It was a litany of misfortune from the start. Early in the summer Tony and I moved in together, in 2006, my car was struck by a Hasidic school bus as it approached the Williamsburg Bridge on Delancey Street. As I was illegally talking to my Serbian club promoter ex-roommate on my cell phone, my car was sideswiped by the bus, knocking the driver’s side mirror. Flushed with fear and rage, I followed the bus as it fled the scene, the remnants of the side mirror dangling in the scalding summer wind, all the way across the bridge. Tailgating the bus aggressively and honking my horn as if my life depended on it, I convinced the driver to pull over in Jewish Williamsburg. It was as I was boarding the bus that I first noticed the Yiddish characters on its side; the curly-haired driver, his brown eyes betraying no emotion as a vast sea of children sat eerily silent in their uniforms of faith and watched on, claimed he hadn’t hit me. Berating him wasn’t making me feel any better; he seemed impervious to anything I might say, such as “Wait here, I’m calling the cops.” As soon as I stepped off the bus, he drove away. I tried to scribble down the license plate, but couldn’t find a pen in time. Then the rain started and the cops, predictably, never came.
“You were middle class in college,” my godmother said to me after I graduated, “but now you enter the world a poor Negro for the first time in your life.” Maybe so; my income and zip code certainly indicated such, even if the amount of West Elm furniture in my apartment suggested my proximity to affluence and ease. In such a place it was easy to look out at “Clinton Hill” from our seventh-floor window and dream. I smelled opportunities in those Brooklyn nights and wanted to believe that they would open themselves effortlessly, that I wouldn’t have to struggle too much, that grinding class and status anxieties, ones I could hardly fathom at the time, would not have to define my way of encountering the world. We seemed to be living through a hinge point in human history, and all I had to prepare myself for it was a loosely evangelical upbringing, a bachelor’s degree in film and film history, and a desire to make movies, but I believed in my own pluck. Unfortunately, facts kept coming to my attention that complicated this sanguine vision of the future.
I had never watched it while in film school, but shortly after I graduated, some friends from Ohio introduced me to HBO’s Entourage, an infantilizing wet dream of film industry life if there ever was one. Consuming episodes from the show’s first few seasons in the weeks before Tony and I moved to Bed-Stuy, I could pretend that that’s what making a little indie movie in Queens, or whatever outer borough I lived in, would lead to: easy girls and drugs, opportunities that proved immune to my own ineptitude. Reality ensued after landing in “Clinton Hill,” however. Being too broke to make a little indie movie in Queens, I taught film history and the rudiments of production to preteens at an arts summer camp on Long Island instead.
This involved driving an ailing mid-’90s Ford sedan from my “Clinton Hill” loft—a seventy-two-mile round trip on the Long Island Expressway in rush-hour traffic—to teach suburban kids about movies. It paid $6,000 for six weeks of work, enough to pay my $800-a-month share of our $2,400-a-month rent for the time being. It was fun showing the children movies they had no business viewing; we watched parts of Antonioni’s The Passenger and Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and all of Kevin Smith’s Clerks II. In a way, even while staying up at night wondering which of these rich grade schoolers would one day use their parents’ dime to make a mediocre but celebrated first indie feature in Queens, it was worth it. But the fact was that none of it, the indie film world I wanted to enter, the apartment in which I was living, the relationships with roommates and lovers, was sustainable. What would I do after the arts camp ended? The dread it embedded within my daily existence began to get tied up in my visions of Tony that “first” summer, lying about on the white leather love seat my mother had given us upon moving in, drinking Sapporos and watching my DVDs ad infinitum.
My great-aunt and good friend Catherine Daniels passed away that July, a few weeks after I was attacked. Having received the news from my father while on the Long Island Expressway, I had to pull over to sob. The following week I journeyed to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to see her buried at a country cemetery on an unbearably hot day in mid-July. She was my maternal grandmother’s best friend and had raised me every bit as much as my mother and father had. I remember crying much of the day, listening to Animal Collective’s “The Softest Voice” for hours straight as the jet pushed me, if not through my unshakable grief and shame, the 630 miles southwest and back again in one day and evening. I had not seen her, due to a family dispute involving my mother, in many years and now I never would again.
When I returned late that night, Tony was fucking his girlfriend, a blonde from another variant of Cincinnati privilege, on the Danish teak couch that he treated like an actual antique instead of a simulacrum of one. Tony knew not of Catherine’s death because of our increasingly uneasy communication. I hadn’t told him that I was leaving town and returning home to go to her funeral, and he hadn’t asked what was wrong as I sulked around in the days before; we saw and spoke so little to each other, only two months into our new living arrangement, that it hadn’t occurred to him I’d left when I returned that night. Even though she cooked steaks and pork chops and apple pie for him on many an afternoon of our youth, even though she concealed our mutual drug use in my mother’s house, nefarious activity that would have earned him great censure, I wasn’t surprised that, when I finally unveiled her passing, he couldn’t muster anything resembling common sorrow.
I began to notice in our new home together, for the first time, the sinews of assumed privilege that he would never be able to let go, and that I’d never, regardless of my proximity, be able to make my own. The way he didn’t remove his stringy hair from the shower drain or clean his dishes after he dirtied them, leaving them in the sink, were signs of someone who had always had someone to clean up after him. Something about having to work every day while watching him comfortably lounge around our place smashed the solidarity we had cultivated over many years and despite several setbacks. There was no way to talk about it comfortably without bringing up his inherited advantages, something neither of us wanted to dwell on. So we didn’t.
Despite our discord, as the summer wore on, I took to Taaffe Place, whether it was in Clinton Hill or Bed-Stuy. One could step into Sputnik, the Leninist-themed hip-hop bar across the street from my building, which occasionally hosted some of the late greats from a previous era of central Brooklyn rap culture (DJ Premier, M-1, et cetera), and think that some multiracial, class-diverse utopia had found its way to this tucked-away part of the borough. Those were months, which soon turned into years, of magical thinking.
All I wanted to do was make features. History had taught me, already, at a tender age, to expect less because of my color. Our careers, according to the black cinema texts, the essay collections and memoirs I discovered, were shorter, more fragile, less likely to speak to the thoughtfully lived experiences of our people—that’s just how the industry worked. Its power centers, like most other centers of authority and wealth in this country, were in white hands who saw little money in supporting the work of a Haile Gerima or a Julie Dash, a Jamaa Fanaka or Kathleen Collins, a William Greaves or a Charles Burnett. When these filmmakers were in their prime, the most significant institutions of American cinema weren’t much interested in helping their work get made. Why would I, a neophyte who had done nothing to suggest I could enter such hallowed company, be any different?
Sure, from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee, many a Negro had made multiple features, but Lee was the only one ever to make them in the studio system, on his own terms, in a personal way that reached significant audiences. African-American cinema has never fostered careers with the wide-ranging and prolific nature of African-American literature. Show me black film directors who have had the opportunity to consistently make feature films of the reach and scope one can find in the myriad novels of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, James Baldwin and Alice Walker,
Colson Whitehead and John Edgar Wideman. Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust was the first movie by a black woman ever released in theaters, years after Butler, Walker, and Morrison had delivered multiple books, including their masterpieces, to big audiences and great acclaim. This was simply, then and now, no country for black filmmakers.
Movies cost, generally, a lot more than I had stowed away. In my spare time, I finished a short film that I had shot in Manhattan the previous winter as my BFA thesis. I spent many a night at the Sandbox, a long-defunct, Gramercy-based, hip-hop-centered streaming video company. In the days before YouTube was sold to Google and the dreams of the Sandbox’s venture-capital financiers were no more, I loitered around the postproduction rooms editing a vampire film called Evangeleo into the wee hours, clandestinely using Final Cut Pro stations that were normally reserved for rap videos. It was a postproduction space vastly superior to the first-generation MacBook in my bedroom, and I used the Sandbox’s facilities for all they were worth, especially since all I seemingly had to do in order to work there was smoke out the right person every once in a while. Short films never pay any money, and no one acquires them generally; for most upstarts fresh out of film school these works only aspired to calling-card status, an attention getter that hopefully would screen at a significant film festival, one that would help make your name in the industry if it was seen by the right gatekeepers, at the right time.
I needed a new job at summer’s end if I was going to afford the $800 a month, and sniffing around on the Internet in the waning days of August, just as my summer camp teaching checks were petering out, I found a job as an assistant at the office of a well-respected independent film production company. They had produced movies I revered, and, hungry for the opportunity to be in the proximity of people reputed to have made actually artful movies, I tracked down their phone number when the website only provided e-mail addresses. I called and was granted an in-person interview. When I visited, climbing a long, dim stairwell to the second story on Worth Street in Tribeca, the once-dilapidated Lower Manhattan neighborhood that had grown chic with development, I found a disheveled office and slender black woman with tight braids who wore a red dress and specs. This was KiKi, the current assistant to the couple who owned the company. KiKi seemed cheerfully disgruntled from the moment I met her. She quit within weeks of hiring me; and like that I was the office manager.
The Triangle Below Canal (Street) had been a run-down Manhattan backwater in the Ed Koch years when Ghostbusters was filmed there, but by the time I began working there it was a hub for the city’s financial and artistic elite, its industrial space long demolished or converted into handsome modern housing, its streets lined with restaurants that attracted celebrities and bankers. Many of the most significant production companies and distributors were based in the area, from Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax and Mark Cuban’s HDNet Films to Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Institute; De Niro had long been a major investor in and ambassador for the neighborhood, starting the Tribeca Film Festival in the wake of 9/11.
I was told to make myself quietly indispensable at my sub-minimum-wage “office manager” job that fall, which mostly required that I field pushy phone calls from unpaid vendors, manage the ego of a former Wall Street character from Great Neck who was paying the company’s overhead in exchange for developing his rock-and-roll movie that no one thought was good, and reading scripts for other pictures that, a decade later, mostly still haven’t been made, regardless of their quality. The financier of a Harvey Keitel movie the company worked on had skipped town owing $125,000 to various individuals and businesses that had all been contracted through us—European co-productions such as this were part of the production company’s lifeblood—and the hard-to-reach Frenchman with a yacht who was responsible for cutting the checks was conspicuously absent when my bosses, through his amiable but clueless line producer, came calling for him. We were always “waiting on the tax credit to roll in,” the percentage of the movie the city and state were willing to pay for in exchange for the shoot being in New York, to make the rest of the vendors whole. No one seemed to have any idea how long that would take.
Amid the torrent of angry dog trainers and caterers, best boys and script supervisors who wanted their wages, I watched videos on YouTube (then in its first year of popularity) and scanned the office for paraphernalia from the Golden Age of Indie Film—Harmony Korine’s underwear, so the legend went among the junior staff, was an item of particular interest, resting as it allegedly did in a cardboard box amid detritus from the set of one of his earliest films—while submitting my own Evangeleo to film festivals. I used my office manager job to my own ends, having meetings for productions I was doing on the side, faxing copies of my own script to other producers, ordering padded envelopes for DVD screeners of my thesis film. Evangeleo got accepted to a student festival in Los Angeles, where I squandered my world premiere status back before I knew that was a big no-no, and then the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Founded in the shadow of Sundance, which ultimately produced the likes of Christopher Nolan, Slamdance was a big deal for me. My bosses were impressed enough to help me get the legendary rock band Sonic Youth, with whom they’d worked on a foreign film soundtrack, to let me use their music in the film for free. For the first time I felt, however small and powerless, a part of the world of independent film I’d read and thought so much about as a young man.
But disillusionment soon set in. After I took over from KiKi, the company agreed to pay me only $800 a month, well below minimum wage. It was, in theory, enough to pay for my apartment, assuming I didn’t eat and walked four miles each way to work. Although it felt like my life could quickly become like the ones sold to me in the film school brochures, even if I was working for less than minimum wage at the office of a production company I revered, “independent film” seemed to operate almost solely on graft and exploitation. I had passed up the chance for a much-better-paid job at an agency that specialized in representing theatrical performers because I wanted to be close to the action of making movies of the type I had spent my late adolescence and young adulthood idolizing. Tribeca was still nicknamed “Indiewood,” given the number of production companies and distributors based in the neighborhood back then. To work on the periphery of the scene for what amounted to $26 a day plus lunch, which I paid for with petty cash, was the first, and in my infinite insecurity, perhaps only way to get a foothold.
Independent film producers are notoriously fickle, ego driven, and occasionally, in the case of Scott Rudin, prone to throwing phones, but my bosses never treated me that way. The two principals would be temperamental occasionally, in vastly different ways from each other, but in the short time I worked for them as their office manager, they taught me a lot without trying at all. But they were too busy surviving the end of the golden years of independent film to worry about my development, and unlike my peers working as barely paid quasi-interns at similarly sized indie outfits, I didn’t get to work on any movies that actually got made.
In a climate in which hedge fund investors and venture capitalists were by and large pulling out of indie film, I marveled at how they stayed in business despite lacking trust funds. Part of it was partnering with a well-known music supervisor and once-prominent movie star to share office space. (His perpetually stoned lackey came in once a week to gather the mail and stare at the wall.) But another way was to limit their labor costs to unpaid interns. During the first week of 2007 I was told that they would no longer pay me $800 to run the office.
I had been spending too much of my time on my own film, on the verge of its major festival premiere in Park City, I was told. I was welcome to hang out at 1 Worth Street anyway, given the affection they had built up for me, but they had decided to hand over the reins of office management to my intern Frank White, a skinny, wild-eyed actor/musician/whatever I knew from making movies in college. I had hired him after seeing him at a photo exhibit upstate, while at the Woodstock Film Festival with one o
f the company’s films, which had played at Sundance and was directed by someone scarcely older than me. “You’ll be a better employer than employee,” one of my bosses said with odd affection, claiming I wasn’t meant to “clean the brushes” but was supposed to go and be an artist myself. She allowed me to keep the keys and use their office for casting or taking a meeting. I had no idea I’d be doing just that, and a lot more, at 1 Worth Street for another half decade.
My mother paid for my ticket to Park City, beaming with pride. I found lodging on Craigslist, traveling with my cinematographer, David, and another ex-roommate, but I quickly learned that as a young man traveling from party to party on those snowy mountain streets, one may end up sleeping in all sorts of places, from hilltop mansions to the hotel rooms of ginger-haired Canadian journalists. While in bed at the latter locale, I discovered it was an inopportune time to be wearing the swag underwear I received from a Slamdance filmmaker as a keepsake to remember his film by, especially when the garment in question was tighty-whiteys branded with the film’s inelegant logo. I was suddenly flirting with young starlets and sharing bathroom line conversations with television actors, competing for girls with Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the legendary Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski. “Lay off my lady friend,” he told me, with the utmost seriousness, in the refrigerated-drinks aisle of a 7-Eleven well after midnight, before we shared a cab with the Canadian redhead. If only he had taken my advice to let me be dropped off first!
It felt glamorous, that initial Park City, even if I was playing the minor league festival with the rest of the Sundance rejects, such as a pudgy college girl from Oberlin named Lena Dunham, whom I had met on the plane to Salt Lake and later shared a van with to Park City. When I got home, even though I was still broke, I had some more swagger in my step and was sure it was just the beginning of a swift ascent into directorhood. I supposed, after Slamdance, that I was about to take off on a long and prosperous festival run; but following its acceptance in Park City, Evangeleo was rejected from twenty straight festivals. I was humbled, to say the least.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 6
