Remembering Sydney Pollack

Jeffrey Goldberg, crackerjack political reporter and would-be screen-writer, has the most vivid and concise account of Sydney Pollack I’ve read. Goldberg arrives with a screenplay to review with Pollack, and gets savaged:

The script at that point was 132 pages long, and, weirdly, there was something wrong on every page. We emerged from the conference room five hours later, completely wrung out. For a while inside, we had fought back:

Sydney: “Fellas, I just don’t get this. How could she be flirting with a guy you told us three pages ago was dead?”

Me: “Well you see, Sydney, he wasn’t really actually dead, the death was just a metaphor—”

Sydney: “Yeah, okay, now on page four…”

After a while, we stopped fighting, because he exhausted us—the Sydney Pollack you see on screen (Ross has an excellent, and illustrative, clip) was the Sydney Pollack we saw in his office. And also because he was right.

It wasn’t all misery, of course. He was a wonderful storyteller, and also a world-class obsessive. He took a fifteen-minute break to explain how he packs for overseas trips. I started writing down the monologue, it was so captivating: “You see, fellas, what I do is I check the weather averages for each place I’m heading, and that way I can know exactly what sock I’m going to need for each destination, so I don’t pack any more socks than necessary, just the socks of appropriate weight for the prevailing weather conditions…” And so on. The business with the socks struck me as unnecessary, by the way, because he flew his own plane and could bring three suitcases of socks, but never mind…

Things happen in Hollywood and Sydney didn’t get the chance to make our movie. Rich and I are cautiously pessimistic about its chances. We hope, of course, that it gets made. If it does, and if it’s any good, it will be because Sydney Pollack laid his hands on it.