The Clumsiest of Cinematic Techniques

So you didn’t win Best Director. It went to John Depreción. Of course, it went to him. He directed The Dupe Journal and Wheels! He’s the founder of Other Fish in the Sea Productions, has been called the Walt Disney of the 21st century. He’s the face of family-friendly entertainment without all the cloying elements so familiar from most children’s movies. Adults become children watching his films. The public sorely wants to be entertained these days. They need it.

Depreción is a film director for the new millennium. Like Hitchcock when he won his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, Depreción knew better than to blather on about things that don’t matter, simply said, “Thank you,” raised his statue to the cameras, and walked offstage. Dialogue is the clumsiest of cinematic techniques, always a last resort. You, too, are learning this. Your films have slowly progressed from promising to sub-genius work. I predict that a similar award, perhaps the same, will be in store for you. Someday.

I saw immediate promise in you back in grad school when you were my student and I created a graph to plot your career. On the horizontal axis I marked the years; on the vertical, I charted “quality.” In an attempt to quantify this amorphous concept, I gave points to various attributes: setting, lighting, editing, sound, cinematography, linking of narrative and stylistic elements, etc. In the twenty years since you worked your way through my program—starting with your thesis film, Information—your trajectory has moved steadily upward from the lower-left-hand corner to the upper right of the chart with only the occasional blip downward. 

Don’t be shocked. I do this with all of my students, but yours has been the most pleasurable for me to yearly trace. In fact, you might or might not be surprised to hear that most of my students don’t succeed as film directors. Some settle for work as teachers or tech people, but the vast majority don’t find steady work in either the film industry or academe despite my efforts to guide them. A few years ago, I attempted to find a few of my more promising students who had disappeared, tracked them down to make an informal survey of what they had been up to in the years since graduation. In order to earn a living, it seemed that they were doing almost anything but making films: waiting tables, tutoring children, guiding tours, modeling for life drawing classes, editing gay erotica. They were doing every kind of awful job from working as secretaries to prostitutes. 

Remember Orville Bonds? He stopped by last year and was living in his car. What a car! A rusty station wagon crammed with cans, broken bottles, hoses, lawn chairs, clothes, and whatnot. He was making ends meet by scrounging for scratched CDs and moldy books to sell. CDs! He and Ada Teratian had split. Surely, you remember her. Apparently, they’d been living in the car until she came after him with a pocket knife at a rest stop in Georgia. He’d left her there and hadn’t seen her in years. 

Orville had seemed so self-possessed, so smart and innovative when he was my student. He seemed to really think in film. I know you all looked up to him. But I couldn’t connect my memory of him from those days with this trashy guy speaking too loudly in the faculty parking lot, almost yelling about various embarrassing episodes. Apparently, he and Ada had had a child though I’m not sure what became of it. He seemed to be barely tethered to reality, his rambling dialogue giving me no clue about whether they took the baby with them when they were moving around the country, left it with a family member, or if they simply put it up for adoption. I don’t even know what gender it is. 

We went out for a beer. I didn’t really want to, but for some reason couldn’t come up with an adequate excuse. It was awful. He picked a fight with some frat boys, screamed the most offensive obscenities and then the bouncer tossed him into the alleyway. That’s the last I’ve seen of him.

I suspect this is not news to you since that image of Orville—snot-faced, shrieking and crying as a bouncer hulks toward him, cracking his knuckles in preparation for punching—is astonishingly reminiscent of your most recent film, Effigies. Except your homeless guy doesn’t curse. And he never leaves the woman at the rest stop; they’re together in the bar when he goes down to his knees. He’s grabbing at his chest, apparently a heart attack. The other people in the bar are strangely—and poetically—indifferent to his suffering. The main thing that really sticks in my mind, though, is the bright yellow shirt your protagonist is wearing. It’s very similar to the one that Orville was wearing the last time I saw him, the only clean thing he had on. Right before he got into the argument with the frat boys, I was getting us a pitcher of beer, carrying it back to the murky corner table where Orville sat by himself, seeming to speak on one of those hands-free telephones, except that he didn’t have one. I felt that I was going to weep. I thought if any of my students would have made a name for himself, it would have been Orville. He was my favorite, maybe even the son I never had. And there he was, talking to himself in a dive bar, wearing a stupid yellow shirt. That shirt, it seemed to glow.