by John Lurie
I have written this book over a few years and have left notes to myself saying, “Don’t slag Jim off.” But in the end, he made it impossible.
There are a lot of great things about Jim. And in some ways he is a fellow traveler.
We are all flawed. We are all flawed. We are all flawed. In a way, that is the point of the whole thing, how we are all individually, uniquely flawed.
32
Flies Swarm All Around Me
I was the forlorn Saint James with the tangled wig in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It was difficult for me to stand there for two months, looking amazed, while Willem Dafoe performed miracles in the desert.
The movie was shot in Morocco, which is a wonderful and horrible world. Marrakech was the strangest place I’d been. They have what they call the souks, basically marketplaces, set in an enormous labyrinth of confusion. There are snake charmers with cobras, people loudly selling rugs and silver, children begging amid the mayhem, forty-year-old cars going in all directions. And there is dust. Lots of dust that sinks into the back of your nose and throat and lives there. There’s a man in an elaborate metal outfit who pours water on the ground from an ornate kettle. He points at you and expects, for some reason, that you are going to pay him for this service.
Turn a corner to find myself on a narrow path that is about two yards wide and forty yards long, with nothing but severed goats’ heads. They are displayed on hooks and stacked eight high, all dripping blood and ravaged by flies.
There is a whirlwind of different music, live and recorded, that all meshes together. But the strongest thing is the smell. The smell of incense, orange peels, donkey shit, cheap motor oil, all blended into one. The first time I saw the movie, someone asked me what I thought and I had no idea, because every scene brought back such a vivid memory of what it smelled like there.
* * *
—
As one of the apostles, I was lumped together with a bunch of guys who all seemed quite lost. Each one of them had endearing qualities on his own. I particularly loved Vic Argo, who I wanted to take home and have him wander around my apartment in a comfy bathrobe and slippers, smoke cigars, and complain about everything in his wonderfully cute, grumpy way.
Despite their endearing qualities individually, my fellow apostles as a group somehow transformed into a bunch of louts. Most of them played the acoustic guitar. Louts with guitars, just what I needed. I couldn’t walk by the hotel bar without hearing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and somebody yelling, “Hey, John, why don’t you get your saxophone?” The answer to that question would have confused them, so I would just cringe and go on my way.
Most of these guys, being very American, after a short time, hated Morocco. Nobody but me left the hotel.
There was a great deal of hostility toward the hotel waiters. No matter what language you ordered in, what you got was not what you ordered. If, for example, you ordered scrambled eggs, they would bring you a cup of coffee. You then would wait to see if they brought you the eggs afterward because they had assumed you wanted coffee with your eggs. No eggs would come. You’d then point to another person eating scrambled eggs at another table, and the waiter would anxiously nod and hurry off, never to be seen again. You’d ask a second waiter another twenty minutes later what had happened to your scrambled eggs. He’d say, “Yes!” and also disappear. Perhaps they just got scared and quit. You’d ask a third waiter, who’d bring you your second cup of coffee.
Willem, Harry Dean Stanton, and I went outside the hotel to eat one night. We couldn’t find the restaurant or it was closed, and we found ourselves on a very dark, deserted stone street that had been built three thousand years ago. There were no lights and no people. Harry was terrified, and I don’t think he ever left the hotel again after that.
There were very few women on the set. There was a theory that Marty had planned it that way so that the apostles would be stuck in enforced celibacy, thus enhancing our acting by making the experience similar to the real apostles’, but I don’t think so.
Having a small part in a movie is often awkward. All anyone else cares about is that you don’t screw anything up, but the actors want to somehow do something exceptional. So if you have a line like “Pass the blankets,” and that is your only line for three days, you tend to overdo it and screw up your face in a ridiculous contortion and say from some odd place in the back of your throat, “Pass the blankets,” in a way that would only really make sense if your line was, “There are many Hitlers but I am the best of them!” Or “I will sodomize the monkey! Tuesday I will do it!”
Whenever they were setting up the shot, there would be this massive surge by the apostles to get in the spot between Willem (Jesus) and Harvey Keitel (Judas), or between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). The idea being that once you’d established your mark, you’d be guaranteed some screen time. It was something like getting in position against Charles Barkley for a rebound.
I didn’t want to go to this extent to be in the movie. Marty was pissed at me for what he thought to be my lack of interest in participating, but I wasn’t going to run and fight to get in the shot. I would have done it when I was eleven, but I was too tired now.
There is a scene in the movie where Jesus is walking across the desert with his followers behind him. It’s done in a series of dissolves so that after each dissolve there are more and more people behind Willem. We do the shot by starting about two hundred yards from the camera. We walk about twenty feet, cut, then more people would be added. The very first shot of this sequence is just Willem followed by a horde of Moroccan extras. These are the blind and the crippled. These people really are blind and crippled.
Scorsese asks the cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, “How was that?”
Michael says, “Well, the blind and the crippled weren’t keeping a straight line.”
By the time we get about fifteen feet from the camera, the whole enormous crowd is there behind Willem, but Paul Herman, zealous to get as much screen time as possible, is now five feet in front of Willem and Harvey, his jaw jutting forward.
Marty, who is Paul’s friend, says, “Pauly, I can’t use that. You can’t be in front of Willem.” To which Paul says, “Keep the shot, change the name of the movie.”
Paul Herman is a real character. You can see him in tons of movies as a gangster, but in a way it is hard to think of him as an actor.
There’s a scene where we’re waiting for Jesus to come back from the desert and all the apostles are doing this improvised whining, questioning our resolve and wondering whether Jesus is really coming back. Pauly, with his heavy New York accent, says, “How can we be a hundred percent sure that he’ll come back?”
Before the next take I say, “Pauly, you can’t say a hundred percent.” And he just throws back at me: “Why not, they only had ninety percent in those days?”
My first scene is near a quiet lake, surrounded by flat stone, stretching out far into the distance. Everything pressed low under the Moroccan sky.
Vic Argo and I are taking these very old fish, supplied by the prop department, out of a net when Willem arrives with the beginning of his entourage. These fish really stink but I’m trying to be a good actor and get into the part. I’m moving the fish from one spot to another and the oil from the fish is getting all over my robe. Vic is being more careful and daintily picking them up between two fingers.
To my understanding the story takes place over a five-year period. I wish I could have convinced the wardrobe department of that, because they refused to wash my robe for the entire length of the shoot. They said it might mess up the continuity. So now, for the rest of the movie, any time I stand in one place for more than a few minutes, flies swarm all around me.
* * *
—
I was impressed by Willem. He had a stamina that I admired. He never complained, which is somethin
g that’s completely beyond me, especially when I’m acting. He worked long hours and he had tons of dialogue to learn every night.
He carried the whole thing well. As the lead in a film in the middle of nowhere and playing Jesus, no less, he had to set an example for everyone, cast and crew. There was nothing else around to draw on.
We were shooting at night. Willem and I were fooling around by a campfire and he was giggling like a little kid. Someone came to tell us that we were shooting in five minutes, and this transformation took place in his face. I swear that even his eyes changed colors.
Normally, I can’t tell if my friends are good when they act, and in this case I certainly can’t say. All I can see when I watch that movie is how unhappy I was doing it, that my wig is tangled, and what it smelled like there, but I know for sure that Willem’s behavior doing that movie was immense.
Harvey Keitel had asked me to get him a cup of coffee. He felt that any actor who had a smaller part than him should treat him with the appropriate decorum. I liked Harvey but thought this was bullshit. Harvey had no idea who I was, but someone on the crew later told me that they had seen Harvey reading Actuel, a French magazine, by the pool a few days later. In this issue of Actuel, I was on the list of the one hundred most influential people of the last ten years. This apparently perplexed and concerned Harvey.
There was a group of very sweet Moroccan extras on the film. None of them spoke English and they were anxious to learn. They spoke a little French and so did I. I taught them that a popular slang greeting in America was, “Harvey, get me a cup of coffee.” They sat on the ground in a circle, dressed as apostles, as I slowly pronounced the words, “Har-vee, get me a cup of cof-fee.” They would all say it back.
When they arrived on the set the next morning, they flashed big Moroccan grins and waved as they said over and over, “Harvey, get me a cup of coffee! Harvey, get me a cup of coffee!”
I was so pleased with the idea that I also taught them, “Marty, what is Michael Jackson really like?” Marty had just finished the “Bad” video for Michael Jackson. For Joe Reidy, the very good and very lovely assistant director: “Joe Reidy, my people will kill you.” But the Moroccans were getting suspicious and these didn’t work.
* * *
—
Willem has an enormous cock.
We were walking around late one night, going from bar to bar, vaguely looking for trouble. We took a piss in an alley, and I looked over to see this giant schlong hanging there and said to Willem, “What is that? A trout?”
Two guys came out from the other end of the alley. One pointed at Willem and yelled, “Klaus Kinski!,” then pointed at me and said, “Mick Jagger!” The really odd thing about this is that one of them looked exactly like Dustin Hoffman.
They started walking with us. Every ten feet or so they would point at Willem and yell, “Klaus Kinski!” We would point and scream back at them, “Dustin Hoffman!” Then we would all laugh.
They took us down an alley to a bar filled with Moroccans. Lots of men and women dancing and a live band. Within five minutes every woman in the place had come over to sit at our table and all the Moroccan men had been left alone. It was uncomfortable. The music was typical Moroccan, except they had an accordion in the band.
Willem said, “Who the fuck brought the accordion to Morocco?”
I loved Marrakech. I had met a tribe of Gnawa musicians and was playing with them almost every night. And it is just so weird and colorful and exotic there.
Toward the end of the production, we moved to Meknes, which was nowhere near as interesting.
The only exciting thing that happened to me in Meknes was a group of kids, about fourteen years old, decided to throw rocks at me when I had gone for a long walk.
So I threw rocks back. They then encountered my throwing arm, which was still rocketlike at that time. They were shocked and scared and scurried away down the alley.
Everyone was excited because David Bowie was coming to play Pontius Pilate. Bowie is very far outside of my musical taste and I wasn’t so interested, though I did think his acting was great in a couple of things and thought he was a brilliant choice to play Pilate.
That night everyone was in the bar. The apostles were playing their mind-breaking repertoire. “Knock knock knockin’…” People were demanding that I go and get my horn. I suppose because it was toward the end of the shoot and because Bowie was there.
So I went to my room and got my soprano.
I had drifted further from the cast and crew than earlier. After leaving my Gnawa friends in Marrakech, I really didn’t want to be in Morocco anymore. I suppose really that I had fallen into a bit of a depression.
I had my soprano standing up on a table, where I was sitting alone. I noticed a hand reaching in to pick up my horn.
I have explained this before, but when you have a rare musical instrument, which my soprano was, one where you love the sound and it cannot be replaced, you protect it like it is your one-year-old child.
It was an extension of my soul, and no one on the planet had any right to reach in and pick it up without asking.
I saw this hand coming in and jumped up. I grabbed the person really hard by the wrist and pretty much yelled, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
The man in front of me was David Bowie. Funny how the mind works. I noticed that he had two distinctly different-colored eyes. I had never seen that before and wondered if one eye was a colored contact lens.
Everyone stopped and looked over at the exchange in shock. Like, Oh no, what has Lurie done now? Now he is yelling at our guest David Bowie?
Bowie looked at me and smiled, then nodded in a way that seemed to mean that he knew where I was coming from and my behavior was justified. Everyone else looked like they wanted to hang me on the spot.
The odd thing was that years later, Bowie showed me exactly who he was in a generous and wonderful way. Harvey Keitel had brought David to see The Lounge Lizards at the Village Gate. They came backstage and David seemed to really have been moved by it. It wasn’t that standard show business thing of the perfunctory “That was great.” Then he came another time to see us a year or so later.
When I did the Marvin Pontiac record, I was trying to create a hoax around Marvin. Mostly because I was uncomfortable with my singing, I had created a character to do it, which was Marvin Pontiac. Then, because I really cannot stand writing a bio, which it seems one has to do every time one puts a project out into the world, I invented the Marvin Pontiac history for it.
Then I decided to make it look more like it might be a real thing. I got quotes from people like Flea and Iggy Pop saying how important Marvin had been as a musical influence when they were young.
Bowie’s office was right up the block from mine on Broadway, so I had someone drop off the tape with a note from me explaining what we were doing and asking him to write a little something to concretize the hoax of Marvin Pontiac.
Not even five hours later, a nine-page fax came into the office. David had written this elaborate story of hearing Marvin when he was young and then playing with Marvin’s son some years later.
I don’t have that fax anymore. I wish I did. Things like that just go missing somehow. That and a letter from Paul Bowles are two things I had like that that I really wish had not disappeared.
* * *
—
Martin Scorsese was my absolute hero as a director. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are perfect movies. I have watched both of them hundreds of times. Studied them. This was why I took the part in Last Temptation, to watch him work. I felt he was surely the best American director.
You know what they say about not getting to know your heroes, that it will lead to disappointment, but I am not sure that is it. Though it did go strangely with Marty and me.
Willem said something like, “You are both extraordinarily inn
ovative introverts but from opposite ends of the spectrum.”
I had always been impressed with just the extra work in the street scenes in Taxi Driver. They felt so real. I wondered how they did it. I would study those scenes.
But in Morocco it was mayhem. There was a scene where a crowd is heckling Willem. This young guy, an American who seems to be a college student on vacation, awkwardly throws garbage at Willem. This martial arts guy, who it has been explained to that Willem is the Son of God, jumps out of the crowd and decks the college kid. Then stands over him in some karate pose.
When we went to disrupt the money lenders, a crowd of Moroccan extras rush toward us, trying to get at Willem. They don’t really understand the concept of it being a movie and they are really trying to get at Willem. It gets pretty rough trying to hold them back.
Vic Argo was in a particularly sulky mood that day and stood in the circle we had created to protect Willem, with his arms folded. He is not going to join in and help. He was going to sulk.
I don’t know what the fuck came over me, I have only done something like this one other time, when I broke a doctor’s nose with my forehead, semi intentionally, while playing basketball. But I saw Vic standing in the circle sulking, while we held off the violent extras charging in on us, and it pissed me off.
I stamped on Vic’s foot. We wore these poorly made sandals that didn’t protect the feet at all.
For the rest of the day, Vic sat there examining his foot saying over and over, “You broke my toe you fuck. You broke my toe you fuck.”
* * *
—
This production had a certain mean-spirited air about it. The Moroccans were treated horribly. If a Moroccan was sick for a day, they were fired and replaced. There was an incident where one of the Moroccan extras had taken coffee from the cast and crew table, which they were forbidden to do. I heard he was beaten, though I am not sure this is true.
