Bud Cort was in Austin recently to present a mini-festival of his films at the world-renowned Alamo Drafthouse, including one of the oddest entries on the Robert Altman filmography, Brewster McCloud, and the one movie pretty much everyone knows him from, Harold and Maude. The usual procedure with this sort of personal appearance is to do a few interviews with the local press in advance, so they can get into print in time to publicize the event. For example, this piece in the Austin Chronicle, in which Cort attributes Harold’s status as the original goth to “the costume designer on the film, Bill Theiss, who met me in New York and took me shopping. We bought this great black trench coat and then lined it in red, and there's one little scene in the film where it kind of blows open in the wind and you see, just for a second, that little line of red. It's so subtle, but it's so cool.”
And then there’s the interview Cort did with the Austin American Statesman’s Chris Garcia on the morning of his Alamo appearance. Neither interviewer not interviewee comes off particularly well in the piece, which ran nearly two weeks after Cort left town. I’m all too familiar with the awkward clamminess of an interview gone awry, and this article drips with it, from the description of Cort’s “loose, wet scrambled eggs” to the actor’s impromptu rendition of “Moon River,” as sung by Truman Capote, which calls to mind “the unnerving noise of an emphysemic Munchkin…It's something he does in Kinky Friedman's show when Friedman takes his touring act to Cort's home town, which will go unnamed here at Cort's request. (He believes he has a stalker.)”
Despite his willingness to introduce Harold and Maude at the Alamo and discuss it with the Chronicle, Cort clams up here. “Let's just say that I don't make any money on Harold and Maude, and I never have.” Apparently unable to elicit much in the way of usable quotes, Garcia instead devotes a few column inches to armchair psychoanalysis. “Cort ticker-tapes a litany of professional injustices with an acrid whiff of rancor, frustration and, just maybe, delusion and paranoia…Cort emanates an air of entitlement born of bad luck or bad choices or whatever it is that makes Hollywood such a torture chamber of heartache, anger and rejection.”
It’s hard to say which party bears more responsibility for this breakfast of infamy (Cinematical compares the situation to "Steve Buscemi's take on the matter in Interview"), but Cort, for one, was not amused by the published piece. In a letter to the editor, Cort writes: “The breakfast interview he concocted was not only malicious, it was inaccurate and contained downright falsehoods, which he had the gall to attribute to me. I declined his original requests for an interview, as the piece would not run in time to publicize my three appearances at the Alamo Drafthouse theater…It was shockingly condescending. This mystified me because I thought at the time that he was extremely nice … if unprepared. I basically had to carry the ball during the entire conversation, which was tantamount to sitting with a sponge.”
It’s always possible that neither Cort nor Garcia is a morning person. Next time, guys, schedule the interview for happy hour.