MovieChat Forums > The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) Discussion > Revealing Quotes

Revealing Quotes

posted 19 years ago by dasein451
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John Nichols: In 1965 or '66 Alan Pakula hired me to write a screenplay of The Sterile Cuckoo. I was 25. I went to LA a couple of times and spent long sessions with him and Bob Mulligan (director of To Kill a Mockingbird, which Alan produced). They were wonderful sessions. Alan was a warm, gentle, intelligent, amazingly hard-working and personable guy. I was surely impressed, as it immediately queered any prejudices about stereotypical Hollywood that I might have harbored.

...Alan was very interested in my book as a story of young love and loss in some way I gathered he associated with his own life. He was very candid and intimate about his own life and loves during our discussions. He also felt that it was a simple enough story that it might be a good vehicle for him to break into directing. It became the first movie he ever directed and did win for Liza Minnelli an Oscar nomination.

The time I spent with him was like relativity sessions, talking about first love, fear of commitment in relationship, all kinds of stuff. It was interesting and powerful to me as I'd just gotten married. Alan was married to Hope Lange at the time. I remember vividly a dinner at his house, and afterward he walked me through the lush Westwood gated community with swimming pools and palm trees and so forth all about, and I was talking to him about how suddenly, at 25, my life was topsy turvy, I'd published books, gotten married, everything was complex, filled with loose ends, obligations, fear and terror of big-time publishing, publicity, money--it felt to me like my life, certainly my peace and cohesion, was unraveling, I couldn't control things, I was kinda panicked. And he chuckled and told me to get used to it because that was the way my life was going to be from then on out.

He hired me to do a script despite my total lack of experience. Suggested I buy a copy of Horton Foote's published Mockingbird script in order to have an example of the form. Then he just let me write it back in New York. I did a sort of treatment or two, and then a script. We talked a lot and I did a rewrite. Eventually he hired another writer, Alvin Sargent, to take over, and that was the script used. I didn't get a credit. Back then it never would have occurred to me that I might have had a right to one...

Alvin Sargent [on Alan Pakula]: He danced around a lot. He was very silly. He just couldn't control himself. He got up, and he got an idea, and he started dancing, and his hands would go back and forth, and he'd be so excited, just truly, truly excited, happy with what he'd found, he'd struck gold-- or, when we were working together, we struck gold, or I struck gold, or we both agreed on something that was going to work.

Alan J. Pakula: It is a story of awakening... Of joy and ecstasy and pain. It's a sense of nostalgia for that experience. It is the Country of our Youth.

Alan J. Pakula: My first directing notes were filled with tricks and theatrical angles which had nothing to do with the story. I finally decided I wanted a quality of understatement. I didn't want something to come between the audience and these two people.

Liza Minnelli: When I first started the book [1965], I kept thinking 'Shut up, Pookie, shut up!' Then her humor got to me, her incredible imagination. She knew so little about the real world that, in an odd way, she could see it very clearly. She's like somebody who has been in prison for 19 years; you don't want to go outside, after that long. You say 'Ahh, it's a bum rap out there.' You prefer what you imagine it to be.

Alan J. Pakula [on Liza]: She looked at me afterwards [having viewed her unimpressive screen test] and she asked me 'Well, why did you hire me?' I said, 'No, the question is, why did I hire me?'

Alan J. Pakula: I just couldn't see it without Liza.

Alan J. Pakula: [Liza would ask me] 'Alan, can you just tell me the story of the picture?' and I said in the most simplistic, infantile terms, as you'd talk to a nine-year old child, 'Once upon a time, there was a little girl, and she didn't have a mother, and she didn't know what it was like to be a woman, and she was obsessed with a death wish because her mother had died young. And she wanted somebody to love her. And she sat in the attic and wrote fantasies. And she didn't think her father loved her. Her father was very remote and lonely and she was lonely, but she hid it. And she was terrified of people'-- you know, just very simple terms. 'And she'd be very, very funny so that people didn't make fun of her. And then she went to college and met this very quiet boy and she fell . . . ' And I told the story just in that way, very quietly, and she said, 'Thank you.' That was very helpful to her. It had nothing to do with giving her some incredible subtext. And then we went back and she was marvelous in the scene.

Liza Minnelli: Why should an actor take so much credit when a role-- Pookie-- is so realized to begin with? Not to mention the fact that we had four really intensive weeks of rehearsal before shooting. Alan was very smart. By the time we got up to location, at Hamilton College, he had Wendell Burton and me doing only improvisations. We already knew the scenes; so by then, we could just be riding in a car with Alan, or anywhere, and he would say to us, 'okay, go improvise,' and we would become the characters. We knew them that well.

...And there was this point where my character sort of stepped from 'here' into 'here' [with her hands she moves an invisible Pookie from beside her, to inside her], and once that happens, it keeps on happening, at the right times. For instance, when Alan got me together with four college girls, there at Hamilton, who were going to play the girls in Pookie's dorm. He wanted us to get to know each other, just as ourselves, so each girl started talking about her background. The first girl said, 'Well, my mother collects antiques, my father's a minister,' and so on. So I thought, what am I gonna say? That I come from a show business family, my mother [Judy Garland] was really a groovy chick, no matter what you read about her, my father [Vincente Minnelli] is a director? And they're not gonna know what I'm talking about. And at that moment, Pookie moved in. And when I had to talk, I told her background, just automatically. Alan said, 'Good, that's it.' He did lots of things like that, he let us take our time.

Alan J. Pakula: A straight romantic leading man would never get involved with Pookie. In real life, Wendell and Liza came from such different worlds that it seemed as if he was from Mars and she was from Jupiter. That worked for the film. And Wendell gives the audience a point of view. She couldn't get her laughs if he didn't cue them.

Alan J. Pakula: The scene where Pookie introduces Jerry to the gravestones came out of [an improvised] rehearsal... it grew out of the fact that she cannot function with real people...

In the chapel, I gave Liza the idea of the bridal march, but the way she walked down the aisle and what she did-- waving idiotically at an imaginary relative-- was all Liza.

Liza Minnelli: Alan and I and about four girls were out on a blanket, and I made up this wild, crazy 'story of my life,' telling them my father was a pimp, and using every curse-word I could think of. You should have seen their faces, with frozen, horrified little smiles! Then I said to them: 'The way you're feeling right now, that's the way you react to Pookie Adams.' ...People that Pookie calls 'weirdoes' is anyone who's accepted. It has nothing to do with their personalities.

Alan J. Pakula: The reason that college kids make Pookie feel isolated has to do with Pookie only. Pookie's fantasies become realer than reality... If she wants to think something about the other kids, that becomes the reality to her. When she makes believe she's pregnant, then that becomes a very real experience. Jerry, on the other hand, is smug... Pookie opens him up to life. He is a boy from a place that has happy endings. When Pookie says that she's afraid of what will happen, Jerry can answer only 'I love you.' Pookie is the kind of person who creates her own unhappy endings.

[Regarding the inconclusive ending:] That was deliberate... I wanted a frustrating ending. At one point, we had considered a suicide attempt with sleeping pills. But what we have is truer to life. Relationships often are inconclusive. It is very painful when something between people is over, and there you are, still together. I suppose that what interested me most in the film was the awareness that some people don't make it in life. This is what Jerry learns.

Alan J. Pakula [on Liza]: My concern was that she not give too much. She's got so much to give. I'd just tell her to put a lid on it, and she'd understand what I meant.

Liza Minnelli: You see, this is the important thing about 'Cuckoo', that I did Pookie right; that people are understanding this marvelous, funny, tortured girl... I mean, I'm glad the movie is a success, I'm glad I got those reviews, I'm glad people stop me on the street. But the important thing is that I thought I could make people comprehend this girl, and I did. And her story is told properly. To me, that's the success. Do you see?

Alan J. Pakula: Liza thought Pookie would be fine, and I thought that was important for her to feel. However, I didn't agree with her.

Liza Minnelli: [To interviewer, while looking in a mirror] Sometimes my ugliness truly overwhelms me. At least I don't have to worry about staying beautiful for my fans!

[to same interviewer] You gave me trouble last night... You started me thinking that people are going to look at that telephone scene and they're going to say 'poor girl, she's acting out her own life.' That girl isn't me! My parents didn't play this scene. Hollywood didn't play this scene. I played this scene. Me! My ability played this scene! I've plotted my life step-by-step. I didn't just happen. When are people going to stop making comparisons? When can I be me?

[–] dasein451 19 years ago

Worst Review Ever, and in Every Way:

The heroine of The Sterile Cuckoo is a happy little dumpling of a college freshman called Pookie, a name that holds promises of maudlin disaster. The movie fulfills them. Pookie (Liza Minnelli) is what used to be called, back in the dim and distant fifties, a kook. She does swell things like move in with her straight-arrow boy friend (Wendell Burton) while he is studying for his finals, puts tape across her mouth-- 'cause she's promised not to talk to him-- and communicates by holding up signs. College is some bucolic wonderland where it is always fall, even in the depths of winter, and the students think that S.D.S. is some new kind of 3.2 beer. The Sterile Cuckoo is not only irrelevant to today, it is irrelevant to any time at all. Liza Minnelli, who is much too obviously the star of this project, strains to bring the whole thing off, but the task is greater than her talents.
-Time, October 31, 1969

Consider the mentality of an insensate cretin so blinkered by the popular culture of his time that he would judge this movie to be "irrelevant to any time at all." Then try to remember what the S.D.S. was.

Alan J. Pakula: Anyway, since the story is about a relationship between two people, the exact period is not that critical.

I would only add: "...and weren't those women painted by Titian FAT?!?"

[–] dasein451 18 years ago

For those familiar with the novel, it is clear that "Jerry," "Schoons" and "Roe" each represent fragments of the author's character: note Harry Schoonover's busted-out hockey-player teeth, Roe Billins' sarcasm, and Jerry's sense of detatched irony and world-weary wisdom. This leads us to the inevitable question: who was Pookie?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6151049493863042947

[–] 18 years ago

[deleted]

[–] dasein451 18 years ago

Nineteen drafts of The Sterile Cuckoo. I'd be thrilled to read every one of them.

Among the letters spanning high school and college from Nichols' Connecticut girlfriend Linda is a photograph. The pretty face in the picture is, to me, recognizably Pookie sans glasses: "...dark-eyed, pale girl, with a thin-lipped, sarcastic, almost smiling mouth..." I believe this is the "real" Pookie.

http://www.haydenfilms.com/pfilm_player.php?film_id=88

[–] dasein451 15 years ago

One face you won't find in the party scene is that of Nichols. Pakula asked the novelist to make a cameo there — at what had in reality been Nichols' own fraternity house — but Nichols "vociferously declined," he recalls. "I was also appalled that all the houseparty extras were unrealistically dressed up like preppy yuppies instead of like slobbering gonzo chauvinist piglets."

But the angry young man who in 1968 was railing against both the darker traditions of college culture and the political inertia of the film based on his first novel has long since made his peace with both. "I mellowed a bit, and I became grateful once more for the charmed life I'd had at Hamilton," he says — particularly for the encouragement of "a great English Department that fanned my adoration of books."

Ultimately, The Sterile Cuckoo "made me queasy, and I think I've only seen it twice," Nichols says. But he notes that he had a similar reaction to two other films made from his novels, The Wizard of Loneliness and The Milagro Beanfield War. Two decades of working on screenplays himself with directors such as Louis Malle, Ridley Scott and Robert Redford led him to realize that "movies are a totally different discipline from novels."

Ultimately, Nichols says, "I thought Pakula made a gentle, delicate, awkward film. It made Liza Minnelli a star, got her an Academy Award nomination, won a Grammy for its sappy theme song, and sent Pakula on his way toward All the President's Men and Sophie's Choice, and Liza got to do Cabaret.

"You know, it wasn't my movie, it was their movie, as it should have been, and I'm glad it kind of worked out."

http://www.hamilton.edu/magazine/2009/fall/Cuckoo4.html

[–] dasein451 15 years ago

On location in Rome with Pookie and Pakula
By Roger Ebert

Rome, New York -- So you tell me: How you gonna explain to the kids a statue of two boys being nursed by a wolf? The chamber of commerce of Rome (Italy) sent this statue of Romulus and Remus, the city founders, being nursed by a wolf as per the legend.

But the city fathers of Rome (N.Y.) could see right off the bat that you couldn't put a thing like that in a public park, so they sent it out to Pat Desito to put in front of his restaurant, the Beeches, where maybe kids would see it but at least it was on private property.

The Desito family owns a couple of places in town where they serve a good steak, and this night Liza Minnelli was sitting at a table in the Beeches bar saying: "Well, it seemed like we waited all night, and finally we kept awake by having a happening. I did a droopy cloud, droopy-droop, and a babbling brook. Babble-babble."

Now the problem with quoting Liza Minnelli is that you can't get the inflection of her voice into print. So likely you thought that was a stupid thing for her to be saying, and indeed it reads that way. Quotes like that are what interviewers use to crucify their victims. So let's start out with the revelation that Liza pronounced those words in just such a way as to establish her own distance from happenings, droops and babbles.

She was also the one who told the Romulus and Remus story. In the three or four weeks she'd been in Rome filming "The Sterile Cuckoo," she picked up a lot of lore about Rome and Ithaca and that section of New York, enough to wince when a New York City radio announcer said the film was being shot in "upstate New York." Not upstate, baby -- Rome. It makes a difference to the Romans.

The film is about a girl named Pookie Adams who is, and I quote from Alvin Sargent's screenplay, "18 or 19. Not pretty. Not homely. Sort of special to look at. Her face always alert, wide eyes, constantly searching and making mental notes. She's a lanky thing, put together with loose hardware that allows her to move in a way most people haven't moved since they were kids."

At midnight, walking back from the Beeches to the Paul Revere Motel with the rest of the company, Liza Minnelli moved just that way, in a comic, gangling walk, shoulders not on a level, Chaplinesque, put together with loose hardware. That's what you'd think, in fact, if you'd never seen her dance. Ichabod Crane. And this was Sleepy Hollow country. When she dances, that's something else.

Pookie Adams meets a boy named Jerry on a bus. Jerry is on his way to college Upstate. Pookie is going to a girl's college nearby. She's clownish, appealing, strange. Over the course of that autumn and winter they're drawn to one another, and make (as the saying goes) their first tentative exploration of love.

The film is based on a novel by John Nichols published three years ago. It's being shot on and around the campus of Hamilton College, which in fact is where Nichols went to school. About 80 percent of the film involves the boy and girl characters alone -- they're both sort of isolated from society -- and the rest, the scenes on campus, are being cast entirely from the Hamilton student body and the locals.

That approach is insisted upon by Alan J. Pakula, who is directing his first film but has been the producing half of a partnership with Robert Mulligan for 10 years. They did "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Love with the Proper Stranger," "Up the Down Staircase" and others, including the underground favorite (and box-office flop) "Inside Daisy Clover."

One of the joys of "Up the Down Staircase" came from the large number of unprofessional actors cast in important roles. For "The Sterile Cuckoo," Pakula's big scene with amateurs will be a typical college beer bash. The problem is going to be convincing the students they're at a party and not in a movie.

Pakula's preference for unknown actors has extended even as high as the leading roles. Cast opposite Liza Minnelli, as Pookie's boyfriend, is a 21-year-old San Franciscan named Wendell Burton, who is making his film debut. It's only his second professional role, and he never intended to be an actor in the first place. Pakula did three weeks of rehearsals with Burton and Miss Minnelli in Los Angeles, and then moved the entire company to Rome for the shooting.

And that is where we join them, on an overcast Saturday morning the day after the Romulus and Remus episode. Pakula is shooting on location several miles outside Rome, on Onida Lake. There's a summer resort there known lyrically as Sylvan Beach. But in autumn, the beach is bare except for a layer of wet leaves, and this morning there is a persistent drizzle falling.

That's fine with Pakula. Huddled in his windbreaker, he says, "This tourist camp is better than any set. Look at this place. We found this whole world here, waiting for a movie to be shot in it."

It looks like a location for "Bonnie and Clyde." There is a ramshackle row of tourist cabins with a "For Sale" sign on them, next door to the Sylvan Beach Union Chapel, which advertises services for all denominations in season. Across a gloomy park, a restaurant is open to serve the bystanders who have come to watch the movie. The restaurant is named Eddie's Original Hot Ham on a Toasted Bun. It is across the street from a building with a sign advising: "Yager's Lounge - Legal Beverages."

"Does that mean," Liza wondered, "that the beverages are legal, or that they only sell them to people of legal age?"

"Either," said Wendell Burton. "Or neither."

The scene to be shot this Saturday morning is an important one. Pookie and Jerry have known each other for several weeks, and they decide, with great awkwardness, to spend a weekend in a motel (neither one quite admitting, to himself or the other, why they might want to do such a thing). The shot will show Jerry's old red Volkswagen chugging down the road, stopping, and Jerry getting out to rent a cabin.

"Who could expect to find such a motel next to such a chapel?" Pakula said. "I wouldn't dare put it there if it weren't already there; people would think it was phony."

"You should see the inside of the tourist cabin," Wendell Burton said. "There's a picture of the Maine -- remember the Maine? -- and an old iron bed, and an enormous diamond shaped mirror, cracked. It looks so much like the cabin Nichols has in his novel that it's uncanny."

"Maybe this is the same place," someone said.

"No," Pakula said, "we checked and it isn't."

Wendell looked exactly like a college freshman, which was the idea. "Pakula goes for a natural approach in everything," he said. "This jacket is mine, the sweater is mine, and the shoes are mine."

He is still surprised to find himself in a movie opposite Liza Minnelli.

"In high school," he said, "I took one drama class. We had a Shakespeare festival and I did a scene from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

"In college, I enrolled in a public-speaking class and the teacher talked me into trying out for a play. So why not? And I got the lead in 'Oh Dad, Poor Dad.'

"Well, our stage manager's brother was the director of 'You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown,' and she talked me into trying out for that, and I'll be damned if I didn't get the part. So I played Charlie Brown in San Francisco for 15 months. That was my first professional role, and this is my second."

That puts him a distance behind Liza Minnelli. As the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland, she grew up in an atmosphere saturated with show business and has emerged, in the last three or four years, as a remarkable talent. Her first film role was as Albert Finney's mistress in "Charlie Bubbles," a good performance in a fine movie that audiences inexplicably avoided. Now, at 22, she is starring in her second drama.

"I wonder when I'll make a musical," she said, munching unenthusiastically on a tuna salad sandwich at Eddie's Original Hot Ham on a Toasted Bun. "Still I think this is going to be a good thing, this movie. The script is good. I mean, it rings true. It's a story that hasn't been done honestly before, about a boy and a girl who fall in love and are kind of ill-at-ease and clumsy and... you know."

"The title stumps a lot of people," she said. "So what's a sterile cuckoo? It comes from a poem that Pookie Adams recites in the book:

Oh, hi ho in the
lavender wood
A sterile cuckoo
is crying.
Oh, hi ho in the
lavender snow
A sterile cuckoo
is dying.
In the darkness of
her heart
It is always
three o'clock in the
morning.

Liza grinned. "Well, the ending is corny, yes," she said, "but the poem is the sort of thing Pookie would like. It's half Pookie Adams and half F. Scott Fitzgerald - or 'F. Fitz,' as Pookie calls him."

The tuna sandwich consumed, it was time to begin the afternoon's shooting. "It's a nice little scene today," Liza said. "The other day, we had to wade out into the lake. You can wade out 100 yards before it gets over your head. But it's polluted. We were kind of gingerly picking our way through the dead fish..."

"Okay, into the VW," Pakula said. While Wendell and Liza were driving down the street, he sat on a packing crate and said, "This is the kind of scene I like, where the characters develop in movements instead of a lot of words. I try for the subjective point of view, and I don't like a big budget. We're spending as much as we need, yes, but I'm after personal revelation, and you lose that when you start spending too much money trying to get it."

By now the Volkswagen was in position, ready to drive back down the rainy street toward the camera. Pakula gave a signal and his assistant director waved the car ahead.

"Are we rolling?" Pakula asked his cameraman.

"Yes."

"I didn't say action," Pakula said. "Action."

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19681117/PEOPLE/100609997&template=printart

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