Interview with Paul Mazursky

In 1954, a young New York actor named Paul Mazursky hung up his beret, combed his hair into a ducktail and went to a casting call for a movie named "The Blackboard Jungle." He got the job. He left behind a bohemian existence in Greenwich Village and set out for Hollywood and an acting career that somehow never quite got off the ground.

When the movies didn't make him a star, he worked as a stand-up comic - first back in New York, and then at the old Gate of Horn in Chicago. He ran into some of the early Second City people - Paul Sills, Barbara Harris - and eventually appeared in a West Coast company of Second City. He did some writing for the movies, had some success, got into directing almost absentmindedly and became a very good director.

And now he has gone full circle, making a film about his memories of Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Mazursky's "Next Stop, Greenwich Village," which will follow "Swept Away..." into the Carnegie, is a very personal film, even though Mazursky insists it shouldn't be seen as literal autobiography. It remembers a time, which is in some ways, as strange and far ago as the last century (it's always a shock to see photographs of the Beat Generation heroes, wearing suits and ties). Mazursky says it's a funny movie, "and then there are heavy places."

That describes pretty well the body of his work, which he refers to as "painful comedies." Starting with one of the basic Second City situations, in which funny skits go through transformations and end up being thoughtful and revealing. Mazursky has made several comedies that end up more seriously than they started out.

His best film was "Blume in Love," about a marriage in trouble. He made "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," about jaded Californians seeking self-knowledge through group encounters. His "Alex in Wonderland" was about a movie director deciding whether to sell out. "Harry and Tonto," which won an Oscar for Art Carney last year, was about an old man and a cat, and about the loneliness of growing old.

All of these films were comedies - technically, anyway, although it's a little unusual for a comedy to end with the love theme from "Tristan and Isolde," as "Blume in Love" did. But Mazursky isn't often included on lists of comic directors like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. He makes a different kind of movie. He rarely goes for a cheap gag, and his occasional lapses - like the shot in "Harry and Tonto" where the prostitute gleefully steers her car, and Harry, off the road - call attention to themselves because they're in such carefully crafted movies.

"I don't like movies that are morally simple," Mazursky was saying during a visit here last week. "I don't think I have it in me to make a movie in which all the situations and relationships are black and white. I get into the gray areas. One of my problems in seeing 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is that it wasn't ambiguous - it was all black and white, the choices were all clear, the sides were chosen up.

"Even when I begin with a situation that's basically funny or sad, I like to keep poking around in it. I like to get into the middle of a relationship, to explore the subtle places. I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way. They're...'bittersweet' is a good word."

Mazursky writes all of his own films, and started as a writer in 1967 with "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas." A lot of other writer-directors (Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese come to mind) began by directing their own scripts and then moved on to directing screen plays by other people.

"I haven't done that yet," Mazursky says. "I wish in my own mind I were more definite - that I was absolutely convinced I'd never direct someone else's script, but I keep reading scripts, because I might find something.

"One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films. I get offered a lot of those, and I'm afraid that if I took one - and I'm tempted I'd lose my will. It's hard to wait around until your next picture idea occurs to you. Right now, for example, I'm between pictures and I have a couple of ideas and a few scenes written down and, basically, I'm just fiddling."

"Next Stop, Greenwich Village," says Mazursky, is more inspired by his years in the village than based on them.