Blog

“wants eleven dollar-bills

you only got ten”

The throes of a Kickstarter, starring Russ Russo

by Pablo D’Stair

I finally met Russ Russo, in the flesh, after months and months of trading just the briefest exchanges via e-mail and twitter, finally met him about two weeks in to his Kickstarter for a film he had written called Heat Wave. I was out in LA on account of I had written an article concerning he and his co-star Natasha Alam for The Arts Magazine, was out there to meet up with folks about another article about another film, too.

***

I didn’t know exactly what to expect of Russ, his e-mails usually succinct (I’d go so far as to say peculiarly so) and from which I had gleaned his honest love for the poetry of Blake, his seething hatred for much of modern culture—indeed he had been a long time coming around to seeing Kickstarter as anything but a form of egocentric-hipster-hoboism—and his very nearly naïve idealism about actual art being recognized somehow as not only that, by as that and by the masses, no less.

He showed up at Bourgeois Pig, a coffee shop he had chosen for our get together and one that, due to a misunderstanding of LA roads, had cost me seventy dollars to get the seven miles to from my hotel by cab.  He ordered a tea, briefly lecturing me on its benefits as opposed to the coffee I ordered, and we sat out in front, shielded only barely from the bleat of the middle day sun and its reflection off the warped pavement’s burped cracks and coughed potholes.

Mixed in with the somewhat random talk of this and that—my bringing up a short film I’d seen him in recently, he mentioning some good fortune a film writer friend of his had recently had, our debating our slightly-at-odds-to-each-other’s reactions and opinions to the Casey Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix film I’m Still Here—he would soberly bring up some of the reservations he had about the Kickstarter process and how it was somewhat dragging on his spirits, the uphill grunt it was turning out to be to get interest, let alone donations.  It was two weeks in and—due in part to some curveball setbacks and in part to it’s-just-the-way-things-go—the project was not even twenty-percent funded.  Already, everyone working on the piece had whittled themselves and their resources to the bone, at least as far as they were reasonably capable, and Russo brought up intricacies of the nit and grit of getting a film off, all more or less foreign to me.

His mood was by no means sour, though, and we soon began an aimless walk around the area, me talking my usual mile a minute, he talking as much, but at more even a draw.

One of the most surreal aspects of his current situation was that his involvement in a small parody film called Batman Maybe (a mash up of the hit song ‘Call Me, Maybe’ and the film The Dark Knight Rises) had turned him into something of an underground pop culture thingamajig—he was confronted with random postings of his likeness every day, his name appearing in small articles everywhere—an amount of attention, he laughed, that dwarfed all the attention toward him from all the stage and film projects he had participated in over the past decade put together, and an attention based entirely around the fact that he looked a lot like Christian Bale and did a funny head jiggle dance.

I could see where that might be odd—seeing his name around variously in hundreds of places a day, while at the same time feeling like a failed panhandler Nowhere Man trying to eek out one dollar donations at a time for his passion project.

Russo explained that—and he felt it must be the same for a lot of working actors and writers and directors he knew—the surreality had kind of lost its edge, though, now was something he felt familiar with and even—he seemed he might be admitting but not wanting to put so fine a point on it—that he had resigned himself to, found a sort of comfort in.

He explained how only some few weeks previous he had been granted a general meeting with the casting agent for a popular primetime drama program on one of the major television networks. Showing up, he had been enthusiastically greeted, but only referred to as ‘Rockstar’ by everyone, patted on the arm, ushered into an office. The casting agent had proceeded to—with no ceremony—hold up various headshots of actors and to deliver scoffs and mockery, asking Russo—always saying ‘Right, Rockstar?’—for encouragement or input. Finally, Russo had been asked ‘When are you getting off tour?’ and it was only at that moment discovered that, due to a scheduling snafu, the agent thought he was meeting with the member of some popular music group and that Russo, the indie actor, would be his next appointment. This ended badly.

Russo seemed to think it was all pretty much a laugh, though, going so far as to correct me that I need not boycott the program, as the casting agent had nothing to do with the actual show, probably never even watched it.

This segued in to a discussion of indie film, in general, and to the idea of how it could be considered a triumph for a small film (he referenced on he had been in called Blue Collar Boys) to, after existing for three years as a finished product in a limbo, get a week long engagement on three screens in three cities, while at the same time a studio system film would be considered a miserable flop and ridiculed by folks far and wide for only holding the number five slot at the box office for two weeks before sliding down into the oblivion of ‘home video’ and grossing a mere worldwide hundred million.

As to Russo’s own film, he explained how one of the interesting dilemmas he was facing was that in casting Kiowa Gordon and Bronson Pelletier as the two leads, he knew there was no choice but to somewhat court these actor’s devotees, all the while knowing they were devotees for no reason other than that the two young men had played sexy shirtless werewolves in the popular Twilight film franchise.  Russo—and for a moment I thought it might be a put on, except for the very somber way he kept taking breaths, like he was the one giving himself the hard time and no one else, we had even stopped walking, stood at the edge of a random lawn, the homeowner having a middle day beer and once or twice nodding at us—related that it made him feel uncomfortable to fundraise from an audience he knew was not the audience ideally suited to the material, that it felt a curious position to be in to even mention Twilight when his film was a Jarmusch-ian, slow burn existentialist riff more in the spirit of Waiting for Godot or Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality than anything either ‘pop,’ ‘in-the-now,’ or that would make young girls giggle.

To lighten the mood, we generally bad mouthed all celebrities who took part in Siri commercials, up to and including Martin Scorsese—though in case anyone was listening (like the man drinking on his stoop) making sure to also point out all the masterful things these artists had done, it all the stranger they were endorsing an only marginally able-minded talking telephone.

I admitted that I was fascinated by the particular mathematics of Kickstarter—the other film I was in LA to meet people about had utilized the platform as well, though the folks producing it were much higher on the food chain and had made the money they needed, lickity-split, and then some—how I had offhandedly researched that the combined starring cast of Heat Wave had something in the neighborhood of three quarters of a million followers on various social media, not to mention their personal friends and connections, meaning that to generate the twenty thousand dollars they were after it was either a matter of point-two-five-percent of the people each contributing one dollar or of every person contributing two-point-five-cents or something silly sounding like that, but here were Russo et al., stuck well behind the eight with the clock hands spiraling into a close knot.

The thing with Kickstarter, in Russo’s experience, was that the money was hard to come by, but the participation poured in. His film had found its Director of Photography through contact related to the fundraising, cameras had been offered, dollys, cranes—during our conversation, even, I arranged it by telephone with my older brother to have not only his band provide some music, but my brother in turn had, within an hour, fifteen musicians willing to work on the project and two engineers willing to give time and studio space, all gratis, just for the sake of doing the thing.

All of this, Russo said, it seems should make things easier, but the budget had already been set to account for not having many of these things, or at least not to the degree the opportunities had come up, that these donations were gravy, but did nothing for the core nutrition needed.  Russo had it that undertaking a feature length film project for no dough usually depended on random kindness—that or luck, or both—or else the film would be made but would have piece of shit music by a band who offered and the filmmakers had no choice but to include, every shot would be filmed as one take (and not for Paul Thomas Anderson effect) and other such amateurish horrorshow: the trick was to not overly compromise and say ‘Let’s do it for nothing and whatever it turns out to be is what it turns out to be’ while at the same time not to get overly caught up in a ‘money is always the answer’ mentality.

“You can’t throw money and get talent…you throw money, you get people that are only after that money, picking it up…the thing is for the film to entice, the work to entice.” This, Russo said, was always his way of approaching projects, and that this philosophy had put him touch with enough likeminded folks to have brought Heat Wave to the page, now it was a matter of lifting it off.

 ***

I had to break it to Russo inside of another week—his fundraising still only at about twenty-two percent of total needed—that The Arts Magazine had pulled some dipshit tactic, canceling on a photo shoot to accompany my article, so I had pulled the article from the publication, full stop (I was able to, through more random kindness, find a home for the article at the indie literature site Outsider Writers). Russo related some other woes that had come up concerning a misunderstanding about Norman Reedus being attached to the project and how the blowback from that had been putting a crimp in things.

Meanwhile, his name continued to be posted everywhere, his image in foreign newspapers as ‘the Christian Bale look-a-like’ or sometimes even as ‘Christian Bale’ by organizations that did less fact checking, the Batman Maybe video a full on viral hit.  Even incorporating that little nugget of ‘fame’ into the fundraising seemed to have a kind of negative effect, he mentioned in e-mail at one point. It seemed people who would be thrilled to see him ‘look like someone else’ would think it awful of him to try to ‘cash in on that.’ This was something I honestly wondered what to make of: being made into a pop-culture in-reference and then chastised for pointing out that you have not only a past body of work, but future plans that don’t exclusively involve being remembered and joked around about by D-list celebs in another decade when VH-1 does a new I Love The…show.

 ***

As of writing this, there are two days left in the campaign and some last minute boosts have come into play. A single donor going by the twitter moniker @Faileas said that they would donate $100 for every retweet of a message, up to $5000—this being met inside an hour, the donor doubling down (having given a 48 hour window) that each retweet in excess of the 50 needed to make the 5k would generate an addition $10 pledge.

In essence, all that is left now is to hope that people are willing to spend enough of someone else’s money to make an artist work see light.

Considering the conversations I’ve had with Russo, I wonder if the surreality is numb on him, still, or if his own coupling with the absurd is renewed with vigor, will perhaps make its way into his film of two young men descending into an ever rising heat to arrive, hook or crook, at whatever nowhere they might.

***

TO SEE THE CURRENT STANDING OF THE PROJECT MENTIONED, VISIT: HEAT WAVE 

 ***

 Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

“Andy Warhol, Silver Screen

Can’t Tell them Apart At All”

Cinema, Persona, Perception, and The Canyons

by Pablo D’Stair

If you happen to be me, you first became aware of James Deen via his seduction of and subsequent fornication with Mrs. Lexi Simone on the venerable adult film website My Friend’s Hot Mom. If you happen to be me, you first became consciously aware of Lindsay Lohan while you were stealing product and grifting cash from the register at Hollywood Video, her face in duplicate on the box for The Parent Trap, always just out of the corner of your eye.  If you happen to be me, those two things happened in the same year, though the former piece of film post-dates the latter by more than a half decade.

And now, another half decade has passed, and Lindsay and James are in a film together. But that might not mean what you’re thinking from those remarks, above.

The film is The Canyons, penned by l’enfant terrible novelist Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Lunar Park) and directed by Paul Schrader (Affliction, Auto Focus).

I

We need no ghost come from the grave to tell us that Warhol’s idea of ‘being famous for being famous’ has taken such root in the psyche of modern American society that it is not only the status quo for legitimized ‘fame’, but has, paradoxically, also become the idealized apex point of it for many aspirants, especially those with eyes set on the silver screen.

At a basic level: once, the idea was to have a talent and be known to excel at it; then this became that the idea was to have no talent, particularly (or at least not a practiced talent) but a persona which could replace the value of X talent in the equation; then the idea became to, quite literally, excel at having no talent and, really, no persona, in itself, of particular note.

But beyond this basic level (which will play itself out, revealed to be the big yawn that it is, every time, before repeating) much more interesting things, singularities, anomalies, start cropping up. Because in the current climate, what is to be done when there is talent, practiced talent, but it must traverse the temporary tower guard of talent being seen as something quite close to a handicap? And how does Art—especially art trying to exist outside of traditional commercial bounds—deal with presenting an actualized idea, let alone a philosophy, to a world which thinks that only not having such things is having such things?

Well, let’s have a look, using our two friends from before, as Lindsay Lohan and James Deen represent two very particular and peculiar examples of non-balancing Warhol-ian algebra.

II

Lohan, it might be said, is a very pristine example of the mutation of ‘being famous for having once been famous.’ Now, I use such phrasing not in a pejorative sense, as Lohan is certainly far from without talent. But the average half-informed, tabloid-common knowledge of various goings on in the actress’ life, it cannot be denied, has in the last few years become the far more identifying trait she bears, as far as ‘persona’. Indeed, it is the un-deniability of actual quality, actual talent that makes such commentary not fleeting, but, in our current economy, substantive.

We never hear of the on-set exploits of background performers, whether they involve hissy fits, drugs, shut-ins (or all of the above) and we seldom are concerned if Jane Nobody accused of Crime Something-or-Other shows up to court in Bumblefuck, MA wearing a designer dress which really shows off her toned legs. Those people have not showcased a talent and so their falls seem to be of the ‘prat’ variety, not nearly as interesting as falls from Icarus-ian heights.

Lohan has shown talent and so her humanity is more of the poetical sort, such that Dylan could well have been referring to her when he sings ‘she knows there’s no success like failure/and that failure’s no success at all.’ And so while her presence in any film is, surface level, understandable (at least as much as any working actress’ presence in any film), there is a particular question begged when we know she was distinctly sought out for a role in this specific film.

At a snap, it seems simple enough to theorize an answer in the artiste vein. After all, if Jorgen Leth cast Patrick Bauchau in his third re-filming, at von Trier’s prompt, of The Perfect Human due in part to Bauchau being interesting on the strength of his seeming ‘well bruised by life’ why not the same of Lohan? It is, after all, life and particulars wrought from it that draws writers to write, actors to act, and expressers of the world to express in all forms.  It is, it might be said, only the peculiarities of a contemporary American culture seeking to reappropriate such things for more base and flaring-out purposes that keep truly nuanced and interesting lives relegated to loose speculative fodder or ‘Where are they now?’ narratives to sell ad space. Perhaps it is commentary through art on this aspect of the ‘collective unartistic us’ which brings Lohan to the top of the pile, a statement of celebration at what made celebrity celebrity to begin with, when celebrity still had its roots in the term ‘celebration’ rather than a bastardized sense of setting apart those who have achieved something we have not as the ‘reprehensible them.’ After all, La Rochefoucauld (and others before and since) so rightly pointed out that ‘It is not enough to succeed, a friend must also fail’ so why not look at Lohan as exemplar of the ultra-American reimagining of this, perhaps ‘It is not enough to succeed, we must make that success a failure.’ Indeed, as long as I seem keen to throw quotations at this, it is irresistible to suggest that Lohan personifies in a most singular fashion—or should—what Hal Hartley mouthed via Henry Fool, that ‘We know we have fallen, because we know who we are.’

But, at more of a long drag than a snap, I think Lohan, in particular, has to be looked at less idealized and more as product, here. Because it is the very fact that she is not looked on as what I above theorize, generally, that seems at the heart of her presence, anywhere. After all, she does not shrink from the limelight—as The Canyons does not—to pursue the art of acting in film in the unadorned fashion of Ferrara’s The Driller Killer or Carter’s The Creeper, and has, we can’t but admit, intelligently and resiliently trod the tabloid-cum-artwork genre of much of modern ‘theatre’. Here, there is (as much as anything) a sense of acceptance of Brand-as Persona—to take a role in this film is because it fits a recognizable form of her, as much as her being offered the part could likely be due to the same. The unavoidable truth is that typecasting now takes place from life rather than previous performance, as life, itself, largely, has to be seen as performance if one wishes to perform for a living.

Now, gone are the days when Bresson could use so called ‘non-actors’ such as Martin LaSalle particularly because they are that. And largely the use of non-actors in modern films seems to have shifted to the philosophy that ‘they don’t need to act, because they naturally are what we would want an actor to do’ as opposed to the earlier philosophy of ‘we don’t want trained actors, because we want the cinema to perform for them.’ Lohan, perhaps, is here because she is a unique commingling of actual and artificial, a prototype before we knew the engineering was desirable of the acting-of-reality as the reality-of-acting.

In any event, she is poised to be one of the more interesting examples, if not the stand-alone one, of an unbalanced Warhol equation. She will be a control built of variables. Instead of achieving ‘fame’ (which may or may not exist in a state any more surely than does a neutrino) she will carve out the new Mobius Strip of Warhol-ian physics, in which she achieves the state of ‘being famous for being famous after being famous for having once been famous’.

I, personally, can only hope that such a thing is at the heart of her, particularly, being desired in the film, as it would be shameful to think that the most she could have been offered was a chance to get back what she had before it was taken away for the fun of being able to hand it back.

III

A lesson that we collectively have learned (or should have) most recently from Steven Soderberg’s The Girlfriend Experience, (some little time back from Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell, though that is the stronger film) is that casting a pornstar into an art-piece film does not, in and of itself, mean or do anything. Indeed, it might be said to do the opposite (that is to say, it does and means nothing) as when I find remarks such as the following, from critics, I cannot help but shift oddly in my seat, take a deep breath in through my mouth and let it out my nose: ‘Through [Sasha] Grey, Soderberg succeeds in making prettiness devastating.’ After all, if this is meant to be a thoughtful, critical remark, I must take it to mean that, sans pornstar (Sasha Grey or otherwise) we have no film and, so, no comment on the ‘devastatingness of prettiness’.

So, what does it mean to cast a pornstar? And what does it mean to cast a pornstar as the lead in a self-declared, outside-of-the-mainstream, very nearly l’art pour l’art film, written and directed by such known, hep quantities as Ellis and Schrader? It means, at least for my purposes, another interesting Warhol-ian anomaly.

Pornography, itself, is rich with paradox from all angles.

On the one hand, it would be easy to consider pornstars folks who have attained fame (I would say ‘their version of fame’ but, come on, it’s ‘fame proper’) for the most obviously and overtly superficial reasons—really, some might say, for nothing. Yet if one were to take just a moment to investigate even ‘casual porn viewer-culture’ (let alone ‘hardcore viewer-culture’) one would find the exact opposite to be true. There is a lowest common denominator in porn (it is apocryphally said that some directors are so disinterested in interacting with their performers they merely hold up illustrative flash cards from behind camera to let them know when to change position) but like in all cultures it is shunned by those ‘in the know’—it is in subtleties, deviations, and uniqueness that lasting presence or impact is made.

And furthering this line, it may seem that the very activity on display in pornography (let’s not pretend modern porn cares much for ‘the set-up’) is pint’s-a-pound-the-world-around, no real ‘performance’ to speak of. But just try to phone it in on a porn set, try to think you’ll have a following just because you keep a flat tummy or a false chest—dear me no, you can phone it in easier at Warner Brothers and keep a lasting stardom than you can at Wicked, at Brazzers, hell, even on the Bang Bus.

Then there is the paradox of why we respect a pornstar (and we do, we know we do). On the one hand, it seems to almost be as simple as ‘Well, they’re inventive, energetic, and get paid to have sex.’ But on even quick examination, this turns to the other hand, the realization that ‘They’re told what to do, utilize multiple takes, and, in effect, are only paid to have sex with people who are paid to have sex with them’ (which, that last part, is a curiosity, in and of itself, and the strongest argument for the true difference between adult film performance and prostitution).

It is impossible (and would be silly) to ignore the obvious: that casting a pornstar is done (not said cynically) as a badge of more-or-less riskless ‘bad-boy pomp’. It’s not the same, certainly, as saying ‘I cast the gigolo I picked up at Caesar’s Palace last night’ as there is an (we all know it) antiseptic sense of only faux-edge to pornography. It is enough to raise eyebrows and, if emphasized correctly when discussed, can seem like an injection of ‘rawness’ into an otherwise stuffy and artificial business.

Because we cannot forget, in this case—as in most—it is the non-porn-filmmakers who approach the pornstar, never the other way around.

So perhaps it is a straight on admission of the superficiality inherent in the ‘Hollywood’ system, a skewering of the old school version of every young man’s dream. In this case, after all, it is well known how romanticized is the notion of James Dean getting discovered while pumping gas, what really then is the difference in James Deen being discovered while pumping ass? And in a way, nothing could be more fitting, a real life extension of Paul Thomas Anderson’s adroit exploration of the hairline that separates performer from instrument in the eyes of both artist and audience. For really what is Deen if not a Dirk Diggler figure realized, at once interested in the willful indulgence his position allows him, yet someone concerned with ‘making sure it looks sexy’?

And extending this to the notion of casting only serves to reinforce the possible explicitness in the choice—any audience Deen would bring (a consideration which it is ludicrous to think is not largely why he is here) would be brought to see ‘a pornstar in a real movie’ and not an actor giving another on screen performance. He allows for a hyperconscious focus on the illusion of the cinema, this very illusion meant to be centerpiece—the hep movie audience knows it’s watching something fabricated in the same way the porn movie audience ignores it. It is as much Chesterton-ian as Warhol-ian, in that the masks of Purpose and Product serve not to conceal each other, but reveal the actual nature of film’s alchemy.

Without question, James Deen, regardless of who he portrays in the film, is meant to portray ‘James Deen in a film’ more than anything else. His presence outside as much as inside, so to speak, is meant as a kind of bludgeon (a jolt akin to hearing someone behind you suddenly yell Cut) and as an injection of noia (a suggestion that someone, somewhere, called Action, whether you overheard it or not).

IV

Filmmaking auteurs such as Michael Haneke have long relished in the process of indicting the audience in the cinema they view, making what is on screen aggressively about the very nature of individuals watching cinema on screen, delineating the morality of non-involvement, distance, regard. Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and  Benoît Poelvoorde, in Man Bites Dog, with equal parts irreverent mischief and dread sobriety, indict Art itself in the subject matter it investigates, suggesting flatly the upper hand of subject-and-experience over creator-and-participant.

This is Cinema capital C, though, and despite its plumbing the more grotesque desires of a viewing individual, it nonetheless could never be said to have a viewer in mind to be witness who did not want to regard what they are made to regard, who was not keenly involved in their distance, their non-involvement, their ‘place.’

But things have come to a point (through a process organic and untreated) in the modern landscape of interface with art, that far less erudite audiences take such things for granted, never have to consider what the conscious aims of any filmmaker are, never have to consider, indeed, the difference between a film and an audience to it. The lay audience—and even the more astute, eager one—these days comes pre-indicted, more than willing to accept that they are involved. Indeed, audiences today have, without a guiding hand, evolved in to an entity so keenly aware of their necessity in what is presented to them, they almost expect a process to be conversational, patronizing, directly about their reviews more than they, themselves, are even about their reviewing.

The very idea of meta-cinema has turned inside out.  And this can be handled by artists in one of two ways.

As always, there is lowest common denominator, so often on display whether named or considered. Nowadays, we hear John Big and Jane Starlet are rumored to be in a film together and the first, unabashed thought is ‘Oh, are they getting married?’ Or we hear Jake Hollywood and Cindy Hotlist are going to share the screen, prompting the immediately reaction of ‘Oh, I bet one of them will be divorcing either Jack Superstar or Janet Darling, pretty soon.’ And so a cinema is created for the life and lifestyle of those uninvolved in it, the notion of ‘vicarious experience’ now having fuck all to do with the celluloid spectacle-as-access-point-for-something-outside-of-oneself, everything to do with the orchestrated literature of synchronized tabloid presses, reissues (with commentary) of His/Her’s breakout performances—this new spectacle as access-point-for-having-no-need-to-consider, just to concur or agree-to-disagree.

But then there exists the more rarified handling, the one based on seeing this current state of unwitting participation not as full reality, but as an aspect that could be incorporated into not the easel, not the canvas, but the pigments the brushes are dipped in.  An audience so self-conscious of itself, psychology would tell us, must at once be unaware of itself—an audience so in-the-moment that the past and future are never considered that way.

To incorporate in the art a consciously participatory aspect from the moment of creation is not that same as gimmick making. It is a way to make the ‘subject’ into the ‘subject matter’ in an evolved sense of how this was classically meant. The artist can conspire to make the audience not concerned only about either the film or only their reaction to it (the old school ideas of Film-viewer versus Film-lover versus Film-buff versus Film-aficionado) but of the very vulnerability of Film if these two things become so coalesced.

I mentioned before my reaction to one critic’s remark of Soderberg’s film, a reaction, I feel, that showcases the nowadays very fine line between something-worth-something-else and something-only-worth-itself—if Sasha Grey’s presence was essential to the very message of the film, can the film be said to have a message? Perhaps and perhaps not. If an unknown actress played the role, would our (the audience’s) unavoidable lack of real-world anchoring alter the very nature of the film? Perhaps and perhaps not.

It is becoming less foreign to think of the performers as part of the writing, to think of the directors as part of the scripts—whether they were considered so at inception of a project or not. Once it is ‘a film by Paul Schrader,’ it is no use asking audience to consider what bit was birthed by cinematographer, which bit by composer, editor, best boy electrician. Once a film is ‘starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen,’ it is no use asking what part of their starring came from savvy agents, iconoclast producer, temp workers in marketing wanting to take a stab at something outside of their station. And audiences of DVDs with behind-the-scenes segments twice as long as the films and readers of the trade papers aware of a film before there is even a script are getting larger and larger, are becoming ‘Audience’ writ large. No longer is casual viewership of cinema casual, at all, even if to each individual viewer it seems like just that.

Both Schrader and Ellis, of course, know this. They have both, for decades, been an active, integral hand in forming the now general and unconscious ideology of what is American Cinema, what is American Culture and have both created works of wide acclaim exploring the nexus point of the two. But all of their conscious, concerted effort has so embedded itself in these ideas, that to anyone approaching their work (new or old) the results of said work is, to them, a priori.

So now, Ellis, Schrader and their ilk are left to take what they helped to create as merely the muddy building blocks everyone now thinks have been around forever. Now, they are left to do what all creators do: take what they already created and turn it freshly new for themselves.

V

I remember wandering a labyrinthine secondhand bookshop and finding a beat up, mass market edition of the screenplay for Taxi Driver, by Paul Schrader, and realizing just how much more I admired the thing on the page than even the pitch perfect presentation of DeNiro, Keitel, Foster through the interpretive lens of Scorsese. Those pages, to me, from that moment have always been Taxi Driver, the film an interpretative print of the original whole. It’s funny, how when we think about the writing of a film, we think about the things that we see, the things that we hear. ‘And the award for Best Screenplay goes to…’ we hear and only maybe or maybe not wonder if those who gave the award gave it based on reading stacks of printed words or gave it, really, based on watching reels of image, light, hearing voice, orchestration. It’s just one of those things—the writer of the film’s work is so often considered only through the conduit of the finished collaboration.

Considering the literary influence Bret Easton Ellis has had in my life, it is odd to think that the only reason I became acquainted with his work was because of a brief snippet in an Entertainment magazine about how Christian Bale would be playing ‘a wealthy axe murderer,’ a role, according to this snippet, that originally was thought to be either for Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise. An ‘axe-murderer’ fan from way back, I looked into the novel this film was based on, a little book called American Psycho—which turned out to be as much about a ‘wealthy axe murderer’ as Taxi Driver was about a ‘vigilante cab driver,’ as I’d had it described to me before my first viewing.

That secondhand shop Taxi Driver, that Entertainment magazine, that shopping-mall SuperCrown  American Psycho, those things happened on the same day, along the same bus transit line, me with a morning to kill before work at Baskin-Robbins.

In David Mamet’s film State and Main, Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) asks, ‘What’s an Associate Producer credit?’ and gets as reply, ‘It’s what you give your secretary instead of a raise.’ I was not a secretary and my Associate Producer credit on The Canyons was not in lieu of a raise but instead came from my giving cash money as part of the film’s open source method of financing. This was something I did for the usual combination of reasons—eyes as big as city moons set on the constellation of participating in something that might get me breathing the same as air as two figures who influenced my own art in ways I cannot name, and the more base fact that incentives were offered which would get my words in front of eyes belonging to these self-same figures, whose words have taken up not only so much time in front of my eyes, but space inside of my head. A thing is always more than one thing, as I have been saying.

But there was another reason, still.

***

If you happen to be me, an author, someone who never needs to hear another human voice if I don’t feel like it to do what I do, it’s funny that the idea of Literature always seemed so participatory, but the idea of Cinema always so individualized, as though what adorned the television screens I’d stay up until all hours watching leapt, full formed, from the will of some single figure, from the breath of Art itself.

If you happen to be me, when it turned out that Paul and Bret, Lindsay and James were all involved in making a film—a fact I became acquainted with only by happening to glance at someone else’s Twitter feed at random, some unknown-to-me person who had ‘followed me’ for Lord-knows-why—it seemed that there was something missing.

Me was missing. Me as modern audience, acting properly, the last glitch in the Warhol-ian string that is the ultimate balancing out of a new, variable cinema.

I am glad to have been there. Things just wouldn’t work, otherwise.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.