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Small moments, big nights | page 1, 2
Incited by Gould's
reputation as a profoundly odd, dynamic character and as a man of letters
said to be halfway finished with his nonfiction masterpiece, the journalist
offers up meals and bits of cash before Gould consents to be the subject of a
Mitchell profile. During their conversations, Gould claims to speak sea gull
vernacular -- thus the title of Mitchell's first piece,
"Professor Sea Gull" (published in 1942), which earned Gould a brief period of celebrity. Benefactors would drop by the Minetta bar in the Village, where the scribe
could be seen hunched by the window, beer or whiskey in hand, muttering to
himself and occasionally scrawling in a notepad. And though Mitchell
maintained contact with Gould for months after the article came out, he was
unprepared for the tenaciousness with which Gould clung to him. At that time
he had no intention of following up "Professor Sea Gull" with another piece. "In New York, especially Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the
misfits and the one-lungers and the might-have-beens and the would-bes and the
never-wills and the God-knows-whats ... I have always felt at home," said
Gould, who died in 1957. In 1964 Mitchell wrote a revealing two-part article
entitled "Joe Gould's Secret." And though Mitchell lingered on as a staff
writer for the New Yorker for the next 32 years, sealed away in an office and
bound to his typewriter, he never published another piece. "It's so interesting that 'Joe Gould's Secret' was the final thing
Mitchell wrote," says Tucci. "It's when he finally reveals Gould's secret
that he reveals so much about himself, about how he identified with Gould,
about how similar they were, about how at the end Mitchell was Gould. "One of the main themes in my films has been the artist as pariah in
American society," Tucci says with a slightly vexed expression. "The
artist's place in our society is always sort of hanging out on this
precipice. Why do we have this awful antagonistic relationship with people in
the arts? Why is the artist always turned into the enemy? It's fucking
bizarre. To be devoted to your art and feel that it is not a luxury -- it is
an absolute necessity to society. It's fascinating to me. Joe Gould had
written something that I put in the script about how people are afraid of the
artist because the artist deals in ambiguity. "But you know, people don't like ambiguity. I knew I had to make 'Big
Night' because, though I had a perfectly fine career as an actor, I was not
satisfied. I was frustrated working with directors: When I'd watch the final
product of a movie, I felt I was seeing what was happening in American film,
that there was this formula taking over. I wanted to see a film that had an
ambiguous ending." Tucci says that he wanted "Joe Gould's Secret" to deal with the idea of creativity in our culture, and the film's subtlety seems to underscore his feelings about the way art is viewed in America. "How many naked sculptures are there in New York? None. You might see a
breast here and there," he says, laughing. "But really, no. You'll never see
a penis. Lots of horses, you know, guys on them. How many statues of women? One -- of Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, where's the sex? Where is it? And then
you look at the Internet and television. It's an adolescent's idea of sex.
Things are ambiguous and dark and sexually provocative, just like your wife
is sometimes. And the artist expresses that stuff freely, and it's
frightening to people." Tucci's frustrations with the artist's undervalued role in society have become even more personal in his yearlong struggle with the Writers' Guild. The idea for "Joe Gould's Secret" effectively first came into being six years ago when one of the
film's executive producers, Michael Lieber, persuaded Mitchell, who died in
1996, to agree to a film. Howard Rodman, the film's screenwriter, worked on
the film for a year and a half before Tucci became involved with the project. When Tucci did commit, it was with the understanding that he would rewrite
the script; he worked on it for four months and estimates that he changed up
to 80 percent of it. When the Writers' Guild, after both an arbitration and
a hearing, refused to give him a shared credit, he was heartbroken. "I know
that because I was both the director and the producer, it was harder for me to get
credit. I know I have to let it go, but it was like the Salem witch trials. They said, 'Can you prove we did anything wrong?' And since everything took
place behind closed doors, I couldn't." Tucci refers to Rodman, the initial screenwriter, as a "great talent."
But he speaks earnestly about the need for a particular precision in this
script, and about how he was compelled to devote himself to the task of getting it
exactly right, despite the violation of the Writers' Guild rules. "Well, you want
to do him justice," Tucci says about the brainchild behind his film. "If I
can make movies the way Joseph Mitchell wrote profiles, then I could die
happy."
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