It’s said that films are about the only genre that have done a reversal when it comes to gender equality; whereas over half the films of the 20s put the female lead above the men in marquee billing, that number has not-so-subtly swung the other way over the past century. With a few films under her belt in the early 1970s, Ellen Burstyn was determined to make her own difference in Hollywood.
She wanted to be the star. Not in the top paying or billing sense; she’d never try to push anyone aside for a few extra minutes of screen time. But to prove that she, like many women of the time never got the chance to do, could put a film on her back, or at least equally share the load, and carry it all the way to success. Too many times, women were the victims that couldn’t save themselves or fight back against the bad guys, the supporting characters to the heroic males, or simply the background dressings, and Burstyn set out to change that.
“The women were awakening to their own value as people,” she recalls. “I certainly felt like an assistant person until the Women’s Movement came along. I felt like I was a help mate. The idea that a woman could be of value on her own…The way I felt about it was if I looked at a sunset and it was beautiful, and I didn’t have a man there to say ‘oh, isn’t that a beautiful sunset?’, if I didn’t have a man there to see that, somehow the sunset was diminished. It wasn’t fulfilled, it wasn’t a complete experience. The Women’s Movement, at the time, it was like we all woke up and went ‘Oh! Me! I’m Alive! I’m here!’ I am an independent human being, whether or not I am with a man. It was a startling concept!”
Still, there was at least one genre in which the term “female lead” seemed all but impossible: a supernatural horror film. A girl being the one to fight off evil, human or otherwise? Impossible!
Think about it: today, a femme fatale in a horror film is all but a necessity; it’s almost always a lady who scored the final win over Freddy or Jason. Back then, this simply wasn’t done. Sure, Marion Crane was the lead for the first part of Psycho, but it ended up being Norman Bates’ film. Night of the Living Dead had several strong females, but a man outlived them all.
Still, a fellow named William Blatty would help to turn that tide. After learning about a 1949 incident in Maryland in which priests performed an exorcism on a young boy, who appeared to be possessed by the devil, Blatty novelized the event. But in his version, the afflicted was a girl, raised by a single mother.
The book didn’t make a bestselling smash when it was published in 1971, but Blatty’s appearance on Dick Cavett’s talk show churned up enough publicity to get the copies selling, and film matters weren’t far behind.
With William Friedkin at the directing helm, everyone agreed early on that Max von Sydow would be perfect for the title role. The character of Chris MacNeil, a single mother desperately trying to save her daughter Reagan from the evil clutches of a demon, proved a bit more of a challenge.
Audrey Hepburn said she’d take the role if filming was moved to Rome, which Friedkin decided against. Anne Bancroft wanted the role, but her pregnancy made her unavailable. Jane Fonda also turned it down.
Then one day, Friedkin got a phone call from Burstyn. She’d looked over Blatty’s book and toward her own spiritual beliefs, and felt that there was enough common ground with Chris MacNeil to become her. Burstyn’s scoring of an Oscar nomination for The Last Picture Show helped solidify her standing in the running, and a screen test nabbed her the role, with Linda Blair locked up as Reagan.
She set about creating a faux-autobiography for the character. Chris being an actress herself gave Burstyn a strong start (Blatty had based the character on his neighbor Shirley MacLaine, who also turned down a shot at Chris). She also looked over the original case the story was based on, in which the boy was labeled possessed after things around him moved on their own, and he flew into hysterics and started shouting Latin, which he didn’t know beforehand.
“I wanted her to being the film unawakened to any other realm of existence except the material, the world that she perceived with her five senses,” Burstyn explains (Chris’ lack of religious sense plays a large role in the film’s early going). “Slowly, during the course of the film, she would be forced to confront the existence of a far greater mystery. I wanted her to do battle completely ill-equipped to deal with the malevolent forces of the unseen world.” The horseshoe charm that Chris wears around her wrist was Burstyn’s idea, and she also read over the writings of the 1949 case.
“It seems to me that one of my main memories of that film was looking at a wall, listening to music,” she explains. “Because it was quite difficult to maintain that level of terror for so many hours and days and weeks and months.”
With a tape of prayers and meditations to keep her spirits up, pun intended, during filming, Burstyn arrived on set. Within days, her dressing room was robbed, the tape taken. But that was little compared to what would happen as shooting went on.
Von Sydow’s brother and Blair’s grandfather died. A cameraman lost a newborn child. The man who designed the refrigerated set died. A night watchman was mistakenly shot by a policeman. The five-year-old son of Jason Miller, who played the tormented Father Karras, suffered a serious head injury after being hit by a motorcycle. A set suddenly erupted into flames, forcing a rebuilding. Both Blair and Burstyn suffered severe back injuries during the filming of scenes when demonic forces yanked them about the rooms.
“Negative energy can create more negative energy,” Burstyn told Friedkin. “An accident happens. Everyone gets nervous and that creates more accidents. Don’t let it get to you. Just hold firm.
“I don’t know if I was telling him or myself,” Burstyn admits, “but I felt a need to say it.”
Near the end of filming, her longtime journey through faith and spirituality helped Burstyn pull Chris away from the same evil spirits that threatened to take Regan. Not so much the possession itself, but the belief that it could even occur.
Even after everything she and her daughter go through in the closing climax of the film, in which both priests die to save the girl, the original ending had Chris saying that she still didn’t believe in God, but could see the possibility of the devil. Laying in bed on one day off, Burstyn perused a newspaper article about the underworld overlord.
“I felt this lazy little thought stroll across my mind,” Burstyn recalls. “Wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out that Satan created the world and is more powerful than God?
“Suddenly, a maniacal voice sounded loudly in my head, laughing like a hyena. It said, ‘That’s the crack in your mind I’ve been waiting to enter. Now I’m inside your head.’ Then a raucous, evil laugh.”
A terrified Burstyn jumped out of bed, her bad back far away. She charged blindly around, much like Karras does during the final exorcism scene. Then she managed to sit on the floor and travel back to her spiritual memories.
“Immediately, I was back up the mountain facing Mount Blanc,” she recalls of an earlier trip. “Then I began intoning the Sufi practices I’d learned. My heartbeat slowed down. The awful voice went away. I finished my praying and crawled back into bed, astounded at the complexity of the human mind and the power of prayer.” In a nutshell, Sufi is considered a magnified view of Islam, one that encourages its believers toward purification through positive traits and deeds.
That’s when Burstyn knew what she and Chris would have to pull off together.
“By the end of the film, Chris had come face to face with the awesome power of evil,” she recalls, “but she also knew the magnificent power in words. She was an actress. She was not about to be flippant using words that might attract whatever it was that had gotten hold of her little girl. She wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it and surely not declare herself a believer in the devil.” She won out in the end, as Chris refuses to accept the devil’s existence.
But nothing ended with the final credits. Filmgoers lined up as never before, with the film charging to the all-time top of the box-office. The Exorcist is also credited with revolutionizing film distribution, as it was one of the first films to have a huge opening, rather than starting small and slowly expanding.
As filming wound down, scripts continued to roll in for Burstyn. Eventually, she and her reps picked up one called Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
It was the story of a recently widowed young mother who gave up her dream of being a singer for her marriage. With her unpleasant attachment removed, she and the youth head the way of the bright lights and big cities throughout California. But on the way, she falls in love with David, a farm owner, and soon much choose between staying with him and taking one last shot at her lifelong hope.
With Kris Kristofferson as David and a young filmmaker named Martin Scorsese behind the camera, Burstyn got into character. She looked back at her past; before her acting career, she’d looked for work as a model. A salesman had tricked the desperate young woman into thinking he could get her some work, and Burstyn remembered bursting into tears. The scene became a part of Alice when the title character gets hustled into a fake job and breaks down.
Burstyn’s emotions had gotten her a job on the earlier outing, and they got one for Alice in the film. For Alice’s crooning capabilities, she looked back a bit farther, and didn’t really like what she saw.
“One of the tasks of adulthood,” she explains, “is to look at what has been laid down in our brains early on and decide whether we want to keep that as part of our worldview. Certainly anything that got programmed in as a limitation of our possibilities needs to be examined and consciously kept or rejected.” Her mother, for example, told her that her singing was dreadful during a middle school-age lesson.
Burstyn was determined to prove her wrong. For months before and during filming, singing and piano lessons allowed her to put together all of Alice’s tunes herself. For a scene after Alice and David make love for the first time, she improvised a story about her and her brother playing as children (Scorsese often encouraged improv, which Burstyn and many others enjoyed very much).
“It was what was happening in the Zeitgeist, you know?” she says. “One of the lines that I put in the film was ‘I mean, it’s my life, not some man’s life that I’m helping him out with.’ To me, that line was the core of what we women were awakening to then.”
As the feminism movement charged through the 70s, Burstyn knew that the film world could help it along.
“If you hadn’t lived through the period before that, you couldn’t have imagined what a revolution the 1970s were for women,” she recalls. One day, she had come home from working all day, only to find her husband at the end of a tough day of lounging around drinking and smoking, waiting for his wife to morph into chef and waitress.
“My reaction to that was, ‘I think there’s something wrong with this. But I can’t think of what it is. Let me see now. I’ve been working all day. Isn’t it possible for you to provide dinner – order in, cook something, get up off your ass?”
Back then, that was how it was at far too many American homes. Perhaps, until that point, Burstyn hadn’t realized that, or maybe just not admitted it.
“If that was your ‘normal’ and then you heard Betty Frieden and Gloria Steinem say, ‘We are human beings with equal rights,’” she recalls, “it was a mind-blowing revelation. No woman today who didn’t go throught the Eisenhower years can appreciate what a cataclysym that was in us. We were all saying, ‘Oh, my God! What have we been doing?” To that point, too many female characters, including many that she had played or was being offered were, like the common American women of the time, indentured servants. Burstyn saw a chance to take her own step against it.
“Alice was the first picture to give voice to the emerging liberation of the modern American woman,” she explains. “We were awakening from centuries of sleepwalking to the dictates of the patriarchy, and Alice was the first film that showed just how it happened to one woman.”
That spring, the Academy agreed with her, and the third time became a charm for Burstyn; the thrice-nominated performer snared the Best Actress award. A month later, she’d take home a Tony for Same Time, Next Year, the play that had kept her from attending the Oscar ceremony.
She’s get another Oscar nomination for bringing Same Time, Next Year to the big screen in 1978, and her fifth for 1980’s Resurrection. Then, in 2000, Burstyn would help another young director kick off his career.
When she first checked out the screenplay for Requiem for a Dream, Burstyn admits, “I did not immediately recognize the value of this script. Who would want to sit through the dreary lives of these people?” It’s the story of a group of characters who battle, and only temporarily triumph over, drug abuse. While her son Harry (Jared Leto) and his friends battle street drugs, a lady named Sarah Goldfarb, desperate to appear on a TV show, tries to lose weight with diet pills, and soon gets FAR too into things.
Recalling her own struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, Burstyn didn’t feel a need to resurrect her dark side in Sara. Until, of course, she watched Darren Aronofsky’s first film: Pi, the story of a mathematician looking for the secrets of the universe.
“After the first few images (of Pi),” she recalls. “I sat up straight. Less than four minutes into the film, I said out loud, ‘Okay, I get it. The guy’s an artist.’”
Embedded in fat suits, Burstyn appeared 40, then (only!) 25 pounds heavier. During a break in filming, she lost 10 pounds on the “cabbage soup diet.” Past experiences with her own son gave her a starting point to make Sarah and Harry’s relationship real.
She also recalled a recent performance as a morphine addict on the stage in Long Day’s Journey into Night (Katharine Hepburn got an Oscar nomination for playing the role in a 1962 film adaptation).
“I understood that once you get hold of your own addiction,” she says, “you understand that what you’re really doing is squashing down your own sensitivity because you don’t want to feel what you’re feeling. You’re not comfortable in your own skin.”
Even after so many years in front of a camera, bringing out the dark side of Sarah, playing a character not to be glorified, much more flawed than redemptive, was a new level of difficulty for the actress.
“The hardest part was accessing the emotional depths of yourself that are necessary to realize a part like this,” she explains. “You basically torture yourself emotionally to get there. And the worst part is that you’re never sure you’re actually going to be able to do it, and it’s such a relief when you do!”
Despite spending the majority of her life in Manhattan, Burstyn knew that New York is hardly just one world, and that Sarah’s Brooklyn homeland was hardly just across the street of commonality.
“I talked to women who lived (in Brooklyn),” she recalls, “to get their speech patterns and outlook on life – and how narrow that is. Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that’s it.”
It was enough; Burstyn scored her sixth Oscar nomination, and Aronofsky’s star’s been rising ever since. She herself even labeled it her finest performance.
“I had to work from a really deep place in my own psyche, the basement of my being,” she says. “The despair and the insanity, you can’t pretend to go to those places. You can’t act as though you know what that’s like. You have to go there and be willing to act in a creative way. That took skill that I may not have developed earlier in my career. It’s accessing your own pain, creatively, and transforming it into your art form.” Although she’d spent a large part of her career proving the naysayers wrong, it looks like Requiem helped Burstyn relief one more shadow of doubt; the one that she herself was casting.
“There have been a lot of surprises,” she says of her career. “I felt that I worked hard at developing my craft, and that it would support me, and it mostly did. There were long, long periods when it was mostly tough. I discovered over a period of time that when you are given the gift of creative energy, you have to use it, or it will back up on you and become destructive.”
References
Burstyn, Ellen. (2006). Lessons in Becoming Myself. Riverhead Books: New York.
Hebron, Sandra. (2000, November 5). Ellen Burstyn. Guardian News. Retrieved on January 9, 2011, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/nov/05/guardianinterviewsatbfisouthbank
Mazur, Matt. (2011). Remain in Light: An Interview with Ellen Burstyn. PopMatters. Retrieved on January 9, 2011, from http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/134275-remain-in-light-an-interview-with-ellen-burstyn/
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