by Brad Fraser
I never saw him again.
PART FOUR
POOR SUPER MAN: CINCINNATI
IMMEDIATELY AFTER OPENING The Ugly Man I made my second trip to L.A. to take the various studio meetings my agents had set up for me. Randy came along again, but this time we stayed at the notorious Holiday Inn on Santa Monica, in the heart of West Hollywood—it was really one step above a bathhouse. I did at least two meetings a day over five days, and they were often quite far apart, so the driving was endless. We were both thrilled to get onto the Fox lot and walk through the still-standing Hello, Dolly! street set.
One thing I learned very quickly was how relentlessly heterosexual Hollywood was. While everyone expressed admiration for the Remains script, anything I pitched with a queer theme was quickly shot down.
I had been working on a sitcom pitch based on Remains without the darkness. Basically a smart-mouthed gay guy (David) and the straight female best friend who once loved him (Candy) share an apartment and various adventures, often aided by their eccentric friend down the hall who was perhaps a drag queen or a trans person. Whenever I tossed this pitch out, it was shut down immediately. I guess it was still too early for a Will and Grace. At the end of the week I left with a suitcase full of scripts that could be rewritten and video versions of European films that could be remade.
I had met a number of writers already working in Hollywood. They seemed to be well-paid, bitter people who worked a lot but rarely got anything made, and on those rare occasions when something did get made, the property was so changed they barely recognized it. I resolved to never take Hollywood too seriously, whatever might happen.
That isn’t to say I was happy to get back to Edmonton. I was feeling very limited in the city, and there was also an anti-Brad thing going on—the inevitable backlash, I suppose. The press, whom I’d sparred with over reviews and articles throughout my career, was getting hostile, with one journalist asking, “Is The Ugly Man Brad Fraser’s autobiography?,” and another referring to me as “Bad Phrases.” There was also a certain contingent within the theatre community who seemed particularly put out by my success. I knew it was time to move on again.
I gave my notice at the bungalow, put everything into storage and talked my sister into fostering my cats until further notice. The world was wide open to me and I could’ve moved to any number of cities, but I chose Toronto again.
I’d been spending a lot of time in Toronto anyway. I’d recently started talking to Robert Lantos’s company, Alliance Films, about adapting for film a prominent magazine story about an infamous journalist’s descent into madness in a foreign country. I was also meeting with various TV and stage companies and pitching them ideas. I usually stayed with Bob O or Tad.
For the next two years I would base myself casually in Toronto while flying all over the continent to take meetings and consider projects. I stayed with friends and acquaintances until they got tired of me drinking their booze and fucking their friends, at which time I would cheerfully move on. I always left an expensive gift behind. My mail was all sent to my agent, who knew how to reach me. No one really knew where I lived, and I liked it that way.
This was a golden age in Canadian theatre consumption in Toronto. George F. Walker’s Love and Anger had enjoyed great commercial success, transferring into one of the large houses for a limited run. Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters played on the stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, not known for its production of Canadian plays, let alone ones by First Nations writers. The uptight, snatchy old reviewers from the eighties had been replaced by some truly interesting critics who happily championed Canuck writers. I was a name. Academics and critics used the term “Fraserian” unironically.
One day I got a call from Denys and Roger; they had a director’s cut of the film and would be showing it at a prominent director’s theatre in New York for an audience that would fill out reaction cards. Would I attend? Of course I said yes, and arrangements were made for a quick trip to Manhattan.
That initial viewing with the film’s first audience was painful. I found the film slow and ponderous. Every scene opened with a wide establishing shot and then gradually moved closer in as the scene progressed. The actors were all kind of doing a method thing that really didn’t work well with my sharp dialogue, and that lack of energy I’d noticed on the set permeated the whole film. The play had been all snap and sizzle; the film was slow pan and fizzle. But, of course, the biggest problem was the screenplay.
Writing the first draft of the film, I had really let myself go. I saw it as a satirical horror film in the Tobe Hooper/George Romero fashion with a soupçon of Noël Coward thrown in. I really did try to make it cinematic and off the wall, to come up with a kind of storytelling that did on film what I’d been doing in the theatre. It was edgy, scary and rude. I recall one scene had a naked Bernie slicing open the chest of one of his victims to remove their beating heart and squeeze the blood from it over his erect cock.
Denys and Roger had been so alarmed by what they’d read that Denys had actually flown out to Edmonton for a couple of days to work on the script, which he decisively wanted to bring back closer to the style of the source material.
Having gotten the crazy one out of my system—and my first drafts traditionally would be crazy—I followed their directions and did a more faithful adaptation. Interestingly, we discovered that many of the scenes in the play were too short to register on film. That’s because film lacks the peripheral knowledge a live theatre audience has with a show like Remains. That knowledge lets them hold the storylines and scenes together unconsciously in a way film, with its constantly subjective point of view, cannot. Even then I could feel the theatricality of the dialogue thudding against the visual needs of film.
I was candid with Denys and Roger with my feelings about the film, and wrote up a point-by-point analysis suggesting a lot of specific cuts that I felt would improve it. They said my reaction to the film hadn’t been what they’d hoped for and that there would be further editing and technical work, since it was slated to open at the Toronto International Film Festival in a few months. Disappointingly, Cannes had passed on premiering the film.
In the meantime The Ugly Man was showing signs of life. In Toronto everyone passed on it for a variety of reasons—Toronto Canadian theatre had not found great success with satire or style. Thankfully, Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal had decided to do it and had hired Derek Goldby to direct.
That spring a friend from Toronto, who would die from AIDS in a few months, drove me to Montreal, where I put us up in a cheap hotel overnight. The friend, who didn’t speak French, was mystified by the show, but I was absolutely stunned by Derek’s production. He’d set the play in the Edwardian period and given it a highly stylized, cinema-noir-meets–Aubrey Beardsley aesthetic that elevated the material in a profound way. The design and the cast were exceptional, and included actress Micheline Lanctôt, whom I’d admired in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz at the Banff Centre fifteen years earlier.
However, the reaction from the press, many of whom had hailed Remains as a work of genius, was mostly angry. I heard that one critic had pointedly ripped his program in half and thrown it on the stage in contempt while the cast were taking their bows. But I didn’t care what the fucking reviewers said; I thought the show was brilliant.
I flew to Vancouver for work and had lunch with Cam. As we were walking down Davie Street afterwards he brought up a long-time close friend of his. “Dwayne and I always had a deal. When one of us got too sick and were in a lot of pain the other one would help them out.” I knew exactly what he meant by “help them out.”
Cam said, “He’s been in the hospital for the last few months. They can’t do anything for him.”
We stopped at a light. It was a bright day. All around us the heteronormative world was bustling about its mundane business.
Cam kept his eyes fixed on the traffic light acros
s the street as he said, “He was coughing up this—stuff—it smelled so horrible—he’d choke and gasp for air. One time part of his lung came up through his throat and I had to—poke it back down with my finger.”
The traffic light told us to walk and Cam continued. “I kissed him and picked up the pillow next to him and held it over his face. He didn’t fight or anything until at the very end when it was like his body had to do it even if his brain didn’t want to but he was too weak. Eventually he stopped.”
The sun was still shining. People flowed around us obliviously. I was stunned by the conversation we were having. I wanted to accost the people around me and say, “He just killed someone he loves to save them greater pain and you assholes don’t know anything about it! We are invisible to you. Our pain means nothing.”
Instead we walked on and I said, “Can’t they tell? Detached retinas or retinal hemorrhages or something?”
Cam said, “The doctors knew. The nurses knew. No one said anything.”
I nodded and we continued on to wherever we were going as if everything he’d told me was the most everyday thing in the world.
I flew back to Toronto, where I was squatting with a lawyer friend (oddly, I’ve always known a number of lawyers) who lived in an illegal loft that was part of his office on Richmond Street. Remains was slotted to open at the Toronto International Film Festival and the city was atwitter. I went to an endless number of parties where I was photographed for the local media and my opinion sought on whatever it was we were doing. There was a pre-showing screening and I invited Bob O and an entire circle of his friends I’d met since knowing him. They were all effusive and friendly before the showing. Most of them disappeared without commentary after.
The night of the premiere, my old friend David Wright and I shared a limo with Thomas Gibson and his brilliant wife Christine. Somewhere there’s a picture of David and me in the back seat looking totally like people who belonged in limos. Thom and I would stay in touch over the years as he starred in Dharma & Greg and Criminal Minds, and he was always a terrific friend. At the Winter Garden Theatre we walked a red carpet lined with klieg lights and reporters sticking mics in our faces every few feet. I watched the first few minutes of the film, then left David Wright, who hadn’t seen it, so I could slip out the stage door and smoke a joint in the alley with some of the technicians and featured players who’d worked on the movie.
When the film opened commercially just a few weeks later, critical reaction was mild. I wanted to disagree with the reviewers but I couldn’t.
I took the failure of the film amazingly well despite the fact there would be no big profit-share cash for me. I had a new project ready to roll.
* * *
—
The new play was something I’d started shortly after Pete and I broke up. I had no idea what I was working toward, though I had this vague idea about a successful artist who gets a job as a waiter because he’s out of touch with his muse.
It had been three years since I’d worked a regular job and it was getting on my nerves. Although I’d spent my twenties wishing I was something other than a waiter, once I stopped doing it I realized how much I enjoyed the constant mix of challenges and personalities that came with working in a restaurant.
I also wanted to write something about AIDS. By 1993 the AIDS play had become its own sub-genre in theatre. William M. Hoffman’s As Is, which I’d seen years earlier in Edmonton, and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart were the most famous American examples. They both came out of New York City, the epicentre of the plague. Canada had Kent Stetson’s underappreciated Warm Wind in China, produced in 1988. I’d seen or read all three of these scripts and admired them, but I also came to dread AIDS plays because so many of them were obvious and maudlin—a variation on the seventies plea-for-acceptance plays.
I knew my play would not be about the gay guy dying of AIDS. I also knew I wanted to write something that explored elements of the relationship I’d known with Pete, something that was an honest look at the situational and complicated dynamics of same-sex attraction that went beyond the trinary of gay, straight or bi. I knew I wanted David McMillan from Wolfboy and Remains to be the lead and to be, like me, HIV-negative.
If David didn’t have AIDS, then obviously someone close to him would have to be dealing with it. Instead of that being another gay friend, I wanted something that was more thematically evocative. Because the script was about the intimate love between a gay man and a straight man, a meeting of the gay world and the straight world, I needed someone who somehow belonged in both those worlds.
And so Shannon, the incomplete trans woman, was born. Shannon and David, like Candy and David, had a complicated backstory that is only hinted at in the play. I had met quite a few trans women after I came out and, unlike many in the gay community, I had no problem with them. Trans people had always been as much a part of the queer community as anyone else. I found the entire idea fascinating and had devoured any trans stories and characters I came across over the years. Shannon was the heart of the show and remains one of my favourite creations, despite the criticism I’ve taken from some quarters for daring to imagine someone so far removed from my own experience.
To sharpen the gender/sex divide I added two women: Violet, Matt’s no-nonsense wife, who was like every hard-edged, man-desiring girl from a working-class home I’d known in northeast Edmonton, and Kryla, the glossy, fast-talking-broad-with-a-hat, over-educated downtown gal who was David’s best friend.
The characters had a lovely symmetry and balance and I had no trouble writing scenes and vignettes for them, but I hadn’t yet found that central metaphor that would hold the concept together—the serial killer in Remains, the werewolf possibilities in Wolfboy—so everything I wrote felt fragmented and loose.
Then one morning one of my nephews called and woke me up. He was five at the time, and I’d ensured my niece and nephews were steeped in comic-book lore from an early age.
He said, “Is Superman dead?”
I realized he was referring to a recent publicity ploy by DC Comics to reawaken interest in their aging property. Superman was going to succumb to a creature named Doomsday and finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Despite the fact there’d been many stories about Superman being killed throughout his history, the mainstream press picked up the story.
I assured my nephew that no one ever really died in comics and that this was all a publicity stunt, and that Superman would be back in about six months when the stories about who would replace him got stale. I assured him all would be well.
After I hung up I thought, “This is my Superman. They’re killing my Superman. The one I grew up reading in the sixties.” I’d found the missing metaphor: the death of the silver-age Superman was the end of an era. After that, the writing came quickly. The play was meant to be as funny as it was tragic, as brutal as it was poetic, moving without being sentimental. And there would be captions.
In interviews over the years I’d often talked about how comics had influenced my work, and with this new play I wanted to explore that more deeply. I always found watching subtitled films or silent films with title cards interesting because I personally found the act of having to read while watching brought me more deeply into the narrative. I wondered how this would work in the theatre and how it would affect my writing. The captions became a kind of sixth character in the play who was actively participating in, and commenting on, the words and actions of the living characters.
Initial reaction to the early drafts was strong. This was the play they’d been waiting for, the true follow-up to Remains. Because it featured David McMillan, some called it a sequel to Remains, and it was in a way, but not literally. To me, all the David McMillan plays, while discrete, are linked.
This play’s connection to what was going on in my life at the time was uncanny. It sometimes felt that what I wrote took shape in reality a short time later.
The scene where Matt and David are dealing with the fallout of just having had sex and discussing the ethics of it and Matt says, “This is different. You’re a man,” was almost exactly what Pete would say to me a few months later when we were in Montreal after our initial break-up.
As I was writing, the deaths of people I knew continued. I kept a list of the names and added them to David’s roster of his dead friends in the play. Imagination and experience were woven together in a way I’d been seeking from the beginning of my career. I kept altering the dialogue, working always to make it more specific and more true to the way people actually communicate with one another.
I was immensely proud of what I’d written and felt I’d answered those critics who said I didn’t so much write plays as create novel theatrical experiences. Both are equally valid, but I wanted this one to be seen as a “real play.”
Shain shopped the script around to a number of theatres, and there was a great deal of interest, but it was Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati’s Mark Mocahbee, whom I’d met in Calgary a few years earlier, who beat the others to the punch. He secured the rights to the premiere production after Ensemble flew me to Cincy to check out the theatre. I liked the space and the vibe of the city. Also, my financial situation didn’t give me time to wait.
A few months later, while I was again taking meetings in L.A. with Randy, I picked up a Canadian paper at a newsstand and found out the Ensemble production had been cancelled “due to unforeseen circumstances.” I raced back to the hotel and called Shain. He said the board of directors at the theatre had reconsidered and overruled Mark and the AD. Apparently some board members had been made nervous after a 1990 exhibit of work by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and related artists had met with a virulent reaction in the city. My show was being cancelled because of the possibility of a homophobic backlash that could jeopardize the theatre’s future funding.
