When Gene Hackman Clocked In

The late actor referred to 'The Poseidon Adventure' as a "money job." It didn't change his process.

This week The Reveal pays tribute to Gene Hackman, who we recently lost at the age of 95.

In a guest essay for The New York Times at the end of February, soon after Gene Hackman’s death, Ben Stiller told a story that had circulated before about a conversation he had with Hackman while shooting The Royal Tenenbaums. Though Stiller writes that Hackman was “always courteous to me and the crew,” he also gently suggests that the legend’s time on that set was not a particularly happy one, marked by conflict with director Wes Anderson, who was nearly 40 years his junior. (“Older, great actors do not give young directors much of a chance,” said Bill Murray. “They’re really rough on them, and Gene was really rough on Wes.”) Yet Stiller considered Hackman one of his “Mount Rushmore” of great actors and he worked up the courage to tell him about the movie that meant the most to him. 

Not The Conversation. Not The French Connection. Not Unforgiven or Bonnie and Clyde or Night Moves or Hoosiers. No, the movie that changed his life was The Poseidon Adventure, an Irwin Allen disaster movie about a luxury liner that capsizes in the Aegean Sea, requiring a handful of survivors to make their way up to the bottom of the ship. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but Stiller saw it at a formative age and he wanted Hackman to know how much it meant to him. 

Hackman’s response: “Money job.” 

It was a deflating moment for Stiller, one that he wrestles with eloquently in the piece. How are you supposed to feel when a formative piece of art for you is dismissed as mercenary work by the artist? Yet there’s one excellent way to thread this particular needle between Stiller’s admiration and Hackman’s brusque dismissal: Watching The Poseidon Adventure. Though Hackman was a leading man and Hollywood star too long to be described as a “that guy” character actor type, he appeared in dozens of movies over a half-century-long career and naturally would not have felt they were all masterpieces. Sometimes he simply had to clock in and do his best with the material. And Hackman, being of the greatest American actors of his generation, would often overachieve.