Crazy for God (43 page)

W
here, as a painter, doing anything but my best had once been unthinkable, not as a matter of principle but as a matter of gut instinct and pride, all I was interested in on the movies I directed was to get the job done and move on to something better. But there was nothing “better.”

I woke to the fact that I was losing everything: my faith, my art, my ideals about art, my pride. I was also treating my family like crap. I wanted a fresh start, any fresh start. I didn’t want to be me any more. I kept sinking—a prodigal son, minus the father to return to.

In 1988-89, Genie, the three children, and I lived in South Africa and Namibia while I directed two movies,
Headhunter
and
Rebel Storm.
I was in Africa for a little over a year. My agent (
Wired
had at least gotten me an agent) snagged me a job directing
Headhunter,
a horror film (in every sense of the word).
Rebel Storm
was a bigger film, but not much better.

For most of the
Headhunter
production, I was alone, with my family only coming out about halfway through, when we were about to go into postproduction. By then, the producers had hired me to stay on for another six months to direct
Rebel Storm,
a sci-fi thriller about a future wherein everything is run by the religious right, when rock music has been banned.

The fact that they hired me to direct this picture was just a weird coincidence. They had no idea about my religious background, let alone that I’d spent the better part of several years helping to make the non-science fiction version of their paranoid-lefty story a reality.

The American producers of my two African productions were generous, fair, kind, and decent. They rented my family a lovely house and flew my wife and children out.

I picked up Genie and the children at the Johannesburg airport. A few moments later, they were staring wide-eyed out the window of my rental car as we sped along thousands of yards of rusted chain link fence. Behind it were tens of tens of thousands of shacks in the Alexandra black township.

Thick haze hung over the whole place. I explained that it was the cooking fires that made the smog. Sunlight cut fingers of pink out of the smoky air, but otherwise it was almost dark. The last of the sun glittered red on the muddy puddles. Mothers, with babies tied to their backs by blankets twisted above their breasts, never looked up. Some squatted next to fires. Others walked on the road, carrying bags of groceries on their heads; some picked their way between the shacks, stepping over ditches. Black men ran up the roads in long lines, ran down through gaps in the fence, ran into alleys full of women and children. The children had on school uniforms, black skirts, white knee socks, white blouses, or shorts, shirts, and ties. A few moments later, we pulled into our whites-only swanky neighborhood, through the gates of our lovely home.

Trevor, one of our local South African producers, and his pleasant wife Veronica were drunks. I never saw them sober for the better part of a year. It was as if what was happening to apartheid South Africa was just too hard to take sober. She had
lots of makeup, chain-smoked, was always pulling cigarettes out of packages of Benson and Hedges Gold that were all over the patio, on chairs, tables, and the bar. Her hands shook when she lit her cigarettes. I had never seen people drink or smoke so much.

At night in the winter, the skyline flickered with flames, as farmers burned off the dry stubble and hay in the fields, and the veldt would catch fire. The whites on the crew, and my American producers, carried guns when they went out at night. I got chased by cops in an unmarked car while I was driving home from a night shoot. When they learned I was an American, they were apologetic. Another night, I saved a man and two women in an overturned car, pulled them out before it caught fire. Then I raced back to the production office to call an ambulance. When it came, the white driver yelled at me for calling a “white ambulance” for blacks. They left, and the black injured man and dazed black women sat waiting until a “black ambulance” arrived. It was an old van with no stretcher. (The white ambulance was a fully equipped American-style EMS unit.) One of our white effects guys set himself on fire after he rigged an explosion wrong. My son Francis nearly had his head blown off when the “weapons master,” another white drunk, brought live shotgun shells onto the set and was shooting with our picture guns “just for fun,” then forgot a round was in the chamber, pulled the trigger and blew in the car door Francis was standing next to. A white production assistant committed suicide. Someone said they thought he had discovered he had AIDS.

It was as if somehow the metaphysical doom and gloom of imploding, last-ditch apartheid was infecting our productions. As Mom would have said (accurately, for once), the whole country seemed filled with spiritual despair.

John remembers things more positively:

Francis writes:

Jessica remembers:

One night on the
Headhunter
shoot, we had a hundred or so black extras out in an old abandoned rail yard in Pretoria, South Africa. The “demonic monster” was going to appear after they held a ritual around a huge fire. The extras would then chase Kay Lenz, who was playing our “Miami cop”—the picture was set in Miami, although shot in South Africa to save money—through some abandoned rail cars.

The extras gathered around the fire. It was part of the scene but was also keeping them warm between setups. As with all movie making, most of the evening was taken up waiting around for things to be fussed with, lights, dolly tracks, makeup. I asked the extras to sing something, anything, and to march around the fire in their “demonic” ritual.

“What shall we sing?” they asked.

“Anything you want,” I said. “As long as your lips are moving. Later we’ll dub in some sort of chant or something.”

The choice was “Shosho Loza,” a hymn that was once sung by the black gold miners about missing their homes. It had more recently been adapted by the ANC as a kind of unofficial hymn of resistance. “Shosho Loza” was considered subversive. And it was very beautiful.

The extras, none of whom knew each other before we hired them, sang as if they were in a choir that had rehearsed for weeks. The song, in several parts harmony, somewhat in the style of the Soweto Gospel Choir, echoed around the derelict rail yard. Some of the white crewmembers, our production manager Trevor in particular, seemed nervous and said we’d better get them to stop this pretty soon. But other whites on the crew joined in.

I was so ashamed. The most beautiful thing in our shit film was going to be some incidental music on the guide track, which later we’d replace with some bullshit incantation. We were with a group of mostly indigent people our production manager had picked up off the street. They were working for a few rand and a hot meal. And they sang like angels, the bass voices sounding sweet as French horns, the women’s voices harmonizing in keening tones to break your heart. I withdrew to a corner where no one could see me. I was in the dark crying.

I
thought I had hit bottom with the African pictures. But I had one further step to fall.

In 1991-92, I was directing what turned out to be my last feature:
Baby on Board.
My final movie entanglement ended with a pathetic whimper, actually more like a runny sneeze.

I was living in the Canadian producer’s guest room in his Toronto townhouse. He was too cheap to pay for a hotel room or rent me an apartment. The only food he kept was an assortment of green teas and vitamins. He had taken over the production of
Baby on Board
from Sandy Howard, a former B-movie mogul, producer of one real movie:
A Man Called Horse.

Genie only met the Canadian once. She didn’t like him. He reminded her of too many of the televangelists we knew.

“This man’s given me a break, okay?” I said.

“Is that right?” asked Genie. “Then why did he defer your fee? Keep him away from me.”

But when I crashed a limousine in New York City, while we were shooting some scenes to cut into the footage we shot in Canada, shooting Toronto-for-New-York, the producer did wire down $2,700 to cover my credit card debt.

I crashed the limousine because the driver kept screwing up the take by getting the cue wrong as to when to come around the corner of an alley near West 66th Street and Broadway.
Fool I that was, I jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to direct via walkie-talkie while driving the picture car.

We were in New York for a week of pick-up shots with just the stars and me. I was shooting without a permit, just running around New York City trying to get little pieces of film, to cut into the picture so it would look as if the action was taking place there, not in Toronto. Our stars, Carol Kane and Judge Reinhold, were gamely traipsing around with me.

By that time, the Canadian production had run out of money, so I was directing and shooting, operating the 35-millimeter Arriflex, lugging equipment, and hiring cabs. We kept hiring cabs that looked like “our” cab, the one we had as a picture car in Toronto.

The story was about a five-year-old girl left in a New York taxi, and the cab driver’s attempt to get her back to her mother, while the mob chases the mother around New York, for whatever implausible reason. Judge (the driver) and Carol (the mom) hated each other by the end of the shoot and wouldn’t film scenes together. I don’t know why they didn’t get along. They were both lovely to work with. Maybe it was just a case of depression at being stuck on such a shit movie. By the end of the shoot, they did lines in the master shots together, then the close-ups with a stand-in. We’d switch and shoot the close-up of the other actor with another stand-in.

Most of the movie took place in a moving vehicle out of doors. And we had two five-year-olds. (One would “act” while the other rested.) We were shooting exteriors in Toronto, in winter, a record-cold winter, for a movie written to take place in New York City in the summer. I got pneumonia. I wasn’t getting paid more than a fraction of my fee. Other than that, the whole thing was great. As Sandy Howard would say, more than once, when I’d call him to whine: “It’s fucking not a fucking movie but a fucking deal!”