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"That's me with Larry Olivier," said Rex Reed, reaching for a black-and-white photo in a silver frame in his eighth-floor apartment in the Dakota on a recent chilly afternoon.
The photo was taken on the set of Inchon, a 1981 Korean War thriller. Looking dashing with his raven hair and Elvis cheekbones, Reed, then at the height of his fame as a journalist and television personality, played a music critic stuck in a war zone. Olivier ” Laurence to most of us ” played Gen Douglas MacArthur.
Old photos of Reed in his younger days with dear friends (Liza Minnelli, Angela Lansbury), some now departed (Natalie Wood, Liz Smith), line the antique tabletops and hunter-green walls of his home of 48 years. The handsome two-bedroom apartment functions as a shrine to a different New York, a different Hollywood: when movies were about silver screens, not touch-screens; when those who peopled them were stars, not celebrities. When not everyone was a critic, posting their opinions free on Twitter.
Reed's eyebrows ” impish, irascible, just like in the framed Al Hirschfeld caricature of him in his den from 1970 were arched in defiance as he sank into a beige suede sofa to talk about the state of film criticism today.
"Some of these young critics have never seen a black-and-white movie," he said."Have they even seen A Streetcar Named Desire?"
Generation iPhone might not realize the power and prestige that Reed once enjoyed. For decades, he has reviewed for The New York Observer, a once-influential peach-coloured broadsheet newspaper for Manhattan elites that, after shape-shifting several times during a decade of ownership by Jared Kushner, is a web-only property, Observer.com.
In the spring, headlines announced that Reed was included in a round of layoffs there. In fact, the there was no formal termination, because Reed is a freelancer, and when a new editor, Merin Curotto, took over shortly afterward, bringing him back was a top priority."He isn't for everyone," Curotto said."Great talents usually aren't."
Reed sees himself more as a guardian of Hollywood standards than as a hatchet man.
"I like just as many films as I dislike," Reed said."But I think we're drowning in mediocrity. I just try as hard as I can to raise the level of consciousness. It's so hard to get people to see good films."
They're too busy"lining up to see to see 'Star Wars 93' or whatever it is," he said.
This Oscar season he has heaped praise on I, Tonya, with Margot Robbie as the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, and Greta Gerwig's coming-of-age drama, Lady Bird, which he called"a stray emerald in a pile of discarded rhinestones."
Young movie buffs who consider him an over-the-hill crank likely do not realize he was always an old soul, even at his telegenic apex as a young man.
"When I was first admitted to the New York Film Critics Circle, you would go to a conference room and you would intelligently debate film with Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, Vincent Canby," he said."You go now, and honestly, if you have white hair, you're over the hill. They don't believe that you can even understand the kind of movies that they like. It's very true. I don't understand. I mean, they're voting for James Franco. How more absurd can life get than that?"
"Unfortunately, we have me, who lived through all that good stuff, and remembers it," he said."So kill me already, you know?"
Rex Taylor Reed was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on October 2, 1938, and spent his childhood bouncing around the South because his father, Jimmy Reed, worked as drilling supervisor on oil rigs in and around the Gulf of Mexico.
Movies provided a glimpse of a world beyond the oil patch."I went every single solitary day after school to the movies," Reed said."My father got very upset. 'What are you going to do when you grow up and have to get an honest job?' I told him, 'I'm never going to get an honest job. I'm going to be a movie critic.'"
He eventually landed a job in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox, where he had to go into the steam room ”"in my starched shirt" ” and read gossip items to the studio head, Spyros Skouras, emerging soaking wet and disillusioned.
He made $57.50 a week, he said, survived on 35-cent ham salad sandwiches from Woolworth's and lived in an actress cousin's apartment.
"It was a one-room apartment over a Chinese restaurant, where all the roaches came up to visit at night," he said."You would turn on the lights, they were so brazen they would just stare at you, they wouldn't even run. I thought, 'This is horrible, but it's New York.'"
The studio eventually laid him off after budget cutbacks, and in 1965 he fled the city to knock around Europe with friends in a rented red Volkswagen. He ended up at the Venice Film Festival just as his money was running out."I didn't know how I was going to get home," he said.
Reed decided to pose as a journalist and bluff his way into an interviews with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Buster Keaton, the ageing silent film star who was promoting Film, a 22-minute experimental silent movie written by Samuel Beckett. Reed sold both articles, making enough to buy a return ticket to the United States.
The Keaton article, which appeared in The Times, was hammered out on film-festival stationery.
Settling in New York, Reed soon became an in-demand magazine writer, then a hot job: churning out swashbuckling profiles of Tennessee Williams, Warren Beatty and many others. His unflinching Ava Gardner profile for Esquire in 1966 portrayed an embittered former screen siren two-fisting Dom P`rignon and cognac, complaining about her tenure at MGM as"17 years of slavery" in which the studio"tried to sell me like a prize hog." The article wound up in Tom Wolfe's 1973 anthology, The New Journalism.
In 1969, he edged out George Hamilton, he said, for a prominent role in Myra Breckinridge, the big-budget film adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel whose protagonist undergoes a sex change ” a scandalous notion then.
Reed played the pre-transition Myron to Raquel Welch's Myra. If nothing else, the project established him socially among the Hollywood A-list.
While there would be other scattered roles ” Inchon, Superman ” but Reed's destiny would be to write about movies, not star in them.
"I just never had the luck," he said."I was never handed a good script. I just think that one of the reasons that movies are so profoundly screwed up today is because the last person who gets any credit for anything is the writer."
He once signed a petition supporting John Lennon when the government was trying to deport Lennon because of his substance use and political activism. If Lennon famously sang All You Need Is Love, Reed appears to disagree.
"I don't have 'relationships,' except friends," he said."I don't know, love is not something that I've been really good at. I think people are intimidated by people with opinions."
He sighed, as if resigned."I think it's all over as far as that goes. It would be nice, though, to find somebody who's really handy with a wheelchair, because that day is coming."
But even if his mobility is impaired, Reed will remain a bucking bull in the china shop of current sensibilities.
"If I had to give the greatest dinner party of my own choosing in the world, the only person I would invite that I have never met was Adolf Hitler," he said."Everybody else, I've met."
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22/01/2018
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