Unmade Beds, Twentieth-Century Boy

I met Amos Poe (who made the film The Blank Generation, nonsync sound) on a photo shoot for New York Rocker, we were doing something on his friend Ivan Kral, guitarist with the Patti Smith Group. I saw him again at Max’s, where he leaned into my booth and said, “Hey, I was gonna ask, do you wanna be in my movie?”

“That’s okay, I don’t want an actor. You could pretty much just play yourself.”

A feature!? Then I figured he meant months in the future, which would give it time for the project to fall apart completely. “When do you start shooting?”

“A couple weeks! In that case, you better give me the script as soon as possible!”

“Uh, I haven’t written it yet,” he said. It transpires that he’s already got a distribution deal set up. A shoestring budget of six thousand dollars (uncle’s loan and credit card), the use of an empty apartment at 110 West Thirtieth Street (Amos is a super and a cab driver). He’s cast Robert Gordon as the angel of death, Debbie Harry as the blonde. It will be a pastiche of New Wave flicks, Blow-Up and Breathless. Sounds good. Nobody’s made an underground film in NYC in quite a while.

Amos put an ad in the Voice looking for actors to be in a Godard-type film. Two people from the Lee Strasberg workshop showed up: a busty brunette from Cincinnati named Patti Astor, and a noisy twenty-four-year-old French kid called Eric Mitchell, who has the look of Belmondo. Amos rounded up a cute club girl, Baby Adams, my sweetheart Mary Jane, black-leather Cowboy Dave (Forshtay). We met with Debbie Harry at her loft on the Bowery that she shares with boyfriend Chris Stein. Arturo Vega’s paintings of supermarket specials are clustered in the front room. We talked in Debbie’s bedroom, TV on, she on the mattress on the floor, which was littered with comic books and sci-fi magazines. They’re big potheads. We plotted our scene: I’m a photographer, she comes to see me for head shots, jump cut to us in our underwear (presumably having just made love), and she sings me a song called “Sweet Thing” in her black lace bustier. I smoke expressionlessly, and then she leaves. It’ll be a nice little showcase for Debbie’s a cappella talents.

Ivan Kral made the piano-and-guitar music. Amos wrote the script each night before the day’s shooting. He had a volunteer crew of ex-NYU film students. He screened Breathless for us all before the shoot. From conception to the first day was two weeks. The shoot lasted nine days.

Amos gave me a bottle of wine each morning to get prepped. One day we were shooting a scene in the re-opened Max’s, and there was a problem with the 16mm camera, so the on-set photographer Fernando Natalici shot Eric and me clowning around onstage, drinking Pernod, while we did a voice-over on the Nagra. There was a morning scene shot in Washington Mews, where I was meant to be drunkenly making out with cute Baby Adams. How to act? Just do it! I’m getting the hang of it! Free pass to French-kiss and fondle an attractive stranger. Acting is great!

I couldn’t memorize my lines, so Amos taped them up around whatever room we were in for me to read. I’d ask Amos to direct me, but he’d just say “Be yourself,” which is hard when there’s a lighting man, a sound man, a cameraman, etc. staring at you. Eric fared much better, being a real actor, and devoid of self-consciousness. He strayed from the script in exciting ways. His energy came through. His off-the-wall humor. Especially a final scene on his fire escape, where he literally threw the script into the air, which fluttered down to Third Street, looked in the camera, and said, “Fuck Amos Poe!” and blasted the viewer with a cap pistol. Blam, blam, blam! “Fuck Jean-Luc Godard!” Blam, blam, blam!

I still don’t know if Unmade Beds is meant to be a tragedy or a comedy. Amos appropriated as many references as he could to the French New Wave. It’s a document of something, I’m just not quite sure what. The amazing thing is that he got it made at all.

Summer Records

Greatest Hits, King Pleasure

Super Nova, Wayne Shorter

Native Dancer, Wayne Shorter

Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake

String Quartets, Debussy and Ravel

Summer Films

Charlotte (Vadim)

Spirits of the Dead

The Missouri Breaks

The Man Who Lies

L’Immortelle

Four Nights of a Dreamer

Une Femme Douce

La Notte

Puzzle of a Downfall Child

Honey Pie (XXX)

Taxi Driver

Le Magnifique

Le Flic

The Night Caller

Edvard Munch

Small Change

Weekend

Salon Kitty

Marathon Man

L’Amour Fou

Out 1: Spectre

The Last Tycoon

Providence

Andy Warhol’s Bad

The Eagle Has Landed

Annie Hall

The Odessa File

Summer Books

Being Geniuses Together, Robert McAlmon

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Living Well Is the Best Revenge, Calvin Tomkins

Speedboat, Renata Adler

Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara

Sermons and Soda Water, John O’Hara

Stranger at the Party, Helen Lawrenson

Archy and Mehitabel, Don Marquis

Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten

Who Walk in Darkness, Chandler Brossard

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

Go, John Clellon Holmes

Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger

The Instrument, John O’Hara

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, William Burroughs

The God of the Labyrinth, Colin Wilson

The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme, Colin Wilson

Ritual in the Dark, Colin Wilson

September 8. Screening of Unmade Beds at the Preview Screening Room at 1600 Broadway. I had mixed emotions watching it. It’s a clumsy pastiche. Not nearly as good as the films it salutes. Hard to separate the fun of shooting it with the finished product. I am certainly wooden, in my vain effort to mimic Alain Delon. I seem devoid of a sense of humor, which makes my character, such as it is, unsympathetic. Eric is much better, loose-limbed, combustible. Debbie is great.

Richard Merkin and his sidekick, graphic designer Kenny Kneitel, come as my guests, and take me to the popular new restaurant One Fifth. Cunard Line art deco. The dining room is assembled from the RMS Caronia. We all drink bullshots (vodka and beef bouillon) and they discuss the new skin mag, Chic. Oiled bodies and blinding sharp focus. Overlit. They disapprove. Too gynecological. Too slick. This must be what metropolitan life is like. We are men of the world! We have preferences for our porn!

Mary Jane and I have moved to a ninth-floor (the top) mini-loft a block away. It has west and south exposure. It has access to the rooftop (the tar beach) and a huge water tower looms above. A fire escape runs past the bedroom window. A gay bathhouse called Man’s Country is directly across the street, so I see men in towels staring into my studio. Torch Art Supplies is on the ground floor. Thomas Wolfe lived next door. There’s a methadone clinic in the building, so there’s toothless junkies in the elevator. Sometimes they sell the “spitback” to the addicts loitering outside. Bless our pad.

I re-read The Subterraneans. Eric Mitchell and I go east to Kerouac’s Paradise Alley, where salsa replaces Symphony Sid, and Eric’s malcontent mocking tease replaces the near-hallucinatory beat exaltations of the 1950s East Village. “Hollow-eyed, and high…” said Ginsberg. Kerouac wrote, “Pull my daisy, tip my cup…Cut my thoughts for coconuts.”

Cute, dopey Nick Charles is gone after fourteen months of cohabitation. Went out one of our eight windows. That big expanse of rooftops got the better of him. He left ten days ago. I scoured the neighborhood for him, calling his name, looking under parked cars, and a Spanish super said there was a nasty tomcat who preyed on weaker animals, and he may have killed him. Unspayed male cats hate spayed male cats. Poor little Nick might’ve been murdered. It’s too awful to think about. I thought he’d be around till I was thirty-eight or so. I really miss him. I still see his hairy black shape out of the corner of my eye as I make a tuna sandwich. I see movement. It’s only the curtain blowing. I loved you, Nick, wherever you are.