So, Oscar nominations: What really thrills me is that The Lives of Others made it into the best non-English language film category. Mind you, I don't think it will win - even though I consider it to be the best movie in 2006 (of those I've seen) - because it's up against Pan's Labyrinth, which hasn't started here yet but which I've seen people rave about on lj, and let's face it, German movies which have nothing to do with the Third Reich whatsoever don't attract a lot of attention in the US. But what do I know? The Academy nominated it, after all. At the very least, this means it has a chance of actually getting shown in American (and British) cinemas.

Other than that, I'm also glad The Queen got the nominations it did, and ditto for Little Miss Sunshine. No opinion on Eastwood versus Scorsese: The Rematch, as Letters from Iwo Jima hasn't started here yet and while I liked The Departed, I didn't love it the way I did The Aviator, aka the one I really thought Scorsese should have gotten the Oscar for. And speaking of people who should have gotten Oscars a long time ago (and not just honorary ones), I'm glad Peter O'Toole got nominated, though I take it the popular favourite is Forest Whittaker.

Someone who never got an Oscar of his own, either, was O'Toole late pal Richard Burton. I just got the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf dvd which reminded me of the injustice of that one (didn't he loose to John Wayne, of all the people, in the Virginia Woolf year?). Said DVD, at least the Region 2 version, is highly recommendable: it has two audio commentaries, one by Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh, and one by Haskell Wexler (the cinematographer), which I haven't listened to yet, as well as several documentaries.

So, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, revisited.



I first saw the play on stage in my hometown, Bamberg, and later in London with no other than Diana Rigg as Martha. (My parents, who were with me, were shocked. Especially Dad. Not about the play - they knew it - but because Dad had worshipped on the altar of Diana Rigg like many a young man in his generation and now here she was with such an unpleasant voice. "But Dad", quoth I, "that's part of her acting as Martha. It's a demand of the role. George describes her voices as "braying". I've seen her as Medea, I promise you it doesn't always sound like that." Well, said he, when he saw the movie back in the day, he had assumed that Taylor and Burton were just being themselves, but the divine Diana, Emma Peel, Tracy, behaving like that...

And there you have a reason, I think, why especially Elizabeth Taylor's performance but also Richard Burton's tends to be underestimated in the public consciousness. Exactly the thing which was a great marketing coup by Warner Brothers back then - see the world's most famous married actors play a married couple that tear themselves apart! - made people dismiss the actual effort in retrospect: they were just "being themselves". Never mind Albee wrote the play with anyone but them in mind and at first was appalled when hearing Jack Warner's casting idea, because Elizabeth Taylor was twenty years too young for Martha (32 at the time, as Mike Nichols reminds us) , and, welll, Elizabeth Taylor, Glamorous Movie Star (i.e. Not A Real Actress), and Burton, while being A Real Actor, was too famous as well. (Albee recanted after having seen both of them in action.) Nichols says in his audio commentary that Elizabeth Taylor, who got offered the part by Jack Warner, hesitated because precisely because she wasn't sure she could do it, Burton encouraged her, she signed on, then he signed on as well, and then both of them pushed for Nichols whom they knew since Burton had done Camelot on Broadway. Nichols was 34 and had never directed a movie before, but he really wanted this, and Taylor had more than enough clout to get him the job. The result more than justified everyone's choices. There is no feeling of "staginess" (and yet the feeling of emotional claustrophobia is as intense as on stage), and Nichols gets terrific performances out of everyone, George Segal and Sandy Dennis as well as his two star players. In the commentary, he mentions that the young Robert Redford got offered the role of Nick and declined because the character was too weak and the least sympathetic of the four, but Segal had no such problem, and he and Soderbergh rave about Sandy Dennis and her utter lack of vanity in playing Honey.

"Utter lack of vanity" is the key phrase for Burton & Taylor as well. At the time, people must have been shocked about Elizabeth Taylor's appearance because this was when she was regularly called "the most beautiful woman of the world" and here she was, deliberately having gained weight and being made up to look older. Today, when we've seen her fat, thin and everything in between, as well as far, far older than Martha ever looked, what's most striking is lack of vanity in another way - the body language, the voice, everything is right for chain-smoking, gin-swilling Martha, and she's not playing for sympathy when she's supposed to be vicious; the vulnerability, and the final emotional breakdown are there, too, but when they're supposed to be, not all the way through. It's an utterly unsentimental performance Meanwhile, Burton, who could have easily made George the much put upon husband and easy sympathy object takes his cue from the way Albee lets George verbally eviscerate Nick a minute after saying hello before he has reason to; there are reasons why George is able to turn the tables on Martha in the end and why they are still together, and it's not just co-dependency, it's the fact they're perfectly matched, in cruelty and wit as well as otherwise. George is quiet, Martha is loud, but Burton believably hints early on that George might be the more dangerous. (Rewatching also made me realise that there isn't a moment when George has pity for the young couple, either together or apart - which isn't surprising, considering they follow Martha's lead early on in ridiculing him - but there is one where Martha has, near the end, when Nick downright begs her to tell George he isn't a houseboy (i.e. impotent).)

As opposed to both theatre productions I saw the movie brings out what Albee in the documentaries on the dvd says is important to him, that George and Martha are quite often amused at the horribly cruel thing the respective other says. Nichols in the audio commentary talks about that as well and says to Soderbergh he often debates this with people but to him the key was that they do love each other passionately, not just because no one else would but because they get each other in a way no one else does. Which of course is also the reason why they can wreak such terrible emotional devastation as well.

He mentions a play he recently directed for tv, Angels in America, and rewatching Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf makes it clear how much Kushner owes to Albee there. Sidenote: one of Albee's least favourite interpretations is that both couples in his play are coded gay couples. Albee, who is openly gay himself, explicitly forbade stagings in which they're all cast with male actors and said "if I wanted to write about two gay couples, I would have". While normally I'm for author-independent interpretations, I can somewhat understand why this annoys him, because it seems to be a cliché about female characters written by male homosexual authors - saying that they're really gay men, I mean. I've seen this written about Blance in A Streetcar Named Desire (and other Tennessee Williams heroines), all of Albee's female characters, and more recently about Brenda in Six Feet Under after likeadeuce pointed the review in question out to me. I'm trying to work out whether this is in a way the reverse of a common criticism of (some) characterisation in slash fiction - that the male characters get written as if they were women by female fanfiction writers - the idea that gay men can't write women without making them into gay men?

Back to the movie. Nichols has some interesting things to say about how the actors approached their roles - Taylor is a very physical actress, he said, she needed to know what Martha did while talking, how she moved, and found her way into the character from there, whereas for Burton it was the sound, he needed to know how George sounded when saying things. (Incidentally, he used the present tense for Burton as well was Taylor - "Richard is", not "Richard was".) Sandy Dennis was great with improvising, as with Honey dancing in the roadhouse. And with Nichols, Burton, Dennis and Segal all coming from the stage, Nichols says they actually learned a lot from Taylor who came from the movies from early childhood on. Arguing against the perception that Elizabeth Taylor learned how to really act from her husband, he says as far as he could see it was more the other way around as far as movie acting was concerned, which is different from stage acting, that he could see Burton observing her, and that he, Nichols, learned as well (remember, it was his first film). What just seemed good but not excellent during shooting suddenly took on a new dimension and became great when he saw the daily rushes and realized what she had done which the camera had picked up but one couldn't see standing six or eight feet away, etc., and when he got to scoring the movie he realised she had left beats for musical cues as well, without making the performance seem wrong if the music was lacking. He doesn't think she could explain it if you asked her; he thinks it came from a lifetime (and due to childhood stardom, it was already a life time back then) in front of the camera, and knowing how to interact with it in a way few movie actors could.

He sounds very protective, affectionate and impressed by his actors still, decades later, with Burton dead and Taylor long past her star years; if he tells anecdotes about the shooting, it's one like the one about one of the crew snoring in the middle of Martha's big scene, talking about how her son was born, i.e. something very emotional to play, and the snores were so loud Nichols had to stop the shot. Instead of being angry or insulted, the first thing Elizabeth Taylor said after Nichols yelled "cut" was "don't fire him!". "And that," says Nichols, "is the kind of person she is."

His favourite Burton anecdote comes during the scene when George goes from laughing to crying in front of the porch. He says Burton first did that very well during rehearsals and he, Nichols, was content, but Burton said "no, Larry did it that way, I have to find a new one" and so he did. Larry being Laurence Olivier. Not in this role - which Olivier never played - in another one. Nichols said this is something he found typical for British actors in general and Burton in particular, never mind that the audience in all likelihood would not have seen the Laurence Olivier take on how to go from laughing to crying - Burton was aware of it, and so he needed to figure out another way.

Both Nichols and Soderbergh wonder whether Who's Afraid... was the last big movie shot in black and white before Peter Bogdanovich brought it back in the 70s with The Last Picture Show, but Nichols said it never was a question for him both for artistic (black and white as more suited to the atmosphere of the play) and practical reasons (making Elizabeth Taylor look older and get rid of the most famous blue eyes in the cinema at the time). (Reminds me of Bogdanovich saying in his audio commentary for Papermoon, which he also shot in black and white, that he had to because Ryan and Tatum O'Neill were so ridiculously pretty with their blond hair, California tan and blue eyes that colour would have made mincemeat of selling them as 1930s grifters. Blue-eyed film stars, clearly black and white is your road to being believable as non-film stars!) As a viewer, I can't imagine the movie in colour, either; shots like George going to get the gun (one of Soderbergh's favourite sequences in the film) or the swing scene outside the house, or indeed the close-ups on Martha, or Honey looking increasingly more wrecked would not have been as visceral.

Speaking of might have beens: the big shocker in the audio commentary was Nichols telling Soderbergh that Ernest Lehman's script had made a crucial change from the play which luckily Nichols was able to reverse: to wit, because at the time some reviewers had complained that George's and Martha's secret, the imaginary child, wasn't the right pay-off, Lehman actually gave them a son and made the secret that he had committed suicide when turning 18. "But..." says a flabbergasted Soderbergh, "that's... a heart transplant." Says Nichols: "Indeed it is." I'd say so. The nature of the secret is one of those things which make George and Martha so believable as a middle-aged couple who have been together for a long time; and all of their reactions in the previous acts are tied to it.

When I saw the play first, I hadn't read it, so it was a "yes, that makes so much sense!" surprise for me; I wonder whether most new watchers today, now that Albee is a classic, go in knowing? Not that knowing makes the experience any less intense, of course, on the contrary. And it's fascinating to see the aftereffects of the play through the decades; as mentioned before, Kushner strikes me as a fan, with Honey prefiguring in many ways Joe's pill-taking wife, and Roy Cohn being a real life Albee character brought back to the stage if ever there was one. I'm willing to bet Marti Noxon is a fan, too; her most famous uncredited rewrite in the Jossverse, the scene between Angel and Darla in Dear Boy, made me sit up and say "wow, they are George and Martha, aren't they?" the first time I saw it. And the lady on this entry's icon, Ellen Tigh, as well as her husband Saul on Battlestar Galactica? Even purer Edward Albee. Which I think is why I always liked Ellen, long before she died her heartbreaking death; I had met her ancestress years before, on stage and in a film...