This week's Mickey Rourke Award for the crazy man on the comeback trail goes to David Carradine, though in Carradine's case, the emphasis is a lot stronger on the "crazy man" part. Last Wednesday, Carradine was at the American Cinematheque for a screening of the 1976 Hal Ashby film Bound for Glory, in which he played Woody Guthrie. Carradine kept up a running commentary throughout much of the film, then jumped up on stage, guitar at the ready, to participate in a Q & A with film critic Kevin Thomas. They were joined by Carradine'ss co-star Ronny Cox and the movie's legendary, 87-year-old cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who Thomas spotted in the audience. The movie was showing as part of series of personal favorites hand-picked by Thomas, but as Carradine got wound up, it became clear that he and Cox were just along for the ride.
In what is shaping up as the definitive account of this well-blogged-about event, Chris Willman writes that Carradine immediately commandeered the microphone and that his flood of anecdotes was "entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way." There were signs of friction, though, when Carradine said that when he got cast as Guthrie, he knew nothing about the singer except that he'd written "Goodnight, Irene", and Wexler, who may or may not have been stepping on one of the star's jokes, helpfully piped up to say that "Goodnight, Irene" was actually written by Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. But then Carradine said that labor unions don't serve the same purpose they did in Guthrie's day, and the wheels started to come off the wagon. This earned him some gentle chiding from the other people on stage, and then a woman in the audience began to holler at him. In his present-tense account, Willman writes: "Carradine starts shouting back, which might've been okay if he wasn't yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn't sound pretty. The woman doesn't let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She's the more obnoxious one, but because he's five times as loud, he's coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler 'Let her speak!' A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting 'Let's hear from Haskell Wexler !' About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this--one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time." As for Wexler, the director of Medium Cool and Latino demurred that he wasn't there to talk about politics, which has to be an all-time first and may be interpreted by some biblical scholars as a sign of the coming end of days. Carradine finally tried to get the crowd back on his side by showing his willingness to engage in debate by throwing the microphone to the woman in the audience. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's a reason why Carradine was never cast as Sandy Koufax. The pitch went short and the mike bounced off the head of Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber--"fortunately for Carradine," notes Willman, "...probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge."
When the subject turned to the look of the film, Wexler got to listen to Carradine declare that the D.P. "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." He mentions that this is one of his all-time favorite lines, just in case Wexler doesn't know that he's been springing it on people at every opportunity lo these past three decades. (No doubt it really broke up the crew on The Warrior and the Sorceress.) Carradine complained that Wexler made the Depression look too pretty and asserts that Ashby wanted to fire him--a charge calculated to really get under Wexler's skin, since Bound for Glory marked an upturn in his fortunes after he was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jeffrey Wells has posted an mp3 of part of the discussion at his Hollywood Elsewhere blog; there, you can hear Wexler, sounding a little more pissed-off than a man his age maybe ought to get, insist that any difficulties he had with Hal Ashby were temporary and fueled by the director's coke habit. Carradine shrugs that all this proves is that Wexler is "a little down on people that snorted cocaine." He then goes into a reverie about what a titanic coke fiend Ashby was, then says that "Even Quentin Tarantino doesn't beat Hal Ashby...", and you can hear the crowd tense up, thinking that he's about to say something to the effect that Ashby was an even bigger coke addict that QT. Much to the room's collective relief, Carradine instead finishes, "...in my list of my favorite directors." Then he adds, "And Quentin is incredible. And he's a big cocaine freak, too!"
In the end, Carradine and Wexler found it in themselves to give each other a goodbye hug, even after Wexler pointed out that for all his supposed trespasses against the ideal look of the Woody Guthrie story, he worked with Ashby on three other movies--unlike Carradine, who never worked with him again. (However, a couple of those movies were Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out, two films that sealed the fate of Ashby's later career by having trouble getting released at all, with good reason. For his part, Carradine, in the course of extolling Ashby as a "fucking genius", declared that the director had never made a single movie that couldn't be described as "one of the best fucking movies ever made," then reeled off a list of titles that seemed to be based on the idea that Ashby's career ended in the 1970s.) Snapping awake, Kevin Thomas called the evening to a close by thanking the distinguished gentlemen for having provided him with "some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking."