B008J4PNHE EBOK

PART 1:
PREPRODUCTION (2002–2003)

Coming Attractions
(1969)

PART 2:
THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):
Thursday Night and Friday Morning

Reel Change
(1991)

PART 3:
THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):
Later Friday

Concessions
(2000)

PART 4:
THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):
Saturday and Sunday

Credits

Acknowledgments

Wesley Latsch’s List of Seventy-five Things that Cause Unnecessary Fatigue

About Owen King

This book is dedicated to the inspiring,
irreplaceable women in my life.

ZJBK

KTB

NRK

TJFSK

&

in memory of Sarah Jane White Spruce, 12/7/23–5/14/07

DOCTOR

(to Guido, the director)

Well, what are you working on now?

Another film without hope?

—Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi,
8
¹
/
₂
(dialogue spoken by Roberto Nicolosi)

The steel-on-steel whisk of the curtain rings scraping along the rod seemed to come from the sky, and for the last seven or eight seconds of his dream, Sam Dolan found himself turning in a circle, searching for the source of the sound, but there was no one else in the vast parking lot. “Samuel!” bellowed an unmistakable voice. “Samuel! I must speak to you!”

Sam opened his eyes and recoiled at the rectangle of white light. He threw his hands out to block the brilliant autumn morning cascading through the revealed window. Something was wrong. “What is it? What’s happened?”

A shadow grew, grew and grew, its mountainous shoulders overwhelming the bright frame. Booth stepped closer. His eyes were wide, his peppery beard tangled and wild, as if he had been rending it.

“What?” Sam’s pulse was in his fingers and his toes, behind his eyes, under his tongue. He was afraid.

“Samuel, my son.” His father cleared his throat and held up a sheaf of pages. “I have some notes for your script.”

1.

The script was for a film called
Who We Are,
a drama set at Russell College, the small liberal arts school in northern New York where Sam had matriculated. The partly autobiographical story had been his senior thesis. Central to the design of the work was the way it compacted time, by means of a trope that Sam privately considered so ingenious he sometimes broke into cackles just thinking about it.

At the break of day, the narrative’s half dozen or so main figures are callow eighteen-year-old freshman, but as the film advances—through parties and drugged-out drum circles, couplings and arguments and pranks—they age at a super-accelerated rate, encapsulating all four years of college in a single Spring Festival, the annual daylong bacchanalia that was the inebriated topper on every red-blooded Russell undergraduate’s year. At sunup of the following morning, finally partied out, the characters are grown-up seniors on the verge of graduation, with different haircuts and thinner faces and better clothes, yet in every significant way no more prepared for the real world than when they started.

While most readers of
Who We Are
found it funny in places, it was an essentially lyric piece that Sam felt spoke to the mad, arrested quality of those four years and, in general, of what a desperate thing it was to be young and free and American.

One character, Rachel, is a buttoned-down suburban honor student when we meet her in the morning; when we leave her, four years later, she is a fully committed member of an ecoterrorist cell; through the first quarter of the movie, Hugh drinks beer after beer, backslaps everyone in sight, climbs on every available chair and tabletop to make ribald acclamations to his friends; by the last fifteen minutes or so, Hugh has stopped going out altogether, developed a policy of conducting communication
exclusively via the Internet or speakerphone, become too indolent to bother dressing himself, and just lies on his couch, gloating aloud about the energy that his old companions are wasting while he is relaxing; another, Florence, renames herself Diana, and then Aurora, and then Divinity, before finally going back to Florence—the bright, gifted arts major who woke up that morning gradually transforming into a grim scold, her final project an installation of a Dumpster filled with words carved from piss-soaked foam blocks:
EMPATHY, TRUTH, INTEGRITY,
and so on; a gold-chain-wearing high school football star when we meet him, Brunson discovers his homosexuality during the first twenty minutes of the film, begins to treat his shame and anxiety with crystal meth around the forty-minute mark, and shortly afterward disappears completely right in the middle of a scene, at which point everyone ceases to refer to him except in the past tense; Kira spends the entire movie holding hands, only the person with whom she’s holding hands keeps changing, and they’re always arguing about that other person’s lack of faithfulness; she becomes angrier and angrier until she literally bites her last lover and rips a chunk of flesh from his cheek.

In a typical scene about midway through, Roger, the ostensible leader of the group, abruptly breaks up with his girlfriend. Initially a humorous skeptic, by the film’s latter stages, Roger has become so chronically dubious that he refuses to believe his own mother when she calls, sobbing, to inform him that his father has suffered a fatal aneurysm. “Nice try,” he says, and hangs up on her.

Several of the screenplay’s characters were modeled on real people: Roger, for instance, was Sam’s stand-in, and most of the things that happened to Roger—like the phone call scene—were semi-fictionalized versions of events from Sam’s own life. Another key player, Hugh, was plainly based on Sam’s best friend, Wesley Latsch, who had in reality, over time, winnowed his direct human contact to the bare minimum, and become so resolute in his fecklessness that there was a kind of integrity to it. Claire, Roger’s girlfriend, was a dead ringer for Sam’s actual college girlfriend, an indefatigably good-natured young woman named Polly Dressler:

EXT. NORTH FIELD PARKING LOT—MIDAFTERNOON

The group comes to Roger’s Saab. Behind them, in the meadow and on the hillside, the festival continues—people
jumping up and down in the bouncy castle, a juggler with devil sticks, the rotating Ferris wheel, etc.

CLAIRE

Slurpee time!

HUGH

T-minus Slurpee!

Roger unlocks the car with a CLICK, as Claire pulls on the passenger-side door with a CLACK. Claire has pulled the handle too soon.

Roger opens his door and climbs in. Claire pulls again on the handle of the passenger-side door, to no avail. Hugh stands with her.

Roger stares at Claire through the dirty glass. Roger’s Radio-head T-shirt is now a Wilco T-shirt. Claire’s glasses are gone, and her hair is different.

BACK-AND-FORTH THROUGH THE PASSENGER WINDOW:

CLAIRE

Let me in! I want Slurpee!

HUGH

Slurpee motherfucker!

ROGER

No. It’s over. I can’t do this anymore, Claire.

CLAIRE

What?

ROGER

I can’t be with you. You’re a handle-puller.

CLAIRE

What?

ROGER

I’m sorry, but we’re through.

CLAIRE

Why are you being such a jerk? I just want to get a Slurpee and have an enjoyable day.

ROGER

I could never love a handle-puller. I mean, it’s proof that we don’t fit.

CLAIRE

Are you serious? This is not funny, Roger.

ROGER

It’s not that you’re impatient, it’s that you want more from life than I do. You want to get going. You want your Slurpee right away. You’re a handle-puller, Claire. You pulled.

CLAIRE

Yes, but I didn’t mean to!

ROGER

It’s too late.

She starts to cry and gives Roger the finger.

HUGH

(to Claire:)

No Slurpee for you.

Hugh raps on the window, and Roger lets him in. They pull away a moment later, abandoning Claire in the parking lot.
A Volvo pulls into the empty space. Bertie, the Welsh exchange student, climbs out, unloads his guitar. Claire, in fresh makeup now, face completely dry, runs over and leaps into his arms.

In truth, Polly dumped Sam. And she was the one who pointed out that their ambitions weren’t especially compatible. Polly wanted to have a career and a family and a house and lots of affairs with men whose discretion she could trust. Sam’s only real ambition was to make a movie. Beyond that, he conceded that he didn’t have much in mind for the future.

But it was true that Polly was a handle-puller. This fact was important to Sam.

The breakup had also taken about two years, which was the beauty of the conceit: the compression of such a development brought it into greater relief. What Sam meant to convey was that minor troubles and lingering dissatisfactions—say, one man’s deep-rooted irritation at his girlfriend’s blithe impatience toward car-door locking mechanisms—often added up to personal shifts with massive consequences.

Taken as a whole, no one who read the screenplay for
Who We Are
denied that it was clever in its composition, original in its pattern, and ruthlessly unsentimental in its conclusions. It was also “a bit portentous,” according to Sam’s father, Booth Dolan, the B-movie mainstay famous for his stentorian blink-free performances in such films as
New Roman Empire, Hellhole, Hard Mommies, Hellhole 2: Wake the Devil, Black Soul Riders,
and
Hellhole 3: Endless Hell,
who, without invitation, had fished a copy of the script from Sam’s laptop bag.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“Portentous?”

After waking him, Booth had trailed Sam to the bathroom, lingered outside while Sam took a leak, and followed him down to the kitchen, maintaining a running critique of the script throughout. The general theme seemed to be that he found
Who We Are
too serious. Sam disagreed; he felt that it was exactly as serious as it needed to be. In addition, he wasn’t thrilled about having his work assessed by an intrusive old fat man before he’d even had coffee.

“Let me put it this way,” said Booth. “I don’t find much in the way of generosity in the story. I’m worried that the irony is perhaps too thick.”

Tom Ritts—a wealthy contractor, Booth’s best friend, and Sam’s godfather, at whose house both Dolan men were staying—had thoughtfully made them a pot of coffee before leaving for work. Sam went to the counter and poured some into a Ritts Design & Construction coffee mug. “Maybe I like my irony thick.”