“There’s Sydney Pollack—and there’s everybody else.” That thought came over me last April when I found myself sitting next to him at the Housing Works Used Books Café; we and a few others had been asked to read some selected work from the winners of the PEN Prison Writing program that night, and I remember that in his tall (!) presence I was too shy for words though he was incredibly genial.
I’d too much admiration for his work, you see. This was the guy whose films had given me pleasure, pain and food for thought since I was a wee child. From The Slender Thread (I wasn’t even 10, but by the end of the film I knew what suicide–and true compassion–meant) to other triumphs: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, Absence of Malice, Out of Africa—those are more than a list of movies, they are chapters in my life, tools that like books and people, helped teach me how to see, and be in the world.
That April night I wish I’d had the presence of mind to tell him that. RIP, and thanks.