‘Two goats in the Mojave Desert. Have you heard it, Viney?’ Weinberger shook his head.
‘They find a tin of film. One of them nuzzles it until the lid falls off. The film leader loosens around the spool and the goat eats a few frames. The second goat eats some too, and they all pull the film off the reel until they have eaten the whole of it. There is nothing left except the can and the spool. The first goat says,”Wasn’t that great?” and the second goat says,”The book was better.”‘
Stone laughed heartily and Weinberger joined in although he’d heard it before (p.191)
Filmworld
After spies, comedy and war, this is another deliberate new departure, or experiment by Len Deighton – this time into the glitzy glamorous world of movie-making and Hollywood film stars.
Deighton had quite a bit of experience of the movie world and no doubt that’s what gave him the inspiration and much of the material for this book. His hugely successful début, The Ipcress File, was turned into a movie in 1965 and there are plenty of photos of Deighton showing its star, Michael Caine, how to cook. Deighton formed a production company with photographer Brian Duffy to produce the film adaptation of his own comic novel, Only When I Larf (1968), and the same company helped produce the screen version of the hit stage play Oh What A Lovely War, for which Deighton also wrote the screenplay (1969), one of the classic British movies of the 1960s.
Thus Deighton knew what he was writing about when he turned to creating a novel about an English actor caught up in the Hollywood machine. However, there isn’t exactly a shortage of novels about Hollywood, quite a few of which reveal that it’s a cut-throat business full of cynical studio bosses, jaded directors, egotistical stars, gagging starlets, alcoholic writers and so on and so on.
What Deighton did for the spy novel (bring a completely new, wonderfully fresh and irreverent style to it) he doesn’t do for the movie-world novel. Close-Up is well-imagined and well-written but it doesn’t break any moulds. In fact, considering the extravagance, cynicism and obscenity of some of the competition, Close-Up is quite cosy and conservative. It fits very snugly into ‘the mould’.
Characters
Marshall Stone is the main character. He’s in his late 40s, risen from suburban dullness (real name Edward Brummidge) to work his way up the ranks of provincial stage actors, before being spotted and given the lead in the wildly successful Western Last Vaquero (1949) (no, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t sound as if it could have been a classic Western). He manages to keep a foot on the English stage with a decade-defining Hamlet i the 1950s, before making more movies through the 60s and now, in the early 1970s, reaching his 50th birthday, he faces difficult personal and professional choices, which the novel describes and dramatises.
Leo Koolman is the unsmiling head of a Hollywood studio who is over in London partly to fête Stone, to make sure he turns up for the filming of his current project, Stool Pigeon, but mainly to coerce him into signing up for a series of TV dramas, a move Stone is understandably reluctant to agree to.
Jake Weinberger (Viny), former publicity manager who is now Stone’s long-suffering agent and confident, and who is being squeezed by Koolman to bring pressure on Stone to sign the contentious TV deal.
Kagan Bookbinder, the stocky producer of Stone’s breakthrough movie, who appears in numerous subsequent scenes as his career intersects with Stone’s, especially in the climactic scenes where Stone gets talked into starring in an ill-fated independent movie of Bookbinder’s which goes seriously wrong.
Edgar Nicholson, another English actor who appears in the famous breakthrough movie, but whose part is savagely cut to foreground Stone, and whose career never recovers, who appears in verious subsequent scenes as a permanent reminder of the price others paid for Stone’s success.
Suzy Delft is Stone’s illegitimate daughter, now in her early 20s and herself trying to break into the movies. Something odd is going on because since puberty she has had to fend off Stone’s rather more-than-fatherly embraces and outright groping. Is he an incestuous paedophile? Or is Suzy, in fact, not his daughter at all?
Peter Anson was a one-time movie hopeful whose career was shafted and so became a writer. Now he’s been commissioned to write Stone’s biography, so gets to meet him and his family and poke around in his past. Given added piquancy because he is married to Stone’s former wife, Mary.
Slow plot
There are lots of leisurely long scenes between these and a few other characters which allow Deighton to display his knowledge of the finances, deals, technology and psychology of movie-making. The novel is long on leisurely conversations (it’s 345 pages in length) and fairly short on plot.
There’s some technical interest in the way chapters alternate between an omniscient third person narrator and the first-person narrative of Peter Anson as he compiles his biography.
And in the way the time frame leaps around, rooted in a present where Stone is feeling his age, insecure, unhappy filming his latest movie and stressed about the TV deal, but abruptly switching to Stone’s youth in the 1940s, to scenes surrounding the making of his breakthrough Last Vaquero, Anson gets hold of Stone’s first wife’s diary of the late 1940s and 1950s and these are reprinted verbatim.
All this is cleverly handled but there is no tension or forward pull to the narrative. It could have gone on like this for a few hundred more likeable pages. Deighton is always engaging, if never quite believable, company.
I thought the business with a lover of Stone’s in his early days, who Koolman says is blocking his career and needs to be got rid of – I thought it might emerge that she was murdered or something. There’s also a permanent shimmer of uncertainty around whether Suzy Delft is or isn’t the illegitimate daughter Stone claims her to be… And there are unlikely suggestions that Stone’s ex-wife had an affair with Koolman…
But none of these build up to anything: there is no big plot revelation at the end. Instead, in the final pages the book becomes unexpectedly post-modern as the biographer, Anson, confronts a Koolman gloating about finally persuading Stone to do the TV deal – and then, in a slightly surreal way, Anson announces he’s not going to write a factual biography of Stone anyway, he’s going to turn the actor’s story into a fiction – ‘A book of fiction can get closer to the truth than a biography.’ (p.344) whereupon the studio owner enthusiastically joins in, suggesting ideas: how about they call the star actor ‘Marshall Stone’; and how about the scheming mogul is called ‘Koolman’ – ‘Say, that’s not a bad name for me – Koolman: cool man, yes, I like it.’ Thus the fiction closes with the fictional characters creating it and the entire book ends with Anson saying he’s just composed the opening to his novel – and quoting the opening paragraph of this book 🙂
Clever though this kind of ending is, it doesn’t add to or undermine the preceding fiction, which we have engaged with too much (or to little) to be swayed by a final throwaway device. I already knew Koolman and Stone were fictions. They’re in a novel. Having the novel say they are fictions doesn’t alter my experience of the text in the slightest.
The risks of writing a Hollywood novel
Writing a Hollywood novel is a high-risk undertaking from the start for at least three reasons: 1) fictitious movie star names and movie titles always seem silly 2) it quickly dates 3) you can’t out-gross the gross things we already know.
1. There is a very big, costly publicity machine working all the time to make sure everyone in the world knows what the new movies are, who the top actors are, who’s making what with whom, and all the gossip and scandals of their private lives. The advent of the internet hasn’t exactly damped down celebrity culture. The reverse, it’s become an all-consuming, hyperactive machine and goes at an incredible pace. Everything in it dates so fast, product moves to DVD and then box set in months and we have moved onto the next thing, it’s impossible to avoid the daily diet of ads or news snippets, reviews on TV, radio, in newspapers and magazines, especially the annual broo-haha about the Oscars. Hundreds of millions of consumers pride themselves with being bang up to date about the movies.
Thus we are all sensitised to the names of the actors and actresses and hit movies of our time – George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Liam Neeson – without trying, I feel I know all about them. They are, in fact, very ordinary names (George) but attached to people of extraordinary skill and amazing charisma who, through their talents (and good looks) and the efforts of a multi-billion dollar multinational industry, have become household words or brands. Name recognition is immediate and total, the mind is flooded with images and emotions evoked by their roles like the palate is by the taste of chocolate.
No work of fiction can compete with that depth of aura. Marshall Stone, Valentine Somerset, Suzie Delft – heard of them? They are the made-up names of the ‘hugely famous’ movie stars in this novel. Except they are not remotely famous. And so their names fall flat. When le Carre invents the spy George Smiley or Forsyth invents Inspector Lefebre, their names barely matter, they are ‘ordinary’ people we would never have heard of. Their character emerges from their actions in the narrative. But the movie novel must persuade us that the whole world knows Marshall Stone, he is mobbed wherever he goes, everyone’s seen his movies, as the premise of the story, for it to make sense. But we haven’t heard of him and we don’t really care what happens to him.
Creating names for fictional movie stars is uniquely difficult because we know to within a millimetre all the names of current and previous generations of stars, as well as having warm feelings for e.g. Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen. To insert ‘Marshall Stone’ in among such names in the narrative is like a bad special effect, is like the appearance of Zelig with famous people in the Woody Allen movie of the same name, or the scenes where Forrest Gump meets famous people – instead of weaving his characters into a seamless fiction, namedropping real movie stars only highlights the empty, connotation-free, arbitrary quality of the fiction.
2. And nothing dates quicker than this topical knowledge. The text references recent industry-changing hits like The Sound of Music (1965), Easy Rider (1969) and Love Story (1970), suggests that Tom Jones or Andy Williams sing the title song of the new movie, Laurence Olivier is namechecked as the actor Stone most resembles and Stone’s 20-something daughter is mistaken for Nancy Sinatra, or is it Jane Fonda? It all seems such a long, long time ago.
3. Out-grossing the gross. Part of the appeal of the Hollywood movie is its ‘thrilling revelations’ about the scandalous behaviour of the stars and bureaucrats – look they take drugs, wow they screw starlets, God the studio boss is a cynical Machiavelli! But this is hardly news. The 1959 classic Hotel Babylon set a new low in its scurrilous stories of movieland’s cynicism, corruption and criminality. Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls didn’t pull its punches about the sex and drugs world of 1940s and 50s Hollywood.
By contrast, the way Deighton’s studio head is a calculating manipulator who sometimes loses his temper, or the main character a 50-something male actor who’s a bit selfish and egotistical, seem very pale revelations indeed. It seems that the girl he was having an affair with in the early days died having a backstreet abortion and Stone paid for a fake story about her dying in a car crash to appear in the newspapers. That seems to be the most scandalous event in the book.
Deighton is too nice, too decent to give real bite to his satire, let alone convey real fear at Stone’s plight. And although Stone appears to have been cunningly stitched up by Koolman in the end, what does that amount to? He has to make a Dirty Harry-style movie and then ten episodes of the TV spin-off for a vast fee. Oh what a terrible fate.
This is an amiable 350-page read, with lots of the usual pleasures of a Deighton novel e.g. the crisp sentences, the understated humour and the interesting factual stretches packed with knowledge about cameras and lighting and directing and editing, and with topical conversations which are now quite interesting social history, where characters worry about TV killing off cinemas or the impact of the newfangled technology of tape cassettes on the movie business… but it isn’t the Deighton novel you’d recommend to newbies.
Books & Boots 