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Author
and film scholar, Kenneth Geist joined
the National Board of Review over 20 years
ago, and has been intriguing us ever since
with his provocative insights and opinions.
Ken's
higher education began at Haverford College
in 1954 and was followed by a year of
studying acting at the London Academy
of Music and Dramatic Arts. Although Donald
Sutherland was taking the 3-year, English
division course, he was occasionally allowed
to act in the plays of Ken's 1-year, foreign
students' division. “We knew he would
be famous one day as a fine character
actor,” Ken remembers, “but he was much
too goofy-looking to be an acceptable
leading man. We were hopelessly
wrong!”
After
a second year of theater studies, in directing
at the Yale Drama School, Ken returned
to New York, working as both an actor
and a stage manager. On the basis of Ken's
successful direction of Nancy Cushman,
(the understudy to Ruth White in the Off-Broadway
premiere of Samuel Beckett's Happy
Days ), Ms. Cushman recommended Ken
to an executive friend of hers at the
Theater Guild. Ken spent two years at
that once- prestigious, Broadway production
organization, as head of its Play Department
and occasional production supervisor.
While at the Guild, he was sent a wonderful
drama, New Gods for Lovers by Sherman
Yellen, which the Guild no longer could
afford to produce.
Ken
took New Gods to London in 1963,
in the belief that a classically-trained
English cast could do greater justice
to the play, and that it could be done
far less expensively in the West End than
on Broadway. While Ken struck out in London,
after a succession of near misses, he
finally directed the play, successfully,
in 1971, at the Berghof Workshop on Bank
Street, with a cast in which the majority
of the roles were played by Broadway names
working without even car fare.
Ken
was summoned back from London by a friend
to stage manage The Sign in Sidney Brustein's
Window , the final work by Lorraine Hansberry.
It eventually starred Gabriel Dell and
Rita Moreno. How has stage managing changed
since Ken's days behind the scenes? “The
Broadway theater, like the Las Vegas spectacles,
is much more highly automated today,”
Ken explains. “Stage management
cues, I suppose, are much the same for
lighting and set changes, and to alert
actors when their entrance cues are impending.
But if you screw up today-- because, say,
an actor has not completed his costume
change-- virtually tons of machinery will
descend upon you, like Desert Storm.
That's why musicals require three or more
stage managers to avert actors' injury.”
In
1965, Ken moved to the west coast, where
he landed a job as assistant to the director
of the Theater Group, then based at UCLA.
From there, he got a job with CBS-TV,
producing the talent tests of name actors
(guided by big-time directors) who competed
for parts in the following-season's CBS
pilots. Fortunately, Ken was able to work
successfully, for a while, by staying
out of the revolving door of the network's
program executives. “I saved the
Company $250,000 [big money, forty years
ago] by eliminating the full sets built
for the pilot tests. As the program
execs were only evaluating rival actors,
I said that I could tape the talent, more
effectively, against black velour drops,
a la the Sunday morning cultural programs
on CBS, which had no budget. But this
great economy failed to enhance my $200
weekly paycheck.”
Working for the seasoned TV producer Ethel
Winant, who had previously overseen the
talent tests, Ken became expert
at working calmly under screaming threat.
“I remember when Ted Post, the then director
of the hit, Peyton Place, couldn't get
a comic performance out of Michael Burns
( A Cold Day in the Park ).
Ted was too lazy to redirect the scenes
for Burns and my boss was raging on the
phone that I had to deal with Burns' long
hair and make him funny, or else I would
be out on my ear. Mr. Burns absorbed all
of my re-direction on the spot, and got
the part, thanks to me.”
Only a few years before the networks programmed
all-black sitcoms like The Jeffersons
and Good Times, Ken had
the foresight to devise a panel discussion
of Blacks in Hollywood for a
CBS affiliate which had requested a controversial
talk show. The black panel was
headed by comedian Godfrey Cambridge and
Rawhide's Raymond St. Jacques,
who devastated the white casting execs
from CBS and Universal. Although
the show aired in the low-rated 1AM
Saturday time slot, a front page item
appeared in Daily Variety ,
following its eventual airing. Ken's copy
of this trade paper had the story black-bordered
in felt pen, and ominously noted
“This is your first and last mistake with
this company.” Among the less-than-thrilled
fellow CBS program execs, Ken could feel
his year-long tenure was growing tenuous.
When the TV columnist for the Los AngelesTimes,
who got in to see one of his improvisation
sessions, wrote that, “with more Ken Geists
in television, the medium could go nowhere
but upward!,” Ken's office phone remained
silent, except for those friends who called
to ask how much he had paid for the plug.
Although
he was lauded by TV columnists for his
unconventional views on improvisational
training for television actors, the Blacks
in Hollywood debacle and later,
his refusal to cast several of his superiors'
actor-wannabe children, sent Ken on his
way back to New York after a year of futile
job hunting.
Blacklisted
by CBS-TV, Ken spent the next five years
in New York writing film reviews for SHOW
Magazine , The Village Voice,
Film Comment , and various other
publications. While he always loved the
craftsmanship of directors such as David
Lean, Fellini, and Kazan, it was director
Joseph L. Mankiewicz who captured Ken's
attention in late 1970, when he interviewed
him to fulfill a book proposal from a
publisher. “I loved Joe's uniquely
literate screenplays and I was fascinated
by his reputation as a lay-analyst of
lovely-but-lost screen goddesses,” Ken
recalls. “I always wanted to know
how he was able to calm a strung-out Montgomery
Clift on the set of Suddenly Last
Summer , which I had witnessed.”
Showing the transcript to the interested
publisher eventually yielded Ken a book
contract. After seven arduous years of
writing, while continuing his occasional
journalism, Geist's Pictures Will Talk:
The Life and Films of Joseph L.
Mankiewicz was published in 1978
by Charles Scribner and Sons.
While
Ken's critical and unauthorized biography
offers an extensive look at the career
and films of Mankiewicz, it also treats
the reader to loads of privileged Hollywood
lore. ”My book is filled with gossip about
all of the famous stars whom Mankiewicz
worked with or knew. I loved knowing how
cheap the super-rich Chaplin and Fields
were--begrudging dollar tips to the poor
waitresses who depended on them; or about
Joe's various affairs with stars like
Joan Crawford and Judy Garland.”
Geist recounts one of the often misattributed
stories about the famed director, in the
golden age of movie-making. “Mankiewicz
was exiting his office, in MGM's Thalberg
Building, with his longtime pal, Spencer
Tracy, when they ran into Kate Hepburn.
Joe, who had just produced Hepburn's
The Philadelphia Story, was set
to produce the first picture to star Tracy
and Hepburn, Woman of the Year,
1942. When Joe introduced
his stars, who had never previously met,
Kate whispered into Joe's ear, ‘Isn't
he a bit short for me?' ‘Don't worry,
sweetheart' Joe whispered back, 'He'll
cut you down to size!'”
Ken
is considered an expert on all things
Mankiewiczian and, in 2002, he provided
a portion of the audio commentaries for
Twentieth Century Fox's DVDs of Mankiewicz'
All About Eve and The Ghost
and Mrs. Muir . Recently,
he completed another, more extensive commentary
for A Letter to Three Wives ,
which is scheduled to be issued by its
producer, Sparkhill, in 2005.
Ken
is currently at work on his second book,
Mis*Fortune , which has required
many more years than his first. Unfortunately
inspired by his own financial debacle
in the early 1980's, Mis* Fortune
is a cautionary tale of fantastic
physical, financial and psychic loss.
“Its not a pretty tale, but a fascinating
one, I think,” he promises.. Hmmm…sounds
like it has just the right elements for
a goods read.
Top
Five All-Time Favorite Films
Citizen
Kane, dir. Orson Welles
Lawrence
of Arabia, dir. David Lean
8
1/2, dir. Federico Fellini
The
Grapes of Wrath, dir. John Ford
The
Conformist, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
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