Before They Were Kings: Part Seven

BEFORE THEY WERE KINGS, Vanity Fair, 2004: Hackman, Hoffman and Duvall reason with rage>>>

Part Seven of an Estimated Eight...

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Truth was their grail. As Duvall puts it, “To live truthfully in an imaginary set of circumstances, that’s what it’s all about. And do that, you now, in a somewhat effortless way.” Hackman learned to do it under George Morrison, still active today as president of the New Actors Workshop. At that time he headed the Premise, an improve troupe that performed in a tiny theater on Bleecker Street. The shy and introverted Hackman did comedy improvisations there. Morrison says, “He fell out of his shell, and learned to be funny, learned timing, delivery, voice.” Hackman says, “When I’m working on a character, I never get to the point where I don’t believe it’s still me. I think there’s everything in me. I think it’s possible that I could be anybody. When you think that way, all things are possible for you.” The disappointments, the rejections, the mental jobs, says Hackman, “create a resolve in you that no matter what kind of part you’re given, you can do anything. Give me the challenge. I can do it. The scarier the better.”

Ever since those beginning years, the three have always been risk takers in their choices of roles and characterizations. Hoffman’s first wife, now Anne Byrne Kronenfeld, is today a talent manager and believes that they “are among the last of a generation. You don’t see actors today go to the edge of a cliff and say ‘OK, I’m going to jump, and maybe I’ll fly and maybe I won’t.’ They’ve done that.” Hoffman describes the experience of flying: “If I tried to define what it means to be most alive, it’s when that cloud of mortality disappears. It’s when you’re in a place of timelessness. You’re free, really free. When that happens in life, there’s not a moment when you’re not completely in the moment. There’s nothing else we want, is there? Our work gives us a chance to have that.”

They are all able to project two opposing feelings simultaneously. One is vulnerability. Duvall and Hackman can draw on their shy kindness. Hoffman, believes Anne Byrne Kronenfeld, “touches the audience with his ability to find the appealing contradictions, even the humor, in the most unsavory characters. That reaches out to the audience.” Sometimes the class clown in him resurfaces. Performing with Ula Grosbard’s wife, Rose Gregorio, who played a whore with a blond wig covering her dark hair, Hoffman suddenly snatched the wig off. She remembers, “We broke up onstage, and the audience just went bananas. We made it part of the scene.”

The second undercurrent in the trio is a simmering, suppressed anger; an unpredictability. Duvall, the specialist in macho men sensitive at the center, explains “You should find some aspect of vulnerability in yourself. And the anger sits there. A sense of danger. What’s next?” Sometimes it is an explosion of rage. In 1965, Duvall again played Eddie Carbone in A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, this time at the Sheridan Square Playhouse, a 199-seat, three-quarter-round theater with tables, close to, and level with the stage. One night Duvall noticed a man asleep several tables away during a scene that required him to threaten Jon Voight with a wine bottle. Duvall smashed the bottle on the nearest table, splattering glass, and woke the man up. Sometimes Duvall would simply spot somebody he thought didn’t like him and use the anger to feed his acting. According to Hoffman, even after Duvall’s curtain calls, as he walked offstage, he would lean over to the person and yell, “Fuck You!”

Hackman confesses that he could have modified some of his mean-guy roles, but “what interests me is to get that edge, get to that anger… A good thing about acting is that you’re allowed to be who you are. It’s OK if you’ve got some aspects of you that are dangerous.” After a movie or a dinner with Hoffman, Hackman would sometimes stand on a street corner and say, “I gotta go.” Hoffman explains what that meant: “He had to get in a fight. He’d go to some bar.” Hackman adds, “There’s a kind of catharsis about it. I don’t want to get hit, but I don’t like to take any shit.”

In Hoffman the rage is more hidden, but it can erupt if he feels that his fiercely held acting processes and judgments are being violated, especially by directors who seem to now nothing about acting. They are the ones who grow impatient if the actors gradually explore their characters, who want to impose their own ideas, who do not want to join the actors in jumping off that precipice – “What? Your wife just died and you want to start laughing?” The anger, Hoffman explains, “comes from your toes. It’s a wonderful feeling.” He adds, “Hackman doesn’t talk. He just picks the person up and throws them out the window.” Duvall says, “It’s hard to be diplomatic when you’re using yourself, your own temperament, to give what the character calls for.” When one film director told him to pause and smile, Duvall walked off the set.

(to be continued)