Innocents and Others (4 page)

In the early-morning light, I sit on the motel bed and examine the equipment I have bought. I read instructions; I put pieces together. I lift the camera and look through the viewfinder.

I will make my trip and I will also make a film diary of my trip called
A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents.
My first film since high school. I will make film after film that spring and summer. In the fall I will briefly attend the college with the excellent undergraduate film program. My life will begin to take an ordinary shape, as if the past nine months never happened. As if it were a dream, an unfinished film, a lost radio broadcast.

I am a hungry young woman, just like thousands of other young women. But I have some ideas. A directive, of sorts. I will work and I will work. I have said this is a love story, and indeed it begins that way: my love of cinema, as pure as any I have known. Making, watching, think
ing cinema. I become a machine of cinema, a monocular creator. It is as though I had been a drawn-back rubber band my whole life, seeming to pull farther and farther away from the life I wanted, until I am released and then I come forward with a huge snap. I am no longer wishing; I am doing. What do I do? I make films that excite and please me, occasionally frustrate me, and for a long while that feels like enough. Later I will find this meager in a number of ways. Later I will see it as self-aggrandizing, problematic, not just useless but hurtful. Later I will quit.

But there is still a bit more of this inaugural story to tell, the end of the story of how I began. A narrative thread that I have left hanging. So here it is: a year after he died, I was working late and began to think about him. There had been a big retrospective of his work, and there was a flurry of articles in the paper. I knew more about him and his work than all of these people. I considered my future and my opportunities. I took the wicker box out. I read the letters. They were ­beautifully written: some were a little erotic, some were funny. They could be tastefully edited, in any case.

I took them out on the fire escape with me, and read them as I smoked. I could have shown them to an agent, published them, offered them to the highest bidder. That's what he had suggested—no, urged—me to do. If I approached it all in the right way, the interest in me could lead to a chance to make a film. One little chance to take that attention and use it to my advantage. It wasn't a sure thing, but it was like a puzzle for me to figure out: here was how I thought the world worked; here was how I thought I fit in it.

I also could burn them, one by one, like a girl in a black-and-white movie. Every last one.

But instead I perched on the steps under a shimmer of deep-night summer stars, and I started once again at the beginning. I read one,
folded it, and put it away. I read another, then another, then another. When I got to the end, I put them back in the box, closed the box, and put them away, my secret forever.

I told you this was a love story.

—Meadow Mori, 11/5/2014

Meadow Mori was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, essay films, shorts, and video installations including
Kent State: Recovered
(1992), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary;
Play Truman
(1993);
Portrait of Deke
(1987), which won a BATT Silver Medal and the jury prize at the Seattle Film Festival;
Inward Operator
(1998), which was a jury prize winner at the Sundance Festival, and
Children of the Disappeared
(2001). Parts of
A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents,
the making of which is described in the post above, can be viewed
here.
Her reconstructions of famous lost films (made in 1984–1985) can be viewed
here.

Related links

Carrie Wexler,
A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8

Meadow Mori interview,
Sound on Sound, June 1999

Meadow Mori film channel at
Gleaners.net
and
Vimeo

Comments (866)

Mouchette
Jan 6

This is so disgusting.

Sleepovergirl
Jan 6

She was Carrie Wexler's best friend, but she barely mentions her here.

LegacyAdmit
12:15 am

What happened to the letters?! Did she finally publish them?

Eds
12:30 am

A Carrie Wexler interview can be read
here.

Limpidpools
12:33 am

Is it just me, or is this a straight-up star fucking/sleep your way up story? Yay, feminism. Not.

Limpidpools
→
Mouchette
12:40 am

Like you said, disgusting.

Mouchette
→
Limpidpools
12:41 am

I meant a teenager sleeping with an old obese man. And calling that a “love story.” Call it whatever you want. It's just sad.

dogyears
→
Limidpools
7:22 am

Nice to be so judgey about a great artist. Yay, female solidarity.

Limpidpools
→
dogyears
9:30 am

Who says I am a woman. #feminismfail

TheQualiaConundrum22
→
LegacyAdmit
9:33 am

She has never published them. She also stopped making films a few years ago. She had some sort of breakdown.

Eberhardfaber
9:37 am

I want to read the letters. I wonder if she will publish them now that she has told everyone about this relationship. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a setup for an announcement of a publishing deal.

deranger
10:02 am

So cynical! Don't you think the point of this is that she doesn't plan on
exploiting the letters? That she got what she got on her own. His help to her was inspiration. What she did is unrelated to the famous boyfriend.

Makemoney
12:42 pm

I didn't believe it until I saw this with my own eyes! I work from home and make $1050 a week doing easy transcription and data entry. Go to
www.workfromhome.com
and stop struggling.

films4freedom
1:00 pm

If you like Meadow Mori's films, you should check out theendpoint dot net. We aggregate nonfiction and essay films that spotlight the struggle against corporate imperialism and environmental degradation. Many important documentaries all streamed for free.

RitaHayworth
3:30 pm

So she fucked Orson Welles. Who hasn't?

Rulalenska
3:37 pm

What happened with Carrie Wexler?

IrrealisMood
→
RitaHayworth
3:38 pm

You are killing me Rita. I laughed so hard I almost choked when I read this.

Canyouhearmenow
→
Rulalenska
3:39 pm

They don't speak because Wexler screwed her over. Neither Mori or Wexler will discuss it.

Limpidpools
3:45 pm

She hardly followed in his footsteps. Making those horrible films. Those distortive, pretentious documentaries. She is a tasteless, self-righteous defender of monsters. And it turns out she is the biggest woman-in-Hollywood cliché of all . . .
expand comment to read more

deranger
→
Limpidpools
3:49 pm

I love when the mens start explaining how feminism works to the womens. Thank you. Whatever origins Mori has had, she came to be a fascinating artist. Why is it that only men get to have colorful pasts?

Limpidpools
→
deranger
3:51 pm

Men can't have opinions about female behavior, huh? Well the jokes on you, since I am actually a woman.

JennyW28
3:55 pm

The Children of the Disappeared is an incredible film.

rookiemistake
4:00 pm

I wonder why she never re-enacted Citizen Kane?

dogyears
→
Limpidpools
4:02 pm

No one cares if you are a man or a woman because you are simply a troll. #dontfeedthetroll

BarbiesCervix
4:02 pm

People, I am calling BS on this whole essay. Welles famously lived and died on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood, not in Brentwood. Everybody knows that. Even the death date is off. She is pulling your chain.

show more comments in this thread

PART TWO

JELLY AND JACK

1985

Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her, and she heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after she said goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle. The little lag when his phone was hung up but you were still on the line, in a weird half-life of the call, semiconnected, followed by the final late disconnection click, then silence, and then if you didn't hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no. The phone always telling her things. She pushed the eleven buttons—the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted—her fingertips not needing to feel the grooves of the numbers, but feeling them nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It must be in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person's phone sounded so hopeful, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, and you could almost see the sound in an empty house.

He didn't have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. You can let it ring all day. Is that true? Has anyone ever tried it? The plastic rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let the receiver rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.

“Hello?” said a male voice that cleared itself as it spoke, so the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was it the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Roused from sleep was a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk also. The woken person could sometimes start out frightened or vulnerable and then grow angry as the reality of the call's interruption hit his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well now I am awake for the goddamned duration, you bitch.” Jelly couldn't get through a feeling like that. Not even Jelly. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always takes her time. Nothing makes people more impatient than rushing.

“Who is this?”

“It's Nicole.”

“Nicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”

This was a crucial moment.

“Is this Mark Washborn?”

“Uh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn't. Who is this again?”

“Nicole. I'm a friend of Mark's. I thought this was his new number.”

“No. That's weird. I know Mark. I mean, he's a good friend of mine.”

“Oh my. How awkward. I am so, so sorry I disturbed you, uh . . .” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited another to complete the sentence. An intricate conjoining, it was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.

“Jack. Jack Cusano.”

“Jack Cusano? Not Jack Cusano, the record producer?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Jack Cusano who composes film scores. The gorgeous work you did on those Robert DeMarco films.”

“That's right.” He laughed. His laugh cleared out his throat a bit more. She lay back on her pillow, held the phone so it barely touched her cheek. She imagined her voice going into the transmitter, sound waves being turned into electrical pulses, up the wires to the phone lines to a switching station, turned into microwaves speeding across the country with the memory—the imprint—of her exact tone, her high and low frequencies, her elegant modulations, to the switching station in Santa Monica, sending electric current up the PCH to a Malibu beach house and into Jack's receiver—undoubtedly a sleek black cordless phone. So fast too: instantly made back into a sound wave by the tiny amplifier near his ear. All that way, all those transformations, but no distortions. A miracle of technology. The sound was as clear as speech in a room. She could, she could—amazing—hear the ocean in the background. A gull, the sound of water pulling back from beach. She swore she could hear the sun shining through his west-facing windows.

JELLY AND OZ

Many years before Jelly called Jack, before she had begun phoning men for love (not work), and before she had recovered her sight, she had fallen in love with Oz. She met him in the summer of 1970 at the Center for the Blind.

Oz was bald and a lurching, lumbering six four. But his hands were soft and she liked the push of sweat with the air-faded tinge of clove that she got when he put his arm across her shoulders. Jelly was more than a foot shorter than Oz, and his arm across her shoulders was a natural fit. Later she would discover that the faint clove she got under—or right up alongside of—the sweat was from an old sachet that she found when she pulled open his undershirt drawer to put away the laundry she had washed and folded for him. It shocked her to see this girlish thing, an ancient silk square with a ribbon. She only saw it as a bruise of pink, but she could feel the slight catch that comes in the weave of older silk fabric. The sachet must have been in the bureau when he got it from the Salvation Army. Because Oz wouldn't buy a sachet of spices and put it in his drawer, would he? That seemed very unlikely. But surely he noticed the scent—his blindness made every scent noticeable. Distracting, even—one got so sensitive, and the overlay of scents could be deceptive, puzzling. Jelly had slowly stopped calling a smell “good” or “bad.” Instead she
thought of them as “real” or “cover” smells. She just wanted everything to smell as it was. Actually. An armpit should smell of sweat and hair and skin. A mouth should be clean but not minty. Hair should smell slightly vegetal, plantish. And a room should smell like old wood. A candle like melted beeswax. The street like rain and leaves. The backyard of grass, earth, flowers. Walking into a store and getting the rank sting of ammonia under fake pine could make her feel ill in a matter of minutes. She would leave gasping for air, clutching a hand to her nostrils.

Even the real smells overwhelmed her lately. She could barely walk past her neighbor's house with its ridiculous lilac tree. What kind of tree is this, with its heavy sudden bursts of overripe flowers? It too made her bring her fingers to the base of her nose. Just thinking about the rotting blossoms brought back the dense thickness of the odor. She had taken to crossing the street and pointedly facing away when she couldn't avoid walking in the direction of that house and that tree.

Oz gradually taught her the phone stuff. He had a kid's red plastic whistle that he got from a Cap'n Crunch box, and he showed her how to blow pitch tones into the phone. Oz had perfect pitch and on his own could whistle the unlocking combination: seventh-octave E at 2600 hertz. Short bursts achieved with tongue against lips and pushed over-and-out air, or by covering the second hole on the toy whistle. (“What's a hertz?” she asked. “A vibration,” he said. “It is all waves and vibrations.”) He could connect to anyone anywhere without any charges to his line. Jelly did not have perfect pitch, but she learned how to use the whistle. Eventually she even had a blue box to make tones, given to her by one of Oz's phone friends, the phone phreaks. The other phreaks were much younger than Oz and still in college. They had learned to make handheld boxes for what Oz could do by ear and mouth alone. Only Oz could do that. To hear
him whistle a series of tones into the phone was impressive, but it was more than a trick. He could talk to her about the intricacies of the phone system like he was a line engineer: “single-frequency dialing system” and “hook dialing” and “Strowger switch.” Or the thing that Oz explained made it all possible: the #4 (then #5) crossbar switch, the innovation to a mechanical electronic switching system all done with tone codes. The world connected by phone lines and Oz could go through it all by whistling. Sometimes he would get to a person deep in the network, an inward operator, and ask her to connect him to any line he wanted. But his favorite thing was reaching an electronic switching station. Then he didn't have to speak. He could use the sharp whistle tones to get wherever he wanted to go.

Oz had sat her down and showed her: seven short whistled tones. There was a click, another click. A distant ring, a connection sound. Another tone. Connected to a switching station in New York. Another series of whistles, and patched through to a switching station in London. Then Chicago. You could hear the response on the line—the gap, the distance—in the lag before the clicks registered. Then the other phone, Oz's second line rang.

“Pick it up.” She picked it up. A distant click. “Hello, girl,” Oz said into his phone. Less than a moment and it crackled on through the speaker by Jelly's ear. Thousands of miles, across a sea, contained in that slight lag.

“Hello, Oz,” Jelly said.

“Your voice just went to London and back to reach me.” There was no reason for it, just the fun of imagining sounds bouncing across the world in seconds. World whistling, he called it. Sometimes Oz was mischievous with his skills—he told her how he once walked past a man talking loudly on a pay phone. He did his sharp whistle and instantly disconnected the call. He could hear the man say, “Hello?
Hello?” But mostly Oz played with phones because he liked losing himself in the vast network of connections and he liked how he felt as a sound from his lips vibrated across the globe.

Oz sometimes patched into an open-sleeve conference circuit that allowed two or more people on a secret untracked and unbilled line. The phone phreaks—all those college boys—called this warbling. Chatting really, about phones mostly, with Ditto in Los Angeles and Mo in Seattle. David in England. They were united in the high of subverting Ma Bell. For its own sake, and also to find one another. Everyone used nicknames or fake names because this was illegal. Go-to-jail illegal, even though it felt like a harmless prank. So the warbling also concerned not getting caught, who got caught, who was being taped and recorded. Oz, whose real name was William, became the Great Oz because he was the first and the best, and Jelly, whose real name was Amy, was called Jelly Doughnut because Oz said she was soft and round and even sweeter on the inside. All the kids wanted to talk to Oz, but the funny thing was that Oz never had much interest in talking. He liked the tones and the mechanics and the distant clicks, whistling from one responsive line to another. But Jelly was different. Jelly liked to talk. Jelly could talk. She loved to patch into the open-sleeve circuit with the others. Their voices hanging in space; Jelly listening and laughing and recognizing. She was the only—the only—woman who phone phreaked. These were shy, awkward men. They gave her lots of attention, which she enjoyed, but they were never ever nasty.

Oz did not like the time she spent talking to other phreaks. At first he was proud of her, but then he became jealous. He wouldn't admit it, though. Eventually Oz started leaving the house when she got into a conversation and not returning until long after she had finished. He said that he didn't mind, but hearing the talking gave him a headache.

In the years after he had left her, Jelly would trace the way they unraveled in her mind. She thought if she could figure out the place they came apart, she could fix it and he would return to her. Being left was bottomless. Not only in the moment, but the way it gave the lie to all the moments that preceded it. Is that true? Is love real and true only if it continues? Was it revealed to be “not love” when it unraveled?