POPism (8 page)

Another party that I especially remember from the two weeks we were in California was given for us by a sort of eccentric Green Stamps heir at the house of a friend of his. Louis Beech Marvin III was building his own house out there, an enormous round thing called Moonfire Ranch in Topanga Canyon with a bed that went up on pylons twenty or thirty feet in the
air—he had fourteen white German shepherds guarding the place. (What he really wanted to do, he said, was buy an island and have it be like Noah's Ark, with a pair of every animal on it. He did get his island, and he got a lot of the animals, too, but they were always dying on him.) Meanwhile, while he was building this incredible house, he lived on the grounds in a trailer filled with dirty laundry.

For a while there in the early sixties, it looked like a real solid art scene was developing in California. Even Henry Geldzahler felt he had to make a trip out once a year to check on what was happening. But there weren't enough dealers there and the museums weren't active enough, and the people just weren't buying art—they were satisfied looking at the scenery, I guess.

We took the
Easy Rider
route back, through Vegas, then down through the southern states.

Right after we got back to New York we sent the
Tarzan
film to the lab. (We used to give our film to a go-between, a little old lady, who would bring it over to Kodak for us.) When the rushes came back, Taylor decided he would edit it himself, so he worked on cutting and splicing it and he put a sound-on-tape sound track on and we went over to Jerome Hill's at the Algonquin Hotel one night to screen it.

Jerome was the grandson of the Minnesota railroad magnate James Hill and he was as generous as he was rich. He was busy shooting
Open the Door and See All the People
in 16-mm, which Taylor had been in, too. He had also made
Sand Castles
, and through his private foundation he supported a lot of artistic projects—groups like the Living Theater.

A young actor by the name of Charles Rydell was at that
Tarzan
screening. We had a mutual friend named Nancy March
who'd introduced us in the pouring rain on my first day in New York years before. Charles had been working in Nedick's then, and I was just off the bus from Pittsburgh, but I hadn't seen him—at least, not to talk to—since. However, I'd happened to catch his performance in
Lady in the Dark
with Kitty Carlisle at the Bucks County Playhouse, and I told him so right away. He thought I was putting him on—he looked at me as if to say, “Oh, come on—
no
body saw me in that.” He was a very big man with a big temper and a great sense of humor. He could really bellow, and he had the deep, full voice to do it right. At the
Tarzan
screening there was a fat guy named Lester Judson who every couple of minutes would point at the screen and say, “This isn't a movie—it's a piece of shit! You call this a movie?” Finally Charles got fed up and almost blasted him off the chair with “Oh, shut up, Lester! Here you're putting it down and this whole underground thing is just trying to get started!”

I liked Charles and I asked if I could call him to be in a movie of mine sometime. He said sure, any time.

One of the things that happens when you write about your life is that you educate yourself. When you actually sit down and ask yourself, “What
was
that all about?” you begin to think hard about the most obvious things. For instance, I've often thought, “What is a friend? Somebody you
know
? Somebody you talk to for some reason over a period of time, or what?”

When people describe who I am, if they don't say, “Andy Warhol the Pop artist,” they say, “Andy Warhol the underground filmmaker.” Or at least they used to. But I don't even know what the term
underground
means, unless it means that you don't want anyone to find out about you or bother you, the way it did
under Stalin and Hitler. But if that's the case, I can't see how I was ever “underground,” since I've always wanted people to notice me. Jonas says that the film critic Manny Farber was the first to use the word in the press, in an article in
Commentary
magazine about neglected low-budget Hollywood directors, and that then Duchamp gave a speech at some Philadelphia opening and said that the only way artists could create anything significant was to “go underground.” But from the different types of movies people applied it to, you couldn't figure out what it meant—aside, of course, from non-Hollywood and nonunion. But did it also mean “arty” or “dirty” or “freaky” or “plotless” or “nude” or “outrageously camp”? When I use the word myself to describe our movies, all I mean is very low-budget, non-Hollywood, usually 16-mm. (Luckily, at the end of the sixties the term was retired and replaced by “independently made films,” which was probably what “underground movies” should have been called from the beginning.)

When the independent filmmakers grouped together in '59 to form the New American Cinema Group, the organizing force behind it was Jonas Mekas. The N.A.C.G.'s stated purpose was to look into all the different ways of financing and distributing independently made movies. Along with Jonas there was Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, and De on the original board of directors. Before long, though, the way it is with most movements, factions developed when members realized that they had different ideas about how to get the main objective accomplished, and also that they had misunderstood each other all along on what the main objective was. Mainly, there were two types of underground film people: the ones who looked at their films from a scholastic or intellectual point of view—as works of art—and
thought of themselves as “underground filmmakers,” and the ones who looked at their films as commercial vehicles and thought of themselves as “independent filmmakers and distributors.” Out of what survived of the New American Cinema Group, Jonas created the Film-Makers' Co-operative.

Although at first Jonas seemed to be interested in both the scholarly and the commercial aspects of making films, by the end of the sixties it was clear that what he really was, was a scholar—he seemed completely content running his Anthology Film Archives. And by then, of course, he was famous.

As De told me, “Jonas is very clever, particularly at promoting himself. He took over that movie column in the
Voice
at zero pay—which was what the
Voice
paid in those days—because he realized it was a good place to pull together a huge following. Which it was. But what the rest of us were looking for was a way to make films independently of Hollywood, and get them distributed to audiences, not to
archives
!”

And Taylor said, “Ron Rice and I gave Jonas
The Flower Thief
to distribute and do you know where he opened it? Way down at the Charles Theater on the Lower East Side! When we'd wanted Madison Avenue! We didn't realize he was into a scholastic, museum-burial, archive-type number. I mean, who needs that? The things Jonas would do to an audience—like give them an entire evening of Stan Brakhage. I mean, talk about an ivory tower intellectual!” (Taylor softened toward Jonas the year he went to Rome, though, because Jonas had told Fellini that Taylor was the “number-one actor in America,” so Fellini staged a grand reception for him on the set of
Juliet of the Spirits
.)

You have to understand where Jonas came from, though, to understand his attitude toward movies. For him, they were like political art. I doubt that he ever once thought of a movie as
entertainment. He was one of those people who are serious about everything, even when they laugh.

The farm he was born on in Lithuania got taken over by the Soviet Union when he was seventeen. Two years later the German army pushed the Soviets out, and the Nazis came along. All during the German occupation, he was involved in underground publishing. When he and his brother, Adolph, were about to be arrested by the military police, somebody gave them fake papers so they could get into the University of Vienna. “But we were caught,” Jonas told me, “and sent to a forced labor camp near Hamburg where we spent most of the war, and after the war we spent five years in various displaced persons camps.”

He studied literature and philosophy in the American-occupied part of Germany till '49, when the United Nations refugee organization brought him to the United States. “We were helpless,” he told me. “We went wherever we were pushed by the various forces.”

There were jobs waiting for Jonas and his brother in Chicago but when they got to New York, they decided to stay right there. They got work in Brooklyn factories—bed factories, boiler factories—“making little nothings,” loading trucks on the docks, cleaning parts of ships; and from practically their first day in New York, they went to almost every film showing at the Museum of Modern Art.

Jonas didn't learn a word of English until after the war. Once, when I asked him how he got so interested in film, he said, “To write in a language, you have to be born to it, so I could never really communicate through writing. But in films you work with images, and I saw that I could use something other than written language to shout about what had happened to me and everyone else in the war.” (The first film he did,
Guns
of the Trees
in '61, was literally full of shouting and spitting, as if he were getting the whole war out of his system.) Jonas had as serious a view of film as he had of life. He was the most un-Pop person I can think of in the sixties, he was such an intellectual. But he was also a great organizer, and he gave the people making small films a place to show them.

In '61, when Jonas was having screenings in the Charles Theater on Avenue B and 12th Street down on the Lower East Side, the young guys who owned the theater let him have open screenings where people could show any films of theirs they wanted.

These places where people could get together and exchange ideas were a lot like a party. I used to see some of the programs and open screenings at the Charles until it closed in '62, and I also used to go with friends to the Film-Makers' Coop on Park Avenue South, which was also where, as I said, Jonas lived in a corner: after being pushed around from country to country, he finally felt like he had a home.

After the Charles closed, Jonas started midnight screenings at the Bleecker Street Cinema till, he explained, “They thought we were ruining business for them, so they threw us out.” From there they started to screen at a small legitimate theater on East 27th Street called the Gramercy Arts Theater, right around the corner from the Coop.

I brought
Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort Of
to Jonas and then as I started doing the
Kiss
series, I'd bring those in one by one and he'd screen a
Kiss
before each new program. I brought in some newsreel-type dance films I'd made, too, and then I decided, oh, why not bring in
Sleep
, which I'd actually faked by looping footage, so although it was hours of a person sleeping, I hadn't actually shot that much. When someone found out before the screening exactly what it was going to be and said he
wouldn't sit through it all for anything, Jonas got a piece of rope and tied him to a chair to make an example out of him. I guess Jonas realized it was me he should have tied down instead, because he couldn't get over it when I got up and left after a few minutes, myself. Sometimes I like to be bored, and sometimes I don't—it depends what kind of mood I'm in. Everyone knows how it is, some days you can sit and look out the window for hours and hours and some days you can't sit still for a single second.

I've been quoted a lot as saying, “I like boring things.” Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn't mean I'm not bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they're essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same—I want it to be
exactly
the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

At the end of '63 when I decided to shoot
Blow Job
, I called up Charles Rydell and asked him to star in it. I told him that all he'd have to do was lie back and then about five different boys would come in and keep on blowing him until he came, but that we'd just show his face. He said, “Fine. I'll do it.”

We set everything up for the next Sunday afternoon, and then we waited and waited and Charles didn't show up. I called
his apartment and he wasn't there either, so then I called Jerome Hill's suite in the Algonquin and he answered the phone and I screamed, “Charles! Where are you?” and he said, “What do you mean, where am I? You know where I am—
you
called
me
,” and I said, “We've got the cameras ready and the five boys are all here, everything's set up.” He was shocked; he said, “Are you crazy? I thought you were
kidding
. I'd never do
that
!”

We wound up using a good-looking kid who happened to be hanging around the Factory that day, and years later I spotted him in a Clint Eastwood movie.

In the fall of '63 I started going around more and more to poetry readings with Gerard. I would go absolutely anywhere I heard there was something creative happening. We went down to the Monday night poetry readings organized by Paul Blackburn at the Café Le Metro on Second Avenue between 9th and 10th streets where each poet would read for five or ten minutes. On Wednesday nights there was a solo reading. Poets would just get up and read about their lives from stacks of papers that they had in front of them. I've always been fascinated by people who can put things down on paper and I liked to listen for new ways to say old things and old ways to say new things.