The insane film event that inspired Saberfrog

I recently read a biography of film director David Lynch, which describes some seminal moments in his life that had a direct effect on his art. One was a memory of his childhood in pleasant rural Montana, when he found a tree whose fruit was oozing blackness and covered with ants. The other was living in 1970s urban Philadelphia as a college student and witnessing crime and violence on a regular basis. These experiences had their most obvious effect on his films Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, respectively.

Reading this, it occurred to me to wonder if my own creative work was similarly impacted by a particularly vivid life experience.

I couldn't think of one at the time. But there was one, and I unexpectedly got to relive it last night.

I was once again meeting up with my fellow film nerd (and Saberfrog co-star) John Karyus for an experimental film screening, this one at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo. I was on the fence about going to this one - there were other important things I could have been doing, and our seeing Matthew Barney's River of Fundament a few days earlier had left me feeling like I should maybe take a break from this sort of thing. So I wasn’t really in the mood, but I decided that one more couldn't hurt.

While we sat in the Hallwalls screening room waiting for the films to start, some old Prince songs were playing on the speakers in the recently-departed musician’s memory. Finally the music stopped and the curator stood up to introduce the films. “Sorry to stop playing Prince…” he began. “Instead we’re gonna play some prints!” I shouted back, jerking a thumb at the projectors behind us. Even at my shyest and most depressed I can never ignore an opportunity for a bad pun, but nobody laughed and the curator ignored me and continued his introduction.

The screening was a collection of old short films, including Un Chien Andalou (a well-known surrealist film by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel), and a film by Stan Vanderbeek which clearly showed his influence on Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python.

Some of these films were more interesting to me than others. Then it got to the final film. And I thought, Oh my God. It's THAT one. From the screening that will live in infamy.

* * *

When I was a kid, I would see oddball animated films and other shorts - either in school, or at a library or museum, or as filler between movies on cable. When I began making my own films, I was mainly influenced by Hollywood fantasy films and cartoons. But these strange and dreamy shorts also crept into my imagination.

My early filmmaking got me accepted into the 1990 New York State Summer School of the Arts - or NYSSSA for short - held that summer at the University at Buffalo. As a film student, I got to make some short films on Super-8 film and to watch a variety of foreign art films and experimental films, an experience that would further cement my interest in alternative cinema.

This was a six-week adventure of a lifetime. It was my first taste of college life, and exposed me to a type of art that was more avant-garde and confrontational than anything I had ever encountered previously. It was at NYSSSA that my sheltered small-town self first saw the aforementioned Un Chien Andalou as well as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, David Lynch's Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, Chris Marker's La Jetee, the Scorsese films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, and the films of Stan Brakhage, among many others.

In among all these was a short film called T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G by Paul Sharits. This was a series of strobing images - mostly a man placing scissor blades against his tongue (as if to cut it off) and that same man having his face scratched by a woman's hand - accompanied by the endless looping sound bite "Destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy..." I don't remember the class's response to this film, but I suspect that my younger self found it annoying.

Watching all these films was the proverbial drink from a fire hose. I was fascinated by the various film screenings, lectures and field trips, but I was also frustrated that they were always mandatory, especially when they cut into the time needed to complete our own film projects. But I was an obedient kid and so I went to all of these events as instructed.

In addition to viewing films in our regular classroom, we also had guest speakers and visiting artists in a different, auditorium-sized classroom. And Paul Sharits himself was present for one of these - a screening of another of his films, called Razor Blades. This film required two projectors, showing two different film reels side by side.

Like the previous Sharits film we'd watched, Razor Blades was an epilepsy-inducing barrage of flickering images and repetitive audio. This time the imagery was much more NSFW (male genitalia in various stages of arousal, an ass being wiped with toilet paper, naked people dancing, stillborn/aborted fetuses) and the audio was a very loud, piercing, stuttering electronic tone.

The film alone would have been a lot to inflict on a captive audience of kids in their early- to mid-teens - especially back in 1990, when The Simpsons was considered controversial and rap music was still seen as a potential threat to civilization.

But on this occasion there was also a live element that pushed the whole thing to another level. Sharits had brought someone with him to the screening. I don't remember much about him (he was a black guy, possibly heavy-set, maybe wearing a big coat or sweatshirt), but I do remember that he stood down in front and yelled at the audience. So we had to cope not only with electronic noise in our ears and dongs and butts before our eyes, but with some guy heckling us at the same time.

Finally the insanity got to be too much for my classmates, who stood up and began walking out of the auditorium. At first I obeyed the edict that we were supposed to sit through every screening and lecture, but as more and more students left I finally left my seat and joined them.

On a later day - possibly the next day - there was a meeting in which the students angrily confronted the summer school's director. He seemed amused by the whole thing and kind of laughed off the outrage of his students. But it transpired that Sharits' cohort hadn't just been shouting at the audience (as I had observed) but was directing more specific verbal abuse at the female students in the audience.

* * *

That screening and its fallout gave a dark tinge to my summer in NYSSSA. Yet that particular event - and the NYSSSA experience as a whole - would grow to a mythic proportion in my memory over the years.

In the short term, it all made me jaded - I saw a lot of the same films that would be later shown in film school, ones I wasn’t always that interested in seeing again, and it made me resentful of having non-narrative styles of filmmaking forced on me by professors. But over time - and especially in recent years - I’ve become something of an experimental film junkie. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve finally matured enough to appreciate the kind of art that NYSSSA introduced me to, or if it’s just some kind of Stockholm syndrome that has made me so fiercely loyal to a genre that once caused me such torment.

My aforementioned friend John Karyus once joked that students enter film school aspiring to be the next Spielberg, and leave wanting to make a 3-hour film about grass growing. He too went to NYSSSA (in a different year, when it was held at Ithaca College), and both of us bonded in film school when we discovered we were both veterans of the same heightened experience.

We each had found it to be both inspiring and misleading. It cracked open our brains, opened our third eye, and showed us the full spectrum of wild and envelope-pushing things that art could be, while arguably steering our tastes and ambitions in a direction that was uncommercial to the point of madness. We wouldn't have missed it for the world, yet we still suspected it had warped our expectations of film and art in a potentially unproductive way. And that conflict was a major influence on Saberfrog, in which the troubled protagonist finds himself inexorably drawn back to a half-forgotten experience in college in order to make sense of his current state of mind.

* * *

I forgot some of the details of that infamous 1990 screening, including the name of that particular Sharits film, and who the hell that guy was doing the yelling. I assumed he was a performance artist of some kind.

After Sharits' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G was shown recently at Visual Studies Workshop, I briefly described the dual-projector Sharits film to programmer Tara Nelson and asked if she knew the name of it, and she guessed that it might have been a different film called Shutter Interface. So when this latest screening at Hallwalls include a Sharits film called Razor Blades in its lineup, I did not know for certain whether it would be one that I would recognize.

But almost as soon as Razor Blades began, I recognized the phallic imagery and throbbing audio. Oh shit, I thought.

Even if I had never seen this film before, it would still have been an intense experience. The flickering imagery was as blinding as ever, and that soundtrack - with the piercing staccato tones laid over a deep bass - made me feel like an airline passenger as his sinuses repressurized during landing. I was bopping my head furiously during the film.

But the autobiographical element made it even more psychedelic. Imagine actually reliving one of the major emotional peaks of your life - your first kiss, a bad breakup, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one. I felt that I was inside one of my own memories, something that I thought never happened in real life, only in stories like A Christmas Carol and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I was seeing a rare film that I hadn’t seen in almost 26 years, and it was still as mindwarping as ever. And because it was from the University at Buffalo’s collection, it was probably the very same print!

When the film ended, I turned to John and excitedly told him that this was the film I’d been telling him about for years, the one I’d seen back in 1990. A woman behind us overheard our conversation and joined in. She had been one of the directors of NYSSSA that year, and had been present when that crazy screening happened.

She told me that the guy yelling at the audience was somebody Sharits had just picked up off the street! And at that screening he had been telling the female viewers things like “I want to touch your p***y”. She added that there were phone calls home to parents the very next day, and that one of the consequences was that NYSSSA stopped accepting students in their early- or pre-teens. She also said that students stole knives from the cafeteria so that they would be armed for the next time Paul Sharits made an appearance, but I wasn’t sure if she was joking about that or not.

She told me all this in a sheepish tone of “yeah, we made sure nothing like that ever happened again.” But I was elated. Not only had I partly relived one of the most intense and inexplicable episodes of my life, but I’d just had the details corroborated and completed by someone else who had been there! I had no choice but to yell out “This is the greatest day of my life!” and thus make an even bigger fool of myself after the screening than I did with my failed pun before it.

To think I almost didn’t go to this screening, when it felt as if it had been prepared specifically with me in mind.

* * *

There’s a semi-recent David Lynch quote that made laugh. I haven’t been able to find the exact quote online, so I may be paraphrasing, but I believe he said “Words … they add nothing.”

I have described to you an intense nonverbal experience I have had, so that a record of it will remain even if I forget it or am no longer around to describe it. But I don’t know whether I have succeeded in making you feel its importance.

And now it is a story told in words, rather than a feeling. Is that better? Is that worse? I don’t know. But art is about communication, and I have tried to communicate my experience to you. And that, ultimately, is all that an artist can do.

Three big lessons I've learned about writing

So I've got a draft of the first novel done, and I've gotten some feedback from friends. It's been surprisingly positive. I say 'surprisingly' because writing the book was a slow and difficult writing process, and getting it above novella length has been a struggle. Being much more used to writing screenplays, I knew that there would be a learning curve, and that by the time I got to the final book I would know a lot more about writing, knowledge that I could then apply to revising the earlier volumes. (I'm not gonna think about publishing – self or otherwise – until I'm sure the books are as good as I can make them.)

Now I'm starting to write the second book, and I find it's flowing a lot better. Thinking about why that might be, and thinking about things that I and other people have written, has made me think about some lessons that I've learned about writing.

These are lessons I learned by doing. Some of this is stuff that I've always believed but couldn't articulate until now, and some of it is stuff that I learned only after making mistakes.

LESSON ONE: Your character needs to be active. He or she needs to have a goal, and be willing to do something to achieve it.

The biggest mistake that people seem to make when they first start writing is having a character who doesn't do anything, who is introverted, alienated, lonely, and passive.

Everybody does this when they start writing. Everybody. Even people who are proudly anti-art and anti-independent in their tastes, who never watch a movie with subtitled dialogue that isn't spoken in Klingon or Huttese, seem to want to write an Antonioni film on their first attempt. If they ever go to film school or take a writing class, and have to read or watch the equivalent efforts by their fellow students, they would probably discover how boring that is for the audience, and it might make them realize that their own version is probably just as bad.

Why do new writers tend to fall into this trap? I can think of two possible reasons. One is that, as a new writer, you are trying to Express Your Personal Self, and writing is an internal process anyway. So it just feels good to write a character who is caught up in his or her thoughts, cut off from the world.

The other, and much worse, reason is that they allow themselves to think that being weak and passive and doing nothing is somehow … deep. I'm not sure how this attitude caught on. Once upon a time, even punks and hippies and grungies wanted to actually do things and make things. But nowadays I notice that a lot of people – especially on the Internet – really can't identify with anyone who had a dream and put in the effort to make that dream come true.

Somehow the people who strive and aim high, and pick themselves up when they fall, are the villains that deserve scorn whenever they do even a single thing wrong … while the people who just sit back and do nothing but complain about everything have somehow convince themselves of their own superiority.

All I can say is that when I was first trying to teach myself to write screenplays, I tended to look at movies that I liked, and try to figure out how they work and what made me like them. I know that many other people have done that also, but it might be less common than I thought it was. How else to explain why people who take pride in only liking genre films – movies about characters who DO THINGS – keep wanting to write dramas about navel-gazers who are helpless and passive?

When people write, they reveal a lot about their own psychology. People who are unambitious, and see life as one big conspiracy against them that they can do nothing about, are unlikely to be able to lead a main character through the process of changing the world. The people who write one page of something, and then can't think of what happens next, are perhaps struggling to understand how a person might go about making things happen.

Sometimes I hear people say “Well, I want to write about character rather than plot.” But here's a secret: Plot is what reveals character. What your character does to achieve a goal, how s/he treats people, how s/he responds to challenges … those are the things that reveal character. Not just sitting around spouting monologues.

So if you're thinking about writing about a character who does nothing, try writing about a character who does something. If that's not true to who you are, then watch some movies or TV shows, or read some novels or comic books. See how fictional characters respond to stuff, and try to learn from that. Study some successful models and try to follow them. Get your character off the sofa, wipe the streaked mascara off her face, and send her out on a journey!

And just having your character do what other people tell him to do? Not quite enough. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not quite enough. Ever heard of the “refusal of the call”, that Joseph Campbell moment when the hero doesn't want to accept the mission he's been given, before eventually agreeing? Until now, I never thought about why that trope is there. But now I realize why it works: It shows the character actually doing something. By choosing the life that's familiar to him over the one that's being presented to him, he is taking a stand. And when he decides for himself that the mission is actually important and that he is willing to take the risk – often for personal reasons other than the ones initially presented to him – he is again taking a stand. Without this element, the character is merely a pawn.

I've certainly written – and even filmed – scripts about a character who is introverted and alienated, as a vessel for my own feelings at that particular stage of my life. So I can't be too smug about this. However, a trick I used to compensate was to surround my alienated protagonist with more assertive and colorful characters who get pulled into his or her orbit.

Which brings me to ...

LESSON TWO: Your character should have, or make, friends.

I'm calling this a “should” rather than a “needs to” because it's certainly possible to tell a decent story about someone who is alone on his or her journey. However, it's damn hard to do this well.

And why do you want to? When have you ever seen a movie that you liked, that did this? I guess it gets back to the “I'm alienated, no one understands me, so I'm going to write about loneliness” approach again, so I won't repeat points I've already made, except to add one thing: Stories with multiple characters are more interesting.

You know how a lot of people say that TV is now better than movies? Why might that be? One reason is that there's more time for big story arcs, but another reason is character. A modern TV drama tends to have an ensemble of characters, each of whom gets his or her moment in the sun, and viewers often have a particular character that they love (or hate).

An important thing about writing for an ensemble, rather than a solitary protagonist, is that you have to write characters who aren't you. Rather than just having a sullen loner who is meant to represent your own sad-sack viewpoint, you have to imagine characters who stand on their own merits as fictional creations, who have their own hopes and dreams and quirks and strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe it's just me, but I always liked movies where there was a gang. I always liked it when there were a lot of characters with different abilities or personalities. You know, obscure arthouse fare like Star Wars and Aliens and, I don't know, The Goonies.

Having a gang means that your characters can talk to each other about the plot. When something happens, they can all have different reactions. The brave one, the fearful one, the smart one, the naïve one, all can have different perspectives on the action. Also, you can split them up and send them off on different subplots. This might be a challenge if you have difficulty coming up with one plot, let alone two or more, but that's part of why you should try it.

What can I say … As a writer, I guess I've always found the Wizard of Oz template more appealing than the Eraserhead template. Even though I like both of those movies.

LESSON THREE: Having a story is more important than having themes or a message.

You might be expecting me to drop the Sam Goldwyn quote “If you want to send a message, call Western Union,” but I personally think that's too cynical and discouraging. Film and literature are certainly capable of having something to say.

I prefer a quote from Orson Welles, who said that “most movie messages … could be written on the head of a pin.” I take that to mean: you can put a message in a movie if you want to, but it won't actually amount to that much. It won't be as important and earth-shattering as you think it will.

There certainly have been moments when it seemed like movies could change the world. The late 60s/early 70s has been widely hailed as such a period. I would argue that the late 80s through the 90s – an indie-friendly period stretching from Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing all the way up to Fight Club – was another one.

I'm not sure we're living in a time like that right now. Maybe once upon a time it was oh-so-shocking if a movie made a political statement or criticized something about our society. But now we have blogs, talk radio, and entire cable TV channels devoted to decrying how much worse things have become since … well, since the last time people said how much worse things have become.

With indie cinema seeming to become ever more marginalized by franchise Goliaths, I don't really like to discourage anyone from consciously putting a personal philosophy or political viewpoint in their scripts. However, I'm not sure any philosophy is likely to be compelling enough to compensate for the lack of a decent story.

First of all, with all the chattering going on out there on the Internet, the chance that you genuinely have an absolutely unprecedented opinion about something is somewhat low. If you think you do, then by all means go for it. But you can't just (to paraphrase Team America) read the news and then repeat it like it was your own opinion.

And usually what people have to “say” is grouchy and negative. Every once in a while we get an Amelie or a Ferris Bueller's Day Off or something that tries to convey a positive philosophy, but usually we get A Hard Hitting Satire rooted in anger. To some degree that's the rebellious spirit of youth and/or art … but man, we are so knee-deep in that toxic negativity now. It used to be a brave thing to create art that challenged the status quo, but that hostility is now so omnipresent that it has become the status quo.

For me the absolute worst is when people write a script or make a film that merely exists to criticize something ephemeral ... like a particular politician or celebrity who's going to be out of the limelight before you know it anyway, or a current pop-culture trend that you find annoying (often for no better reason than that it differs from the pop-culture of your own childhood). When I see something like that, I tend to think: Come on, dude. You had a chance to make something cool. You could have been part of the solution. Instead you gave the problem free publicity.

I guess it's easy for me to say all this stuff now that I'm more experienced. I've done much of the above, and have now gotten it (largely) out of my system. Maybe people need to do it wrong first, not just for practice but because you need to get those things off your chest somehow. But what motivated me to write all this up was encountering a lot of scripts recently that are about self-absorbed inaction.

Two decades ago, indie filmmaker Hal Hartley complained about the “empty formal posturing” of suburban film students trying to make urban gangster films. He said that, instead, they “should be writing stories about sitting on their couch watching gangster films.” But since then, we've gone so far in that direction. We've had so many Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino wannabes who've embraced the “dude, we can make a whole movie just about guys in one place talking” aesthetic of both directors' debut films without demonstrating the wit or cleverness of either. Spouting opinions has become a substitute for actually doing anything or having any ambition.

So I think a little of the “formal posturing” that Hartley complained about 20 years ago – understanding how drama and storytelling and genres work, rather than just snobbily rejecting them or nerdily critiquing them – would go a long way toward making off-Hollywood scripts and movies better.

And novels, too. Speaking of which, time to get back to work ...