"Your Country Is Your Head": An Interview with Gore Vidal

This interview with Gore Vidal, in Los Angeles, took place via telephone on April 19, 2007.

Drake Stutesman: It's been a pleasure reviewing your work. You have a wonderful writing style.

Gore Vidal: It doesn't put you to sleep?

DS: No. I admire the smoothness with which you write.

GV: Thank you.

DS: I was told that you had once done a script for Marco Bellocchio, is that right?

GV: For who?

DS: Bellocchio, the Italian director.

GV: No. I never did. I admire him . . . but no. In fact, I don't think I've ever met him.

DS: You wrote so many scripts but were disappointed with some of the outcomes. In an ideal world, if you had had more control over your scripts would you have gone on writing scripts, even until today?

GV: No, script writing is ridiculous. You have so many focus groups that review what you have written, kids off the street. "Do you understand it?". . . "No we don't understand it. What are those long words?" You know, it's ridiculous. Committees of people who think they can write? It's given us some of the world's worst movies.

DS: So it's not a form that would have gone on appealing to you?

GV: It would. I'm a drama student. I've had six or seven plays on Broadway. And I did about twenty plays in the era of live television.

DS: Yes, you've said that you enjoyed writing those live television screenplays a lot.

GV: Oh, because the writer was terribly in charge, and you picked any director you wanted. That's how it got done. The idea of the director as auteur was a mistaken French notion.

DS: When you were writing the screenplays for live TV, was there something about that process that taught you something about writing itself, that you took on into writing in later life?

GV: Oh no, everything you do somehow or other relates to what you ultimately do—certainly perhaps. Also, we had enormous freedom to do just about anything we wanted, and we cast ourselves, the writers cast, the director would be cast by us, not the other way around. And directors did not, in live television, figure very much; writers did.

DS: They were writerly driven.

GV: Yes, and the result was I think we had a vast audience out there.

DS: Very much so.

GV: And the quiz shows were cheaper to do, so that work killed off live drama.

DS: People remember many of those dramas. Requiem for a Heavyweight is still famous, and your own Visit to a Small Planet was very successful.

GV: It went on.

DS: But you were very disappointed with its later production.

GV: Yes, of course. By then, the studios were taking over, and I was going to do it with David Niven, and the next thing I knew, Jerry Lewis had grabbed it. That was the end of that project.

DS: Well, I thought your idea of casting Lily Tomlin as Lincoln was very funny. It reflects the disappointment you've felt in the way some characters have been cast over the years.

GV: Yes.

DS: You have an interesting comment in Screening History: "I saw the movies and understood the world." You're talking about yourself as a child and people in general looking at the movies as a way of conveying information, especially about history. If your films had not been taken over, would you have chosen film as a greater way to influence people or would you have stayed with writing?

GV: Well, writing is the key to all of it. It's not improvisation that you see on the screen.

DS: Writing in the form of, let's say, essays or novels, which you moved into and away from screenwriting.

GV: Well, it's one way to get away from the producers. The studio system was actually pretty good. If you had the talent, they left you alone. As they thought of Orson Welles, which we...