Reel lives

Film critic David Thomson talks about his masterly survey of movie people -- who's in, who's out and just what makes a star different from the rest of us.

By Laura Miller

Dec 16, 2002 | It's unusual for a book to come into its own 27 years and three editions after it was first published, but then David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" is no ordinary reference work. It is, as he puts it, "personal, opinionated, unfair, capricious," but since the dictionary first appeared in 1975, readers have also found it addictive and unforgettable. The "Biographical Dictionary" is really a collection of essays on the various people who have made movies both the signature art form of our time and a trashy good time in the dark. And it's also an autobiography of sorts, a wide-reaching account of Thomson's filmgoing life, a fierce argument about popular art and an ongoing investigation of what it means to be human in a world full of spectators and performers.

Plus, the guy can write. Devotees have been known to joke about Thomson's idiosyncratic passions (he says Angie Dickinson is his favorite actress and calls Cary Grant "the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema") and obsessively quote their favorites among his many sterling lines. (Mine: Charlie Chaplin's "a character based on the belief that there are 'little people.' Whereas art should insist that all people are the same size.") His willingness to take liberties with the reference form makes each entry a potential surprise and delight. (Thomson, who has written biographies of Orson Welles and David O. Selznick, took this impulse even further with his 1985 novel, "Suspects," another cult favorite -- though not, regrettably, still in print -- a biographical dictionary of classic fictional film characters whose lives intersect in mysterious and ominous ways.)

Just out in its fourth edition, and retitled "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," Thomson's ongoing magnum opus is selling briskly and being widely reviewed -- his audience has finally reached critical mass. A frequent contributor to Salon, Thomson dropped by our New York office to talk about who's in the book, who's out and what makes a movie star different from ordinary mortals.

This is the fourth edition of the "Biographical Dictionary" since you first wrote it in 1975. How much has changed since the third edition?

There are 300 brand-new entries, and every entry has been updated, in the case of the people who are still working. And there's a certain amount of looking back at earlier entries and playing around with a sentence or even changing your mind about a couple of paragraphs. Every time I do an update, there's been room for that kind of rewriting. There are a lot of changes. The brand-new entries are not all new people. Some are people who've been dead a long time and could've been in the book ages ago, like Graham Greene or Rin Tin Tin.

Who gets an entry and who doesn't is more or less determined by how interested you are in them, isn't it?

You're completely correct. It's personal, opinionated, unfair, capricious, sometimes momentary. Sometimes you decide to do someone today for a reason you don't know, and it's a great day for doing that person and you find out you have more to say about them than you ever dreamed, so you say it. [When updating the book] I don't go through the entries alphabetically or systematically. I'm not very good at systematic things. The nearest I have to a rule when I'm doing the writing is that I pick one person I really want to do, am excited to do and one person I've been putting off because they bore me.

Did you find yourself surprised by some of the changes in how you saw or evaluated certain artists -- or figures, because not everyone in this book is technically an artist?

Yes, actually. I decided I wanted to do Pauline Kael. I didn't want to write about her while she was still alive because I knew I had some things to say that were tough and I felt very badly for her. She suffered a terrible fate, that she lost the ability to write when really that is what had been her life.

Because she was very ill.

And because her illness was peculiarly hostile to the act of writing. But she was dead, and I felt now's a good time. I wanted to say what I felt about her as a person because I felt that it affected her criticism as well as the way she conducted herself, but I found I liked her more than I had thought. Yeah, she could be a bit of bitch, or whatever you want to call it, and a lot of people suffered because of her a little bit if they were film critics -- unless they toed the line. But now she's gone, and that's going to fade. I'm not really complaining. I still read her work and I still think she's amazing. So it turned out a much warmer entry than I imagined it would be in advance.

That does happen, particularly with dead people where you've had a chance to reassess everything about them. Even people about whom I have very mixed feelings, like Scorsese, I think if he were to die tomorrow -- and I'm not urging that because it would be horrible for him to die before "Gangs of New York" opens -- immediately everything gets readjusted. You say, Well, even if some of the later films were not so good, some of the earlier ones were amazing and they changed everything. That balance comes into play.

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