A New Look At The Life And Work Of Filmmaker Alan J. Pakula

It was a freak accident and one that could not possibly have been foreshadowed. On November 19, 1998, an errant length of metal pipe lying in the middle of the Long Island Expressway near exit 49 was sent airborne by a passing car. The pipe, which was 7 feet long and 4 inches in diameter, turned into a projectile and flew through the windshield of a 1995 Volvo driven by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, striking him in the head and causing him to lose control and crash. He was killed as a result.

At the time, Pakula, who was 70 years old, was driving from the city to his weekend home in East Hampton and in the wake of his death, he left a fabled film career as a director, writer and producer. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “All the President’s Men” and “Sophie’s Choice” were the three films for which Pakula won Oscars. Who knows how many more influential films he might have made in the years that followed had his life not ended on that day?

One person who had hoped to learn the craft from Pakula first-hand is filmmaker Matthew Miele, who, at the time of Pakula’s death, was a recent college graduate.

“I’m 48, and I was coming of age in the early ’90s, in the era of films like ‘Presumed Innocent’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ When I was young, I saw ‘All the President’s Men’ on VHS over and over,” Miele explained in a recent phone interview. “I became a big fan and always meant to seek him out after I graduated from college in ’96.

“I wanted to work for him and try to get my foot in the door,” he added. “Then suddenly, I hear he’s been killed on the Long Island Expressway. It was one of those great losses.”

Though Miele never had the opportunity to meet Pakula in person or work alongside him, as the director of the documentary “Alan Pakula: Going for Truth,” he has come to understand a great deal about the filmmaker’s life and the way in which he approached the art of storytelling for the screen.

On Sunday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m., Sag Harbor Cinema will honor Alan J. Pakula with a special screening of the documentary, followed by a discussion with Miele and the cinema’s artistic director, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. In addition, beginning April 1, the cinema is hosting screenings of three of Pakula’s best known films — “Klute” (1971), “The Parallax View” (1974) and “All the President’s Men” (1976) which, together, are known as the “Paranoia Trilogy” due to their themes of surveillance, conspiracy and governmental secrecy.

When asked what initially inspired him to make a documentary about Pakula, Miele responded, “One of the reasons is that I’m always attracted to people who shun the spotlight and are just in it to make their art. They don’t seek out the benefits of a high-profile career like that. “

“[Pakula’s] interviews were few and far between. He was professorial and always about the work,” said Miele, adding that a recent New York Times opinion piece maintains that the last great year for cinema was 1999. “And Pakula died in ’98.”

Because he had never met Pakula, in setting out to tell the story of his life on film, Miele wanted to ensure that the family was closely involved. He approached Pakula’s widow, Hannah Pakula, both for her blessing and her help with contacts and archival material.

“She was into the idea of the whole thing and she was very into protecting his legacy,” Miele explained. “He had great work for us to mine and no one had done it, but he also inspired so many filmmakers and actors.”

Many of Pakula’s actors agreed to sit down with Miele to be interviewed for the documentary — including Harrison Ford, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Securing those interviews is a task that, on its surface, would seem Herculean, but Miele explains it’s one that came together fairly smoothly.

“No one was too difficult. Alan had such sincere relationships and was a true friend of many of them and Hannah had kept in touch over the years,” said Miele who conducted over 100 interviews for his film. “She had emails and addresses. We made it clear it was an authorized documentary. Sometimes it became a scheduling issue, but no one said ‘no.’”

Miele and his crew began work on the documentary in September 2017, and shortly after the film’s completion in 2019, it screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival and was part of a Pakula Tribute at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles in November 2019.

Then came early 2020 and the world came crashing down with the arrival of COVID-19.

“We wanted to shelve it and wait. Then I saw this opening where we could pop it into art houses now,” said Miele who notes that in addition to screening at Sag Harbor Cinema, the documentary is being shown simultaneously at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan and the Arrow Theatre in Los Angeles.

When asked what he learned about Pakula as a result of making the film, Miele said that the process was a confirmation of much of what he had long suspected to be true.

“I thought, a man like this must be interested in psychology,” Miele explained. “He majored in psychology at Yale, and wrote his thesis on the psychology of drama. When I went to his apartment, there were many shelves of books about psychology.

“He was a bookish, heady guy who was interested in the human condition — which in the film is revealed strongly,” Miele added. “He also got to know actors in an intimate way and directed women in a specific way, long before people were focusing on female actors and giving them a place.”

Decades before the birth of the #MeToo movement, Miele notes that Pakula was a filmmaker who was giving women the opportunity to explore the complexity and depth their stories deserved while treating them with a high level of respect.

“This man was a gentleman to the end — both to men and women,” he said. “He was a producer first and understood that side. As a director, he knew what he had in the film he was making and didn’t have to do any cheap shots or things that appealed to the lowest common denominator.”

As a result, the material Pakula optioned for his films offered structure and stories that went far beyond what Hollywood was typically putting out at the time.

“Since I didn’t know him, I wanted to get him right. His stepchildren and Hannah talked about him and had books and artifacts that helped me learn about him, with notes in the margins, understanding his process,” Miele explained. “Harrison [Ford] tapped into it. The phrase ‘NGE’ — Not Good Enough — was the one Harrison used. He was chasing something — there was always this higher part and you don’t see that much anymore.

“He also took on thick, literary books,” Miele continued. “When you see literature in film, you typically get Jane Austen. But Alan went with material for our time, penetrating culture and political correctness when it wasn’t done.”

And his films were often revelatory in ways that made them relevant years later — particularly those that make up the Paranoia Trilogy — “Klute,” “The Parallax View” and “All The President’s Men.”

“There’s something about those three films. They speak to conspiracy and paranoia, which is heightened now and are prescient in what they portend today,” Miele said. “He understood the themes he was in overarching. He died in his 70s. What would he have done had he lived longer?”

In addition to Miele’s talk on April 3, taking part in a post-screening discussion of “The Parallax View” on Saturday, April 2, at 6 p.m. will be screenwriter and Sag Harbor resident Bill Collage, who feels that the film is one of the most-overlooked thrillers in the last 50 years.

“Beyond being action-packed and full of memorable sequences — and great acting, and great cinematography — it has a gripping sense of tension and dread from the moment it starts until its shocking ending,” Collage noted. “Without giving anything away, the film remains as relevant today as when it debuted in 1974.”

Collage explains that what made Pakula effective as a director was the fact that he let his characters drive his films, allowing audiences to discover the plot through their eyes.

“He invested us in his characters,” Collage said. “From John Klute — or Fonda’s Bree — to Woodward and Bernstein in ‘President’s Men,’ to Harrison Ford in ‘Presumed innocent,’ to Meryl Streep in ‘Sophie’s Choice’ — Pakula carried us through his actors and allowed them to shine as surrogates for our curiosities.

“Sag Harbor Cinema’s idea to revisit Pakula’s most suspenseful and taut thrillers — as well as show a documentary which contextualizes Pakula among one of the most socially and artistically relevant directors of the 1970s and 1980s — proves again that it is one of the more interesting movie houses in our entire country,” he said.

“Alan Pakula: Going For Truth” will be screened at Sag Harbor Cinema on Sunday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m. Following the film, director Matthew Miele will take part in Q&A with the cinema’s artistic director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. Tickets for all screenings are available at sagharborcinema.org.

“Klute” – Friday, April 1, 8:30 p.m.

Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels — a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door — Jane Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. She also won an Oscar for the role. Suffused with paranoia by Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, “Klute” is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970s New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society.

“The Parallax View” – Saturday, April 2, 6 p.m. (with a talk by Bill Collage)

Warren Beatty is a news reporter who, along with seven others, witnesses the assassination of a political candidate. When the other seven die in “accidents,” the newsman begins to doubt the official position: that a lone madman was responsible for the crime. He imagines a sophisticated network of highly trained murderers. But his nightmares pale against the bizarre truth he uncovers.

“All The President’s Men” – Sunday, April 3, 7:30 p.m.

Academy Award winners Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star in this true story as Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whose investigation of a seemingly minor hotel room break-in uncovers the greatest political scandal in U.S. history and leads to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.