by Lillian Ross
The movie is about the unlikely friendship between Forrester (Connery), a cranky, hard-drinking, withdrawn-by-choice, basketball-loving writer who mysteriously seems to have stopped writing, and Jamal (Brown), a high-school basketball player who has been relocated to a prestigious private school and who secretly wants to be a writer. Jamal goes to Forrester for literary help, and he tries to draw the older man out of his isolation. Busta Rhymes, who had his own trailer on the set, and his own hair stylist to do his dreadlocks, plays Jamal’s older brother, Terrell.
Russell Smith, the movie’s handsome twenty-five-year-old basketball consultant, said, “Rob knows how to play, but I’m teaching him some aggressive things, some moves, and elbowing, shoving, things like that. I didn’t have to teach him things like the Hood. It’s the handshake with three stages—clasp with thumb up, regular shake, then clasp fingers.”
At the location—on the stairs of the elevated subway platform at 167th Street and River Avenue—the life of the neighborhood was going on as usual, amid screaming sirens, thundering trains overhead, yelling residents, and tantalizing aromas drifting over from a nearby Cuban deli. The director, Gus Van Sant, worked with his cinematographer on the camera’s placement and with the electricians on the lighting. Neighborhood kids kept begging, “Gus, put me in the movie, please, Gus!”
Everybody on the set seemed to be supremely mindful of the danger of disturbing Rob Brown’s calm. “If anybody shows panic, everybody feels it,” a young production assistant whispered solemnly.
“Rob originally answered an ad for an open-audition call,” said a producer, munching on a juicy Cuban sandwich. “When he walked into our office, we liked the way he said his name: ‘Rob Brown.’ Just like that. That was it.” After casting Brown, who usually lives at his school, the producers placed him in the custody of an acting coach, with whom he is sharing an apartment while he shoots the movie.
Another producer, savoring a fried plantain from the deli, said, “On Rob’s first day of shooting with Sean, Sean said to him, ‘Did you have any trouble sleeping last night?’ This kid just looked puzzled and said, ‘No.’ Can you believe? Only that—‘No.’ ”
Connery is larger in life than 007. Waiting in his trailer to be summoned to the set, he entertained a couple of friends by recounting his visit, that day, to his four-year-old granddaughter’s nursery school, in midtown. “It’s like no school I ever saw—you should see this school!” he said, in an overpowering Scottish accent. “All the equipment! All the paints! Buckets of brushes! Every damn thing you could imagine! And they cook and they bake and they wear these little aprons and chef’s hats!” He laughed joyously and did an excellent impersonation of four-year-old cooks and bakers.
Then he was called to duty. He put on a tan duffel coat and a matching cap— quickly all business and no nonsense—and strode with serious purpose to the set. Rob Brown, escorted by a couple of solicitous P.A.s, followed. He wore black Nike Air Jordan sneakers, fashionably baggy jeans, a hooded black sweatshirt, and an alpaca Tibetan hat with ear flaps and fake yak fur. Brown coolly propelled himself forward in a floppy lope, arms swinging. He looked around with mild interest.
Both actors—attending the routine shouts of “Stand by!” “Here we go!” “Roll sound!”—plunged into action and worked for several hours doing scenes on the train steps, on the platform, and inside Yankee Stadium. In the stadium, standing alone together on the pitcher’s mound, they did what Barry Papick, Brown’s acting coach, said was the “cathartic” scene of the movie.
“The scene is all about loss, so I tried to get Rob down to his own loss,” he said. “I follow the Lee Strasberg method: Sense memory! Get to the bottom! Find the real emotion! The rediscovery-of-emotion thing! Like Brando! Rob is fearless. In front of the camera, he’s naked and truthful.”
After the shot, Gus Van Sant, who had rehearsed the actors quietly and briefly, with minimal suggestions, told them the scene was “perfect,” and they looked happy. A few minutes later, he talked to some friends about what had prompted him to make “Finding Forrester.”
“This is almost a sister project to ‘Good Will Hunting,’ ” Van Sant said. “This is mainstream, but good. You can get top dollar for this. Today, it’s all about overhead.”
“It’s tough to disguise hard work and preparation, but it pays off,” Connery said.
“This movie is a mixture of the old and the new,” one of the producers said. “That’s what the movie is about.”
At about 4:30 A.M., when the shooting was done, Brown hung around on the set with Russell Smith and Busta Rhymes and Barry Papick and some of the local kids who were playing his friends. They did a lot of gleeful elbowing and carefree shoving and, fearless and naked and truthful, they gave each other the Hood.
2000
NUDIE PIX REDUX — Mark Singer
A HEM. A couple of months ago, we reported the imminent publication of a book with a title that bore the earmarks of a commercial slam dunk, “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends: Romance in the 70’s.” Here, it seemed was an exceptional journalistic and social document. Evidently, not only had Mark Helfrich, a Los Angeles–based film editor and photographer, enjoyed himself inordinately during that particular decade; he’d brought along a Nikon. And, remarkably, he’d managed to remain on such good terms with his old flames that, when he began tracking them down, two-plus decades later, thirty-two (!) women graciously signed releases saying it was O.K. to publish their nude photographs. Beyond its simple voyeuristic appeal, Helfrich’s book delivered a mixture of ostensibly candid and posed snapshots, skillfully composed, that evoked in a novel way a familiar cultural-historical epoch. The accompanying text, hand-lettered in the manner of a family photo album, hummed along with a straightforward crudeness that somehow came across as disarmingly blunt rather than crassly macho.
End of story? Not exactly.
After reading in these pages about Helfrich’s excellent adventures (reviews or features also appeared in Time, Details, and the Times ), a painter named David Glynn picked up a copy of “Naked Pictures” in a SoHo bookstore. For his own work, Glynn has photographed dozens of nude models, and he recognized in Helfrich’s book three women he knew, including two who had posed for him about three years ago, when they were in their mid-twenties. The math wasn’t complicated: even toward the end of the nineteen-seventies, these “ex-girlfriends” would have been less than ten years old. “As sexually free as I remember (and want to believe) the 70’s were,” Glynn wrote in a letter to me, which I read with chagrin as well as a degree of relief, “this guy was making this stuff up!”
When, with Glynn’s help, I spoke to four women who appear in “Naked Pictures,” it was on a first-name-only basis. What they had to say made it plain that they (a) had modelled for Helfrich because they were getting paid, (b) hadn’t known him in the Biblical sense, and (c) hadn’t anticipated how they would be depicted in this book.
“Wanda” (“Wanda had a boyfriend who worked night-shifts. She would call me up at 2:30 A.M. and say, ‘You want some company?’ ”): “I read about the book in Time and I immediately recognized Mark Helfrich’s name. I didn’t think any pictures of me would be in there, because they were taken seven or eight years ago and I hadn’t been contacted since then. I’d have no problem if the book had been called, say, ‘Pictures of Beautiful Women I’ve Met.’ The ex-girlfriend thing I had a problem with, because it wasn’t true. I knew Mark over a period of eight months and saw him maybe four times and he was single that whole time and didn’t have a girlfriend. He definitely came across as a guy who did not go out with a lot of women. He seemed very lonely. I don’t know what his intentions were. Maybe it was to look real studly. He says in the book that Wanda’s breath always smelled of rum-and-Coke, and that implies I’m an alcoholic. And then he says, ‘You know how people say, “That’s the best sex I’ve ever had” . . . I never had that kind of sex with Wanda. But it was either sleep or Wanda at 2:30 A.M., so what the hell?’ Well, I don’t
like that either.”
“Delhi” (“What can I say about Delhi! We were in love”): “I appreciate photography and I appreciate art. But I might not do it again if I knew how it would come out. Things he wrote made him come out on top, when in fact he probably couldn’t get a date. If he had really been intimate with these women, I think there would have been more tenderness in the writing. But instead it seemed sort of calloused and clichéd.”
A dark-haired model who doesn’t even want her alias mentioned: “I found the writing derogatory toward women. I found it really stupid. But I think the pictures are nice. I think he’s a good photographer.”
“Angela” (“The times I spent with Angela were pretty idyllic. We’d walk through the woods sharing a joint and end up naked together in a pile of Connecticut leaves. We were casual lovers. These pictures were taken during one of our ‘Strip Ping-Pong’ matches”): “The text is kind of cheesy. Am I offended? I think the world itself is so offensive, especially the way women are portrayed, it just seems a bit late in the game to be offended by that.”
All this gives rise to a variety of questions: “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends” is unmistakably art, but the meaning of art shifts with its context, so what kind of art is it? Conceptual? Can it work as conceptual art if it enlists collaborators who aren’t fully clued in to the concept? In this instance, the label “pseudo-personal journalism” fits the concept. Is pseudo-journalism exempt from the ethical strictures of real journalism? In the end, what’s a reader to make of the author’s statement? “I’ve remained friends with most of my ex-es, and I asked their permission to publicly display these intimate photos. In the same spirit that the snapshots originally were taken, the women consented.”
“I knew it was just a matter of time before someone asked the questions you’re asking me,” Helfrich said when I called him and told him what I’d learned. “The book is full of models. But the intent of the book is still intact. I do have naked pictures of all my ex-girlfriends, but when I asked whether I could publish them the overwhelming response was ‘No way!’ So I decided I would just re-create these photographs, which I did over a few years. Even though the photographs aren’t authentic period photographs, they’re re-creations of the real thing. I could show you some of the originals.”
I happened to have plans to be in Los Angeles, so I arranged to take him up on this offer. One recent Saturday morning, we sat on the patio of the commissary of the Disney lot, in Burbank, where he was working on a Keenen Ivory Wayans movie. He’d brought along a copy of “Naked Pictures,” bookmarked with a half-dozen loose photographs that he said had inspired his re-creations. For instance, in the book, “wild and crazy Cindi,” a long-haired brunette with unshaved armpits, wore a silver mask and playfully pointed a revolver at her temple. Handing me a snapshot, also of a brunette with unshaved armpits, Helfrich said, “See? Same mask, same gun. Have I spoken with her? No, I don’t remember her last name.” On another page, “Jill” was shown sleeping, prone on a bed with a mirrored headboard—minus the curled-up cat in the snapshot Helfrich proffered as the original. “I had enough trouble getting women to pose—I wasn’t about to work with animals, too,” he said.
Scrutizining the loose photographs, I asked, “And how do I know these are original originals?”
“You have to trust me. They’re real.”
And I believed him, though I can’t exactly say what this exercise proved.
“Just to make it fun,” Helfrich said, “I’ll tell you that there are some authentic pictures in the book, but I’m going to choose not to say how many”—an indication that, notwithstanding the exposure of his talent for deception, his commercial instinct hasn’t dulled.
“These are real memories,” he continued, referring to the text. “I embellished a couple of things here and there. But these are actual slices of life. Just because the photo opposite a particular passage of text isn’t actually . . . Now, how do I want to say this? Well, let’s just say I used photographs to illustrate the thoughts in the book. And the actual photographs—the ones I couldn’t get permission to publish—conjured most of the stories in the book.”
What about the aggrieved “Wanda”? “I’m sorry if any of the models feel distressed by the juxtaposition of the text and their photographs, but I told them what the project was. I told these models that they were like actresses playing a role. There’s no way she could be mistaken for that woman in 1979. Anybody who knows her would, seeing her in the book, realize I’m obviously not talking about her.”
I studied Helfrich’s face—early forties, light-brown hair, blue eyes. He was pleasant-enough-looking but definitely didn’t exude a lock-up-your-daughters vibe. How many women did he sleep with in the seventies? “Truthfully, I never counted. I’m not even going to venture a guess. But the late seventies and early eighties were very good to me.”
The present decade has thus far been good to him in a different way. The first two printings of “Naked Pictures,” a total of ten thousand copies, are almost sold out, and a third printing is in the works. “Originally, I wanted to include a little line on the copyright page that said ‘Photography/Fiction.’ But my publishers talked me out of it. They just said, ‘Go with it. People will believe what they want to believe.’ Which is true.”
2000
BALLOON DIPLOMACY FOR ELIÁN — Rebecca Mead
THE Cuban psychologists and teachers who have been drafted to help Elián González readjust to life back home have doubtless discussed with him the traumatic experience of being corralled by masked men and carted off in the middle of the night with nothing but the pajamas on his back, not to mention the experience of seeing Diane Sawyer stand on her head. But one wonders what they will make of Elián’s account of a less well-publicized event that took place during his American sojourn: his visit, one Saturday in June, to the home of a Washington, D.C., couple named Judy and Gary Kopff. On the strength of an E-mail account of the event which the Kopffs sent to the members of an on-line neighborhood group, the outing was just the kind of thing that, were you a hard-line Communist ideologue looking for evidence of the decadence—or the plumb insanity—of the United States, would keep you busy for weeks.
In the mass E-mail, Judy Kopff explained how she and her husband, who is a financial strategist, volunteered to throw a party for Elián and his friends, because they thought he would enjoy their large collection of life-size toy animals. “Jasper the Kangaroo is about six feet tall and stands in what we call Evie’s Ballet Room (where we pretend that our cat Everest practices her ballet lessons!),” Kopff writes. “In the third corner of the dining room is our collection of furry lowland and mountain gorillas.” The children also met George, a brass monkey who hangs from a trapeze in the front hall; Archie, a seven-foot wooden ostrich who wears sneakers; Jock, an eight-foot papier-mâché giraffe; Susie, a three-foot cow with a hand-crocheted udder; and dozens of other inanimate livestock.
Most of the seventy-odd guests were Cubans, among them four of Elián’s schoolmates from back home and Cuba’s equivalent of an ambassador. Among the guests was Ruthanne Miller, the chair of the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, who had suggested to a Cuban contact that a party at the Kopff house might amuse Elián and company. “Part of this might have been overwhelming to them,” Miller said last week. “A lot of the houses they saw in Washington were very, very, very nice—a big contrast to their lives at home.” Such concerns, however, don’t seem to have deterred Elián and his young friends: they lined up to have their photographs taken as they sat on Dolly, the six-foot rocking llama in the Kopffs’ living room, and joined in when Judy gave the children a lesson in making balloon animals. “Although they had a difficult time learning how to make a balloon in the shape of a dachshund dog, they easily understood how to make balloon hats and showed a lot of creativity in fashioning their individual versions,” she writes in her E-mail.
There were other amusements of an order not to be found in Cárdenas. “The childr
en went to Gary’s second-floor office to watch (on our large plasma monitor) four DVD Walt Disney movies in Spanish (i.e., ‘Lion King II,’ ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ ‘Jungle Book,’ and ‘Mulan’). Watching them sing the words to the songs in the ‘Lion King II’ movie was heartwarming,” Kopff writes. It seems that the Cuban children were also capable of being just as intractable as their spoiled, materialistic American counterparts: “The kids would not leave our house until they had finished watching all four videos.”
The visitors weren’t just couch potatoes, though. “The children also played in our gym located in our British-style conservatory in our back yard,” Kopff writes. “We had disconnected the treadmill, elliptical trainer, StairMaster, and other electrical exercise equipment. Gary supervised them in the gym and told them about his climbs up Mt. Everest, Vinson Massif in the Antarctic, Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Mt. Elbrus in Russia.” Each child left with an assortment of party favors, including an eraser in the shape of a cat, a yo-yo in the shape of a hamburger, a medal with the word “Winner” written on it, and a balloon pump so that he or she could practice making dachshunds back at home. Elián also received “a large battery-operated clock with baseballs instead of numbers on its face” and a backpack in which to carry his loot home.
Kopff concludes her account by writing, “Gary and I did not make any judgments about whether sending Elián home to Cuba is a good idea or a bad one. We just wanted to extend some humanitarian warmth to children from another country. We believe that we did the right thing.” And although you might think that the guest of honor would have had enough of zoos after months with the press camped outside the home of his Miami relatives, he was, apparently, “extremely well behaved and patient, considering how many of the Cuban people were asking to have their photos taken with him. We think that he was reluctant to grin, however, because his two front teeth recently fell out!”