Paul Koslo

Interview by Justin Humphreys

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"At the end, when we were moving to the next city, to Canyon City, Colorado, we were all paying our bills. We were in that lobby area and it had stairs going back upstairs. So some people were sitting on the stairs, waiting to pay their bills. There was Charley, right there on the stairs. People had to go around him. He just sat there, big as life. I go to pay my bill and he says, 'Hey, you.' I turn around and it's Charley sitting there. 'C'mere.' He pushed somebody aside and said, 'Siddown.' And I felt like an idiot because everybody's watching us because everybody hates his guts! He says, 'My wife thinks I should apologize to you. I don't apologize to nobody. Next to me, you're the best actor in this movie.' I said, 'Don't count on it, Charley,' and I just got up and walked away. Then he asked me for his next movie after that! That was really a weird relationship.

"Al Lettieri was the real Mr. Majestyk on MR. MAJESTYK. He was great. This is a true story. We were outside of- I think it was Canyon City. It could have been another city we were at. We were in this cornfield. There was nothing but corn for miles around and this gravel road. Lettieri was like seven days late because he was doing a film in London. So they were shooting around him. We'd just had lunch. It was just some of the crew and some of the actors standing around and stuff. Charley's off by himself, pouting somewhere down the road. We look down the road and see this cloud coming towards us. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it's just a few feet away and we realize it's a big super stretch limo. And it pulls up, the driver gets out, he opens the back door, and two young, little chicks come out, you know, like twenty, twenty-two years old. And out comes Al Lettieri, this warthog of a guy. This guy's from Sicily, you know: the original GODFATHER-type guy. He says, 'Hey, where's the honey wagons?' (NOTE: A "honey wagon" is a long trailer with bathrooms for the cast and crew and cubicles for the actors. It's called a honey wagon because it's always surrounded by flies!) Somebody pointed them out. 'The actors- they're around?' Somebody said, 'Yeah.' 'All right, girls, do the honey wagons first!' He'd brought these two girls to blow everybody in the honey wagons! (laughs) We thought this was great. He says, 'Hey, is that Charley over there?' We said, 'Yeah.' You know MR. MAJESTYK is about a melon grower. This is unbelievable. If I had a picture of this, I would have made a billion dollars. Here, this little warthog of a guy, short guy- not any taller than Bronson, but twice as wide- Lettieri, says, 'That's him over there?' We said, 'Yeah.' He walks up to Bronson, right next to him, and he puts his arm around him, his shoulder, and grabs him by his right arm. And he SQUEEZES him to his right side, and he lifts him right off the ground! He turns around and he's walking past us, singing (to the tune of Melancholy Baby) 'Won't you be my MELON-CHARLEY baaaaaaby!' He carries him like this- Bronson's feet are off the ground- and Bronson didn't know what to do because he had this death grip on him- it was like a vice. And he walked him down this road, past the limo, about two blocks, carrying him like this. To this day, nobody knows what they talked about. There were lots of stories on that one, about Bronson being belligerent to the hosts of this big dude ranch they were staying at. The food was incredible and Bronson would send his driver off for some bologna and white bread and say, 'It's because me and my wife can't eat this shit,' the food which they were serving, which was incredible food. Stuff like that. But the guy was a gigantic star. What are you gonna do? Just chalk it off to oddity, to personality, I don't know. You just do the best you can. Richard Fleischer made it all worthwhile."

Other 1974 roles were in Stuart Rosenberg's THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN starring Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern as cops and Richard Rush's FREEBIE AND THE BEAN starring James Caan and Alan Arkin as cops. Both were filmed in San Francisco, and both featured Koslo being interrogated by the leads. Charles B. Pierce's Arkansas drive-in movie BOOTLEGGERS starred Koslo and featured Jaclyn Smith and Slim Pickens. ROOSTER COGBURN (75), the sequel to TRUE GRIT (69), featured Koslo in another villain role. "Ah, the Duke. Yeah (laughs). Again, that was one of the highlights, when I think about some of my movies, I think about him and Katharine Hepburn. He had some sort of a lunch that he set up for everybody, for the crew and for the actors to all get acquainted and to get acquainted with him and Katharine Hepburn. And he says to me (does John Wayne imitation) 'What part 'ya playin', kid?' My character's name was Luke, so I said, 'I'm playing Luke the Duke.' And he says, 'No, you're not- you're playin' Luke the Puke. There's only one Duke around here!' I said (groveling) 'Yes, sir! Yes, sir! You're absolutely right!' That night, back at the hotel, some of his grandkids were playing guitar and I had my guitar. He came over and said, 'Anybody my grandkids like can't be all bad,' and he shook my hand and sort of made me feel at ease. He was a great man. He WAS bigger than life. He was a living legend, more so than Clint Eastwood. I mean, I was impressed by Clint because he was a big star, but he wasn't a legend. When you were in the Duke's presence, you couldn't take your eyes off of him. I don't know how to compare anybody to him as far as formidable legends go. If you were screwing up, like if you hadn't done your homework, he'd come down on you hard, real hard. But if he saw that you were working, that you were lending a hand, then he wanted to have a beer with you- he was like a regular guy. He was always making jokes and stuff. That's one of the highlights of my career, working with that guy and Katharine Hepburn. She's another one- she's the flipside of that legend. For all the macho things he'd do, she'd do macho female things. Like she'd ride on the tailgate of a pickup truck, bouncing around, messing with the kids, whatever, Of course, (producer) Hal Wallis was having a heart attack (Note: It was his last credit). There was a running competition between the two of them (Wayne and Hepburn). It was really just great. You felt really secure being part of that. I felt like I was blessed, like I was chosen or something. I felt really comfortable being in it. We had Anthony Zerbe in that movie, and Richard Jordan. All the outlaws were a bunch of reprobates from Hollywood. There wasn't a class distinction or anything like that, working with these big stars, these legends. We were not as close as the Robert Ryan thing, but it was a pleasant and pleasurable experience and you felt like you were one of the team instead of just another actor on the job."

THE DROWNING POOL (76), a sequel to HARPER (66) was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starred Paul Newman. (laughs) "Paul Newman. He and I- man, it looked like we were gonna go into fisticuffs right at the beginning. We were in Louisiana and we were in a swamp hovercraft going through the swamp. They had a pilot that steers and runs it, and then behind him was this little seat that would barely fit two guys in it. So (Newman) always kept pushing me off of it, he kept crowding me. I didn't know why, but it got to be really old pretty quick. On the third day, the hovercraft was next to the wharf. We're on the water. Then, all of a sudden, he goes to push me in the water. And at the last second, I grabbed the seat on the hovercraft and I grabbed him. And I go to push him, and he's gonna go in, but at the last minute, I just pulled him back inside and he saw that I wasn't going to take any shit from him, that I'd prevented him and myself from going into the drink. After that, I could do no wrong with him. He used to drink these little cans of Coors, they were only about eight ounces or maybe six, and he had those specially made for him. The Coors Company made those especially for him. He would give me a couple of six packs every few days of his special brew. He'd let me use his phone, his little cell phone. In those days, they were like batteries, where the phone was clipped on top." Andrew Robinson (PV #23) was also in the cast. "Yeah. I loved Andy. He's great. I've known Andy since then. He does a lot of theater, all the time. He's a very dynamic actor- very gifted. (He's) like a lot of good actors, they start in the theater and that's where they go back to. You've got to build your craft. It's a whole different animal, acting in front of a camera or in front of a live audience."

VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (76) was a major serious British production, set in 1939, when Jewish refugees were turned away in Cuba. "Like I said, I feel very, very privileged to have worked with these people in some of these movies because they'll never make movies like that anymore. The only thing, maybe, I wish I could have been part of were some of these big (movie) experiences, of the STAR WARS trilogy, for instance. But I feel this way about some of these movies that I've done, and certainly VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED is one of those movies. First of all, we got to travel a lot in Europe. We actually shot this thing on a big, pop-rivet, old 1933 ocean liner. I don't know how you could get another cast like that. You were with giants. Royalty. I was on that movie for about three months. It was another experience like HEAVEN'S GATE: big, big cast, incredible talent. And it's an experience, a part of your life that you'll never forget. And it's not a thing that you think about consciously, but, once in a while, you'll cross its path somewhere. I still know people from those movies. I keep in touch with them- there were a couple of people that didn't have big parts that you'd probably remember: Georgina Hale- she's an English actress- and Jonathan Pryce. We played brothers in that movie. It was great. We really got along great. Since we were both (playing) Jews with the shaved heads, you know, we got really close. Faye Dunaway was not my type of person. She's just too much. The only other guy who was like that on that film was Oskar Werner, who was always my hero. JULES AND JIM is one of my favorite movies. Werner was a fucking drunk. He was so drunk, he couldn't work. They would have to try and dry him out to sober him up. It took like six or seven hours, so he could only work at like the end of the day because he was too fucked-up. And then he had a nasty streak when he drank, and he always drank, so I never knew what he was like any other way. And I did spend time with him to try and get inside his head and see why he was like that. We went to a concert, a classical violin concert at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. But he had a mean streak in him. When I heard he was in that movie, it just made my whole year. And when I met him, it was just frightening. But, that having been said, working with those people was (like) working with royalty. They're the old guard and they're legends. The great (acting) royalty for me were James Mason and Max Von Sydow. And Dame Wendy Hiller, who really WAS royalty. And Julie Harris and Luther Adler. They were all great, great pillars of inspiration."