 All right, good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special edition of Classic Tuesdays on Monday, Election Eve 2020. We're very glad that you're taking some time out to join us. I want to just say, first of all, thank you to everyone for all of your support. The good news since our last gathering for Classic Tuesdays and one of the reasons why we decided to make this sort of an election special is because the Bedford Playhouse has now reopened at restricted capacity and with all COVID protocols safely in place. So our hope is that going forward, we're going to be able to do this series as sort of a hybrid. We are actually going to screen the film in the theater, but if you want to participate in the conversation, we're also going to stream it. For those of you who may not be comfortable coming into a theater yet. So our next installment, I'll just say right now, we're trying to get the Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, which we were originally going to do back in March before COVID happened. And we're going to try and do that one again towards the end of this month on the 24th. So for those of you who are feeling comfortable and are interested, by all means, we hope you'll come in and watch the film with us on the big screen. It's going to be phenomenal with the Technicolor and the Great Score, and certainly all of the sword play in that film. But if you're not, you can certainly tune in and we'll be streaming it and we'll be able to have these conversations. And you can still enjoy these from the security of your home. That being said, tonight's film, we're talking about The Candidate, which was a great movie starring Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, Don Porter, and Mel Ovan Douglas, directed by Michael Ritchie, which was made in 1972, filmed in a semi-documentary style, as if you're watching a news report. The screenplay was written by a man named Jeremy Larner, who had actually been a speechwriter for Senator Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 presidential campaign. And Larner, who actually he's still alive, he lives in Northern California in his 80s. He was previously a novelist and a journalist and an English professor before he turned to politics and to speechwriting and then later screenwriting. And he worked very, very closely with McCarthy, starting with the Wisconsin primary, which is right around when LBJ announced that he would not be running for reelection, through the California primary, which we all remember ended with Robert Kennedy's assassination and then through the infamous convention in Chicago. Larner's biggest claim to fame was that he wrote the famous seconding speech that Julian Bond, for those of you who remember Julian Bond, gave for Eugene McCarthy, which really kind of launched Bond's political career. And they had never met before. He wrote the speech for him, having never met him or knowing really much about him. And then Larner wrote a book about his experience on the McCarthy campaign, which was serialized in a number of magazines in the spring of 1969. And then he more or less turned to the anti-war movement. He became very active in the anti-war movement before he wrote the screenplay for the candidate. So talking about it as we are on the eve of a presidential election, you can't help notice, if you've all watched it recently, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Most of the messages that are delivered in the film, although meant to be presented in a satirical fashion, sound like they could have come right out of today's news. And the contrast that is drawn between the incumbent senator Cropper Jarman, which, in my opinion, is one of the all-time greatest movie character names ever. And Bill McKay, who is the candidate of the title, could very easily been taken from the current headlines. There's many moments where if you close your eyes and imagine that it's not Robert Redford, but it's somebody else, you can hear the similarities. So the film was co-produced by Robert Redford and by Michael Ritchie, the director. And they had worked together on the film Downhill Racer, the skiing film Downhill Racer, prior to making the candidate. And Robert Redford had initiated the idea of wanting to make a film about a candidate who quote unquote, sold his soul. But the only way it would get made was if Redford agreed to also be a producer. This is the period of the new Hollywood that had started with films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, and films could speak more directly on subjects that previously had been box office poison. And while there were certainly examples of political dramas going far back as the industry can go, certainly the one that comes to mind is like something that Mr. Smith goes to Washington. This is one of the first times where the entire system came under scrutiny. The character arc where Bill McKay starts off as an idealist and he ends up as just another cog in the machine is one of the foundations of the counterculture. And because he's embodied by Robert Redford, there's that sense that different audiences probably had different takeaways to it. The parallels are drawn, so it's not really a stretch to suggest that Crocker Jarman is a stand-in for Richard Nixon, who was president then, and the establishment, and Bill McKay is a stand-in for Robert Kennedy in a potential what might have been scenario had he not been assassinated after the California primary. So Warner Brothers was really not willing to finance the film unless Redford was willing to take responsibility for it. They were fearing some sort of backlash. And so even though he was really not crazy about the idea, it turns out that he actually was a very conscientious producer. And that's one reason why the movie reflects the personality and the values that we've come to know and associate with Robert Redford today as an environmentalist and humanitarian of all of the causes that he supports. So Redford and Richie spent the summer of 1971 working with Jeremy Larner on the script. And there were certain things, there were plenty of things that Larner had lifted directly from his experiences working for McCarthy. There's the scene where McKay is in the men's room and he gets accosted and paraded by someone and that is based on an incident that actually happened to Eugene McCarthy. Also in the original script, there was a subplot and some dialogue that was planned for the character who was supposed to be Bill McKay's mistress. She's represented, you've noticed if you watch the woman in the film who wears the glasses, her part was drastically reduced. So there's some sort of innuendo we see her smiling and making eyes at Redford, some suggestive glances. It was actually a much, much larger subplot that he had a mistress. But it was all removed, that subplot was removed specifically at Robert Redford's request because he felt that the public would not accept the character and it created a lot of friction with the character of the mistress. And it creates some friction with Larner because he was surprised, genuinely surprised that Redford was so conscious of his own self-image. Larner, in addition to that, in the process of writing the script was mentored by the legendary screenwriter Robert Town, who is a huge figure, particularly in the New Hollywood, probably is most famous for his work on the script for Bonnie and Clyde and shampoo and particularly for Chinatown along with many, many others. The character of Bill McKay is actually based on US Senator John Tunney, who served one term from California from 1971 to 1977. Michael Ritchie had worked for Tunney's campaign, during which he had run against the incumbent who at that time was a man named George Murphy, who was himself a former Hollywood actor, very much in the mold of Ronald Reagan, who at the time was governor of California. And during that campaign, they had made use of the actual campaign, had made use of the contrast between the fact that Tunney was so much younger and Murphy so much older, very much as you see depicted in the film. And even though California at the time was a much more conservative state than it is now, it did split the vote. So in that year, in that election year, Ronald Reagan was reelected as governor, but John Tunney was elected to the Senate from California. There are many, many cameos and appearances by well-known and political figures, media figures from the time. And that's mostly through the use of very strategically edited news footage. So if you have sharp eyes, you probably might have noticed George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, John Tunney himself is in the film, Alan Cranston was another senator from California. The journalist, Van Amberg is the one who moderates the debate within the film. And Howard K. Smith, who was the one who gives the commentary about Bill McKay's campaign, losing its principles. But certainly the most prominent one is by Natalie Wood, who at that point in time had semi-retired from acting. And she had previously co-starred in two films with Robert Redford, which were inside Daisy Clover and this property is condemned. So there's that brief scene where Natalie Wood as herself meets Bill McKay, and it's sort of an inside joke because she had worked with Redford a couple of times and they were very, very close friends. Robert Redford, of course, at that time is one of the most popular actors in Hollywood. And after he made a name for himself in the 60s doing films like Barefoot in the Park and the previously mentioned films with Natalie Wood, he was very, very concerned about being stereotyped as a blonde romantic lead. And so he started turning down a lot of roles that were offered to him that would have probably been interesting to see. Like he turned down the George Siegel part in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. And believe it or not, he was originally slated to play the graduate. It wasn't Dustin Hoffman. It was Robert Redford. But he and Mike Nichols, whom he knew from their work together on the stage, soon realized that the graduate would completely not work if the character is Robert Redford and not Dustin Hoffman. And then of course, they linked up a little bit later themselves. So he tried to focus on what he thought was much more serious work. And so by 1972, he's coming off films like Butch Casting and The Sundance Kid, Downhill Racer, which he did with Michael Ritchie, both of which were very well received. And right after the candidate, he's going to do Jeremiah Johnson, which was a huge box office success. He's going to do The Sting, which he gets his only Oscar nomination of his career for, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men. And several of these films, certainly the last two, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men, have strong political content that could arguably be traced back to Robert Redford's participation in the candidate. Peter Boyle had first gained notice for playing the title character in a movie called Joe, which was kind of almost like a precursor to Archie Bunker. He was about a bigoted factory worker and had a very, very controversial one that was released because of the violence and the language it contained. This was in 1970. So although Boyle himself was very much involved in the counterculture and the anti-war movement, when he saw people cheering his character in that film, he started to turn down roles in films that he believed glamorized violence. And one of them was the lead role in the French connection that went to Gene Hackman. So his role in the candidate was something of a cleansing of his conscience, although his role as the campaign manager masks that a little bit because he's clearly someone who's supposed to be on the inside when he really, really wasn't. And nowadays, of course, when people think of Peter Boyle, the first thing that comes to mind is either young Frankenstein where he played the monster or it's his role on television and everybody loves Raymond. Those are, of course, two of his most enduring roles. Don Porter, who plays Crocker Jarman, had a very long career on stage and in films in the 1940s, but he really found his niche on television. First, he was on the Ann Southern show where he played her boss. And then probably the one that he's most well-known for is he played Sally Fields' father on Gidget. But he guest starred on many, many popular television series. He was on Green Acres. He was on The Six Million Dollar Man, Hawaii 503s Company, and really worked up until he passed away in the late 1980s. The role, interestingly enough, the role of Crocker Jarman was originally offered to Jimmy Stewart, but he turned it down because he felt that it was derogatory towards conservative politicians, which, let's face it, it was, I guess that sort of went over his head a little bit. Melvin Douglas, who plays John McKay, the former governor of California, for those of you who tuned in when we were talking about being there a couple of months ago, was also featuring Melvin Douglas in kind of a similar role. It's 10 years, almost 10 years later, and he's playing another political, very influential political figure. But Melvin Douglas was a product of old Hollywood. He was a very, very suave leading man in the 1930s, best exemplified by his performance in Ninochka with Greta Garbo. And he did many, many films as a studio contract player up until the late 1940s. He usually played the best friend, some sort of variation on the best friend role. The best version of that short sidebar is in a film with Carrie Grant and Myrna Loy called Mr. Blanding's Builds His Dream House, which if you have never seen, is absolutely worth seeking out. Anybody who's ever owned a home and remembers films like The Money Pit or things like that, they all harken back to that film and Melvin Douglas is great, Carrie Grant is great. He did start to age rather quickly and he looked quite a lot older than he actually was. So for a period of about 12 years, he moved to working on television and on Broadway before he came back to films. And then when he came back, he was playing fatherly roles and received Academy Award nominations for HUD with Paul Newman. He also was nominated for his role and I never sang for my father and as well as being there. And he won the Academy Award for best supporting actor twice. He won for HUD and he won for being there. So Michael Ritchie, just to round out the main participants, was a director who was best known really for satires and comedies. In addition to the candidate, his best known films are Downhill Racer with Robert Redford and The Bad News Bears. I don't remember that one. And then he did a lot of very broad comedies in the 80s and those included the two Fletch films with Chevy Chase. He did a film called Wildcats with Goldie Hawn, also sports themes. And he did a movie with Eddie Murphy called The Golden Child. He's very hard to pin down. Many people have commented, many film critics have commented that it's really hard to think of a director who had a more quote consistently uneven career. He was up and down. He did a handful of really great memorable films. Although in retrospect, his reputation has recovered somewhat as people kind of appreciate the subtlety of his humor more than they did. So the concept, the entire concept of the film is built on the present premise that there needs to be a candidate or a Senate race that is unwinnable. Crocker Jarman has been, as he says in the film, has been in the Senate for 18 years and there's no viable opponent to him. And so Bill McKay with his idealism and his good looks and his charisma and his pedigree as the son of a former governor is the ideal choice for the party, the Democratic party to run against Crocker Jarman. And what makes it more unusual is the idea that since Jarman can't lose, then McKay is free to campaign and say pretty much whatever he wants. And so the chance to spread his values and his message is what appeals to him to make him agree to run. However, when it looks like he's going to lose by an overwhelming margin, then the campaign has to change tactics because now they're afraid that they're gonna be humiliated and they can't have that. So in order to stay in the race, his message has to get more generic. And so naturally, the less he actually says, the more his poll numbers rise. And the media also come in for indictment tremendously via a couple of different ways, mostly through the character of McKay's father. They interpret his silence as an endorsement of his son's opponent, which forces Bill McKay to ask his father for help and clearly doesn't wanna do that. It surfaces again after they have the scene about the debate, at the end of the debate when they're making their closing arguments and he's been given the script and told to keep it generic and keep it bland. And his conscience gets the better of him. And so while the natural presumption is that this makes him a more serious candidate, if you're watching the film, your reaction is he's become a much more serious candidate. The reaction of the campaign and of the media in the film suggests otherwise and they're ready to crucify him until his father shows up and conveniently draws all the attention away from the issues again. So it's one of those moments where, if you really watch the film and look for those, all those ironies and satirical elements, they're all presented, but yet they're all presented as absolutely straight up true to life. We actually have a couple of clips we're gonna play. We're gonna play one right now, which is a little bit of the, that scene I just referenced, the end of the debate. So can we play that first clip, please? We're gonna clear the hall, I'll be just a couple of minutes. Come on, come on, come on. He's split a little while ago. Son, you're a politician. Other clip, hang on. Out to our concluding statements, each candidate will have one minute. The order was picked by the flip of a coin and Senator Jarman will go first. Senator Jarman. To me, this country was never stronger, but the test of a strong country is how it faces its difficulties. And now and then, when I hear the barking and the baying of those who would knock our system down, I am reminded of the last days of the great Roman Empire. They argued about what vices they could legalize and what happened was an onslaught that nearly spelled the end of civilization. Now I am not suggesting that that is what will happen if the people do not send me back to the Senate. I just promise you this, I will continue to stand up for the philosophy that has made this nation great and is more than ever called for if we're to face the future with hope and confidence. I have that hope because I believe in America. I believe that our greatest moment is yet to come. Thank you. Mr. McKay, you and I have one minute to sum up. Mr. McKay, in the beginning, I think it's important to note what subjects we haven't discussed. We've completely ignored the fact that this is a society divided by fear, hatred, and violence. And until we talk about just what this society really is, then I don't know how we're gonna change it. For example, we haven't discussed the rot that destroys our cities. We have all the resources we need to check it and we don't use them. And we haven't discussed why not. We haven't discussed race in this country. We haven't discussed poverty. In short, we haven't discussed any of the sicknesses that may yet send this country up in flames and we better do it. We'd better get it out in the open and confront it before it's too late. Gentlemen, now just a moment. You had to do it, didn't you? I never dreamed that my opponent would stoop to encouraging violence. I very seriously doubt that any man could do that. Gentlemen, it's paid in there. Why not do it? This has been the job of a paid debate. So, you know, some kind of familiar buzzwords in there. I mean, they shot it in that documentary style that really kind of gives it that air of authenticity. And if you remember, they said to him as they were coaching for the debate, they said, don't take your eyes off him. Stare directly at him. Don't take your eyes off him. And he was about to give the canned response until he went off script. And if you remember what happens following that is his media advisor is gonna lay into him before he gets sidetracked. They shot the film. It only took them 41 days. It really was a very, very rapid schedule for the time. And that sort of gives it that realistic flair. The other scene that I think resonates a lot is if you remember when it actually seems like he's got a chance and the absurdity of the whole situation gets exposed. When he goes into the television station and he's running late and they have time for him to do a quick announcement to film a campaign spot and he can't stop laughing. Everything makes him laugh and the microphone and all that. And it's dawning on him that this could actually happen and what had been sort of a fluke or a long shot, he's now in a chance to actually become a US senator. All of this obviously culminates in the closing sequence when right before that, if you remember he compromises to get the labor vote and he gives the speech before the union hall and he's told by his father that now he's a politician. And then he has probably what's one of the more prophetic responses to the entire system of government. He's gone from running just to get his message across to actually wanting to win so badly that he does compromise. And so we're going to play the second clip very quickly. There's a, and we're going to watch that scene real quick. We're going to clear the hall, it'll be just a couple of minutes. Son, you're a politician. No, we're ready. Here he comes. He's not supposed to be here. You've got about 60 seconds of privacy before they find out we're here now. So what's on your mind, Senator? See, I told you they'd be here. What do we do now? I mean, I wonder how many of those people we elect today find themselves reacting to the exact same way in the exact same situation. Interesting thing about that clip, two things that come to mind to me. When his father smiles at him after he tells him he's a politician, I wonder if he's smiling because he's genuinely happy for him or if he's smiling because he knows that he has no idea what he's just gotten himself into. And also, if you noticed, when he walks out of the room in the right-hand corner is the woman who was supposed to be playing his mistress in the subplot and she was there again. So I think that sort of signals that he really isn't any different from any of the other stereotypical politicians that we may think about when we think about what's the stereotype of the senator. Adding to the irony, of course, is the fact that the film was released in the year of Watergate and politics started taking on a whole new meaning for the public at large who may or may not have been paying attention previously. The film was actually released a month prior to the 1972 California presidential primary. And the promotional posters, they put up promotional posters for the film all over the state that simply had a photo of Robert Redford and it had the slogan that they used in the film, which was, McKay, the better way, which actually caused people to write in Bill McKay in the primary. I guess the fact that he looked a lot like Robert Redford must have worked in his favor. There's also a prop campaign button from the film which is on display at the Smithsonian Institution at the Museum of American History, hidden among many other authentic campaign items. So if you ever are down that way, whenever things get back to normal slightly, you can, it's become a little bit of a game to find that button in that exhibit. Over the years, a lot of politicians, many lifelong politicians, really did not seem to realize that the movie was intended to be ironic. The main story, some example of that is Dan Quayle. We all remember Dan Quayle when he was running for vice president in 1988. He spoke frequently about how the film, the candidate had inspired him, which caused the filmmakers to erupt. Jeremy Larner ended up writing an op-ed for the New York Times where he just blasted Quayle for completely, completely missing the point of the film. Upon its release, it garnered mostly positive reviews, although in this particular case, to me, the negative reviews are the more interesting ones because the critics who did not, who faulted the film, did it for a couple of main reasons. One major one was that they thought the message didn't go far enough that somehow they just, they didn't go as overboard as they probably could have. And another interesting, very common criticism was that the character of Bill McKay in the form of Robert Redford was considered kind of, for lack of a better word, vulgar casting. Because he so clearly, the implication was he so clearly could have been mistaken for a Kennedy and many considered that to be opportunistic casting coming so soon on the heels of RFK's assassination, which was an interesting take that had never really occurred to me before. Although I do think that the California primary aside, this is one of those films where because of the nature of it, the marketing and publicity campaign for the movie really speaks very, very well for capturing the essence of it. And so if you remember the poster, which is basically Robert Redford in what would normally be a portrait pose as a senator, blowing a bubble, he's blowing bubble gum. And I think that that's the perfect contra positioning of imagery to market a film. That tells you in a snapshot exactly what you're about to see when you watch it. The film missed out on most of the major awards, although Jeremy Larner did win the Oscar for best screenplay. And then he later went on, as I mentioned, not only did he become an English professor, but he also wrote on a number of different topics, basically playing off on issues like sleep apnea and environmentalism and cancer, cures for cancer, alternative medicine therapies and practices, really very interesting guy, kind of flew into the radar. So I hope that on this night before an election that the film proved to be a little bit of a distraction, certainly as we go in and whatever happens tomorrow happens that there's always the candidate to revisit. So if there are any thoughts, any comments, any ideas, anybody wanna campaign for someone on their own, feel free to do so with the Q&A. If not, I wanna thank everybody for coming and we will see you hopefully sooner rather than later back at the Playhouse. As I mentioned, November 24th, we're doing the Adventures of Robin Hood and then we'll be continuing the series into December and probably doing Miracle on 34th Street, the original Miracle on 34th Street. And then we will see what the new year brings with regard to our ability to open a little bit more, increase our capacity and hopefully not would start going back towards some normalcy. So thank you very much again for tuning in. We really appreciate your time. And if there are no thoughts or comments, have a good night, everybody. Thanks again.