By Kevin Lewis

"I love New York. I can't imagine living anywhere else," director, actor and writer Stanley Tucci emphasized at the Moving Images at DGA evening at the DGA Theater in Manhattan on March 10, 2000. David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film and Video at the American Museum of the Moving Image, moderated the discussion of Tucci's new film Joe Gould's Secret, which was the first event this season of the co-sponsored AMMI-DGA series.

Joe Gould's Secret is based on the two stories - Professor Seagull and Joe Gould's Secret - The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell [played by Tucci in the film] wrote about the legendary Greenwich Village bohemian writer Joe Gould, notorious for the unwritten and undiscovered Oral History of Our Times, a compendium of overheard conversations by Gould of New Yorkers from the 1920s through the 1940s. For decades, Gould, a real street character, was supported by handouts from Gothamites of all classes anxious to support the Joe Gould Fund.

It is a highly personal movie for Tucci. He spent his first years in New York, before success as an actor, walking around the city as Joseph Mitchell did, listening to people, looking at its buildings. He regards living in New York as akin to living inside a sculpture. In this movie he wanted to show normal New Yorkers living in a "simple, naturalistic way, with no romanticism, no sentimentality and with no affectation with a real light that exists when we look at them on the street."

Tucci doesn't romanticize Joe Gould either. Even if Gould had been given the means to publish, psychological impairments would have prevented it. "I think Joe Gould was crazy," Tucci states.

The film, which depicts New York during the 1940s in all its dinginess, required 43 locations in 35 shooting days. The movie crew journeyed to Jersey City to re-create the Edward Hopperish diners, such as the legendary Goody's and The Jefferson Diner, and nightclubs of the era, such as the Village Vanguard.

"The Jefferson Diner was shot in a coffee shop in Jersey City which has not changed since 1942," Tucci said. "A Greenpoint, Brooklyn, bar substituted for Goody's, another bar and the Village Vanguard. The tavern had two bars in one, so we could never shoot directly from behind the bar facing this way because that's where the other bar was. We could only shoot from a certain angle. When we changed it back, put up some flats, throw some different tables in, that was the Village Vanguard. We pulled them out, put in some booths, and that became the back of Goody's. You had to choose your angles very specifically, the same as if you were shooting on the street, otherwise one inch to the left there was a boom."

Tucci credits the success of the re-creation to his cinematographer Maryse Alberti, production designer Andrew Jackness, costume designer Juliet Polcsa, and his crew. Tucci also said that Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) was an inspiration for the look of New York, and originally he wanted to shoot in black and white but was overruled by his producer. Now, he says, he is grateful that he shot in color, and the desaturated color, with the characteristic New York City blackened red bricks delineates urban life.

On his contributions to the writing of the script (for which he did not receive credit in WGA arbitration), Tucci said that he rearranged characters and dialogue from Howard A. Rodman's script, and pointed out the often over- looked aspect of a script: the visuals.

"The visuals are the transparent writing. Because it's a film and not prose," he explained. "The visuals are the equivalent of transparent writing, [such as] the images of the people on the subway. What was interesting to me were Gould's observations of philosophical musings on humanity and existence. The combination of those two things is really who he was and what this film is about. Also, there wasn't anything written by him. Howard wrote a little of it but it really wasn't interesting enough. What was much more interesting to me was simply the images of the people walking on the street and his wonderful philosophy."

For his background, Tucci interviewed many of Mitchell's friends, including caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and Mitchell's daughters.

Tucci became a director because, "I didn't feel that acting satisfied enough of my creative self. It didn't make use of my visual self." He also felt frustrated working for directors who understood technical aspects more than they knew about communicating with actors. Tucci's films use more actors in speaking roles than many other contemporary films because he is comfortable with actors and casting them suitably.

As an actor/director, does he allow his actors leeway or improvisation choices? The actors, among them Ian Holm as Gould, Susan Sarandon as Alice Neel and Steve Martin as publisher Charles Duell, all fit neatly into Tucci's concept and are "truthful to the script," he says. "Ian doesn't like to improvise. He said, 'I can't do it. I'm no good at it,' so he said what was there. When I write dialogue, because I'm an actor, I act out all the parts so I'm able to feel if it's truthful or not because that's what I know most of all. I know how something comes out of your mouth, whether it's going to work or not.

"The long monologue [Gould] has in the bar where he tries to explain what happened to the money, I took combinations of stuff that actually happened that were written and then I expanded upon it, made stuff up and so forth, and I just acted out over and over again like an actor as though I'm playing that part, and then I gave it to [Holm]. I've been very lucky in the films I've directed in that things work. People memorize the lines and they get it."

The film, which he wants to be an intimate experience, incorporates the city without using its landmarks, such as the Empire State Building, as a demarcation point.

"The city has to be on the human scale. It has to become abstracted. By becoming abstracted it becomes more real. Visceral," he explained. "I absolutely adore New York City. I don't want to romanticize New York City. I don't think you can romanticize New York City. I think it's silly. It would be foolish. It's a dirty city, it's a dangerous city but why would you want to live anyplace else. It has everything you could ever want. It's the cultural center of the world."

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