Let other actors in their 80s complain about a paucity of scripts offered, the lack of good roles for those past a certain age, or Hollywood's general fixation on youth.
Hal Holbrook is far too busy working to have time for kvetching.
"I have a movie opening --- 'That Evening Sun.' We opened in New York, and I'm headed from here to the Denver Film Festival," Holbrook said last week from Ames, Iowa, where he was preparing to perform his one-man "Mark Twain Tonight!" which comes to Escondido on Saturday.
"I just finished a film a little over a month over, called 'Flying Lessons,' with Maggie Grace. She's really a wonderful young actress. I'm going to start another in about three weeks now. It's a very low-budget thing for a friend of mine, who directed a film called 'The Florentine' about 10 years ago."
This is all on top of the two episodes of "E.R." he was in last year, a role in the film "Killshot," as well as a pilot for ABC Television titled "Captain Cook's Extraordinary Atlas" ---- all of which have come since his Oscar-nominated role in "Into the Wild" in 2007.
"I'm probably busier than I've ever been in my life, I suppose," Holbrook said.
Of "That Evening Sun," now in limited release around the country, Holbrook said, "I play the leading role. It's an independent film ---- it's about the South, characters based in Tennessee. It was shot last year in August, in east Tennessee in the foothills of the Smokies.
"It's a story basically about a Tennesssee farmer who's been put in a nursing home by his son, and the first thing that happens in the picture is you see him packing up and walking out of the nursing home to go back to his farm. He finds his son has leased it out to what you could describe as a redneck family. He knows the father and dislikes him intensely and doesn't approve of him at all. My character refuses to leave and takes up residence in the tenant cabin.
"He starts a confrontation between these two men ---- two different kinds of Southern people: the middle-class Southerner who's educated, and what you can call a white trash kind of person.
"The script is written and directed by a man who comes from the South, and he wanted to present an honest picture of the South instead of the classic thing that everybody down there is stupid and doesn't know how to talk."
Holbrook said that while he's always stayed busy, the attention he got for his role in "Into the Wild" ---- and the nomination for Best Supporting Actor Oscar ---- brought renewed interest, as well as the role in "That Evening Sun."
"Part of the reason they offered me the script was having seen me climb the mountain in 'Into the Wild,' which settled their concerns about my being able to do the part."
His longest-running role, of course, is that of Twain ---- which he first performed in 1954. Yet even after more than half a century of performing the great author ---- re-creating Twain's own live performances late in life ---- and having read everything published by Twain (and quite a bit that hasn't been published, in libraries and archives), Holbrook said he still finds new material to work into the show.
"There's stuff that lies there that you see and you pass over because it doesn't really speak to any subject I'm interested in bringing into the show at a given time. Suddenly, you want some material on a certain subject, and there's something you've passed over for the past 40 years and suddenly it's very, very topical.
"There's a slug of material we're inserting for the show at Iowa State, and we'll do a second time in Escondido. It has to do with the terrible greed and arrogance that can bring a republic down. It's a big warning, and it will shock the hell out of you because you can't believe it was written a hundred years ago. When you have a country like ours that started out with such great principles and is now excusing itself for damn near everything and refusing to take responsibilty for abhorrent behavior, despicable behavior, that's a very bad piece of news for us.
"Mark Twain puts his finger right smack on top of it. He saw the danger that can happen to a great country that gets led by the nose by greed. It can happen to us all."
Hal Holbrook in "Mark Twain Tonight!"
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: California Center for the Arts, Escondido,
Tickets: $31-$65
Info: 800-988-4253 or artcenter.org
