Jean-Luc Godard? Jack Palance wasn’t impressed.

So there I was in my hometown of New Orleans in 1991, attending the junket for City Slickers and seated at a table with Jack Palance. I wanted to ask a question I figured that he hadn’t been asked a zillion times before, so I tossed him this one: What was it like to work with Jean-Luc Godard in the 1963 international co-production Contempt?

Palance smiled at me — indeed, almost winked at me — and replied.

“Godard, I thought, was a good filmmaker, but he was so… Well, I remember, we had a question about a scene that we were doing, and I thought maybe there was something I should be doing, and he said, blatantly, ‘You know, of course, that I am considered one of the great filmmakers today.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that. Why don’t you tell me about it?’ And so he goes on like this.

 “He was one of those guys, one of those directors — I’ve worked with a few of them, and my God, they’re infuriating! Because suddenly he’s walking out there, and he’s throwing things, saying, ‘And then you will do this! And then you will do that!’ And you stop and say, ‘Hey! I'm not going to do what you’re showing me anyway. So don’t show me!’

“See, he was doing that with all the actors. Like, ‘And now, I think if you touch the glass on the table…’ And you know you’re not going to touch the glass after he’s shown you something like that.”

And yet, for all that, Palance said Contempt had its funny moments. Sort of.

“I think one of the most memorable things for me in that film was doing a scene with Brigitte Bardot. We were in that red car, a little red car, and we had a scene where she and I just drive away. We’re going off to something. No dialogue. And we’re set up somewhere in Italy, and Godard’s got his camera way over there. He’s sitting on a box, hunched over, and he wore a hat, looking like a very, very artistic picture of a director.

“And so, we start to drive. We drove by, and we could hear his voice saying, ‘All right, we will do an encore. We will do it again, please.’ So you come back — there’s no explanation of what went wrong — and you do it again. And then you do it again. And do it seven, eight times — just driving by the camera, nothing else. And nobody says, ‘Faster,’ or ‘You're looking at the wrong direction,’ or some goddamn thing.

“So, as we got back this time, I said to Bridget, ‘Look, if he says we’re going to do it again, you and I are going to lunch.’ And as we drove by, we heard the voice saying, ‘Tell them we will do it again’ — well, we just kept driving.

“It’s true. We went off into the mountains, had a nice lunch, came back — and so help me God, he had not moved! He was sitting there, and as we approached, he said, ‘Tell them we will do it again!’

“And that was Jean-Luc Godard…”

R.I.P.: Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

It feels like I’ve been seeing movies scripted by – and/or adapted from books or stories written by – Richard Matheson all my life. Maybe because, well, I have. But that isn’t the only reason I find it difficult to imagine a world without him. While I would like to offer my sincere condolences to his family and friends, I strongly suspect that his death this week at age 87 will do little or nothing to end the ongoing flood of films and TV dramas that others adapt from his works.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (script and novel) and his oft-filmed novel I Am Legend arguably are his best-known works, followed by his classic teleplays for The Twilight Zone (including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” later recycled in Twilight Zone: The Movie) and Star Trek. But mention also must be made of his enduringly influential script for Steven Spielberg’s Duel, the lean and mean 1971 TV-movie (based on Matheson’s own story) that impacts you as simply and efficiently as a blunt instrument.

I’d also like to give shout-outs to his three Edgar Allen Poe adaptations for Roger Corman – one seriously spooky (The Pit and the Pendulum), another splendidly silly (The Raven -- somewhat deceptively sold in this trailer), the third a bit of both (Tales of Terror) – which I saw at an impressionable age, back when Castle of Frankenstein was my favorite magazine in the whole wide world. I continue to remember the movies, and the magazine, quite fondly. (In fact, I occasionally show the "Black Cat" segment from Tales of Terror to scriptwriting students as a good example of "loose" adaptation of literary source material.)
And while I can’t claim I’ve ever been a big fan, many incurable romantics still swear by the 1980 sci-fi/fantasy romance Somewhere in Time, the script for which Matheson adapted from his 1975 novel Bid Time Return. I’ll give the movie this much: Lead player Christopher Reeve was nowhere else ever more effective, or more affecting, as a non-super-powered protagonist.
Matheson also scripted an impressive 1973 TV version of Dracula – starring Jack Palance – with a slight but unmistakable touch of Sergio Leone to it. (In this version, Dracula periodically gazes at a portrait of a lost loved one in his chiming musical pocket watch – not unlike Lee Van Cleef in For a Few Dollars More.) Unfortunately, when it was set to premiere on Oct. 12, 1973, it had to be pre-empted (and later shifted to the following February) for then-President Richard Nixon’s introduction of Gerald Ford to replace the resigned-in-disgrace Spiro Agnew as Vice President.
Of course, this allowed me to joke for years afterward that I watched the telecast for a good ten minutes before realizing that Nixon wasn’t Dracula…