Writer’s ‘Influence’ Draws Star Power ; Elvis Mitchell Introduces Us to the Real Hollywood

By Jeff Simon

There’s magic in the number three. The ancients always knew that.

That, for instance, is how many people, even the most informed of us, can think of named Elvis — Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello and Elvis Mitchell.

It’s also the number of indisputably great film interviewers I’ve ever seen regularly appear on television: Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel, former talk show host Dick Cavett and, now, Elvis Mitchell, the colorfully ubiquitous (if not generally famous) film writer who was once a film critic for the New York Times.

I include the latter on the basis of seeing the first two episodes of Mitchell’s TCM series “Under the Influence,” which will begin on the network with showings at 8 and 10:30 p.m. Monday. Following it at 8:30 p.m. will be “Tootsie” and at 11 p.m. “An American in Paris.”

Mitchell’s new miniseries, airing through July, would be memorable if for no other reason than that Mitchell’s first show finally gives viewers a glimpse into why film critics like me revered the late Sydney Pollack (who died of cancer just recently). As good as Pollack was introducing movies as the first host of TCM’s “The Essentials,” you couldn’t really get a sense of Pollack’s passion for movies and the people who made them, and his plainspoken charm about them all unless you talked to him “one on one” (as it’s called in journalism’s congenital narcissistic and hierarchical terminology).

What Mitchell’s new series lets viewers do, is eavesdrop on such encounters for 30 minutes. Future interviews will be with Bill Murray on July 14, Laurence Fishburne on July 21 and Quentin Tarantino on July 28. I’ve been lucky enough to interview them all myself and I know that Murray may well come as a revelation to those who only know his persona as the smirking unofficial president — and indeed co-founder — of the Phi Beta Cannabis Society.

When he isn’t clowning, Murray is far more immersed in Hollywood movie history than most people think. Listen to him talk to Mitchell about William Holden in “Stalag 17″ or Margaret Sullivan (“this performance is just stuff that makes you gasp”) in the not-exactly- everyday comedy “The Moon’s Our Home.” People will definitely be hearing a Murray they’ve never heard before and were unlikely to suspect. (I was one of six people at a roundtable interview before the release of his remake of “The Razor’s Edge” and I remember thinking there was something almost tragic about the disparity between his individual tastes and what Hollywood was eager for him to do. It was only in middle age, when indie directors Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch found his benevolent melancholy on camera, that people really got a sense of what was always there offscreen.)

To be honest, the most interesting interview of them all to me personally is going to be Fishburne, a man who was, to understate considerably, unenlightening when I talked to him and about whom I have never heard another journalist speak of with any affection. If Mitchell’s Fishburne interview is enlightening at all, it will be in the lower regions of the miraculous.

It isn’t, by the way, that Mitchell asks remarkably astute questions during those Pollack and Murray interviews. It is just as valuable, if not more so, to present an interview subject with someone they actually want to give an intelligent and candid answer to.

That’s why Mitchell is a great TV interviewer about movies and these people know it. He truly understands whatever they’re going to say. What makes Bravo’s “Inside Actor’s Studio” interviews so fascinating aren’t Lawrence Lipton’s hilariously arch questions, it’s that performers (and sometimes directors) are talking to aspiring performers and directors. They’re telling them seriously about what they do in a way they simply can’t when they’re talking to Letterman, Leno and Regis.

Mitchell’s history in film world ubiquity is fascinating. Most famous as the first African-American film critic for the New York Times (and a man who, reportedly, couldn’t find it in his heart to be overawed by that), he’s been a familiar voice on NPR and now has an interview show on Santa Monica’s KCRW. (Whose interviewers also include former UB prodigy Michael Silverblatt, now thought of as the best literary interviewer in America. All can be accessed on their Web site.)

I met Mitchell once at a Toronto Film Festival. I mentioned, at the time, that I’d liked his reviews on NPR. He gave me what was obviously a stock response — a joke about being amazed those reviews had any listeners at all.

On Monday, at long last, a cable TV audience will get to hear what one of America’s smartest film people can draw out of a few of film’s most interesting figures.

It is, I promise, quite a lot.

e-mail: jsimon@buffnews.com

Originally published by ARTS EDITOR.

(c) 2008 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.