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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.
“Again, it goes back to being dyslexic,” he explained. “What led me into being a graphic artist was that it was very difficult for me to understand things and in turn communicate things through reading, but I discovered I could do it through drawing. I could better keep my concentration. I drew a lot, and got better at it. And I found it easier for me to follow visual narrative in a movie than the narrative on a page. It occurred to me that if I were going to write at all, I should try it for the screen.”
His first screenplay to be produced does not occupy a significant spot on his resume: “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman,” in 1966. But then the following year he collaborated with David Newman on “Bonnie and Clyde,” which also gave huge boosts to the careers of actors Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Faye Dunaway, director Arthur Penn, and actor and producer Warren Beatty.
For his part, Mr. Benton stated that Mr. Beatty “as an actor, producer, and a director is one of the major influences in late 20th-century American film.”
Mr. Benton wrote “There Was a Crooked Man” with Mr. Newman for the director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and then the comedy, “What’s Up, Doc?” for Mr. Bogdanovich, and then his opportunity to direct arrived in 1972. He and Mr. Newman wrote, and Mr. Benton directed “Bad Company.” This underrated film stars a 20-something Jeff Bridges as a robber in the Civil War West. It did not do boffo box office, so it was five years before Mr. Benton could make “The Late Show,” during which time he and Mr. Newman wrote the script for the first “Superman” movie.
Then along came “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which originated as a novel by Avery Corman. “I did not know Avery then,” Mr. Benton recalled about the writer, who lived in Water Mill. “It happened that someone gave me the book. I read it and liked it but didn’t think that I was right to direct it, and it went to the producer Stanley Jaffe. Originally, I was going to only do the screenplay and Francois Truffaut was going to direct it. A while later I gave my agent my new screenplay and he thought it was terrible. I figured I better get a job right away. At around the same time Truffaut realized it would be two years before he could direct the screen version and Stanley wanted to do it now. I signed on to direct as well as write the script.”
“Kramer vs. Kramer” was an enormous hit. It received the Oscar for Best Picture and Dustin Hoffman won for Best Actor while Meryl Streep won for Best Supporting Actress. Coincidentally, Sally Field won Best Actress for “Norma Rae,” and would win her second for Mr. Benton’s “Places In the Heart.” Mr. Benton gave Ms. Streep a starring role in his next movie, the thriller “Still of the Night,” with Roy Scheider.
According to Mr. Benton, it is happenstance that over the years he has worked with actors and writers with connections to the East End such as Mr. Scheider, Mr. Corman, Danny Glover, E.L. Doctorow, and Kim Basinger.
“With Roy, while I was writing the ‘Kramer’ script, I got to know him in New York, and we invited him out for a weekend that summer,” recalled Mr. Benton. “He and his wife came out. This was soon after ‘Jaws’ came out, and as we’re walking on the beach people in the water are running out because there’s Chief Brody scanning the waves. Roy fell in love with the area then, and as we know he moved here.”
“Places In the Heart” combined Ms. Field with a strong supporting cast that included Mr. Glover, John Malkovich, Lindsay Crouse, and Ed Harris. It as based on Mr. Benton’s childhood years in Waxahachie, and it was also a major hit, with Mr. Benton receiving a Best Director nomination. After making “Nadine” with Bridges and Basinger and re-teaming with Hoffman on “Billy Bathgate” (which also starred Bruce Willis and Nicole Kidman), he took on the novel “Nobody’s Fool,” which resulted in two especially meaningful collaborations—with the actor Paul Newman and the book’s author, Richard Russo.
“I was lucky that over the years the dyslexia subsided and I learned strategies to deal with it,” Mr. Benton said about tackling literary fiction. “Still, what works for me is that there are some writers like E.L. Doctorow and Richard Russo who are cinematic. In Richard’s case, I not only adapted his novel, but we have written a couple of original screenplays together.”
Their next script was “Twilight,” a gem of a movie that is a whodunit down to the final scenes and features a 70-something Mr. Newman in almost every shot, sharing those shots with Ms. Sarandon, Mr. Hackman, and Mr. Garner, as well as a saucy Ms. Witherspoon.
“That’s as good a group of actors as I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Benton said. “On top of that, Paul is one of the best actors and human beings I’ve ever worked with. It was a spectacular experience to make that movie.”
Clearly, he doesn’t fit into the category of Alfred Hitchcock, who tended to view actors as necessary evils. Quite the opposite: Mr. Benton likes and appreciates actors.
“I’m certainly not anti-Hitchcock, but I think the biggest influence on me in working with actors was Robert Altman, who produced ‘The Late Show,’” Mr. Benton said. “He said to me on that picture, ‘Listen, Bob, you must pay attention to the actors. We stand behind the camera and make up these stories. They’re the ones out in front of the camera who are totally exposed to the audience, and they are largely responsible for making it work. We have to trust them.’ I learned from that experience to listen to them, and began to work more collaboratively than I ever had before. And let’s face it, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some great actors.”
Of late, it’s been more literary fiction for Mr. Benton. He did the film version of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” with Ms. Kidman and Anthony Hopkins in 2003, and last year’s “Feast of Love” was based on the novel by Charles Baxter and featured Greg Kinnear and Morgan Freeman. He is continuing in this direction.
“I’ve done an adaptation of ‘Appointment in Samarra’ that I would really love to produce,” Mr. Benton said. “There are several John O’Hara novels that I like very much. Richard Russo and I are talking about adapting a collection of John Cheever stories to turn into a movie. I’ve learned over the years that there are books that I love but I wouldn’t do justice by them. I have a certain circumscribed voice and brain, and there are books that are out of my range and I should stay away from them.
“I look for a book that I not only love but have a true connection with and contains characters who I want to spend the next two years with. Then I enjoy being back with the actors.”
on Jul 28, 2008