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He has not watched “Bonnie and Clyde” in 39 years. This would not seem so odd, except that Robert Benton co-wrote the original screenplay, and the critical success of this groundbreaking film put him on the Hollywood map and resulted in one of the longest and most respected careers in American movies as a director as well as a writer.
It turns out that “Bonnie and Clyde” is not an exception. For Mr. Benton, watching his own work can be painful and he avoids it as much as possible.
“Part of it is when something is done, it’s done, I don’t want to spend my life looking backward,” the Bridgehampton resident said in a recent interview. “It is also that when I have been forced to watch one of my films, most of what I see are the things I could have done better. For me, it’s very important not to get trapped by looking backwards. I close the door and move on.”
The door will creak open a bit this Friday evening at 7 p.m. when “An Evening with Robert Benton” gets underway at the Avram Theater at the Stony Brook Southampton campus. The event is part of the inaugural Southampton Screenwriting Workshop that also includes, on the following evening, a tribute to the late Alan Pakula. Some tickets are still available for both events.
Like his fellow East End residents Mr. Pakula and Sidney Pollack, Mr. Benton was part of a generation of writer-producer-directors who joined a generation of American filmmakers that included Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet to make some of the most influential and honored motion pictures of the 1970s and 1980s. And in the case of Mr. Lumet and Mr. Benton, up to the present day.
Mr. Benton has earned three Academy Awards: one for adapted screenplay for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” one for original screenplay for “Places In the Heart,” and one for directing “Kramer vs. Kramer.”
Two of his “smaller” films open a window to what led Mr. Benton into a film career. “The Late Show” and “Twilight” are almost bookends: The small-budget former film, with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin, was released in 1977 and was only Mr. Benton’s second outing as a director. The latter film starred Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, a very young Reese Witherspoon and Liev Shrieber and came out in 1998. Both heartfelt, these sublime pictures center on a tough-guy detective on the skids who won’t surrender his honor and dignity.
“I did have a strong affinity for stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and a lot of those hardboiled, tough-guy novels,” Mr. Benton recalled. “But because I’m dyslexic, reading was very hard for me as a young person. Also, the locked-room mystery in which you have to figure out a puzzle, I’m very bad at that. I was drawn to the stories that relied on distinctive characters and action. The more visual for me, the better.”
He continued: “Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are characters who are bigger than the stories they are in, yet Hammett and Chandler maintained enough of a narrative drive that I could stay involved even though reading was a slow and deliberate process. And I had a father who, when he came home from work, didn’t ask if I’d done my homework but, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’ I saw ‘The Maltese Falcon’ before I read it, and when I did read it I recognized what a brilliant job John Huston did in adapting to the screen. He kept to the book. What Howard Hawks did with ‘The Big Sleep’ was terrific, and he and Chandler kept to the book.
“Directors, including me, are such liars,” Mr. Benton said, laughing. “I read an interview with Hawks done by Peter Bogdanovich in which he said that the scene with Marlowe going into the bookshop and putting on the glasses and flipping his hat brim up and speaking with a lisp was improvised, that he and Bogart made it up on the set. That’s nonsense, it’s right in the book, Chandler wrote it. Oh well, sometimes we get caught.”
From the perspective of a career that is now in its fifth decade, Mr. Benton can see that he was not alone in being influenced by the “noir” writers of the 1930s and ’40s. “Film learned a lot from those hardboiled writers,” he said. “Then, over time, the next generation of detective story writers learned a lot from those films, and that includes me when I was doing ‘The Late Show’ and 21 years later with ‘Twilight.’ I’ll always enjoy those stories.”
Though captivated by motion pictures, Mr. Benton didn’t necessarily see himself becoming a filmmaker. He grew up in Texas, but he went to New York to attend college, at Columbia University, and he wound up in the magazine business, eventually becoming the art director at Esquire. That job did lead to a sidestep into movies.
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