Arkady Inin: “I would return the Brezhnev stagnation – the best time for our country”

– Arkady Yakovlevich, will you celebrate your anniversary with your relatives and friends, but will there be official events?

– On May 23, there will be a concert at the Cinema House at my request.

– You are talking about a joyful event, but as if with a sadness in your voice …

– Such my evenings were always opened by Joseph Kobzon. Arkady Arkanov, Tolya Trushkin, Ilya Oleinikov, Mikhail Zadornov, Yan Arlazorov came … Today they are not with us.

– There is a well-known story about Mikhail Zoshchenko, who came to the doctor complaining of melancholy and apathy, and the doctor advised him to read his own stories. Are you a merry fellow or a melancholic in life?

– There is such a formula that satirical writers, having invested their soul sparkling with joy in their works, go gloomy in life, like hypochondriacs. This comparison, like any other, is lame. There are sad writers, there are those who sprinkle jokes left and right. But that’s the case in any profession. And taxi drivers are very different! As for me, I’m definitely not gloomy and not as merry as Borechka Grachevsky, our mutual friend and comrade, was: you meet him in the elevator, he takes you by the button and says: “So, such a joke …” Without preamble , without anything…

– In the era of gadgets, no one thinks about the fact that the root of the word “writer” contains the meaning of “write by hand.” And how did you work at the dawn of your literary activity?

— I am a person who has passed the development of gadgets from scratch. At first I wrote by hand, it seemed to me, well, what else do you need ?! But still, they told me: you need to keep up with life. I signed up for a queue to buy a typewriter in a store on Pushkin Street – I stood for two years, got a German Optima car, which everyone was chasing. He began to work on it, moreover, he also bought a portable Kolibri, GDR one. She was in a suitcase – just in those days I traveled a lot on business trips and to concerts. That’s how I worked until these computers of yours appeared.

My advanced screenwriter colleague Sasha Chervinsky persuaded me: the PC is so convenient, so you need to change the paragraph – no problem. I objected to him that I have a typist, and if necessary, I mark a paragraph with a pencil. It was the same with mobile phones. He said: why? If I am at home, they will call me, and if I am not, let them wait until I come home. Now I even go to the toilet with my mobile phone.

— Why was it difficult for you to make friends with new technology?

– Such Soviet thinking. I remember that I bought a TV with a remote control for my late mother, and my mother was indignant: am I disabled, I can’t come up, press and turn on the TV?

– You called yourself a “scoop” in one of the interviews, not at all considering this word offensive. If you could bring back any segment of the Soviet era, which one would you choose?

— Brezhnev’s stagnation. This, in my opinion, was the best time in our country. Why do I think so? For example, there were no problems with leaving the child for the whole day in the yard. No one was afraid – from morning to night the children ran. In terms of personal security, the person felt confident. No one says that there were no bandits – but there was no organized crime! And, most importantly, there was no social inequality – there were rich, there were poor, but the people did not see such a wild stratification as now, obviously unfair.

People saw a luxurious house and knew that it was built by a scientist who came up with a cure for pneumonia. And today we know that this was just built by a swindler who has a network of beer stalls. Or what owns the house, excuse me, an idiot – or not, a smart blogger who turns billions …

Yes, a lot was bad. The Iron Curtain, the inability to freely travel abroad, the unified leadership role of the CPSU, the power of the Chekists, who tracked so many. But people were sincere, sympathetic. Yes, they did not live well, but normally, calmly.

– Did the nationwide popularity of films based on your scripts and TV programs created by you (“Around Laughter”, “With All My Heart”) ensured your personal popularity? Do they recognize you on the street, in shops?

They didn’t know then and they don’t know now. I’m a screenwriter, not a star, because they recognize artists. But when the evening passed and they saw me on stage, they came up, took an autograph. Here is Vitya Merezhko, my friend, the kingdom of heaven to him, led the “Kinopanorama”. So everyone knew him! Fame gives, of course, TV. But we writers are not offended. We are known in accounting.

– In the Soviet era, cultural figures interacted with the first persons of the state – for example, the poet Andrei Voznesensky argued with Khrushchev, and Yuri Stoyanov parodied Brezhnev at the leader himself. And with which of the rulers of the USSR-Russia did you communicate personally?

– With Yeltsin, when the House of Cinema was the center of the democratic movement, I met a couple of times and then recalled our handshake in the days when he drank, and the press secretary said that he was “working with documents” and that “his hand is strong.” She was really strong, I am ready to confirm this.

And with whom I actually had a “kinship”, it was with Mikhail Sergeyevich. And why? Because after the release of the film “Good weather on Deribasovskaya …”, where, as you remember, Leonid Kuravlev played the president of the USSR, Gorbachev, who really liked the film, said: “Yesterday our film was shown.”

– You did not accept the geopolitical outcome of perestroika – but how do you assess the attempts of the putschists to prevent the collapse of the country?

– In the days of the State Emergency Committee, I was not at the barricades – I was in Yugoslavia at a film festival. But I immediately realized that this was an empty number when I called Moscow from a hotel in Banja Luka. Picked up the phone and called right away! Real revolutionaries, you understand, the first thing they should do is take the post and telegraph.

– In the film “Good weather on Deribasovskaya …” we see Leonid Gaidai for the last time, by the way, there you also played a cameo role. Are your appearances in the frame and the small roles of Gaidai “twin brothers” or different things?

– Gaidai was a wonderful actor, he found a role in his film or with other directors – not so much, but he played. I got into films by accident. We went to America, but the money was only for the flight, accommodation and a small amount for an American actress (Kelly McGrill, who embodied the image of the partner of the CIA superspy Sokolov). And that’s it! And we also had a lot of characters. As a result, a free illuminator played some pot-bellied American, a make-up artist – someone else. Including me and Gaidai, who was carried out by security guards from the casino with the handle of the “one-armed bandit” torn off.

Or here – in Sevastopol (during the creation of the film “The Sailors Have No Questions”. — I.V.) someone had to get on the boat! And I foolishly climbed, and then cursed everything in the world, because what was calm for sailors seemed to me to be rolling, after which I was barely alive.

And in the 1989 comedy “They didn’t get along” there was a role where you had to come to a psychologist (the role of Irina Miroshnichenko) and say a very short text: “Yes, I was an alcoholic, my wife said: anything, but not alcoholism. Medicine got rid of this addiction, but there was a small side effect: impotence. Now my wife says I’d rather be an alcoholic.” None of the male actors wanted to play it. So I had to!

– In the United States, since the time of McCarthyism, they have filmed a mountain of “cranberries”, where the Soviet man was necessarily depicted as a kind of monster with a revolver raping an American woman. And then came the “discharge”. How was a Russian film crew met across the ocean in 1992?

– Attitude was great! Not because “Russian, we are glad to see you”, but because they don’t care who is in front of them. They have a good attitude towards Jews, and Russians, and Belarusians, and Georgians. America is a giant melting pot. And as for the specific attitude towards us during the filming period, wonderful guys, drivers, agents cooperated with us on the set.

– The fact that Donald Trump could be in the credits of Deribasovskaya is not a bike?

– No. We received a work permit at the Trump Taj Mahal casino. Personally, I have not seen Trump. But he, through an assistant, conveyed the wish to appear in the episode.

– Like in the same year in the second part of the Chris Calumbus comedy “Home Alone: ​​Lost in New York”?

– Only Gaidai Trump refused. He said: “People’s artist Dzhigarkhanyan, people’s artist Myagkov are filming. And I don’t know the artist Trump.” And we could have starred Mila Jovovich. But Gaidai joked that two Jovovichs on one site is too much. (A play on words, Gaidai’s patronymic is Iovich. — I.V.)

– Then it would never have occurred to anyone that a billionaire would become president?

– Certainly. But Trump still got into the credits as the owner of the casino. We express our gratitude to him there for his help in organizing the filming.