Mailer by the Bay
David Thompson's interview in California magazine (August 1987), ranging over all of Mailer's films through Tough Guys Don't Dance and his moviegoing youth — including his memory of asking Burt Lancaster to play Lieutenant Hearn in a film of The Naked and the Dead.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Mailer by the Bay,” David Thompson’s interview, ran in California magazine in August 1987 (66–69, 124, 126). Lennon calls it an “important interview that ranges over all of Mailer’s films through Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” as well as his experience of going to the movies as an adolescent. Among its set pieces: his memory of asking Burt Lancaster to play Lieutenant Hearn in a never-made film of The Naked and the Dead — “Burt wanted to do it, but the war in Korea started, and there was no way then of making a fairly serious movie of the book” — and the Marlon Brando anecdote from his 1949 Hollywood months (“What the fuck are you doing here, Mailer? … Why aren’t you in Vermont writing your next book?”). Thompson finds in Mailer “two brothers who wrestle”: the writer who accepts his calling’s “brutal isolation,” and “the flighty adventurer … ready to play any part.”
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.