Distrust That Particular Flavor (21 page)

BUILT IN THE LATE TWENTIES
heyday of the early studios, the Chateau Marmont boasts a fine deep mulch of Hollywood psychogeography, a wealth of ghosts. It's hard to imagine doing anything in one of these bungalows that someone hasn't already done, but maybe we're doing it tonight: We're holding our own private festival of digital video, screening films that were shot without the benefit of, well, film.

First up:
Dancehall Queen
, a feature from Jamaica that we'll watch with its co-writer and editor, Suzanne Fenn.

Suzanne was a member of Jean-Luc Godard's Dziga Vertov Group, circa 1970-71, where she functioned as the embodiment of Liberated Woman. Trained by the great documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, she cut Errol Morris's
Gates of Heaven
, all of Michael Tolkin's movies, and films by Percy Adlon, Louis Malle, and many more.

Dancehall Queen
, shot in the Jamaican ghetto of Standpipe, is an all-digital production, the result of Chris Blackwell's initial moves toward creating a modern movie studio/industry in Jamaica, based on the way digital cameras and editing pare down and open up the filmmaking process. That is, the way they reduce costs to a point where films can be feasibly geared to smaller audiences, thus allowing
the development of true indigenous cinemas. It's the third-world version of what Americans call "guerrilla filmmaking," extending the same vocabulary of techniques and strategies: on-the-fly street shooting, more nonprofessional actors, and so forth.

What becomes apparent, listening to Suzanne and then watching her film, is that
Dancehall Queen
couldn't have been made without this technology. In a milieu of ambient squatters, working with conventional equipment and a large crew is virtually impossible. (There aren't even any viable authority figures to bribe.) The technology opens up the world in a new and global way: If you can go there, you can shoot there. For all her Euro-film pedigree, Suzanne is not the type to be held back by nostalgia for an old media platform, and
Dancehall Queen
uses the new technology to great effect, plunging the viewer into the outrageous color, hypnotic energy, and desperate socioeconomics of the Standpipe ghetto and its club scene.

As the film ends I glance over at my daughter Claire, 16, and see that she's excited, too, even though the movie's dialog is in a variant of English that would send American video distributors running to the nearest subtitle house.

Suzanne tells us that her next feature, also shot digitally in Jamaica, is called
Third World Cop
. I tell her that's the best title I've heard this year, and then we slot our second film, Hal Hartley's
The Book of Life
. Featuring singer P. J. Harvey as Jesus Christ's backpack-toting personal assistant, it was shot in Manhattan for French television on the proverbial shoestring.

On the final day of 1999, an immaculately suited Jesus and a Bukowskiesque
Devil warily circle each other through a series of sleazy bars and chilly law offices, trying to cut a deal that centers on Christ's PowerBook. This contains the biblical Seventh Seal: Unlock the file and the Judgment Day program will launch, and then all hell will break loose. Christ also unexpectedly finds himself on a quixotic last-minute mission to save the soul of a saintly waitress who has run afoul of the Devil's negotiating skills. The film displays a fine nervous energy, heightened by loose-limbed camerawork, Hartley seeming to relish the so-called limits of digital filmmaking: His images smear, blur, judder, pixelate, and twist. It's a weirdly compelling grammar he assembles, and the film is funny, tender, and vertiginous.

I check Claire again. I'm using her as a tunnel canary, those birds that miners employed to warn them of poisonous gases. If she goes comatose, we're definitely off the track in terms of a crucial target demographic. Will this stripped-down mode of production hold the attention of a teenager raised on studio product?

It looks as though Hartley's grabbed her, handheld and all, so now we're ready for Thomas Vinterberg's
The Celebration
, a Danish film, digitally shot, that won the Jury Prize last year at Cannes.

Vinterberg was proud to put
The Celebration
forward as an example of the principles codified in Dogma 95, a manifesto calling for location sound, natural lighting, and other new realities of digital filmmaking. The movie, staged in a very large and handsome chateau, explores the inner psychic recesses of the deeply troubled annual reunion of a very large and extraordinarily
dysfunctional Danish family, and it seems . . . very long. After twenty minutes of Danish gloom I look over and see the tunnel-canary effect kicking in, big time. Claire's about to opt for bed and a head-clearing hit of MTV.

The Celebration
is triggering my own Joe Bob Briggs reflex, but maybe that's because watching a triple feature is pushing it for me. Or maybe it's because the movie is 105 serious minutes of what
Variety
calls "arthouse," fraught with incest and repressed memories of child abuse. It definitely would've been a tough pitch in Burbank.

Still, though I may not be enjoying it tremendously, I can honestly be glad it exists. Vinterberg has probably made exactly the film he wanted to make--a lot of it, at that--and any technology that empowers this uniquely personal process is ultimately going to do some good.

So Claire goes to bed,
The Celebration
ends, Suzanne and my friend Roger depart, and I go out to the patio to smell the eucalyptus and think about dreams and platforms and how platforms affect dreams and vice versa.

Digital video strikes me as a new platform wrapped in the language and mythology of an old platform. Lamb dressed as mutton, somewhat in the way we think of our cellular systems as adjuncts of copper-wire telephony. The way we still "dial" on touchpads. We call movies "film," but the celluloid's drying up. Film today is already in a sense digital, since it's all edited using an Avid.

But people still come to Hollywood, and I know that some of the people driving the cars I can hear now, out on Sunset, desperately
want to make movies. As I turn in, I think of the Garage Kubrick and wonder what he'd make of the films we've just seen. Probably not much.

The Garage Kubrick (he never quite managed to be assigned a name) is a character who somehow escaped the focus of my latest novel. He was there in the notes, but he didn't make it to the literary equivalent of the screen. He had already demonstrated his unwillingness to take his place in my book when I learned of Stanley Kubrick's death. The character was based not on Kubrick himself but on certain theories about Kubrick's methods and intentions that were put forward by a friend of mine, a young British director who once worked for him. Kubrick, my friend opined, didn't care how long anything took, and would have been happiest if he'd been able to construct virtual sets and virtual actors from the wireframe up. The idea took root in my college-film-history recollections of auteur theory--which has it that the director is, absolutely, the "author" of a given film, just as the writer is the author of a book.

Whether this is literally true is arguable, but the world, in my experience, is filled with wannabe auteurs, and my imagination conjured one particularly focused and obsessive example.

I thought of the Garage Kubrick when I went to Sundance for the first time and saw young filmmakers doing what young filmmakers apparently must do to get attention for their work--the public part of which seemed to involve shuffling in a tense sort of lemming-lockstep up and down the main drag of Park City, talking on two cell phones at once and looking near-fatally stressed. The private part, the deal-making part, I
assumed (based on experiences of my own) would be worse. Or simply wouldn't happen.

Watching the Sundancers cultivate cell-phone tumors induced a certain empathy. I felt for these people. And that feeling fueled my fantasy of the Garage Kubrick.

Who is maybe fourteen, fifteen at most, and is either the last or the very first auteur--depending on how you look at it.

The Garage Kubrick hates everything that Sundance, let alone Hollywood, puts people through, and he won't have Slamdance or Slumdance either, or any of the rest of it.

The Garage Kubrick is a stone auteur, an adolescent near-future Orson Welles, plugged into some unthinkable (but affordable) node of consumer tech in his parents' garage. The Garage Kubrick is single-handedly making a feature in there, some sort of apparently live-action epic that may or may not involve motion capture. That may or may not involve human actors, but which will seem to.

The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline. He is making, literally, a one-man movie; he is his film's author to the degree that I had always assumed any auteur would want to be.

And he will not, consequently, come out of the garage. His parents, worried at first, have gone into denial. He is simply in there, making his film. Doing it the way my friend assumed Stanley Kubrick would have done it if he'd had the tech wherewithal.

And this, come to think of it, may be why the Garage Kubrick never
made it into my book; I was never able to imagine him letting go of the act of creation long enough to emerge and interact with any other characters. But characters who miss the bus have a way of haunting their authors, and now, falling asleep at the Marmont, it comes to me: He's back, and I'm going to have to figure out where he fits in with this new technology. And whether or not we can, or if we'll want to, get there--where I've imagined him--from here.

We start the next day with blueberry pancakes and a couple of compilation tapes of digital short subjects, animations in one style or another, that remind me of Siggraph demos. The Garage Kubrick would recognize these, I suppose, as units in the language in which he's learning to sing opera.

At this point, Claire's real-life media needs start to manifest. She needs digital, but not film. She needs Japan-only PlayStation games and Final Fantasy associational items. We get on the road to Monrovia, where she's found the physical retail locus of a website called Game Cave. Game Cave turns out to be a much slicker, more contemporary operation than the fanboy pod-mall outlet I'd imagined, and while Claire makes her selections I consider that this place, rather than anything more conventionally cinematic, is where the Garage Kubrick is likely to emerge.

Maybe an entire culture of these people will emerge, since building digital sets from scratch might prove too difficult for most individuals. Maybe a specialist market selling things like templates for an American suburb, or mall interiors, or car chases. These could then be tweaked into more specific shapes by the
individual enthusiast. Some people might find that their most valuable asset is the set they've developed, which they can rent to others, to modify, layer over, cut, paste, and sample.

Which has me scratching my head in Game Cave, as the concept is so strangely like aspects of contemporary Hollywood: an "industry" on the Net.

The Garage Kubrick mutters at me, wipes his sweaty hands on his dirty chinos, and goes back into the garage. He doesn't want this. He's the Author.

Back at the Marmont, we're watching
20 Dates
, a film by Myles Berkowitz. "There's the place where we bought the Austin Powers teeth!" Claire says, delighted.

20 Dates
was shot, more or less, in this neighborhood, so we score a very localized kind of deja vu, an inverse verite. We sit here, watching video of places a few blocks away, and feel--pleasurably--less real.

20 Dates
cost around $65,000. With its Candid Camera aesthetic, it feels more like television than the other features we've screened, but in some ways it seems more radically itself. We watch the director tape his way through his twenty dates, looking for true love. Which he eventually, against serious odds, claims to find, so that in the end
20 Dates
somehow feels a lot like the Hollywood product it tells us it's trying not to be.

Still, Myles made his movie and has an audience, so we chalk up one more to digital.

I suspect the Garage Kubrick was probably assigned projects like
20 Dates
in fifth grade: Go out and make a film about your neighborhood, about people, about how you feel about girls, whatever. He
did, but he hated doing it. He already knew what he wanted: high narrative tension, great sets, unforgettable characters, the texture of his own imagination turned into pixelflesh. He wanted the garage, that fertile darkness, unspeakable embrace with whatever artifact of convergence waited for him there.

Next up, after a lunch break, is Bennett Miller's
The Cruise
, a black-and-white documentary from New York that has attracted a sizable audience. This interests me more than it does the tunnel canary, who opts for the pool. I sink into the world of Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a tour guide on Gray Line buses, who looks a bit like the late John Lennon and can be almost as irritating as Myles Berkowitz. This is one of those idiosyncratic films about an idiosyncratic guy in what is still, in spite of everything, a pretty idiosyncratic city. I'm a fan of this sort of thing, and if there were a channel that ran such films all day--like Real One in my current novel--I'd surf it.
The Cruise
is, as they say in festival brochures, a very personal film, and very personal films are notoriously difficult to fund. If digital were any more expensive or any more technically demanding, these images probably wouldn't be here.