Longtime San Francisco resident David Thomson is widely considered the preeminent film historian of our time.
Lucy Gray
“The key to success is sincerity — if you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” according to the (perhaps apocryphal) quote from the late comedian George Burns. It might serve as a jumping-off point for David Thomson’s new volume, Acting Naturally: The Magic in Great Performances, the latest addition to a shelf full of books about the silver screen (“too many,” Thomson jokingly allows) — including the definitive New Biographical Dictionary of Film and his last book, 2021’s A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors — that have led many to regard him as the preeminent film historian of our time.
“I’ve written a lot over the years about the fruits of what’s known as the auteur theory, which was valuable and rewarding in the sense that it says, ‘Look, movies are made by individuals, and we can look at them as if they were novelists or composers,’” explains Thomson, who was born in London but has been an American citizen living and working in San Francisco for years. (His wife, Lucy Gray, is a noted photographer.)
“But if you ask an ordinary filmgoer, they’ll tell you that they go to the movies to see actors,” he emphasizes. “We respond to people on screen — that’s where the magic lies. From the earliest days, people went to the movies to have a dream-life in which they looked like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper. So I thought I’d do a book about acting itself, and picked as an essential theme the idea that actors in general try to act naturally.”
In Acting Naturally, out February 7 from Knopf, David Thomson provides insight into the craft of acting.
It’s not as easy as it looks.
“[Actors are] making decisions about behaving, which are planned and rehearsed,” Thomson notes. “They live a battle between being spontaneous and calculated. It’s at the heart of acting, a way of measuring the best actors from those who are not so good. [Since] movies have been around, we’ve all got used to seeing how people behave there — and copying them. That leads to the awareness that as people leading our ordinary lives, we’re not quite as spontaneous or truthful as we’d like to think.”
It’s a signature Thomson thesis, mixing in essayistic speculation and scenarios that posit what it would be like if Meryl Streep, instead of Maria Schneider, had costarred with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. He also adds rich, granular details about the medium he grew up loving ever since seeing Rebel Without a Cause as a London schoolboy and autobiographical elements (the new book is dedicated to his father, whose abandonment he wrote about in the memoir Try to Tell the Story).
The book is set against the backdrop of the Trump years — and the ongoing political battles about casting, race and the merits of canceling performers guilty of poor personal behavior. On the page, Thomson even poses the contrarian question, “Is Tom Hanks a more honest man than Donald Trump? That’s not a trick question, and it has no simple answer.” (Let the record reflect that he is not implying that Hanks is personally dishonest, but that he is a much subtler performer than he is sometimes given credit for.)
For his part, Thomson avoids the pretense that he’s a film critic per se. “I don’t think I’m well suited to the discipline of going to see a movie in the morning, writing a review that evening and seeing it appear in print two or three days later,” he says. “I’m much better writing about films I’ve lived with for a while, and seen for a few times. I remember sitting next to [famed New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael] at a screening where she was writing away so furiously, she was clearly beginning her review. I admire that kind of criticism to no end; I’m just not very good at that. I prefer to take the movie in, and be taken over by it.” He cites influences from Hemingway and Joan Didion to Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene.
So, what are David Thomson’s favorite San Francisco movies?
“I have Vertigo in my bloodstream — I don’t think it’s that good a film, but I can’t drive across the Golden Gate Bridge or Fort Point without feeling its effect. Equally, I can’t drive in the City without feeling Bullitt, even though all San Franciscans know that the car chase is crazy. It’s a trick of editing; we go from one street to another that’s miles apart. I’m also a big admirer of The Conversation, and What’s Up, Doc?”
