“Intelligence is a friend to that enigmatic light that comes to the
world.”--Magritte
“What a dream this
place has been.”--The Bee Gees
 |
| New Times illustration by Dickran Palulian. |
My first New Times
article, “Bodies in Revolt” appeared in that magazine in March 1975,
just in front of an interview with Gena Rowlands, cued to her now hit
movie
A Woman Under the Influence. That particular issue was
notable also for its cover story on the threat of aerosol cans to the
ozone layer, an issue about to become a very big one. My story was
graced by the illustrations of Dickran Palulian that outlived the
article itself as greeting cards.
To produce this piece I
read articles on related research and did phone interviews with
experts on sleep and biorhythms, as well as lighting and the specific
problems in office workplaces caused by unhealthy and distracting
heating or cooling. I don’t recall who I interviewed for the
narrative portions, about the problems of a Owl in a Lark world or
the conflicts the difference could cause in relationships, since I
disguised names. But a lot of it was me.
According to research
on biological rhythms—a fairly new concept then—Owls (as in night
owls) are likely to be physically and psychologically weakest early
in the day, and so they are likely to be more stressed in the
workplace. It’s pretty much the opposite for Larks, the early
birds. Such stress has consequences. I stated my case:
“Individual
differences are often treated by employers as illegitimate, as
attempts to shirk and cheat. Employees themselves often think of
them as abnormal and self-indulgent. We like to think of ourselves
as the kind of machines that only need fuel and occasional
maintenance to operate at the same level all the time. Biological
cycles tell us otherwise…Biorhythms tell us that we are not made of
insensitive steel, like desks or lathes. They tell us that we are
not dynamos or even computers, but vastly more complex organic
mechanisms with processes and subtleties that demand respect.”
Nearly fifty years
later, though the reality of Larks and Owls is acknowledged, those
demands are still not recognized, let alone met. More flexibility
in scheduling famously existed in certain computer-related workplaces
for other reasons, and ergonomics theoretically could apply, but in
practice seems to follow a rigid sense of efficiency.
Nor is much priority or attention given to environmental factors such as lighting, heating etc. that affect individuals in the workplace, even though more is known about the short-term and long-term effects. It could be, however, that the popularity of working from home has a lot to do with biorhythms and these other office environment factors.
* * *
I obtained in fairly
short order three other assignments for New Times. One had a similar
if now piquant theme—the psychological burdens of the telephone. This too had a personal origin.
But I was more
interested in the other two assignments. One emanated from a
lifelong interest. The other came from the movies, and the Orson
Welles Complex.
As a concept, even as a
word, the future had been magic for me for a long time. From
Captain Video and Forbidden Planet to Star Trek; from the Winston
Science Fiction novel series at the public library, the Robert
Heinlein juvies to the speculative stories in comic book and then
print anthologies that went beyond outer space adventures, science
fiction had fed the fascination. But by the 1970s, the concept of
the actual future had also become more serious, and more present.
That’s partly because
the future had become a place of potential disasters: from
overpopulation (Paul Eurlich’s
The Population Bomb,
published in 1968) to the doomsday prospect of Lifeboat Ethics in
The
Limits to Growth (1972), and more broadly to the impact
(psychological and otherwise) of the onslaught of new technologies in
Alvin Toffler’s
Future Shock. Published in 1970, the Toffler book was so
popular that its paperback edition was the first to be issued with
six different-colored covers.
Books and articles on
alarming levels of air, water and soil pollution, as well as
environmentalism in general, had also been added to the perennial
threat of nuclear war as possible threats to the future itself.
Doom was in the air,
but there were also visionaries with ways to meet these challenges
and make the future better—Buckminster Fuller being a popular one
in the 1970s. Then there was the tantalizing idea of predicting the
future.
There were always those
who claimed to see the future. In my first years in Cambridge I
remember buying annual paperback anthologies of psychic predictions
for the following year. I noticed that a lot of these seers forecast
the assassination of Fidel Castro. A lot of the prophets also lived
in Florida. Years later, when the efforts of the US “intelligence”
community to kill Castro by means that included an exploding cigar,
it occurred to me that these seers were possibly less connected to
psychic vibrations than local CIA agents.
But more than a decade
before, Herman Kahn and his cohorts at the Rand Corporation had
applied math and computer technology to the possibilities and
possible outcomes of thermonuclear war. Their macabre conclusions involving "megadeaths" aside, they came up with two key concepts: how different
circumstances in different combinations could lead to “alternative
futures,” and that those sets of circumstances could be developed
in chains of events they called “scenarios,” which up to that
time was a little-used term. By the mid-1970s, these ideas and
technologies were being applied to all kinds of alternative futures,
and the field of future forecasting was starting to hum.
But for me, the most
exciting development—and the biggest impetus to my creating an
article proposal—was the trend in something called Future Studies
in colleges, universities and even high schools: at least a thousand
such courses, including at Harvard and UCLA. By their nature, they
tended to be multi-disciplinary, cutting across departments and
requiring synthesis as well as analysis. That’s the approach I
always wanted to experience when I was a student.
“We
cannot humanize the future until we draw it into our consciousness
and probe it with all the intelligence and imagination at our
command,” wrote Alvin Toffler in the introduction to his 1972
anthology The Futurists.
“This is what we are now just beginning to do.”
Toffler
listed some of the fields relevant to this inquiry: “anthropology,
biology, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy,
sociology, art, economics, history, journalism and a dozen other
disciplines.” Uniting them was their major if not sole purpose:
the study of the future. This felt like something I was moving
towards all my life.
So I attended a
symposium on the future at MIT, where I met an advertising copywriter
who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, a social scientists
who was also a transcendental meditator, and a Harvard Business
School student who had spent four years in Vietnam. There was an
Israeli physicist, an economist and several biologists who talked
about an operating principle common to biology and futurism, that
survival during periods of change depends not so much on being
well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.I discovered that one
of the most impressive future studies programs was across the state
in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts. It granted not only a
bachelor’s degree but a Masters and a PhD in future studies. So in
1975 I went there and met a futures studies student named Fran
Koster, who guided me into this new world. (Koster later had a career
in environment and the future.) One of the chief books he
recommended was Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke.
That book was the gateway to many others, and I was off and running.
(The texts that resulted are reprinted at Kowincidence here.)
* * *
 |
Arnie Reisman and David Helpern, Jr. while making
"Hollywood on Trial" 1976. Photo by Elizabeth
Offner. |
If that article idea
was to be about the future in the present, the other I was pursuing
was about a dark aspect of the past coming into the present. And
once again, it came from the Orson Welles.
Or at least from
someone I met there regularly: David Helpern, who while launching his
one-hour film on director Nicholas Ray, was shooting interviews for
what would be the first full-length (90 minutes or so) theatrical
documentary on the Hollywood Blacklist. Once again he was teamed with
producer Jim Gutman, and this time with film editor Frank Galvin
(both also veterans of the Orson Welles film school), as well as
writer Arnie Reisman.
Beginning with the
first "Inquiry into Hollywood Communism" conducted by the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, a period of
intense political and cultural repression hit the dream factories: a
time of fear, suspicion, doubt and injustice that did not end for
nearly twenty years. It destroyed families, friendships, careers, and lives well into the 1950s.
Before it was over it
had taken from the screen such talents as John Garfield, Lee Grant,
Zero Mostel and hundreds of screenwriters, actors, directors and
other artists in film, television and even theatre, as well as some
academics and others. In particular, the Blacklist sucked the
lifeblood from Hollywood.
I knew little about
this, but I wasn't alone in that. Though the Blacklist slowly
began losing its teeth until it quietly died out in the early 1960s,
Hollywood still had not acknowledged it. There was a sense that this
was changing in the mid-1970s.
In addition to closely
following the progress of this movie, to be titled Hollywood on Trial, my particular focus
became the children of the Blacklist. I interviewed several,
including the child of an informer, who buckled to HUAC’s pressure
to “name names” of people in Hollywood who had somehow been
associated at one time with the U.S. Communist Party (a legal party
that participated in elections) or with groups the committee found
suspicious (especially those involved in civil rights and civil
liberties.) It didn’t matter if the committee already knew the
names (as they did in this case.)
Among those I
interviewed was Tony Kahn, the son of blacklisted writer Gordon Kahn,
who Arnie knew and who later became a well-known broadcaster for NPR
and PBS. But I also interviewed his brother Dr. James Kahn, at his house
in New Hampshire. He showed me documents suggesting he himself had
been blacklisted from a medical position associated with the
government, solely because of his father’s blacklisting in the
1940s and 50s.
 |
Buffy Offner, awaiting her scene in the
John Semper student film mentioned later. |
It turned out that I
also knew a child of the Blacklist. Buffy Offner lived in my building
on Columbia Street for a few years, but I got to know her at the
Orson Welles Complex, where she worked as a waitress in the bar
restaurant. Her father was Mortimer Offner, who’d been a
Hollywood screenwriter ( including three movies with his friend
Katharine Hepburn), a television producer and a New York theatre
director—until the Blacklist wiped out everything.
In addition to my
interviews, the footage that Hollywood on Trial shot included
interviews with children of the Blacklist. Two children of
screenwriters Hugo and Jean Butler, and Dalton Trumbo’s son Chris
were filmed around Jean Butler’s dining room table. But the
interview that brought the experience home to me aesthetically and
emotionally was with Buffy Offner and her younger sister, actress
Deborah Offner.
They were filmed
sitting on a sofa side by side in the upper West Side apartment where
they grew up, and where Debbie was then living. The green shades of
their dresses blended softly with the leaves of houseplants behind
them, and sunlight through the window illuminated their hair, as they
sifted through what their father left: pictures he’d taken as a
young portrait photographer of stars such as Sylvia Sidney and
Tallulah Bankhead (he was Ethel Barrymore’s favorite photographer,
and the famous profile of her in the Barrymore Theatre is by Offner),
clippings from his first Broadway hit, an ecstatic letter from the
sponsor of his hit television series in 1951 (“A Date with Judy”)
and reviews of the last play he directed in New York, the Broadway
revival of “Room Service” (which introduced Jack Lemmon.)
 |
| Deborah Offner |
Then his subpoena to
appear before HUAC in 1953 (which absurdly is pink). His show
business career then abruptly ended. The next document was a letter
lauding the number of insurance policies he’d sold.
Debbie has been
reading and showing the documents, which included a letter describing
an earlier hearing that year, while Buffy had a protective arm around
her. Both had been very young at the time, though both were aware in some way of
what had happened, when their father—who loved show business, and
taught them how to do double-takes—suddenly became an insurance man
who worked quietly at home. “He loved working in TV,” Buffy
recalled. “He talked about it a lot. That was one year. The next
year he had nothing.”
There
wasn’t much written yet about the Blacklist I could find, but I did
have journalist Stefan Kanfer’s history,
A Journal of the Plague
Years, as well as Dalton Trumbo’s memoir,
Additional
Dialogue, and Eric Bentley’s 1972 play that reproduced actual
HUAC testimony, titled
Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been (the beginning of the standard HUAC question) as well as his larger work on the committee,
Thirty Years of Treason. But I was especially absorbed in
that interview footage.
Several interviews were
shot on lush lawns in warm sunshine, as incongruous as a deadly
Blacklist in Hollywood. I found that seeing the complete footage of
these interviews was very powerful, though only sections of some of
them made it into the finished film, and some (like the Offner
sisters) not at all. I hope that footage exists somewhere. (Again,
the texts resulting from my research into the Blacklist are available
at Kowincidence here.)
* * *
So I was working on all
three pieces that year, attending a local hearing on the monopolistic
practices of Bell Telephone and interviewing people who expressed
various forms of disenchantment with the telephone, while also
pursuing the future and Blacklist stories.
I probably sent a
draft of the future article to my editor Frank Rich (who responded positively)
before I took the train down to Washington that summer for the second
general assembly of the World Future Society.
 |
Alvin Toffler and Barbara Marx Hubbard during
the WFS convention |
Gathered at the
Washington Hilton in early June were some 2800 participants:
the
director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University,
government planners from Japan and India, and the director of
marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. There were
city
planners in Hush Puppies, corporate forecasters in khaki suits and
university students in cutoff jeans, plus parapsychologists, science
fiction buffs, and members of communes dedicated to ecological
self-sufficiency.
Formal
sessions explored topics such as long-range economic and
environmental planning, new technologies, systems analysis, and the
future of religion. The exhibit hall overflowed with future-oriented
products from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer
space. Discussions continued at coffee shops and restaurants.
Above
all, there were the futurist stars. Young visionaries like Stewart
Brand and Karl Hess mingled with Alvin Toffler and author Paul
Goodman (Growing Up
Absurd), who both roamed
the halls between hotel meeting rooms wearing sunglasses. Economist
Kenneth Boulding and Roy Amara, head of the Institute of the
Future in Menlo Park, California, spoke at sessions. There were four
Members of Congress and Senator Edward Kennedy was a featured
speaker. Frances Fitzgerald was there, covering it for Harper's.
But
the Assembly took an unexpected and dramatically different turn at
the opening press conference. On stage were the elders of the field,
including Harvard’s Daniel Bell and Herman Kahn, who’d left RAND
and founded the Hudson Institute to research the future beyond
nuclear war scenarios. Kahn, who was once an inspiration for Stanley
Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, was looking more like a white-bearded
Santa Claus. He was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively
about the prosperous future ahead, when the stage was suddenly
invaded by an uninvited guest.
It wasn’t a wild-eyed
flying saucer abductee or a vegetarian revolutionary but a neatly
dressed middle-aged woman.
She was
Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of the National Organization of
Women. Standing on a stage filled exclusively by white men, she made
the point she spoke about: the future the Assembly discussed
apparently didn’t have any women in it. Specifically, it had not
one woman among the main speakers.
The
ironies were many. The women’s movement had been making headlines
(and disrupting male bastions) since 1970. So an organization
dedicated to forward thinking was having its feminist crisis several
years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn’t have required
systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.
Moreover,
Alvin Toffler and presumably others had noted that women and people
of color were underrepresented at the first Assembly four years
before, but nothing had been done about it. The Assembly leadership
at first tried to respond by shooing her off the stage, until the
audience protested. She finished to applause and some conciliatory
mumbles. But the real response came later.
That
night a women’s caucus was formed, and assembly leaders were
persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker. She spoke the very next
morning, and apart from being the hit of the convention, she changed
its entire emphasis. She brought another kind of futurism to the
forefront.
She
was Hazel Henderson, an economist with an interest in ecology, and an
advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment. Born in England and
retaining a British accent, she was tall, blond, and charismatic, and
she galvanized her audience.
She
told them that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and
scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes
and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions
buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies.”
“Citizens
now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training
cannot adequately define our problems,” she continued. “Not that
professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see
where the limits of their technical competence end, and”—the key
phrase—“where their values carry no more weight than those of any
other citizen in a democracy."
Hazel
Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her
message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the
proceedings. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this.
But her clarion call for a kind of participatory or democratic
futurism engaged not only in exploring alternative futures but
“desirable futures” changed the following days.
I did some quick interviews, collected transcripts and press releases, observed a lot and had coffee with Frances Fitzgerald. When
I got back to Cambridge I quickly re-wrote my article to include some
of what had happened and what I learned at the Assembly, and sent it
off to New Times. By then I’d also finished and sent in my
telephone piece.
* * *
 |
| Walter Bernstein, Martin Ritt on set of "The Front" |
Come the autumn it was
back to the Blacklist, for
Hollywood on Trial wasn’t the
only movie being shot about those dark days. The other was
The
Front, a major studio feature film directed by veteran director
Martin Ritt from a script by movie and television veteran Walter
Bernstein. Both had been blacklisted.
The movie mostly
followed a blacklisted screenwriter (played by Woody Allen, in his
only role in a movie he didn’t write or direct) and a blacklisted
comic actor (played by Zero Mostel, who had been blacklisted.) The
title comes from the practice of some blacklisted writers to employ a
“front,” or a person who pretended to have written their script.
They got screen credit, and sometimes showed up for script
conferences. Some got carried away. A lot of rueful blacklist comedy
ensued in real life, and Bernstein drew on his own experiences as
well as others.
Most of the movie was
shot in New York, except for a sequence at a mountain resort in
western Massachusetts, where I spent a day observing and doing my own
interviews, along with a crew from Hollywood on Trial. I’m
pretty sure I caught a ride out there with Fred Barron, a former
Boston After Dark/Phoenix colleague and friend, who may have been
representing the Real Paper, but I remember for sure riding back with
him. He’d also become friends with David Helpern.
We were present for a
scene in which Zero Mostel (playing a
writer/performer named Hecky Brown) was finishing his nightclub act,
which he was performing for a fraction of his pre-Blacklist fee
because it was the only work he could get.
Later there would be a
scene in which the night club owner pays Hecky even less—something
that had really happened to Zero Mostel. But the scene we saw was
wondrous. We watched Zero Mostel sing, crack jokes, do sight gags and
otherwise resurrect his 1940s nightclub act. There were a number of
takes but Mostel made sure to do something different each time, so
the audience of extras would really laugh. He kept getting funnier.
It was a bizarre scene.
The young extras from New York, dressed for a night out in the 1950s
at 7 in the morning, mixed with hotel guests, many of them visiting
members of the National Hebrew Association and the Medical Center of
Denver. It looked like the last remains of a junior prom held at an
old folk’s home.
I interviewed Walter
Bernstein, who was warm and funny, and several others on the set with
connections to the Blacklist, including two who were children: Julie
Garfield (who had a small acting part) and her brother David Garfield
(a production assistant), the children of blacklisted actor John
Garfield. John Garfield was a big star in the 1940s, and one of the worst victims
of the Blacklist, condemned for signing a few petitions and attending
a few parties with the wrong people.
“My father wasn’t
a leader in the thinking department, but he was curious,” David
Garfield told me. “When his best friends turned against him, it
broke his heart. One minute he was a star, the next people were
crossing the street to avoid him. I really believe it killed him.”
Later, in between
set-ups in another part of the building, director Martin Ritt talked
to me, saying that though the movie had started out to be more of a
comedy, it was getting more serious as they went on, and morally
tougher. He wanted the movie to be entertaining but “At my age I
don’t have too many more films to make, I want them to be serious.”
(In a few years he would make probably his most famous film, Norma
Rae.)
In his rumpled blue
jumpsuit, Martin Ritt was totally present in his conversation with
me, and I was concentrating on him completely. But I suddenly
realized that things around us had gone quiet, and when I looked
beyond him I was startled and then amazed to see that everyone
working on this large set was motionless and looking at us, waiting
for the director to start the scene. I was holding up the progress
of a Hollywood movie. Awed and a little shaken, I quickly wound
up the interview.
* * *
My moviegoing in
Cambridge continued, most of the time alone. I still spent hours at the Orson Welles Cinema and sitting in its lobby, subsisting on coffee, popcorn and licorice. Part of my social life consisted in talking to the people I knew when they came to see movies there. I also once spotted Faye Dunaway skulking along the lower lobby (she was then in a relationship with a Boston rock and roller), trying so conspicuously not to be recognized that it was obviously her.
In March 1974, my friend and former colleague at the Boston Phoenix, Kerry Gruson, had been attacked by a deranged Vietnam vet in Hawaii when she was on her way to Vietnam as a reporter. The attack left her partially paralyzed. We hadn't parted on the best of terms but when I heard what happened I wrote her an encouraging letter. Apparently others we knew had abandoned her, although her family was completely with her. But I hadn't seen her until one evening in the Orson Welles lobby, when there she was in her wheelchair, accompanied by an unfamiliar young man. As far as I knew she was still in New York, so it was a shock, as was my first sight of her condition. We spoke warmly but briefly, after which I retreated to the men's room very shaken.
I later visited her once at a rehab facility in New York State and we kept in touch by letter and phone for the next 15 years or so. She had moved to Florida and in 2024, despite a worsened condition, she is a principal in a nonprofit,
ThumbsUp International, dedicated to positive change, mostly through participatory sports that include the disabled.
 |
| Pat Mitchell |
In addition to my own cinema outings, I occasionally
accompanied Janet Maslin to films she was reviewing, especially in
the dodgier parts of town. Probably through Janet, I met the new
entertainment reporter at the Boston television station WBZ, Pat
Mitchell. Her list of credits and awards since then is enormous,
including as head of PBS. But this was her first job in TV
journalism, as part of that first major wave of women on camera. I
went to a few movies with her, after which we sped to the TV station
so she could write and deliver her review for the 11 O’Clock news.
Once on the ride to the
station she asked me what I thought of the film and then stopped me
after a few sentences, saying that’s what she thought as well, so
she didn’t want my words to get mixed up with hers. Writing a
review as quickly as she did amazed me. She would show me her script
before air time—that second pair of eyes. This was my first look at
a TV newsroom before and during a broadcast.
One evening after the
broadcast she took me to a restaurant and bar in Boston where show
business people hung out, including famous performers making local
appearances. We wound up seated near the table of Maggie Smith and
her companion. In person in 1975, Maggie Smith was breathtakingly
beautiful, and I found myself envious of those empathetic eyes
trained on her older male companion.
While Pat and I talked
at a very late hour we could hear someone playing piano and singing
above the din. I thought he sounded a lot like Joel Grey, famous for
his recent role in the stage and film versions of Cabaret. A
few minutes later when we got up to leave, I was astonished to see
that in fact it was Joel Grey.
That year I was
especially inspired by a new book I read: The Lives of the Cell:
Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas. These eloquent
essays illustrate the interdependence of life at every scale, beyond
the categories that limit our understanding. The human body as a
cooperative, symbiotic medley of lifeforms, human intelligence as
located in the body beyond the brain, the permeable definitions of
organism and superorganism—these and other themes were largely new,
and not only to the general public. But fifty years later, they are
becoming the basis for new understanding of life on Earth. In its
quiet (though best-selling) way, this has to be one of the most
important books of the twentieth century.
That book in turn
inspired me to write in a form I don’t think I’d attempted since
college: stage plays. I wrote three short plays
designed to be performed on the same evening on basically the same
set that I called
After Dining at Googolplex. One was about
the relationship of a man and a computer. Long before AI or even
home computers, these were still the days of the big mainframes. I
used to get Carol’s brother Raymond to bring me back computer
printouts from M.I.T. just so I could see what the language looked
like.
My play involved an
expert summoned to diagnose an experimental computer that had stopped
functioning. As a younger and more idealistic man, this expert had passed many nights
reading to the computer. Eventually the computer began repeating
back quotes to him from those nights: lines from D.H. Lawrence, Thoreau, Jean
Cocteau, William Blake, Jung and John Cage, as well as Carl Sagan,
Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Thomas etc. The expert, now compromised, discouraged and
disenchanted with his life, gradually recognizes them, and wonders why the computer is saying them to him, and only him.
The other two plays
(one set in a bedroom, in which the television is a character) also
riffed on these same authors, especially Thomas, in contemporary
stories. The premises of these plays were creative and ahead of
their time; the execution of them however was much less successful.
Today they seem pretty much unplayable.
I continued to write
pages for my college novel that year, and started a revision, but it
was getting unwieldy, the chapters I sent out elicited no interest,
and I couldn’t get a handle on it anymore. So in some frustration
I dropped it for awhile, and sometime in 1975 I started something
completely different.
* * *
 |
I made collages as title pages, which I've
lost track of. This old photocopy remains. |
For this fiction
project, titled “Alien’s Tapdance,” I did pretty much the
opposite of what I tried to do with the novel: I wrote spontaneously,
based on contemporary experience, and the style was bolder, more
experimental in places, reflecting more directly the surrealist
writings and art in my books and on my walls, while also influenced
by the films I was seeing. I used collage (including visual
collages); I even tried a brief section using Burrough’s cut-up
method.
I started with a
fictional version of the Orson Welles Complex and Cambridge as the
main settings, but as I kept writing and adding other sections (such
as the first person “Confessions of a Popcorn Fiend”) the Complex
became itself a subject, as well as the form (as if each of three
sections was a movie playing in one of the theatres.)
The end result was A
Night At The Complex, nearly 100 single-spaced pages, which I
photocopied and distributed to people I knew there (and yes, I was
aware of the triple meaning in the title, and the allusion to A
Night At The Opera was intentional.) It created a little buzz in
the building. Reading it now, I recognize an early DeLillo influence
in the style. It became, by default, the most sustained and finished
work of long fiction I had accomplished.
The third part of my
Complex fiction involved the fictional making of a film by people that worked and hung out there. The
urge to get beyond just exhibiting and watching movies to making them
was widely shared. Larry Jackson was assembling a documentary on the
making of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, featuring Bugs Bunny and
other cartoons from the 1940s. It was released in December 1975 as
Bugs Bunny: Superstar, the first of many collections of these
cartoons and films about them. Terry Corey also worked on the release
of this project. Larry would become a producer and movie executive in Hollywood.
Meanwhile, John Semper,
another young OW Cinema employee I knew, was making a student film
using people from the Complex as actors (among them, Buffy Offner) as well as in creative and
technical capacities. Semper would go on to a career as a
screenwriter and story editor, notably for Spider-Man: the
Animated Series.
And even while
completing Hollywood on Trial, David Helpern was looking ahead
to finding a feature film project. We discussed books we liked that I would
adapt, such as Don DeLillo’s End Zone, J.P. Donleavy’s The
Ginger Man (which got as far as a phone conversation between
Donleavy and Helpern during which the author explained why he wasn’t
selling the film rights to anyone) and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of
Champions—which for a blissful moment looked like it might
happen, until a bigger bid for the film rights took it away.
(A film version of
Breakfast of Champions was finally made—in 1999. It wasn’t
very good and didn’t do well. In the book’s introduction
Vonnegut wrote about how his plays had failed because they didn’t
include his voice. The novel was replete with his voice—and I
wasn’t planning on making the mistake of eliminating it, as the
1999 film did.)
At some point David had
mentioned that the two local alternative weeklies, the Phoenix and
the Real Paper, might make a good subject for an original script.
Maybe I was still too close to both the complexity and the traumas
associated with my experiences with them, but I didn’t immediately
seize on the idea.
Some months later,
director Joan Micklin Silver came to the Orson Welles with her first
feature, Hester Street (which went on to success, with its
star, Carol Kane, nominated for an Oscar.) I was included among those
invited to share a meal with the Silvers at the Restaurant. Also
present were David Helpern and Fred Barron.
One of the topics of
table conversation I remember (possibly because I started it)
requires some historical explanation involving two outside events
that dominated the news that year. After a bloody and chaotic
decade, American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in March 1973 as a
result of the Paris peace treaty, but fighting continued throughout
1974 between North and South Vietnam. By spring 1975 the victory of
the North was complete.
The other was the
Watergate scandal and the surrounding events in Washington, which
were unlike any other in memory. That tumult had absorbed us since
early 1973. I was among those who obsessively watched the televised
Senate hearings into the Watergate break-in and coverup in May 1973,
and then the televised hearings the bipartisan House committee
considering the impeachment of President Nixon in the summer of 1974,
at the end of which anguished Republicans as well as Democrats voted
to send three articles of impeachment to the House floor. But before
the House could consider them, President Nixon resigned on August 8,
1974.
The reporting team of
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had covered the Watergate story from
its beginning in 1972, and in 1974 their first book on the subject
was published,
All The President’s Men. By 1975 the movie
version had been announced, and particularly among film obsessives a
popular game was debating which actors should play which real-life
characters. (I’d made my own semi-serious list, proposing Jack
Palance as Nixon, Broderick Crawford as attorney-general John
Mitchell, Orson Welles as Senator Sam Ervin and Peter Sellers as
Henry Kissinger. It turned out that none of these figures was ever seen in the movie. My only choice that actually came true was Robert
Redford as Bob Woodward.) So this was a topic of table conversation
with Joan Silver, which she joined enthusiastically.
We also talked about
the much talked-about movie version of
The Great Gatsby, again
with Robert Redford. Joan Silver said she would have flipped the two
male leads, so that Bruce Dern would play Jay Gatsby and Robert
Redford the callous, wealthy husband of Gatsby’s love object, Daisy
Buchanan. I thought that was a fascinating idea, and I could see the
difference it would make, even if the chances of it ever happening in
Hollywood seemed slim.
I left after the
thoroughly enjoyable meal. Only later did I learn that David and
Fred stayed behind to discuss a feature film story with Silver—about
an alternative newspaper in Boston. I didn’t know David had talked
about this idea with Fred, and I don’t know what was in writing at
that point, but eventually they were both credited with the story,
and Fred Barron with the script.
It became Silver’s
next project. Initially titled
Alternative Lives (I read
several early drafts), it came to be called
Between the Lines, now
known for introducing an astonishing number of young actors
(including John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry
and Bruno Kirby, plus Stephen Collins, Marilu Henner and others) who
went on to prominent Hollywood careers.
Silver
eventually filmed at least some of it in Cambridge and Boston.
Several Orson Welles Cinema people worked on it, as their first jobs
in the movies. OW Cinema manager Mary Galloway was a location manager, and Martha
Pinson was a production assistant, who got interested in the work of the script supervisor. In any case,
Mary soon moved to LA and Martha became a prominent New York-based
script supervisor for major directors like Martin Scorsese and Sydney
Lumet, and more recently she directed the award-winning feature
Tomorrow.
Though there was
nothing particularly nefarious about David and Fred pitching this
movie without mentioning to me that they'd been working on it, and I remained friends with both
of them, it seemed not only a lost opportunity but another piece of
evidence that despite my regular presence I was still at the fringes
of things.
* * *
.tif) |
| closing time at the Orson Welles bar. Photo by Frank Siteman |
I am the Alien. I am not one of you. How do you
know until you know who we are? Listen: I know.
So says the protagonist of Alien’s Tapdance, an “astropologist”
from another world. The alienated alien, shades of Mr. Spock, was my
internal persona as well as, I thought, my external appearance. I
felt like an alien from a startled world, nearby in space and time
perhaps, but in another slightly different dimension of being. I
was more observer than participant, or at least that’s how I
felt---both there and at a distance.
And it was hard not to
see it that way. One afternoon I was having coffee with David in the
Orson Welles bar when someone—I think it was Nat Segaloff, who at
the time I believe was doing publicity for Boston’s big cinema
chain—came hurrying in, and asked David to join him outside for a
photo someone was taking in front of the Welles Cinema. Larry, Terry
and Myron Meisel (who’d been the writer on David’s Nick Ray film)
were waiting. Nat said something to the effect that someday people
would marvel that the five of them had started out in the same place
at the same time. I was not invited or included.
It was just a moment
but it came to mean something, more to me than probably to anyone
else involved. In fact, all five of them went on to careers in and
around Hollywood, at least for a time. (However, as writer and
producer of two hit television comedy series, a producer of a major
motion picture and a later career in British television, Fred Barron
eventually eclipsed them all.)
On one level that
moment just amused and also insulted me, but on another it fed my
doubts. It hadn’t escaped me that many of my colleagues in Boston
had attended Harvard and Brandeis and other high-powered
universities, and came from solidly middle class if not upper middle
class or wealthy families. In day to day work and relationships it
didn’t matter. I didn’t discern that I was treated any
differently, and I didn’t feel any less intelligent or talented.
But they seemed
to know things I didn’t know, like how to succeed or at least
survive in the worlds that interested us all. I’d made it this far on talent and luck but
my sudden progress had stalled, at least in terms of making a living,
of assembling a career.
I was not the
only one ambivalent about this career-building business, but somehow
they managed to make the right moves. When I came up against
unfavorable circumstances and my own limitations, I didn’t have
family contacts or old school ties or other networks, or any experiences to draw from:
I was not brought up nor educated anywhere near the worlds in which I was trying
to navigate a life.
I sensed also that my
friends were moving into long-term relationships and marriages with
partners who coincidentally would help them in their ambitions. I
was nowhere near that: practically, financially, emotionally.
When I started writing
for Boston After Dark, everything was equal and sui generis. I never
thought about my future, other than to dream of publishing novels
and other books, of making records, writing plays and movies. Within
a few years, however, much to my surprise though maybe not to the
surprise of others, the mainstream media outlets that we scorned and
that had scorned us, started to raid our editorial offices. The
first I was aware of was the BAD film critic John Koch, who was hired
for that same position at the august Boston Globe. (John and his
wife Sharon remained my friends while I was in Cambridge.)
It took a few years
more, but eventually the alternative papers became proving grounds
for mainstream media jobs. Janet Maslin juggled gigs at Seventeen,
Cosmopolitan, New Times and elsewhere even while she was still at the
Phoenix. But shortly after Frank Rich was recruited by Time, Janet
got the film critic position at Newsweek. When several years later
she moved to the New York Times, she was replaced at Newsweek by the
Real Paper’s critic, David Ansen, and shortly after that, Frank Rich became the chief drama critic of the Times. And so on, for decades.
Apart from considerations of experience and whatever qualified as qualifications, I didn’t especially
want that kind of specialization, or what I perceived as the straitjacket of those institutions. I also doubted I could handle it.
I
knew the path most suited to me was the one I was more or less on—of
writing on various subjects for magazines until I hit on something I
could write a book about. Or even if I was luckier, I might find a
novel among my pages and plans.
But maybe I didn’t have the right
skills for success. I probably didn’t have the right attitude
either, for the world symbolized by Cambridge and New York and
Hollywood. My attempts to make a life work must be individual and
improvised: my alien’s tapdance.
My doubts were
underlined by financial and professional realities. Towards the end
of the year, my telephone story had been edited and scheduled for
publication in a December issue of New Times, as “Fear of Phoning.”
It’s interesting now to note how much of a love-hate relationship
many people had with telephones even in the 70s—their intrusive
demands, their phony-ness (it’s where the word comes from), how
people talked on the phone and ignored the person standing there,
etc. But reading it now, I recognize the people I interviewed and
gave disguised names. Apart from expert testimony, many of the
interviews were conducted in the Orson Welles bar, and several with
Complex employees.
It’s interesting now to notice how the subject of these articles reflected
aspects of my own alien-ness—for example as a Night Owl and
telephone-phobic introvert—while practically pleading for the world
to make a place for me.
But my future studies
piece was in trouble, chiefly because my editor Frank Rich left New
Times to become the film critic for Time Magazine—in those days
still a powerful and prestigious position. A new editor was assigned
to me, and we never really saw eye to eye on much of anything. My
revisions, and revisions of those revisions, didn’t meet with
anyone’s enthusiasm at the magazine. I could see the writing on
the wall for the Blacklist piece as well, and it too was ultimately
rejected.
Having devoted so much time to these pieces, I was behind in my
bills and behind in my rent, and now with no active publishing
relationships. I still had a little money coming in, but it would go
fast—if I remained in Cambridge.
I can’t completely
reconstruct my thoughts and feelings at that point. But my notebooks
suggest that I felt too caught up in the emotional turmoil of others
to deal with my own. Emotional noise combined with a strange
loneliness. At this remove I can see how busy and complicated and
depleting that year had been, especially in the lack of immediate
results of all that energy and effort. It did not feel like the ordinary rhythm of ups and downs that it probably was, and there was no one to counsel me. But in any case I didn't feel I had the resources (financial and otherwise) to weather the storm.
So beyond the emotional
confusion was the intuition that to move forward I needed to take a
step back, conserve my resources, and be ready. After all, I could
write anywhere, and travel from anywhere.
I’d been thinking
about quitting Cambridge for some time, to the point of figuring out
what to take and what to leave behind. Then I just decided to do it.
I can’t say what role my mother’s death played in all this, or
the letters that kept coming from family and friends after my two
months back home, or even the time I spent there, but that was my
rent-free option. My youngest sister Debbie and her new husband Jerry
would drive up in a covered pickup truck to take me back to my family
home in Greensburg.
I packed up, gave
stuff away. I stripped my blue walls of the representations of my
Cambridge life: the arts prints—Magritte, Picasso, Ernst, Klee,
etc.—the clipped cartoons (mother and father observing their son at
the typewriter as the mother says: “Good news! It’s not a novel.
It’s economic theory”; another with a middle aged man in a suit
telling his office secretary, “my tragedy is I joined the
surrealist movement too late”), the poster of the Marx Brothers
with a photo of Einstein, the drawing of the god Janus (who looks
both ways, to the future and the past), movie stills, a photo of Kirk and Spock in the
transporter room, a Paris cafe photo allegedly of Brigitte Bardot by
Cartier Bresson, several child drawings, most of them by my niece
Chrissy.
I left my excellent
work table and my beautiful dark wood bed to friends, gathered my
three cats and of course my books and records, and then suddenly I
was gone, breathing out at the dark highway.
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