BEFORE I STARTED the Seberg film, I had written pages and pages of notes about various subjects that I knew the film would deal with: Joan of Arc, Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Lilith, Godard and Gorinís Letter to Jane, and the Kuleshov effect. They were stream-of-consciousness maunderings that were way too long to use in the film once I started the actual editingóólittle mini-essays which had to be cut, abbreviated, and rearranged if they were to be used as entries from Jean Sebergís ìjournals.î These are some of the unedited notes, some parts of which worked their way into the script, dancing in and out, like a very perverse call and response, to a barrage of film clips. I think that they are sufficiently different from the film so as not to seem redundant even if youíve seen it. And if you havenít, they might make you want to.

Notes on Jane

In Barbarella, Jane does the first striptease in outer space, captured for earthly mortals in Playboy. She plays the first intergalactic sex kitten. Roger Vadim parades her around in a variety of S&M costumes suggesting a wide variety of overlapping fetishes for the delectation of a presumably drooling, all-male audience. Vadim, who made And God Created Woman, which made his then wife Brigitte Bardot a world-famous movie star almost overnight, clearly enjoyed displaying his wivesí and girlfriendsí charms to a mass audience, hoping that they, as spectators, would occupy the place he usually did. When Jane threw her hat into the ring as a serious actress, none of this was held against her. But itís also true that she was recognized as a serious actress only after she played a hookerócombining the best of both worlds. Although she publicly apologized for championing the cause of North Vietnam, she never apologized for playing bimbos. How come Hanoi was held against her, but when she became a feminist, Barbarella wasnít? I guess your politics are recognized as a function of the real world, whereas movie roles are recognized as an economic necessity, a job like any other, that you have to take. Everyone has to pay the rent.

In 1992 I finished my film Rock Hudsonís Home Movies, which I called ìa fictitious autobiography.î Hudson, back from the dead, played by an actor, is young once again, and comments on various aspects of his career and his closeted sexuality, and how and where the two intersected. At the time I transferred the footage from videos of Rock Hudson, I also transferred hours of material about the representation of art and artists in American films. I planned to make a clip-film about the way Hollywood claims to worship, but actually reviles, art and artists, often at the very same time. It was to be called ìArt Is Just a Guyís Name,î taken from a line of Rock Hudsonís in Magnificent Obsession, when he proudly declares his disinterest in all things artistic. I had collected an assortment of real gems, including Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street ordering Edward G. Robinson, since heís a painter, to paint her toenails. She drawls sardonically, in the way that only Bennett could, ìTheyíll be masterpieces!î And then thereís Deborah Kerr, in An Affair to Remember, playing an accident victim who will never walk again, chirping optimistically and without a trace of irony to Cary Grant, who had always wanted to be a painter: ìIf you can paint, I can walk!î I edited about 15 minutes of the material, which I thought was interesting and fun, and I realized that only about ten other people in the whole world would be interested in this examination of Hollywoodís deeply conflicted relationship to all things cultural. I decided, since so much more work was required to make the piece into the feature-length work I envisioned, it wasnít worth the trouble. I abandoned it.

Around the same time, I read that Jodie Foster was planning to do a film about the life of Jean Seberg, with Foster herself playing Seberg. That really touched a nerve. I thought to myself, What the hell does she know about Seberg? To her, Seberg was just a historical anecdote, whereas Jean Seberg was a very important figure in my life at the movies. I was a child when Preminger announced that he was scouring the planet for an unknown actress to play Saint Joan. Even though I didnít see the film when it was released, I remember very vividly all the hoopla surrounding that well-publicized search for a new face. Just because she studied French at Yale didnít give Foster the right to lay claim to Sebergís life. Sebergís life and mineóas a vieweróintersected in too many ways for me to give her up without a battle. Maybe itís not the best motivation for making a movieóa grudge fuckóbut, hey, it worked. I was going to beat Foster at her own game and make my film first. And I did.

A filmmaker friend who had made a very well-received documentary that no one went to see had a great idea for me after he saw the film. In the ads for Jean Seberg, under the title, he said, it should proudly proclaim itself ìAn Essay.î Right. What do people go to even less than they go to documentaries? Essays. I didnít take his generous advice. But I donít think anyone was fooled, either.

Notes on Joan

Seberg in Saint Joan

Joan of Arc is to films what Macbeth is to the theater. It has a curse on it. Traditionally, everything goes wrong in any stage production of Macbeth. As for Joan of Arc, nothing good happens to anyone who plays St. Joan in the movies. Falconetti, who played in Dreyerís La Passion de Jeanne díArc, never acted in another film. She was so indelibly associated with the part that she consumed her own image in Dreyerís film. And Ingrid Bergman? At the height of her popularity in America, after having played Joan of Arc on stage and on screen, she had an affair with Roberto Rossellini and left her husband and infant daughter to live with him. Add to that that she became pregnant with Rosselliniís child while he was still married to another woman and before he and Bergman were married. These transgressions ended her American career for almost a decade. She was vilified in the press and from the pulpit, and was virtually excommunicated from movie theaters in the U.S. Her second Joan was in Rosselliniís Joan at the Stake, at the end of their relationship. It didnít do either of them any good. It was the last of the five-and-a-half films they did together, during which time she didnít do films with anyone else because he didnít want her to. I wonder if she ever regretted not having appeared in Viscontiís Senso opposite Marlon Brando.

The curse of Joan of Arc extends even beyond the actress who plays her on the screen. A subcategory should be addedóactresses who play Joan of Arc in the movie within the movie that theyíre in. Lucia BosË, in Antonioniís La Signora senza Camelie, plays a former shopgirl who, because of her looks, makes it big as a movie glamour-queen of the sex-and-sandal variety. She lets her husband talk her into making an art film as bid for artistic respectabilityóthe life of Joan of Arcówhich effectively ends their marriage and her career. Alida Valli, in The Miracle of the Bells, plays an aspiring actress who lands the role of Joan of Arc. Even though she is great in it, she dies before the movie is released. The producer refuses to release the movie: her death is a bad omen and itís bad for box office. Who wants to see a dead would-be star? It takes the miracle of the title to make him change his mind. The point is, playing Joan is bad for your health.

And, of course, thereís my story, I who had everything in the worldóthe most coveted screen role a girl could hope for, instant fame and success and then, a year later, international flopdom, failing very publicly when the movie was released. I was burned at the stake again when the reviews came out. Then I made my way back and, I suppose, I lived my life like most people, with the usual highs and lowsóuntil I was 30, when the lows took over. The curse of Joan took over and didnít end until I committed suicide ten years later. Do me a favor: donít invite me to be the guest speaker at any Joan of Arc film festival.

I was on the check-out line at the grocery, if you can call a high-priced, snobby food store a grocery. A woman ahead of me said that after seeing the film, she got herself a Jean Seberg haircut. Someone Iíve been friends with told me the same thing. I didnít think about it much but I guess it was flattering, although it really had nothing to do with me. I had just finished editing and writing the video rough cut of the Seberg film. All the spaces where the actress was to appear were just black leader, with my voice standing in for what would be the actressís voice. Before this version was completed, it was almost useless to try to look for an actressóthere would be nothing to show her. There was someone in experimental theater whom I had seen a few years earlier who actually did look like Jean Seberg. And she was wonderful in the material that she and her partner had written. Through a friend, I was able to track her down in London. I had been dreaming of this actress as my ideal Jean Seberg for a year and a half. She came back to the United States briefly because her mother was ill, and we met. Even though she looked the part, as a Jean Seberg who had gained weight and aged somewhat, I knew from the first lines out of her mouth that it wouldnít work. Everything she said seemed flat and dull, the way it is when the wrong actor is reading your material.

My casting director kept promising me people, but she never arranged for meetings. Though I did meet one young actress, who has subsequently become a little well known (maybe by the time this is printed, she will be even more well known), and I realized the film would not be nearly as effective with her. I wanted an older actress, someone who continued the aging process after Seberg died. It would, I felt, add a poignancy and piquancy to what she was saying. To have a young woman muse about various disasters in her life, disasters that still loomed ahead of her, didnít make a lot of sense. It was less than four weeks to the time I had to shootóthe unfinished film had been invited to a film festival and I had a very tight deadlineóand there was a great deal of script for the actress to memorize. Strangely enough, I wasnít the least bit anxious about finding someone, even though there was so little time.

Anyway, after I finished the rough cut, I went out and, in a celebratory mood, bought some cookies. Even though Iím not supposed to eat things like that (is anyone, over the age of 20?), I wolfed down the whole box. As I knew it wouldóas someone who has hypoglycemia and tries, if not always successfully, to stay away from sweetsóit made me drowsy, and I wanted to take a nap. When I woke up, the first thing I did was rush over to a film reference book and look up Mary Beth Hurt. Either in a dream or upon waking, her name had come to me, and I thought she would be the perfect person to play an older Jean Seberg. The only reason I tell this story is not to suggest that sweets, although they may be bad for you, can also have good side effects or that the best casting ideas come when youíre unconscious, but something else. In the reference book it said that Mary Beth Hurt was born in Marshalltown, Iowaóthe same city where Jean Seberg was born. Bingo! I was positive that she was going to do it. It turned out that Seberg had babysat Hurt, and Hurt remembered going to the parade welcoming Seberg back for the screening of Saint Joan in Marshalltown. In any case, that kind of luck or chance or synchronicity or whatever you want to call it canít be looked for, hoped for, or asked for. It happens or it doesnít. You donít go after it. It will come after you. When I think about it, I donít know what I would have done if Mary Beth Hurt hadnít agreed to play the part.

Notes on Jean-Luc, Jane, and Jean

What else did I have in common with Jane Fonda, aside from the fact that I jokingly called myself the poor manís Jane Fonda? We were both in movies by Godard. But nobody deserved what he did to her after she was in Tout va bien. After the film, she went to Vietnam and was photographed with North Vietnamese peasants. The photograph made the front page of every newspaper in the world. ìStar Consorts with Communist Guerillas!î And, of course, the way it was reported, Jane, not the Vietnam War, was the event. Godard couldnít forgive her for that. But instead of talking about her trip, he excoriates her as if it were her doingóas if she were waging the war on North Vietnam, as if she had taken the picture with her tragic-looking face in perfect focus in the foreground and the peasants blurred and relegated to the background, as if she had personally written the captions in every newspaper and magazine. He, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, drafted his poison-pen Letter to Jane. She, not the photographers or the merchandisers of the photograph, became the villain. Nor could he forgive the fact that she was rich, a celebrity, a movie star, and especially a woman. Donít tell me he would have done a similar hatchet job on a man. I donít believe it for a second. This, after all, was the man who wanted me to rifle through Belmondoís pockets as he lay dying on the street. Janeís real crime, in addition to the other offences, was that she was a bleeding-heart liberal, not a Marxist-Leninist, and totally unschooled in radical rhetoric. The common perception is that actors are dolts, unable to think for themselves if they donít have their lines written out for them. Well, after seeing Jane on TV defending her trip to Hanoi, Iím not sure I disagreed. But she got better at it the more she did it. And, I guess, thatís the point. When you become involved and discuss the issues a lot, you do get better at it. But at that time anyone could lay an elephant trap for her. I mean, after all, Godard wanted her in Tout va bien because she was an American movie star. Then trashing her was like calling a woman youíve slept with a whore because she had the bad judgment to sleep with you. Thereís always a sexual aspect to these so-called political vendettas. For example, what the FBI did to me because I had slept with black men.

My worst fear was that Godard would do the same number on me in relation to my involvement with the Panthers. But I guess the Panthers didnít mean so much to him as a French intellectual. In fact, the French found the Panthers sexy. Genet certainly did. And Vietnam was always an open wound with the French. After all, they lost it first. Then we went in and lost it again, under a new name. But they could afford to be self-righteous about it. Our atrocities were world-class news, theirs were merely a continuation and an extension of nineteenth-century colonialist policies. Perhaps they would have done better to be more outspoken about problems in their own backyardóAlgeria, for example.

I was afraid Godard would crucify me. But it never happened. I guess, unlike Jane, I was small potatoes.

A couple of film critics mentioned that I neglected to cite Letter to Jane. I thought the film too obscure to refer toóa diversionary little sidetrip that would not be interesting to a larger audience. Also, I didnít want to have to deal, in the editing room, with a film I find really hateful.

In David Richardsí 1981 biography of Jean Seberg, he mentions her first serious boyfriend, a young actor from Texas whom she met in summer stock. They played in William Ingeís Picnic together and fell in love. The guyís name was John Maddox. Now years ago, in the late 60s, I had a job on a documentary about killer sharks. This was way before Jaws. I was the sound editor, and because the editing team was working on the film by day, I had to come in at night and add the glug-glug-glug to every breath that anyone took underwater. I found the job excruciating. I would transfer sounds from the master tapes to 35mm and lay them in. For amusement, I would poke around in the office refrigerator and nibble at the food. The point of this story is that the editor of the film was a John Maddox who came from Texas. He was a handsome guy and very quiet, with a pleasant gravelly-tenor voice and the trace of a Texas accent. But with a quietness that also suggested a roiling rage underneath. I sensed he was very unhappy and that he felt he was destined for more interesting things in life than cutting banal nature documentaries. It was almost physicalóthe unarticulated aching for something else that he radiated. In reality, I didnít know very much about him except that he loved the Beatles and that he always had very beautiful girlfriends. He certainly never mentioned Jean Seberg. How do I know that this was the same John Maddox? My John Maddox, several years later, without having had any previous sailing experience, decided to sail by himself down the North Atlantic coastóin the middle of the winter!óall the way to the Caribbean. He was never heard from again. When the book mentions that Sebergís Maddox was lost in the Bermuda Triangle, I knew it was in fact the same person. But I learned something else as wellóhow an act that, even at that time, I thought was a terrible suicidal impulse dressed up as desperate macho posturing can be seen as something adventurous and even romantic. To say that he disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle is a bit of fanciful eyewash that biographers and readers of gossip columns are so enamoured of. The truth or, rather, another truth, the one that I was familiar with, is much uglier but more to the point. But maybe Iím being harsher and more ungenerous than John deserved. Or is this the kind of situation in which one can genuinely say, ìWhen the legend becomes fact, print the legendî? In any case, this is how rumors and tall tales and even myths are born. Poor John. Poor Jean. If only they both could have remained young and in love forever . . .

Notes on Lilith and Women and Depression

Seberg in Lilith

You know, Iíve never believed those statistics that women are more depressed than men. Itís partly the way they measure depression and the expression of depression. If a man drinks too much and totals his car and takes a couple of people with him in the ensuing wreck, thatís called . . . Well, what is it called? Drunk driving? Antisocial behavior? Itís never called manslaughter or, heaven forbid, suicide. If a guy is on a bell tower with a high-powered rifle, picking off people at random, heís not depressed. Heís just . . . what? A psychopath, a sociopath? A loner, a loser? But he evades the classification of depression. Women who have prescriptions for valium, however, never do. Women need ìmotherís little helpersî; men need guns and bullets. I donít believe the statistics for a minute. You, a woman, walk into the doctorís office and whatever your ailment, if it canít be seen, cut off, or cut out, they describe it as psychosomatic. And then there are all those movies about crazy women. All made by men, of course. The Blanche Dubois syndrome. I played my fair share of them and that was good for me, as an actress. Itís always more fun to play someone off the deep end. But how come itís always women whoíve gone over the edge? Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. And Robert Altmanís Images, with Susannah York. Me playing Lilith. Me in Dead of Summer, in which I play a woman who wanders around in a trance for the whole movie, wondering where her husband is and then, at the end, it turns out I killed him. Anyone ever see Sch–nbergís ìErwartungî? Women, in case you havenít noticed, only go crazy over love and aging. Men, in movies anyway, donít go crazy. They just want moreópower, money, guns, whatever.

Actors canít afford to question the ideology, the meaning, the ultimate what-is-it-all-about? of the script. If they did, would they ever be able to act in anything? No, when you read a script, you have to wear blinders. You read it to see if thereís anything there for you, if thereís anything you feel you can do with the lines on the page. Salary, of course, is not an inconsiderable consideration. Iíve played the whore more than once. I had a family to supportóa child and a nanny, lawyers, agents, accountants. Everyone has to be paid. And sometimes you work just to pay them. Movie stars are no different from other people. OK. I played those parts. They were offered to me. I took them. Isnít that what actors do? Thatís what I did.

An arts journalist camouflaged in floppy hat and sunglasses told me after a press screening that she had auditioned for the role of Saint Joan but I shouldnít tell anyone else. She didnít share this confidence with the people she worked with because then they would know how old she was. She had no memories of her audition.

My then wife and I were both fans of Jean Seberg. Before she and I met, we both saw and fell in love with The Five-Day Lover, a bittersweet Mozartian comedy with an ending so sad and unnerving it feels like a punch in the guts. Somewhere around the time that I was working with Maddox, my wife and I went to see Dead of Summer, on 57th Street, at a theater that is no longer there. We went together to see Birds in Peru, which Sebergís then husband, Romain Gary, wrote and directed. Even in 1968, it was a dismal, embarrassing affair. The theater where it was playing on Avenue B and 13th Street is no longer there. We went to see Seberg in the underrated Paint your Wagon, in which she co-starred with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, a huge, over-produced movie that overwhelms the modest behavioral charm of the three actors, who are even more charming, especially Lee and Clint, when they raise their untrained, unassuming voices in song. We went to see it in one of those old movie palaces on Delancey Street. It, too, needless to say, is gone. All these theaters that no longer exist, which played movies that no one remembers, and even those of us who remember them only remember shards and slivers, imperfectly framed images, parts of scenes and snippets of dialogueówhere do these forgotten memories go? But even if nothing else remains, Seberg I remember. Let me put it another wayóit was the Sebergness of Seberg that sticks with one decades later.

I am giving you my credentials as to why me rather than Jodie Foster. Seberg was part of my life in a way that no other movie star ever was, or ever will be again. Even though young cinephiles at that time avidly followed the careers of Anouk AimÈe and FranÁoise DorlÈac and, especially, Jeanne Moreau, it was Jean, partly because she was an American who straddled two worlds and became part of the charmed world of French culture, who really mattered in a very personal way. I donít remember having heard of her death until much later. In the late 70s I was very busy making one movie after another and I never read the newspapers. And it was long before I started reading the New York Times obituaries on a regular basis.

Later, someone I know who was doing research on Seberg for Fosterís film told me Foster abandoned the project because it was clearly going to be too sordid and too dirty. It wasnít simply the simple story of a girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, who becomes a star in France and then is hounded to death by J. Edgar Hoover. Jodie wouldnít be able to use her excellent college French to portray a woman who was merely a victim of a right-wing political conspiracy. There were too many lovers, too many bottles, too many suicide attemptsóall too sordid for a Hollywood movie.

Notes on Romain and His Father

From the journals of Jean Serberg

Although Romain talked about his mother, he never talked about his father. With good reason. He barely knew his father. He was an illegitimate child, but an illegitimate child who had an extraordinary father. His father was an actor in pre-Revolutionary Russian films. After the Revolution, Ivan Mouzhukhin fled to France, where he became a very big star in silent movies. But he was a casualty of the sound era: his thick Russian accent betrayed him. In many ways, his story was not unlike Romainísóan outsider everywhere, a Russian Jew in France. Romain, a citizen of the world, almost fit in everywhere but really never did. There was always something wrong. In France, he was Jewish, and of Russian-Polish descent. In America, he was French. Everywhere he lived, he was always missing something, maybe because he was a bastard. I never met him, the father. He died broke and forgotten, in the year that I was born, the same year in which Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, and The Wizard of Oz were made. But even more interesting to me was his place in film history. He had a key role in Russian Formalist film theory and history. There was a famous experiment about the nature of film acting and its relation to editing in which Kuleshov, the author of the experiment, shows a manís face devoid of expression, and intercuts his face with a child playing, then with a man in a coffin, with a plate of soup, suggesting that, to the audience, the manís expression is really colored by what he seems to be seeingóthat movie acting is an act of neutrality and blankness, and context becomes everything. To react properly, that is to say neutrally, is as important as emoting. To look is as significant an action as feeling. And for the audience, because of the juxtaposition of various elements, seeing is more important than what one actually knows. Film acting can and often does reside in what is cut out and what connections are made when you cut from a face to another object, person, or situation. Mouzhukhin was the actor in that experiment. He was a personal link to the beginnings of film historyóhe was in pre-Soviet movies as early as 1910óand, of course, the experiment fascinated me. None of it has survived, unfortunately. But hereís Mouzhukhin, who even if you didnít know it, you would have to recognize as Romainís father. The resemblance is uncanny. There are very few secrets in a face. It always tells more than it wants to, no matter how it tries to hide. That was the story of my face, too. It seems to be a mystery, for those who are looking for that sort of thing, but it is totally open. If it has a meaning, Iím not sure what that meaning might be.

At one point, my distributor and I thought if a prominent film magazine was interested in the film, maybe we could arrange to have the American premiere in Marshalltown, Iowa, and they could cover it. It would become an event. And then we could get People magazine to cover it, as well. And ìEntertainment Tonightî too. These are the kind of nutty thoughts you have when youíre trying to rustle up publicity on a film. Well, it never happened. Eventually, however, the film was shown in Marshalltown. We were told that Sebergís father came to see it. I did have some kind of momentary fantasy about him calling to say he saw it and loved it. But then I thought, Wait a minute, itís his daughter. He wouldnít even be seeing a film about his daughterófor him, in all likelihood, it would be an opportunity to see a parade of film clips heís never seen in which his daughter figures prominently. Whatever his response would be, it wouldnít have anything to do with me or the film I made. I hope that he didnít dislike it, though.

Seberg looks back

For years now everyone has been talking and writing about how important a role memoirs have been playing on the contemporary literary scene. After all, everyone has at least one story to tell. And we havenít heard all six billion of them. Yet. And since everyone is doing it, they canít be that hard to write. And if you were even merely semi-famous but were an abused child or a person who triumphed over a severe disability, thereís probably a pot of gold at the end of the bestseller list for you. What I never understood, and this must be a deficiency on my part, is why anyone considers a biography or an autobiography more truthful than fiction. The order, the arrangement, the details, the emphasis in any biography or autobiography add color and weight and meaning to a process that, by its very nature, becomes a very artificial simulation of a highly subjective, and selective, ìtruth.î If truth can be found anywhere, and I doubt that it can, why would anyone look for it in an autobiography? And how could anyone recognize it in such a self-serving format? It certainly isnít in the recounting of anecdotes that in their retelling get sharper and more shapely and more amusing than the original incident they are supposed to describe. The nature of representing any given reality is an effort destined to failure. But in the fiction of the movies, now there at least some truths can be found. You can describe what you see in the film a million different ways, but when you show a clip from a movie, even though you are showing an isolated fragment, you canít change the camera angle, the acting, the lighting, the framing, the dialogue, the action that is shown on the screen, and it all has a kind of validity that any description of it is bound to betray. So, Iíll tell the story of Jean Seberg, illustrated, as before, with clips from films, and pretend that she is telling it. Let it be a memoir, although itís not my life. Let me write her memoirs. And the film clips will, if nothing else, provide a level of accuracy that most memoirs can only dream of.

Notes on the Face, the Look

What did I have that was so special? Well, of course, every actor thinks he or she has it in spades. Movie actors have to think they have it to an even larger degree than people who act on the stage. The face is everything. It must be read like a book. Itís in the eyes, itís in the skin. Maybe it was presumptuous of me, a small-town girl from Iowa, to think that I had what Dietrich had, what Garbo had, what Monroe had. All I knew was I had the energy, the drive, and the need. The rest would come later. And, of course, Mr. Premingerís choice of me to play the lead in Saint Joan indicated something, even though it was a something he would repudiate later. I did have something. And if being a movie star is about having a face that the camera loves to look at, but more importantly a face that audiences are interested in watching, I was some kind of movie star.

But I was something else as well. I was the first star that looked back. The first thing they tell you when you begin acting in the movies is, Never look at the camera. When you look at the camera, it seems as if you are looking into the eyes of each member of the audience, and of course the illusion of life being unobtrusively observed is shattered. I, on the other hand, was encouraged to return the cameraís unblinking stare. I looked back as much as I was looked at. No one in film history had such luscious closeups as Dietrich or Garbo. It was almost as if their films were afterthoughts, merely vehicles to get these gorgeous faces into situations where they could be lavishly and fetishistically photographed. It was as if reasons had to be invented to have new lighting set-ups, different hairdos, more hatsóin order to study the already familiar faces in unfamiliar contexts. But that was another timeóthe studio system, the golden age of Hollywood. I arrived in the film world when the idolatry accorded to stars was over, when the studio system was already in decline and the explosion of foreign films suggested new possibilities about how to make films and, more importantly, what they could be about. I was the star or, better yet, the anti-star of that era. The camera looked at me, but I was aware of it. And audiences understood that when I was being looked at, I knew that I was being looked at. But when the camera looked at me, what did it see? A riddle waiting to be solved, a mystery about to be uncovered, an enigma that refused to give up its secrets? How did I know that I had this in me? I didnít. But the camera knew. If Garbo or Dietrich were the most looked-at womenóthe camera gazing lovingly on them as if they were artifacts from some alien planetóthe camera lingered obsessively on me as well. Maybe the reasons were different, but the impulse was still the same. To crack the mystery, to get to the heart of it, whatever it was, to dissect the soul. My unembarrassed return serve was an ironic mockery of such a futile attempt.

When I was making the film, I thought only five or six people in the world would be interested in seeing it. And I knew who most of those people were. While I was making the film, I didnít actively seek out people who knew Sebergóit wasnít going to be that kind of movie in any caseóbut people who came forward with stories about her were people who had known her only in the very distant past. After the movie was shown, suddenly everyone came out of the woodwork to tell me awful stories about her. One man who claimed he was a friend of the agent of one of the three young women who were finalists in Premingerís Saint Joan run-offsóhe never mentioned her name and I didnít askótold me that the only reason Seberg got the part was that she was the only one of the three who agreed to sleep with Preminger. Even if this story is true, did I want or need to hear it? Another person, a jazz maven, told me that she had an affair with a famous jazz musician. I didnít know. Would I have mentioned it if I did? I doubt it. A French actress I was introduced to a year after I made the film said I should have contacted so-and-so, a world-famous director, and he would have told me many stories about Seberg, since they had had an affair. In fact, this actress was interested in telling me stories as well since the director threw her over for Seberg.

The film was an invitation for a lot of people to tell me a lot of unsavory anecdotes. Somehow if the celebrity is an abstraction, the stories of the various affairs are like notices in a gossip column written 30 years ago. But this stuff all had a strangely pressing immediacy to it, because in some way, it was also about me. I had been living with her ghostly presence 18 hours a day for months and months. The woman had been dead for, at that time, 16 years, and everyone was dying to share stories with me about whom she slept with even ten years before that. What kind of Pandoraís box had I opened? It dampened my appetite for a certain kind of gossip. Especially since, in some way, I had become Jean Seberg. To this day, when someone mentions Rock Hudson, for one nanosecond I think theyíre talking about me. My immediate response is to raise my hand and say, ìPresent.î And then I remember Iím not Rock Hudson. Nor am I Jean Seberg.

When I read in Elia Kazanís autobiography that Marilyn Monroe came to his house the night that Joe DiMaggio proposed to her and that she wanted to celebrate her impending marriage by sleeping with Kazan, I felt for a variety of reasons that it was a story that didnít need telling. Why couldnít Kazan take that story to the grave with him without putting it into print? Did he think telling a story like that, while DiMaggio was still alive, would enhance his reputation as a great cocksman? It does something for his reputation but I donít think thatís it.

Notes on Clint

If films are, among other things, about watching and being watched, both Clint and I did our fair share of both. What does it mean when the camera looks at a woman pityingly? OK, not pityinglyóobsessively. OK, not obsessivelyóintensely. OK, not intensely . . . All these adverbs, and others, are often used to suggest that the camera has emotions and desires. OK, thenóat such great length, occupying so much time on the screen. Woman is the mystery to be solved and dissected and broken down and understood. At least until the day when women direct and women are behind the camera, assuming, of course, that women are indeed different than men, as everyone keeps assuring us. In recent times, who has occupied more space on the screen, more screen time, than Clint Eastwood? The audience watches him and the response is not ìI want to know more.î Itís never ìI want to penetrate to the heart of the mystery that is Clint.î No, thatís not why we look at Clint. We never get past the surface of Clint, the most looked-at man in modern times, because thereís nothing more than the surface. We watch Clint. But what is he doing? Weíre not watching him in repose. Weíre watching him watching. Heís always watching something else thatís going on. Weíre watching him, waiting for him to spring into action, which he invariably does. When I am watched, I am like the sleeping beauty waiting for the prince to kiss her and wake her up. I am passive as I am being watched. You canít even be sure that the wheels are turning in my head. Clint has the stillness of a cobra ready to strike. And much as we like looking at his face, which rarely changes, we never learn anything more about him than we did in the previous shot. He is an unchanging, static spectacle devoid of meaning. And donít even bother trying to supply any where none is asked for. What do we see when we look at Clint? When we look at me? Clint. Me. Clintóa man waiting for something to happen that he will participate in, a situation that he will actively change. Meóa woman waiting for something to happen to her, waiting for a man to take her away from all this. And donít think there werenít plenty that didnít want to.

The programmer of a major film festival, after seeing the film, asked me where I had gotten Sebergís diaries. I was baffled and took a second to respond. ìFrom the same place Dickens got David Copperfieldís diaries.î The festival director looked at me blankly and said, ìWhat do you mean?î

A French entrepreneur and man-about-film who had worked on Breathless took me aside after seeing my film and chastised me for the way I had portrayed her. He was also a good friend of Romain Garyís and had seen them both together many times in the years since Breathless. He told me that Seberg was really ìa milk-and-cookies type of girl.î Not if you read Carlos Fuentesí account of his affair with her in Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, she wasnít. They had an affair when she was in Mexico making Macho Callahan, which is, apropos of nothing, the story of a woman who falls in love with the man who murdered her husband and rapes her. Seberg, and you can hear her voice very clearly in the book, as if she is actually speaking what is written on the page, comes off as a taunting, mocking lover who demands that her new lover measure up to Clint Eastwood. It was in Mexico that she became pregnant, by a student revolutionary, not Fuentes, who was the father of the child that died shortly after birth. It was that same child that the FBI deliberately insinuated was fathered by a Black Panther.

Nor do you get the feeling that she was a milk-and-cookies type of girl if you read White Dog, by Gary, in which Gary virtually says that Seberg ran guns for the Panthers and hid weapons in their house. An American producer who made a film in England that Seberg desperately wanted to be in but ultimately wasnít, told me that when she met a man she looked in his eyes and immediately knew if they were or werenít going to fuck (his words, not mine). Well, people give off what they want to give off. And people see in others what they want to see. But whether or not you believe that people at bottom are really unknowable, no matter how intimate you are with them or how many experiences youíve shared together, I think that on almost any level one would have to say that Seberg was an extraordinarily complex person and could, perhaps more than most of us, assume a variety of different guises depending on the situation. Robert Rossen, who directed her in Lilith, said she was like an all-American cheerleader who cracked up. And this was long before she cracked up. Several people who knew her quite well told me that I had captured her very accurately and truthfully. Even though that pleased me, I donít know what it means. Accurately? Truthfully? I never knew the woman. I only knew her as a fan knows an icon. But I think I learned a great deal about her, from a very particular perspective of course, as a viewer, from watching and re-seeing her movies, because every actor projects something of their own essence onto the screen. I suppose it depends on what the viewer sees or imagines he sees there. If itís milk and cookies, so be it. I donít buy it for a second.

My most recent Jean Seberg-related incident: I was invited to a party for the premiere of a public television arts magazine show. The friend who brought me introduced me to one of the producers who, when she was introduced to me, looked at me for a moment. ìYou made From the Journals of Jean Seberg,î she said. ìDidnít you?î She told me that after she saw the film she went and got her hair cut in the Seberg style. This time it saddened me. Itís one thing to have your hair chopped off after seeing Breathless. Itís quite another to emulate a dead movie star whose life was, well, an extravagant mess, and whose last years were considerably less than edifying. A few weeks later I was called by the executive producer of the show and invited to do an episode about Cindy Sherman, because the woman who had gotten the Seberg haircut showed him a tape of my film. Sherman wouldnít consent to being interviewed, and they felt that I would be the ideal person to do a piece on someone who refused to appear on camera. I guess I was being typecast, and I sort of resented it. But what the hell. I took the job. Even filmmakers have to pay the rent.

Mark Rappaport is a filmmaker. He is currently preparing two feature-length fiction films, Roy Cohn-Or, How I Learned to Hate the Commies and Pasolini's Next Film (both bios, sort of), and writing "My Life in Art" by Howard Hughes, a script about the making of The Conqueror.