Gotta Get Theroux This
Page 6
I found part-time work as a fact-checker in the legal department of a large publisher. Most of my Spy friends had already found work elsewhere by this time, at other magazines and news agencies, and a couple on a new TV show named TV Nation. It was the brainchild of the film-maker Michael Moore, and a pilot episode had been shot the previous year. A mixture of satirical stunts and humour reportage with a left-wing point of view, it was similar in style and feel to Roger & Me, Michael’s documentary about the death of the auto industry in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. One of these friends, Chris Kelly of the rappers on gun safety idea, suggested I might want to send over a packet – a collection of ideas for jokes and sketches. NBC had financed the pilot, he said, but the network had balked at paying the full amount for the series. The BBC had stepped in, providing one-third of the budget. According to Chris, the BBC commissioners had told Michael, given they were chipping in, they’d quite like him to hire a British correspondent.
‘Hmm,’ Chris said one evening after work. ‘If only we knew a British person who was intelligent and had a sense of humour. I just can’t think who that could be.’
‘Ha ha!’ I said. ‘I’ll let you know if I think of anyone.’
I didn’t take the teasing seriously, mainly because the idea of me as a TV correspondent seemed so unlikely. Still, I remembered my ambition to write for television, on a sitcom or a talk show. I wondered if pretending I wanted to be on TV might be the price of being offered a more menial job.
Chris encouraged me to send Michael some segment ideas. I sat in front of the computer and tried to come up with something – the only one I recall had to do with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I wondered if it might be funny to go to the Iranian Embassy and offer our services as hit men. I sent off the packet and then didn’t think much more about it.
I didn’t know it then, but I was far from being the ideal hire for Michael Moore. Hailing from Michigan, from a family of autoworkers, Michael had an unapologetic loyalty to the American working class of the Midwest. My background, private education, bookishness, soft hands, university degree, effete interests and lack of enthusiasm about sports were all likely to be marks against me. Still, Chris said he was feeling optimistic about being able to get me an interview and he began prepping me for what to say to Michael.
‘You are willing to do anything on the show,’ he told me. ‘Make coffee, do messenger work, phone bash.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘You saw the TV Nation pilot and you absolutely loved it.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘And you’ve seen Roger & Me, right? He will definitely ask you about it. It’s your favourite film.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Got it.’
In fact, while I had seen and enjoyed many of Michael’s TV segments, including some short comic pieces he’d done on The Tonight Show, and had paid money to watch his Roger & Me sequel, Pets or Meat, at the cinema, I had never actually seen Roger & Me itself. Naturally, I decided I should probably see it, but life being the way it is, I delayed, at some level not really believing Michael would call. I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I wrote an article about Charles Manson’s latest parole hearing for a small British magazine. I got stoned and played Tetris on the computer. I stared at the red-eyed figure in the bathroom mirror, looking for answers to who I was and what I was supposed to be doing, finding none.
I did any number of things, except watch Roger & Me, with the result that when Chris phoned to say Michael was ready to meet right now I realized I still hadn’t seen it and it was too late now.
Michael was then working out of the Brill Building in Times Square, hallowed headquarters of many composers and songwriters of the early rock-and-roll days: Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived, having pedalled up from Chelsea – a cold winter’s day, just beginning to get dark. He was then finishing up post-production on his first non-documentary feature, Canadian Bacon. He was with my friend Chris when I arrived. Michael looked tired and harassed, slumped in the corner at his desk, his body language barely registering that I’d entered.
He asked about my previous jobs.
‘How was it working at Spy?’ he said.
‘Good. I enjoyed it a lot.’
Chris, acting as my corner man, added: ‘Louis did the piece about rappers. Free-styling raps about gun safety.’
‘And you also worked at Metro?’
I was surprised he’d heard of Santa Clara Valley’s free alternative weekly. ‘It was great,’ I said. Later, I discovered Michael had got his start in journalism by founding and editing The Flint Voice, which was his hometown’s left-wing weekly and its equivalent of Metro – part of the same network of papers – and that, for him, my time in the salt mines of alternative newsprint may have been my greatest selling point.
‘Did you see the TV Nation pilot?’ he now asked.
‘Yes, I did. So funny. And the segments you did on The Tonight Show.’
‘What do you see yourself doing on the show?’
‘Anything. Whatever I’m asked. Photocopying. Phone bashing . . .’
I was trying to be as ebullient and enthusiastic as possible – buoying the mood and compensating for the sense of Weltschmerz Michael was giving off. My overall feeling was that it was going OK, and that Michael, having had his arm twisted by the BBC to consider a British correspondent, liked the idea of having one that wasn’t too British: someone who understood American cultural references, who wasn’t too establishment. Also, strangely, he didn’t seem too bothered by my lack of TV experience.
Then Michael asked, ‘Have you seen Roger & Me?’
‘Yes, I have. I loved it,’ I said. ‘It’s one of my favourite films.’
I’d like to say it cost me some pangs of conscience to lie about having seen Roger & Me, but it didn’t, it slipped out very easily, though I did make a mental note to watch the film as soon as I got home, thereby making my lie into a truth retroactively, if you can do that.
The interview ended soon after. I cycled back home. I have no idea what I thought about on the way back. Possibly Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which I was reading, or, just as likely, the Texan supermodel Bridget Hall who was on billboards at the time . . . I do know I had no inkling of being on the verge of a momentous change.
Chapter 6
Millennium
When I picked up the ringing phone and the voice said, ‘Louis? Jerry Kupfer. TV Nation,’ I put my spliff down and stood up, not feeling equipped to conduct a high-stakes professional conversation. I didn’t normally answer the phone high and I was regretting doing so now. I tried to gather my thoughts – he was talking about ‘the millennium piece’, an idea I had discussed with Michael and Chris Kelly, and when could I fly. It seemed I was being offered the job of presenting the segment and I did my best to reply appropriately and sound on-point and alert.
It was to be a satirical investigation cross-referencing the predictions of various apocalyptic groups for when the end of the world was going to come and how it would take place. I would be leaving the following night. It was weird and surreal – the idea of me being a TV correspondent. I was struggling to process it and after I put the phone down, I realized I had been so clouded with anxiety and dope that I probably hadn’t sounded keen on taking the job. I called Jerry back. ‘I just want to say how pleased and excited I am,’ I said. ‘You caught me off guard. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.’
‘OK!’ Jerry said. ‘That’s good to hear. Yeah, good to know you’re excited. I didn’t know if I caught you in an off moment.’
‘Ha ha! No!’ I said. ‘I’m very much . . . on! And excited! Thank you!’
Truthfully, though, I was mainly panicked and worried.
It was now several weeks since my first interview with Michael. There had been a follow-up interview, at which, afflicted with toothache, I was aware I’d been less effervescent. Michael had mentioned a possible segment about hockey fights. ‘T
hat sounds amazing,’ I’d said but maybe without enough conviction – Michael was exquisitely attuned to body language – and afterwards he’d told Chris, ‘He doesn’t seem very enthusiastic.’ Dubious about my knowledge of US culture, he’d also pointed to his ballcap, which had a ‘p’ on it.
‘What does this stand for?’
‘Philly?’ I said. I am still not sure whether this was the right answer.
After that, it had all gone a little quiet, though Chris had mentioned the millennium segment. It had been offered to Merrill Markoe, the author and comedian who’d been a writer on Late Night with David Letterman, but she’d been worried that talking to religious loonies might disturb her mental equilibrium. Then the performance artist Karen Finley had been in the frame, but it was said she’d wanted to bring her baby and partner, making the flights prohibitively expensive.
And to be fair, seriously, why was I being offered a network TV job? Weird-looking, gawky, socially awkward, unqualified, anxious, twenty-three years old . . . Yes, I was cheap and keen and, in being British, a sop to the BBC paymasters, but I was very far from conventional TV material. I thought of all the people I knew who were funnier than me . . . school friends like Adam and Joe and Zac, family members, random people down the pub. I tried to reassure myself that my sense of curiosity about the story itself would see me through. I had no idea whether I’d be any good at asking questions on TV but I did know I was excited to meet the various religious groupuscules making their lonely cataclysmic prophesies. I thought back to university and my interest in offbeat sects, millenarians and chiliasts, the fanatics that flourished during the English Civil War . . . I’d once bought a copy of The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn, a landmark overview of apocalyptic religious movements – one day I planned on reading it – and maybe that enthusiasm would carry the day . . . Or, you know, maybe it wouldn’t.
The next afternoon, having given notice on my legal fact-checking job, I went into the TV Nation offices with my bags packed to pick up my tickets and have a quick briefing chat with Michael. We sat in a conference room with a couple of the writers. On the wall were segment ideas on index cards. ‘Pets on Prozac’. ‘Move the Show to New Jersey’. And also: ‘Apply as Hit Men to Whack Salman Rushdie’. That was mildly encouraging.
Michael screened a rough cut of a segment he was working on in which he visited the Serbian Embassy and they explained the Balkan conflict using slices of pizza. An embassy aide, reaching over for some pepperoni, said, ‘I think I would like a slice of Montenegro because my mother is from there.’
This was supposed to be my speed-education in presenting fact-based comedy on TV, and Michael began throwing out pieces of advice: how to play to the camera in reaction shots and elicit small moments of humour. ‘That Monty Python guy, on PBS, Michael Palin. He’s great but we’re not doing gentle comedy, Americans don’t want that. You’ve got to kick ass and take names. Get in there and shake it up. This camera guy – I’m not happy about how he shot this. He needs to stay on the interviewees, he’s coming back to me too much. You can always repeat your own lines but the gold is in what they say so you make sure you get that.’ There was more advice but it was flying by and for some reason the main pearl of wisdom that stayed with me was to be careful not to interrupt or talk over my interview subjects as it made the segments hard to edit.
I was going to San Francisco. US union rules meant network TV shows had to fly writers and correspondents business class. This somehow exacerbated my sense of unworthiness – there I sat with my sparkling wine and free packet of socks, thinking about all the money that was being spent on a segment I would probably end up making a complete hash of. I looked at sheets of funny questions written for me by the TV Nation writers. Of a Christian fundamentalist I was supposed to ask: ‘Let’s say I worship the devil. Should I be worried?’ I couldn’t imagine having the gall. Then I began to fixate on how I would remember all the questions – could I carry a little notebook? Or maybe a clipboard? I thought I’d seen people on television doing that.
I arrived at San Francisco airport to find a limo driver holding a card with my name – the first time I’d ever been privileged to such a welcome.
At breakfast the next morning I met up with the segment producer.
‘Hi, Daniel!’ I said.
‘David,’ he said.
‘David, of course. Such an interesting subject,’ I said. ‘Really keen to get started. Have you read The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn’s landmark history of late medieval apocalyptic movements?’
‘No,’ he said.
Looking back, I am struck that David must have thought it strange to be saddled on a network show with a presenter with literally zero hours of television experience. But he showed no disquiet. Entirely professional, he said he was excited to have me on board.
‘Ve fing is,’ he said now, betraying a very slight speech defect, ‘ve important fing is to have fun.’
For the first day of filming we were in the San Francisco Bay Area to speak to a radio evangelist named Harold Camping, based in Oakland, who was predicting the end of the world for later in the year. Camping’s outfit, Family Radio, had listeners in the thousands. He’d written a book, 1994?, outlining the biblical basis for his prophesy, with the question mark to indicate the small possibility that the apocalypse would not materialize.
We arrived at his radio headquarters: me, David the director, Chris Kelly – who’d flown out on Michael’s orders to hold my hand through the four-day shoot – and the sound recordist and camera operator. Inexperienced as I was, I felt self-conscious around the crew, imagining them sizing me up as a jumped-up chancer. Presumably they had worked with hundreds of presenters and could recognize a greenhorn when they saw one.
The sound recordist miked up Harold Camping. We sat in his office, me with my questions folded in the inside pocket of the thrift-store jacket I was wearing. Craggy and deep-voiced, Camping must have been in his seventies, and he droned on and on about his bible studies and how he’d arrived at the conclusion that 1994 was God’s appointed year of doom. ‘The evidence in the Bible points to the fact that September 6 of 1994 will be the last day of the final tribulation period,’ he said. Christ was coming back – on the Tuesday or possibly the Thursday and ‘every mountain and island’ would be ‘moved out of their places.’
Bearing in mind Michael’s advice, I waited for Camping to finish what he had to say before asking follow-up questions. But there weren’t many breaks in the torrent of theology. And so Camping had free rein to deliver long rambling biblical monologues, instead of the peppy tongue-in-cheek repartee I’d been hired to provide.
Camping took me on a tour of his radio studio, pointing out the collection of Christian records – some of whose tracks had been marked with little stickers to indicate they had ‘too much beat’. I asked a couple of the silly questions that had been scripted for me: ‘Are you any relation to the beast spoken of in the book of Revelation called “Camping”?’
‘Heh heh,’ Camping said.
That night, I felt relieved to just have got through the day but, without anyone saying it, I could tell I wasn’t doing very well.
‘Good just to be underway,’ David said as we rode up in the hotel lift.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I always fink everyfing relaxes when you’ve got somefing in ve can.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘One small fing. I would just say you could maybe interrupt if someone is really going on?’
‘Oh, OK, will do.’
The next day we flew down to San Diego.
On the plane, David passed along a packet of information about our next group. They were called the Unarius Academy of Science, and their predictions involved a cargo cult-style prophesy of a vast number of flying saucers landing in the near future, bringing gifts of technology way beyond our mortal imagining and ushering in an age of peace and tranquillity on Earth. They didn’t seem to have many members.
The Unarius headquarters were on a low-rise commercial strip in El Cajon, a small city in the mountains some miles east of San Diego. Their spokesperson was a past-life regression teacher, Lianne Downey. Lianne was in her early thirties, fawn-like and bright-eyed. In her teacherly dress with sparkly jewellery and big earrings, she had the air of an intergalactic primary school teacher – which, with her advanced extraterrestrial-derived wisdom, is perhaps what she felt like.
‘We’re not predicting doom and gloom or fearful of doom and gloom,’ she said. ‘In the year 2001 we expect the first spacecraft to land from another planet in our galaxy.’
She laid out a vision involving the arrival of thirty-three space ships, which would stack one on top of another like a cosmic game of Jenga. In its strangeness it was oddly appealing – not that I believed it, naturally, but there was something intoxicating about her conviction. To someone like me, who struggled daily with uncertainty about far more banal matters, her complete faith in something so silly felt enviable.
Before arriving I’d learned that the Unarians enjoyed dressing up in space-themed costumes for big celebration days and also to make their visionary films. I thought it might be funny to interview them while dressed up in one of their outfits. I raised the idea with Lianne. She seemed a little surprised but took me to a storage room where they kept their costumes. I settled on a blue nylon space suit with a little gold hat – I looked like a bellhop at the Hotel Liberace.
We were joined by Lianne’s superior at the Unarius Academy, director Charles Spiegel. Charles was in his seventies and had been married to one of the founders of Unarius, Ruth L. Norman. Ruth had been a glamorous, larger-than-life figure, reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, in puffy skirts, with diadems and wands and sparkly jewellery. Charles, in sober suit and tie, lacked her over-the-top clothes sense, but he had brought an unlikely accent of outlandishness by styling a wholly unconvincing wig.