The Man Who Wasn’t There
When Austinite Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” opens in theaters this month, Hollywood’s most famous disappearing act will come to an end. Or will it?
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Five and a half years later, Malick won the best director award at Cannes for his second movie, Days of Heaven, which tells the story of an itinerant couple whose love affair ends in bloodshed. It was an ordeal to make. People who knew the movie’s history felt it was patched together, but others saw an epic told in a fantastically spare style, as if some offbeat poet had brought to life a Willa Cather novel. “This is a film that tells us, with a narrative restraint and a noble absence of emotion, about the strength of Americanness,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker. “In what the film leaves unsaid, it is voluble.”
Then, inexplicably, Malick vanished. He refused offers of work, severed his ties to Hollywood, and wandered the world. Over time his disappearing act became the stuff of myth. Filmgoers stirred by the elliptical magic of Badlands and Days of Heaven yearned to see that kind of fluid, surprising work unfold before them again. The fact that he wasn’t around said something to cinephiles in the way that Janis Joplin’s overdose or Bobby Kennedy’s assassination spoke to the country at large. Malick’s films had helped define Hollywood in the seventies; after that colorful period drew to a close, the times that followed were defined instead by the absence of directors like him.
“I guess it’s that old Southern thing—don’t talk about yourself and try to draw the other fellow out.”
—Terrence Malick, Women’s Wear Daily
To understand why Malick left the movie business, it helps to learn how strange it was that he ever got into it in the first place. The eldest of three brothers, Malick, now 55, grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where his father, Emil, worked for Phillips Petroleum. This Midwestern beginning would color all of his work. “He didn’t grow up with asphalt under his feet,” says Bill Scott. “He has a strong sense of land, of sky, of weather.” Malick’s paternal grandparents moved to America from Russia, and his maternal grandparents moved from Ireland—an immigrant background that led screenwriter Jacob Brackman to compare Malick with Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront; America, America). “Terry has that same second-generation sensibility,” says Brackman, who met him in college. “A certain kind of feeling for America and for the West.” When he was eleven, Malick’s parents sent him away to St. Stephen’s, an Episcopal boarding school in Austin. He fashioned the most enduring friendships of his life there, as did many other students. “Our spouses think we’re all crazy,” says Harry Gerhart, a classmate of Malick’s back then. “We tell them, ‘Sign on to the idea that St. Stephen’s is the center of the world, or you can’t marry us.’” Subsequent years took Malick far afield. In 1961 he went to Harvard University. “He was somewhat on the vague side,” recalls classmate William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. “He spent most of his time drinking coffee, talking about Wittgenstein and Husserl.” As an undergraduate Malick translated a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger; in the summer he worked as a stringer for Newsweek. From Harvard he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, but he hated it. “It’s a long way from Bartlesville,” Weld observes. “He said trying to talk to the Brits was like trying to talk under water.” After feuding with his adviser, reportedly over his thesis topic, Malick left for London and started writing for Newsweek from there. It seems he found conflict so unpleasant that he was willing to redirect his entire life to avoid it.
When Malick returned to the United States, he worked briefly in the Miami bureau of Life, covering Latin America. In 1967 he left to write a long article for The New Yorker; Brackman was working there at the time and had put in a good word for him, as had another classmate at Oxford, Wallace Shawn, the son of the magazine’s editor. Based on these references, the editor, William Shawn, agreed to let Malick write a profile of Regis Debray, a leftist intellectual who had chronicled the life of Che Guevara. Malick spent several months in Bolivia, watching Debray stand trial before a military tribunal after being captured with a band of guerrillas. The following year, he borrowed an office at The New Yorker and sat down to write.
On April 4 he was interrupted by the news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot. Both Brackman and Malick had met King, and they teamed up to write about the assassination. Malick drew on the memory of visiting King at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta: “In the course of our conversation, Dr. King told of a recent threat against his life, in Cleveland. ‘It has been given to me to die when the Lord calls me,’ he said, digressing from his narrative. ‘The Lord called me into life, and He will call me into death.’” Malick showed an eye for cinematic detail when he sketched the scene outside: “We remember that a young black girl in a stiff organdie dress was spinning a hubcap on the hot pavement.”
That collaboration was all that Malick published in The New Yorker. Though he spent at least a year on the Debray assignment, he never completed it. He struggled to fit the complexities of Debray’s life into the convenient box of a magazine article, but the life refused to be so neatly circumscribed. Such an early failure, especially with so ambitious a project, was hardly unusual, yet the bitter tang of the disappointment appeared to stay with Malick and to corrode his interest in journalism.
Struggling with his setbacks and his perfectionism, Malick returned to philosophy. He got a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching a seminar on Heidegger. But he was thinking of getting into film. “Terry was feeling discouraged about being a writer because of how much you were cast back on yourself,” Brackman says. “It was such a solitary activity, whereas making a movie was like putting your raft in a river; you could get carried along by all the other people involved.”
“The thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood . . .”
—Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind
In 1953, when From Here to Eternity was made into a movie, L.A. was in the rush of the post-war boom. It was the studio era, the height of Old Hollywood. The movie, which starred Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, and Frank Sinatra, won eight Oscars, including the one for best picture. But by 1964, when The Thin Red Line was made into a movie for the first time, Old Hollywood had begun to crumble. Filmed in Spain, the adaptation was a clunker. Presented with the challenge of capturing interior struggles on film, director Andrew Marton opted instead for kinky melodrama—at one point, the cowardly Fife demonstrates his lack of masculinity by cross-dressing. New Hollywood had many originators, but one of the most influential was George Stevens, Jr., whose father had directed Giant. In 1969 Stevens founded the American Film Institute’s center for the advanced study of film. “The kind of person we were looking for was someone who had an interesting sensibility,” he says, “not necessarily someone who knew how to operate an editing machine.” Brackman, who was writing about film, recommended Malick. After Malick sent in a quirky 16mm short, he was called in for an interview. “He was from Oklahoma and Texas, a Rhodes scholar, interested in sports, and teaching philosophy,” Stevens says. “In my view, he was a home run. I felt he wouldn’t make the same pictures everyone had made last year.”
Besides Malick, the first AFI fellows included screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff), and director David Lynch (Blue Velvet). “It was the cream of the crop,” says Bill Scott, who worked as the AFI’s staff production manager. “The idea was, let’s take a bunch of talented people, put equipment at their disposal, and see what happens.” Malick worked diligently at moviemaking, charmed the right people, produced strong work. After agent Mike Medavoy took him on as a client, Malick wrote an entertaining script about a long-distance trucker that was made into an awful road movie called Deadhead Miles. Malick also wrote Pocket Money, about a cowboy looking for easy money; it’s pretty good. Some have suggested that watching his writing become other people’s property inspired him to direct.
Arthur Penn was a figure of great influence to the younger prodigies. In 1967 Penn had helped usher in the new era with Bonnie and Clyde, his reinterpretation of the western—Kael called it “the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate.” Malick’s first wife, Jill Jakes, had once worked as Penn’s assistant, and the two directors became friends. In 1971 Malick set out to make a movie that owed an obvious debt to Penn and to Bonnie and Clyde, as it also told the story of a fugitive couple who attract notoriety for their crimes.
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