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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Making Badlands was tough. The $350,000 budget was so small that staff and equipment vendors agreed to be paid after the movie was released. Everyone on the set was green, which caused a series of mishaps. Most were benign, but during the filming of the scene in which the Starkweather character (played by Martin Sheen) burns down his girlfriend’s house, an assistant lit a match too soon, creating an instant inferno. The lead special effects man was horribly burned. Legend has it that assistants then got into an ugly row over whether there was enough money to fly him to a burn center. “Every movie is hard to make,” says Bill Scott. “I’ve worked on studio movies that were harder. Badlands was hard in the respect that none of us had acquired a professional veneer yet, so you saw everyone’s entire emotional range. You saw them at their best and at their worst.”
As the shoot wrapped up, stories filtered back to L.A. of Malick wandering Colorado, too broke to pay for a crew, shooting images of wildlife by himself. After a year of editing, he emerged with an unconventional picture. It seemed more like a novel, particularly in its use of an unreliable narrator. Producer Ed Pressman sold the film to John Calley at Warner Bros. Calley was known as a director’s executive, but for Badlands, he paid just $1.1 million, a sum that barely covered expenses.
Nobody expected the avalanche of attention that followed. Once he had captured the notice of Kael and Canby, Malick joined the coterie of directors whose work constituted the emerging cinema. This opened doors. On his next movie, he worked with Bert Schneider, a central figure in the New Hollywood. Schneider threw wild parties, wore velvet, funded the Black Panthers, and was revered for having had the chutzpah to produce Easy Rider. Schneider took Days of Heaven to Paramount. For the studio, little risk was involved: At around $2.6 million, the budget was relatively low, and Schneider agreed to be liable for any cost overruns. Production began in 1976.
If Badlands had been grueling, Days of Heaven was torture. Malick may have been dissatisfied with the cast (Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, and Brooke Adams), since he had hoped to work with other actors. Or he may have been dissatisfied with life in general, as he and Jakes were divorcing. Or there may have been problems with the script. When Malick realized things weren’t working, he started to improvise. He shot vistas, sky, and birds. To the hidebound union crew, it looked like he was wasting his time. Old harvesting equipment broke down, delays inflated the budget, and Malick kept fooling around, looking for something monumental in the wheat fields, which spoke to him alone.
Sorting out a story line took more than two years. Much of the dialogue fell flat, so Malick started discarding it, but by the time he was done, nobody could follow the story. He resorted to voice-over—this time out of desperation—and chose sixteen-year-old Linda Manz to narrate. “You had to talk stuff to her and have her say it back to you or get her in a conversation,” recalls Brackman, who coached the young actress. “We would go into the studio for hours and send this stuff back to Terry. Then he would call up and say, ‘This isn’t working. Try to get it to be more mysterious. We need something Huck Finnish for that section on the river.’” There was so much imagery that the movie could be cut in a thousand ways, presenting Malick with countless decisions. Some felt he dithered over every one. His steely side emerged; despite repeated showdowns with Schneider, he wouldn’t back down. “Money was tight, and time is money,” says Brackman. “He had a lot of people screaming at him by the end.” Finally Paramount kicked in another $800,000, which covered what Schneider was obligated to pay.
The movie came out in 1978. As it had been shot mostly in the afternoon, the images were drenched in gold light—Malick had indeed captured the wheat field’s metaphoric bounty. If there was any argument over what he had accomplished visually, it was settled when the movie won the Oscar for best cinematography. Some critics lambasted him for resorting to voice-over again, but others thought the enigmatic commentary was the best thing about the movie. This is the way it would be for Malick: His successes have everything to do with his failures, and his failures necessitate his successes. He would never please everyone.
“I was once like you, my friend, but then I cut the rope, I slipped my anchor, and once I had, how—restful it was.”
—the Hermit’s soliloquy, Sansho the Bailiff, by Terrence Malick
Paramount was run by Charlie Bluhdorn, the chief executive of the studio’s corporate parent, Gulf + Western, and his opinion carried far greater practical effect than any critic’s. Bluhdorn fell for Days of Heaven. He gave Malick carte blanche on his next project—a terrible mistake, as the director was destined to wander far off course if given total freedom. Malick embarked on Q, a rambling enterprise about the beginning of the world. “He was thinking more in terms of symphony, rather than film,” says cinematographer Paul Ryan, who worked on Q. “People said Days of Heaven didn’t have enough story, that it was just imagery. He said, ‘I want to go more in that direction.’” Malick noodled around: He wanted to find out if it was possible to film from space, inside a volcano, at the South Pole, on the ocean floor. Q turned into an endless research project. Later, people in the business assumed that Malick couldn’t finish it—actually, he couldn’t start. Paramount remained accommodating, which was part of the problem. “Terry worked better from the underdog position,” says Ryan. “Suddenly he had all the approval in the world. I think he felt under a magnifying glass.”
When Malick started spending time in Europe, members of the crew realized the film wasn’t happening, so they started leaving to take other jobs. Finally Paramount shut the production office down. Then Bluhdorn died, initiating a power struggle for control of the studio. “At The New Yorker, Mr. Shawn would never say, ‘Where’s that piece?’” Brackman says. “Bluhdorn was that for Terry. When he died, Terry became just like anybody else in the business, and it was too much.” Approaching forty, Malick went into some kind of tailspin. He felt L.A. was making him into a person he didn’t want to become. He moved to Paris, cut off his old ties, went underground.
Meanwhile, L.A. itself changed, as The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Jaws ushered in the era of massive marketing campaigns and wide breaks—when a movie appears in thousands of cinemas at once. Many careers ended prematurely as the New Hollywood faded. Of all the directors who arrived in the seventies, only Spielberg went on to create a string of blockbusters in the eighties. Still, in Malick’s case, there was no scandal, no public failure, no death. Others flamed out, but Malick chose to vanish, and that was far more mysterious. People never forgot him because they never knew why he left. Rumors circulated that he was guru-seeking in Nepal. The longer he stayed away, the more like fable his story became. “He’s one of those people who have become a cult figure because he has done so little,” says film critic Andrew Sarris. “He hasn’t made any other movies, so people can say, ‘Oh, for the days of Badlands and Days of Heaven.’”
To support himself, Malick did a lot of script doctoring, which paid exceedingly well. Once he wrote an entire screenplay—a version of Great Balls of Fire!, about musician Jerry Lee Lewis—but it was deemed too dark, and the movie that was ultimately made was based on a sunnier script. He got married again, to a French woman (they have since divorced). In time, however, Malick grew nostalgic for Texas. When he moved back in the mid-eighties, it felt like a homecoming. Nobody from St. Stephen’s cared much about the movie business, and with a Southern graciousness, they didn’t pry. “My impression was that he thought absolutely unprincipled people were running the industry,” says a longtime friend. “It was like he wanted to shuck off that part of his life. Because of his notoriety, this required that he simply not admit to it. He wouldn’t talk about Hollywood.”
“No one succeeds in film if he’s not hustling. The first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning is, Who can I hustle? and the last thing you think of before you go to bed is, Who can I hustle?”
—Paul Schrader, from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
That might have been the end of Malick’s career had it not been for the tenacity of two men who wanted desperately to get into the movie business. Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau are not Hollywood insiders, but they certainly know how to hustle. The movie industry is predicated on a hunger for fantasy, something that Geisler acquired as a boy, working at a cinema in San Antonio. The manager was his hero. “He was a showman!” Geisler remembers. “He had this big diamond ring that he would beat on the candy counter. Certainly, by San Antonio standards, here was a Ziegfeld! A Barnum!” In the seventies Geisler moved to L.A. and looked up Malick after seeing Badlands. They had lunch at the Studio Grill. Geisler tried to interest Malick in a screenplay he had optioned, but Malick demurred. Geisler plied him with gifts, and they talked about putting on a traveling roadshow, but somehow Malick slipped through his fingers.
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