Brat Packers & Coppolas: Diane Lane Edition

Actress Diane Lane around age 1, in 1966, with her acting coach father (and John Cassavetes collaborator) Burt Lane, and her former Playmate mother, Colleen Farrington

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In doing some research for my NYC crime fiction novel Murder in Birdland– about musicians, comedians, actors, nightclubs and mobsters in the Kennedy era–I just discovered a fascinating through line from Broadway and Hollywood back then, thru my own adolescence in the 1980s, and straight on up to today in the New Roarin’ Twenties. In a wonderful synchronicity, that through-line is one of my favorite actresses– and probably my first serious movie crush (a first crush also confessed by Matthew McConaughey)– Oscar-nominee Diane Lane!

Turns out Diane’s late father Burt Lane was an important writer, actor, acting coach and occasional taxi driver to pay the bills–besides being a doting single “stage dad”–from the late Fifties into probably the Seventies, if not longer. In checking Burt’s Broadway World profile, he only has one off-Broadway credit listed: “Chiaroscuro” in 1963 (in which Diane’s mother Colleen Farrington also appeared, though it only went on for five performances–which was and is a more common occurrence than one would think in the cutthroat New York theater world). However, that one small credit doesn’t mean Burt wasn’t the real deal as a New York area creative. How I stumbled upon him doesn’t matter, but his most significant work turns out to have been as a co-founder of the Cassevetes-Lane Drama Workshop in 1956. In the heyday of Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan and Manhattan’s famed Actor’s Studio, Cassavetes and Lane had the chutzpah to put forth an entirely contradictory model for how to train actors, and write and perform plays. Simply put, to paraphrase an academic journal’s statement, the Cassavetes-Lane “method” emphasized INTERACTIONS OVER IDENTITY. “Authentic” internalized identity was one of The Actor’s Studio’s and Stanislavsky Method’s main philosophies, one that Cassavetes semi-mockingly called “organized introversion” in interviews.

[By the way, to see the remarkable resemblance between Diane and her former Playboy magazine “pin-up girl” mother Colleen, I’ll refer you to Medium.com, and thus I’ll stay within the bounds of more conventional tastes, and avoid copyright issues as well. She’s not nude, but she is certainly lovely, proof that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with Diane.]

I have previously mentioned Diane on this blog, most importantly in one of my early articles about Francis Ford Coppola’s high-quality 80s “Brat Pack”/teen films based on S.E. Hinton novels. He did three: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and That Was Then, This is Now.

Matt Dillon & Diane Lane in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983)

When Ms. Hinton herself made some very kind clarification comments on my article, I felt like I was on my way, both as a film historian and as a writer, myself.
[re Diane Lane’s Coppola work >>> ]
The third movie Diane did with Coppola, after The Outsiders & Rumble Fish, was “The Cotton Club”, a jazz age gangster film. In it, Lane played sultry nightclub singer Vera Cicero.

From here, I’ll let Diane take over, as quoted in reporter Anthony Mason’s CBS News interview item from May 2017, when Diane’s movie “Paris Can Wait” –directed by Francis’ wife Eleanor– was coming out.
“It was my nightclub scene,” she recalled [of the 1984 film], “and Richard Gere was playing the trumpet in my ear, and I was supposed to be all confident. And I just wasn’t really feeling it. That was the only fight I ever got into with Francis Coppola. He wanted me to be sexier. And he just finally said it: ‘I don’t know what that thing is that women do, but be sexy.’ …And maybe because I had a showgirl for a mom, I found I was very reticent to do that, …When it’s asked of me to be sexy on cue, I get a little gender-pissed-off. …I feel like I was raised like a son, in a way, by my father, you know? I didn’t feel genderized until I started to promote films and realized, ‘Oh, there’s a switch you’re supposed to throw and be sexy.‘”

[ Regarding her steamy scenes and Oscar nomination for Unfaithful (seen above), in 2002 >>> ]

…Mason asked, “What did you think when you finally saw the film?”
“You know, when my Dad saw it — it wasn’t long before he died — he said, ‘You rang the bell.'”
It earned Lane an Oscar nomination.

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In her recent film, “Paris Can Wait,” Lane has gone back to the Coppola family. Francis’ wife, Eleanor Coppola, is the director: “When that bell rings, ‘Where do you want me?'” Lane said. “I mean. I’ve made four films for Francis, and Eleanor was there.”

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…Diane Lane has had many of those moments since she first landed on that cover of Time magazine [“Hollywood’s Whiz Kids”, circa 1978…when she was just 13 and had her first major role in A Little Romance, with Sir Laurence Olivier in a supporting role].
But she asks CBS’s Mason, “I don’t know, do you think I lived up to it?”
“The larger question is, ‘What did you expect from yourself?'”
“Well, the voice I hear is my father’s, and he would say, ‘Eh, you’re a lifer.’ Who wants to do anything all of your life? It just seemed so preposterously long and unfathomable. But now, I’m thinking it’s a pretty good gig!”