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Public Speaking
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Public Speaking
Who needs elocution lessons when you can go to the movies?
No one who knows me well would say that I am short on words, unable to keep up my end of a conversation, or reluctant to speak up in a group, but I sometimes wonder where I developed such verbal dexterity.
Early in my educational career, I never hesitated to raise my hand in class if I felt I knew the right answer, which occurred on a daily basis, and my brief stint as a member of my school’s drama club involved a tiny part in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! that included at least one line that constituted a complete sentence. Perhaps I was on my way to becoming a champion debater, but such opportunities were curtailed when, from the third grade onward, my parents decided to homeschool me and my younger brother. This was not the natural setting to learn to speak well in front of crowds.
Where, then, did I become comfortable as a public speaker?
As with so many other things in my life, the answer has something to do with the movies. While I was still a teenager, I began arranging my calendar according to which movies I wanted to see at local art houses or film centers — let’s see, how about Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night on Thursday morning and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca on Friday night? Since I lived not far from a major university’s arts center, which not infrequently invited people associated with a movie to talk about that movie, I quickly learned to circle, highlight, and double-underline such screenings. These appearances were generally accompanied by question-and-answer sessions, which offered cinephiles a chance to show off. To insert oneself into a conversation, especially a public one, is to assert confidence in what one is saying, even if what one is saying takes the form of a question.
One of the first filmmaker-accompanied screenings I attended was at that university’s arts center. In February 2000, when I was 16, I bought a ticket to see the winsome, soulful Gen-X romance Before Sunrise, which was to be introduced by its director, Richard Linklater. Taking a livelier approach than some, Linklater conducted an impromptu movie trivia quiz before the movie started. I no longer remember the question to which I raised my hand, but twenty-six years later, I still remember my (correct) answer: “Vince Edwards from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.” Linklater tossed me my prize, such as it was: a signed baseball cap from his movie The Newton Boys.
About a month later, at the same venue, I attended a screening of the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Of course, nearly everybody associated with the movie was deceased — Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, and so on — but very much alive was the producer of the restoration, James C. Katz.
Now, I loved Rear Window, but at that moment in my moviegoing life, I was far more interested in Stanley Kubrick, whose epic Spartacus had earlier been restored by Katz and his colleague, Robert A. Harris. So, during the Q&A that followed Rear Window, I raised my hand to ask the question that I had been preparing and rehearsing in my mind as I was supposed to be watching the machinations of Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in that Greenwich Village courtyard: Had Kubrick, who was not known to have taken great pride in Spartacus, been involved in the restoration and, if so, how much? For posterity, I wrote down what Katz told me from the stage, which is still one of the more amusing answers I have ever received to a question — and I now interview showbiz people for a living. “He couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast,” Katz told me of Kubrick, “but he remembered every frame of Spartacus.”
These experiences were so confidence-boosting — a piece of movie merchandise thrown in my direction by a talented director, a wonderful anecdote told by an industry veteran — that I began to seek out any screenings that included audience discussion, whether or not a celebrity was present. I came to see my presence as indispensable: the teenager who knew all the right things to say or ask about a movie. I became a fixture at a classic movie series at the local art museum that invariably included post-movie confabs hosted by local film professors or critics. It would be some years before I became a published critic, but I spoke with the confidence of someone well on his way. In fact, my little remarks about, say, Days of Heaven or Foreign Correspondent were dry-runs for my future profession: I had to formulate concise, coherent thoughts about a movie for public consumption, even if that “public” was the thirty or forty people who had decided to spend their Friday night in a musty museum screening room. I liked asking or talking about a movie, and I liked being listened to — essential ingredients for a man who intended to make a career out of his words.
Going to a movie armed with questions or talking points might not have been a substitute for elocution lessons, but I worked with what I had.
During these years, I lobbed questions and comments from the audience to director Jim Jarmusch, actor Ned Beatty, and director Gus Van Sant, each of whom made appearances at theaters in my area. The undeniable high point, though, came in October 2004, when I attended a book signing and personal appearance of Peter Bogdanovich (whom I already knew and about whose work I had already begun to seriously write). The evening at the AFI Silver in Maryland included a screening of Bogdanovich’s masterly romantic comedy They All Laughed, which was followed by — you guessed it — an audience Q&A. With a certain degree of shamelessness, I raised my hand and asked Bogdanovich a question I had earlier asked him during one of our interviews. I knew exactly what he was going to say, so my asking was (selfishly) a way of displaying my cinematic knowledge and (unselfishly) an invitation for him to share a great story with everyone else in attendance. From the stage, Peter sighed and said: “Well, Peter, you have a bit of an advantage because you know the story already…”
In the years that followed, as my career started to take off, I began doing public speaking for real. I became accustomed to interviewing Hollywood directors or stars over the phone, and that, in a way, was a form of “public” speaking—especially if their publicists or handlers were on the line with them. More legitimately, in 2007, I was interviewed on the BBC World Service about Orson Welles, and in 2011, I was interviewed on-camera for a documentary about Bogdanovich, One Day Since Yesterday. By 2012, I had, rather amazingly, attained sufficient local prominence to be asked to introduce one of my favorite movies (George Roy Hill’s The Sting) at the same university arts center where I had once bellowed questions at whomever was on stage. I didn’t field any questions afterwards, though. You can’t have everything.
The post Public Speaking appeared first on The American Conservative.
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