walter kohner | The Timothy Carey Experience

Our quote for this week comes from John Baxter‘s biography of Stanley Kubrick. It may generate some discussion. Obviously, I don’t share his low opinion of Timothy’s acting skills. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on this one.

On Spartacus, Kubrick’s next film, stills cameraman William Read Woodfield asked him why he cast people like Timothy Carey, “who couldn’t act at all.”

Kubrick replied, “They bring a texture to the picture that a better actor wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure, Stanley?” Woodfield pressed. “Or is it that you don’t really like good actors?”

“That may be, ” Kubrick conceded.

What could Kubrick have against good actors? It’s Woodfield’s theory, borne out by Kubrick’s later work, that he prefers performances which remove the film from reality. Given capable actors like George C. Scott or Jack Nicholson, Kubrick forced them by repeated takes to abandon naturalism for mannerism and hysteria. A protean actor like Peter Sellers, who stuffed half a dozen characters into a single film, and an abysmal one like Carey, who always played himself, gave the same distancing effect.

Kubrick had a soft spot for Carey, a New York contemporary of his, though from Brooklyn, not the Bronx. The gangling Carey bluffed his way into the Marines at fifteen and, after demobilisation, joined the thousands of dissatisfied young men milling around New York in search of artistic fulfilment. He took advantage of the GI Bill to study drama, and agent Walter Kohner got him bit parts in Billy Wilder‘s The Big Carnival [aka Ace in the Hole] and Laslo Benedek‘s The Wild One. These led to a role for Carey as the brothel bouncer Joe in Elia Kazan‘s version of East of Eden opposite James Dean.

None of this experience refined Carey’s technique, which always hovered somewhere between Elvis Presley and Lon Chaney Jr. On Paths of Glory, he could never remember to tear into his last meal of roast duck the same way twice. “Every take required an untouched duck,” says Kubrick. “I think we used up sixty-eight or so ducks before we got it right.” Kirk Douglas despised such unprofessionalism, which may have been why Kubrick insisted on flying Carey to Germany for the film. During the court-martial scene, when Douglas was making his disgust at Carey’s bad acting obvious, Kubrick whispered, “Make this a good one, ’cause Kirk doesn’t like it.”

– from Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter (Carroll and Graf, 1997)

Our quote for this week is once again not by Timothy, but about him. It’s from an unpublished interview with his younger brother, George Carey:

Timmy’s big mistake of all time was not taking the part of Luca Brasi in The Godfather. He had the part, no question about it, but then decided he didn’t want to get involved. I was taking calls from Paramount and Francis Ford Coppola definitely wanted Timmy in the film as Luca Brasi. Basically, Timmy was replaced (by Lenny Montana, a former wrestler). That part was Timmy’s. All he had to say was he wanted it. But – that was Timmy. He passed that up and it was a big mistake. One of Hollywood’s top agents (Walter Kohner) personally told me that if Timmy would only cooperate by playing the game, he could be one of the big stars. He told me this personally right in his office. He was Timmy’s agent for a while, and it’s really remarkable, when you think of it, that Timmy had this guy as his agent. I think Timmy’s biggest problem was that he had hostility with certain directors. Maybe they thought his acting methods were too outlandish. Once the cameras were rolling, Timmy might do a scene in a totally different way than it was rehearsed. Sometimes, the directors retaliated by taking his name off the credits.

– Filmfax article (not published) by Harvey Chartrand, 2003