Anna Deveare Smith quizzes James Mangold at Tuesday’s “Work in Progress” benefit at MoMA (Photos: STV)
The Reeler had the good fortune last night of scoring a ticket to MoMA’s annual “A Work in Progress” benefit, which this year celebrated filmmaker James Mangold. The museum’s Junior Associates group organizes these tributes as sort of a This is Your Professional Life for 30- and 40-something directors in the early to middle stages of their careers; previous honorees include Sofia Coppola, Alexander Payne and Marc Forster. As such, the company is pretty good, and while nobody registered the P. Diddy, Maggie Gyllenhaal or Will Ferrell sightings that accompanied last year’s Forster extravaganza, it was nice to see Mangold veterans Liv Tyler, Dallas Roberts and John C. McGinley drop in for support.
Myself, I wound up in the fourth row next to Lloyd Grove and right behind a semi-dozing Michael Musto, both of whom I presume had little use for the keen cine-centric insights threading the discussion between Mangold and moderator Anna Deveare Smith. Mangold’s personal history proved a little more unanimously dazzling; as the son of painters Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, he became the third person in his family to have work in MoMA’s permanent collection.
“The thing about growing up in a house with two painters was that I was not a rebel in trying to become an artist,” Mangold said. “It was something that made a lot of sense. These two people got to dream, paint and work and somehow make a living making beautiful things. So it seemed like a good way to go. The only rebellious act I can think of, in fact, is being frustrated (at) the narrow band of the world that appreciated me. And in a way, it was very frustrating growing up in kind of a blue-collar town where no one who I went to school with understood what my parents did and how it related to the world. It was very hard to be in an upstate town, and I’d go, ‘My dad is a minimalist painter.’ Or, ‘My mom paints landscape with masking tape on it.’ ”
Of course, no critical assessment of Mangold’s career would be complete without dropping the phrase “actor’s director”–a label the filmmaker earned early with his masterful feature debut Heavy and later cemented with the ensemble drama Cop Land and the Oscar-winning films Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line. Smith brought it up within about three minutes of the first film clip.
“I remember hearing people at film school complain, ‘They don’t have any Steadicams; I’m trying to get a donation of one from blah blah blah’ ” Mangold said, recalling his days studying at CalArts with legends like Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell of Success). “It’s all about equipment. It’s like, ‘Dude, in that equipment room, you have what Orson Welles made Citizen Kane with. All that shit you’re trying to get is shit that you don’t need. What you’re missing is Joseph Cotten. You need Joseph Cotten and a light. And a camera from 1964.’
“Whenever you find a young filmmaker–and I include myself–looking at his movie and going, ‘It sucks,’ it’s not because of that shot that you missed,” he continued. “It’s because there’s no human ‘there’ there. And so what occurred to me that what was really missing from my own work was being moved. What blew me away, whether it was something as far reaching as Star Wars or The Conversation, was that they both moved me. And if somehow, you don’t get moved, you’re dead. … It’s your special effect.”

“That’s what an actor’s director is”: Mangold with Identity co-star John C. McGinley
McGinley was more specific in his introduction to a scene from Mangold’s 2003 thriller Identity. “I asked Jim what it’s like to be an ‘actor’s director.’ And what it means to me–there are some other great actors in this room; I’m not sure what it means to them–but what it means to me is to be included in a collaboration when someone has a vision. And a vision can be as simple as how we’re going to tell the story–‘This is my opinion, and this is how we’re going to do it.’ It’s just night and day when someone doesn’t have that vision. It really takes some backbone to turn to somebody and say, ‘I love that idea. Bring that into my vision.’ On set, as Jim was saying, one person has to marshal 120 people or more. And so when your ideas are integrated into that vision, it’s extraordinary. It elevates you, and when you’re elevated, actors have a chance to flourish.”
He turned to address Mangold directly. “That’s what an ‘actor’s director’ is, and that’s what you do with your films, and it’s extraordinary.”
Mangold and Smith also get around to discussing Heavy, which I have always considered one of the great, woefully underrated films of the ’90s and was thrilled to see back in the theater again after a decade (the film screens at MoMA June 4 and 22). Mangold wrote the film while attending Columbia University’s film school, bouncing 20 to 30 pages of drafts every week off some instructor named Milos Forman. It was his first feature-length script.
“For me, it was a very purposeful decision to make as silent a film as I could in this day and age,” he said. “With what was going on with Reservoir Dogs and Quentin and a lot of people following that kind of movement toward bigger, faster, louder, talkier, (and) cooler, there was a level where, in a sense, I couldn’t compete. I felt what was happening out there, and I felt that what I was interested in I couldn’t wrap up into that form. Whatever I went after at that point, I wanted it to be fragile. I wanted it to be myself.”
I later snuck in a word with Greg Allen, the filmmaker and writer behind Greg.org who has also spent almost a decade as a member of MoMA’s Junior Associates. The group comprises art lovers age 40 and under; Allen was the co-chair of this year’s “Work in Progress” event. “When filmmakers aren’t trying to sell a specific film–when it’s just them talking about what they love–it’s just so much more educational for me,” Allen said. “As a filmmaker, anyway. But it’s more interesting, too, because they talk about the good and the bad things. They talk about what worked and what didn’t. Could you imagine him talking about, ‘Oh, they shouldn’t have marketed Kate and Leopold as a Meg Ryan film,’ when she’s the star? He couldn’t do that right at the time, but in retrospect, when he’s out of that marketing bubble, it totally makes sense.
“There’s more to it than just that,” Allen added, “and it’s one of things that we tried to do when we defined how to create this event and this award: finding filmmakers who had something to say. They’re not just studio hacks, and they’re not these introverted, auteur-y filmmakers, either. They CAN talk about what they do in a meaningful way, and not just to, like, film students. It transcends just the pure professional aspect of it.”

I also got about four seconds of face time with Liv Tyler before Mangold sweetly pulled her aside. “I’ll bring her right back,” he told me. I never saw her again. Robert Mangold, however, told me about young Jim’s decidedly different artistic tastes. “You know, a painter’s life is basically that you go to your studio and you’re all alone,” he told me at the event’s after-party. “Basically it’s a very solitary process. But Jim was interested from the beginning in puppet shows and in magic; we used to go to these magic shops in Times Square where these magicians were performing. It was like he was always involved in this kind of rapport with an audience that’s very different than a painter or a sculptor.”
That rapport showed Tuesday night, when Mangold could not stop smiling as one attendee after another congratulated him on the MoMA accolade. But by that point, the prognosticator in me was far more interested in who might be up for a tribute in ’07; my magic eight-ball tells me P.T. Anderson. After all, he will be 36 at this time next year, There Will Be Blood should be due out around that time (probably for Cannes), and many of his best-known ensemble players–Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly–are New Yorkers. This is work that absolutely should be in progress.

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