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Daily News
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CineVegas Celebrates Stockwell
Actor Dean Stockwell chats with FilmStew in advance of this weekend’s honor at CineVegas for his 1948 allegorical classic The Boy with the Green Hair.
Friday, June 11, 2004
By Richard Horgan
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While Dean Stockwell has fond memories of working with Joseph Losey, the British director who guided him as a young lad in The Boy with the Green Hair, he was not so fond of the techniques employed by Elia Kazan the previous year on the set of Gentleman’s Agreement.
“Kazan took an approach that was at odds with the way I worked,” recalls Stockwell during a phone interview earlier this week from Monterey, CA. “And the way I worked was a strictly private matter with me. I didn’t discuss it with anybody.”
“There was a scene where I was supposed to be upset because of being called a Jew at school and telling Gregory Peck, who played my father, about it,” the actor continues. “Kazan pulled me aside and said, ‘Think your puppy died,’ and that type of crap. I just kind of looked at him, nodded and then stuck my finger in my eyes before the scene and made myself cry. And he thought that he did a great directing job there.”
Stockwell is traveling to Las Vegas this weekend to accept the CineVegas film festival ‘Changed My Life’ award on behalf of The Boy with the Green Hair, in recognition of the profound impact this film had on many moviegoers and future fellow artists. Sadly, Losey, the producer and writers of the film were all blacklisted by Hollywood soon after the film came out and in Losey’s case, fled to Britain and never came back.
“I know that The Boy with the Green Hair has influenced a lot of people and I’ve had people tell me – the likes of Ringo Starr – that it had the most effect on them of any film they remembered as a kid,” Stockwell recalls. “And strangely, in most cases, I find it interesting to ask someone something like, ‘Do you remember why the kid’s hair turned green?’ And they very rarely do remember, that it was an anti-war film.”
Although Stockwell has a small cameo role in the upcoming remake of The Manchurian Candidate for his old pal Jonathan Demme, who guided him in the 1988 send-up Married to the Mob, he tends to concentrate these days on the production of elaborate collages using computers and an oversized printer.
Like his closest and oldest friend Dennis Hopper, who is chairing the CineVegas event that began today, the 68-year-old Hollywood native has found solace in the relative comfort of other artistic pursuits. Later this summer, an exhibition of his pieces will open in Taos, New Mexico at the RB Ravens Gallery.
Still, he can’t help but be a little bit puzzled by this latest piece of film work for Demme.
“Jonathan asked me on the phone if I would do a cameo in the movie, and I said that I would,” explains Stockwell. “It turned out when I read it that the part was so small that it’s only because he asked me that I did it. I don’t really realize why he needed me to do it, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ll find out when I see the movie.”
“When I got Married to the Mob, I felt and I told my wife at the time, ‘If I get this it’s all over,’” he continues. “And I got it, and I delivered, and I got a nomination for it, and won some awards, and this and that. And I said, now I’ll get some f**cking offers. [But] I didn’t get any movie offers, nothing. And some time went by and I landed Quantum Leap.”
Stockwell admits that he has never been as well paid, before or since, as he was for his work on the 1989-1993 NBC series. What’s more, along perhaps with his work for Wim Wenders on the 1984 Cannes Film Festival triumph Paris, Texas, a film for which the actor says the German filmmaker had no specific ending in mind when he began, it marks a highlight of his illustrious career in terms of being given freedom to improvise.
“I probably did more improv on that show than anything I’ve ever done,” he says. “Some of the best things Scott [Bakula] and I ever did were improvised.”
Were it not for the persuasive powers of Francis Ford Coppola, Stockwell’s film career might have taken a decidedly different turn in the early 1970s. After producer Robert Evans decreed that Paramount would not hire Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Stockwell moved to the top of the list on the strength of his screen test. However, in the end, Coppola was able to change Evans’ mind.
Around the same time, Stockwell was hoping to direct a script that Hopper had encouraged him to write after they had worked together on The Last Movie, but when Universal decided to take a pass, it wound up in very different creative hands.
“Neil Young happened to read it in Topanga Canyon – I don’t know how he got a copy of it – and he told me that he had been for two years prior to that in writer’s block,” recalls Stockwell. “His record companies were all over him, he couldn’t come up with anything.”
“He read this screenplay and wrote the whole album, it poured out of him, called “After the Gold Rush,” he adds. “That was the name of the screenplay. But the film was never made and after that I said to hell with that.”
Although Stockwell was offered the chance to direct episodes of Quantum Leap, he turned down the oppor~tunity, leaving as his only official directing credit another collaboration with Young some ten years later, the anti-drug movie Neil Young: Human Highway.
“Neil’s whole approach or statement is, ‘The plan is there’s no plan,’” observes Stockwell with a laugh. “So trying to make something up to shoot was very difficult. There’s a lot of silly stuff in it, but there’s some pretty interesting passages as well.”
In the end, given Stockwell’s astute analysis and observations of the working habits of the various filmmakers he has collaborated with, a group for which he places Coppola, Wenders, Demme, Hopper and fellow CineVegas honoree David Lynch at the very top, it’s tantalizing to think what might have happened if Hollywood had given him a fair shake behind the camera.
Given the opportunity, it's likely he would have benefited greatly from his own experiences as a hard-working actor, such as the time he co-starred for Sidney Lumet in the 1962 drama Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
“I love Sidney, he’s great, but I had one little personal problem with him at that time,” Stockwell says. “Sidney was so in love with and so in awe of Katherine Hepburn that all his attention was pretty much 100% of the time on her. I sort of took a back seat to that, which I shouldn’t have.”
“There was one moment in a scene where he told me afterwards that it was the only moment where I took stage away from Katherine,” he continues. “And I’m thinking in my mind well, sh*t, all you want to do is watch her, I’m laying back trying not to take stage away. And I absolutely loved Katherine myself, by the way. All those people, Jason Robards and Sir Ralph Richardson, were just fantastic.”
[CineVegas begins today and runs through Saturday, June 19th, with an assortment of parties, premieres and homages crowned perhaps by the incidental gathering of an edgier new millennium equivalent of the old Rat Pack – Stockwell, Hopper, Lynch and fellow attendee Jack Nicholson. For more information, please go to the web site CineVegas.com.]
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