10/30/23
Newsletter #499
The Crack of Dawn
This is in response to Bill Maher’s recent comment on his Club Random show. I believe he was speaking with the young, wrongheaded, Candace Owens. Bill, who really is goofy when he’s stoned, tossed out that he had sat all the way through the movie, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), at 174-minutes, as an illustration of his monumental intellectual strength and patience. I’ll just bet he hadn’t sought out the movie, but had to watch it for a class at Cornell.
OK, so this would have been 1975. I was matriculating at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and writing for the school newspaper, a tri-weekly called, The Eastern Echo. I was 16 years old and in my second year of college – two years ahead of myself – and was as overeager to impress everybody as a slobbering puppy. I would take any assignment – and since we actually got paid $20 an article, this was my job – so I reviewed movies, records, concerts, stand-up comics (Dick Gregory played our campus that semester), as well as plays — anything they’d give me. I really annoyed the entertainment editor, Dan O’Malley. He was a completely serious, redheaded, probably 20-year-old, who wore a sport coat and a tie, which was odd even for 1975. He once got mad at me for cluttering his desk with too many articles and reviews, saying tersely, “Do you think this newspaper is just for you? That you get to write everything?” I thought, “Then don’t use them,” but, of course, he ran them all. Just by the way, back then we actually typed on rough, pulp stock paper that came in rolls, like paper towel, and you tore off pages. No shit.
I had befriended the geeky, former EMU student who was now the projectionist for the on-campus, 16mm movies. I’d go over to this fellow’s low-budget house, crammed with 16mm films and movie memorabilia, and he’d run the movies on a screen in his living room for me. This allowed me to see the movies before they were shown, thus being able to review them before their screenings. Nobody had ever gone to the trouble of doing this before that. Luckily, most of the movies that were shown on-campus I’d already seen. All of the early Marx Bros., Sherlock Holmes with Basil Rathbone, Frankenstein, etc. It wasn’t a challenging repertoire, but a perfectly good one, and generally attracted a good crowd.
One day my editor had a challenge for me – Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Jason Robards in the lead (and directing), Michael Moriarity and Zoe Caldwell, would be at the Power Center in Ann Arbor, which is a beautiful venue. The show was only running for one weekend and there was no preview. So, did I want to see it and review it, even though no one reading my review would be able to go see it? The play’s run would be over by the time the article was printed. But since it was a big, professional production – with movie stars, for goodness’ sake – right nearby in Ann Arbor, it would look good, and would help keep EMU on good terms with the Power Center. I asked, “So what’s the challenge?” Dan said, “Jason Robards has demanded that they perform the entire text that runs over four hours. It has two intermissions. It starts at 8:00, But who knows when it ends?” I said, “Of course I’ll see it.” I’d already seen Sidney Lumet’s solid film version with Ralph Richardson and Katherine Hepburn, Jason Robards playing the older brother, and Dean Stockwell (whom I would later meet at a comic con), in the abbreviated, not-quite three-hour, film that Bill Maher found so daunting and impressive.
It was an amazing show. The audience was mesmerized for all four-plus hours. This rendition of the play was far superior to the movie. In my humble opinion, Jason Robards made a better father in the show than he had as the drunk son in the movie. Young Michael Moriarity was much more suited than Robards as the weak drunkard son – Moriarity could play being weak more convincingly; Robards is strong, and therefore more appropriate for the father (as I think about it now, I just bet Robards knew this when he made the movie, then waited thirteen years to play the father). The part of the morphine-addicted mother, who doesn’t appear until halfway through the show, portrayed in the film by the truly awesome Katherine Hepburn, was beautifully handled by Zoe Caldwell.
Because the show was so good, and I was young and full of piss and vinegar, after the show I went to the stage door and hung out. After a few cigarettes I actually caught Jason Robards on his way out. I raved about the play, got him to give me a few quick quotes, and he was gone. I wrote the quotes down as near as I could get them word-for-word. When I wrote the article, I sprinkled them liberally throughout as though Jason Robards and I had spoken at length. “Mr. Robards went on to explain . . .” What can I say? Even Dan O’Malley was impressed that I had waited around to get Robards’ quotes after a four-hour play.
Sitting through the well-shot, condensed-by-an-hour, movie isn’t all that hard.