PIGGY BANK (1976)
As new Palmer Lab bills arrived in the mail at my apartment, including invoices from the Claremont shoot (picked up some crucial shots for the narrative), I just placed them in a drawer with all the rest of my unpaid bills – not something I currently recommend. Without funds, it seemed counter- productive to terrorize myself with the financial facts that I was bucking on a daily basis. So I did my best to forget about my overhead, tune out reality (all too frightening!) except for what was projected on the screen.
On the home front my kindly landlord let me go three, four, five months without paying rent, while the corner grocery store let me pay off my bills at the end of each month. I was fortunately very high on the editing of Showboat 1988, which kept my spirits up during this difficult time.
Sometime around March my mother offered to start sending me a check for $20 each week as a type of birthday present (I had just turned 32), just to help out with groceries and insure that I could feed my little kids on weekends. And of course, I quickly got behind. Since I was scrounging the smallest amounts of cash, a dollar here, a dollar there, just to keep editing (it took a $1 bridge toll to get from Oakland to Palmer’s Lab in San Francisco), the $20 didn’t stretch very far.
I finally resorted to asking my nine-year old daughter, Heather, if she would agree to loan me money from her piggy bank each Monday morning, to help me stay afloat through the week. I explained that I would return all her money on Fridays, when we arrived back at my apartment, and even add an extra fifty cents for interest each time. Heather was initially doubtful that she should risk her nest egg. But after I repeatedly answered her doubts (yes, I would return exactly what she had saved – the silver dollars, paper money, exact breakdown of change), and reiterated her profit of fifty cents per transaction (a new half-dollar coin for her collection!), she finally broke into a large grin and agreed to my proposal.
I know this sounds like very small strokes after the thousands I rustled up for filming, lab costs, and the rest, but sooner or later it all comes down to pennies, even with feature filmmaking.
Each Friday I would take my mother’s check for $20 which, thanks to her precision mailing showed up regularly in the mailbox, and cash it at the Bank of America in downtown Oakland. And I’d ask the teller for the same breakdown of seven silver dollars, three half- dollars (plus one for interest), ten quarters, a certain number of dollar bills, change etc., packing it all neatly back in Heather’s special box/bank at my apartment, once again preparing it for her careful inspection. By the time each weekend rolled around and I settled back into my babysitting duties, I was thankful for the required break from filmmaking, worn out from the trials of editing and my tight money routine.
I can’t remember how many extra half-dollars Heather earned, but it was enough money for her to figure out that she had a real cash-cow on her hands!
Finally, after hitting the same bank teller a few weeks in a row, cashing my twenty-dollar check for Heather’s combination of coins and bills, the young but dour-faced woman behind the counter asked me why I always requested such an odd assortment of currency. When I told her a shortened version of the basic story, about how I borrowed from my daughter’s piggy bank, she looked at me with total disgust.
FACING THE MUSIC (1976)
In late April, having faked my way along for another few months, I was called into a meeting with Mr. Marshal, along with Bill Palmer himself, the owner of the Palmer lab in San Francisco. They had finally figured out a way to stop me from continuing to edit my film under their roof. Mr. Palmer spoke first. He said that since I already owed them so much money, and wanted to continue charging editing room rent at the lab, what I was really asking them to do was to invest in my film. And if that was so, then they wanted to see a prospectus of my current Showboat 1988 project, view some footage, and then make an appraisal and final decision. If my film met their criteria for investment then they would go ahead and back it.
About a week later, after getting a few more days of editing under my belt (there wouldn’t be many more under their roof, I feared), having screened some footage for them and given a couple pages of text, I received word of their “difficult” decision (it had gone against me, as imagined), and a pre-appointed time (the following Friday) they would officially explain their reasons for voting against making further investment in my film. My hangmen had manners. But between showing my cut to the lab executives and our proposed meeting, a $ miracle occurred. I learned by reading the San Francisco Chronicle that I had just won a $7,500 grant from The National Endowment For the Arts (NEA) to complete Showboat 1988!
Walking into that fateful meeting, I greeted my two sober associates, shook their hands, and took a seat at the table. And actually, they didn’t look very happy, obviously not relishing the job of removing a working artist from their lab. I tried to let them off the hook as quickly as possible. I handed Mr. Marshal the newspaper article which announced that I had won the NEA grant, and gave Bill Palmer some information in letter form about the NEA. Bill spoke first, saying that he thought that the NEA might be a viable source of revenue for my projects up the road, but that unfortunately it wouldn’t help our present problem. But Before Palmer was completely finished Marshal interrupted. Turning the newspaper toward his boss, he said “No, Bill. He got the grant!”
KILL ME TO STOP ME (1977)
Early in January, 1977 I got a telegram from Marc Weiss, the programmer at Bleecker Street Cinema who had shown my first feature, A Man, A Woman, and A Killer, saying that Film International in Rotterdam had picked it to be presented at their film festival in The Netherlands, and that I should also bring my next film as well. I saw this as an opportunity to bust out of my editing hell, wrap up my cut under pressure of a deadline, and thusly I set out on a crash course to complete Showboat 1988 within ten days. It was during this impossibly hectic few days of around-the-clock work that my willpower was tested at an Oakland laundromat.
As I was doing a hundred things at once in preparation for the Rotterdam film festival, I realized I also needed to wash a load of clothes at the neighborhood laundromat. I don’t know what errand I could have performed in that short period of wash time, but I thought of something. It felt like every second counted. So I left my load unattended, jumped in my car, and sped around for an hour.
Returning to the laundromat to put my wash in a dryer, I noticed that in my absence a cleaning woman had cordoned off half of the room and had already begun to soap down the floors in front of the dryers. As I edged toward her side of the room with my cart full of soggy-but-clean clothes she stopped me in my tracks, telling me to wait until she finished up. When I asked her if the dryers still worked, she answered, “Yes, but yuh ain’t gonna use’em ’til I’m done!”
It was obvious that she was going to be clraning for at least another hour or more, totally screwing up my plans. My schedule for editing was so tight that if I didn’t get those clothes dried right then and there I would be wearing those wet things all the way to Europe. And that was obviously unacceptable.
As soon as I saw her heading to the other end of the room, her back to me, I scooted onto her wet and soapy floor, opened the porthole door of a dryer, threw my clothes in, and started digging for quarters. Upon noticing my transgression, she immediately rushed over to where I was standing and laid into me again, ordering me off ‘her’ floor. But I wasn’t budging this time.
“You’ll have to kill me to stop me,” is what came out of my mouth, my crazed eyes meeting hers. And she knew I wasn’t kidding. She backed away a little, seeming to have finally recognized one of her own. We both belonged in the same booby hatch that day.
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CUTTING THE PRINT (1978)
While my Rotterdam film festival screening of SHOWBOAT 1988 went well—it was pretty successful as a crowd-pleaser—I still decided to modify the cut, re- arrange it as new editorial ideas came to mind. And the only way to do that was actually edit a print, make cuts that way. At first this procedure felt totally insane because as a filmmaker I had been dedicated to keeping my prints pristine, always trying to protect them from any little break or tear, and here I was cutting one of them to ribbons! But there were no other options left. If I cut right at the frame line between one set of images and another, I would be carrying along a little more than a second of sound from the previous image at the head end. So I removed the sound-tainted first 26 frames of each scene as I reassembled new cuts, tape-splicing portions of the print into new experimental orders.
Rearranging the assembly of printed scenes became more like an intellectual exercise, thoughts and ideas fueling new concepts of how the film’s separate parts (lead actor Ed Nylunds life story, audition acts, scripted scenes, video interviews, news footage) could fuse to deliver a cohesive experience.
Finally, at a point sometime in late January, 1978, after I’d made hundreds of tape splices on the projection print, I stumbled upon a new blend of story and acts that seemed to come alive in my hands.
“It’s working! It’s working!” I shouted to myself, praying that I wasn’t just completely deluded from spending so much time alone. With the cut down to 93 minutes I felt that maybe I had finally hit the correct length. A manager at Palmer’s processing lab had once told me that “Your film better be damn good for every minute over 90, because 90 is the limit our bodies can comfortably sit without fidgeting.” So knowing I had approximated that desirable length, and seeing the film deliver with a gusto and clarity of purpose, I had to believe that my job was finally done.
CIGARETTE WAR (1978)
I decided to use my last $200 for a trip to Michigan, to enter the Ann Arbor Film Festival with my only print of Showboat 1988 (hundreds of double-sided splices!). I would hand-carry the print right to the selection committee, making sure that I didn’t lose it through the mail. I hoped that this test before unfamiliar audiences might tell me the film was done—and make all the pain of editing worthwhile. Girlfriend Julie (later my wife) and I had been seeing each other regularly by then, and she agreed to take over my childcare responsibilities for the two weekends in early March, while I traveled to the festival. My kids had already gotten used to her, so I knew everything would be fine. It was great to be in love and have a film.
In Ann Arbor, I was housed by the ex-husband of Anne Wehrer, the dear woman who had helped me survive my first film trip to New York in 1975, when the Bleecket St. Cinema had given a show to A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER. Once there in Michigan I was meeting an intriguing group of Ann Arbor artists, men and women in their forties and fifties, some of whom I had heard about from Anne and our mutual friend Mary Ashley. Their legendary “Once Group” had spawned important artists like New York’s Robert Rauschenberg.
At the core of the group left in Ann Arbor was George Manupelli who had founded the ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL and was its current director. George and I had met once before, in Death Valley, California in the early 1970s. And, of course, he had given me that great tip of how to soft-light A Man, a Woman, and a Killer (and had awarded that movie “Director’s Choice’ at the film festival in 1975).
One day, as I sat in the lounge with George and about fifteen others of the festival clique, he started laying into me out of the blue, saying how I had done the meanest thing to him, something meaner than anything anyone had ever done to him in his entire life. Luckily, I was confident enough as a person at this point (I had the film!) that I was able to regard the first stages of his diatribe as just what it appeared to be – a little art game. Gradually he gained everyone’s attention as he described in detail how I, the “biggest shit in the world,” had withheld his cigarettes during an LSD trip we were on together in Death Valley.
As he carried on, I tried to remember the incident. I knew that I hadn’t taken much of anything that time, maybe a quarter of a tiny “window pane” of the drug, but I did finally remember telling him that he didn’t need to smoke, that he was better off without cigarettes.
It suddenly came back to me how I'd held his pack of cigarettes in the air, out of his reach. I also seemed to remember something about him having crutches, for mobility with a broken leg or something. Watching him try to navigate rocks and the changing terrain of the desert, and light cigarettes at the same time, had prompted me to try and convince him to forgo the smoking. And as I recall, he had. Of course, I had no idea that he'd been harboring such resentment ever since.
As he built up momentum, focusing everyone’s attention on this dumb issue, it actually started to upset me. With all the little nods and side comments of the encircled group I suddenly felt like they were ganging up. Before I could do something to turn it around, laugh, get up, or fart (anything), Manupelli moved in for real blood.
In front of the entire group he said, “What makes you think your film will even get shown here?” It was at this point that it stopped being funny at all. This was hitting below the belt. Then he doubled up. “I can guarantee you that your film will never be shown at Ann Arbor.” And everyone in the circle agreed, nodding and mumbling things like, “That’s right.”
Like a doomsaying Greek chorus, they all agreed in unison that I’d done George a terrible injustice, and now I had to pay the price. Keep in mind that this little group consisted of all the Ann Arbor Film Festival hierarchy––film selection committee, judges, the whole shooting match.
I knew that part of what I had just experienced was just a strange type of psychodrama/art performance, a mind-game juxtaposing art with real life, of which Manupelli was a master. So I shouldn’t have been bothered, right? But no one could have imagined all the hell I had gone through just to have a chance to see Showboat 1988 projected on a movie screen before an audience. I knew I didn’t deserve any special considerations beyond being judged fairly by the selection committee, but I still prayed that I would at least have my film screened before I left Michigan, And even if it was selected I wasn’t sure that the tape splices would hold, couldn’t guarantee that the film wouldn’t unravel, break apart sometime during its hour and a half show. How many more disappointments would I have to endure for this one film, I wondered? I had struggled with it for almost three years. In addition, I had bought a one-way ticket and didn’t know how I would pay for the flight home.
While wandering around in the snow (what was I doing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, anyway?) I got an idea to just buy Manupelli a bunch of cigarettes as a peace offering. I located a nearby tobacco store and bought a carton of his special brand of Players cigarettes, the kind he’d so proudly displayed during my inquisition. I opened up the carton and emptied all the loose packs into my carry-all bag. I would make sure that he felt paid back, in full.
During the course of the day, and into the evening, whenever I encountered one of his cronies––the people who had sat in on my “circle of shame”––I gave them a cigarette pack, asking them to please just slip it to him without bothering to tell it was from me. By going through his friends in this way, I thought I could reduce some of the negativity before he had a chance to retaliate. I worried that he might use this cigarette-payback for more grandstanding, and wasn’t emotionally prepared to deal with that.
Fortunately, each person I met seemed happy to oblige, picking out a fresh, unopened pack of Players from my bag with a twinkle in their eyes. I didn’t realize that these high-powered friends of Manupelli's were, themselves, experts in the parlor game we’d played. They each knew how to survive initiation rites and eat their own.
So all during that big opening night of the film festival, Manupelli’s friends handed him my packs. When he offered someone a single cigarette they would take it and later return an unopened pack. Because he was on automatic pilot, and drinking heavily, he didn’t notice the difference. When he offered someone a half-opened pack to bum a cigarette they would return an unopened pack, and a minute later his half-full one too. Each of these artists put a slightly different spin on the process of giving him my cigarettes, pushing the concept to a limit far beyond anything I had envisioned. Soon, in his super-inebriated state (many beers and films later), he was having trouble finding any available pockets for cigarettes. He hadn’t noticed that he’d been filling up with more and more packs all along. He would squirm first right, then left, reaching for back pants pockets (already full to the brim!), trying to cram packs down upon other packs. The noose was tightening.
Finally, at some point things hit the wall. Manupelli absolutely could not find an empty pocket anywhere for the unopened pack in his hands. And that’s when some spark of consciousness told him he’d been had. When he saw me next, across the hall during a film’s intermission, he was in shambles, stuttering, calling my name loudly, squawking like a trapped parrot.
“HI RICK! WANT A CIGARETTE? WANT A CIGARETTE?”
He was drunk, confused, but not so disoriented that he didn’t realize through all the fog that I had performed a payback, and with some measure of artistic grace (I CAN’T TAKE TOTAL CREDIT HERE—IT WAS THE GROUP FLEXING THEIR COMBINED CREATIVE TALENTS). Still, I was relieved that that was over.
The next day Showboat 1988 won 1st Place, and most importantly, $200 (TWO-HUNDRED BUCKS!!), which got me airfare back to Oakland & home. The following week the print headed out from Ann Arbor (splices and all), for their national film festival tour where it won several more cash prizes. And Variety gave it a glowing review, saying, “The acts range from incredible to merely bizarre,” ending with, “...the put-on is pulled off!”
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MY SHOWBOAT 1988 FINALE-––takes Piggy bank, NEA grant, Rotterdam Intl. , and "Cigarette War" (Ann Arbor Film Festival), to get 'IN THE CAN.'