THE CARDS

I was a young fellow in Chicago in the early seventies. Our theater company was the St. Nicholas. We supported it through outside straight jobs. Macy and I were waiters at a gay restaurant, Patricia Cox was a B-girl at a local bar, and I don’t recall what Steve Schachter did but it will occur to me as we go to press.

The neighborhood (Halsted and Addison) loved and supported us, and we were opposed by the Chicago Tribune, in the person of its drama critic, Roger Dettmer. There was an alternative newspaper, the Reader, whose critics came to our defense. These included Michael Feingold, who later went to the Voice (and was influential in getting me the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry in 1984), a friend in the true Chicago tradition, and Michael VerMeulen.

VerMeulen had dropped out of school at fourteen and walked into the Reader offices, handed them a phony résumé, and demanded a job. Obiter dictum: ALL theatrical and film résumés MUST contain attractive lies. These are the equivalent of the Big Hair of TV evangelists: one has to stop the eye of the buyer. No kidding. Tell them you were a Forest Ranger in Alberta. Who’s going to check?

In any case, VerMeulen was our friend and champion. He later took over as editor of British GQ. He died young. He was the real thing. In any case, he championed us in the true Chicago tradition, which is, “Fuck it, you’re right. And if you’re not right, fuck it anyway.”

In some interview I referred to Roger Dettmer as “an asshole,”^I and the comment found its way into print. Dettmer responded, in the Tribune, saying that I’d used a word unsanctioned in polite discourse. I wrote him my apology: that of course he was not an asshole. He was like an asshole.

These were the days before computers. Newspaper copy was hacked out at typewriters and carried by copyboys to the compositor’s room. I schemed with Schachter to have one of us from the St. Nicholas hired as copyboy; when given a “Kill this play” review by Dettmer, we would swap it out for one of our own composition and rush that to the presses. But we never got around to it. And computers took the place of typewriters.

Aha, but as the fingernail heals, the quick beneath recalls the wound; just so, the mind, affronted by (you-know-whoms), may callous, while the affront remains, awaiting reactivation.

This, in my case, came with the Cards.

Back then, in the ’70s, film audiences went to sneaks at Bakersfield or somewhere and were invited, upon their exit, to fill out cards, cataloguing their opinion of what they had seen. These responses were most heavily relied upon by Studio Executives, insufficiently hip to consider that they were less views of The Movie than records of those flattered into casting themselves as Film Critics. Many such jotted down, as did the professionals, their proclamations as to “what a person like oneself, now a critic, might think of a film like the one just viewed, in reasonable hope of endorsement from the notionally like-minded.”

Why, hell, I thought, it’s just like Roger Dettmer.

I never learned to play chess past “how do the pieces move,” but did read that advanced players did not think “five moves ahead” but, rather, recognized the similarities between the board’s position at the moment and the games they had played and studied.

With the Cards, here I was, looking, once again, at Roger Dettmer.

When one had turned out a magnificent low-budget film, the budget guaranteed that the distributing entity would, having good hope of recouping its initial investment, be unlikely to shell out more than chump change on promotion. Unless the CARDS were so overwhelming as to portend… etcetera. But I never got around to that scam, either.^II

Nor to the oft suggested writing of two screenplays. One for the making of the film, and another for the diversion of the script readers.

To actually make the film:

FADE IN:

DAWN. OPEN SEA. SEABIRDS LANDING ON A MASS OF DRIFTWOOD. CAMERA MOVES IN TO REVEAL IT IS A MAKESHIFT RAFT, TO WHICH IS HANGING MORTON GRAVES, A FORTY-YEAR-OLD NEAR-NAKED MAN.

And the script reader’s studio version:

LITTLE DID MORTON GRAVES THINK, WHEN SETTING OUT TO DISCOVER THE LOST ATOLL OF BORAGAVORA, THAT THE ERRATIC COURSE OF AN INTER-ISLAND STEAMER, CAPTAINED BY A DRUNKEN LOUT, WOULD SLICE THE BOW OFF HIS LUXURY YACHT.

That’s right.

I should have done it. And, as a prolific author, I should have adopted, forty years ago, several pen names, under each of which I could appeal, not to a different audience, but to the benign neglect of various unangered critics. For the question of those enraged by productivity was, “Who did I think I was…?” Whose very vehemence was an indictment of their talentless, loveless, drab, and pointless lives.

I attended one Oscars and one Emmys, nominated, each time (The Verdict, Phil Spector), but came away sadly disappointed in the judges’ ruling.

But I should not have been, for theirs was the same as those committees who ruled MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. Their choice fell upon one most likely not to succeed but most obviously to have succeeded in those endeavors thought praiseworthy in a dedicated high school student.

Give me the ne’er-do-wells, every time. I’ve never met a stupid audience, but bureaucrats and their mob-think make me sick.

1. I. For the artist all criticism is devastating, and no praise is sufficient. One might remind oneself that criticism comes from paid detractors, these, of necessity, talentless and otherwise unemployable. But our umbrage at criticism of our dog is not lessened by the critic’s profession as a breeder.

   A blind pig, we know, can find a truffle. And a critic whose only excellence is an unabashed readiness to indict his betters can come to a conclusion about our work’s shortcomings that we may in fact share. Which only makes the affront worse.

   Here it is as if our private practices are being broadcast to the world not only by a Peeping Tom but by one who is only guessing, although he may be guessing correctly. Samuel Johnson said the censure of knaves and fools is applause: a phrase rendered in the vernacular as “Fuck ’em all but six for pallbearers, and fuck them, too.”

   What other attitude might one adopt? For if we accept as helpful the loathsome (if accurate) gossip of fools, have we not joined their number?

   Yes and no. The truth hurts, and by that pain we may identify its accuracy.

   Impertinence may offend but it cannot humiliate. A better man than I would kiss the rod. But I am not a better man, and so my strategy is to read no criticism. This, though profoundly moral, is a pointless choice, as the power of indictment is the power of salaciousness, which, like murder, will out.

   E.g., “Dave, it’s appalling what X wrote about your last film. How dare they say _____.” And, as always, “Here we are, in Boise, all moved in. We enclose this from the local paper, which you may have missed.”

   And there is always that superglacial silence on the morning after the failed opening.

   Two notable fan offerings: “I’m a great fan of yours. Great, great, very very great.” And the horror of the Other Name: “You’re one of my favorite filmmakers: you and _____,” the last a perpetrator of works with which no rational being would wipe his ass.

2. II. Here is all you need to know about Hollywood. There is not and never has been any correlation between audience testing and box office.

   Joe Farrell was the king of audience testing from the late seventies till his death in 2011. He used audience cards, surveys, and electronic testing, among other means.

   In the last, the chosen participants would sit in a booth and screen the film. They’d each have two knobs, one for each hand. One was turned to indicate “excitement” or some such, and the other to indicate “enjoyment of the scene.” The responses were displayed on graphs to the filmmakers, indicating the age and sex of the testees.

   Joe did the research on several of my films. I asked him, after one screening, how the cards looked. He said, “Mixed”; I said I wished the numbers were higher, and he said, “How high would you like them to be?”

   A smarter man than I would have shelled out.