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Filmmaker's Diary:
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I've been dodging Ned's e-mails and phone calls lately. He wants me to return to my much overlooked duty of making entries in my diary. I've been avoiding him because a great deal is going on right now, and not all of it good. But it is high time, so ok here we go. Although I feel compelled to point out that I recently visited the I Am Trying To Break Your Heart website (devoted to the documentary film on Wilco, if you've forgotten), and director Sam Jones hasn't updated his filmmaker's diary since august 16th, 2001! Now that's negligence! Either that or he's been busy getting his film finished, screened at major festivals, securing nationwide theatrical distribution, and preparing a deluxe dvd version. Excuses, excuses...
Actually, I hesitate to call this thing a 'filmmaker's diary' at this moment, since I haven't been engaged in the act of filmmaking for quite some time. Instead (as you probably know if you've been playing along at home) I've been play-making: Nom de Guerre's production of PAINS OF YOUTH. I hope you bear with me as I gush for a minute: working on this play has been the most exciting and fulfilling experience I've ever had in the theatre. It seemed like it was blessed or something. The right people, in the right roles, at the right time. The actors were all doing some of the best work of their lives, we got some terrific reviews, and audiences were involved with it and affected by it. Everything just seemed to work. Until one day when it all just stopped. It's amazing to me that about eight months ago, my friend Thorin Alexander was starting a theatre company and asked that I be involved. He wanted to start by putting together a series of staged readings of plays we might want to produce. Now, I've had some bad experiences with 'companies' in the past, so I didn't think it would work for me (there's no 'I' in team, you know) [Neditor: however, there is 'me', and 'meat' for that matter...], but Thorin asked if there was any play that I'd want to pitch. And there was this one. My friend Zoe Benston turned me on to it about 5 years ago, back when it didn't seem so perverse for us to do something called pains of YOUTH. And I've kept it in my back pocket since then. So I assembled a cast for the reading consisting mostly of convicted criminals, each with a specialty in either guns, explosives or computers, and got them to work for me in exchange for their release from prison. No, wait... that's SHE SPIES. The actors I brought in for the reading were actually a group of very talented and determined artists who were down with the challenge of presenting this very difficult play. We rehearsed in my living room, and read it for an audience in the back room of the Los Angeles Cannibus Resource Center, a great place that has since been shut down by the DEA. And rightly so; I mean, we can't just let these scoundrels keep providing marijuana to AIDS and cancer patients, for christ's sake! They might, I don't know, feel better!
The reading did not go well. The people who came hated it. "Why would you want to do that play? It's a downer," said one area man. A downer? I guess he never heard of DEATH OF A SALESMAN, or A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE or WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?. Or how about fuckin' HAMLET? I got your downer swinging between my Cuban thighs. So we took a page from PopCanon's book and decided to take the audience's annoyance as a sign that we were on the right track. [That book is very long and written from a wealth of experience.] We forged ahead. And I'm so thankful that we did.
The exact same group of actors from the reading made themselves available for the production some six months later, which ain't easy in LA. I made some decisions early on that would prove to be hard as fuck to pull off. First was that I would direct it (under the pseudonym 'Guillermo Cienfuegos') as well as act in it. That was met with some resistence, which took a long while to break down. But I was putting up all the money so what are they gonna do? Next was that we'd do the play in my acting coach's studio, which was not really a theatre. In fact, it was formerly a dentist's office. In Los Angeles, most theatrical productions can only afford to get in the theatre when it's time to actually present the play. Rehearsals are usually held in whatever space is available, so you're always moving around, and it's usually shared with a bunch of other people putting on some other play. Or it's the director's garage and you've got to keep it down or his mother will wake up. I wanted us to have a homebase. A Headquarters. So we produced it there because we'd be able to do with it whatever we needed to do, and we'd have run of the joint from beginning to end. Every meeting, every rehearsal, every party would take place right there at Pains of Youth HQ.
"I know it doesn't look like much right now," said the nervous director on the first day, "but I promise, you won't recognize it when we're done."
We gutted that place. Tore out the carpet, smashed out the tile, rearranged the seating, painted, screwed, nailed and fucking willed it into being a theatre. The last major decision that would impact us all was to approach the text by working against it in a way. It's a wonderful play that Ferdinand Bruckner wrote. But it's not easy. His themes and characters may ring true and resonate today, but the dialogue is a bit stiff. He was writing in Germany in the twenties, when expressionism was the order of the day (his hero was Carl Sternheim). So the characters often speak to each other in either an unnatural staccato fashion [like Mamet, but with less cursing and in crazy German-speak], or they go off on existential tangents about suicide or "youth wandering down life's highway..." I felt that the only way the play would work today would be to make it about behavior instead of words. We would have to create this world very specifically and actually live in it. This would mean convincing a cast not accustomed to working this way, to commit to an eight week rehearsal process that would include a lot of exercises and improvisations designed to build the characters and relationships. So that we would create these real people, then just bring them into the room. And based on the work we'd done, the play would basically play itself. And the words would cease to be stiff and seem to be the spontaneous thoughts and expressions of these very smart but very damaged people. And goddamnit if it didn't work. It all worked. It was hard, most everyone had an emotional outburst at least once during rehearsals including me, but it all came together like magic. Ned once told me that the PopCanon song FISHBEE ISLAND when being performed should seem "like it's always about to fly apart, but then doesn't." That's what I think theatre should feel like. Most theatre is just a live version of a tv show. All worked out. Dead. It should be breathing and moving spontaneously and unpredictably, with the actors truthfully relating to each other instead of 'acting' at each other. Sloppy, like life. Almost falling apart. But it doesn't. That's how PAINS OF YOUTH felt everytime we performed it.
