Long ago I attended a MoMa tribute to the great Hollywood director Douglas Sirk (“Written on the Wind,” “Imitation of Life,” “All That Heaven Allows”) with the Maestro himself in attendance. It was a heady moment for me as I had loved Sirk’s movies since college and now I was meta-appreciating them through Fassbinder’s reinterpretations (“Fear Eats the Soul,” “Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven,” etc.)  And nowadays, younger people can find their way to Sirk through Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven.”  One of things that is so great about Sirk is how he has inspired so many filmmakers to adapt and shape his work to their own talents.

During the Q&A, somebody asked him, “Mr. Sirk, what do you think makes a good director?”

Sirk stopped to think and then answered quietly:   “Making movies is very hard. Very hard.  In my opinion anyone who makes a movie….is a good director.”

I’ve always loved that he said that.  It was so unexpected.  If he had said the usual baloney I would never remember it today.  Most people would find the idea crazy, ridiculous, filled with false humility, or even dangerous, but if you had been there, you would have known he was absolutely sincere.

And having tried to make movies myself, I’ve been forever grateful for what he said.  I may not have had the talent to make something good--but at least I tried. Or so I thought until recently.

Lately I have been looking at a lot of online movies as I gear up for the launch of SpeedCine Beta.  My work involves going to Amazon VOD hundreds of times a day, where I am treated to the first two minutes of some of the most astonishingly bad movies I have ever seen.  After looking at a few hundred of these opening salvos of cinematic malignance,  a director like Chris Seaver starts to look like Orson Welles.   At least the auteur of “Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker!,”  “Anal Paprika 3: Menage-a-Death,”  “Filthy McNasty,”  “Heather and Puggly Drop a Deuce,” and “Terror at Blood Fart Lake,” knows how to conjure up a memorable title. 

There are thousands of movies that are turned down by every festival in the world each year.  Nobody in a position to curate ever found anything in them to praise.  In the past, they might as well have been languishing in outer space;  now they go on to glory on Createspace.

But as I said, at least they tried. And maybe if they keep trying, they’ll get better.  I think Robert Rodriguez said something like everybody has at least seven bad films in them.  But I think what he meant was you should wait before you hit number eight before you launch your marketing campaign.

Still, for better or for worse, no matter how much negative feedback you get, no matter how many film festivals turn down your movie, no matter  how much debt you get yourself in trying to express yourself….no matter what, it is an achievement that you had the perseverance to make a feature film.  You’re in a special club and no one can take it away from you.  Except for me right now.

But not Douglas Sirk.  He gives you props.

I need a long rest after all those movies….

“I’ve got to make films.”

It was back in the late 70s, and I was having a coffee with a friend. It was a common refrain from her. She wasn’t trying to convince herself. She wasn’t gearing herself up emotionally and practically for what she would need to do to make her dream a reality. It was just a statement of a basic need, like eating or sleeping, something not to be denied. I was certain that she’d achieve her goal--but I felt that way about lots of people I knew. But she was different.

I thought  Kathryn Bigelow could make great films.

I met Kathy (that’s what we called her then) in New York in the late 70s in New York. She was part of a circle of friends that gathered for a film club every weekend at cinematographer Ed Lachman’s immense loft on 19th Street. Somehow Kathy and I became friends and we started hanging out a bit outside the group. (She was way out of my league to be anything more than a friend). Kathy was (and is) strikingly beautiful and overwhelmingly talented; she would have been extremely intimidating to be around if she wasn’t so nice. Kathy probably could have made it as a painter if she had wanted to stick with that. She had received a scholarship at the Whitney, but then moved on to Columbia Film School.

She had a tremendous fascination with how violence could be portrayed in the cinema, particularly as seen through the filter of a French writer and philosopher I had never heard of named George Bataille.  I got the sense that Bataille was some kind of mélange of surrealism and eroticism and de Sade-like cruelty, but the precise way he blended them and what he put in of his own was vague to me then, and even more vague to me now. But what I did understand was that Kathy wasn’t just looking back to the styles and techniques of Hitchcock, Peckinpah, Romero, Argento, etc.—she was attempting to build on a highly aestheticized foundation. She didn’t want to ape anybody else, she wanted to make a kind of movie that hadn’t been made before. This I understood well, as it was a commonplace in European cinema for filmmakers like Godard and Resnais to use literary ideas as a means to “reinvent” cinema. The difference, and it was a huge one, is that Kathy was reading different books. What she wanted to create was more visceral and stomach-churning--more of a punch to the stomach and a battering of the subconscious than a detached and modish Brechtian challenge for the mind.

Kathy had a reckless ambition that made her want to be more than a director; she wanted to elevate the art. Sure, there was an abundance of would-be filmmakers around town, as well as lots of people who liked to talk about the aesthetic potential of cinema, but Kathy had everything working full cylinders, plus talent, charisma and determinism.

Just for fun, I googled “Kathryn Bigelow” and “George Bataille,” and I found a 1998 academic paper, “Georges Bataille and the Visceral Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow,” written by Jeff Karnicky, then a grad student at Penn State. He wrote: “This essay finds similarities between George Bataille's philosophy of expenditure and Kathyrn Bigelow's films “Strange Days,” “Near Dark,” and “Point Break.” More specifically, I argue that, among other things, Bigelow's films viscerally elicit, in the film spectator, many of the concepts Bataille discusses in his writings, so that the practice of ‘joy before death’ becomes more than words on a page. Philosophy becomes visceral sensation, leaves the world of abstract thought and enters the domain of bodily sensations.”

When I watched her new film “The Hurt Locker,” my hands started trembling during the first sequence and they didn’t stop until an hour into the movie. They were shaking so much that the man who was sitting next to me got up and left. I suppose it’s possible that the movie was too much for him, but I doubt it—my hands were distracting me too. The movie had literally entered my nervous system. I’m willing to bet that if you’d measured everybody’s vital signs in that theatre, they’d have been off the charts.

Actress Hanna Schygulla, me with horrifying 70s hair, Kathryn Bigelow

In David Poland’s interview with Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, she says that the material was so strong that she didn’t want to aestheticize it in any way. It was intense enough that it didn’t require it.  While that’s undoubtedly true, I believe Kathryn Bigelow is such a masterful filmmaker because there are ideas behind what she does, and yes, aesthetic underpinnings to her style.   And the main one, decades ago, was Bataille.  Perhaps she jettisoned him while making this film, but can she really work him out of her system completely?   Let me count how many films I have seen in all my years of movie going that have made my hands tremble like that. Let’s see….there’s one. It’s hard not to think of Mr. Karnicky’s words:  “Philosophy becomes visceral sensation, leaves the world of abstract thought and enters the domain of bodily sensations.”

I remember seeing a monograph on Bigelow in a bookstore once, and being delighted.  Imagine!  Kathy, who once expressed herself with the high-toned jargon of academia, had gone on to become “Kathryn Bigelow,” someone with a book studying her oeuvre!  I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of Bataille in that book.  Bigelow is a serious intellectual,  I’m sure she’s spoken about Bataille relative to her films, and I doubt Karnicky is the only one to study her from that angle.  Still, I don’t know if critics from popular magazines have written about her in that way.  And I’d like to.

Anyway, Bigelow is an artist, always developing and changing.  She’s taken what she could from all her mentors and the directors who preceded her and has lived to become someone that others study.  David Poland, in his interview, asked her:

Poland: Do you look back much?

Bigelow: Never. I don’t. I just kind of keep looking ahead.

(Poland was asking her about whether she looked back on her previous films, but it sounded to me like a more general philosophy.)

I’ll end with a story. After she finished her first feature (co-directed by Monty Montgomery), she brought her poster art to my apartment/office. (I don’t remember exactly why, but perhaps it was because I had supervised the printing of many posters while at New Yorker Films.) It was simple and striking—basically a very intense picture of an extremely young Willem Dafoe(it was his first film) in a leather jacket. But she didn’t like the title, “Breakdown” at all. It did seem too generic for the film. She left me some of her publicity materials and I took a look at them that night. In the midst of the text, she wrote, “the loveless and the damned.” I called her up and said, “Why don’t you call it ‘The Loveless and the Damned?” She didn’t say anything, but a little later, she called me up and said, “I’m going to call it “The Loveless.” And she did.

As you can see, I’ve changed the name of my blog.   Originally I thought I would be writing about issues involving online video, intellectual property, piracy, etc.   The original title, “Shake Your Windows,” came from Dylan’s “The Times They are A-Changin’,” and the general idea was that the internet is changing everything and if people in the industry don’t figure out how to take advantage of it, it’s going to run them over. (Of course it also suggested the way people in the industry use the term “windows.”  I spent days writing these blog posts and threw them all out.  In fact, I hated what I was writing so much that I deleted some of my early posts.  There are so many people generating millions of blogs on these issues, that I didn’t see how I could offer something new and distinctive into that discussion.  So I fell back on what I did with my first blog (on Zoom-In Online), and started writing about my own life.    I do other stuff too, but that’s the general thread. 

The inspiration for all this was years ago,  when I was having lunch with  Amy Gross, who was then an editor at Elle.  I was telling her a lot of my stories and she said, “you’ve got to write this down!”  So she gave me an assignment to write the crazy story I told her.   But  a week  later River Phoenix died, so I asked her if I could write about him instead.  So that was my first story, “Remembering River,” and it ran in Elle in their February 1994 issue.

At that point I started to think I might have a book in me.  And I knew what I wanted to call it: “My Life as a Dog.”  That really summed it up for me, even though other publicists got really indignant when I told them the title.  But I didn’t see being a dog as a negative thing.   Who doesn’t love dogs?  No one.  Being a dog is great.   I got to be around talented and famous people, many of them my heroes.  I often had the opportunity to help them, and that made me feel really good. I have always said that the most important thing a publicist can offer is love, and I gave everything I had. 

I never made any real money doing publicity.  It was an unselfish love, just like the kind a good dog gives its Master.  Can there be anything better than that?  Or more satisfying? 

If you look at the picture above long enough, you will recognize that there is a true nobility to my vocation.

I tried to be helpful with people’s careers, and in many cases, I was.  I’m very proud of that, and I think I’ve had a wonderful life.  Promoting movies is something I do well, and I’m very fortunate to have had the chance to do it.    There are so many bonuses I can’t even list them, like when you go to industry parties, you get goodie bags, or as I like to call them--treats.

Anyway, my friends talked me out of writing the book, saying it would be career suicide.  They said it was better to commit career suicide the way I was already doing it—in bite-sized chunks—rather than going whole hog at one go.   So that was it for “My Life as a Dog.”

But when I realized that “Shake Your Windows” made no sense with what the blog was shaping up to be, I sent out some emails to friends to ask them what they thought about “My Life as a Dog.”  The response was lackluster.  And while I was doing that, I came up with “My Life as a Blog.”   And that seemed right.  It may not make any sense, but then again, neither does my life.