Arthur Penn: American Director

23. Back to Basics

240 23 Back to Basics Like the proverbial bad penny, television reenters Arthur Penn’s life at the strangest times. In July 1967, with his salary from Bonnie and Clyde spent and the film facing a profitless studio writeoff , he was so strapped for cash that he took on a project that reminded him how far the once-mighty medium had fallen. NBC paid playwright William Hanley $112,500 for Flesh and Blood and determined that it would be one of the first TV movies to be shot on video. The story of a troubled family living in an abandoned apartment building, it starred Edmond O’Brien, Kim Stanley, Suzanne Pleshette, E. G. Marshall, Kim Darby, and Robert Duvall. Penn agreed to direct it and asked for Stanley, not knowing that the actress was in crisis.1 Both she and O’Brien were drinkers, and at one point during rehearsals Stanley went off on a binge that threatened the whole production. Colleen Dewhurst was hired as a standby. Recalls Penn, “There was sober and drunk, and with drunk came a paranoia, the feeling between Eddie and Kim of terror, of people coming to get them, of the FBI. It was just ghastly. Whether they infected each other with the paranoia, I don’t know. Certainly Kim was worse than Eddie at that point. It was about as agonizing as anything I’ve ever done in my life.” Penn coaxed a performance out of the actress, the show was taped, and it aired unhappily on January 26, 1968. By that time, Bonnie and Clyde had taken off, and Penn didn’t have to look back. Not for another twenty-five years would he seriously Back to Basics 241 entertain another TV offer, and when he did, it turned out to be another shotgun marriage. The Portrait, adapted by Lynn Roth from Tina Howe’s 1982 play Painting Churches, dramatizes how Margaret “Mags” Church reconciles with her aging parents, the headstrong Fanny and Gardner Church (Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck), as they begrudgingly sit for her to finish a long-neglected painting of the two of them. At the same time, they are downsizing their home in advance of Gardner’s retirement from academia (he is a poet); Mags has broken up with yet another beau; her parents insist on denigrating her choices while pretending to encourage her; and Gardner may be in the first stages of dementia. The film held importance to Peck, who arguably committed to the project to benefit his then thirty-four-year-old daughter, Cecilia, whom he cast as Mags.2 He also served as executive producer . “He wanted her to be an actress,” Penn observes. “She didn’t really want to be, I think. I stayed as superficial as I could and just tried to give her physical liberty and get her to be physically different from Greg’s age group. He didn’t fight me on that, but he would be sitting there in the scene with her, registering his disapproval, which, of course, she was enormously sensitive to.” Over the course of rewrites and preproduction in 1991 and early 1992, Penn and Peck adjusted the script. Peck, in particular, made handwritten notations of line readings not only to his own dialogue but to Cecilia’s. After a week’s rehearsal in New York in spring 1992, the four-week shoot commenced in North Carolina with Duke University serving as Harvard, Lake Crabtree as the Charles River, and the lush Durham area doubling for Cambridge , Massachusetts’ historic Brattle Street. Production went smoothly, although it was obvious that there were personal agendas . Playing Peck’s wife, Lauren Bacall (“Betty” to her friends) kept her distance, and the director noticed. “I knew Betty for a long time around New York,” Penn says. “She was very close with Greg Peck. They were very dear. But she’s a realist, and she could see what I could do with that daughter and what I couldn’t do. Every once in a while she’d give me one of those [he rolls his eyes].” 242 Arthur Penn The Portrait addresses matters seldom explored in public, namely, that parents are not perfect, plus the fact that two people in their seventies have a sex life. Once again Penn was excluded from the editing process by the network, TNT, although he was sent various cuts to screen...