A Gypsy in New York

A Gypsy in New York from Matt Proctor on Vimeo.

A short film I finished today.

The Girlwatcher

This is a short video, followed by the story which it was based on.



I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.

She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.

I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.

I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.

We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.

I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.

I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.

I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.

When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.

I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.

The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.

“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”

I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”

I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.

“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”

I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.

“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.

“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”

She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.

“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.

The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.

Some Thoughts on Making Movies From an Amateur

"Julia"



I've made a number of short films and videos as a kind of apprenticeship. I've heard a from the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino that their first movies were bad, and how they wouldn't want anyone to see them now. I figured that if their first movies were bad, then mine probably would be too, so I might as well just make them and get them out of the way.

I wrote dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pages of scripts in high school classes. My friend Chip and I wrote a Vietnam War movie featuring Prometheus, the man who stole fire from the Gods. I saw "The 400 Blows" and wrote a semi-autobiographical New Wave coming of age drama. I didn't have a good video camera or a computer, so I never really made a movie until I was 19 years old (save the improvised, unfinished "The Magic Baseball" which I've yet to upload to youtube). After I saw the movie "Adaptation" I got the book "Story" by Robert McKee. Later I read David Mamet's "On Directing Film" and "The 3 Uses of the Knife" and took screenwriting classes, and I feel these books shaped my writing in a very kind of sitcom-y style, which I have only recently figured out how to escape.

McKee recommends planning your story out on note cards before attempting to write your screenplay. Each scene gets a note card and you write the beats on it. I would argue that it is nearly impossible to write this way (at least for me). It's like asking a river to flow in reverse. It causes you to think too rationally. It introduces the critical impulse before the creative has had a chance to express itself. Joseph Campbell speaks of how Pegasus, or poetry, was born out of Medusa's severed head. One must remove the critical agent, the "head", before one's creativity can take off. How can one write if one is sitting around thinking of little bits of information to put on note cards? It is only after one dives into a situation, a scene, after one's hand is moving freely, writing, that the intricacies, the details, the life comes into a scene. You travel into the layers of a thing. If you sit around thinking, and not writing, you remain on the surface. I would advise a screenwriter to visualize everything, to see the movie in your head and write what is seen and not worry about three act structure or story beats or any of that. It is a natural human tendency to structure things dramatically. The most satisfying course a basketball game can take is to have one's home team suffer early on and have to make a comeback which climaxes with a three-pointer made "at the buzzer." A story, if you work at it hard enough, will find it's structure as water finds it's level. Part of the problem with movies today is that we have internalized the form as audience members so completely, and that writers obey it so slavishly, that it has become predictable. After the premise, the conflict has been set up by the end of the first act (ten to fifteen pages, or minutes, in), the movie rarely spirals out of it's own constructed ethos into the unpredictable. The hero is guaranteed to have a third act break were he or she loses everything, only to surge against the antagonist at the end and either acheive their goal or be denied. The writer should be following the story where it wants to take him, he shouldn't be forcing the story to take the course of some prefabricated structure or form. A movie should unfurl like a flower, rooted in one place, but free to grow wherever the sun leads it.

Writing is a voyage into the unknown, and if one has the guts to throw oneself off the cliff without note cards stories have a way of solving themselves. The seemingly invented, inconsequential details of the thing lead to the resolution. The way things are written now, every detail must add up to the sum of the film, must lead in some way to the climax. Movies are slim, efficient emotional machines calculated to evoke a particular emotional reaction from the viewer. Hollywood achieves this with great success every few years. Think of how you felt at the end of "The Usual Suspects." The machine of that film was so finely calibrated that it triggered the surprise, the thrill in all of us. Many Hollywood movies are aiming at this kind of reaction. This is not the only way to make a movie, however. Jimmy Stewart told a story of how, late in his career, a man came up to him on a film set somewhere in the country, Colorado or someplace, and asked him, "You Stewart?" He said Yeah. The guy said, "You read a poem in a movie once. That was good." The man didn't remember the story, the context, only the scene, the moment, but that is enough. Movies should be curious. The dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" has little to do with the plot, but it is a joyous, memorable sequence. Movies should be concerned with creating these kind of moments and images. Movies needn't be roller coasters where every rail and board, where every line of dialogue and shot is building, building, building towards the climax. They should be works of art encompassing the totality of man's existence, great and small. They should be paintings, poems, songs, novels, plays, operas all rolled into one. They should have a little fat on their bones.

The tough thing about movies is expressing things only through pictures and dialogue. Too many people think writing dialogue is writing movies. It isn't. It's writing radio plays. It's writing sitcoms. People end up writing 12 characters that all speak in the same "witty", "urbane" voice. It's verbal ping pong. This is why so many sitcoms have cute eight year old girls who talk like middle aged comedy writers. Writers are crafting situations and peopling them with faceless vessels for their own jokes. It isn't even just sitcoms. Aaron Sorkin is an example of a well-respected writer who's characters are essentially mouthpieces for one voice. The characters parry and joust, swipe at each other as they walk down hallways. The walks give the illusion of movement, of action, but nothing is really happening. In order to escape this, a writer must not create from a place where two characters are speaking to each other in the darkness. He must instead imagine in vibrant life the totality of a situation, as if he were writing a novel and record that. Nabokov said something about how he never thinks in words, he thinks in images. He just uses words to communicate the images to others. This is what a screenwriter must do, communicate the image to the director, actors, the artisans on the set.

Advice from one who has read McKee, Mamet, taken screenwriting classes: Don't read these books. Don't read any books. The only way to learn how to make movies is to make movies. Solve the problems on a one to one basis. Do not try to follow any rules. Every film has a number of difficulties that will arise, and you must face each of these as they come. They are what making a film is about. If you don't like arguing with an actor over a line reading, if you don't like filming outside in freezing temperatures, if you don't like waiting around while they set up lights for 3 hours, don't make films. Go do something easy, something predictable, like work in an office.

Mamet says that there is no such thing as character, only action, lines on a page, but this is a very dangerous thing for a writer or filmmaker to hear. Of course, plays and movies, the dramatic arts, are about action, but if one writes or acts believing "There is no such thing as character," one will have a tough time creating anything specific or original. People, characters handle situations differently. An elephant walks differently from a mouse. Zorro would handle the kidnapping of his daughter differently than Uncle Buck might. The characters must be specific, unique. If Hamlet were nothing but a plot line, a neutral, blank entity's desire and obstacles, there would be nothing of interest in it. Hamlet is what makes Hamlet intersting. Just because a character has a "goal", an "objective" doesn't mean we're going to care if he or she achieves it. The objective is only interesting insofar as we can relate to it, as we can sympathize or respect the character who is after it. We wouldn't care one way or the other if John McClane saved those imaginary people in Nakatomi Tower if he were just some regular guy, but John McClane is funny and badass and that's why we want to see Hans Gruber eat it. John McClane is an interesting character and a good guy and this is why we want him to be able to make it home for Christmas. If John McClane had no individuality, if he weren't a smartass, if he weren't a character, we wouldn't give two shits if he lived or died. "The Big Lebowski" is a movie where, essentially, the plot is laughable, yet it is endlessly watchable due to the hilarious eccentricities of the characters.

One of the things that is frustrating about making films is that, the way things are done nowadays, you have to make a film three times. Once, when you imagine and write it, again when you shoot it, and finally when you edit it. A fully realized and carefully planned screenplay is like a grocery list. You set out for the store to gather specific ingredients which later you will put into the pot and stir and cook into a film. The mechanization of the process, the equipment that Hollywood has taught us is "required": trucks full of lights, set pieces, costumes etc. bring the creative process to a crawl, and allow little room for interference or the spirit of invention. Any kind of unpredictability on a set leads to problems. Orson Welles said a director is one who "presides over accidents." Francis Ford Coppola said a director is "Ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself." And yet most films try to fortify themselves against the unpredictable, against accident, the unforseen. If it rains, if a certain prop or costume can't be obtained, the whole scene could be ruined. I would much rather make a film with vague notions, where the story arises during the process like an island from a mist. I would rather start out with a treatment, an outline, improvise the shooting, and craft the story in the editing, and this is what I'm doing with the film I'm making right now, a story about a Greek gypsy living in New York. It's also sort of what I did with my short "Julia" (seen above), which is on Youtube, a video I did for my Gothic literature class, and probably the best thing I've yet done.

Anyway, you can check out my shorts here. They're pretty mediocre overall, but there are some fairly beautiful images here and there. I am fine with this, because I've figured out how to work, and I will make better films in the future.

Over the Mountain

Lying in his armchair with a
joint in his mouth, my dad
decries and prophecies
and coughs at the television
sunk in the floor like a tomb
heavy with all the world’s ghosts.
He putts a ball into a machine
that shoots it back at him.

His uncle once told him “Someday
I’ll be going over the mountain and
I won’t be coming back.”

Mornings he and the dogs walk through the field
behind the church. He hits at the sticks he’s poked
into the earth to mark the holes
and the dogs chase after the balls and drop
them in the grass at his feet. Once
they brought him the femur of an autistic
girl who had been murdered along with
her unborn child a few doors down.

Her boyfriend buried her by the
creek in the woods out back.
His father shot himself when the
Police came to take his boy away.

Dad hurried the dogs home up the hill.
Someone else found the remains later
and we watched him on the news.

Mack Sennett

Mack had this huge office on stilts right in the center of his lot so he could watch over all the production on the stages like a goddamned prison warden watching over his yard. The stages were all open-air in those days, no ceilings, to let the natural sunlight in, so Mack could see everything. He was especially keen on keeping an eye on Mabel, make sure she wasn't carousing with that week's leading man. He liked to watch the Bathing Beauties of course too.

Mack had a big reputation. Everybody started with Mack: Fatty, Chaplin, Mabel, all the greats.

Murray, my manager at the time, gets the idea in his head that he ain't gonna let Mack Sennett, the King of Comedy, push him around. We're in the elevator up to Mack's office and Murray leans over to me and says, "Don't you worry about a thing. We ain't gonna let some porkbarrel get you for a nickel less than you're worth. The thing about these Hollywood guys is you gotta grab'em by the balls."

I knew Murray was gonna embarrass me. I could smell it. Instead I just told myself the same rubbish people always tell themselves when they're trying to make it easy for themselves. "Murray's been around for a long time. He bought me a train ticket all the way out to Hollywood. He's making ten percent. He wants me to succeed." I shoulda trusted my instinct. I shoulda stopped the goddamn elevator right then and there and booted his ass out. Always trust your instincts. That's why God put'em there.

So we get up there and the doors open and Sennett is sitting behind this desk with a bib tied around his neck eating the biggest steak I've ever seen in my life. Looks like he cut down a redwood tree, carved a desk out of it, slaughtered a bull and cooked the whole ass. He stands up to greet us and, aside from being big in the business, he was physically one of the largest men I've ever seen in my life. Every one of his pictures had some big, black-eyed bastard chasin' the little hero around, the Heavy they call him. Well, Mack was twice is big as any of those guys. He's got two feet on me, easy. He puts his arm around my shoulder, says "Hey kid lemme show you something." He walks me over and points to the Bathing Beauties down laying around the pool in the sun. He says "See them girls? I keep'em on set full-time. Pay'em twenty-five a week. Think they're gonna be stars. See the kid cranking that camera at'em? There ain't even film in that camera." Then he laughs like a buncha bowling pins clobberin' about and goes back to his steak.

That's when Murray went to work. Murray marches right up and starts banging his fist on Sennett's desk. Sennett looks up, a little confused, not mad or anything, just curious why this guy's banging his fist on his desk. Then Murray does something I'll never forget so long as I live. Most damn fool thing I ever saw. Murray takes Sennett's plate and throws it across the room against the wall like it's a goddamn banana creme pie. Then he looks Sennett right in the eye and goes "Fuck you, you fat fuck."

Mack had a look on his face like he just about shit. Murray was a good manager, or had been up to that point. He knew how to talk to the Circuit owners, theatrical agents. Mack wasn't one of those city guys. He was from the forest somewhere in Canada. He was a lumberjack. He was Paul Bunyan.

Murray points at me and says, "Sign this kid right now or kiss your studio goodbye cause he's gonna be the hottest star there ever was and Metro and United Artists already offered us three thou a piece."

I had no idea what to do. I was just a dumb kid. I stood there, nodding my head, flaring my nostrils, trying to look tough even though I knew goddamn well we didn't talk to Metro and UA wouldn't even let us on the lot.

Mack, real calmly, takes off his bib, puts it on his desk, stands up, looks over at me, sizes me up. I turned away. I couldn't watch. I looked down at the Bathing Beauties. They were so gosh darn pretty down there dangling their toes in the pool. The water looked so cool and blue.

"This the Irish kid?" Mack says. Murray says yeah.

"I'll give him seventy-five a week to play stock. We'll see where it goes from there." And he sits down like that's the final offer. No negotiations, nothing.

Well, I'll tell you, that sounded pretty good to me. I'd been making fifty a week doing eight shows, six cities, and that was before travel expenses. I was lookin' around at all the palm trees and the Bathing Beauties, thinking, yeah this is the place for me. I felt like I was in some Arabian Palace or something, like Sennett was the Sultan with his harem and all that. I shoulda spoke up. I shoulda said something.

Murray leans over Sennett, gets right up nose to nose with Sennett and laughs, once, as hard as he can right in his face.

HA.

He turns around and walks past me right out the door. Doesn't even say anything. Like an idiot, I follow him to the elevator but right before I get on I hear this great, booming voice call out.

"Boy," he says. I turn around.

"Yes, Mr. Sennett?" I says.

"I seen your act," he says, "It's one of the best."

"Thanks Mr. Sennett."

And that was it. I got on the elevator and the doors closed and I looked over at Murray, with his nose sticking up in the air like it was the goddamn cherry on top of the Sundae. He was saying something about how this was ultimately the best thing for my career, but I wasn't listening. I just had this feeling like maybe one of my dreams had passed right in front of me.

Mack Sennett was the King. He was prestige. Everybody started out wearing those bobby hats and badges, swingin' those billy clubs and bumblin' and chasin' each other around the screen.

I got a job making my own two-reelers at King Studios for $125 a week. Sure, I was starring in my own two-reelers, but who ever heard of King Studios?

Smile

"What is so defeating is this everlasting good-spiritedness, the application of enthusiasm against loneliness. The expression of the force that seeks to go with the grain--actually to become the grain--is, everlastingly, a smile. But the smile is a lie, and it makes people glum. And the glumness then flows against the grain, being confident of its bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile. In our time, nearly all art has been made from glumness and has had very little to do with power, because it feeds on this tiny bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile.

It's so little to feed on. That little bit of truth. Feed on it only and you go mad. Nourished by just that little truth, how can you have strength to resist your enemies? The smile, for instance?

How lonely white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to die their hair green. They thought they would have both things: the flow of history, because they knew history; and the edge, because they had talent. But history belongs to children, and the edge belongs to adolescents, so they have neither. What they have is a kind of superior whining, and the one freedom they have been able to make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint. So this is what they inhabit now: a tiny space where they struggle toward a sense of history and a sense of edge by refining their whimpers."

-George W.S. Trow Within the Context of No Context