The Director Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen is a record of conversations between author Rose Eichenbaum and some 35 film, theater and television directors. She also takes their pictures. The beautifully produced book, published by Wesleyan University Press, is a serendipitous pleasure for anyone interested in how directors think about their jobs, and especially for fans of particular directors. Don’t care much for sitcom jockey Jay Sandrich? Maybe Peter Bogdanovich will hold your interest instead.
An engaging conversationalist, Eichenbaum asks many of her subjects what inspired them to take up directing. Many recount particular incidents. For Rod Lurie, it happened the night he disobeyed his babysitter and snuck out of bed to watch Ben-Hur on TV. For Mel Brooks, seeing Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Anything Goes was “a revelation.” For most readers, both admissions will be surprising.
The film directors with memory, including Bogdanovich and John Landis, agree that the old Hollywood studio system was an efficient factory that—despite censorship and commercialism—produced an inordinate amount of good product. Landis speaks of getting started in the business at age 17, working in the mailroom of Twentieth Century Fox. “I was there for the death of motion picture studios,” he says. The old names, though preserved, are nowadays nothing but “gigantic multi-corporate distribution and marketing companies.” The pressure is hard on opening weekend box office numbers. Even in the days of The Blues Brothers, “you had some time to build an audience for your film.
Some of the most profound comments come from John Carpenter, who says that horror films provide “a kind of coping mechanism. It’s an attempt to explain things that can’t be explained.”
