Leonard Michaels had a few insights into movies. Then again, he had a few insights into quite a few subjects. In a new, posthumous collection, The Essays of Leonard Michaels (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the novelist and story writer reflects in elegantly spare but evocative prose on growing up Jewish in Brooklyn during World War II, the anxiety of failure in American literature, the clashing sensibilities of poetry and philosophy, even an exegesis of the Book of Jonah.
He wrote well and insightfully on any subject to which he turned his thoughts. And movies were something he thought about, both as a moviegoer and during his once only stint in the Hollywood industry. In the ‘80s his novel The Men’s Club was optioned for a movie. After the first draft of a screenplay was rejected, Michaels asked if he could try his hand at transforming his novel into a film.
Michaels recounts his brief career as a screenwriter in “Kishkas,” an essay both humorous and rueful. Working in tandem with his agent, much of his novel was “thrown out,” the intimacy of his characters and their milieu “dissipated, ‘opened up’ for the sake of a movie.” The agent felt in his bones that they had a hit, despite long stretches when funding dried up and the project was dormant verging on dead. When finally released in 1986, The Men’s Club sank without a ripple.
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“The screenplay was shopworn, passed around too much, soiled, cheapened,” he wrote. “Worst of all, when I reread the screenplay, I didn’t know what I felt about it. When one doesn’t know writing is okay, it isn’t okay.” I
n “The Zipper,” Michaels offered a cogent analysis of the enigmatic film noir classic, Gilda. A truly bizarre love triangle, Gilda is the story of an almost flirty friendship between two men (Glen Ford, George Macredy) and their emotionally sadistic relationship with a woman (Rita Hayworth). Michaels identifies “a mysterious need for betrayal” and “a delirium of masochistic self-destruction.” He rues what a remake would look like, strip-mined of emotion and left with the husk of brutal spectacle. “Movies didn’t have to show naked bodies, f***ing, paraphilia, or graphic mutilation and bloody murder,” he wrote. “Techniques of suggestion were cultivated ... and less was more except in regard to words.”
Michaels was brilliant with words, regardless of whether they were deployed in the service of fiction or nonfiction. The Essays of Leonard Michaels is a collection of thoughtful musings that wonder about the meaning implicit in every human act.
