Distrust That Particular Flavor (22 page)

What do the films we've been watching have in common? A technology that facilitates motion capture and assembly, and does indeed put the tools of production into the hands of just about anyone with a serious hankering to make a film. But that's a simple observation, rather like saying that anyone with Microsoft Word can produce a book that looks, well, exactly like a book.

"Digital is an inexpensive way to make films," my friend Roger decides, as
we watch the onedotzero3 cassette, a compilation from a recent digital-film festival at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, "but it's a very expensive way to do club graffiti."

We've come out to Roger's place to access his multiformat VCR, our English tape being in PAL, but now there's a problem with the tape, or with the VCR, or with how the two interact: The imagery, a lot of which resembles clip art, is in black and white. It's supposed to be in color.

I feel guilty watching it this way. This is grossly unfair to the filmmakers, although it does seem to underline the idea that most of what we are watching here has been created either as a background for serious clubbing or as neurologically specific tools for the appreciation of proscribed substances, or both. If we could crank these images up to wall size, with full Dolby, I'm sure they'd jangle a few synapses. But largely abstract content, in monochrome, on a standard-size monitor, is simply an exercise in design.

The tunnel canary isn't comatose, but she's not watching, either. She's teaching herself to juggle with three large lemons from the tree in Roger's front yard.

Sleep eludes me. The Garage Kubrick is muttering, keeping me awake. Does anybody really need him? Will he ever happen?

I remember the people I've heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I've heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed
on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth.

But surely, says a very American part of me, things (if not people) can get better, and what the early stages of one technology take away can be restored in a later stage, or by a newer technology piggybacking on the first.

And my Garage Kubrick wants full fractal richness. He wants to control the very texture of the dream, down into its finest grain, its tightest resolution. He wants to build his characters from the ground up, from the inside out. He thinks not in terms of actors but in terms of models for motion capture. His medium is entirely plastic, to a degree that has never been possible before. And isn't, I remind myself, possible today.

But it might be eventually. It seems to me, really, that it must be one day.

Digital cinema has the potential to throw open the process of filmmaking, to make the act more universally available, to demythologize it, to show us aspects of the world we've not seen before. In that sense, it will be the "eyes" of the extended nervous system we've been extruding as a species for the past century.

To think in terms of entertainment, or even of art, is probably to miss the point. We are building ourselves mirrors that remember--public mirrors that wander around and remember what they've seen. That is a basic magic.

But a more basic magic still, and an older one, is the painting of images on the walls of caves, and in that magic the mind of the painter is the mirror, whatever funhouse twists are brought to the remembered
object. And that cave is also my Kubrick's garage, and whatever he's driven to cook up in there will simply be another human dream. The real mystery lies in why he is, why we are, willing, driven, to do that.

Some of us will use digital film technology to explore all of those places, all of those people, in the world we're still trying to discover. If the Standpipes of the world cease thereby to be invisible, out of sight and out of mind, it will have all been worth it right there.

And others, like my own Garage Kubrick, will use the same technology to burrow more deeply, more obsessively, more gloriously, into the insoluble mystery of the self, even as the Chateau Marmont outlasts the media platform and the studio system that gave it birth.

I fall asleep imagining someone building a virtual Marmont, and in one of the bungalows, a character is falling asleep....

A CLEAR COLD
Monday midmorning in Toronto, February 1994, and I'm standing beneath the dim high ceiling of a brick Victorian factory on Lansdowne Avenue, perhaps a foundry once for steam engines, more recently a General Electric plant. This room is vast, and in it are built other rooms, ceilingless, lights slung above. Here's a hotel suite, Beijing, early twenty-first century, realized in the most fastidious detail (though the faux Philippe Starck chairs have recently been riddled with explosive flechettes, setting goose down to play across the wonderfully ugly carpet). Here's the back room of the Drome bar, with grease-stained duct-work to rival Gilliam's
Brazil
. And here, in a propman's plastic Ziploc bag, looking like a cross between some fetish queen's jewelry and the business end of a Roto-Rooter, is a weapon of a sort that has never before existed anywhere in the human universe. Except, that is, behind my forehead. Why we spent however many mornings driving to Century City in some rented car, with the windows down and the air-conditioning on, as if, thereby, we were stealing something from this system that so effortlessly, so seamlessly, so consistently refuses us....

I've become an intimate of Sunset Strip hotels, moving over these four years from Bel Age to Le Reve to the St. James, and finally
to the Chateau Marmont, that historied pile, where the ghosts of Jim Morrison and Gram Parsons (who didn't actually die there, though they certainly served their time) sit around the pool at night with the ghost of John Belushi (who did). There I learned to stay in the "9" suites: 39, 49, 59, 69. These have balconies running the length of the building, facing the Strip, and more rooms than you can ever quite discover during a given stay. Like vast 1920s Hollywood apartments, their original fixtures and fittings strangely intact. Huge white gas ranges, deactivated dumbwaiters, cedar-lined closets with fold-down ironing boards. A place fraught with mysteries. Mysteries and intriguing-looking European tourists, who stand around the front desk complaining of irregularities in their wives' rented cellular service. Complaining of strange voices, speaking as from the very well of time. Of a madman on Frau X's pocket Motorola, muttering that the severed finger joint of one particular and long-forgotten Fifties starlet languishes this very day in the locked drawer of that odd brown piece of furniture in the hallway of Suite Sixtysomething--but the precise location is always lost, awash in that ferocious garble of Russian cab-static, up off the crawling Strip, where the cabbies, mainly Vietnamese when I began my term of service (four years ago? five?) are now mostly from Vladivostok.

Not to say that I wasn't happier at the Marmont, once I discovered the place. My home away from home. Glitz-free. Patient to a fault, the Marmont. A place proud of its Bohemian heritage.

A place to sit up late at night, rereading whatever current draft, so curiously indistinguishable from the last, while pondering what
it might be, exactly, that one does in order to make this strange thing, a movie, happen? And they do happen, movies, because through the window, past the palms and the shadow of the Marlboro Man, you can see the billboards down Sunset, the ones announcing all the new films. Yes, but movies are quite impossible to make. Utterly. It cannot be done. And yet. And yet.... So that life, or anyway the segments of it concerned with trying to make this movie, becomes a sort of Kafka loop, but Kafka as done by the Fox Network, say. So that you go away. Go home. Back to the world. But eventually it tugs you back yet again, as if on a bungee made of prepaid first-class air tickets and something that starts to feel, well, fairly deeply compulsive--yes, even a mania of sorts.... To cut the Kafka-loop bits short, what initially sounds like yes, but--no no no no no begins to sound like yes, of course, but no no no no, and, well, yes--except of course when we mean no.

When it's virtually all yes, you find several million dollars at your project's disposal (though quite amazingly useless, you discover, and which, anyway, under no circumstances whatever, including any eventual making of the film, will ever belong to you) but the rare no really means it, and while that no is there, some eldritch entity in Dimension Zed, be it a faceless Bahamian banker, her cousin the Parisian tax lawyer, an Alaskan accountant, or Herr Virek in his designer cancer-vat in Neo Zurich (and believe me, you'll never know) will not sign the check you need to secure "the talent"--i.e., "name" actors--without whom you cannot make this movie. And it goes on like that. And, well, on.

So that, sadly, when at last you are flushed through that very final membrane, you scarcely even know it. You are, in some odd and I suppose merciful way, past caring. It's all very odd. You're kind of like one of those hapless yet endearingly tough-talking personality-constructs in a William Gibson novel. The part of you that is most nearly human has come to inhabit certain interstices in a piece of software called "scriptor." You have started to experience everything in terms of Scriptor's "Work" menu. When you enter a room, you feel a momentary anxiety: Should this be under "scene" heading, or "action"? You aren't sure, so you say something, really anything, to the first person you see, because that will definitely be under "dialog." You have been working fourteen-hour days, six-day weeks, for the past two months. Your family, when they see you, look at you oddly. You dream of having a personal assistant. Someone to handle all the little things, like relating to your children and brushing your teeth. You experience moments of terrible lucidity, in which you see how deeply and cosmically silly this whole experience has gotten to be. Meanwhile, your friend who wants to be a director has relocated to Toronto, where the "film"--you've taken to thinking of it in quotation marks--is supposedly to be shot. He has taken his pregnant wife, their two children from a previous marriage, into the bitterest, most nightmarish winter in Canadian history. And he has already spent literally millions of somebody's dollars on.... something. You aren't quite sure what. And the check has not been signed. Not quite. No.