Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking was the name of the autobiography of Daryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck was the last of the old-time cigar-chomping chorus girl dating, rageful studio heads in the 40.50s, and into the 60s. You know, the kind that heads off to Africa with John Huston to make a movie and most of the budget gets spent on drinking and hunting elephants. The kind who loans $100,000 to a pleading Orson Welles, who needs the money to shoot one last scene of his coming epice, then, after the lunch meeting in NY, Zanuck flies to Monte Carlo, where he finds Welles already at the baccarat table, trying to turn the loan into some real money. He gives Orson a cigar. The kind who marries the attractive but untalented French nighclub singer, guitar player, faux-beatnik Juliette Greco, and makes her the star of several flop films.
I read it when I took my first film class -- at Mass College of Art, where we were looking at things like Michael Snow's 30 minute movie, which consists entirely of a camera tracking ever closer to a wall on the opposite side of the room. Gripping. And so much to talk about.
The teacher, who I remember chiefly for his pronounciation of the French word as "denooment", told me I must be reading Zanuck to torture him. I wasn't.
I could see both sides, and didn't see the difference so much. Both ends of the spectrum were about having fun, and going (as it says in the Dylan/Sam Shepard song) "all the way, til the wheels fall off and burn... til the seat covers fade and the water mocassin dies") So here I am, derivitive, and still going in all direcions at once. There are worse things. Yes?
