Tod Lippy: I understand that various members of your family were involved in the arts. 

Carole Eastman: Not the arts. Movies. My father was once a grip at Warner Broth­ers, his brother was a camera operator, and among various uncles and in-laws there was an assistant director, a director and a D.P., I think. I’m sure none of them would’ve referred to them­selves as “artists,” and those in the entertainment world who do make me want to reach for my beanie. Apropos, Jean Renoir, in response to whether film was an art or not, said, “What does it matter?” Then speaking of his father, added, “[He] never spoke to me about art. He couldn’t bear the word.” My kind of guy.

Did you know at an early age that you wanted to enter the field as well?

Actually, I had other plans. Maybe the fact that I ultimately did is because I was born where I was, and if where it was had been a jute farm, I might be weaving strands of burlap with a dust mask on my nose. But whatever I may have charted or chosen, the outcome feels like a series of accidentals, a not always fortuitous and seldom skillful pinball effect, combined with “necessities’ irrevocable laws.” And not too off the point, after you forfeit your baby billing and are not all that cute and de­fenseless, you’ve got to find something to do to be housed and fed. And if you discover you’ve one or two things to wag or wibble or wave at the world, you just want to do that as well as the limits of your gift allow.

When did you begin to write? When you were young, or was it later?

Later. But the truth is, I always wanted to “make” things, and did. Even trouble, if I ran out of paint.

I know that you began your career as a dancer. You then went on to study acting with a rather extraordinary group of people. Could you talk about that a bit?

If it wasn’t for liking both you and Jeffrey [Altshuler; Scenario’s managing director] and not wanting to say “no” to you, I’d have preferred to pass on being interviewed. Here and there, my reluctance might cause me to draw a convenient blank, but this is a genuine one. l’m afraid that whoever these extraordinary people you refer to are, it might take all the air out of my lungs to whiff some life into them. I’m not undervaluing anybody I might have known then, but I don’t know, other than Jack, who you mean.

My source for that was from a biography of Nicholson that said you, Nicholson, Robert Towne, and several other people were involved in an acting class at the Players’ Ring Theater.

It was in Jeff Corey’s class that I met Jack...

Yes, Jeff Corey.

But I met Robert somewhere else, I think, and spent less time in his company than I would have liked…

Your first film credit, to my knowledge, was for The Shoot­ing, with Nicholson as both actor and producer; and with the involvement of the people at BBS. How did that come about?

If BBS was ever involved, the news is very slow in reaching me. Jack and Monte Hellman were to make two Westerns for Roger Corman. Jack was to write one and I, the other. I was very pleased to be asked. And that was by Monte.
   By way of anecdote, I didn’t know then that Jack thrives on a certain amount of distraction when he writes, and as one who reaches for her six-shooter if she hears a pin drop on the next block, it wasn’t the most auspicious of circumstances that we started, at his suggestion, to work in the same room.
   We sat at separate desks in a small office on the second floor of the Writers’ Building in Beverly Hills. And while I blindly groped through the “arduous empty quarters” for something to put on paper, he planted his tree-stump legs on the floor and, looking like a seated colossus, flourished his pen over unlined pages, writing six- and seven-page scenes while he whistled annoying tunes that tended to obliterate whatever fragile con­centration I had. Occasionally, he’d look over to see me frown­ing and pulling the skin off my lips, and ask: “What’s wrong, Speed?” Not wanting to hurt his feelings or interfere with what seemed to him a delightfully creative and chummy atmosphere, or dampen the spirits of a man who seemed as happy going about his work as if he was painting the side of his house on a nice spring day, I didn’t let on that his tunes were kicking the excreta out of a muse I’d barely met and would like to get to know better. So I said, “Nothing’s wrong, I’m just thinking,” and he said, “Okay, then let me read you what I’ve written.” And after he had, he’d ask, “What do you think?,” and I’d say, “Great,” and he’d go back to writing again. After several repeti­tions of this, he had a stack of written pages on his desk and I had nothing to show for the morning but a series of red polka dots on a Kleenex from the blood on my nether lip. As I recall, the following day I stayed at home, worked alone, and was replaced, I think, by a portable stereo.

The feel of The Shooting is very European. What films might have served as your models or influenced you?

Roy Rogers Nous Appartient, or Fort Marienbad, or maybe Last Year at Gene Autry’s. It’s so long ago, I can’t really remember how much might have come from roisterous Saturday after­noons at the Hitching Post Theater, or much later, from those French, Italian and Japanese importations that awakened an almost religious awe and fervor in oneself. I mean, movies are very strong juju, and there are dozens or more that I’ve loved beyond all telling, from Rules of the Game to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, but there are as well things seen, felt, read, imag­ined and dreamt. And out of such an olla-podrida, how do you really trace an influence?

Why have you chosen to use Adrien Joyce as a pseudonym?

I don’t use it anymore, but if the Guild didn’t limit the writer to two pseudonyms, I’d have taken a different one each time out. Beneath the ostensible reasons I had, I think it was just plain fear—assuming a kind of operating cover or anonymity in an unsuccessful attempt to elude some of the horrors of adult life, where the urge to imaginative “play,” which has its roots in childhood, is quite often subject to public maulings. No matter how long in the tooth you get, a certain dispiritedness enters into the playing when called to account for the quality of it by clumsy thumbs and scales from one to ten. I’m a little tougher now, a bit patchier, and though praise still feels better than blame, both carry the dangers of having that part of oneself start to play for effect, for asses on seats, for anyone’s smile, or, to quote Edwin Muir, “for victory/and not to make each other glad.”

Could you tell me a little bit about another film you wrote, Puzzle of a Downfall Child?

Very little. Except that I loved working with [director] Jerry Schatzberg and would again, happily. But my vanity moves me to disassociate myself from the title. Somebody else authored it and to this day it makes me wince. Your question also offers the opportunity to say that he and I are both blameless for the abominable narration the studio grafted onto the beginning. Such things as that just make you want to drop off your twig for good.

How did you become involved with Five Easy Pieces?

Robert [Rafelson, the director] had been working with another writer, or writers, on something for Jack. I don’t know the reason he discontinued with whatever it was, but he asked to meet with me about it. I think, maybe, to rework what he had. I declined. And kept declining through an endless series of exhausting meetings in which no common ground of story interest was ever established. At least for me. Finally, I said, “It’s perfectly all right that we have no creative affinities, so let’s not have any more meetings.” But as I made a move to go, he said something like, “Wait. I don’t care what you write. Make up anything you want to, but just say you’ll do it.” And I said, “Well, that’s a different story altogether. Let me go off and think about it.” He detained me again with, “No, wait. I just want to say one thing. I want Jack to be a concert pianist.” I wasn’t sure if he was being whimsical or that he’d suddenly dredged this notion up from the deepest wellsprings of his being, but I was definitely intrigued, especially with the incongruity of it. So with images (that as the story eventually developed, were never to come to pass) of a Rubensteinian fright wig on the head of this original Neptunian from New Jersey, l started to leave again, and as I got to the door; Robert said, “And give me a moment where he’s playing the piano with his hair blowing in the breeze, like Cornel Wilde in A Song to Remember.” I’m not sure there’s any such scene, but I took it as a challenge. Hence Jack on the back of the truck in a freeway jam, playing Chopin.

How many drafts were there before the shooting script, and how long did it take you to write the first draft?

One draft, in seven or eight weeks. Then some changes, a scene cut made by Robert, which I suppose you could say made it a second draft. And all of it, for some kind of scheduling pressures, very rushed.

Which draft is published here?

The one I just referred to, with one or two scenes that became orphaned along the way, and with some sequential adjustments to the final filmed version.

I’ve read there were some discrepancies between your screenplay and the filmed version. What were those?

A different beginning, for one. Robert preferred the transition from hardhat to classical pianist, I suppose as an element of surprise revelation. I liked it the other way around. I wanted to see him from the egg, with some hint, and that’s all it is, of why he gets no further than Five Easy Pieces. And his placement in the family, being born at the end of the line, with exemplar sib­lings he can never catch up to, and indentured to patriarchal expectations which serve mainly to impoverish him, has some­thing to do with that, and with his black sheepery.

Theres also a different ending, isn’t there, from what you originally wrote? How do you feel about the film’s ending?

Robert didn’t like what I’d written and I was intractable about changing it at first. But I think he was right. It’s ultimately bet­ter than having him die, as he did in my original ending, and better than shooting him, with a hidden camera, selling ties in a Seattle haberdashery, which is what the associate producer, Richard Wechsler, told me Robert intended to do. So between the bad ideas we each had, this was the better choice.

I’m curious to know how you came up with the character of Bobby. He’s certainly one of the most enigmatic and com­plex characters in American film. Where in your experience did he come from?

Well, “complex” is your word. I hope it’s so.

I’ve read various accounts that he was at least partly based on Nicholson. Is that true?

I knew at the outset that I was writing something for Jack. I’d known him for years, loved him dearly and still do, and his influence is, as is anything you’ve let into your bloodstream, definitely there. He’s a glorious and extraordinary actor. Along with Chaplin, probably one of the most generous in American films. Ever. Jeanne Moreau once said to me that he has the courage of an actress, which I understood to mean, his willing­ness to risk the kind of emotional exposures most actors won’t. (If there be any doubts, witness the scene with Rita Moreno in Carnal Knowledge.) But, despite the fact that he’s a presence in my heart and mind, both radiant and sometimes aggravating in its pervasiveness, and that life would be less without him, there was nothing biographically based on him. We never spoke about the character or the story, and in fact, to this day, I don’t even know if the bum liked the script, and as much as I might have wanted to, I never tin-cupped him for a response.

I read, too, that the character bore some relationship to your brother.

Yes, there was a period of time when he disappeared for several years and a detective was hired to try and find him. My brother’s no longer alive, but from as early as I can remember he seemed to be off dwelling in the distance of some more appropriate dream. Some place he preferred to be or felt more welcome in, and though Bobby Dupea isn’t a portrait of my brother, there is this similar drift into oblivion and anonymity.

Several accounts I came across assert that the roadside diner scene originated out of a bad experience Nicholson had with a waitress at Pupi’s on the Sunset Strip. Is that accurate? And if so, could you describe how that came to be transformed into the “hold the chicken” scene?

I’ve never been involved with a movie, before or since, that has accumulated so much misinformation and mythologizing. Though l was influenced by witnessing a particular outburst of temper from Jack, it wasn’t something that took place at Pupi’s. In answer to the second question, Robert had initially shown me an incomplete draft of something that he and the “writer or writers” I mentioned before had written. And though, as I said, it wasn’t something I wanted to work on, or rewrite, I did eventu­ally appropriate two things from it: a man returning home after an absence, and a stop at a roadside cafe on the way, where he did have a mild contretemps with a waitress. Very mild. It wasn’t Bobby Dupea, there was no Rayette DiPesto, no Palm and Terry, it didn’t conclude with the character “clearing the table,” and yet I’ve heard many times since that the now thrice-mentioned “writer or writers” claim to have written this scene.

Did you have any inkling it would lake such a prominent place in American moviegoers’ collective memory?

No. And maybe the subtler “playing” that I imagined wouldn’t have been so heartily clasped to the national bosom, but l never meant either the waitress or later, the Samia Glavia character; to be dripping venom from their eye teeth.

You know, that’s funny, because I’ve always felt sorry for that waitress.

You should. So do I. And so does Studs Terkel.

So it’s the interpretation that you don’t like?

The heavy-handedness, yes. I didn’t intend to incite the audi­ence to rise up against waitresses, or intellectuals. Also, I might mention that Carl wasn’t written to be the imbecilic dizzard he seems to be at the dinner table, when he loses his train of thought to ask, “Catherine, what was I saying?” His injury is to his neck, not his brain, and whether it’s an actor’s ad lib or a directorial request, it’s very displeasing...

Speaking of “interpretations,” I read Pauline Kael’s review of the film. It was sort of impressionistic, and I wonder if what she said had anything to do with your intentions.

I don’t know, I’ve never read it.

She said it described “as if for the first time the nature of the familiar American man who feels he has to keep running because the only good is momentum.” Does that sound like it’s hitting the mark of what you were thinking?

No. And if I really was writing some kind of “generic” man, she’d probably have been more likely to kick me in my funda­ments for it. And as to intentions or trying to impart anything to the world, the plain fact is, I don’t always know what I’m doing other than feeling my way as l go. I mean, writing is sometimes like going around poking at lifeless things to see if they move. At least for me. Other times, it’s like digging to China, while simul­taneously trying to reduce in oneself the sense of any enormous undertaking or burdensome obligation of really having to get there. It’s very hard work, but sometimes worth the worms and other fetching things found on the way.... But because I don’t always have an ordered way of looking at things, and have to create a chaos first, a kind of omnium gatherum of things, like fallen petals and saliva and dead musicians playing a somber waltz, that it’s my task to find some thread of kinship for, I can’t always say what my intentions were, except here and there, and very superficially. And that’s why we’re going to have a relatively short interview, which you’ve been kind enough to agree to.

The motion picture credits say story by “Adrien Joyce and Bob Rafelson.” Who exactly contributed what to the original storyline?

Next question.

My impression was that you were heavily involved in the production of the film. Were you?

Nope.

How do you account for the fairly detailed representation of oil drilling in the script?

Well, I had some familiarity with it because my father ran a company that serviced oil wells, and then I did a little research as well.

Apropos of that, Bobby continually refers to Rayette as “hand” in your script, a term of endearment I assume has some relationship to his work in the oil field. Why was that cut out of the film?

I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. Jack or Robert. Along with it being a term of endearment that toolpushers use, it refers to an absolutely essential implement for a musician and is some­thing which Rayette, for all her devotion, can never really sub­stitute for. Anyway, however slight its meaning, I think it’s a little rude, or at least careless, to have omitted it.

Music plays an essential role in this film. The Tammy Wynette songs, and later, the classical music that’s a part of Bobby’s early life. Did you have a background in music?

I had piano lessons when I was very young, and again, with much greater interest, when I was an adult. But my earliest remembrance of music is that my mother always tuned the radio in to the New York Philharmonic broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. The feelings it aroused in me were so oceanic, so beyond what I was capable of containing at that time, that it would cause me to cry and I’d beseech her to turn it off. Which she never did. It was all right if it was Mozart or Haydn, but I’d have to seek safety from the cataclysmic emotions of Beethoven or Brahms or Mahler by leaving the house for some far corner of the backyard. Also, my stepfather was Russian and had a fierce passion for music. He’d play old recordings of Fëdor Chaliapin, whose basso profundo sonorities would vibrate against your chest plate, creating radiant waves of sound that made your entire body an organ of listening. And there were other in­fluences, but it would take too long in the telling, as well as would my initial acquaintance with country-and-western music. But I wrote the Tammy Wynette songs into the movie from the beginning and they were in peril of being replaced by BBS, who I believe hired Carole King and Gerry Goffin to do the music. I don’t know what changed their minds, but I’m grateful some­thing did.

Ultimately, how do you feel about the film? Do you like it?

I think, like most screenwriters, I have a “mixed and malarial” response. So, yes and no, some things and not others. But Robert certainly did some very graceful things and, all in all, I’ve come to like it more than I did initially. And I’ve always greatly enjoyed Helena’s [Kallianiotes, the actress who played Palm] aria on crap, filth and stink.

Did you write that part for her?

Yes.

Can you tell me a little about The Fortune?

It was something I wrote, loosely based on a crime that took place in Los Angeles in the ’30s. It was the tale of two low-mind­ed, bumptious inepti trying to murder a woman who is immune to death. Though Jack and Warren [Beatty], the Bull of Mulhol­land and the Lion of the Loin, with their dimpled smiles and perfect rows of fighting canines, were very entertaining to watch, they weren’t really meant to be Ollie and Stan. I’d intended a straighter rendering of their characters and much less reaching after laughs.

What was your role during production?

My opinions were solicited and I was flattered by the pretense of being listened to. But ultimately, it had no effect on anything at all.

What projects are you involved in now?

Well, I recently finished writing something for Scott Rudin and Paramount. It’s a remake of a film made in the ’40s by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger called I Know Where l’m Going. It’s a movie that both Scott and I have a lot of affection for, that originally starred Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey and that takes place in the Western Isles of Scotland.

And what kinds of things are you interested in doing in the future?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe something based on the revelations of the Great Mystic Jew, Lifeless Levi...

Really, I don’t think I’ve heard of him…

Neither have I, really.

Lifeless Levi, I like that.

Thank you, Tod, that’s very encouraging. Also, if I could find the Riot Grrrls who originated this subvert pair in their ’zines, I’d love to do the life and times of “Wonder Wench and her side­kick, Turbo Slut.”

My impression from what l’ve read is that you pretty much gave up screenwriting from about 1975 to 1985. If that’s true, what were your reasons for doing so? 

I don’t know if the dates you mention are correct or that the hia­tus was that long, but you do take some bungs and bruises in the field and I’d say I definitely had a few hematomas of the spirit somewhere around that period.

Why did you return to writing films?

Because I had to support myself and the livestock. Because the desire to play with the facts and imaginals of the world returned. Because there are poets, such as Wallace Stevens, to console, inspire and remind one that “The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,/The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos.”

(This interview consists of a taped conversation with Carole Eastman in Beverly Hills combined with Eastman’s written responses to a series of questions written by Tod Lippy.)