Here Comes Trouble (47 page)

None of that was known to me as the very first roll of film made its way through the sprockets of Kevin’s Aaton 16mm camera on that cold February day in 1987. We filmed the Sit-Down Strike remembrance, and we shot thirty other scenes in the next seven days. The plasma center where the unemployed sold their blood, the free cheese line, the GM flak who said GM was only in the business to make money and not to help out its hometown. We filmed from sunup to long after dusk.

I watched what Kevin and Anne did as they pointed out things to me about how it’s sometimes the little moments that you grab with your camera or microphone that tell the bigger story. They talked about how, with only ten minutes of film in the camera (after which you would have to stop and reload, thus shutting the shoot down for a few minutes), you had to operate as a sort of on-the-set editor and do it all in your head. This discipline would not only save you from wasting film, it would force you to think about what exactly it was, this story you were trying to tell. They did not see the ten-minute restriction as an impediment; they saw it as a creative benefit.

“Imagine if we had an hour’s worth of film in the camera and film was as cheap as paper,” someone on the crew observed. “We’d just get lazy and shoot everything. Wouldn’t have to think about it while shooting. Worry about it later!”

“I want to go down to GM headquarters and see if Roger Smith will speak to us,” I told Kevin. “Are you up for that?”

“Are you kidding?” he said with his typical droll, sarcastic voice. “I was wondering when things were going to get interesting.”

And so we drove down to Detroit and entered the lobby of General Motors. I went straight to the elevator and hit the button. The doors opened and we went inside. I pushed the button for the fourteenth floor, where Smith’s office was. The button wouldn’t light up. I kept pushing but nothing happened. The doors wouldn’t shut. And that was when a security guard asked us to step outside. He was a polite, older man and he told us to hang on while he called someone. He came back and said that we needed an appointment, and to come back when we had one.

For the next two-plus years I tried to get that appointment. And when I couldn’t, I made numerous trips to Detroit to just show up and see what would happen. The search for Roger, to get him to come to Flint so I could show him the damage his decisions had caused, became the thread of the movie. But the real mission of the film had nothing to do with Smith or GM or even Flint. I wanted to make an angry comedy about an economic system that I believed to be unfair and unjust. And not democratic. I hoped that would come through.

Our week with Kevin was up. I thanked him profusely for all that he and Anne and the others did to give me my start. He said he would help in any way he could, just give him a call. I showed him an application I had received to apply for a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. I asked him if he could help me fill it out, as I assumed this was something he had to do all the time.

“What do I put in this box here,” I asked him, pointing to the line that asked for my “occupation.”

“Filmmaker,” he said without missing a beat.

“I’m not a filmmaker,” I responded. “I haven’t made a film.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied curtly. “You write down that you’re a
filmmaker.
You were a filmmaker the second that film started rolling through this camera.”

And so I wrote “filmmaker.” And for the next two and a half years, I made a film. There would be over a dozen more shoots. Kevin connected me to friends of his in the documentary community, most importantly to a couple from San Francisco, Chris Beaver and Judy Irving. They, too, came to Flint and shot for me for a week. The rest of the time it was just me, my wife, and a few friends (plus a cameraman or two from Detroit) bumbling around with the equipment, trying my best to make a movie. There were never more than four of us in the car as we drove from shoot to shoot. Left on our own, we would constantly screw up the camera and the sound recorder—so many times in fact that by the end of shooting in 1989, only about 10 percent of the footage we shot was usable.

I was having a hard time staying above water financially and so the film lab, DuArt in New York, said I could defer payment until I was done. It was run by an old lefty, and he liked seeing the footage as I shipped it in. I heard about an event in New York where distributors and funders came together to look at films in progress. If you paid them a fee, you could show them fifteen minutes of what you had. But none of my footage had been edited together because, well, I didn’t know how to edit. Again, Kevin to the rescue.

“I’ll put a reel together for you,” he said. “When can you come to New York?”

“Whenever you say,” I said.

Three weeks later I revisited his editing “suite” in the Village. I sat down and watched the fifteen minutes of my movie he had put together. I was blown away. It
looked
like a movie! He showed me how the Steenbeck worked. He showed me his editing system and how I could create my own. I spent hours watching him as he worked on his Nazi film, how he made decisions, how he knew just how long to hold a scene and when to get out. He did not believe in narration, or himself being on camera, or using music.

One day in the edit room, I asked him how he learned how to do all this.

“Well, I got a film degree.”

“From what film school?”

“I didn’t really go to film school,” he said.

“So where did you go?”

He paused. “Harvard.”

“
The
Harvard?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Yes, that Harvard,” he answered, not wanting to.

“Shit. I mean, wow. Cool.”

How on earth did
this
guy get into
Harvard?
I didn’t want to pry, especially into matters like how the hell could he afford it. After all, Harvard has scholarships, too. Not everyone who goes there is rich. Don’t be a bigot! One thing was clear: the dude was smart, very smart, and so that was clearly his ticket.

I set up an edit room in Washington, D.C., and hired a close friend from Flint and a local woman from suburban Maryland to be my editors, even though neither of them had ever edited a movie. So the three of us taught ourselves, with Kevin’s guidance, how to edit a movie. Our edit room was a cut above the ambience of Kevin’s, yet we did have our own cockroach-and-rodent problem. We had a room on the ninth floor of a dilapidated building on the corner of Pennsylvania and Twenty-first Street, about four blocks from the White House. There was a Roy Rogers burger joint next door to us, and the exhaust from that spewed into our edit room on a daily basis (that alone should have made the three of us vegans on the spot, had such a thing existed in those days).

Bit by bit, we figured out how to put the movie together. My two friends became amazing editors. The film was funny and it was sad. We stopped making a “documentary” and decided to make a film we’d take a date to on a Friday night. It would have a point of view, but not the point of view of the rigid, unfunny Left. I felt no need to fake the sort of “objectivity” that other journalists deceitfully hid behind. And I could sit there in our cramped edit room and see an imaginary audience in a big dark theater howling, cheering, hissing, and leaving the movie house ready to rumble.

We were working ’round the clock in the edit room, trying to finish the film before the bill collectors shut me down. And then, on a cold morning in January 1989, a new president was to be inaugurated at noon that day. His name was George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan’s vice president.

I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day, so I bundled up and headed over to the National Mall, where anyone from the public could watch the swearing-in of President Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. It was not very crowded, and I found a way to get closer to the Capitol steps than I thought would be possible. Looking up at the stage, at all the muckety-mucks sitting behind the new president, it was there that I saw Kevin Rafferty.

“Jesus,” I thought, somewhat in shock. “I think that’s Kevin up there!”

It did, in fact,
look
like him—but this guy was dressed up in a suit and tie and a fancy winter overcoat. There was no way this was him. Or if it
was
him, well, he’s got a good gig for the day, filming an inauguration! But I didn’t see any equipment.

A few days after the inauguration of the elder Bush as president of the United States, I tracked down Kevin at home. I had to know if that was him.

“Kevin,” I said into the phone, “I was at Bush’s inauguration the other day and I could have sworn I saw you up by the podium. Was that you?”

Silence.

“You were
there?
” I pressed.

More silence, then a drag off his cigarette, then the exhaling of the smoke. “Yes, I was there.”

“On the stage?”

Another drag. “Yes.”

“Jeez! How cool! What the hell were you doing up there? How’d ya get in?”

A sigh.

“My uncle is the president of the United States.”

“Hahaha. That’s a good one. My uncle’s Dan Quayle!”

“No. I’m not kidding,” he interrupted. “My uncle is George Bush, the president. My mom and Barbara Bush are sisters. His four sons and his daughter are my first cousins. I’m a member of the family. That’s why I was there.”

I’ve had many things told to me over the years: personal things, shocking things, the kinds of things everyone gets to hear at some point or another from someone—
“I’m gay.” “I’m leaving you.” “Only Austrians may depart this plane.”
—but nothing in life had prepared me for this piece of news. What Kevin was saying to me was that he had been working with me for nearly three years, first with me helping him with his movie, then him shooting my movie, then editing the first part of my movie—but, more important, being my mentor, my one and only teacher, a one-poorly-dressed-man film school—and now he was telling me that his uncle was the President of the United Friggin’ States of America??????????????????????????????????????????

My head was spinning.

“Look,” he said, “I know you’re probably pissed at me for not telling you. But try to look at it from my vantage point. Whenever someone finds out who I am, they immediately start acting different, treating me different, judging me, wanting something from me—you name it, it’s a drag to have this around my neck. And frankly, I thought you knew. I thought I told you—or tried to tell you. But you wouldn’t believe it. I thought Anne might have told you or someone had or you figured it out—but when it became clear to me that you didn’t know, well, I liked it that way. Because right now, now that you know, you’re sitting there thinking,
He’s one of those fucking Bushes!
”

I jumped in. “No, no, none of that! I don’t make those judgments. But Kevin—
shit, man!
You could have told me.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I did.”

“I mean, so during this whole time, your uncle was the vice president and now he’s the president? What were you thinking whenever I said something negative about him or Reagan?”

“Nothing. I agreed with you. I don’t share his politics. And to be honest, the family stuff is complicated. Personal. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
¹²

“Sure, I get it. This is still fucking me up a bit. I’m just being honest.
A member of the Bush family has been a significant part of not only making this movie but also teaching me how to be a filmmaker.
Whew. Fuck. I mean, really, fuck!”

“Well, there you have it. Do with it as you will.”

“This changes nothing, Kevin. Don’t worry. And I’m glad you finally told me.”

Seven months later I finished the film. I had shown a cut of it to three film festival selection committees—Telluride, Toronto, and New York. They all liked it and accepted it to be shown at each of their festivals in September 1989. I had also shown an early rough cut of the movie to my two sisters. They sat with me in our parents’ home and watched it. They said nice things to me and encouraged me to keep working on it. What they didn’t tell me (until years later) was that they were mortified about how poorly put together they thought the film was. They spoke quietly to one another—“What should we say to him? How can we let him down easy?”—but they couldn’t find a way. They didn’t want to burst my bubble as I seemed so excited about what the final film would look like. So they said nothing. But they did make a pact with each other to be there at the first film festival screening so that I wouldn’t be alone in my moment of public humiliation.

The first festival turned out to be in Telluride, Colorado, over Labor Day weekend. The festival paid my way (as I was truly broke by then). Some of my crew got out there and back on the money they’d raise by hawking handmade silk-screened T-shirts and buttons of the movie’s logo on the streets of Telluride.

The week before the festival I went into a panic that I had picked the wrong title for the film. I called up the festival organizer, Bill Pence, and told him that I was changing the name of the film to
Bad Day in Buick City.

“No, you are not,”
he said quite forcefully into the phone. “The name of this film is the one you gave it—
Roger & Me
—and that’s the perfect name. You’re not changing it. Besides, we already sent the program guide to the printer.” I was bummed out but afraid to say anything else. I hung up the phone.

When I arrived in Telluride and was handed the program guide, I noticed something awful: the festival had decided to schedule my opening at the same time as their big opening night gala film,
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
by the British director Peter Greenaway. The opening gala film would be held in the town’s historic Opera House. My film would have its “world premiere” in Masons Hall down at the other end of town. Masons Hall! Was I supposed to feel good about this? Like, be thankful it’s not the Kiwanis? Or, God forbid, the Elks Lodge? I tried to see all the positives in that. Well, I mean, after all, who was I? No one here knew me, I had never made a movie, and, let’s be honest: it
was
a documentary! So I guess I understood why its opening was being buried. Oh well.