In a shed at the bottom of the yard he showed me a sign they used for roadside sales. The wood of the sign was old and battered – ‘rethered’, to use Grand Dragon Michael’s word. Still, it wasn’t so rethered that you couldn’t read that it said: ‘For the discriminating individual’, with the word ‘discriminating’ in red.
‘And it’s kind of catchy,’ he said. ‘For the discriminating individual.’
‘Is that because you discriminate?’
‘No, we do not discriminate. No, sir.’
‘It’s not a pun, there?
‘Course not,’ Grand Dragon Michael said, not quite able to keep a straight face.
‘A slight one?’
‘Well, maybe just a slight one,’ he allowed, in the spirit of someone conceding that he might be a ‘wee bit of a Nazi’. The moment was so odd that both of us giggled awkwardly.
A little later he let us into his bedroom, where we found more racist pictures. One showed a cartoon of a petrified-looking black boy – Grand Dragon Michael said he was planning to put it on a t-shirt. There were also Klan figurines doing what looked like Nazi salutes.
‘Why is he sticking his arm in the air like that?’ I asked.
‘It is a salute,’ Grand Dragon Michael replied. ‘A lot of times the media will think it’s a Nazi salute.’
‘It looks a little bit like a Nazi salute.’
‘Yes, sir, but it is a right-hand Roman salute. Like the Roman Empire, they gave the right-hand salute, to legions.’
‘But that’s his left hand.’
The mood in the room had become awkward again, and though, truthfully, it really didn’t matter which arm the Klan figurine was saluting with – it was as racist either way – the revelation of the mistake momentarily broke the tension. ‘They made ’em wrong!’ Grand Dragon Michael said, and we both laughed nervously.
I continued, in as gentle a way as I could, asking to look at other objects until Grand Dragon Michael lost patience. The mood shifted again. ‘Now, now. Don’t burn me. Let’s face it. I been nice!’ he said, and ushered us all out of the room.
Our other main contributor – Michael Lowe’s Klan colleague and superior, Thom Robb – lived in a rusticated old house up a long driveway on the outskirts of Harrison, Arkansas.
Robb was smoother than Michael Lowe. He wore glasses; he didn’t have a mullet – if anything, with his rumpled bearing and air of educated indigence, he came off like a professor at a community college. On the top floor of his house he had an office – family members were stuffing envelopes with his Klan newsletter, to give an impression of activity.
‘What would you say is the traditional negative image of the Ku Klux Klan?’ I asked.
‘The image is that every Saturday night you put on your Klan robes and go out and lynch a black person or burn down somebody’s home. This is the image – of a bunch of yahoos out night-riding in the back of a pick-up truck . . .’
‘Do you hate being called a hate group?’
‘The white people are my family. I love ’em, but it doesn’t mean I hate anybody else. Hating people is stupid.’
We filmed him printing out a flyer – ‘New leadership! New ideas! New direction! . . . We’re not in the cow pasture any more’ – then he took me on a visit to a local store that made up little pieces of branded Klan merchandise – keychains, ballpoint pens, fly swats. It was all fairly low-key, less obviously fractious than the encounter with Michael Lowe, and I wasn’t too sure how much useful material we were getting. As ever, there was a balance of ‘normal’ questions and sillier satirical bits of business. I had thought it might be funny to suggest other rebranding ideas, like giving their outfit a classier pronunciation: ‘Ku Klux Klaaahhn’. He batted this away, likewise the ‘which human meat would you eat’ hypothetical dilemma, and a sophomoric riff about whether, if you were checking out an attractive woman from behind and then discovered it was actually a man, that made you gay. In the end it wasn’t Thom Robb who lost patience but my camera operator, who stopped filming in the middle of a testy exchange about the Holocaust, exhausted from holding his camera for so many hours while I frittered the time away going down conversational blind alleys, needling about nonsense.
By the end of the shoot, I had no clear sense of whether we had what we needed to make the segment work. I was aware that I hadn’t been in control of the encounters in the way I had on the millennium segment. If the mission had been to build rapport with the contributors, put them at their ease and gently satirize them, I was fairly sure I’d failed. In the edit, most of my sillier questions were cut out; I worried we didn’t have much of a story, that I’d been bumbling and hadn’t built the necessary trust.
But in the course of cutting down the material, something surprising happened: the tension and the sense of me being out of my depth combined to give the encounter a power I hadn’t expected. The encounters were stronger for my being less in control. There was comedy in seeing me diffidently probe Michael Lowe and in his fumbling attempts to explain away the unexplainable. There was a winning quality in the juxtaposition of mildness and malice and a kind of maturity in the way the segment did not push its judgements too hard. Michael came into a screening of a rough cut and said simply, ‘You got it.’
For a final coup de grâce in the story, we found news footage of Michael Lowe and Thom Robb at rallies, facing off with counter-protesters, being less guarded and more openly racist than they had with me. We edited these against the blander statements they’d made when we filmed, making the point that the main difference between the old and the new Klan was how careful they were about what they said in public. From a mild soundbite of Robb telling me he didn’t go around saying ‘He’s a Jew, he’s not a Jew’ we cut to footage of Robb at a Klan event saying to a protester: ‘You’re a Jew, I’m not going to talk to you.’ From another clip – of Robb saying he didn’t hate black people – we cut to a speech of Robb declaring in strident tones: ‘America belongs to the children of the Republic! Not those from Mexico! Not those who came on slave ships from Africa!’
We also had a clip of Michael Lowe claiming, with a display of sensitivity, that Nazism ‘turned his stomach’ – then showed him on stage shouting about ‘taking back’ the country ‘for White America’ and doing what looked like a Nazi salute. He might have called it a Roman ‘right-armed salute’ but, once again, he was doing it with his left arm.
Time passed. I did more segments. There were some rifts on the show, and several writers departed – including Chris Kelly, who had been so instrumental in getting me hired. Much of it had to do with disgruntlement over an occasionally eccentric work environment. Coming from Flint, Michael and Kathleen sometimes gave the impression of viewing the TV Nation staff as spoiled and pampered and insufficiently grateful for their jobs, while the writers understandably took the view there was a contradiction in Michael, tribune of the working man, skirting union rules on his own TV show.
Working on my own segments, I was insulated from the office politics. Having been rescued from publishing drudgery and set to work in TV as a writer and correspondent, I was still enjoying the novelty of a busy, well-funded workplace. I loved spitballing with the other writers, wisecracking, trying to come up with ideas for segments, and writing ‘sheets’ – questions and ideas for bits of shtick for other correspondents on location.
I’d gone from being a confused and insecure magazine underling to a TV correspondent flying around the country to talk to the wild and weird denizens of the American extremes. I liked and admired Michael, while also being grateful for the break he’d given me, which felt undeserved. Given how green I was, looking back I’m surprised at how much latitude Michael afforded me to do my work. He was far from being a conventional mentor. He wasn’t huge on bonding. But just his keeping me on board felt like a huge endorsement.
I knew I was doing well at TV Nation because I kept being brought back – for more segments, for a year-end special, for a second season, by which time
the show had moved from NBC to Fox. I thought back to Michael’s hiring me and as time passed I began to realize how much my own unfitness for TV was part of what worked. It was my lack of the conventional qualities of a TV presenter – smoothness, self-assurance, maturity, good looks, half-decent wardrobe – that marked me out and made a funny contrast with the American characters I was reporting on – and in fact, more than that, which licensed them to express themselves to me, confide in me, and sometimes in amusing ways dominate me.
But I also had pangs of conscience. Increasingly I worried I was taking something real and abusing it – building trust and making it a basis for ridicule. I suppose I came to see myself as a bit of a hatchet man, doing hit jobs on racists, members of the far right, religious kooks. At the same time, I didn’t see myself as a satirist, and my guilty secret was that I rather liked some of the supposed crazies I was spending time with.
With many of the alpha-type ideologues, I had a reassuring feeling of invisibility when I was in their presence. In certain ways it was a little like being around my dad – himself an American gun-owner of decided opinions. It was comfortable, like listening to an oldies station on the radio. I found I could switch off a bit, surrender control, and go with the flow. It was almost a secondary side effect that whatever friendliness arose turned out also to be useful for the creation of a candid and revealing TV segment.
I made about fifteen pieces for TV Nation in the end. Most of them are forgettable and in all of them I’m embarrassed now to see how weird my hair looks, the strange way it is sort of stacked on my head, the size of my spectacles, and the puffiness of my shirts.
Looking back, those segments that worked best were the ones that relied on me forming good-natured relationships with contributors, in which the comedy flowed from an unlikely bonhomie between me and someone utterly unlike me, usually a gun nut or a religious crazy. It may sound obvious – the idea that some chemistry and goodwill might be a helpful ingredient in making a TV segment – but in fact the idea that we were satirizing the enemy or trying to get one over on people we viewed as malevolent or wrong-headed meant that there was sometimes a gravitational pull towards an antagonistic approach, which could end up being ugly and unkind. Minute for minute, the best piece of television I appeared in at that time was probably a very short segment about a visit to an exotic weapons shooting range in Arkansas, called The Farm, and advertised as ‘the safest place on Earth’. The owner, Robert Lee Warren, a droll good old boy and Vietnam vet, had laid out a selection of high-calibre guns on a table, like a paramilitary buffet.
Robert’s enthusiasm for his weaponry was infectious, and by the time we had blasted off a thundering round from a fully functioning military-grade mortar I had more or less forgotten about the angle of the segment and was enjoying the intoxication brought on by discharging heavy-duty artillery. ‘That was coo-ool!’ I heard myself exclaim.
Later, I heard a British colleague refer to the segment as a piece of satire, and I was a little surprised. Not that I didn’t think it was weird that such powerful firearms should be freely available to the citizenry. It was just that an encounter that I’d viewed as textured, ambivalent, warm, he’d seen as a kind of exposé.
From colleagues I kept hearing that the BBC was taking an interest in me – an exec had visited from London. ‘He wrote down your name,’ I was told.
Towards the end of the second season of TV Nation, when it became clear that the US network wouldn’t be renewing the show, a BBC producer named David Mortimer took me to one side to let me know there was an appetite ‘at the channel’ for a spin-off project from me. This all felt rather theoretical. I didn’t lend it much credence. It felt premature to begin outfitting my own escape vessel when the mother ship was still afloat, albeit listing badly.
It was never officially said that TV Nation was over. In a way, it was classic Michael. He would never admit defeat and even after it was clear she’d gone to a watery grave, I stayed around to find out whether we might be called upon to do the show on cable or in some other incarnation. For a while Michael developed a sitcom for Fox, called Better Days, which Jim Belushi was supposedly attached to. It was to be a more political Roseanne. He sent me a copy of his script and I tried to offer constructive feedback. Then he began writing a book that would appear as Downsize This. Once or twice we spoke on the phone and I suggested ideas, but by now I was distracted because David Mortimer had made good on his word and offered me a BBC development deal to come up with ideas for my show.
Chapter 8
Popular Documentary
It should have felt like a kind of redemption – my own show. From a state of directionless obscurity I had been vaulted into a realm of possibility I hadn’t ever dared imagine. And one part of me saw it this way. But another, greater part was dubious, suspecting that the transformation was not wholly earned and therefore not really mine. I wasn’t exactly sure what the shadowy execs at the BBC who were taking a chance on me imagined they were buying and I worried I was on a conveyor belt trundling towards something I’d never aspired to be – a presenter on BBC2, making light-hearted documentaries that pandered to a superior view of America as a benighted haven of misfits and morons, with the further paradox that I was myself half-American and something of a misfit, with occasional moronic tendencies.
David Mortimer had explained that I should be thinking of ideas in the ‘popular documentary’ genre. ‘You’re probably aware of the boom in popular documentary programming,’ he said, like a man at a corporate seminar. I had never heard the term before. I was wholly unaware of the alleged boom. When I finally got around to watching some examples of ‘popular documentary’, I didn’t like them. The travelogues with comedians and raconteurs were self-satisfied and lifeless. They didn’t follow any of Michael’s rules of style – they were well lit and they looked nice and nothing weird or surprising ever happened in them.
The only example of British television I found in anyway relevant to what I hoped to do was a couple of episodes of a series called The Ronson Mission, hosted by a comic journalist called Jon Ronson. It followed him around the UK on absurd quests. I’d only seen two episodes on VHS, one about mega-fans and another in which his mission was to increase the ratings of his own show. There was something about the weirdness of Ronson that I enjoyed, his sly subversiveness mixed with awkwardness, and the feeling the shows had of always being in motion. I mentioned The Ronson Mission to David and he was dismissive. ‘That didn’t do very well,’ he said.
Meanwhile I’d also been continuing my education in independent documentaries, immersing myself in films that pushed the boundaries of subject and approach: Todd Phillips’ documentary Hated, a portrait of the disturbed punk rocker GG Allin. There was a scene in it in which a super-fan peed in Allin’s mouth as a birthday treat, causing Allin reflexively to vomit. You didn’t see that on a BBC2 ‘popular documentary’. The same director made another film about the pornographer Al Goldstein, called Screwed, which had a scene on an adult film set that was both funny and imbued with a surprising dignity and pathos – an actor reeled off a list of theatrical credentials in mainstream productions before the film cut to a ludicrous bit of dialogue (‘Would a blow job go well with that?’ ‘A blow job would go great with this’) as a precursor to an energetic sex scene.
In those days, in New York, those so inclined could investigate the world of niche film-making at a legendary video store in the East Village called Kim’s. Kim’s is gone now, rendered obsolete by the Internet and streaming, but in an era before YouTube and WorldStar and Twitter it was like the nether regions of Web 2.0 in physical form. Racks of underground films organized by director, esoteric documentaries on bizarre subjects. Chicken Hawk, an access-based documentary about NAMBLA, a group that advocated in favour of paedophilia; Blast ’Em, about obsessive fans and paparazzi who stood in gaggles outside stars’ homes in New York; Dream Deceivers, about a pair of teenagers in rural America who attempted suicide under the influence of a
Judas Priest record. One of them lived, but with the bottom of his jaw missing so he drooled and had to be subtitled during his interviews.
In general I was drawn to the sort of stories of strangeness and deviance that were the opposite of how I was living my own life, which was domesticated and quiet.
Sarah and I were still in the same studio walk-up in Chelsea and also, by this time, married. We’d tied the knot one cold December day at New York City Hall in a gambit intended to make it easier for her to work in America, though clearly we were in a real relationship. The term ‘a small ceremony’ doesn’t really do justice to the minimalism of the occasion. We didn’t tell any friends and family. We were the only ones present, and to make it legally binding we had to ask a passing stranger to witness the event.
Even afterwards, I didn’t think of myself as married; I imagined that if we ever did decide to marry ‘for real’, which I thought we might, we’d get married again. It was a little confusing. If you are ever thinking of marrying someone, I don’t recommend marrying them before you marry them.
Now able to work lawfully, she found a job as a writer on a trivia quiz website called Riddler – the Web was just then taking off as a force and everyone seemed suddenly to be finding work at e-zines and dotcoms – while I rented a cubicle a short walk from our apartment. I spent my days there, staring at my laptop, at least part of the time trying to think of ideas for my putative BBC TV show. Most of these revolved around my persisting fascination with macabre and taboo themes. Jumping off from the work I’d done at TV Nation, I wanted to go further into the realm of deviance and the really weird.
Gotta Get Theroux This Page 8
