June
4 Sydney Pollack By Bill Horberg

He taught us how to look. His work as an artist was Always about trying to find the spine, or the skeleton, or the armature as he liked to call it, the metal framework over which a sculpture is molded, so the predominant image one conjures up when you think of Sydney is of someone Peering Deeply, penetrating through the layers, hi-beams slicing the fog, and he was just so damn smart. Sometimes too smart for his own good, as he often described himself as someone who saw so clearly both sides of any argument, who had this Garry Kasparov-like ability to see so many moves ahead on the chess board, that it could be paralyzing, and it was famously difficult to get him to commit to things, especially to the thing he was most famous for - making movies.

It was a revelation to me when I went to work for him that he actually didn't like directing movies. He was the opposite of a shooter, a person who lives to get on the floor and roll film through the camera. Often to the chagrin of his agents, or the writers and producers or actors longing to be directed by him, he would go to great lengths to avoid making a film. He used to laugh and rattle off the list of the movies that he was offered and turned down, or developed and walked away from, or handed over to someone else. Now I find it hard to think of his amazing body of work without also including this imaginary filmography of the movies he woulda, coulda, shoulda directed - famously Rain Man which he walked away from just before principal photography only to watch it go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, but Sydney's versions of Dirty Harry or Julia or Sense and Sensibility or Mission Impossible or Cold Mountain might have been pretty fun movies to watch too. He was not a cinephile. It might be amusing to those who know him from his commentaries on classic movies on AMC, to have seen him scrambling when they first invited him on to the series, calling friends and associates for lists of old movies he hadn’t seen and renting scads of dvd’s to fill the holes in his cinematic education. He was always much more interested in Life than in cinema, and the process of making movies for him was usually to work out an idea or an argument he was preoccupied with, to go on an adventure posing a question that he did not have the answer to. His movies were never about other movies.

I remember sitting in his office one day when Tom Cruise walked in with two large manila envelopes. It was like a tv game show, as he slid them across the desk to Sydney and with his thousand kilowatt grin, offered him a stark choice between two would-be film projects he was considering directing. As Sydney opened the first envelope to find a photo of a small Piper Cub airplane inside, Tom thinly and flatly said "Possession", and then as Pollack unwrapped a glossy brochure of a Citation X, the world's fastest small business jet, Tom coo-ed "Mission Impossible". It was a brilliant act of salesmanship, but it also spoke to the open secret of the lengths one had to go to get Sydney behind the camera.

And more deeply it spoke to Sydney's love for flying. He was his own pilot and I'm sure he spent many more hours over the course of his life with co-pilot Ed in the cockpit of his airplane than he ever did on the floor of a film set. But he talked about both things in the same way - he loved the journey, he loved any endeavor that challenged him to have to work the left brain and the right brain simultaneously, he loved the mystery of not knowing things, and of discovering them along the way. I was with Sydney a few days after that terrible day in 1993 when he got the news that his son Stephen had died in an airplane crash. The single hardest thing any of us can contemplate in life is as a parent to outlive our children. It was a very hard thing to witness. Sydney was the strongest man I had ever met, and he faced this horrible news with unbelievable courage, but he aged overnight and he always carried that pain with him from that day on. I often thought that God could not have devised a more cruel irony than to have the instrument of this terrible loss come in the form of one of the things that Sydney loved the most - flying. But now the pain is gone, and they are together, and they are flying together, soaring I'm sure.

Before anything else, Sydney was an actor. He came to New York in the '50's to study acting with Sanford Meisner at his Neighborhood Playhouse, and soon and precociously he was teaching acting himself, and over the course of his career he taught us All about acting. I remember when Woody Allen sent him the script of Husbands and Wives. At that time, Sydney hadn't had a major role in a movie since his pitch-perfect performance as Dustin Hoffman's agent in his own "Tootsie", over fifteen years earlier, and he was nervous as hell. He studied that role like a young acting student, memorizing his lengthy speeches and other characters lines as well, constantly reading the scenes out loud in the office, and he flew to New York feeling scared but prepared. He liked to tell the story of walking in to the dark theatre where Woody and Juliet Taylor conduct their auditions, and of Woody in the shadows in the back not introducing himself or welcoming him, and of walking on stage to launch into his first long soliloquy only to be interrupted after the first couple of lines by Woody shouting "Okay, that's great, thanks very much." He was surprised, and I think a little bit insulted, and asked Woody to let him carry on, as he had devoted so much time to his preparation. But Woody called back to him, "No Sydney, you've got the job. I just wanted to be sure you weren't going to do any of that acting shit." It was a perfect expression of Sydney's own view of truth in performance. I remember him talking about how they used to teach by letting their students watch the old Candid Camera tv show, where real people were unwittingly placed in staged fictional situations and you'd see how they would react, which was always truthfully, and then flipping the channel to any film or tv show, to see if they could discern the same degree of honesty from actors reading scripted lines. They rarely could, which was the point of Pollack's lesson. The highest praise I ever heard from Sydney about an actor's work (and this was a guy for whom the glass was ALWAYS half-empty) was after he attended a screening one night of The Remains of The Day. He really marveled at Anthony Hopkins performance in that film. "Not one false note" I heard him say. Hopkins, wherever you are, you'll never get a more meaningful review than that.

Sydney was characteristically clear-eyed about the kind of actor he was himself. He loved to show off a telegram from a famous New York casting agent of the fifties who had come to a play to assess his work. “Character actor. Solid performance. Abraham Lincoln looks” the wit drolly wrote of him. It was Burt Lancaster who convinced Sydney to be a director. Sydney was his acting coach, and Burt took to him, and in one of my favorite episodes and anecdotes from his colorful life, Sydney used to tell us about how Burt took him with him to Italy when he was filming The Leopard with Visconti, how he lived on the Via Veneto at the height of the La Dolce Vita period, this kid from South Bend Indiana hanging out with Claudia Cardinale and Alan Delon and other European luminaries. Sydney later directed Burt in two of his least seen performances, odd interesting films that have been overlooked historically, The Scalphunters, and Castle Keep, which was produced by John Calley, another lifelong friend of Sydney’s. Sydney loved to talk about Burt – you could tell that if he had a hero, it was Lancaster and all he represented as an actor and a man. One time they were all dining in the Yugoslavia location of Castle Keep and a gorgeous local woman came into the restaurant where Burt was sitting at the head of the table. In her high heels and low cut dress she walked over to Lancaster, and proceeded to hold up a bottle of wine and break it over his skull, screaming at him in her Slavic tongue. Blood and wine pouring down his head, Lancaster reeled momentarily, and then grinned. “That’s my girl” he said, and put his arms around her pulling her into a kiss. There is a great picture of Sydney on location astride a white stallion at the head of a parade of soldiers from that period, and he did have real affection for Hemingway, and Ferrari, cigars and fast cars, and motorcycles and the machismo of that era.

I met Sydney when I was a young studio executive at Paramount, and he was doing one of his familiar tap dances, trying to get out of directing the movie "Scrooged" with Bill Murray, which his agent Mike Ovitz, and my boss Ned Tanen, badly wanted him to direct. At Paramount I worked with Sydney as a producer on two films, Kenneth Branagh's "Dead Again", and the ill-fated "Crazy People" which started life as a movie written and directed by Mitch Markowitz and starring John Malkovich, and ended life as a movie directed by Tony Bill and starring Dudley Moore. Go figure. But often you get to know people and see real character in the worst of circumstances much better than you do when everything is going swimmingly, and watching Sydney work and handle both films, I knew that I was getting a first hand education from a master, and it was inevitable that I found myself following my good friend and colleague Lindsay Doran when she left Paramount herself to go and run Mirage Enterprises, Sydney's production company that he had started a few years earlier as a vehicle for making his films, and for helping other filmmakers navigate the Byzantine waters of the studio system and make their own movies.

I got to spend twelve years at Mirage with Sydney and it was a master class every day. Many directors get into producing films during their career, often to the chagrin of their agents and accountants, who would prefer to see them making their own films, almost always a more profitable use of their time and energy. More often than not, when directors have their own company, they are seen as vanity deals, and after a few years or a few films, the Sisyphys-ean task of producing sends them scurrying back to looking out for themselves first and foremost. Sydney was one of the few directors who stayed in the game as a producer for his whole career, and helped so many films and filmmakers, in both a credited and un-credited role, in their work. He particularly liked to help first-time directors, writers whose work he greatly admired like Steve Kloves or Steve Zaillian or Peter Howitt or Tony Gilroy, make the transition to directing. Or foreign or independent directors making their first American or studio financed film, as was the case with Kenneth Branagh and Ang Lee and Jez Butterworth and Tom Tykwer among many others. He saw his role as providing a resource for these filmmakers, who could avail themselves of his unmatched experience as a lifelong denizen of the Hollywood system, and of his wisdom and taste and creative instincts in all parts of the process. He was the smartest person I've ever been around in regards to script and story and casting and performance and editing. He'd often joke about how he found it so easy to see the problems and solutions in others work and to help them bring out the best version of their intended vision, and how difficult he found it to do the same for himself.

Nowhere was his unique ability to get creatively involved in other filmmakers work in a way that was respectful and non-threatening more evident than in the working relationship he formed later in his career with Anthony Minghella. It was truly an Odd Couple, as Minghella was an academic, who one could say was ambitious to produce Art with a capital “A”, and for all of his success with the Academy, always saw himself as an outsider in Hollywood. While Pollack was in many ways the ultimate insider, who disdained pretension of any kind and had a great respect for the business and the commercial demands of mainstream American filmmaking. But as someone once said of Sydney “The amazing thing about Pollack is that whatever you say about him, the opposite is also true.” He wanted to be a studio mogul, and he wanted to have a little boutique production company. He wanted to make huge commercial hits, and he wanted to be acknowledged and appreciated as an artist. So it wasn’t a complete surprise to me that these two men gravitated towards each other, each wanting something of what they thought the other had.

Sydney was so enormously self-deprecating. Another of his favorite quotes was from another of his favorite directors. When asked how much of what he set out to do on any given project ended up on screen, the Polish director Krystof Kieslowski estimated "about 30 percent." Sydney loved that notion, but probably never gave himself that high a mark. And when Federico Fellini died, I remember Sydney clipping his obituary out of the paper. It hung pinned on the cork board in his office for years so he could always look at the quote from the old master. When asked how he found the inspiration to make wildly ambitious personal movies like 8 ½ and Amarcord, Fellini quipped "I took the check. I cashed the check. I spent the money. I couldn't give it back. I had to make the movie." Pollack was the ultimate craftsman, and he admired greatly, and tried to himself embody this ethos, this lack of pretension.

Two of my favorite Sydney Pollack stories involve Billy Wilder. The first comes from the night that Sydney won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director for "Out of Africa", a film that Wilder once told him was "classy, but boring", while praising his "The Way We Were", "now that was a masterpiece." So ironically, it was Wilder, along with fellow legends Akira Kurosawa and John Huston, who were tapped by the Academy to present the statue for Best Director that year. Sydney was up against Spielberg and The Color Purple and he did not expect to win. I can't do justice to the way Sydney used to tell the tale (what a great raconteur he was) but first octogenarian Wilder came to the podium, then Kurosawa wearing a great big pair of wrap around sunglasses, and finally Huston, wheezing and wheeling the oxygen tank which was by then his necessary companion, and he felt he was watching three angels of death coming to deliver his sentence. Kurosawa was given the task of opening the envelope and reading the name of the winner, but as he patted first his breast pocket, then his back pocket, then his trousers, with the audience waiting in suspense and the tv directors frantically signaling him to hurry up, something was clearly wrong - he had misplaced the envelope. Wilder and Huston were growing agitated with him, when he finally managed to locate it and clumsily tear it open. "Ah, Misser Slidney Parrack" he said in his thick accent, so thick that Sydney did not understand that he had won and his name had been called until elbowed in the ribs to go and take the stage. Leaping up in a daze, he couldn't remember much about his speech or the next few minutes except for one classic line he heard Wilder say to Kurosawa about his poor performance as they were all four walking off to the backstage. "Goddamn Jap", he said, "Pearl Harbor you could find."

The other story was about the day that Sydney, having had the audacity to remake his own version of Wilder's "Sabrina" had to face the music and accompany Billy to a private pre-release screening of the movie on the lot at Paramount. Unfortunately, I only got to personally witness the before and after of this Clash of the Titans - I would have given anything to have been a fly on the wall that day, and given even more had I had the foresight to ever get Pollack to set down or record the blow by blow of his experience. You have to understand, Sydney may have been self-deprecating, but he also had an enormous ego, and was often an intimidating figure of such strength and certainty that it was hard to challenge him, let alone win many arguments. So I must admit it was with some pleasure, although not without affection, that I watched him reduced to the wildly uncharacteristic role of young student, waiting in a flop sweat to get his test results back from the mean teacher. Sydney himself used to glumly refer to the predicament he faced remaking a classic, which when he'd tell his friends about what he was doing, he found it easily reduced to the quality of a Polish joke. "I hear you're remaking Sabrina." "Yeah." "With who?" "Harrison Ford." As in, that's nice that you're making a movie with Harrison Ford, but who in the hell are you going to get to fill the shoes of Audrey Hepburn?

He'd arranged to pick Billy up at his office in Beverly Hills and chauffeur him to the lot for the screening. Suddenly Pollack was a character in a Billy Wilder movie himself, and like Joe Gillis, he found himself driving the director of Sunset Boulevard through the old Bronson Gate for the screening. The lights went down, the movie started, and Wilder, through his coke-bottle thick glasses and in his high-pitched Austrian accent, suddenly shouted out "Who the hell shot this thing?". "The great Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rottuno", Sydney answered defensively. "Oh yeah," Wilder said, "well you tell him from me - Troppo Obscuro - it's too damn dark." Pollack slunk down in his overstuffed chair. There was no escape. "Who's that guy?" Wilder screamed. "That's Greg Kinnear, Billy." Sydney knew what was coming. "Hmm. Well, I had Bill Holden, you know. Now that was an actor." Wilder proceeded to kibbitz through the film, telling stories about Ernst Lubitsch and Paramount and the old days when he was on the lot and the Hungarian restaurant they used to eat lunch in next door and the whorehouse upstairs. The film finally ended, and Wilder turned to Pollack. "Well, kid, it wasn't bad. Not a bad picture. I hope you do some business with it." It must have been the last time in his life that anyone called Sydney Pollack "kid."

In the last year of his life, his closest collaborator and now dearly departed friend Anthony Minghella told me of going to visit Sydney and coming away shaken. "Ever since I met him, my mental image of Sydney is of a man who was so convex," he said in his lilting Isle of Wight voice. "Complex?" I asked. "No, convex. His shape, so straight and fit, in his pressed jeans and cowboy boots, with his chest proudly jutting out. And now he is concave, as he has been so ravaged by this illness, and lost so much weight. But it is the loss of that shape that haunts me." I never got to see Sydney before he passed away. I spoke to him last summer, when he so matter-of-factly told me about his cancer, and stoically announced that he didn't have that much time, but said he'd been a lucky man and had done a lot with the time he had in his life. He had no regrets. It was too shocking at the time to take in. I wrote him letters over the last year, and I spoke to him on the phone a few times, most recently a few weeks ago. His voice was weak but his mind was sharp. We’ve had so much time to anticipate losing Sydney, but now that he is gone, it doesn’t matter, it is equally hard to understand that he is not here, that that voice, however soft, won’t speak to me again.

Now we feel Concave, as there is such a big hole in the world. We’ve never needed more the leadership and inspiration and intelligence and humanity and compassion and passion of artists like Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and we’ve lost both of them in one short season.

They made Mirage a brand name, a name that stood for an idea that seems sorely tested in today’s bleak film landscape, the idea that quality and commercial do not have to be contradictions in term. That craft and good writing and good storytelling, movies that are about human beings and not cartoons, movies that are entertainments but also strive to hold a mirror up to our world and ourselves and reflect political or social ideas, are virtues that actually have a value and a place in the market. Its an idea that feels like a birthday candle in a cave at times, but one that everyone who’s lives and careers were touched by these men invariably carry forward with them.

But as a teacher, Sydney’s life and work and his family and his children, his legacy, will continue to teach us, and so it is with gratitude and love that I remember him today for who he was to me:

Father, friend, filmmaker, businessman, icon, pilot, boss, critic, guide, mentor, cook, wine connosieur, passionate reader and viewer and debater, a man of curiosity, larger-than-life, a man who saw life in all of its vast complexity, and had the gift to show it to us in all of its simplicity.

Goodbye, Sydney. Thank you and I’ll miss you.

Sydney Pollack
1934 - 2008