A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 57
As Christa and I flew back to France, I stared out the window of the jet at the passing clouds, feeling as if I'd sprouted wings myself. Like the mythical fire bird, the phoenix consumed by flames yet reborn from his own ashes, this old fart was getting new opportunities. I had reason to rejoice. Not only had I survived the risky aorta operation, but I'd weathered all the years of pitching yarns to wheeler-dealers who didn't really have the power to get movies made. I'd been able to scratch out a living for my family while holding my head high. Best of all, Samantha's cancer was in remission. My daughter was developing into a well-rounded young woman, preparing her baccalaureat diploma at a private French lycee. The Ruth Snyder picture, endorsed by Scorsese and Demme, was the icing on the cake.
Back in Paris, nobody could take my wings away from me. I plunged back into the twenties. I was only sixteen when Ruth went to the chair, so I needed to open up my memory full throttle and be as scrupulously accurate as possible about the facts. Gene Fowler, Damon Runyon, and H. L. Mencken were high on my reading list. Fowler's great A Solo in Tom Toms opens with a quote I loved, from a poem by Longfellow:
A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
My brain was humming. Images, scenes, and even smells, Proust-like, came back to me. I was greatly assisted by Runyon's wit-"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong but that's the way to bet"and the sagacity of Mencken-"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know." I also reread Flaubert's Emma Bovary to remind myself of how he'd given a newspaper story passion and soul.
Still remarkably agile, my old hands started to bang away on my Royal. Neighbors passing underneath our windows heard the tap, tap, tapping, and went quietly on their way, knowing I was too absorbed to gibblegabble. I didn't shave, and I rarely changed my clothes. Christa had to coax me out of my little office for meals. Unsociable and uncouth, I ate hastily and hurried back to work. It was a great time, my mind bubbling with ideas. I let it loose to gallop at full speed down the racetrack to the finish line. Maybe I was just coming full circle, back to a precious time in my life when everything seemed possible.
Developing a pisscutter of a movie from scratch was what I loved doing most. I went to work on a treatment recreating the sensational atmosphere surrounding the first-degree murder trial of State of New York vs. Ruth Snyder. Ruth was a daunting character. Millions of words had been written about her. She was the "granite woman" who killed in cold blood, a saint, a sex maniac, a drunk, a whore, an egomaniac, a Joan of Arc. One of the first lightning rods of female liberation, Ruth received over twenty-five hundred letters from women approving of her homicidal revolt against marital bondage. Men found her irresistible, too. Waiting in her cell, only a short walk to the horrible room where the electric chair would fry her to death, Ruth received 164 separate offers of marriage. Most important to her were the poignant notes from her nine-year-old daughter, praying for her to come home soon. But Ruth wasn't ever going anywhere, except to the electric chair, guilty as charged.
Jonathan Demme called me regularly to see how I was progressing. He informed us that actress Laura Dern wanted to play Ruth. Dern seemed perfect for the role. An important factor in getting the picture off the ground would be the fact that she'd starred in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), a box-office smash. Everything seemed to be coming together. I wasn't going to let my natural skepticism put any salt on my wings. Still flying high, I finished the 112-page treatment and sent it off to Demme and Scorsese. With all my heart and soul, I trusted that the Ruth Snyder picture was going to happen.
Meanwhile, Christa shipped Mika Kaurismaki all my footage from my 1954 trip to Brazil. Happily, Mika had raised enough money to produce our documentary/ road movie that was to be called Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made. Going back to the Amazon to revisit the Karaja was something I'd been dreaming about for a long time, and I was finally getting my chance, accompanied by my young filmmaker friends. While Demme and Scorsese were talking to major studios about The Chair vs. Ruth Snyder, Christa and I boarded a plane for Brazil. Samantha was happy to have our apartment to herself and her boyfriend-of-the-month.
Throughout the long flight to Rio de Janeiro, memories of my first pilgrimage into the Mato Grosso flashed through my brain. I was nervous about what I'd find down there nowadays. How had four decades changed the Karaja? Would they remember me, with my movie camera and my boxes of cigars? Were they still as kindhearted and content, or had civilization, with its power, greed, and egotism, encroached on their idyllic existence?
State of Peace
59
Kaurismaki's big house in the Santa Theresa quarter of Rio de Janeiro was built during the heyday of Portuguese colonialism. He lived there with his lovely lady, Pia. We all moved into the place to prepare for the shoot. Nowadays, Santa Theresa was afflicted with poverty. I was warned against taking my early-morning walks on those mean streets, but I didn't pay any attention. After soaking up the local sights and sounds, I'd return to Mika's place and sit down under the palm trees in the garden. There I'd light up a cigar, one of the few I permitted myself after the aorta operation. A twelveyear-old girl with big, brown eyes brought me a bowl of caffe latte. She waited at my side until I took a sip.
"Boa?"she asked me in Portuguese. "Good?"
"Boa, "I repeated.
The little girl was pleased. She was one of several youngsters who helped with the cleaning and cooking in the big, tiled kitchen. Happy to be off the streets, they ate their fill of rice, beans, and breaded fish and made a little dough for their families. They were great kids.
Mika, Jim, and I got down to planning the tricky shoot ahead of us. Along with the DP, Jacques Cheuiche, we talked for hours about my memories of the 1954 trip into the Mato Grosso. Over and over, we watched a video of the footage I'd shot back then. Mika had cooked up a loose shooting script, having Jarmusch and me gibble-gabble as we went along. The dialogue would have to be spontaneous, because no one had any idea of exactly what we'd find on our journey.
Jim and I were an odd couple-he, the tall, irreverent young skeptic, and I, the short, quixotic old curmudgeon. On a beach in front of a fancy Rio hotel, Mika and his crew started shooting our contentious twosome. Hell, a film needs some goddamned conflict, so we found some right away, disagreeing about my chances of ever finding the Karaja Indians and making friends with them again.
With Jim Jarmusch on the beach in Rio before heading inland for the Mato Grosso. Thanks to my young filmmaker friends, my dream of revisiting the Karaja Indians was fulled.
"You know, damn it, Jim, my hunch is right, and yours is wrong!" I said, puffing on a cigar. "My hunch is they're going to buy it!"
"It'll never work, Sam," said Jarmusch.
"It's gotta work!"
"Come on, that was forty years ago. They don't even remember who the hell you are."
"We've got to take a crack at it!"
"Sam, I think you're ON crack, man."
I could see the grinning face of Jacques Cheuiche behind the viewfinder, and I knew we were on the right track. Being in the dark about what lay ahead, I realized that that movie was the only one that I'd ever done without knowing the ending before I began. Still, I was game. My only worry was that the Karaja had vanished, leaving nothing more than the images on my old footage. Or worse, that civilization had reached far into the jungle and changed their Xanadu into paradise lost.
The journey wasn't going to be easy, but it would certainly be better than my first one back in the fifties, when riding horses was the fastest means of penetrating into the jungle with mules lugging our equipment. Nowadays, there was a landing strip for our chartered plane at Sao Felix, a village on the Araguaia River. A short boat trip from there along the "river of the dead," as the Karaja called the Araguaia, would take us near the jungle where the tribe had lived. After seeing all the crocodiles popping out of the river in my old footage, my young friends were uneasy about bo
ating on the Araguaia. I laughed and told them there was nothing to worry about. All they had to do was keep counting their fingers along the way.
The five-hour flight to Sao Felix was without a hitch. The best motel in town was a dilapidated place with frayed mosquito nets over the beds. Jim and I took a walk down to the banks of the river while Mika and his crew followed us with their equipment.
"Sam, do you remember any of this?"
"The river is the same," I replied, seeing the women washing clothes on the banks. "But the rest is different, so much concrete everywhere."
I saw the worried look on Jim's face.
"Rip van Winkle fell asleep for only twenty years," I told him. "It's been twice as long since I was here!"
A couple days later, we set off down the Araguaia. Jim and I paddled in a dugout canoe while Mika's crew shot the scene from a riverboat at our side. Scouts kept us on course. We finally came to a rise on the bank where natives were watching us from up above. I did a double take. The Indians wore some familiar feather ornaments. Holy cow, they looked like Karaja! We maneuvered the canoe to the shore, got out, and walked up to greet them, with Mika and his crew following.
Their village was so much more developed than the primitive place I'd visited in the fifties. The brash and trees had been cleared away, and there were telephone poles everywhere. Instead of going naked with body paint, now the Karaja wore T-shirts. Curious faces stared at me. Many of the Karaja spoke a little Portuguese. Mika explained the point of our visit. They were just as friendly as I remembered, guiding us back to their village to find rooms for us. Instead of the hand-tied huts that I remembered, they lived in tin-roofed shacks with electricity. Chief Atau and the other elders greeted us warmly, but no one remembered me. I was disappointed. Their faces didn't look familiar to me either.
The next night, Mika's crew set up a movie projector and, for a screen, stretched out a bedsheet between two trees. We were going to show my footage to the Karaja and capture their reactions on film. Everyone was excited about seeing my reels, but no one more than me. I felt more nervous than ever before at a premiere, be it in Hollywood, New York, Paris, or London. That footage was very dear to me, because it was completely authentic. How would the Karaja react to seeing their relatives again on a screen? What would they think of the crazy white man who'd filmed their grandmothers and grandfathers?
Wordlessly, the Karaja watched the opening shots of my arriving in the Mato Grosso forty years before. They were mesmerized. Their faces became even more intense when my scenes of the tribal fertility dance flashed on the screen, women rubbing their bellies, men wearing masks as they pranced around. The only sounds came from giggling youngsters. It was exactly how our kids would react to seeing their grandparents dancing, say, the fox trot. The elders stared silently, then they began to moan or talk to each other, enthralled when a young man's legs were scratched bloody with a piranha's teeth and when newborns were painted with images of fish and jaguars. As people recognized family members, waves of joy washed over the audience. If there was still any doubt, now I knew for sure these people were descendants of the gentle Indians I'd stumbled upon four decades before. I shivered when I thought about what could've happened to me if I'd landed across the Araguaia with the Jervantes or Jivaros, both reputed to be headhunters.
After the screening, Chief Atau made us understand that he did remember me and my cigars. I was thrilled. We smiled at each other, glad to still be alive, bemused at having crossed paths twice. His face was wise and compassionate. We had a chat that Mika filmed for the documentary. Confined to simple sentences, we talked basics. We couldn't tell each other where life had taken us over the last forty years. We didn't have to. Warm smiles and twinkling eyes did most of the talking. Chief Atau saw my deep admiration for his people's graciousness. He showed me his respect and appreciation for my film, something I valued more than any award or critical praise.
Jim, Mika, Pia, and Sara came to realize that everything I'd told them about the Karaja was true. A state of peace still reined over their land. They shared the abundance of nature in a wonderful communal spirit. Harmony and contentment manifested in many ways. The Karaja took care of one another; they were generous and playful with each other; they were kind to strangers. Passions that had pushed our civilization to the brink of destruction, and beyond-greed, hubris, and lust for power-just weren't in their hearts.
To thank us for the screening, two of the elders put on a special dance for us. They wore traditional costumes with feather headdresses, chanting what sounded to us like "Hollywood! Hollywood!" Everyone found it very entertaining and chuckled. I was deeply touched by the gesture. A proud people, the Karaja would never ask for anything. As a present for them, we'd brought along a modern electric stove. After trying it out, they continued cooking over wood fires. It was easier, and food tasted better.
Above the riverbank, there was a majestic tree on a hill. We quickly realized that it was the same tree that had appeared in my fifties footage. I'd framed a couple of Karaja boys shooting arrows by that tree. We sat down there, and some Karaja started to come over and tell me about relatives and friends they'd recognized in my film. An old man remembered the two boys with the bows and arrows. Their names were Kubereue and Iroa. The man explained that the Karaja originally migrated from the Andes in Peru. They'd always lived on the rivers, their most important asset, their bank account. From it, they withdrew all the fish they needed to feed their families. The Karaja considered themselves independent of Brazil. Despite efforts to "civilize" them, the Brazilian government had accorded the tribe special status, letting them remain autonomous but printing the portrait of an old Karaja woman, a storyteller, on a thousand-cruzeiro bill to show they were still part of the nation.
Another man told me he was so happy to see his father as a youngster. His father had been killed while fishing when a crocodile attacked his canoe.
"In your movie, I felt he was alive again."
An old woman, now a widow, spotted her deceased husband as a young man in the footage.
"I miss the safety he gave me," she told me shyly. "He came into my hut one night, and the next morning we were husband and wife."
"Lonely?" I asked.
"Yes, yes," she said. "He was a very good person, very kind and hardworking."
The day came when we had to say good-bye to the Karaja. I had only love and respect for these people. It was a great gift to find them again, still thriving, the women still humming songs as they washed their clothes in the river, the children still munching on mangoes. No need to make any sweeping statements comparing our society to theirs. Except how could the Karaja's simple well-being not make you think about the excesses of our world, our governments' wrongheaded, aggressive policies, not to mention the general decline in decency and good will as Judeo-Christian- Muslim civilizations have accrued military might and economic power?
Making Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made was a powerful experience for me and my young filmmaker friends. We'd expanded our vision of the world by leaping froglike into a strange world. As much as I've been obsessed with my own country's history and development, I better understand America from having seen how other people live in faraway lands, feasting on their charms and plunging into their cultures. I had to go back to the Amazon for a second dose of the Karaja's laughter and harmony to come full circle in my own life.
You young people sitting around watching the goddamned television! Get off your asses and go see the world! Throw yourselves into different cultures! You will be always be wealthy if you count your riches, as I do, in adventures, full of life-changing experiences.
The day before we had to leave the Karaja, they painted Jarmusch with their traditional symbols of peace and friendship.
"One marks the sun," Jim explained, showing me proudly the two circles under his eyes. "The other, the moon."
Giggling little boys and girls surrounded us.
"Sam, I'm not going," he said. "Come back and pick
me up in forty years.
"Okay," I said, only half joking. "For now, I have to go back to our uncivilized world."
To my dying day in this flawed world that I proudly call home, I'll cherish the gentle memory of the Karaja and their joy for living.
Kiss Me, Baby
60
Even with Marty Scorsese and Jonathan Demme behind The Chair vs. Ruth Snyder, Universal Studios wouldn't green-light the picture. Studio chief Tom Pollock said a period movie was just too expensive an enterprise at that time. Hell if I know what the real reason was. No doubt my age worked against me. Maybe it was my reputation as an "independent." I took the setback in stride. No one but my inscrutable third face would see the hurt of yet another unproduced movie.
To get over the disappointment, I revisited Rodin's great statue of a defiant Balzac in a bathrobe, now located in Montparnasse. I don't know why, but that imposing bronze statue always lifted my spirits with its indefatigable spirit, reminding me of my beloved British friend Alex Jacobs and the movie about Balzac we dreamed of doing together.' I'd wanted Alex not only to cowrite the screenplay but also to play the chubby, rosychecked writer. Set in the 1830s, the picture would have our hero embroiled in daring episodes, pursuing the Polish countess Eveline Hanska, staying one step ahead of his many creditors, struggling with his arch rival, author Alexandre Dumas. That was going to be one helluva picture, too, if I ever got the chance to make it. Except I wouldn't. Time was running out.