Cinemad

Nina Menkes retro coming to NY and LA

2012-02-16T09:30:00.000-08:00

For the first time in the US, a retrospective of Nina Menkes' films, and in both NY and LA. Including her first short A SOFT WARRIOR, which nooooobody has seen. Plus, thanks to the gracious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, there are brand new film prints of her first three movies.

and revisit Cinemad podcast #1, with Menkes - now on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad.

Menkes' alma mater UCLA starts the retro this weekend:

UCLA at The Billy Wilder Theater:
Feb 18: DISSOLUTION (2010)
Feb 19: QUEEN OF DIAMONDS (1991) and THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA (1983, 40 min, new print)
Feb 24: MAGDELENA VIRAGA (1986, new print) and A SOFT WARRIOR (1981, 11 min, new print)
March 2: THE BLOODY CHILD (1996)
March 7: PHANTOM LOVE (2007)

the complete retro then goes to Anthology Film Archives in NYC
who will be running DISSOLUTION for a full week, NY theatrical premiere
and a special screening of the very rare documentary Menkes co-directed, MASSAKER

Anthology Film Archives, NYC:
DISSOLUTION (2010)
March 9 at 7:00 PM
March 10 at 4:30 PM
March 11 at 3:00 PM
March 12 at 7:00 PM
March 13 at 7:00 PM
March 14 at 9:00 PM
March 15 at 9:00 PM

THE BLOODY CHILD (1996)
March 9 at 9:00 PM
March 11 at 7:00 PM
March 15 at 7:00 PM

THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA (1983, 40 min, new print)
preceded by A SOFT WARRIOR (1981, 11 min, new print)
March 10 at 3:00 PM
March 11 at 9:00 PM

MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986, new print)
March 10 at 6:30 PM
March 12 at 9:00 PM

QUEEN OF DIAMONDS (1991)
March 10 at 8:30 PM
March 13 at 9:00 PM

PHANTOM LOVE (2007)
March 11 at 5:00 PM
March 16 at 7:00 PM

MASSAKER (2005)
March 14 at 7:00 PM
March 16 at 9:00 PM

podcast #6: The Zellner Brothers

2011-12-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad

Cinemad: The Zellner Brothers by Cinemad

From their homes in Austin, TX, David and Nathan Zellnerhave been making weird and funny films since the 1990s. Their first twofeatures PLASTIC UTOPIA and FRONTIER were extremely under the radar, even forfilm festivals. Then they went on a long run of making entertaining shortsstarting around 2002, finding a cult comedy fan base. After playing Sundanceevery year since with shorts and their feature GOLIATH, they will be premièringtheir new feature KID-THING there next January. We talk about the glory ofmaking a film on VHS in-camera, being featured extras in SALO, working withchickens, cats and sharks, and how they got back to their roots with SASQUATCHBIRTH JOURNAL 2.

bookends:

“Rawhide” by The Dead Kennedys

“Aguirre I” by Popul Vuh

photo: Nathan and David at the Cinemad podcast test site.

http://www.zellnerbros.com/

All podcasts are available for download with that down arrow button on the right hand side. Headphones are best – get personal with it. Also now available on the iTunes.

podcast #5: Ken Jacobs

2011-12-11T12:11:00.001-08:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad
Cinemad: Ken Jacobs by Cinemad

What to say about Ken Jacobs? An avant-garde film legendfrom his early epic film STARSPANGLED TO DEATH to his many Nervous Magic Lantern live performances. Even at just 40minutes, his new film SEEKING THE MONKEY KING is another epic, combining his strongpolitical statements with his incredible use of abstract 3D imagery, showinghow a new technology (and tired fad) can be used to create great art in theright hands. Ken’s son, filmmaker Aza Jacobs, sits in and interviews him,covering his past and present work now spanning 50-plus years, his time withHans Hofmann, Stan Brakhage and Nicolas Ray, and how Ken met Flo.

bookends:
“Without Ryhthm” by Cab Calloway (composed by YellenDougherty)
“Hypnotist in Hawaii” by The Raymond Scott Quartet

photo: Ken and Flo Jacobs, from Aza Jacob's film MOMMA'S MAN.

http://www.starspangledtodeath.com/

http://mubi.com/films/seeking-the-monkey-king

All podcasts are available fordownload with that down arrow button on the right hand side. Headphones arebest – get personal with it.

past podcasts:
podcast #1: Menkes
podcast #2: Aza Jacobs
podcast #3: Bobcat
podcast #4: James Fotopoulos

podcast #4: James Fotopoulos

2011-10-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad
Cinemad: James Fotopoulos by Cinemad

Filmmaker James Fotopoulos helped me coin the term 'avant gutter' - too dirty for the art world, too existential for the genre film world. That was an immediate reaction - James' films have actually played at tons of film festivals and in museums and galleries over the past decade, having made more than 100 works of all lengths. He might even help connect the worlds without compromising style or tone.

bookends: samples from Rahdunes soundtrack for Fotopoulos' ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2011).
photo of James Fotopoulos by Mike Plante, NY, 2000.

WWW.JAMESFOTOPOULOS.COM

2011-09-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Faith in Cinema

2011-08-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

Aza Jacobs, Ken Jacobs and Mark Toscano

Went to Cinefamily last night - upstairs the programmers were watching the somehow-made-for-TV-special promoting The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, in preparation for the upcoming Dolly Parton 9-to-5 all-night moviethon. The image of families cheering at the whorehouse set is trippy.

But the main show was a screening of Ken Jacobs films, co-presented by Film Forum and curated by Mark Toscano, with all the Jacobs in the house. Incredible films - plus we watched 16mm, 35mm and video. After the show I walked out and down the street with something to believe in.

podcast #3: Bobcat Goldthwait

2011-08-08T00:23:00.000-07:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad
Cinemad: Bobcat Goldthwait by Cinemad

You may know Bobcat from his long standup comedy career, his many acting roles from the 1980s and 90s, or that time he set a couch on fire. But Cinemad is more interested in the films he has written and/or directed over the past decade. Mixing a real underground, independent film vibe with some extreme plotlines, he provides a cutting insight to human nature that is hilarious but not all that absurd.

bookends:

"Weinerschnitzel"

"I Like Food"

The Descendents

photo by Mike Plante: Bobcat in the Cinemad media wing.

podcast #2: Aza Jacobs

2011-07-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad

Cinemad podcast #2: Azazel Jacobs' award-winning film MOMMA'S MAN premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, and quickly became one of the most lauded films of the year, winding up on many "best of" lists. Released in numerous international territories, it was distributed domestically by Kino International. Jacobs' short film KIRK AND KERRY was named Best Dramatic Short at the 1997 Slamdance Film Festival and became part of the Permanent Collection of the New York Public Library.

He later teamed up with fellow filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo to make the micro-budget feature THE GOODTIMESKID, which found a small but loyal following, and was released by Benten Films. In 2009, he received a commission from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create the short film I SEE.

The son of avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Jacobs was born in 1972 and raised in lower Manhattan surrounded by important and innovative artists. He went to undergraduate school at the film department of SUNY Purchase and received his Masters from the American Film Institute in 2002.

bookends:
"Attitude" by Bad Brains
"Gates of Steel" by Devo
we got that P.M.A.

reference points:
Terri
IMDB
Ken Jacobs

podcast #1: Nina Menkes

2011-07-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

also on iTunes for free - just search for Cinemad
Cinemad: Nina Menkes by Cinemad

Called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today”
by The Los Angeles Times, Nina Menkes's radical and pioneering work synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. Her seven films are a body of work Sight and Sound has called “Controversial, intense and visually stunning.” We talk about her films, the notion of the avant-garde tag, her teenage witch school, violence in cinema, freaky animals and her new film, DISSOLUTION.

bookends:
"Popcorn Bop" by Permanent Voltage
sounds from Vegas I recorded

reference points:
Nina Menkes official site
Dissolution page and screenings at Cinemad Presents
Nina Menkes at MUBI
Nina Menkes at Senses of Cinema

Cinemad influences:
Black Flag
Dischord Records
Thrasher
Dishwasher
Exile Osaka
Giant Robot
Razorcake

Nina Menkes retro

2011-06-08T23:29:00.000-07:00

If you've read anything in Cinemad and liked it, you will like the work of Nina Menkes. Her work is one of the reasons I started the zine, actually. In 1997, some friends left Tucson for CalArts. A steady supply of amazing VHS tapes came my way. I finally got to see great avant films by filmmakers I had only heard about (remember pre-internet) and I got introduced to so many new names that had been working strong for years but stuck to screenings in the larger cities or in rural strongholds like Portland or film festivals that had room for pure art cinema. Frustrated at the lack of information out there, and inspired by other homemade zines like Giant Robot and Dishwasher, I started Cinemad to have a reason to search out films and filmmakers and share the knowledge. I figured it would help me find more films and filmmakers by default. Menkes was the first person I interviewed and Tinka Menkes in THE BLOODY CHILD was the first cover, published in fall 1998.

Its over a decade later and Cinemad finds itself an online zine now, spastically updated. And there is a new frustration: getting films into theaters. Its always been difficult for avant, cult, underground, experimental.... undefinable films to make their ways into movie theaters, which operate within the traditional business sense of mainstream movies. Its hard to break away from those "box office success" notions, because the equipment is expensive. Screens, projectors, lenses, bulbs, electricity, air conditioning, speakers, amps, wires, it all adds up in cost and its all made by big companies who are not making it to be creative artists. Even if you have a floor staff that are volunteers, you can't just have a theater with no money coming in. Yes, there are many exceptions, incredible homemade places, great non-profits with loyal audiences, microcinemas that install faith in you. And yes digital projection is changing everything, giving us even more hope. But video bulbs are not cheap either.

And so, Cinemad is starting to help those interesting, unusual venues that like the Cinemad type of film find the films and filmmakers and vice versa. Cinemad Presents is booking films into theaters across North America and slowly into other countries. Sometimes its a traditional weeklong run on the big screen, sometimes its a single special screening down the road you have to get to or you'll miss. We are not trying to write a manifesto here. Just sharing knowledge.

Some of the first films we are distributing are by the first filmmaker we wrote about: Nina Menkes. The mystical, intense worlds she created will be travelling in a retrospective to select theaters. Her new feature, DISSOLUTION, and her recent film, PHANTOM LOVE, will be part of that and showing in more cities.

But only with your help. If you want to see her films and others like them, you can lend support to her Kickstarter page, getting the films out to theaters. A little goes a long way.

The Kickstarter page is right here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1704010854/nina-menkes-film-retrospective-in-theaters?ref=email

and Nina wanted to note words of inspiration from John Cassavetes, the Godfather of doing-it-yourself cinema:

"If you need distribution in place before you have the courage to make a movie then it’s not a movie worth making. There are many other ways to make money than making movies. If you need to make money, please find some other way to do it. You make movies to lose your money. That is the purpose of making a movie to put your life into something not get something out of it."

Of course, if you pay to see a film you enjoy, nobody is losing, right?

Our distribution company is right here: www.cinemadpresents.com Hope you like all the stuff.

Coming soon to Cinemad magazine - lost articles found and brand new podcasts.

PRISM index

2011-04-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

While I slowly but surely get another group of interviews together for Cinemad, please check out and support the new issue of PRISM index with lots of kickass subjects, coming soon. Its time again to hold some art in your hands.

"PRISM index, a handmade, mixed-media art book, through a website called kickstarter. If you are unfamiliar with the platform, it is crowd-sourced all-or-nothing funding. I offer up nifty rewards to funders, like PRISM index #2, original art from the compilation, metal plates from printing, etc. and if people want to help fund the project they pick a reward, or can opt to pick none. The project features 60 artists including Su Friedrich, Sam Green, Abigail Child, Stephanie Barber, Seuongho Cho, Tomonari Nishikawa, Chris Johanson, Nick Gazin, Mel Kadel, Aimee Bender, Matt Furie, Phosphorescent, David Grubbs, Guitar Slim, Big Blood and many more. The first issue features Bill Plympton, the Kuchar Brothers, Jay Rosenblatt, Trent Harris, Azazel Jacobs, the Zellner Brothers, Michael Hurley, Luke Ramsey, Lisa Hanawalt, Diane Cluck, Theo Ellsworth, Jeffrey Brown, and many more. There are so many goodies in this compilation I can barely stand it.

Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands (the project doesn't get funded and the funders are returned their money). I'm trying to raise $7,200 by June 10. You can see more information about it here, including a trailer for PRISM index:"

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1103692945/prism-index-handmade-mixed-media-art-book

ANIMAL CHARM

2010-07-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

The duo of Rich Bott and Jim Fetterly as supervideohero ANIMAL CHARM are masters of video reconstruction. Taking found footage out of many sources – educational tapes, homemade music videos, b-movies, resume reels, pyramid schemes, and the worst (best) self-help tapes – the Charm create their own world of seeing, letting the rest of us understand what’s really under the surface, our own personal Rowdy Roddy Piper out of THEY LIVE. They’ve performed live as sort of video DJ’s in all kinds of places, from basements to museums and film festivals. Bless them, bless the charm. Do their bidding.

CINEMAD: We’ll start easy. When did you guys first hook up? Were you doing work on your own or did you start doing stuff together?

JIM: We can’t hear you.

CINEMAD: When did you guys start!?!

JIM: We each had done videos on our own, but as far as probably like one specific moment…

RICH: I didn’t make any videos. I made films, but not videos.

JIM: No, but you made videos in Amsterdam.

RICH: Well, that’s true.

CINEMAD: What were you in Amsterdam for?

RICH: To go to school my last year. We used video on reel-to-reel. There were no computers or anything.

JIM: Not reel-to-reel, just deck-to-deck.

RICH: Yeah, deck-to-deck.

JIM: Rich and I met…we went to a summer school for the arts at the Arts Institute of Chicago. Rich moved in where I was living downtown. There was one time where we pointed a camera at a TV and changed the radio and tried to change the TV really fast. Remember that? That little fast tape we made? But then it wasn’t until like five years later, out of school, we went to the library and got some videos from the library and it happened to be a “How to Take Care of Your Pet” video and something on bacteria and petri dishes. There was one image that was a Q-tip in a petri dish, and in the “How to Take Care of Your Pet” video it was a Q-tip cleaning the nose of a cat, and I had just learned the Avid at work. I just put the shots back-to-back, then I cut to Cat Fancy Magazine’s over a Donovan-like song called “Sunshine Kitty.” It wasn’t Animal Charm, it was just kind of a response to a lot of the stuff we found online in 1994, like sample music and Stock, Hausen and Walkman.

1)*****NOTE****(Stock, Hausen, And Walkman are a mid 90s plundering improv group from UK. There name is a play on words for 3 famous pop music producers as well as the Stockhausen reference which often gets misquoted like you just spelled it. Actually, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, at an exhibition we were involved in called, “The Church of What’s Happening Now,” we were asked to supply a list of inspirations and they were going to include some of them in the exhibit before our performance. They didn’t know Stock, Hausen, And Walkman, so they put an audio tape of Stockhausen in a Walkman cassette player and hung it museum style on the wall! That was pretty funny, but sad because the translation made it seem as if we were inspired by this composer that neither of us had much more than just a pop knowledge of. It’s like the specificity of each cultural reference got mixed through confusion and the end result did turn out to be close to what actually happens in our videos but by mistake.)

CINEMAD: That’s when the internet first started to be happening, right?

JIM: Yeah, John Oswald and Plunderphonics and getting that online, and ordering from Stalplatt, which is in Amsterdam, this label putting out people like us.

2)*******NOTE******(People Like Us is the moniker of Vicki Bennet from the UK who has been cutting and pasting audio for years and recently accompanying video. She has a great show on WFMU. Check www.peoplelikeus.org for more info)

It kind of just started slow. Right before Rich left for Amsterdam, we started collecting vinyl like crazy, right before the Incredibly Strange Music books came out, and it was really cheap because there was a lot of it in Chicago. So then he left for a year, and we just sent mix tapes back and forth. And that one video you made was to a mix tape.

RICH: Yeah, with some Moog sounds.

JIM: And then he came back and we had a studio set up just for audio, like four-track recording, home recording stuff.

RICH: We first started to do this live when we first got the video mixer, in an apartment without using computers. Just recording to VHS tapes and using the video mixer and the sound mixer. We made the whole tape that we got distributed by the Video Data Bank (VDB) that way.

JIM: The whole reason we bought that thing was because we made some shorts…LIGHTFOOT FEVER and SLOW GIN SOUL STALLION were done in one night. And we had this one tape of these two, like our single, that we’d just come home and show to friends and then dub it to friends of friends, and that’s what got shown at Chicago Filmmakers, I think. It just ended up climbing the world of experimental video and film. That was like ’95, ’96, and it was under a different name with different people, Janet Anglosaxophone Jackson Junior.

RICH: That was our best name.

JIM: Nobody could ever say that.

RICH: “That’s too long, man.” They could never remember it.

Figure 2: Ninja Charm.

JIM: Like some John Oswald super name. We performed ASHLEY live before it was even done, so it was always this really local thing for us there in Chicago, different cafes.

3)******NOTE*******(We performed ASHLEY live in the basement of The Logab Beach Cafe with our friend Paul Deuth who was in Janet Anglosaxophone Jackson Junior at the time)

CINEMAD: So it just sort of made sense for you guys just being video DJs?

JIM: Well, no, after making those single channel videos, then we decided to keep going in and rigorously trying more experiments until we had a number of them and had sent them off, through tape-trading networks, to Matt McCormick at Peripheral Produce. He decided to put a tape compilation out and go on tour, so that was already three years later, by that time we had already bought a mixer, because we trying to figure out how to go on tour and show. When we do these shorts, we’d have to do them from 7pm to 7am the next morning where I worked. We had to get it off the hard drive right away. This is when a 9-gig hard drive was $4200. I’m serious, and it weighed like a fucking brick. So we’d have to wipe it in the morning and everything got laid off to VHS, we never had beta masters, all the beta masters we had that our tapes got distributed on were bumped up from VHS of just those initial outputs.

CINEMAD: That’s how it’s gotta be.

JIM: And then we thought, how are we gonna play all these back, like pop a tape in and have a blue screen and it says “Channel 2 - Play.” So we got a four-channel mixer to just do that one way after another, and then on that tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles we got really bored halfway down the road. I mean, even by the time we were in Portland, we were playing the sound of one video with the picture of another, kind of like, wow, we can constantly re-edit these things over and over and it’s different and the audience doesn’t know, except for Matt, who we’re torturing.

CINEMAD: We’re all sort of the same age, coming out of the ‘80s sensibilities. It seems like everybody just started doing stuff at the same time throughout the ‘90s, and it’s sort of this weird process of figuring out that everyone’s doing the same thing, just in different cities.

JIM: In Chicago, it was cool going to a school and seeing a video databank. It didn’t really set in until later, but it kind of erased my entire knowledge of TV and made me think about it in a really different way. I went to the Chicago Filmmakers for the first time, and it was Sadie Benning like, 18 years old, showing all of her videos. I thought, “Wow, I understand this. I don’t understand art school. This stuff’s not making any sense but she’s saying these things that are really understandable and just making things really easily.”

CINEMAD: What kind of stuff were they teaching at the Chicago Art Institute? I thought that place was better than usual?

JIM: It was good, it was just radically different than my high school. I think the art program in my high school was kind of like, “Oh, look through a magazine and find a picture you want to draw,” which ends up being what I do in video. It’s pretty freeform, no grades, pass/fail, no major, lots of people there were just kind of like taking four years off to go to summer camp because they were really rich. I met a lot of really rich people I’d never met in my life. I don’t know, what were some of the videos you remember? At the summer school, we saw the entire Andy Warhol retrospective, that was fucked up but I didn’t really think anything of it.

RICH: We took Tom Pazzollo’s class. He made great breakfast on Sundays, we could drink in there and smoke, watch films, shoot films.

JIM: And he’d just support anything that you did.

CINEMAD: Did you guys just slowly start moving away from shooting stuff?

JIM: We never shot stuff.

RICH: We started doing things better, taking samples of things.

JIM: I had started on like a totally different track, like I didn’t even want to go to school anymore and started working at Kartemquin, the documentary place in Chicago that ended up doing HOOP DREAMS at the time. I remember that being a whole secondary education. They were a bunch of radicals from the ‘60s that were: do it grassroots, make a film, show it in a basement to a labor organization or a youth group or whatever, and that’s the fun part, traveling around with a film. I’d bring home all those old Chicago newsreel films that were basically like the Indymedia of the late ‘60s, little documentaries. We had a film in the basement that was “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” but it was re-edited about “I Was a Teenage Marxist.” It was like an introduction of how to get people to get into ideas of Marxism in an ironic way, just a cut-up.

CINEMAD: Had you seen Craig (TRIBULATION 99) Baldwin’s stuff by that time, too?

JIM: That was like a big catalyst, seeing his SONIC OUTLAWS. There was really a strange synchronicity. I kind of went wandering around looking for Baldwin on foot while I was in San Francisco working on a job. I just happened to go to the ATA (Artists’ Television Access) and just said, “It looks like you would know where I could find Craig Baldwin,” and they were like, “He lives here.” That was the beginning of our relationship with Craig, and I remember at the beginning he would say, “You don’t know about that? You don’t know the Tape Beatles?” He was just shocked at our naivete and giving us all these little drawings to go out and eat in the neighborhood. We got a show with the Beatles during the summer, when SLOW GIN SOUL STALLION got into the San Francisco International Film Festival and won a New Visions Award in 1996.

fig 3; SLOW GIN SOUL STALLION

CINEMAD: Were you guys called Animal Charm by that time?

JIM: No, that was Janet Anglosaxophone Jackson Junior still.

RICH: For the New York Video Festival the following year, Gavin Smith called and asked for videos from Animal Charm and Janet Anglosaxophone Jackson Junior, and didn’t know that it was the same thing. In San Francisco, it was just under our names, Jim and Rich, but then we had this whole, big, convoluted idea to be anonymous and try to maintain that.

CINEMAD: So Animal Charm, somebody else gave you the name?

RICH: No, it was based on a drawing in a Rob McEwen book of poetry. It’s kind of weird to describe it.

4)*******NOTE*******(That’s spelled, Rod Mckuen, the poet and hot air balloonist)

It’s also a spell in Dungeons & Dragons. Like, you control animals to do your bidding.

JIM: It’s like Beastmaster, but it’s Animal Charm, you cast a spell and they do the works for you. But, no, the whole Animal Charm thing, I don’t know if it was something we came up with.

RICH: No, it was. I know it was. It was for the NCA thing in Chicago, that’s when we had to do it. We did a show at the NCA and they said, “You guys have to have a name.” They pressured us into making a name and we came up with that.

*******NOTE******** ( That was the MCA-- Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago)

CINEMAD: The NCA wouldn’t just let you use your names?

RICH: No, we said we had a couple of names, and they were just like, “You have to have one name so people know what the fuck’s going on.”

JIM: Mckuen has a ton of poetry and records that we’ve been collecting for years, but there was this image of a peacock, a line drawing…

RICH: That we were using for a logo anyway without any words.

JIM: Yeah, there were no words, just that logo, so that tape then became Animal Charm. It was kinda going to be the name of the compilation, but then it took off as just that name. It was a bumbling beginning but it definitely wasn’t planned and it kind of just took off in a way that neither of us expected, which was incredible. Sending out tapes to festivals because they’re calling you because somehow it got dubbed and went somewhere, and it’s not like we put them on the internet and it becomes some sort of ongoing download thing. It just spread in a very strange festival to festival type way.

CINEMAD: We must be the first generation to do that because we’re the first ones to have VCR-to-VCR recording at home.

JIM: We were really excited about this idea of having, instead of a 7” label, you release VHS tapes. To go out and literally say, “Oh hey, I loved your movie, here’s one of ours,” and trade, like a zine, a video zine.

CINEMAD: That how outsider artists can survive. Like the great Laz Rojas, who acted out scenes from his own scripts, playing every single character himself. Adults, children, two lesbians, a sci-fi script….

JIM: Just like Blazin’ Hazin’.

CINEMAD: Yeah, that’s right. Where did you find that?

JIM: Kent Lambert. We met him at the Fall Festival in ’99 or 2000 and he gave us a tape.

RICH: I found Hazin’ on the internet. He lives in Canton, OH, the home of the Football Hall of Fame, and he’s a cameraman for the Cleveland Browns. We just did a search for his name, and found an online ministry that ended up being his parents. They have an online Christian church. I wrote him and we got nine more videos in the mail, plus a headshot, plus a resume and a cover letter from his manager, thinking we’re a record company that’s going to release his music out here. We don’t know what to do with it. We would love to just put that on DVD and sell it out there, but he’s such an earnest guy and he’s such an outsider…I mean, we’ll show them at shows or remix them in.

JIM: Did you ever see our tapes on Bat Dance?

CINEMAD: No.

JIM: Remember when you could go to the mall and you could record a song, but they give you a full video production at the end? They give you costumes and everything. This is a whole crew of people doing Prince’s “Bat Dance,” somebody dressed up like Batman, a gypsy, a cowboy, a ninja…

RICH: Jason.

JIM: Jason from Friday the 13th, all of these different costumes.

RICH: No, it’s Halloween. It’s like an office party went to this place on Halloween so they’re all dressed up in these different Halloween outfits and Batman’s all like, “Yo, pump it up.”

JIM: With video effects, too. Total toaster culture, too, like those early 2-D animations. That’s like those Bear Aerobics, that ancient animation of teddy bears doing whiirrrrr. I know we played that at CineVegas for a really annoying long time. What’s that song? They sing a bunch of songs, but we played the “Disco, Disco Bear” song.

CINEMAD: So you guys were grabbing tapes from where you worked and people and trading and everything?

JIM: Where I worked, that documentary place, we would receive all this stuff as people’s cameraman demo reels in Chicago. Plus we’d go scouring in the thrift stores. And then there’s stuff that we would go and shoot the original material, like “Pieland, USA: Where All the ‘Bama Pies Are Made.” I actually shot footage of like a million pies a day being made, then we use it in a mix later. I remember my boss coming up to me at a show at the Empty Bottle, he saw all the shorts and said, “Oh, my daughter really loves it,” but she was like four, she really liked it like children’s television. Then all of a sudden I realized this tape I’m playing was the CEO from McDonald’s. I was at the company, at Hamburger University, which is where they teach all the managers in Chicago. There’s this image of this guy that we edited just being like, “Ahhahaha.” You can’t even recognize him because he’s laughing but his eyes are blinking and we called him the laughing blinking man and we throw it on every now and then. And I’m there and Jerry’s behind me and I thought, man, Jerry’s gonna be pissed because that’s someone we were just videotaping two months ago and I told him that I would never, ever use any of that. Because that was the thing at that job, after a while, it got to be known what we do. It’s the same thing out here when I was working at Art Center in the video library, they were like, “Yeah, you can work here, but don’t take any of our videos for your performances.” Which sucks so bad because at first, my job was to dub 35 hours of director-cameraman reels, little two-to-five minute reels, I had to sit and watch and burn VCDs of and see the most inane, disgusting commercials from like ’85 until now. I couldn’t touch them. It definitely made me insane. But the Bat Dance came from the projector booth at Otis.

RICH: No, Art Center.

JIM: Oh, Art Center. Something came from Otis that was really good.

Figure 4: The mantle at Animal Charm house.

CINEMAD: One of my favorites is FAMILY COURT, the all-sports-court-in-one for your family, with Dad screaming while making a shot.

JIM: That’s the one that I think we got at a thrift store. That product’s actually called Family Court. “Portable play yard for your artificial lifestyle.”

Fig. 5: FAMILY COURT

CINEMAD: So now do you guys take more time now that you have your whole set-up?

RICH: We’ve got like 40 grocery bags full of tapes that we’ve got to go through, that we haven’t even used. That’s kind of the first project.

JIM: That’s why we bought all those computers and stuff. We are gonna perform live, record the output and sell them at the end of the show

RICH: Franchise our show, like Taco Bell. We could do it all over the place.

CINEMAD: What other sub-communitites have you found?

JIM: The all-guy duck-hunting weirdos from Wisconsin. Remember that duck-hunting video? It was very strange, not like hunting… this guy videotaping ducks out in the pond and they keep falling. He’s like hunting them with the camera, he’s never shooting them. Probably like a thirteen year old.

RICH: Camera Hunt.

JIM: Camera Hunt. Camera hunting ducks at a lake.

RICH: And someone gave us one a kid made of cats having sex.

JIM: A four-year-old girl was videotaping cats having sex and asking questions about what’s going on, and the mother awkwardly laughing and also being fascinated in the act but you don’t know what to say to a kid, like it’s the early sex-ed with animals. Often, we’ve asked people to bring their own materials, and then once we’ve started to do our thing, we started inserting their tapes.

CINEMAD: So did you guys focus more on goals as it went along, or has it still been more of like what’s been dropped in your hands or what you’ve found and then destroying it?

JIM: It’s kind of a combo. Now that we’re conscious and can do stuff like that, it’s like every video store, every library collection is your source. There’s no real need to have to only find it, like when we did the TOOTSIE VS. KRAMER VS. KRAMER idea. That’s what we went out to do, but KRAMER VS. KRAMER wasn’t available that night, because we’re not gonna go out and buy KRAMER VS. KRAMER or even spend weeks preparing to go and make sure that they have it that night. It was just that night at 7, “Oh, maybe at Video Journey, they have it. Oh, no, they don’t? OK, what else do we got? Let’s use WHITEY from Bass Finder and, oh, SHAOLIN SOCCER.”

5)******NOTE******(That is WHITY from Fassbinder)

RICH: And BARRIO WARS, like Latin gangbanger movies they make here in LA, low-budget.

Figure 6: The Wow Guy

CINEMAD: What was TARGET?

JIM: TARGET is the video of driving around in circles in the Target parking lot and Rich was dressed up in bandages. Have you ever seen that? I’m sitting on the hood shooting, and it’s to Carol King’s…uh, what song is it?

RICH: “So Far Away.”

JIM: “So Far Away.” And he changes the station on the radio and then it goes to “Level 42.” And the whole video changes but it’s the same circle of driving and we cut in Jumpin’ Jim Brunzell and Red Gagne from wrestling, but they’re not wrestlers, they’re dressed as…on one of their training tapes, they’re doing military-style boot camp…

RICH: It’s Sgt. Slaughter.

CINEMAD: Why’d you guys pick LA from Chicago?

RICH: It’s like a warm Chicago.

JIM: It was random. I mean, it wasn’t that random, we had done a show here at Film Forum.

RICH: I met my biological mom here. That was the first time we were here. The second time we were here was for Film Forum, then we came back again for Film Forum. Then a little later, Jim was out here working with a friend of ours. We had never been out west until that first time in San Francisco. It was just like, where could we move in America that would be different than Chicago but still not fucking lame, too small, or expensive like New York?

JIM: And isn’t like subculturally indoctrinated. There isn’t a scene, so to speak.

RICH: And it was affordable. I didn’t really move, officially. I was also breaking up with someone at the same time.

JIM: He came out in February and went back in April to get all of our stuff. It was like a two-week ticket you dissed. I mean, that is the coolest thing. Animal Charm is just like a way to make art with a friend.

Figure 7: Animal Charm at CineVegas 2003.

I don’t know if I would make or do things on my own just because it’s getting off on myself and having fun and it’s a social…not just Rich, but other friends or meeting other people like-minded, it’s a way more social activity that allows for learning and all that stuff. The weird part is we meet people out here because we came out here with this whole history behind us and people thought we were these career artists or career bands.

RICH: And people in Chicago think that we came out here to be successful art stars, and they kind of have this idea that we are because we live in a house and have cars and stuff, like we’re living the high life out here. It’s so retarded.

JIM: Those tapes are also adopted in the fine art world and there are all these people out here that are machinating, making careers, and aligning with friends to talk about how to get their next show and let’s curate this and let’s curate that, and it’s all really revolting for the most part. I mean, there are some very interesting individuals, but the really fake part of it, which is the networking, like any industry whether it’s like plumbing to Hollywood filmmaking, where it’s not about the content of what your interests lie, but it’s about where you want to get, an end result, that made this place kind of like, “We can work in film and video in a vaccuum here.” And there’s all these other people here working in film and video that I have no interest in starting a conversation with, but at the same time, there’s all these other interesting folks to go meet and see.

www.animalcharm.com

CRISPIN HELLION GLOVER

2010-07-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

CRISPIN HELLION GLOVER has finished his long-awaited, legend-surrounded, controversial, stunning debut feature film WHAT IS IT? Glover plans on personally touring with the film across the country, then following it with parts 2 and 3 of the trilogy. I guarantee a set of images and sounds you have not experienced before. Glover is easy to talk to, intelligent and cheerful.

CINEMAD: I saw the film many years ago; you came through Tucson and showed a rough cut. I’ve noticed some sort of changes.

CRISPIN GLOVER: That was a long time ago. What did you notice most changed?

It seemed to be much more structured. I did show it in various stages. That might have been an earlier cut. It was always approximately the same length it is right now [72 minutes]. It was never a shorter film than this. There was less information at certain points. When I was touring around with it I had almost everything I have now in it. There are two sequences in a graveyard, one is a graveyard set that has a lot of actors in it. That was the last thing I shot. And I did tour around without that bit. There’s a lot of information in that section. I put a lot of subplot elements in that sequence. It could feel more structured now.

I read things that say, “This is the weirdest movie…” or whatever. And yet really there is a very simple, basic structure that has been there since it was a short film. There is somebody that gets locked out of their house and they go on an adventure trying to get back home, various things happen and then he gets back home. But there has been more added on since that basic structure.

How long has the film been in production? It’s been 9 ½ years. This summer it will have been 10 years since I started shooting.

Did the film or your plans for it change over the long production? Yes, very much. It started out as a short film. After I’d done the first edit of the short film, it came together longer than it is now, I think 80-something minutes. I knew that was too long for the film. I also knew that I could make a feature film by adding some more depth to it. I knew I could put myself in it as an antagonistic character.

How do you know it is finished now? I had locked the film about six years ago. It really hasn’t been a problem about me finishing it in terms of the artistic conception of it, as much as it has been about the material elements of finishing and working with people that could really help me as opposed to hinder. The worst thing of all for the film that really delayed it for five years was it got stuck at an optical house in New York. They gave me so many excuses. I was afraid to pull the negative away because the element of responsibility of it. If there was anything wrong with the negative and I paid money already, something wrong could happen. The fact of it is, they did damage my negative. As soon as the sound edit was absolutely completed, I went to New York, I saw that the lab had not told me the truth and taken advantage. I brought the negative back to Los Angeles. There was a lot of restoration work that had to be done. A lot of damage had been done by the negative sitting around. A lot of dust, which digitally is a very extensive thing to get rid of. I had a hair in the gate [in one sequence] and that was digitally removed. The damage that the optical house in New York did was they cut the negative too close to where the cut was supposed to be. So when I telecined it the image jumps and ripples. It still is in the film, there are some small jump elements, I’ve had to live with it. Much of it has been restored and corrected.

Of course it was frustrating to talk to people about it because nobody really… you get the feeling that people end up thinking you’re being flakey about it. It really wasn’t the case. There were other issues as well, other technical problems but that was the culmination. I got caught between the optical house and the negative cutter who kept pointing fingers at each other, they’ve got to do this and they’ve got to do this. I didn’t live in New York. And then I’m working and away some of the time as well.

Were the actors friends or professional actors? There is one actor, the fellow doing the Michael Jackson stuff. He had done some films before and some television earlier on. He was really good at matching. The reason that all of the Michael Jackson stuff is in the movie is because he was just doing that on the set naturally, I didn’t tell him to do it. So I shot that and then I worked the other stuff around him.

A lot of the way the film is made is like that, where there are happenstances. There are things that were brought in because they looked good. They had an interesting image quality or color or something. Then things were made around those elements. A lot of the outtakes end up becoming part of the dialogue.

Were there traditional auditions for the rest of the actors? There was when it was a short film. I’ve done other projects and I haven’t always auditioned [the actors]. This time mainly I wanted to see the level of functioning of each of the people. Most of the actors with Down’s syndrome I worked with were very high-functioning people. Because Down’s syndrome is extremely varied in terms of functionability. In the short film much of the actors were very able to remember dialogue. In the last thing I shot, in the graveyard with the woman who has that repetitive element and they are interviewing the minstrel, there are people that are more around that section that aren’t verbal. They are more low-functioning people.

You know, the length of time the film is so irrelevant. A lot of people will think that had a lot to do with working with people with Down’s syndrome. But that isn’t the fact at all. I shot the film in 12 days all together, over a period of two and a half years.

Really the most important thing about the actors is I wrote it for them. I knew what they would be like in front of the camera. The most important thing for any kind of casting whether somebody has Down’s syndrome or not is if somebody is enthusiastic. If they are enthusiastic and into the concept and enjoying themselves with it then really good things could happen. Every single person that I worked with was extremely enthusiastic.

You already knew Steven C. Stewart, the actor with cerebral palsy, right? Yes. I had known him already because he had written a screenplay. I had done an AFI film in 1982, THE ORKLY KID. That’s a very good movie, I’m proud of that performance and the film. Its only 35 minutes but its still one of the few movies that I’m in that I think is an excellent film. That filmmaker, Trent Harris, was from Salt Lake, Utah, and knew a community of filmmakers including Steve Stewart. Steve had written a letter to the news station that Harris worked at. Another filmmaker named Larry Roberts worked there and did a news story about Steve’s situation.

What happened was Steve was a man of normal intelligence but he was very difficult to understand, he had severe cerebral palsy. They called him an MR, a mental retard, and he was imprisoned in this hospital for at least 12 years. They did a news story on him and consequently Steve was able to get out of the nursing home and was able to live a relatively free life. He was still in a place for people with disabilities but it was much better.

The story [Steve Stewart wrote] has to do with, I like to say a psychosexual retelling of his point of view of life. But his point of view is naïve. So there’s an almost folk artist element to it. They also call it “outsider artist” element. But its fantastical as well, its not just a straight-forward retelling. Its very unique and I’m glad we shot it. The money I made from the first CHARLIE’S ANGELS (2000) film I put straight into making the Steve Stewart film.

The minstrel betrayed by his concubine?

That was originally going to be a completely separate movie that was his own story basically. But there were concepts I realized in all these screenplays that worked together. Commercially it made sense for me to put him into the feature version [of WHAT IS IT?] and make his film a sequel. So then this dueling demigod auteur element comes between us. The second film is absolutely Steve’s story. The third film is more my story. I co-wrote it with people but it’s very pertinent to my own psychology. But Steve’s film is 100% him. I co-directed that film and produced it. It’s still ultimately his movie. I am very excited about it. It probably will be the best film I ever have anything to do with in my career.

That was another delay on WHAT IS IT? There was at least a year where I was just concentrating on Steve’s film. He was 62 and even though cerebral palsy is not degenerative he was starting to choke on his own saliva and one of his lungs had collapsed. So it became pretty apparent that if we didn’t shoot soon it wouldn’t happen. We shot it and then he died within a month of us finishing.

If the third film in the trilogy is about you, how much of WHAT IS IT? would you say is you? That I would say is 100% [laughs]. It’s hard to say, I won’t say that everything is about me personally. There are things that come in, like I said, because they look interesting or because there is something amusing about it or something like that. In a very organic fashion I wrote it with the film blocks that I was editing with. There aren’t too many films made like that. It has to come from your psyche somehow.

You have talked about how everyone is making pro-culture films now and not too many filmmakers are creating counter-culture work. I’ve been able to analyze what my interests are since I was quite young. You can call things various art movements or counter-cultural movements. But I realize that a lot of the things I’ve had interest in throughout my life are usually some kind of media that has to do with countering the culture that is at hand. Not necessarily this culture but other cultures when they’ve been reactive to certain things. Like the surrealists being reactive to the culture surrounding them. Right now there is a very different culture than what the surrealists or the hippies were reacting to.

I think it is very bad for the culture itself when there is only one point of view about things. That is what’s happening today. If there’s not discussion it turns into stupidity. It sounds a little bit overly polysyllabic but it’s simple: There’s a totalitarian esthetic of corporate pro-culturism. That infuses itself ubiquitously. [laughs] The thing of it is, when there’s a generation or more of people that have grown up with only one point of view of what is considered right and how to think and what should be published and what shouldn’t be published… then if anyone does anything about that at all, that person is really thought of in a bad way and very bad things will be said about that person.

I’ve written a lot of screenplays before I’ve finally made this movie. Its really just been a feat of getting the film made inexpensively. This doesn’t really resemble the type of screenplays I’ve written previously. I’ve written much more structured screenplays that were to be shot in a certain time period and the film was to represent that screenplay. This was a different way of making a movie than I had planned to make it originally. I’m not upset about it, I’m happy to have taken this and made it work. I’m proud of that.

But I’ve noticed something while I’ve taken meetings or talked to people about concepts. I’ve written screenplays that I wanted to be what I would call a commercial type of movie. But there is always something in them here or there. They weren’t necessarily as overtly counter-cultural as this particular film. But the was always something in it that had a concept or an idea. What I noticed in meetings was you’ll get people saying, “We wouldn’t want to say that.” A very seemingly innocent thing to say. But if you think about it, well, why not? [laughs] Why not say whatever that is? Why be afraid of saying anything at all? I’m funding this [personally] because corporate kinds of entities were questioning the concept of funding a film that had a majority of people with Down’s syndrome as the cast. It isn’t just that they were concerned about working with those actors. It was the concept of a majority of actors in a film having Down’s syndrome and the film not being about Down’s syndrome. That is a counter-cultural concept. There was no interest.

So I thought I should explore that sensibility. Go 100% in that direction. Find the things that you are not supposed to talk about, you’re not supposed to deal with, you’re not supposed to say at all. It doesn’t even necessarily have to delve into it, just have it be part of the fabric of the texture of the universe that the film exists in. Its funny to me. I personally don’t find these things [in the film] offensive. I’ve seen some reviews where people say it is made to shock. I don’t find anything in the film shocking in the least. Why are none of the elements of the film even delved into for an iota of a second anywhere in the media in the United States at all? The pro-cultural media state has become so ubiquitous that people don’t realize that there is a whole universe of thought that is being kind of wiped out by the fact that corporate interests aren’t allowing people to think on many different levels than they should.

When I toured around with the film I got positive reviews. Now I’ve gotten a few positive reviews but I feel I’ve gotten more negative reviews recently. I’m not certain what it is. I know the film hasn’t gotten worse. [laughs] I know the film has gotten better. A lot has happened in the last six years since the film has been locked. I’ll be curious about it. I do expect good reviews. I did get some from big magazines and newspapers before. Are people afraid they’ll lose their job if they say something positive?

Think of the type of reviewer that the big paper would hire in the first place. They are not going to like the film. There isn’t even groundwork there for you to deal with. Yes, yes. What is it that, if there is a generation or so raised in this thinking… But I know that’s not 100% true because when I go on tour and show the film I have people coming up to me and get positive reaction and response. I would say from Sundance I’ve seen the most negative reviews for the film. I saw three separate reviews that all watched the same film and they even came up with some of the same references but they were references to things that were not in the film at all!

Blood ... Is it satisfying?

[laughs] I don’t know if they were referencing each other or if they were genuinely thinking that they’d seen things that aren’t in the movie. It’s bizarre to me.

I think that ends up being a positive. Sure. Part of the film is to not dictate to what people think. I corrected one person because they said something that was so outrageous to the point that it would make it seem as though I was doing something that was illegal. They wrote that there were kids with Down’s syndrome having sex with each other. That’s just not the case! There are no children in the film at all. And nobody has sex in the film. There are definitely graphic elements in it. Strong imagery…

The real issue is handicapped persons are not allowed to be actors in this society, they are expected to play themselves and that’s it. I always stress that this isn’t a film about Down’s syndrome at all. What I very much wanted to do is treat these individuals as competent actors exploring interesting things. I didn’t want to point to the people as people with Down’s syndrome particularly. Just as people in [the film’s] particular universe and they are trying to accomplish certain things. I do not consider this film a ‘cause’ film at all. But if one goes into that level of it, I consider that much more of a positive outlook on the people than putting them in these cutified, puppetized, muppetized non-realistic elements that happens so much in movies dealing with people with handicaps. That to me is very irritating.

Did you know Adam Parfrey before the filming? [The writer and boss of underground publisher Feral House books plays a key role in the film.] Yes. I had known Adam quite a few years already. Of course he wasn’t originally in the short film. That was another thing that grew separately. I knew I wanted him to be somebody that wanted to become like a snail and that he was jealous of certain things. A jealous type of character. I didn’t know what he should look like. Everybody in the movie has kind of a look, including myself. Arbitrarily I had him in blackface. Then there’s the fellow on the set doing the Michael Jackson thing. It didn’t come in til much later that Parfrey’s character was going to want to become Michael Jackson. One might think that these things were designed from the beginning but it’s more that I’m open to, ok, these things can be connected together, that’s fine. I wasn’t connecting them together myself. Sometimes I did in my own mind. Often they were just things that happened and they correlated. A lot of that had to do with not censoring it.

Because of the surface level issues people have, I think audiences are going to miss the film’s subtext of fame and celebrity. Part three deals with it even more specifically but this deals with it in a poetic fashion. No question, to me, what I am reacting to in this film, is growing up within this world. My father’s an actor, my Mother’s a dancer and an actor, I’ve grown up around the media and Hollywood and I’ve seen how people treat that and think about that. What it means within the culture. How there can be a certain kind of sensibility that I find disturbing. This film deals with that. It’s hard to pick that out on some

Love between the minstrel and his concubine? Or is it betrayel?

levels but more than anything that is exactly what this film is reacting to. When I’m saying pro-cultural media, that is what I’ve grown up in. I’ve always wanted to be part of a counter-cultural film movement but there hasn’t been one the whole time I’ve been acting. I started when I was 14, in 1978. My first film role wasn’t until 1982. It’s been frustrating for me.

Celebrity is another icon for people, a symbol, to the point where you can’t walk down the street. When you say “you”, what do you mean?

I mean a person who is a celebrity, whether it’s literally you, or anybody that is in a movie that is recognizable. Personally I don’t have a difficulty with that. I get recognized a lot. There’s a way that people act about celebrity where they are both getting attention by pretending that they’re not wanting to get the attention [laughs]. It has a hypocritical element to it. It’s not like I wrote down ten sentences of what I was reacting to and then tried to visualize those sentences. If it fit in then to something, I was open to it existing. If it was on my mind, then some of those things come through. The minstrel character being jealous and wanting to be a special person that is recognized, it deals with that element, that is a big part of what people do in any art form. There can be a healthy element about that and there can be an unhealthy, neurotic element as well. Probably in this film it’s dealing with it in the less healthy aspect [laughs].

www.crispinglover.com

Sam Green

2010-07-06T14:09:00.001-07:00

It is hard enough to make a documentary without overcoming the greatest obstacle: finding a worthy subject.

SAM GREEN has not had that problem, with his past films investigating The Rainbow Man, that guy who was always at sporting events holding up a John 3:16 sign and wearing a rainbow wig, a group of filmmakers attacking socialites with pies, a seminal girl band film and one of the most controversial, yet forgotten, group of 1960’s radicals. His films (always made with collaborators) cut to the chase, offering sincere portraits of outside society, bring the audience closer to it’s fringes. The films have played many film festivals and THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2002) just got Academy Award nominations for Green and co-director Bill Siegel. Other Cinema has just released a great DVD of his short films.

CINEMAD: Did you always want to make documentaries?

SAM GREEN: I never went to film school, but I did study journalism at UC-Berkeley, and Marlon Riggs, the documentary maker, taught there, so I studied documentaries with him, but it was all video. I never learned how to do film or anything. He was awesome. I got a master’s degree. When I went there I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but then I took this video class and it was really fun and writing was so lonely. I wasn’t even that good at it. I would spend super long hours in front of a computer alone, being frustrated. And video, to me, was so much more fun and collaborative. After I took that class I changed direction.

What did he show in class? He showed all sorts of stuff. He was great because he, in a lot of ways, sort of showed me a direction that I wanted to go and ended up going, which was both a real rigorous journalistic approach, but at the same time, kind of an experimental impulse as well. I had not been super into film before that, and I saw some things there that really knocked me out and opened my eyes, like SANS SOLEIL (1983) by Chris Marker. Or SALESMAN (1969). …Seeing those movies kind of opened my eyes to this whole world that I really got sucked into, I guess.

Did you make RAINBOW MAN (1997) at school? I made some short pieces, but Riggs was dying at that time and the program was kind of falling apart, and there really just wasn’t any support to do a longer film. So I graduated, and I figured I’d have to get a job, so I moved to LA and got this job working for Fox Television on this news magazine show. My job was to find footage of people, and it was a really dumb job and I needed something to keep me busy. I had read something about the Rainbow Man in a paper and really got curious. It really got under my skin, so I just decided to try to find shots of the Rainbow Man, because I could call up Major League Baseball to get stuff for stories, like they were doing a profile on Barry Bonds. I would just slip in, “Hey could I also have the 1977 World Series?” I started to acquire all this footage of the Rainbow Man, and at first it was just kind of a funny, goof, lark type of thing, but then after a while it started to become more serious. I was totally perplexed because my parents were kind of super-liberals, and so they didn’t have a TV when I was growing up. I never watched TV, and I remember reading about him when I was in LA and thinking to myself, “How do I know who this guy is? How has he penetrated into my consciousness? I never even watch TV.” So that was one of the things that interested me, that he had been so incredibly successful, in a way.

At least according to your film, it’s misguided, but it’s an interesting goal. The cult of celebrity is interesting, and then when you mix in the religion, and a crazy upbringing, the rest of the story. He sort of struck me as like the ultra-American. He seemed to have all the qualities of an American, only in super-extreme forms, like no family, no direction, no other values except TV. TV was his total reference point. That’s obviously not a good recipe for having a stable, positive, peaceful life.

Was he pretty cooperative since you were another piece of his celebrity? I wrote him a letter. He’d been in prison for a couple years and nobody had ever visited him. He’d never had a single visit. I went once without a camera and talked to him. He was crazy about the idea because at that point, and I think it’s actually still true, he felt like the world was still just about to end, and so I was a way for him to get the word out. It was weird when I actually did go back and interview him, I did this long interview, and you know how when you do an interview you save the more sensitive questions for the end, and one of the questions I saved in case he’d get upset was, “Do you think that the media, myself included, exploited you?” He had been really tense throughout the whole interview and it was the only time that he smiled. He actually smiled and chuckled. He said, “Actually, I’m the one that’s exploiting you. Who else is getting interviewed in this prison today?” And it sort of knocked me back for a minute. You know, that’s the way he thinks of it. He feels like he’s using the press, although I would disagree with that.

He’s still in prison? Yeah, he’s gonna be there forever. I showed it in Europe, and the first question was always, “How is this guy in prison for life?” To them, it makes absolutely no sense.

It’s because we’re scared of the mentally ill. Yeah, or just somehow this crazy guy is stuck in the non-crazy part of the criminal justice system, which is itself crazy.

Is he actually in a prison or is it a mental health institution? He’s in Vacaville, which is like a prison, but it’s prison for… not people who are certifiably crazy, but I think they pump them full of drugs and stuff like that. It’s a medical prison.

When did you find out about the incident in your film PIE FIGHT ’69 (2000)? It was probably like ’98 or something. The year after RAINBOW MAN, I started working on WEATHER UNDERGROUND, and I was at the Bettman Archives in New York, which is this great photo archive that has since been bought by Bill Gates and is not accessible anymore. I was going through folders of photos, and one of the photos was this really funny one of a woman in a tutu throwing a pie, and it said, “San Francisco Film Festival, Opening Night, 1969.” And it didn’t say anything more than that and I was completely intrigued. So when I got back I got a couple of articles and read about what happened… the ringleader was Peter Adair, who was a huge hero of mine.

The first real film that had moved me had been… this is a little bit of a digression. I’d had a job in college showing movies in classrooms, and this was back in the days when you would bring a 16mm film into the class, set up the projector, and show it. Most of the movies sucked. I showed INSIDE THE HUMAN BRAIN in psychology classes like 400 times, and these were all old educational movies, but once I went to a comparative religion class and showed this movie HOLY GHOST PEOPLE (1967). It’s Peter Adair’s first movie, and it’s a documentary he made when he was actually still a college student at Antioch College. It’s about this church in West Virginia, Appalachia, in the late ‘60s where they handle snakes. Like that’s part of their ecstatic approach to religion where they handle snakes and speak in tongues. They handle rattlesnakes. It’s fucking amazing. This is a verite documentary in black and white. Unbelievable. After I saw it in class, my jaw dropped and I took it back to the office and just projected it on the wall and watched it again. I was amazed. I’d never seen a movie that movie me like that, so Peter Adair was always a big hero of mine.

When I got these articles about the pie fight incident and read that Peter Adair had been the ringleader, I was really intrigued, and also the articles had mentioned that the radicals had filmed this event with cameras and they wanted to make a film about it. I just started to ask around to find out about what happened to this film, and nobody really knew. So it became this big mystery, and then I talked to Bill Daniel, you know, like the Zelig of the underground film world. He said, “Oh yeah, I found that film once in the free box at Film Arts Foundation.” You know in the lobby there’s this box where you can put things if you just want to give it away. I was amazed. I said, “Well, what did you do with it?” And he said, “I gave it back to Peter Adair,” who was real sick with AIDS and had subsequently died. So I asked around, I went to Peter Adair’s family and his business partner and his old boyfriend, because now I knew that the film existed, but it had sort of disappeared again. Nobody had it and I went through

THE RAINBOW MAN (1997).

all of his stuff and I couldn’t find it. This went on for a couple years so I sort of figured it was lost. Then one day, late at night, I got a call from Bill Daniel, saying, “Sam, you won’t believe this. I was in the basement of ATA (Artists Television Access) going through some unmarked boxes and I found that film again.” The odds of that, that’s almost divine, there’s no other way of explaining it. So I rushed over to look at it and it was amazing footage, it was beautiful. At that point, I was really inspired to make that little movie.

Were the people involved happy that something finally came out of the film and incident? Yeah, you know, the whole thing had been a complete disaster. It was like if somebody made a movie about your worst date or something, uncovered footage about it and made a documentary about it thirty years after the fact and people liked it. I think it’d be this bizarre but somewhat heartening experience.

What drew you to the Weather Underground? I had always known about the group and I loved the story. With RAINBOW MAN I really loved that story. It resonated with me emotionally and it felt to me like it was a story that was almost a parable. This is what I liked about it. It was a really fascinating story, but it evoked ideas and themes and kind of said something in a very indirect way. It was both kind of dramatic and sexy and interesting, but there was also a lot of substance at the heart of it.

And at that point, was it sort of a forgotten thing? I think it’s more than that. It was always weird to me that when you work on a documentary, you have eight billion conversations with people about what you’re working on. Anybody over 40 that I talked to about it, said, “Oh, wow, the Weather Underground,” and 99.9% of people under 40 I mentioned it to would just have this blank look. They’d never heard of the group. I think, in a way, it doesn’t fit into the sort of clean cartoon version of the ‘60s in history at this point. You know, the idea that everybody was a hippie and they all went to Woodstock and protested the war and then the war stopped and everybody got into disco and got jobs. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy to suppress a story like this so much as it’s hard to write about it. You have to write about it in a sophisticated way to fit it into those narratives.

Were the people in the WU pretty much on board? Oh, no. They all initially said it was a horrible idea. None of them wanted it to happen at first. “Why bring this up?” It took a long time to get the people who had been in the group comfortable with us to the point where they would actually participate in the project.

How did you even find them? Some of them are kind of public, but most of the others, it became pretty clear early on that there were going to be good ways and bad ways to find them. Once I just got somebody’s number off the internet and called them up. I said, “Hi, I’m doing a documentary on the Weather Underground. Can I talk to you?” There was this long pause and she said, “I don’t know how you got my number but never call me again,” and hung up. I just realized then that that’s not a good way to do that. We would talk to people and sort of develop a relationship with them and then ask them to help us get in touch with other people. You know, one person could call another and say, “These guys are doing some research and they’re OK, they just want to talk to you in a very off the record way.” Almost anybody will have coffee with you just to see who you are, and after a while we were able to impress upon people that we were serious and it wasn’t Fox News, it was an independent film.

Did you at least have the RAINBOW MAN to show them? I was kind of uncomfortable with that. I didn’t want them to think that I was kind of putting them on the same level as the Rainbow Man. The only person who really asked was Mark Rudd and he loved it. I was completely shocked. He said that he’d never really talked to anybody about it, and he had been sort of a famous guy, so certainly over the years people had tried to get him to talk. He said later that it was THE RAINBOW MAN that had made him decide to talk to us because he felt like it was kind of nuance and dealt with the subject matter in a kind of complex way and wasn’t black and white. I was surprised but happy to hear that.

How is it that you were working with Siegel? I lived in New York in the early ‘90s and I got this job working on a documentary series about Muhammad Ali, just doing photocopies and then I started doing research. We had mutual friends and I ran into him one day when he was looking for a job, so I helped him get a job there. We ended up working together for a year on this series, this totally ridiculous project. It was a lot of fun and we became friends. We had these common interests in history and documentaries, so when I started to get into the Weather Underground film, I really like working with people and almost all my films have been done with somebody else.

How did you go about deciding what was important and what had to be included and how do you figure out what order all those things are? That was really hard. With documentary, you’re always kind of subtly rearranging chronological events. The line between fiction and nonfiction is blurrier than most people think. I’m not making stuff up, but just sort of adjusting sometimes. With the Weather Underground, there were all these people who had a.) been in the group, and you had to have your shit straight for them, and b.) all the people who had lived through that time and had strong feelings about the group, either pro or con. I felt a huge responsibility to know what I was talking about and to get it right. The editing took a long, long time just to make the film communicate the story in a clear way and also to include enough context where it made sense and make sure that important things were in there, and on top of that to make it work as a narrative. Those are sometimes things that conflict. With a documentary, you show people a rough cut of the film and you do that over and over again, the most helpful person was Caveh Zahedi. He was amazing because I didn’t know anything about dramatic film. He said real early on that you’ve got to make this work like a feature film. You sort of have to take that structure and use it, and I haven’t got nothing against that. If those kinds of things work, I’m all for it. It’s a real formula and I didn’t adopt it a hundred percent, but the ideas behind it are really sound.

Was there anything that you thought would work and you ended up taking it out? I went through all sorts of crazy ideas. I had this great footage that I loved and this whole section I put together. I was trying to develop this sort of sub-theme for the movie about the consolidation of the media and sort of explain why nobody under 40 has ever heard of the Weather Underground. I was in the middle of editing and I read 1984 which I’d read in high school and thought was cool, but I read it again and I was flabbergasted by how good and how sophisticated it was. There was this quote in there, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Whoever controls the present controls the past, and whoever controls the past controls the future,” and there’s a lot to that. The idea that whoever is in power now controls what we know of history or how we think about history and people’s notions of the past inform what they’re going to do in the future.

I tried for a long time to work in this more experimental thread through the film that evoked these ideas in a very nondidactic way, and it never worked. Eventually I had to cut it out. That kind of broke my heart because one of the films that I loved and was kind of an inspiration for me in making WEATHER UNDERGROUND was DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998). It’s amazing. It’s a really smart movie about lots of big ideas but never explicitly so. It’s very experimental in that it’s just this weird history of the hijacking phenomenon without anything else that’s explicitly articulated and it’s just a compilation of great footage. I was aiming to do something that was in that direction in terms of being experimental but I kept getting pushed in a more straight direction just by the nature of the story and the kind of responsibility that I felt to make it clear.

So did you show the people in the Underground rough cuts at all or was it just understood that they would just see it at the end? There was never anything said about anything like that, but we did all the interviews before September 11th, and before September 11th, the story was just this odd piece of forgotten history that nobody really cared about. After September

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2002).

11th, obviously the context was so much more charged and people were going to take it a lot more seriously, so it was important to me to show it to all of them when it was done, not so much to get their feedback, but just so they would know what they’re getting into. I wanted all of them to be OK with it. We really hadn’t thought what would happen if they weren’t, but we went around and with everybody watched it, just a VHS tape. They had criticisms of it, but everybody was on board. They’ve all done a lot of screenings, except for David Kilbourn, who’s in prison.

Was there anything that you found out about them that you didn’t expect or was everything pretty well-reported? I had always thought that if you bomb a building, they go out and buy the bomb and put it in the building and that’s it. Takes a couple hours. But it was a really big, pretty impressive operation. They would get a hotel room a couple days before and people would fly in from around the country who knew about how to do the different parts of this, and they had to get all the parts in ways that couldn’t be traced, and get people to take care of things and build it and test it, and it went on and on for a couple of days and involved a lot of people. Then they’d all split, disappear, leave the town after that, go somewhere else for a while. That was kind of surprising.

Instead of a comic book sort of way with capes and masks and shit. Right.

So after that, when did you finally finish it? We finished it at the end of 2002 and showed it for the first time at Sundance in 2003, so a little more than a year ago.

Was it preaching to the converted, or was it a lot of mixed feelings? It depends. In general, it depends on where I’m showing it. In a way, it’s never preaching to the converted, though, because even if it’s an audience of a lot of people who are on the left, a lot of them hate the Weather Underground anyway, so it’s a controversial subject even on the left. Those screenings, there’s often a lot of people who stand up and have a lot of negative things to say, and at a lot of more mainstream screenings, people will say, “Why are you supporting terrorism?” Stuff like that. To me, that’s like a softball pitch because that’s a very easy question to deal with. I don’t necessarily consider this terrorism. Terrorism, to me, is killing or hurting innocent people to make a political statement or to achieve political ends. This was the destruction of property. Bombing is a strong word for what they do. They put like a stick of dynamite in a bathroom and blow up a couple of toilets. They did 25 bombings and never hurt anybody, so to me, it’s closer to the Boston Tea Party, which was the destruction of property to make a political statement and those people are revolutionary heroes, they’re not terrorists. But anyway, Sundance was cool. It was the first time I really showed it, and it got a lot of buzz and the screenings were all sold out and two of the people from the film were there. It was a pretty phenomenal way to premiere the film.

Do people in the industry and distributors take documentary filmmakers seriously as filmmakers, or is it just that you’re stuck with the content and that’s all people care about? Yeah, it’s pretty much that. At this point, some documentaries are making a couple million bucks, so they kind of get taken seriously in that sense, but it’s still like nobody cares about it, which I love. I think one of the bad things about documentaries starting to make money is that I’m afraid it’s going to attract a lot of assholes, the same assholes who are in the feature film world.

So are you supposed to go to meetings about the Academy Awards, or do they just send you a pamphlet about what to wear and where to go? The weird thing was is that for a couple days I never even heard from them.

So you just heard that you were nominated? Yeah, but never heard from them, and I started to wonder if maybe it was a mistake. But eventually I called them and was like, “Hey, it’s me,” and they were like, “Oh, we were gonna call you,” like when you’re trying to blow off somebody, it was the same thing. They don’t really tell you much, like what to wear or anything. I went online and looked at what other people wore. I had always heard that you could get free clothes, although I didn’t know how to do it. Like, do you just go into a mall and yell out, “I want some free clothes!” But you know who hooked me up?

Who? Elizabeth Subrin.

Really? How did she know? She lives in New York and moves in rarified circles, you know, and she emailed some friends of hers at this designer Mark Jacobs, who I didn’t know about but I think people are impressed. They were like, “Yeah, have him call us.” So I called him and the guy was like, “Yeah, no problem. We’ll FedEx you a tuxedo.” It was like they don’t realize that it’s just me.

And this is assuming just because you’re going to be seen on TV at the awards. I mean, for them, they want people to see their clothes, but I was still just like, God.

What else? Did you get like a gift bag or fruitcake or what? Nothing, man. Nothing. They don’t do nothin’ for you. The whole thing ended up nearly breaking me financially. It’s funny. I just get poorer and poorer. People sometimes look at the box office totals on Yahoo, and they’ll see Weather Underground on there and get in touch with me and say, “Dude, you must be rich! The money’s pouring in!” And I’m literally getting poorer and poorer. I’m going to wearing a barrel in a couple months. But it was really fun, that was the most amazing thing and kind of surprising thing. It was super fun. I ran into Prince. That was the high point for me. I turned into this hallway and literally ran into him, like I was face to face with him, and I was so starstruck and shocked that I screamed and I went, “It’s Prince!” He kind of just looked at me like I was a total idiot and went around me. But that was the high point for me.

How fast did people realize you aren’t a celeb? I think they realized that when we walked up. I mean, I’m not going to get a limo. Those things cost tons of bucks. We all walked up and I think that was a dead giveaway. When you walk up in LA, you might as well be carrying a neon sign above your head saying, “I’m nobody.”

So what did you guys drive? We took taxis to the hotel next door.

Did you have some badge saying, “It’s cool, I’m supposed to be here.” Yeah, and that was weird because the red carpet is divided into two halves. The riff raff goes down one side and everybody gets kind of hustled along, and all the stars are on the other side, and the nominees as well. That was so bizarre. It was one of the most surreal spaces I’ve ever been in, because it’s like you’re in this thing and there’s like hundreds of screaming photgraphers, literally this wall of photographers and they’re all screaming, like, “Nicole! To the left!” And then to us they were screaming, “Get the fuck out of the way! Security! Get those people out of there!” We just kind of started to lurk in the background, and it was totally fascinating. This’ll sound a little new age-y, but the energy was totally bizarre, because there were also bleachers where people had camped out for days to get these seats and they’re all screaming, so you’re just kind of at the focus point of this intense blast of energy, and I was just sitting there phoning people trying to explain to them how fucking weird it was. I had never been in a weirder place. It’s like Vegas where it’s so far beyond weird that there’s no point in judging it. It’s just pure spectacle. For ethnographic value, it’s completely fascinating.

Did they seat you high up or what?
I knew this was going to happen. All I wanted to talk about was my serious work and all you want to do is be a starfucker. No, we got four seats right down about ten rows from the front, and my whole posse, we got about a million seats for them in the back. But we were sitting next to Ted Turner and in front of Faye Dunaway, so that was pretty weird.

Is there still no way for somebody who wants to make documentaries to kind of navigate making a living? I’m convinced that the only way to do it is to make films really fast and make ‘em for TV and get paid while you make ‘em. Anybody I know who’s done that has started to make shitty films. I’m just going to keep doing it as long as I can. I do a few college screenings and make a little money off that, but I teach and that’s how I make money, and I also live in a pretty low-budget way.

I think it’s age 50 where people just kind of… Fall off. “It’s a young person’s game.”

Sam Green at the Academy Awards.

Or then it’s the wine commercials, the comedy with Robin Williams… The bad corporate videos.

Yeah, I mean, you gotta plan your eventual sellout. The problem is at that point it’s going to be for such little bucks, an exercise in humiliation. At that point I’m going to go to law school. In California, you don’t actually have to go to law school, you can just take the bar exam. Very few people do it, but I’m just gonna study hard for a year.

Do you have another film lined up? I’m doing something, it’s a real messy idea at this point, but I want to do something that’s more experimental, a documentary that weaves together unrelated stories to kind of make a meta-narrative, in a way, that would be about idealism and utopia, the idea of utopia, and the limitations of human nature. I’m approaching things differently than I have in the past where I’ve always had a story that evokes ideas, and here I’m sort of starting with the ideas and putting together a few stories. I don’t know, it’s still real unformed at this point. I gotta figure out a way to work in a celebrity, though. I’m trying to see how this idea can incorporate the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard. If I could get ODB in this, I’d be really happy.

www.samgreen.to

KEVIN JEROME EVERSON

2010-07-06T13:26:00.001-07:00

Completely proficient in a variety of mediums, KEVIN EVERSON has been the recipient of numerous awards including a 1999 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in photography, and the Peter Wilde Award for Most Technically Innovative Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His films are personal, distinctive studies of his working class background and surroundings. He is incredibly down-to-earth. After a number of shorts, Everson has just finished his first feature, SPICE BUSH (2005).

CINEMAD: How did you get into art? Is it what your parents did?

KEVIN EVERSON: No, no, I got into art because I couldn’t do anything else.

Why, what did you try to do? Well, nothing. I wanted to do botany and shit, but in high school I didn’t do anything other than play sports and chase women. But I had a camera, so I decided to do photography. I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was journalizing or that it had to be art. I started liking that art so I kept doing that art.

So you didn’t ever want to go to college? I did want to go to college so I wouldn’t have to go in Reagan’s military. It was either that or work in a factory, but the factories were closing up in my hometown.

What was your hometown? Mansfield, Ohio. I wanted to go to college because I just wanted to be around stimulating people and meet people from all over the world, although I did go to Akron University, which is the global mecca. [laughs] But there were a lot of Nigerians and Angolans that were going there, so that was cool, meeting cats like that. They had a good engineering program, so I think they were all dealing with that kind of stuff. I just wanted to get away from home, and for me, driving an hour away to go to school was faaaarrrrrr.

SPICE BUSH (2005).

Was Mansfield just basic small-town America? Yeah, small industrial town, and then the factories closed. But then when I went to Akron University and started doing all that art… You know, I was never a really good student. I mean, I was smart in high school, I just didn’t know how to study, but then something clicked in college. Well, first of all, I came home and worked in the factories for a summer. That sobered a motherfucker up hardcore. After that, I was on the Dean’s list every year and I really liked learning. I figured out how to study, started taking art history and philosophy, started making art, started working hard. Using that working class background. And then from there, they had just gotten this new art building and they were trying to put it on the map, so they said, “Hey, don’t you want to go to grad school?” I didn’t know anything about college. I really liked school and I didn’t want to stop, so I just went straight through and got a Master’s of Fine Art in photography. But I did films as an underground. I did a lot of artist books, and I thought the pace and the regimen were the equivalent of short experimental films. I did a lot of Super 8 junk and flicker films, film installations, too.

So was this all at the same school? No, I went to Ohio University for my master’s. Ohio University is in Athens, Ohio. It’s like a state liberal arts school. I didn’t really start making films until like five years after I got out of college because I was just showing a lot of art around the country, and around the world, actually. I had a couple of international exhibitions by that time.

What kind of art were in the shows? Photos, I want to say street photography, in the genre of Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank. Then I did a lot of sculptural work, and that’s how I got into film, because I liked making all this stuff that looked like it belonged in a black American working class kind of home. I would always relate to things in an art manner, like whatever I’d see was art and then I’d remake it and present it on a white wall, like at a gallery. What I really liked was the fact that I knew people, like my parents or my uncles or neighbors or whatever, would go down to Bing’s Furniture and pick out frames for family pictures and assemble them in their house. I really liked the task of selecting and putting stuff up. For me to portray that task, I had to use a time-based medium, so I started making films in like ’95.

photo by Kevin Everson

What were you doing at that point? Were you teaching already? Yeah, ‘cause right when I got out of college, I taught at my old alma mater Akron University, taught there for like three years, taught at Oberlin College for a year, and one year I got a bunch of grants and didn’t teach at all. Then I went down to Tennessee and taught for four years at the University of Tennessee, and I’ve been here (Univ of Virginia) for four years also.

What do you think about teaching? The kids are fun, every day is different, you get a steady check, and you get resources. I know my New York colleagues go down to Kinko’s and spend hundreds of dollars, and I just have to walk down to the copier. I got staples, office supplies, I’m telling you, man, long-distance phone calls… That’s the shit that really helps the factory. The press is still saying that TARNATION (2004) cost $213 to make, but the fuckin’ external drive costs $270, so I know that ain’t true. You can’t put all those hours on a fuckin’ iMac. But I’m talking about stuff like gas and copies, that’s the real money stuff, the nitpicking. I can see how easy it is to get married to the universities. It’s like how these NYU kids take forever to get out of college because they want to use the equipment. That’s why they take forever to make their thesis films. It’s just a strategy so they don’t have to rent equipment. Even when I was doing photos and sculptures, you can’t use printmakers outside of an institution. It’s impossible. So I started gearing up for leaving an institution and still being able to make that art, so I taught myself to paint in grad school. That’s the kind of stuff I can always do.

photo by Kevin Everson

What’s an example of the kind of stuff you do for the artist books? I’d make all my covers and my bookbinding. It would be photo-based or some drawings or prints or transfers. Just kind of image-based stuff. I also did a lot of sculptural things out of wood. I had some power tools, so I could make art outside. My strategy was that if I had an idea, I had to make drawings of it in several different mediums. There’d be a short film version of it, a photo, an artist book, whatever, and whichever one was cheapest at that time, that’s the one that would get done. All that stuff is the real world when it comes to that art. That’s what I always tell my students. This shit is not the kind of stuff you’ve got to prepare yourself for. In ’95 or ’96, I started doing more films because I could kind of afford them and do them on the cheap. Then it was all digital editing, started cutting on Avid in Columbus, Ohio.

I come across more and more people who screwed around for a long time before they figure out what they want to do, or how to do it. It’s funny. I think a lot of people just don’t finish stuff and don’t have that kind of mentality. Right before I finished SPICE BUSH, I started writing a new film. I don’t want to linger on stuff forever, and I think that comes from an art mentality. You just want to make a body of work. I just have a regimen, like in the fall, I should be doing this. Even when I didn’t quite get SPICE BUSH finished, I had already started doing what I was going to do anyway.

You’ve got a thing with numbers as far as the work goes, like you’re obsessed with numbers in your films. Is that something like what you were doing in the art, too? Yeah, I was always into lottery and chance, permutations, that kind of thing. But mostly like the working class thing, the relentlessness of everyday life.

Like wanting to win the lottery? Yeah, which is a poor people tax. When I show that stuff to an academic art crowd, they don’t know what the fuck that is. It’s totally exotic to them. I showed a rough cut of SPICE BUSH the other day and people were asking me all kinds of questions about the lottery.

SPICE BUSH (2005).

What’d they ask? Well, first of all, the neighborhood black folks that came, they were actually happy that nobody died. [laughs] I think that [the art crowd] were waiting for a narrative to pop at ‘em. But then again, it’s slightly a documentary, so they got comfortable with that, and then it just switches on these people forty-seven minutes into it. They were slightly impatient, but they actually kinda liked it, I guess.

They can relate to the “characters” at least. It’s not even that. It’s how they relate to cinema and cinemaspace and what they anticipate on screen. If you position African-Americans in a way that you weren’t used to seeing, people get either intrigued or annoyed or impatient or whatever. It’s just a different kind of language.

So the academics were more interested in the lottery. They were into the political aspect. They automatically see black as political. For me, I’m a formalist. I try to make things look handsome straight up and down and have art references in it. There’s social issues going on in it, too, but that’s something that I think about very late in the game, when I’m designing films.

Right, you don’t go into it like, “Oh, I’ve got to show this so the crowd thinks that…” No, I’m not that kind of didactic when it comes to that. SPICE BUSH is set up as, no matter what you think it is, it’s not a window, it’s a total film. It’s like a language. It’s got narrative, it’s got documentary, a little experimental, it’s got all these collages… Hopefully, you never think that you’re not watching the film. I think the biggest question in the film was when the little girl was watching the TV show. In those three segments, you are definitely watching cinema, like that one, GET CHRISTIE LOVE (1974). You can tell it’s not real. And the one with the dinosaurs…

The one where they use a real lizard that’s slowed down. Yeah. I like the fact that it’s all self-referential and it’s all kind of fake, although I like to use reality as a device.

How do you find yourself preparing for the films, then? Are you actually doing a lot of the drawings for the films now? Actually I’m writing more, because I’m not looking at things and drawing them, I’m listening to stories and writing them down.

What about your short VANESSA (2002)? Oh, there’s drawings for that, because I was in Rome and I was looking at all that Michelangelo. All those circle images, that’s just mimicking Doni Tondo by Michelangelo.

What was the deal in Rome? I had a fellowship at the American Academy, so I was there for like eleven months. They give it to four American artists a year. I made four or five films over there and I made a huge body of photo work. That actually screwed me up from teaching because I realized how much I could get done if I wasn’t teaching. I literally have not been the same since then, because I’m really resisting it.

What else did you get out of that Rome experience? Was it the first time you’ve been in Europe? No, I had shows there, so I had gone there for shows and visited people there before. It was the first time I lived there.

What did you think about the art scene as far as Europe versus America? In America, we always complain about how in Europe there’d be more support. Well, Romans are very nationalistic about their art, whereas here, people don’t go out and support Ohio artists. It just doesn’t have that kind of history. But Italians don’t have a lot of contemporary art, because they’re all into restoration and shit. I think the American art form is probably film, but they haven’t really done a good job with that.

How much film history did you do? Did you feel like you had to go back and see what had been done? Nah, because every time I’d start a film, I’d just look at paintings and other artwork. It’s based on formal devices, not just cinema. I think this next feature is gonna be cut like a thriller because it’s going to be about a bank teller and a race car driver.

In SPICE BUSH, did you feel like you had to do everything yourself? Yeah, it was one of those things that I did by myself.

Was it partly resources, or you just like doing it? Or both? It’s that stuff, it’s that I came in late in the game, I had a rough spring where I was doing a lot of travelling. Also, I just wanted to see if I could do it. I had it all scripted out, I just had to make sure I got all this information.

How did you feel working with non-actors? Did you have to convince them to be in it? Well, I haven’t convinced them yet. [laughs] You know, it was a nightmare. More so than I thought it would be, because people back home think I’m playing, like I’m not serious, so it became that kind of thing. My uncle was really into it, I think because it was about him. He liked the script because he thought I made it up. All the other locations, they would just not respond to me. This time, I’m gonna have the Virginia Film Commission lock down locations for me. There was two weeks where I couldn’t do anything for SPICE BUSH because I was just waiting for this one location and it just would not happen. It was one of those things where I couldn’t afford to do the film and I couldn’t afford not to do it in a weird way. I didn’t get any grant money so it came out of pocket. It’s probably about six thousand dollars now.

What’s the documentary that you’re working on? I’m working on this feature film called LOWNDES COUNTY. It’s about the teenage bus drivers in 1959, Columbus, Mississippi dealing with these secondhand school buses. It’s a script of 102 pages. We gotta clean it up a little bit. That’s a narrative film, we’re just waiting for the cash.

And they were teenagers driving school buses? Yeah. My two uncles and my dad, they drove school buses when they were 14 or 15. Everybody worked during segregation. The movie’s actually about these sisters that took attendance on the bus. We just used that situation to create this experimental narrative. My producer budgeted it $450,000. So I’ve got that.

SPICE BUSH (2005).

Nick Flynn has a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The book got great reviews a few months ago. It’s a memoir about his dad. Nick worked in a homeless shelter and one day his dad showed up. I did some films about poets. When I was in Rome, there was this resident poet named Mark Holiday, he actually wrote something for me to shoot. And this guy named Vincent Katz who was also a resident poet, I did a little film on him, too. And I’m doing one on Nick Flynn, too. He’s got this poetry book called Blind Huber about this French cat who studied bees in the 18th Century. I took a student to Blacksburg, Virginia and we shot these beehives on the Virginia Tech campus.

I’ve got some other short films floating around here that I can’t even make sense of, and I want to do that film about the race car driver and the bank teller. You’ve heard of the de Medici family, the ones that bought art back in the day? One of them was black, Alexandro de Medici, and I’m thinking about putting him in there because he was a banker and a traveler. Maybe have a little classical soliloquy about that. That would relate to the speed of the race car and the money in the bank. And he was also killed by his cousin.

The thing I saw about that family was that they were trying to figure out what happened and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t think a lot of that stuff happened, but they probably did kill each other once in a while.” When you’ve got money and power and greed and ass, it’s gotta be done. Anyway, it’ll be about that kind of stuff. I think it’ll be a feature, like 60 minutes or more. The film’s also about landscapes, because if you’re a banker and you’re giving out loans, you’re really dictating who lives where. Plus I’ve got to do these SPICE BUSH paintings, like the colors and stuff. I have some descriptions of spice bush butterflies, so I want to make some paintings.

Is that going in the film? Nah, that’s just art.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ke5d/

Where To Show Your Film

2010-04-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Cause:
I made a
a) film
b) video
c) installation
d) curated a strange series of shorts

and because its an unusual project, I

x) can't get a distributor
y) have no illusions about what it is
z) want to do it myself

Effect:
Cinemad list of theaters

This map is at a early stage, I'm adding to it every day. But the concept is simple - these are theaters or galleries or warehouses - screening rooms in one way or another, that tend to work with individuals. They also seem to have good taste. So find the ones that work for your project and contact them for a show. Good to have your own website for the project to direct them to.

And if you are a screening location, let me know - filmplante at g mail

Anything goes - I've projected against moving trains and will be booking a film on tour to maritime museums this fall.

AND - distributors with unique films out there - here are some places you should know about.

-mp

PETER HUTTON

2009-11-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

Any time there is a poll of the best cinematographers working today, the list will be half-full. By default of being a pop resource, any list of remarkable image-makers is usually missing out on the entire avant-garde film world.

Alas, in a perfect screening room, a list of great cinematographers working today will have Peter Hutton in the top ten. Nothing looks like his films. An utterly gorgeous mix of thoughtful framing, nuanced contrast and distinct subjects, Hutton’s images are at once breathtaking and poetic. With strong photography and never a single sound, his films pull off something even more unbelievable – they aren’t pretentious. He goes out with a camera and essentially makes diary movies. But it’s really about capturing incredible moments in a beautiful way. Whether it’s an extreme (a fire in Boston, cliffs in Iceland, a ship being built) or the seemingly mundane (ice on the Hudson, odes to painters), Hutton will make you sink in.

A longtime sailor, Hutton has traveled the world, making films in many cities and on the lost territory of the oceans in between. Hutton recently had a MOMA retrospective in 2008.

CINEMAD: Was there a flashpoint where you became interested in art film?

PETER HUTTON: For the first 10 years of my creative life I wasn’t making films, I was a painter as a teenager, then a sculptor. I was in L.A. for a summer in the mid-60s. I went to see one of Kenneth Anger’s experimental films on La Cienega. I then moved to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Art Institute. I started seeing Harry Smith and Bruce Conner at the Straight Ashbury Film Society that Freuda Bartlett ran. I thought this was going to be huge! Everybody did! In some way a rival to commercial film culture, because the parameters were so blown open from traditional cinema. It’s interesting watching it over the last 40 years collapse into a pretty delicate little culture. It’s kind of kept alive by young people who are just discovering this work, who get really excited about it, and fortunately start writing about it. But it’s also kept alive by those who teach, the art schools who are, for the most part, employing a lot of people who are propagating it through showing their own and other people’s work. It’s a relatively modest yet a wonderful alternative to commercial film culture.

NEW YORK PORTRAIT, CHAPTER 1 (1978-79)

If you want to see it, you’re going to have to become involved with it.

I think that’s good though. One of the things that is important to me is the contrast between the accessibility of TV and commercial media that are being pushed at you. You really need to find stuff, you have to be curious, go out of your way. Like going to flea markets and finding great old books, photographs, paintings. You have to have that curiosity. There’s an element of satisfaction that comes with discovering something that wasn’t publicized or in front of commercial culture. I like the fact that there’s an obscurity to the culture. Maybe that’s good. Even if there is a sort of crossover with the mainstream, like Andy Warhol. Probably the most well known artist who did films, who had this huge public image within the culture.

Did your parents want you to take on another path?

Not at all. Actually my father had a little film society. He was a New Yorker that got displaced to Detroit, so he always had a sort of New York vibe. He wasn’t hugely sophisticated, but he loved theater, film and literature. He started a little film society with a friend of his and they used to show Jacque Tati’s films.He loved M. Hulot's Holiday (1953), PLAYTIME (1967), Mon Uncle (1958) and all of his films.

Actually, he got a letter from Tati at one point because he would rent these films so much. He was just an individual renting these 35mm prints in Detroit. Even Tati, given how precious he was, wasn’t that well known in this country. He was kind of obscure. Even though you could say Tati was progressively experimental my father wasn’t into super alternative stuff. He just liked culture. So that was good for me. He acted in the theater and did TV acting in Detroit.

As a graduate student I moved onto film, because I did performance work in the 60’s, where I started making little 8mm films of performances and realizing ‘Whoa! This is awesome’ because the films are 100 times more interesting than the performances. They were black and white, they were very abstract and you could manipulate the performances. The performances themselves were pretty amateur, I was just mimicking the phenomena of happenings that were going on by Alan Kaprow, Oldenberg, Red Grooms, etc.

Then I thought, ‘Well this is great, because I can just film things and that’ll be my art. I don’t need ideas anymore. I can just use my eyes and go around the world looking at things and it’ll be great.’ I kind of combined that with working on ships and traveling. In some ways it’s always been the same. Combining traveling, looking, filming. That takes care of itself in a way. Most filmmakers don’t always take their cameras with them when they travel. Today’s world, they do because they can bring tiny video cameras. I was always amazed at how people can bring these 16mm cameras with them when they went on trips to Europe. I’ll ask them if they took their camera and they’ll say, “No, I didn’t want a hassle with that.”

Did you study still photography?

No. Painting was my big deal. My uncle was an artist, Edward Plunkett, he knew a lot of NY artists including Marcel Duchamp and collected pop art. He was a great influence on me. My mother was also an amateur painter. When I was a kid, my father had kept a photo album as a merchant seaman. I loved looking at these photo albums filled with images of places he had gone when working on ships; India, China, Indonesia. They were just snapshots. Landscapes, seascapes, very amateur casual photographs. This was before TV, so it was a very cool place to zone out and imagine these places. When I started working on ships, I was so happy to be going to these places. It built up my appreciation for this sort of traveling.

I took photographs when I went to India, then after that I eventually learned film. In the 70’s, the last time I ever worked on a ship was in ’74, so there was a 10-year period from ’64 – ’74 where I intensely worked on ships. I paid my way through art school by working on ships. I went to sea for a semester, then to school for a semester, back and forth from sea to school.

SKAGAFJORDUR (2004)

That’s unique for an art star.

It was a good thing to do. When I was 16, my father told me ‘I know you might want to go to college, but you should really look into working on ships for at least a couple of years.’ It’s a pretty dicey world in many cases, so it’s rare that parents would go ahead and support you in that regard. I think for him it was the best thing he did in his life.

Was it that attitude that you’d grow up faster?

My father was a real romantic. I, in turn, grew to develop an appreciation for Romanticism. There’s a lot of poets, writers, a lot of people who worked as merchant seaman during the 1940’s and 50’s. I read a book by Kerouac, written when he was at Columbia University. He was actually a football player. It was cool getting a totally different perspective on who he was. He rode merchant ships for a while. I think it was all a part of that tradition of working while you were traveling to different countries, having the options to do that.

AT SEA (2007)

What were your duties?

In the days when I worked on ships, they were smaller. I almost always worked on the Deck gang. This is pre-containerization. I spent a summer on the Great lakes working on Ore boats then I saved money and moved to Honolulu from Detroit to catch real ocean going ships.

The first salt water ship I worked on was a freighter that was contracted to haul grain to India. We were giving the Indian government grain. This is about 1964. After arriving in Honolulu, I went to the SIU union hall and the dispatcher said, ‘Hey kid, you want to go to Calcutta?’ I was like a dream come true. I was used to going to places on the Great Lakes, Toledo, Ashtabula, Duluth – but Calcutta!! Finally I was really going somewhere.

A lot of the guys on the ships were loners. One of my best friends was an ex-con that had just gotten out of Oahu State Prison, a Portuguese guy. I never asked him why he was doing time. He was cool, a nice guy. He just needed a gig. The ship was leased from a company in Singapore, Liberty Navigation, by USAID to carry wheat to India during a famine. But the wheat had been held in the ship so long – the ship started in Tacoma, WA and sailed to Guam and broke down and was towed back to Honolulu. The original crew disembarked. They hired an entirely new crew when the boiler was repaired. By the time we got to India, a lot of the wheat had rotted inside the ship. They popped open the hatches to unload it and there was this huge stench. It was Conradian in a way. A deed of good will gone very bad.

We actually stayed in Calcutta for almost a month because we first dropped off a load in Madras, then headed up to Calcutta, discharged the remaining cargo. After we left, we ran over a huge buoy in Hooglie river (the AB on watch was drunk). It actually bent the propellers, so they had to tow us back to Kidderpore, the waterfront area of Calcutta. They filled the two forward holds of the ship with sea water to jack it up in the stern, to cut up the damaged part of the propeller off. Then when we headed west back to San Francisco they filled the last 2 holds with sea water to hold the stern down (smaller propeller). We went back and raked angles. It was weird.

Since we spent a month in Calcutta, most of the sailors moved off the ship and rented rooms and hotels. A lot of companies, when they would send the ship to India, they would contract Indians to paint the ship because the labor was so cheap at the time. While we were at port, there was about 300 men hanging off the edge of the ship with little hammers wacking on the hull. The racket was unbearable, you couldn’t even think! So we all moved off the ship into cheap hotels. It was great, I saw Calcutta and it changed my life. Being in that place at that time, exposed to a world unknown to me.

You were 18 or 19 then?

19. That in itself was an important experience for me. I never saw the world quite the same after that. It kind of busted me out of the typical, young, naïve, midwestern frame of mind. I quickly developed this passionate desire to travel more and to learn about what I was experiencing. I had a very limited understanding of the world. The sea makes you aware of a different velocity of time.

As a kid, I read a lot of Maritime books, Jack London, people like that, big adventures. Subsequently I read more of the classic stuff. There’s so much great literature about the sea. Visually, it’s fascinating because it’s without any parameters. It’s not the world that we know. It’s almost like traveling into outer space. I always thought that was perspective was great, particularly as someone who used to be a painter. It exposes you to this different atmosphere. You experience things that feel really unique. Even though there’s the tradition of Maritime painting. If you think of someone like Turner, his whole life was spent doing seascapes, paintings about ships and naval battles and nature referencing this incredible atmosphere.

When you work on ships, it’s a job so you get locked into it. But there’s a lot of downtime. You’re able to space out and look at the atmosphere of the sea. That in itself is amazing. The sense of time is really different because you’re traveling so slow. Sometimes on ships you’re dead in the water. They shut them down and work on the engine or something like that and you’re just out there floating. In the middle of nowhere.

One time in the middle of the Pacific, we stopped because they were working on the boiler on this grain ship. A whale came up and was scraping barnacles off the side. All the guys who were up forward were hanging over the front of the ship staring down at the sea. Here was this giant whale scraping barnacles off against the hull of the ship. Wow! Stuff like that was mind-boggling.

Sailing into storms, I’ve got a lot of stories of how visually intense it was. In the 70’s, when I was working on tankers, there was one night when we were sailing from Thailand to the Persian Gulf. We had just turned the corner around Sri Lanka in the Indian ocean and I was on watch. Which meant that I was right at the fore-peak of the ship, standing there. What a deckhand would do was look off in the horizon and look out for lights of other ships approaching. If you saw light, you’d ring a bell and report it to the bridge. There was also a phone there so you could call up and say there was a light about two points off the starboard or port bow up there. It was kind of an old system to keep the guy on the bridge who was steering the ship informed. Even though he couldn’t see it, he knew where to go with the radar.

TIME AND TIDE (2000)

One night I was out there, the moon was out, it was a summer night. It was warm, I was in a t-shirt. All of the sudden I felt it getting really cold. I started scrunching up a little bit. Then I realized it was getting darker. The moon went behind some clouds. Colder, darker, colder, darker. It was amazing! I felt like we were sailing into an inkwell.

I didn’t realize there were so many degrees of darkness. Pretty soon, you couldn’t see anything. We were sailing into a storm, which I wasn’t aware of. The clouds covered the moon and everything closed in on the ship. It started raining, the seas became very active. Then the officer on the bridge shined a light down on me, which meant that I should go up to the bridge. I turned around, and a wave came over the bow. The seas were starting to boil.

So I went to the bridge and I continued to watch this rainstorm. We were sailing into this storm. It was so beautiful as a visual moment. Something you could never film, because it was so dark. It was this experience of sailing into this murky, dark world. Eventually we punched through and it started getting lighter, warmer, the seas started calming down, it started getting warmer. I was like, ‘What an experience!’ As an artistic moment, it was really interesting, almost spiritual.

So you’re encountering stuff like that, which is awesome. Like going through a tornado, but without the vulnerability.

Yet terrifying.

I don’t know if I mentioned this the other night, but the more I’ve done this, the more I’ve dealt into the history of it. I was reading in National Geographic about the Polynesians, because after spending so much time in Hawaii, you become interested in Polynesian culture. When they used to canoe across the Pacific, they’d go from Hawaii to Tahiti, to Bora Bora, whatever… on their oceanic migration.

They developed all these different systems of navigation. One was to study the color of clouds. They’d be in these large canoes studying clouds way off in the distance above the horizon, they were carefully looking at the clouds, If they saw a small hint of green, that meant that the cloud was over an island that was not yet visible because of the curvature of the earth. Who would have thought that was a reliable way to navigate? “Oh it’s a little green over there, 30 miles off.”

There’s a kind of culture of survival when you’re out at sea, where you have to develop a kind of visual acuity to know where you’re going, what’s happening. That’s always been a part of the Maritime culture; to be looking very carefully. One of the benefits aside from all the traveling is that you’re forced to look at things much more carefully. Particularly more at night. You’re out there in the darkness, you’re thinking ‘There’s nothing happening up here’, but night after night after night, you begin to see things that blow your mind. Pools of phosphorescent plankton under the sea that are exploding and illuminating. It was like hallucinating. Going through the Sulu Sea in the Philippines, it was like there were depth charges going off and there was light exploding under the surface of the ocean. Porpoises would streak through these pockets of plankton like underwater rockets. “Am I really seeing this?”

TIME AND TIDE (2000)

How does that change or affect your depth of field, especially when you start looking at things through a camera? Did you feel differently because water’s clear?

One of those great moments, I don’t know if you can even record that on film, the darkness. It was more about this idea that we can see a lot more than we can understand. Our eyes give us the capacity to see and process a lot of information. In today’s world, we don’t need to survive that way, so we don’t use our eyes that way. We tend not to spend hours looking at clouds, watching light move. People who were out in that world had to get engaged in a more intense visual level to figure things out.

For a filmmaker it was good, not so much for technical phenomena, more about ‘Ok, this is something I can do’ and just looking at the world in general. Looking more carefully at things, developing a greater appreciating the idea of looking.

There’s a visual passivity with a newer generation of filmmakers where things are fed to us through TV, media, entertainment, what have you. We don’t have to sit and look at stuff as much. Its all fed to you. That’s something I think that comes into play, especially as a painter. Looking at other painters and being fascinated by the way they looked at things and how they realized visual ideas. Those influences were invaluable. But it might come from some primal thing such as being on the ocean for a long period of time.

A lot of my early art teachers (at the university of Hawaii) were Chinese and Japanese. There ideas of looking at things were much more meditative, contemplative. Where you sort of give yourself to that thing you’re looking at. Whether it’s a rock garden, a brush painting, you’re kind of wandering into it visually.

I think a lot of Western art is more like shouting at you saying ‘Hey! I’m over here, look at me! I’m funny! I’m weird…’ Pop art, contemporary art, it’s trying to get your attention because there’s so much wacky shit going on.

Eastern art is much more quiet, subtle. It’s about you carving out some space to interact with that thing. That had a much bigger influence on me and how I make films. The pleasure I get just from looking at nature. The shadows, light, events, people, weather. There’s a kind of wonderful appreciation for light and dark. Very reductive. It’s not about the narrative or events occurring. It’s about the small details and time passing. You give your time to vision and it gives you a reward, it’s a discipline.

Did you ever feel contained by the camera frame? Or did painting help inform that?

That’s part of the whole art thing. You’re always referencing. Even in sculpture I always kept making things in a box. I would do big events, make big objects, steel welding, props, found objects and a whole vocabulary of sculptural objects in a relatively short period of time. I ended up making these Plexiglas boxes and then putting things inside, sort of architectural elements, making these miniature rooms.

In some ways these cubes were like the frame as 2D and 3D spaces. There was always a fascination with wanting to miniaturize ideas of the world. Film to me is still about space, time. It’s still about painting with the language of cinema. It’s a very reductive appreciation for some of the potential of cinema that was never realized aesthetically because it was so eclipsed by entertainment, narrative and telling stories that some of the core phenomena of what was happening spatially, the ambiguity of space. 2D and 3D that translation is still very interesting for me as an artist.

AT SEA (2007)

That stereoscopic effect goes way back to the earliest times of photography. You can achieve that 2D obviously when you’re on a ship.

Ken Jacobs, I appreciate what he’s doing with the nervous system, working with the apparatus, creating a shuttering effect, mixing in his own technological stuff. You begin to reference that early stuff and it’s amazing. It’s about depth, space and movement. He’ll take those old stereo-optic photographs and activate them into a way that translates into cinematic time. Fucking gorgeous. It’s a very simple thing that grows spatially.

When I started making films in the 60’s, I wanted to keep everything very simple and keep working. Cinema tends to be this additive thing, gets more complicated technologically. Just the logistics of cinema is not an easy enterprise for someone coming from an arts background. It’s very expensive and complicated logistically. I wanted to do it alone, keep it personal and private. Almost like making sketchbooks. The more I kept it simple the more I could work.

That’s hard. People fall so in love with cinema, it’s such a seductive culture. Then you go Fuck! I need some serious cheese to keep things going because you almost get into this competitive thing where I marvel that my students are making films that are in some way, they’re using the industry as a model to emulate. They’re walking around with these tiny little cameras by themselves and trying to do that. That’s great! It’s ambitious. But it’s also so unrealistic because, they’re lucky they’ve got $500 to make a film. All the narrative strategies they pursue tend to get compared to Hollywood stuff. Even the indie stuff that tends to cost $5 million, $14 million or $1 million, there’s something perverse about getting seduced into that big money game.

Every generation should subvert that tradition and say, ‘Wait, I can do this stuff with $150, a shitty camera’ and turns someone’s head around by doing something that’s so obvious nobody ever thought about. It’s not about the pyrotechnics, it’s about something else, being inventive with limitations.

There’s no real structure about how to make short films in most film schools, because you are referencing legendary directors who make studio-backed feature films. You need to learn the craft from the bottom up.

Now with the accessibility to digital cameras, editing, resources and everything, the whole apparatus of cinema has been thrust into a more democratic kind of mix. Everyone says ‘I can do this!’ They get their friends together and try, that’s great, but that’s so much easier said than done. The time that it takes to develop an eye, such as an cinematographer for example, is huge. You need to shoot a lot of film in order to understand that language.

Kids are just picking up cameras, there’s this whole lack of appreciation for practice. Just practicing your craft as a director, as a cameraman, as an editor. Learning to negotiate that tradition with some confidence, that only comes from experience.

I always say to my kids, ‘Listen, you can’t just pick up a violin and expect to function with it unless you know it inside out with your arm, your neck, your brain, your hands.’ It’s like that with everything and to think that film is different because it’s technologically easy is bullshit!

Do you show your students paintings at all?

I show them photography, and painting in all my classes,particularly whenI do a cinematography class. The first cameramen studied painting. Not super seriously, but they learned about lighting there.

What’s the first medium that dealt with light in a pictorial way? Painting! Rembrandt had the north light, Vermeer had this side lighting thing, there’s a lot to learn from these guys. The first generation of Hollywood cameramen used these strategies, realized how effectively they could be used in films.

Film is so logistically complicated that you can’t light everything like a painter. But at least you can see how that changes the space, how that sculpts the space and articulates depth. There’s a lot to learn from that.

When I do the cinematography class, we spend a lot of time looking at Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hopper and just talking about fundamentals. Where’s the light? Where’s the light coming from? What’s that doing to the space? But that’s film school 101, it should be. Then we look at photography, Cartier-Bresson, Aget, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus as well as a lot of contemporary work. Talking about the decisive moment and where things are in the frame, how your eye tracks things, try and give them a more complete and complex appreciation for making images.

They have to compound all that filmmaking with film history. So hopefully they can get it on that end as well through looking at Renoir, Tarkovsky, Ozu or whoever. We spend a lot of time opening up windows for these kids for the things they’re not finding in popular culture. When you look at KNOCKED UP (2007), or any of these popular movies, it’s not about the visuals, it’s a comedy. It’s like a TV sitcom in a way. They’re not about the craft of filmmaking.

Barely making it work in the editing.

Maybe that doesn’t even matter anymore. The convergence of entertainment, it’s always ironic for me to tune into the Academy Awards and everybody’s always talking about ‘artistic this’ and ‘artistic that’. I thought ‘what the hell are they talking about?’ You know? Is this really art? The high and the low of American culture…… its mind boggling.

Do you feel like you’re more an image-maker than a filmmaker?

Yeah. I don’t even tell people I’m a filmmaker. It suggests someone who tells stories with cinema, or putting together elaborate ideas through filmmaking. Mine are more like sketchbooks, keeping diaries and records of things that interest me. I hope that at some point in time they might be interesting things for people to look back on. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Picasso’s sketchbooks, they were so fascinating because they were not the big pieces, but they were the process of what contributed to the big pieces. They’re really interesting as sketchbooks. Even someone such as Leonardo’s sketchbooks, they’re so complex and mysterious. It’s the rough, funky, elegant, interesting insights on the process.

Ultimately, what’s great about film is the process of shooting all the time. I come from an arts background where you’d go to the studio all day to work. You’d learn a lot from that repetition of trying to solve all these problems.

Film in this day and age, kids who go to art school remain very conceptual. They’re always sitting around waiting for the big idea. Where as they should be practicing more. Especially with digital, where you can go out and shoot for 12 hours. You can erase it, tape over it, if nothing comes out of it…no big deal. The idea of actually practicing the craft, of collecting images, developing your eye. I’m amazed that people don’t appreciate how important that is to develop a more active relationship to practice.

It gets back to the violin metaphor. Practice, practice, practice and the camera becomes your eye and not so much this complicated technological thing to mediate to get an image. The whole process becomes forward, you can be spontaneous the way any good photographer can knock off a shot without having to take a reading or setting everything up.

That kind of fluidity is important to me. You can capture things that are just occurring under short notice. There can be a revelation. It would be like living in a city, turning a corner and BAM! There’s this thing on fire, you can be there with a camera and grab it. Truth is so much stranger than fiction. There should be these narrative crews lurching around these environments, you know ‘ACTION!’ Cars going through an intersection and a pedestrian is trapped in the middle of the street. That’s better than most of the shit they cook up in Hollywood anyway.

How is distribution going for you?

It’s ok. I have a distributor in Germany and Canyon Cinema. It gets the work out to this small artistic community. But it’s a big problem. It’s something interesting that Gene Youngblood talks about in Expanded Cinema. He was thinking about that back in the 60’s. Alternative cinema needs a really good distribution system. Nobody anticipated the Internet back then. There were a lot of interesting people thinking about technology back then. He sort of had his hand on the zeitgeist.

The co-ops were the main source of alternative experimental cinema. It was effective to some extent, but it was the format of 16mm and how you get that seen by people as there weren’t that many theaters showing films on 16mm projectors. It’s always been an issue. With film, I always do as much as I can with the resources that I have. Clearly with the Internet and DVDs all suggest a whole other level. The problem with the people of my generation is that you get adjusted to your medium and acclimated to good projection and having enough room, blah blah blah.

There’s a lot lost when you have to compensate for the size of a TV screen or the window on the Internet. It’s better to keep your work within the context of the theater where people go and sit down and actually see the work. They have a commitment to experience it, whereas everything else seems less formal and less engaging via the internet.

If video projection could only catch up to film projection - it’s gotten so much better, but it’s not all the way. It’s starting to become more affordable to buy a projector for your house. At least then you could start to get a little closer.

It’s getting there, they’ll figure it all out within the next 4 or 5 years. Every year the competition between the film image and the digital image becomes less obvious. Not the competition, but sometimes I can’t tell the difference, and I’ve been shooting film for 30 years!

Have you tried shooting on video at all?

I’ve shot on HD, every format. Usually for other people who’ve seen my films. I’ve shot features and documentaries. It’s fun to work that way because people are typically looking for a different eye or a different perspective.

Does that give you a lot of freedom?

Yes. I don’t do a lot, if it seems like a good situation I’ll go for it. The last thing I work on was Albert Maysles who called me. He was doing a big documentary on Christo - the “Gates” project in Central park. He gave me this huge HD camera, the size of a Samsonite suitcase. My wife and I drove around in a golf cart for a week in the winter tripping out on these gates with the orange fabric.We had a ball. He loved it too. No one else was looking at it the same way we were.

I shot a couple of features. One was fairly successful and won a prize at Sundance [NO PICNIC, 1987, won Best Cinematography], the other never got distributed (titled ERRIE). It’s a challenge to work in that system because you’re working against the clock. You have a lot of limitations you have to resolve. I’m not really suited for it but it was fun to do. I never learned film in a practical way when I was young. I just bought a camera, figured it out and started shooting. I didn’t have the confidence or thought I could make money doing that. I greatly admire filmmakers who can survive narrative film culture, it’s a beast.

One time this director in New York saw a poster for a film program and there was a little postage stamp sized image from one of my films. Based on that little image, he called me up asking if I wanted to shoot a feature. I had a really good assistant; Mike Spiller, who ended up going on to be a successful DP. He was really sharp. It helps when you have a good support staff. Really all they want is your eye. The DP frames it up and you’re not solving a thousand technical issues. If you have a good gaffer and AC then it makes your job really fun.

Are you shooting on a Bolex?

I have an old Arri-S.

So you can still do a long shot, but the roll is going to run out.

I like that, I think that’s ok. I think one of the best thing about filmmaking is running out of film. It gets you to change your point of view and mix it up a bit more. With the HD thing, you can do a shot for 2 or 8 hours. You don’t want to kill the edit of it with infinite variations of the same thing. I asked Albert when we were done shooting the Gates project how much material we had. HBO wanted an hour cut.

He said ‘Right now, we’ve got about 600 hours.’

I just thought ‘Oh my God, the poor editor…’

How much footage do you usually shoot and not use?

I tend to shoot 2:1 ratio. Sometimes 3:1. 4:1 is the most extravagant because I can’t afford it. The films aren’t about perfection, they’re about trying to get a hold of something and giving it some credibility and quality. Almost everything I shoot looks reasonably good, it’s just that sometimes you’re always trying for something different. ‘Well, maybe I’ll shoot it here, maybe there, in this light or in that shadow…’ You’re constantly pushing the envelope a little bit just to see.

In film, I’m never 100% sure of how it’s going to come out. Even after 30 years I can’t nail it, but you don’t care about that. I’m always trying to give the images a little edge so that they look different from the average thing.

For the most part, there’s not an audience for what I do. You sort of work with what you’re happy with and throw the rest out. You hope that people can learn from it or have some sort of appreciation for it. It’s a challenge to keep it a personal thing.

You won’t die if it doesn’t work, but you want it to be accepted, as you want to contribute something to the audience. You’re invested in it. It’s not any different form writing or painting, you just want to define yourself in a stylistic way and hope that it reflects well as a different variation on a the visual tradition of cinema.

It’s like being a poet. You’re never going to get the attention a novelist would get, but there might be something there for someone who’s interested.

LANDSCAPE FOR MANON (1986-87)

Do you get frustrated working in the lab?

A little bit. I’m colorblind so that doesn’t help. I’m always having miscommunications with the lab.

Are you completely colorblind?

No, I just can’t see different values of colors. Brown things turn out that they’re green.

The grays are blues, a metaphor for my soul. (laughs)

I came to film during a time when everybody was doing color. In the 60’s a lot of people were into this psychedelic thing even though there’s a lot of great work done in black and white coming from Europe and Japan. For me, going to San Francisco, I was coming with some Eastern sensibilities. I wanted to keep things simple, reduced it down to a very primary language and see how that suits me. I never felt that I had to dabble into the color thing.

In AT SEA you have a lot of land shots, or at least of the modern docks loading the ships. Did it feel less personal, less human, than earlier days of shipping?

As a former merchant seaman, all these shots of hundreds of men on the ship taking off the cargo, it brings me back to this time in my life when all these fascinating images engulfed me. Confronting a sense of the world and sensing how different the world was.

There’s something about going back into time. It’s so important to show people that this is what happens when you end up with these modern things. We’re in this twilight zone where you make this hugely sophisticated structure, send it out into the world and it ends up being taken apart by someone’s hands. To make that connection is really interesting even though ironically that’s the first part of the film. The film starts in the future and ends on this timeless seascape that looks pre-industrial.

It’s fascinating to watch all these insane cranes and technological advances that build the thing in the first place. Is there a math to your shots?

No. I load in100 ft. roll. I’m not looking to prove something in a structural way. The velocity of life is so much faster, much more kinetic. The way we process information, the way we’re exposed to information. It’s like looking at a trailer of a film BAM BAM BAM BAM! The whole film in 30 seconds, it’s astounding that you can put it all together that way.

It’s good to go against the grain and stretch things out. It’s not like a lot of people want to go backwards in terms of how they process information. But there’s something to look at and if they can reference a way of looking and it’s interesting to them, than I think it can be pleasurable. If you can combine that with an idea, there’s some potential there.

The next film takes place in a steel mill in Detroit where I grew up. I hope this works out. I’m applying for some money to do it. I don’t even know what that’s about. It’s like revisiting Vertov, you know, Enthusiasm. Maybe it’s been done, but it’s trying to do it with a different velocity.

With more people? More faces?

Maybe, if they’ll allow me to do that. I want to have some kind of official access so I can space out. It’s kind of like a heaven and hell environment. Beautiful graphically, as this intense industry. It’s hellish as an environment. If I can even get in the door, I don’t know if I can. This landscape is posted with these huge signs NO PHOTOGRAPHY!

The post 9/11 world is a nightmare for people like me because we’re drawn toward these forbidden environments because of their implications. People are hugely paranoid by industry and who’s checking industry out.

I’ll try and do something and hopefully the public relations people will listen. I’ll say, ‘I grew up there and I want to support this working class industry.’ It’s a kind of metaphor for my work as a filmmaker, its out of sync with the contemporary world but yet timeless and mysterious.

At publication time, Mr. Hutton reports: The Detroit film is still in the conceptual mode but I'm going to Ethiopia this Jan 2010 to shoot in the Dallol Depression, a vast salt flats where the Afar tribe mines salt.

LEIGHTON PIERCE

2009-08-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Leighton Pierce has an uncanny control over the images in his films, with luscious colors and warm, dissolving movement. With a static camera, he captures people and objects in a mysterious way, using focus as an impressionistic tool. While your eyes can’t fully define what you are seeing, your mind still recognizes it. His soundtracks mimics the images well, flowing and shifting, recognizable but fresh. Pierce was won over 60 awards from film and experimental festivals, numerous grants including the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and NEA, and has screened his films all over the world in museums and festivals, including the Whitney and the Cinémathèque française.

After years of 16mm projects he made the switch to video yet kept his beautiful cinematography and warped sound consistent. Lately he has made the jump into installations, with multiple screens allowing tons of his images to wash over you. Big pun intended.

CINEMAD: Were you doing shows before you went to Iowa or were you doing stuff when you were growing up?

LEIGHTON PIERCE: I never thought of myself as a filmmaker. I made a couple regular 8 movies in high school but really I thought of myself as a musician and a potter back then.

Where did you go to high school? Was there any exposure to art in that town?

Not much. I went to Fairport, which is outside Rochester, NY. That’s where I got into ceramics. I read poetry and hung out with poets and musician types. My first exposure to real film was a Bergman film and it really blew my mind. It was kind of amazing, very remote and mysterious. How could you even make this? I had no clue.

Do you remember what film it was?

Cries and Whispers – I think. It was really right after high school. I didn’t go to college right away. I remember going to my girlfriend’s college and seeing that movie and thinking this is really an experience.

Did you feel like you were on a path?

I did feel like I was on a path. A path to being a potter. That’s where I really discovered all kinds of different sources of art. That was really a life changing experience. I had kind of a limited experience growing up- I was into music- but I didn’t know too much about art. I went to the Museum School in Boston to study ceramics. It was there that I was exposed to the wider world of art and where I first made some portapak videos.

There were a few people doing film there. But even then I didn’t understand the concept of editing- no one told me- of course and I didn’t ask - I don’t know how you stick all this stuff together… But I did do a soundtrack for a guy there. I was mostly doing music by the end there. Electronic music.

Why did you end up going with the filmmaking and not just doing soundtracks?

Well I didn’t continue that direction. I didn’t finish art school. I went there for three years. Then I worked and I studied jazz composition and worked as a waiter and did stuff like that in Boston. And then saved some money and went to Europe and wandered around for six months. When I came back I wanted to finish my B.A., that’s when I went to Iowa. I had a few friends going to the Writers Workshop I followed them there. I was going to be music major. But when I got out there it felt so much like high school. Everyone was in the marching band…it was terrible. Then I decided to take a film class because it seemed to relate to my process of composition. I really liked the people. That’s how this whole trajectory started. I was like 'wow, this is kind of amazing.' As I leaned about continuity editing, my world expanded. Then it was like- ’wow, this is magic’.

Do you mean figuring out editing in more traditional narrative ways? Or did you see something that was cutting on form?

Editing that’s like classic Hollywood stuff right? It opened up this idea of how space and time be manipulated. Even in the beginning I thought this is pretty amazing. Other than narrative films, back then I had only seen some Maya Deren films, Andy Warhol films and the “left-right” panning Michael Snow film. I remember I saw that at art school and it really lingered, almost festered, in the back of my mind.

I am re-watching your early 16mm films, including He likes to Chop Down Trees (1980) – they all have a lot of sound in them. Did you like editing the sound and that would make the images?

Actually CHOP was really conceived in a musical form. It was very much an exploration of sound cutting in relationship to image cutting in a very simple way. There is one spoken line and one sound, the ax cutting. But when that all happened, when looking at the picture, I didn’t think of the sound, I thought of the character. It was kind of an integrated process of sound and image editing that allowed me to discover character.

At some point did you think this is what you were going to do…Become a filmmaker or were you still working or teaching and making films along the way?

Well, I went to grad school as a film student. I did a short stint in Iowa to finish my B.A. actually and then I went to Syracuse. I thought when I left that I would either get a job teaching or I could work in the industry. I didn’t get a teaching job right away so I came to New York. I was working recording sound, assistant editing, and I had a technical job at NYU for awhile.

I thought I was actually going to be a sound editor in the commercial industry. And then this job in Iowa popped up and I took it because I thought it would give me the most opportunity to develop as an artist.

What year was that?

1985. (gulp)

Short of the biggest cities, I feel that experimental filmmakers have found the cities they live in because it gave them a way to make films.

I do have to say at Iowa, besides all the work with teaching and administration, I have a lot of freedom. No one hassles me about the kinds of films I made, they have supported me with time and money, doing what I wanted.

How did you structure your filmmaking time – were you shooting all the time or would you go out and get footage you needed and then edited?

It’s different for different periods in my life. I would shoot a lot in the summers, or get leave from teaching, or just find time to shoot. It was hard to edit. In the beginning it was very hard. I had to share facilities with students so I was never away from teaching. I didn’t like that so much.

Editing sound on 16mm mag tracks is a lost art.

Let’s hope so (laughs). Cumbersome, it worked fine and I got into it but I would never go back to that. I mean, you could see the picture and touch it. But editing sound? Cut off a small piece, and its brown, on the floor, too short to listen to, you roll over it with your chair a few times, make some obscure note on it with a sharpie… It is an experience I will tell my students about when I get old, “ Back when I was you age, well, we . . .”

YOU CAN DRIVE THE BIG RIGS

With the early films, did you get inspired by something you saw, and then built around it?

With early films like YOU CAN DRIVE THE BIG RIGS (1989), which I do think of as a documentary, they were shot like films – there was an idea, planned it out, shot it. From RED SHOVEL (1992) on that’s when I started gathering by making structures of how to shoot. Like with 50 FEET OF STRING (1995), I didn’t know what I was doing when I started making it. I just said every week I’ll shoot and see how the film would grow out of it. The laundromat film, THE MIRACLE OF CHANGE (1984), which you can see online, was also preplanned and shot according to plan, It is another venture into the realm of paranoia and voyeurism. I don’t really think that way anymore. I tend to see what presents itself. And flow with that.

Do you like gathering images better than the planning?

Its just what I….do. I like the unknown. I don’t know what I’m going to have at the end of the day, you know?

It feels more like an experience.

It is like a feeling. In the café film (You Can Drive the Big Rigs) I would go in and sit and listen. I’d hear all this gossip. Just sort of eavesdropping. I went and and interviewed the owners, and they would say, “Oh no one gossips here.’ They were giving me some part line. It was in response to that mismatch that caused that film to become more about how it feels to enter one of those cafes as an outsider rather than a film that is actually about the cafes themselves.

How much do you think Iowa informed your films?

I shoot where I am whether it is Iowa, NY, Maine, France, wherever. The actual location matters but more importantly it is the way a place feels that matters. I have had mixed feelings abut being in Iowa over the years and these are reflected in my films and videos. As I said, the University has been supportive in some senses by giving me time and equipment. But it’s a double-edged sword. Iowa is isolated from the experimental film community and especially from the art world. I have had fewer opportunities to establish those all important personal ties with a cross section of like minded people.

I heard that by having kids it changed your film form.

It was more a mode of working that changed once I had kids. It was a decision. Either I was constantly going to be frustrated or I was going to find a way to keep shooting with the kids around. So that’s why they became part of the process. That’s why I’ve worked at home. Again, it is the idea that I shoot where I am. The challenge is to develop something interesting from anything that is happening.

Do you have normal home movies of your family? Or does it all go through the “art” filter?

The problem is that it’s all on one tape—the home movies and the art stuff. And I never actually know when I might switch into “art mode” when shooting home movies. So I have a tape and it goes, and its one of the kids blowing out candles, then the next shot is something artistic… there is no clear way to even know what I’m shooting when I’m shooting it. For example, THE BACK STEPS (2001). I was just shooting, a kids Halloween party. Then when I looked at the footage I see this one amazing shot. I think I can do something with that.

Do you think your sound design has taken a different feel too?

Most of the sound is created after the edit is complete. I tend to ignore the sound that is recorded with the image. In the later films and videos, that’s the beginning of more musical sounding elements. In the last 10 years, partly because its video, there is more flow to the editing. Its no longer shot, cut, shot, cut. Now these moments flow from one to the other. So it almost not possible to create true post-sync effects anymore—something my previous films were anchored in. It’s now more like composing music from sounds.

MY PERSON IN THE WATER

Do you have a name for the blur effect? That seems to lead to a different type of sound.

No, I don’t have a name to it. Again, I would think of it as music. It’s actually much harder to do sound on the works I am doing now, because it not real space. In YOU CAN DRIVE THE BIG RIGS and 50 FEET OF STRING there were real (yet imaginary) spaces. I simulated the sound in those real spaces and created a new soundscape. Now I can’t fall back on making a sound of a space since there is no longer a real space, so it’s more of a construction.

Was there a point where you put the 16mm camera down to rest?

I noticed there was a point that I stopped shooting, but its not like I chose. GLASS (1998) was the last 16mm film I shot. But up until this summer I had film in my freezer but it thawed when my basement flooded for a month so I guess I might be finished with 16mm.

Was it economics or did you enjoy the aesthetic of video right away?

It’s a very different tool. 1998 is also when I got a digital video camera and could edit digital video in a computer with no loss of quality. Before that I was using Hi8. What really happened – I was doing video all those years since 1980. But once DV hit, I really embraced it. I like the way it looks, and most importantly I could edit picture and sound in similar ways. I could have multiple tracks of each and could see and hear them right away., That became more interesting to me. So I didn’t give up films. I got so enamored with the potential of digital video there was no reason to shoot on film. And, of course, the sound is clean and clear with wide dynamic range and in stereo—not like the noisy narrow 16mm optical sound.

Many people still shoot on film and edit on video.

I’ve thought of that but then again at this point, my camera is so small, my shooting becomes so gestural, I’m not sure I could go back to 16 and back to tripod carefully composed. In 16mm I looked through the lens and composed shots. With video, I do occasionally look through the lens to focus etc but I do much more choreographed or improvised camera movements in order to create a shot.

You have a lot of water in your films. You love it or is it just around you?

I don’t know the answer to that. I know that I shoot a lot of water. I use it because I like those shots and I am around it a lot. I used to shoot a lot of cars going by. I kept wondering, ‘why am I doing this. What does this mean that I keep using it. I’m not sure but I do think about it.

It reflects light so nicely.

Yes, sometimes a mirror, sometimes a lens.

Are you doing a lot of adjustments within the camera while you shoot?

I adjust exposure, certainly. And shutter speed, normal stuff, nothing special. Until the things I’m doing now with stills. My current technique came from the technology, just from taking a lot of stills. I could do a certain kind of motion effect within a single exposure, and then make a sort of animation. I think that most people will see it like one of my videos. Its not unlike the shutter speed effect of video, the difference is very subtle. And I’m interested in that subtle difference.

When you work on a project, how do you balance the technical discoveries with the emotions and ‘story’ you are trying to get across?

The emotion is always the main thing that matters in the end. But I’m not thinking up an idea. I just went out and shot a bunch of images, not knowing if it will work. And then it’s in the editing that it turns to emotion, working with the image and sound. I’m interested in these technical tools. Still camera, video camera, all the stuff interests me, some times that is the thing that gets me just to shoot something, to play with this tool. That alone is not enough. I have look to find some emotion resonance in the image that I can build on.

VISCERA

With VISCERA (2004), that title might be the most descriptive of all your films. In your other films the title is much more of an exterior (HE LIKES TO CHOP DOWN TREES, HAMMOCK (2005), THE BACK STEPS).

Wood as we know, you see the wood, ok there’s the wood. What I did was call them something fairly mundane, almost to say that’s not what the film is about. It’s not about a kid cutting wood. Some kind of musical or poetical resonance. A feeling that happens. Viscera, on the other hand ,isn’t a thing. That one is leaning more toward emotion. Titles are hard.

A PRIVATE HAPPINESS (2003) and MY PERSON IN THE WATER (2006) are in the more romantic vocabulary.

Something like that, in the past six years or so.

When you are always dealing with your life, taking your life to Iowa, kids, romance – it would be foolish if your art didn’t reflect that.

I think it does. I can line them up. I have very personal reactions to each one. I can look back and say, oh that’s when I was dealing with that. I see the heart attack that I had, the kids, something about that emotion. When I was making it I wasn’t thinking that. I look at it now and its just so obvious. That’s clearly what its about. It takes about six months to a year for me to say “oh that’s what that’s about.”

There is a film that relates to your heart attack?

WOOD (2000). It’s the feeling of the kids, the boy and girl, then the space. There’s the water, then there’s the empty swing, then the puddle that’s bubbling like a heartbeat, then it stops.

Did you start the film after the heart attack then?

Yeah. A year or so after.

Only heart attack so far?

Yes! Only one ever!

How does a film feel five year later and then 20 years later? Does that keep it interesting?

With most of the things I sent you, that’s how I selected titles. All of them do something for me still. When I show CHOP its kind of fun because its soooo ancient history. Some of the videos now I can see an indication of impending divorce. FALL (2002) and EVAPORATION (2002) are good examples of videos that express what I don’t yet understand. When I look at those now, I see them as predicting the separation. I didn’t know it at the time. That what it was really--Isolation.

The best art has so much tied up in it.

Let’s hope so. For me, it’s better than reading a journal entry with all the specifics.

We should say you have many happy films, too. How old are your kids now?

My son is 19 and my daughter is 14. Certainly my son has always been engaged in the filmmaking and watching and giving advice since he was tiny. He was always interested. We’d go for a walk and I asked him some questions and he offered me something, I wish I could remember what it was but I cant. But it was actually really useful. He is generous. He interested, I showed him the recent stuff and he has had stuff to say, we talk about music too. My daughter and I have a very different relationship that I also enjoy. She reflects less but seems to be proud to be a part of my process. Although, when she was younger I have many shots where she is saying something like, “Daddy look with your eyes! Not your camera.”

RED SHOVEL

You have two films that are explicitly political, showing the flag anyway. Have you wanted to make more overtly political works, or is it the nature of the content that strays from that?

VEILED RED (2002) was a shot that I had. Actually I was in France at the time, right after 9-11. It is a month later, there is all this talk of war coming from the States. In France it’s a little more complicated. You hear the States saying let’s go get them. So I used that shot. But for me it was an understated meditation on war and especially impending war.

With RED SHOVEL it is political because it’s the flag and I’m thinking, what could this mean. Flying the flag on the 4^th of July, but its also very beautiful. More like contemplation than nationalism. I do have a general fear of nationalism so perhaps I am trying to strip away some of the symbolic power of the flag in these pieces.

Have the installations been recent work or were there some in the past?

The first one was 2004. I’d been thinking about installations for quite a while. Most of my films are short. You make a film in which something happens to the viewer when they watch it. But in festivals that feeling in the viewer can be totally erased by programming. Making a short is really like making a shot in someone else’s movie (the film program). So going to installations involves space and the viewers’ movement through a room. People come and go but that room is always the same. I like that. It is like creating emotional eddies in a physical space.

Do you like the opportunity to use more content in an installation?

Yes but its not exactly that, though. WARM OCCLUSION (2006) had 13 projections. It’s not that it has more content, I like giving up the absolute control of the experience the audience has. When you watch a film, you sit down, start watching it, and at the end if they haven’t left, its over. It’s all very orchestrated and controlled. In WARM OCCLUSION it’s not possible to see all the projections at once. It might be more content but you don’t really know. You have to move to another position to see something else. There is also the realm of repetition. There is a lot of repetition of images. It’s a very different experience. With installation you give up a lot of the control.

Your images must seem different to you as well in the installation, its such a different form. Even with multiple editing monitors its not the same.

WARM OCCLUSION was amazing. I had been working on it on 22-inch screens. Then in this huge 5500 sq. ft. room, I was surprised, it was way better than I even imagined. It was big and all around and the glow on the floor. When a film is shown it’s big and it’s with a crowd (hopefully) and that’s nice. I want to do more with the films. Deciding to do an installation, you still have to get the space. That’s tougher. I’m learning about that.

Have you thought about online distribution?

I haven’t, I don’t know.

For being an avant-garde consumer, I would love to go to a site and see something I have always heard about, or a filmmaker that’s almost lost. But its small, its only half the experience.

I agree with you, oh that’s the piece I couldn’t find and it would cost tons of money to rent. But its kind of like looking at artwork. Oh ok, that’s what Rothko looks like. And you do get a sense, the shape and the color. But you don’t really get it. Sometimes that’s what you want, its research. Not an experience. I’m not opposed, and a number of films and videos on my website with more coming soon.

leightonpierce.com

Leighton's short VISCERA is available on the Cinemad Almanac 2009 DVD.

NEW (AND OLD) STUFF

2009-08-22T13:45:00.001-07:00

BRAND NEW: Leighton Pierce interview here...

BLAST FROM THE PAST: Interview with Chris Wilcha from Cinemad #2 here - done right after he made his great feature doc THE TARGET SHOOTS FIRST, about his work and possible soul-selling while at Columbia House mail order. Since then he has gone on to many TV and film projects, the best being his direction of the THIS AMERICAN LIFE series. PDF here.

The Cinemad Almanac 2009 DVD is currently available from Microcinema DVD, Aurora Picture Show, Netflix, at select Fry's Electronics, and in Los Angeles at Skylight Books and Family Bookstore.

RONNIE BRONSTEIN

2009-04-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

I first heard about FROWNLAND from Scott Macauley, the editor of Filmmaker Magazine. He was on the jury for SXSW in 2007 and was compelled to fight hard for an award for the film and tell others about it. I first saw the film on DVD as a submission to CineVegas, with its weird handdrawn cover, scrawling pink-and-white image of a family at a dinner table, as if an underground comic book artist re-imagined Bunuel’s EXTERMINATING ANGEL. The movie inside was unlike any other film of recent times. Director Ronnie Bronstein packs a lot of punch in the film with realistic dialogue instead of snappy lines. Main character Keith (Dore Mann) is not your typical leading man. He is unlucky in life and love, as a girl that’s just a friend (Mary Wall, Mrs. Bronstein) comes to him to cry about other guys, and his day job takes him out of Manhattan to peddle coupons door-to-door in the ‘burbs, only to leave him far behind on bills with a hostile hipster musician roommate, who may spit more verbal abuse at him than Kinski did at Herzog. The atmosphere of the film recalls the grime of 1970s’ 42nd street glory, shot on film, projected on film, with unknown actors throughout New York. When you see the end credit of “2007” it’s bewildering.

After a long festival run, no distributor would take the film on, receiving a stint at the IFC Center in New York and various one-off shows around the country at small art houses and universities. Frequently interviewed by websites and mags already, we concentrated on recent days, with the film starting a 4-day run at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, a double-feature screening with Josh Safdie’s THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED, and with a DVD release of FROWNLAND coming this summer, the first release from the new label Factory 25.

CINEMAD: For a film without distribution or even indie stars, people seem to be finding FROWNLAND.

RONNIE BRONSTEIN: They’re finding it. Thing is, there’s not so many people out there that should find it. That’s what it comes down to. I just have to say that off the bat. The disclaimer before we get down to it, whatnot, especially since you told me that you could post this also at the Filmmaker Magazine site. Because they already have done a pretty extensive interview with me.

Yes but this is a follow up.

Not to be egomaniacal about it, but it sounds humiliating, because the world is constantly turning out new product, new movies are coming down the pike all the time, and like this douchebag, this dipshit, is talking about the same thing, he’s treading water. Running on a treadmill. Fuck, man, ya know?

I wanna make it clear: my process is a long one. I got this new project I’m working on. FROWNLAND will finally come out on DVD and I’ll be done with it. You know what I mean?

Completely.

All sorts of tasks will be behind me. But at the same time, the fact is that anybody who shows up and sees this thing in LA – This movie will not occupy any real estate in their skulls until they see it, so ya know, I need to effect some kind of freshness when I talk about it. It’s only old to me.

Mary and Ronnie Bronstein.

Did you think of having a film festival life rather than a theatrical life when you were done making it? As a projectionist for places like MOMA, you understand non-traditional theatres and films discovered long after they are finished editing.

I don’t know, man, that’s a good question. It's hard to access what my hopes for the movie were. Because the struggle behind the movie was not a commercial one, you know what I mean?

All I can say is I kind of nursed a nitwit notion that there were other people like me with the same itch they wanted scratched. And this movie would scratch it. If anything, what’s unrealistic is you imagine that there is more people like that. And you have to maintain that false pinheaded assumption all the time you’re working, otherwise, why would you work?

You are not bitter about the process.

Not disappointed by any means. That sort of critical approbation in whatever cult it is that has sorta coagulated around the work has been so strong, and the connection to it has been so deep and matched my connection to it that I feel pretty successful with it in that sense.

I don’t know. Filmmakers these days need to look beyond the short-term fortunes of finding a place in the industry. Even the margins of the industry. It’s just not where my head is at. So it doesn’t disappoint me that the film wasn’t, like, picked up or something.

I mean, the time for me to worry about this stuff was when I was coming up for ideas for my movie. You know what I’m saying. I didn’t think about those things, I didn’t worry about those things. And they weren’t my concerns, it wasn’t my struggle, so now I can’t just sit back and be bitter about it.

Some filmmakers do set out to make quote “indie film” in a low-budget manner. Hopefully they are not worrying about the indie film world liking it. Nor should you sit around thinking, “Mechanics won’t like my film.” Someone that works on a car could like your film. That’s totally part of the equation.

The word ‘like’ is such cheap word anyway. Obviously I wasn’t going out of my way to alienate people with the movie. In fact I was surprised, I was struck, by the level of venom that people have continually spit at it. Ya know?

I feel some people read it as a deliberate sort of middle finger to them or to the industry. I don’t know, I certainly didn’t conceive it that way. I tried to be as sensitive as I possibly could to a character I knew was difficult, that would test the limits of people’s tolerance, but that in itself, I thought would be interesting and engaging to dig into.

That’s what makes your film work, the characters.

If you were to worry whether what you’re doing is likeable, well, that's this sort of hovering on top of your work rather than being inside of it. That kind of thinking is just a contaminate.

Absolutely. Have your screenings solidified that feeling?

Again, from my point of view, and my point of view is pretty limited, my life was irrevocably changed the moment I premiered it. I can’t tell you the amount of new life experiences the movie has fomented for me. The people I've connected with, the people i've wound up collaborating with. The whole experience with acting in Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film. That came out of their seeing the movie and for some ineffable reason coming to the conclusion that I needed to perform for them. Jesus. I've had so many crazy experiences. In general, the people that have responded to the work have responded so strongly that I lose sight of the fact of the most people that have never heard of it. I mean i think it's a success.

More than expected?

By the time I was editing it I was so emotionally invested in it and my self-esteem had been so bankrupted that while – whatever. It was not on my radar to judge its success on financial terms. It wasn’t like I made it to get the money back, the same way you don’t go on vacation thinking you’re going to get the money back. It was money I spent and whether it was a success or failure was gonna be based on how people felt about it.

Being a projectionist for a living, did you get the sort of extended perspective of films, beyond reviews and articles and the importance of something being newly released?

A very warped perspective. Almost a delusional one. I’m projecting less now than I have in a decade because I’m working on this stuff all the time. I haven’t made this little money since I was 22.

Congratulations.

Nonetheless, I project on the museum circuit, the rep circuit in New York City. And there’s such a healthy vibrant sort of culture that surrounds that. You know, people that go to the movies everyday wanting to put on boxing gloves and sort of duke it out with ideas.

This isn’t an environment where… You think of the moral responsibility a filmmaker has to prod and poke people, you know, out of their passive viewing habit. Well, I don't work around a passive demographic. I’ve always seing audiences watching challenging work, so maybe it just warped my perspective of how many people like that are out there.

I’m not a big fan of the per-screen average of something that is truly low budget, truly tiny. Because there’s an independent film that stars two recognizable actors and then there is an independent film, if your meaning of independent is based solely on budget number or studio affiliation. What is important to me is: if thousands of people saw a film you made with very little resources – that is incredible.

It seems like I’m so green that I don’t have deep insight into the way the industry works. It just seems that the distributors of independent movies are playing it to safe, and it's to nobodys benefit. They're consciously picking the most accessible movies from the crops of independents and funnelling them through the first-run pipeline, but they don’t seem to be making much money off of them. So since no one is making money, all it seems to be doing is ruining the culture.

Let’s make it clear that you haven’t just been sitting around doing nothing since you finished the film.

My process for my own work is painfully slow. I mean, it’s not something I’m embarrassed about. I work slowly, and I’m comfortable with that. The first sort of step, after the thematic scope of a project is mapped out, the first step for me is to create a central character who will become the anchor of the work. For instance, with FROWNLAND it took four months of heavy collaboration with Dore until Keith was alive and breathing, so I could sort of wind him up, and spin him around and toss him into any situation and he could respond in character. This new one is taking a little longer. I’ve been working for about seven months with this my lead. And now finally the character is there, he's alive.

Right. In your new script?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But I did take a break to work on Josh and Bennie’s movie [The Safdie Brothers’ new GO GET SOME ROSEMARY, which Ronnie acts in and helped edit]. And I can see why people attach themselves to greater, higher infrastructures in their life. Why they get jobs that tell them where to be everyday, and why. It’s a true pleasure to be involved in something so creatively engaging and fulfilling and yet not have to steer the ship.

Like, I had my base sense of purpose, the reason to get out of bed, that was taken care of, without any of the angst and stress that comes with having to create your own infrastructure.

Once that movie was done, oh my God, it was like being punched in the gut. Terrible, man. I lost my wind.

Cause you had to go back to—

Waking up everyday and having those panic attacks.

There was no school schedule.

Oh my God, no. I don’t want to give the impression of lethargy.

Your general motivation was because you wanted to make a film. It’s just a matter of – you gotta do it your way.

Right, that’s right. I don’t know. What the product is is kind of secondary. I’m just looking for that sense of purpose, so I don’t feel like I’m flailing.

How is your new project going?

We just finished with such a successful weeklong exercise. This is gonna sound so overwrought, but this guy is on a crusade against, I don’t know, the spiritual, intellectual, imperialism. Just grabbing hold of consciousness these days, ya know? This guy is just against everything. I took [the actor] into this single-room occupancy, way into the dirty end of Brooklyn, and he was the only one under 65. Entered into this environment and sort of sparked a revolution. Sounds corny, but by the end of this week, he fermented such a violent upheaval amongst the people. I can only call them inmates. Just the sad souls living there. He had to be removed.

So you got the actor to spend time in an old age home?

I wouldn’t call it an old-age home.

An apartment building with mostly senior citizens.

Only by default. These people have nowhere else to go. This place is as cheap as you can possibly live in the city, ya know? Like the very, very end of Greenpoint. The part of the neighborhood that will never be gentrified.

Oh wow.

I’d rather not even get into that, because I’d rather the work just speak for itself. I don’t think I can make it sound good, so…

What’s up with the DVD for FROWNLAND? That’s an actual done deal?

I have to just sign the contract. Yeah, but it’s moving ahead. Like a deluxe edition that would come out with the score on vinyl.

Are you happy it continues to get the occasional theater screening?

I’ve had really good luck. And, of course this is something I don’t think I would have not explored if had found distribution in the states early on. It had a week run in New York and it had so many screenings in New York. I had one at MOMA, I had one at BAM, then I played a week in Chicago, a week in Seattle, we have this LA run coming up. And then Mark who is a producer on this film – we sort of did this huge outreach of reaching out to University cinematheques because there is money there, they have budgets, money they have to spend. And I’ve been able to bring in some money in which to live off of, just by simply going out to Universities and showing them the movie and lecturing them. It’s been satisfying, a lot more satisfying.

It’s just like each city is a little dead-end. It’s nice when you get these theatrical runs then you’re entitled to space in the local newspaper. That’s the reason to go theatrical – not to make the money back in ticket sales, but to sorta be able to get your voice heard in the press.

The film will have a life, you know what I mean? It was purchased by MOMA, it was purchased by the Harvard Film Archives. It exists now. It won’t disappear. I feel like I made as much noise as I possibly could with such an aggressive, craggy movie.

Did you go to film festivals before you made FROWNLAND?

Nah, I was just working in an air-sealed vacuum environment. But i don't know. I feel like it’s such an anemic time in cinema right now…and like if somebody makes a movie, and the struggle behind that movie is not a commercial one, and their goal is not to make their money back, but rather to just try and make noise and affect the culture.

I think it’s a really empowering time because there’s very little competition. It’s a very good time to make a lot of noise with a very little bit of money. If one has the sort of tenacity, go for it.

All these Q&As that you’ve basically done for over a year now. Do you think you find audiences that way?

Yep. You do. I think there’s probably many people who think the Q&As are more interesting than the movie. I just have a personal disinclination of the kind of niceness that seems to define most screening Q&As. Where people are talking about their budget, or finding nice anecdotes, funny anecdotes about the making of the movie. And thankfully, I was spared that. No one even asked those questions, ya know? I guess the movie, at its worst, upsets somebody. It upsets them the way a molecule gets upset. And then they hold me personally responsible for that. And then I’m on the hot seat – I don’t know. It’s a nice place to be.

This has nothing to do with your question, but I guess if I had to attach FROWNLAND to an established genre, the genre I find most personally irritating is the trope of the loveable loser.

Keith (Dore Mann)

You’ve got that in spades.

Somebody who just can't hold it together. His infrastructure is a wreck. He can’t get a girl, he can't move ahead at his lousy job, that kind of thing. Movies that focus on nerds are the most superficial example. But whether it’s REVENGE OF THE NERDS or SIDEWAYS -- these movies use all sorts of insidious tricks to make it easy for the audience to sympathize with the character. They make it so that this character will appeal to the loser in everyone.

And there’s something disgusting about going into a movie theatre and being made to feel, for two house, that you're more tolerant towards weakness than you will be the second you leave the theatre. I was going out of my way to avoid that trap. What does it really mean to spend time with somebody that you might instantly dismiss, and what does tolerance really mean? And tolerance and compassion, the nature of tolerance, maybe it only has value when you don’t feel it. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah.

Being considerate of somebody who is different from you and maybe weaker than you. Again, the value of that comes into play when it’s a fight inside of you to get it.

Your characters portray that struggle we can relate to, they can’t deal with each other.

Maybe that’s what bugs people so much. I mean, my relationship with you is the most sort of extreme example of people getting upset, at the movie during CineVegas. What’s more common is someone will raise their hand in the audience and will ask a question in which the subtext is hitting the text over the head with a mallet. They aren’t really asking me a question. They are just disguising a very negative statement. Like a question like, ‘What do you think you were gonna achieve with this movie?”

That’s the kind of hostility I’m used to. In Vegas it actually erupted into screaming. Like something that is physical. And in a way, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that.

The guy who was booing, did he actually ask a question? Did he stick around?

He didn’t just boo, he booed for several minutes. I mean, jesus, to drain the air out of your lungs and then re-draw new air and then drain it out again and again. That guy was committed. I kind of respect that. But when I addressed him, well, I didn’t even have the chance because somebody else got up and started screaming at that guy.

In defense of the film –

I value confrontation. I feel like our culture has become so unconfrontational that I’m happy to play a role in that. Like my own little turn of the screw in the vice of our culture. And make something that is creating that kind of conflict, or that kind of dialogue, makes me feel good. Makes me feel successful. And not in some cheap punk way. Not looking to punch buttons for the sake of doing so, that would be valueless.

Either an audience member or Keith's roommate in the film.

No, you gotta go all the way. If you make a film about teenagers, let’s find the truly uncool kid. Not just somebody that has acne and wears black.

Well, just what I was trying to get at. And again, I wasn’t sparing myself in the sense that the whole movie for me was the struggle. I want to create work where that struggle is embedded inside of the work. Where it feels like the guy that made it isn’t just standing on top of everything judgmentally. I wasn’t trying to preach about tolerance. I was trying to expose how difficult it is.

Fuck, man. Whether you’re a student working in the dorm or whether you’re working retail, or walking around the city, like in any environment, you come across people once in a while that are just off. There is something off about them, ya know? Are there is a kind of mindset that one instinctively adopts when they are around someone like that. It’s like you are walking down the street and the somebody asks you for directions, and just because of the vibe they are giving off, you find yourself saying, “Sorry, I don’t live around here.” Even though you know exactly where they want to go, you just wanna push that person away. Or if you’re working retail and some guy comes up to you, you find yourself answering questions very strategically that will preclude any follow up. You just want to push that fucker away.

And in reality, what does it mean to dimiss somebody that isn’t doing anything bad per se but is just off? In life you can do that so easily and never think twice about it. There is no real reason to question it. You force someone away from your little territorial bubble, and go about your business and never have to question whether or not that dismissal was justified, you know? So, wow, a movie theatre is a really good place, I’m thinking, to sort of confront people with people. It’s that old adage of ‘the captive audience.’

And they paid for it.

And the thing is, why can’t people just leave the theatre the same way they can dismiss someone in real life. Why is somebody staying through the end and getting that upset? If you wanna dismiss this guy, you can easily do so by getting up and leaving. I’m not gonna mind.

He booed through the entire credits.

That makes the film so much more powerful. Because it’s easy – you can watch distributors. They fucking file out of films after 10 minutes. And that’s their job, to watch movies. It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be good at releasing this.” Then you got a film festival goer: ‘Well, there’s something I might like better…” so it’s easy to skip. Then you got somebody who doesn’t like the film and they stay all the way through. When they have an incredible amount of opportunities right outside the door. Especially in Vegas.

My film always plays better when people have to buy tickets. In a festival, where people buy badges, and you're not laying out money for each screening, you don’t feel like they have to justify sitting there if it's not your thing. You can just get up and leave and see something else. But once somebody slaps down that $10, they feel like they have to sit through it to get their money’s worth.

For it to work, FROWNLAND relies on that commitment. Which is why I’ve turned down every offer to have it stream on the internet. I know what internet culture is like, and I know how flaky and flighty people are in their internet search habits, ya know? And the way people jump from page to page on the internet is the way people watch movies on the internet. It’s one and the same, I think. I don’t even want to enter into that. Because I know the movie cannot succeed in that way.

I think it’ll play well on DVD. But if you’re the casual audience at home, then it might not work.

Right. But that just outlines how ridiculous or how deluded my general point of view is. I’m worried—I’m turning down opportunities that might be financially rewarding ones—I’m turning down opportunities because it’s more important to me how people see, if they’re gonna be able to see the right way, than it is for me to turn a buck. I don’t know, I’m gonna have to get over that if I wanna keep working, but that’s where I’m at.

But that’s why making this film wasn’t a job. And crowds have connected to it.

Connections have been so strong. Again, if I’m measuring success, basically how strongly the work is actually communicating and how I want it to communicate, then I feel like a million bucks.

Has Dore Mann done anything since?

Not acting-wise. You know he’s going through life. My relationship with him is really complicated, and in a way, it’s really possible that I cannot separate my personal relationship with him with my working relationship with him. They can’t exist independently. We just got so deep into it…Oh God, it’s almost like we accidentally stumbled into the field of psychodrama without the therapeutic knowledge of how to deal with it. But he’s moved into kind of a different line of work. He’s not doing acting. He’s doing social work.

He didn’t do that before?

No. He was always interested in politics and history. That’s what he studied in school. Now he’s working for a needle exchange program. He was working for a suicide hotline at some point, and now this is what he is doing.

So for the film world, he will only be Keith from FROWNLAND, making it stronger.

In general, I really like seeing new faces in moves. I like the lack of baggage. I feel like those are the ones you can really project onto.

When the actors are unknown, it doesn't make it a documentary, but it definitely adds the level of a real world, someone's real experience to a viewer. You are introduced to the characters instead of a favorite actor doing things.

Look, this idea of realism, at face value, this belief in camera as truthteller. The camera is an idiot. The camera is a fool. It doesn’t have anything to say. And some of these movies substitute verisimilitude for discernment. There’s a mistake in that. This idea of realism that all you have to do is sort of capture the external world as it is, as it unfolds, and this is enough to capture how reality makes you feel. And it doesn’t require any sort of heightening and prodding, and getting underneath with the crow bar. I just don’t have a relationship with that, you know what I mean? Because I know how the world makes me feel doesn’t necessarily show up on my face.

But I get so serious when I talk about it. I think the movie is really funny. It’s just that—Maybe that humor reveals itself on repeated viewings. Maybe more than the first screening when you’re so disoriented of where it’s going and who your sympathy should be anchored to…that being in that state of unrest, being in that state of not being sure, isn’t a state that works in tandem with laughing. The second viewing you know where it is, where it should be, and where you stand on watching it…and you can sort of get into that texture of what’s funny about it.

There is an endless discussion about when somebody is laughing at, and somebody is laughing with, a film. And at times something is so extreme I need to laugh in shock.

Exactly. Or just laughing at pure nuance. It’s not even what you’re seeing is funny. But you’re seeing a detail and the case of FROWNLAND you’re seeing his neck contort and his veins pop out of his neck at a moment of such supreme discomfort. That in itself, those details, you wanna react to it. You wanna feel something rolling up inside of you. And you want to let it out, it’s like a steam pipe, ya know? And what are you gonna do? You’re not gonna yell, and you’re not gonna cry in anguish, so the laughter just ends up coming out like a bark.

Absolutely.

Again, I don’t want to use my own movie as an example. Because that implies that I think it’s successful. I’m just saying that these are things I’m attracted to, you know what I’m saying?

We are talking about audience reactions to your film, though. And what you think about them.

I didn’t want to the coddle the audience by orienting them to a fixed point of view. I didn’t want to make a morality play in that sense, where there was good and bad. I wanted to pivot around these variuous viewpoints and allow people to sort of feel both ways. Like the roommate. You can say that guy is sort of an arrogant prick. At the same time, when you think of the random lottery of possible living arrangements…who would actually want to be living with Keith? Nobody! No matter how tolerant you are as a person, ya know? I don't care how much compassion you have for the human race. I mean, sure, Keith doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. But his total inability to read social clues is hardly a saintly quality.

The saint is someone who can deal with him despite all that.

Right. That’s not realistic. The idea is that by the end of the movie you can find grounds for compassion. I hope so. But it’s through a constant process of chewing him over and regurgitating him. Maybe the compassion comes through the backdoor. First you feel good watching the roommate cruelly bitch slap Keith, and then you feel good watching the roommate get bitch slapped himself. Maybe guilt that sits at the root of compassion. I don't know.

(phone hangs up)

Hello?

(Bronstein calls back)

Sorry, I don’t know what happened.

It’s like you combusted. And then the phone just went out.

I turned to vapor. The Nude Bomb. I got no clothes on now.

Is there going to be…

Someone asks me for what my big inspirations are…what’s so fucking funny about that: by the time you have an aesthetic in place and you’re looking in the world to pick the people that booey that aesthetic, you’re already passed the point of influences. Like for me, as a kid, probably THE NUDE BOMB is a bigger influence on the movie than like Mike Leigh. What you see when you’re 12, you’ll never, ever, ever for the rest of your life be that invested in a movie as you are when you’re 12.

Have you run into any 12-year-olds that have watched FROWNLAND?

It’s funny, I was brought out to Norway to show it. First of all, they brought me to this town. And I went and it was all 13-year-olds. A row of 13-year-old kids.

Really?

I don’t know, man. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t make me feel good. It’s not like I want to force this. It’s the same reason why I don’t have it on the internet. It needs to find the right people.

So the guy who was booing in Vegas, did he stay for the Q&A? Did he ask anything.

No, I said to him, “You want to make the first comment?” But then he got cut off.

Somebody else started defending it. Then someone else started defending the boo-er.

Yeah. It was fun, ya know, it was fun. Who doesn’t want to take part in a riot? By no means a riot, but it touches upon that, that, that deep-seated desire.

People should be as hard on the films as the films are hard on the audience. That’s what I wanna live. I wanna live inside of a culture where that is not just acceptable. That is par for the course.

It’s hard for me to even get financing. Someone would see the movie and think, ‘Of course, it’s hard to get financing not making commercial work.” But I’m even saying beyond that. When I have people who are willing to sit down at the table with me, and hear what I’m going for. Since I value that struggle inside of work. Not just all work, but work that I take to…usually you wouldn’t sit down with a businessman until you were on top of your work so much that you can just outline all the details for them and hopefully get them onboard. For me I can only speak about what I’m doing in very broad strokes. Until I’ll be done with it. And even then, it’s going to be something I’m constantly chewing over. Again, I’m looking to expose that struggle in the work that I make. There’s never this point where I’m just together with it. With this new one I’m working on, I’ll never be together until the day I’m done with it. Until it closes over.

Have you found non-traditional financing for the new film?

I just got a grant. And that was really great, that was the first step. A businessman, a producer takes the greatest risk for a work of art. They are the ones putting themselves in the biggest jeopardy based on the way society looks at the world, because they are the ones putting up the money. So in a way, it’s very hard to imagine me creating very personal work unless I share in that risk. I saved up a lot of money for years to do make Frownland, and now I don’t have any left, so i'm reliant on investors. But it’s still really hard for me to come to terms with accepting someone else’s money given the kind of work I wanna make. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m just beating myself up, but…

Enough distributors have lost tons of money on supposed safe bets. So why not take a chance and have reasonable expectations?

I don’t think if I did get into distribution, based on the level of – based on the kind of deal I would get. I don’t think anything would have been that different. Best-case scenario, I’d play a week in LA, a week in New York, a week in Chicago. You know what I’m saying? I did all those things. It’s just that they would have spent money on advertising, while the only advertising available to me was reviews in newspapers. But all the reviews were good.

Is anything extra on the DVD or is it just the film?

I’m so leary about that kind of stuff. I find ultimately, I don’t know, there isn’t a great thrill. There’s a compulsion to go through DVD extras, but the second they start you are ready to go next thing on the menu.

I don’t mind seeing someone’s short films that I wouldn’t be able to see…stuff like that.

I have some great, great, great process ephemera I would like to include in the package. Like from Dore -- I could make a book out of Dore’s character journals. I have just the most rancorous exchanges between Keith, the roommate and Charles. They are great. So great. Keith’s constant need to be indirect forces him to go thru the most circuitous, longwinded aggressions to explain why he is asking for the money for the bills. He can’t just fucking say, ‘Please, I need the money. It’s due tomorrow. I need the money.” No. He has to recount some analagous anecdote about his fucking grandmother in order to build up the strength to ask.

You wrote the journals?

I would be the middleman. They would write them, I would clean up to get the kind of responses we needed. I would only orchestrate it… But no, they would write it in character and I would clean them up and send them along. So yeah... By that point, it was months into the process and the characters were so formed. I sort of need the presence of the characters to get the details of the scene. That’s the way I work.

That’s great.

What makes the scene come together, those details, they aren’t the type that can be invented on paper as an absolute thing. I’m looking for pure nuance. You wanna know how your film is gonna go, but you wanna be surprised by how it gets there. This would be a simplistic way to put it.

That’s a good quote to end on.

End on something better than that. To hear someone talk about process, it’s the lamest thing ever. Focus on what we were talking about the movie, about the culture. Process I think is…eh. It’s always self-indulgent.

I’m gonna say I met you and you were all tan, wearing a mesh t-shirt.

And a message. I had a message.

Anyway, you got any money?

Nope.

God, it's so much easier to be honest with people who don’t have money. End on that note. I like that…. I want the struggle to be inside the work.

Frownland on DVD

TONY STONE

2009-03-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Vikings rule - The kickass new film SEVERED WAYS finally gets to theaters, courtesy Magnet Releasing, opening in New York this month.

A graduate of Bard College, filmmaker Tony Stone’s first feature, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, unleashes an almost-new genre – the indie historical drama. It might also be the ultimate heavy metal video. Based on historical research, Severed Ways follows two Vikings stranded in medieval America, encountering both Native Americans and monks, everyone trying to survive. It is deeper than an action film as the Vikings are complete characters, violent but missing their girlfriends. In a way, Old Joy with Vikings.

Shot on mini-DV, the result is stunning, a period piece that looks like a painting but feels like an inside view with characters even speaking in Norse language.

Interviewed director Tony Stone for Filmmaker mag, check it out here...

Great REDCAT shows coming up

2009-02-19T16:41:00.000-08:00

Two great shows are coming on the next two Mondays at REDCAT in downtown LA:

O'ER THE LAND
Deborah Stratman's new feature takes us into the wild wild world of, well, America - exploring battle reinactments, RVs, gun shows (the kind where you can shoot something and it will blow up) and the incredible story of an airman who parachuted from his plane only to get caught in a thunderstorm for 45 minutes. Stratman's tone and camera is controlled yet playful, with beautiful imagery and far more humor than you would expect. What the hell is going on in this country? The freaking wild west never ended.

Also shows with Stratman's "Paranomal Trilogy" of short films. An older Cinemad interview with Deborah is here.

Mon 2.23.09 8:30 pm
http://www.redcat.org/season/0809/fv/stratman.php

BRUCE CONNER'S EXPLOSIVE CINEMA: A TRIBUTE, PART 2
Bruce Conner was one of the first to rework found film footage into new short films, but that's not what makes him one of the greatest. His movies examine politics and celebrity, sex and violence, using images you may recognize but with his notable hand in the mix. Although he was adored by academics and the art world, Conner was not interested in making everyone happy. He made films because he had something to say. Sadly, he passed away last year.

Surveying the filmmaker's work over a 50-year span, the program includes A Movie (1958, 12 min.), Marilyn Times Five (1973, 14 min.), Permian Strata (1969, 4 min.), Mea Culpa (1981, 4 min.), Looking for Mushrooms (1967, 3 min.), Looking for Mushrooms (1996 version, 15 min.), Report (1967, 13 min.), Television Assassination (1995, 14 min.), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977, 5 min.), Valse Triste (1977, 5 min.) and - the caveat - Bruce's last film, the gorgeous Easter Morning (2008, 10 min., DV).

In person: Dennis Hopper, longtime Conner friend and co-conspirator, and guest of honor Jean Conner

Mon 3.02.09 8:30 pm

http://redcat.org/season/0809/fv/conner.php

Bruce Conner's Explosive Cinema: A Tribute, Part 1 is being shown on February 28. See cinema.ucla.edu for program info.

The Cinemad interview with Bruce Conner is available here.

Bruce Conner

2009-02-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

You may know BRUCE CONNER as an experimental filmmaker – whose films dominate their bastard grandchildren of music videos in style, form, humor and commentary, some 50 years after he started. You may also know his collage, assemblage, sculpture, photography, print making, painting and conceptual art. He even took a ton of photos of influential punk rock bands in the 1970s. Basically, if you are creative in any format, you would be inspired by something Conner made. Sadly, Mr. Conner passed away in 2008 after a lengthy illness. He was one of a kind. This interview took place in 2005, as his film LUKE (1966/2004) was making the fest rounds, and his show of punk rock photos was opening at the Barbara Gladstone gallery.

CINEMAD: Your film LUKE is showing at festivals.

BRUCE CONNER: It had a sneak preview at CineVegas, and then it premiered at the New York Film Festival and the London Film Festival. It’s also showing at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York from January 4th until the 29th. That’s in conjunction with an exhibition of fifty-three black and white punk photos that I took in 1978 at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco.

How did you find the punk rock scene? In 1977 Toni Basil called me and said, “You gotta go to Mabuhay Gardens tonight and see the world’s greatest new rock band, Devo.” So I went there and I liked the show, the place was pretty interesting. I started going back to see if I would find another band just as interesting. There were a number of events there, some of which I photographed. Most of my photographs are of San Francisco and California punk bands; some of the bands were obscure and only played once. There are pictures of Toni Basil and Devo and a few others that are better known.

“Devo: Airborne”

The Search and Destroy you showed me had great photos of The Avengers and Negative Trend. Also in the show are Crime, UXA and the Mutants. Usually there’s more than one photo of each band. There is one photo of a band called Ointment that gave a great performance and then disappeared.. Vale, who published my photos in Search and Destroy magazine, told me recently that he thought they were the best punk band he remembered seeing at Mabuhay Gardens.

But were you drawn to the scene quickly? In its own way, it reminded me of the energy of the poets, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who had been characterized as the Beat generation in the 1950’s. Then in the ‘60s some of the same people were called the Hippie generation. This creative phenomenon appeared to become publicly conspicuous in San Francisco every ten years.

You must have seen it differently than everybody else since you had lived through the other two angry youth movements. They weren’t always angry. They were complicated periods of time, just like we are in right now. I wish we could find more people with that kind of intensity today. It’s worth gravitating towards that type of environment. A kind of activity that compels people, despite the limits of their technological or professional abilities, to produce, perform, and have their say.

Were the punk photos pretty conscious, or more snapshots? The second time I was there, I saw Vale, who worked at City Lights Bookstore, he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m interested in this stuff.” And he said, “ I’m starting a new magazine called Search and Destroy about the punk scene.” I said, “Maybe I could take some photos for that.” During the next year, I probably wasted too much time trying to take photos that would be appropriate for the magazine.

I had no idea which of three bands playing each night would turn out to be really unique and interesting. I ended up being at Mabuhay Gardens several days a week. I also conceived creating a photographic document during the year of 1978 at Mabuhay Gardens. I didn’t receive any money for the photos printed in Search and Destroy. But, over the years, I’ve gotten used to paying people to look at my work.

cover image of Negative Trend by Bruce Conner.

The reverse of the mainstream. Well, people think they’re paying me when they go to a film festival, but as you and I know, festivals don’t pay the filmmakers when they show their films.

Do you get paid for books and art gallery sales? I don’t get paid when any of my words or work are published in books. Art galleries sell my work once in a while. I distribute my films through Canyon Cinema. It’s questionable whether I’ve ever made back the costs of more than a few of the short films. Beyond the initial cost there are the expenses of maintaining and producing new prints, transferring, archiving and all the rest of it. I like to support Canyon Cinema because they are the only viable 16mm distributor of short independent films. The films they distribute are about as independent as film can get. They are usually produced by one person who has conceived the work, filmed it, edited it, and distributed it.

What was the impetus behind finally putting out the DVD of some of your shorts (2002 B.C.)? It was produced as a fundraiser for charitable organizations. It was available through the galleries where I exhibit.

People could obtain a free copy if they made a donation of fifty dollars to a non-profit organization such as Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic or the Food Bank in San Francisco. The dealers and I dealt with it as public service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Manhattan. It also brings people into the gallery to see my drawings, prints, photos, paintings, etc. My justification, in terms the IRS understands, is that the films are nothing except a form of publicity for me to bring people closer to the work that is for sale at the galleries. If I were to actually try to deal with this as a business, there isn’t any business. [laughs]

People seem to have the illusion that, because they see these films and they read about them, it means substantial cash in the pocket for the filmmaker. In contrast to the ‘50s, many of the short films that get shown at film festivals, are there for practical reasons such as getting jobs in video or commercial film. Or it’s necessary for academics who must publish or perish. Or it’s pure vanity. I guess I fall into the latter category.

A MOVIE (1958)

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, these types of films were in a different economic community that had created its own distribution, venues, literature, and news. There were film groups and film societies all across the country. People did make money, but after a while, it became clear that these people had to be “helped” by others who were not artists. They took “pity” on these poor artists. They decided it was time that there should be grants administered by non-profit organizations (that would take all the money that was available) so artists could present their wonderful hobbies to the world. So everything was transformed to the point where that earlier film community no longer existed. It had been a classic example of free enterprise before the takeover. It’s now totally monopolized by non-profits who do wonderful things for the filmmakers and take the lion’s share for themselves.

It’s nearly impossible to start a film group because every city has a film festival that is charging filmmakers to display their films, collecting all the money at the gate, and having nice parties for their friends. I’m not sure how long things like this will go on. After a while some filmmakers won’t want to do it. Many people are going to be making low-cost video productions that are available on the Internet or elsewhere. Perhaps the festival environment for these types of films won’t be so promising for promoters.

A lot of the festivals’ job is connecting filmmakers to meet an agent, a manager, financers, other film production folks, to continue to produce work. It’s a big trade show. Many of them do a good job of showing the films, but at least half of it is trying to further yourself with these things. Do you think the answer would be that the film festivals simply rent the films they show? I think that would be nice, but why would anybody want to do that? Independent filmmakers pay for it and the festival pockets the money. I’ve tried to ask for film rentals at film festivals. The New York Film Festival says, “Well, you get the honor of your films being shown in our festival in New York.” The festival burns up the audience in the area. The people who see it there are unlikely to see elsewhere in the city afterwards. No second run theaters.

Right now, LUKE is doing the trip around to festivals. [Producer] Henry Rosenthal is handling all that for me since he has entered his productions in film festivals before. The theoretical goal is to find a sale to cable or commercial television. We’re not renting it, we’re not selling copies, and if that doesn’t pan out, I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with LUKE. It’s possible that it will never be available, because if I need to pay people to see my movies, why bother? It means a lot more work. 2002 B.C. is no longer available. We accomplished what we wanted to do. Now I have another DVD with CROSSROADS (1976) and LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967). It is distributed by the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. It seems more sensible to the gallery to have it for sale even if we don’t end up making a profit. It makes it seem a little more reliable and business-like.

LUKE (1966/2004)

How have you made a living? Being an artist of fifty years, that’s not job security. Well, at one point in the ‘60s, I had four jobs simultaneously. My wife was also teaching. In the ‘70s, my grandmother died and left me some money. My uncle died and was equally generous. My father left me some stock in a company that has since been absorbed by Kroger. So, after a while, I could pay my basic bills. I’ve assumed that I could live off this mainly because I bought my house here in San Francisco in 1972 when the costs were very low. We just take care of ourselves in a simple way. I’ve been telling people for ten years I’ve made enough money to live on from my work for the last 10 years. I started assuming that was the case in the 1990’s but I didn’t know what it really cost to live in San Francisco, the most expensive city in America. I was living off some of the inheritance that I received.

Buying a place back then was a smart move. I made enough money to live on in 1960. The next year, I made absolutely nothing and it pretty much stayed that way with minor improvement for years. Then I slowly started to have more income selling my work. I had a dealer, Paula Kirkeby, who told me, “I want to have a show and we need to raise the prices.” I said, “I don’t think people will buy this stuff at a higher price. We’re already charging $250 for these drawings and we only sell two or three out of the twenty-five we put in a show.” She said, “You might as well not sell them for $500 as $250.” We raised the prices and we sold two or three from the show.

I had a show in Los Angeles in 1991. The prices had gone up so much that I thought, “This is outrageous.” But I remember hearing somebody at the opening say, “Oh, these prices are so reasonable.” It seemed to make a difference when people realized that the work was at a certain economic level. Now the galleries will raise the prices and tell me afterwards, “Here’s the extra money.”

I expected people to value the work for what it was and not its prestige. I didn’t sign a lot of my work in the 1960s. If I did sign it, I would put my name on the back. I always thought that a signature on a piece of artwork represented an advertisement for Coca-Cola or Salvador Dali (interchangeable entities). I wanted to see that each piece had the character of a phenomenon that could be experienced without any predispositions or expectations about who made the work or when it was made or anything else. I want the work to live and succeed on its own merits, nothing else.

COSMIC RAY (1962)

In fact, you can see that a number of my films don’t even have my name on them. I would complete them and, sometimes as an afterthought, I would add titles. I was more interested in finishing it and showing it to people and I would forget to ever put a title on it. COSMIC RAY (1961) did have my name in it at one point. My credit was only three frames long among all those flashing frames. Since I edited the film linearly in an A-roll and didn’t use a work print I would lose a frame every time I made a splice. After a while my name disappeared. It was a gratuitous demonstration that my ego involvement was too demanding.

And when you do get your name in there, you just stay on it, like in A MOVIE (1958). In A MOVIE, I decided that the credit concept was so absurd that I would just sit on it long enough for people to think that the name credit was all that the movie was ever going to be. Rushing movie music and “Bruce Conner” on the screen forever and ever. I just assumed when I made A MOVIE that every film I made afterwards could be spliced onto the end of it. The other movies would be like a continuation of the same film so I wouldn’t have to make any more titles. But of course, each of the following films changed character.

At CineVegas you told me you waited on LUKE because you didn’t want to release it without music? It was shot in regular 8mm and was intended to be shown at five frames per second. It had a production cost of less than four dollars. The camera and projector were very inexpensive because regular 8mm film was being phased out for Super 8 in the 1960’s. I could photograph using the features available on an 8mm camera that are more awkward or costly with 35mm. It was possible to fade in and out while running the camera, advance the film forward and backward by hand, film at fast speeds so things were in slow motion or do single framing of one picture at a time. I could take thousands of individual photographs with an 8mm camera and look at them in a little viewer.

I put my 8mm films in the Museum of Modern Art Film Archives in New York, and they made 16mm enlargements of them in 1984. I used that 16mm copy when Patrick Gleeson decided couple of years ago that he wanted to create another musical soundtrack for a film of mine. He has worked with synthesizers in advance of everybody else, introduced synthesizer to modern jazz, and created a lot of wonderful music.

He was able to do a stereo track for LUKE with such precision that I knew I could never turn it back into film after synchronizing it to 3 images per second on digital tape. LUKE will only be on video. I have been working more with video, in part because it gave me the opportunity to put the original stereo soundtrack by Terry Riley into CROSSROADS.

REPORT (1963-1967)

How did you come to create a new version of REPORT (1963-1967) this year? One of the projects I’ve had in mind was to recreate the character of one of the seven unique edits of REPORT before it was finalized in 1967. Between 1963 and 1967, it went through seven transformations. My concept was to make every viewing print similar using the same soundtrack, but the images would change with each print. People could see this long process of various images at different viewing times. The experience would be similar to people’s memory of seeing films when they are shown again. There is sometimes a moment of wonder when the images seem to be different or in a different order than when the film was first seen. I have been told by people after they viewed A MOVIE a second time that they were sure that I had re-edited it. In the 1960s, it was possible to make unique reversal prints. I would just edit the A-roll of REPORT (one single line of 16mm film) take some images out, move them around, put other ones in. During the first eight minutes of the film, I used one image that would repeat over and over and over as a film loop. The prints went into distribution or into people’s hands, and then they would someday disappear from wear and tear.

All on 16mm? Yes. So after transferring REPORT to digital, I went back and tried to recreate the character in one of these earlier versions. There’s a series of repeat images during the first eight minutes. The repetitive image I chose had been used in the third or fourth version. All of the various repetitive images were consolidated into the negative that was finally made in 1967. Obviously, coming back to this some 35 years later, it’s not going to be the same thing. Of course not, it’s on digital video. I changed the edit of the last five minutes, moved some images around or added other ones into it.

I can’t put it in Canyon Cinema because they don’t rent videos. They sell videos. A problem with selling videos is that the wonderful people who care so much about films and lecture about them in schools or present them in museums will sometimes cheat the filmmakers and Canyon Cinema by making copies for their multimillion-dollar non-profit organizations. This problem came up with the DVD of 2002 BC. There were people showing it in classrooms. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art put it on exhibit in the worst possible manner by exhibiting it next to a sculpture by Ed Kienholz called Backseat Dodge, which had a transistor radio in it running at all times. My video was on a monitor inside a clear plastic box with sound coming through the box. It was in a brightly illuminated environment. Of course, on the DVD it says that it is not for be shown for public performance.

Canyon Cinema also told me that rentals were dwindling for some of the titles available on the DVD. I want to preserve Canyon Cinema as long as possible. They have one and a half employees, they’re always on the edge of dissolution, and they’re the only viable distribution that I know of. They take care of the films wonderfully, they’re knowledgeable of what the films represent, they treat filmmakers with respect, they pay rentals immediately on request, and they treat the clients who rent the films very well. They’re dependable, unlike some non-profit organizations.

MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-1973)

How did you feel, seeing all the images in REPORT again? The film itself? It always takes care of me. I was passionately involved with the subject matter. I try to make films that would have interest to me in the long run since I must continually look at them again and again if they’re going to be distributed or exhibited. REPORT is one of them, and it’s gone through a lot of transformations. I was so emotionally involved initially with REPORT that I would have to leave the auditorium while it was shown. It would disturb me so much that I would be physically shaking. I find it very difficult to convey my feelings or how I experience these films. I know they aren’t the same as other people’s experiences because many haven’t lived through the whole process. Perhaps they’ve only seen it once.

I try to structure the films so that there’s something new that can be found in them each time they are viewed by using the techniques that I’ve to found work with memory and kinetic relationships. I am aware of the way in which things will change in people’s consciousness when re-experiencing something. I had become aware that these experiences are like part of a movie in my consciousness and other people’s consciousness. When you recollect these images or even recollect other movies, they get are assembled differently. Invariably, if you see a movie a second time there has to be something else that’s rewarding in order to enjoy it another time.

When I saw one or two of your films in college there was this pressure from the instructor to interpret the film only one way, the “official” way. “Grrrr” (the artist growls.)

Which I never understood, especially as you made multiple versions. Sometimes when academics take over and write their books, they take all the fun out of it. They try to knock the balls off of them. I remember being at a college in the Midwest. I was invited to do a film program, exhibit in the art gallery, and visit a film class. We were watching A MOVIE in the classroom, and some of the students started laughing at the beginning of the film. The teacher said, “Shut up! This is a serious movie!” God, I could have throttled the guy!

So wait, he thinks you having your name up there for ten minutes was serious? This was at the first part, where all the cars are racing, one after another. There’s other stuff that’s intended to be ludicrous, but it’s not really a comedy. It has had an undeserved reputation for being a comedy. Andrew Sarris wrote a review of the presentation of the History of American Avant-garde Film in the Museum of Modern Art. He took vengeance on Jonas Mekas and all the independent films he had to look at. He had exploited his position at the Village Voice writing reviews of movies under Jonas Mekas’s authority. He must have hated all of the films that Mekas liked. Unfortunately the commentary and presentation at the Museum of Modern Art would make this reaction totally justifiable all by itself. Every part of the juice was excised, analyzed, historicized: use a lot of big words that people don’t commonly use for communication.

It’s important to analyze things to a certain point. But chances are, somebody, somewhere has beat off to MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-1973). Well, yeah, the music is wonderful. Sometimes you hear groans as the audience starts to see the third or fourth repetition of the song when it’s shown publicly. The audience was looking for an erotic girlie movie and it wasn’t catering to them.

Once they started to get “invested,” then you’d cut away. Things just kept repeating over and over. It was a girlie movie but it wasn’t following the girlie movie format. I was turning it around and beating those jocks over the head with it.

Porn gets used and consumed, and then thrown out. That’s kind of my feeling about Marilyn Monroe, too.

About how she was consumed and then thrown out? Yeah. That’s the tragedy.

Do you ever connect that film with REPORT? Yeah, I recently put them back to back. It’s hard to judge how people relate to this since they’ve become historical icons. Back in the ‘70s, I thought nobody would be able to understand REPORT again because they wouldn’t know the details of the assassination of President Kennedy. The media celebrated the 25th anniversary and the 30th anniversary, and then Oliver Stone made the movie called JFK (1991).

Did you see the movie? I did after a while when it was on VHS. People told me that it was a lot like REPORT. I didn’t think it was. He used a similar style of presentation with his own simulated media coverage. The only thing I really liked about the JFK movie was the clip of Eisenhower when he left office as the President of the United States. He warned the American people about the military industrial complex. His message was profoundly ignored at the time. It’s an amazing statement by someone who should really know, who led the American forces through a successful campaign in Europe during the second world war. Although it appears to me that we lost the war against the Nazis.

You think we lost over time? I recently looked at some anti-Nazi movies made during the war. The American view of the cruel Nazis actually looks kind of benign compared to the way things are here in the States. Almost like a travelogue to encourage to vacation in Nazi Germany to get away from the loss of civil liberties, stress and invasion of privacy here.

Encyclopedia Britannica had an educational film in the early ‘60s about despotism. I think it’s something that the current administration would not like to see presented today. It depicts how people lose their freedom piecemeal and the characteristics signs of despotism. I have this definite impression that, over the decades, we didn’t really win the war. This country kept taking over characteristics that were attributed to the Nazi regime. You can look at some of the old posters and books about life in Nazi Germany from the Second World War depicting people pulled off the street and thrown into jail without a trial. A so-called President or Fuhrer can take anybody off, doesn’t need Congress to declare war. The Bill of Rights is treated as a sort of nostalgic, quaint document.

I remember a time when politicians would tell you exactly what their point of view was and you would either vote for them or you wouldn’t. When they went into Congress, they usually did what they said they were going to do.

BREAKAWAY (1966)

Now, the assumption that a candidate should tell the truth is shrugged off and the subject of amusement. The bigger the lie is, the more support people give to it, apparently. As Goering said, the big lie wins. There are a lot of things that Hitler had initiated in running his empire that have been implemented in ours.

You told me something one time when you were wearing an American flag pin. I had an American flag pin on my jacket. Some people who were opposed to the war or the Bush administration said, “Why are you wearing that flag?” I decided a long time ago that that flag belongs to me; it doesn’t belong to the government or George Bush or the war makers. It’s my flag, and I’m not going to surrender it to them just because they misuse it.

ALMANAC 2009

2009-01-15T01:02:00.001-08:00

short film compilation coming soon

The Flaming Lips

2008-12-02T09:20:00.001-08:00

New interview with Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips up at Filmmaker mag's website, talking about his DVD release of CHRISTMAS ON MARS, which is a cool little emo-sci-fi film.

interview is here

Bruce LaBruce

2008-11-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

New interview up with Bruce LaBruce in the new issue of Filmmaker magazine:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2008/otto.php

"The film has a lot of strong social and political commentary. Is anonymous sex more exciting with a zombie? Listen, zombie porn is the wave of the future. Think of all the potential orifices to be explored. As to your question, if you‘ve ever had anonymous sex in a park or even in a bathhouse, basically it is like having sex with a zombie, and not necessarily in a bad way. Zombies tend to be kind of emotionless and anonymous — they all act pretty much the same, and they‘re interchangeable — so having sex with them frees you from the personal and emotional restraints of normal sexual behaviour and allows you to overcome all your inhibitions and really go crazy. That concept interests me, but the sociopolitical dimension of the zombie phenomenon interests me even more. As the master, George Romero, always reminds us in his films, zombies result from the alienation, materialism and rampant consumerism that is the logical outcome of advanced capitalism. Zombies are the ultimate consumers."

ATA Film Festival in SF starts

2008-10-01T02:46:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Artists' Television Access celebrates independent and underground film with the 3rd ATA Film and Video Festival on October 2, 3 & 4, 2008.

On Thursday, October 2, the festival opens with Craig Baldwin's latest feature, MOCK UP ON MU. Drug orgies, spaceships and monsters, oh my… Rising from the hippie-UFO scene, MU follows the intertwined lives of Jack Parson, inventor of rocket fuel, Marjorie Cameron, new age sex leader, and L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer turned Scientology founder, as the "insansational" '60s feeds them with the occult, beatniks, and spaceships to the moon. Cultural historian and culture jammer Baldwin has made cult masterpieces like Tribulation 99 and Sonic Outlaws, and may know every conspiracy and urban legend invented from Alcatraz to Bermuda. His takes on the lurid history of the universe are crazed yet commonsensical. Mashing up real events with rumors and miles of found footage, he creates an elegiac fairy-tale so cohesive that you'll feel like a manic scholar afterwards.

Don't miss the intro act by MU-vie star, Stoney Burke as John McTaint (think McCain).

On Friday and Saturday, October 3 & 4, the festival will showcase 20 short films that run the cinematic gamut of art, comedy and lucid trip. Some of the highlights include Tony Gault’s CASE HISTORIES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY – a hilarious case study of 80s club life as interpreted by Unsolved Mysteries and then reinterpreted by Gault, the beautiful, flickering SPHINX ON THE SEINE by Paul Clipson – a luscious display of wires, lines, light and contrast, and VISIONS OF WASTED TIME – an apparently controversial but utterly unique home movie by Neil Ira Needleman. I didn’t get to see Kerry Laitala’s RETROSPECTROSCOPE but love all her work and the title is sure promising.

In addition to the screenings, the work of 11 experimental film and video artists will be displayed as installations throughout the gallery during the festival and in the ATA Window in October.

ATA is at 992 Valencia at 21st Street. Doors open at 7:30pm every night. Screenings start at 8pm. Tickets are $10. Limited amount available online.

For complete information, including interviews of the filmmakers visit http://festival.atasite.org/2008

FESTIVAL PROGRAM

Thursday, October 2 - Opening Night

Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin).

Friday, October 3:

Why Was I Born (Marlon Gonzalez); Vivid Dreams (Jim Granato); Ants (Ants Ants Ants) (Clare Samuel); Case Histories in Psychotherapy (Tony Gault); Kogel Vogel (Frederico Camapanale).

The Quite Storm (Jibz Cameron); Sunshine Bob (Christian Simmons); Martha's Party (Marthaxiv) Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show (Lise Swenson/Richard Schimpf); Sphinx on the Seine (Paul Clipson)

Saturday, October 4:

Ghosts and Gravel Roads (Mike Rollo); Retrospectroscope (Kerry Laitala); Nocturnal Transmission (Carl Diehl); What for What (John Davis); Visions of Wasted Time (Neil Ira Needleman)

In Search of a Mystic Bartone (Mack McFarland); Baird's Beaked Whale (Douglas Schultz); The Stalin that was Played by Me (Daya Cahen); Infection (Esther Maria Probst); and 3x1 (Telemach Wiesinger)

Gallery Installations - October 3 & 4

Ode to Kirlian (Sam Manera) and Television for Ghosts: The Big Storm (Shalo P.)

Window Installations – October 2-October 31 (7pm-midnight)August (Vanessa O'Neill); Ozuland 002 (Carlos Sansolo) Poderia Haver Algo No Fundo Do Espelno (Ericka Frankel);Steve Martin on the Loose (Rebecca Whipple); RGB Expose (Nick Briz); The Isthmus of Kansas (Christopher Cassidy); Baghdad Plan Is a Success (Sabine Gruffat); Close to Home (Jan Hakon Erichsen); and Sandwich: The Musical (Eric Arsnow)

CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN TONITE

2008-09-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles:

The World Premiere of CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN, a new documentary by Lee Anne Schmitt. Filmed in beautiful 16mm film, TOWN records the present day landscapes of towns throughout the Gold Rush state established by industrial companies. As the company went, so did the town, experiencing huge booms of prosperity in different economic waves of the country. Although the company always ruled – one town made sure it had only one way in and out. When a union protest tried to form, it was blocked outside the city limits. If an employee quit or was fired, they had to move away. Alas, almost all of these companies in the film have moved away or went under, transforming each would-be city into a ghost town. Schmitt does a wonderful job of capturing each location with investigative and nostalgic ways, yet without too much mystery or pity. The beautiful (and scary) buildings and artifacts left behind in each landscape are lost histories for the audience to piece together, made even more timely with today’s financial waves (I make that analogy knowing it’ll work every year somehow). Schmitt’s controlled style and camerawork is solid and intuitive, with narration letting you learn things about each town that you can not see. By capturing this unseen world within one of the richest states – in the world – we learn about some fascinating American landmarks and feel the need to learn more about our own neighborhoods.

Check it out – its not too late:

$9 [students $7]

REDCAT is located at 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 - at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure and at adjacent lots.

Tickets are $9 for the general public, $7 for students with valid ID. Tickets may be purchased by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org or in person at the REDCAT Box Office on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets (30 minutes free parking with validation). Box Office Hours: Tue-Sat | noon–6 pm and two hours prior to curtain

For more information, go to www.redcat.org

The film/video program is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud.

New Interviews

2008-07-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

New interviews and an article I wrote,
that are on other websites:

Interview with Daft Punk
for Filmmaker mag, about their film ELECTROMA, now out on dvd

Drawing on Inspiration
article on DIY no-budget animation done for Film In Focus

and my interview with Don Hertzfeldt was in the Feb 08 issue of The Believer

see the side links here for older interviews.
Upcoming interviews with Peter Hutton and Leighton Pierce.

Working on a Cinemad Anthology and short film DVD, this is my 10th year of "publishing."

WENDELL B. HARRIS JR.

2007-12-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

In the film CHAMELEON STREET (1989), the enigmatic Doug Street goes through a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon.

The point of the film is not just to tell a story of a con man, but asks what a black man is expected to do to make a living in this modern world. Based mostly on the true story of super-con-man William Douglas Street, Jr. the film is written and directed by Wendell B. Harris, Jr. who also turns in an uncanny performance as the lead character.

The film existed in the burgeoning indie cinema of the early 90s. Unlike most of the films around him though, Harris provided a complicated character and not a simple genre drama or comedy. The extremely intelligent Street has great ideas to fight the system, but is constantly stumped by tiny details he cannot control. It’s a drama and you root for Street to win but feel sorry for the people getting conned as well. And it’s bittersweet funny, as the sardonic humor in the film rings all too true. Above all, you feel the frustration that leads to fighting back against the grain.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990. But that didn’t lead to distribution. Rather, the prize led to many meetings in Hollywood, the insult of a possible remake rather than a distribution deal, some deals for writing scripts, and a brutal joke. CHAMELEON STREET did get a forgettable theatrical release and Wendell was able to write some scripts. Only now at the end of 2007 does the film finally get a DVD release.

CINEMAD: I’m glad the film is finally coming out to DVD.

WENDELL HARRIS: My DVD distributor told me, “Please understand that CHAMELEON STREET is being perceived as an ‘art-house’ film by retailers. This will affect their initial buy.”

I’ve always had a really big problem with understanding what the word art-house film means. What is an art-house film? To me, it always has a connotation that, from a marketing standpoint, it means that not much of an effort is going to be made.

I would agree with that.

That may not be the case with Image. I think John Powers [marketing Vice President, Image Entertainment] knows what he is doing. What is your take on that phrase?

The art-house tag? That does mean that they will not put as much effort into it as they would toward a bad movie with a famous actor. I don’t necessarily think an art-house film has to make you think, but for the most part, it’s a film that’s not escapist.

It’s not TRANSFORMERS (2007).

No. You’re not going to be thinking while you’re watching TRANSFORMERS.

There are films from all over the world that are called art-house. But when I hear the words ‘art-house’, for some reason, it’s genetically speared into my DNA: I always think of EL TOPO (1970). And I haven’t even seen EL TOPO. But I think about this film! I’ve heard that the director lined up a million lizards and shot them on camera.

Frogs. [Actually, the famous frog scene is in the follow-up film to EL TOPO, called HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973).]

OK, frogs then. But that’s what comes to my mind whenever I hear that art-house tag. Shooting a million frogs. Something accomplished on a very low budget that very few people want to see. I have never fought people who call [CHAMELEON STREET] an ‘art film’ or a ‘black film’ or an ‘avant-garde’ film. To me, an art-house film is an un-marketed film.

CHAMELEON STREET has never been marketed aggressively. Up until this point, this is the most exposure it has ever received. The only reason you’ve ever heard of the film is because some film critics from 1990, 1991 and 1992 … they would not let it die.

The first time I heard about your film was because of the controversy of it not getting distribution. I don’t know what the show was, but you were being interviewed on a PBS show. It was specifically about how no one would distribute it even though it won at Sundance. Only Will Smith wanted to buy it so that he can make a remake.

That’s partially true. It went through four permutations. It was Arsenio Hall. Then Will Smith, then Sinbad. Between 1990 and 1993 I was totally focused on getting through the gauntlet. You know. You’re running through this gauntlet trying to reach a distributor. I never said Hollywood suppressed CHAMELEON STREET until around the mid-90s.

I remember when Elvis Mitchell came with the BBC to interview me at my apartment in Burbank. At one point Elvis Mitchell says to me, “Sorry for your film being suppressed.”

I said, “ Uh – what do you mean? Why do you think that?”

He said, “Well, why do you think Warner Brothers has paid you a quarter of a million dollars for the remake rights? Yet they refuse to distribute your film.”

The camera’s running and I’m going , “Aaaaaaaah…er, ah…” Robert Krulwich made the same point a year later on an ABC special. Now it’s 2007 and I can tell you: yeah, it was suppressed, all right.

How do those discussions with distributors go? “We really love your film and we think it’d be better if we make it again?” It’s purely business for them to buy a good idea and put someone famous in it.

That’s true. If you make the money, you’ll be promoted. If you don’t make the money, you won’t be. But as Orson Welles said, “There’s something more important in Hollywood than money. What vision is being promoted? ” In other words, what are the ideas being promoted in the film? Ideas get demoted and suppressed. Money is not the final arbiter. Content is king. It is what’s going to be given / fed to the American public and to the world.

The ideas in CHAMELEON STREET have always threatened the status quo. I was essentially paid a quarter of a million dollars to . . . it almost feels like bribe money, or hush money. I was told repeatedly by every distributor in Hollywood, “It’s a wonderful film! We just don’t know what to do with it.” But they knew exactly what to do with it. Suppress it.

I forgot to mention it was also being considered for Wesley Snipes as well. Each time it was given to a different person, it was given a different ambience. For Wesley Snipes, it was changed into a kind of car chase movie. For Sinbad, it was changed into a kind of goof-ball character. For Arsenio, it was a hybrid of the two.

Wendell B. Harris, Jr. as Doug Street.

Did they tell you what other titles they were going to call it?

No, they were going to keep it CHAMELEON STREET. By the way, when this went down, I was also given an associate producer credit, so that when the film was remade, I would be consulted.

Did winning Sundance not pack enough punch?

The prize of winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is a 14” crystal obelisk. But that’s not the real prize. The real prize is that you get immediate access to every major production house in Hollywood. You get 25 meetings with all the top people. I could take the next three hours and tell you about my meetings with Jane Fonda’s company, Robert Redford’s company, Barry Levinson, Ed Pressman, Irving Azoff, Steven Spielberg, whoever! That’s the real prize.

If you were alive at the time you’ll recall I’m sure that 1989, 1990, 1991- that was the epoch of the black director. That was when being black was such a wonderful plus and you could actually get a good deal. After Sundance, I went to Hollywood in 1990, got an apartment in Burbank. I told myself that I was going to make myself as available as possible for the next three years.

But by 1993, after being there for three years, working to get work, I was sitting in Musso and Frank’s. A friend of mine who worked over at Paramount came over to my table and said, “Guess what I just heard?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “Well, it goes like this ….. All you have to do to get a production deal in Hollywood today is be black, male and NOT Wendell Harris.”

(Laughs) I said, “Thanks a lot!”

That sucks.

It makes a great anecdotal story. But man, when you actually go through it, it’s like going through hell.

I heard of one project called NEGROPOLIS.

That was one of my projects that I was pushing. I pushed to get that made for about four years. That was my satire comedy. I did get a bite in 1992 from Spike Lee’s production company but the deal fell apart. I pitched NEGROPOLIS all over Glib Town. In retrospect, I think some people in Hollywood were perhaps disturbed by the premise of NEGROPOLIS. You know, you walk into these meetings in Hollywood and say, “Okay, the whole movie takes place in ancient Rome except the emperor and ruling elite are all black and all the slaves are white. Isn’t that hilarious?” The response would always be, “Isn’t that amusing - ? Yes, what a novel approach. Do you see that novel door over there? Go make a novel exit.” I guess white people don’t want to be slaves. Who knew? Oh well ….. But the Senate is mixed. There are a few white senators. Koreans, too .

But there is so much hilarious stuff in NEGROPOLIS. Like I said, ancient Rome is being run by a black emperor named Canigula. Not Caligula -- Canigula. I wrote some great roles for several great artists: Shirley Caesar, Aimee Mann, Dom Irrera, Stephanie Miller, Aretha Franklin, Leah Krinsky and Chris Tucker…. This was before Chris Tucker started making 50 million per pic. One of the characters I loved was the Middle-Aged Hercules. He’s still strong but he wears a truss. Wanted Bill Murray for that. Then there is Alexander the Great who happens to be Jewish. Very Kosher but he’s got this long flaxen waxen blond hair which he is totally obsessed about… constantly combing his hair. I wrote that part for Howard Stern. You have to remember back in 1990 Howard Stern looked like he was about to assume the mantles of Groucho Marx, Pigmeat Markham, Jack Carter and Don Rickles. So, I wrote this great role for him. Also wrote a phenomenal role for Oprah Winfrey…. Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile and Cosmetology. Cleopatra runs this global corporation called Cleo’s Cosmetics, Inc. whose main product is beauty makeup for women. You would have seen facets of Oprah that have never been seen on film. That woman is a great actor. But they always stick her in these stolid, rustic, turgid, bucolic, Jemima matron roles. She has so many nuances but you never…. Well , anyway --- She was born to play Cleopatra. Then there was “Canigula.” That’s the part I wanted to play.

We should talk about something positive around the film. Was this your first feature?

I had experience with 8mm back when I was 9. But, yes -- it was my first feature on 35mm. Prior to that, it was short films in 8mm, super 8, 16mm and super-16. Working for years at Prismatic Images…. our audio/video studio in Flint, Michigan, which was incorporated in 1979. The end goal was always to make feature films. But to get to that end goal, there were 8 or 9 years shooting weddings, commercials, state lotto ads, making dubs for people of their VHS and beta tapes. It all built up to the making of CHAMELEON STREET.

It was obviously friends and people from around the city, everything coming together to help.

You got that right. Two-thirds of the investments for the $1.5 million budget came from my parents, Helen and Wendell B.Harris, Sr. that was $740,000. The remainder of the budget came from other investors. It took 4 years to get essentially a quarter of a million dollars from investors. It was like scraping dried blood off the sidewalk. You make hundreds of presentations to potential investors and only a handful come through.

But then it did.

It did. I’ve always said that CHAMELEON STREET is like the emblematic independent production. Everything about it is from the independent world and that experience.

Did you already know about the subjects that made the main character? It was essentially based off two scam artists, correct?

Certainly 90% of it is Doug Street’s story. The section where he impersonates the foreign exchange student from France comes principally out of Erik Dupin’s experience. Although, I have to add, Doug Street has a hot and heavy foreign film addiction. He loves German and French films.

You heard their story and were taken by it?

In 1983, I read a Detroit Free Press article on Doug Street. He had just been incarcerated in upper state Michigan for his impostor activities. In the article, they ran through what he had done during the 70’s and early 80’s. The moment I read the article, I said ‘Ah! What a fantastic film!’ I walked into the kitchen and told my parents. That’s how it all began. That was May of 1983. Took a year and a half before I went up to Kinross Correctional Facility in upper-state Michigan to interview Doug Street on three-quarter inch video. That began a prolonged period of research, which continued for the next 3 years, using letters mostly. I visited him a few times after he got transferred to Jackson Prison.

When you take this movie around the world, it’s amazing how some people respond. After screenings there would always be a question and answer session. You’re standing up there answering questions. It was like people were talking to Doug Street and not me! They got angry with Doug for treating this woman like that or using this kind of language, or whatever! If I ever saw the power of media, it was then. I would be answering questions at the end of the screening and people would be talking to me as if I were Doug Street …. completely oblivious to the fact that I’m just the actor. It was his life’s story that had been painstakingly researched. There were 36 versions of the screenplay written over 4 years. Doug Street wrote innumerable letters and everything in the film comes out of his experience.

That’s a good acting job too.

You hear about these people who are on soap operas, you know --- they’re walking through the grocery store and someone reprimands them for doing something to someone’s husband on the show. It’s very interesting.

Doug Street (Harris) makes a black Barbie for his daughter.

Did you understand his motivation? Is he nuts or is he somebody who just got so frustrated with society that this seemed like the thing to do?

I wouldn’t call him nuts. You used the word frustration, which is the illegitimate brother of anger. I know that Doug is angry. He told me one time, “I’ve got anger that goes back to kindergarten. Anger is my best friend.” It goes back to things that happened in his childhood which he continued to fester over as the years went on.

The anger that is present in Doug Street is present in 99.99% of black males in America. Every black male in America has been touched by this anger. Sometimes it feels like you’re being marinated in anger. Why? The playing field of this country is not only uneven --- it has potholes. And some of these potholes have signs that say, “For Colored Only.”

I’m not necessarily leaving out black women either. I’ve been black for 53 years now. Certainly, I’ve never met a black male who’s happy with the way black people are regarded and treated in the United States.

Does he have a wall that is missing that enabled him to take the steps to do things he knew he would get caught and put in jail for?

On the back of the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, there’s a small little blurb that reads:

CHAMELEON STREET IS A FILM BASED ON THE TRUE STORY OF AN AMAZING CONMAN FROM MICHIGAN WHO EXCHANGES HIS DEAD END LIFE FOR A BRAND NEW IDENTITY. IN FACT, MANY NEW IDENTITIES ARE ASSUMED: REPORTER, DOCTOR, LAWYER, DETROIT TIGER AND MORE.

For Doug to actually take his bit of black anger and channel it into these various roles, I feel that there are so many things at play here. The effects of racism really boil down to personal experiences. You talk about ‘Oh, I went over here and this happened to me, the next minute that happened to me’. People who are constantly railing on ‘black people really need to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, get on with their lives, stop playing the blame game, stop playing the race card’ have not only missed the point … they have also missed the past. And they have also missed the elliptical nature of racism. Racism insists that your Present, Past, and Future are all identical. Playing the race card …. ! What a canard. The moment you are born into this country they hand you a race card. It’s a color-coded society. It would certainly be hypocritical to deny that. When Doug Street takes his experiences and says ‘I’m not going to play this game the way they are hypocritically laying it out for me. Instead, I’m going to go through these permutations that reveal how hollow and shallow the game really is.’ Then he proceeds to perform 36 hysterectomies at a Chicago hospital without getting past high school, let alone medical school.

He’s showing that society is ready to bow down at what you’re wearing, or what you say your degree is. All of that does work on a thematic level. But when you sit the real Doug Street down, you look into Doug’s face, you hear him talk about what he did, when he did it, who he did it to….. you can see he gets a real charge out of making this society dance to his tune.

Which is incredible.

People are amazing. People can do so much! The people who actually make the decisions for the masses in this country and in this world, they are very aware of ‘the power’ of the people, and how important it is to keep people thinking: Keep quiet, pay your taxes, just shut up and shut down, keep on keeping on and keep off the lawn while you’re doing it.

Don’t think about how we are raping you physically, spiritually, medically, financially, culturally. Don’t think about any of that. That’s partially why I think the whole undercurrent of Doug Street’s life and what he has attempted to do, really does expose this hypocritical , harsh life we’re living in, in high relief.

Did he enjoy the process of the film being made, something being done with his life? After he was caught, what was his mood?

He was only caught the two times. He was incarcerated not because somebody found out he had been impersonating someone, but because he was turned in by his wife. Another time he was caught because he had used someone else’s credit card, using too many charges. The point is that he wasn’t caught because of trip ups in his impersonations, but because of what he regarded as betrayal by his ex-wife.
He really is one of the most incredible con men that lived because he didn’t get caught.

That’s true. That’s true. We didn’t tell the whole story. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told a lot of people. The screenplay that we shot was a 274-page screenplay. That’s longer than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), along with half of GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). We shot an amazing story. I could make another two CHAMELEON STREETs with the footage left over!

Production still: Incarcerated in Jackson Prison, Street (Harris, left) listens to fellow inmate Eugene Raymond (Henri Watkins) explain why he killed his mother over comic books.

I take it he was smart enough to know that sooner or later, if you’re not playing by the rules, you’re going to go to prison.

One word you have not used in this interview that usually crops up is ‘compulsion’. He’s been incarcerated on more than one occasion for living this kind of lifestyle of impersonation. I don’t want to, in 2007, make any kind of equivocal statements based on where Doug’s head is at now. But I will say that between 1983 and ending with our joint appearance on the Geraldo show in 1990, my impression of Doug was that he felt it was his duty to continue with this lifestyle. He would make an effort to shore up or eliminate those aspects of his life that ended up always getting him in jail. Like bad credit card debt, or a woman.

The existence of racism … in so many words, this seems to be his take on it. As long as he is living in a society that promotes inequity, where a Katrina can take place at the drop of a hat, he is going to continue his crusade which other people have labeled (usually white people) a criminal compulsion. Racism is a criminal compulsion. Nothing good comes out of it. It triggers all kinds of angst and emotional abortion. Things happen. Things don’t happen. Some people weep, some people wail, some people work and some people impersonate other characters, like Doug.

It’s not done in a way where he’s ashamed of who he is, he wants to be someone else. That’s more like giving up. It’s different to say, I want to be a doctor so badly that I’ll just do it. That’s almost more of a psychotic thing where you’re trying to erase your identity. Instead, he was more like ‘look asshole, I can do this.’

When I’m standing in front of an audience after CHAMELEON STREET, I often end up mentioning that Doug literally performed 36 hysterectomies. There is always this gasp of horror that comes from the audience. Mostly from women. And I agree … it’s worth a couple good gasps. But Doug would say it’s also worth gasping at the way doctors are treated like demi-gods in this country. Not just doctors but anybody with a degree. And it really bugs him that our society kow-tows to an idea of professionalism … not the real thing. Cutting a woman open without a medical degree is an extremely disturbing aspect of how far he was willing to take this thing. I hasten to add that every one of those 36 hysterectomies was blatantly successful. But it’s small consolation to those women who scream at me, “HOW DARE HE!”

Production still: Street (Harris, center) removes uterus of female patient without a medical degree, high school diploma or GED. Dr. Wendell B. Harris, Sr. hovers in the background serving as medical consultant for this scene.

It’s hard enough to make a film about somebody and their life, which you also want to make a film in which their condition exists in. At what point in your editing or your shooting, do you think, ‘Ok, this is going to be my comment.’ When there’ll be other times that reflect what happened exactly.

I did not see CHAMELEON STREET as an opportunity for Wendell Harris to start editorializing or adding to this or that experience. When I get a response from an audience member who acts like this entire thing came out of my experience, it is disheartening because I have to go back five steps and explain that this was a well-researched film. It was Doug Street’s life story, not mine. I did not spend four and a half years on that script so that I could get my take or slant grafted in. When we were shooting the film I would always tell the crew, ‘Look …. What we’re doing is, we’re putting Doug Street alone, naked, on top of a large Formica table. We’re putting these klieg lights on him and we’re going to shoot him from every angle.’ That’s what we did. One thing you haven’t quite asked me yet is, ‘What was Doug Street’s reaction to the film?’

Yeah that was coming.

There’s a famous registered letter that Doug wrote and sent to my mother, the executive producer, Helen Harris in 1989, hours after he first saw CHAMELEON STREET. He sent a brief one-page letter … very succinct, very pithy, very to the point. Doug was very disappointed. He felt exposed, that liberties had been taken with his life story. He was most upset with the slogan on the poster we used in our first campaign: I think therefore I scam.

He was very offended about that. He forgets that I got that line from him. One thing he was very pleased about was getting any revenue from the film. Through contractual agreement he did get a cut of the film’s revenue. He never turned down any of the checks.

What’d your parents think?

They liked it. My mother is very much alive but my father died in 2000. But they both liked it. They would have liked it even more if it had made a profit for the Harris family. I was just thinking earlier this morning that the film was released 17 years ago. The only thing that has gotten me through the last 17 years, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, are the memories of watching CHAMELEON STREET with audiences in Italy, Germany, and America. That as well as the reviews critics have written. I mean – I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve spent the last 17 years sitting in a corner fondling reviews of CHAMELEON STREET. But an odd thing happens when you spend the family’s fortune on an independent film that sinks, not without a trace but certainly without a profit. Some people kind of look sideways at “artists” anyway. But when the artist doesn’t make any money they go from looking sideways to looking down, avoiding eye contact. And if you don’t make money for a very long time they stop looking altogether.

But the memory of seeing audiences in Germany, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, almost falling out of their chairs laughing…. That helped sustain me.

Did you always act in your films growing up?

Yes. Acting is always #1. Everybody has three aspects of genius…. Everybody has three talents – three areas of expertise in which they can perform at genius level. But one of these talents is your main root and the other two branch out from it. For me, it’s acting. Acting is my main root. Writing and directing came from my desire to act back when I was four or five years old. That’s when I told my Mom, “I think I need to start directing and writing my own films. That way, I’ll always get the part.”

That makes sense. After the three years in Burbank, did you think wanted to try acting instead?

I had a development deal with Jerry Weintraub, Cary Granit and Matt Leipzig at Warner Bros. for an alien / UFO movie. I was contracted to write the screenplay in 1991. I stayed in that development posture for about a year before everything evaporated into the ether. It’s called ‘turnaround’. I then moved back to Michigan with my research that I had done. Took all that research into a different direction, for a film called ARBITER ROSWELL. I started writing that script in 1993. I was writing other scripts for Hollywood and Showtime at the time. All the money I was making was being funneled back into ARBITER ROSWELL, which we started shooting in 1997. Steven Soderbergh was one of the actors we shot with. Also Ed Lawrence, Joel Weiss, Denice Marcel and Serena Roney-Dougal. Began making trips to Roswell with film crews …. Interviewing most of the major participants including Walter Haut, Glenn Dennis, Phillip Corso, and Carl Vick. Extensive interviews with the crème de la crème of ufology: Stanton Friedman, Linda Moulton- Howe and Michael Hesemann. We also interviewed counter-intelligence agent Frank Joseph Kaufmann on multiple occasions. There is no doubt that Frank Kaufmann is the most important witness / percipient of the Roswell incident --- period. The actual process of shooting and editing ARBITER ROSWELL extended over the next 10 years. There’s a trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL on the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, which will give you an indication of what that film is all about.

The bottom line is: What’s great about being an independent is that you get to do it your way. I spent three years in Hollywood writing scripts for people and got a very good taste of what it’s like when you have a committee of six people giving you notes about the screenplay and screwing it nine ways to hell.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t work, but it does pay the bills. It doesn’t get the film made with the vision intact. 13 years have been spent on ARBITER ROSWELL – that’s three times as much time spent on making CHAMELEON STREET. You lose all kinds of things when it takes 13 years to make a film. You lose the respect of most of your family and friends. People don’t return your phone calls. But here’s the plus. At the end of the process, you get what you want. I was spoiled by CHAMELEON STREET where 99.9% of what’s on screen is what I wanted. The exact same thing is the case for ARBITER ROSWELL.

That’s great. Do you see the end coming? The finished product? Or do you see that some things still need to fall in place first?

The trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL is a 33-minute trailer. The finished film is a three-hour film. All the footage has been shot, but it is not completely edited yet. This 33-minute trailer gives a very good taste of what the finished film is all about. Many people have told me that once the DVD gets released, it’ll be much easier to find investors to help complete ARBITER ROSWELL. To be finished after 13 years…..

You started it with Jerry Weintraub, but do you actually own it?

The screenplay I wrote for Weintraub was called UNTITLED UFO STORY. That was just a generic title. That screenplay is still owned by Warner Brothers and Jerry Weintraub and has nothing to do with ARBITER ROSWELL. With Jerry Weintraub, a very funny guy, by the way, he gave me complete ownership over all the books his production company purchased to research UNTITLED UFO STORY. It was almost like $3,000 worth of research material. But I have to make clear that there’s no relation between ARBITER ROSWELL and UNTITLED UFO STORY.

You made a friendship with Steven Soderbergh from meeting at Sundance. Weren’t you there before his film was?

Here’s how the world perceives it. SHE’S GOT TO HAVE IT (1986) by Spike Lee and SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE (1989) were both released before CHAMELEON STREET. Steven had won [the Audience Award at] Sundance for SEX, LIES. Even though CHAMELEON STREET was actually shot and completed before [either film]. I took 11 months editing CHAMELEON STREET. That’s what, like four times as long as the guys who edited GONE WITH THE WIND ---? That’s about a year. That was brutal. Spike and Steven had both gotten out of the box with their films.

By 1990, Steven was one of the judges [at Sundance] along with Wim Wenders. The first time I ever met Steven was at a CHAMELEON STREET screening. The lights come up; we go up on stage and answer questions. Somebody from the back asked me a question that was so erudite and on the money, that I said, “Who are you? Are you a filmmaker?”

This voice in the back mumbles “Um, yes.” That was Steven, that’s how I first met him.

When you win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance ---- that is not an automatic distribution deal.

Or even a job.

Although it did transpire into three development deals. Steven kept saying “Don’t worry, it’ll come through. It’s going to come through!” This is in 1991. When a joke starts going around Hollywood that all you have to do to get a production deal is be a black male director and not Wendell Harris, I finally got hip to what was happening. Shame on me spending three years trying to work with them. I should have moved back to Michigan, worked up my company and gone on to the next film. But, I could not believe you could win the Grand Jury prize and not get some kind of deal.

What Hollywood cares about is money.

You said a mouthful there. I went to a million of these meetings. I pitched and I pitched until I was hoarse. I remember belly aching to Soderbergh, “I’m pitching and pitching and they’re nodding and showing me the door.”

He said, “You know what I do when I go to these meetings, I don’t talk. They think I’m extremely profound. You might want to try that.”

I wish I had now. All that talking I did was so much lost carbon monoxide.

Doug Street (Harris) refuses to pose seriously for his mug shot.

The film wouldn't be the same if made by a studio.

I’m sure you’re aware of how many of your decisions, as an independent, are made by how much money you have. If I ever sat down and went through CHAMELEON STREET and said ‘I wanted to do this, but I had to do this’ because you are limited with money. All of that means nothing when you can actually put your product on the table, go to bed at night and not lose sleep over, ‘I wish I had done that, I wish I had this or shot this’. Being an independent is glorious.

Will Smith has apparently copied your scene about solving the Rubik’s Cube to get respect. Do you have any idea of what that was?

I don’t necessarily blame Will Smith for the impression of CHAMELEON STREET. He was smart enough to marry Jada Pinkett Smith. If I have a problem at all, it’s this: I feel that CHAMELEON STREET deserves as much distribution as --- uh …. what’s the film with the dead guy on the beach?

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (1989).

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S! If I were to walk through the country and ask people about the two films, people would recognize WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S immediately. Then they would ask me, ‘Where is CHAMELEON STREET?’