As an inhabitant of one of the cities caught up in the nationwide heatwave earlier this month—Columbus, Ohio—I can confirm that the weather was stifling.
The heatwave has dropped out of the news—that will happen when a Democratic Senate candidate has ended his cataclysmically ill-advised candidacy and the Iran War peace deal has evidently failed to hold—but the temperatures remain persistently unpleasant. But, having learned from my upbringing in the reliably hot and humid suburbs of New Orleans that the solution when such weather arrives is to buy a ticket for as long a movie as possible in an air-conditioned movie theater, I did just that this past week.
So, on Wednesday night, I went to one of my usual haunts in downtown Columbus, a big performing-arts venue that honors its movie palace roots by showing classic flicks each summer, to see Jack Clayton’s 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby. This movie—whose admirable fidelity to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was confused for shallowness in its day— starred Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Gatsby’s longtime idée fixe Daisy Buchanan, Bruce Dern as her moneyed but ill-mannered husband Tom, Karen Black as Tom’s lover Myrtle, and Sam Waterston as the genteel narrator Nick Carraway. The screening was pitched as a tribute to Redford, who died last September at age 89.
As it happens, I have interviewed three-fifths of the principal cast—though none of them about Gatsby and all by telephone.
I interviewed Redford in 2017, about his experience with director Michael Ritchie on the movies Downhill Racer and The Candidate; Dern in 2019, about working with director Hal Ashby on Coming Home, and again in 2023, about his memories of director Peter Bogdanovich, whose distinguished career was preceded by a period of grunt work as Roger Corman’s assistant on The Wild Angels; and Waterston in 2009, about appearing in a play directed by my then-biographical subject James Bridges, and again in 2019, about James Thurber. (Look up my piece in The Christian Science Monitor—it’s good.)
But enough about me—really. Believe it or not, while watching The Great Gatsby, I was not thinking about my fleeting telephonic encounters with Redford, Dern, or Waterston (all of whom were exceedingly nice, incidentally). This is not a matter of false modesty but of how many things I can keep in my head at once: I can either tick off each person in a given movie that I might have had some long-ago conversation with, or I can watch the movie. I’m happy when I forget that I once interviewed this or that person. Really? I once interviewed Dustin Hoffman? About what? (I did, and it was about the great prison movie Papillon.)
Since I happen to love Clayton’s film—and admire the performances therein of Redford, Dern, Waterston, and the rest—the choice was simple.
Yet my principles were put to the test upon exiting the theater the other night and overhearing a conversation among my fellow moviegoers. This experience is not unknown to me. Years ago, when I reviewed classical music and dance performances for my hometown paper, I often overheard the chitchat of departing attendees (who invariably liked the show more than I did). Back then, I kept quiet out of professional integrity: I was not about to divulge my views before they had appeared in print.
This time, a few people just ahead of me were wondering among themselves whether or when Robert Redford had died—a simple matter that could have been cleared up by someone who hadn’t ever spoken to the man, though I will admit that, listening to them talk, it occurred to me I was uniquely qualified to share some insight into the star. I could have said that, yes, Redford sadly did die last year, and by the way, I interviewed him once, and he was really very nice.
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Instead, I kept with tradition and said nothing. Would they have believed me if I had said I had talked to Redford once? Would I have believed myself? I did not want to taint a memorable movie experience by trying to be the star pupil. I also wanted to get home, back into air conditioning.
Yet it occurs to me, as I contemplate my own silence, what double lives we can lead. Politeness dictates that we seldom share the full breadth of our own experience. Just as no one at the theater could have guessed that among them was an interlocutor of several members of the cast of The Great Gatsby, I, by turn, would have had no way of knowing if some other ticket-buyer that night had some similarly unlikely impressive quality or story to tell. What if I had been sitting next to some distant descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald?
It’s nice to think that the person next to you in a movie theater or in a restaurant or on a plane has some hidden depths. Of course, it is not lost on me that I am sharing my own hidden depths in a column for the world to read. I have gone this long without mentioning that another movie I plan to see this summer is the original 1961 version of West Side Story—whose talented and kindly co-director, Robert Wise, I interviewed the year before he died. Well, I have to tell someone, don’t I?
