Gene Hackman : Everyday Magic.

I once told a friend that if I tried to write about Gene Hackman, I feared I might never stop…I guess today I must put that then hypothetical to its test. Hackman at the very ripe and towering age of 95 years has died ending a towering career in what seems to be very mysterious causes despite his age when factoring in the death of his wife, and strangely enough, his dog. It is a rather abrupt and unfitting end to a man of his stature, but then what end is fitting for someone who has been and done as much for any field or discipline as Hackman has been or done for acting! And what end can I bring to any scrawling about of such a massive figure?

My first encounter with Gene Hackman cannot easily be remembered, my best guess would be Richard Donner’s “Superman”, or Roger Donaldson’s “No Way Out”. The latter was an HBO mainstay when I was a kid, and one of the few “grownup” films I was allowed to watch. The summer in Blythe, California was oppressive. Temperatures rose to well over 100 degrees regularly, and going outside to play (then a common occurrence) was quite literally trial by fire. So, many an hour was spent in the air conditioned home of my grandmother alternating between her soap operas and my cartoons and then whatever was on cable. I watched “No Way Out” anytime it was on, it was less an obsession and more an instinct. I was drawn to the ominous electronic-like sounds of Maurice Jarre's score, the beauty of the naval whites, and Kevin Costner's “high and tight”, and to Gene Hackman’s curly sunroof of a mane and the face that hung beneath it. I liked watching him rock that silly toupee in “Superman”, even when I didn't recognize that the comedy was intentional. In retrospect that role faltered because Lex Luthor is not a great fit for what Hackman does best. Luthor may be human, but he's not an everyman, he is a genius and “The world’s greatest criminal mastermind”. To fit him onto Hackman’s blue-collar frame they had to parody him. Didn't matter though, because Hackman wasn't yet an actor to me- he was more like a showman. A kind of clown your folks hire to amuse you from behind a screen when they need a break from your incessant hanging about. I didn't truly meet the actor or understand the draw until 1992’s “Unforgiven”. Already by then a Western aficionado by way of my father's influence, I was drawn to the film upon release of its trailer. Already pretty well converted into the church of Eastwood, he was the central draw of the film, but once I saw the movie it was Hackman's “Little Bill Daggett” that walked away with it. Daggett was an interesting figure, he was more than just “mean” even to the over simplified mind of a 13 year old me. He was magnetic, complex, agitated, cruel, and funny. Saul Rubinek’s weasel-like wanna be auto-biographer-stenographer W.W. Beauchamp’s interest in him felt warranted even from under a gun. Bill was incredulously charming considering he was a steaming pile of excrement, and he moved with an ease heretofore never seen before by little ol me. That observation is maybe the central tenent of my rather impromptu thesis on this titan. In my favorite scene, Hackman's Daggett has rather merrily secured Beauchamp’s services after viciously beating and jailing his previous employer “English Bob” (a fantastic Richard Harris) and midway through his pedantic diatribe on the import of a steady mind over a quick draw in a gunfight, decides on a whim to put on an impromptu demonstration of his theory. The turns this scene takes are exemplary of exactly the skill with which Hackman makes the most complex and ambiguous work look as simple as eating a slice of warm apple pie.

Hackman's Bill is at first laying down while relaying all this wisdom to Beauchamp, as he gets into the details of his philosophy he excites himself, and as he gets excited he comes mysteriously to the decision to give Beauchamp a gun. Hackman for his part intelligently buries the lead under a barrage of charm. He opens the drawer and plops the gun onto the desk without so much as a glance at it, “Look here, take that” before he's back down head almost fully submerged in another drawer looking for keys. “Go on, take it”. He says this with the same assertive optimism of an infomercial salesman. The “sham wow” guy getting ready to show you just how much water his novelty rag can soak up without losing its dryness. Once he finds them, the keys to Bob's cell join the gun and he now surprisingly instructs Beauchamp to shoot him and he and Bob will be free. We the audience know this is too good to be true, and so does Beauchamp, but Hackman’s aplomb and streamlined delivery assuages the two of us, it serves as a veritable magic trick, allows us to convince ourselves of the impossible. Beauchamp scoffs, stumbling over his tongue “It isn’t…is it loaded?” Hackman's reply is instantaneous, and the inflection of warmth hasn't moved one degree in temperature - “Wouldn't do you much good if it wasn't” “First you gotta cock it” - he instructs as if teaching a child to ride a bike. Beauchamp is in patient disbelief, Harris’s English Bob previously mired in silent defeat, now sits up, himself caught at the intersection of disbelief and bewilderment. “Now you got to point it”. Rubinek makes every decision to follow through with an instruction a visceral exercise in anxiety, which only serves to further the mystery behind what exactly it is Daggett is up to set against Hackman's flaccid informality, that is until..”Go on point it”. This is the first line delivery Hackman gives that has something of a menace underneath it. It's the first clue that this is not merely a demonstration at a science fair, a confirmation of a hypothesis, but something else entirely. It's firm and curt, and bares the teeth of a threat. “Now all you got to do is pull the trigger”. Hackman’s face is a complete mystery. Bill’s actions up to this point have informed us he will shoot them both, but he hasn't so much as moved, and if his body hasn't moved, then we at least should be able to look to something in his face, in his eyes. Hackman’s Bill -normally a showman, gives us nothing. It confuses us every bit as much as it confuses poor old Beauchamp. The physical silence of his face is as important as that of the lack of words, and then he suddenly and abruptly breaks it, falling right back into his arresting charm. He chuckles, “Hot ain't it”. Maybe my favorite action in this favorite scene is Hackman rubbing his face as he says “You ain't even put your finger on the trigger”. Mouth wide open as he slides his index finger down from his nose to his upper lip. That movement is an affirmation of the ease with which Hackman worked. His dedication to the truth of any scene, any moment, every moment. Nothing for Hackman was about pomp and excess, he was always lean, always -to purposely pun - “Prime Cut”.

Robert DeNiro once said “Be in the moment. Period. Just be there. Because if you get all like, ‘Oh I got to do this big thing.’ It just never works. It just doesn’t work. You’ve just got to let go. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Whatever you do is ok, just be truthful, honest, real, and that’s all you can ask for.” It certainly meets the bulk of DeNiro’s career as an actor, but it is the entirety of Hackman's. Hackman always seemed to just be doing things. You know his prep had to be vicious, because the results were always of the unconscious type. I liked to say alot that every character Hackman played, every role he encountered, he stepped into it as if he was Mr Rogers. Taking off his professional blazer and trading it in for a casual cardigan, dress shoes for a comfy pair of loafers. Every piece of furniture in any movie he was in seemed figuratively imported directly from his house, the way he moved around it, or in it. In “No Way Out” he plays the nefarious Secretary of Defense “David Brice”. Hackman is notably not Little Bill in this. He could hardly be less tough, a little less cruel, far more vulnerable. I once wrote to the effect that his confidence goes in and out like a bad accent, but what does remain is that ease around a room. In his opening meeting with Kevin Costner he makes his blocking look alot more like it should be called rounding. There are no jagged edges, no “herk” and no “jerk”, every movement flows seamlessly into the next and feels as natural as breathing. He rolls a piece of paperwork in his hand. When his feet take up residence on his desk the arrive there the same way a paper plane seems to sit on air. As he's acting, he takes a call, and his stalls to hold as he speaks to Costner might as well be your mother. Everything he does is pure veracity, there is no affect. In 95’s “Crimson Tide”, he calls in Denzel’s Ron Hunter for a meeting, before he gets to his point, Hackman takes off his cap and rubs his head, they've not actually been in that boat for hours on days, but Hackman's organic note there implies as much, it not only serves to reinforce the illusion of reality, but to show just exactly the level of unconscious comfort Hackman frequently displayed for years over his stories career. In “The Royal Tenenbaums” he sits there in this cramped sardine can of a kitchen dining booth, smoking with the lived in non-chalance of a man whose seen every corner of his home for well over 60 years so his head goes nowhere it isnt needed. As beatific, extravagantly architectural and well put together as the movie is Hackman counters with a dress free uncomplicated, complicated performance. In short Hackman is a magician.

In Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” there is a constant refrain that the fundamental object of magic, and thusly a magician - is to make the ordinary extraordinary, and then to make the extraordinary astonishing, that was what Hackman was to me, to us, to the craft. Intentional or not, like Nolan himself, Hackman understood on a near metaphysical level, that the power of this medium, this discipline, is in making a spectacle of the mundane. This brings me back to the second half of the aforementioned scene in “Unforgiven”, where after Hackman has made the tension disappear, he brings it back. Beauchamp is the instigator, of this event, but Bill is going to finish it. When Beauchamp asks what would happen were he to give the gun to English Bob, Hackman doesn't blink, literally or figuratively. “Give it to him” he clips. As Beauchamp slowly and carefully guides the gun towards Bob, and Bob cautiously moves towards it, Hackman now reveals the threat that lived under it all along. His eyes, face and neck finally move, and the implication is clear, Bob is a deadman if he so much as touches it. This is not the reveal of merely the threat, but the motivation that up until then had been somewhat mysterious. The buried lead? - This was not merely a demonstration of proof of philosophy, but of power. This is the big “tadah”. Like the sawed woman we know the impossible was not possible, the trick was to allow us to give in to fooling ourselves for just long enough to arrive at some joy, some sense of wonder, of astonishment. “You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.” explains Michael Caine's character John Cutter in The Prestige - this was an essential trait of Hackman’s magic, to being us back from the brink. To have us question, to interrogate, good and evil, to bring us back to ourselves. Hidden in every one of his mostly every-men, and his supposed simplicity, was the extraordinary in us. The way that he worked, the way he executed was vital to the creation of a career steeped in the magic of the everyday, and that was his legacy and that is his magic. RIP