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Veteran actor James Karen has been a part of film, television and theater history since the 1920s, and his body of work is massive. He is one of those actors everyone kind of knows, even if they think they don’t, and he has worked alongside some of the biggest stars ever. Karen is living history and a delightful reminder that there once was such a thing as the golden age of cinema. Currently, he is in the spotlight for NOTFILM, a documentary about Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett’s bizarre collaborative stab at avant-garde cinema, a project with which Karen was intimately involved. Though he was originally slated to travel to Santa Fe for a Q&A session after the doc screens at Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-5050) on Thursday, May 26, sadly, Karen will be unable to attend. We interviewed him anyway, because he rules.
When and how did you get into acting?
Well, I'm very old. I served in World War II, so you can tell from that that I'm in my 90s. Other than that—and I mainly goofed around with all the other soldiers—I've never done anything else in my life. We would go to the movies when I was young and it never ocurred to us to check what time they started. You'd go in and sit down when you did, and that's where you'd start from. So you'd wait for it to end and start up again and when you reached the point in the film when you had come in, your father would say it was time to go. And I knew I wanted to be an actor, I knew I wanted to be onstage, and so I was. I never once thought of not being an actor. And so I was onstage. Then at some point, my wife and I drove out to Los Angeles thinking we'd have a brief lark and we started to work and we never made it back to New York.
What kinds of roles do you wind up taking on these days?
Old people. Surprise! Or maybe it's not a surprise. I've been at this a long time. Now, do I think I'll ever stop? Oh, if I die, I suppose. Or maybe if I am pelted to death after a particularly bad performance. I'm 92 now, and I think I will probably just keep going until I'm done.
What can you tell us about NOTFILM?
Well, it's a very mysterious film, the one that Buster made. And it's diffused. Now Buster, who was not an intellectual but who was one of the great directors, or maybe ... he was truly one of the great auteurs, I suppose is what I want to say—he wrote and directed and produced and starred in all of his films, and here he was working with a writer like Samuel Beckett who had never done a film before. Like I said, Buster was not what you'd call an intellectual, he was a filmmaker. So it's a wonderful film, the documentary is, too, and it's written by Beckett, right? And this was the only time, I think, that he had ever come to America, and it was to work with Buster. So Buster and I showed him around New York and looking back, I can say that it was a wonderful time in all of our lives.
Santa Fe Reporter