New York -- When is this guy going to fail? This success stuff is really getting boring. He just keeps churning out the hits. Where's the drama? Where's the giddy existential edge of doom, the bold streak of self-loathing?
But no. Clumpa-clumpa, another hit. Maybe not so big a hit and then again maybe a really big hit. But very quietly, "Bugsy" is looking like it'll be another one.
Or can he at least get an entourage? Say, 20 guys in Armani suits and nuclear mousse who run around saying, "Barry can't see you now" and laugh oh-so-loudly at the boss' excellent jokes and hover obediently to add fresh cubes to his Pellegrino and point out to everybody how brilliant he is?
But again, no. It's just Barry Levinson, from Baltimore, Md., in a hotel room, with his wife Diana and no big deals about it at all. He doesn't even have a ponytail. He's wearing a coat and tie. He looks mildly prosperous, slightly academic, a 49-year-old man who'd just gotten a partnership in a downtown law firm or tenure at the Hopkins. Go Hollywood? He hasn't even gone Towson!
Pleasant and always funny, never insistent, he seems pleased to hear nice things about "Bugsy," and from the easygoing way he chats it up you'd never guess that "Bugsy" stars Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, cost $40 million, was filmed in a desert, was helped enormously by Mr. Beatty's impregnation of Ms. Bening and is getting predominantly to-die-from reviews.
And you'd never guess that a director who's put himself on the map with a series of brilliantly observed, gunless examinations of the human condition as lived in such out-of-the-way spots as Baltimore, Md., has actually made . . . a gangster movie.
But he has.
"Bugsy" is the life, times and death of one Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who took the 20th Century Limited to Hollywood in 1935 and in 12 years achieved fortune, fame and infamy, shed one wife and gained another, invented a city (Las Vegas, Nev.), and while reading the Los Angeles Times in a snappy double-breasted suit as he sat on a floral-print sofa, caught a carbine bullet in the eye. The news photo of Bugsy, his clothes dapper, his newspaper open on his lap and his face shattered, flashed around the world the next day and seemed to sum up the glamour and the gore of the gangster lifestyle: Live fast, dress well, die young.
"If someone came up to me and said, 'You want to do a gangster movie?' " says Levinson, "I'd say, 'No.' You know, the usual shoot-em-up, my mind starts wandering. I zoom in and out. 'Yes, that was a very nice shot.' 'Look, the guy did that.' But I have no interest. But what [writer James Toback] had there was this character. It was mesmerizing. There were things in it that I'd never thought about.
"One was the idea that Bugsy Siegel was so taken by Hollywood. And the key was that he made a screen test. It was ludicrous. Here's a gangster making a screen test. Does he want to be an actor? This guy was fascinating to me."
Levinson confesses that, growing up in Baltimore, he didn't learn much about gangsters.
"I remember as a kid going to one of the nightclubs in Baltimore. But Baltimore didn't have the real mobsters. It had 'entrepreneurs.' "
A breakthrough of sorts is Levinson's first close-up, on-screen handgun murder: In the very early going, Warren Beatty's Bugsy walks into a betting parlor, takes nasty to the boss, then pulls out a snub-nosed heater and ventilates him.
"It's the story," says Levinson, who then draws a distinction between the two kinds of movie violence. "Take a guy like Joel Silver [producer of several famous violent hits like 'Die Hard' and the current 'Last Boy Scout']. That guy is basically saying, 'OK, the public likes violence. How do we do the killings? How do we keep the audience interested?' That's his goal, pure and simple.
"I'm interested in the stories and the characters. If something has to happen that is violent, it's a different thing. And even then, I don't want to dwell on the mechanics of it. I want it clean. I want to show its reflection on the character. When we see what happens with Bugsy, it's to say, this isn't a wonderful guy. We need to know he has that element in him, as opposed to celebrating his violence."
In fact, says Levinson, "If I read the script to a great shoot-em-up, I'd probably be lost. As a filmmaker, I'd get bored."
He was much more interested in the interpenetration of image and ideal as it flickered through the life of Bugsy Siegel -- that is, how the authentic gangster was fascinated by movie gangsters and movie stars and how he even took the screen test, when he showed that he'd make a pretty rotten movie gangster.
"That conflict between the reality and the image was something that just evolved on the set. I'm not afraid of dialogue, but I'm always looking for ways to play into it and make it interesting. I had these two people meeting on a movie set [Bugsy and Bening's Virginia Hill] and rather than just play it against a blank brick wall, I put them against one of those '30s-movies backdrops, the road going over the hill with a tree by the side."
In one of the film's most arresting images, the two first make love in the flickering beam of a projector light; they weave in and out of the bright white beam of movie magic.
"I decided to continue that movie motif -- two people who wanted to be movie stars. So we just played them out on the wrong side of the screen. And it seems to support stylistically what the movie is all about."
Most critics agree that Levinson has managed to get an exceptionally lively performance from leading man Beatty, even a daring one. Beatty has the nerve to play a handsome shallow man -- as he himself has also been accused of being -- who can't keep his eyes off himself in the mirror and who between shootings and garrotings will ask the waiter if his tan is fading.
"We started to develop the idea of the vanity of the man -- I thought that would be kind of funny, his obsession with suntans and hairnets -- especially for a gangster. Bugsy was like that, and I thought, why not take advantage of it? And sometimes a movie star won't do that kind of stuff. But Warren was wonderful for the character -- he showed such a cockeyed sensibility."
Of course the movie enjoyed an incredible burst of public relations good fortune when Ms. Bening announced that she was carrying the heretofore childless Mr. Beatty's firstborn. The two have subsequently moved in together.
"Whatever took place," says Levinson, "was very private and not something that we knew. They were very discreet. It's not like they were over in the corner kissing and telling little stories. So when I heard about it, I was as surprised as anyone else. It was amazing."
Bening, he says, is "very uncomplicated in her approach to work. It's simply, 'Let's do it.' She was there to do the stuff; she didn't have anything else going on. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that success came to her in her 30s, instead of when she was 18 or 20. She seems to be much more grounded."
He was much more concerned with the conventions of the genre -- that is, avoiding them.
"I wanted to stay away from the genre. That very reverential famiglia feeling of the 'Godfather' and those very brown tones; I wanted to stay away from that. We're much more colorful, much more alive, more fast-paced. We have much more humor and are far more romantic.
"I didn't want to get caught between the hard-boiled Warner Brothers thing [the old gangster movie] and what Coppola was doing. What we have here is by its nature a departure from its genre, so let's not try to put ourselves into it but rather just pursue something else."
An Oscar winner for "Rain Man" and known for his "Baltimore" pictures "Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon," his next film will be one he's been trying to make for 12 years. It's a "full comedy" with Robin Williams -- who starred in Levinson's "Good Morning, Vietnam" -- about a toy company and the United States military. It's called "Toys." After that, he may return to his native city.
"I have an idea, but I haven't quite figured out how to do it," he says.