Happy Birthday Karen!

The Anniversary of Karen's 80th Birthday.

KAREN'S BREAKTHROUGH AUDITION

Karen Black, 1965

Karen arrived in New York city in 1962.  She worked odd jobs, performed Shakespeare in the Park, off-Broadway productions, came close to a Broadway debut in the original version of "Something Happened on the Way to the Forum,"  but didn't last past the previews.  Then in 1965 at the age of 24, she got a phone call that changed her life for the Broadway play The Playroom.  From her unpublished biography:

A woman who had witnessed one of my auditions, singing with my guitar, wanted me to go up for a play called “The Playroom”.  She knew I was very young,  not only looked young, and the part was for a fifteen year old character. Okay, I rose from my couch and readied myself.

I went by subway to a tall building, one of the top floors, actors were given scripts to study before going across the street to a Broadway theater and getting on stage to audition.  I read the scene without enthusiasm.  It was bunches of teens singing and talking.

In the course of time, I was walked across the street.  Waiting, waiting. I was told later that hundreds of girls auditioned.  So there I was in a huge mass of “being teen” girls.  I’ve never seen so many blonde ponytails in my life.  Waiting waiting. I found some stairs backstage and climbed them and there before my weary eyes:  a black leather couch!  I lay down and almost immediately went to sleep.

The stage manager, a handsome gay fellow who seemed to grasp the amusing quality of the moment awakened me and handed me the other scene.
 Okay, drowsily, I sat up to read it.  Oh my God!  This was a role.  Of course she’s saying that and doing that - she is frightened down to the depths of her being that she will lose her father, Lose him, if he goes on that trip.  Fear drives her; why it could drive her clear across the stage.  Oh my god she would do anything, anything to make him stay.
Enormously inspired, I rose and I paced.

It was my turn next.  I went behind the curtains and could hear the girl auditioning onstage. Well she was very Bryn Mawr.  I’ll never forget the comfortable drawling of her words.  “NO!” I said to myself. “All wrong!´ There’s nothing comfortable here.  This moment here is life and death for our character.

 I got out on stage and they wanted me to do sing, talk teen scene.  I sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” acapella in my soprano range.   Joseph Anthony’s voice then rose from the back of the pitch dark theater, “Do you know anything a bit more - Rock and roll?”  I sang the new Beatles hit, “We Can Work it Out.”

Well they seemed to like that okay because they then invited me to continue and to do the scene.  

In the scene, my dad way across the stage. I ran up to him as I spoke.  I ran in desperation, hardly knowing I was moving. It was fear driving me to him.  I begged him to stay, and every word held beneath its sound the depth of fear urging me to speak.  I finished the scene.

I won’t forget what happened next.  Because what happened next was nothing.  Silence.

Then Joseph Anthony’s voice came out of  the darkness, “Where have you been?” he asked.

“Why, I’ve been right here, “ I answered. “Right here in New York City.”

Rehearsals were intense.  I would get on the subway with the toast and hardboiled egg still in my mouth, and sometimes it was hard to swallow it.  I was concerned!  I wanted to do the best that I could. Seeing Peter Kastner there everyday mde my insides rise to an exotic delight.  It was if a light shone from his Canadian sweater right into my eyes when I would see him every morning onstage.  And Joseph Anthony was a proud handsome and wonderful director.  He would say to the kids- Peter Kastner, Bonnie Bedelia, Christopher Norris, Augusta Dabney And me,  “Nothing! is easier to play than fear.  Just about anyone can produce fear in his or her belly and feel it.”  For some reason I never forgot those words and they helped me to feel a comfortable latitude in pulling up my fears in shows such as  “Trilogy of Terror!”

Mr. Anthony invited me to stay over at his wonderful home out of town - a white house with windows galore in the living room overlooking forestry.  After breakfast one morning and after what he called our “Ablutions” we  all went for a walk through the  trees, beautiful forlorn trees of November. Mr. Anthony then said, “Didn’t this come on rather suddenly?” meaning Peter and myself.

I suddenly wasn’t alone anymore.  There were calls for interviews.  The New York Times came over to the shabby place where Peter and I were living and mentioned in the paper that it was a railroad apartment on the 55^th Street and 10^th Avenue (an awful section of town in the mid sixties) and that the rent was $85 dollars a month.  Well what did they expect?  I had lived on as little as believe it or not 30 dollars a week in my time there in New York!  Was I suddenly to be a rich Broadway star??  

THE MAKING OF FIVE EASY PIECES

I auditioned for Five Easy Pieces just like any other actress might and it was just one of those things that couldn’t stop going right.

I used to bring changes of wardrobe along with me in my large purse when I had more than one audition in a day.  After the first one, I’d slip into a bathroom, say, on the Paramount lot, change into the outfit that better suited the character I was about to audition for, get in my car and drive away, careful not to drive into anything. (I’ve always been a lousy driver.) 

On the day I auditioned for Five Easy Pieces, I just happened – seriously folks- to be wearing the perfect outfit, though I hadn’t read the script yet.  These guys knew me, of course, as I’d done Easy Rider with them. But the whore I played in Easy Rider had nothing to do with the gentle, mindless sexuality of Rayette Dipesto.

I was wearing a ruby-colored satin blouse with a pair of silly ruby satin ruffles all down its front and flowing slightly see-through crazy pink and purple floral print pants Rayette would’ve died for.

I went home and to my new plush (for ME) apartment and read the script. I  talked it out loud a little, laughed a lot, loved it.  Being a comic since my childhood, I can’t help but bring light-hearted aspects to any character.  If Rayette takes herself seriously, you’ve lost the performance.  She is foolish.  She doesn’t, of course, know this.  And that gives the audience a kind of distance from her: they can laugh at her, but at the same time, love her.

When I went in for the reading, quite relaxed, Fred Roos was there, one of the all time great casting directors – (Black Stallion - producing eventually with Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather, Lost in Translation)—along with the great genius Bob Rafelson. I got all the laughs I’d intended so I felt this was going well, as this is a very good gauge for me of the efficacy of a performance – tragic OR comic !  I remember sitting on Fred Roos’s lap as Rayette.  Made it part of the scene.

Well, they wanted to give me the part! But there was a problem.  Rafelson had me come into his large but cozy office again, this time in the evening and this time to “accuse” me of being smart - too smart to play Rayette Dipesto.  He made this very clear to me, looking at me seriously and yet with tenderness.  “Well”, I responded, “and I’ll be smart. Right up until the very last moment before you say, ‘Action!’ and then I’ll simply stop any and all thinking.”  Rafelson could see that I wasn’t being cute.  I meant it and he knew somehow that I could accomplish this.  I got the part. 

There are certain very workable things to be recognized about film that just never get stated. So I’ll state them now:

I’ve made at present (2008) one hundred and seventy-five films in my life and never before Five Easy Pieces nor after this film have I experienced shooting a movie entirely in sequence.

The opening scenes of the movie script were shot in Bakersfield, L.A. and then we all got into a car and shot the movie, again, in exact sequence as we traveled northwards up the west coast of the U.S.  We stayed at hotels along the way, and the next scene in the script was tomorrow’s scene and the next, the scene written for the day after!  The movie culminates at Bobby’s ( Jack Nicholson’s) home which again, was the true end of our journey, in Vancouver Canada.  Even the motel where Bobby planted me for his return to his family, was, in fact a motel outside of that city.

I had already met and fallen in love with Toni Basil ( one of the lesbian hitchhikers Robert and Rayette picked up along the highway) as we’d been driven to  the point of insanity together making Easy Rider and the hilarity of doing something that made no sense to either of us day after day has made us loving friends to this very day.

She had gone into the closet of the house she shared with Dean Stockwell and had screamed for hours to break her voice and lower it to suit the character she played. 

Helena Kalioniotes was a great favorite of the group.  Carole Eastman had heard this endless intense rap of Helena’s about how “man” was dirtying up his environment so many times she just put it into the screenplay. Helena was hilarious.

Evenings we’d order up food, and then gather together in Jack’s room and dance to the Beatles. “…Something in the way she moves..” 

Oh God the way Jack moved.  What a great dancer! I can see him now in the big warm room, his leg up, knee bent , making those slow ass-first turns. I in my jeans and little top, watching as I ate my breakfast for dinner repast of bacon , eggs and no carbs.  This was the only outfit I wore of which Toni approved.  

ASIDE:

Toni basil was and is on of the great all- time dressers.  I had visited her home and she took me down to her closets in the nice basement of ----home which were filled with outfits and clothing.

She had a way of predicting just what was about to come into fashion.  After Five Easy Pieces, at one of Jack’s parties up on Mulholland where Barbra Streisand would show up and everyone he’d ever worked with practically, Toni came into the darkened living room crowded with the stunning paintings Jack liked wearing a little round black hat perched on her head (with a slight veil) a suit from what seemed to be the forties and socks with heels.  It was only months later that I saw almost the same outfit in the fashion pages.  True. Believe it or not.

BACK TO THE MAKING OF.

Jack was a magnificent soul. I was falling in love and the more I understood him the more I stood in admiration of him. Once I said to him, “Jack, some people just are not there!  I swear, no matter how hard I try to connect, they don’t come up to the point of being there.” 

“Blackie”, Jack replied, “you can always find the person.  Just keep looking.”

He had warmth, he had a great brightness of soul.  Jack shines.  And that ebullience of soul cannot be extinguished, ever.  

There were producers at that time who shall remain nameless who really scared me then.  Clever, well- suited execs that I just didn’t feel would ever be on the same wavelength as mine.   But Jack would just – how can I put this- just include them.  Just embrace them for whatever they were. And he would work with them.

I remember in one of motel rooms once, seeing the scripts that were being offered him.  It makes no sense that this occurred on the road shooting “Pieces”-because why would he lug around this huge lot of scripts?  But I remember seeing neat piles of them on two long pieces of furniture.  Even at that time there were tremendous numbers of offers.

Jack once talked about how his spot-on knowing of which scripts would make a great movie.  The fact of that never made its way into people’s understanding of him as a potential director.  In my opinion he was correct, and had this particular aspect of his brilliance been addressed differently, he would have become one of our great American directors. 

This was a very golden time.  Toni, Helena, Jack , Bob, myself- we were very happy; only in the making of “Nashville” with our beloved Robert Altman have I experienced the near ecstasy of happiness I felt on that long drive /shoot up the Northern coast.

As the sun was setting one day, we spied a huge hill of sand. We stopped the car, took out the oranges we were saving to eat on the drive and played catch with them as the sun went down.  Then all of us including, at least in my memory, Bob, lay down and rolllllled down the great hill, getting all dirty and sandy.  One after the other, rolled and rolled.

Nothing in “Five Easy Pieces” was improvised.  Carole Eastman’s dialogue was just so natural, it sounded that way.

Jack convinced me that I was a good actress.  He honestly believed in my work, saying “You got a lotta moves, Blackie.”  This is a great compliment because what he meant is that I have plenty of choices I can make as an actor at every given turn- choices of voice, expression, gesture, choices of character -while in the moments of the scene being shot.

His belief in me truly helped me and I’ll always love him and be grateful to him.

As my career diminished and his exploded as the years went by, I no longer was invited to his parties and only at odd hours in the morning might I get a call from Jack, still calling me Blackie.  When Jack was honored by the American Film Institute, I was not invited, but my amazing P.R. man at the time, the illustrious Elliot Minz, made sure I was present at the event.  I was not asked nor could this man convince anyone that I should sit at the long table where Jack was presiding and being photographed with others more acceptable now to be seen at such a prestigious event.  Afterwards I went up to the dais and gave him a hug, and he said, “Blackie. I didn’t know you were here.”

There were many endings for “Five Easy Pieces” and only toward the very end of the shoot did Bob Rafelson, Jack and all the members of their company -B.B.C.- agree upon which one it would be.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Eckelberry

Karen and Nina

About a year ago, Karen reunited with her biological daughter.  The last time she saw her before that was the day she was born.

You see, many years ago during her first year at Northwestern, still a teenager, Karen gave up a girl for adoption.  She called her Nina.  Her father was a young Drama student, Robert Benedetti, with whom she remained friends till the day she died.

Illinois had, until recently, very strict closed adoption laws.  It made it virtually impossible for biological mother and child to connect.  What made it even more difficult for Karen was that in the 80s two different people approached her through her agent saying that they were her real daughter.

But the dates didn't match.

That made me her a little gun shy about trying to find her daughter.  Her brother Peter and I both tried going through the Illinois authorities, but it was not fruitful. 

Then on August 7th, 2012, I checked Karen's FB fan site and found the following message:

"Hi Karen, Illinois has recently allowed adoptees like me to access their original birth certificates. I just received mine today. I was born on March 4, 1959 at Cook County Hospital, and the name listed for my mother is Karen Blanche Black. Would this happen to be you?"

The dates matched.  And this is what Karen wrote back:

"I am. Been a long time. I hated leaving you behind, turbulent waves of sorrow. thank you for making this possible Diane. Your father is still a good friend, a genius, a professor, a television producer. you will love him. we will all love each other. I'm kinda stunned."

Since then Karen and Diane reconnected, she stayed at our house a number of times, even managed to paint together.  She help care for Karen when she could, helping us when she visited when the cancer started taking its toll.    The talked emailed and texted many time, staying close until the end.

Stephen Eckelberry's Eulogy of Karen on her Memorial, September 17th, 2013

I recently found 1996 Chicago Tribune press clipping of an interview Karen did - one of those where you have short answers to questions - favorite childhood memory, my heros, etc.  The last question was "three words that best describe me."  Karen's answer:  Light, present, non-derivative.  I couldn't have said it better myself.
On the subject of light, she was essentially, to her core, a happy person.  She could work really hard and often did.  But she loved having fun.  She would put as much energy into having fun as she would into her work. Her parties where legendary - people still come up to me and say what a great birthday party we had in 1989.  She loved seeing friends and going on picnics - and playing party games - especially games that involved performing - like one she invented "Are You Pleased?"  Of course the answer was always 'no'.  "What would it take to please you?"  - "sing me a song that expresses how you feel about flowers" ' "Stand on your head" or "do you an improv that you are a barking dog trying to get a steak off the table."

Let's talk about present - what she means by that is being present - and to me that was the biggest lesson I learned from Karen - Be there - engage life! There's an exercise in Scientology where you have to sit in front of another person and do nothing - just be there comfortably without fidgeting.  It's a lot harder than you think.  When you first do the exercise you typically do it a couple of hours a day for a few days.  Karen loved that exercise so much that when she first did it in the early sixties she did it for a whole year.  'I think you are done Karen'  "No, I love this!"  She was present right until the very end.  She was actively engaging life until the very end, which astounded the doctors, they never saw anything like it - most in that stage just nod out on morphine.  She was in major pain, and yet took less pain killers than most housewives - she wanted to be there!  A few hours before she died she had me doing her leg exercises, she wanted to get strong so that she could walk again. 
I learned more about living watching her die than watching anyone else live.
She had been writing her autobiography with Linda Kandel, finished the last interview the night before - but she remembered one sentence she wanted to add.  -  by this point she could barely breath, and I couldn't understand what she was saying, but she dictated to me over the course of 15 minutes, a whole paragraph, one word at a time.  Here is what she had me transcribe - now mind you, this is not some deep philosophical statement, it was just a sentence that she wanted inserted in to the section about her love life - or rather her unrequited passion as a young woman:
"But these beautiful deep and bright red wooden apples that I gazed upon where the very ones that kept me from going across the slender hallway and into the television room and having sex with Charlie's brother Tommy, just as I stared at the bannister along the hallway at the room in which classes where held in daylight at Perdue U. which kept me from rolling on the cement walkway with Jim Stevens at midnight." 
That was her last creative act, 2 hours before she died.

Okay, the last one - non-derivative:  Karen though about things in her own way, had her own conclusions and ideas about everything. Everything about her was completely original. 
She made up her own language, I tried to figure out what it was - seemed like a combination of Celtic and Swedish - it was usually when she was happy and wanted to express her affection and delight about something - so it would come out in various ways:
"Oh Sorsee sordid crinda!"  Just nonsense words that I guess had a certain satisfying quality when expressing them.

And she was completely original when it came to acting.  It really wasn't method, though she did that too, it was just a combination of an insane amount of prep and then a complete in-the moment expression. She would prep by researching her role - do a Texan accent - what part of Texas?  Pan handle?  Southeastern?  Dallas?  She would call people who knew people and then find someone that was from Southeast Texas - "I don't have accent anymore really" -  then Karen would proceed to write out using her own phonetic notation how each vowel was pronounced. She would memorize like crazy! 
When I first went with her she told me her rule:  Be able to say your lines flawlessly 10 times.  So she would have me run lines with her, and if she made one screw up, she would reset the counter to zero, and do it again, until she had it 10 times perfect. Then, when she was on set, she was free to be completely in the moment and there for the other actor.
Her work was an astounding combination of iron-willed discipline and freedom - complete control and complete lack of control at the same time.  It's a trick that few people are capable of doing.

Last thing I want to talk about is help.  Karen helped a lot of people - in her own way.  She never though she really helped anyone, she felt guilty that she was too hedonistic to go out and feed the homeless or raise money for earthquake victims - and yet she helped everyone she met.  She had an ability to become best friends with everyone she met, usually in less than five minutes.  She saw them for who they were deep inside and validated them for what they did. She gave you - you.  She certainly did it for me.  I was introverted when I first met her, reading books voraciously, but not going into the world - she made it okay to engage life, and led by example, which was a kind of joyous charge at existence.

Many wonderful thoughts and kind words and thoughts have made their way to us since Karen's passing.  I'll leave you with one, from my friend Noel Sterrett:

"Several years ago I was in the middle of writing a script, and I asked Karen to let me know what she thought of the story. In it, the female lead inadvertently  saves the life of a rock star she is stalking. As a result, her dream comes true and he falls for her, and...

Karen stopped me right there: 'NO NO NO, that's backwards. You don't love who saves you, you love who you save'."

Well, on that note, Karen must have loved a lot of people, because she helped everyone that had the fortune to cross her path.

Thank you.

END OF TREES

Karen wrote many poems, in fact several poems made their way into the California Quarterly, a fact for which she was very proud.  "I'm a published poet!" she said when she got her copy in the mail.  Here is a poem I found that seem appropriate at this time - Karen, by the way, loved trees.  Stephen.

END OF TREES

In a little month the men will come
and screw unscrew the screeching trees
uncorked, unable, not to grow again
Replaced by many many things that we call houses
we stupid angular masses that move only to the rhythm of success and failure
to build that which likens to us:
square houses , drab in colour, never fetching to the eye
square homes milky gray and khaki
vomit peach and sometimes a hope of blue
eight of them on the place where my trees have been.
I went , of course, for a talk,
a last goodbye.
There is one, oh there is one that I must mention.
I know it cradles, circles , embraces the old homestead
with a crafty needle- birch - eye!
For how else could it assiduously escape the roofing enclosure!
It bends back just now, moves over the rafters when it may!
And in so doing, paying little attention to the winding snakey direction of its own limbs,
it comes up more fragile, formed with attenuated grace,
in fact more of an explosion of bark and tiny greens than all the rest.
Ah well, that’s the nature of giving, isn’t it?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of that which gives.
And then: a Christmas tree! Two stories tall, sporting the pointed reflective leaf,
lacking only berries. All hail! The last Christmas!
But there are rattan trees
points
proffering only sprouts of fading green
one bony trunk and then another and another
pointing to the sky,
simple, like simple children pointing effortlessly with tiny bodies at the sky
meaningless

And the fruit trees are pregnant.
They bulge with the fumes of life,

more highly scented and ambrosiac than a vagina.
And they will die
they will all be cast down by red metal in a month.
No I will continue:
I picked a small orange from one,
It was underneath the white thunderously scented white stars on branches above.
And now,
before its better birth,
the aborted ball in my hand smelled only of perfumed flowers.
It doesn’t know.
No one has told it:
The heavens will be empty soon.

August 7th update from Stephen, Karen's husband

A lot of people have been asking me what's the latest with Karen, so here it is:
   Last post I did was mid-June, we were in St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. A week later, everything the hospital could do for Karen had been done; bacterial infections & anemia handled, heart & lungs working - everything but the cancer itself.  By the way, props to St John's, a top notch hospital with a great staff of doctor's and nurses.
  Karen's health continued to deteriorate at an alarming pace. She became bed-bound: the spreading cancer having eaten away part of a vertebra and nerves in her lower back. Her left leg stopped functioning.  We could not go to Europe as we had hoped. It would have been almost impossible to travel to the airport.  So we brought alternative treatments to her bedside.  Hardly as effective as doing a full treatment in a clinic, but I firmly believe that these treatments have been keeping her alive.  I can't tell you how many times doctors and nurses have pulled me aside and told me that I better start hospice, as she was about to die.  One doctor told me that he thought that Karen had only 24 hours to live when she arrive at St. Johns June 3rd, and yet here she is alive two months later.
   The kind people at the Motion Picture Television Fund helped place her in a nursing facility, where she is now.  The cancer is still spreading slowly and it takes its toll.
   I have given up predicting what is going to happen to Karen.  In June family members flew in fearing the worse, but Karen is still here.  You look at the scans, they tell you one thing, then you meet Karen, and what you are left with is how amazingly alive she is. Maybe it's her belief system, maybe it's because she was never one to tune out with drugs in her life, but mostly it's her innate character. She can't help but take life head-on and be completely engaged in the moment, always interested, always curious, always present.
   My daughter and I have both stopped working so that we can be by her side and we have hired someone to help as well. Thanks to your generous support through this process we can be there for her all the time.  We are supplementing traditional medicine with all the alternative care we can afford.  This would not have been possible without your generosity.
  As a filmmaker I never remain idle, and have been filming this whole process from the beginning almost three years ago - it has been therapy for both Karen and myself, because after all, if cameras are rolling, it can't be really serious, it's just a movie, right?  I hadn't planned on doing anything with the footage, until a few weeks ago, Karen reached out to her old friend, Elliot Mintz. Elliot is considered a media guru who has offered advice to dozens of famous clients over the years including Karen. They spoke by phone about ways Karen could share her experience with others, in her own words, in her own way. I spoke with him about the many hours of film I had shot and within days, Elliot presented some ideas for us to consider.

Karen & Elliot screen grab

   On June 21st, Karen put on her make-up and her hair (chemo is not kind on hair) and had a heart to hear - a bedside talk with Elliot. They spoke for almost two hours. With my daughter shooting second camera in the tiny room, I filmed the deeply moving and candid conversation. Karen of course is very enthusiastic about finding the right platform for some kind of presentation. 'You can take the girl outta showbiz.....' so, we will see. It's still a little raw for me, I'm not sure. It would be an interesting and moving journey to share with a truly unique and original spirit. We are both grateful to Elliot for his support and guidance (He is representing us pro bono).
   So, that's where things are as we begin August. I wish I had better news to report. But cancer seldom allows for that. Karen and I have received hundreds of messages from you. Your prayers and well wishes help sustain us. We remain eternally grateful for all the love you continue to share.

An interview with Karen Black on acting in The Great Gatsby

Interview: Karen Black

Interviewer: Chloe Boasberg

May 16, 2013

DO YOU REMEMBER THE SCENE WHEN YOU BRAGGED ABOUT ALL OF YOUR DRESSES?

That’s a very good moment for the audience to find out that they know much more about Myrtle than she knows about herself; they know she is a fool, that she is not making any sense, but she thinks she does and thinks people will believe her and her fantasies. Her costume is overdone, it’s orange, there are all kinds of things draping from it. Her big goal is to be part of the social circle - so it's a very wonderfully thought-out costume – but it’s a kind of ridiculous dress.

DO YOU REMEMBER ACTING WITH THE CHARACTER, GEORGE WILSON, AND HOW YOU SORT OF REJECTED HIM?

She didn't like herself.  She attained confidence by grasping at a social level, not simply feeling fine; she wants to be Tom's wife, though this never happens.

I will tell you I did something from the book, I tried to do things directly from the book, from the era: in the book it says that when Myrtle dies, her spirit is so large that it ripped her mouth as it left.

So I asked Jack if I could please have rips created in my mouth, and he said yes.

When he saw me lying there, Scott Wilson (who played George Wilson), the tears actually flew out of his eyes; he was brilliant.

DO YOU REMEMBER ANY CRITICS' OPINIONS?

No… Wow! I don't remember a thing! They must have said really good thing because I won the Golden Globe!

ON ACTING AS MYRTLE:

Nobody tells you how to act, it’s like hiring a maid, nobody has to tell the maid how to wash the dishes… its what they bring to the job.

Jack Clayton (the director) -  I did the speech when she meets Tom for the first time and he said “do not ever look at it again, don't say it, or repeat it” because he liked it just the way it was, there was that freshness about it that an actor likes to experience. That's as much as he said to me about acting.

Just find out what the characters needs, what the character wants. Once you know the characters goals, and the character's future, then you just do the part, but nobody can do that for you because basically, it’s inside you, it’s like something you own, something you need.  It was done with a light hand, I'll tell you what I mean: I did a movie once with an actress who thought she could think her way into a role, she would work very hard, her voice would tremble, she had the idea that imagination is like an object - it isn't, imagination is like nothing, its like air, it’s light, you don't force it; you work hard to establish the life of character and the reality of character so you no longer have to think, you only produce the result of living your character; you are that character. You don't want to be two people: you and the character.

SO HOW DID YOU BECOME MYRTLE?

It just happens. You study, you do whatever it takes to become the character, though it can happen instantly, so you don't force it, but you think about their lives, where they were born, and a lot of times the place will determine what they want or need.  You have all that in you, and the leap is talent.

AMOUR  AN ATTEMPT TO STATE WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT

Amour is a watershed movie:a very important point of transition.  Amour will change the making of films for better or for worse.
Here's why:
In a movie theater, why do you continue to watch the screen?  Well we think we've always known the answer to that one. We've got that one solved. We watch because we want to find out where the story is going.  Our interest has been aroused: will Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert get together?  What will the King of England say to President Roosevelt? Will our hero get his revenge on those who have harmed his loved one? Notice that these are broad subjects.  They carry the viewer along from scene to scene.

In Amour we are not partially suspended wondering what will happen next.  we are fixed in present time, urgently wanting to know, "What is happening now?"
Right now,in front of us (no overview)a man sits on a small sofa reading a paper and his wife lies dead in the other room. Glued to the screen, we watch avidly as a man reads his paper.  The camera doesn't move.  In present time, right now, we ask ourselves, "what is he doing?"  "what is he doing?" "what is he doing lying there reading that paper?"
 Or, we have before us, a man catching a pigeon.  Right now, in present time, we are watching to see if he will catch the pigeon. We know it is happening now, right now and not shot earlier and later and edited together -because the camera doesn't move.

Nothing is done for us. Nothing is pressed forward into our faces.  We must find it in there for ourselves. Our attention and interest are invited in. We are the ones reaching toward the screen. It is not the film maker's notion that he must hand us over the scene after he has made into the collage  he is moderately sure will be understood the way that he has made it to mean.


Because of the elegance of this film, the unmoving camera causing reliance upon human perception and the concentrated  brilliance of the performances, the ending of this movie can be pure metaphor. 

I dont remember ever seeing a movie where the ending is utterly satisfying in every way, and yet it is pure metaphor.  Again, not depending for its meaning upon fact and generalities, it can be as specific as true metaphors always are, and as truthful as they always are.       

Funny how it took the French to show us the new way.  Reminds me of the sixties. 

 

Something an Actor Shouldn't Do

I don't think any actor in performance, or any artist for that matter, should try to please anybody.  This does not pertain to taking direction which is completely on the purpose line of the actor , to evince just what is needed and wanted to make the story work.  It is the audience he should not be trying to please.  Because then it is always going to be a generality.  For there is no specific person or personality he is trying to please- it is "them".  It is a generality. 
And only specifics endure, only specifics actually occur or have any presence in art.   Either say it or do it the way you see it or you have said or will have done nothing.

SENSELESS SHOOTINGS - WHAT IS TO BLAME?

We have never had kids going into schools and shooting students in the history of man. The history of man- that’s a long time.

What has changed?

For hundreds of years, people have had guns.

For hundreds of years, children have endured poverty, orphanages, cruelties of every kind.

What is new on the scene? Think about it.

Every child who has committed these homicides has been on psychotropic drugs and under the “care” of a psychiatrist.

People, taking psychotropic drugs are committing suicide and committing homicides.  If you take the time to investigate, you will find that these deaths are going on about you all the time. It’s not like six degrees of separation. It’s like three degrees.  Someone you know knows someone who has had a bad experience.  Mighty prevalent, yet somehow we have bee induced to totally overlook this thing staring us in the face.   One of my best friends took a sort of muscle relaxant and said to her husband:  lock me in my room. Don’t let me out of my sight, or I will kill myself.” She knew it was the drug.  Others do not and think it is themselves.  My costumer on a recent film’s friend walked into the ocean when he  stopped taking a psychotropic drug.   A smart witty terrific pal of mine was given a drug by his doctor for a cold or regular sickness and he woke up in the night and started hallucinating blood pouring down his walls.  He found out from that doctor it was the drug, and asked the doctor why he hadn’t been warned.

There is a group of drugs called benzodiazapenes and if you want to take one of them, you might as well take your brain out and put it on a silver platter and hand it over to the nearest passerby.  It is no longer your own.  It may make you take your own life.  I know you’re a nice guy, but it may make you take the life of another.

Some years ago, on the internet, I could bring up the number of suicides of children in some city in Canada.  There had been six that week.  About three years ago I read in the paper that a lad had “woken up” and found that he was facing people holding a gun.  We are no longer, in this culture, privy to these facts.  The media does not disclose them to us. 

There is another class of drugs called neuropathics.  These also can make you take your own life.  Watch TV ads.  I know the wife of the man who lobbied to get the information that psychotropics can make you commit suicide into the warnings. After years, he finally did. The box says something like “suicidal ideations”.  This means that your brain, not being your own anymore, can make you take your own life, and this is just to get over body aches and pains! So you may not feel that pain in your knee anymore, but the reason for that might be simple: you are no longer here to feel it.

- Karen Black

My top 10 favorite moments in all of the scifi/science-fantasy/horror films I have seen

BEST SCREEN MOMENTS

1. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS  1958

O.K. Here's my favorite moment from all Science Fiction, Fantasy and horror films I've seen. . .

In this absolutely terrific movie, Kevin McCarthy knows full well that if anyone from his community where the body snatchers are replacing humans with outer space unfeeling replicates of its citizens -- if anyone  falls asleep, that during that unconscious moment, the body snatchers will take over and you will wake up, not "you" anymore and never to be you again.

   McCarthy and his girl, Dana Wynter escape the town, make a run for it. But it's late and they are getting more and more tired. McCarthy goes to search for a path for them to take. When he returns, he sees Dana asleep on the ground and tries to wake her. Here's the moment: Close up. She opens her eyes. They are unseeing, utterly passive, opaque. She's been snatched!

 

2. IT'S ALIVE  1974

One of the great science fantasy movies, this one by Larry Cohen. Sharon Farrell has given birth to a very small but deadly monster. But she's his mommy. She loves him. She hides him away. But he keeps killing people.

   Finally the police are onto the little guy and with ludicrously unnecessary force, about 44 police cars surround the big building where the child is hiding. His dad is appointed to go in and get him and surrender him to the police in whose keep his baby will surely be put to death.

   John Ryan looks at his little son, knowing what he must do and what he is going to do. Great tears of love and sorrow fall from his eyes and were falling from mine, I can tell you. What a moment. It's emblazoned within forever. But without the masterful performance by John Ryan this moment would not have been realized and would not have become unforgettable.

 

3. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD  1968 TOBY DAMMIT segment

This film is a collection of three shorts or segments, one by Frederico Fellini, one by Louis Malle, and a third by Roger Vadim. The short by Fellini about a tormented actor named Toby Dammit and played by Terence Stamp, is in fact known as a great film. When it was last screened at a theater in L. A., respected directors who know good film came out of the woodwork to see it. 

   Toby Dammit is pursued by a small, glitteringly happy little girl who represents death in the film. The great screen moment, in this horror science fantasy film, is as follows: Toby Dammit, a famous actor, walks through the audience toward the stage where a TV interview has been set up for him. The stage has roaring blatant white lights and looks more like a fighter's ring than a television broadcast. As he walks, he looks down upon all those faces in the audience upturned towards him. They are Fellini faces: splendid and sordid, people who are real yet seem to have arrived from a nearby circus with skin a little too white, lips a little too red.

   Faces, faces, faces, and the great screen moment was there for me. I swear I got high watching them.  I went into a trance of some kind. Only the genius of Fellini could transport his audience in this way.

 

4. UNEARTHLY STRANGER  1964

The only way we can tell that this beautiful woman, Julie Davidson, played so wonderfully by Gabriella Lecudi, is not from our planet is that when she achieves human emotion and cries, great dark crevices appear in her face where the tears have fallen. And the other way? She experiences no heat. The moment occurs when her husband Dr. Davidson, played by John Neville, suddenly walks into the kitchen to see his wife taking a 400 degrees, steaming hot casserole out of the oven with her bare hands. You've got a lot of  'splainin' to do Lucy!

 

5. DRACULA  1931

I know this is a popular favorite. That does not mean that it is not one of the best moments ever to be seen in the horror genre and really, it must be mentioned. 

   Count Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi, is welcoming Van Helsing, played by Edward Van Sloan, to his castle, and is standing on a vast gray, splendidly crumbling staircase. There is a noise. We all know what Dracula will say. And he says it so beautifully that many of us can remember his exact inflections.  "Listen to them.  Children of the  night.  What music they make!"

 

6. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE  1974

Would anyone but Tobe Hooper ever be masterful enough in the horror genre to think of having people be utterly casual at the moment that someone is waiting to be slaughtered?

   In "Chainsaw Massacre," the father of the ratty household and his son sit chewing on the decision, arguing in the most casual of ways, as to which one of them will slice off the girl's head and let it fall into the bucket placed in front of the chair onto which she has been tied. This chair, by the way, is between the two men, each trying to impress the other with how right he is to do the task, so we can watch her enduring this contest while she waits for her horrible end. An entirely original and unforgettable moment in all of horror films.

 

7. TERMINATOR  1984

Here is a stunning classic moment so good I'm surprised it's never occurred before in film: Arnold Schwartzenegger holds out his hand and stops an enormous truck dead in its tracks. I think it's his right hand.

 

8. E.T.  1982

We all know and love this moment: Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas' mom, played by Dee Wallace, looks into the closet in which her children have hidden the little loveable guy from outer space!  She scans the shelves. The children hold their breaths. So do we! We see a shot of what she sees: rows and rows of dolls and stuffed animals of all kinds. The moment comes when we all breathe a sigh of relief, because to their mom, E.T. looks just like every other stuffed plaything sitting  to his left and to his right! Adorable. 

 

9. DAWN OF THE DEAD  1978

We are all used to that ominous knowledge, watching zombie movies, that the undead are man-eaters!  But in this George A Romero movie a zombie simply walks toward camera and actually takes a big bite out someone's shoulder in a shopping mall. Pretty neat and it let me know that Mr. Romero has quite a sense of humor.

 

10. TWILGHT ZONE Episode title: "Time Enough at Last"  1959

Henry Bemis, played by Burgess Meredith, absolutely loves to read, but works so assiduously at his bank, he never has enough time to do so. Outside the thick, protective walls of the bank's vault, a terrible war ensues, and at its end, there is no more work nor any world for Henry, but what there is, is "time enough at last" to read and read to his heart's content. But alas, the violence of the blast has shaken him and his glasses have fallen. And now, the unforgettable moment: he steps on his own glasses  and shatters them and also his own hopes for a contented future.

What are your favorite moments?  Mind you I don't mean your favorite movies, I mean those moments you will take with you for a lifetime.

 

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE A FAMILY (FOR WHICH I COOK AND WITH WHOM I DEMAND TIME) AND ALSO WORK AS MUCH AS I DO. WHAT’S THAT LIKE? HERE IS AN ANSWER, TAKEN FROM MY JOURNAL OF LAST YEAR.

September 18, 2009
Lee Sankowich called about a weekend ago and asked if he thought I would be okay to go into first public performance for SLASHER on the 22nd of October [at the Zephyr Theater in L.A.] I checked dates and checked how long this play, (my play here in Georgia) had been in rehearsal and called back to say it would be okay. [ I WAS IN REHEARSAL FOR MY PLAY, MUSIC BY HARRIET SCHOCK, “MISSOURI WALTZ”.]
Then I realized that Celine is starting on a life. [SHE HAD BEEN ACCEPTED IN PHOTOGRAPHY AT ART CENTER OF PASADENA AND THIS WOULD BE HER FIRST SEMESTER] This is it. Her chance. Hope is something that looks so beautiful on her just as when she was the most beautiful little thing with a great lifting space around her.
Her voice now, the quality of the bounciness of it, her opening in her spirit to look forward to and not to renounce tomorrow -

I called Deborah Taylor [PRODUCER FOR THE ZEPHYR] that lovely miss and we talked about schedule for rehearsal and then I called Celine and between the three of us we seemed to work it out and I was relieved.
I would do the play, which I loved very much, and Celine would do most of our school work Saturday evenings and all day Sunday.

Then the word NO woke me up at 3:30 in the morning. I lay there, and with all assiduousness and rapt attention tried to honestly mock up the days - those days of her being at Art Center and my being in rehearsal and eventually, in performance. What would they be like? I remembered the way I am almost completely absorbed into the play when I do a play; how I re-memorize every single day so I am sure I will be okay for the evening’s performance every night. I thought of how, after opening, I would not be there any evening, or many of them. I thought of how I would be at rehearsal, earlier, when she came home from school at 3-4 in the afternoon. I remembered the way when my parents came to visit with me, I would have a feeling of subtle joy in my gut, I would sort of float with them there downstairs, talking. I knew I had to be at home for her, even if she doesn’t like my dinners, (which she often doesn’t) even if she wants to finish watching the TV show she’s got up instead of talking to me (which she often does), even if I can’t get her to take vitamins and she eschews some of my attempts to help; even then, I know that inside of her there will be that satisfaction that is so important -that sense of contentment – and she will feel it because we are both there and that she is cared for in a contiguous way.

So I turned it down.

YOUR FRIENDS KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU THINK!

Kristen Anacker came over to dress me for Christopher Munch’s movie last month. She brought with her a wool jacket with quite small squares of a mild green, somewhere between wintergreen and meadow green, very English looking. “I thought this was you,” she said. I looked up at her with astonishment, when I could pull my eyes away from this ideal garment. “How did you know? I asked. “How could you see me so well?” I love that people do this about and for each other.
Later that week, I talked to my briiiiiilllllllliant accompanist for my one woman show (now called “My Life For A Song”), Tracy Stark. She was asking about the tour that those last people for whom we did the show would like us to go on. “Well,” she said, “you’re not the touring type. You like to stay indoors and at home.” Now Tracy and I have only worked together. She lives in New York and I live in Sherman oaks, CA! “You are spot on,” I told her. “How could you know that?” She knows I love to perform and I can’t recall ever sharing recipes with her! “ I don’t know,” she said. “I just did.”

My daughter is now twenty-two and her birthday is on November 22. my husband’s birthday is on December 8th, so I decided for the first time this year to have one birthday party for them both!

It was a wonderful party, and the next morning I wandered the living room/ front room alone, totally elated (I just love the next day after big parties!) fingering through my daughter’s presents lying about - the earrings, the lip color pots, and so forth and I saw that my pal, Lisa Yesko had left a bag for not him and not her, but for MOI! Looking down I saw oh! My favorite tea, Darjeeling! My favorite brand, Ahmad! So I joyfully pulled out the box of tea. Oh oh. There was something underneath. It was a teapot, one of my favorite things to possess. It had flowers of the most exquisite delicate colouring. It was completely representational England. It was a garden in England in the late spring with morning light falling across pale roses. Well I took one look at this gift, and though I don’t like to admit it, I actually screamed!
I looked away, shut my eyes tight. Swiveled my head back so that my face once again was facing that perfection. I opened my eyes. IT WAS STILL THERE! I screamed again!
I called her. “How could you know?” I asked. "Well," she said about my being feminine and the colors and… “I don’t know. I just did know.”

WOW. Let’s all do this for one another- go with what we sense about our friends, trust that we know, from this day forth!

Great article in the Toronto Star!

Karen Black: Still sexy after all these years
'70s movie icon brings new cabaret show to the Gladstone

Eric Veillette special to the star
Karen Black's voice still sounds as vibrant as it did when she sang to Jack Nicholson in 1970's Five Easy Pieces; her soft tremolo as fresh as when she hosted Saturday Night Live in 1976. Reclining on a leather sofa in the art gallery at the Gladstone Hotel, she sings a few breathy lines from an old standard and, without hesitation, turns the song into a country-western tune full of twangs and growls.
Black is in Toronto for her new one-woman cabaret show, My Life For a Song, which premieres tonight and continues tomorrow at the Gladstone. Her stories of working with some of the greatest names in Hollywood – she has appeared alongside Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bette Davis and Oliver Reed, and has been directed by Dennis Hopper, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman – will be interspersed with appearances by characters she created for past stage shows, along with musical interludes featuring long-time musical director Tracy Stark on the keyboard.
"It's an eclectic mixture of music," Black says. "I might do `Ten Cents a Dance,' then a delta blues or a country song."
After both shows, local filmmaker Bruce LaBruce will join her onstage to discuss her career and take questions from the crowd. "She brings a tremendous intensity to her roles," says LaBruce. Her performance in 1975's The Day of the Locust is "tragically underrated," he adds.
After her heartbreaking portrayal of Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, which won her a Golden Globe Award as well as an Oscar nomination, Black became one of the most sought-after performers of the '70s. She appeared in The Great Gatsby – which earned her a second Golden Globe – Cisco Pike, Family Plot and Burnt Offerings.
But anyone familiar with Black's work knows she loves to sing. She grew up in a musical family – her grandfather was classical musician Arthur Ziegler – and she briefly studied opera before her acting career took off. "Our living room was always filled with music," she says.
While Jascha Haifetz records would play, she says she would hum along to Julie London and Doris Day. She has been known to sing a tune or two in many roles and recorded the title track to the 1973 Canadian horror film The Pyx, as well as two of her own compositions in Altman's Nashville.
As an actor, she's still incredibly busy. She received critical acclaim for her dual roles in Steve Balderston's Firecracker and appeared as Mother Firefly in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses. Among other things, she just completed a pilot for a comedy co-starring Bud Cort.
"I have very few regrets," she says when discussing her career. Among those few is a script Woody Allen once sent her that she ultimately turned down.
"It was the part of a woman who loved to have sex in public but couldn't do it privately. That's great," she says with a laugh. "What was wrong with me?
"But I did meet him. He told me I looked like Warren Beatty."
She speaks highly of her son Hunter Carson, her co-star in Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of Invaders From Mars. "He had a great acting career as a child," she says. "Wim Wenders came to our house because he wanted to cast him in Paris, Texas. Hunter tried to sell him a lemon from the tree in our backyard." Carson got the part.
As we speak, people come in to introduce themselves, followed by adulation and offers of dinners and tours while she's in town. But tonight's show is on her mind – there's limited rehearsal time, as well as technical aspects that need to be ironed out.
As one of the visitors departs, Black – well known for her impressions – jokingly musters her best Greta Garbo: "I just vant to be alone."

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/WhatsOn/article/670913

Another great article, this time in Eyeweekly!

The voluptuous joy of Karen Black
The screen legend comes to the Gladstone to debut her new one-woman show

How do you introduce Karen Black? Maybe she’s the kooky goddess of all things cult: a scene-stealer in videos by Cass McCombs and L7; the voluptuously horrific namesake of Kembra Pfahler’s performance-art band; the star of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, of Dan Curtis’ Trilogy of Terror and of disaster-movie Airport ’75, in which she plays Nancy “the stewardess is flying the plane” Pryor. But this neglects that she was to the Hollywood Renaissance what Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau were to the French New Wave, appearing in such pivotal 1970s films as Easy Rider, Nashville, The Day of the Locust, The Great Gatsby and Five Easy Pieces — all of which turn, to a significant degree, on her distinctive presence. Oh yeah, and she played a jewel thief in Hitchcock’s underrated last film, Family Plot.When Black comes to the Gladstone Ballroom this weekend — thanks in large part to David Daniloff of Rue Morgue — she will showcase yet another facet of her career: writer-performer for the theatre. Coming off the recent premiere of her play Missouri Waltz, Black unveils a new one-woman show, My Life for a Song, which combines Americana character studies from Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter with her previous autobiographical one-woman show How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sing the Song. Fans of Black’s work with Robert Altman should take especial note: this is a chance to see her act onstage, as she did for the late director with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (later a film containing one of her best performances), and to see her sing, as she did as Connie White in Nashville.Bruce La Bruce will interview her, and there will be a career-retrospective montage and audience Q & A. But don’t expect wistful, self-important, cabaret-style reflection. “I think that the way things come about for actors, and maybe especially for actors in Hollywood, is that you don’t have as much of an overview as you might want,” says a convivial Black, on the phone from LA. “There aren’t any signposts in Hollywood that tell you what’s going to happen next, nor even what street you’re on.“I’m a lighthearted person,” she continues, “even though I have a lot of commitment to people and things. Lifelong commitments. I don’t think that I sit around and reflect on things. I write poems, but I write those fast, too.”In fact, she has been prolific since the very beginning of her career, with over 150 films under her belt to date. Currently, she’s got half a dozen projects in pre- or post-production, and boasts of her contribution to small films like The Blue Tooth Virgin, which just got a distribution deal. It goes without saying that she does not subscribe to the notion that it’s difficult for women of a certain age to get work in the industry.“I’m not a complainer,” she says. “If I were, I would have stopped doing movies long ago, and I wouldn’t have been very happy. I like working. My goal in life is to continue art. And there are people who have great art, sometimes people who don’t even know how good their work is. So that’s what I’m doing and that is my purpose and I’m quite happy about it. My life is like a salon.” Still, her film work has not, by and large, been for Hollywood since the 1970s. Black has said that, after The Day of the Locust, rumours began to circulate that she was difficult to work with; and in an interview with Charlie Rose in the mid-’80s, she indicated that it was not a choice to do independent films. (She also reminds me that she’s done many “bad films.”) Isn’t her career a sobering lesson on what happened to the Hollywood renaissance, specifically to her strong, intelligent peers like Barbara Harris, Shelley Duvall and Louise Lasser?“Some of the leading women now have wonderful personalities,” she rebuts, citing Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts. “I think I’ve always been a character actress. I don’t know that I’m a personality. I don’t even know what I’m like. I know that I’m warm-hearted. I know I have a lot of life force. But I don’t worry too much about that — what I am like. It’s not interesting. I’d rather read.”What Black does find interesting — and this is made abundantly clear in her empathic, dynamic acting style (which, by the way, she refuses to define as Method) — is other people. “I just love getting concepts,” she says, “and really being a concept. When I did Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, I spent months on that character. I went to gay bars. I worked with a transsexual woman. It was very hard to deliver what was actually required of me. But in order to embrace what’s actually required of you, you have to understand it. You have to grasp the concept. It’s not some characteristic of myself as a personality; it’s just a love of concept. “And some kind of integrity,” she adds. “You have to live up to snuff. You have to live up to your own standards.”

http://www.eyeweekly.com/arts/theatre/article/66775--the-voluptuous-joy-of-karen-black