There’s no point in my plumbing the depths of the disappointment I feel, later, trudging out of the Vista at two a.m. the morning of the twentieth. How do I put it? There’ve been so many metaphors, at this point.
My favorite, so far, is from comedian Dana Gould: “George Lucas told the greatest joke about two men walking into a bar in 1977. Now, twenty-two years later, it’s time to find out how the bar got its zoning permits, and liquor license, and how they hired the busboy.”
But since I feel obligated to put something of my own here, even after all of the jaw flapping I’ve done about it, how about . . . Okay, think of it this way. Imagine that all four members of Led Zeppelin are still alive. And they’re doing a reunion show. And you get there, and it turns out that Robert Plant has fired the other three members, and he’s hired three frightened music students and is insisting they perform acoustic versions of the chord progressions that led to songs like “Black Dog” and “Whole Lotta Love.”
Eh. Still not as good as Dana. Here’s another one, from my own brother, who sat next to me, during one of the Galactic Senate scenes:
“This is like watching C-SPAN but everyone’s wearing monster masks.”
But two things happen, a week after I leave that screening.
First off, let me fully admit to seeing The Phantom Menace again, that Saturday, at the now-defunct Coronet Theatre on Geary in San Francisco. I’m doing a weekend there at Cobb’s Comedy Club, and I guess I’m hoping for some sort of redemptive miracle, or that maybe I was wrong in my initial assessment. Also, there are parts of it I like. It’s sheer, uncut nostalgia. I want to see a Star Wars movie in a theater with a lot of people. Like I did when I was eight, and had my mind blown apart.
But it still sucks.
And then—the Two Things. These two things are what pull the needle out of my cinephilia, for good. They peel me forever from the projector sprockets. I still haven’t directed a film, but films don’t direct my life, either. So that’s something.
The first thing that happens is: I go back to the New Beverly the Sunday I return from San Francisco. They’re showing Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday. Howard Hawks and Cary Grant. Two films about two different professions (bush pilots and newspapermen) with slangy secret languages and ethics that seem brutal and heartless to outsiders. Come to think of it, those two films go farther than pretty much any other movie in explaining the codes and rituals of comedians. If the second chapter of this book doesn’t explain my world to you, go watch those two movies instead.
I buy my ticket and Sherman looks at me through the glass with his merry, camera-lens eyes.
“Patton.”
I say, “Hey, Sherman.”
“Four years to the day. Figured you’d be handing me a script to read by now.”
(Kick.)
Then, a week later, I have dinner with some other movie-buff friends, all of us steeped in the Star Wars universe. And—and I remember so much of this conversation—we pick apart The Phantom Menace. We aren’t happy with it.
But we also have very detailed, very reasonable, very personal reasons for believing the film could have been better. And not only better, but great. As thrilling as Star Wars, as deep and dark as Empire and as satisfying as Jedi.
Why is our conversation so detailed, so astute, so passionate? Well, part of it is we’re sprocket fiends, film freaks, with one foot always in the celluloid world. That would always be a fact.
But the other reason is: George Lucas created something that, even when it makes a wrong turn, has a rich enough history to it, and has enough life pulsing through its heart, that we could have conversations like this. And arguments. Classic films that are better regarded than Star Wars rarely spawn an entire subculture of argument, speculation and even greater creativity. And I’m not even talking fan fiction. I’m talking about other short films, gorgeous YouTube spoofs like Troops or Stabbing at Leia’s 22nd Birthday.I Websites that make intricate, detailed short films about The Phantom Menace and the subsequent, even more disappointing prequels, with anguished, often brilliant ideas on how to improve them. Like The Godfather: Part III, which is a stunted flower growing on the rich loam of The Godfather Parts 1 and 2. I still have friends who’ve posited brilliant alternate versions of the third part of Coppola’s trilogy. About how it could have been a war for control between Michael and Tom Hagen. Or how Connie Corleone could have been a hidden puppet master, like Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor. David Thomson, in his brilliant Suspects essays, constructed a grand, epic narrative wherein Connie, Maerose and Elvira Montana—Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Scarface—form a tripartite drug kingdom.
Movies—the truly great ones (and sometimes the truly bad)—should be a drop in the overall fuel formula for your life. A fuel that should include sex and love and food and movement and friendships and your own work. All of it, feeding the engine. But the engine of your life should be your life. And it hits me, sitting there with my friends, that for all of our bluster and detailed, exotic knowledge about film, we aren’t contributing anything to film.
I flash to the coffee shop in San Francisco that all of my comedian friends and I would hang out in, when we were young, before we’d done anything in the way of television or movies. Bitching about how awful and shitty the industry was. We were very comfortable, waking up at eleven in the morning, choking down caffeinated mud, assuring ourselves that some invisible foot was keeping us down. Some of us moved to Los Angeles, made our lives. But some of us stayed in that coffee shop, because that’s ultimately where our comfort was. There was comfort in preemptive disappointment. Because it was never your fault.
(Kick.)
And then, once the group of us who moved down to Los Angeles got there, there was more bitching—about not getting bigger roles or better opportunities to pitch shows for ourselves. And we’d piss and moan and get comfortable—fuck, some of us built whole careers—pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert.
(Kick.)
And here I am. I’ve traded a late-morning coffee shop for a late-night, postscreening bar, angry at George Lucas for producing something that doesn’t live up to my exacting, demanding, ultimately nonparticipating standards, and failing to see that the four hours of pontificating and connecting and correcting his work could be spent creating two or three pages of my own.
(KICK KICK KICK.)
I still haven’t made a film. As I write this, I’m fourteen years removed from that flurry of figurative head kicks. But I’ve written six screenplays. Sold three of them. Have seen none of them made. They’re just bigger open mikes for me.
Film stock and movie theaters are dying as I write this, but I’ve got a phone in my pocket with a mini movie studio inside that I’m learning to use. The Five Books are all gone—hauled away to Goodwill. Maybe you’ll find one, with my tight, OCD pencil scrawl next to dozens of movie titles. My movie-a-night habit is gone. And, as I’ve been cramming fewer films into my head, my memory has opened up and brought into sharper focus moments in films that pierced me, that will stay with me without my ever having to draw a star or check mark next to a title. And for every one of those moments that another human, in a collaborative fit of struggle or passion, brought into being, I’m more attuned to moments in my everyday life—with friends and family and even (sometimes especially) strangers. Faces are scenes. People are films.
. . . Kick . . .
Sherman Torgan and George Lucas pulled me off of the sprockets. My love of watching movies has turned into a love of savoring them. And the flirtation with becoming a filmmaker abides, and has stayed fun.
Listen—you don’t have to follow me into the sunshine. If this is your first time seeing Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole? By all means sit and see ’em. They’re great. I envy
your getting to watch them with new eyes. But take what you need from them and get out of the dark once in a while. You’re going to have more of the dark than you can handle, sooner than you think.
The thing about the dark is, it can never get enough of you.
* * *
I. Written and directed by Josh Trank, who edited Big Fan, my first lead dramatic role in a movie, ten years later.
FIRST EPILOGUE
Whistling in the Dark
Sherman Torgan died on July 18, 2007. He was riding his bike in Venice Beach when a heart attack toppled him off of the planet and out of this life. Did it look like a scene from a Jacques Tati comedy? Did his life flash before his eyes—and if it did, what movie scenes did it contain? Or had he beat the addiction, too, and was content to lead others into it, hoping for a screenplay from each one, exactly four years after they first entered his celluloid shooting gallery? I’d like to think that Sherman’s memory was only enhanced by his years in the darkness, in front of the glowing screen. That the memories of his real life, lit by the cosmic candle of sunlight or deepened by the infinite ink of the evening, were clearer and more precious for his having seen life re-created, secondhand, for so many years watching films.
I was celebrating my nineteenth year, to the day, since I first stepped on a stage the day Sherman passed. I wish I could say I spent it at a club, working on new material. Or even at the New Beverly, watching a Wednesday night double feature and filing away a camera angle, a focus pull or a simple cut as something to emulate and strive for if I ever directed a movie. Instead, I was on a soundstage in Santa Monica, sitting in front of a green screen, running my trap on another episode of VH1’s Best Week Ever. I was probably mumbling about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Some Other Dumb Idiot Whut Was on TV Acting Like an Idiot. Disposable. Rent and ramen on a grander scale.
It was also twenty days after I’d voiced the lead character in Pixar’s Ratatouille. I was planning on bringing a bottle of “Ratatouille” vintage white wine to Sherman. Pixar and Disney had planned to do a product tie-in but then decided alcohol wasn’t appropriate for their young audience. But they sent me one of the bottles, now a near-impossible-to-get collector’s item. I don’t like accruing artifacts of my career, so I wanted to give it to Sherman. To make up for the screenplay I never handed him through the booth. But now he was gone.
On August 18 there was a sloppy, spontaneously organized “wake” inside the Egyptian Theatre. Everyone who attended had decided, without ever saying it out loud, that it would have been impossible to mourn Sherman inside his own temple. So we met in a theater designed for a pharaoh’s farewell journey and told New Beverly stories. I told the one about Laurence Tierney. Clu Gulager, who played the fitness-obsessed hitman in Don Siegel’s The Killers as well as fighting off a punk-rock ghoul invasion in Return of the Living Dead, talked about how going to the New Beverly stopped him from sinking into despair and alcoholism. Julie Marchese, and her bright green Louise Brooks haircut, didn’t attend. The despair was too deep, too fresh for her. She, along with Sherman’s son Michael, was about to grab the tiller of the temporarily adrift movie ark that the New Beverly was becoming. A few days later, Quentin Tarantino announced, “As long as I draw breath, the New Beverly will remain open.” When film preservation pioneer Henri Langlois died,I thirty years before and an ocean away, his Cinémathèque Française was also kept running. He saved films from being destroyed by Nazis. Sherman saved them from indifference and passive digital downloads. The Nazis were better dressed than the digital pirates.
I told another story at Sherman’s wake, besides the Laurence Tierney one. It was this:
On Friday, November 3, 1995—still fresh into my addiction, still going to the New Beverly three or four times a week—I stopped in to see Casablanca. I’d actually seen it twice before—once on television, and then at the Alhambra in San Francisco. But I had a free Friday night, and Casablanca is a movie that pays increasing dividends every single time you see it. Why not study it when it’s twenty feet tall and early December Los Angeles rain is tattooing the roof? What would I see?
It was a medium-sized audience. Some of the usual freaks were there. I was one of the usual freaks, at that point. I was already noting, to myself, that Casablanca appeared in both The Psychotronic Encyclopedia (because of Peter Lorre) and Cult Movies volume 1. This was a well-spent evening.
We got to the point, near the end, where Rick is sending Ilsa off to be with Laszlo. He’s regaining his heart by breaking it. About to start the “Here’s looking at you, kid . . . ,” speech.
He actually got out the words, “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of—” and then the word “beans” became warped and shrill and then silent as the film broke. The fucking film broke right at the moment in Casablanca that everyone knows, that everyone can quote, that the whole film leads up to, emotionally!
There was, at most, half a second of outrage, of half-expelled Whas and Huhs, and then silence. Stunned. And then . . .
Laughter. From everyone. The house lights went up as Sherman and his projectionist rushed up to the projection room to fix the problem. The light brought more laughter. Of all the places for Casablanca to break. It couldn’t have been timed more perfectly.
And then the lights went down again. Darkness. Was the movie going to restart? Nope. Not yet. Just sitting there, in the dark. Nothing glowing on the screen.
And then everyone . . .
. . . began . . .
. . . whistling.
We all started spontaneously whistling “As Time Goes By,” maybe twenty of us, on a rainy Los Angeles evening in the little New Beverly Cinema. Elsewhere in the city people were at nightclubs, seeing concerts, roaring their youth at parties or sporting events. Big movies were premiering to packed houses. Famous comedians were doing sets in crowded clubs. Crimes were being committed, decisions to change one’s life were being agreed to. Money changed hands. Rain fell to the earth and made its way back to the sea.
And we were whistling in the dark. “As Time Goes By.” You must remember this . . .
I thanked Sherman, apologized for never handing him my screenplay and sat back down in the front row of the Egyptian. Later that week, I stopped by the New Beverly and gave Michael my Blade Runner replica gun. It could not have been farther from a finished screenplay, but I needed something symbolic to soothe my self-loathing. The replica gun exchange did it. Barely.
As I write this now, Sherman’s been gone for six years. No one’s even sure if movie theaters will exist six years from now. Just like when silent movies transitioned to sound, and then black and white to color, and then television appeared, and then videotapes and DVDs. Now there’s the Internet, and the ability to pull cinema from an electronic empyrean, to funnel it onto a tiny screen in your pocket. And us sprocket fiends are waiting to see if the movie theaters will continue to stand. We’re whistling in the dark. Time is going by.
One thing I didn’t talk about at Sherman’s wake was a blog I’d written a few weeks after he died. I did it quietly, posted it on my website, used it to vent any residual grief I was feeling and then didn’t think much about it after. I certainly wasn’t going to mention a fucking blog inside of a movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard. Why invoke another soldier in the electronic army of distractions that was making it hard on movie theaters?
But I went back and reread it while writing this chapter. It’s called “I Will Program a Month in Heaven for You, Sherman Torgan.” The second paragraph of that entry, I now realize, was a rough précis of this entire book:
All I know is, when I moved to Los Angeles in May of 1995, the New Beverly was a cool, dark continent of then-forgotten history. It was Saturday, May 20th—blazing and white outside on Beverly Boulevard. I watched a double feature of Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard. Ace in the Hole just came out on a deluxe Criterion DVD. Thanks to people l
ike Sherman Torgan, “NOT AVAILABLE ON DVD” will quickly go the way of phrases like, “Who’s Michael Reeves?” and “I’ve never seen El Topo or Blast of Silence—are they good?”
What I’d done was organize a month’s worth of titles to play in a netherworld movie palace. Someplace cool and comfortable, and smelling of popcorn fumes and spilled-soda perfume, where Sherman could unspool heaven.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I’m a stone-cold atheist who’s genuinely grateful that religion exists. All religions. I look at them as a testament to the human race’s imagination, to our ability to invent stories that explain away—or at least make manageable—the nameless terrors, horrific randomness and utter, galactic meaninglessness of the universe. Is there anything more defiant and beautiful than, when faced with a roaring void, to say, “I know a story that fits this quite nicely. And I’m going to use it, pitiless universe, to give meaning and poetry and hope to my days inside this maelstrom into which I’ve, in Joseph Conrad’s words, ‘blundered unbidden’”?II
None of these movies exist. Well, except for one of them definitely and one of them maybe. Some of their source materials and the actors starring in these films don’t exist in the same time frames. Time and mortality don’t hold sway once you’re off this planet. Just like Neil Gaiman did in the Brief Lives story line in his Sandman comics, wherein exists a “dream library” of all the novels that the great writers dreamed of writing but never did (Chandler’s Love Can Be Murder, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures on the Moon), I dreamed up a cinema where Sherman could spend the afterlife watching movies that various great directors dreamed of directing or that the collective sprocket-fiend consciousness would want to will into being.
August 1 and 2
A Confederacy of Dunces
dir: Hal Ashby
(w/ John Belushi, Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin)
Blood Meridian
Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Page 13