Monday, July 15th, 2013
My dinner with Andre
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE
110 minutes. Copyright 1981 The André Company.
The Pacific Arts Corp., Inc.
New Yorker Films Release
ANDRE GREGORY
WALLACE SHAWN
in a film
presented by GEORGE W. GEORGE
in association with MICHAEL WHITE
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE
director of photography JERI SOPANEN
production designer DAVID MITCHELL
editor SUZANNE BARON
sound JEAN-CLAUDE LAUREUX
music ALLEN SHAWN
produced by GEORGE W. GEORGE
BEVERLY KARP
screenplay by WALLACE SHAWN
ANDRE GREGORY
directed by LOUIS MALLE
with JEAN LENAUER: waiter
ROY BUTLER: bartender
My Dinner with André
[We see Wally walking along the streets in a big city; we hear street sounds. Wally has a blank expression. We hear his voice commenting on the action, as a narrator would. This narrating voice will be labeled "WALLY'S NARRATION" to distinguish it from Wally's actual words within the action of the story.]
WALLY'S NARRATION: The life of a playwright is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on! You take up other lines of work to try to make a living...I became an actor...and people don't hire you! So you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade. Today I had to be up by ten in the morning to make some important phone calls. Then I'd gone to the stationery store to buy envelopes. Then to the xerox shop: there were dozens of things to do. By five o'clock I'd finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had just been stuffed with bills! What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all I was already doing my best! I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the upper east side, and when I was ten years old I was rich! I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I'm thirty-six, and all I think about is money! [Change of scene: in the subway. A train pulls in; Wally gets in and we see him riding, standing against the door.] It was now seven o'clock and I would have liked nothing better than to go home and have my girlfriend Debby cook me a nice delicious dinner. But for the last several years our financial circumstances have forced Debby to work three nights a week as a waitress. After all, somebody had to bring in a little money! So I was on my own. But the worse thing of all was that I had been trapped by an odd series of circumstances into agreeing to have dinner with a man I'd been avoiding literally for years. His name was André Gregory. At one time he'd been a very close friend of mine, as well as my most valued colleague in the theater. In fact, he was the man who had first discovered me, and put one of my plays on the professional stage. When I had know André, he'd been at the height of his career as a theater director. The amazing work he did with his company, the Manhattan Project, had just stunned audiences, throughout the world! [Change of scene: Wally is again walking.] But then something had happened to André. He'd dropped out of the theater. He'd sort of disappeared! For months at a time his family seemed only to know that he was traveling in some odd place, like Tibet, which was really weird, because he loved his wife and children. He never used to like to leave home at all! Or else you'd hear that someone had met him at a party and he'd been telling people that he'd talked with trees, or something like that? Obviously something terrible had happened to André. [Wally is now approaching the entrance to a restaurant. We hear piano music, the easy kind that is played as background music. Wally puts on a tie.] The whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I mean, I really wasn't up for that sort of thing. I had problems of my own! I mean, I couldn't help André! Was I supposed to be a doctor, or what?! [He walks in and checks his coat.]
WALLY: [To the hat-check girclass="underline" ] Hello.
HAT-CHECK GIRL: Hello. [Wally checks his coat.]
WALLY: Thank you. [He goes to the headwaiter.]
HEADWAITER: Yes, sir.
WALLY: Uh...sir. My name is Wallace Shawn. I'm expected at the table of André Gregory.
HEADWAITER: [He checks his list.] That table will be a moment, sir. If you like, you may have a drink at the bar. [Wally goes to the bar. The piano music is louder. A woman laughs. Conversations.]
BARTENDER: Good evening, sir.
WALLY: Uh, could I have a club soda, please?
BARTENDER: I'm sorry, sir, we only serve Source de Périon [Perrier?].
WALLY: That would be fine, thank you. [The music takes over, now with a violin. We see the musicians: piano, bass and violin.]
WALLY'S NARRATION: [Standing against the bar, Wally looks at the diners. We are given views of people eating and talking.] When I'd called André and he'd suggested that we meet in this particular restaurant, I'd been rather surprised. Because André's tastes used to be very ascetic. Even though people have always known that he has some money somewhere. I mean, how the hell else could he have been flying off to Asia and so on and still have been supporting his family? [Conversations in the background.] The reason I was meeting André was that an acquaintance of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town the night before, and he'd suddenly come upon André leaning against a crumbling old building, and sobbing. André had explained to George that he'd just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he'd been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life." [The music takes over.]
ANDRE: Wally!! [André comes in with his arms outstretched. Wally goes to meet him. They laugh and pronounce some disjointed words; André says something like "Wow" and Wally replies with something like "My God."]
WALLY'S NARRATION: [They hug and André pats Wally on the back.] I remember when I first started working with André's company, I couldn't get over the way the actors would hug when they greeted each other. "Wow, now I'm really in the theater," I thought.
WALLY: Well! You look terrific!
ANDRE: Well!! I feel terrible! [They both laugh.]
BARTENDER: Good evening, sir. Nice to see you again.
ANDRE: Thank you! Good evening. I think I'll have a spritzer, if I may.
BARTENDER: Yes, sir.
ANDRE: Thank you.
WALLY'S NARRATION: [Wally and André start talking; we can hear only parts of the conversation, underneath Wally's narration.] I was feeling incredibly nervous. I wasn't sure I could stick through an entire meal with him! So we talked about this and that. [The music dies down and stops.] He told me a few things about Jerzy Grotowski, the great Polish theater director, who was a friend and almost like a kind of a guru of André's. He'd also dropped out of the theater. Grotowski was a pretty unusual character himself. At one time he'd been quite fat; then he'd lost an incredible amount of weight, and become very thin, and grown a beard!
WAITER: [Coming up to them.] Your table is ready, if you feel like sitting down. [André and Wally both say "Oh!" Then André says "Thank you." They go to their table and settle in. They look over the menu.]
WALLY'S NARRATION: I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this evening bearable would be to ask André a few questions. Asking questions always relaxes me. In fact, I sometimes think that my secret profession is that I'm a private investigator, a detective. I always enjoy finding out about people. Even if they're an absolute agony, I always find it very interesting.