Remembering Bay Area roots of film critic Pauline Kael.
New Yorker’s influential Pauline Kael remembered fondly by her ‘Paulettes’ in the Bay Area, where she got her start
Years before she became the director of the Pacific Film Archive, Edith Kramer remembers her first visit to Berkeley. It was the early 1960s, and Kramer, then teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene, traveled with a friend for a visit.
One stop was at the Cinema Guild, a ragingly popular art house theater that was culturally lightyears from anything she could find in Eugene.
“I was just so hungry for films, and that was my first experience at those theaters,” Kramer recalled. “Through my colleague we were invited to some sort of party — a cocktail party, a holiday party. And we ended up in
Pauline Kael’s house on Oregon Street with the Jess murals.”
Kael’s famous parties were said by some to be the intellectual center of Berkeley, a sort of West Coast version of the Algonquin Round Table. By the end of the 1960s, Kael was in New York, where she would change the face of film criticism — and, in some cases, the film industry itself — with her column in the New Yorker magazine. At her height, as detailed in the new documentary “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael,” she could make or break movies and careers.
But she never forgot the Bay Area and had a network of friends she regularly visited, often stopping by the PFA to chat with those
she knew, going to dinners and lunches and, of course, the movies.
Kael was born to Polish immigrants in Petaluma, where she grew up on a chicken farm before the family relocated to San Francisco, where they struggled during the Great Depression. Movies — popular films from the Hollywood dream factory — helped Kael through her childhood, and it was that infrastructure that informed her groundbreaking criticism.
In the 1950s, she turned the Cinema Guild, which was owned by Ed Lansberg, who later became her husband (briefly), into a destination event with her creative double bill bookings (Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” with the British drawingroom comedy “On Approval”) and what was essentially her first criticism — the program notes for the Cinema Guild schedule.
About Howard Hawks’ “Red River,” she noted the nowunshakable classic was “not really as ‘great’ as devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie ‘The Gunfighter.’ ”
Noted Berkeley rock critic Greil Marcus, who became a lifelong friend and is featured in the new documentary, said Kael “said criticism is exciting because you must use everything you know and everything you are. You have to bring your absolute full self into it.”
And she brought that allin approach to friendships, too. Marcus, in a telephone interview with The Chronicle, said they met after he had written a critical review of a book of her film reviews, noting that she was becoming repetitive and overpraising, among other things.
“A little while later, I got a phone call, and the voice on the other end said, ‘This is Pauline Kael,’ ” Marcus recalled. “I was, like, immediately, ‘Wow, Pauline Kael is calling me?’ and I was kind of frozen. And she said, ‘Did you mean all that stuff you wrote about me?’ Well, what was I supposed to say? ‘No, I just made it up to sound important’? But I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ Then she said, ‘Well, my daughter agrees with you,
“What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael”
opens Friday, Feb. 14, at Landmark’s Opera Plaza in San Francisco, Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. but I don’t.’ And then she said, ‘I’m coming to Berkeley, and I’d like to meet you.’ ”
And so a friendship was born. Kael apparently enjoyed friendships that were “giveandtake,” as described by former San Francisco Examiner film critic Michael Sragow, one of a circle of critics who were Kael confidants known as “Paulettes.”
“She loved to argue with you,” Sragow said by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I think that was part of the fun of knowing Pauline. People talk about the Paulettes as if it was a oneway street, but it was a dialogue. It was much more kind of a dynamic, and often amusing to be a part of. And I think Pauline was a genius. The mind was always working so fast. She was just extremely stimulating to be around and have as a friend.”
Like Marcus, Sragow first got to know Kael after he had written something critical about her, in his case while he was a student writing in the Harvard Crimson.
“Pauline knew everything that everybody had ever written about her,” said Sragow, who is also in the documentary. “I had, in an obnoxious, adolescent way, taken her on a couple of times about ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ which I’ve certainly grown to appreciate things about it. At the time, I said some crude, attentiongetting things like ‘she seemed to have written that review with the typewriter between her legs’ (laughs) . ... When I went up and met her, she looked me up and down and said, ‘So that’s what you look like.’ ”
Meredith Brody, who now lives in Berkeley, got to know Kael when she was a food critic in New York; they both had weekly columns and would compare critical notes. Brody said Kael would often take young critics under her wing and mentor them.
“She read every letter that was sent to her, she responded to it, and if she liked somebody’s work she’d ask to see more of it,” Brody said.
“She got people jobs. People from other publications would call and ask her for suggestions, she’d make them. She was very, very good at promoting other people’s work.”
Brody’s friendship with Kael continued after Brody relocated to the Bay Area. Kael briefly considered heading back to the Bay Area too — she turned down an offer to be the programmer of the San Francisco International Film Festival — but instead lived out her life mostly at her house in rural Massachusetts. She died in 2001 at age 82.
Marcus said after he and Kael discovered they had the same birthday, “we made a game to see who could call the other first to wish each other happy birthday. We did that until she died.”
“I loved her very much,” Brody said. “I miss her on a weekly if not a daily basis. She was the best conversationalist I ever knew.”