SF State Gator Buzz

Just heard the tragic news. Actor David Carradine, who studied acting at SF State in the 1950s, was found dead in a hotel in Bangkok. I exchanged a few e-mails with Carradine back in 2004. Here’s what he told me about his time at SF State:

Yes, I have many fond memories of what was then San Francisco State College. When I started there, the new campus had just opened. It was a gorgeous facility. I was a music major, there to learn how to write operas, but The Drama Department was in the same building and, as an actor’s son, I naturally gravitated down the hall. There I discovered Jules Irving.

 He was both my first mentor and the reason I dropped out. I loved to sit in the theater and watch him work his magic on students. I could say “wreak the havoc.” He was quite mercurial, once, in the middle of an exercise, throwing a chair at a student, and when the boy caught it with an honest expression of surprise and fear, yelled, “That’s what I want!” The criticism he was most fond of giving was, “Interesting, but not believable.” That concept was drilled into me. You can never catch me “acting.”

 For one of Irving’s classes I did a 30,000 word thesis on Hamlet. When I got it back, it was graded with an “A,” crossed out, and then a “B” and “Late” (one day). Below was the notation, “Pity, as this is a perfect paper otherwise.” I needed a two-point average to stay in school, and the “B” wouldn’t do it. I caught him in the hall and pleaded with him. He took the paper and wrote a “plus” beside the “B.” No thanks. It had to be a three-point grade. An “A minus” would do it. He was unmoved. So I walked out of college that day.

 Always quit before they fire you.

During the crossover period at State from music to drama, I took a seminar in Jazz piano from Dave Brubeck, and audited Prof. Hayakawa’s course in semantics, wrote the music for a ballet, which was to be part of the spectacular student revue, and was cast as one of the conspirators in a student production of Julius Caesar. Neither of these came about, as I dropped out to play Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet at a Little Theater across the Bay, and went on to mount my own production of Othello in a converted church in San Francisco.

Jules Irving was against doing these extracurricular productions for all his students. He remarked to his class once that “Carradine seems to have a lot of time to waste.” Well, Jules went on to become the artistic director of Lincoln Center in New York. I went on to do a couple of seasons of Shakespearean repertory, and then, after two years in the Army, played two successive leads on Broadway. I came to California to do the short-lived but innovative series, Shane, and went on to play the lead in Marty Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, Boxcar Bertha, and straight from there to Kung Fu, the series. The rest is, I guess, history.

Years later, in New York to do a movie, I met Amy Irving, whom I had always had a crush on. I tried to tell her the story about her father and me, thinking it would create a bond, but she cut me off, saying, “I’m not gonna listen to nothin’ bad about my daddy.” I feel the same way, though I wish I could have gotten to know Amy.

 I’m still into music. Recently, I’ve formed a new band, The Soul Dogs. We’ve been playing around L.A. I still have to write that opera.

Any former classmates of Carradine’s out there? Care to share any memories? Send me an e-mail: abee@sfsu.edu

6/05/09: This just in from Joseph McBride, associate professor of cinema at SF State:

David Carradine was a son of the equally eccentric — and uniquely brilliant — character actor John Carradine, who made indelible impressions in a number of John Ford classics, including THE GRAPES OF WRATH. I interviewed David Carradine for Daily Variety in the 1970s about an independent film project he was directing, and he was affable and expansive, but when I tried to interview him on location for BOUND FOR GLORY in central California,he wouldn’t talk. He was notoriously moody with the press and the public. I was fortunate enough to have a chance to play a brief scene with him in the Roger Corman film CANNONBALL. As a reporter at the finish line in the road race, I asked Carradine, “Mr. Buckman, tell us how you won the race.” He replied with his best glower, “I drove fast.”

Carradine was marvelous in offbeat action movies such as Corman’s and Paul Bartel’s DEATH RACE 2000 and in Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL movies. In such films his brooding presence adds layers of edgy depth and charisma to the action. Carradine’s theatrical training at what was then San Francisco State College gave him the steady underpinning of technique that never deserted him, even when he was at his most unsteady personally. He won the respect of Ingmar Bergman, who cast him as Abel Rosenberg in the uneven but unfairly maligned THE SERPENT’S EGG, about the early incubation of Nazism. And Carradine was brilliant as the great American folksinger Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s BOUND FOR GLORY.

As I wrote in Film Comment magazine about his performance in that film, “Carradine’s Woody Guthrie is abundant with charm and sensitivity, yet with an undercurrent of mangy meanness and animal ferocity — in sum total one of the few convincing portraits of an artist ever put on the screen. Unlike Ken Russell’s Byronic artist figures, characters out of a bygone Romantic age, Carradine’s Guthrie is a reserved, uncertain, slowly developing twentieth-century folk artist whose evolution can be detected in small increments emerging in the course of experience.”

On the night I spent on location for BOUND FOR GLORY near Stockton watching the shooting of the squatter camp sequence (the first time the Steadicam was ever used in a feature film), I asked Woody’s second wife, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, what she thought of Carradine playing her husband — who was short, unlike the lanky Carradine, but equally feisty — and she replied, “I”m enough of a believer in change to respect the fact that David has to be David. I like what my young kids said about him — he has ‘Woody’s vibes.’ If he has that, I can’t complain, can I? I told David, ‘We don’t need another Woody, we need you.’”

That’s how I’d like to remember David Carradine. For a time, at least, he had Woody’s vibes.