“Where will you live?” my mother asked.
“I will stay in the collective’s apartment so we can work all the time.” My mother pursed her lips.
“You are going to make films. That’s great,” my father said. “That’s what she wants to do, she should do it.”
“You are going to make films with Carrie?” my mother said. My mother loved my best friend Carrie. It is ridiculous how an adult decides to take to one of your friends. A bit of eye contact and a thank-you from a teenager is a kind of miracle I suppose. I knew any harebrained scheme became instantly credible to her if I included Carrie.
“Yes, Carrie. And others.” They looked at me and leaned in. They were saying yes, but they expected some detail, so out it came: inventing, as I had just learned to do, a story about myself. A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word. It is maybe a fabule, a kind of wish-story, something almost true, a mist of the possible where nothing was yet there. With elements both stolen and invented — which is to say, invented. And it has to feel more dream than lie as you speak it. I could see it ribbon from my head like an image in a zoetrope. “We are remaking lost and never-completed films. Like The Apostle of Vengeance by William S. Hart. The Dream Girl by Cecil B. DeMille. The Serpent by Raoul Walsh. The Eternal Mother by D. W. Griffith. Maybe every Alice Guy-Blaché short made before 1920. There are a huge number of famous silent films that don’t exist anymore. The nitrate ignited or they were just trashed. Destroyed. Only titles, descriptions, and some stills survive. I want to make these films. Enact — but also interpret, because what reenactment doesn’t involve an interpretation — the films as described. That is the summer project of the collective.” See? I made it up on the spot and I already wanted to do it. My parents had no further questions at this moment. Just the benign smiles they always got when I started talking in detail about films. Like they wished they found it interesting so they almost did.
“But you will be in New York City by the time school begins, of course,” my mother said. I was supposed to start at NYU in the fall.
“Of course,” I said, and maybe I believed it.
“Orientation is August twenty-fifth.”
I nodded.
“When do you leave?”
“Today — this week anyway.”
Later, as I packed a suitcase in my room, my father knocked on my door. Did I need anything, anything at all? I looked at him. An Eclair ACL 16 mm camera, 16 mm film, a Nagra IV-STC, a good microphone, a Magnasync Moviola upright editing console, a Betacam video camera, a Sony VTR tape-editing deck, and videocassettes. But I wasn’t sure what I would do with the equipment, as I planned to return to the Brentwood house with the pool and the huge filmmaker. My father wrote me a check for these things, trusting me to buy them. And I intended to buy what I described to him. I cashed the check and stored the money in a sock in a side pocket of my suitcase. Someday I would get my gear. But now? I wasn’t — as it happened — ready to make films. I was still just thinking, wishing, hoping. Pretending to make films.
* * *
Things I now had to figure out after my lie:
1. NYU at the end of August — Can I defer? By when? Would I just inform my mother that I had deferred, after it was done, a fait accompli? Yes.
2. Mailing address. My mother will want a mailing address. Can you get a P.O. box without being there in person? And then forward the mail?
3. Ditto for phone number. However, I can say there is no phone, I will call you from a pay phone once a week.
4. Not to be seen lurking about Los Angeles by parents, friends of parents, friends.
* * *
I moved into his Brentwood house with one suitcase, five notebooks, a box of videocassettes, and a stack of paperbacks (including Spectropia: Or, Surprising Spectral Illusions Showing Ghosts Everywhere and of Any Colour, a reproduction of an 1864 novelty book of optical illusions that gave my film collective its name). I parked my Rabbit in the garage, closed the garage door, and didn’t take it out again for nine months.
I had my own room, because of the times he needed to sleep by himself. But I spent many nights with him. He worked, mostly writing screenplays and treatments, and I read on the couch, screenplays or whatever I found on his shelves. I read Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett and I read all the plays of Shakespeare. I read Swann’s Way (in translation), several Booth Tarkington novels, and I read a tattered paperback of Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet. There was only one thing I missed. I wanted to watch movies with him. The Brentwood house had a mini screening room, with a projector for films but also a VCR and a videodisc player. People sent him packages of movies, and many of them sat unopened. He rarely wanted to watch films. Later I would come to understand why, but at this stage in my life I needed to watch everything. This small difference in appetites was my only real complaint. He didn’t stop me from watching them on my own, but I wanted to do it with him. I longed to watch movies — black-and-white movies, Technicolor movies, glistening silent movies, short and long movies, old and contemporary movies, funny slapstick movies, deep subtitled movies, glorious American movies — in the dark, with him. I wanted to share that love with him.
On one of those special nights when he did want to see a film, we watched a hand-marked videotape of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. He asked me if I’d seen it and I pretended I hadn’t because I didn’t want to spoil the fun of his introducing it to me. It’s the story of two American kids, Kit and Holly, who calmly fall into a killing spree as if it were a Sunday matinee. We watched, but he didn’t say anything as he watched. I was disappointed. I wanted him to point out what he thought worked so well in the film. I wanted him to say, instructively, knowingly, “See how he uses long shots? Kit gets farther away from us as the film progresses.” But he did not.
There is a scene in which Holly uses a stereoscope and we get her point of view as she looks at photos. We hear her voice-over as she looks at the hovering vintage images of strangers and wonders:
“It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought, where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me?… Or killed anybody? This very moment… If my mom had never met my dad? If she’d of never died?… And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute?… Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?”
This:
I used to have a View-Master with various “sets” of viewing reels that each contained twelve related photo slides. You pushed the plastic-and-cardboard reels into the View-Master and clicked through the illuminated photos. I had the Wonders of the World set. I looked at those a lot, but the ones I loved best were the slides of the Apollo landing. The capsule tiny and glowing on the screen. The men fragile and unprotected in their tinfoil suits. I imagined climbing into that capsule, and being the first person to do it, shooting past the clouds, the ship burning away, and then the world beneath me. Would I be brave enough to do it? What did they think about, the very first time they shot into space?
But also this: