Pic from The New York Post
New York Times 9/28/84: John Shea
September 28, 1984 AT THE MOVIES
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
SEARCH though you may, you will find no Fort Neal, La., on any roster of United States military installations.
It exists only in the heart and imagination of Charles Fuller - and at such theaters as the Baronet and Guild 50th Street, where ''A Soldier's Story'' is playing.
''A Soldier's Story,'' the film version of Mr. Fuller's Pulitzer Prize- winning drama, ''A Soldier's Play,'' deals with the investigation of the murder of a black sergeant during World War II at the fictional Fort Neal.
''The play was written for Larry Neal,'' Mr. Fuller explained. ''He was my best friend. I had known him for 35 years.'' Lawrence P. Neal, a poet, critic and playwright who was a major influence on the black arts movement of the 1960's, died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 42 while in Hamilton, N.Y. for a workshop at Colgate University.
At the time of Mr. Neal's death, the 45-year-old Mr. Fuller said, he had not yet written ''A Soldier's Play.'' ''That was written for Larry Neal,'' Mr. Fuller said. ''And the name Fort Neal was given so that all the events sort of symbolically take place in the heart of Larry Neal.''
From the time the Negro Ensemble Company production opened in late 1981, Mr. Fuller said, he made clear there was a condition attached to making it into a movie: ''You could not buy the rights unless I was also part of the writing.''
Norman Jewison, the director of ''A Soldier's Story,'' was amenable. ''There are many things you can't do on the stage,'' Mr. Fuller said of the process of adaptation. ''You can't drive across the stage. What the film does is open up all those possibilities. It's an exciting challenge and I enjoyed doing it.''
''I'm working on a new play,'' he said. ''Just researching it. I honestly don't know what it's going to be yet.'' But chances are you can look for it in a Negro Ensemble Company production in the fall of 1985. The Appeal of Work For Ryan O'Neal
''I hadn't worked in a while. There's a certain appeal to someone offering you a job.''
Between sips of coffee laced with honey and milk, Ryan O'Neal was discussing how he came to take on the role of Albert Brodsky, a film teacher from N.Y.U. who hitchhikes west and finds fame and fortune and misery and despair in Hollywood.
Among other misfortunes, Albert Brodsky and his former wife, played by Shelley Long, are sued for divorce by their 10-year-old daughter (Drew Barrymore) in ''Irreconcilable Differences,'' (review on page C10) a comedy written by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, who were two- thirds of the writing team on the 1980 hit, ''Private Benjamin.''
''There are very few guys that can go out and make their own pictures,'' Mr. O'Neal said. ''The rest of us hope that someone will call.''
Aside from the appeal of being offered a job, Mr. O'Neal said, he found Albert Brodsky himself appealing. ''This was a story about people I knew, and maybe even myself.'' But, he said, studios were leery of the project. ''Two or three studios turned it down,'' he said. ''It was about Hollywood. They wouldn't touch it. I think they all saw portions of their own existence.
''Here's an example: Everyone will go nameless. At one of those nameless companies that had the picture, one of the heads of this major company had script meetings.'' And when he came to the part where Albert Brodsky has fallen in love with a starlet and Mrs. Brodsky is packing to leave, Mr. O'Neal recalled: ''He said, 'I can't listen to this. It drives me crazy. I've got a girl in New York. My wife doesn't know about it. This part just tears me to pieces. What's going to happen? We have three kids. Do you know what the child-support laws in this town are?' ''
The nameless studio did not make ''Irreconcilable Differences.''
Mr. O'Neal's next movie, ''The Fever,'' will be about a sportswriter who sets out to write about sports gambling and becomes too deeply involved. It's a different sort of character from Albert Brodsky.
''I think I've got to play somebody tough,'' said Mr. O'Neal. Exploring the Differences Between Screen and Stage
Like Mr. Fuller and Mr. O'Neal, John Shea had some things to say about the differences between screen and stage and about choosing roles.
Mr. Shea waited for a year after ''Missing'' before choosing his next movie role - Danny Morgan, a struggling novelist in ''Windy City,'' Armyan Bernstein's story of friendship, playing at the Gemini.
Between the two films, Mr. Shea occupied himself on stage, and he has clear ideas how the stage feeds his movie portrayals and vice versa.
''I would say that there is a kind of architecture of acting that you learn on the stage,'' Mr. Shea said, ''where you learn how to build a character from the beginning through the climax to the end. And learning how to do that for two or three hours on stage, where you are the emotional arc of the character, is something that serves you when you go to make movies. In the rehearsal of a film and the original conception of your role, as you read a script, you must build a similar emotional architecture. When you're shooting out of sequence, you know where you have to be at any given time emotionally, so when the editor puts it back together at the end, it will have an emotional integrity to it.''
As for the movies feeding theater, he said: ''The intimacy of the close- up lens demands continual thought and feeling from a character in the movies, and so a film actor is forced to create what we call an in-depth subtext - the thoughts and emotions beneath the text, so that when the camera is coming in close on you, it is simply reading the thoughts in your eyes. That attention to detail that film acting requires enriches stage work.''
Having discussed movies and stage, Mr. Shea is off to England to star in a television production - ''SS,'' in which he portrays an idealistic young Nazi during the days of Germany's Weimar Republic. Jean-Jacques Annaud Tackles Medieval MysteryUmberto Eco's best-selling medieval mystery, ''The Name of the Rose,'' is moving toward the screen. During a recent appearance at the 92d Street Y, Professor Eco said Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of ''Quest for Fire'' and the Academy Award-winning ''Black and White in Color,'' had turned his apartment into a small medieval library and was preparing a script. Plans call for filming to start in January. A Look at How the Past Looked at the Future .
Tomorrow at the Thalia, it will be possible to visit the future by witnessing the past.
It's not as confusing as it sounds. Beginning at 2 P.M., the Thalia, just west of Broadway at 250 West 95th Street (222-3370), is presenting a show devoted to the 1939-40 World's Fair, which was all about the way things were going to be.
The twin bill will consist of ''The World of Tomorrow,'' a well-received documentary constructed of newsreel footage, industrial films, cartoons and home movies, all narrated by Jason Robards; and ''All's Fair at the World's Fair,'' an hour of short films compiled by the Thalia. The latter consists of complete newsreels; ''Billy Mouse's Aquacade,'' a cartoon parody of the Billy Rose Aquacade; an excerpt from ''Eternally Yours'' (1939) in which David Niven, in the role of an escape artist, parachutes into the fairgrounds; and a rare animated puppet film directed by Joseph Losey, who later won fame for such films as ''The Servant,'' ''The Go-Between'' and ''Mr. Klein.''
Tickets are $4.50; and until 5 P.M. children 12 and under and adults 65 and older will be admitted for $2.50. A devotee of the World's Fair is scheduled to be on hand to display some memorabilia and to sell something that was still in the future when the World's Fair was in its heyday: commemorative T-shirts bearing a likeness of the Fair's famed Trylon and Perisphere.
© The New York Times
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