Thick haze hung over the whole place. I explained that it was the cooking fires that made the smog. Sunlight cut fingers of pink out of the smoky air, but otherwise it was almost dark. The last of the sun glittered red on the muddy puddles. Mothers, with babies tied to their backs by blankets twisted above their breasts, never looked up. Some squatted next to fires. Others walked on the road, carrying bags of groceries on their heads; some picked their way between the shacks, stepping over ditches. Black men ran up the roads in long lines, ran down through gaps in the fence, ran into alleys full of women and children. The children had on school uniforms, black skirts, white knee socks, white blouses, or shorts, shirts, and ties. A few moments later, we pulled into our whites-only swanky neighborhood, through the gates of our lovely home.
Trevor, one of our local South African producers, and his pleasant wife Veronica were drunks. I never saw them sober for the better part of a year. It was as if what was happening to apartheid South Africa was just too hard to take sober. She had lots of makeup, chain-smoked, was always pulling cigarettes out of packages of Benson and Hedges Gold that were all over the patio, on chairs, tables, and the bar. Her hands shook when she lit her cigarettes. I had never seen people drink or smoke so much.
At night in the winter, the skyline flickered with flames, as farmers burned off the dry stubble and hay in the fields, and the veldt would catch fire. The whites on the crew, and my American producers, carried guns when they went out at night. I got chased by cops in an unmarked car while I was driving home from a night shoot. When they learned I was an American, they were apologetic. Another night, I saved a man and two women in an overturned car, pulled them out before it caught fire. Then I raced back to the production office to call an ambulance. When it came, the white driver yelled at me for calling a “white ambulance” for blacks. They left, and the black injured man and dazed black women sat waiting until a “black ambulance” arrived. It was an old van with no stretcher. (The white ambulance was a fully equipped American-style EMS unit.) One of our white effects guys set himself on fire after he rigged an explosion wrong. My son Francis nearly had his head blown off when the “weapons master,” another white drunk, brought live shotgun shells onto the set and was shooting with our picture guns “just for fun,” then forgot a round was in the chamber, pulled the trigger and blew in the car door Francis was standing next to. A white production assistant committed suicide. Someone said they thought he had discovered he had AIDS.
It was as if somehow the metaphysical doom and gloom of imploding, last-ditch apartheid was infecting our productions. As Mom would have said (accurately, for once), the whole country seemed filled with spiritual despair.
John remembers things more positively:Being seven years old I was oblivious to the fact that my parents were in real financial trouble, that my father was stressed and exhausted, that we were living within a few miles of a black township that had one of the highest murder rates in the world and that we were living in the midst of the last moments of one of the most racist regimes on earth. For me South Africa was a new place with lots of frogs that were easy to catch and movie sets where I could pretty much do what I pleased. The crew was indulgent. I spent a lot of time in the back of the effects truck rigging explosives. Almost all of my memories are good.
Francis writes:I was fourteen. One event made a big impression on me, the near death of one of our stunt men. He was meant to ride his motorcycle in front of the vehicle that had the camera on it. He timed it wrong, or there was some miscommunication, whatever the cause, he ended up going under the tire of the camera vehicle, which was a mockup of a Soviet troop transporter. I happened to be in the truck at the time and felt us hit him. I remember being surprised that we could have hit such a big bump given the flatness of the desert. The visibility was not good, so I did not know what had happened until I got out.
Dad told me to run back to the base camp to tell one of the producers what had happened. This was smart of Dad as it kept me from sitting there and watching the stuntman die. Though he did not actually die, he came very close and spent many months in the hospital. I knew that this was bad by the way everyone reacted to the news.
Jessica remembers:By South Africa our father-daughter relationship had more or less fallen apart. Not that it was going well with any other member of the family, we just weren’t very happy and that was that. Dad’s movie directing career wasn’t going well, the people he was working with were brutal, our finances were in shambles, when we left South Africa my parents didn’t even have the money to pay our school.
Even Mom, our family pool of healing, was struggling to keep her equilibrium. I was seventeen turning eighteen, a plump, spacey teenager girl, the very sight of which irritated my Dad. There is a double edge to having parents who are too young to cope with you happily. Eventually your presence makes them feel guilty and it’s hard to enjoy your company.
Having said that, South Africa was our family’s last great adventure when we were all together and we did enjoy it. Some experiences were larger than my personal difficulties. South Africa was bleeding internally, like a body hemorrhaging from poison but we children wandered through as charmed beings. I headed off with a stunt man and learned how to change places on a moving motorcycle driving through the desert sand. Francis and John made bombs for the movie explosions, we wandered in a deserted gem mine picking bits of sparkling stone from the walls.
The head grip (he was white) was stealing film equipment, lots of film equipment from the production company. When my brother’s souvenir—John’s Zulu spear—went missing, my dad told the grip that it had better be found. The grip looked furious and John’s spear reappeared.
We met a black pastor who had been tortured almost to death by the police and we met a white police officer who tortured black prisoners and bragged about it. Meanwhile our black pastor friend told us that Winnie Mandela was burning blacks to death who didn’t agree with her.
Five months later I would graduate from high school and move to New York City. The next time I visited home it was to prepare for my wedding.
Dad did get back from South Africa more or less in one piece. Three of his neighbors had been murdered in their homes on separate nights and two production crew women were raped. He had ended up sleeping holding his only weapon, John’s Zulu spear. On the plane ride back he had decided to really rest, took a large dose of sleeping pills and mixed them with alcohol just to make sure they did their job. He arrived home sick, stunned with exhaustion, and more dead than alive—as usual.
One night on the Headhunter shoot, we had a hundred or so black extras out in an old abandoned rail yard in Pretoria, South Africa. The “demonic monster” was going to appear after they held a ritual around a huge fire. The extras would then chase Kay Lenz, who was playing our “Miami cop”—the picture was set in Miami, although shot in South Africa to save money—through some abandoned rail cars.
The extras gathered around the fire. It was part of the scene but was also keeping them warm between setups. As with all movie making, most of the evening was taken up waiting around for things to be fussed with, lights, dolly tracks, makeup. I asked the extras to sing something, anything, and to march around the fire in their “demonic” ritual.
“What shall we sing?” they asked.
“Anything you want,” I said. “As long as your lips are moving. Later we’ll dub in some sort of chant or something.”
The choice was “Shosho Loza,” a hymn that was once sung by the black gold miners about missing their homes. It had more recently been adapted by the ANC as a kind of unofficial hymn of resistance. “Shosho Loza” was considered subversive. And it was very beautiful.
The extras, none of whom knew each other before we hired them, sang as if they were in a choir that had rehearsed for weeks. The song, in several parts harmony, somewhat in the style of the Soweto Gospel Choir, echoed around the derelict rail yard. Some of the white crewmembers, our production manager Trevor in particular, s
eemed nervous and said we’d better get them to stop this pretty soon. But other whites on the crew joined in.
I was so ashamed. The most beautiful thing in our shit film was going to be some incidental music on the guide track, which later we’d replace with some bullshit incantation. We were with a group of mostly indigent people our production manager had picked up off the street. They were working for a few rand and a hot meal. And they sang like angels, the bass voices sounding sweet as French horns, the women’s voices harmonizing in keening tones to break your heart. I withdrew to a corner where no one could see me. I was in the dark crying.
60
I thought I had hit bottom with the African pictures. But I had one further step to fall.
In 1991-92, I was directing what turned out to be my last feature: Baby on Board. My final movie entanglement ended with a pathetic whimper, actually more like a runny sneeze.
I was living in the Canadian producer’s guest room in his Toronto townhouse. He was too cheap to pay for a hotel room or rent me an apartment. The only food he kept was an assortment of green teas and vitamins. He had taken over the production of Baby on Board from Sandy Howard, a former B-movie mogul, producer of one real movie: A Man Called Horse.
Genie only met the Canadian once. She didn’t like him. He reminded her of too many of the televangelists we knew.
“This man’s given me a break, okay?” I said.
“Is that right?” asked Genie. “Then why did he defer your fee? Keep him away from me.”
But when I crashed a limousine in New York City, while we were shooting some scenes to cut into the footage we shot in Canada, shooting Toronto-for-New-York, the producer did wire down $2,700 to cover my credit card debt.
I crashed the limousine because the driver kept screwing up the take by getting the cue wrong as to when to come around the corner of an alley near West 66th Street and Broadway. Fool I that was, I jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to direct via walkie-talkie while driving the picture car.
We were in New York for a week of pick-up shots with just the stars and me. I was shooting without a permit, just running around New York City trying to get little pieces of film, to cut into the picture so it would look as if the action was taking place there, not in Toronto. Our stars, Carol Kane and Judge Reinhold, were gamely traipsing around with me.
By that time, the Canadian production had run out of money, so I was directing and shooting, operating the 35-millimeter Arriflex, lugging equipment, and hiring cabs. We kept hiring cabs that looked like “our” cab, the one we had as a picture car in Toronto.
The story was about a five-year-old girl left in a New York taxi, and the cab driver’s attempt to get her back to her mother, while the mob chases the mother around New York, for whatever implausible reason. Judge (the driver) and Carol (the mom) hated each other by the end of the shoot and wouldn’t film scenes together. I don’t know why they didn’t get along. They were both lovely to work with. Maybe it was just a case of depression at being stuck on such a shit movie. By the end of the shoot, they did lines in the master shots together, then the close-ups with a stand-in. We’d switch and shoot the close-up of the other actor with another stand-in.
Most of the movie took place in a moving vehicle out of doors. And we had two five-year-olds. (One would “act” while the other rested.) We were shooting exteriors in Toronto, in winter, a record-cold winter, for a movie written to take place in New York City in the summer. I got pneumonia. I wasn’t getting paid more than a fraction of my fee. Other than that, the whole thing was great. As Sandy Howard would say, more than once, when I’d call him to whine: “It’s fucking not a fucking movie but a fucking deal!”
After ABC watched the rough cut, they flew me to LA to re-cut the movie under their supervision. I recut with Candice Bergen’s brother, a film editor with a reputation for being able to “save” movies. I still wanted to try to make the movie work, make my career succeed. And finishing the picture was my only chance of getting another job. But I wasn’t getting paid, not even a per diem. And I had never caught up financially from not paying myself when I directed Wired. But, as the Canadian producer said, “Your name will be on this piece of shit, so if you want someone to fuck it up even worse, then go the fuck home.”
Then the really bad times began. I started to steal.
It was after I had written my first as-yet unpublished novel Portofino. I still went crazy. At Genie’s urging, I had started writing the book the year before I went to Canada. I began writing it on the back of an airline ticket envelope. I finished the first draft in about five months and found an agent. I had told no one besides Genie that I was writing. I read the new chapters out loud to her as I completed them. She laughed and loved it. The book was the first thing I had made since I quit painting that Genie really liked.
Macmillan bought my novel. And then, except for some minimal editing exchanges carried on by mail, I more or less forgot the book. It wasn’t going to come out for almost a year. As I sank deep into the Canadian production, I hardly thought of the novel.
I was in LA, living in a tiny squalid rented room on Hollywood Boulevard near the Chinese Mann Theater, where my kids and I had watched so many movies back when I thought I was on the cusp of success. I was editing and reediting, and still trying to put together more movie deals.
The edit ended, but I didn’t dare go home. I felt as if my only hope was to stay in LA and do meetings, look for work, read more horrible scripts, anything but go home in total defeat. And then what? Get a job washing dishes? Genie was talking about getting a waitress job.
Of course I wasn’t sending any money home. And I didn’t want to ask Genie to deplete our savings by sending me money. The only cash I had on hand was reserved for gas. (I was driving the old Schaeffer Productions Honda. It had 230,000 miles on it and only worked in second gear and reverse.) I hadn’t paid the rent for two months.
I was convinced that I’d never earn another dime, that somehow I had to make our dwindling savings last forever, that my life was more or less over. I felt as if I was viewing a wasted life from the grave. But I was not going to pretend to reconvert to my evangelical faith and hook up with the old Jesus cash-cow again, no matter what, though it would have only taken two or three phone calls to line up a speaking engagement or two.
This wasn’t a matter of high principle; I just couldn’t take the bullshit any more.
Long after the edit was done, I lived for the better part of four months by eating off the craft-services table in the editing suite. No one cared. By then, I was like some ghost that haunted the place. Maybe they thought I had become homeless. I ate doughnuts and stale cereal. When I craved protein, I shoplifted pork chops from Ralph’s grocery.
Most of the time I sat next to the phone in my room, looking at other people’s fingerprints on my yellow wall. When I figured that the producers, who rarely returned my calls, were on their way back to Beverly Hills, the Valley, or Santa Monica, from their Hollywood, Century City, and Westwood offices, I turned on my answering machine and went to Ralph’s.
Ralph’s, on Sunset Boulevard at La Brea, was a good place to shoplift. It was a five-minute walk from my room, down Alta Vista Boulevard. I always went the same way. I’d walk past rubber plants with dusty leaves and benches covered with advertisements for the Jewish cemeteries. They were vandalized by people who misspelled their profanities.
“Fuk Yous.”
“Deth.”
“Asole.”
The heavyset Mexican security guard at Ralph’s was no problem. He spent his time playing with his keys or fingering the mace strapped to his shiny belt. Once in a while he would do his security guard stuff and keep the homeless, who hung around the boarded-up, frozen yogurt bar across the street, from panhandling Ralph’s customers. But mostly he didn’t do anything. Anyway, he never bothered me. I was convinced it was because Jesus was protecting me, an odd, mad mixture of faith and larceny.
Besides, my Reeboks were ne
w-looking and I kept my hair combed. When my Reeboks got dirty, I touched them up with typing white-out. Sometimes I would think about the fact that I was the same person Billy Zeoli had given company credit cards to, and who had flown my family all over America in a private plane during the seminars. Sometimes I’d wonder how Rich DeVos and the other evangelical billionaires that I’d raised millions of dollars from would view my present state. Mostly I just sank into a trance. I didn’t even have the energy to jack off.
Once in a while I’d fantasize that I’d re-re-reconvert, go back on the 700 Club, cry, come home to Jesus, and even pull a Chuck Colson! He got out of jail after serving time for Water-gate, wrote a best-seller, founded a prison ministry, hired ghost writers (who wrote best-sellers for him), and he never looked back! He was even being hailed as the “next Francis Schaeffer” by Christianity Today magazine!
I’d be tempted if some dire need came up, say I needed a new pair of shoelaces or a script copied. Then I’d catch a bit of Christian radio wafting out of some car window at a traffic light, or spot Pat Robertson’s grinning face, or hear some street preacher ranting on the sidewalk. I’d remember that if it came down to it, I’d rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked.
Even with two extra-thick cut pork chops stuffed into my underpants (the cold meat made my testicles ache), the guard didn’t seem to notice or care. I was a white guy. And for my neighborhood, Hollywood Boulevard at Curson, I looked fairly honest compared to the homeless crazies that hung around the sticky sidewalk and scrawled their names on the hacked trunks of dying palm trees.
Crazy for God Page 31