All language subtitles for The Hustler (1961) (1080p BluRay x265 10bit Tigole).mkv.stream4-eng

Hello, this is Stuart Galbraith

and welcome to the audio commentary
track of The Hustler.

In this commentary,

you'll be listening to the memories
and reflections of Carol Rossen,

daughter of director Robert Rossen,
star Paul Newman,

editor Dede Allen,
assistant director Ulu Grosbard,

Time Magazine's film critic
Richard Schickel,

writer-producer Jeff Young,
actor Stefan Gierasch who plays Preacher.

Dede Allen.

DEDE ALLEN: Hustler begins with
a pre-credit sequence,

and that was, I am told, rare in 1961.

An interesting story relating to that
is that we made the film in New York,

and we cut it in New York
which made Fox rather unhappy.

In fact, they sent people east to find out
if we knew what we were doing.

They sent the cameras and it was all done,
technically very beautifully.

They sent the cameras because they were
sure that New York wasn't going to be

up to par.

That was the attitude in those days
about New York,

and probably a lot of it was justified.

The person who came to see
if I knew what I was doing,

happened to be the son of the head

of one of the Heads of Camera

at Columbia when I was there.

He knew me well.

It was just very funny because he said,
“It's you!"

But they thought, "Who is this?
They don't know what they're doing."

Anyway, that was one of the things.
When we finished the film

and it was sent out
and it was a big rush at the end.

Barbara McClain, who was head of the
editorial department at Fox, called me.

She said something like, "De, hon.

"That scene in the beginning
of the picture?”

We were long because
we never really finished cutting it down.

She said, "De, hon.

"That scene at the beginning
of the picture before the titles?

"Why do you even have that?

“It doesn't do much,
and it would be a good cut.”

And I said, "But the title of the picture
is The Hustler,

"and that scene was showing you
what a hustle is."

She said, "Well, it still could start.”

I said, "It'd be a gangster picture.”

Rossen ran it that way
because he got pressured.

It was ridiculous. It was like
we were starting in a pool hall,

and it was going to be
a gambling, gangster picture.

Anyway,
there was a little ruckus about that,

but in a totally different way
from what you figured.

She was a very bright lady,

but I guess she was getting pressure
from the studio.

Rossen had fought all the way
to do it in New York,

because that's where
it should've been done.

Anyway, I think what happened was
that this was just pressure,

but it was amusing to me because that
was exactly what the picture was about,

and without the hustle
it would've been a different opening

and you would've had a whole different
feeling about Ames Pool Hall.

STUART GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen,

how did your father
become involved with The Hustler?

CAROL ROSSEN: / don't know the specifics
of how the book got to him.

It was a book that had a great deal
of interest.

I remember that fact.

I was working in Hollywood
as an actress at the time.

I really wasn't privy to every moment
of the development of that.

I do know it had been optioned by a
number of people before my father got it.

The last one was Frank Sinatra.

The problem with it was
that nobody knew how to do it.

Nobody really knew
how to translate the book,

which I'd never read,

into a film that was watchable.

Until my dad got a hold of it.

Now the back story
of my father and pool,

iS that he himself as a kid,

impoverished doesn't even
describe his background.

He came from

an immigrant background
that was destitute, really.

Extraordinary people.

He decided, being a smart ass,

that he would hustle pool when he was

in his earlier years, or rather,

really live in a pool room rather
than in the horrors of a slum dwelling.

And so the pool room really
became for him and his pals

a kind of fraternity of the upper class.

There they could dream.

There they could tell lies about
the women they had or had not been with.

There they could be

top of the heap.

He also hustled pinochle,
later on, just to pay the rent.

Later on, when he was still in New York
and writing and directing plays,

which he did do before
he came to Hollywood, just briefly,

he was working on a play
called Corner Pocket.

It was a play that
he must've worked on all his life.

It never got done.

He says, in his own notes,
that it didn't get done because

it never felt right.

He had captured the pool room,

He had captured the pool room,

but he hadn't really captured
the leading character that it was.

I read between the lines
of what my father is saying.

What I read is that he was making him
too much of the hero and the smart guy.

Too much of the leader of the gang,
too much like himself as a romantic image.

When The Hustler was finally done,

if that character is anything,
it is the anti-hero.

If the female character is anything,
it's the anti-heroine.

That was big news in those days.

I think that's where he

finally brought all of that passion

for his youth and for

the pool room.

The pool room became a metaphor
for winning and losing in America.

I watched it the other night,
as a matter of fact.

I was struck

not only as I saw it, kind of
aesthetically as almost a piece of jazz

with silence playing the lead role.

It was very poetic.

It's in no way social realism
in the sense that he had started,

and that we know that it is poetry.

When I said it is a metaphor
for winning and losing in America

that it was my father's obsession.

That was what

his films were about and it is what
The Hustler is about.

That's why he could transform

a picture that nobody knew how to do,

because they were probably,
I don't know this, concentrating on pool.

It isn't about pool.

It's about character.

The most important line in the picture...

Two important lines,
and they come at the end of the picture:

“It's not enough to have talent,
you also have to have character.”

The next line is

having finally understood
the consequences

of not thinking through
the passion to win at any cost,

he says,
"I'm not gonna play it conservatively.

"I can't play with percentages anymore.

"Why not just go for it?
Why not go and be the best that I can be?”

There are consequences
to that, too, as we know.

He's told, in the picture at least, that
he will never play in a big pool hall again.

These are all metaphors for living and
breathing in America and being successful.

Certainly the pool hall itself...

I was struck the other night

by what a corporate entity
that place was.

Everybody's powdering their hands.

They're very neat,
and they wear the coat and jacket.

Nobody drinks,

nobody smokes and it's a killer game.

It's a wonderful picture.

There is a reason why it's a classic.

It holds because it's about something
that is the American passion,

which is winning and losing and
what is it gonna cost you in this society?

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young,
what about Carol Rossen's

assertion that the film is really about

winning and losing in America?

JEFF YOUNG: The movie raises
the questions

of what does it mean to be a winner,

what does it mean to be a loser

in the small society that it depicts.

But by doing it so specifically
and thoroughly,

it, of course, expands out
to the entire world that we live in.

It is just winning a pool game.

Does that make you the best?
What does it mean to be the best?

What does it mean to be successful?

Is it being the number-one guy around?
The best pool shooter?

All through it, it says, the whole thing is:

"You shoot a good game of pool,
Fast Eddie, but you got no class.”

The Scott character, all through it,
Bert Gordon keeps saying to him:

"It's not just about
being a great pool shooter.

“It's about character.”

In the first big match...

It's amazing,
there are scenes that go on forever.

I doubt anybody would have the courage
to structure a movie like that today.

That opening match between
Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats

must be 15 or 20 minutes of film.

It goes on and on.

And in the end,

after they've both been
playing and drinking around the clock,

Minnesota Fats, Jackie Gleason,
cleans up, showers,

comes out, looks like a guy
who's just woke up

and is in the prime of his virility.

And there's old Paul Newman
who lost because he didn't have the class.

He didn't have the character.

Indeed, the whole movie is about him

acquiring the character.

It's about learning that there
are things more important than

Just the sort of showiness of it all.

The whole relationship with Piper Laurie
makes him grow up,

makes him understand
there are other values that are important.

Caring about other people,

loving someone,
responsibility towards other people

is very important,

and more important
than just winning a pool game.

Yet at the end of the movie,

Rossen is actually...

It's very profound because

in the end he goes back

and still becomes George Scott's
partner again, in a way.

In the end,
he sort of sells out all over again,

but he does it with an awareness
of what he's doing

and he's a grown man who knows
what sort of deal he's making

and what compromises he's making.

In some ways it's very disturbing,

because it's a deeply cynical movie,
in a way.

This is what it takes
to get along in this world.

GALBRAITH: Stefan Gierasch,

how did you come to be cast as Preacher
in The Hustler?

STEFAN GIERASCH:
The way for actors in those days

where your agent
would get you a reading.

I guess Rossen was in town.

They were casting.
It was generally a New York deal.

You'd get an appointment, you show up,

and sometimes if you're lucky
they'll give you a script.

You go in and

Rossen would sit there

and I'd read the scene.

Actually, I read the scene

for the guy who breaks...

Eventually, Fast Eddie tries to hustle him.

They catch him, they break his thumbs

in a little place
down by the Hudson River.

That was who I read first.

When I finished the reading,
his assistant said...

Rossen's assistant said,
"Why don't you read for Preacher?”

And Rossen said...

That one passed.

I think I came back again

and I got a call from my agent saying,
I think they said:

"Paul has a call directly for you.

"Newman is gonna be there
this afternoon.

"You're both in the studio.”
I know Newman from various things.

"They're expecting you there.”

I think I was late, and I got this call,
"Where are you? Newman's waiting."

And anyway...

So I went away without, I think,
ever reading for Preacher.

I forget, but I remember
they called me and said:

"Congratulations,
we want you to play Preacher.”

I was a little aghast, saying:

"Really? That's nice."
I just thought, "Good."

"Negotiate," which meant two cents.

I don't know what it was.

But I was very happy to do it.

Now I know why they call you
"Fast Eddie."

GALBRAITH: Paul Newman.

How did you first become involved
with The Hustler?

PAUL NEWMAN:
The story of how The Hustler got on is

very strange.

I was doing a film with Joanne

and Sidney Poitier in Paris.

I was supposed to do Two for the Seesaw
with Elizabeth Taylor,

and I had it in my contract that if she

did not perform, for some reason,

that I had my choice
of four different actresses.

None of those actresses were available,
and so

that slot suddenly became open.

Apparently Robert Rossen

read about it in the newspaper,

and although he had already
signed somebody to play the part,

he called me in Paris
and asked me if I'd read the script.

He sent it over.

I remember getting finished
with work about 11:00 p.m,

and sat down and read half of it.

I woke him up and said,
"I haven't finished,

“the other half, but I don't need to.”

So, that's how I got in it,
because Elizabeth got sick.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

As a young assistant director,

how did you become attached
to The Hustler?

ULU GROSBARD:
I became involved in The Hustler

by being hired by Charlie Maguire,

who was the first assistant director
on The Hustler.

He had worked with me,
or rather I had worked with him,

on Kazan's movie,

Splendor in the Grass, the year before.

It was my first job
on Splendor in the Grass as a second AD.

I was then hired.

He called me and
said did I want to take the job.

I said, "Sure," because I enjoyed working
with him on Splendor in the Grass.

He was the first AD.

He also functioned somewhat
as production manager.

Actually, the first AD was Don Kranze,

who, most of the time,
was the functioning first AD on the set,

although Charlie was there quite a bit.

I didn't know Robert Rossen.

I knew nothing about the project

until obviously when I said yes,
I was given the script to read,

which I was very impressed by.

I thought it was one of the best
screenplays I had read up to that point.

I was looking forward
to going to work on it.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

This was very early in your career
as an editor.

How did you first become involved
with The Hustler?

ALLEN: I had done a picture for Bob Wise
in New York,

called Odds Against Tomorrow,

which was actually my first really big,
major studio picture.

It was United Artists.

I was doing my normal stuff
which was commercials and industrials

and whatever you can get in New York.

There were only a couple
of feature editors in New York.

So, Rossen heard from Bob Wise that

I had done a great job
and so he hired me.

Carliner was busy with a different
picture and he was the main editor.

He and a man named Dave Cummings
who died too young

were the main two then.

Gene Milford, of course,
was part of a service called MKR.

He did features.
He did Kazan's features in those days.

I don't know whether I was hired
before the shooting began because...

I had several conversations
with Robert about the script.

I remember he said to me,
"Kid, are you as good as Bob?"

Bob was his editor on one
of the major films he did in Hollywood.

Bob Aldrich, I think it was.

I said, “I don't know if I'm as good
as Bob Aldrich."

He always kind of put it to challenge you.

That was his method and it was fun

and I stood up to him
So I guess he liked me.

GALBRAITH: What do you recall about your
first meeting with Robert Rossen?

ALLEN: / don't recall anything
about the first meeting with him.

I do remember we talked

and it happened pretty fast
because he wanted to do it in New York.

And the recommendation
had come through Bob Wise.

I had met Rossen early
in Hollywood at one period.

But I don't think he remembered me.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

What do you remember
about working with Robert Rossen

and also the atmosphere
of the set during production?

GROSBARD: While it's one of my favorite
movies, as far as the end result,

it is hardly a favorite

when it comes to the atmosphere
working on the set.

I really knew nothing about Rossen
when I went to work with him.

One of the problems, I think, was,
aside the other baggage he brought to it,

prior to coming to work on this,

he started shooting some
of the most difficult stuff

to shoot in the movie.

The first pool scene was with Gleason,

Minnesota Fats.

That's a difficult sequence.

It'd be a difficult sequence for anybody,
probably, but Sidney Lumet,

who has a very good sense of direction,
just keeping track

of where you are
in relation to screen direction.

It's basic mechanics, but it's difficult.

It's a very long sequence,

and it came within the first
couple of weeks of shooting.

He obviously must've scheduled it.
I'm not sure, but my sense of it is

he must've scheduled the picture
pretty much in sequence.

That's why he tackled that
at the beginning.

Normally, you wouldn't want to do that.

It's set up, the whole shoot,

in a way where it was not a relaxed set.

It may have been for the cast
but it wasn't for the crew.

Nevertheless,

in the course of it,

I felt very strongly
that he was doing an excellent job.

I'd come from the theater,
I didn't have a lot of experience,

but I was an aspiring director.

And so I had a sense of staging and stuff,

although I didn't know
that much about film.

But I could see that he was
staging those scenes with a very

accurate sense
of what the scene was about.

He knew what the point
of the scene was

and he knew, therefore,
when he was physically staging it,

as well as, the input from his actors.

He knew what he wanted
to get out of the scene.

Except for the pool sequence, really,

I think he was on sure ground
for the rest of the shoot.

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young.

Looking at the picture today,

what do you find most striking
about the direction?

YOUNG:
What impresses me about the movie

in terms of Rossen's directing is

the fact that he never fudges anything.

Every scene and moment in the film

is very clearly what it is.

And yet, the overall impact of the movie

is to raise one gray area after the next.

He'll present proposition A

and take it all the way

and then he'll contradict it

with someone else

in almost the Greek classic tradition
of the anti-strophe and then you'll say:

"Gee, maybe that's right.”

Then he'll come back
and reargue the other side.

So, at the same time
that you have very specific

and clear notions at every moment,

the overall impact is

to be one of great ambivalence
and to make you really think.

You don't come out of the movie
with an absolute clear understanding of:

"This is what our world is about
and this is the way we should live in it."

What you come out of it with is a feeling
of having been greatly disturbed,

of knowing that you've been through
some experience

that has altered you in some way

and that won't allow you
to just not think about it.

It sits in you.

It's like the grain of sand in the oyster.

It's disturbing,
and it makes you think and ponder,

and wonder and what more
can you ask from a movie?

I mean, that's a lot.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

Did director Rossen shoot a lot
of coverage compared to other directors?

GROSBARD: As I remember,

Rossen shot, I would say,
an average amount of footage.

I don't remember him doing
a very large number of takes

at any time throughout the film.

He had an extraordinary cast,

and he had, I think, a very good sense
as a director

of when he had gotten what he needed.

When the take that he was doing

reflected the best the actor could do,
then he'd move on.

I've worked with directors,

some directors who are good directors,

nevertheless would sometimes
get so tense on the set,

that they would keep on shooting
past what I thought, at that time, was

as good a performance as they'd get.

In fact when I would see them
going to take

20, 25, 30,

I would just see the actor go downhill.

This was not the case with Rossen.

So, I don't think he shot a lot of footage.

Dede would know better.

ALLEN: Did Robert shoot a lot of footage?
Yes.

Every scene was from
the top to the bottom.

I'd have to have somebody stand
behind me and push the reels

so the whole reel would go into a big

bag which the prop man built for me.

Like one of those laundry bags
they push things around in.

The prop man, not the prop man,

the assistant art director
had it built for me.

The whole reel would go into the bin

because he would shoot takes
that were so long.

He shot a lot of footage.

The only time he didn't cover something

was the dissolve in the apartment.

It was a skinny apartment on the set.

Most of it was done in real locations.

That was a set and at one point I had to go
from a long shot to a long shot

because we decided to take out
a whole section of a scene.

It was a pretty lousy dissolve.

But it was unlike Robert not to cover.

He always did cover.

Although, some scenes he knew
specifically how he was gonna shoot,

like when they wake up and look out.

They're looking out at a wall
in the morning

after they spent the night together.

That was planned and was shot that way.

So, he did that, also, a lot.

I had tremendous amounts of footage
which is why the characters are so rich.

Because you had great cut-aways

and great acting performances
from almost everybody.

GALBRAITH: To what degree was Rossen
involved with the editing of the picture?

Did he work with you very closely?

ALLEN:
We were in the projection room a lot.

Bob Rossen never looked over
my shoulder over a Moviola

the way Sidney Lumet might have done.

Directors work different ways.

Rossen would see it on the screen
and see the big picture.

That's why sometimes in a scene
that might be very nice,

but you could make it a little shorter

scenes in the bar,
in a restaurant or whatever.

I'd say, "I can really make that better.”

He would say:

"Don't improve it into a disaster,
it works."

We would move on to the next thing.

That was very helpful for me,

because this was the man
who challenged me

to find out whether I was as good as

the people he had on the Hollywood
films that he had made.

The great films he had made
before he was blacklisted,

and then before
he did the Committee bit,

which destroyed a lot of lives.

GALBRAITH: Did you have any hesitation
about working with Rossen?

You mentioned the naming of names?

ALLEN: The fact that Bob named names...

I think it was in 1957 or something.

No, I don't remember
when he named names.

I thought about it,
I had been named by somebody

in a much lower echelon.

I thought about it,

but I also knew I had
a pretty strong point of view about it.

Everybody was a victim in those days.
Whether you were pro or con,

and God knows
I certainly don't like what he did,

but I don't get personally involved
or socially involved.

In effect, I always say,
"I don't sleep with my director."

I also worked for Kazan,
whom I didn't know.

He was in New York later.

Some of my friends were
very questioned about this.

But relationships between
editors and directors,

in the documentary field in New York
were much more personally involved,

and that wasn't the way I worked.

I didn't really have a problem with it
and I still don't have a problem.

Both of those were great experiences,
in terms of learning.

You learn something different
from everybody.

And Rossen was...

Even though he was, at times,
not too well because he had diabetes.

He was an extremely good director

when he was not having
a diabetic situation.

He was a really excellent director
and wonderful with actors.

He knew what he wanted, and a story
about winners and losers was his meat.

That's what he does brilliantly.

I work on characters
and it's worked very well for me,

because I can learn from these people.

It was a complicated time.

A lot of families were destroyed.

It's still a complicated time.

I still would never change
anything I did in those days.

I believed, even though I've changed
my opinions about certain outcomes,

I'd never change that for anything.

It was part of what made me who I am
and the way I see characters.

GALBRAITH: Richard Schickel.

How did the naming of names
impact Rossen and his career?

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
You mean the blacklisting business?

Blacklisting is a complicated issue.

I'm not even sure I can get into it,

because I don't believe
guys like Rossen or Elia Kazan,

or Jerry Robbins,
I don't think they did anything wrong.

I think the Stalinists
were a bunch of evil twits,

and I essentially feel that
at that stage of life

you had a right to almost
anything you needed to do.

I don't think it was particularly right
to enquire about people's political beliefs.

But I don't think it was wrong, either.

Because I think Communism was
a kind of a conspiracy,

and I think it did not have any
good American interests at heart.

People like Bob Rossen
who tried for years

to evade subpoenas from those people
until finally he had to just give in.

I didn't see anything wrong with that.
By the time he testified,

they had every name they could possibly
imagine to have been a communist.

No harm was done.

I thought he behaved very honorably.

He'd held out as long as he could,
he'd made pictures overseas.

He disrupted his life and his family's life
to avoid these

congressional idiots.

Only to be subsequently denounced
by the communist idiots.

I have a lot of sympathy for the fact that

at that time, a promising career
was disrupted and interrupted.

Most of the pictures he did abroad
were not so hot.

In a certain sense,

The Hustler was
kind of a comeback movie for him.

It was return to his kind of

not quite proletarian roots,
but his roots in

lower class, marginal American life,

which I think was his best subject.

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen.

How do you think the blacklist
impacted your father?

ROSSEN: My father was a loner.

My father was someone who

really embraced the ambivalences of

living.

To be honest, I've listened to a lot
of people on the far right

the far left, the middle, whatever it is,

who've grabbed the bully pulpit
and screamed their brains out

on the subject of the polite politics
of the era

or what is politically correct.

That was a terrible time.

It was the time of Un-American Activities
and my father was involved in that time.

In the end, the people who were most
vulnerable to the time, on both sides,

were the people
who had a group-think mentality.

The people who dared because they didn't
know any other way to do it.

For good or for evil

to

truly process as much as one can
in the middle of a tidal wave.

I think what's hard for everybody to

remember and to experience is

what it's like to see a tidal wave
of evil coming at you

and know that all responses
can only be evil.

It was a terrible, terrible time.

He spent six years of his life trying,

from 1947 to 1953

to not...

To avoid having to deal with

the Un-American Activities
Committee directly.

He did everything,
he was part of the Hollywood 19.

Everybody talks about the 10,
but there were 19 guys and 10...

It was stopped at that point.

Everybody thought of it as great success,

that it was over.

That this terrible kind
of abuse of the Constitution,

and of legislative rights,
hanging people for...

What was that committee doing?
What was it in service of?

They stopped that committee.

Some people said Truman stopped it

because he thought
it was Un-American, himself.

We don't know why it was stopped
but it was started again in '51.

By that time,
my father had done All the King's Men,

and he had won the Academy Award.

His contract had been
cancelled by Columbia,

because everybody who was involved
in 1947 was blacklisted.

Whether they took the First
or they didn't ever get to the microphone.

Most of them were writers.

Not all.

Then he tried to take
what was then called the Diminished Fifth.

The language was stultifying.

As a child, I thought I was stupid because
I couldn't understand the Left or the Right.

I just thought:

"Surely they must be talking
about something.”

They weren't talking about much.

The language of Marxism is impossible.

The language of the Right, in terms of:

"There's a communist at the window

"and they'll come in here
and rape your grandmother, momentarily."

It was nuts.

It was a cold war mentality that

almost overthrew the very best things
in this country.

There wasn't anybody who acted well

including those who were
not communist, not redbaiters

and who stayed silent.

Because the fear was palpable.

You wore it like a coat.

Everybody was frightened of
their livelihood and in my father's case,

after going in front of the committee
and saying:

"I'll tell you about me,
but not anyone else.”

That's the second time he'd been
in front of them.

“No, we're sorry."

They had promised he could do what
a lot of people did in the back rooms,

which was to talk to them on camera

in closed doors and be able to work.

He couldn't work, couldn't get a passport.

A lot of people were able
to get a passport, like Julie Dassin.

All kinds of people who were
on the Left at that time worked

and worked successfully,
made their living in Europe.

My father couldn't get out of this country,
they didn't give him a passport.

So, finally, in despair,

because he was a man
whose work was his lifeblood.

Some people, like Bart Litton,

who was also a screenwriter,

who had been blacklisted,
became Litton Banks.

Some people like Mattel
who was also a screenwriter,

who was blacklisted

became Barbie Dolls.

It was an amazing kind of scattering.

But in my father's case,

he was American through and through

and his lifeblood was film,

his creative urge
was only met in that way.

Ultimately he gave in,
and he gave names that had been named,

but nevertheless he gave names.

He did what they asked him to do,

which was to give them house seats
for Broadway plays.

That was the deal,
for which he would get the right to work

and his passport back.

The 10 years prior to The Hustler

were 10 years in which

he was the man who hadn't done
the group think, ultimately,

because he was well out of the party
before this had ever even started.

So, he was despised by the Left.

He was despised by the Right
and I, personally, was attacked

both professionally
and personally by both,

because I was of his seed

and my mother's loins.

So, this was pretty ugly stuff.

I would like to read,
just because I wrote it clearly

what I thought about my father

in the last paragraph of an
introductory chapter to this book, if I may.

He died, by the way,

in 1966 and he was only 57 years old.

He had been ill
with stress-related things

as well as with diabetes.

As a member of his generation,
he drank pretty good, too.

It was an evil, I can't say that enough.

Just think of what it's like

in Nazi Germany when you kept thinking
it was gonna stop and it didn't.

"Some people say he died of his shame.

“I don't know, I wasn't him.

"But I think not.

"He died as he had lived,

"a man of passion and conscience,

"whose humanity struggled
with the deeper meanings

"of his dreams and fears,

"of goodness and evil,

"of winning and losing on the fields
of his time and within his soul.

"Winning and losing

"the American passion.

"The distillations of those battles
formed the body of his work.

"His work was the God point

"which blessed his struggle.

"Life tries people in very different ways.

"The path of survival
is not a simple matter.”

That's as well as I can put it.

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young.

Do you think The Hustler
is a political film?

YOUNG: I don't think there's any such thing
as a movie that's apolitical.

For starters,

I think The Hustler's
a very political movie.

Just on the basis
of the question that it raises

about what our society is based on,

and on winning and losing,

about being number one,
about being a hustler.

Being a hustler is what

many people would argue,
iS what our entire culture is all about.

So, I think it's silly to say it's apolitical.

It's apolitical in that it doesn't tell you
whether to vote Democrat or Republican.

But if you expand your definition
of politics to include

something that explores the values
of the society and world in which we live,

surely that film does that
as deeply as any movie of its time.

And Rossen, as you point out,
was blacklisted.

He did inform on a number
of his colleagues.

Some people never forgave him for it.

I'm sure this movie came
well after his testimony.

What came in between, I don't know.

He made great movies before that:
All the King's Men.

I believe it's based on a novel
by Robert Penn Warren.

It's about Huey Long,

who was the Kingfish,

the man who was
the Populist governor of Louisiana,

the precursor to George Wallace
and all the rest of them.

It was clear evidence of the fact that

if there was ever to be fascism
in this country,

it would come out
through a grass-roots movement,

a good old boy movement.
It's a wonderful film.

It's a really brilliant movie.

GALBRAITH: Paul Newman.

Could you talk a bit about the location
used for the pool room sequences?

And also,
what research did you do prior to filming?

NEWMAN: Ames in New York was on
47th Street on the second floor,

just off Broadway.

I'm trying to think. I don't remember
the name of the pool hall.

I do know that before
we started shooting I went up

to just kind of case the place.

By that time, I had done,

I don't know,
a dozen films or something,

and I had a cap on
and some dark glasses.

I was watching what was going on
and this young kid came up and said:

"How would you like
to shoot a little pool?”

At that time
I hadn't even had a stick in my hand.

I said, "No, I'm just looking."

He came back in about 10 minutes,
and said:

"Why don't we play for a couple
of bucks, it's no big deal.”

And I said, "No, I'm no..."

He came back a third time,
"I don't see why you just stand around.

"Why don't we shoot some pool?”

I said, "I don't play pool.”

He said, "I've seen your face someplace.
You're an actor aren't you?"

I said, "Yes."
He said, "What are you doing here?"

I said, "Just sniffing around.”

I said, "Let me ask you a question.”

I said, "You don't know me.

"You come up to a stranger and try
to hustle me into a game of pool.

"What if I'd have whipped your butt?"

He said, "Well, if you beat me,
see that tall, skinny fellow over there?

"I'd have asked him to play you."

I said, "What happens if I beat him?"

He said, "That fat guy over there
on that second table,

"I'd ask him to come over and play you."

I said, "What if I beat him?"

He said,
"If you beat him, we call Chicago."

So, in any case, they got you covered.

GALBRAITH: What about the research?

NEWMAN: I took the dining room table out
and put a pool table in.

Willie Mosconi would come up
and we'd play.

So, that was the research that I did.

He was a wonderful teacher
and of course, he was

one of the greatest players
we've ever seen.

But he was patient with me and I think
he was patient as a competitor, too.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

What do you remember
about the pool room location?

GROSBARD: It was a real pool room.

In the picture it's called
the Ames Pool Room, I believe.

I don't know if that was its real name,
but it was the pool room in New York.

It was down off Times Square.

When you walked in
the atmosphere was just absolutely...

The feel of it, the filter of light
through the windows, the pool tables...

It was not a set, it was the real thing.

And you just knew it.

I think it was something
that gave you a leg up.

I think it was terrific.

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen.

Does the film represent the life
of pool hustlers accurately?

ROSSEN:
I never knew a pool hustler, but...

If you start to define... What's a hustler?

A hustler is someone
who sees the edge and then

lives by his wits
and exploits that edge, right?

That sounds like politicians to me.

That sounds like studio executives to me.

That sounds like
any number of people to me.

So, it's the hustle that is the issue here

and the fact that the story tells
about a pool hustler.

It could be about...

What Makes Sammy Run
is about a hustler, in its way.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

How much of the film was shot
using real locations

versus those scenes shot
on a sound stage?

ALLEN: The sound stage was Movietone
which was at the corner of

54th and 9th, I believe.

Yes. How could I forget?

No, the sound stages
were actually a block

east of that or two blocks east of that.

All of the apartment
was built on the stage.

Every bar, every restaurant was actual.

The streets were actual.
The pier scene was actual.

I don't remember about Art's,
where he gets his fingers broken.

That could've been a set.
I don't remember that.

But I would say that
except for the apartment,

which was obviously a very main place,

it was almost completely done
in actual places.

Ames Pool Hall was the biggest location
which was not a location.

We took over Ames Pool Hall.

It was on Broadway and what? 44th?
Something like that.

On the east side of the street.

That was a great set
because it wasn't a set, it was real.

GALBRAITH: Have you ever gone back
to the original locations?

ALLEN: Over the years,
having lived in New York,

sometimes I go down by the pier.

And I say,
"That's where we did such and such."

Or I remember the night
that we did a scene down there.

The scene where Eddie walks into Art's,

the little place where he gets
his thumbs broken.

And, of course, the Parisian.

The Parisian Restaurant
which was there for many years.

I haven't been in New York in awhile now.

I mean, to live.

I don't know whether that's still there.

It was there for the years
I worked in New York,

which was up through the beginning
of the '80s.

It was all there.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

What are your memories
of expert pool player Willie Mosconi?

GROSBARD: Willie Mosconi, who was,
at that time, world champion or something.

I don't know.

Every pool player who was on the set
or came to visit,

was clearly in awe of him.

He was a very dapper man. He reminded
me of Gleason, oddly enough,

because he always dressed
with a tie and a suit.

He was very neat, and a quiet man.

Absolutely brilliant the minute
he went to work on a pool table.

It was like watching a great musician,

a great violinist or a great cellist.

There was nothing he could not do
once he went to work on that pool table.

It was phenomenal.
He was a very nice man.

He was, obviously, enormously helpful
to Paul Newman and to Rossen,

in terms of helping,
advising how to stage the scene

and setting up all the pool shots.

Not the camera shots,

but what sequence would be in
to make the contest interesting.

He would set up trick shots
that were just awe-inspiring.

(GROSBARD LAUGHING)

It was like watching a great artist at work,

which he was, really, in his field.

which he was, really, in his field.

GALBRAITH: Stefan Gierasch.

GIERASCH: Willie Mosconi,

the pool player

par excellence.

A great pool player.

He set shots up

and you could be blind

and hit where he wanted you to hit.

I guess people wouldn't be able
to do that like me, but...

He had the whole thing worked out.
The camera would be at one place,

and he had set it so that

all he had to do
was hit the ball, pretty much.

I don't remember
many things being missed

that were set up.

It was wonderful to have him.

Because

if you didn't, you'd spend a long time
trying to get some of those things.

I remember him sometimes
wearing different shirt sleeves,

because the arms
of whoever was shooting...

If you're trying to be one character,
you have to have the right wardrobe.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

What are your memories
of Willie Mosconi?

ALLEN: Willie Mosconi, I guess
he was the most famous pool player.

He was on the set and

some of the trick shots in close-up
were maybe done by him,

because there was no need
to take an actor like Gleason

and have him do some of the stuff
that we put in later for montages.

But he was a very good player
and Paul became an excellent pool player.

A great deal of the stuff
that you see them do, they do,

and Mosconi was there
on the set with them.

He was one of the characters.
He's the white-haired man they call over.

I think they called him Willie.
I can't remember.

I was probably one of the only people
that had a chance to work,

to learn from Willie Mosconi
for as long as I did,

but I never became a good pool player.

I can do certain things.
I never followed up on it.

I played pool in the country,
in New York, once in a while

in a little bar, but that was about all.

Willie Mosconi was sensational
and very patient and very sweet.

GALBRAITH:
Were there a lot of takes needed

for the trick shots during the pool games?

ALLEN: Gleason is a terrific pool player.

A very good pool player.

And Paul, maybe he was before,
but he became excellent.

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young.

What was the impact
of the pool sequences at the time?

Did it inspire a big interest
in hustling pool or playing pool?

YOUNG: I don't think that audiences,
particularly young men,

wanted specifically to go out
and become pool hustlers

or any kind of hustler.

But, I think that they were emboldened
in some way

to become whoever it was
they might want to become.

It came at a time in American life where

people were breaking the mold.

They weren't necessarily doing
what their parents asked them to do,

or what they thought
had been expected of them.

People were no longer headed
down that road just towards

security and conformity.

If there ever was an iconoclast,

it's this role of Paul Newman's.

He's going to be the best.

He will do anything.

It's an obsessive, compulsive drive
to be number one.

He is going to get Minnesota Fats.

It's a kid against the grown-up.

In a way, a sort of ultimate
anti-establishment movie,

and Minnesota Fats
is the establishment.

When Newman goes after him,
the last confrontation:

“Let's shoot pool, Fat Man.

“Let's play for $3,000 a game,”
which is his whole stake.

"You can take me out in the first game.
I'm finished."

And, of course, he's on a roll

and Gleason can't touch him.

There is that moment
in which Gleason says:

"It's finished. It's over. I can't beat you."

He does what the establishment does.

It knows when it can't win

and it folds its cards,

knowing that it will come back
some other time.

But the renegade's on a roll and you can't
beat the renegade when he's on a roll.

But in the end, he will outlast him.

That's what I mean about the movie,
in some way, being a very cynical movie.

It's relentlessly cynical in that

the idealism won't be allowed
to win out.

It's inspiring because you've got
Paul Newman who's so...

Who do you want to be?
Paul Newman or Minnesota Fats?

That's not much of a contest, is it?

Rossen stacked the deck,
as all directors do.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

Could you talk about the construction,
in terms of editing

of the first pool sequence?

(ALLEN CHUCKLES)

ALLEN: The first game...

The first montage in the picture
which takes you through,

I can't remember how many hours,
was it 26 or 40?

Whatever it was
before Eddie finally collapses.

It was a full reel when I first cut it.

It was all done in cuts
and it played beautifully,

but it was a solid,
close to 10-minute piece

on just that montage.

We went on and kept cutting,

and I brought someone in, named
Evan Lottman, who was very good,

to take it and turn what I had cut
into the montage and that's what we did.

And of course,
it was all done in black and white,

and I would do
what I called "quick and dirty" opticals.

Having worked at an optical house,

because I couldn't get a feature
in New York,

I knew what they could do and they'd
do quick and dirty opticals to test it.

We didn't have to go to fine grain
and scratch the negative and reprint it.

We didn't have to do that because
we did it on quick and dirty opticals,

which Leon Levy at Film Opticals

was very willing to do.

So I was known as somebody
who did quick and dirty opticals,

and I did it for years.

It was a good way
to test things without spending

huge amounts of money and time,

when you were in
the three-process Technicolor process.

It was hard. It took a lot of time
to get opticals done correctly.

GALBRAITH: Paul Newman.

What are your impressions
of working with Robert Rossen?

(NEWMAN CLEARS THROAT)

NEWMAN:
I don't know that he was one of those

micro-managers in terms of directing,

but if you got in trouble,
he certainly knew how to get you out of it.

That, to me,
is the measure of a good director.

GALBRAITH: Richard Schickel.

You knew Robert Rossen personally.

What are your memories of him?

SCHICKEL.: / thought Robert Rossen
was a delightful man.

I think he was probably
the first movie director I ever met.

He was a round,

tough-talking, sort of sentimental

guy off the New York streets
who had, I think, gone to NYU.

He was what you might call
a kind of street intellectual.

He was a guy who had

studied some and read a lot,
and was very literate

but had never lost his sort of,

I don't know, feistiness,

and that New York-y quality
that is very attractive in people, I think.

I liked him a lot.

I knew him mainly
through his daughter, Carol.

He was always very kind to me.

I wasn't then a movie critic,
although I was writing about movies.

But he seemed to enjoy talking to me,
and we had good conversations

about movies he thought
he might be wanting to do,

some ideas he had for movies.

So, he was a good guy.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen,

what did you take away from
your experiences of working with Rossen?

ALLEN: / learned so much about story
from Robert Rossen.

There was a lot of juggling,
he wouldn't fool around, as I said.

He wouldn't allow me to finish or fine cut
certain scenes if they were playing.

What he was interested in
was switching things around.

Each time we would
go up to the big screening room,

which was connected to the lab
I was working in, Deluxe, and Movietone.

It was a 60-foot screen
and we would go up and run

the whole picture with different things
playing different ways.

That's the way Rossen worked.

He shuffled scenes and stories
and things like that.

I learned a tremendous amount
about how you build a story

and the importance of characters.

I certainly learned about
winners and losers.

If you look at the picture now,
the dialogue is quite brilliant.

Obviously, the final script was done

by both the writer
of the original screenplay,

and Robert Rossen
who was a fine writer.

But it has all of Rossen's personal beliefs

in terms of the winner-loser story.

I never read the book
so I have no idea what that was.

It probably had the same theme.

But Rossen was able to really
develop and characterize,

and then have actors play these scenes

and the dialogue is quite brilliant.

There are so many brilliant speeches in it
which are part...

They don't come out as big long speeches,
but they're part of the character.

They're all character-driven
and story-driven.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard,

prior to working on The Hustler,
you worked with Elia Kazan.

How would you compare
their styles in terms of directing?

GROSBARD: I worked with Kazan
on Splendor in the Grass, primarily.

On America, America / only worked on a
few weeks of location work here in town.

Kazan's method of working

was to create an atmosphere
on the set

where you enjoyed coming to the set
every day to work.

It was relaxed, it was playful,

yet it was serious business
at the same time.

I think both the cast and the crew

brought an enthusiasm to their work.

He made it fun to be there.

Compared to The Hustler,
as I've said before,

for the crew, I think,

was more of a "let's get the work done.”

It was not particularly
a pleasant experience.

Rossen tended to be very short.

He didn't go out of his way to be nasty,

but he tended to be short with the crew.

Kazan was always very warm
with people he worked with.

He also had a crew.

Remember, there's a difference,
to be fair to Rossen.

Kazan had worked with that crew
for a number of movies.

Splendor was shot in ‘60, I believe?

He had that crew since Waterfront.

So there was a kind of camaraderie,
which couldn't have existed here,

simply because this was
a brand-new crew.

They had never worked with him,
he had never worked with them.

But his behavior
was not conducive to camaraderie.

On the other hand, as far as the cast went,
I felt he worked very well with the cast.

I don't know that he was
buddy-buddy with them, either.

But there was a very positive...

I felt there was no tension
that I could detect

between him as a director
and any members of the cast,

as far as what they were going for
or what he was aiming for as a director.

Or as far as their being dissatisfied
with what he was asking them to do.

Not at all.

GALBRAITH: What do you think
was the root of this tension?

GROSBARD:
I'm sure the whole blacklist business,

which I never was really clear on.

But I guess he brought
a whole bunch of baggage.

You have to remember, he started...

Just the bare bones of the career,
to give you an idea.

He started off with Body and Soul,
which was a very well-received movie.

He went on to win an Academy Award

for a very acclaimed movie that won
the Best Picture, All the King's Men.

That was what? That was late '40s.

We're now 11 years later, and he's made
four or five movies in between,

none of which, I think,
did particularly well.

I don't know how he felt about them.

There was this whole issue
of the blacklist,

which I really am not clear about,
as to what...

All I felt is, with this movie, he was under
a lot of pressure, that is true.

It wasn't just another movie.

He came into it, I think,

like a do-or-die thing.

It meant a great deal for him
to have this movie work.

That isn't always conducive
to the most relaxed behavior.

GALBRAITH: Paul Newman,
let's talk about the cast.

Your scenes with Myron McCormick
work extraordinarily well.

NEWMAN:
Myron McCormick was one of those

extraordinary actors who could

express everything
without doing very much.

That old adage, “Less is more,”
he certainly understood that.

GALBRAITH: What are your memories of
working with your co-star, Piper Laurie?

NEWMAN: The thing I remember most
about Piper was her privacy.

She guarded that.

She did her work by herself,

until you got on the set
and then she was...

She was there.

Those scenes were difficult,

but she really made them easy, I think.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard,
what are your memories of Piper Laurie?

GROSBARD:
Piper Laurie very much kept to herself.

I had to go get her and fetch her.

I would alert her when to come on the set,
and set up.

I had a fair amount of contact with her.

I liked her,

but there was something...
She was on her own wavelength.

And an unusual wavelength it was.

It fit, I thought, the part very well.

She did something very unusual.

In my brief career as a second AD,

I never saw any other actor do it.

We shot all of the interior scenes,
not the pool stuff,

the pool stuff I shot, as I said before,
at the real pool hall,

but most of the other scenes,
not all of them,

but all the scenes
between Newman and Piper Laurie

that happened in the apartment,
the set was built.

That set was a Fox studio, I believe,
on 55th Street and 10th Avenue.

I think it was 56th, or 54th.

The dressing rooms were fairly small.

They were almost like cells, really.
It was an old building.

I would say they were the size of,

maybe 10, 12 by 8 feet.

Basically sort of brick.

I don't remember a window,
to be honest with you. I could be wrong.

She went on to furnish
that dressing room

as if she was going to live in it
for the rest of her life.

She had it fully furnished, with pictures

and I think she would stay over.

My impression is,
she would actually sleep there.

It was odd.

(GROSBARD CHUCKLING)

But I thought that she fit the part,
and brought whatever that is.

I thought Rossen was very smart
in casting her,

because it brought
a kind of an odd quality

sort of an off-center,
off-kilter feel to the character

instead of the standard ingénue.

I thought she did an excellent job.

I don't think anybody really
got to know her.

She didn't talk to anybody,

outside of coming on the set
and doing her scenes.

I don't know if she was doing preparation.

I honestly don't know
what her background is as an actress,

or who she had studied with.

She was very intense, very private,

and very much...

It's redundant,
but I guess very much kept to herself.

But very pleasant.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen,

what are your strongest impressions
of Piper and her performance?

ALLEN:
Piper was great and very interesting.

Sometimes her archness would worry me,
but it turned out right for the character.

And of course, I think that was
the beginning of a big career for Piper.

I believe it was that
that started her off on a big career.

I got to know her later,
she lived on the West Side

and I'd see her occasionally.

She's a very bright, very good actress.

She was wonderful in it.

This was such a different kind of role.

I didn't know her work previous to it.

But this was a very unusual role,
you know.

Her way of speaking and the kind of
arch way she played certain scenes.

It was unusual.
She was very good in the looping.

We'd had to do quite a bit of looping,
which is called ADR now.

But in those days, it was loops that ran,
when you put your words in,

because the sound was bad
and had to be replaced.

She was great in looping.
She toned some of her performance down.

At one point, she'd been a little shrill...

She caught on very fast
and did it very well.

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen,

you were establishing
yourself as an actress at that time.

Did you have any interest
in playing Piper Laurie's role?

ROSSEN: Yes, I did. I wanted to play
the Piper Laurie part, are you Kidding?

I was a young actress,
and I wasn't wrong for it in terms of type.

I was in Hollywood at the time,

and I had done, I think,
35 roles on television that year alone

everything from Twilight Zone
to the pilot of Kildare,

and to The Verdict Is Yours,
Perry Mason, and God knows what all.

I remember when my father came out

visiting Hollywood,

I got the impression,
particularly with that screenplay,

that he wanted to present it personally
to whomever he was presenting it to.

At that time, they didn't have Paul.

He was having a tough time in Hollywood.

Twentieth wanted
a big moving-picture star,

whatever that meant at that time.

But this was a character who had a limp.

In those times, leading ladies,

believe it or not, Ripley,
since it's changed so much now,

didn't play ladies with limps,
even though it's a psychological limp.

And they certainly didn't play characters

who seriously thought of knocking
themselves off at the end of the picture.

So he came out, and it was at that time
that I had the opportunity to read it.

It was a perfect script. It was great.

I wanted to play it.

He was very wise in picking Piper.

Not because I would have been bad,
but because I was a young actress.

An unseasoned actress.

I think Piper's performance in it is brilliant.

It took me 10 more years

to know how brilliant it was.

Because then I watched it
and then I understood.

I have a friend, Bob Redford,
who I went to...

I've known for 743 years.

We went to
Emerson Junior High School together.

I remember at some point, we were
talking about the film, which we didn't do.

We did not talk shop.

But he said he had pretty much
the same response vis-a-vis Paul.

This is before he had ever worked

with Paul, God knows.

He was a young actor,
and he saw the picture.

It was exciting and he was kind of
thinking about, obviously,

how he was going to do that role,
if he had done that role.

It took him I'm sure, five years, not ten,
he's faster than I am,

to figure out how brilliant
Paul was, too,

which he is. Paul characterized it to me.

I'm writing a book about my family

and it's about many things.

But in the process,
I have interviewed a lot of people

and I was listening to Paul's interview
that I had.

He calls it a gut film,
and that's exactly what it is.

Everyone in that picture
is working from their gut

and that screenplay is a gut screenplay.

That's why it's a classic. It's truthful.

It's about bigger things than that moment.

You don't even notice that Piper's hair
is of that moment.

It's ageless in a very wonderful way.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen,

what was your reaction
to Paul Newman's performance?

ALLEN: I personally think

it was an absolutely
great performance, as was Gleason's.

All the people in the picture were good.
It was a beautifully cast picture.

As far as I'm concerned, it started

with Gleason, Newman,
and George C. Scott

in the Ames Pool Hall,
which is what we shot first.

We were, I think,
five or six weeks in Ames.

I'm particularly fond of Paul Newman
as a performer, I've always been,

and I've worked with him
several times since.

He's one of the best actors
in this country as far as I'm concerned.

So was Gleason. He was very interesting,
because even though it was his first film,

Gleason was totally professional.

In fact, he had no patience for some
of the things that go on in feature films.

You know, where people are
worrying about the character and all.

He was used to TV,
where you did things in a hurry.

He was always on the nose.
You could cut to Gleason anytime.

That last scene, for instance.
I used him to play it off.

We had a couple of places where

they had shot themselves into a corner.

It was the last day with Gleason,

otherwise it would be
a huge amount of money a day.

Ames Pool Hall was going to hold them up
for a lot of money.

We had a case where they were both
looking camera left or right at each other.

By having Minnesota Fats at the end
of the table, you could play off him.

That's one of his best scenes,
because it is, a great deal, played.

The discussion between Bert Gordon

and Eddie Felson
about character, and about winning,

all gets played off Minnesota Fats.

Of course, in the end,
Minnesota Fats told him

he was the winner
because he was the best pool player.

He couldn't beat him anymore,

because Eddie had developed
enough character to know how to win.

He had learned how to win,
instead of constantly being a loser.

The question of whether Minnesota Fats
was working for Bert

is displayed clearly, right from
the beginning of the game on.

He's called in from the poker game.

He's the man who holds the money
and obviously they split percentages,

because that becomes
very evident later.

The story is so much about that.

There are so many scenes where Bert tries
to get Eddie on a 75 to 25 percent basis,

and Eddie won't do it.

He was always self-destructive
in those ways.

He didn't understand the business,
and it was a business.

Bert was, I guess, what you would call
the holder of the money.

Eddie Felson's partner
was a very sweet, wonderful guy,

and they'd been partners for years
on these little hustles they did.

But it was small money.
This became big money.

Of course,
having become a brilliant player,

that's what Eddie Felson wanted to do.

He wanted to beat the best in the country,
and that was Minnesota Fats.

GALBRAITH: Jackie Gleason is billed
second in the opening titles,

but he's really only in the movie
for about 20 minutes.

ALLEN: But what a 20 minutes it was!

He certainly is as main a character
as you can be

as part of this triumvirate
of Bert, Gleason, and Eddie Felson.

And of course the woman, you know,

played by Piper Laurie,

played by Piper Laurie,

where Bert Gordon's evil comes out.

It may have been a little over-dramatizeq,
I sometimes wonder.

He was such a villain.

But there are guys like this, who'll do
anything they can if they feel threatened.

He felt threatened by this woman because
he knew Eddie was in love with her,

and she was going to present problems
for his aggrandizement.

She wasn't going to
want to go around to every pool hall.

I presume that was really the way
I thought about the character.

GALBRAITH: You often cut away
from shots of the ball

actually dropping into the pocket.

Could you talk about that a little bit?

ALLEN: One of the first things

Robert Rossen said to me
when we started this picture,

because I didn't know anything
about pool, he said:

“Look, the prop man did a wonderful
thing for me, he set up all the balls.”

They used to joke,
they called it "Dede's balls.”

I had them all on the wall
so I could tell in black and white.

I could distinguish one from the other.

He said, "This is all you need to know."
But it came about

because Robert Rossen said to me,
when I said I knew nothing about pool,

he said, "Pool is a very boring game
to watch unless you're a pool expert.”

He said, "It's not about pool,
it's about characters.

"This is a story about characters,
not about pool.

“Very often,
once you set up how good they are,

"you don't need to follow every ball.

"This isn't about a billiard game,
it's about Minnesota Fats,

"and Eddie Felson, and character.”

“It's not enough to have talent, Fast Eddie,
you've got to have character, too."

Or something like that.

But he was constantly being told,
that's very much part of the story.

It would've been very boring to shoot
a pool game and follow every ball.

That's not what the story was about.

It was about these two men, and Bert,
and that was the whole conflict.

The whole thing was

Eddie's weakness in the beginning
and then his strength in the end.

GALBRAITH: The Hustler was shot in

the anamorphic
wide-screen process, Cinemascope.

As the film's editor, did this present
any special problems for you?

ALLEN: I had no trouble with the fact that
the picture was shot in Cinemascope.

There was some hassle about that.

Over the years, Fox has made
more than their money off Hustler.

I have no idea, ‘cause I didn't get involved
in those things when I was in New York.

That was the beauty of New York.

I didn't have someone saying,
"You cost me $250,000 just for this."

-Do you want a drink?
-No, do you?

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen.

Do you think that your father's film
could be seen as anti-establishment?

ROSSEN: I see the establishment figure
as being Scott,

the one who's taking
a piece of the action.

The real hustler is Scoft, in some ways.

They're both hustlers.

Everybody's a hustler,
they're different variations on a theme.

What is a hustler?
You have to ask that question, too.

It's somebody who sees the edge,

who lives by his wits,
and takes advantage of the edge.

Gleason is a puppet of that.

He's pure talent, or that character,
not Gleason, Minnesota Fats.

Clearly,
he's an enormously gifted creature.

But he has given over his power.

He works for the establishment,
as it were.

And in the end,

the Paul Newman role,
Fast Eddie Felson, can't do that.

But the consequences of not working
for the establishment

is to be a loner
in a most profound sense.

What becomes of Eddie Felson?

I'm not sure it's what was ultimately
in the next picture.

The book and the picture
are very different.

That's what I see,
and that would be my take on it.

-Why did he tell you?
-I'm not sure.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard, there's so many
apocryphal stories about George C. Scott.

What was working with him like?

GROSBARD: George C. Scott, I thought you
mentioned that you'd heard lots of stories.

But you must remember, I think this was,
again, one of his first jobs on a film.

It's certainly the first time
I had heard about him,

because he was also a stage actor

before he became a film actor.

So I had never seen him close up.
I'd heard he was a very good actor.

I was very impressed with his work.

I thought he did excellent work.

He carries about him,
he always did in life...

Because, again,
I had to relate to him as a second AD.

He carried a certain kind of a weight,
a certain kind of presence,

an intensity about him.

I thought that
he might bring some stage habits

to his work in the film and he did not.

I thought it was a very calibrated,
very subtle,

very good performance.

That I remember, he was not given

to palling around with the cast or crew.

I don't remember that at all.

But I thought, looking at him

and looking at his work,
I was very impressed with him.

I thought he did excellent work.

GALBRAITH: Stefan Gierasch.

What are your impressions
of working with George C. Scott?

Your character
has a lot of interaction with his.

GIERASCH: I learned to drink vodka
boilermakers with George Scott,

down in the Claridge, downstairs
from the pool hall, it was a bar.

Things like that I remember.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen,

what are your memories
of working with George C. Scott?

ALLEN: / loved working with him, because
he, for instance, did not want to loop.

I think he was fairly young in movies then.

I don't remember
what he had done before.

He obviously had done things, because
he was a brilliant stage actor, too.

He really resisted the looping process.

On the train scene, which was shot
on a real train, you couldn't hear a word.

So George C. Scott had to loop that.

It was kind of a difficult, tense,
impossible looping session.

I ran the looping sessions, Rossen didn't.
He was there on the looping session.

At the end, he was sweet,
because he had given me a hard time

about, "Do I have to do this?"
and so forth.

He was very contentious
about the looping.

And at the end, he apologized.

He said, "I don't mean to be hard,

"but as an actor, I find this
a terribly difficult thing to do."

I thought in the years following,

when he's done all the great
performances in Hollywood,

that he must've become a good looper.

Like Gene Hackman on Bonnie and Clyde
had never looped before.

He had a hard time in the beginning.

Now he's a brilliant looper.

I've looped with him since,
on Reds and other pictures like that.

But he had a difficult time,
because looping is an ear thing,

you know, a melody thing.

If you have a singer,

Arlo Guthrie or Estelle Parsons
sang their natural loopers,

because it has to do with the rhythm.

If you have someone
who's more of a different kind of actor,

it's more difficult for them to learn.

That's my memory of George C. Scott
being difficult.

Otherwise, I never gave it a thought
because his performance was so great.

He was just a really unusual
new star on the film scene.

It was terribly exciting
to work with these actors.

Murray Hamilton, who's just wonderful,
was a great actor.

He had a complicated, difficult part
of the homosexual,

I guess it was, billiard player.

The people were very real.
We've all known people like that.

Maybe not the Bert Gordons so much,
I haven't, but...

Yes, I've known people
in the film business who were like that.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

What are your memories of the interaction
between Newman and Gleason?

GROSBARD:
They seemed to get on very well.

Gleason just...

Gleason was very professional.

He'd come in, he'd do his thing

and, I think, he would leave.

I don't know that they were pals.
I'm not aware of that.

Newman must be able to tell you that
better than I do.

But I thought the atmosphere on the set

amongst the cast was very positively
professional, I would say.

People worked well together.

I didn't sense any in-fighting,

or covered or hidden agendas
of any kind.

I think the cast knew that they were
working on something really good.

And invariably, when actors are working
on good material,

they know it.

Because it makes it easy for them
to do their job.

It makes it easier for them
to bring something to it, to make it real.

It sets up a working atmosphere
that is ideal for a director.

GALBRAITH: How about Newman and
George C. Scott? Did they interact well?

GROSBARD: / just remember
watching scene after scene

between Scott and Newman,
between Newman and Piper Laurie.

Particularly, Scott and Newman,
because I didn't know Scott's work.

I had seen Newman before,
but I didn't know his work.

He brought a credibility
to what he was doing.

I found it mesmerizing.

You could see it on the set.

I have never had, as an assistant director,

a stronger sense
of being involved in the movie

that was going to turn out first-rate.

I had done enough movies at that point

to know that the general consensus of a
crew as to what the quality of a movie is

is very much influenced
by their feelings about the director

and their feelings about how much
they're enjoying making the movie.

It bears no real resemblance to how good,
ultimately, the movie proves to be.

In this instance, as I said, the crew
was not particularly enamored of Rossen.

Neither was I.

But there was never a doubt in my mind
that he was making a very good movie.

GALBRAITH: Paul Newman,

what about the psychology
of your character, Fast Eddie Felson?

NEWMAN:
That's what Minnesota Fats knew.

He knew that under pressure Eddie
would break. That was hustler psychology.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen,

as The Hustler's editor,
what kinds of things do you do

to emphasize the psychology
of the various characters?

ALLEN: This need to play character
versus the pool game

is how you set up the psychology
of all the characters,

including the people who watch.

Including the Myron McCormick character.

The way you set up
the whole character of Bert Gordon.

I think his name was Bert Gordon,
the one played by George C. Scott.

And, of course, Eddie and Minnesota Fats.

Minnesota always cool, neat,
wonderful, professional.

And Eddie, so cocksure of himself
in the beginning,

and so lacking in any maturity
in terms of how you win a game.

GALBRAITH: Would you talk about
the length of that very long shot

when George C. Scott's
and Paul Newman's characters first meet?

ALLEN: The fact that Rossen often
had a scene suddenly

that played for a very long time
in one shot.

Maybe he did coverage on the scene,
and maybe he didn't.

But if I thought it played better
in the master, I would've used it.

There's a scene in the bar
between Eddie Felson and Bert Gordon.

I think it's where the first suggestion
comes up about his working for him.

Or maybe it's the first time he tells him,
"You're a loser."

They have that argument.
I can't remember which one.

But it was very well-staged,
brilliantly done.

You see them close when you want to,

and you see Bert in the distance
when you want to,

before he gets up and comes to the bar.

I see no reason not to,

even if I'm known by negative cutters
as someone who puts too many cuts

in the days when they used
to cut negative by the reel.

It was like a package deal.

I was told once by one of my good friends
in New York who was a negative cutter.

He says, "You make too many cuts.
I will lose money on this scene.”

I said, "Then charge differently."

I said, "I'm not going to count cuts.”

The picture, although it had a lot of cuts
in some places, didn't in other places.

I did more straight cutting
between scenes than Rossen was used fo.

The screenplay has everything dissolving
from one to the other.

So I used that slightly differently.

You're in the era of the MTV
and video and fast cuts,

and you have people come in
on features, who've never done one.

They don't know from three acts.

Because they're good with the Avid
and very flashy, they'll come and do it.

Sometimes they become
very good editors.

Other times they just flash.
And some directors flash.

It's brilliant stuff. Michael Bay,
for instance, is a very brilliant director.

But it's all about technique
more than about story and character.

Of course, the studios don't do
character stories as much as they did.

They do the things that sell to kids now.

GALBRAITH: Do you have a general
approach to editing narrative feature films?

ALLEN: Let's put it this way.

I know you get long, kind of intellectual...

When you're talking about editing
and what drives you, what moves you,

you can get a long,
intellectual explanation,

like an Eisenstein explanation

of all of the philosophical
things that go into editing.

I'm strictly a gut editor.

When I started in the film business
out here in California,

I worked at a place
called The Actor's Lab.

It was the one that was driven out
after the Communist

after the period of Parnell Thomas
and the hearings.

I worked there every night,
when I was a messenger,

when I was a sound editor,
until after the war when we worked

SO many hours, there was no time.
But I worked shows, I worked theater.

I always think it's very important
to know acting and know theater.

As far as I'm concerned,
I just go by my gut.

I am sure I'm one of the early people
in industrial films in New York,

who would sometimes start
with a close up and not with a long shot.

My directors at the place I worked,
Film Graphics, for so long,

they were always delighted that I didn't
do it necessarily the conventional way.

I think it's a gut thing.
I go for what I think is interesting.

Obviously, I don't sit and say:

“I'm going to cut here and there."
I usually know pretty much

where the performance is
because I learn the performance.

I memorize the film very well,
and all the dailies.

So even on Little Big Man,
where I had a mammoth amount of film

and lots of takes,
I knew exactly which one I was aiming for.

And then you change it as you go.

I did a lot of films with Arthur Penn
and it was a wonderful school

because he does
So many different kinds of films.

I don't sit and intellectualize about a cut.

I go for the performance, for the story

of what I think the film's about.

If it's a good film
which has well-written characters,

and good performances,
how can you go wrong?

GALBRAITH: As the editor,
working closely with the director,

were you involved
in the selection of music?

ALLEN: Yeah, it depends. No, actually,
we had a wonderful composer

and he started very early, I think.

The question of what influence
you have on music as an editor

depends completely on the film,

on the director,
how they're used to working with music.

I've always had...

For instance, when I cut for Bob Wise
on my first big feature,

he had a lot of silent scenes.

It was a story that took place in Hudson,
New York about a bank robbery.

He had a lot of silent scenes.

I would get a track and fill it,
and he was so thrilled with that.

He said, "Nobody in Hollywood
would dare do that!

"Just go out and put a track on it."
Because I believe you make it play.

Silence is play.
Sometimes you go silent to make it play.

I wouldn't show somebody a bunch of
scenes on a montage if it wasn't playing.

You can't really play well silent,
if it's a montage where you want to...

So I would pick a piece of music,

and you're always exposing yourself to,
"Is your taste good, will they be mad?”

I knew nothing about how Bob Wise
would feel. He was thrilled.

I was doing things that
he couldn't get people in Hollywood to do.

I was doing things that
he couldn't get people in Hollywood to do.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

What are your memories of
the film's costume designer, Ruth Morley?

GROSBARD:
Ruth Morley, I thought did a fine job

and went on to a very illustrious career.

I've worked with her again,

with Arthur Penn on The Miracle Worker.

She had a very solid, excellent career.

All you have to do is look at the movie.

I think the choices of clothes are first-rate.

A very good sense of realistic...
She was very good

in realistic material, realistic stuff.

It's a different talent
than a costume designer

for period stuff, let's say,

or sort of sophisticated costumes.

She had a very good sense

for that kind of script.

You want somebody who can
dress an actor in a way,

not only for the actor to feel comfortable,
which obviously is important,

but where the stuff genuinely
feels like it's been lived in

and doesn't come across as a costume.

I think she did have that talent.

GALBRAITH: Stefan Gierasch.

What are your memories of Ruth Morley?

GIERASCH: Morley was well known

for using real costumes.

She'd go to a thrift store.

Out here, they design them
and they have fittings.

But she did a lot of stuff
that was very documentary, or real.

Everybody would just get used clothes.

The difference between Hollywood

and New York was the reality,

and things we wore
were just what we would wear

and not what looked good.

Not that you can't get a star
to go and look like a schlump,

but I guess you talk with
the director about they want to do.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

You've worked with Paul Newman
a number of times.

You've edited films
that he's appeared in as an actor

and you've also edited films
he's directed.

What are your general impressions
about him, working with him for so long?

ALLEN: Paul was a good actor then,
he's always been a good actor.

He's evolved into one of the great actors
of the film world.

I adore him, he's a wonderful man.
A good man.

A good human being.

Of course, philosophically
we believe in a lot of the same things.

We always did, I presume we still do.

He is an angel to work with.

When I cut Rachel, Rachel,
which was his first big directing job,

he had done a smaller film
on the evils of tobacco or something.

He said to the crew the first day,
"I'm a virgin, so be gentle.”

He's that kind of a man.

He listens and has very strong ideas.

He learns from people.

He became, as far as I'm concerned,
an excellent director.

I loved working with Paul
the few times I had a chance to.

I mean, he's a good friend.

He's someone I really care about. They're
a wonderful family, wonderful people.

GALBRAITH: Could you talk about that
very subtle freeze frame

of Piper Laurie
as she's writing on the mirror?

ALLEN: It was done for the effect of leaving
the scene not knowing what she'd written.

You couldn't see “crippled.”
It wasn't clear until he finds her.

You knew that she'd
had this nightmare situation

with Bert where he'd gotten her drinking
and he'd gotten her in there.

The minute she started writing I think the
audience understood what would happen.

That she was completely defeated,

because he had brought this woman
down to nothing in her own mind.

And had compromised her relationship
with Eddie down below,

where he got angry at her
and told her to go upstairs, and so forth.

If it was a freeze frame,
it was a very deliberate freeze frame

to the next scene which was,
I can't remember what it was.

I don't think it was a long freeze frame.

I remember being frustrated
when I was first working on it,

that I couldn't see what she was writing.

You only see it in a flash
when he finds her.

You see the bottom one is “crippled.”

Twisted something or other,
“twisted crippled.”

GALBRAITH: Could you describe
your approach to editing the scene

where Fast Eddie Felson finds her body?

ALLEN: That was shot very much...
It was edited...

The scene where Eddie Felson
finds Sarah's body...

We've left at the mirror
where you can't see what she'd written,

and we froze frame and went out.

And when he comes in,
they've had a big fight

and he goes out
and decides to walk home instead,

because he's all riled up and angry.

Bert Gordon takes a cab home
and that's when Bert Gordon

does all of the damage.

He goes deliberately in to break her
and he does.

And so when the Newman character
comes in

and there's a strange look
on the doorman, not the doorman,

the desk's face when he comes in
to ask for, I think it was Room 57.

As though, "Don't you know?"
or something,

but it's just very subtly done.

Then you go up and you see it
all from his point of view first.

He walks in, he puts down his things,
and he sees

the money on the bed
that Bert threw her.

Whore money.

He sees it, he's confused,
picks it up and looks,

and you can see through the door
in the distance

that there are people around
So he goes in,

and of course all the cops are there.

He goes in and he sees her
and then there's this very fast shot

where you get a view of his seeing her,
and I think he comes

in on a shot down on his knees,
you never see her face or anything.

I think it was done in,
that shot was done in one

and maybe it was covered in others.
There was never any question

of how it should be used
as far as I was concerned.

That's the way I cut it,
I cut it the way it was shot.

GALBRAITH:
The Hustler has that great last shot,

where each of the characters
walk off-frame one by one.

Could you talk about that particular shot?

ALLEN: Yeah, you mean the end cut.

What's to talk about?
It was the end of the picture

and Rossen had decided to do it
in a big pull-away,

where they just
walk out of the pool hall quietly.

It was a very logical way to end it.

I think it was a great way
to end the picture.

It's after this whole last scene.

The story's over
and you're back to business.

Ames Pool Hall goes back
to its normal way.

All the people who played,
the watching characters

around this whole drama,
throughout the whole picture,

all these Ames Pool Hall regulars,
just go home.

GALBRAITH: Ulu Grosbard.

The Hustler was released in 1961,
that's more than 40 years ago.

How do you think the picture plays today?

GROSBARD: / really was amazed
at how well the movie stood up.

I found myself totally caught up in this.

It didn't let go of me for a second.

It's really a very good movie.

GALBRAITH: Dede Allen.

How do you think the editing of
the picture holds up to today's standard?

ALLEN: / looked at the picture yesterday

and all I could watch
were the performances,

the dialogue, I'd forgotten
how brilliant the dialogue was.

The revelation of characters still grips you
even though the movie was too long,

and there were areas that
could've been cut down

if we'd had more time.

It's the experience of seeing it.
I never look at a cut, per se.

I did look for that dissolve
that I mentioned before,

where we didn't have coverage
on one scene.

I don't remember seeing it yesterday.

It may have been cut differently for video,
I don't know.

Sometimes that's done.

Or maybe something was cut out,
I don't know.

I would have to see the original
to see if that were true.

I didn't notice it yesterday.

I went back to look,
it was a scene when Myron McCormick,

that whole period when he comes in,

and Eddie, in effect,
blasts him out of his life

and tells him,
he doesn't stand by him or anything.

All I saw were the characters
and the scene

and the fact that it thrilled me to look
at it and see how wonderfully it still plays.

I don't look at cuts.

I don't look at cuts.

When I go to other people's pictures,
if I'm looking at the cutting,

then the picture's bad.

If I'm involved in it, I might at the end say:

"Jesus, that was beautifully cut.”

You see something like Gladiator
with those wonderful montages,

and I have great admiration for
that kind of editing, it's wonderful.

I love what Oliver Stone does,
he does wonderful things

with film.

But I don't ever go to his pictures

looking for the cutting.

The way he tells a story,
he usually reaches you

in a certain way, or doesn't
if you don't like the picture.

But if I'm too coconscious
of the way it's being made,

then something is kind of wrong.

I don't particularly go out to see
all of the big Stallone-type pictures,

although Stallone's made
great pictures in his time.

You know what I mean, the big...
"14-year-old boy pictures”, I call them.

The Valley boys,
where they preview, and girls.

I was delighted to have a chance that
you gave me to look at Hustler again,

‘cause I haven't seen it in so long
and I had forgotten.

People don't talk
about The Hustler that much anymore.

There was a period where
you'd talk about it

if you went to school
and you were talking to a film class.

But I hadn't seen it in a long time,

and it was very exciting to see again
how good it was,

and why it was good and to become
involved with the characters again.

These actors, of course,
have proved themselves as great.

Newman is one of the greats,
and obviously George C. Scott.

GALBRAITH: In many respects, The Hustler
seems positively modern in its editing.

Particularly compared to the pictures
that were being made at the same time.

Do you think in terms of editing,
The Hustler was breaking any rules?

ALLEN: /t very well may have.
I wouldn't know, having done it.

I wasn't aware
I was breaking any rules at the time.

I was cutting it the way
I thought it should be cut.

Cinemascope was merely a plastic thing

that you put over your Moviola head
and you saw the full frame.

I got used to it very fast.

You had to get your grease pencil under it
and that took a day to get used to.

Otherwise,
it was like cutting any other film.

I never thought of it in those terms.
I was never careful about:

"I've got to do this because
it's Cinemascope."

I was doing a story.

That was the format
that Fox, at that time, was using.

They had developed it, I think.
Yes, of course they had.

They were using it.

It told a great story.

Mark that one up, too, Bert.

I'll beat him the next game.

GALBRAITH:
The technology of editing has changed

enormously since The Hustler was made.

Have the new tools of editing
helped make you a better editor?

ALLEN: The new tools, of course,
are great if they're used right.

They're also misused a great deal.

Editing has evolved in
a strange way today,

because you work on digital machines.

The first one I ever worked
on was Wonder Boys.

I didn't know the digital.

The picture I cut before
I became an executive

at Warner Brothers,
was the first Addams Family,

and that was still on film.
I always was a two-Moviola editor.

I used to pay for my own second Moviola
in the early days,

because I could work very fast
with little bits and pieces.

I didn't work on reels well.

I used the KEM or the Steinbeck
for viewing things,

and I made a few changes
on it occasionally.

But I was never a flatbed editor.
I was a two-Moviola editor.

So in a way, the Avid was kind of
made for someone like me,

because the principle of it is very similar.

You can get any little piece
that you want,

as long as you know it and memorize it,
and you get it with the push of a button.

Of course, I didn't even know how fo type.

I didn't take typing because
I didn't want to become a secretary.

Those were the days in the '40s when...

Right after the Depression.
I did not want to be a secretary.

I didn't take typing,
which was very stupid,

because it's held me back in some ways.

Certainly, it's held me back
in terms of learning the Avid.

Now I'm on my second picture
on the Avid and enjoying it very much.

It does wonderful things.

But it has changed the way
studios behave toward pictures.

They think because the Avid is there,
that everything can be done faster.

They've forgotten process, a lot of them.

The process is still the same,
thinking time is the same.

It's very easy to be very quick and
glib with a little screen in front of you

with pictures you can manipulate quickly.

That's what I'd been doing for years.

I'd do quick and dirty dupes
and have alternate versions

and things that my director didn't
necessarily ever see but I'd have them,

in case I wanted
to go in a certain direction.

It used to drive my assistants crazy,

because the track had to be
marked up with the numbers

that matched the picture
of my alternates.

So it was kind of made
for someone like me.

I have enjoyed learning it
but there are abuses of it.

A lot of the abuse is people coming in
who don't know anything about film

or process, and thinking because
they can sit there and see it:

"You can cut,
anybody can make a cut anywhere.”

But what happens to
the old dialectics of film?

What happens to the scene before it,
the scene after it, the scene way down?

You should sit and look at your film,
that I learned from Rossen.

You should look
at your picture to see what happens.

Because sometimes
it's not what you think.

Everybody thinks they know
So much about story.

When actors breathe life
into the characters,

and writers have dialogue
that's wonderful,

what you read on the page
is not necessarily

what you see on the screen.

It should be better
than what you're seeing.

But if the dialogue is great dialogue,
as it was there,

and you have good actors doing it,

as we did in Wonder Boys, for instance,
you can...

It's still the same kind of method
and I'm learning to love the Avid.

But it took me a little while,
because I was very late in the game.

How much do I owe you?

$12,000.

The Color of Money was a picture that was
made as a kind of a follow-up on Hustler.

My son, who does most of the
re-recording in New York, at Sound One,

Tom Fleishman, does it
for Scorsese on many of his pictures.

I had trouble hearing
the dialogue in the first scene in the bar,

or wherever it was, with Newman
and it frustrated the hell out of me.

Because I knew that certain scenes,
when Paul has the performance perfectly,

he would not want to do it.

We had a scene on the hill in Hustler,

with Piper Laurie
and him where he's describing what it is,

what's magical about it,
and he wouldn't loop that.

In a way it was very good,
but the work that went into trying

to get that track clear, and Dick Vorisek
was the re-recording mixer,

and he was fantastic.

It just took endless time.

The scene in The Color of Money...

Was that done by Disney?
I don't know, whatever.

You couldn't understand his first dialogue
and that sets me off right away.

It was an interesting picture and I loved
the Tom Cruise character and so forth,

but it wasn't The Hustler.
It wasn't my Hustler.

It was a remake
of The Hustler with a young, hot new star.

And the brilliant Eddie Felson,

who then was the Minnesota Fats
of the situation.

As I said,
my son is Scorsese's re-recording mixer,

and so there's a kind of
an affinity there, to that.

I love everything Scorsese does.

GALBRAITH: What do you find most
striking about the editing of the picture?

ALLEN: / don't remember it, which is good.

ALLEN: / don't remember it, which is good.

You don't remember.

If you notice the editing, unless it's been
written about and becomes a classic,

I think you've failed,
unless you want to know it.

Like in Giant,
going from the extreme long shot,

right into the close up
or the close up into the long shot.

That's a deliberate attention-getter.

If you're noticing the editing and not
following the story and the characters,

I don't care how fancy it may be.

If you're a film historian,
yes, you get into all of those things.

But the audience reaction should be

involved with the characters
and the story.

It shouldn't be, "Oh, that's a good cut.”
If you stop to think it's a good cut...

It's all good and well in the days
with all of the new magnetic

and video tapes,
everybody can go back and study it.

If you study Bonnie and Clyde,

that was considered
one of Hollywood's worst-cut pictures.

I didn't even get a nomination for
that until they started imitating it.

Because, you know, we broke all the rules.

It's evolved in such a different way now.

With MTV cutting,
now everything is so fast

and so jazzy that very often
the story is forgotten.

Very often it works brilliantly.
It's very good.

GALBRAITH:
How did the success of The Hustler

impact your career as an editor?

ALLEN:
Not too much in the very beginning.

The Hustler didn't do much for my career
in the very beginning,

but it was a combination of things.

Obviously, having worked with Bob Wise
is what got me The Hustler.

In New York, there weren't
that many pictures made then.

Until I started working with Arthur Penn,
when I made six films with him.

I'd practically do
the phone book with Arthur!

I wish he were still making films,
he's a fantastic filmmaker.

I don't know that that, in itself...
It gained me respect among actors.

Among editors, with Bob Wise, I'm sure.

My friends in New York,
who were very intellectual...

I was working on Spot Allison,
then doing commercials and industrials,

so they didn't take me very seriously,
my left-wing friends, until Bob Wise.

"Bob Wise is a great editor.
He must've cut it."

Hustler came along,
and there was a little more respect.

But I'd worked for a guy who'd named
57 people, or whatever Rossen did.

There was kind of disrespect.

It took time for
even people who knew me

to gain any respect, because I think
it's a case of your body of work.

I feel that having had to start in sound,

because I couldn't get into pictures
in Hollywood,

was the best thing that happened to me.

Because a lot of my editing style
has to do with hearing and seeing.

In other words,
sound is something I use a great deal

in my timing and everything else.

in my timing and everything else.

My husband always says,
he can see a scene...

If I work with another editor,
he can tell which scene ['ve cut,

and which one [I haven't,
because the rhythm is different,

although I've worked with people
who cut like I do.

A lot of my assistants do.

The Arthur Penn School, when we had
all those great pictures that

developed a lot
of great editors in New York, who

now are big editors in Hollywood.

He didn't care if I put on an extra person

as long as I was in charge.

I was able to give assistants
a chance to cut

and they came up
through the cutting room.

They used to kid
and call it The Arthur Penn School

of Film Editing.

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young.

What are your impressions
of Jackie Gleason's smooth portrayal

of Minnesota Fats?

YOUNG:
Jackie Gleason is very good in the movie.

He almost,

for two hours,
stops being Jackie Gleason.

He actually plays the character.

You have to give some credit
to Rossen for that.

You don't feel the guy going

"And away we go,"
doing The Honeymooners behind that.

You actually do believe
that he is really a quite nasty,

quite beaten,

very complicated man.

Al the end of the movie when

George Scott and Paul Newman
really go at each other

and Newman says,
"We really carved her up.”

Talking about Piper Laurie
who had committed suicide

over the relationship
with both of these men.

Several times in that scene,
he cuts to Gleason,

who is not an active participant
in the scene but who

becomes a participant by virtue
of being the audience to it.

He's unflinching.

You can see it's a very painful
human experience for him.

It's a wonderful piece of acting.

He's very good in it.

GALBRAITH: It seems to me that
The Hustler is very much ahead of its time.

Would you agree with that?

YOUNG: It's very ahead of its time.

I thought it was a very, very frank
and tough look at

the sort of underside
of all of those questions of

being on the hustle, or on the con,

the alcoholism.

Even drug addition,
though that's not directly there.

Even drug addition,
though that's not directly there.

And explores it without

saying we're going to explore alcoholism.

It just gives you Piper Laurie
as a character who is ruining her life

because she's drinking herself to death.

And in a funny way.

I didn't think of it when I was watching it

about whether it's about
alcoholism and all that.

In the very opening scenes,
with the first pool game,

with Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie...

Basically, Paul Newman drinks himself
out of the game.

Just "J. T.S. Brown, no ice, no glass."

When I was a kid and saw that movie,
that's what all the boys did.

We used to go into bars and say,
"J.T.S. Brown, no ice, no glass.”

GALBRAITH: Richard Schickel,

do you think
The Hustler was ahead of its time

and unusually frank for a film from 19617?

SCHICKEL: I think The Hustler is frank-ish

about some kinds of personal issues.

Alcoholism, maybe even suicide.

On the other hand, it was a characteristic
of post-war American movies

to take up those topics,
like in Lost Weekend.

I guess we were heading towards

or maybe we'd been past,
Days of Wine and Roses,

when that came out.

I think that was characteristic of directors
and writers like Bob Rossen.

These were people who were serious
about the movies,

and felt, at the beginnings
of their career,

that movies had evaded
significant issues.

Personal issues, political issues,
social issues.

I think it was part of Bob's drive

to encompass things that had been

just elideq,
passed over by film makers before him.

This was in the late ‘40s and the early ‘50s
where a lot of subjects,

whether it was discrimination,
anti-Semitism, those kinds of topics,

began to appear in movies.

I think Bob was
terribly taken with those possibilities.

He had, after all, made All the King's Men,
which is a great movie.

And had taken up, really,
a very serious political issue, I guess.

Sort of possibilities of native fascism
and all that.

He'd done the boxing picture.

That picture had a lot to say
about American corruption,

especially in fringy sports which is a
precursor to what he does in The Hustler.

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen.

What are your memories
of the film as it first went into release?

ROSSEN: / didn't go to the premiere.

I remember, one of the ways...

I'm told that that picture was

in its final state, left the way it was,

because my father
hired a gentleman, Arthur P. Jacobs,

to be a PR guy on it, after the fact.

Because he was being pressured
by Twentieth to cut,

because the women
wouldn't understand the pool.

And because it was too long, and
they were rushing it into distribution,

because they were trying to support
Cleopatra's efforts.

But Arthur P. Jacobs set up,
it then became a thing to do,

because I was on Broadway
at the time, a little later on,

a midnight showing before the opening,

So that all of the big stars...

It was a big year, Camelot was on,
or who knows what was playing,

but it was a very big year on Broadway.

All of the stars came to
a midnight showing of this new movie.

It was a New York film so they were
interested and knew all the actors.

All of whom, by the way, were brilliant
in my estimation as an actor.

They loved it.

And the word of mouth became massive.

It actually, I'm told,
forced Twentieth to keep their hands off

even if they still didn't understand it.

So that's that story.

As far as what attracted all the actors
to this thing, I'd like to add this,

to a man that I have spoken to,
and a woman, the script.

They didn't even finish reading it
and they said yes.

No actor, and that's a picture filled

with brilliant actors, all of them.

From Murray Hamilton fo...
Everybody in it is wonderful.

But actors are only as good
as their material.

They can never be better.

They can make bad material look okay,
but they can't be better.

And that really is a great testament
to that screenplay.

One of the things my father liked to do,
he didn't always do it,

but one thing he liked to do, he had
a finished shooting script when he started.

That picture was the picture.

He flipped scenes as he was cutting,

but he was not cavalier
about language and character.

And I admire that.

GALBRAITH: Jeff Young.

What impact did The Hustler have
on audiences when it was new?

YOUNG: /t had huge impact.

It was one of the first movies
where you really saw Paul Newman act.

He wasn't just a pretty boy.

He was...
That's a really good performance.

In a way,
it's a non-movie star performance,

because he doesn't back off from
making Fast Eddie an asshole.

When Fast Eddie says,
“No, I'm the best pool player.”

He makes him into the guy
who he really is.

He becomes the character, as opposed
to this is always Paul Newman.

In some ways he does it better in
The Hustler

than the ones he got
more credit for later on.

Like, Absence of Malice,
or The Verdict, where he played a drunk.

That performance in
The Hustler is a really good performance.

When he got his thumbs broken,
we were all, "Did you see that?"

George C. Scott's performance,
another incredibly bold performance.

He never begs for sympathy.

Nor does Piper Laurie.

Those three performances
are really quite amazing.

That movie had a huge impact
on all of the guys

and women, my age at the time.

It has...

Rossen's a very clever guy.

He didn't write the underlying material,
Tevis wrote the novel.

It has all the things about magic.
Here's the magician.

It's about a guy who has this wand,
isn't it?

The whole movie
is about a magician with a wand.

It's interesting, that throughout the movie,
whenever they get angry at Newman,

they break his thumbs, they do whatever.

They never break his cue stick.

They never break the wand.

The magician's gear is left intact.

GALBRAITH: Carol Rossen.

How would you describe
your father on a personal level?

ROSSEN:
My father was a very complex man.

He was, on the one hand, perceived
as being a New York tough guy

who did pictures about sports.

Body and Soul is about power, attitude.

If I had to describe him,
if I had to write him,

physically he was like a cross between
Jimmy Cagney and John Garfield.

Which is very nice. I thought it was fun.

He did come from the street,
but he also came from

a deeply spiritual
and religious background.

And not just the orthodoxy
that we were all Eastern European Jews

who came over to this country
and by rote, religious.

He actually wanted to be
a cantor as a child.

Later on in life,
he never traveled anywhere

without his tallis,
which is his prayer shawl.

I didn't know that until after he had died.

That says a lot to me about the battle.

He was trying to find that balance.

How do you win in America?

What is winning?
Winning is money, power.

In his case, his talent.

And how do you stay straight?

How do you hold on to the ethics?

In his case, they were
very deeply embedded in his being.

That didn't mean that he...
All of the pictures are about that.

That he was personally involved
with writing and directing.

And they also all end up
with almost a I'chaim in the end.

Almost a toast. It isn't, perhaps,
enough just to have the talent.

You do have to have the character
and you will be burned in finding that out.

He was deeply involved in process.

But in the end, you gotta live.

You can't die,
you can't stay in that other place.

The question is whether people want
to give somebody permission to survive.

The question is whether people want
to give somebody permission to survive.

ENGLISH - US - SDH - COMMENTARY