Directing Herbert White (4 page)

River

Hello, James, it's River.

Where do you think I'm calling from?

Deep in hell, deep in the Florida wilderness?

Deep in the cement bowels of LA,

Beneath the neon, and the signs?

It's me, River, calling you

From the underworld.

I died at age 23,

Ten years before your age now.

James, you're the Jesus age.

You think you know me?

I tried to be something good,

Something that spoke to people,

I was pushed into acting, but I loved music,

You're in acting because you chose it.

Pick up the phone, James, it's River,

I'm calling to say it's over.

You know that moony feeling,

Like the air is gone, because there is no

More of a life? I've left just a little,

I know you want more, James,

But I left only a little.

And what time

Do we have for others

Anyway?

I've been gone for decades,

I've been forgotten.

I spent my two decades

Focused

On work and family.

You're all over the place, James.

I was a River that flowed straight

And pure; you're like a king

That orders one thing,

And then orders the opposite thing.

Hello

I am writing to you because there are so many words

That don't have form, and when I put them on paper,

They have a
little
form, but then I worry that it's not the
right
form

And then I know that my thinking is not clear.

But but but, the years go by, and decisions are made,

Like wind blowing leaves down a backlit tunnel,

Just words going round, and the form is ridiculous,

And now I think I need a little red in here, okay,

Look at the hood of her Stanford sweatshirt, the girl

I'm in love with, a fucking miracle,

A rippling blue miracle breaking on the surface of the lake,

After I've dropped my lucky penny through.

Hello down there.

Hello up there.

Hart Crane's Tomb

The guy that could fuck sailors

And
throw a punch,

And whose life was so bound up

In his poetry that when he said to the Brooklyn Bridge

“A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,”

He meant himself.

A circle on the surface of the ocean,

For a second,

And then the bottom of the sea.

Sal Mineo

I directed a film about the actor Sal Mineo.

Many people in the new generation

Might not know who he was,

Because he's been dead since '76.

My film focuses on his last day alive,

Because he lived his whole life in his last day:

He talked to his lover Sid on the phone,

About plans for the future;

He went to the gym;

He invited people, including Liz Taylor and Paul Newman

And Nick Ray to the opening of his new play,

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead;

And he went to rehearsal

With Keir Dullea of
2001
fame, and Milton Katselas,

The future guru of the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

In
P.S.
Sal played a bisexual burglar

That gets caught burgling an apartment.

Later that night, after rehearsal,

Sal was actually stabbed

By a real burglar

In front of his apartment,

On Holloway Drive.

Stabbed near his heart,

In the heart of Hollywood.

For a year they didn't capture his killer.

So the tabloids said he was killed for drugs,

Or because he was gay:

A GAY LOVE TRIANGLE KILLING.

But it was none of those things,

None of those things.

•

Don't worry, famous people;

Three and a half decades

Aren't the limit of fame.

Sal fell out of favor long before he was killed.

He came out.

He got older.

He did bad films.

He couldn't find work.

He did cocaine.

A down-and-out actor randomly killed.

I made the film,

It's called
Sal,

Because I wanted to tell about a life

That had lost its life,

And I wanted to tell it with love.

When My Father Died

I was about to shoot the last scene of the night:

A scene in the Dark Woods,

Opposite a screaming tree

With a mouth and eyes like a jack-o'-lantern.

I was in the chair getting makeup checks,

When my manager called;

My mother was following my father's ambulance,

She had been writing in the back of the house

And she had heard him gasp

In my old room,

His new office,

And that was about all.

Me, a buffoon in cake-thick makeup,

The Wonderful Wizard,

With a set full of people ready for the next shot.

I walked the long halls of the long stage,

And down the Yellow Brick Road,

Where the director, Sam, was waiting.

It was hard to grasp his words,

Like scooping gold fish from a tank

With a broken net

At the kindergarten fair.

Plenty of refrains in my head,

Should
I be working?

Should
I be racing to the airport?

And they played and played.

I went through the motions of the scene.

We wrapped,

And I got in the car, my driver

Drove me out of the lot

And turned right toward Woodward.

A block away from the studio,

My manager called again.

It was over.

The hanging traffic lights did their work:

Yellow to red as I listened to the cell phone—

My father's spirit was released,

As a green light releases an SUV.

VI.

Film Sonnet 1

The beginning is my favorite part:

All the boys pretend to get romantic

And talk in high voices and blow kisses

At the stuffy teacher's back as he recites

Poetry. The boys flutter and croon.

Then we find out our young hero has

A cheating mother and a weak father,

And he runs away. After all of his

Trouble-making, Antoine Doinel ends

Up at the beach, staring at the ocean

And then staring at us. He's not bad,

He's just lost. The title was always confusing:

400 Blows?
Is that porn, S & M?

No, in French it means “to raise hell.”

Film Sonnet 2

Marcello is fatigued. A passive-aggressive genius,

A man wrapped in himself: art, mistress, and wife.

He goes to the spa, why? At the spa, people in white

Walk about the plaza, there is a fountain, everyone is rich.

It is something about the water, just the right combination

Of minerals to cure. But no one seems to get healthier,

And no one seems very sick. A conclave to the enclave,

The rich and the sick, Europe's guilty sexual conscience

Spilled out. And this movie is just that, but for one man:

Fellini's getting old, inspiration dries up, but here,

This despair is nice because it is the sorrow of an artist.

An important artist has important despair, and everything

He does can go on the screen: sex, religion, fear.

A confession of pain and proclivities.

Film Sonnet 3

He walks mindlessly, maniacally

Across the desert, like a Sam Shepard man,

A man who has been down to Mexico to die

Of a broken heart but didn't die,

So he comes back to Texas, and then to Los Angeles,

Because all the cowboys retired to the movies.

Now they don't even make Westerns anymore.

Paris, Texas, the name of the place

Where he bought some land, like a slice of Paradise,

But only in his mind. The real place

Is just a deserted plain in the middle of nowhere,

And his wife is working in a peepshow palace,

And you never think, but you should,

He was too old and ugly for her in the first place.

Film Sonnet 4

Wonderful whore, Deneuve, to flow

From the Polanski madness to
Umbrellas
to the housewife

With a penchant for sex. And in that one, I could watch

The john with the swordcane five million times.

His black hair and iron teeth. Good casting, Buñuel:

Pierre Clémenti, later he worked with Bertolucci

On the adaptation of Dostoevsky's
The Double.

He's also in a little flashback in
The
Conformist.

In
Belle de Jour,
there is a shot of him and Deneuve

That starts on their faces as they make out on the bed,

Then the camera pans over their horizontal legs, to their feet,

At which point Pierre pushes the toe of one wicked black boot against the heel

Of the other, and the boot drops to the floor to reveal

A red sock with a hole at the end, his big toe snailing out.

Film Sonnet 5

She begins brokenhearted. She is barred

From her apartment. She has nothing

To eat and walks around Paris one night

With a man she knew before her troubles.

He takes her to a diner and she sleeps with him

For money. First it was the one man and then

Many men. That's called prostitution.

It was easier to fall into everything

Once she had done it the one time.

Sontag called this film “near perfect.”

Dreyer's
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

Is stuffed in the middle, whole sections,

A film within a film, to align great suffering

With the suffering of the humble.

Film Sonnet 6

You, Monica Vitti, with your lips, like fruit, how could

That guy in
L'avventura
be blamed for forgetting

The other pouty bitch? If I got a new life I'd pray for

A girl like you. The island where you lose your friend,

Deserted and mysterious. And then after looking

All over Italy for her, you fall for him. And what is

It that compels him, in the aftermath of that party?

In the destroyed room, strewn with plates, silverware,

Food and candlesticks, he with her, on the dislodged

Couch? And what is it that compels you to let it pass,

Just like you let pass the death of a friend?

A mystery. Like in your other Antonioni film,
L'eclisse,

Which ends with a series of unchanging images:

The building, the sky, a fence, a street.

VII.

Nocturnal

I fight sleep like it's a sickness.

I work up my resistance.

I push it back as far as possible

Every night, like a runner,

Working down his time.

I run through books

And hike through films

And write like a sprinter.

I'm a nocturnal creature,

And I'm here to cheat time.

You can see time and exhaustion

Taking pay from my face—

In fifty years

My sleep will be death,

I'll go like the rest,

But I'll have played

All the games and all the roles.

Brad Renfro

on the fourth anniversary of his death

There is one of two things that happen

When a kid enters the biz.

Either the parents guide that kid

And he becomes a product,

Or he gets no guidance

And he becomes a menace.

Brad Renfro broke out when he was a

Tennessee twelve in
The Client.

As a newcomer to LA, I remember

Hearing about the wild youngster

High at adult parties,

Making jokes like an adult.

When I worked with him

In
Deuces Wild,
he, the wise age of seventeen,

Had the body of a beat-up,

Balding, beer-bellied adult.

He had played the young version of Brad Pitt

In
Sleepers,
had played opposite Ian McKellen

In
Apt Pupil,
had been a talented little mother,

And then it turned

And he wore out like an engine without oil.

He tried to steal a boat, he got caught in a sweep

In downtown LA that the addicts down there

Talked about for a year.

And when he died, it was a week before Heath,

And because Brad wasn't in
Brokeback,

And because Brad didn't play the Joker,

The joke was on him; he wasn't even mentioned

At the Oscars, while Heath won the award.

But I remember you, Brad. Not for your warmth,

Or professionalism, or skill,

But because you were someone that was picked up,

Used, fed with drugs, forgotten, and killed.

Directing Herbert White

When Frank wrote “Herbert White” he was a student at Harvard.

•

Frank grew up in Bakersfield, California.

•

Frank had a tough childhood. He wanted to be a filmmaker. He loved film. His mother would drive him to LA to see films.

•

There were only technical film schools in the 1950s, nothing like USC or NYU now, so Frank went to Riverside and studied English, and then went on to Harvard and studied with Robert Lowell.

•

His first book,
Golden State,
was published by Richard Howard. None of the poems had been published in magazines.

•

Golden State,
what a fucking title. Frank is the loving son of Lowell and the rebel son of Ginsberg. He is the recondite and the hip.

•

Herbert came out of a cheap, dime-store, medical case study called
21 Abnormal Sex Cases,
cases that included “The Homosexual” and “The Transvestite.” Herbert was “The Necrophiliac.” In that book he did hor­rible things, like fuck dogs' stomachs while they were still alive. In Frank's poem Herbert fucks a goat.

•

James got to know Frank when he asked Frank if he could make a movie out of his poem. Frank told James he loved him in
Pineapple Express.

•

They spent eight hours together the first time they met. They just talked and talked at the restaurant, Frank's regular place in Cambridge, Mass., where he eats every Friday with his buddy Louise Glück. James and Frank stayed after everyone left, oblivious that the restaurant had left a waiter behind to lock the door after them.

•

James knew after hearing the poem read in a class at Warren Wilson that it was something he wanted to adapt into film. These impulses are visceral. It wasn't just because it was about a killer, it was because the killer had been fused with something else. Frank was playing with both sides of the coin again. There are moments in the poem when the killer takes down his mask, and the poet shows through.

•

It wasn't just that Frank had decided to put Herbert's story into lines of verse; Frank had given elements of his own Bakersfield childhood to Herbert. The father, the place, and the desire to make sense of the world were all Frank's.

•

James learned all of this later.

•

Frank also gave Herbert his own young life's isolation and loneliness. This is a guess, but Frank as a young gay man in 1950s Bakersfield must have felt like he had a secret, a secret so dark that he could tell no one. A secret so dark he attempted to become a priest to avoid himself.

•

At the end of the poem it sounds like Herbert is in hell or in jail. He says,

—Hell came when I saw

MYSELF . . .

and couldn't stand

what I see . . .

This is a reference to Lowell's “Skunk Hour,” “I myself am hell,” which references Milton's Satan. There is no way Herbert, without Frank's help, would ever reference Milton.

•

There is a part in the poem,

Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,

tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,

hop out and do it to her . . .

The whole buggy of them waiting for me

made me feel good;

He has a family! And they don't know he's a killer! So, he has a deep secret. This was the source of tension that James would use in the film. Herbert has a secret—he's a murderer of women and a fucker of corpses—which he can tell no one.

•

A beautiful thing happened. In the place in Virginia where James was planning to shoot the film, they started tearing down the trees. Huge machines cutting them down and shipping them away. Machines like you've never seen, one with a tractor body and a crane arm at the end of which is a huge claw that clutches whole trees and cuts them with a circular saw in one, two, three seconds, then tosses the trunk like a doll.

•

They let the actor playing Herbert, Michael Shannon, get in this machine and drive it for the film.

•

The machine stood in for Herbert's inner life. He cut people down.

•

The man who actually operated the machine for a living was named Gator. He taught Michael Shannon to drive the terrible thing. It was as easy as playing a video game.

•

Once they had the machine as a metaphor they had everything they needed. The machine was the key to the story of Herbert White as told on film.

•

Frank never reads the poem to audiences. The one time he did, back in the 1960s, he warned the audience that it was
not
a confessional poem, because confessional poetry was all the rage in those days. The only way into the hall was a wooden staircase, and after Frank started the reading an elderly woman made her way up the stairs, clop, clop, clop. She came in and listened. She didn't like what she heard. She got up and went back down, right though the reading, clop, clop, clop.

•

The poem is told in the first person, but it isn't Frank speaking. He's wearing a mask. Or two.

•

Frank isn't married. He lives alone among stacks of books and DVDs and CDs. The stacks are so large and numerous they have become his walls.

•

Sometimes, I would like to live in a tight space and be a spy on the world.