Back on July 20, I posted on an independent film called Light Fantastic (1964), starring Dolores McDougal as a young single woman in New York who is seduced by a dance instructor. The movie had a jazz score composed by three well-known musicians. Dolores's performance in the film is a ray of natural light when compared to the rather wooden male cast. A day after I posted, I heard from a reader who knew Dolores and her husband, Bill Weeden. I asked the reader if he could make an e-introduction and he did. [Photo above of Dolores McDougal by Bill Weeden, in the same general location as she appeared in Light Fantastic (below)]
Dolores and I had a series of lovely email exchanges and she agreed to be interviewed. After the interview, Bill agreed to photograph Dolores for this post in the vicinity of her film scenes on Manhattan's Upper West Side. As is often the case at JazzWax, I'll post about someone or something I'm passionate about, only to hear from the artist or someone who knows the artist and an interview and friendship soon follows. I'm happy to report that Dolores and Bill are a marvelous, upbeat and generous couple.
In case you missed the film, here it is...
Here's my interview with Dolores McDougal:
JazzWax: Where did you grow up, Dolores?
Dolores McDougal: In San Diego. I wanted to be a stage actor growing up.
JW: Were your parents actors?
DM: No, but my mother always said that if it hadn't been for me, she would have been an actress.
JW: Did you act in school?
DM: I did, from age 7 on. At first, I just made up plays in our backyard and cast neighborhood kids. At San Francisco State, theater and drama were my majors. Then I went to Catholic University of America for my masters in drama and toured for two years performing in Shakespeare and Greek plays. Then I came to New York in 1959. [Photo still above from the film, Light Fantastic]
JW: Did you move to New York to audition for a specific production?
DM: No, nothing specific. At the time, I knew people in New York. Two of the people I toured with were my roommates. We had a place in Manhattan at 106th Street and Riverside Drive. I also had a boyfriend then. [Image from the film shooting south on Broadway from 80th Street in the summer of 1963, with the Belleclaire and Ansonia in the distance on the right]
JW: Where did you two meet?
DM: In San Francisco, when I was a member of the Actor's Workshop run by Jules Irving. Later my boyfriend and I were both on the Catholic University of America production tour. We came to New York but broke up before we arrived.
JW: Did you start to look for auditions?
DM: I was cast in a 1960 production by Manhattan's Equity Library Theatre of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. I had already performed the play in summer stock. That was my first job here in New York. Then I auditioned for a movie called The Lonely Tree. It was entered in the Greenwich Village Film Festival and won a prize. But it didn't get mass distribution. It was about a young dying girl who is befriended by a drifter in the farmlands someplace. She falls in love with him, he’s very friendly and he sort of awakens the life in her. But he isn’t in love with her. Eventually he goes away, and I can't remember if she dies. I suppose she does, since the film wouldn’t have won an award if she survived (laughs). The film's producer became my first husband.
JW: When did you audition for Light Fantastic?
DM: On St. Patrick's Day, in 1961, I think. I was cast and then became pregnant. We didn't shoot the film for about a year. I had my son, and when he was about five months old, we shot the film.
JW: What do you think they saw in you during the audition?
DM: A friend of mine, Robert Milli, who has since passed away, recommended me to director Bob McCarty for the part. Not that this was the reason for me getting cast. I honestly have no idea. I think maybe I was similar to the Beverly character. I was very self-conscious and naive and similar to the character. But I don't know for sure.
JW: What did you think of the script?
DM: I was so happy to be cast. It could have been gibberish and I would've been happy. I was over the moon to be working.
JW: Did Bob McCarty have to provide direction?
DM: He left the portrayal of Beverly to me, really. He must have filled me in somewhat when I was auditioning: Naïve, codependent young woman, etc.
JW: In the movie, were you being yourself or were you channeling something from your past that helped you realize the character?
DM: I think my approach was just intuitive. That’s how I worked. After I had arrived in New York, I took acting lessons at the HB Studio with Uta Hagen. I also went out on tour in The Hostage, by Brendan Behan. It was the second national tour of the play. My husband, Bill Weeden, says I’m the least actor-y actor he knows and that you can’t see me working. I just became the character, probably because there’s a lot of the real me in there.
JW: Who was most difficult to work with on that film?
DM: Maybe Jean Shepherd (above), the New York radio personality. He was very friendly and extremely accommodating but extremely loquacious. That's not my style, for somebody to talk to me in monologues and monologues and monologues. That's the kind of personality he had, but he was a very nice, sweet man.
JW: Monologues while acting or when off-camera?
DM: Off-camera. He wasn't man-splaining, but you couldn't get a word in edgewise with him.
JW: Was he a good dancer?
DM: I wasn't even thinking about that at the time. My character just wanted to get away from him. I think he was in the film because he was a name, a draw.
JW: How was New York back then?
DM: The Upper West Side of Manhattan, where much of the movie was filmed, has changed, of course. The area seemed very stark and dark back in the early 1960s. There were no trees on the blocks. Now there are trees on every block. The crime wave had started. People were afraid to come up above 96th Street. It was hard to get people to come and visit us where we lived.
JW: Were extras used or were those actors in the street scenes?
DM: I remember there were people who gathered to watch us when we shot on Fifth Avenue outside the Guggenheim Museum. For the scenes of me walking around New York, I believe they were shot with a handheld camera from across the street. That's for the distance pan of me on 42nd Street and when I was going into the dance studio between 77th and 78th Streets on Broadway. I don't know what the policy was then with extras or whether you had to get clearance. I know it was a lot more liberal back then in terms of including ordinary people on the street in the background.
JW: Did you have to learn to dance for the film?
DM: No. I’ve always loved to dance. But I'm an intuitive dancer and can't do steps. It's really hard for me to do choreography, but on my own, I can do quite well.
JW: Who played the guy outside the bookstore who gives you a creepy smile? Was he an extra or a real person who stopped on the street to leer?
DM: No, he was an actor.
JW: Did the film get much attention at the time?
DM: Oh sure. I went to see the premiere at a movie theater on the East Side in January 1964. For some strange reason, it seemed like the entire Navy fleet had been invited.
JW: How were the reviews?
DM: They were OK. There weren't many. I got a review from Akron, Ohio, that was very positive about my performance. They said I was a cross between Carol Burnett and Giulietta Masina.
JW: Hey, that's a pretty good cross.
DM: It is. [Photo above of Dolores McDougal today by Bill Weeden, taken in a location a block north of the one in her film, Light Fantastic (1964) below]
JW: What did you do after the film?
DM: Getting parts after Light Fantastic was difficult. It was hard to make the rounds to find an agent. You had to see 10 in one day. I finally landed one, but he didn’t really do much for me. Also complicating things was my divorce in 1965. Soon after our split, I decided it was too difficult to be a single parent, even though my husband at the time lived close by. He was up the street. We co-parented, but it was still difficult for me to be an actor and raise a child.
JW: What did you do?
DM: I eventually left acting and went into social work and eventually became a therapist.
JW: Did you miss acting?
DM: There had been several times in my early career when I didn’t want to act. One of them was before I was in Light Fantastic. I had two loves, acting and psychology. I always seemed to be more interested in why actors became actors than acting itself. So I went into social work, and I did it for a long time. Then I met my second husband, Bill, who is an actor, performer and entertainer.
JW: When did you meet and marry?
DM: We met 31 years ago and married four years later, in 1995. My son, Eric Schaeffer, had made a short film called What About Love to present to a film school. He cast Bill, whom he knew. And me. That's how we met.
JW: When was the last time you saw Light Fantastic and what did you think?
DM: The other day, on YouTube. All I could think was “God, Beverly, get a life. Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.” Honestly, I don't like to look at myself when I'm acting. When I do, I want to do the whole thing over.
[Editor's note: The photo above is of Dolores McDougal and Bill Weeden, with comedian Amy Stiller in the middle. Bill is a stage and film actor, comedy writer and songwriter. Amy is the daughter of the late great comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara and sister of actor-comedian Ben Stiller. She was strolling by when she spotted her long-time friends. Bill used to write comedy for Stiller & Meara, and Amy and Ben both babysat Bill's daughter some 45 years ago. That's the Upper West Side for ya!]
JW: What would you do differently?
DM: I think I would have had a different sense of rhythm in the pacing of my dialogue, and my responses might have been more offbeat.
