Return Engagement

By: Paul Zimmerman
Date: Friday, January 04, 2002

A reel life, much like a real one, is full of peaks and valleys. For veteran actor Martin Landau early peaks would be appearing in films like North By Northwest and Cleopatra and playing on television in classic genre series Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999. His valleys would have to include starring in over three dozen B movies and virtually dropping out of film for most of the late '70s and early '80s. Now on a rebirth that started in the late 1980s with Francis Coppola's Tucker and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and continued on with Tim Burton's Ed Wood, Landau once again finds himself the center of attention in Frank Darabont's The Majestic. The buzz is good. The buzz is on Landau getting another Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Playing Harry Trimble, a fragile old man who has lost both his only son and the movie theater he ran in an idyllic small town, his character gets a new lease on life when his long lost son reappears. Or does he? Jim Carrey, in a 180 degree reversal of what we're used to seeing him do, subtly plays a morally confused blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter in the early 1950s who, after getting bonked on the head, wakes up in Lawson, a town that seems to have sprung from old Frank Capra movies. Mistaken as Landau's war hero son, he's embraced by the entire town. It's a nostalgic story filled with notions about starting over, being yourself and doing the right thing. While a romance at heart (between Carrey and X-Files bad girl Laurie Holden), the scenes Landau and Carrey share are the film's most emotional moments.

A cartoonist

at 17, Landau's life course changed in 1955 when he and Steve McQueen were chosen out of over 2000 applicants to join the fabled Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. Rising to become one of America's best character actors, Landau would go on to guest star (usually as a villain) in shows like The Twilight Zone, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Outer Limits, as well as appear in nearly 80 features. Trivia buffs take note: Comfortable on the stage, big screen and small, Landau was in fact Gene Roddenberry's first choice to play Mr.Spock in Star Trek. After his cult success in Space: 1999 his career slowed in the late 1970s, forcing Landau to return to his first love: teaching acting.

"I started to teach originally because Lee Strasberg encouraged me to teach when I was in my 20s and he didn't do that with anybody else," says Landau, while promoting The Majestic. Neatly clad in black and gray, the silver-maned thespian adds, "I run the Actor's Studio on the West Coast. [Directors] Mark Rydell, Sydney Pollack and I have run it for years, and right now we just elected [Al] Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Ellen Burstyn to run the East Coast."

Landau may not be as well known a teacher of actors as his mentor Strasberg but his former classmate list is notable. "I've had some interesting students over the years," Landau says, "Jack Nicholson was my student for three years, Harry Dean Stanton, Oliver Stone studied with me before he directed his first movie, Shirley Knight, Anjelica Huston was my student."

Working on

the New York stage in the 1950s, Landau got to see firsthand the toll the blacklist took on this country. "I was just starting and this was all going on. It was crazy," he says, shaking his head. "One guy committed suicide, he jumped out of a window. He was blacklisted, replaced and he killed himself. Zero Mostel was blacklisted, he couldn't get a job other than in the theater."

While Landau personally escaped HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), the overzealous governmental probe that ruined countless lives (and plays a prominent part in the climax of The Majestic), he recalls that the actual blacklisting, commonly thought of as a 1950s aberration, lived on. "John Randolph was an actor and when I did Mission: Impossible [producer] Bruce Geller hired him," Landau says with a hint of pride. "And it was the first time he'd worked on film in years. And he did a show with Marty Sheen that was an episode of Mission: Impossible. And that was in the '60s, it was still carrying on."

Some have embraced The Majestic as a loving homage to Frank Capra films, while others are complaining Carrey's triumph over all adversary creates a false portrait of the troubled time. Landau smiles. "Hey, this world that we've created with this movie, even in the 1950s did not exist, O.K.? Like a Norman Rockwell world."

And the

film's lasting quality beyond making people feel good? "It instructs people," Landau says with a teacher's patience. "The new generation doesn't know anything about it. And it's time for heroes. There's a lot of things that have been fictionalized over the years but [The Majestic] doesn't postulate. What it does is introduces a character who has every intention of selling out but because of a story that goes before it he can't do it."

Not surprisingly, Landau's glowing analysis of co-star Carrey is something only a real teacher could come up with. "Let me just say, you always think of Jim as angular or horizontal. And here he's perpendicular and economical," insists Landau. "I think Jim is a terrific acting instrument, I really do. If you spend any time with him he's incredibly bright, very perceptive. Had a life that was filled with pain. He's a guy that lived in a car for three years with his mother and father. I mean his family lived in a car for three years. And then he spent 15 years in saloons, strip joints and nightclubs. You think that's easy?"

Landau continues, "What I like about this movie is you've got a guy [Carrey] who's pretty awful. He's a hack writer, he really doesn't give a damn about his craft, he's a product of god knows what, he was never political. He just happened to like a girl and went to six meetings because he felt he could get into her pants. I mean, he's not a nice guy."

If the

rumors prove true and Landau is nominated for The Majestic, it would be the capper in a distinguished career that includes three nominations (for Tucker, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Ed Wood) and one win (playing Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood) for the Academy's Best Supporting Actor. The strength of his chances rests on two standout scenes. One where he makes an impassioned speech in a dilapidated movie theater about why we go to the movies and one a classic death bed moment where the audience suspects Carrey will confess he's a fraud.

"It's an amazing moment," Landau says, smiling wide. "A movie moment." Indeed, it's so moving many that see it are sure both are actually crying. Landau smiles again, saying the scene was so convincing because both had acted like they didn't want to cry. "Only bad actors try to cry. Good actors try not to cry," says Landau. "Bad actors try to laugh, good actors try not to laugh."

Landau may be in the autumn of his career, (and frankly, an actor could hardly ask for a sweeter swan song than The Majestic), but he's enthusiastic about Carrey's future. "I think for Jim this is the beginning of a new direction," Landau says, sizing the superstar up. "He has the chops, he's a very attractive guy, he's very bright and as I used to say to my students, 'You have to embrace the pain in your life.' Because pain brings about a lot of different kinds of feelings. And that brings vulnerability, the willingness to let people know, because everybody feels pain. Good actors in training should go to pain. Pain creates anger and anger creates all kinds of stuff."