As far as my own attraction to TSC is concerned I of course became infatuated with the character. Pakula had me hooked about a third of the way through the opening credits and I stumbled out of the theater having to keep myself from hugging telephone poles. That the music comes close to my personal tastes was certainly a part of it as well as the characters and circumstances and the way they relate to own life. Saying much more I'd really have to collect my thoughts before veering off into incoherence.
I collect most things if they seem interesting don't cost too much and aren't too bulky.
Some of the memorablia I've collected include:
Numerous stills including some jpegs I snatched off ebay
The Japanese program and souvenir book--In the Japanese version Gordon Lightfoot
sang CSM.
Originals and jpegs of posters from a number of nations including the former Yugoslavia
which gives Austin Green top billing.
The "press kit", the thing sent to movie theaters to direct their promotion
activities.
Editions of the novel--All the mass market paperback cover art I've seen
shows Pookie with long hair.
I think you're right about the TSC poem and the Oct '68 press conference. That guy from
the MIT student newspaper doesn't seem to have read the novel or even to have been aware of it's existence so I don't see how else he could have aware of the poem except through the newsconference. They improvised for about 3 or 4 weeks before shooting began; Pakula had them go over the scene as it was in the script and then do it mprovised. So I think Liza could well have whipped out her copy of TSC from time to time and improvised a lot of things from the novel including the poem. My uncle tells me studios sometimes have screening sessions for outtakes from their old films that are open to the public. When one was given for "Angry Red Planet" people came from as far as Norway.
As far as filming locations I think Sylvan Chapel is still standing or at least it was when the aerial photograph on googlemaps, http://maps.google.com/maps, was taken.
It's the large, barn-like structure on the south end of Sylvan Beach on new Village St just east of the marina with no intervening fence between it and the beach. The cluster of buildings just south look like they could be Oudin's Court. If you want to go where the cottage interior scenes, including the "stripping scene", where shot you'll have to go to Rome, NY, to the site of historic Fort Stanwick where Benedict Arnold held forth. This scene as well as the alcove scene were shot on constructed sets in an old Montgomery Wards building which was later torn down by urban renewal and replaced with the reconstructed fort. The opening scenes were probably shot in downtown Rome just west of there. I'll eventually give a fuller accounting of where I think the filming took place.
With regard to TTOTSC it ocurred to me that Nichols did write about his experience with Pakula at the time of the latter's untimely death. If you haven't seen it I've included it below. Here, he was more sympathetic to Pakula and had more appreciation for Pakula's personal interest in the project.
=======
A personal tribute to film director Alan Pakula by writer John
Nichols 16 December 1998
American film director Alan Pakula, 70, died in a tragic freak
accident November 19. While driving on the Long Island Expressway
35 miles east of New York City a metal pipe lying on the highway
was kicked up by another car and crashed through Pakula's
windshield. He lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a
fence. He was taken to North Shore Hospital in Plainview, New York
where he was pronounced dead.
Pakula first made his name in Hollywood as a producer for Paramount
in 1956 with the film Fear Strikes Out, directed by Robert
Mulligan. In 1962 he produced the civil rights drama To Kill a
Mockingbird and the following year, Love With the Proper Stranger,
both also directed by Mulligan. He directed his first film, The
Sterile Cuckoo in 1969. He did perhaps his best work in the 1970s,
with films such as Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All
the President's Men (1976). Other films include Sophie's Choice
(1982), See You in the Morning (1989), Presumed Innocent (1990),
The Pelican Brief (1993) and The Devil's Own (1997).
In a letter to WSWS arts editor David Walsh writer John Nichols,
author of The Sterile Cuckoo, contributed this recollection of Alan
Pakula.
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.
At the time he and Bob were shooting a picture called Inside Daisy
Clover with Robert Redford and Natalie Wood. I had fun meeting all
those people. One was Roddy McDowall who recently died. 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. Sargent later
became famous for scripts like Ordinary People and Julia.
Alan shot the movie in and around Hamilton College where I went to
school. Everybody there seemed to love him. He was very considerate
and not at all Hollywood, as I understand. I was told that crews
went around after every location shot cleaning up, making sure even
to pick up every last cigarette butt. He had a great relationship
with the college.
I didn't have contact him after that, but, a rarity in Hollywood,
in the years to follow I always received an Xmas card from him and
his second wife Hannah.
He directed some fine movies like Klute, All the President's Men,
Sophie's Choice. He seemed to me like a really decent human being.
Obviously, I didn't know him that personally after The Sterile
Cuckoo. But for a first impression of Hollywood, he was wonderful.
Honest, worked like a dog, gentle, very intelligent, compassionate.
All my life I've been grateful for that brief couple of year's
connection. Part of my good luck in films and career.
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dasein451
19 years ago
Gordon Lightfoot?!? In any other connection, I'd think you were putting me on, but I've come to expect the unexpected when it comes to TSC.
Thanks very much for all of this incredibly detailed information! I was amazed that you had found the precise location of the chapel, and it was terrific to see that aerial of the building layout on Google... I could even see about where the campfire-at-the-beach scene was shot. Months ago, I traced the driving directions to the cemetery via these maps and aerial views, but wasn't sure I'd found it.
Mostly it's great to know I'm not the only person who's succumbed to a strange obsession with this book/movie. I first saw it when I was ten or eleven years old, but didn't understand it at all... except that there was a feeling that went with it. Undefined, but very important. Some twenty years later, I happened to catch TSC on late-night cable tv, and it was then legible to me, but also very honest and moving; I remember being impressed with this long-forgotten item, which lost none of that indescribable sense of longing in the intervening years. Now, add another fifteen years, several readings of the original novel, and another viewing of the movie out of curiosity-- and another twenty more, at least-- and it crystallized: TSC is a serious and powerful work of art. It rises above its many flaws, and effectively recreates a very meaningful experience. That's what art is for. Nichols' art inspired other artists to create this movie, and I find that process fascinating, and want to know all about it. That's as close as I can come to a rational-sounding explanation of my fixation on TSC.
I also have several paperback editions, one of which has a cover illustraion of a long-haired girl who looks like Elizabeth Hartman, and was sold cheap, "as is"... it was marred with an inscription by John Nichols.
An excerpt from Nichols' reflections on Pakula appears on my "Revealing Quotes" thread. Hope you've seen that. Especially where Minnelli starts sounding incredibly Pookie-like at the end.
Here's a Japanese page which I'd like to have translated. There is a section which quotes the poem, and Google translator (for what it's worth) makes it appear to come from a "scene" in the movie. If they re-recorded the soundtrack with Gordon Lightfoot (!) surely there are other differences in the Japanese release of TSC, or "Mouth Attaching".
http://www.geocities.jp/metropoleclub/movie/youga/3/kuchizuke/1.html
I should receive the script soon. I want to look for more evidence that Sargent/Pakula deliberately morphed Holden Caulfield into the character of Pookie. Calling everyone a "weirdo" (not in book) is not a far cry from calling everyone a "phony"... especially when the literary Pookie would much more likely call everyone a "bullguano'd fetus". That is, if Nichols had chosen to portray Pookie as misanthropic or unpopular, which he surely didn't. The scene with the two nuns (not in book) looks to me like a semaphore to the lit-crit crowd: "H - O - L - D - E - N - H - O - L - D - E - N -..."
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tbreed3
19 years ago
One of the few movies that might have a similar effect on me was Bladerunner; kind of marginalization in the extreme. As with TSC it was a matter of feelings than anything I could easily articulate. Another movie that comes to mind is "A Taste of Honey" with Rita Tushingham. It had something of the flash-in-the-pan history of TSC.
Patty Duke eventually got to make a TSC-like movie called "Me, Natalie". It even has a scene taken directly from TSC where Duke comically attempts suicide by jumping into waist-deep murky water. It was a nice little movie but was no TSC.
The Kirkland-Prospect Hill Cemetery can be found on the maps on
terraserver.microsoft.com just west and south of Hamilton. The radio tower to the north is visible on some of the stills. Have you at the south end of Vernon Center yet?
I reread CITR last summer and I didn't catch the business with the nuns in the movie. With phonies/weirdos I suppose Pakula was consciously trying to be salingeresque. I suppose we should put together a list of salingerisms some time. It's odd that Pakula made such a point of shooting in upstate NY when Nichols much more specific use of locales in NYC. The Henry Hudson Hotel and of course Central Park are real places.
As far as the book covers and Elizabeth Hartman I've been looking at my cover of the Avon 1st printing dated Jan 1966 and comparing it to Hartman stills, especially that where she's sitting under the tree with her box of beads; there's something like the same slack expression. The hair is of course colored and dressed very differently from the way Hartman liked hers done. However, as far as the face goes the cover image image seems a bit leaner and the brows aren't quite right being a bit lower and more horizontal than Hartman's. However, the eyes seem about right in size and spacing and have the same narrow bags under them. The nose isn't too bad but the mouth is uncannily simliar to Hartman's. The cover image seems to have a cleft chin, a very distinctive feature and in some stills Hartman seems to have a slight cleft in her chin. Still, Jan 1966 is a bit early to be somehow promoting Hartman in the role.
I'm curious as to what Nichols inscribed on your cover. I've seen something like this on abebooks.com for about $65. He wrote the band-aid scene so why object to it?
I have a lot of my TSC stuff in digital format; about 600 megs of jumbled scans, text, etc.
I also have mpeg-2s of TSC on data DVD's. If your computer has a DVD drive you could navigate with the slider bar with WMP and find out what Faison's really doing with her fingers. I have a Mac so viruses might be an issue. If you gave me your snail I could send it.
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dasein451
19 years ago
Ah, I think you might be describing this cover:
bandaidcover.jpg
Which is the one I believe Nichols described as "pornographic".
The 1979 Pocketbooks edition I bought looks like this:
pocketcover.jpg
I see a bit of Elizabeth Hartman in that cover illustration-- at least a passing resemblance in the visage:
http://www.thegoldenyears.org/hartman2.jpg
Certainly a better "fit" than Liza, Patty or Tuesday!
The inscription looks like this:
pocketifc.jpg
I read it thus:
"Dec. 17, '83
For Dr. (?) Gliddens (?)
I hope that you get a kick out of this story!
All my best,
John Nichols"
I've found his signature scrawl elsewhere... it appears authentic. Perhaps the "as is" refers to the water damage. I have never seen a copy of this edition before or since.
There's a place hereabouts where I can rent "Me, Natalie", believe it or not, as a DVD-R.
I don't understand your Vernon Center question. Can you tell me what scenes were shot there?
CITR is one of the most studied books in Western History-- probably some Lit mavens know it by heart. Nichols didn't put two nuns into TSC, but Sargent/Pakula did. Maybe I'm overinterpreting. Could happen.
-Two Nuns: Holden meets these two at the train station where they are collecting money. Holden decides that they are only the only adults that have not become phony and therefore can retain their innocence.
http://www.bellmore-merrick.k12.ny.us/catcher2.html
{edited 12-14-06 to remove broken links}
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tbreed3
19 years ago
The south end of Vernon Center is the location of the mailbox and allied scenes. You can see the big grassy oval that the bus sweeps around.
Other TSC locales include:
South Hall-- site of the staircase scene. There was a sizable Sunday spread about this in the Syracuse newspaper.
probably Root Glen-- the camperdown elm used in the tree scene. A camperdown elm is an odd looking, seedless tree propagated by botanical shoots. It's literally a "sterile cuckoo" tree.
probably Eells House-- I think the dorm scenes were shot here
----------------
more TSC covers:
Avon 3rd printing, 1968--photos of a young woman with long auburn hair crouched on the ground wearing some kind of hippie garb.
UK Pan paperback 1965, 1967-- looks like the same square-jawed young woman on the Pocketbook cover. Pookie seated in a rocking chair with her teddy bear. Others of Pookie shooting crows and throwing bottles.
UK Pan movie tie-in-- entitled "Pookie"- shots from the film including one with Liza with her face screwed up; used in UK & French posters.
UK Heineman hardback-- uses coke bottles.
Norton paperback first version-- illustration of a rather homely, barefoot young woman with short hair in jeans and pullover sweater contemplating a butterfly. Aside from movie tie-ins this is the only cover I know of where the hair is short and is possiibly the cover where Nichols had the most say. Still the eyes don't look right to me; they don't look big and dark. I wonder if Pakula wnated short hair and Hartman wouldn't oblige? Norton has since replaced this cover with a small photo of black-garbed woman seated on the ground.
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dasein451
19 years ago
Wow. The "second draft" script-- dated April Fool's, 1968-- is a big revelation. This really is a different Pookie and a different movie! Jerry is portrayed as a fully developed and aware character, which is much more consistent with the novel... but the Pookie here is much more scary than pathetic, and the ending is an absolute shocker! After her pantomime suicide attempt (as a "joke") Jerry slaps her repeatedly and then breaks down into sobs, and then SHE comforts HIM!
Good GOD!
Practically nowhere does this script correlate with the movie. Wherever the dialogue matches, the scene doesn't, and vice versa. Was there a "third draft" or did they simply "wing it"?
The TSC poem is nowhere to be found in any of the dialogue, as you indicate. I'll have to go back and correct myself on other threads.
This is an amazing read, and it respects and extends the spirit and letter of the novel in many ways I had not expected at all, given the final result. Sargent is a fine screenwriter.
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tbreed3
19 years ago
I think they winged it; although, I think a lot in the script was filmed and ended up on the cutting room floor. Liza says somewhere that she collaborated with Sargent on the "final version" to make the dialog sound more like her own voice. Her screen test was own March 11, '68 so she could have collaborated with Sargent in March or perhaps later in August but it doesn't sound like they made any major changes. I actually have a copy of the first draft dated June 28, 1967. It didn't seem that different from so I haven't examined it closely but it's about 18 pages longer.
Feigned suicide you say? I hadn't thought of it but that's another thing Sarah tries to pull in TCOH ; time to wheel in my FO'C fixation which I'll take up on that thread.
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tbreed3
19 years ago
You think Blessing actually knew who the "real" Pookie was? I think he's only saying that he knew any number of poetry-spouting young women who he thought resembled her. Besides TTOTSC goes to some pains to explain how important Pookies's appearance is to understanding her personality so Nichols might have been expected to give some convincing detail. Besides, none of the colleges in Blessing's list are in CT. I will agree that Nichols' girlfriend is a person of interest for us.
Blessing's list set me off on another tangent regarding the location of Pookie's college. Nichols writes of this locale with such specicivity and feeling suggesting to me that it was a real place he'd actually been to and that it meant something to him. What struck me particularly was the specicivity of always walking on the left hand side of the street down from the bus station. Maybe we need to know about Pookie's jutting hipbones but why that? When I went poring over maps Skidmore in Saratoga Springs(SS) really stuck out. Pookie's college is described as being 4 hours drive by that dysfunctional '47 Buick which given speed and road conditions might mean somewhere as close as SS. The college campus is described as being within comfortable walking distance of a built-up downtown area with Victorian boarding houses. This fits Skidmore well and none of the others on Blessing's list. I even found a river bluff on Fish Creek that looks like the one in the novel. I was all set to start poring over Skidmore yearbooks when I checked the last clue. There was, alas, no Friendly's in Saratoga Springs at that time.
The notion of Nichols having a girlfriend in CT, especially if the novel's detail are autobiographical, makes me a bit suspicious if he really engaged in obsessive weekend jaunt's by Greyhound. From Utica to Skidmore would I think be at least 3 hours and further on to northern CT or Hartford would add at least another hour. Of course if he had a private plane there'd be no problem but that's not in the novel. As his reaction to the Avon cover might suggest Nichols wasn't too happy with how he'd exposed portions his private life in the novel. He surely knew about Blessing's list and perhaps came up with "Connecticut" to draw attention away from Skidmore. Still, if you came up with a women's college in CT with details that fit and a Friendly's it might be a better bet.
With the feigned suicide it looks like Pakula and Sargent were deliberately injecting story elements from TCOH into the script as they were with TCITR. Script-Pookie is more Ham-like than novel-Pookie. Aside from the feigned suicide Sarah is a pathological liar and a check-kiter while script-Pookie is a pathological liar and a beetle thief. I suspect they were well-read men but I'm not sure well known FO'C was at the time; that hyper-Catholic, southern gothic style isn't everybody's cup of tea. Interestingly, these are the added story elements TTOTSC specifically objects to. As far as scary goes I've seen TCOH included in a horror anthology due to the nocturnal visitation scene. Incidentally, there's actually a 45 minute indy production of TCOH starring Stockard Channing.
The part of the novel that strikes me as likely autobiographical is the breakup; particularly the "freezing up" episodes. The think Nichols could be talking about his own experiences with a girlfriend. When I read "An Elegy for September" thinking Nichols might be revisiting TSC themes it struck that the characters and situations were comparatively flat; this could suggest that other story elements, such as the initial meeting episode, were also autobiographical.
It would be interesting to know what fraternity Nichols was a member. He doesn't seem to have been a member of alpha delta phi of Eells House.
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dasein451
19 years ago
[Are we on the wrong thread? ;)]
I'd hardly stake what's left of my reputation on any argument to Pookie's objective existence as an historical figure. Certainly, she's a literary invention in all sorts of ways... but Nichols' TSC reads so much more like a passionate and ironic memoir than a novel-- in both its recollections of feelings and of details-- that I am unable to believe Pookie is purely an imaginary character, or an invented homage to another character from literature. That is not to say she could not have been sculpted or embellished into such an homage; it is there I think you may well have found something in Sarah of TCOH. Only Nichols himself could say for sure.
That being said, I can say for sure I screwed up my recall of AACS. What Nichols writes of the Connecticut GF is this:
...but my hormones were lit up like a Christmas tree, so I chose instead to hover near my Hartford girlfriend before entering Hamilton College in upstate New York that fall.
Nichols attended a Connecticut prepschool called Loomis, mid to late '50s. Note that the song "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus, which Pookie hums to herself after her accident, and which she says is "getting to be very popular" was a novelty hit in 1957. It was during a summer away from Loomis that Nichols "helped scientists collect lizards, rattlesnakes and gloriosa beetles" in Arizona. As for hobbies and such, the guitar-playing remains Nichols' own in real life and in TSC, but the hockey-playing is foisted onto Schoons. In AACS Nichols goes on to describe the fraternity system at Hamilton in much the same terms as in the novel, though Nichols does not present himself as any sort of victim of hazing out of the "pig pool"; that befell unfortunate others. He pledged to Theta Delta Chi.
Did Richard Blessing know the "real" Pookie? Maybe not. In my opinion, his comments raise the probability that she actually existed, though. The scattershot background descriptions make me think he may have caught a glimpse of her at some point, and he does repeat the nickname of one girl in particular, as if implying that that was his GF... by extension, it might imply that another one of the nicknames was that of Nichols' GF. Again, I wouldn't stake any bank accounts on any of this... but it looks very suggestive to me. I'm taking a wild guess that the real-life Pookie was called "Puddles". Same first initial as Pookie-- like John/Jerry-- and "Puddles" calls to mind her beloved tadpole pond just a bit, don't you think? Isn't that how nicknames are invented?
So, what's my point in presenting all this admittedly arbitrary and speculative minutiae? I guess it is simply to reinforce that I remain convinced-- at least at some emotional level-- that a "Pookie" really existed, and that she left at least as deep and memorable an impression upon John Nichols as his fictionalized Pookie leaves upon his readers. At least. I believe he both intended upon, and succeeded in, capturing some of her essence in his first published novel. That he most likely wrote largely from experience rather than pure invention does not diminish his art at all in my opinion; to me, it makes it more engaging and meaningful.
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dasein451
19 years ago
Back to the script!
One name comes up repeatedly in connection with the way Pookie is written into the movie: Frankie Addams from "The Member of the Wedding". Now, I really don't like this one... while I never read the book, I find the movie practically unwatchable because of Julie Harris' annoyingly unconvincing performance. Yes, I know, it's one of The Best Movies Ever Made. But I'm no "movie lover."
I am much more impressed with TBReed's connection of the scripted Pookie with Sarah of TCOH, and think there's probably greater evidence for that.
I Don't recall who first called Pookie a female Holden Caulfield, but my search for evidence began and ended with the nuns having been written into the script, and "weirdos" sounding sort of like "phonies". Pookie does use the word "phony" explicitly in what would become the staircase scene, about "the biggest phony of them all [that] lies up there somewhere in that floating mass":
POOKIE None of it's real. Ninety percent of her body is by DuPont. Fiberglass boobs.
SCHOONS Knew it all the time.
POOKIE I mean they all come in pieces. Phony hair, phony eyelashes, phony boobs...
But I see no more Holden in her. Maybe her attempts to keep Jerry "innocent" in a sense, trying to isolate him from corrupting social influences, can be seen as sort of Holden-like, but it's a stretch.
The element of the scripted Pookie that stands out most distinctly by comparison with the published Pookie is her death-obsession. The entire dead-mother business, with the strained relations with her father and ensuing neurosis, was invented for the screen. Pookie's biggest fear in the book was that she would miss out on life's meaningful experiences and end up as "turd-like" as her parents! The writer of TTOTSC implies that the death obsession was created for the movie to offset Minnelli's vitality, and reestablish the fundamental insecurity of her character... to that writer, the largest part of the "transformation" was putting Liza in the role of Pookie. He seems think she was decidedly miscast, and that the story had to be rewritten around her. I would counterargue that Minnelli-- if anything-- appeared to have been trying doggedly to put the novel back into the script wherever she could! I give reasons on another thread. But, finally, where did that dead-mother thing come from? Where did Pakula/Sargent pick that one up? We know where it went, spookily enough: Judy Garland died several months after the wrap of TSC.
Did Nichols' book affect other movie scripts, such as "Me, Natalie"? I saw it recently on DVD-R, and that failed suicide-by-drowning scene sure does look like something straight out of TSC! I think it was more of a tantrum Pookie threw in the tadpole pond, though. She felt a lot better afterwards. :)
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