Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For the next two weeks, we'll be talking with author Gavin Edwards
about his latest book, _Bad Motherfucker: The Life and Movies of
Samuel L. Jackson, the Coolest Man in Hollywood_.  
<https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/gavin-edwards/bad-motherfucker/9780306924
309/>

The book explores the life and work of the coolest man in Hollywood,
Samuel L. Jackson—from his star-making turns in the films of Spike
Lee and Quentin Tarantino to his ubiquitous roles in the Star Wars
and Marvel franchises, not to mention the cult favorite "Snakes on a
Plane."

Gavin Edwards is a New York Times-bestselling author, a public
speaker, and a survivor of the world's largest tomato fight. He is
the man behind twelve books including _The Tao of Bill Murray_,
_'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy_, and _Kindness and Wonder: Why
Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever_. He has come in second
place on Jeopardy!, third place on Merv Griffin's Crosswords, and
seventh place in a demolition derby at Riverhead Raceway.

Peter Meuleners will lead the discussion.  Peter has been an active
participant on the Well for over 22 years. He's  had a variety of
careers, and is currently working as a Technical Support Analyst for
a large company in the SF East Bay. Widely traveled throughout North
America and East Asia, he is a lifelong resident of the San
Francisco Bay Area, currently residing in suburban San Ramon. His
eclectic interests include historical biography, philosophical
inquiry, and human potential movements. He has cohosted the Trek.ind
conference on the Well with Gavin and is a longtime fan of Gavin's
work. He loves action movies. By his count, he has seen 40 movies
that Samuel L. Jackson appeared in.

Welcome, Gavin and Peter!
  

    
Hi All! Jon, thanks for getting us started.

Gavin, welcome back to the Well and to Inkwell! While I have the
good fortune to see you on THAT OTHER social media forum all the
time your presence here has been missed. You were and still are an
important part of the fabric of this place.

It is truly a pleasure to lead this discussion. I am a fan of good
writing and Samuel L. Jackson so this book is a double winner for
me.
  

    
So how did this project come about? I'm kind of hoping that Sam
called you at 3 in the morning and said, "Look motherfucker, you're
about to write a book!"
  

    
Thank you to Jon and Peter for hosting me! It's amazing to return to
the Well after ten years. I can't claim quite as many adventures as
Odysseus did on his way back to Ithaca, but I've done my best.

Samuel L. Jackson calling me up at 3 am: That would be the best!
Clearly I should just say that!

I had wanted to write a book on Jackson for some time. My son, now
in junior high, had been lobbying me to do it, because he knew that
if I watched every Jackson movie, that would mean we'd get a chance
to rewatch a lot of the Marvel movies together. During the course of
the book, by the way, my son made the transition from being an MCU
fan to a Tarantino fan: an unexpected side effect of me working my
way through 140 SLJ movies.

When I pick subjects for my books, I gravitate toward people whose
existence expresses a larger theme or philosophy. I love a lot of
Bill Murray movies, for example, but what made me want to write THE
TAO OF BILL MURRAY was my fascination with the crazy stories where
he would, say, crash a party, wash the dishes, and then leave. That
gave me a chance to write about his philosophy, and the very nature
of creativity and spontaneity.

So when I realized that I could write not just about Jackson's life
and work, but his impact as our leading exemplar of cool, that was
one of two epiphanies that unlocked the book for me. Exploring cool
as a cultural value, what it means in the 21st century, and how it's
intertwined with race in America--that became the book's opening
section, "Worth of the Cool." 

The other epiphany was that I realized the book had to be titled BAD
MOTHERFUCKER.

 
  

    
The book is laid out with narrative sections about SLJ's personal
and professional life and history, and expository sections about the
specific movies he appeared in.

How did this format of the book develop?
  

    
Samuel L. Jackson is a prolific, hard-working motherfucker. He has
acted in over 140 films--despite the fact that he didn't start
regularly appearing in movies until the year he turned 39! I suspect
that the number of people who have seen all those movies can be
counted on one hand. (Jackson himself would be the thumb.) So
naturally, I wanted to dive in and take his whole body of work
seriously, from the single-line cameos to the leading roles.

I also wanted the book to be a map for people trying to find their
way through his impressive career, so I wrote up each movie he
appeared in, rating both the movies and the impact of Jackson's
performance (what I called the "SLJ Factor") on a scale of 1 to 10.
And I tabulated how long it takes in each movie for Jackson to
appear on screen and counted exactly which obscenities he used in
each role (and how often). That resulted in one of my favorite email
chains ever--between me and my super-cool editor at Hachette, Brant
Rumble--where we discussed exactly which words counted as curses
these days.

Immersing myself in Jackson's work helped me appreciate and
understand him better, and I was happy with the write-ups were
turning out, mixing criticism with cool stories from the set. (SLJ
on Goodfellas: "Marty [Scorsese] got concerned about the blood
spatter and kept saying, 'No, no. More, more!' So I took about eight
showers that day while Marty kept upping the amount of blood and
brains he wanted flying across the room.")

But halfway through working on the book, I realized that if I put
all those writeups in a section at the back of the book (which was
my original plan, and how I had structured THE TAO OF BILL MURRAY
and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TOM HANKS), it would be way too much: 140
movies is a =lot= to read about, one after another.

During the early days of the pandemic, one of the only ways I had
human contact outside my family was having lunch in my backyard with
my pal Jeff Jackson (a super-talented novelist: check out his book
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS). I was telling Jeff about my structural
concerns and he made the simple but brilliant suggestion of breaking
the filmography into smaller chapters and running them at the
appropriate points in the chronology of Jackson's life.

It still took me some tinkering to get the balance to a point where
I was happy with it, but once I had that structure, the book really
came together.
  

    
Also, having tabulated all those curses came in handy, because it
allowed the good people of Hachette to compile this definitive
supercut of all the times Samuel L. Jackson says "motherfucker" in
movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvNwUan1gSs
  

    
That YouTube video is amazing.

One more nut and bolts question for now before the discussion opens
up to everyone next week.

Please talk a bit about your interview process and what sort of
access you had to various individuals who are noted in the book.
Emails, Zooms, phone calls, 2nd party relays of info, that sort of
thing.
  

    
My preference is to do as much face-to-face interviewing as
possible! There wasn't much of it possible in this past year,
because pandemic. (To answer your nuts-and-bolts question: I did a
lot on the phone, a little on email, nothing on Zoom.) I did a
moderate amount of cold-calling people who had worked with Jackson
in the past, and sometimes that would take me to surprising places:
I tracked down Albert Cooper, for example, because he was in the KFC
scene with Jackson in =School Daze=. It turned out that they knew
each other well from the Atlanta theater scene--Cooper is now a
location scout in Atlanta--and he had great stories about that era,
not to mention that he was staying with Jackson when SLJ got cast in
=Coming to America=. The more interviewing I can do, the happier I
am. Having a deadline is the only thing that saves me from what
happens to some authors: endless interviews stretching on across
years, feeling that you can get started writing if only you talk to
one more person.

I had interviewed Samuel Jackson himself some years back, and
although he didn't give me any extra time for this book, that
conversation was a cornerstone for me: I had already asked him a lot
of my most important questions. Naturally, I dove into every
significant interview he had ever done--he's given hundreds of them
over the years, so there was a lot of information available from the
man himself. Some of them just ask the same questions over and over,
but there were plenty that didn't.

Part of putting the book together is the detective work necessary to
find all that information (and supplemental materials--it was a
happy day when I uncovered a stash of documents about student
protests at Morehouse College in the 60s). A surprisingly large part
of writing a book (for me, anyway) is then =remembering= where all
the information came from.
  

    
Before we open the doors to this party, I'm curious about =your= 40
SLJ movies! Looking at the ones you've seen, is there a theme about
what you're drawn to in his movies? Do you have a favorite movie or
performance of his?
  

    
After looking again through the full list of his movies I see two
very different threads that come out. 

In the actioners I am drawn to his unflappability in the face of
overwhelming danger, even when other more powerful heroes are not so
calm. You noted this in the book when you talked about how natural
it was for him to embrace characters who had been there, done that.
This ethic even comes through in movies where his character is not
heroic or a leader. It's just who he is in his fabric and could
doubtfully be entirely removed from any character he plays. Zeus
from Die Hard with a Vengeance is a seeming exception but even then
he usually betters Bruce Willis when they are talking smack to each
other.

In seeming contradiction there is the character Elijah Price in
Unbreakable and Glass. An extraordinarily damaged man both
physically and emotionally. SLJ manages to display a wide range of
vulnerability while still claiming what power he can behind it.
Unbreakable in 2000 was the first time that I saw the amazing range
he was capable of. Spike Lee had earlier certainly given him
opportunities to explore some range, but to see him so physically
vulnerable, to see the guy who exploded into the lives of the
greater public as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, to see him in
such a role, it was amazing.

I don't know how to pick a favorite movie, maybe it's Unbreakable,
but I really do love a fairly low key Nick Fury appearance in
Captain Marvel. Washing dishes and just bumping around the house,
leaving the room when a private conversation needs to happen between
other characters, the small mannerisms associated with these acts
that we take for granted but you seldom see as part of most actor's
kit of tools, it was neat to watch.

One more note on his performances. A week or so ago I was
considering this interview and some of the notes I had made when of
all things Kong: Skull Island came on. I've watched it a couple of
times before but I figured it was some kind of serendipity that
needed to be fulfilled so I watched it again, playing very close
attention to SLJ's character, Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard. He
is a very one note guy and an anti-hero of sorts. But on close
scrutiny we learn somewhat through his words but more so through his
facial expressions and body language that in this life he was
created as a warrior and the only thing that he knows that he can
ever be is a warrior. He can't go home. In a role that many actors
would have mailed in, SLJ still tells us and shows us what is going
on inside of Packard. 

The critical point in SLJ's career when he is made aware of the
difference between just acting and bringing out the deeper inner
motivations of a character, what it took in Jackson's life to find
that, was for me a really interesting part of the book.
  

    
Yes! That movie has a surprising number of top-notch actors who are
cast as relatively stock characters and deliver a fully realized
performance anyway: John C. Reilly particularly comes to mind. But
even with a brusque, blunt military dude, Jackson makes you feel
like he actually has an interior life. 

A paragraph from BAD MOTHERFUCKER set in the early 80s that touches
on what you're saying:

[LaTanya Richardson] bluntly informed her husband that his acting
was bloodless. "You're smart," she told him. "You have the right
facial expression. You know the vocal inflection. You know
everything to do except how to feel it." Understandably stung,
Jackson told her that she had no filter--but as time went on, he
conceded that she was right. "I was always watching people react to
me rather than being inside the character." He was gifted enough to
fool audiences, and even to fool himself, but the performances were
all happening on the exterior of his soul
  

    
(The turning point in his acting was that he got clean, kicking his
cocaine addiction.)
  

    
Here's a link to a version of this topic readable by those who are
not members of the WELL:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/515/Gavin-Edwards-Bad-Motherfu
cker-T-page01.html>

If you're reading this topic and you're not a member of the WELL,
you can't post comments and questions directly. However you can send
comments and questions to inkwell at well.com, and the hosts here
will post (within reason).

This discussion will last for two weeks, through December 20th. If
you visit the link regularly between now and then, you can follow
the progress of the conversation.
  

    
I was particularly happy to see him in the BBC series STAGED, where
he plays a version of himself, one that has David Tennant and
Michael Sheen completely terrified to confront.

You have interviewed many larger-than-life stars, but is he a bit
intimidating to talk to?
  

    
A version of himself or a version of Jules?
  

    
>You have interviewed many larger-than-life stars, but is he a bit
intimidating to talk to?

A bit! Not because he's channeling Jules and there's an undertone of
menace in the conversation, but because he's wicked smart and so you
don't want to say something stupid. But he's very funny and very
present in the moment and willing to talk about anything, so he
makes for a good interview.

(Generally speaking, I'm intimidated by my interview subjects right
up until the moment where we start talking, at which point all of
that drops away and we're just two people having a conversation.)
  

    
I enjoyed the story about the actor who would not knock SLJ’s hat
off in a scene, as called for in the script.  The Director can only
ask so much of the actor.  
  

    
That was Luke Wilson! (Discovery in my index just now: the Wilsons
mentioned in this book are August, Flip, Luke, Patrick, and Rebel.)

They played opposite each other in the straight-to-video
kinda-drecky thriller MEETING EVIL.

Luke Wilson: "I just yelled at him, and the director was like, 'Did
you forget to knock Sam's hat off?' I was like, 'No, I just couldn't
bring myself to do it.'"
  

    
I got a much better sense of what happens on the set from that and
other stories.  

I was impressed by SLJ’s method of preparation, writing a biography
of his character for example.  I read a story about the new Macbeth
movie, when Denzel Washington asked Frances Macdormand to describe
the Macbeths as a couple. She suggested the play was the story of
Romeo and Juliet, but they didn’t die; they stayed married for 50
years.

When SLJ came with a motherfucking biography, I suppose the Director
had to take his rendition of the character into account, because
that’s who was going to be in the movie.

Have you spent much time on movie sets?  Who really runs the show?
  

    
Yeah, Jackson can and does work collaboratively with directors, but
his basic feeling is (paraphrased) "You hired me for a reason, now
trust me to make creative decisions about my character and do the
work."

One notable movie where he had to convince the filmmakers that his
choice was right, even though they were initially skeptical:
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2015), where he played the
supervillain with a lisp. Jackson was inspired by his own speech
impediment (he grew up stuttering): "If you're Steve Jobs and you've
got everything--you've got money, you've got power, you've got
everything you want--but you've still got this goddamn stutter and
lisp, and people aren't 100% taking you seriously, it can take you
to that next level of going mad."

I have spent a moderate amount of time on movie and TV sets, enough
to know the etiquette at video village, and enough to say that
although they can be thrilling creative environments for the people
involved, they are also extremely slow (long hours of work every day
to get a few usable minutes on film) and some of the power dynamics
are not immediately obvious to visitors. The truism is that
directors run movies and writers run TV, and that's not wrong, but
there's a lot of power centers on a set, including the actors and
the people writing the checks, and a lot of times different parties
are keeping their power veiled until/unless they need to assert
themselves.

Jackson, for example, doesn't like to give directors more than three
takes, and he doesn't want to mix up a bunch of different approaches
to the role. His logic: “I don’t get to go to the editing room, but
you do. And you’re going to put that thing that you asked me to do
in there, because that’s the thing you like. So if I don’t do it, I
don’t have to worry about you fucking with my performance.”
  

    
By the way, I'm always fascinated to know other people's favorite
Samuel L. Jackson movies and performances. So if you're reading this
and you're lurking because you're not sure you have a relevant
question, feel free to chime in with a favorite movie and we can
talk about it!
  

    
I've always had a fondness for his final scene in DEEP BLUE SEA.
  

    
Gavin, let's talk about "Cool" a bit. 

IMHO there are only a handful of actors that can improve a movie
just by being in it. It takes serious cool to pull that off. Why is
SLJ so motherfucking cool? How do you think it affects (or even
creates) our perceptions of him and our perceptions of the movies he
appears in?
  

    
Jackson's lessons on acting in Master Class are really good.  He
give very practical advise to aspiring actors.  The only one I
remember specifically was the one on auditioning.  He gives very
specific advice on how to approach and do an audition and on what
the producer and director are looking for.

I am not an aspiring actor, but last year for employee appreciation
day my company gave everyone a subscription to Master Class and for
some reason I was drawn to his lessons.
  

    
SLJs years at Morehouse, hanging with the town kids but schooling
with the preppies, read like pretty good preparation for his
caricature of the street smart cool guy. I recall reading how that
role was at odds with his drug addled years; he played what was in
his head, not what was in his own story.   

There’s something about living outside the box that helps you see
what’s going on inside that box better than the people in it. That
perspective is fertile ground for writers and actors.  

He went to be in the Morehouse play to meet girls though, right?