Which is a more foolhardy mission? Rehearsing Shakespeare’s greatest play, Hamlet, in only three days or making your directing debut by filming those rehearsals on a ramen-noodle budget?
Judge for yourself by checking out Three Days (of Hamlet), screening Friday evening, April 13, at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. As Alex Hyde-White, who directed the production as well as the film, and who stars as the Melancholy Dane, puts it: “My life has been half-classical, half-improvisation. This film is exactly that. It’s improvised, reality-style filmmaking meets the classic of classics.”
The first-time filmmaker is the son of the late British star Wilfrid Hyde-White, best known over here for playing Colonel Pickering in the movie version of My Fair Lady and for appearing in such popular TV fare as Laverne & Shirley and Peyton Place.
In the course of Three Days (of Hamlet), as the Danish prince grapples with the ghostly pull of his assassinated father, Hyde-White the younger ruminates on his celebrated father, who was 56 when Alex was born. “He was a fairly sedentary guy,” Hyde-White says of his dad. “He didn’t like the grind very much anymore. He enjoyed going up to Universal to do a ‘Columbo’ for the week. And then in the summers and Christmases, he would do these plays, and that’s where I grew up, backstage during school vacation.”
Whether or not acting talent is passed down genetically, Alex feels he gained his from his father. “I think that whatever ingredients talent are, a large portion of it is embracing the unexpected, or embracing the indefinable,” says Hyde-White. “My dad had an innate quality not to have to quantify everything. So I was blessed that his sort of existential nature — he was certainly not a philosopher — he just didn’t give a bugger about what he didn’t care about. He was an iconoclast.”
Hyde-White denies that he has been fixated on Hamlet since a young age. “I wasn’t literate enough,” he says matter-of-factly. “I got through with as little schooling as possible. I got into Georgetown University at age 16, but also got out when I was 17. I didn’t do high school drama, I wasn’t a classicist. I was experienced onstage, but I certainly wasn’t overexposed.”
Eventually, though, the role reached up and grabbed him. “As I got older, yes, I would always try to find a way to do ‘Hamlet,’ in a classroom or a workshop, but I never did a production,” he concedes. “I suppose I was Captain Ahab and ‘Hamlet’ was my whale. I was either going to get it or it was going to get me, y’know?”
He credits his father with making his entry into show business easier, without the pressure of having to measure up to him as an actor. “Luckily, although he was well-known in England, and very sort of recognizable, he wasn’t as exposed in America. So we were below the radar enough,” Hyde-White explains. “If you are the son or the daughter of an actor who has carved his own way, you better be good. I mean, can you imagine Robin Williams’ children going into show business?”
Without rising very high in the movies, Alex racked up a fair number of credits, appearing in such features as Pretty Women, Catch Me If You Can, Fantastic Four and the notorious Ishtar.
By osmosis, he picked up the techniques of filmmaking from the directors he worked for. “Spielberg, of course. The collaboration and trust that Steven shows on his set is above compare. But it’s also balanced by the greatest technical expertise that money can buy,” he says. “Garry Marshall on ‘Pretty Woman.’ Garry is a little more New York, a little brusque, a little more active. And then of course Warren (Beatty), when I was with him on ‘Ishtar.’ He is the ultimate.
“So I’m comparing myself subconsciously to singular talented American filmmakers, all with a unique style.”
Considering that his film cost what Hyde-White calls “1/100th the budget of any film out there,” he has gathered an impressive cast, including Richard Chamberlain as Polonius and Stephanie Powers as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.
As we learn in the film, Powers was once Hyde-White’s babysitter.
“My grandmother grew up in Queens with Stephanie’s mother, just after the Depression in the early ‘30s,” he explains. “In the ‘60s, we met up again in the desert — Palm Springs. She’d be shooting a ‘Girl from UNCLE’ and on the weekend, she’d be down babysitting. It was great.”
He concedes that as a youngster, he had plenty of impure thoughts about Powers. “Oh, God, yeah. I’ve been trying to get close to Stephanie for a long time.” Which makes his casting her as his mother either very Freudian or highly Oedipal. “Yeah, how can it not be?” he asks. “It’s there in the play.”
The Palm Beach fest is only the film’s second public screening, after the International Family Film Festival in Hollywood, where the movie won best documentary feature. Hyde-White is currently torn between finding a distributor and trying to book the film himself. Ultimately, though, he feels Three Days (of Hamlet) belongs on television.
“The ideal would be PBS or A&E or one of the cable networks. Wherever the audience is,” he says, then quickly adds, “If you were a distributor asking if the film was available for distribution, I’d say, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ ”
THREE DAYS (OF HAMLET), at Palm Beach International Film Festival. Screening Friday, April 13, at 7 p.m. Muvico Parisian 20 at CityPlace, West Palm Beach. Contact: www.pbifilmfest.org.