Sidney Lumet: Making Movies. NY: Vintage, 1995. 220 pp, no index.
Making Movies is one of the best books on the nuts and bolts of film-making ever. It deserves the highest rating simply because it is both well presented and full of practical insights. Lumet is brilliant on the psychology of movie-making in the old days, for instance, when each producer had the power to order cuts at will. The director who knew this would deliberately leave some weak scenes in during early screenings so that the producers could order them removed and thus later claim to have “saved” the picture – if, that is, it turned out to be a hit.
That said, Lumet’s overall approach is not historical but topical, from selecting a writer to making the final cut. In Chapter Three, he raises a point I often try to impress upon my students: The way you tell a story should relate somehow to what that story is about. That gets to the whole question of the importance of style, which he terms “the most misused word since love.” (pg. 49)
He also explains something I’ve always wondered about – why the second reading of a scene in rehearsal is almost never as good as the first: “This is because the actors’ instincts were pushing them on that first day. But instinct wears out quickly in acting, because of repetition. The nature of movie-making is repetition…. By the time we reach that second reading, instinct has been used up, but we still haven’t had enough time to find all the emotional triggers that the actors need.” (pg. 62)
Good, practical advice can be found on every page. Here’s how he can tell if something is off when watching a scene during rushes: “If my concentration breaks, something is wrong.” (pg. 141) This, I might add, applies equally well to reading as to watching – if our attention drifts, there may be something wrong with the book we are reading, or the text of the speech we are delivering.
Another example of his prudence: “Our old definition of melodrama still stands: making the unbelievable believable…. Edit it for story, but as part of the form of melodrama, edit it as surprisingly, as unexpectedly, as you can. Try to keep the audience off balance, though not to a point where story gets lost.” (pg. 155) This counsel might seem commonsensical, even self-evident, but it is surprising how many movies get made that ignore it.
Here’s something that may seem counter-intuitive: The audience’s perception of the length of a film depends not on the tempo of the movie itself so much as the presence or absence of changes in tempo. The fewer the changes, even if the tempo is fast, the longer the movie will seem. Most melodramas accelerate towards the end. Inexperienced directors adopt an up-tempo from the start, then find they have left themselves nowhere to go except even faster, thus exhausting the audience long before the final credits.
Lumet candidly confesses he doesn’t know what makes a hit, and doubts that anyone really does. It is certainly not the stars alone. He talks about those he has worked with (including Paul Newman and Al Pacino) without indulging in gossip, and when he has something negative to say, he does so without naming names. One movie of his, which he refuses to identify, suffered from the limited range of one of its stars. “On the second day of shooting, I began to realize that the leading actress lacked the tenderness her part called for. She simply didn’t have it in her as an actress or a person. She was superb with anger; she had humor. But if she was asked to show the simplest affection for the person playing opposite her, a falseness crept into her acting that was readily apparent, particularly since her acting was otherwise so real and true…. Since the movie was fundamentally a love story, I knew that we were in trouble.” (pp. 143-144) I wonder if the movie in question might not have been The Morning After. The only hint he provides is that the film “had three very high-powered stars in it.” Morning After featured Jane Fonda, Jeff Bridges and Raul Julia. On the other hand, Fonda did receive an Oscar nomination for her performance here, so I can’t be certain.
He is self-critical when it comes to one of his neglected works, The Group (1966), saying the movie needed “a lighter comedic feeling in its first twenty-five minutes.” (pg. 11-12) The real problem, though, was length, or perhaps tempo – in any case, there is no way this film should ever have been allowed to drag on for two and a half hours. It’s the only movie of his I’ve never been able to sit through. Today they would make it into a mini-series, which is the format it needs. At least he mentions The Group, which is more than can be said for The Offence (1973), a film that truly deserves the epithet “stark.” Though it stars Sean Connery in one of his best roles ever, readers will search in vain for any reference to it here.
Chapter Nine, “The Cutting Room,” might be the best. Here I learned the most about the old Hollywood studio system with its factory-like production line. His summary: “When I think about it, it’s quite amazing that so many good movies were made [working under those conditions].” (pg. 149)
Some readers may be surprised at the precision with which music is deployed. “We get very specific about where the music comes in and where it goes out. We time it to the frame. The entry point is particularly critical.” (pg. 174)
One of the hardest jobs filmmakers have is not so much making the movie, it’s promoting it afterwards, when they’re thoroughly sick of it and have moved on to the next project already, or even the one after that. Participating in these events induces in Lumet “a stupefying dullness that makes my teeth ache.” (pg. 212) Keep this in mind the next time you see stars on the talk-show circuit, promoting their upcoming release.
Though most (but not all) of the examples are taken from movies he himself directed, Lumet most definitely does not provide a survey of his career. While “Murder on the Orient Express,” for example, gets mentioned at least a dozen times, “Fail Safe” rates only a single one, early on. Incidentally, what he has to say about “Murder…” gives me a higher opinion of that movie than I ever had before; now I am tempted go back and take another look at it. The chapter on the “lens plot” in “12 Angry Men” – how he used differing lenses to create an increasing sense of claustrophobia – is justly famous.
I mentioned at the beginning that the book was well written. I wonder if it was based on tapes, because the tone tends a bit toward the spontaneous and conversational without exactly being informal. Reading it is somewhat like listening to a very well-organized lecture delivered without notes.
On the whole, Making Movies is an enlightening introduction to the craft, presented by an insider. If you are like me, you will be amazed at what you hadn’t noticed in movies you thought you knew.
In their audio commentary to “Solitary Man,” directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien said they re-read this book before every movie they make.
Update
Since the book does not have an index, I have supplied one myself. I can’t guarantee it includes every name, but I tried to include every film.
ADR editor – see Looping
Alexander Nevsky, Prokofiev, Eisenstein 171
Allen, Dede 155-157
Agony and the Ecstasy, Charlton Heston 19
Anderson Tapes 14, 19
Antonioni, Red Desert 9
Apocalypse Now 182
Appointment 8, 10
Bacall, Betty 94
Bartkowiak, Andrzej 52, 91
Blondell, Joan 149
Book of Daniel – see Daniel
Booth, Margaret 151, 212
Brando, Marlon 64
Buchman, Sidney 11
Bye, Bye Braverman 11f
Carlito’s Way, dir. Brian de Palma 49
Casablanca 163
Chayevsky, Paddy 42
Child’s Play 143, 168
Christie, Agatha 11
City Lights, Chaplin 53
Connery, Sean 6, 104, 114f
Cruise, Tom 213
Daniel – 14, 43, 57, 91, 98, 165, 181, 195
de Laurentis, Dino 178
Deadly Affair (le Carré) 86, 177
Di Palma, Carlo 9, 97
Dog Day Afternoon 14, 32, 41, 57, 88, 99, 100, 112, 120, 163, 178, 191
Dreiser, Theodor American Tragedy 16
Fail Safe 14
Family Business 104, 198
Fatal Attraction 210
The Firm 214
Foley editor (adds natural sounds) 189
Fonda, Henry 18, 115, 139
(Fonda, Jane – not mentioned by name, perhaps implied at 144?)
Fugitive Kind 14, 72, 81, 103
Garbo Talks 98
Gillespie, Dizzy 176f
Gone With the Wind 95
a Groucho (a tall actor starts to lower his body before he sits) 115
The Group 11f, 123
Guilty as Sin 99
Hepburn, Katherine 67f, 162
Heyman, John 44
The Hill 83, 152, 164, 211f
Hitchcock 51
Holden, William 66
Jones, Quincy 176f
Kaufman, Boris 18, 52
King, Alan 19
Landry, Tom 26
Long Day’s Journey into Night 8, 14, 15, 24, 32, 55, 67, 89, 103, 123, 158, 162, 181
Looping (re-recording of dialogue in the studio, with exact lip synchronization; done by ADR editor) 173
Mamet, David 39
A Man and a Woman, dir. Claude Lelouch 50f
Marjorie Morningstar 54
Markfield, Wallace 11
McCarthy, Mary 11
McDonald, Peter 117
melodrama 11
Menzies, W.C. 95
Mickey-mousing (wall-to-wall music) 170
Miller, Arthur 30
Morning After 86, 99, (144?)
Moulin Rouge 87
Murder on the Orient Express 11, 12, 20ff, 56, 70f, 78f, 85, 94f, 157, 172, 178, 184
Network 14, 36, 41ff, 66, 85, 122, 146, 178
Newman, Paul 6, 60
Nyquist, Sven 93
The Offence – not mentioned
Pacino, Al 17f, 67, 139
Pawnbroker 14, 102, 158, 175, 184
Phoenix, River 203
Place in the Sun, dir. George Stevens 16
Prince of the City 8, 14, 15, 31, 47, 51, 54, 87, 96, 100, 158, 180, 182
Q and A 47, 99, 182
Richardson, Ralph 65
Robeson, Paul 181
The Rosenbergs 91
“Rubber-ducky” school of drama 37
Running on Empty 14, 37f, 203
Sargent, Herb 11
Schindler’s List 112
Serpico 14, 15, 156, 177, 183
Silence of the Lambs 11, 40, 172
Spielberg, Steven 211
Stage Struck 26
Stevens, George – see Place in the Sun
Stings (short, sharp orchestral outbursts designed to scare audience) 173
Stranger Among Us 104, 106f, 127
Thalberg, Irving 151
That Kind of Woman 66
Theodorakis, Mikis 179
Truffaut, Day for Night 5
12 Angry Men 16, 26, 81, 115, 123f, 161
The Verdict 39, 60, 91, 98, 99, 158, 174
Walton, Tony 94f
Williams, Tennessee 81f
Willis, Gordon 53
The Wiz 14, 101, 141
Young Lions 213
Zabriskie Point 47
Update 2: Of related interest at this site, see my reviews of “The Offence” (directed by Lumet), and Scott Jordan Harris, World Film Locations: New York.
See also the documentary “By Sidney Lumet” (not reviewed here).
© Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 