Norman Mailer’s big regret about the worst line reading in movie history
The opening sentence to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Executioner’s Song reads: “Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.” So, you can rest assured that Norman Mailer certainly knew his way around a great line. This makes it all the more incredulous that one of the trailers put out for his film Tough Guys Don’t Dance featured Mailer himself reading the following audience feedback from advanced screenings: ”Stinks”, ”The Devil made this picture”, and finally, ”One of the worst ever, my grandmother could do better”.
The 1987 film came with the synopsis: ”Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car.” It was typical Mailer fodder, a profound study of America’s pitfalls. Alas, also in typical Mailer fashion, it was profoundly pitted with pitfalls itself.
In many ways, this makes it his most defining work. Mailer was a man of intense contradictions, which forever played out in his work. His undoubted intelligence and skill spawned an outsized ego that often precluded the refinement and temperance needed to apply those talents to the best of his ability. The Village Voice co-founder had more than 30 books to his name and a string of films, most of which had been met with enough success, some with colossal reverence, that he was able to pave over any shortcomings and just steadfastly plough on.
The lead character in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, played by Ryan O’Neal, is much the same… until his drinking catches up with him. This leads to a moment where his world implodes. Such was Mailer’s own astronomical ego, he figured that the arrival of an unfortunate impeachment upon it should be met with a Shakespearean whirlwind of dramatic despair. Thus, his direction to O’Neal at this moment was very specific, and the resultant overacting has gone down in history.
”In one scene,” Mailer says in a DVD feature, ”Which I insisted on – everyone else begged me to take the scene out of the movie, and I insisted on it, its in the film as you’ll see – there’s a terrible moment when Ryan receives a letter that just shatters his universe from an old lover. And he’s up high, out on a bluff about eight miles from his town, looking out at the ocean, high up in the sand dunes, and the camera start swirling as if his world is falling apart, and he starts going, ‘Oh man, oh god, oh man, oh god, oh man, oh god.”
”He screams,” Mailer continues. The swirling camera, screeching violin that arises out of nowhere, and O’Neal’s oddly muted yet despairing plea is a hammy mishmash with all the dramatic sincerity of a toddler crying to get their sibling in trouble. However, there is a Lynchian twist to things because it plays out as though everyone involved in filming it was trying to sabotage it in the act. In short, everything is terrible, and nothing seems to pair.
”I wanted the high pitch of it and wouldn’t tone it down,” Mailer earnestly admits. ”They begged me; the sound engineers, the sound men, everybody begged me later to take it down, the editors… but I insisted on it.” But nobody insisted on it more than the unfortunate protagonist, now the figurative thumbnail of bad line readings. So, Mailer met with his wrath when he kept the scene in the finished film against O’Neal’s wishes who lashed out, fearing his aspiring acting career would be hampered forevermore.
Sadly, Mailer disagreed with everyone at the time. ”I think Ryan [O’Neal] unjustifiably, from my point of view, [got angry]. I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I really thought the picture needed it. It was an extraordinary moment in the picture but it’s a disaster. It’s the one disaster in the film, I’d say. So, I think he was furious about that and will never forgive me for that. So, that’s why I didn’t get that mad when he called me a jerk because there was a certain truth to it. I’d been a jerk about that moment in the film.”
