My introduction, as shallow as this may seem, was through Reservoir Dogs. “You put the lime in the coconut”, etc. My brother said to me, “It’s a stupid song, and you think it’s just a gimmick or a novelty song, but try to sing along with him. It sounds so eas but it is not easy. It’s impossible to sing along with him!” Try it. Bren is right.
It’s Harry Nilsson’s birthday. There he is up above “getting one Beatle drunk” during their four-year-long bender, where they caused a lot of trouble, made music, and heckled people at the Troubadour (getting thrown out for said heckling). Nilsson’s catalog is fascinating. I was recently listening to “Down” and I was just blown away by his vocals.
My GOD.
Nothing I can say can top my brother’s writing on Harry Nilsson. Bren got obsessed over a decade ago after watching a documentary on Nilsson. Bren was not familiar with Nilsson’s work or career (despite being obsessed with the Beatles), and he was blown away by what he discovered. How had this man not become such common knowledge that it took Reservoir Dogs to re-introduce him to a new generation?
Later, when Bren was in the throes of his Scott Walker obsession, he dug into one of the connections between the two artists, with a little Randy Newman thrown in:
Like a lot of artists whose music I own (I still like to own music: will never give it up), Waylon Jennings is on almost constant rotation. He’s always there. In playlists, first of all, but also … he recorded so much, and I have all of it, so even on Shuffle, he’s usually present. His voice touches me for some reason I can’t quite describe in words. I’ve tried. Maybe it’s his openness: you can feel it. There’s not much bullshit there, in terms of ego or facade, although he obviously had both – in spades, at times. He was frustrated (understatement) with the conservative restrictions Nashville (i.e. the country music establishment) put on him – put on everyone – down to the kind of sound you were “allowed” to use, the kinds of instruments that were “acceptable” – not to mention your own personal lifestyle. Jennings was not down with all of that. He came from a mix of musical backgrounds. Born in Texas, and befriended by Buddy Holly when he was just a teenager … rockabilly was obviously a major influence. It was how he got his start. But the “abilly” part of “rockabilly” is the country influence, the mix of genres which all these guys created. It was a revolution and he was part of it. He did do the strict “country thing” for a bit, and he’s a wonderful country singer/songwriter, but he also had a big folk music influence on him – and he marketed himself as a folk artist – his first album was called Folk Country. It was a sign of things to come. He was about to shake things up in country music in a major way, and country music would never really be the same.
A word about that: When rockabilly started to rise in the ’50s, with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Buddy Holly … the country music industry panicked. It was really Elvis who caused the panic, although it probably started with Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” – a MONSTER hit. Then Elvis came along, and in a matter of a couple of months he had something like 4 or 5 songs in the Top 5 on every chart – pop, r&b AND country … a sure sign that the boundaries between genres were dissolving. Country fans (i.e. white people) were buying rhythm & blues records, rhythm & blues fans (i.e. black people) were buying rockabilly records, and all these rockabilly boys were buying country music, and many had set out to be country-music singers in the first place, since “rockabilly” didn’t really exist as a “thing” and r&b was seen as for/by black people. So the mashup that began – with the dovetailing of these three styles, and throw in a little gospel too, had huge appeal, and that appeal crossed cultural and racial lines. Nashville panicked. THIS wasn’t country music!! Nashville’s response was racist in nature: some said it explicitly, some just implied it, but the message was clear: Some of this stuff just sounds too … black. (Little did they know that Ray Charles would come along down the line, and his Grand Ole Opry/Hank Williams influence was so strong, he made inroads into the country establishment, recording some stuff in Nashville. But that was in the future. In the ’50s, there was resistance to racial blending, in art, in politics, in the real world – but with music, the blending couldn’t be held back. You can’t segregate the airwaves.) Anyway, it was a confusing time for “the suits” and they ended up basically banning Elvis from their charts – and a couple others too – but it was mostly Elvis since he dominated their charts. This affected people like The Everly Brothers too – who were also “banned” even though their style has so much country in it. It wasn’t like a decree came down, but Nashville saw how Elvis was all over their charts in the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 slots and they had none of it, and so shut him out. Country music put up a wall around itself to shut out progress and change. Faron Young, a singer-songwriter, observed: “Elvis vaporized country music,” a comment I’ve never forgotten.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Johnny Cash
Waylon was a teenage DJ in the mid-1950s, caught up in the rockabilly thing (he was fired from a couple of DJ gigs for playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard. So you see the landscape). He was taken under the wing of Buddy Holly, and he ended up touring with them (he was on the “Winter Dance Party Tour”, the one where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – including everyone else on board – was killed). But he was coming into an era – the 60s – when country music calcified, or at LEAST was not open to “the new” at all. It was their way or you didn’t get radio play.
“They wouldn’t let you do anything. You had to dress a certain way: you had to do everything a certain way…. They kept trying to destroy me…. I just went about my business and did things my way…. You start messing with my music, I get mean.”
— Waylon Jennings
Waylon made albums, had some quasi-hits, but eventually he shattered the wall by going “outlaw”, going rogue, with others, including, crucially, Willie Nelson. The two of them – who most decidedly did NOT “fit in” – took country by storm, as well as “crossed over”. They did a number of albums together. The country music industry wobbled on its foundations. This was the 70s.
Eventually, Waylon rejected the “outlaw” label -it was becoming too kitsch, too much of a “brand” – and country music in many ways retreated. The rise of Garth Brooks – whom I do like – represented a slick and polished version of the music … not much “outlaw” stuff going on there, right? He was a “good boy” as opposed to a “bad boy.” And his fan base, albeit huge, did not want to grow with the times. I mean, they all threw a bitch-fit when he wrote “We Shall Be Free” which included the lyrics “When we’re free to love anyone we choose…” Okay, fine, be a bunch of backwards bigots. Watch the world pass you by. Country is again revitalizing, although it is still mainly white (at least in the mainstream: get out of the mainstream and there’s all kinds of other stuff happening) … but people like Miranda Lambert and the Pistol Annies, or the mega-star and crossover wonder boy, Eric Church, who has a Waylon-type stature and a Waylon-type trajectory – are kicking ass, and reaching people outside the country-music-belljar. Eric Church looked around at the country music industry and thought, “Fuck these goody-goodies.” In one interview, he said most country music was made for “Christian soccer moms”, perhaps the biggest burn I’ve ever heard. Eric Church is a Christian but I know – and everyone knows – what he meant by that burn. And now he’s one of the biggest stars in the world. He fills stadiums in Germany, Scotland, all over.
I’ll get to Eric Church in a bit.
Waylon was a hard-living man, who drank, chain-smoked, was addicted to amphetamines in the 60s and 70s. His health was ravaged. He married four times – and the last one – to singer Jessi Colter – “stuck.” She was with him to the end. They did a number of duets together: go to YouTube and find them. As I said, there’s an openness in Waylon’s voice – a depth of tone – and this lends itself beautifully to duets. There’s so much FEELING there, and the feeling – the tenderness – is unexpected with someone who looks so WILD. Hearing him sing with a woman, his loving-ness, his openness to her … it’s tender, and pained, and human. He was a flawed man, and the best of country music is all about acknowledging your flaws. Everyone’s a fuck-up in country music. Nobody’s perfect. The songs are filled with mistakes, ruined lives, alcoholism, infidelity, bad choices, violence, regrets … You don’t feel so alone when you listen to it. We could use a little more of that today. Self-empowerment positive messages are fine, and in some cases necessary. But as a grown adult woman, with miles of bumpy road behind me, I gravitate towards flawed people, people who have made mistakes, and hopefully grown from them – but maybe not grown from them, maybe they’re just haunted (I mean, listen to George Jones) and their art is their way of dealing with being haunted. This is the stuff I love. This is where I feel, as the kids say, “seen.”
One of the first songs he recorded, I’m pretty sure he was still a teenager, was “Jole Blon”, with Buddy Holly and Tommy Allsup on guitars, and King Curtis on sax. HISTORY.
The death of Buddy Holly was a formative moment for Waylon Jennings. Buddy Holly was a big-brother figure, a mentor, an early supporter. Here they are together, in Grand Central Station, just a little over a week before the plane went down.
Waylon was on that tour, and he gave up his seat on the flight to someone who had the flu (the tour busses were freezing cold). As they parted, Buddy Holly joked, “Hope your bus freezes your ass” and Waylon said, “Yeah, well, hope your plane goes down.” All in fun, just a joke. Waylon carried guilt for the rest of his life about the whole thing. He wrote multiple songs about Buddy Holly, the first one being “The Stage”, not only for Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, but also Eddie Cochran, killed in a car accident in early 1960.
He also would perform medleys of Buddy Holly songs in his concerts. Here’s another tribute song he wrote called “Old Friend.” It’s so sad.
One of his first real hits was “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” – which holds up, as all his stuff does. It’s one of my favorite Waylons. Here he is performing it on the Johnny Cash Show. The two of them were roommates for a time. That had to be a crazy fucking apartment, let me tell you.
See how cleancut he was! There’s a rockabilly swoop to his greased-up hair, but he’s all buttoned up. The man was FINE … and has an uncanny resemblance to my Window Boy, particularly in the first photo booth picture posted above – it’s almost eerie – that’s what he looked like when I met him, a gorgeous RAKE – so there’s a visceral response there. But it’s hard to square young Waylon with the long-haired cowboy he became not long after. Then came the breakthroughs. Like he said above: being told what to do with his music made him mean. His declarations of independence came with great albums called things like Ladies Love Outlaws and Lonesome Or’nry and Mean. He was NOT “family-friendly”. His song “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” couldn’t be more clear. It’s an indictment. It’s a callback to country’s real roots … to Hank Williams … saying “Yeahhhh, I don’t know what you all are doing with your countrypolitan sheen, but Hank didn’t do it this way.”
I love that song so much.
Now we come back to Eric Church:
34 years after Waylon called up the ghost of Hank to shame country music into remembering its roots, Eric Church came out with “Lotta Boot Left to Fill”, which refers back to Waylon’s song, and then further back to Hank, re-establishing the continuum. It’s an indictment. Eric Church has said the song criticizes the country-music big-wigs who refuse to accept the “new” – which Church, with his rock and metalhead influences – his bad-boy un-family-friendly sex-pot stoner vibe – represented. In other words, “Lotta Boot Left to Fill” is the words of country fans who reject him. Honestly, the song could go either way. When I first heard the song, I put it in line with all of the other songs Church has written criticizing Nashville. He’s an outsider. The FANS picked him, not the “suits”, and the “suits” are happy to make that money, but deep down they resent outsiders who come in and shake things up.
Regardless, here is Eric Church’s rager of a sequel to Waylon’s song about Hank Williams, where he sings:
“I don’t think Waylon done it that way
And if he was here he’d say “Hoss, neither did Hank!”
Jennings and Willie Nelson were soulmates, and the clips of them performing together are wonderful. You can feel the mutual regard, the appreciation. Their voices are so different but they blend together beautifully. Here they are performing “Good-Hearted Woman”.
Oh, and wait, detour to duet with his wife, Jessi Colter.
Then the outlaw thing started to lose its appeal. Once everyone jumped on the bandwagon … once country music was transformed, with Waylon, Willie and others injecting some wildness into it, opening up the sound … Waylon got sick of it. He wrote a song called …
“Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?”
LOL.
You know that I couldn’t let this post end without mentioning this song …
“Nobody Knows I’m Elvis”
You can practically hear the smile in his voice.
And who can forget his cameo in Follow That Bird, where he sings a duet with Big Bird, and he’s so easy and focused, you never for once remember Carroll Spinney is inside that suit.
Plus he also appeared on Sesame Street, which I find so touching.
In the mid-80s, he and Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson created a “supergroup” called The Highwaymen (another term for “outlaw”). They put out a couple of albums, and I remember watching them play at Farm Aid in 1993.
I’ll close this up but hopefully you’ve had fun watching and listening to these clips.
One of my favorite genre of song is what I call the “Bad Sport” breakup song. Songs about breakups that are not sad and regretful, mournful and longing, but pissed, and a little bit petty. Being a bad sport is just as honest as saying, “I miss so-and-so, my heart hurts.” I love the songs that are like, “I’m better off without you anyway.” (Kelly Clarkson is a master at this kind of song.)
I love Jennings’ hilarious cover of “You Can Have Her.” Every time the huge angelic chorus comes in, it makes me laugh.
He’s not just singing the song alone. He’s so over this broad who did him wrong he calls in in the big guns, the gigantic chorus is there to back him up in his Kiss Off.
Happy birthday, Waylon. I haven’t even scratched the surface here. Even your name is slightly epic, since it evokes so much. There’s only one of you. To this day, if you say the name “Waylon” everyone knows who you mean.
I’ve written enough about Kate Lyn Sheil’s projects I figured she’s due her own post. It’s her birthday today. Sheil is ubiquitous in the American indie scene – and there is still an indie scene, although distribution has changed. If Sheil came up in the ’90s, she’d be way more well-known. People probably know her from House of Cards but … You have to seek out her film catalog, you have to know it’s there and go find it. You won’t be sorry. Many of the films are low budget or micro-budget, and early on, the mid2000s, she was sometimes making 10 films a year. If she were more mainstream, she’d make 1 or 2 movies a year. She “came up” in the New York mumblecore scene, with other artists – all of whom she worked with – many of whom were her classmates at NYU. Like Alex Ross Perry. Perry and Sheil both worked as clerks at the legendary Kim’s Video. In an interview, Sheil talked about the closing of Kim’s Video:
I worry for New York City without that place existing. I would have been completely lost without it, and it changed my life very clearly. I would not have a career if Kim’s Video didn’t exist, ’cause all of my earliest projects were with people I knew from Kim’s. It means more to me than I can even really explain.
This crowd is based in New York. They all come from elsewhere, but New York is where it happened. The people in this scene all collaborate with one another: appearing in each others’ films, writing, directing … the brilliant cinematographer Sean Price Williams lives and works in this scene (he shot one of my favorite movies in the last ten-ish years, Christmas, Again. Other names: Joe Swanberg, Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kentucker Audley, Dustin Guy Defa, Adam Wingard … (Greta Gerwig is probably the scene’s most famous “graduate”, and … well … I think she might have been the Eve Harrington of the mumblecore scene.) These people have been doing interesting challenging work – in all genres – for 20+ years at this point. Shiel has also worked multiple times with Amy Seimetz and Ti West.
Listen Up Philip, with Jason Schwarzman
Alex Ross Perry has reached indie-darling status, and Shiel is in Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth … the Kim’s Video connection has served them well. (Perry and I were both interviewed for the documentary about Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.) Sheil was in the found-footage horror anthology, V/H/S, with different “chapters” directed by this whole crowd – Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg … Shiel starred in the “chapter” directed by Ti West, who has gone to blow my mind in particular with his horror trilogy known as “the X trilogy” starring Mia Goth. Because those films are horror I thought maybe they weren’t getting the kudos they should have gotten: of course, they were hits but each one had its own style and look, steeped in Hollywood history … And the trilogy films came out one after the other … just amazing. Sheil and Ti West worked again in Sacrament.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Sheil has collaborated a number of times with Sophia Takal, whom I wrote about for Film Comment. Takal hasn’t directed much, unfortunately. Her Always Shine knocked me out! Takal works with her husband Lawrence Michael Levine, including the indie hit Gabi on the Roof in July – a mumblecore mystery caper written and directed my Levine, which Takal starred in, along with Amy Seimetz and Sheil. Well worth seeking out. The gem, for me, is Green, written and directed by Takal, starring Takal and Sheil, primarily, with Levine playing the third character. Green haunts me, and Sheil plays a woman with dangerously porous boundaries, who is seemingly “taken over” by Takal’s character, a chatty-Cathy local girl who becomes a little obsessed with Sheil’s more worldly cosmopolitan character. The two women even look alike, and are indistinguishable from behind. It’s a beautiful film, and a precursor of Always Shine.
Sophia Takal and Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Speaking of Amy Seimetz: she’s a wonderful actor and also a director and writer (I served on a jury with her at Indie Memphis). Her Sun Don’t Shine, starring Sheil and Kentucker Audley (whom I’ve written about ad nauseum: he’s a fave). Seimetz made headlines a while back for being “let go” from that horrible series The Idol, because The Weeknd thought she brought too female a perspective. Don’t get me started. You don’t DESERVE Amy Seimetz. So sick of this shit. Sun Don’t Shine takes place in sun-blasted strip-mall-littered Florida, with an aimless “couple” – played by Audley and Sheil – on the run after she murders her husband. The film has this languid flat-affect eeriness, these people seem incapable of strong feeling, both exude a scary passivity … like attracts like?
Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley Sun Don’t Shine
The film may “borrow” from every couple-on-the-run movie ever made but Seimetz’s approach destabilizes the expected tropes. It’s like the characters are circling the drain, their interiority is barred from us. Maybe because there’s no “there there”, which is an even scarier proposition. Because the characters seem opaque even to themselves, the whole thing feels like a fever dream, with characters running from a threat, but not even fully realizing what’s actually happening. These two seem capable of literally anything. The final shot, Sheil swimming in a backyard pool, and then confronted by the owner, stays with me. Terrific film.
Both from Sun Don’t Shine
Sheil worked again with Seimetz in the quietly terrifying She Dies Tomorrow, which I reviewed for Ebert. Sheil is the lead here, and she starts out in a frightening state of deterioration, completely shattered, until she sees …. it. And when she sees it, she has these moments when she looks into the camera, dazzled – but frozen – Is what she sees beautiful? Is it a gaping black abyss? We eventually know what this … swirling light … does, but before then and even after … She is caught in its glow, and the look on her face is truly mad in an ecstatic way. (Sheil would make a great nun, one of those ecstatic people who see the Virgin Mary weeping in a cave somewhere in Albania, and people flock to her for healing.) We never see what she sees. We don’t need to. Sheil works from a liminal space, much is unspoken – we see this in Green, in Sun Don’t Shine … but we are never unclear. Some of the mumblecore acting style was almost non-acting and often it lacked focus, nothing cohered – which can be valid, but sometimes it just felt like actors flailing through an improv in a small apartment. Sheil works from a deep, real, and even existential place, and the the hard-to-pin-down-ness of it makes her powerful. She knows why she’s doing everything.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
The nameless terror we see in her face in She Dies Tomorrow is mixed with a swoon of need … which we somehow connect with the opening sequence, pre-discovery of swirling colored lights, where she lies prostrate, outside, in a glittering green cocktail dress, beside herself with anguish. She’s already ready for the colored lights. This reminds me a little bit of the look on Jane Fonda’s face at the end of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The ecstasy and RELIEF of knowing your end is near, the nihilistic desire to be done with it all. Not too many actresses can go there, the way Sheil does.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
A couple more notable excellent performances – and movies – to highlight. Like I said, Sheil’s career is extensive.
Zachary Wigon’s The Heart Machine is a harrowing film about obsession and John Gallagher Jr. captures a man’s descent into monomaniacal romantic obsession in such uncomfortable ways there are times it is almost unwatchable. But so very real. A man and a woman meet up on Tinder over Skype. When the film opens, they speak every day in a totally familiar way, it’s been going on for a while. They have never met in person because she is living in Berlin for a couple months. They can meet up when she gets home.
John Gallagher and Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
We only see her on Skype. The story is really from Gallagher’s point of view: the subway rides, the parties, the East Village bars – it’s a great New York movie and very very familiar if you lived here at a certain time in your life, before things were settled, before you “settled down”, the challenges of finding a person to date in New York. I found it a horrible adjustment after careening through the social scene in Chicago, where the men were aggressive (in a good way), and came up to you to chat you up, intentionally, and then got your phone number at the end. Maybe it’s because it was before online dating? And so if you wanted to date someone, or go on a date, or even hook up, you had to get yourself together to do it in person. The Heart Machine takes place in the Tinder era and these two feel a connection, and immerse themselves in a relationship before they ever met. I had a couple of those once I lived in New York, and once the online thing was happening. I learned a lot of lessons, one of which was: force the in-person meeting as early as possible. Don’t get into a long back and forth online thing.
The Heart Machine shows the dangers of feeling such a connection and pinning hopes on it before it’s been tested in the real world. The film is not didactic: it’s made by a younger person who knows this world well. He’s not some older person judging “the kids” for their online shenanigans. It’s so easy to meet someone you really feel something for online … but (in my experience) that way danger lies. Gallagher’s obsession is the real deal: not exactly Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle level but … close.
John Gallagher, The Heart Machine
I wrote a long piece about the film. (There are some spoilers there. I’d suggest going into it semi-cold.
Here, Sheil plays a mystery woman. Seen only on a Skype screen at first. She exists (again) in a liminal space: here but not exactly here, an image but not corporeal … She exudes warmth and closeness but there’s something unreachable there, and it’s seductive. Not exactly Vertigo-level but … close. A millennial Vertigo. She’s there but not there.
Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
A film like The Heart Machine depends solely on the power and reality of the performances. You need to enter their world and relationship, you have to be pulled down into Gallagher’s obsession: you feel how crazy he’s getting, and you feel alarmed, but you’re only with him for long stretches of the film: his headspace gets more and more claustrophobic, at the same time she’s retreating into a remote idealization and maybe even something either sinister or supernatural. Gallagher is so obsessed you start to wonder if the whole thing is a delusion, if she isn’t real at all, she exists only as a fantasy of the perfect woman. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Last, but far from least, is Kate Plays Christine, by documentary filmmaker Robert Greene. The film got a lot of press and won a lot of awards when it played the festival circuuit in 2016. In fact, Kate Plays Christine was my introduction to her and I was so intrigued I went back to watch the rest of her filmography.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
The film is hard to explain as is a strange coincidence happened in 2016. Another film came out in 2016 called Christine, starring Rebecca Hall. I reviewed for Ebert. Christine was about Christine Chubbuck whose main claim to “fame” was shooting herself during a live news broadcast in 1974. She was a reporter reading the news. She had a gun in her purse. Except for one in-depth article back then, where the writer interviewed her friends and colleagues who spoke of her increasing desperation and mental problems, the entire event is cloaked in mystery and – naturally – the television station had no desire to set the record straight. They wanted to erase her memory and have people forget what happened at their station – traumatizing viewers. The film Christine is really good (for whatever reason I had reservations about it at first, reflected in my review. This is what happens when you write about a film a couple hours after you’ve seen it. Sometimes things are revealed on re-watch, and I’ve re-watched Christine many times. It is excellent and one of the best portrayals of unshakable depression – and the helplessness others feel when watching the descent – I’ve ever seen.)
Kate Plays Christine also came out in 2016, and while it is – essentially – a documentary, it also focuses on Christine Chubbuck, albeit taking a totally different approach. 2016 wasn’t an anniversary year or anything, and the story isn’t well-known at all, so what are the odds of two films coming out in the same year on this subject? They are interesting companion pieces, almost as though the Rebecca Hall version is an alternate version of the film we see being prepared in Kate Plays Christine. Kate Plays Christine details Sheil’s acting process in preparing to play the role (for a film that never happened). Christine Chubbuck was in the air. Strange.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
As I’ve discussed, Sheil works from a fluid space: she’s orbiting the earth AND she’s in the dirt. Kate Plays Christine makes this explicit. Sheil and Greene and a small crew travel to Florida to research Christine Chubbuck, in preparation for a proposed and/or potential film about Chubbuck. I actually haven’t researched whether or not Greene decided to pivot into a film about process solely, to document Sheil’s process, emotional, physical, investigative … and give up on making the actual film … or whether … they actually did plan on making a film and this was meant for behind-the-scenes footage, and Greene decided to leave as is. Either way, it’s one of the great films about acting preparation. I’m in heaven watching it.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Greene comes from a documentary background and so Kate Plays Christine also includes footage of Greene and Sheil tracking down people who knew Chubbuck, to find out their impressions, their memories, all to be used by Sheil in her portrayal. People are hard to find. People have died. People are also hesitant to talk to them. This tragedy happened in 1974 and it covered the television station in shame and infamy (the news broadcast footage is nowhere to be found. It was only seen once, and live.)
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Sheil also works on Christine’s physicality, studying the existing footage of Chubbuck from her various broadcasts (Chubbuck was not an anchor. She was a local reporter, frustrated with the stories she was assigned – strawberry festivals, etc. The stuff she was interested in was considered boring – re-districting, land laws, school board, etc. Not exactly money-makers for the station). Sheil studies Chubbuck’s walk, her posture, her odd intense physicality – the long mane of black hair, the slouched posture. She tries wigs. The process is not haphazard. The wig is important.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Disappearing into the role is the goal. Not because it will win her an Oscar but because she wants to inhabit Chubbuck, who remains a mystery. Sheil is confronted with the mystery, the gap in between what we know and what Chubbuck did ultimately. How could she have done what she did? Sheil resists the confrontation. She can’t go through with it. She can’t re-create the broadcast, she resists reaching into her purse for the gun. She confronts the gap in understanding, the abyss Chubbuck was in which allowed her to do such a heinous thing, and Sheil’s knowledge of how much she doesn’t – and can’t – know.
There’s a dream-like quality to the film. The stormy skies, the dark green gulf, Sheil in a motel room staring at footage, or wandering up to a house, wearing huge sunglasses, hoping someone will let her in and talk to her about Christine.
I haven’t written a full piece about Kate Plays Christine, although I do discuss it briefly here. I’d suggest starting with Kate Plays Christine and then watching Christine.
There aren’t too many films like Kate Plays Christine, and the film speaks to Sheil’s status in the “scene”, among her peers.
“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born today in 1865. Yeats is a great poet and all that, but I grew up pretty much “over” him because he was omnipresent in our household. We were made to memorize his epitaph in order to receive 25 cents for our allowance:
Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by.
There was a framed copy of the epitaph on our dining room wall. You feel me? That’s the level we’re talking about. He seemed like a revered ancestor.
Despite an appearance by Aimee Mann – playing herself – where she sings two songs in their entirety – O Horizon is a slow generalized chore. Plus there’s the Sackler connection, which has to be acknowledged. I reviewed for Ebert.
It’s okay now to talk about what I wrote about for Sean Abley’s zine PHYSICAL MEDIA BOOKLET ESSAY. Sean’s pitch was along the lines of: “You know how some movies show fictional movies within them?” Examples: the soap opera in Twin Peaks. The movies Meryl Streep is seen filming in Postcards from the Edge. There are many many more examples. So Sean’s idea was to have his writers write 2,000 word essays, along the lines of a Criterion or Vinegar Syndrome booklet essay, for a 4k edition and/or restoration of a film that does not exist. He had this idea, and he reached out to a couple of writers, and asked if we’d be interested.
This was such a fun and funny idea, and I’ve had writer’s block for months now. I’ve got family things happening, I have not been at all well, and also I think I’m just tapped out from the last two years. But enough is enough. I jumped at the chance to do this fun random thing. Something different. The project was, essentially, fiction. And I haven’t written fiction since I wrote my script in 2009, and before that … I wrote a novel in the early 2000s called The Enchantment of Things, which naturally never saw the light of day, but I was very engrossed in writing it. I never write fiction anymore. So … basically making up a fake movie and then pontificating on it as though it exists in our world … sounded hilarious.
We each chose a movie-within-a-movie, something existing within the confines of another movie (or television show), that does not exist in our world.
Here is our Table of Contents:
I chose to write a lengthy “erudite” essay about Living in Oblivion, not the 1995 film directed by Tom DeCillo – one of the great films about film-making and such a ’90s New York staple – but the movie they’re seen shooting in the film, which is also called “Living in Oblivion”. So Catherine Keener plays a fictional actress, and I built out her entire biography in my piece. I created out of whole cloth the entire filmography of the director Nick Reve, played by Steve Buscemi. Literally every crew member, down to the gaffer, I created a biography for them. I wrote about a fictional not-real film as though it is real and I created this whole world including made up academic dissertations, scholarly quotes from scholars who do not exist, and made-up rabid fan bases on made-up Reddit boards. I chose to make the fake Living in Oblivion a “lost” film, only seen by a handful of people in a tiny film “festival” held in a basement in Bushwick. The reels disappeared at the festival wrap party. The film was never released, but its reputation in the intervening years ballooned, with all kinds of rumors proliferating about the shoot and what the hell happened. I made references to the Orson Welles’ cut of Magnificent Ambersons and Erich von Stroheim’s 9-hour version of Greed which only twelve people in the history of the planet ever saw. Coleridge and “Kubla Khan” makes an appearance.
Look at that title, absolutely dripping with bullshit.
As I worked on it, I actually started believing my bullshit. I wanted to see this fictional film. I believed in the lost reels. I hoped they’d turn up. The whole thing was so random and so fun. It felt like an acting exercise and it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of them.
Reading everyone else’s essays has been hilarious and awesome, because everyone is so smart, everyone just went with the ridiculousness. Sean was a grand master of ceremonies. Physical Media Booklet Essay was his brainchild and he made it happen! You can purchase the zine in Sean’s store. Over the next couple of weeks, interviews with each writer about our process for this will roll out on Sean’s podcast so I’ll be sure to link to it.
Let’s hear it for Living in Oblivion, the fake one and the real.
Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets: “Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare.”
When people have discussed him, throughout history, more often than not they do so in comparison to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the context, Jonson is in that context’s shadow. As giant as Ben Jonson was, and he was a GIANT, he is not allowed to stand alone, because Shakespeare hovers over all. One cannot exist without consciousness of the other.
The men are placed in opposition merely because of their closeness in the timeline.
Bing Crosby once said something along these lines in re: Frank Sinatra: “Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?”
One can imagine Ben Jonson thinking something similar about Shakespeare.
Where does the humor lie? Can this moment be broken down to discover its secret? Is it the eye pan to the right? Is it the delayed eyebrow raise? Is it what’s happening with his mouth? Is it that it’s one of his specialties – the comedic pause?
Trying to describe in words why this moment is so funny is like trying to describe in words how a complicated calculus equation works. At a certain point, you just have to be good enough at calculus to even understand the lingo. Same here. All is really left is to sit back and be awed at someone who is this good at what he does.
Humphrey Bogart said that good acting was “6 feet back” in the eyes. Gene Wilder went that deep. Like … where WAS he? When he was at his most lunatic – he – whoever he was – was gone. All that remained was a devotion to the maniacal moment.
For example this:
Actors watch a moment like that and have the same reaction a young violinist probably has to seeing Ihtzak Perlman. You are in the same field as the genius, but in watching you realize it is in name only. You’re not even in the same hemisphere, really. A moment like Wilder’s turns the actors I know into Salieris. That’s the breaks. Just be grateful there are such artists who come down among us for a short while and grace us with their presence, their generosity, their gifts. We can learn from them and be inspired to be better.
This is a famous story, but worth repeating:
In Gene Wilder’s book Kiss Me Like a Stranger, he describes his first meeting with the director Mel Stuart, before he had decided to do Willy Wonka. Wilder had reservations about the script as is. He had an idea. Listen to him, and learn. This is how specific he was as an actor. This is how much he understood story and character and AUDIENCE, too, let’s not forget. Those who think actors just do what the director tells them … well, they haven’t ever ever been involved in a creative process. Ever.
Although I liked Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.
“What’s bothering you?”
“When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself … but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”
” … Why do you want to do that?”
“Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”
Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn’t quite sure about this change.
“You mean – if you can’t do what you just said, you won’t do the part?”
“That’s right,” I answered.
Mel mumbled to himself, ” … comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay!”
Imagine Willy Wonka without that tumble.
Best of all: Mel Stuart filmed it exactly as Gene Wilder told him to. Shot for shot.
Wilder was RIGHT.
He was also right about Willy Wonka’s costume. Mel Stuart sent Wilder some sketches. Wilder looked them over, and wrote Stuart a note back with his thoughts.
Don’t miss Wilder’s letter.“The hat is terrific, but making it 2 inches shorter would make it more special.”
Gene Wilder came and spoke at my grad school. He would say something, or pause to think a bit before saying something, and the moment wasn’t even funny but his TONE and his TIMING had us roaring. He would stop when he heard us laugh, and say, “Y’know, that happens to me all the time.” He wasn’t annoyed. He calmly accepted that when he spoke in a serious way large groups of people began to laugh.
His timing was otherworldly.
My favorite Gene Wilder story (it’s in his book, but he told it to us when he visited my school) was about his first day on Bonnie & Clyde, his debut in film. He had done tons of theatre, but no movies.
He’s in the back of the car for the scene where the criminals take him hostage, and director Arthur Penn yells, “ACTION” and Wilder immediately started the scene. Penn stopped Wilder and said, “Just because I say Action doesn’t mean you have to start. It means that we are ready for when you are ready.” In other words, Penn felt Wilder’s nerves, and wanted him to chill. “Just take your time, and start when you’re ready.” Wilder was grateful. He took a moment after Penn called “Action”, got himself together, and then played the scene brilliantly. Afterwards, someone on the crew said to him, “Don’t get used to that.”
Wilder told that story in praise of Arthur Penn as a director (who was present in the room, this was an Actors Studio event), but also to illustrate that it’s an actor’s job to get himself together, however he has to, in the middle of the chaos of a set, so that you’re ready to go when everyone else is ready. That’s the job. Be ready when the director calls “Action.” And Penn gave him the space to learn that lesson on his first day on a movie set, without being yelled at/shamed/scorned.
He also told the story of seeing Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus when he was a kid, and having an “A-ha” moment in re: comedy. There’s the bit with the little boy and the hotdog.
Wilder watched it, agog, his analytical mind trying to break down WHY it was so hilarious. There was the timing of the bit with the hot dog, and Chaplin making goo-goo faces at the baby and then eating the hot dog, etc. Finally, Wilder realized that why the scene was so funny was that nobody in it – including Chaplin – was “acting funny.” The situation was funny. Chaplin played it for the reality of it. Wilder said that that one moment in The Circus inspired his whole career and he would come back to it if he got stuck. It was a roadmap of what to do, how to solve any given problem. Create a situation that is so funny that nobody needs to “act funny.”
Which brings me back to him saying something serious and all of us bursting into laughter.
His genius was untouchable. It’s like musical genius or a genius for math.
You can get more proficient in those things. But you cannot learn to do what the geniuses do. You’ll never EVER catch up.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Chester Burnett, who would eventually become the legendary Howlin’ Wolf, was born on this day in 1901.
He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the “early influences” category. He is in the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (He recorded at Sun Records in the early years – pre-Elvis, in other words). He is in the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame. He is in the Blues Hall of Fame. I could go on.
Sam Phillips at Sun Records talked about him with the reverence usually reserved for spiritual experiences or out-of-body close encounters with extra-terrestrials. Everyone felt that way about him. The Rolling Stones sure did. He was one of their major influences. When the Stones appeared on Shindig, they handed over the stage to Howlin’ Wolf, with a great blues band, including the great James Burton (who would eventually play for Elvis all through the 70s). It’s astonishing, and the young Rolling Stones sit on the stairs behind him, looking up at him, agog. Poor quality clip visually, but all you need are the vocals.
Howlin’ Wolf was born in Mississippi, recorded in Memphis, but eventually would become associated with the Chicago blues. His voice is unmistakable. So powerful it’s impossible to listen to him casually. He demands full attention. His strength of persona was titanic. He had major gravitas – as though he was emerging FROM the earth – but also explosive lift-off, creating an excitement so huge it must have been absolutely overwhelming to see him life. Most artists have one or the other – gravitas or lift-off. He had both.
We’re lucky he lived long enough (he died in 1976) so there is a lot of footage of him performing live.
One final thing, a funny thing I just discovered while trying to find the photo of him at the top of this post (it’s my favorite photo of him because he’s IN ACTION, he’s coming right at you). If you Google “Howlin Wolf” he is the first thing that comes up – of course – but one of the alternate searches showing in the search bar was “Howling wolf animal.” So what this means is: the determined wolf lovers out there who just want to see pictures of their favorite animal out in the wild howling at the moon, have to add “animal” to their search, to clarify what it is they are actually looking for – otherwise all they’d see would be pictures of this legendary bluesman.
The landscape is still saturated with his name.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
It’s the great, the irreplaceable, Judy Garland’s birthday.
The screengrab above is from John Cassavetes’ 1963 film A Child is Waiting. This film is not really well-known, except among Cassavetes/Garland completists – but some serious Cassavetes fans don’t know about it either. This was a “job” for him, it wasn’t a self-generated project, and so … to these purists … maybe it doesn’t “count” as much. Or something. I don’t know. He himself disowned it, saying the end result was not what he was going for, that there was a conflict between himself and producer Stanley Kramer about how to tell the story. All of this may be true, but that’s no reason for us to not watch the film and make up our own minds. It’s definitely filmed in a more “conventional” way than his other more personal films like Faces, Woman Under the Influence, Husbands and etc., all of which came later. But it’s interesting to watch because it shows what Cassavetes is like as a “director for hire” … and you can FEEL his sensibility in every frame, I don’t care what the purists say. A Child is Waiting is about a woman (Garland) who joins the staff of a mental hospital for disabled kids and immediately disagrees with the treatment of the patients, as decreed by the head doc (Burt Lancaster). She bonds with the kids – one in particular – whose mother, a chilly blonde played by Gena Rowlands, cannot deal with the fact that her son is not “normal” – she’s put him into the institution and basically never comes to visit, breaking the son’s heart and spirit. Garland fights for better treatment of the kids. The children in the movie were not trained actors. They were all mentally-challenged and disabled kids from a nearby state hospital. It gives the film a palpable and almost dangerous sense of reality that it certainly would not otherwise have. Cassavetes didn’t try to control the kids, or manipulate them, in either what they did, or who they were. This is where “he” is most felt in the film. He doesn’t film the kids with pathos, or pity, or sadness. He captures them in the fullness of their lives, mischievous, angry, sullen, pleased, whatever. And: He just thrust Garland among them. And the whole film, as far as I’m concerned, is about watching her take it all in. The screengrab at the top is what she is like through the whole thing: She takes them in – listens to them – intuitively cares about where they are at and what they are going through. Because it’s Cassavetes and his eye was always so tender and human – this does not feel exploitive. A Child is Waiting was produced by Stanley Kramer – who wanted to expose the plight of such children – (he was a very socially conscious guy as I’m sure you know). Other big actresses were considered for this part – offers were made, they all turned it down. Kramer had just worked with Garland in Judgment at Nuremberg so he got her to take the role.
If you want to see pure distilled empathy – felt in every thought/word/deed/gesture/expression … it’s in A Child is Waiting in Judy Garland’s performance.
Because that’s the thing with Judy Garland. She couldn’t do it any other way. It ALL was real for her. It’s how she was built, it’s how she received the world. It’s why she was a great actress, and it’s why she suffered so mightily. She paid the price for the easy accessibility to her own depths, of course, but it came from a place not of neurosis – as is so facile-ly claimed – but of generosity, fearlessness, and, above all else, reality. And actors must always “find a way” to make their fictional circumstances real. That’s the gig. Garland couldn’t do it any other way and so actors have much to learn from her.
If the pain was real for her, and it was, then so too was the joy, the love, the humor. It ALL was real. She had access to ALL of it.
This is a PHENOM in emotional availability and performance, in actors AND in regular people, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
She was DIFFERENT. This is why she is who she is and why she was who she was. It’s why she’s so wondrous to watch.
For me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting in the 20th century – and one that predicts Brando by over a decade – is the scene in Wizard of Oz when she sees Aunty Em in the big globe. This scene is one of my Talismans of Great Acting.
She’s not controlling the emotion, or even expressing it. She is IN it. And remember: Aunty Em is NOT in the glass globe. Judy is looking at nothing. Nobody’s there. She’s looking at a prop. Everything she does she does from her imagination. It’s astonishing.
Another high-water-mark: Judy Garland’s one-of-the-greatest-performances-of-all-time rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, sung on her TV show a couple of weeks after President Kennedy – a friend of hers – was killed.
Like I said: one of the greatest performances of all time.
Another high-water-mark: the scene in the dressing room in Star is Born. Again, for me, it’s another Talisman of Great Acting. Judy has a ton of those.)
It’s long. But that’s why it’s so masterful. Because I must point out: she does it with no cuts. She has to speak a huge wall of text – the scene is 5 minutes long – and she must “go” someplace during the course of the monologue. She doesn’t start out where she ends up. She can’t play the end of the monologue before she gets there … so she actually has to go THROUGH this. In front of us. No cuts, to give her time to prepare, or jump-start the final emotional state. The camera is placed on her and we watch her … she starts out sad but relatively calm, and at the end she is completely BROKEN. (The following scene is the huge number “Born in a Trunk” – which she is forced to perform with all of THIS churning around underneath it. And so that scene ALSO is a wonder, because in it she has to suppress all of THIS that we see here.)
No fakery. Never. She literally COULDN’T fake it.
Nobody like her. Happy birthday Judy.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
