Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  After putting her New York job on hold, Schwartz followed the director to Taos. “When he met me at the airport I could see right away that he’d gotten wilder, gone over the edge he’d held back from before. He was acting a caricature of himself, a limping one-eyed satyr, and for the first time he seemed to think himself old. He had grown a beard and a surplus of paranoia and had taken to wearing a gun in a holster.”

  When not busy at target practice, “or out god knows where with the boys,” Ray was fooling around with a Western script “about kids who seize control of the town from their parents,” Schwartz recalled. He phoned old friends and collaborators in Hollywood and Europe, talking up his future plans. Out of the blue, one day, Ray called Jon Manchip White, a writer acquaintance from the Bronston days, who was teaching at a Texas university, and asked him if he had any interesting scripts sitting around that he might care to submit for his consideration. The director ran up tens of thousands of dollars in phone bills.

  Though Ray and his Taos boys’ club were ingesting “ounces of coke a day,” the director was trying to withdraw from his ruinous speed habit—“if nothing else,” as Schwartz recalled. “One night between moans he asked me to marry him. Since by then I knew I would be with him at least until one of us died I told him we could consider it done. Nick gave me his ring, I gave him a pearl.”

  Ray was rescued by a feeler from Harpur College in upstate New York, inviting him to make a guest appearance there in the spring of 1971. Mustering his discipline, Ray rose to the occasion, staging audience members in filmed reminiscences of their May Day experiences as protesters battling police. The event’s success prompted the college to offer the director a real lifeline: a two-year contract as a visiting professor. Ray’s onetime RKO colleague Robert Wise loaned him money to make the move from Taos, another auspicious cross-country drive like so many he had made in the past.

  A New York State public college, which had been separated from nearby Binghamton University in 1950, Harpur College of Arts and Sciences was located in the town of Vestal, just south of the Susquehanna River and north of the Pennsylvania border. The school was two hundred miles upstate from New York City or, for that matter, the town of Katonah, where Ray had briefly tried teaching at Brookwood Labor College thirty-five years before.

  “The hell with a lecture!” the former Hollywood director told his students on the first day of class, “You’ll learn by doing.” Although he did assign some reading—including Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Henri-Louis Bergson on the corrective value of laughter—the new professor let his students know from the outset that his course would be unconventional. That first night, Ray and his students set up lights and cameras and sound machines and shot the first scenes of a communal film they would make together, starting from pages of a script he’d scribbled that very afternoon with the working title “The Gun Under My Pillow.”

  Officially headquartered in the basement of a college building, the class quickly spread outside. Though at first they met at the appointed day and time, the official timetable soon became irrelevant; the class dug in at Ray’s rented farmhouse off campus for filming sessions that tended to start late in the afternoons and become long days’ journeys into night.

  The students served as actors but also as the production crew, and everyone was expected to try both sides of the camera. Ray’s original idea for “The Gun Under My Pillow” swiftly fell by the wayside; he assured the students that the final script would evolve as they evolved. He urged his students to deep-think their roles, to turn trauma into drama, to use whatever works. He taught them mantras about action and motivation. In hours of freewheeling rap sessions and improvisations and rehearsals, he encouraged them to unbosom themselves when speaking to the professor-director and the camera alike—to speak as though addressing a mirror. Their personal revelations would be incorporated into the film.

  The class was unorthodox and demanding, and the faint of heart dropped out. Others dropped out of the college altogether yet continued to show up for the communal filmmaking. A handful pledged themselves to Ray and his rolling film production for the entire two years the director spent at Harpur, finding in the experience a surrogate family, a brotherhood like Taliesin, a defining life passage. “He was more than a teacher,” one student, Tom Farrell, wrote later. Ray “was a father confessor. We were more than students; we were his children.”

  The onetime Hollywood filmmaker regaled the students with anecdotes about Bogart and Dean, showed his famous movies on a sheet stuck to his bedroom wall, lent them his marine corps knife, inscribed by Duke Wayne. (They spent hours in the barn throwing it until it fell apart.)

  Of course, this wasn’t Hollywood in the Golden Age; the conditions were hardly optimal, the students were amateurs, the budget was nickel-and-dime. During the actual photography, Ray shot infinite takes and variations, encountered endless glitches, lost time and footage. He told his students they could make a virtue of the low budget by embracing the snafus and temperamental equipment. They would end up deploying a variety of millimeter gauges (eight millimeter, Super 8, sixteen millimeter, Super 16, and thirty-five millimeter), using the different formats to add another level of complexity to Ray’s treasured notion of multiple story lines depicted in a split-screen format.

  In one sense Ray had finally broken free. He had always been, at least potentially, an avant-garde, “arty” filmmaker, but perhaps one who had followed the wrong muse and ended up mismatched in the Hollywood factory. Although he found fleeting connections with individuals in the film industry, he fell into conflict with many more. He found the deepest connection with this latest tribe of young people and felt renewed as the questing, passionate, risk-taking director he believed himself to be.

  Drinking and taking all manner of drugs round the clock, Ray was still prone to interminable, unfathomable silences, but now, unlike in Hollywood, they were sometimes punctuated by tantrums and rages. Once known for his velvet-gloves treatment, the director was now capable of screaming at an undergraduate coed to impose his message on the wide-eyed actress—or at his own son Tim, who was in and out as a cameraman.

  Again and again, however, the professor brought his admiring students back from the brink of frustration and despair. He won them over with his boundless optimism, his sincerity and generosity. Although the course picked up an arts grant or two, Ray poured his entire Harpur salary into the communal student film—$850,000, the director boasted in one article, though he undercut his credibility on that point by adding that in the meantime he’d turned down a Hollywood contract offering him 50 percent ownership of a $2.5 million Victor Hugo screen adaptation.

  While Ray lived and taught at Harpur College, Susan Schwartz maintained her day job in New York City, commuting to the college to help out. Time and again she stepped in with vital advice or participation that kept the communal film going.

  During the first year, word spread that Nick Ray was teaching at Harpur and directing his first motion picture in a decade. Auteurist journalists and film critics flocked to upstate New York to meet the living legend. The publicity the director of Rebel Without a Cause had engendered in D.C. and Chicago became a small tidal wave.

  The first-string reviewer for the New York Times—and probably the single most powerful critic in America—Vincent Canby had written admiringly about the director during his sixties hiatus. In September 1972, Canby visited the college to interview Ray about the avant-garde student film he was making, its methods as newfangled as its narrative—“an adventure in time and space,” Ray kept saying.

  Canby was given the red-carpet treatment, such as it was. In a screening room with a dripping ceiling, he watched advance footage of the student production projected by four sixteen-millimeter projectors and one Super 8, with one or more of the machines breaking down every few minutes. “If things work out,” Canby reported in knotty technical terms that might have baffled ordinary newpaper readers, the student film “will consist of a 35mm frame i
nto which 16mm and super-8 images will be set, not optically in the lab, but via a videotape synthesizer.

  “As I sat in the leaky screening-room,” Canby’s decidedly sunny account continued, “the people in the movie sat there too, passing around a large bottle of beer and a large bottle of white wine. . . . I was more aware of the time-space adventure than I’d thought would be possible, for the film, even though unfinished, breaking down, acted by non-pros, every now and then recalls the controlled, melodramatic density and sheer technique of They Live by Night and Rebel Without a Cause.”

  The niche film fan journals were even more excited. “This film, if Ray ever finishes it,” reported Jeff Greenberg in Filmmakers Newsletter, “will be bolder and more revolutionary than any film he has ever made before. He is creating a new reality on film: the scene being filmed and the act of filming that scene are no longer separate.” Niceties like “follow focus and balanced lighting” no longer mattered, Greenberg explained; the “hurried, careless filming” was part of Ray’s revolutionary approach.

  Filmmakers visited Harpur, eager to capture Ray for documentaries of their own. Half a year after Canby’s visit, in mid-February 1973, a Boston crew photographed the director and his core tribe as they staged student-film scenes over the course of a long, frigid night. The footage would be tucked into an approving documentary about Ray’s life and career, including interviews with François Truffaut and Natalie Wood. (Ray negotiated an honorarium, and a percentage of the producer’s profits, in exchange for his cooperation.) The Boston team called their documentary I’m a Stranger Here Myself, which was “the working title of nearly every poem, play, short story, any screenplay I’ve ever written,” as Ray often said. (“I’m a stranger here myself ” was a line delivered by Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar, virtually identical to a line in the Roy Chanslor novel.)

  Though administrators at Harpur were initially proud to have snagged the living legend as a faculty member, they had to wonder if the beer-and-wine-drinking young filmmakers that Canby described in the New York Times ultimately reflected well on the college. The reality was even worse, according to the rumor mill, and college officials worried increasingly that Ray’s class had become a hero-worshipping cult.

  Some students admittedly embraced their father confessor’s lifestyle. “We would all drink together,” recalled student Danny Fisher, “but I never did drugs with him, like some of the others. He was very giving that way! He would shoot up and his line was that amphetamines were his vitamins, and I accepted that. We were like a commune, all sleeping and breakfasting at his house. I thought, ‘Is this a film school?’ ”

  The student film underwent a series of title changes, reflecting the group journey. Ray inevitably became a main character in the story, speaking up from behind the camera and eventually stepping in front of the lens. For example, when a local poet who appeared in a few scenes was run over by a truck while hitchhiking—dressed, according to several accounts, as Santa Claus—Ray restaged the incident, playing the dead Santa himself. The two roles, actor and director, would eventually merge toward the end of the film’s story, when, “after a confrontation with the students in which he is accused of exploiting them,” wrote Bill Krohn, a U.S. correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma, “the director fashions a noose and hangs himself; the students decide to let him die.”

  The student film inevitably became a student-professor film. And though the onetime actor was using it as an opportunity to stage his own death, the project had undeniably given Ray new life. Indeed the project had evolved into a kind of collage of his life, with bits from many of his autobiographical scripts and unfinished stuff. But the student-professor film had to be finished by the end of the spring term of 1973. Many of the young people had burned out by then, and it became clear that the unorthodox visiting professor would not see his contract renewed in the fall.

  As time ran out, so did the money necessary to put the student-professor film through proper postproduction. Ray tried to contact rich friends like Howard Hughes, now a reclusive billionaire, but without success. Mike Frankovich, “a producer for whom Nick claimed he had made millions,” in the words of Myron Meisel, took the director’s phone call from a Boston hotel. Ray pleaded with the producer “to let some of the student film be processed with the rushes from Frankovich’s film then in production,” Meisel recalled. The answer was no.

  “Nick’s personality on the phone was quite different than I had become used to,” Meisel remembered. “With his kids, he was hip, and affected the mannerisms of the counterculture of the day. With Frankovich, he was bluff, cocky, transformed into a firmly remembered Hollywood persona. It was a humiliating conversation.”

  Ray set up a Hail Mary screening at Movielab in New York for possible investors like David Picker of United Artists and former associates like Dore Schary, the onetime studio chief of RKO and MGM, who’d given Ray his start as a director. “The film they see,” reported Joseph Lederer in American Film, “is a rough cut without dubbing, dissolves, fadeouts, or music, to say nothing of certain crucial scenes . . .” “It’s exciting,” Schary murmured as he left the screening. Picker concurred: “Some beautiful things . . .” Nevertheless, United Artists declined to underwrite the completion of the student-professor film.

  The director then made a dash to Europe and convinced Cannes officials to allow the student-professor film into the annual festival without first seeing it in polished final form. Ray’s goal was to screen a temporary version at the festival and to use the inevitable acclaim to raise the necessary funds to finish the production. Ray also screened excerpts for select friends at the Cinémathèque Française. “The predominant reaction was puzzlement,” wrote Bernard Eisenschitz.

  The Cannes officials agreed to host the work in progress, and the visiting professor packed and left Harpur College, never to return. He headed to an American Film Institute lecture in California, where he also expected to arrange cheap editing facilities. A handful of his students loaded the hard-won footage into a drive-away car and followed after him. At least by now the student-professor film had a title that would stick, the Thomas Wolfe–like We Can’t Go Home Again.

  “The main task now,” Bernard Eisenschitz wrote very precisely, “was to combine the various images (including those produced by the synthesizer, which had been transferred to 16 mm) on the same piece of film. An optical process would have been too costly and the results too inflexible. So the film had to be projected (using five projectors in all), and filmed in 35 mm, on a transparent screen, sequence by sequence.”

  At first Ray wangled the use of an AFI editing room for the purpose, but then he and his students got thrown out. The same thing happened a short time later at another facility. Finally he and they ended up back at the Chateau Marmont, his 1950s digs, where the director threw an elaborate buffet-lunch fund-raiser for the unfinished student-professor picture. Among the stars and producers who attended were Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, a scenarist and his wife Ray knew from his RKO days, and a former Howard Hughes secretary he’d once dated.

  But “very few people” in total came to the event, recalled one of the ex-Harpur students who had trailed after Ray, helping with the editing and reshooting of the student-professor film, “and we were starving, faced by all that food we couldn’t touch! We ended up eating the leftovers. It ended as always with Nick getting out his address book, full of numbers that had probably been out of date since forever.”

  With the Cannes deadline looming, Ray and his cohorts assembled the best material into a ninety-minute version. One student, Tom Farrell, recorded a narration for the film, intended partly to compensate for its intermittently faulty sound. Susan Schwartz went to bat, raising the several thousand dollars necessary for the director to make the trip to France. Carrying the film cans with him, Ray met his sweetheart in New York and they continued on to Cannes.

  We Can’t Go Home Again, the first new Nick Ray film unveiled to the public since 55 Days at Peking ten y
ears before—albeit a temporary version—had its world premiere on the afternoon of their arrival. The sleep-deprived director dozed during the screening. Sterling Hayden, one of the guests, was seated next to Schwartz. “Shit!” the Johnny Guitar star exclaimed. “Was Nick on psychedelics when he made this?” The answer was yes, perhaps, some of the time; Hayden and Schwartz themselves were stoned on hash at the Cannes premiere.

  Accounts differ as to its reception. Some insist the film earned a standing ovation; in contrast, Ray’s French biographer Bernard Eisenschitz reported that “the film went unnoticed, even by the few people who might have been expected to acknowledge it.”

  Sunning himself on the beach in front of the Carlton Hotel afterward, Ray gave expansive interviews about the student-professor film, linking his modernist techniques to those used by Frank Zappa in 200 Motels and by the Korean avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik. “Video creates a Socratic relationship,” the ex–Hollywood director declared. “I’d like the people to take over all the open access channels in the world. They need the means of communication at their disposal.”

  Then, having “lost or gambled away” what little money he’d brought with him, according to Eisenschitz, the director decamped to Paris, crashing at the homes of various acquaintances. He spent time on a houseboat Sterling Hayden kept moored on the Seine and ran up high bills that were eventually paid by novelist Françoise Sagan and filmmaker François Truffaut.

  Ray had been among the international filmmakers who flocked to the defense of Cinémathèque Française founder Henri Langlois, when French culture minister Andre Malraux tried to fire Langlois in 1968. Now Langlois repaid the favor by putting the American director in touch with an Amsterdam producer who was making an artistic/pornographic anthology film, and who sought to hire Ray to contribute a segment. Ray, who badly needed the money and work, arranged to fly through the Dutch capital on his way back to the States.