Henry Cooper became a movie star very late in life. He has an 8-second role in a film that came out in December, 2004, called "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." He is still waiting for his Oscar. The fact that his daughter Molly, Yale '99, was assistant to the producer may or may not have had to do with this brilliant bit of casting.
“People
Say Eleanor is the Brains Behind Team Zissou…"
by Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
A year ago last September, I went to Rome to visit my daughter Molly, who was in the middle of an eight-month stay there as assistant to a young film producer, Barry Mendel. Mendel was co-producing a film that has just opened, called “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” which some journalists and critics have described as a sort of parody of Jacques Cousteau and the Cousteau Society. Indeed, the members of Team Zissou ride around on an oceanographic vessel, looking for strange fish, wearing bikinis and red hats, like Cousteau’s sailors. But Cousteau’s boat was called “Calypso,” whereas Zissou’s boat is called “Bellafonte,” which should dispel any identity. The film stars Bill Murray, Kate Blanchette, and me, and not necessarily in that order. I am on screen for eight seconds, right near the beginning. If you blink you might miss me. But don’t do that. You’ll be sorry. What an eight seconds! I have one line, but that is enough to gain me admission to the Screen Actors’ Guild.
On my first night there, I took Molly to what, fifty years ago, on my first visit to Rome, had been my favorite restaurant, the Tre Scalini in the Piazza Novona. The restaurant seemed to have gone downhill in the intervening years. But the square was bustling with life; it has become the Washington Square of Rome, full of musicians and jugglers and vendors of all sorts of arts, crafts, and postcards. Molly had not changed at all. A short young woman in her mid-twenties with dark brown hair and a lively face and manner to go with it, she was just as American as when she had arrived four months ago.
“How’s the movie going?” I asked.
“Great, Daddy, but we are in the middle of a flap,” she said.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Well, day after tomorrow, we are shooting a scene where Bill Murray, or the character he is playing, Steve Zissou, is being interviewed by a New York television talk-show host, like Charlie Rose or Dick Cavett,” she said. “Day before yesterday, the guy who was supposed to play that role flew in from New York, went to his hotel, and had a stroke.”
“Oh, my goodness!” I said.
“’Oh my goodness’ is right,” Molly said. “We all feel very badly. There’s no way he is going to be at the shooting the day after tomorrow. And we have been calling all over the world, and we cannot find a replacement.”
I swirled my Pinot Grigio in my glass and waited for Molly to say something more. I am about the same age as Charlie Rose –- a little older maybe – and even though I don’t look much like him, I come from New York and have a New York accent of sorts.
When Molly didn’t say anything more, I said, “What about your old man?”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. And we went on to talk about more important things.
The next morning, at about 10 A.M., while I was trying to get over my jet lag, the phone rang in my hotel room.
“Remember that part we talked about last night?” Molly said.
“Yes,” I said groggily.
“How would you like to try out for it?”
“Why not?” I said.
And she gave me my one line, which was “People say Eleanor is the brains behind Team Zissou. What is Steve?”
“Write it down,” she said.
I did.
“Now repeat it,” she said.
“’People say Steve is the brains behind Team Eleanor. What is Zissou?’” I said.
“No, no! It’s “’People say Eleanor is the brains behind Team Zissou. What is Steve?’” she said.
I asked her what it meant.
“Steve Zissou is the head of Team Zissou, which some people think is a little like the Cousteau Society, but it really isn’t,” she said. “Eleanor is his wife. What you are asking is, ‘People say your wife runs your organization. What do you do?’ You are needling Bill Murray.”
She gave me the address of a place where auditions were filmed, in some remote Roman suburb. When I got there, I took a seat in a waiting room filled with stylish young twenty-somethings, mostly Italian, who were trying out for different parts in this and other films.
When my turn came, I entered a dark studio and was told to walk to the center of the stage and say my line.
What came out was “People say Zissou is the brains behind Team Steve. Who is Eleanor?”
Dismayed, I said, ”My goodness, I blew my line. Do you want me to do it again?
The woman at the camera waved me away.
In the taxi on the way home, I thought to myself, “Oh, well. Win a few, lose a few.”
Around 4 PM, Molly called from Barry Mendel’s office.
“The wardrobe department wants to know your jacket size,” she said. I told her.
“They also want to know your shoe size,” she said. I told her that, too.
Then I said, “Why do they want to know?”
“I don’t know,” Molly said.
Half an hour later, Molly called back.
“Daddy, Daddy, guess what?” she said.
“I can’t guess,” I said.
“You got the part!” They hadn’t minded that I had muffed my line. They loved my New York accent.
Molly later wanted to make it clear that she had had nothing to do with my selection. Apparently, when the crisis occurred, Wes Anderson’s assistant, Dan Beers, a friend of Molly’s, had said to Anderson, “Molly’s Dad is in Rome, Why don’t we get him?”
Wes Anderson called Molly’s boss, Barry Mendel, and said, “Get Molly’s Dad.”
Mendel had called Molly and said, “Get your Dad.”
The next morning at 8:30, Molly picked me up at my hotel in a limo and took me out to the film studio, Cinecitta, somewhere ‘way in back of beyond of Rome. Mussolini founded it in the ‘thirties because his wife wanted to be a movie star. It had been very successful until Mussolini’s demise; in the decade after the war, it had had slim pickings until Fellini, Visconti, and other Italian film directors made it their headquarters. In the ‘seventies, it suffered another decline, and then picked up again in the late ‘nineties, when American film companies discovered that Cinecitta was a superb studio that cost less than American ones. The first recent American film made there was “Gangs of New York;” the second was mine, as I’ve come to call “The Life Acquatic.”
We slipped through the main gate, a small Mussolini-style piece of architecture reminiscent of the entrance to the Universal lot in Hollywood, where Molly normally worked, but somewhat the worse for wear since its erection in the Fascist heyday. Molly took me to the wardrobe department, which had been so enigmatically curious about my dimensions.
She turned me over to the wardrobe mistress for the film, Milena Canonero, a lively, elegant woman with reddish hair and an authoritative manner. She told me she had won two Oscars for her costumes. I told her I had known a woman in New York, Irene Sharaff, who had won five Oscars for costumes, and that she kept them on the back of her toilet in her New York apartment. She did not seem impressed.
She took one look at my clothes – a dark blue herring-bone tweed jacket from Brooks Brothers, a pair of grey flannels from the same place, a pair of Rockport walking shoes, a white Brooks Brother shirt, and a paisley tie I had bought at J. Press about 20 years ago. She cocked her thumb and moved it backwards like a hitchhiker, in the international sign for “Away with it,” “Get rid of it,” and “Off.”
I was left standing in a pair of boxer shorts.
She tried on a number of Italian suits, all of them too tight. Finally she settled on what looked like a Versace number, in a shade of light grey, with long, narrow lapels. I don’t like light grey. Even as a child, I did not like other people dressing me.
“It’s too tight,” I said. While they were at it, they should have got my waist size.
“Wes Anderson wants you to look slim and sharp, with these sharp lapels,” she said. “He wants you to look like Dick Cavett.”
I told her I knew Dick Cavett, I liked Dick Cavett, but there was no way I would ever look like him.
“Keep quiet,” she said. “You will when we get through with you. Wes Anderson wants his actors to look sharp and hip.”
She tried on several pairs of shoes, settling finally on a pair of what I took to be Guccis that were a sort of chocolate brown.
“They pinch,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said.
A few minutes later, the door opened and a kindly looking older woman came in, short with white hair, with a gentleness otherwise lacking from the wardrobe department.
“Now I want to introduce you to a landmark here at Cinecitta,” Ms. Canonero said. “This is Maria Teresa Corridoni, who was Fellini’s hairdresser for some of his films. And now she is going to do your hair.”
“No, she’s not,” I blurted out. It was tough enough having to look like Dick Cavatt, but to look like an Italian Dick Cavatt – and a sharp, hip Dick Cavatt at that -- was asking too much. My rumpled, tousled hair had always been my trademark. A Fellini-style hair-cut wasn’t me. The fact that I wasn’t supposed to be me, but rather a character in someone else’s movie, did not occur to me just then.
Before we could pursue this impasse further, it was time for lunch.
I met Molly outside her office. She could see at a glance I was disgruntled. She took me for a short walk in a place where she sometimes went when she felt out of sorts or homesick – an outdoor set for the Gangs of New York, a 19th-century square in the meatpacking district where the knife-fight between two rival gangs, with blood all over the snow, took place.
She told me I looked great. I felt somewhat better – mollified, in fact.
She introduced me to her boss, Barry Mendel, a neat, trim-looking man about forty wearing a decidedly non-Italian plaid shirt. I told him I had liked the two previous movies of his that I had seen, “Rushmore,” which he had done with Wes Anderson and which also had starred Bill Murray, and “The Royal Tennenbaums,” whose trailers, I told him, had not done justice to the film. He agreed, grumbling that the trailers were in the hands of the studios.
After lunch I went to the makeup department, where my face was smeared with various unguents and powders. I could see the hairdresser behind me, in the mirror, brandishing a pair of shears.
Just then the door opened and Wes Anderson interrupted the process. He is in his mid-thirties, as thin as a toothpick, and was wearing a light-colored, tight-fitting jacket with long, sharp lapels. I could see why he liked sharp, hip, Dick Cavett figures. He looked like me in my costume – if you overlook fifty pounds and thirty-five years. Aside from “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tennenbaums,” he had also written and directed a film called “Bottle Rocket.”
He took me aside and said, as he was going to be directing me later that afternoon, he wanted to get to know me a little. “How are things going?” he asked.
I said they were going fine, though I had a couple of problems, such as the suit and the shoes, and now the hair. “It just isn’t me,” I protested.
He looked me up and down. “I see what you mean,” he said. “I’ll cut you a deal. If you will keep the suit and the shoes, I will let you keep your hair.”
We shook on that, and Wes waved off Fellini’s hairdresser. I was a little sorry afterwards. I have wondered, in the year since then, what I would look like with a really sharp haircut.
When my makeup was all done, it was 2 PM. The shooting wouldn’t begin until 4. My hair had been all slicked down despite my agreement with Wes, and my makeup was fragile. What to do with me for the next two hours?
A young Italian girl, an intern, escorted me to a nearby building with several dressing rooms. One of them had a big blue star on the door and my name, HENRY COOPER, just below it. Next to it was another dressing room with another big blue star, and the name BILL MURRAY just below.
The intern shoved me into my dressing room, which was bare except for a couch. “Sit down and don’t touch yourself,” she said.
Soon I got bored with just sitting there, not touching myself. There was nothing to read. There were voices from next door. I decided to introduce myself to my co-star.
Bill Murray is a surprisingly tall man in his mid-fifties, relatively trim in a light blue sweat suit – what turned out to be the Team Zissou uniform. With him was another actor, Seymour Cassell, also wearing a light blue Team Zissou uniform. Cassell had been in several other Wes Anderson movies, including “Rushmore” (in which he played the father of an irritating gifted kid) and “The Royal Tannenbaums (in which he was an elevator man who pretended to be a surgeon). Cassell would also be in the New York talk-show scene; he would play the part of Steve Zissou’s oldest friend who, not long after the TV show, would be eaten by a shark.
The two seemed a little surprised – indeed, alarmed – when I introduced myself as their co-star, but soon we settled down to talk shop. Cassell had just flown in that morning from Texas, where he was shooting another movie; he said he felt jet-lagged. I asked Murray whether we would get a chance to rehearse our parts before the shooting; he said the shooting was the rehearsal, because we would do the scene over and over again before we got it right, and then the editors would pick the best takes, or the best parts of different takes. Rehearsals were for play actors.
I had read a day or so before in the Paris Tribune the review of Murray’s latest movie, “Lost in Translation” which had just opened in the United States. He had not been to the opening – he could not get away from “The Life Acquatic” -- but was delighted with the reviews. He is very much like the character he plays in both movies, that is to say, laid back, understated, and wryly funny. He seemed to have calmed down and mellowed since his younger days, when he made the film “Ghostbusters,” when he had seemed more exuberant.
Murray and I had some mutual friends in New York; they had given me a book for him – a book of walking tours in Rome by another William Murray, a New Yorker writer, which I had passed on to Molly to give Bill. Bill, Wes, Barry, and others were great walkers, taking off on long nighttime rambles through Rome. I had the impression that underneath the rather laid-back, present-day Bill Murray, there was a restlessness that needed these long rambles, and occasional boisterous cast parties as well, to let off steam and focus him for his intensely held-in roles. Much of his life, perhaps, was rehearsal.
Soon an intern arrived and led us off to the sound stage. We entered a cavernous dark room, like a warehouse, with the set brilliantly lit at its center – orange tile walls with three reddish-brown chairs and a small table, as garish a talk-show setting as one could hope for. The bright floodlights made it hard to find one’s way across the floor, filled with snaking electrical cables and upright tripods for cameras and other equipment. A couple of dozen technicians and assistants were milling around; Wes Anderson was sitting in a chair near the set.
We sat in the three chairs, me at the left end, facing the other two; with Bill Murray in the next chair and Seymour Cassell just beyond. The lights were bright; it was next to impossible for me to see the crowd of technicians – though Wes Anderson was visible at the edge of the set. People from the wardrobe and makeup department busied themselves about us; I felt my glasses being removed and a piece of white plaster pulled from the bridge of my nose – it had been put there earlier so that my glasses would not rub off my makeup. Even so, the bridge of my nose did require a little dab of grease and a final rubdown.
The room quieted down. Anderson told me to go ahead when I was ready.
“People say Eleanor is the brains behind Team Steve,” I said, and then stopped in embarrassment. “I got it wrong!”
Anderson said not to worry; I could make as many mistakes as I wanted to, providing I got it right just enough for the film editor to do his thing. Anderson basically had stretched out a safety net beneath me. I felt encouraged.
“People say Eleanor is the brains behind Team Zissou,” I said, getting it right. “What about Steve?”
“No, not ‘What about Steve?’ it’s ‘Who is Steve?’” Anderson cut in. “And you should pause long enough after the first sentence, to let it sink in, before you come out with the zinger.”
I did it again, perfectly this time.
On cue, Murray started back in his chair, clearly hurt and angry, and at a loss for words.
Seymour Cassell leaned forward, put his hand on Murray’s knee, and said “Steve is the Zissou.”
Murray turned and beamed gratefully into Cassell’s face.
Cut. End of scene.
Anderson wanted me to wait even longer between my two sentences, for emphasis. And he wanted Cassell to emphasis more the word “is” in “Steve is the Zissou.”
We did it again. Next time, Anderson wanted Cassell to come down harder on the word “Zissou,” so that it would come out, “Steve is the Zissou.”
We did it a few more times, though Cassell kept emphasizing is instead of Zissou. He was probably still a little jet lagged.
Anderson wanted Murray to start back a little further after the zinger.
At length he asked me to ad lib some questions, so that when we got to the scripted part, we would be more relaxed.
I asked Murray, “Were you influenced at all in your work by the work of Jacques Cousteau?”
“Ah, the great Jacques Cousteau!” Murray ad-libbed, a far-away look in his eyes. “He is the founder of our field, and its foremost practitioner. Without him, the rest of us would be nothing. I have the greatest admiration for him.”
I asked, “Did you ever meet Jacques Cousteau?”
“Just once,” Murray said. “We were both tied up on opposite sides of the same pier in Monte Carlo. On the pier, I looked down and saw the great man sitting at the wheel of the Calypso, a drink in his hand. He asked me to come aboard, and we shook hands.”
“Did you ever meet an unpleasant fish?” I asked.
“You must mean a shark,” he said. “Yes, I have met many of them. They can be quite pleasant, if you do nothing to upset them.”
It was time to zing the zinger. “People say Steve is the brains behind Team Eleanor. [Pause] What about Zissou?” I said, followed by an anguished, “No, no, no!”
We took it again. This time, I got it right, but Cassell screwed up his line.
The next time, Cassell and I both got our lines right, but Murray didn’t look stunned enough.
At last, everything seemed to fall into place, and we clicked.
We did it dozens more times, sometimes without the ad-libbed questions, and sometimes with them. As the ad-libs did not make it into the movie, I myself have had to do some ad-libbing in this reminiscence, but I believe the lines are close to what we said. Clearly Murray, and Anderson, are believers in some philosophy of acting, like Method-acting, perhaps, in which the actor works his way naturally into the part, frequently by ad-libbing. Indeed, Anderson, like some other directors, extends the principle even to casting; he is accustomed to casting friends or other non-actors that seem suited to his roles – me, for example. (In my case, he was lucky to the extent that I am a journalist, and asking questions is what I do; I simply had to be myself.) The original person he had picked for my role, the one who had a stroke after his arrival in Rome, was his architect in New York; he made a complete recovery and toured Cinecitta a couple of weeks later.
After two hours, the shooting ended as suddenly as it began, at a word from Anderson. The first I knew it was over, Murray rose from his chair, gave me a big hug, and said “It was a pleasure working with you.”
Taken aback, I said, “Bill, it was an honor working with you.”
Seymour Cassell came over, and we gave each other a big three-way hug.
Meanwhile, everyone in the room clapped. There were dozens of flashing lights; every technician had a camera of his or her own, and was popping away at what was a ritual photo-op. I could see Molly in the back, with a clip board. She had a camera, too.
I was escorted back to my dressing room. The star was still on the door, but my name was no longer underneath it. They took away my Versace suit and my Gucci shoes. I put on my wrinkled old jacket and grey flannel pants and my Rockports. I felt a little sad that it was all over – like Cinderella after the ball. I was vaguely dissatisfied with my old self.
After I returned to New York, the shooting went on four more months, much of it off of the Bay of Naples and Anzio, aboard the Bellafonte. Molly told me sometimes she thought I, too was aboard; she kept hearing my voice saying, “People say Eleanor is the brains behind Team Zissou. [Pause.] Who is Steve?” Upon investigation, she always found Murray around the corner somewhere, imitating me. Repeating the line, in my voice, with a trace of disgust, helped put him in the mood for his part, I think, because my zinger burned Zissou. It rankled, because his wife in the movie, played by Angelika Huston, really did run his organization. In the film, he actually repeats my line, days afterwards, indignantly.
Still, I count myself a fan of Bill Murray’s. I was unaccountably upset last March when my co-star failed to win the Oscar for best male actor for his role in “Lost in Translation.” (Compared to Murray, I thought Sean Penn, who won it for his histrionic role in “Mystic River,” couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.) Maybe Murray will get the Oscar this spring for Steve Zissou. And – why not? – perhaps the Motion Picture Academy will inaugurate an Oscar for Best Bit Player. If so, I have a candidate.
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