September 12th, 1991. It is lunchtime, and we are sitting in the grounds of the United Methodist Church in Hollywood, the venue chosen by Francis Ford Coppola for the final rehearsals of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the film he will begins directing in less than a month's time. Around the table are his stars: Cary Elwes, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman - the kind of assembly that you might suspect would lean the conversation towards the theatrical and the high-minded. You would be wrong.

"Snyerrrr Byuuuppp!" thunders Cary Elwes suddenly, pushing his hands away from his body in a from-the-chest basketball pass.

"Wnngggg Omollll!" counters Richard E. Grant, catching it and passing it on.

"Wyoooop Rahhh!" goes Gary Oldman.

What we are witnessing here is an acting is an acting exercise known as "sound-bouncing", which involves you passing unlikely noises across the room as if they have a physical manifestation. (Ahem.) These particular thesps, however, are not really engaging in a solemn spot of sound boucing. They are instead - as it it their right in their lunch break - being stupid. And it is Keanu Reeves' turn next.

"Tiny Byattt!" he offers, enthusiastically proffering his sonic issue towards Anthony Hopkins.

Sir-Anthony-to-be looks up quizzically, gamely producing a nonsense grunt in return. Then he sighs, muttering in a stage whisper the single word, "drugs."

There are, of course, no drugs in sight here today, just some very fine Italian cuisine, set up on a trestle table in the Californian sunshine - the word is that the food is always good when you work with Francis Ford Coppola. I sit at one end, interrogating Gary Oldman. Winona Ryder sits opposite me, picking absent-mindedly at her plate.

"We're talking about the canon," Gary tells her, smirking. "The work."

Ryder smiles and nods.

"Gary Oldman," she says, as if she were quoting a headline. "Intense Actor."

She listens for a while then wanders off to put on a 19th Century frock. Oldman babbles on, stopping short at the daft unanswerableness of the following question: What is the point of acting?

"Let's turn this over to the table," he bellows, running round to solicit answers of his co-stars.

"It's better than working for a living," grunts Anthony Hopkins. "Keeps you off the streets."

"To enliven people's lives!" smirks Cary Elwes.

"There is no more noble thing," pontificates Richard E. Grant in a hammy thespian accent. "I do it for the people - I'm going to take it to the people of Scunthorpe!"

"I don't know," considers Oldman when he finally sits down again. "What's the point of anything? We're all going to die in the end. Fuck the people of Scunthorpe."

He gets up again and steals one of Cary Elwes' cigarettes.

"This is the point of acting," he says, torching the snout. "You can cadge other people's cigarettes and you never have to give them back. . ."

For Gary Oldman, however, the point of acting is a very great deal more than simply smoking on the cheap. For the part of Count Dracula, as with all his roles, he has been taking breaks from rehearsals to work on specific skills, this time including fencing training with an expert swordsman and speech therapy with the dialouge coach who's helping him find a suitable accent for Dracula ("It's not actually Transylvanian - more Hungarian with a mix of Romanian"). He believes in doing these things properly: when playing Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK he had a Russian dialouge coach because of the time Oswald had spent in the USSR.

"There's still a part of me that thinks it's all just a load of old bollocks," he mutters. "I should have done National Service. They'd have made a man of me, instead of all this arty-farty poncing around in frocks and greasepaint."

Later, Oldman takes me into the rehearsal room to show me his newly delievered coffin. In the break between rehearsals and filming it's going to be delievered to his rented house in the Hollywood Hills so he can get to know it.

"When it arrived, the first assistant director said, 'I wonder what it's like to fuck in a coffin?'" he chuckles. "Maybe I'll find out and tell him."

Suddenly, Oldman grabs my tape recorder, climbs inside and closes the lid above him. Later, when I play back the tape, I can hear his ghostly voice echoing.

"What. . .is. . .it. . .like? To. . .be. . .undead?"

(Copyright: Empire Magazine, date unknown)

WRITTEN BY ANNE RICE

This, our fourth number is written specifically to be distributed at the MEMNOCH BALL on October 28th, and afterwards by private mailing.

No rights reserved; reprint, copy, distribute, as you please. And quote anywhere anytime you want, only quote me right, please...and I'll love you for it.

October 24, 1995. 10 p.m. 1239 First Street New Orleans a warm night.

Dearly Beloved Readers,

Within the last few days I have listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony over and over again, at least eight complete times, including three different versions.

As I write, I'm listening to Highlights (the arias?) from Mozart's DON GIOVANNI. On Sunday while I was signing our first personally designed bookplates by the hundreds (I'll explain more about that in the next issue. We made these bookplates for a store that we missed on our tour. We had to cancel our signing due to illness. But we love making bookplates and I will write more about it, just in case anyone is interested.) I listened to three different versions of DON GIOVANNI and am now listening to it for perhaps the fifth time.

What I'm grasping deeply perhaps for the first time in my entire life is what the word "romantic" means. I know technically that Mozart wrote DON GIOVANNI before his death in 1791 and that it is what we would call BAROQUE music. Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony in 1822 and nobody would argue by that time that the world was fully into the ROMANTIC AGE -- the age of Keats, Shelley, Byron...a dark, tangled, emotional, luridly beautiful contrast to Mozart's time which we still call THE AGE OF REASON.

I can hear in DON GIOVANNI the gathering storm of the Romantic Movement. I can hear it moving in on the Age of Reason! And this music is feeding me like the Elixir of Life. It is feeding me like blood might feed Lestat. I go back and forth between Beethoven's last symphony, and Mozart's most risky opera (perhaps), and I am drunk on this music.

OKAY, having UNDERSTOOD THE ENLIGHTENMENT VERSUS THE ROMANTIC ERA from childhood, having understood it a little more with each passing year, I'm now ready to dive into the most committed romantic novel of my life, a sixth novel in the Vampire Chronicles, and one which is not written from Lestat's point of view at all, but from a completely different point of view.

This novel, which has a tentative title in my mind "Symphonie for Mary Anne" (this title could change and Mary Anne's name could change. This sometimes happens with a character. The character, as she develops, forces the name change on the author), will be my most uninhibited abandonment to my own romantic vision and my own romantic love of language and music.

Nightly I'm reading the poetry [of] Keats and Milton, and daily and nightly I live on this music as described. (Technically Milton isn't a romantic poet, I suppose, but I find him as romantic as Keats.)

This new obsession with the Romantic was crystallized for me by seeing GARY OLDMAN in BERNARD ROSE'S IMMORTAL BELOVED. I saw this film on Laser when I came home during a break on the tour.

The idea for the sixth novel in the vampire chronicle had already come to me while I was on tour this summer. We went all over the country, quite literally from Seattle to Nashville, from San Diego to New York, and we met thousands of readers of the Chronicles and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches and other novels, and some time during this wondrous adventure, the novel took form rather like a lightning bolt, which then became a beacon.

My handwritten diary entries tell me when and how it developed. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to remember.

The tour was our longest (though we did take long breaks in New Orleans for rest), and one of our most enjoyable ever, and certainly one of the happiest times of my life, thanks to the people who came out to see us. The bookstores we visited were filled with generous spirited people; readers showed up in delightful and truly gorgeous costumes; we tried desperately and happily to sign as much as we could of our books for everyone, and the stores gave us enormous support and help.

However I was so exhausted at the end of the day that often I scribbled only notes in my diary, and though the faces of my readers remain distinct as do moments of incredible warmth, love, and verbal exchange -- the dates began to merge in my mind. Anyway, thanks to the late night scribbling in hotels throughout the country I can now see the growth of the novel.

What I see is that after the lightning bolt struck the great flash of light only grew brighter and brighter. This is the way it is with me and books. Some books come, and sometimes, without ever being written, they go. Other books come, and they stay. They simply stay.

Weeks pass, months pass, I view movies. I read history. I stare at the wall. I talk to my family and friends. But this "new novel" doesn't shift or go away and the same images occur and reoccur and give birth to new and more detailed images. And fairly soon, I know the mental concept of the novel is deeply rooted, and will never die.

Well, this is what happened with this sixth vampire novel, which for short, I'll call SYMPHONIE.

But it wasn't until I saw Gary Oldman in IMMORTAL BELOVED that I really understood what I wanted to do, and it wasn't until then that I was filled with the courage to do it.

Let me say that this movie is very simply magnificent. As a child, I was obsessed with Beethoven, and was not eager to see a film about him. (I was scared.) But this film is a masterpiece. And this is BEETHOVEN. There is no question in my mind. Gary Oldman's performance wasn't merely skilled, powerful, terrific and all of that, it was genius. It ranks with any other performance I've seen in film in my life. This film and this actor's portrayal of the immortal composer is without question an exquisite cultural event.

Gary Oldman was already one of my obsessions, understand. I have been entranced with Gary Oldman ever since I first really "saw" him. I'd viewed JFK and Coppola's DRACULA without really "seeing" Gary Oldman. This is more attributable I think to his genius than my obtuseness. (I am however obtuse. I have to see films over and over to see everything and everybody in them.)

Whatever, I suddenly "saw" this man Gary Oldman when re-viewing JFK. I realized that Oswald was Gary Oldman! -- the same guy I had so recently admired in other films, notably ROMEO IS BLEEDING, THE PROFESSIONAL, and TRUE ROMANCE (he plays the pimp in the beginning). I was stunned.

How could one actor do all this? How could he go from the fairly ordinary looking Oswald of JFK tragedy to the flamboyant and eccentric and evil cop of THE PROFESSIONAL? What in the world was going on? (And now Beethoven! Beethoven whose name is connected with our most sacrosanct concepts of art. Beethoven, the household word. Beethoven, the composer who is known even to those who know no other composer's name, just as Rembrandt is known to all the world as the painter.)

All right, let me backtrack before IMMORTAL BELOVED. I "saw" Gary Oldman when I realized he was all these faces...

Then of course I remembered that readers had been asking me for years about "Gary Oldman" -- did I think he would ever be in one of "my" movies, etc.

Suddenly it all fell into place. This man is some kind of genius. We aren't talking movie star, we aren't talking a fine actor enamelled with sensational good looks. We aren't talking "vibrant young flame" or "hunk" or "fascinating promising actor" or any of that. We are talking pure genius. We are talking prime genius if I dare combine those words. We are talking about greatness.

(For a study of Gary Oldman start with the tape of CRIMINAL LAW and then go to IMMORTAL BELOVED and please don't skip MURDER IN THE FIRST, or THE SCARLET LETTER which is out now. I haven't seen THE SCARLET LETTER. BUT I WILL AS SOON AS I POSSIBLY CAN, IF FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN TO SEE OLDMAN.)

To return to the question of a sixth vampire novel, IMMORTAL BELOVED was for me the final sealing proof of Oldman's genius, because Oldman had the wrath, the strength, the temper, the passion and the pain, and the irresistible beauty of Beethoven. No question. No question.

I emerged from the watching of IMMORTAL BELOVED in something of a trance. Not only had I seen Gary Oldman give an extraordinary performance, I had also seen in this film the firmest and finest statement of the "Romantic Point of View" that I have ever seen in film.

The film was passionate, madly passionate -- very much the way that Kenneth Branagh's FRANKENSTEIN was, and very much the way INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE was. That these films were all released in 1994 makes me shiver.

(While I'm writing Mozart is threatening my sanity with the beauty of this opera! DON GIOVANNI is pouring out right next to me.)

But IMMORTAL BELOVED not only embodied a full blown romantic vision of life, it stated the case for romanticism, for the entire romantic approach to art -- when Beethoven himself talked about what his music meant -- that it was [the] sound of the feeling of a man suffering. The end of the movie demonstrates this...the personal suffering that went into the boy Beethoven which later culminated in the miracle of the NINTH SYMPHONY. The lines in the movie are too beautiful to abbreviate here. See the film. Oldman's voice is unforgettable. His face is unforgettable. His control and his beauty are unforgettable.

Gary Oldman is a man who creates his beauty. He creates it around himself in a film. He can modulate it, make it go pale, bury it, or let it explode as it did in IMMORTAL BELOVED. In a way he is blessed by not being as conventionally juicy and goodlooking as some actors, say, Paul Newman for instance. Gary Oldman has in himself an instrument of greater flexibility perhaps because his beauty is created around him by himself.

But let me repeat: the entire film itself was romantic. It was extreme, the music full of turbulent emotion, the performances full of angst and love, the camera work dramatic, the sets and costumes lush and sensuous, the plot tragic without the slightest apology.