When I got back from Cuba, I was mildly surprised not to find a phone message from Derek H. The first shoot of the Viagra documentary was supposed to start in a month; we had no final script. I waited a day, then another and sent him a jolly e-mail. (I loathed its tone of phony camaraderie.)
His answer came almost immediately. He had been offered a two-hour documentary on Nelson Mandela; full interview access to him, to his ex-wife, even some of his cronies from prison. There was a time factor at play, Mandela was eighty-four years old, surely I could understand. He was, Derek concluded, terribly sorry, but he had just “run out of time.”
I was floored. Not to mention broke after the “celebratory” trip to Cuba. I also felt that I’d been “had.” Lured into a frivolous, undignified piece of work that made me look like a fool. I remembered my words to Jesse in the cathedral square, the missionary’s zeal with which I’d delivered them. “You never get anything worth getting from an asshole.”
I stomped up and down the living room with my fists clenched and swearing revenge; Jesse listened quietly, numb with guilt, I imagine. I went to bed drunk; woke up at four in the morning to pee; just as I flushed the toilet, my watch slipped from my wrist and whirled down the chute. I sat down on the toilet seat and had a small, private weep. Here I’d let Jesse drop out of school, I’d promised to look after him and now it turned out I couldn’t even look after myself. A bullshitter, just like Claire Brinkman’s father.
By morning, I could feel a kind of terror spread through my chest like poison, my heart raced; it was as if a belt was slowly tightening around me. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. Just to do something, to move, I climbed onto my bicycle and rode downtown. It was a funereal summer day, muggy and full of unattractive people. I was walking through a narrow laneway, when I crisscrossed a bike courier riding cautiously my way. He was wearing sunglasses, a big bag thrown over his shoulder, gloves without fingers. But what interested me about him was that he appeared to be my age. “Excuse me,” I said. “You’re a courier, yes?”
“Yes.”
I asked him if he had time for a few questions. How much did he make? About $120 a day. A day? Yep, if he hustled. I asked who he worked for, he named the company. He was an easygoing fellow with perfect white teeth.
“Do you think it might be possible for me to get a job with your company?” I asked.
He raised his sunglasses and looked at me with a pair of clear blue eyes. “Aren’t you the guy from television?”
“Not at this moment.”
He said, “I used to watch you all the time. I saw you interview Michael Moore. What a prick that guy is.”
I said, “So what do you think?”
He looked down the alleyway and frowned. He said, “Well, we have an age limit. You’ve got to be under fifty.”
I said, “Are you under fifty?”
“No, but I’ve been there a long time.”
I said, “Could you do me a favour? Could you speak to your boss on my behalf? Tell him I’m not fooling around here, I’ll stay for at least six months, I’m in good shape.”
He hesitated. “That’s going to be a pretty weird conversation.”
I wrote down my phone number and my name and gave it to him.
“I’d be really grateful,” I said.
A day went by; then a few days; then nothing; I never heard back from him.
“Can you believe this?” I said to Tina. “I can’t even get a job as a fucking bike courier.”
In the middle of a silent breakfast the following morning, I rose from my chair and went back to bed, fully clothed. I put my head under the covers and tried to get back to sleep. A few moments later I felt a presence like a small bird alight on the side of the bed.
“I can help you with this,” Tina said, “but you have to let me. You can’t fight with me.”
An hour later she gave me a list of twenty names. Newspaper editors, cable television producers, people in public relations, speechwriters, even a local politician we vaguely knew. She said, “You have to call these people and tell them you’re available for work.”
“I already have.”
“No, you haven’t. You just looked up your old pals.”
I looked at the first name on the list. “Not that fuck-weed. I can’t call him!”
She shushed me. “You said you wouldn’t fight about this.”
So I didn’t. I gave myself a day’s respite and then I sat down at the kitchen table and started making calls. And to my surprise, she was right. Most everybody was pretty decent. They didn’t have anything for me for the moment, but they were friendly, encouraging.
In a moment of energized optimism (phoning is better than waiting), I said to Jesse, “This is my problem, not yours.” But he wasn’t a lout or a parasite and I could feel him tiptoeing around “the situation,” could feel him almost wince when he asked for ten dollars for this, ten dollars for that. But what could he do? He didn’t have a bean. His mother was helping out but she was an actor, a stage actor at that. And it certainly wasn’t up to Tina to crack into her savings (started when she was sixteen) to support my son whose free-floating, it’ll-happen-dude posture I had so confidently encouraged. In the middle of the night (when little good comes from thinking about anything), I wondered how unpleasant things were going to get, how toxic the atmosphere around money, if my luck didn’t change soon.
The film club resumed. To lure Jesse into watching more movies without making it too school-like, I made up a game of spot-the-great-moment. This meant a scene or a bit of dialogue or image that snaps you forward in your seat; makes your heart bang. We started with an easy one, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the story of a failed writer (Jack Nicholson) who goes slowly mad in a deserted hotel and tries to murder his family.
The Shining is probably director Stanley Kubrick’s (Dr. Strangelove [1964] and 2001 [1968]) best film. But Stephen King, the author of the novel, loathed the movie and disliked Kubrick. A lot of people did; Kubrick was famous for being a finicky, self-adoring man who made actors do things over and over with questionable results; when Jack Nicholson ambushes Scatman Crothers with an axe in The Shining, Kubrick made them do it forty times; finally, seeing that the seventy-year-old Crothers was exhausted, Nicholson told Kubrick that was enough takes, he wasn’t going to do it again.
Later on in the filming, Jack pursued his knife-wielding wife (Shelley Duvall) up the stairs fifty-eight times before Kubrick was happy. (Was it worth the work? Could the second or third take have done as well? Probably.)
But more importantly, Stephen King felt that Kubrick just “didn’t get it” when it came to horror, didn’t have a clue how it worked. King went to an early screening of The Shining and came away disgusted; he said the movie was like a Cadillac without an engine. “You get in, you can smell the leather, but you can’t drive it anywhere.” In fact, he went on to say he thought Kubrick made movies to “hurt people.”
Which I sort of agree with; but I love The Shining; I love the way it’s shot and lit: I love the sound of the tricycle wheels going from carpet to wood to carpet. It always scares me when the twin girls appear in the hallway. For my great moment though, I picked the scene where Jack Nicholson hallucinates a conversation between himself and a hotel waiter, a stiff, British-butler type. It takes place in an almost blindingly lit washroom—electric orange and white. The dialogue begins innocently enough but then the waiter warns Jack that his young son is “making trouble,” that maybe he should be “dealt with.” The waiter (Philip Stone) steals the scene with his precise stillness and quiet line readings; watch the way he closes his dry lips at the end of each phrase. It’s like a delicate, vaguely obscene punctuation mark.
He too had problems with children, the waiter confides. One of them didn’t like the hotel and tried to burn it down. But he “corrected him” (with an axe). “And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” It’s a letter-perfect performance. Unlike Jack’s, which has not aged so well since I first saw it in 1980. Here he seems hammy, almost amateurish, surprisingly bad, especially alongside this exquisitely controlled English actor.
That wasn’t Jesse’s great moment, though; he chose the scene where the little boy steals into Jack’s bedroom early in the morning to retrieve a toy only to find his father sitting on the side of the bed with the thousand-yard stare. He summons his son over, who sits uneasily on his lap. Looking at his father’s unshaven face and bleary eyes—in a blue dressing gown Nicholson’s as pale as a corpse—the little boy asks him why he doesn’t go to sleep.
After a beat comes the chilling response: “I’ve got too much to do.” Meaning, we intuit, chop up his family just like the waiter did.
“That’s it,” Jesse whispered. “Can we play it again?”
We watched Annie Hall (1977) for, among other reasons, the scene where Diane Keaton sings “Seems Like Old Times” in a dark bar. Keaton is shot slightly from the side and appears to be looking at someone off-camera. It’s a scene that gives me goosebumps—she seems to be singing the song, making its dramatic points with her eyes. It’s also a moment of self-realization for her character, Annie Hall, a fledgling musician, who is taking apprehensive but certain first flight.
Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there’s no magic left. I showed him Around the World in 80 Days (1956) which, with its glorious shot of a balloon floating over Paris at sunset, had knocked me out when I was his age but now seemed appallingly dated and silly.
But some films still do it, still give you a thrill years and years later. I showed Jesse Mean Streets (1973), a movie that Martin Scorsese made at the very beginning of his career. It’s about growing up in New York’s violent, macho Little Italy. There’s a sequence near the beginning I’ve never forgotten. With the dramatic chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me” in the background, the camera follows Harvey Keitel in his passage through a red-lit bar. Anyone who has gone into a favourite bar on a Friday night knows that moment. You know everyone, they wave, they call out your name, the whole night is before you. Keitel snakes his way through the crowd, shaking hands here, exchanging a joke there; he’s dancing slowly, just in the hip, to the music; it’s a portrait of a young man in love with life, in love with being alive on this Friday night with these people in this place. It also bears the signature of a young filmmaker’s joy, a moment of transport, when he’s doing it, he’s actually making a movie.
There were other great moments, Gene Hackman rousting a bar in The French Connection (1971). “Popeye’s here!” he cries, rushing down the counter, pill bottles, switchblades, joints hitting the floor. There’s Charles Grodin’s double take in Ishtar (1987) when Dustin Hoffman asks him if Libya is “near here.” Or Marlon Brando’s monologue in Last Tango in Paris (1972) about a dog named Dutchie who used to “jump up and look around for rabbits” in a mustard field. We watched Last Tango late at night, a candle burning on the table, and at the end of the scene I could see Jesse’s dark eyes staring over at me.
“Yep,” I said.
There’s Audrey Hepburn on the fire escape of a brownstone Manhattan apartment in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), her hair wrapped in an after-shower towel, her fingers gently strumming a guitar. The camera takes it all in, the stairwell, the bricks, the slim woman, then changes to a medium tight shot, just Audrey, then blam, a full close-up, her face fills the screen, those porcelain cheekbones, the sharp chin, the brown eyes. She stops strumming and looks up, surprised, at somebody off-camera. “Hi,” she says softly. That’s one of those moments people go to movies for; you see it once, no matter at what age, you never forget it. It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defences and really break your heart.
I sat smitten as the credits rolled, the theme song fading, but I sensed a reserve on Jesse’s part, as if he was reluctant to walk across a carpet in muddy shoes, so to speak.
“What?” I said.
“It’s a peculiar movie,” he said, suppressing a yawn, something he sometimes did when he was uncomfortable.
“How so?”
“It’s about a pair of prostitutes. But the movie itself doesn’t seem to know that. It seems to think it’s about something sort of sweet and nutty.” Here he laughed. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful about something you really like—”
“No, no,” I said defensively. “I don’t really like it. I like her.” I went on to say that Truman Capote, who wrote the novella the movie was based on, never liked the casting of Audrey Hepburn. “He thought Holly Golightly was more of a tomboy, more of a Jodie Foster type.”
“For sure,” Jesse said. “You just can’t imagine Audrey Hepburn as a hooker. And the woman in that movie is a hooker. So is the guy, the young writer. They both do it for money.”
Holly Golightly, a hooker?
Jesse asked me once, did I think Rebecca was out of his league? I said no, but I had private worries; that the competition for such a stunning creature, particularly the arena in which it might be played out (stylish superficialities) might defeat him. I remember him turning his pale, despairing face to me in those weeks after “the incident” and saying, “I think God is going to give me everything I want in life except Rebecca Ng.”
So once he “got” her, I was relieved—because it meant that, for the next while at least, he wouldn’t be haunted by the suspicion that a higher happiness lay just beyond his fingertips. Thinking back on it, I imagine it was the cafeteria rumours about Claire Brinkman that revived Rebecca’s interest in him—in old “huggable” Jesse. Rumours that blew her nerdy boyfriend far out to sea and sadly took Claire with them.
The truth is though, once you got past her dazzling looks, Rebecca Ng was a weapons-grade pain-in-the-ass. She was a stirrer of the pot, a lover of intrigue and distress, a creature who seemed to draw oxygen from the spectacle of people at each other’s throats, everybody in a state of upset and talking about her. It put colour in those sunken, movie-star cheeks.
She’d telephone Jesse late at night and imply disturbing things. She was having second thoughts. Maybe they should “date” other people and see if it was “a good fit.” All this reserved for the final seconds of the call. It was her way of keeping him on the line. She couldn’t stand for him to be the one to say, “I have to go now. Goodbye.”
Hours and hours went by like this, conversations that left him ragged and feeling as if there was sand in his eyes. I worried she was going to scar him.
But there was a small unhaveable part in Jesse, something all the other boys gave her which he, for reasons I still don’t understand, withheld; a single, dark room in the mansion to which Rebecca had no access and it obsessed her. You knew the moment she got in there with a flashlight, the moment she understood she could come and go, it would be a valueless room, he would be valueless, and she’d move on. But for the moment it was a locked door and she waited outside, trying to find the key that would turn the bolt.
On warm afternoons, birds chirping, lawn mowers buzzing, hammers banging on the converted church across the street, Rebecca Ng appeared on our porch, her black hair gleaming with health and vitality. For two or three minutes, she engaged me in breezy, impersonal conversation, the kind you expect from a politician at a fundraiser. Chat, chat, chat. Fearless eye contact. The kind of girl who was going to run a string of world-class hotels one day.
Duty done, she descended into the basement. The door at the foot of the stairs closed with a soft, firm click. I heard the murmur of young voices and then, wondering if I should remind Jesse to brush his teeth or put a pillow slip on the pillow (and deciding not to), I removed myself to a distant, soundproof part of the house.
How perfect, I thought, that “straight-A” Rebecca Ng should be having a fully realized love affair with a high-school dropout. Wasn’t that just what her parents had in mind when they fled Vietnam in a rowboat?
On those other afternoons when she was overachieving at a manager-in-training course or preparing a debate with the Young Conservatives Caucus, Jesse and I watched movies on the couch. I can see from my yellow cards that we spent a couple of weeks on a “unit” (there’s a despicable “school” word) called Talent Will Out. This was simply a small group of films, sometimes not very good, where an unknown actor turns in a performance so good that, to put it vulgarly, you know it’s only a question of time before he or she becomes a huge movie star. Think of Samuel L. Jackson as a crackhead in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991). You watch it for thirty seconds: “Who is that guy?” Or Winona Ryder’s tiny role in Beetlejuice (1988).
Same thing, of course, for Sean Penn’s performance as a stoner in the high-school sex comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Watch the way he looks at people when they’re talking to him. It’s as if he is deafened by the sound of white noise in his head and has a pillow squeezed between his ears. It’s not a leading role, but Penn stands so solidly in the middle of the film, his talent so authentic, so glaring, that everyone is reduced to a kind of backup singer (the same “greying” effect that Gary Cooper had on his fellow actors).
“Do I have talent?” Jesse asked.
“Tons,” I said.
“That kind of talent?”
What do you say? “The trick,” I said, “to having a happy life is being good at something. Do you suspect that you might be good at something?”
“I don’t know what.”
I tell him about André Gide, the French novelist, who wrote in his diary that it enraged him when, at the age of twenty, he walked down a Paris street and people couldn’t tell just by looking in his eyes the masterpieces he would produce.
Jesse sat forward in his seat. “That’s exactly how I feel,” he said.
What I didn’t mention was that it wasn’t until 1909— when Gide was almost forty—that he got the recognition he craved.
I showed him Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1953). It was her first film as a lead, she was twenty-four, inexperienced, but her easy, comedic rapport with Gregory Peck seemed to spring from an inexplicable artistic maturity. How did she get so good so fast? And with that strange accent and a kind of emotional keenness, she is oddly reminiscent of Tolstoy’s romantic heroine, Natasha. But Ms. Hepburn also had that thing you can’t learn, an intuitive rapport with the camera, one successful, attractive gesture after another.
I ask Jesse to again watch what happens when the camera settles on her face; it feels as if it has come to rest where it rightly belongs, as though drawn by gravity. Roman Holiday won her an Academy Award.
I picked the debut of a young director as part of our “Talent Will Out” program. To this day, this largely forgotten little TV movie remains one of the most exhilarating pieces of youthful, look-at-me filmmaking I’ve ever seen.
Movies for television tend not to be the domain of the brilliant, but seconds into Duel (1971), you can tell that something odd is going on. You see, from the driver’s point of view, a car leaving the pleasant suburbs of some American city and heading slowly out of town. It’s a hot day, blue sky; houses thin out; traffic thins out; the car is alone.
Then, out of nowhere, a rusted, eighteen-wheel transport truck appears in the rearview mirror. Its windows are shaded. You never see the driver. You glimpse his cowboy boots, his hand waving out the window, but never his face.
For seventy-four minutes, like a prehistoric monster, the truck chases the car through the sun-baked landscape. It is Moby Dick seeking out Ahab. Waiting by the roadside, hiding in gulleys, appearing to lose interest then suddenly reappearing, the truck is a vector of irrational evil; it is the hand-under-the-bed waiting to grab your ankle. But why? (Hint. Even at his young age, the director knew not to answer the question.)
A truck and a car; no dialogue between them. Just running down the highway. How, I ask Jesse, could anyone animate such material? “Like squeezing wine from a rock,” he said.
I suggest that the answer lies in the director’s visual attack. Duel compels you to look at it. It seems to say to the audience, There is something of primordial importance going on here; you have feared this very thing before and now here it is again.
Steven Spielberg was twenty-two when he directed Duel. He’d done some television (a Columbo episode served as his calling card) but no one anticipated that he was going to tear up the material with quite this relish. More than the truck, more than Dennis Weaver’s escalatingly frightened driver, the director is the star of Duel. Like reading the first pages of a great novel, you sense you’re in the presence of an enormous, incautious talent. It hasn’t learned to second-guess itself, to be too smart. Which is what, I suppose, Spielberg meant a few years ago when he told an interviewer that he tried to rewatch Duel every two or three years in order to “remember how I did it.” You have to be young, he implied, to be so unapologetically sure-footed.
You can see why studio executives took one look at Duel and gave him Jaws (1975) a few years later. If Spielberg could make an unwieldy truck scary, just imagine what he could do with a shark (which, like the driver of the truck, remains out of sight. You see only its effects, a missing dog, a girl pulled suddenly underwater, a buoy exploding to the surface, things which announce the presence of danger but never give it a face. Spielberg intuited at an early age that if you want to scare people, let their imaginations do the heavy lifting).
We watched the “Making of Duel,” which came with the DVD. To my surprise, Jesse was intrigued listening to Spielberg talk about the shot-by-shot construction of the movie—How much thought had gone into it. How much work. The storyboards, the multiple cameras, even auditioning a half-dozen trucks to see which looked the meanest. “You know, Dad,” he said in tones of mild amazement, “up till now, I’ve always thought Spielberg was a bit of a suck.”
“He’s a film nerd,” I said. “Slightly different species.” I told him the story about a young, hard-partying actress who knew Spielberg and George Lucas and Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese in California when they were just starting out. She was amazed, she later said, that they didn’t seem to be interested in girls or drugs. All they wanted to do was hang around with each other and talk about movies. “Like I said, nerds.”
I showed him A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). I told him how in 1948, a young, relatively unknown actor, Marlon Brando, hitchhiked from New York to Tennessee Williams’s house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to audition for the Broadway production, how he found the celebrated playwright in a state of terrible anxiety; the electricity was out and the toilets were stopped up. There was no water. Brando fixed the power problem by putting pennies behind the fuses and then got down on his hands and knees and fixed the plumbing; when that was done, he dried his hands and went into the living room to read the part of Stanley Kowalski. He read for maybe thirty seconds, so the story goes, before Tennessee, who was half-bombed, waved him to silence and said, “That’s fine,” and sent him back to New York with the part.
And his performance? There were actors who quit acting when they saw Brando do Streetcar on Broadway in 1949. (The same way Virginia Woolf wanted to give up writing when she first read Proust.) But the studio didn’t want Brando for the film. He was too young. He mumbled. But his acting teacher, Stella Adler, had made the ominous prediction early on that this “strange puppy thing” was going to be the greatest actor of his generation. Which is how it turned out.
Years later, students who took acting workshops with Brando remembered his unorthodox ways, how he could recite a Shakespearean monologue standing on his head and still make it truer, more affecting than anyone else’s work that day.
“Streetcar,” I explain, “was the play where they let the genie out of the bottle; it literally changed the whole style of American acting.”
“You could feel it,” Karl Malden, who played Mitch in the original Broadway production, said years later. “The audience wanted Brando; they came for Brando; and when he was offstage, you could feel them waiting for him to come back.”
I realized I was getting dangerously close to overselling the film so I forced myself to stop talking. “Okay,” I said to Jesse, “you are really going to see something today. Buckle up.”
Sometimes the phone rang; I dreaded that. If it was Rebecca Ng, the mood would be shattered as certainly as if a vandal had thrown a rock through the window. One afternoon—it was a honey-hot day in late August—Jesse disappeared to take a call in the middle of Some Like it Hot (1959); he was gone twenty minutes, returning distracted and unhappy. I put the movie back on but I was acutely aware of his absent attention. He had settled his eyes on the television screen as a kind of anchor so that his worried thoughts about Rebecca might roam freely.
I snapped off the DVD. I said, “You know, Jesse, these movies were put together with a great deal of thought and love. They were meant to be watched in one sitting, one scene flowing out of another. So I’m going to make a rule here. From now on, no phone calls during the movie. It’s disrespectful and it’s shitty.”
“Okay,” he said.
“We don’t even look at the number when it comes up, okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
The phone rang again. (Even at school, Rebecca seemed to sense when his attention was elsewhere.)
“You better take it. This time anyway.”
“I’m with my dad,” he whispered. “I’ll call you back.” A buzz like a small hornet trapped inside the earpiece. “I’m with my dad,” he repeated.
He put down the phone.
“What is it?” I said.
“Nothing.” Then with an exasperated exhalation, as if he had been holding his breath, he said, “Rebecca always picks the strangest times to want to talk about stuff.” For an instant I thought I saw tears misting up in his eyes.
“What stuff?”
“Our relationship.”
We went back to the movie but I sensed he wasn’t there anymore. He was watching some other movie, the bad things Rebecca was going to do because he’d pissed her off on the phone. I turned off the television. He looked at me startled as if he might be in trouble.
“I had a girlfriend once,” I said. “All we ever talked about was our relationship. That’s what we did instead of having one. It gets to be a real bore. Call her back. Clear it up.”