a very long dissolve in THE CAT'S MEOW. We went from the coffin to the yacht, which became his coffin. A bit literal, but I liked it. We also went from black and white to color, that was fun. I always wanted to do that, do a picture in--start out black and white, and then go to color, and come back to black and white. [INT: Yeah, the black and white's very good in CAT'S MEOW [THE CAT'S MEOW], much better than you frequently see now.] Yeah, well there's hardly any black and white. We did it with wide-angle lenses again, so everything was very sharp. [INT: Is it literally the case that there was just more silver in the nitrate, and that's why you can't really reproduce black and white as it looked in its glory years?] Well, in the silent era and all through the forties, you had, yeah, you had the silver in there, a lot of silver, and so it shimmers. Black and white shimmers, actually seems to be moving. [INT: Right.] It's gorgeous. [INT: Right, whereas it generally looks flatter.] PB: Flatter now. Flatter since then, since the late forties.

INT: What did you--You were gonna mention something about television? 

PB: Well, I did quite a bit of television, and you know, because television is so shown once or twice, and then you never hear about it again, some of it comes out on DVD, but not always, I have had a few things released on video or DVD. But television is sort of expendable, it seems to go, and movies, features stay around forever. But I don't have a snobbish attitude about the television work that I did, and in fact in almost every case, I'm rather proud of it and I wish it were seen more, because I think it's quite good. There's a snob-ism about, in feature film circles, there's a snob-ism about television. And in television, there's a snob-ism about features. “Well, it's feature, let 'em go to hell.” “Oh, it's television, let it go to hell.” I mean, it's so stupid. And I think it's all movies, finally. And the only one that is more of a television movie was the Natalie Wood picture [THE MYSTERY OF NATALIE WOOD] where I consciously used the idea of montages and interviews as part of a television movie, and I knew it was gonna be on television, I rather liked using those devices that are television devices. But I did a--for example, I did another thing for Showtime, based it from a series that Norman Jewison did called PICTURE WINDOWS. I did a show called “Song of Songs” [PICTURE WINDOWS: Song of Songs”], based on a very good little short story, and we had George Segal in it. And that's some of the best stuff I've ever done, and it's got a real kind of European flavor to it. We shot it in Toronto, but it has a story, and the way we told it, has a kind of I don't know, it's just exactly the kind of tone that I really like, which is sort of in between comedy and drama. My favorite kind of movies are the ones that walk that line between comedy and drama, and you go from one to the other, kind of easily, which I think Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch] was able to do very well, and McCarey [Leo McCarey].

INT: Do you have a sense also in working in television, of relief, like you're not working under a magnifying glass, which I know you were when you were making your films in the seventies? 

PB: Well, that is part of it. That's a nice part of it, but on the other hand it's a pity that you don't get it seen more. A lot of people do see it, but it isn't, you know, memorialized the way that features are. I did a--Streisand [Barbra Streisand] produced a series for Showtime also, about Gentiles who saved Jews during World War II, called RESCUERS: STORIES OF COURAGE [RESCUERS: STORIES OF COURAGE: TWO WOMEN]. And I did one about two women, we did an hour on each one. We shot two hours, period, in nineteen days. Well, you know, I was kind of proud of that, and it reminded me of all those Directors I've interviewed, whether it was Jack Ford [John Ford], or Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock], who are about as different as you can get, or Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang, about as different as you can get, or Otto Preminger and Allan Dwan, about as different as you can get. All those Directors I interviewed on paper, I mean, you know for paper, for print. And all the ones I talked to who worked in the movies, they had, people asked me what did they have in common? The biggest thing they have in common was pride in doing something economically. “And yeah, we shot that in twenty days.” “We shot that in three weeks.” “We shot that in six days.” “That whole sequence took a day.” You say, “What?” That, to me, that's professional and I love it. And I love being in that tradition of saying, “We did that really fast”. “We did, that was tough, but we did it in three weeks.” [INT: Have you ever noticed that Directors all seem to know the exact number of days every movie they've made took?] Usually. [INT: They always remember, “Oh, that was thirty-one days,” or “twenty-six days.” Isn't that curious?] Yeah, because it was, you know, you live with that. [INT: Yeah. Yeah.]

INT: What was your fastest shoot for a feature, TARGETS? 

PB: You mean for a theatrical feature? TARGETS. Twenty-three. [INT: So you know.] I remember it. Twenty-three days. But I mean, the fastest I ever did was two hours, it was RESCUERS [RESCUERS: STORIES OF COURAGE: TWO WOMEN] was two hours, and we did it in nineteen days. I don't even know how we did that. [INT: Did you work overtime?] Some, but it wasn't extraordinary. [INT: I think it's that thing you're talking about where you just get into a rhythm of going and suddenly it doesn't seem like you're hurrying up.] You get into a hurry rhythm, and then it seems sort of okay. [INT: It seems normal.] Yeah, it seems normal to go fast. And there's a nice thing about it, which is that one of the things I don't like about making features is that there's a lot of downtime, when you're waiting for the lighting. And I must say, I rather like just plowing on. Okay, we got it, let's go, when can we... I hate waiting for lighting.

INT: Do you have an opinion about what's happening possibly with the future of how we're gonna see movies? Do you think the theater will ever go away? 

PB: That's hard to say. I don't think so. I don't think the idea of a community spirit of every--will disappear entirely, though I think a lot of, less films will be made for the theater experience. I can't imagine that would completely disappear. I guess it could, but I don't think so. [INT: That might become more of a specialty.] More really specialty thing, because you can get it piped into your house. That may happen. First time you see a movie, get it live on, you know, sort of live, what do you call it? Not really live, but cable. [INT: Well, it seems like within the next couple of years, the whole downloading, you know, movies off the internet's gonna be very quick, and that's clearly gonna change a lot of the release window. I just wonder sometimes if people over- or rather underestimate the power of what you call the communal experience. You know it…] Well, it's huge. I mean, you know, my favorite story about that is we made WHAT'S UP DOC? and I heard that it was gonna be released at the Radio City Music Hall, which was the biggest theater in the country. Still is, but now it doesn't show movies exclusively. 6,500 seats. And I called Cary Grant as I often did, to tell him this exciting event. I said, "Guess what, my new movie's opening at the Radio City Music Hall." "Oh, that's nice. I had twenty-eight pictures play the hall." "Twenty-eight?" "Yeah, all of my pictures played the Music Hall." I said, "Oh, that's wonderful." "I'll tell you what you must do. Put on some sunglasses and a raincoat, and--well, you won't need that. But go down there and you stand in the back, and you listen and you watch while 6,500 people laugh at something you did. It will do your heart good." And I did, of course. I would've anyway, but I had his words ringing in my ears. I never had such an experience. That was, that was the high point of my, of seeing my own movies, or seeing anything I've ever done in front of an audience. That was extraordinary. He was right. We broke the house record at the Radio City-the thirty-year house record, we broke it two weekends in a row. At the same dollar price that it'd been when it opened. Two dollars, top. And there were lines around the block, and you could hear the people screaming outside across the street, the laughter was so intense. The place shook! And I stood there in the back, and it was heaven. I mean, I took some--a couple of friends, I remember, and I said every time I snap my fingers, they're gonna laugh. It was such power. And you know, this is the communal thing. We made that movie, and everybody was encouraged to contribute schtick, you know, jokes, and anything, you know, little schtick here and there. And there were little bits of schtick in there that we thought nobody will get that. But if you have 6,500 people, somebody gets everything. So even the little schtick, a hundred people would get. And somebody--so people were laughing all the time. It was heaven. I only went twice. I should have gone ten times.

INT: I think that's a very lovely note to end an interview on. 

PB: It was my favorite--[INT: It's an amazing experience of--] It was an amazing experience, and at the same moment, this was the high point of my career. The Ra--WHAT'S UP DOC? was playing at the Radio City Music Hall on 6th Avenue, and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW was still playing first run on 3rd Avenue at the Cinema One, whatever it was, Columbia Theater. Both still first run, both in the top ten VARIETY. An arty picture and a commercial picture both playing. [INT: In your hometown, it must be said.] In my hometown. It was- I didn't live here then, but I came back. [INT: The greatest city on Earth, your hometown, and you were the king.] Yes, I was definitely the king. In fact, my name, without my asking for it or even knowing that they were gonna do it, the Radio City Music Hall put my name on the marquee. So it said "Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal in Peter Bogdanovich's comedy, WHAT'S UP DOC?" And my name went around from 6th Avenue to 51st Street, whatever that was around the bend there. That was pretty good. I have a picture of it somewhere. Yes, memory lane. That was a good moment. But we just keep going. And, you know, you can never go back, you can just go forward. So it's nice to remember the high points and aim for them again.