by William Boyd
In his notes on the film Schnabel happily bandies about the term “genius” as applied to Basquiat, but the idea is utterly risible. Basquiat was not a modern snake-oil salesman, not quite; but the currency of his talent, his ability, his “knack,” was on the lightweight side, and I suspect—and Wright’s deeply sensitive performance encourages this conclusion—that amongst the demons that hurried him on his way to his premature death were those that were whispering “fraud” and “sham” in his ear. One of the loudest messages this film broadcasts is that there is no medium- or long-term substitute for talent, hard work, elaboration and exploration of technique, intelligence, hard work, empathy, thought, virtuosity, hard work and so on. This is the serious artist’s lot—his or her via dolorosa, if you like—and the froth and spume of celebrity, of radical-chic acclaim and lots of easy money cannot drag you away from it. One smart idea may buy you all this, for a while, but unless you cultivate a redoubtable cynicism (and bank your loot) it will not stand you in any further stead. Plenty of other flim-flam men and women are coming along behind you with all their smart ideas. Soon you will be old hat.
Perhaps Basquiat saw old-hatdom beckoning, perhaps he couldn’t think of anything else to do apart from his graffiti stuff? But, in any event, the indictment is not his to bear alone, but must rather be the burden of the world and its denizens who fell upon him and pushed him into the lucrative glare of the limelight.
Basquiat was vulnerable from the start because he held the wrong concept of what an artist was, believing that “Your life was the price you paid for your talent.” Such ideas of “being an artist,” a poet maudit, a tormented genius, or whatever, demonstrate a fanciful romanticism of the most puerile sort (which is why they are more often found amongst very young rock musicians, or very deluded actors). No serious artist can afford to believe in this notion of afflatus, whether God-given, spontaneous or drug-induced. The art world may be indifferent, or reluctant to make such a judgement, but the world of the real artist is ruthlessly self-regulating. The Stoics’ famous rejoinder, “Be silent—unless what you have to say is better than silence,” casts a long, minatory and humbling shadow over all artists’ endeavours.
Julian Schnabel has made a fine film and he can be proud of his debut as a director, but it seems to me that what emerges is something different from what he may have set out to achieve. Schnabel has said that “Jean-Michel’s work mocks categorization. It wasn’t enough for him to be a great black artist, or a graffiti artist or even a young artist. He placed himself among the great artists of all time.” Good God. Well, if he did, he paid a heavy price for his hubris. But this is not what the film conveys: there is a marked absence of vainglory, of preening self-congratulation. As Basquiat is fêted and wooed by his well-heeled acolytes and hangers-on, his mood appears rather to start as one of gratified bafflement, shading swiftly into cynicism, self-disgust and ultimate despair. Basquiat, it seems to me, is not so much Icarus or Narcissus but a sort of latter-day, low grade, Manhattan Faust. Too young, too gullible, too insecure, too easily led, he made his own Faustian pact with the art world—he did the Faust deal—and got royally burned.
1996
Woody Allen
I have seen Woody Allen in the flesh three times in my life. I’ve never actually met him but the encounters remain vividly memorable, not to say poignant. I regard myself as a committed fan, though not an uncritical one, and my acquaintance with his work began with his very first film as a writer and director, Take the Money and Run (1969).
I saw this film as a teenager in an open-air cinema one evening in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1970. I’d gone to the cinema—casually, uninformed—expecting vaguely to catch some American thriller. Instead I was presented with a wry, knowing, absurdist, comic vision of life that seems to have emerged fully formed and that has really hardly changed over the subsequent thirty-odd years. As the moths and other night insects dipped and dived through the projector’s beam, scattering their ephemeral shadows across the screen, I found myself laughing, first incredulously, then out loud, then painfully, at the Allen persona—nerdy, intellectual, inept, randily heterosexual, angst-ridden. I was eighteen and such first encounters with an artist you come to revere and admire remain embedded in the memory, anchored there by something close to shock: a shock of recognition—the pure thrill of finding your own sense of humour, your own view of the world, replicated by an artist in an art form. At that age empathy and identification are the shortest route to aesthetic pleasure. Who is this Woody Allen? I wondered. Where can I see more of his stuff?
As it happened I didn’t have to wait long, nor have any of us. By my count he has made thirty-four feature films as writer/director and (mostly) actor since that debut. A Woody Allen film is as predictable as spring or autumn—every year sees a new launch, new debate about its quality, new speculation about the stellar cast. Until this year, that is. Woody Allen’s latest film, Anything Else, was released in the US in August, indeed it’s available for purchase there on DVD and video from the end of this month. You can currently see it in cinemas in France but not in the UK. A British distributor, it appears, may or may not be imminent, but why the delay? It is some sort of ominous signal when the new Woody Allen film, as far as his UK fans are concerned, risks going straight to video. One reluctantly starts to wonder: have audiences begun to fall out of love with the Woodman?
The first time I actually saw Woody Allen was in New York. It was 1981 and it was my first visit to the city. I stepped out of my hotel and wandered north up Park Avenue gawping at the skyscrapers and the other New York clichés that were on display. Then the biggest cliché of them all came sauntering down the avenue towards me: Woody Allen in trademark baggy chinos and combat jacket. Even better—he was arm in arm with Diane Keaton. I stopped still and tried not to stare too intently. They were laughing and chatting freely, apparently unaware of the ripples of interest and rubbernecking their passage provoked. They passed close by me. Was I rocked slightly by the turbulent wake of their renown and charisma? Yes: it was an epiphanic moment and in a way I now expect to see Woody Allen every time I go to New York. It was almost as if the sighting had been arranged for first-time visitors by the New York tourist board, so synonymous is Allen with the city. And to see him strolling its streets within hours of my arriving there, with his co-star and lover to boot, seemed both a serendipitous blessing and unbelievably appropriate.
This sighting occurred only a few years after Annie Hall (1977), remember, and I suppose that film still survives as his trademark, signature work. So many Woody Allen tropes were established there, and to such an extent, that later films that have gone back to the source suffer badly in comparison. This is all too true of the latest: Anything Else is a kind of poor man’s Annie Hall but without its freshness. Two other actors—Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci—replicate the Allen and Keaton roles but are hopelessly handicapped by our knowledge of their forerunners. Biggs (of American Pie fame) is seriously miscast and Christina Ricci (a wonderful actress) seems strangely lost, out of sorts—as if she were too aware of the ghostly redolence of the earlier film and of her vain efforts to recapture its allure. I loved Annie Hall when it first came out and decided to re-watch it last year. I stopped after five minutes, not wanting to spoil the memories of those earlier viewings. Age has not been kind to it. Furthermore it has had a baleful influence on American comic acting—what you could call the Friends school of acting. Allen’s furrowed-brow, hesitant, stuttering, self-regarding delivery and Keaton’s ditsy, kooky, stuttering, self-regarding delivery have spread like a pestilence through American drama schools. Pale shadows of Allen and Keaton throng American TV sitcoms (Friends being the most culpable in my opinion—but the disease is spreading over here too—fast). Anything Else is a ghastly depiction of the malady. Jason Biggs can’t get out three words without a pause, a “mmm,” a “huh,” a twitch, an “I mean.” “No” emerges as “N-n-n-n-n-no.” Beside him even Woody Allen himself sounds as sonorous and articul
ate as John Gielgud.
But I don’t think Allen minds his occasional turkeys and flops. His working practice is simply to work and work again and carry on working and he seems indifferent to criticism, positive or adverse. Like old-school film-makers he is concentrating on producing an oeuvre, a body of work. Out of the thirty-plus films he has made so far there might be six comic classics: a success rate most artists would kill for (think of Manhattan, Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives and Bullets over Broadway to name the first half dozen that spring to mind—there are another six that could also be contenders). But such a relentless output has a built-in fault mechanism: it’s impossible to maintain excellence with that level of productivity—whatever the art form you are working in. Allen’s yearly film prescribes that some will inevitably disappoint and fail. But something else has happened recently. I find myself less intrigued by the recent movies: I haven’t seen Celebrity (1998), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) or Hollywood Ending (2002). It’s not just a question of overproduction. I worry that it’s a question of over-familiarity—with the man himself.
The second time I saw Woody Allen was in 1995. I walked into a Madison Avenue bookshop and there at the rear I could see there was a small book-launch party going on, twenty or so people with glasses of wine and canapés in their hands. Customers were still allowed to browse, so I did and after a minute or two looked up to see that I was browsing beside Woody Allen. A little way off Soon-Yi Previn was standing. The whole Soon-Yi scandal, Allen’s humiliation and Mia Farrow’s despair and outrage, has changed our perception of Allen in a disastrous way, I feel. The confusion between the man and the roles he played in his films was one he deliberately allowed to take place—and it was creatively very effective: whatever the name of his character you felt you were watching, in essence, Woody Allen. But it was funny and ambiguous and self-deprecating. And then we found out it wasn’t: the court appearances, the memoirs, the suits and counter-suits provided us with too much unsavoury information—we came to know too much about the man and that knowledge has begun retrospectively to shadow the work. It’s very hard now to watch a film like Manhattan, for instance, or Husbands and Wives, and watch Allen lust after his young co-stars and remain in the state of benign, amused ignorance you were in when they first came out. As I stood beside him in that bookstore that day he looked much older and frailer than I expected. Then Soon-Yi called him over and he rejoined the guests.
In the latest film, Anything Else, Allen permits himself no unseemly sexual dalliances with much younger women. He’s a wiseacre, wannabe comedy writer dispensing laconic aphorisms about the human condition and worldly advice to his younger alter-ego. On a scale of ten the movie probably rates a four: it doesn’t really work—the dialogue seems strangely clunky, the situations appear reheated and mannered and we never engage with the central couple. I suspect Allen will chalk it down to experience. His next film, the Untitled Woody Allen Fall Project (2003), is in post-production (awaiting a title) and will be released in 2004. And then he’ll make another.
The third time I saw Woody Allen was in the spring of last year. I was in Manhattan, sitting in Bemelmans bar in the Carlyle Hotel one evening having a drink. On my way out to dinner I paused in the corridor between the bar and the Café Carlyle and squinted into the cafe through the glass door at the live show that was performing. A small jazz orchestra was on stage and there, in the second row, was Woody Allen playing his clarinet. I watched him for a minute or two. He seemed a contented man.
2003
Electra Glide in Blue
I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories—I must have been about six years old—is of being so terrified by The Wizard of Oz that I covered my eyes for most of the film. Another is of a bizarre Disney film called The Three Caballeros, a mixture of animation and live action, which I saw in a cinema in Accra, Ghana, in the late 1950s, and of being bafflingly but erotically stirred by a sultry flamenco dancer who was flirting with the cartoon characters. These moments are the start of a long catalogue of subconscious influences that the cinema has had on my imagination and, no doubt, my personality. When I was at school I was a member of the film society and was profoundly affected (for some reason) by Juliet of the Spirits. In 1971 I lived in France for a year and went to the movies three or four times a week. I recall vividly oddities like Le Voyou, Bof, Le Beau Monstre — films I will probably never see again—as well as modern classics like The Conformist and Little Big Man. But none of these films, although they left indelible imprints on my mind, can really be described as crucially influential. The first film that had this effect on me, that for ever altered the way I responded to film, was Electra Glide in Blue.
There is a moment in every writer’s life when he or she consciously starts to think of himself or herself as a writer. It can happen early or late but as soon as that moment has arrived everything changes. That self-consciousness then mediates all experience. Electra Glide provided something similar for me which is why I select it as important. Up until I saw Electra Glide (in 1973) I had gone to the cinema as, if you like, a simple consumer, happy to be amused, thrilled, shocked or whatever. But when I saw Electra Glide I was no longer content with these unreflecting emotional responses. It was the first film I saw where I began actually to analyse how it worked; the first film I saw where I became excited by the process of movie-making, the manipulation of image and mood, rather than responding to it as a straightforward intellectual and sensual stimulant.
The film itself is an odd amalgam of thriller and road movie, of nihilism and wry humour, of action-adventure and morality tale. It tells the story of a motorcycle cop who wants to be a detective, who becomes one and, in the process of investigating a murder, discovers his ideals and standards are corrupted or misguided. It was written by Robert Boris and directed by James William Guercio, a former record producer, and as far as I know it is the only film he ever made. But for a debut it is extraordinary. There is a tremendous central performance by Robert Blake as the diminutive but tough motorcycle cop and the photography, by Conrad Hall, is audacious as well as sensational. I think it is the look of the film that is initially haunting—Monument Valley and the Arizona desert have always made great cinema—and on the wide screen the vast landscape with its lonely ribbon of road becomes a potent symbol. In fact I think that there lies the explanation of Electra Glide’s special allure: as the story unfolds the film subtly plays with key metaphors and icons of Americana and American film and refashions them for a modern audience. You have the elemental and essential loneliness of the American West; the one brave man; violent death and raw carnality (there is a bravura performance of white-trash sexuality from Jeannine Riley); you have the eternal appeal of the road movie—the transitoriness of experience, the possibilities of freedom—and an ending of shocking and absurd tragedy.
Electra Glide in Blue is not a great movie but it understands, I think, what movies can do best (and other art forms can’t) at a visceral and unconscious level, and exploits these particular strengths with seductive skill and brio. It certainly changed—irrevocably—the way I went to the cinema and it is a measure of how much it affected me that I still find myself thinking about it over twenty years later.
1998
Adapting Armadillo
When I told people that my novel Armadillo was being filmed for the BBC the first question I was inevitably asked was: “Are you adapting it yourself?” Yes, I would reply, instinctively, and then a part of me would shout “No! I’m not adapting it. What I’m doing to it is far more complicated than that: I’m writing it again, which is something entirely different.” I think the first thing we have to do is get rid of the word “adaptation”—the problem lies in the image conjured up by that innocuous noun. And the verb “to adapt” sounds too easy: “I’ll adapt it” implies something anyone could do—just hand me my tool kit and give me half an hour and I’ll adapt it. But in actu
al fact turning a novel into a TV series or a film—or an opera, or a musical, or a radio play—is a far more complex and radical act than one might think. By changing the art form the rules are completely rewritten. Turning a novel into a TV series isn’t a simple matter of “adaptation”—what we’re actually talking about is “transformation.”
Let’s try a thought-experiment. Let’s imagine the novel Armadillo as a house, a standard three-bedroom detached house with a garden. Now you want to turn it into a three-hour series for BBC1. The way you do this is to demolish the existing house and rebuild it using the same materials. As everyone knows when you knock something down and try to put it together again it’s not going to look exactly the same. Some of the bricks will have been smashed, windows broken, pipes burst, tiles cracked, joists given way and so on. As you assemble your materials and try to conform to the original plan certain compromises and alterations will have to be made: the sitting room will be smaller, the attic bedroom will have gone. You find that you can only make the central heating work downstairs, the new windows won’t quite fit their embrasures, you can only get into the kitchen through the downstairs loo and the garden has been ruined by all the heavy machinery. This image is not meant to be flippant or facetious: in my opinion and experience it genuinely reflects the process that is undergone when a novel is rejigged, reshaped and reformed for the screen. When you’ve rebuilt your demolished house it will look similar to the original but the building itself will have been through a process of death and rebirth and in so doing will be utterly transformed. Something different—something new—has been created.