He had no proof he’d been much of an actor in New York, so he started doing theatre in the hopes of building up his resume enough to get noticed. Hall would later bitterly recall that he got to LA and he had to start over. Around 1972 he started to hear from his peers that if you went to LA as a New York actor they’d roll out the red carpet for you, that they were looking for the next Brando.
He wasn’t exactly succeeding, even if he was working regularly. He started acting in theatre and then later in films, including the now forgotten “Cowards” (later re-edited into the sex film “Love-in-’72”), in which he plays a priest who’s been radicalized by the cause of the draft in Vietnam. Hall eventually moved to New York, away from factories and from the depression ravaged streets of Ohio. If Hall’s film career had started in the same decade he was born, he’d have become a Bogart-style noir hero.
Anyone who’s heard Hall’s voice won’t ever forget it. Hall sounded authoritative while his peers sounded like teenagers. He was in every play as the father, the judge, the man at the end of his life. This made him the favorite of his high school teachers who moonlighted as drama teachers. Philip's voice changed when he was about 12, and suddenly he sounded like an adult. He did, for a few years, but Philip had other plans. His father eventually got a job at the famous Willys Overland plant and, knowing too well what hardship feels like, thought young Philip would follow him into the factory. Though the word hadn’t entered the American lexicon yet, the Halls survived for the next ten years on welfare. Then the stock market crashed and he lost the shop. His father had only a few years back been a prosperous and enterprising mechanic, who’d gotten into vulcanizing tires. Hall was born in 1931 in Toledo to a family suffering through the worst of the depression. A few months later he’d be in a dorm room surrounded by film students, introducing himself to American audiences by screaming, “I am the American Dream. His career started, for a second time, that day. He called his friend the theatre director Robert Harders with a plan. He started rehearsing it in his living room. He didn’t see how anyone could do it and said no. Stone in the early '80s, a things so heavy you could have clubbed somebody with it. No one wanted to think about Nixon.” Hall was given the script for a play called Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M.
THE HOSTAGE THE WALTONS MOVIE
Nixon had been portrayed publicly for the first time by Rip Torn in an exhaustive TV movie called "Blind Ambition," but Hall put it succinctly when he was asked about the part for the occasion of the film's on the Criterion Collection: “No one wanted to talk about Nixon. The man is Philip Baker Hall, and he’s portraying Richard Nixon in the film " Secret Honor" like no one else had played him before or has since. The man changes into a smoking jacket, pours himself a drink, gets a gun out of an ornate box and places it on his desk, then he starts recording himself speaking. It’s an old man’s study it couldn’t be anything else. A man in a suit enters a handsomely appointed but subliminally off-putting room.
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