The plan was for us all to drive to the future landing site of the intergalactic federation fleet. Charles, Lianne and I would be riding in the Unarius ‘space caddie’ – a bright blue Cadillac with a model of a flying saucer fixed to the top and the message ‘Welcome Your Space Brothers’ written on the side – and the crew would follow behind. We took off, appropriately enough, like a rocket, leaving the crew vehicle in our dust. Alas, it was several minutes before we realized we’d lost them and – this being before mobile phones – had no way of contacting them. As we travelled, Lianne and Charles were wondering aloud – given the screw-up – which of their various past lives they were now reliving. They couldn’t seem to agree, and were becoming irritable. In the back seat I was having flashbacks to long car journeys growing up, feeling hot and bothered, my parents arguing, not to mention the nylon space suit which, in the heat, was becoming itchy and increasingly unfunny.
Having failed to rendezvous with the crew, we drove back to the Unarius headquarters and there I sat in my space uniform, wondering about my next move. Charles and Lianne disappeared. It was strange and depressing: comedy and high jinks had curdled into a feeling of being lost and forlorn. A woman who was plainly mentally ill wandered into the building and began asking me questions about the space brothers, which I didn’t feel well qualified to answer. Finally, what felt like hours later, the crew called, from a payphone. They had found the landing site and would meet us there.
We drove out again and when we arrived, the light was going. We had about fifteen minutes and captured a short sequence of me at the landing site: an expanse of scrubby desert.
‘It doesn’t look as though it would be the ideal landing place for a spacecraft just because it’s so uneven,’ I said.
‘Oh, the technology they possess – the space brothers – is entirely in advance of anything we know,’ Charles said.
‘Is it OK to call them aliens?’
‘No! They’re not aliens. They’re homo sapiens, like you and I. They have the same anatomy.’
‘They’re homo . . . ?’
‘Sapiens.’
The mix-up with the crew and the ensuing delay blew out the schedule. We were able to film the Unarian choir singing a bizarre space song about the flying saucers coming, but an interview with a small cult in Los Angeles, scheduled for the following day, had to be cancelled and I felt guilty – I couldn’t help feeling it was my fault due to my failure to stay in contact with the crew vehicle.
We were now three days into the shoot and clearly it wasn’t going brilliantly. I probably should have felt bereft. But the truth was I had such low expectations for myself that by my own lights I was doing sort of OK. I hadn’t burst into tears on camera or shat my pants. In a way, I was ahead of the game.
On day three, we flew to Montana then drove several hours through a wild landscape of snow-patched fields and lonely farmhouses, and in the distance the Bitterroot Mountains, to the far west of the state, arriving late in the afternoon at a small trailer. This was the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, a white supremacist Christian group. There were only two of them: Archbishop Carl Franklin and Pastor Wayne Jones. They came to the door in matching uniforms modelled on those worn by the Nazi Brownshirts. They were vague on when the apocalypse would happen and when Jesus was coming; they just knew it would be soon and who he was coming for: specifically, white people, with other races banished to other planets.
‘We teach the gospel of the Kingdom, which Jesus teached,’ Franklin said. ‘He did not teach a gospel of so-called brotherly love with other races . . . He came only for his own race, the white race, the Aryan or Adamic race.’
Jones chipped in, ‘Each race will have its own territorial imperative, its own place. There will be no integration.’
‘And will it be on Earth?’
‘No. See, the Earth was the inheritance of His children only.’
‘So only the white people get Earth,’ I clarified. ‘So the planet the black people get, will it be better than the white people’s planet, about the same, or not quite as good?’
‘Well, it’ll be whatever they make it.’
‘So they could make it as nice as they want?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So what about if there are white people on Earth and Earth’s not doing so well and they see the black people have done a good job on their planet, would they be allowed to maybe emigrate?’ I asked.
‘No, there is no interracial mixing. No.’
It was a paradoxical mood – as the conversation progressed, the Nazi Christians settled into an attitude of teacherly indulgence. They seemed grateful for some attentive company, and my questions, ludicrous as they were, had a soothing effect. Later, I found out that the two of them had a long history in far-right politics – they’d been involved with Aryan Nations, as chief of staff and chief of security – but in that moment they came across as a pair of lonely bachelors, enlightening their visitor in a friendly way on the secret knowledge of their theology.
We retired to their small kitchen, where they made me tea. They talked about Star Trek and Star Wars – they believed that the mythology of the two franchises contained a great deal of historical truth about the grand cosmic plan.
‘Star Trek does actually represent some of the battles that were fought when Lucifer actually came to the Earth and declared himself a God.’
‘How about Star Wars? Pretty accurate?’
‘Pretty accurate.’
By now, I had the impression I had cast a kind of benign spell over them and that there was almost nothing I could say that would break it. I sang a space hymn that the Unarians had taught me, and wondered whether our rapport was now strong enough that it could possibly cause them to recant some of their racism.
‘I have one teensy-weensy, eensy-speensy bit of Jewish blood,’ I said. ‘Do you think I might be allowed to stay on planet Earth?’
‘You will have some place to call your own,’ Jones said.
As I left, putting on my woolly hat and stepping out into the cold dark Montana night, I said, ‘After the race war, when we’re all on other planets, maybe we can keep in touch by phone.’
‘Communications are unlimited when things are put back right,’ Franklin said.
Over the years I’ve been tagged with the epithet ‘faux-naive’ – sometimes unfairly, I feel – but that encounter with the two millenarian neo-Nazis was one time when I definitely earned the description, lobbing fake-sincere questions that ostensibly attempted to put a humane gloss on a weird space-Nazi vision, thereby satirizing it. After the encounter, back at the hotel, the sound recordist came up to me. He looked a little pale.
‘I’m Jewish,’ he said. ‘Kind of weird spending a couple of hours with people you know would like to see you annihilated. But I thought you handled it rather brilliantly.’
The camera operator, an older guy from the Bay Area, also sought me out. ‘You’ve been on this journey the last few days and I’ve seen you grow,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with a lot of correspondents. Your voice, your inflections are beautiful, because it’s the voice of an ordinary person.’ Then, perhaps feeling he’d overdone the compliment, he added: ‘I find all the voices of ordinary people beautiful.’
In characteristic fashion, I toggled from the insecurity of the preceding days to an overweening feeling of self-satisfaction. I began to think what a shame it was that such rich material would have to be whittled down to an eight-minute segment. It seemed to me we had enough interviews and moments to deliver a spin-off project, possibly of feature length. That night, at our hotel in Missoula, Montana, Chris and I got drunk as a celebratory valediction to the shoot. I overslept the next day and very nearly missed the flight back to New York.
After I got back I fell ill, possibly related to the stress of the preceding week. I called in to say I was unwell.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jerry Kupfer said. ‘Take your time, no need to rush in.’
Late
r I realized that I’d been in a holding pattern – kept away from the office while they decided whether I’d done a good enough job to be offered more work.
On day three Jerry called and asked if I wanted to come in to the office.
I was hired.
Chapter 7
Don’t Burn Me Now
For a year and a half, up the Amazon in a rickety motorboat, in the revolutionary hills of Mexican Chiapas, among religious crazies in Jerusalem and good old boys in the backroads of the Deep South, and occasionally amid the almost-as-alien milieu of a well-funded workplace with ambitions to change American television and society, I worked at TV Nation. But it was all a salutary apprenticeship – I was learning, without realizing it, skills and techniques that I would rely on through the course of my TV career.
That was all in the future. When I started I was simply intent on lasting from week to week, working from segment to segment. I remember thinking if I could get enough together for a reel, maybe I could find more TV work when Sarah and I left for Vietnam. Later the Vietnam option receded as my position at TV Nation became more secure. I figured I should keep going as long as they would have me.
It was a summer replacement series, commissioned for six episodes on a trial basis. My beat was, more or less, offbeat cultural phenomena – or, for want of a better term, weirdness. For an idea to work, there also needed to be some political or social relevance. A branch of the Ku Klux Klan whose leader was rebranding it a civil rights group for white people. Avon sales ladies who worked in the Amazon rainforest, selling cosmetics to dusty villagers. A company in Baltimore that specialized in cleaning up the mess left by crime scenes and suicides.
At the time I didn’t have enough TV experience to know how far from being a typical show TV Nation was. Much as he had reinvigorated the documentary form with Roger & Me, Michael was attempting a new way of making TV. He would often say he wanted to see meaningful political change in his lifetime, and the production had an enjoyable mission-focused atmosphere of being about something bigger than making entertainment. It was part TV project, part political advocacy group, with a sprinkling of religious cult. ‘Behave as if you are never going to get another job in television,’ he would say. He told us we should consider it a good sign if we were ever arrested while making a segment.
Michael had a year-zero attitude to the work. In long story meetings in his office, he would slouch back in his chair and ramble about his pet subjects, mumbling out of the side of his mouth: his theory that OJ had been framed for the killing of his wife Nicole; the liberationist properties of rock and roll for the baby-boomer generation; random people in the media he had a grudge against for their reviews of Roger & Me. Prior to working at TV Nation, I had thought of myself as being politically liberal, though not in an active way. But TV Nation’s undercurrent of Jacobin anger appealed to me. It spoke to my unacknowledged resentful side that saw the world as corrupt and inhospitable. To be fair, this was driven as much by my own callow angst against those older and more comfortable – and a world I viewed (ridiculously) as having taken insufficient notice of me – as it was by any righteous political attitude. At least as much as the politics, I enjoyed the weirdness and danger of the show and its writers and, in the spirit of Shakespeare’s third life-stage, I was seeking ‘the bubble reputation’ in the camera’s mouth, in charged encounters with excitable extremists on the American fringe.
One of my proudest moments came during the second season of TV Nation while making a segment about Ted Nugent, the right-wing rocker, when I was manhandled and shoved by a gatekeeper at the Washington office of the NRA after being repeatedly told to leave. Later, back in the office, Michael commended me, using me as a kind of object lesson for other staff and drawing attention to the irony that a person born to privilege should end up his fiercest soldier.
Without realizing it, I began to breathe in Michael’s way of making television. There was a house style that dictated everything should be shot hand-held; when a correspondent met a contributor for the first time you captured it for real; there were no sit-down interviews. Everything was geared towards creating a sense of liveliness and authenticity. One of the few times I saw Michael annoyed was when a producer showed a rough cut that had a reverse shot from inside a door as it opened, signalling to any thoughtful viewer that the sequence had been set up in advance. ‘I never want to see that shot in this show,’ Michael said solemnly.
Many of the show’s most memorable segments involved satirical stunts and pranks. In one, Michael hired a ‘TV Nation lobbyist’ to see ‘how much democracy $5000 could buy’ – they managed to get a ‘TV Nation Day’ passed in congress. Another involved Michael flying to Britain and buying a Lordship. In another, a black TV Nation correspondent, Rusty Cundieff, attempted to hail a cab – and was repeatedly passed by in favour of criminals and men in clown suits. All of the segments were supposed to serve the show’s political agenda of advancing socialism.
TV Nation was justly lauded for the inventiveness of these satirical pieces, but what made them work wasn’t just the concepts but their execution and in particular Michael’s eye for reality-based comedy and the moments of tension and awkwardness it created. Interviews that went sideways. The corporate handler putting his hand over the camera. Random people shouting abuse. Michael had a gift for taking situations into extreme terrain by nudging and twitting his interviewees in a friendly way, threatening to run into the back of a factory across the Mexican border to check out working conditions or gatecrashing political conventions in a quixotic attempt to hug all fifty US governors.
TV Nation’s strange mix of comedy show and political documentary was reflected in the way the show was staffed. There was a team of writers who came up with ideas and who tended to be younger and less ideological than the rest of the staff but who were in a way – certainly at the beginning – Michael’s inner circle. Then, at one remove, there were segment producers, some of them distinguished documentary film-makers with Oscar nominations to their credit. At marathon meetings, Michael and his wife Kathleen, who was also an exec on the show, would sit in session with the writers as producers came in for progress reports on the segments they were developing. For all his political bent, Michael seemed to view his writers in an almost talismanic way, recognizing that for the show to work it needed first and foremost to be funny.
Always there was a hunger for ideas, to the point where ‘What else ya got?’ – Michael’s question to a writer or producer who was pitching him – became an office catchphrase.
While many of the segments on the show were high-concept satirical pieces, my own bits tended to be less stunt-driven. Usually they involved me visiting a weird or eccentric character with questionable views and then shooting long days and pushing him or her until something funny happened.
In a way, the millennium piece, with its mixture of crazy religion and racism, set the template for much of my subsequent work. My second shoot was the one about the Klan rebranding. Before we flew to the location, the segment producer, Kent Alterman, convened a bull session in the conference room. Someone suggested it might be funny if I wore a Klan robe and hood during filming. Michael advised against it. ‘You don’t want that photo out there,’ he said. Michael felt the segment wouldn’t require any big gestures on my part for it to work. In the mid-eighties, before he made Roger & Me, Michael had collaborated with the director Kevin Rafferty on a feature documentary about the racist right called Blood in the Face. He knew how the Klansmen operated, he said. ‘If you just go down there and film, without them meaning it to, all the racist crap will slip out. They can’t help themselves.’
We flew out to the location a couple of days later. Having already made one segment involving white supremacists, I imagined it might be the same drill with the Klan: be nice, and wide-eyed, and gently satirize their ludicrous racial vision. But it quickly became clear these were a different calibre of racist – they weren’t sequestered in the mountains of western Montana, l
onely and maladapted. They were in mainstream America. Their spiel, about being for white civil rights, had a surface plausibility, and they had an instinct for the need to cover up their more outlandish beliefs.
Our first contributor, Michael Lowe, lived in a quiet unassuming single-storey home outside Waco, Texas, which he shared with his mother. Probably in his forties, slightly built, mullet-haired, in jeans and a short-sleeved collared shirt, he came to the door, seeming both a little friendly and a little wary. Much of that day is lost to me but I can reconstruct it from viewing the finished segment. He led us out into his extensive yard, green and overgrown and backing onto fields, centred around a vegetable patch. Nodding to my heritage, he smiled and said, ‘Those are my English peas.’ With that old footage as evidence, I’d like to make fun of Michael’s appearance but what is clear is that, of the two of us, it is I – in an ill-fitting thrift-store sports jacket, hair shaggy and uncombed – who am the more ludicrous to look at.
‘You’re the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klu Klan,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How is your Klan group different from other Klan groups?’
‘Well, one, we promotionalize. We have items to sell to the public and that’s an advantage. It’s the nineties and you need to sell yourself to the public and let them know about the Klan.’
The conversation continued – I was asking about women he found attractive and whether it mattered what race they were. The name Roseanne came up. ‘She’s Jewish, ain’t she?’ Michael said. Other TV Nation writers had written up some sheets of goofy questions, which I tried to slip in alongside the more normal ones. One written by my colleague Stephen Sherrill was: ‘If you were in a plane crash and you had to eat human flesh to survive, would it make more sense for you to eat the white people or the people of other races?’ ‘It has happened,’ Grand Dragon Michael conceded, and attempted a thoughtful answer, before returning to his media script: that their branch of the Klan didn’t hate anyone but just preferred their own.
Gotta Get Theroux This Page 7
