Last weekend thousands of the world’s most passionate and obsessive movie fans descended upon Hollywood for the 16th annual TCM Classic Film Festival, which provided opportunities to see everything from “Gunfight at the OK Corral” and “We’re No Angels” projected in true VistaVision to nitrate prints of “Daisy Kenyon” and “Mildred Pierce” at The Egyptian Theatre, one of only five venues in the country capable of screening that format. There was also a restoration of a silent classic with live accompaniment (“Beau Geste“), a BFI restoration of Ernst Lubitsch’s timeless — and timely — comedy “To Be or Not to Be,” and a a tribute to groundbreaking director Michael Schultz, among many other delightful programs.
It’s hard to pick a favorite event from such a stacked weekend, but for sheer moviegoing pleasure it was tough to beat the 35th anniversary screening of “Misery,” which screened in the legendary TCL Chinese Theatre to a packed crowd. The movie itself — a diabolically funny and terrifying two-hander in which obsessive fan Kathy Bates holds writer James Caan hostage after he suffers a debilitating accident — plays better than ever, and after the audience was done laughing and screaming for 107 minutes straight they were treated to an even more special treat than seeing “Misery” on a huge screen: Hearing Bates and director Rob Reiner discuss the movie live with TCM host Dave Karger.
Reiner began the evening by saying how happy he was to see that the movie still played to a crowd. “I was surprised by how many laughs are in there,” he said, adding that he was also surprised to see how well Caan and Bates came across on screen together given their different working methods. “They come at acting in very different ways. Kathy is a brilliant stage actress and Jimmy didn’t want any rehearsal, he just wanted to be instinctive. So we found a way to rehearse more than Jimmy wanted and less than Kathy wanted, but it works.”
Aside from not getting as much rehearsal as she would have liked, Bates had only great things to say about her experience on “Misery” — though she did admit being disappointed that Reiner toned down the gore in the novel, cutting a scene in which her character ran someone over with a lawnmower and downgrading Caan’s foot amputation to a mere hobbling. “I was crushed that you took that out,” Bates said to Reiner, who defended himself by saying that he felt Caan’s character shouldn’t have to lose something after he had learned something. “I didn’t agree with that at all,” Bates said.
While Reiner said he knew Bates was his Annie Wilkes after just a few minutes of her audition, casting Caan’s role was far more difficult. Actors who turned the role down included William Hurt, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Robert Redford, and Gene Hackman. At one point Warren Beatty was attached and made what Reiner says was a key contribution to the script rewrites.
“He said, ‘This is not a horror movie. This is not a thriller,’” Reiner said. “‘This is a prison movie. This man is in jail and he has to be as smart as you in trying to figure out how to get out of jail.’” Reiner says he and producer Andrew Scheinman, who were rewriting the script after William Goldman left the project, spent months tightening the story and “plugging up the holes” with Beatty’s directive in mind. “We had a script that I thought was air-tight. And then Beatty said, ‘I don’t know if I want to do it.’”
Reiner also offered the part to Richard Dreyfuss, who had turned down Reiner’s previous film and regretted it. “I had offered him the lead part in ‘When Harry Met Sally…,’ and he said, ‘You’ve got a great director but not a great script,’” Reiner said. “I thought, ‘Jesus, it’s Nora Ephron, one of the great writers!’” After “Harry” came out and became a huge hit, Dreyfuss told Reiner he would be on board with anything Reiner wanted to do next. “He said, ‘Whatever it is, I’ll do it.’ And then he turned us down!”
Caan turned out to be the perfect person for the role, both because the differences between his and Bates’ approaches created automatic tension and because his athleticism made him feel so trapped in the bed where he spent most of movie. “He was the greatest physical athlete,” Reiner said. “He was in rodeo — the only Jewish cowboy I ever met. I thought it was perfect that he would be so constrained. I would come to set every day and just say to him, ‘Listen, Jimmy, in this scene…you’re in bed.’”
Bates said that Caan’s physicality made their climactic fight scene extremely convincing. “I think he played every sport known to man,” she said. “He was built like a brick shithouse.” Bates credited stunt coordinator David Ellis, who would go on to direct two “Final Destination” movies and “Snakes on a Plane,” with choreographing the fight to look as violent as possible. “We worked out all of the moves and everything, and when it came time to shoot it we put a piece in the floor so my head wouldn’t get hurt too bad. But he really had to slam my head into the floor, and it was upsetting to be on the other side of that. Thank God I’ve never been in a relationship like that — I guess there’s still time.”
That got a laugh from the TCM crowd, as did one of Bates’ other observations. “I had an interview recently where someone asked, ‘What character are you most like,’ and I said Annie Wilkes,” she said. “I get manic and I can get down, and sometimes I could get obsessed about someone really talented.” Reiner nodded in agreement, saying of the psychotic Annie, “Everybody lets off steam every once in a while.”
Bates admitted that when she saw “Misery” for the first time she had no idea what she and Reiner and Caan had pulled off. “I thought it was the end of my career,” she said. “I was horrified.” When Bates was ultimately nominated for an Oscar for her performance, Reiner told her she could campaign if she wanted to, but there was little chance of her winning because the Academy didn’t respect horror movies. She told Reiner she could still remember his reaction when she won the Academy Award. “You just stood up and went, ‘Yeeeaaaaaah!’”
