Robert Benton: From Esquire to the Academy Awards
RIP, Mr. Benton
Big-hearted filmmaker Robert Benton died this week at the age of 92. He is best known for directing Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart, Bad Company, and Nobody’s Fool. (Don’t miss his 1977 debut, The Late Show, starring Lily Tomlin and Art Carney, an underrated 1970s flick that’s a real treat.) Before his life as a filmmaker, Benton worked at Esquire, first as art director in the late 1950s, and then as a contributing editor, alongside his writing partner, David Newman—they were the minds behind the original Dubious Achievement Awards as well as other humorous features in the 1960s.
It was with Newman that Benton wrote the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most radical movies to ever come out of Hollywood.
“The script for Bonnie and Clyde came out of that time at Esquire,” Benton told me nine years ago when we spoke on the phone. “It came out of being in a place that looked for something new, to discover something that was unlike anything you’ve seen before.” Dig into Wilfrid Sheed’s admiring review, along with Rex Reed’s marvelously snide 1967 profile of Warren Beatty, which puts you right there in the moment—The Summer of Love!—as the movie was set to be released.
Benton and Newman also collaborated on the screenplays for the hit movies, What’s Up, Doc? and Superman.
Benton thoroughly enjoyed his years at Esquire. “Harold Hayes wanted a magazine that was a highly styled New Yorker or Harper’s or The Atlantic,” said Benton. “He wanted a reading magazine. I remember getting into a long argument with Harold about the difference between humor and wit. We had very different points of view about that. I came down on the side of wit, and Harold came down on the side of humor. Neither one of us was right.”
“What is the difference between wit and humor?” I said.
“What’s the difference between The New Yorker and Mad Magazine?” said Benton. “They’re both valid but there’s a big difference. You either come down on the side of one or the other. People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.
“I co-wrote a little book with Harvey Schmidt called The IN and OUT of Humor, which was about the importance of style over substance. I thought substance was vastly overrated. Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn’t tell you what it is. It’s unexpected and it makes you laugh and think. It’s hard for me to describe it. Style is a way of talking about yourself. It’s not talking about if you have good taste or not.”
That’s just the sort of thing that George Frazier wrote about in Esquire, as well as the author John O’Hara.
“Style mattered to O’Hara,” said Benton. “It was a way of describing character, it was a way of describing content. He would describe characters in terms of their style. It was like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so you would know who they were without literally having to say they were this or they were that. I think he’s one of the most astounding writers there is. The style is less obvious than Hemingway’s. It’s artless and so direct. The greatest style is when you can’t see the style though you walk away knowing it was there. It’s like a perfume—there but not there.”
What’s the difference between style and taste, I asked.
“One doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” he said. “It’s the difference between wit and humor again. Taste has nothing to do with style. Style is the most ephemeral thing I know. It’s not about how effective you are it’s about how you are effective. George Clooney has taste, Cary Grant had style. Style lasts forever and taste doesn’t. It’s like beauty doesn’t have anything to do with prettiness. Beauty has to do with something else; it gets into an area where words can’t go. It’s interesting that there are places that words can’t get to.”
Style is the true subject of Bonnie and Clyde, just like it was in Goddard’s Breathless, and it is particularly expressed through Dede Allen’s editing.
“Bonnie and Clyde was exactly about style,” said Benton. “Dede Allen deserved a writer’s credit as much as anybody. Boy, she was good. When I saw Jules et Jim, it just haunted me. I saw it maybe 20 times. It was the invention of the movie; it was the unwillingness to be bound by convention. It both respected the form of films and threw it away at the same time. The script for Bonnie and Clyde came out of that time at Esquire. It came out of being in a place that looked for something new and didn’t go back and look at what was best about was old, and to discover something that was unlike anything you’ve seen before.”
When asked how his time at Esquire prepared him to be a movie director, Benton said, “It taught me to work with other people and to understand that sometimes other people have better ideas. Clay was one of the greatest teachers I ever had. I remember one time I had an idea, and he said, ‘What’s the idea?’ I said, ‘No, no, it’s not ready.’ He said, “You know something, you nitwit. You’ll never get a new idea until you get rid of this one.’ Having one perfect thing was less important than having a range of ideas, realizing they were all taking you in a certain direction. That changed my life.”
Salute to one of the good ones. Watch Benton’s movies and in the meantime: Happy Reading.
The Esquire Classic Team