"Just be, don't act ... I guess I was, sometimes, begging for the audience's empathy, even though I didn't mean to. I had to get away from all those actorly devices, and just be."
-- Hal Holbrook on acting in "That Evening Sun" (2009)
A little over 10 years ago, Hal Holbrook -- who died earlier this week -- called me after midnight.
He immediately apologized, he had been traveling -- and it was only a little after 10 p.m. West Coast time. There was a note from his personal assistant that mentioned I wanted to talk. He had some time if I didn't mind doing it right now.
Sure. I was up anyway -- my wife, Karen, was out of town and I'd been up watching basketball. I poured an inch of bourbon and took the cellphone into my office and set it on speaker. I switched on a microphone to record the conversation and sat back, wondering at how strange life sometimes gets.
I was taping Deep Throat.
A couple of weeks earlier my friend Ray McKinnon had asked if I'd be interested in talking to Holbrook, who was Ray's co-star in "That Evening Sun." (Ray was also one of the producers of that film, based on a William Gay short story.) I told Ray I was, and I suppose he set things in motion, but when a week or so went by and I hadn't heard from Holbrook or his people I figured it was one of those things that wouldn't happen.
And I don't perceive there's much value in talking to Hollywood actors about their latest project anyway. They aren't going to tell you anything they haven't told 100 other writers and radio hosts. Most of them are contractually obligated to promote the movie -- they will be complimentary of their co-workers, hit their marks and repeat their talking points, and they'll probably make you feel good about them while they're doing it. There is a reason they're movie stars -- they are professional empathy enlisters.
That's one reason why -- when I used to regularly go to Los Angeles and New York to watch movies and talk to movie people -- I preferred talking to writers, directors, cinematographers, anybody who worked behind the cameras rather than the big-name actors.
But if Hal Holbrook calls you after midnight, you listen.
I'm not in the habit of saving notes and though I often record conversations I rarely listen back to them (and I never bother transcribing them). Which was good because in this case the recording somehow glitched; I must have accidentally hit the "pause" button a few minutes in.
Looking back over my notes, I see we talked a good bit about his character in the movie, and how he and his wife Dixie Carter (who would die of cancer a few weeks after our conversation; Holbrook said one reason he hadn't called me earlier was because he was dealing with "personal issues") worked together on building the character he played in the film, a fiercely proud Tennessee farmer named Abner Meecham based on Carter's father, who he described as a taciturn, dignified man with a congenital inability to suffer fools.
"Dixie and I worked on the character, on the accent, word by word," he said. "I was worried about his accent being too thick, hard to understand, but we kept pulling it back, doing less and less ...."
Holbrook was born in Cleveland and reared in New England, but he told me he identified as much with Meecham as any character he ever played in the movies.
"Hollywood tends to put you in a box," he said. "They'd dress me up in a suit and have me play a lawyer or a senator and that's what I was. But it wasn't until this movie that I got a chance to play someone more like myself ... I was at my best when I remembered to stop acting."
We also talked about the usual things, how much he liked working with Ray and Walton Goggins, who played his son in "That Evening Sun." We talked about his hopes that the film might manage to break through the noise and hype and connect with audiences.
It didn't, though I imagine it had an impact on those who saw it. It remains one of my favorite films of this century.
We talked about Mark Twain because that is what you did when you talked to Hal Holbrook; he was pleased I was familiar with a piece he'd written for a Library of America anthology of essays about the author.
We talked about Sean Penn, who directed him in his Oscar-nominated role in "Into the Wild" (2007). We talked about Sidney Lumet, who gave him his start in the movies.
At some point long past the 15 minutes or so I'd mentally budgeted for the conversation, it started to flag. I thanked him and told I appreciated him being so generous with his time. I think he would have talked to me for as long as I stayed on the line.
...
A year or two later, I met him when he showed up to a Sunset Strip screening room to watch an early cut of "The Last Ride," a movie produced by Harry Thomason and Little Rock's Tim Jackson about the final car trip taken by country singer Hank Williams. I was surprised to see him; it wasn't until later that I remembered Dixie Carter had starred in "Designing Women," the TV series created by Harry's wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
He remembered me and we chatted briefly. Like a lot of movie people, he was smaller and finer featured than I imagined; elegantly but casually dressed in jeans with cashmere overcoat and scarf.
He was unmistakably Hal Holbrook.
...
This looks like a quiet week at the local movie houses; as I write this, the only theatrical opening on the books is "Little Fish," an intriguing (and well-reviewed) sci-fi romance starring Olivia Cooke, Jack O'Connell, Raúl Castillo and French singer-songwriter Soko.
I'm also interested in how "Rams," an Australian remake of one of my favorite Icelandic films (from 2015), translates the odd darkness of the original to the Outback. It looks, at least from the poster and trailer, to be substantially different in tone from the original, which you could call a black comedy though most people would probably receive it as a tragedy.
The new version of "Rams" is available for rental through the usual digital sources while the original is available to stream (for free) on kanopy.com.
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