![\"Oscar-winning](\"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Robert-Benton.jpg\")
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August 2, 1987 |<\/strong> Thomas Wolfe was mistaken: You can go home again. And if you\u2019re Robert Benton, the only triple Oscar winner ever raised in Waxahachie, Texas, you can keep returning. All you have to do is want to make movies in your home state.<\/p>\n Benton, a soft-spoken, silver-haired fellow with a slight lisp and an occasional air of melancholy, has lived in Manhattan for more than 30 of his 54 years. Yet his heart belongs to Texas. And his Places in the Heart<\/em>, a profoundly moving drama starring Sally Field, was set in Waxahachie, where Benton, a Dallas native, spent most of his formative years.<\/p>\n More recently, Benton has written and directed Nadine<\/em>, a spirited comedy-thriller set in 1950s Austin. The city holds fond memories for Benton \u2014 he attended the University of Texas, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art history. Even so, most of the characters in his new movie are culled from memories of people Benton knew in El Paso, where he spent his 1954-56 Army service painting dioramas at Fort Bliss.<\/p>\n Nadine<\/em>, which opens Friday, has the off-hand exuberance of something created in a single, giddy burst of inspiration. It\u2019s a trifle, to be sure, but a trifle brimming with energy and great humor. And its most endearing quality is its seeming casualness. It\u2019s not hard to imagine a wrap party after filming ended, where it suddenly dawned on everyone that all their good times and horseplay actually resulted in something practical: \u201cWell, damn, look at that! We made a movie!\u201d<\/p>\n For Benton, the movie works on many different levels. First off, of course, it\u2019s a trip down memory lane, with a few detours into creative license. But it\u2019s also a movie heavily influenced by Benton\u2019s favorite filmmaker, the late, great Francois Truffaut. In Confidentially Yours<\/em> (1984), Truffaut\u2019s last film, \u201cIt seemed to me that Truffaut had reached a point where he was able to work as though it were handwriting,\u201d Benton told me during a long conversation in his New York office. \u201cThat it was like writing a letter to somebody. It was that personal, that direct. And that intimate.\u201d<\/p>\n On yet another level, though, Nadine<\/em> is a typical Benton effort: It began as one kind of movie, then evolved into something completely different. And the finished product has a major female character influenced by the great love of Benton\u2019s life, artist Sallie Rendigs, his wife since 1964.<\/p>\n In Nadine<\/em>, the title character, vibrantly played by Kim Basinger, is a sassy manicurist who allows herself to be talked into posing for \u201cart photographs\u201d by a sleazy photographer. Shortly after Nadine attempts to gain possession of the saucy pictures, the photographer is murdered. To extricate herself from this tight spot, she must rely on the dubious assistance of her estranged husband, Vern (Jeff Bridges). Love, not unexpectedly, reblooms as the plot thickens.<\/p>\n This is not the movie Benton set out to make. Not by a long shot. \u201cI started out writing a very serious movie about married life,\u201d Benton said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd these characters evolved. First, Nadine. I was sitting there at the typewriter one day, and this thing came into my head. I wrote a little thing about her, so I wouldn\u2019t forget, and then I put it away, and went back to work on the marriage script. And then, a day or so later, Vern showed up.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it got to where I would come in in the morning, and write a couple of pages about them, and then I\u2019d go back to the regular movie. And then they slowly began to take over.\u201d<\/p>\n It remained a screenplay about married life, Benton insisted. All that changed were the characters and the story. \u201cPutting it into the genre of a comedy-thriller, that\u2019s just a McGuffin, that\u2019s just an excuse for it. It\u2019s really a movie about marriage for me.<\/p>\n \u201cI love these two people, and I care enormously for them. And I think there is something true about them. And about their marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n This sort of indirect approach to cherished goals has served Benton well over the years. The son of a Ma Bell employee and a housewife, he spent a great deal of his youth preparing for his adult career. Only he didn\u2019t know what he was doing at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cThree nights a week,\u2019\u2019 Benton recalled, \u2018\u2018my father would say to me after dinner, \u2018Let\u2019s go to the movies.\u2019 Instead of saying, \u2018Finish your homework, and then we\u2019ll go to the movies,\u2019 he\u2019d just say, \u2018Let\u2019s go to the movies.\u2019 And we\u2019d go all the time. And it nearly ruined me in high school. But it was a great thing for later life.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I\u2019d seen Truffaut\u2019s The 400 Blows<\/em> before,\u2019\u2019 Benton recalled, \u2018\u2018and I liked it. But the earth did not move. But when we saw Jules and Jim<\/em>, I was totally transported by it.\u2019\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n After graduating from the University of Texas, Benton moved to New York \u2014 partly, he said, because \u2018\u2018I had been in love with a girl in college, and when I left college, she married someone else. And I was so brokenhearted, I couldn\u2019t stand to live in Texas.\u2019\u2019 But there was more to the move than romantic disillusionment. During the summer between his sophomore and junior years, Benton and a friend had taken a Continental Trailways bus to New York City, and had immediately fallen in love with the place. When the time came to pick a graduate school, he didn\u2019t look much further than Columbia University.<\/p>\n Once he moved to Manhattan, however, neither his money nor his interest in higher education held out very long. After completing his Army service, he fled back to the Big Apple, where he lucked into a job as art director for Esquire magazine. He felt very much at home.<\/p>\n Years later, Benton would recall his attempt to reinvent himself as a New Yorker with a fair degree of embarrassment.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, let me tell you: I came to New York during the J.D. Salinger period. And during the J.D. Salinger period, you went to the Biltmore Hotel, or the Plaza Hotel, and you sat around there. And you saved your money and got a polo coat or went to Brooks Brothers for your clothes. And you tried to act like, \u2018Hey, Texas? Where is that?\u2019 You tried to act, like John O\u2019Hara said, like you had never gone west of the Connecticut River.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Obsessed with maintaining an ersatz-bohemian image, Benton took it upon himself to wear Army shirts to the office, almost a generation before such attire became common for chic civilians. (These days, he appears to favor a more conventional shirt-and-tie look.) And to make sure no one mistook him for anything so d\u00e9class\u00e9 as a Texan, he and roommate Harvey Schmidt (another Dallas native) wrote the aggressively trendy IN and OUT Book<\/em>, a nervy attempt by outsiders to codify in-crowd behavior. (\u2018\u2018To be poor is OUT. To be rich is OUT. To be nouveau riche is best of all.\u2019\u2019) The book, much to Benton\u2019s amusement, continues to be influential \u2014 even today, city magazines and newspaper feature writers borrow the basic premise when strapped for story ideas.<\/p>\n At the time, though, IN and OUT<\/em> was a reliable story concept for an Esquire art director often strapped for cash. (Son of IN and OUT<\/em>. IN and OUT Go West<\/em>.) Although he was a staffer, Benton was able to sell free-lance pieces to the magazine. He specialized in dry-witted, mock urbane essays about Sophisticated Life in the Big City. And then, much to his surprise, he got the idea for a period gangster yarn with a subversively modernist twist.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018All the key incidents in my life,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, only half-jokingly, \u2018\u2018seem to be tied to one form of heartbreak or another. I had been involved with a young woman for several years, and we had just broken up. And I was desolate.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n So when a friend visiting from Chicago suggested an evening of dinner and moviegoing, Benton eagerly agreed, if only to shake himself out of a deep blue funk. Purely by chance, the theater near the restaurant where they ate was playing Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut\u2019s celebrated, seriocomic story of a strong-willed woman and the two men she loves. \u2018\u2018I\u2019d seen Truffaut\u2019s The 400 Blows<\/em> before,\u2019\u2019 Benton recalled, \u2018\u2018and I liked it. But the earth did not move. But when we saw Jules and Jim<\/em>, I was totally transported by it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n He continued to be transported again and again over the next month, as he viewed Jules and Jim<\/em> eight times. \u2018\u2018And, of course, after you see a film eight times, you begin to notice things. That what the camera tells you is exciting as what the dialogue tells you. And you begin to see the director at work.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018Like, with Jules and Jim<\/em>. After a while, I began to see those rhythms, and that way he would move the camera, and that lyricism. And that mixture of humor and heartbreak. It was a movie that had sentiment, but not sentimentality.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n During this same period, Benton made another important discovery: He wasn\u2019t cut out to be a magazine art director, at Esquire or anywhere else. \u2018\u2018I knew that my days there were numbered \u2014 that, ultimately, for any number of very good reasons, I would not be able to remain as art director forever. And I didn\u2019t want to. But I didn\u2019t know what else to do.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Fortunately, Benton found a kindred spirit on staff: David Newman, a nimble-witted Michigan native who shared \u2014 or at least came to share \u2014 what a colleague once described as \u2018\u2018Benton\u2019s bittersweet, crazy-legged point of view.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Benton recalls his father, who slept with a gun under his pillow, once settled an argument with a neighboring farmer by slipping on brass knuckles and starting a fist fight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n During his years at Esquire, Benton said, \u2018\u2018I had evolved from somebody who was an artist, an illustrator in some way. I had come to work more and more in a collaborative way with various editors, until I couldn\u2019t quite tell you what I did. I think the least important part of what I did was the design of the magazine \u2014 because the design of the magazine was good, but it wasn\u2019t that<\/em> good. I think what I did best was work in tandem with other editors, to come up with ideas. David and I would do that a lot. And we were very close friends at the time.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n One thing led to another: They shared a high regard for Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other brash young filmmakers at the vanguard of France\u2019s nouvelle vague<\/em> (new wave) movement. They also shared the sort of determinedly hip, high-stakes recklessness that comes naturally to outsiders desperate to make a mark in the big city.<\/p>\n So when they stumbled across a book that mentioned Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the Depression Era bank robbers Benton heard much about during his Texas youth, it seemed perfectly logical that they would try to write a gangster movie script, \u2018\u2018even though we didn\u2019t know how to write a script,\u2019\u2019 on speculation for Francois Truffaut, a man they had never met.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018Quite frankly,\u2019\u2019 said Benton, \u2018\u2018I had nothing to lose. If I\u2019d had a rich emotional life at that point, if I had still been involved with that girl, I might not have done it. I might have had other things to do.<\/p>\n \u201cBut because my emotional life at that particular time was barren, to say the least, this gave me someplace to put my heart.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Benton and Newman struggled \u2018\u2018two or three nights a week\u2019\u2019 for more months than they would care to remember, grappling with the intricacies of what was for them a new art form. Quite often, their scenario would explode into the sort of sudden, vicious violence Benton remembers as the dark side of his Texas nostalgia. (Benton recalls his father, who slept with a gun under his pillow, once settled an argument with a neighboring farmer by slipping on brass knuckles and starting a fist fight.) At other times, though, their version of the Bonnie and Clyde saga had the easygoing humor of a folk ballad.<\/p>\n At length, Benton and Newman managed to hammer out a rough draft intriguing enough to capture the fancy of Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York. Scott mailed the draft to Truffaut, along with a note suggesting he get it translated for his own perusal. A few weeks later, Truffaut called Scott to announce he would be in New York within a month and wanted to meet the two Esquire-employed scriptwriters during his visit.<\/p>\n Flash-forward one month: Benton and Newman are in Truffaut\u2019s suite at the Regency Hotel. Much to their relief, the French filmmaker is disarmingly charming and encouraging. (At least, that\u2019s how he sounds via the English translation of Helen Scott.) Much to their amazement, Truffaut is eager to offer suggestions.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018There\u2019s one sequence in Bonnie and Clyde,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, more than two decades after the Regency Hotel meeting, \u2018\u2018that Truffaut dictated, verbatim. The sequence starts with Bonnie and Clyde sitting in a car in the rain. And she\u2019s reading the poem that she\u2019s written, \u2018The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.\u2019 You see her first reading it, then you see it being set in the newspaper, then you see (Texas Ranger) Frank Hamer reading it. Then you come back to them, and they\u2019re lying in a field. That was Truffaut\u2019s sequence.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018And he did a lot of other things. He broke the film down into unities, he cleared out a lot of garbage, he taught us structure. \u00a0And he taught us that it wasn\u2019t simply the dialogue, it wasn\u2019t simply the cameras, but it was an organic relationship, of one scene following the other. And expectations: If you raise a question in one scene, you know you\u2019ve got to answer it later.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Truffaut himself could not fulfill Benton\u2019s most optimistic expectations. Already in pre-production for Fahrenheit 451<\/em>, his first (and only) English-language film, he was unable to commit to Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>. \u2018\u2018But he did say he was going to send it to his friend, Jean-Luc Godard.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n By the time Godard, the eternal enfant terrible<\/em> of French cinema, came to the United States to discuss Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>, Benton and Newman had already optioned their script to two independent producers. \u2018\u2018And the producers were trying to do it in a way that I now understand was very intelligent,\u2019\u2019 Benton said. \u2018\u2018But they were dealing with a couple of writers who hopelessly believed that you could take Truffaut or Godard to a Hollywood studio and get financing.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018Well, Godard came over, and said, \u2018I\u2019m supposed to do this picture called Alphaville<\/em>. I\u2019m gonna go back, buy my way out of it, come back here. I\u2019ll be back in three months, we\u2019ll start to cast, we\u2019ll start to shoot. We\u2019ll be finished shooting by January.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018But the producers didn\u2019t have the money ready \u2014 they were trying to put\u00a0together a package. They were trying to get a director, then get a star, then\u00a0go to a studio. But they didn\u2019t want to admit that \u2014 and I can\u2019t blame them.<\/p>\n \u201cSo they said, \u2018Well, you know, this script was written for the summer.\u2019 And Godard stood up and said, \u2018You\u2019re talking meteorology, I\u2019m talking cinema.\u2019 And he walked out.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n And no one else walked in. For the next two or so years, Benton and Newman shopped their script around to just about every studio in Hollywood, but found no takers. During this period, Benton married Sallie Rendig, an artist he met while doing a free-lance story for the New York Herald-Tribune. She provided comfort and encouragement as her new husband faced one rejection after another.<\/p>\n But then, out of the blue, Benton received a phone call. At the other end of the line: Warren Beatty, an impossibly good-looking actor who, at the time, was more popular with gossip columnists than film critics.<\/p>\n Beatty was looking for a serious movie project to produce, so he could \u2018\u2018play with the big boys,\u2019\u2019 Benton said. Francois Truffaut had suggested Beatty read Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I have always thought,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, \u2018\u2018though I have no reason to believe this, that Warren went to see Truffaut in order to try and talk Truffaut into doing another picture. And Truffaut, in order to get Warren off his back, said, \u2018Warren, there\u2019s this script you ought to read\u2026\u2019\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n For whatever reason, Beatty said he wanted to read Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>. Benton said OK, he\u2019d sent Beatty a copy. No, Beatty replied, he wanted to drop by Benton\u2019s apartment. In about 20 minutes.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018Ten minutes later,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, \u2018\u2018there was a knock on the door, and my wife opened it, and there was Warren. And her knees buckled.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Beatty managed to remain much calmer, even after he finished reading Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> and decided it was just what he was looking for. He patiently waited for the original producers to run out their option. Then he snatched up the script as quickly as Clyde Barrow used to rob banks.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I really think Warren has never been given quite enough credit for the success of Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>,\u2019\u2019 Benton said. \u2018\u2018It had been turned down by virtually every major studio in Hollywood. Warren gets it, and says to us, wisely, \u2018Who do you want to direct this?\u2019 And we said, \u2018Truffaut. And if not Truffaut, Godard.\u2019 And he said, \u2018Wait a minute. You\u2019ve written this as a French movie. You need an American director. This script is so heavily influenced by the New Wave that you don\u2019t need to compound it. What you need is an American who will do the best with what you\u2019ve got.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018His logic was inescapable; he was quite right about it. So he got Arthur Penn,\u2019\u2019 who had directed Beatty in Mickey One<\/em> (1965), \u2018\u2018to do it. And that\u2019s the story.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Or, to be more precise, that was the beginning of the story. Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> opened poorly \u2014 Warner Bros. had little faith in the production, and promoted it as an exploitation film \u2014 but critics rallied around it in support. Beatty fought to get the film reissued in classier theaters, and won. Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> wound up being an international box-office smash and earned Academy Award nominations for almost everyone involved. Benton and Newman lost the Best Original Screenplay Award to William Rose (for, of all things, Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner?<\/em>) But they had little time to grieve \u2014 they were too busy working.<\/p>\n They collaborated on the book for a Broadway musical \u2014 It\u2019s a Bird! It\u2019s a Plane! It\u2019s Superman!<\/em> — that opened and closed almost as fast as a speeding bullet. Then they cranked out a sketch about wife-swapping for the long-running Oh, Calcutta!<\/em> (Benton, who claims he has never seen an actual performance of the sexy revue, insists the sketch is not at all autobiographical.) For the screen, they co-wrote the sardonic script for the revisionist Western There Was a Crooked Man<\/em> (1970), in which the well-meaning hero (Henry Fonda) discovers the rewards of outlawry. And they helped Buck Henry and Peter Bogdanovich polish up the script for Bogdanovich\u2019s 1972 nouveau screwball comedy What\u2019s Up, Doc?<\/em><\/p>\n They took lots of meetings, discussing all sorts of off-the-wall projects \u2014 a remake of Mildred Pierce<\/em> for Truffaut, a film of Jules Feiffer\u2019s play Little Murders<\/em> with Godard \u2014 that were never realized. And they cranked out a monthly column called \u2018\u2018Man Talk\u2019\u2019 for Mademoiselle. A typical essay offered women advice about handling would-be Don Juans: \u2018\u2018It\u2019s hard for you to spot this guy in advance, because he doesn\u2019t do his real number on you till the last minute. But at that point, what you must do is very simple.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018You hit him.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n By 1972, Benton felt ready to try his hand at directing. He took control of Bad Company<\/em>, a script he had written with Newman, and made a richly textured, engagingly picaresque Western about two Civil War draft dodgers (Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown) who drift into lives of disorganized crime. The film was highly praised by many major critics. It was studiously ignored by most ticket-buying audiences.<\/p>\n Benton, long on a roll, smashed into a brick wall and was badly shaken. After he and Newman wrote an early draft for Superman: The Movie<\/em>, they amicably broke up their writing partnership to attempt solo projects. Newman, writing in tandem with his wife, went on to bigger if not necessarily better things (Superman II<\/em>, Jinxed!<\/em> and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle<\/em>). Benton spilled into another deep blue funk.<\/p>\n Years later, Benton would describe his post-Bad Company<\/em> condition like this: \u2018\u2018I was 40 years old and I had one son, one wife and one picture that was a big flop. \u00a0At that point, I could not get arrested. I even tried to get people to hire me to do commercials.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n But some good came of Bad Company<\/em>: Superstar agent Sam Cohn genuinely liked the quirky little film, and agreed to take Benton as a client. He introduced Benton to maverick moviemaker Robert Altman, who agreed to produce Benton\u2019s first solo effort as writer-director: The Late Show<\/em>, an eccentric comedy-mystery that teamed Art Carney as a semi-retired private eye with Lily Tomlin as a trendy ex-flower child. The project meant a lot to Benton, who says he put \u2018\u2018a lot of my father\u2019\u2019 into Carney\u2019s character. And it certainly helped his career: The Late Show<\/em>, though by no means a hit, at least broke even.<\/p>\n Better still, it received even better notices than Bad Company<\/em>.<\/p>\n Benton was at work on his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller tentatively titled Stab<\/em>, when producer Stanley Jaffe approached him to write the script for a novel he had optioned. The book was called Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I said I\u2019d write it,\u2019\u2019 Benton told me, \u2018\u2018if Truffaut could direct it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Years after Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>, he still wanted to make a movie with the filmmaker he regarded as a mentor \u2014 and a friend. But their proposed Mildred Pierce<\/em> remake was aborted in the early discussion stages. Years later, they considered making a film about the last days of Howard Hughes, with Henry Fonda in the lead role. But then Melvin and Howard<\/em> opened, and they decided their project might appear too similar.<\/p>\n Still, Benton wasn\u2019t discouraged. \u2018\u2018I always thought I could learn so much from Truffaut,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, \u2018\u2018since I spent so much time taking stuff from him, just from watching his movies. I thought if I could write with him, I could learn a lot more.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Jaffe was agreeable to hiring Truffaut, so Benton set Stab<\/em> aside. He completed a first draft of Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em>, only to find Truffaut was committed to another project. It would be two years before he could direct the film, and Jaffe didn\u2019t want to wait that long. Disappointed, Benton returned to Stab<\/em>. He finished the script, and turned it over to Sam Cohn for comments. Cohn commented: \u2018\u2018This is terrible. You really shouldn\u2019t do this picture.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018None of us as writers, journalists, screenwriters or whatever, expect ourselves to proceed with a sort of machine-like progress, in an evenly paced, steady movement forward. Sometimes, those lapses, those failed pictures, are necessary to get us to some other place.\u2019\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Stunned, and a little embarrassed, Benton asked Cohn, \u2018\u2018Well, what should I do?\u2019\u2019 Well, Cohn replied, Jaffe still needed a director for Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em>.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s how Robert Benton backed into winning his first two Academy Awards, for writing and directing the Best Picture of 1979. Dustin Hoffman also won an Oscar for his moving performance as Ted Kramer, the self-absorbed advertising whiz who comes to appreciate the joys of fatherhood. And yet another Oscar went to Meryl Streep, who won the Best Supporting Actress award as Joanna Kramer, the ex-wife who battles Ted for custody of their young son.<\/p>\n Even so, there was a small but insistently buzzing fly in the ointment: A few journalists, including industry reporter Rona Barrett, accused Benton of rampant sexism for supposedly suggesting that fathers are better parents than mothers. Benton, who at one point during his bachelorhood dated feminist Gloria Steinem, was stung by the criticism. That Joanna Kramer was a character largely based on Sallie, his wife, only intensified Benton\u2019s discomfort.<\/p>\n Benton based the break-up scene at the start of Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em> on acrimonious conversations during a rough patch in his marriage. There was a time, he admits, when Sallie felt he wasn\u2019t taking her seriously as an artist.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018Joanna\u2019s leaving scene is based on a time when Sallie and I had a terrible argument,\u2019\u2019 Benton admitted. \u2018\u2018And I was afraid that she was gonna leave. And I knew, if I could keep her talking, she would stay. The secret of Joanna\u2019s leaving is, Ted couldn\u2019t<\/em> keep her talking. So what I did is, I took that element out of my own life, and used it in another way. What I hope is, essentially, a compassionate and sympathetic vision of Joanna is part of Sallie.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to talk about this,\u2019\u2019 Benton added, \u2018\u2018because somehow I end up being in all of everything I\u2019ve ever done. I\u2019ve stolen bits and pieces from the lives and characters of the people around me. And I have twisted them in one way or another. I have oftentimes, I\u2019m afraid, taken the truth and turned it into a lie that would serve the narrative that I need. Or shifted it. Or betrayed it. The people I love are very wary of me now, because I\u2019m liable to use any moment with them.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Yet it was the conspicuous absence of precisely this kind of emotionally resonant truth that undid Still of the Night<\/em>, the cold-blooded Hitchcock homage that Benton directed as his next project. Adapted from the early drafts of Stab<\/em> \u2014 the script Sam Cohn warned him not to film \u2014 Still of the Night<\/em> featured Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep in a self-conscious thriller that freely borrowed images and plot devices from the Hitchcock oeuvre. It is, quite simply, the worst film Robert Benton has ever directed, a fact even Benton is willing to concede. \u2018\u2018When I tried to do Hitchcock,\u2019\u2019 he said, \u2018\u2018I became a slavish imitator of Hitchcock.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Still, Benton defends Still of the Night<\/em>, with a fair degree of persuasiveness, as part of a necessary learning process. \u2018\u2018None of us as writers, journalists, screenwriters or whatever, expect ourselves to proceed with a sort of machine-like progress, in an evenly paced, steady movement forward. Sometimes, those lapses, those failed pictures, are necessary to get us to some other place.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n In Benton\u2019s case, the failure got him to Places in the Heart<\/em>. If only for that reason, it\u2019s tempting to view Still of the Night<\/em> as a kind of purging, as a way for Benton to shed the phony veneer of super-cool pseudo-sophistication. Certainly, Places in the Heart<\/em> signaled a move in another direction, a direction pointing the way back home.<\/p>\n Ironically, it was during a 1975 conversation with Arthur Penn \u2014 director of Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>, which was shot largely in and around Dallas \u2014 that Benton was first moved to make a sentimental journey back to Texas.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I told him about some stories about my great-grandmother,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, \u2018\u2018and he said, \u2018Gee, why don\u2019t you make a movie out of that?\u2019 So I thought about it, and started doing some research \u2014 particularly about the people in the family who were bootleggers.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Benton wrote a bit, then put the uncompleted script aside to do The Late Show<\/em>. He didn\u2019t pick it up again until after Still of the Night<\/em> was in the can.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018And what started out as a picture about bootlegging and violence in Texas \u2014 I inserted into it this story about my great-grandmother, so the picture wouldn\u2019t be quite so violent. And she sort of muscled everybody else out of the way.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Benton wrote the character of Emma Spaulding, a Depression era widow determined to hold onto her farm and her family, with Sally Field specifically in mind. Field complemented Benton\u2019s lovingly felt, richly detailed script with a performance of tremendous passion and conviction. It was only fitting, then, that each won an Oscar \u2014 he for Best Original Screenplay, she as Best Actress \u2014 for Places in the Heart<\/em>. As Benton sees it, neither the role nor the film would have worked without her.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018This is a picture,\u2019\u2019 Benton said, \u2018\u2018about another time, another economic world. And for people in California and New York, another geography. And I felt that, even among the other fine actors in this country, many of them would have a tendency to act the part, to comment on the part, to sort of stand a little bit outside that person. I wanted an actor who would do what very few actors can do \u2014 disappear into the movie, disappear into the part. Sally can do that.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n It\u2019s true: You can\u2019t see any traces of an actress when you study the unaffected sincerity of Fields\u2019 performance. But, then again, neither can you find any traces of the studied irony Benton brought to much of his early magazine and movie work. More than a decade ago, critic Richard Corliss described Benton and Newman as \u2018\u2018two street-smart Manhattanites trying to immerse themselves in rural, past-tense arcana,\u2019\u2019 entertaining audiences best \u2018\u2018when they pull the charade off.\u2019\u2019 But it\u2019s not a charade anymore for Benton.<\/p>\n Neither Places in the Heart<\/em>, a generous-spirited memory play, nor Nadine<\/em>, a rollicking good-time romp, can be viewed as anything but an expression of affection for a place that once was home.<\/p>\n Later in his life, after some of his early rebelliousness had cooled, Truffaut used to joke that \u2018\u2018I\u2019ve now come to make movies that I would have attacked as a young man.\u2019\u2019 Benton knows just how Truffaut must have felt.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018I\u2019m making the exact opposite kind of movies,\u2019\u2019 Benton told me, \u2018\u2018that I would have made when I first came to New York.\u2019\u2019 In large part, Benton\u2019s moved by an emotion as homespun simple, and emotionally complex, as homesickness. His mother passed away a few years ago \u2014 his father died in 1969 \u2014 so, even though he still has friends and relatives in Waxahachie, there\u2019s no truly compelling reason for him to visit Texas \u2018\u2018unless I make movies there.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n But even if he specialized in, say, gritty urban street dramas about New York, Benton is certain he would find other excuses to go back home. In fact, now that their son is off at college, Benton and his wife are toying with the notion of renting a house somewhere in Texas for a few months, a place where she can paint and he can write.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018My father grew up in East Texas,\u2019\u2019 Benton said. \u2018\u2018And as he got older, he began this thing of needing to go back to East Texas. I don\u2019t know what it is. But something happens to you at some point in your life, and I don\u2019t know what causes it. But there is this bizarre, animal need to go home. And you can stand on a street corner and ask yourself, \u2018Why am I here? What am I doing?\u2019 You know you\u2019re not having a great, moving experience.<\/p>\n \u2018\u2018But you do need to be here.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" August 2, 1987 | Thomas Wolfe was mistaken: You can go home again. And if you\u2019re Robert Benton, the only triple Oscar winner ever raised in Waxahachie, Texas, you can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[333,329,331,330,189,332],"class_list":["post-9576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-interviews","tag-bad-company","tag-bonnie-and-clyde","tag-kramer-vs-kramer","tag-places-in-the-heart","tag-robert-benton","tag-warren-beatty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9576"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9586,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576\/revisions\/9586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}