My three minutes with John Huston
You may think that Hollywood is too preoccupied with image and success to care much about the individuals who get caught in the cogs of its industry. But here's the story of how I walked into a producer's party as an up-and-coming publicist for the stars and walked out knowing who I really was.
It was the fall of 1985, two years after I'd moved to Los Angeles from a small town in Oregon. Amid the stacks of Broadway and Hollywood trade publications those at my firm had to read every morning, I discovered an invitation for an unusual Malibu party. Shortly after I arrived, I was on the phone with one of my more dashing clients, an actor I'll call Mr. A.
"They're honoring John Huston at a luncheon for documentary filmmakers," I told him. "Believe me, it's worth the $75. There will be tons of directors there and good press. Don't worry; I'll be there. I know the media. No, I don't know Huston, but trust me. I'll find a way to introduce you."
Although he was a producer, writer, and actor, Huston was most famous for directing films like "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), "The African Queen" (1951), "The Night of the Iguana" (1964), and "Prizzi's Honor" (1985). Now he was being honored for his lesser-known but fairly controversial World War II documentaries that the United States Army Signal Corps had commissioned in the 1940s. When the International Documentary Association scheduled an advance screening of three of the documentaries, we obliged ourselves to attend as part of our homework.
In "Report from the Aleutians" (1943), Huston showed the human reality of war, which caused a great amount of turmoil between him and the Army. The footage had nothing to do with the propaganda for which it was commissioned. Instead, Huston reported on Allied planes being downed over the Japanese-held island of Kiska.
"The Battle of San Pietro" (1945) was to be a victory film of the Allied invasion of Italy, but Huston turned the camera instead on an American attempt to take one tiny hill that became a bloodbath. The film was condemned by its commissioners as "antiwar" until General George C. Marshall later released it, believing that an accurate picture of war might help prepare new soldiers emotionally for battle.
The last of the trilogy, "Let There Be Light" (1946), never saw the light. The film was banned by the US government until 1981. Apparently, Huston's intent to show psychiatric patients recovering from the shock of war had shown, too well, how war affected people.
The reality of these films overshadowed my purpose at the Malibu party: I was trying to be a writer with Huston's kind of boldness, but I didn't have the guts. Publicity was easier.
At the surfside luncheon, after we had toasted the unsung heroes of documentary films, John Huston appeared, also applauding them from his wheelchair. His beautiful and statuesque daughter Anjelica stood behind him.
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