If David Milch had his druthers, he probably wouldn't be strapped into
a twin-prop plane at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, his aching back
braced with a pillow as the aircraft scythes through the Central
Valley haze.
Milch, after all, has plenty of other claims on his time: projects to
plan, Emmy Award-winning TV scripts to churn out.
Then there's that racehorse he's hoping to sell by sunset, one of
several that he has acquired — the spoils of Hollywood success for
his work on groundbreaking serials like "Hill Street Blues,"
"NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," the ornery noir
Western that Milch developed and scripted for HBO.
But Milch, a legendary talker, has been lured by the prospect of a
conversation that promises to touch on themes familiar from his own
work: larger-than-life masculine figures; the uses and abuses of
power; and the poetic vitality of language.
Especially since one of the men in question is his mentor, the late
poet and author Robert Penn Warren, and another is Sean Penn, who, in
one of the fall's most anticipated films, plays a giant pulled from
Warren's 1946 novel, "All the King's Men." Penn's character,
Willie Stark, is a relentlessly driven, radical-populist Deep South
politician bearing more than a passing resemblance to the real-life
firebrand Huey P. Long, who served Louisiana as governor and U.S.
senator from 1928 until his assassination in 1935.
At the invitation of The Times, the two men have agreed to meet at
Penn's Marin County home to talk about the book and the film, and see
where the words take them.
"I'm doing this as an homage to Mr. Warren," Milch said as
he scrambled aboard the private plane he chartered at Van Nuys
Airport.
When he and Warren first crossed paths four decades ago, Warren was a
Yale professor and literary idol, best known for "All the King's
Men," which won him the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (He won
two others for poetry collections.)
Milch at the time was a prodigiously gifted but troubled young
undergrad at Yale. "I was doing a lot of pharmacological
research," he says, using the jocular idiom he favors when
discussing his life's darker chapters, particularly his years-long
addiction to heroin and alcohol. Eventually, Warren became Milch's
exemplar and enlisted him to help edit his poems in manuscript.
The new film boasts a prestigious transatlantic cast that includes
Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini and Mark
Ruffalo. And it plunges into Warren's ever-timely themes: the thin
line between leadership and demagoguery; the quest for moral clarity
when you're up to your hip boots in an ethical swamp; and the uneasy
relationship between our vulnerable private selves and our more
blustery and stylized public personae.
This version of the novel, which Warren originally wrote as a play,
arrives in theaters Sept. 22, more than half a century after a 1949
movie treatment directed by Robert Rossen, which won the best picture
Oscar as well as acting awards for Broderick Crawford and Mercedes
McCambridge.
But Willie Stark is as reverberant a figure as ever, a man of the
people and monumentally flawed hero who taps his inner preacher to
inflame and enlighten the masses. Perhaps the same can be said of any
successful artist, writer or teacher, roles in which Penn, 46, and
Milch, 61, have variously excelled.
Poised on the Van Nuys runway, the meeting's premise hopefully would
take flight.
RISE OF A POPULIST
No one who journeys far with Milch will lament the absence of an
in-flight movie. He can riff for hours on practically any subject,
embroidering baroque intellectual formulations with raw-meat
expletives, much like "Deadwood's" irresistibly repellent
protagonist Al Swearengen.
Initially, the conversation turns toward chitchat. But soon Milch
steers into an extended commentary that ends up linking the grimly
Darwinian world of "Deadwood," set in an 1870s Dakota
Territory mining town, with the world of "All the King's
Men." Warren's novel, much of it set during the 1930s, exposes a
shabby-genteel patrician class that's sinking into its own corruption,
while populists like Willie Stark wrestle the good ol' boy politicians
and oilmen who run the state. In some ways, it's a latter-day,
cracked-mirror image of "Deadwood."
Such societies create opportunities for opportunistic,
self-mythologizing men like Swearengen and Stark.
Milch's one-man skull session is still going strong when the plane
descends into the parched hills surrounding Novato air field, north of
San Francisco. Within seconds a driver materializes and whisks the
visitors off to Penn's Spanish-style home.
Penn has been working in an upstairs room with his longtime editor,
reviewing dailies from "Into the Wild," which Penn is
directing and shooting in Alaska. Based on Jon Krakauer's bestseller,
the movie depicts the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who
renounced his material possessions and met his ill-starred fate on an
Alaskan odyssey.
Penn looks a bit frazzled but perks up after lighting a cigarette.
"You guys want some food?" he asks.
A few minutes later, at a local Cuban-Mexican restaurant, the
conversation returns to Warren's masterpiece.
Milch tells Penn that he was struck by an early scene in the movie in
which Stark, speaking at a county fair, drops his stilted delivery and
finds his true voice: folksy, filled with righteous indignation and
utterly riveting to the crowd that has gathered around him.
Penn's body language, as well as his voice, shows how Willie is
flexing his rhetorical muscles, getting ready to give hell to the fat
cats who thought they could twist him to their own ends. The film
contains several memorable scenes of Stark raining down fire and
brimstone on the political powers that be: "Listen here, if you
don't vote, you don't matter! And then you're just as ignorant as them
in the city say you are!"
"It's a great speech, but there's something else that's going
on," Milch says. "You know what it reminded me of? It
reminded me of a scene in '2001' where the monkey figures out how to
use the tool, and he throws it up in the air, like, 'What have I just
discovered?' And that was in your eyes."
"Well," Penn says, "that's a great image. I wish I'd
had that."
Everyone orders drinks and burrito/taco plates they won't finish. Then
Milch pulls out a key prop: a collection of some of "Mr. Warren's
poetry."
Milch asks if he can read aloud one poem, "I Am Dreaming of a
White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision," a densely
layered, impressionistic work in which Warren ruminates on how the
pain and trauma of childhood can be transformed into the hard-won
insights and attainments of adulthood. Penn listens intently as Milch
softly recites the verses, concluding with these stanzas:
"...all things are continuous, / And are parts of the original
dream which / I am now trying to discover the logic of. This / Is the
process whereby pain of the past in its pastness / May be converted
into the future tense / Of joy."
"That was a theme for Mr. Warren his whole life, in his
work," Milch says, snapping the volume shut. "And the most
naked presentation of it, trying to find the organizing principle for
the gift that Willie Stark had." The poem's final lines, Milch
says, have become a kind of artistic mantra for him, as they were for
Warren.
ROOTED IN THE BAYOU
Penn's ability to convey Starks' charisma surely will be one of the
keys to whether the movie finds a large, receptive audience. One
memorable montage in the film shows Stark running for office,
exhorting small clusters of farmers and men seated in boats on the
bayou with his preacherly cadences, while promising to build roads,
schools and bridges.
Later, as governor, shouting and gesticulating before the floodlit
state capital, Stark electrifies the crowds with oratory that
sometimes calls to mind Billy Graham, other times George Wallace or
Benito Mussolini. The film also includes a scene of Stark in a music
studio recording Huey Long's signature tune "Every Man a
King," demonstrating his mastery of radio and mass media, the new
powers in mid-century American politics.
The movie has a strong sense of place and a feel for the lyricism and
smart-alecky wisdom of Warren's prose, mainly as conveyed through the
voice-overs of Jack Burden (Jude Law), the newspaper reporter who is
drawn into Stark's magnetic field and narrates the novel. It is Burden
who chronicles Stark's tragic passage from idealistic political
crusader to corrupt bully, while waging his own emotional and ethical
battle with his family's turbulent past.
When the film finished shooting in Louisiana last year, Penn didn't
know that a few months later he'd be back helping to rescue Katrina
victims by diving into the toxic waters of New Orleans. He plans to
return sometime soon to the bayou state for a screening of the film.
Penn says that he and director Steve Zaillian, who wrote the adapted
screenplay, talked a lot about the importance of a leader's ability to
sense what a group of people wants, then making them feel that he can
deliver the goods.
"There were times where I'd try to kind of experiment with that
on the movie, where I'd go on with the speech beyond what the thing
was and sometimes contemporize some of the politics," Penn says.
He really got to put his rhetorical powers to the test while
practicing with what he calls "a festival of Louisiana
voters." "I always thought in movies that people don't
always know when they're being lied to, but they always know when
they're being told the truth," Penn says. "And so they start
off with, you know, 'Here's some actor from Hollywood, we know his
politics,' or whatever else they're feeling. You put it [the speech]
in a context that's personal and, man, they'll fly with it! And when
you have writing like Warren's, or Steve's, it didn't take me a lot of
time to find what I was going after."
Penn compares the way Stark channels the voters' desire and energy to
following in the draft of a big freight train. "You get on the
track behind it and you can kind of cruise." When a politician
has that gift of making each individual voter feel personally
connected to the leader or the cause, Penn suggests, it can render
actual politics — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative
— almost irrelevant.
"The really great leaders always had that, and it's way beyond
politicians," Milch chimes in. "Muhammad Ali had that
capacity. In between rounds in Zaire he's conducting the crowd: 'Ali,
Ali!' He was drawing strength. Hitler had it. Michael Jordan had
it."
So too Milch says, does Bill Clinton — though, he adds, he's no fan
of the man. (As it happens, Clinton's former campaign strategist,
James Carville, a.k.a. the "Ragin' Cajun," is an executive
producer of the new film.)
But when the leader can't move his followers beyond that gut-level
connection, calamity may ensue, as it does for Stark.
Penn considers this. "A friend of mine wrote a poem," he
says, "that ends, 'Though we all know deep down in our heart /
That one day this will all fall apart, / For right now, let's just be
heroes.' "
In the bayou country of "King's Men," the old order ruled by
elitists is breaking down and being replaced with a new order that is
rougher, cruder and, just maybe, more democratic. In recent years
there's been talk of a New Populism transforming American politics and
culture in similar ways.
"Yeah," Penn says, laughing, "I can't tell who's won
that one right now! The roughneck or the frayed-around-the-edges
version of the sophisticate. The elite's still the elite."
Milch pounces again.
"But the elite learned the lesson with Andrew Jackson, which is,
you've gotta 'country' it up," he says. "But always remember
George [W.] Bush went to Andover. And that's not cynicism, that's not
anybody saying to him, 'This is what you've got to do.' "
Milch would know something about that:
Bush was his Yale fraternity brother in Delta Kappa Epsilon.
However much American politics have changed since Huey Long's heyday,
"populism isn't going to go away," Penn says, ticking off
the names of Jesse Ventura and H. Ross Perot. But, he adds,
globalization is changing the power structure, along with the model,
of leadership.
"If somebody's going to get anywhere, they've got to be able to
talk to the world," Penn says. "So it's a new kind of
populism. Bono has more power than any of 'em," he says of the
activist and singer of the rock band U2.
As lunch draws to a close, Milch brings the dialogue full circle, back
to the haunting imagery of the poem he read aloud. Stark's tragedy,
Milch says, was that he finally could not find "the logic of the
dream," could not fully "articulate" his great gift.
"And so there was a fallen man," Milch says, "the way
you see an animal trapped in, like, a tar pit or something; they keep
trying to get up the wall."
"That's the best I've ever heard it," Penn responds.
"That makes a lot of sense."
