Low-Rent Cineaste
VCR
One of the most significant innovations in the history of film, more important than the invention of sound, color, Cinemascope, the drive-in, television, or cable TV, is the invention of the VCR. With a VCR, anybody can go to film school, no matter where they live.
Movies that used to play only in art theaters or on college campuses are now available in Minit Markets and video stores. Indeed, the video stores are so hungry for product that independent films are suddenly viable, commercially, foreign films are viable, classic films are viable.
Not only that, but film criticism is now possible on a wider scale than ever before. Not publicity for movies currently playing in mall fourplexes, and advertised in newspapers, but genuine criticism, about movies not currently in release, not currently advertised, as if the reader could go down to his video store, rent the movie, and screen it in his home-as more and more film buffs are doing.
Movie watching is up. People who used to go to one or two movies a month may rent ten times that many movies, to watch in their home, where they don’t have to pay $l for a candy bar, where they can pause the tape to go to the bathroom, where they can back up and replay something they didn’t catch.
The more movies you watch, the more curious you are about movies as a medium, and the more movies you will watch you didn¼t used to watch. So that, no longer do teenyboppers drive what gets made. Movie buffs drive what’s made, or will.
Finally, at home you can watch an X-rated movie you wouldn’t go into a dirty movie house downtown to see. X-rated movie watching is up. The range of what’s accepted broadens. Whether you want to watch them or not, somebody does, and their very existence lessens the taboos mainstream commercial movies must adhere to. For film as a means of artistic expression, that’s good.
Why, I could even write a piece on X-rated movies, and people would have some idea what I was talking about.
Film School
Some reasons to go to film school are to get your credentials, so you can land an entry-level job, and begin working in the field; to be taught by someone who has more experience at it than you do; and to make contacts that will be useful to you later in your career.
To my mind, the time you spend in school would be better spent on the job, learning first hand. If you want to work in pictures, go work in pictures. Once you get going, you will rise, or not rise, depending on your ability-not where you attended college.
That’s not to say college isn’t important. A liberal arts education is invaluable to a film maker. However, college isn’t the only place to get a liberal arts education, and in college, film school isn’t the place. Stuart Rosenberg, the director of Cool Hand Luke, majored in Irish literature.
As for learning from your teachers, most teachers teach as a stopgap. They’d rather be doing what they teach. If they’re truly creative, they taught themselves. So can you. The ones who studied it, and then went straight on to teaching it, without ever having done it, or having done it only for an audience of captive students and professional colleagues, have nothing to teach you anyway. They’ll ruin whatever freshness, imagination, and individuality you have, until you fit the cookie cutter all your class mates fit.
As for contacts, you meet the kind of people who help each other out, always ganging up on their peers who won’t play politics. You’re either with them or against them. Being with them will help your career in the short run, but ruin you as an artist, while opposing them, or simply go ing your own way, while they oppose you, will hold you back in the short run, but add to your character.
Two good reasons to go to film school are time to think about movies, talk about them to other enthusiasts, and make them, on a student scale, and second, access to a library of old movies, no longer in general circulation.
Now that we have the VCR, you don’t need to go to film school to see old movies. And also, now that we have the VCR, it’s easier to find someone who knows as much about movies as you do wherever you live. And also, now that we have the VCR, and the camcorder, you can make student films in Chittlin’ Switch, Arkansas. The VCR is going to be as big a shot in the arm for film as an art form as cheap paperback books were for mass literacy.
Books aren’t a mass medium anymore. They are elitist. Nobody reads books but Yuppies and old people and weirdos. But that has to do with distribution, not production. You can still produce books for a mass audience, that are of a high artistic quality, as long as you don’t expect to make a living at it.
Why should anyone expect to make a living writing books?
Make home movies. Show them on the local public access channel. Or trade cassettes with kindred spirits through the mail.
Is there an analogue to the little magazine/small press phenomenon in film? Of course. It’s underground films. Guerrilla theater. Performance art.
You’re going to be excluded. Blackballed. Branded a crank.
Resign yourself to it, and do your own thing. For a lifetime. The necessity of fighting school does not lessen, nor does the difficulty of doing it with only low-rent resources.
It doesn’t get easier. It gets harder. But the satisfaction increases directly with the intensity and the duration of the struggle.
The economic definition of rent is the difference in value that accrues to one property, vis-a-vis another, because of accidental factors like location. Rent is injustice. It’s inevitable, and as impersonal as Fate.
So, low rent is the goal. To have as few things working for you as you can. To take no advantage of things denied somebody else, to make it strictly on intrinsic worth. For that matter, the goal must be to position yourself so that you don’t get the things that make a career possible. To commit professional hara-kiri as a principled act. It’s better to live in a hovel than to be a slumlord. As Thoreau put it, he was ashamed of nothing so much as his own good behavior. “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” he said.
You can’t get much lower rent than Walden, which was free. Thoreau said he measured a thing’s worth by what he had to give up to have it. Put a value on integrity and success in the marketplace looks different. I fear success worse than cancer. It’s given me a chip on my shoulder I can hardly carry and the perverse outlook you see here. But the outlook is my own, and true to my conception of the way things work.
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 is on the radio. I sit at my computer at home, after work, typing away, and singing the music to myself, like Walter Matthau in Hopscotch, driving along humming Mozart off-key.
Low Rent Cineaste
Aria was a movie in which ten directors each shot a short segment based on a scene from an opera. “Low Rent Cineaste” is a short story in the form of movie reviews and essays on film making. It has a plot and characters, a setting and a theme. What’s the theme? The Mall Builder culture eats its artists, like Saturn eating his children. But a painter like Goya will always make it.
Of course, his palette darkens. It’s always the darkest just before the pitch black.
Where is it set? Parker, Florida.
What is the plot? Who are the characters ?
Action is character and character is plot. To write is a form of action. A man defines him self by creating.
Go. Make movies. Make home movies.
Publish then yourself. Review them yourself. Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself, Roland Kirk said.
Music
Music is an integral part of some movies. And not just musicals.
Can you imagine Five Easy Pieces without Tammy Wynette? Or Chopin?
Hopscotch without Mozart? Or the oom-pah band in the beer garden in Munich?
I love music. I think I’ll write a movie. Adapt “Low Rent Cineaste” for the screen. I’ll shoot it as a musical. A bebop musical.
In bebop, music got away from songs you could sing or dance to and got into pure music. A bebop musical will do that with film. Use film abstractly, rather than visually. Narratively. Linearly. I come at the Mall Builder culture thematically. “Low Rent Cineaste” is like a music video, only on a movie length scale. It will be to music videos as bebop is to rock and roll.
No. No tricks. A straight-ahead movie. But about a life that’s revolutionary. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn. I’m living it. I’m going to show that, simply and without adornment. The life of a writer. On the way to becoming a director Jack Nicholson became a star, Henry Jaglom said. On the way to becoming a movie star I remained a writer. “Low Rent Cineaste” is about not becoming a movie star. The ultimate rejected treatment, or screenplay. No, the penultimate rejected treatment, or screenplay. The ultimate one is the one I write when I finish this one. In infinite regression. I’m going out backwards. Disappearing up my fundament, like a snake, swallowing its tail, to mix a metaphor. Familiar motif of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or Buzzard Cult, nickname for my coterie of steadfast readers. A nativistic movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact. I studied millenarian movements in college.
And then I taught myself!
