A whole week? In Flint?
“Kevin, I’d be happy with whatever you could do. Do you think you can teach me this stuff in a week?”
“It doesn’t take long to know how the equipment works. The most important part about making a movie is what’s in your head, your ideas, and then the beats and rhythms it moves to. Knowing how to say more with less. Having a sharp eye. Listening for the stuff happening between the lines. Having some balls. I watched you when we came to Michigan. You’ll do fine.”
At some point it dawned on me that I would have to pay him for his time, plus his crew and equipment. I was on the public dole, so I was hoping for a little mercy.
“Of course, you know, I’ll pay you for this,” I said. “Maybe we can work out something?”
“Not necessary,” he replied. “You did us a big favor with our film and we didn’t pay you. So we’ll return the favor. You don’t have to pay us anything.”
The table did not break when my jaw hit it.
“Um, wow—I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve had nothing but one door after another shut in my face for the past two months. This is really beyond necessary. I can’t thank you enough.”
I wanted to break down right there, but I was in New York sitting at a table in the Village with a top filmmaker, and I wanted to act as cool as possible. So I smiled. A big smile.
Kevin took me over to his edit room which was in (and I will be polite here) some back-alley location you have to walk on 4 x 12s to get there. It was in a basement on MacDougal Street. The place looked like the kind of room where a cheap Chinese restaurant might store its garbage, or maybe a dead body. No, strike that—no one would do this to the deceased, not here, no matter how rotten they were or who they owed money to.
He saw the look on my face and said that the owner of the building did some deal with him that didn’t cost him that much to put his Steenbeck editing machine down in the basement. In addition to the Steenbeck, there was what he called a “rewind table,” a few “trim bins,” and stacks and stacks of developed film. He turned the machine on and showed me some of the scenes from the Nazi film he was working on. It was cool to see the things he had shot in Michigan, and even weirder to hear my voice and see my mug on this little screen. Other than my parents’ home movies, this was the first time I’d ever seen myself in a film. I hated it and I loved it.
“You made a lot of this possible,” Kevin said. “All your best stuff will be in here.”
I went back to Flint and started to think about what I would shoot. I had to get back to San Francisco where my wife was packing us up to move to Washington, D.C., where we both had found jobs. We arrived in D.C. in January 1987, and while I was happy to have the work and the income, my thoughts were on the movie I wanted to make.
I got word that the UAW in Flint was going to hold a rally on February 11 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike. I thought this might be a good place to start shooting. I called Kevin to see what he thought about that.
“Good plan,” he said. “I’ll get everybody together, we’ll bring all the equipment with us, and I’ll go buy the film and put it on my credit card. You can pay me back when we get there.”
I wanted to say, You have a credit card?! but I didn’t want to offend him. I was just glad that he had one.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s about $200 for a ten-minute roll of Kodak. I’ll bring about sixty rolls. That’ll be about $12,000. Can you handle that?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, lying.
“Good. You don’t have to develop the film right away, but it’s best if you do. That’ll cost you about $12,000 more to do the developing and sound transfers.”
Gulp.
I had some money saved from my four-month job in San Francisco, but that would not be enough. I would have to sell the building that was the office for the Flint Voice. It was a four-bedroom house with a yard in a nice part of town. The depressed economy in Flint would get me a whopping $27,000 for it. I was all set.
Kevin, Anne, and the others arrived from New York the day before the first shoot was to begin. A friend offered his home as a place for them to stay. We met that night in his house and invited a few Flint people over to discuss ideas for the movie. Everybody had a good idea about what this movie should be. I was getting a little overwhelmed and Kevin motioned me to step outside so he could have a smoke—and a talk.
“Movies are definitely a collaborative process,” he said to me outside in the cold. “But they are not a democracy. This is your movie. You don’t hold meetings and have discussions. We shoot your ideas. We just need to get out there tomorrow and start shooting.”
Kevin’s philosophy was to just film whatever happens, cinema verité style.
“I do have an outline of the things I’d like to get,” I said, pulling the list out of my pocket.
“I don’t use shot lists,” he said. “I just shoot. But this is your movie, so we’ll do it your way.” He did not like my idea of having a little bit of a plan, but he was willing to go along. “Let’s just call this meeting to an end and get some sleep and get to work in the morning,” he said as his cigarette concluded.
“Roger,” I said—which reminded me of the title that I had come up with for the film. I decided to wait for another time to tell him. I figured he wouldn’t think much of titling something before you knew what you had.
But I knew what I had. I’d been living it for thirty years, all the while taking notes in my head. I’d been writing about Flint and GM for over a decade. I was already operating at 24 frames per second, even though I had not yet encountered a woman who raised bunnies to sell for “pets or meat,” or a deputy sheriff who evicted people from their homes on Christmas Eve, or a future Miss America parading down Flint’s main street on top of a convertible and waving at the boarded-up stores, or the elite of Flint dressing up at a party like the Great Gatsby and missing the irony, or one tourism scheme after another to convince people to spend their vacations in Flint. And I was yet to meet a man named Roger Smith.
None of that was known to me as the very first roll of film made its way through the sprockets of Kevin’s Aaton 16mm camera on that cold February day in 1987. We filmed the Sit-Down Strike remembrance, and we shot thirty other scenes in the next seven days. The plasma center where the unemployed sold their blood, the free cheese line, the GM flak who said GM was only in the business to make money and not to help out its hometown. We filmed from sunup to long after dusk.
I watched what Kevin and Anne did as they pointed out things to me about how it’s sometimes the little moments that you grab with your camera or microphone that tell the bigger story. They talked about how, with only ten minutes of film in the camera (after which you would have to stop and reload, thus shutting the shoot down for a few minutes), you had to operate as a sort of on-the-set editor and do it all in your head. This discipline would not only save you from wasting film, it would force you to think about what exactly it was, this story you were trying to tell. They did not see the ten-minute restriction as an impediment; they saw it as a creative benefit.
“Imagine if we had an hour’s worth of film in the camera and film was as cheap as paper,” someone on the crew observed. “We’d just get lazy and shoot everything. Wouldn’t have to think about it while shooting. Worry about it later!”
“I want to go down to GM headquarters and see if Roger Smith will speak to us,” I told Kevin. “Are you up for that?”
“Are you kidding?” he said with his typical droll, sarcastic voice. “I was wondering when things were going to get interesting.”
And so we drove down to Detroit and entered the lobby of General Motors. I went straight to the elevator and hit the button. The doors opened and we went inside. I pushed the button for the fourteenth floor, where Smith’s office was. The button wouldn’t light up. I kept pushing but nothing happened. The doors wouldn’t shut. And that was when a security g
uard asked us to step outside. He was a polite, older man and he told us to hang on while he called someone. He came back and said that we needed an appointment, and to come back when we had one.
For the next two-plus years I tried to get that appointment. And when I couldn’t, I made numerous trips to Detroit to just show up and see what would happen. The search for Roger, to get him to come to Flint so I could show him the damage his decisions had caused, became the thread of the movie. But the real mission of the film had nothing to do with Smith or GM or even Flint. I wanted to make an angry comedy about an economic system that I believed to be unfair and unjust. And not democratic. I hoped that would come through.
Our week with Kevin was up. I thanked him profusely for all that he and Anne and the others did to give me my start. He said he would help in any way he could, just give him a call. I showed him an application I had received to apply for a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. I asked him if he could help me fill it out, as I assumed this was something he had to do all the time.
“What do I put in this box here,” I asked him, pointing to the line that asked for my “occupation.”
“Filmmaker,” he said without missing a beat.
“I’m not a filmmaker,” I responded. “I haven’t made a film.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied curtly. “You write down that you’re a filmmaker. You were a filmmaker the second that film started rolling through this camera.”
And so I wrote “filmmaker.” And for the next two and a half years, I made a film. There would be over a dozen more shoots. Kevin connected me to friends of his in the documentary community, most importantly to a couple from San Francisco, Chris Beaver and Judy Irving. They, too, came to Flint and shot for me for a week. The rest of the time it was just me, my wife, and a few friends (plus a cameraman or two from Detroit) bumbling around with the equipment, trying my best to make a movie. There were never more than four of us in the car as we drove from shoot to shoot. Left on our own, we would constantly screw up the camera and the sound recorder—so many times in fact that by the end of shooting in 1989, only about 10 percent of the footage we shot was usable.
I was having a hard time staying above water financially and so the film lab, DuArt in New York, said I could defer payment until I was done. It was run by an old lefty, and he liked seeing the footage as I shipped it in. I heard about an event in New York where distributors and funders came together to look at films in progress. If you paid them a fee, you could show them fifteen minutes of what you had. But none of my footage had been edited together because, well, I didn’t know how to edit. Again, Kevin to the rescue.
“I’ll put a reel together for you,” he said. “When can you come to New York?”
“Whenever you say,” I said.
Three weeks later I revisited his editing “suite” in the Village. I sat down and watched the fifteen minutes of my movie he had put together. I was blown away. It looked like a movie! He showed me how the Steenbeck worked. He showed me his editing system and how I could create my own. I spent hours watching him as he worked on his Nazi film, how he made decisions, how he knew just how long to hold a scene and when to get out. He did not believe in narration, or himself being on camera, or using music.
One day in the edit room, I asked him how he learned how to do all this.
“Well, I got a film degree.”
“From what film school?”
“I didn’t really go to film school,” he said.
“So where did you go?”
He paused. “Harvard.”
“The Harvard?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Yes, that Harvard,” he answered, not wanting to.
“Shit. I mean, wow. Cool.”
How on earth did this guy get into Harvard? I didn’t want to pry, especially into matters like how the hell could he afford it. After all, Harvard has scholarships, too. Not everyone who goes there is rich. Don’t be a bigot! One thing was clear: the dude was smart, very smart, and so that was clearly his ticket.
I set up an edit room in Washington, D.C., and hired a close friend from Flint and a local woman from suburban Maryland to be my editors, even though neither of them had ever edited a movie. So the three of us taught ourselves, with Kevin’s guidance, how to edit a movie. Our edit room was a cut above the ambience of Kevin’s, yet we did have our own cockroach-and-rodent problem. We had a room on the ninth floor of a dilapidated building on the corner of Pennsylvania and Twenty-first Street, about four blocks from the White House. There was a Roy Rogers burger joint next door to us, and the exhaust from that spewed into our edit room on a daily basis (that alone should have made the three of us vegans on the spot, had such a thing existed in those days).
Bit by bit, we figured out how to put the movie together. My two friends became amazing editors. The film was funny and it was sad. We stopped making a “documentary” and decided to make a film we’d take a date to on a Friday night. It would have a point of view, but not the point of view of the rigid, unfunny Left. I felt no need to fake the sort of “objectivity” that other journalists deceitfully hid behind. And I could sit there in our cramped edit room and see an imaginary audience in a big dark theater howling, cheering, hissing, and leaving the movie house ready to rumble.
We were working ’round the clock in the edit room, trying to finish the film before the bill collectors shut me down. And then, on a cold morning in January 1989, a new president was to be inaugurated at noon that day. His name was George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day, so I bundled up and headed over to the National Mall, where anyone from the public could watch the swearing-in of President Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. It was not very crowded, and I found a way to get closer to the Capitol steps than I thought would be possible. Looking up at the stage, at all the muckety-mucks sitting behind the new president, it was there that I saw Kevin Rafferty.
“Jesus,” I thought, somewhat in shock. “I think that’s Kevin up there!”
It did, in fact, look like him—but this guy was dressed up in a suit and tie and a fancy winter overcoat. There was no way this was him. Or if it was him, well, he’s got a good gig for the day, filming an inauguration! But I didn’t see any equipment.
A few days after the inauguration of the elder Bush as president of the United States, I tracked down Kevin at home. I had to know if that was him.
“Kevin,” I said into the phone, “I was at Bush’s inauguration the other day and I could have sworn I saw you up by the podium. Was that you?”
Silence.
“You were there?” I pressed.
More silence, then a drag off his cigarette, then the exhaling of the smoke. “Yes, I was there.”
“On the stage?”
Another drag. “Yes.”
“Jeez! How cool! What the hell were you doing up there? How’d ya get in?”
A sigh.
“My uncle is the president of the United States.”
“Hahaha. That’s a good one. My uncle’s Dan Quayle!”
“No. I’m not kidding,” he interrupted. “My uncle is George Bush, the president. My mom and Barbara Bush are sisters. His four sons and his daughter are my first cousins. I’m a member of the family. That’s why I was there.”
I’ve had many things told to me over the years: personal things, shocking things, the kinds of things everyone gets to hear at some point or another from someone—“I’m gay.” “I’m leaving you.” “Only Austrians may depart this plane.”—but nothing in life had prepared me for this piece of news. What Kevin was saying to me was that he had been working with me for nearly three years, first with me helping him with his movie, then him shooting my movie, then editing the first part of my movie—but, more important, being my mentor, my one and only teacher, a one-poorly-dressed-man film school—and now he was telling me that his uncle was the President of the United Friggin’ States of America??????????????
????????????????????????????
My head was spinning.
“Look,” he said, “I know you’re probably pissed at me for not telling you. But try to look at it from my vantage point. Whenever someone finds out who I am, they immediately start acting different, treating me different, judging me, wanting something from me—you name it, it’s a drag to have this around my neck. And frankly, I thought you knew. I thought I told you—or tried to tell you. But you wouldn’t believe it. I thought Anne might have told you or someone had or you figured it out—but when it became clear to me that you didn’t know, well, I liked it that way. Because right now, now that you know, you’re sitting there thinking, He’s one of those fucking Bushes!”
I jumped in. “No, no, none of that! I don’t make those judgments. But Kevin—shit, man! You could have told me.”
“Yeah, well, I thought I did.”
“I mean, so during this whole time, your uncle was the vice president and now he’s the president? What were you thinking whenever I said something negative about him or Reagan?”
“Nothing. I agreed with you. I don’t share his politics. And to be honest, the family stuff is complicated. Personal. And I don’t want to talk about it.”12
“Sure, I get it. This is still fucking me up a bit. I’m just being honest. A member of the Bush family has been a significant part of not only making this movie but also teaching me how to be a filmmaker. Whew. Fuck. I mean, really, fuck!”
“Well, there you have it. Do with it as you will.”
“This changes nothing, Kevin. Don’t worry. And I’m glad you finally told me.”
Seven months later I finished the film. I had shown a cut of it to three film festival selection committees—Telluride, Toronto, and New York. They all liked it and accepted it to be shown at each of their festivals in September 1989. I had also shown an early rough cut of the movie to my two sisters. They sat with me in our parents’ home and watched it. They said nice things to me and encouraged me to keep working on it. What they didn’t tell me (until years later) was that they were mortified about how poorly put together they thought the film was. They spoke quietly to one another—“What should we say to him? How can we let him down easy?”—but they couldn’t find a way. They didn’t want to burst my bubble as I seemed so excited about what the final film would look like. So they said nothing. But they did make a pact with each other to be there at the first film festival screening so that I wouldn’t be alone in my moment of public humiliation.
Here Comes Trouble Page 34
