We have always liked to imagine Samuel Beckett as more the inhabitant of his own wild pages than of any mundane place or time, and we were consequently a bit skeptical, the other day, when we read in a newspaper that he had materialized in our very midst and could be found that morning in a small movie studio on the upper East Side, watching over the production of his first screenplay. We headed straight uptown, and were halfway down the long, dark hall of a converted bakery on Ninetieth Street when we came upon Barney Rosset, the president of Grove Press, Beckett’s American publisher. Mr. Rosset informed us that he had formed a subsidiary called Evergreen Theatre to commission and produce movies by his own authors, and that Evergreen’s first film, now in production but still without a title, was being made from three short screenplays by Mr. Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco. He grinned, bounded proudly down the rest of the hall and into the studio, and added that Beckett’s screen treatment, which contains no dialogue at all, had not only the author as adviser but Alan Schneider as its director, Boris Kaufman as its director of photography, and Buster Keaton playing its major character. Rosset then steered us across the studio, nimbly sidestepping coils of rope and piles of boxes on the floor, and left us at the door of the set of a small, exceedingly Beckettian room. It contained a rusty cot, a mattress smeared with dirt and sprouting chicken feathers through a large rip, a crumpled green blanket, a dingy mirror, an even dingier window hung with tattered curtains and an old air-raid shade, a picture of what looked like a carnival figure, a Chihuahua, a cat, a parrot, two goldfish, a Victorian rocker, a large camera on wheels, forty spotlights, twelve technicians, one script girl, two magazine photographers, Mr. Schneider, Mr. Kaufman, Mr. Keaton, a bearded cameraman named Joe Coffey, and Mr. Beckett, who was sitting in a corner on a Coca-Cola crate, peering intently at the scene. The playwright, materialized, turned out to be tall and quite thin, with soaring eyebrows and graying brown hair that stood straight up and swept back over his head like a wiry crest. He wore small round steel-rimmed glasses, a light-blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves and open at the neck, and tan trousers that were liberally splattered with feathers from the mattress. He was nervously smoking a strong French cigarette, and his forehead was deeply lined.
We were edging across the set to Mr. Beckett’s crate when Mr. Schneider called, “O.K., let’s try it!,” and the technicians dispersed to various posts around the room and on the scaffolding, leaving Mr. Kaufman, his cameraman, his camera steerer, and his camera-cord carrier behind the camera and Mr. Keaton in front of it. Keaton, with all his traditional gloom intact, was wearing an eye patch, baggy black trousers, bright-red suspenders, and an old, battered, pancaked hat. With Mr. Schneider counting and Mr. Beckett shyly watching, Keaton took four slow steps toward the Chihuahua and the cat. The Chihuahua and the cat, who shared a wicker basket, stared curiously at him.
“That all right, Sam?” Schneider called.
“Exactly. Just the way I’d want it,” Beckett said softly, standing up to clasp his hands behind his head and stretch.
“Would you like to take a look, Sam?” Coffey said.
Beckett, pleased, peeked into the camera. “It’s fine. Good,” he said.
“Here, sit down, Sam,” one of the technicians said, and pulled up a new crate.
Beckett took him by the shoulders and chuckled affectionately. “Really, I promise you that when I get tired of standing up, I will sit down,” he said. “I promise to sit down.”
Schneider held out a Coke. “Here, have a drink, Sam,” he said.
A tough-looking young technician, walking across the set with an extra spotlight, stopped next to us. He looked protectively over at Beckett, who was back on his Coke crate, absorbed in the rehearsal of the next scene. “I can’t believe it,” the technician whispered. “Sam’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met. He’s just so nice that he makes you nice, too.” He shook his head, incredulously, and continued on his way.
We walked over to Beckett. He was quite tanned, and he explained that he had spent the weekend in East Hampton, at Rosset’s house. “I met Edward Albee at his place in Montauk, but I haven’t done much in New York,” he said matter-of-factly and not at all regretfully. “Kay Boyle brought a writer called Kenneth Koch over to say hello, but mostly I’ve been here, working on the film.”
Schneider strode by and off the set, and we followed. We asked him about the film.
“It’s really quite a simple thing,” he said. “It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver—two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”
We asked Mr. Schneider who did win, and he said that he thought the perceiver won. “You know, people come in here and ask Sam ‘What do you mean?,’ trying to make him something obscure, befuddling, inscrutable. Well, I think he’s the most crystal-clear poet—notice, I say poet—writing today. ‘Godot’? ‘Endgame’? They’re lucid. Maybe it’s just that we’re afraid to hear what they’re trying to say.”
Mr. Schneider strode on, and we turned back to Mr. Beckett, who was listening to a young woman from the studio. “Sam, the teen-agers love your novel ‘Murphy,’ ” she said. “They laugh and laugh.”
Beckett smiled. “Well, it’s my easiest book, I guess,” he said. He then told the woman that he was returning to Paris, where he lives, as soon as the film is finished.
“You should have been around for the exteriors,” said Coffey, who had walked over to the crate. “We shot under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was perfect. The street we were on was semi-demolished and desolate. It looked as though the street was all that existed, all there was—a world blocked off.”
Beckett nodded in agreement. “Pearl Street, it was,” he said.
Coffey edged away from the crate and beckoned to us. “You know, Sam’s incredible,” he said. “He grasps his own work visually. He can think cinematically. He spotted Pearl Street as the place right away, when we were driving around.”
Coffey looked admiringly over at Beckett, who was now engrossed in wordless conversation with Mr. Keaton. Keaton, with a disarming dead pan, was digging into one of his trouser pockets, looking for change. He dug deeper and deeper, through the proverbial hole in the pocket and straight down to the cuff. Upon reaching the cuff, he pulled out a quarter, held it up triumphantly, and handed it to Beckett. Beckett threw back his head and laughed.
“Sam, they released ‘The General’ again, you know, with foreign subtitles,” Keaton said at last, in a low, gravelly voice. “It went all over Europe, and all of a sudden everybody loved it. A German lady even sent me flowers” He paused thoughtfully. “Now, why couldn’t she have sent them forty years ago?”
Beckett laughed again. “You could’ve used them then.”
“O.K., let’s go, Buster!” Schneider called, as Kaufman wheeled the camera into place for another take.
Beckett left his crate. He reappeared a moment later on the scaffolding, leaning over a makeshift rail, chin in hand.
Keaton, his face averted, was groping along the wall, clutching the green blanket. When he reached the mirror, he flung the blanket over it, blocking out all reflection.
“Cut!” called Schneider. “How was that? All right, Sam?”
“Exactly,” Beckett said quietly.
We left him on the scaffolding, peering shyly and profoundly, and even a little inscrutably, down. ♦
