JOHN WATERS ON….

I'm not sure which was more pleasurable: experiencing John Waters' wit or Peaches Christ's joy interviewing him onstage at The Bridge to launch the 10th season of Midnight Mass. Fortunately, I don't really have to make a choice. For those who missed out on that momentous event, here's some of John's opinions.

On San Francisco & The Cockettes

San Francisco was the very first place that any of my movies caught on outside of Baltimore, really, way before New York. I came here and I showed at the Palace Theater and the Cedar Cinema and all those places with The Cockettes and it was really the first time that [my films] got a following.

Divine came out here for the very first time—he was still Harris Glen Milstead then—and The Cockettes flew him out here. He got on an airplane in full drag without one penny in his pocket with those fake tits and everything and sat by himself on the airplane. Imagine if you were sitting next to him? He had narcolepsy too and fell asleep [Waters imitated Divine's loud snoring]. He got off the plane and The Cockettes met him at the airport in full drag and he never went back, ever, in his mind to being that other person.

On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen

[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top—his fake vagina—and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"

On Costume Designer Van Smith

He did everything from the very beginning. The first one he did was Pink Flamingos for us. He did the fishtail gown and all that. But then he did the roach dress in Hairspray. He did A Dirty Shame. He did them all right up until the very end. He got the most amazing obituary in The New York Times. They said he was a terrorist and an artist. I hope they say that about me! The L.A. Times, they both gave him this amazing obituary and his family—we gave him a memorial in Baltimore—they were kind of shocked by it. They knew he did it but they were afraid to see the movies because some of them were rated NP—No Parents. I never let my parents see Pink Flamingos. They paid for it too. I paid them back. They were shocked.

Financing & Promoting the Films in the Old Days

How we distributed the films before New Line, we'd try to get midnight bookings and we'd drive around the country. We would follow wherever they burned the Bank of America down. In the '60s burning the Bank of America down was like going to a rave so we would go there and I would find some theater and talk them into renting [it to us] for a midnight show like for $40. My mother would ship me the flyers and I'd stand on the corner and make Divine go dressed as Divine walk sometimes on the subways of New York. People would run out of the cars screaming and we'd give them a flyer. Or we'd give plate jobs. That's where you go into a restaurant while people are eating and hand them flyers until the management throws you out. Then I would send my father back money every week as we traveled. He was so amazed. So was I. First this was Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs, before Pink Flamingos—they paid for those too—and then I would ask them for twice as much. Finally, they paid for Pink Flamingos and I started to pay them back and he said, "Look, you didn't go to college. Don't pay me back. Put it all into the next movie and don't ask me again." Which was great. But they were really humiliated by the movies. Because nobody said they were good, ever, and the newspapers would say, "Horrible homosexual films" and stuff and my father would go, "Oh God. Do they have to say that stuff in USA Today?" He still says that because it's the paper he reads.
They were great but they were humiliated by the films. My mother would come sometimes and leave in tears and say, "You're going to die in a mental institution or commit suicide." She said that once. [Though they didn't see Pink Flamingos], they had to see [Female Trouble] once. My mother said to me afterwards, "That Gator—is that the kind of man you find attractive?" I lied and said, "No."

My mother says now that she hates the people who come up to her and say, "You must be so proud." She says they're the same ones that in the old days would just ask about my brothers and sisters and not mention me like I was dead. They liked Hairspray and people will still come up—my mother's friends in Baltimore—and say, "We love your movies." And I say, "You didn't like Multiple Maniacs?" They liked Hairspray and that's fine; as long as they liked one.

On Hairspray

When the movie came out, and when the Broadway show came out, families would go and they'd say, "We love Hairspray; let's get another John Waters movie!" In the real Hairspray before we made it Divine was going to play the Ricki Lake character and the mother. It was like The Parent Trap. But I didn't really like that idea. Even Divine understood.

On the Anonymity of Singing Assholes

Now Pink Flamingos plays on television! It's on The Sundance Channel uncut, which is just shocking to me actually. In some cities that's regular cable. The Directors Guild called and asked if they could blurb a blowjob scene and I said yes but they forgot to! So it isn't like "home-at-Thanksgiving" channel surfing. Your parents [object] to a singing asshole? What do they expect?

He comes to my Christmas party every year and my mother always says, "Who is that?" I say, "Nevermind." I've never said his name and he's asked me not to but the only good thing he said is that when his parents died, they never found out. I've said to him, "Have you ever been recognized?" He said, "Nobody was looking at my face. And the muscles ain't what they used to be." He's a totally straight guy and he works in a regular office and I said, "Have you ever shown somebody?" He said, "I gave it to a secretary once and she put it back on my desk the next day and wouldn't comment." Can you imagine? Going to some straight job—"Wanna see a movie I'm in?" He would go to screenings when it would just be a matinee and there were like five people in the audience and sit there and—when his scene came on—he'd tap strangers and go, "That's me!" He was going to do it along with [the movie] once when he was drinking a lot but people said, "No. Don't do it." Can you imagine? You'd regret it the next morning. "What did I do last night? Oh God…."

On Simulating Divine's Dogshit-Eating Scene

Recently there was a New York disc jockey who was promoting Pink Flamingos and he said that anyone who would come down to the station and eat dog shit, they'd give him $500. And no one came! I thought a junkie might. But no one did and they kept calling over and over, "Please, we have five $100 bills right here." Not one person would do it. Ever. They would in this city. This is the one city ever where we did a radio show and afterwards there was somebody waiting there and he said, "I'm into eating shit." I ran from him. This was a political act; this was not coprophagia.

[After filming the scene, Peaches asked if Divine freaked out and called the hospital.] No, they were all just smoking pot. They said, "What's going to happen?" He pretended that he was a mother who had a retarded child that ate a dog turd and [phoned a hospital and asked] what would happen? They said, "He might get the white worm." [Divine] said, "The white worm?!!" [They were all laughing at him because they were high on pot.] He also brushed his teeth with the toothbrush of someone he was having a fight with.

On Divine As An Actor

Divine was a really good shoplifter. One time he wrote all these bad checks and he got caught. The police came and he lied to his parents and said, "I didn't do it." They gave him a lie detector test and he passed, even though he did do it! He was a good actor. Now that the new Hairspray is coming out, all of the reviews are treating [Divine] like this great icon and giving him all these great reviews. I wish he knew that today. Revisionist history is fine as long as it's more positive. He got good reviews in Polyester. He got good reviews as soon as he wasn't the Divine character. In Polyester he played a housewife and in Hairspray he played a hideous-looking woman. Basically, that's when he got good reviews because it was so against type.

On Divine's Death

Divine just dropped dead from being too fat really. He did have narcolepsy. He had to sleep sitting up and he just went to sleep and didn't wake up. The next morning he was supposed to be on Married With Children playing a male character, a gay uncle, which would have been one of the first gay characters on network television and it could have been a great success. Of course I went to the funeral. [The night I heard of his death], I just sat in my bedroom with Pat Moran and people in Baltimore and we were just stunned. We couldn't believe it and the phone just kept ringing. There were news teams. It was a nightmare. I'm still shocked by it. I wake up still and think, "Did he really die?" Even with Van, I do that still. So it was terrible. Hairspray had been out a week and so it ruined the joy of that because we had just done a press tour through the whole country. Everybody had news footage of us laughing and then they'd cut to the funeral. Who wants to see that movie? It was terrible. People go to his grave still. Recently, the graveyard where he was [buried] was vandalized. His grave was vandalized. People leave dresses there and doughnuts. Somebody wrote "Satan" on it, to which Pat Moran said, "They meant satin."

On Reviews

The reviews of Pink Flamingos: we never got a good review of that. The whole ad campaign was negative reviews. That wouldn't happen today because critics are too hip for that; but, then, they would write, "Like a septic tank explosion; it has to be seen to be believed!" You can't get a better review than that. That's perfect.

But the best review I ever got was for Multiple Maniacs. I sent up the print to Canada and it just never came back. The authorities finally sent me a letter and it just said: "DESTROYED."

On Mink Stole's Couture

Mink Stole as Taffy Davenport in Female Trouble: didn't Courtney Love steal that look? At the beginning that sort of was her look. But Mink had the best fashion statement ever when we lived in San Francisco. She would go the day after Halloween to the thrift shops and buy all the children's Halloween outfits because they were a nickel and just wear them all year. The fairy princess, it was only a nickel the day after Halloween. She just wore them all year; that was her look. My parents always used to say to us, "It's not Halloween, y'know."

On Washington Monuments As Sex Organs

In Washington you don't hear that much about the Pentagon and 9/11, and it's sexist because the World Trade Center was phallic and the Pentagon looked like a vagina. That's why the Pentagon is never featured as much.

On His Favorite Newer Film

They ask that question and the cliché is your movies are like your children, it's Sophie's Choice, and mine all have learning disabilities. Basically, you pick the one that did worst at the box office. Desperate Living was the one that did worst of my old movies and Cecil B. Demented, it didn't do great, but they're all the same thing in a weird way because each one you get through it. When it's over you think, "How did I ever get that movie made? How did that one come out?" Each one is like a war to get made. I still have trouble getting movies made. It's not like people are waiting in line to give me money. The last one [A Dirty Shame] was such a hassle with the MPAA and that caused a great financial burden on that movie because in the video shops Netflix—which I like because they produced This Filthy World—but they put all the independent video shops out of business so all that's left are the Blockbuster chains and they won't carry NC-17 movies. So there's nowhere to buy it. So take your porn and sneak it into those shops. Put it on the shelves of WalMart or take the movies out and edit scenes in from Gag the Fag. There's this whole genre of blowjob movies that are out now. They started with Slap Happy and then The Gag Factor and then Shut Up and Blow Me and now there's a gay one Gag the Fag.

On Chucky Movies

I'd like to see a Chucky blowjob movie. I was in Seed of Chucky directed by Don Mancini. [He's out.] the ad campaign for Seed of Chucky was "Get A Load of Chucky." The best one is Bride of Chucky with Jennifer Tilly [where] she says, "Have sex with me but use a rubber" and he says, "I am rubber."

On the Acid-in-the-face Scene in Female Trouble

I just realized in Female Trouble when Edith says, "Here's something for your face, motherfucker", that is from this movie Crazy Love. I don't know if you've seen it. It's this documentary that's out about this couple that I remembered from 1971 where he threw acid in her face and then went to prison and when he got out they got married again. She's still blinded by him but it's like, "Oh well, we all have bad nights." It's a great documentary and I realized that's where it came from when I was writing Female Trouble. It was based on a real case. And you should see her. She may be blind but somebody does her hair!

On Tab Hunter and Polyester

I have to give Tab Hunter a lot of credit for that because he really had some nerve to make that movie then and he did a great job. He was greatly responsible for the success of that movie. People couldn't believe that Tab had done this and actually kissed Divine in the movie and everything. Even though that sounds like nothing, it was a big deal then. They wouldn't even show pictures of Divine and Tab together embracing in the magazines. He was very brave to do it.

[I called him] because we didn't have casting. Well, Pat Moran always worked with me; but, yeah, I just called him and I said, "Don't watch Pink Flamingos" because I thought if he saw that, he never would come. He said yes and we filmed the whole movie around him so he was only there 10 days. We did all his scenes and paid him for that amount of time. He was great and he liked it so much that he went with Divine afterwards to make Lust in the Dust, another movie I didn't write. But he had such a good time doing it that in his book that he wrote last year—which is quite good the book—he was very kind to us remembering the whole thing. It was lovely to work with him. He was really professional with Divine and the only time I saw Divine nervous was the night before when he knew Tab Hunter was coming the next day and he had to slowdance with him. That was the first scene we filmed; Cuddles' debutante party.

On Edith Massey

She treated everybody exactly the same. She could meet Jacqueline Kennedy or a bum and she would be exactly the same. She didn't know there was a difference—and there isn't really—but she was grumbly and she said everything outloud. She was never silent ever. If she were sitting here, she'd say, "Water pitcher. Glass. Light." You'd say, "Edie, ssssssh." But internalization was a concept that was mystifying to her. She did nail some of her lines deliciously, but you can ask Mink, sometimes, "Take 38!"


You can hear her in "Purr, purr, Francine." I would say, "It's poor Francine." But she couldn't say it because of her teeth. Another thing, when her teeth started to fall out, she was on the news every night in Baltimore. Day 8 of Edie's Last Tooth and she's like, "It's still here!" When it finally fell out, a dentist gave her free false teeth but she hated them because she couldn't be Edie so he made her a fake set of snaggle ones. She would have one left for real and every night she'd be on the news, "Hello, it's really going to go!" This was a news event in Baltimore.

On Kathleen Turner and Serial Mom

Kathleen was the guest of honor at a film festival where I am in the summer and we appeared live at the Well Fleet Drive-in this year. It was raining and we showed Serial Mom. It was great. They had a champagne reception. It was exactly like the scene in Polyester where we had the Margarita Duras. It really came true, this champagne reception, and it was great being with Kathleen at the drive-in, alive and in person.

She's good. I saw her—of course she played Virgina Woolf this year—she was just amazing as Martha, really really good. She has a book coming out called Send Yourself Roses. She tells some pretty rude stories about herself.

On Johnny Knoxville

Johnny Knoxville was my date for the Hairspray premiere. We sat down and he had popcorn and he said, "There's a hole at the bottom." I did write him and I know his girlfriend and I said, "Tell her I won't do anything." He emailed back and said, "How do you know I won't?" He's the gayest, friendliest straight boy and he's not one bit a closet queen. I was in Jackass 2 and there was a scene that got cut where I throw Steve-O down a flight of steps when he's wearing a jock strap.

[Jackass] is great because here the key audience is basically heterosexual straight blue collar boys and they're all sticking stuff up their ass. Have you ever seen, they had a tape Too Hot For Jackass that they never could show and there's [a scene] where one of them jerks off in front of the other one and they're like, "Eeeeeuwwww, don't shoot it over here! Eeeeeeuwwww no!" It's so great. It's true. They're two straight boys that if they were straight and jerking off they would find it repulsive. It's really funny.

There's another one where they throw up a pukeburger and then eat it and puke again. If there ever was my type.

On Johnny Depp

It's not true that I called Johnny Depp "the rimmer." His code name was Cry Rimmer. He still sends me cards signed "Cry Rimmer." We called him that and he called me John Walters, because people got my name wrong a lot too. John Walters and Cry Rimmer. Johnny's great. He's a lovely guy. I really loved that he came back and did the whole Cry Baby when we did the new version on the Directors Cut, he came back and did the commentary on it, which he really didn't have to do. Johnny's a great guy.

On Sonny Bono

He was great. He kept saying that he thought I was going to trick him; that—as soon as he'd leave the room—30 people were going to run in and eat dog shit. He'd keep saying, "Is there some scene you haven't told me that's in this movie?"

On Pia Zadora

She was lovely. I just saw Pia recently. She recently married a cop. I saw her mother, who was in a wheelchair with a headband and a fringe outfit, at a Hamburger Hamlet. She's great [in The Lonely Lady]. When she's in the shower wiping off lesbianism? It starts out with the credit of her alone walking at the Oscars with [singing] "Looooonely laaaaady." Butterfly's amazing too. C'mon, it's a movie where Ed McMahon and Orson Welles are in together! Together at last. Pia's great. She can sing. I like Pia. She's funny. How I met her, we were at the Berlin Film Festival together. Rick, her husband, had totally done the wrong thing and came with Butterfly and spent a billion dollars and had this huge party when the Berlin Film Festival was very left wing. It was the year of Fassbinder and everything. Everybody made fun of it and booed it and I wrote a thing about how brilliant it was in the paper and then we became friends.

On Patty Hearst

Patricia doesn't come back to San Francisco. You all owe her an apology. She was home doing her homework. She won't come here. I keep trying to get her to come back but she won't. She's great. She came and visited me in Provincetown. She's a good friend. I think a good comedienne. She's been in five of my movies now. She's always telling the truth even in the last SLA trial where they said, "We're going to get her on the stand." She went on Larry King and said, "I'm not afraid of them anymore" and they all pled guilty the next day. What happened to her—well, I guess I get [why] they think she did it because they were never with her when she wasn't kidnapped; but, you can be scared to death really when someone keeps you like that. It happens all the time. You're doing your homework and people come in and beat you up and take you out in a trash can and lock you in a closet; that's not a good night. But she did play a kidnapped victim's mother in my movie and that was pretty funny because who wants to be a famous victim? If you make fun of that image, they can't use it against you. Traci Lords did that with me. Y'know, she's pregnant. She's having a baby at 41. Old chickens make good soup! I stole that from Pat Moran's mother. She used to date an older guy and her mother said that to her. The other thing that Pat Moran's mother said is when you have a hangover: "Heavy hangs the head that last night wore the crown." That's a good one too.

On Airplane Disasters

I always think when I'm on airplanes and they say, "In the unlikely event of a water landing"—I hope it's unlikely! I always picture a fireball coming down the aisle, my hair catching on fire while I'm trying to open that door where I lie and say I can do it to get that one seat.

On Future Projects

I've written a terribly wonderful children's Christmas adventure called Fruitcake. It's mostly children in it and Johnny Knoxville's the father. I don't know what it's going to be rated so please don't ask me that tortured question. Because I was wrong last time when I said "R". This could be PG-13. A really hard one.

On A Dirty Shame

[The rating controversy] was so ridiculous. I don't know why they were so uptight. Maybe because I kept felching? But you didn't see anything. There was supposed talk that in the MPAA a doctor explained what felching was so I was only hoping that they would send that to me so I could say, "It isn't that! It means farting in the bathtub and biting the bubble." That's not true; but, what could they say? How could they prove what felching is, really? Not in my neighborhood. In my community it's farting in the bathtub.

On His Favorite Place To Visit in San Francisco

Kayo Books. I love that store. I went in there and got so much great stuff the other day. That store, if that was online or in L.A., they'd be millionaires because it's the best place to find a present and they're fairly priced. That sounds like I own the store; but, I don't. It's the only store that collects uncollectable books. They have a section on Catholic guilt. An abortion section. I bought The Illustrated History of the Penis there yesterday. They also had an Ed Wood book called Watts After? A book about revolution by Ed Wood? I never knew it existed. It's an amazing store. I always go there.

I go to the art galleries. Most all the hideous bars. There was one called The Hungry Hole with gloryholes where you put your ass through. I want the sign. Somewhere there is that sign. Van used to go there. But I loved the fact that it was like a gloryhole but this was for asses. Back to the bar, yeah, for indiscriminate rimming.

Cross-published on Twitch.

HAIRSPRAY

During Peaches Christ's onstage interview with Mink Stole for the 9th season of Midnight Mass, she called for a national boycott of Adam Shankman's Hairspray. Granted, she enthusiastically—if not hastily—proposed said boycott as an indirect compliment to her on-stage guest and friend; but—as the song goes—children will listen. So when it came down to a choice between interviewing Nikki Blonsky or Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ), I chose Peaches, boycott in mind. Imagine my surprise, then, when Joshua confessed he had attended an advance screening of Hairspray! Whaaaaaaat?!! Joshua pulled an alter-ego on me, rationalizing that Peaches had called for the national boycott, not him. I grumbled to myself, "How convenient." He apologized and said he was unclear himself on how to proceed and that he would need to touch base with both Mink and John Waters to gauge which way to go.


When I interviewed Mink Stole and brought the subject of Shankman's Hairspray up, Mink characterized the film as "fluffy." "Certainly a lot of the real depth of the movie isn't there," she added, "But it's a light, entertaining way of telling a story that was a true story." As for why she wasn't featured as a cameo, Mink explained, "It would have been nice to be part of that but I think that—if they had too many people from the original film—it would have been more like acknowledging the original. This is a movie of the musical; it's not a remake of the movie. My character in the original movie got blended with Deborah Harry's character in the Broadway show so now Michelle Pfeiffer is playing me and Debby [in the new film]."


At John Waters' recent on-stage appearance at Midnight Mass, Waters offered: "It's really good. It's better than I ever imagined it could be. If I hated it, I would lie a little; but, it's really good. They did a good job. They reinvented it, again. It's really close to the spirit of me. I'm very very happy with it." Upon hearing about Peaches' call for a national boycott, Waters smiled and said, "People are very protective of me. They go in and they don't want to like it because they liked the first one so much. But this isn't a contest of which is better." Peaches admitted that by the end of watching the film, she realized that—though it's not necessarily a movie for her, a hardcore John Waters obsessive—she nonetheless enjoyed it a lot and the kids in the audience loved it. "And those kids," Peaches predicted with a provocatively-arched eyebrow, "will go out and rent Pink Flamingos!"


I've now seen the film twice and will probably go see it again this evening because—if ever dropping a tenspot has made me happy and satisfied—this is the film that does it. Though Travolta does trip me up now and then with his Baltimore accent, he—as Manohla Dargis has pointed out—is the only one in the cast who at least tried. And though I have some reservations about Michelle Pfeiffer becoming stereotyped as the beautiful Ice Queen (she basically plays the same role in Matthew Vaughn's Stardust), I'll forgive her for having seen it here first. Essentially the rest of the characters are perfectly cast and the movie is a no-holds-barred feel-good event. My feet couldn't stop moving. This is what a movie musical should be.

Cross-published on Twitch.

FISH KILL FLEA—The Evening Class Interview With Jennifer Loeber, Aaron Hillis and Brian Cassidy

Aaron Hillis graciously forwarded a screener DVD of Fish Kill Flea ("Fish")—co-created with Brian Cassidy and Jennifer Loeber—when I wanted to participate in its SXSW premiere by chiming in from San Francisco, which I thought would be good, wholesome Internet fun. Unfortunately, the screener froze in my DVD player and I wasn't able to do that; but, Aaron has since sent a working replacement and now I'm truly pleased to shout out from the West Coast on their upcoming East Coast Saturday night premiere at Brooklyn's Rooftop Films, maintaining a truly bi-coastal texture to the film's critical response.

As the film's website details, prior to collaborating on their first feature, Brooklyn-based friends Brian Cassidy, Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber had each fallen into filmmaking from divergent paths.

Originally from the Poughkeepsie area near where Fish Kill Flea was shot, Brian has worked as a photographer for such commercial and editorial clients as The United Nations, UNICEF, and Colors Magazine. He was a winner of the Photo District News Photo Annual, and recently earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Two short films he co-directed with Melanie Shatzky, God Provides and The Delaware Project, premiered at the 2007 Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals.

Aaron is a freelance writer and film critic whose work can be read regularly in the pages of The Village Voice, plus online at Premiere, IFC News and The Reeler. As a passionate cinephile, he is also partner to Benten Films, a new DVD distribution label that will launch its first release, Joe Swanberg's LOL, on August 28th, 2007.

Jennifer received her BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art, and her collections have been seen all over the U.S., including in F-Stop, File Magazine, and Humble Media's Group-Show, who exhibited her work in NYC in March 2007. While pursuing fine art projects, she has also worked as a photo editor and director at several national fashion magazines, including Allure, Glamour and Instyle.

The filmmakers of Fish Kill Flea describe their documentary as "A Eulogy for Shoppers by Shoppers." Aaron Hillis synopsizes at IMdb: "Once thriving, a dead mall in upstate New York is now home to a ragtag flea market, living proof that the American Dream is in perpetual decay. Blending vérité with a stylized wit, this heartbreaking portrait raises questions about our disposable culture through the unfiltered lives of its eccentric community." I caught up with all three of them earlier this week by phone.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I read a lot about your reactions to the film's premiere at South by Southwest, how are you three feeling about your Brooklyn premiere?

Aaron Hillis: We're all really excited! We all live and work in Brooklyn so getting the chance to show it to all of our friends and family and colleagues and people who weren't able to see it at some of the other festivals we've been at is nothing less than thrilling.

Brian Cassidy: Rooftop was also a really nice place for us to premiere because, as you know, the film deals with appropriating space and that's what Rooftop does by showing films on the roofs of buildings, so it seemed like an appropriate match; we're happy about that.


Guillén: The photograph you have announcing the premiere looks like fun, all the people up on the rooftop like that; it looks like a modern-day version of the drive-in.

Jennifer Loeber: [Chuckles.] You could put it like that….

Guillén: Fish is an eccentric pearl of a film; odd in shape with an idiosyncratic sheen. I don't mean to undo the seamless braid the three of you have achieved in co-directing this film; but, I am curious about the structure of your collaboration. Can you talk about the genesis of the film, how the three of you decided to embark on the project, and how you went about divvying up duties?

Hillis: Well, we'll start with Brian since he's actually from that area.

Cassidy: For a number of years I had been photographing—my background is in still photography—and the Dutchess Mall in Fishkill is actually the mall that I used to shop at as a child. As I grew older and started to realize that this mall was dying before my eyes, once it really did die and this flea market took it over, I became interested in this culture that took over the space. For a number of years I was going there and spending time with people, photographing and making pictures, but still photography never quite [captured] the kind of storytelling that I thought could come out of this place. It wasn't until a few years later [when] I had moved out of the area and met Aaron and Jennifer—the three of us became fast friends—and we went upstate for a weekend and I showed them this great place, [that] then and there we decided we would make a film about it.


Hillis: Adding to that, while we were there—which was the first time for Jennifer and myself—we found out right then and there that they were finally going to raze the mall and turn it into yet another Home Depot. With a deadline limitation, it made the idea of making the film—since none of us had done something like that—a little more immediate.

Cassidy: As far as designating tasks and duties, we were improvising roles as we went. Often there were two cameras going at once. One of us would be at the far end of the flea market and then one would be at the other end and we would meet in the middle and see what we got. I was the editor on the film but then we would get together and I would start to select from the material and we would all see what worked best for the story we wanted to tell.

Guillén: Definitely the editing was how you achieved the narrative stream of the film. James Renovitch at The Austin Chronicle characterized the editing as "deft" and I enjoyed your insightful Austinist interview where the "thumbwrestling" regarding the editing was brought up. So Brian was given full rein?

Hillis: Brian was finishing up his Masters Degree at the School of Visual Arts and—since it was a collaboration—it made sense for him to be the sole editor so that he had a project that he could call his own. He definitely did all the grunt work and would come up with the initial edits that we would all look at and see what worked and didn't. So it was still a collaborative effort but Brian was definitely the sole editor.

Guillén: Roughly then, about how many hours of footage did you have to work with?


Cassidy: When all was said and done there was about, I'd say, 50 hours worth of footage, maybe 45-50 hours that we had to whittle down. We knew there was the story arc, the trajectory of what was going to happen with this space, where it was going to end up being or not being, but besides that it was really about responding intuitively to the material we had collected. We were really collectors, collecting moments, collecting interviews, collecting images and sounds. In that regard it was really about intuitively shaping and making a musicality to it. It was almost like creating a piece of music.

Hillis: Might I add in all that collecting, it was at bargain discount prices.

Guillén: [Laughs.] Fish kept reminding me of a recent conversation I had with documentarian Heddy Honigman regarding her latest film Forever, which screened at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, where she expressed a similar methodology to shaping her film. Her film is about the culture in a Parisian cemetery and Heddy talked about an intuitive process of waiting for the stories to come to her. Let's talk a little bit more about your methodology: were you randomly filming? Did you pick up threads early on that you then actively pursued?

Loeber: When we first started filming, we were randomly capturing images as we walked around. But within a week or two of shooting, we started becoming friendly with the vendors and it became more of almost a family atmosphere. People were getting to know us and they were giving us interviews that felt more like conversations. We didn't start out with any great narrative threads but we worked our way into it as we went.

Cassidy: And I would just add that—though we did take an observant approach to what we were seeing—we all as filmmakers acknowledged that we had our own story to tell as well and that the best moments were ones that were an intersection between our own sensibility, our own sensitivities to what we were seeing, and what actually existed.

Guillén: Aaron, when you were being interviewed by Matthew Odam for Austin360, you characterized the directorial approach to Fish as "unconventional." Can you amplify on what you meant by that? What is it that is unconventional in how you've approached this subject?


Hillis: Sure, we didn't know what we were doing. [Laughter.] We all had ideas about aesthetics and ideas of how a film should be made that came from, obviously, a bit of naiveté. The learning curve was steep. Because we also had three people who didn't have clearly-defined roles—as we ventured on we didn't—we found ourselves doing a little bit of everything and wearing a lot of hats. Sometimes we would be doing interviews. Sometimes we'd be off shooting something on our own. Sometimes we were assisting one of the other people. I don't know if that's the right or wrong way to make a film but it seemed right to us considering it's a documentary, we didn't have a script, all we had was a lot of content in front of us waiting to be shot, and trying to come up with interesting ways to present it rather than just turning on a camera and letting it run.

Guillén: One of the things I immediately appreciated were the composed static tone poems that served as interstitials between the conversations between yourselves and the vendors. I took that as direct influence from the fact that two of the filmmakers were still photographers?

Loeber: That's definitely because Brian and I come from photography backgrounds. Our eyes as photographers are somewhat similar so the meeting of minds when it came to that kind of shooting—static images, holding things so that people could sort of swim around in—came naturally in a way.

Cassidy: I would say also, as the editor of the film, but also as one of the—I guess you would say—cinematographers, the material that Aaron, Jennifer and I came back with, as an editor it was easier to wade through than I imagined. Many documentaries are made in this way where the filmmakers go out and just shoot and shoot and shoot and where it's not uncommon to see as much as 300-400 hours of footage for a 72-minute film. We didn't really take that approach. We made critical decisions in the moment as far as being visual storytellers. With that regard, even though maybe the overarching structure needed to be found in the editing, a lot of the moments were made in the marketplace.

Guillén: It felt that way. There was a compositional integrity from the get-go. The look of the images were attractively composed. Who caught the image of the doll in the tree?

Cassidy: That was me.

Guillén: I liked that image a lot.

Cassidy: Thank you.


Guillén: Fish is something of a cinematic close-up on the shifting face of modernity and how modernity defines itself through exclusionary practices of progress. There's no gentle way to gauze the lens when capturing that grinning grimace. In other words, modernity is essentially clothed in whatever is the current fashion of commerce. At one stage capitalism colonized regional areas of the United States through the shopping mall, demeaning the value of small town mom & pop businesses. Joni Mitchell has keenly observed how "history falls to parking lots and shopping malls" but she hasn't yet penned the tune where the malls themselves are undone by the colonial practices of internet commerce and transnational capitalism. Can you speak to those shifting trends and why you felt them important to profile with what Andrew Grant (Filmbrain) has described as "an almost Marxist gaze"?

[Jennifer laughs and there's an almost palpable stunned silence.]

Guillén: Does that make sense?

Hillis: Yeah. Give us a minute I guess. [Laughter.] I don't even know where to begin. The thing is, while there are a lot of macro and micro ideas within this portrait, obviously this mall can't represent all of America; but, it does show the contrast between past, present and future, which plays right into what you're talking about modernity and how it's measured. Once this mall was a thriving thing. Back in the '70s it was the new hotness and everybody in the town was excited to go to this place; the mall itself was an event. Leading up to its demise and the flea market then being able to reinterpret unused space into something practical and even positive, obviously there's a lot of decay. You can still see the past within that. There, just that measurement shows the contrast between past and present. The future … I guess if you're going to get into online retailers taking the business away from malls, the only tangible thing I see that makes sense within something like this is that there isn't as much socializing. One of the great things we liked about the mall and even the flea market is there was a sense of community there and, although there are online communities, this was something different because this was a community that was meshed and went hand-in-hand with commerce, with capitalism. Once you have that in an online forum, that's certainly lost.

Cassidy: They're faceless.

Hillis: They are faceless. What is considered a community then? Seeing what other people recommend for their shopping habits? No one's going to stop going to stores. No one's going to stop going to malls. People still need human interaction. I don't think we're all going to get plugged into the Matrix anytime soon even though some of us here do have crippling Internet addictions.

Cassidy: May I just step in for a moment? This idea of community is an aspect of the film but at the same time I don't think it's the entire film. In some ways there's a very grim side to this portrait. People shuffle through this mall at a slow pace and there's another side to it that's a bit like looking at a black lung, a smoker's lung. It still works, it still breathes, but it's congested and it's failing. That in and of itself is the tonality and the texture with which we wanted to infuse this portrait. The community is one side of it but at the same time—if we were to have made a film that was really rallying around community—we would have found a place that was in some ways far more [vital]. We would have gone to a farmers market or something that was far more kinetic. That community aspect is definitely a part of our film but it's only one part of our film.


Guillén: Interesting. Glenn Kenny, when he wrote about the film for Premiere, spoke about its "early-Errol-Morris feel for American weirdness." You've handled that "weirdness"—as applied to the sociality of the community that you've profiled—with compassionate, nonintrusive and nonjudgmental gloves. I have to praise you for that. But let's put a respectfully-gloved finger on that "weirdness", if we may. You've described the flea market phenomenon as something of a "black lung", Brian, and I have to be honest and say I had some issues with some of the personages in this flea market community. I felt the guy who was selling the Nazi memorabilia was borderline racist and there was just some overall wackiness to these people that I found somewhat uncomfortable. That's why I was surprised, and actually delighted, when one of the vendors in your film lambasted a "flea market snob" like me. Her comment made me suddenly aware that I was judging these people whereas you were not.

Cassidy: She pulled the rug out from under you.

Guillén: Yes! Merle Bertrand at Film Threat likewise admitted that your compassionate non-judgment "is something that most viewers of Fish Kill Flea … probably can't claim." As you were going through all of this collected material, how did you go about finalizing your "cast of characters"? How did you choose your talking heads? Why did these particular testimonials pronounce themselves to you?

Hillis: The easy thing about putting together any of the footage was that—on the surface—it all takes place at this flea market, it's all within this mall, it's all self-contained within this community; but, we realized that what we lacked in narrative momentum, we would have to come up with something to push it along, some sort of momentum. One of the things we used as momentum were its ideas: the idea of preservation, of community and commerce, and nostalgia, everything that comes out of how you want to interpret this film. We looked at things one at a time and tried to weigh the balance—how interesting is this? Compared to how much does it say?—not just fascinating moments because we have tons of that still on the cutting room floor. What is going to speak to the other segments to tell a story? To show a larger portrait than just this finite thing?

Guillén: What came across to me was their poignant struggle to survive and to maintain this situation. I applied a biological metaphor to their experience. It struck me as wholly symbiotic—these people, this situation—so intimately connected to even exist as something of an ecological niche. What were you trying to say about diversity and its importance?

Loeber: I don't know if we were really focused on diversity per se.

Hillis: As much as not judging. I think that's really the key.

Cassidy: There's no easy answer. The thing is, there are no pat answers here. You feel for a group of people who this space means something to but perhaps you question some of their behavior and some of their own sentiments. There are no easy answers.

Guillén: That's exactly what I would say you have achieved with the film: I ended up wondering and caring about these people and what happened to them, once I became aware that their livelihood, this experience, was dying for them. You did a good job of presenting that.

Cassidy: Thank you. A lot of documentaries do render people either one way or the other and they show how someone transforms themselves over the course of the 90 minutes or whatever and we simply wanted to show people as they are or as we perceived them and put it on the viewer to complete. If we did our job, then people will have different opinions depending on where they're standing, perhaps even watching the film 10 years from now. That's what we wanted to achieve.

Hillis: That would be so cool if people were still watching our film 10 years from now.

Guillén: I think they will be! It's a historical document and—part of the reason it has an important historicity—is the archival material that you gathered from, I assume, the vaults of the Poughkeepsie Journal? What were your adventures in combing those vaults?

Cassidy: That was a lot of fun.


Hillis: Brian used to work as a photographer there so he knew a lot of people there still and they gave us full rein to sift through their dusty archives. Some of these things had not seen the light of day [in decades]. Our allergies were kicking up a storm. But we found a section of catalog bins that had photographs and things from it that made us instantly nostalgic, which seems normal for Brian but I didn't even know this place and I was nostalgic. That also speaks to some of the things we had in the film as far as eulogizing mall culture itself because there's so much overlap between what this mall used to be; it's a uniquely American thing.

Guillén: All that optimism, all that ribbon cutting, comes across as you say nostalgic and profoundly sad.

Cassidy: There were things that didn't make it into the film for one reason or another. We came across pictures of Mickey Mantle when he came and did an autograph session at the mall.

Hillis: Someone got married in the fairway of the mall.

Cassidy: There was just so much, as you say, optimism. Celebrities would come to these shopping malls and attend grand openings. There's a sadness in the demise of that, which we wanted to show through the archival pictures.

Loeber: And then there's also a little bit of the universality about the photos. Almost everyone in America at least can relate to those photos. I—being someone who grew up in New York City that didn't have a lot of malls—could even completely relate in a nostalgic way to those kinds of images. That's also a thread to the film that speaks to just about anyone watching it.

Guillén: One final question here. I was impressed with your soundtrack. You have a lot going on there and it adds a textured layer to the film. You've included a song played on an organ made of stalagmites, I understand? And another sung by an Egyptian choir of 4,000 voices? A couple of blues pieces. Could you talk a little bit about how you structured the score?

Cassidy: Sure. We wanted to find—I guess "score" would be the word—sound music that would be music that resonated but was marginally made by nonprofessionals. This doesn't include all of the pieces but the majority of the music is made by people who were trying things, experimenting and tinkering, and creating something that resonates and has a haunting amateur poignancy to them. We just felt that spoke to not only our subject matter but also our approach as filmmakers. This is not about a high gloss experience so there's a rawness to the music that we wanted to infuse the images with.

Guillén: Clearly, one of the great achievements of this project is that the three of you have remained friends.

Hillis: [Laughter.] BINGO!

Guillén: Do you imagine that you will be making another film together? Any future plans?

Hillis: We're all definitely going to be making films. Brian has actually been making short films with Melanie Shatzky and they're going to continue making those. Jennifer and I are going to do another documentary after this one. We're all making films. If you want to then call it a collective or whatever—because, obviously, we're here to support one another—feel free.

Cassidy: It's also dependent on the story. Everything has to do with if a story comes across, we'll join forces again.

Hillis: I think the three of us specifically are going to make another film in 2016.

Guillén: [Laughter.] That's wonderful to hear. It's great that you collaborated on this one and I congratulate you and I hope you have a lot of fun at your New York premiere. Thank you for taking the time.

Cassidy: Thank you.

Hillis: Take care, Michael.

Loeber: Bye-bye.

Cross-published at Twitch.

2007 SFSFF—Robert Osborne Introduction to Camille

President Emeritus of the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Richard J. Meyer presented Turner Classic Movies a special tribute award for their contribution to the preservation, exhibition and education of the general public to silent films. He adamantly opined that—though this award has been given to other organizations—TCM has done more than all of the previous recipients put together towards advancing silent film.

On behalf of TCM, Charles Tabesh accepted SFSFF's Distinguished Contribution to the Preservation and Restoration of World Film Heritage. "Obviously I will never claim," Tabesh qualified, "that watching a film on TCM can even compete with watching a movie in a venue like the Castro; but, I am proud that TCM is able to bring silent films to the overwhelming majority of the country that can't attend a festival like this. And I hope we aren't only satisfying existing silent film fans or classic film fans in general, but also introducing new audiences to these incredible works of art. So please count your blessings that you're here because these films are best seen in this way, experienced in this way, in the Castro Theatre with some of the best musicians that the world's ever known and some of the best performers in the world. Thank you very much to the staff of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for this great honor. I hope we continue to live up to your high standards."

Meyer then presented Robert Osborne ("who tells me more than I really want to know about Joan Crawford's underwear") with his own special award for the work he's done not only at TCM but through his writing on the history of the Oscars.

"I'm really pleased to be here," Osborne admitted. "We're really always so thrilled whenever we come and we hear the enthusiasm people have for Turner Classic Movies because I think it is a great channel and a necessary channel. We're just very pleased that you respond the way you do. I do think that one of the wonderful things we've done is to have our Sunday night silent movies because it's introducing it to a whole group of people who wouldn't get to see silent films otherwise or they're used to seeing them only in butchered versions run at the wrong camera speed. At TCM we get these wonderful prints and you get to see what it was like when they were making these wonderful films. So it's a great honor and I also agree with Charlie that there's nothing like seeing a film in a theater on a big screen. The values are all different and its great to share with other people. There's nothing like that experience and I'm so thrilled—Nazimova would have been so thrilled—that you've packed this house tonight. She'd be absolutely delighted. I am glad that we have Turner because we wouldn't get to see a lot of these films otherwise and, of course, if you don't live in a great city like San Francisco or can travel here like you've done, you don't get a chance to see these films. We [at TCM] are grateful for our chance to bring these films to you. We're grateful that you're out there watching them and appreciating the channel as much as you do.



"I'm going to talk a little bit about Camille right now. It came out in 1921. It was very much a product of Nazimova. She was a great great star at that time and this is very much—as you will see right from the beginning—absolutely a Nazimova production because it's Nazimova in Camille and then it's a Nazimova production and her name is always kind of written in script and also it's very curious, you don't see Rudolph Valentino's name at all in the credits except when they list the characters; he's there. Thereby hangs a tale. When this movie was made, Nazimova was 42 years old. She was a great great star, curiously, and I say that because she's not somebody you'd automatically think would be a great star [who] would be beloved by people all over the country; but, they did, during this period of time. This was her 11th film at the Metro company—her 11th and last film there—and the public did love her; she made $13,000 a week, as compared to Rudolph Valentino who in this film made $350 a week.



"What's interesting is she's very theatrical. In this movie she has bee-stung lips and she's got a hair-do that looks like her head has exploded. She's very theatrical but we have to realize that in 1921 that was the way that actors performed. It got a little less so of course when you get into the later '20s and silent films were really at their apex and people were much more natural acting and all that. The interesting thing in this film is that Valentino is very natural and low-key and she's very theatrical. I think that's interesting to watch the two mix. This film came at a time when Nazimova was hugely successful, very famous. Rudolph Valentino was actually cast in this film when he was an unknown.



"Nazimova was very much in charge. She hired Natacha Rambova, who was this very interesting woman, as the art director who later married Rudolph Valentino. [Camille] is set in France in 1921—it's kind of an updated Camille—but still it's very German Expressionism in the settings and art deco. You'll see one scene where they go into a casino and a whole side of the wall is like a white spiderweb. It's all very kind of bizarre; but, that's Rambova; that's her signature. Also, the script is by June Mathis [based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas] who was a very important script writer. June Mathis had been the one who had gotten Metro to sign Rudolph Valentino for Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. At the point that he was signed for this movie, he had just filmed Four Horsemen but it hadn't opened yet. This film went into production in late February of 1921 and two weeks later on, I think, March 6th of 1921, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse opened and all of a sudden this guy who Nazimova had hired kind of as an afterthought—because she wasn't planning to spend much time with Armand in this movie; this was all going to be about her—all of a sudden he became the hottest new star in the world, almost overnight. Everybody went crazy for Valentino. All of a sudden [while] making this film, the dynamics had changed. This fellow who was totally unknown, who was an afterthought, people were waiting outside of the studio to get his picture, fans were lining up, and people were going crazy about him. As somebody said, Nazimova never wanted to share with a male on screen so she wasn't too keen about this. So much so—and I'm not going to give away the ending—but, it's interesting because this is definitely Nazimova's Camille, this is not Alexandre Dumas, because it ends in a totally different way than Traviata or any other Camille you've ever seen. The structure of the story is very much the same as it was in Greta Garbo's Camille when she did it, except for the finish; it's pure Nazimova.



"When the film opened it was a moderate success for 1921 but it didn't have enough Valentino in it for the fans who were now ragingly mad about him. In the meantime, a film he'd made later called The Conquering Tower had opened in July of '21 and right around the corner was—and everybody knew it was—his big hit The Sheik was about to open; that was in November of 1921. So people didn't pay a lot of attention to this film.



"Nazimova—after this film checked off the Metro lot; it was the last of her 11 films for them—immediately what they did was, they couldn't change the credits of the film, but they did change the ad campaign. So all of a sudden the ads all said: Rudolph Valentino in Camille with [in much smaller letters] Alla Nazimova. [She was] not too pleased about that. Anyway, I think that what's interesting to keep in mind is that she is very exaggerated and theatrical and in a way over the top in this movie; but, she was also really a wonderful actress. If you're fans of movies of the '40s, she made two wonderful—well, three actually—films as a character actress in which she's very naturalistic in her acting and interesting. One was Escape [1940] with Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer, where she plays Robert Taylor's mother. The other one is Blood in the Sand [1941] where she's Tyrone Power's mother, and then she has a wonderful sequence with Claudette Colbert in the 1944 film Since You Went Away, which is a very touching scene where she plays an immigrant who tells Claudette Colbert who's working in a defense plant about what seeing the Statue of Liberty and what it says at the base of the Statue of Liberty means to her. She's very low-key [in that performance] and really a wonderful actress, so [in Camille] she was obviously acting the style of the day when she made this film. But it's great fun to watch, particularly if you know Camille through Garbo or through many other versions of it. So we bring it to you now, happily, from Turner Classic Movies and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival!"



Although the score in the TCM broadcast of Camille (captured in its entirety on YouTube) is an original composition by Peter Vatine, the SFSFF screening was accompanied on the Mighty Wurlitzer by the dramatic and popular Clark Wilson.

2007 SFSFF—The Evening Class Interview With Robert Osborne and Charles Tabesh

Without question the program that most thrilled me in this year's SFSFF line-up was Camille (1921), screened in conjunction with a special tribute to Turner Classic Movies ("TCM") for their continuing contributions to the silent film genre. I have to be honest and say I was excited not so much for the film itself, but for the fact that attending the festival to accept the award would be TCM Senior Vice President of Programming and New Media Charles ("Charlie") Tabesh and TCM's weekday host Robert Osborne. Though I had spoken with Osborne on the phone earlier this year for "31 Days of Oscar", this would be my chance to finally meet him. Further, it provided the opportunity to also meet TCM's publicist Sarah Hamilton, who has been nothing but kind to me in this past year, tossing me one choice plum after the other.

Robert, Charlie, Sarah and I met up in the lobby of the Galeria Park Hotel. They were running a bit late from lunch, having gone all the way out to Clift House in hopes of an ocean view. As luck would have it, of course, San Francisco was socked in with fog and they didn't see much past their forks. To compensate, they invited me to spend the afternoon with them as they conducted their interviews with radio hosts Andrea Chase and Tim Sika. We all relaxed into something of a round table.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I'm intrigued by your both being in San Francisco to receive the Silent Film Festival's tribute award on behalf of TCM for Turner's contribution to silent cinema over the past 12 years. Clearly, TCM has had so much to do with silent movies because of their programming of silent features on Sunday nights. I was wondering if between the two of you I could hear some history on what led TCM to focus on that programming and to develop the Young Film Composers Competition?

Robert Osborne: Well, that would be more Charlie than me; but, it's been great and I just want to say that I'm thrilled that they're giving the award for [the fact] that Turner's had a help—and I think it has—in making people aware of silent films. It is, however, as we've talked about, I think a little more potent on the West Coast because of the time it's on. You get it here at 9:00 on Sunday nights.

Michael Guillén: The East Coast gets it at….?

Osborne: Midnight. We're three hours later. So I don't think it's had quite the impact on the East Coast, although people who are already into silent films and people who are up later do watch it. But I love the impact that it's had here because of that.


Charles Tabesh: The Young Film Composers [Competition] was the idea of Katherine Evans who used to be our head of marketing. She really was so key to all of what TCM has become. She was there from the very start and helped shape it. As far as the silent film programming and why we do it and why it's important to us, there are three things I can think of off the top of my head that I think really explain it: One, we are not ad-supported. As a programmer, that's great because it gives us all sorts of flexibility and it allows us to not do things that advertisers would want to try to reach a mass audience or whatever. Strategically, then, doing something niche like silent film, gives us really passionate advocates for the channel because we're the only place you can get it. There are a lot of people all over the country [where] the only way you're going to see a silent film is on Turner Classic Movies and that's really key because then you have those people going to their cable affiliates saying, "I really want TCM. Give me TCM." From a business perspective, that really helps us. It helps us and we're not hurt by the fact that it's very niche because we don't have to worry about advertisers. That's really good.

The second thing on that is [that] our general programming strategy and philosophy is we're the history of movies. We're the history of the film and we're the place to go to learn about it. Of course, that means sometimes that includes newer films and people might complain when we play a newer film, but that also includes silent films. You can't be the history of movies and not include silent movies. To narrow that further, we're also very much about context. We don't just put movies up on there; everything is themed and there is an idea or a reason behind it. So not only are we about film history, but in the way we look at film history by looking at actors, or directors, or various themes. No matter what theme you do—if you're doing romantic comedies—silent film is a part of that. They're actors and actresses that were both in silent films and sound films and—[if] we're going to do a tribute to Garbo—we're going to show both her silent and sound films. [Silent films] are just a piece of film history and that's what TCM is all about.


Osborne: What I love also is the fact that on TCM people are sometimes seeing for the first time a silent film shown at the regular speed of projection that they're supposed to be. So many people only have an impression of silent film as being very fast, jerky movement that go back to the Keystone Cops or something. I love to see how the evolution of film was going through—there were prehistoric days and then up into the late '20s when they became so sophisticated at their apex and then all of a sudden sound comes in and they almost go back to the beginning again. Those early sound films are so static because they didn't know how to move a camera and pick up sound at the same time. Just to see that whole evolution of film, you really have to see silent film and how it grew from nowhere and became so important and then went down again and had to build up and go again.

Then, of course, widescreen came in and some of those early widescreen films like Kismet [1955] with Minnelli—who was so great with the camera—[were] very static because he didn't know how to move the camera around with that letterbox dimension. Then they got into that and had to learn how to do it. The whole evolution of movies wouldn't be complete without silent films. All those musicals before Busby Berkeley, they never move the camera. They're literally there and the actors come in like the camera's sitting in the audience and it doesn't move at all. But before that, the camera was swooping around in those silent films. It was so beautifully done. It must have been heartbreaking for people that were in the industry then to see what happened when sound came in at the beginning. They'd say, "We had something really great going here" and then all of a sudden they're back to the basics again.


Tabesh: The other thing is the music. You talk about the Young Film Composers Competition and that's one thing that Katherine was very eager to do was to show off that connection between movies and music with that competition. With the silent films, you watch the same film but with two different scores and you have a totally different experience watching it. It's really interesting and it's kind of a nice way to reach out to the music in the audience and composer world as well as the film world.

Osborne: Plus, get younger people interested because they can participate and maybe score a film.

Guillén: [Addressing Charlie] So are all the thematic concepts yours?

Tabesh: Often. Usually. I suppose so. The themes we do come from all over the network; but, yeah, that's our department's job is to put those together.

Guillén: So if I have an idea, I pitch it at you?

Tabesh: Yes, you send me an email. I'll give you a card.

Osborne: The great thing about Charlie is the fact that he accepts those ideas. A lot of times in big corporations you don't get somebody willing to accept the ideas because [they'll respond] "This is what I do." But he's always so open to any kind of suggestions from anybody and often uses them or explains why he can't or why it doesn't work.

Tabesh: We definitely try to respect the intelligence of the audience.

Osborne: I think my favorite theme night was "Great Slaps." Slap scenes. Ginger Rogers in Vivacious Lady [1938], which is so funny with that slap, and then Faye Dunaway in Chinatown [1974]; it's just terrific.

Tabesh: We try to have fun. We do get serious and get in depth and academic but then we also have fun. Hopefully we stay smart. We certainly try to.


Guillén: In terms of the evolution of cinema—as you're talking about, Robert—what TCM is doing by using television to educate about film history—is actually a not-as-yet fully perceived leap in film literacy. I mentioned that to Richard Schickel when I interviewed him for Spielberg on Spielberg. I asked him if he could comment on how audiences are becoming more literate and he countered, "Are they?" I responded that I wanted to believe they were because of the efforts of programming like TCM's and he conceded that TCM was a unique case; that TCM was the only channel a person could go to become educated on film. Everywhere else, zilch.

Tabesh: That's nice.

Osborne: Yeah. As long as we entertain them at the same time.

Guillén: That's a given. So let's shift gears. Let's talk about the rarely-screened 1921 version of Camille that stars—not Greta Garbo—but Alla Nazimova and a young Valentino who at the time was just on the verge of becoming a superstar.


Osborne: It's a very interesting film. It's the same structure as the Garbo film but what's so interesting about it is that it was done in 1921 when films were still kind of theatrical, acting was overly generous and large, and Nazimova is very much that way but Valentino is very honest and natural in it and he's just charming in the film. It's also interesting because—I don't want to give this away but it's very interesting—Nazimova was a high-maintenance, very popular star at that time. She didn't really know who this Valentino was. He had made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1921] but it hadn't yet been released. It was released while the film was being made. Of course that changed the whole course of his career. She was so incensed by the fact that Valentino was getting all this attention from the press hanging around the studio and fans whenever he'd leave the studio—they weren't mulling around her too much—that she actually cuts him out of the last part of the film so that the famous love scene between Marguerite and Armand doesn't exist in this movie. She does it all by herself.

It's a fascinating film to see, particularly in the context of its time, and because we know the Garbo film and also because it's a chance to see Valentino at a very young age at the beginning of his career.

Guillén: Does he already have his characteristic swagger?


Osborne: No, not yet. Because he wasn't a star yet, he's very honest and plays it very realistically for 1921 kind of acting. I think that it may have been because he just didn't have the confidence yet. He'd made Four Horsemen but he had no idea whether or not that would be a success. He's very attractive in [Camille], he's very real, and she's so over the top that it's a very strange mixture of two acting styles.

Guillén: Was this a film that TCM particularly wanted the San Francisco Silent Film Festival to show?

Osborne: They let me pick one and I thought this would be fun because they hadn't shown it before. They asked me to pick one and I actually sent them a list of about five that [TCM] had and let them pick which of the five would fit their program.

2007 SFSFF—Mick LaSalle's Introduction to The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

Mick LaSalle, the author of two books on pre-Code cinema—Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man—is likewise film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He had the honor of introducing Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.

Because he feared becoming one of those people who gets on the Castro stage and suddenly become enamored with themselves, thinking they are interesting beyond belief, LaSalle made a point of setting his stopwatch and placing it on the podium.


"This is a wonderful movie you are about to see," he began. "If this happened to be the first silent film that you ever saw, you couldn't possibly start off with a better one. I know there are a lot of veterans here. A lot of the times with silent film, people will tell you, 'Silent films are great' and then they'll show you The Birth Of A Nation—and you'll never want to see another movie once you've seen that—but, this one really makes the case for the art form. It's beautiful. It relies on image and gesture. Its odd way of making specific people seem emblematic, seem almost like a symbol of something, make them not literal, make them bigger than they are, have more meaning. This is probably one of the most purely tender and touching love stories ever put on film. It's a real thing of beauty.


"It was released on September 21, 1927, which means they were not thinking about us at all. They were thinking about us the way we're thinking about 2087. It stars Ramón Novarro and Norma Shearer. I think it's the best thing that Ramón Novarro ever did—you could point to a few other movies—but, this one really captures that sweetness of spirit that he had; it's very unguarded and touching in this movie. This was not a typical role for Norma Shearer. Even at this point she hadn't graduated to full-blown sophistication yet that she would in the early talkies; but, she was by now playing mostly contemporary roles and working women and here she's playing a flat-out ingénue. But she's really lovely and she's just terrific. Now both the actors had trouble at a certain point with [Ernst] Lubitsch because they thought he was shooting the movie too quickly and that their performances were suffering. Shearer—because she was about to get married to Irving Thalberg—pulled Thalberg onto the set to try to put Lubitsch in line and Thalberg looked at what was going on and he said, 'We have a lot to learn from Ernst Lubitsch' and left it at that. So he was smart enough to just let Lubitsch make the movie.


"It would seem to be a simple story; but, what it has to say about the shadow of the world intruding upon the private world of the heart and emotions, is actually profound. None of that means anything less today than it did then. It portrays the power of the human capacity to love without doubt or reservation or fear, which is a quality that diminishes somewhat as we get older and wiser. If you get older you end up getting wiser whether you like it or not and this is about that moment before that happens. It was a very serious and important and universal thing at the time being depicted by the film in the early 20th century or in 1927 when the movie was made or now. It depicts the world of Heidelberg. It's a world where nothing bad happens, where the window boxes are always full, and the music of course was better then. It's the lost world. It's depicting the lost world and we all have one. The movie is about that.

"The experience of old films, of silent movies, is not about nostalgia. Nostalgia is about looking for the past in the present. What we're doing here is the opposite of that. We're finding the present in the past. We are finding those qualities about human existence that are eternal. They don't change. They don't end. Sometimes it's clinical things—the way people move and smile that we just marvel at from 80 years ago—but sometimes it's emotional things. It's just truths of the spirit. We will walk out of here tonight feeling exactly the way people did when they walked out of this film 80 years ago and that is a very mysterious thing and it is also a very good thing."

LaSalle has included a YouTube clip from The Student Prince at his blog Maximum Strength Mick.


Expanding on LaSalle's comments, Scott Brogan writes in his erudite essay for the festival program: "Student Prince costars Norma Shearer and Ramón Novarro occasionally found themselves at odds with Lubitsch during the filming. Both objected to his insistence on minimal or no rehearsal for a more spontaneous effect, only to then shoot multiple takes—reportedly filming one scene in The Student Prince 102 times. The already jittery Shearer was reduced to tears after Lubitsch exploded at her in frustration, remarking that he could get a studio commissary waitress to do a better job of playing a barmaid. Shearer called on Thalberg to come to her rescue, but he reportedly told her, 'Everyone has a lot to learn from Mr. Lubitsch.' Ramón Novarro had an even tougher time. Lubitsch knew of Novarro's homosexuality and he was amused at the prudish attitudes of American men and women. In an effort to poke fun, Lubitsch forced Novarro to endure multiple takes of an ultimately deleted scene with an effeminate extra. Shearer feigned a fainting spell to put a stop to it."

Later in his essay Brogan remarks that Novarro's accent, "which had not been an obstacle during the silent era, now limited the roles available to him. The official story for his departure from MGM was stated as 'artistic differences', but the real reason was most probably Novarro's homosexuality. Rumors circulated that he was either caught in flagrante delicto with another man, or the studio demanded that he find a wife." Tragically, "On October 30, 1968, Novarro made headlines once again when he was tortured and killed by two brothers he had hired for sex who attempted to rob him. Several of Novarro's closest friends, unaware of his homosexuality, were shocked to find he had been using male escort services for years. It was a sad postscript to a fine career that transcended the limits of the Latin Lover stereotype."


Festival favorite Dennis James provided a rousing accompaniment on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer. Just as LaSalle predicted, I found The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg to be endearingly sweet. The glittering mirth in both Shearer's and Novarro's eyes exemplified youthful love in all its awkwardness, silliness and naiveté. The scene where the Prince and barmaid Kathi lounge on the flowering hillside beneath a lustrous canopy of stars is achingly and visually romantic. Prince Karl Heinrich's burgeoning awareness that he must meet his obligations as heir apparent, sampling the lost world of his youth one more time before capitulating himself to the duties—and the official loneliness—of his prearranged marriage, underscores the poignancy of the comment made by the elderly couple at film's end as they watch him in his wedding procession: "It must be wonderful to be a king!"

SUNSHINE—The Evening Class Interview With Danny Boyle

We are stardust—we're made of million-year-old carbon—We are golden—we just got caught up in some devil's bargain.—Joni Mitchell

I'll defer to earlier write-ups on Danny Boyle's Sunshine by Twitch teammates Mack and Swarez and dive right into an interview I conducted with Boyle earlier this week regarding the (seemingly belated) release of Sunshine in the United States. We met in his suite at the Mark Hopkins and he was charmingly forthcoming. Not for the spoiler-wary.

* * *

Michael Guillén: You haven't been afraid in the past to tweak a genre. You reinterpreted the zombie flick with 28 Days Later when you transposed the characteristic stumbling, shuffle-footed zombie into raging racers. What struck me with Sunshine was likewise its pace. Can you speak to how you determine the pace of your films?—fast and furious in 28 Days Later but much more brooding in Sunshine—how was that determined?


Danny Boyle: [A space film] doesn't work if you don't do them like that. I tried to cut it quick; it doesn't work. [In] space, it doesn't work. It's one of the rules that you learn. It just doesn't work. I saw a Ridley Scott interview when they re-released Alien a couple of years ago for its 25th anniversary. He said, "I don't think it would work now if you released it because the first 40 minutes are so slow." I have to say I disagree with him. My feeling is it wouldn't work if you recut Alien and speeded it up for the modern attention-deficient audience. To create the reality of space, there's this sense of suspension, nothing's happening, it's endless; we're traveling at 27-28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing's happening, nothing. You have to do that. There are all these rules that you have to follow. I've never known anything like it. You mentioned 28 Days Later, that zombie genre you would think is much narrower; but, actually, it's a complete open field. You can do anything you like really. This is absolutely disciplined. It's Zen. You have to be focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and then you can achieve when you get there. It's weird.

No director goes back into space. It's the ultimate experience making [a space movie], I think. Maybe a modern day musical is as tough. I'm never done anything like it, certainly. But I loved doing it. I fell out with a lot of people because you have to be pretty tough on your crew to get there, y'know?

Guillén: So who was your editor? How do you work with your editor to achieve that pacing?

Boyle: Well it's the same guy Chris Gill who edited 28 Days Later. The material dictates itself. The way you shoot it, it dictates itself. We tried cutting it in a slightly different way—because I was aware that the beginning is quite slow—and it just didn't work, it just doesn't work. I think it is the discipline of space. Maybe more pop fantasy films you can speed up like Star Wars or whatever but this kind of film, this hardcore eight-people-in-a-steel-tube fired out into the endless eternity of space, basically works at this pace.

Guillén: What I sense is a mythic gradient to the pace of the film because you are dealing with an encounter with the ineffable. I'm a Mayan epigrapher by training and there is a Mayan glyph which is the verb "to witness." Basically what it is when you look at the glyph is it's a sideways view of an eyeball. One of the presiding images of your film is the sideways view of an eyeball with solar flares reflected in it. Can you speak about what witnessing means in this film in pursuing the theme of encounter?


Boyle: The biggest "fakedom" of the film—but the most important thing about the film—is that there's a room that they can sit in that allows them to see the star as they approach it. [Laughs.] In retrospect, NASA would never give them that room. Although psychologically you think it's good to look out the window, it's a recipe for disaster to witness this thing, for ineffectiveness, for realizing how meaningless [humans] are compared to this growing globe as they draw closer to it. But it was the drama really—it was all the drama—to be able to have that room and to have them witness it and to have the significant events that happen in the film happen in that room really, where they witness Mercury. The most important thing ultimately is that [Capa (Cillian Murphy)] witnesses Pinbacker (Mark Strong). That scene where [Capa] comes in and Pinbacker is burning himself in front of the sun—I don't think people get this from the film, which is of course the fault of the film—but the whole idea of Pinbacker is that he was a challenge. It's not so much what is Pinbacker—obviously he represents fundamentalism—but it's really a challenge to [Capa's] sanity, which is of course what it would be to go out there. Do you keep your sanity? Is it possible for someone for seven years to have burnt themselves and still speak like a human being? How is this possible? That's the key. And that's why that scene is played out in that room. [Capa] tries to touch him and [Pinbacker recoils] because there's no touch of course. He's not human anymore in a way. He's the Taliban—or whatever—but that's crucial to it.

The eyeball we use, the interesting thing about the eyeball is that when you get like that, all eyeballs are interchangeable. It's absolutely incredible. It doesn't matter what race they are. One of the eyeballs that's used is the Japanese guy's eyeball. One of them's Cillian's. We just mix them about.

Guillén: Which is to say that witnessing is universal.

Boyle: Absolutely, yeah. I like that you can mix them up and nobody can tell whose eyeball was whose. That tells you all you need to know about it all, doesn't it? We're all in this. That's what I love about space. Apart from that little blip where Reagan wanted to have a Star Wars up there, [space travel has] always been on behalf of mankind. Everything that we've done so far has been done on behalf of mankind, which is one of the few times we've ever achieved that in any of our history and I hope and I pray that that continues, that it's not divided up.

Guillén: Human flaws do seem to be the pivotal plot points in this film.

Boyle: Yes.

Guillén: Returning to Pinbacker, how did you come up with your visualization of him?—this strange, blurring image—what was that all about? And how did he get on the ship? I have to be honest, I didn't understand how he got on the ship.


Boyle: It's obvious. I can't believe people say that. We haven't explained it enough clearly because you're not the first person to say that. If you watch it again, it's very obvious where he gets on the ship, I think, where he switches ships. I can't explain that any more. It is in the film where he switches ships. We did visualize it at one point. We did show him switching ships; but, again, I didn't want that because I didn't want any manifestation of him until [Capa] walks into that room and witnesses him. It's when the ships join and they go on to the other ship and then the ships get separated. He has mechanically separated the ships. He has switched ships, thereby abandoning all four of them and leaving himself on the ship with three other people so he can stop this mission as well. He knows his mission was stopped; it's not going to go on any further. So he goes onto the other ship and he's going to stop that mission as well. Because he believes that science is wrong. He's basically the Taliban, isn't he? Because apart from the Taliban, the rest of us believe in science. We believe we can improve our lives. We believe we can innoculate. We believe that science can extend life. If nature threatens us, if smallpox threatens us—whatever it is—we can protect ourselves. The whole film is about that belief apart from him.

Why we visualized him like that is because of what I said before about witnessing. It's very difficult to say when somebody has lived out there for that long, it's not possible but who knows what's possible? We've discovered extraordinary things. So I wanted him to be spectral, but not like a ghost. He's literally like the bits that make him up—the protons and neutrons that make us all up—have kind of reorganized in some way.

Guillén: He's weird. [Laughter.]

Boyle: Your electrons, your protons, your neutrons, your atoms are empty basically, aren't they? They make you up but we know most of it is just empty space. So there's nothing there really. What gives you this shape? Nothing really. It's an illusion. And we just wanted to shift those about a bit so we used this rig on the camera that blurred the image and it's completely organic because you can't do it the same twice. Because it's a guy in front of the camera with this lens and—depending on how the actor moves or how the light hits him—it's an amazing, weird process.

Cross-published at Twitch.