Imaginary Insects

On a freezing cold Presidents' Day I drove across the state to the old whaling city of New London. Several inches of snow had fallen the night before, and that plus Nixon's holiday had left the highways of Connecticut empty, a forbidden land. Everything was absence as I trespassed beneath the still, snow-covered trees in frigid silence, the evergreens standing sentinel for their sleeping young cousins and watching my car scoot below like a shiny crab. Somewhere within their splintery memories they thought back on their own founding fathers, probably, ancient pioneering arboreal species who laid down the law in seedlings and took no days off.

After a lot of fruitless searching through the ordinary channels, I had finally scored Tonhoe's address from a film geek acquaintance in Moodus; the cinephile had spotted the director in a Sports Authority last April and had stolen a peek at the information the man had provided to get his '04 fishing license. Now I was almost there, and his street turned out to be a narrow road sidling off from the city to moon along the banks of the river. I drove past frozen beaches, boatworks, slips, clam shanties and ramshackle restaurants of the sea before finally spotting the house number I was looking for. The problem was that the building was not a residence but a bait shop; I cupped my hands and pressed my face against the glass, but all I could see were rows of featureless shelves and the silhouettes of unsold fishing rods pointing into the air like the spines of a beached monster. I backed away. It was a bum lead. A dud. No Trent Tonhoe or anyone else inside. Of course. It would have been all too easy. What was I thinking?

It was then that I noticed a chain-link gate to the left, and turning the corner I saw beyond it an open wooden stairway leading up the outside of the powder-blue building. An apartment above...from the outside the accommodations looked to be modest, to put it politely, but still....

I rounded up the various scraps of courage within me, opened the gate and quietly climbed the steps. A single door faced the landing. I knocked hard on the wood.

With a pop the catch sprung and the door slowly swung open onto a small, dark kitchen littered with mismatched glassware, abundant evidence of past preparations of coffee, and unwashed cooking machinery of unfamiliar purpose. At the far end of the small space was a shuttered bar, slightly open, and beyond it I could just see the top of a man's head.

"Ah...er," I stammered, "I'm sorry, but the door just opened by itself...I didn't mean to..."

One dark eye came to view over the top of the bar.

"...intrude..."

"No matter," said a rough voice. "Come in out of the cold, kid."

I did as was suggested and cautiously entered the main room of the apartment. There was a grim but homey gloom to the place; the cold light shining in through the large picture window overlooking the bobbing masts and the river beyond seemed to be held at bay by old cigarette smoke and floating dust, and warm darkness had managed to make itself comfortable in every corner. The space was furnished haphazardly with castoff furniture and grey milk crates, and every flat surface was littered with papers and other debris. Texts and sketches were everywhere; in particular there were plies of charcoal drawings on large sheets of paper, the subjects seeming to be either fish, birds, or some mix of the two. I sat down cautiously on a nappy couch piled with European cycling magazines and trout stocking reports. On the table before me sat a small toy frog attached to a squeeze bulb. The fish and birds were in force here too, as well as pages of illegible, scrabbled writing which may have been film scripts or recipes for chowder.

The man at the table was, by my best guess, black Irish crossed with something exotic—Albanian blood, or maybe Turkish. A mop of thick black hair was becoming shot with white, as were the outrageous mutton chops that broadened an already wide face. On a sharp triangular nose sat a pair of tinted spectacles, and the man squinted through them in anxious concentration at a machine which looked something like a science fiction zap gun, except that tied to the tip like a weensy Fay Wray was a tiny pile of black fluff. String, feathers, and deer tails littered the rest of the table.

It was, unquestionably, Trent Tonhoe. I recognized him from the famous photograph from the set of Divine Wind in which he is handing a loaded rifle to Emmanuelle Clewert.

Abruptly the director bent his face down to the machine and bit off the last dangling bit of black thread with his teeth. He then sat up and turned to me. "Does that look like any bug you've ever seen?"

I squinted at the smidge on the table. It was an odd, complicated knot of red and black thread, with squibbled loops representing wings and long burrs suggesting filthy insect appendages. There was a hint of iridescence about the tiny monstrosity, with scarlet tufts and carmine swirls churning through the black furze to make a peppered illusion of depth and anatomical purpose. I shuddered. "I guess I'd have to say no."

Tonhoe did not seem displeased with this answer. "Verisimilitude is a conceit," he announced with a nod. "The funny thing about tying flies is that the right fiction will catch more fish than a good forgery. A perfect arrangement of color and shape can tweak sunken memories of extinct predators and dream-prey. Or maybe that's putting too fine a point on it? Let's just say that it hits them in just the right way, it touches the right electrical trigger point; it's not what the fish sees to be real, it's what the fish knows to be real. Two completely different things." Tonhoe touched the various half-empty mugs that were scattered about him, found one that presumably was fresher or warmer than the others, and took a long drink. Fidgeting, I gingerly touched the squeeze bulb of the frog. It hopped.

"So, what can I do for you?"

My brain had been threatening to knot itself up like Tonhoe's twine insect the moment I had climbed the first step of the stairs, and now an invisible hand pulled the end of the string tight. Whatever it was that I had planned to say had disappeared, and my blindly groping thoughts found only a strange, irregular object whose function was unclear.

"I'm making a film," I said.

Tonhoe leaned back and shook a cigarette out of a mostly empty pack. I could see now that he had an older man's frame, spare but heavy. He was wearing grey running sneakers and a fishing vest. A match sparked.

"I wrote the script, there's a production company, but I need a director. A real director. There's not a lot of money in it, but it's good, I know it's good. I...I don't know what your time, I mean your schedule is like...."

"Time!" A thunderhead of smoke rolled across the room. "Time is a nasty bitch, mostly because you never know if you're supposed to hump her or not, and she makes you feel guilty about it either way. I stay as far away from that stuff as possible. What's the title of this particular epic?"

"Uh, 'Night of the Lobster'."

"Night of the Lobster." repeated Tonhoe. He leaned back in his chair and blew curlicues of smoke at the ceiling. "Night of the Lobster?" He gave me a dubious glance. His gaze then wandered out the window, or else inward. After several minutes of silence, he spoke. "Have you ever seen the Dr. Mabuse movies?"

Well, I had. We talked about film for a couple of hours, with mostly Tonhoe doing the talking, and while only half of his comments made sense to me, everything he said had strange resonance, the deep ring of a bell that has tolled many hours. When the light outside began to fail, my host deftly maneuvered me out of his pied-a-mer. We had not discussed my project, but in between a diatribe against zoom shots and a detailed description of the creation of three-dimensional space in a Griffith short the director told me to mail the script to his post office box. We parted ways at the bottom of the steps. It was only then that the subject of Divine Wind came up.

"Yes, the scene with the centurion...everyone loves that scene. I guess I do too. It was fun to do. Italy is beautiful. They had good pasta in the valley below. Fresh tomatoes, goose liver. Clive was still in the Roman getup, shoveling in salad and wine. The people loved it. He was a celebrity...not as an actor, you understand, but as a man from the past, the glorious past, come to visit, to see if the vino was still good in that part of the world two thousand years later. They practically asked him what it was like to know Caesar. It was lovely."

Thank You for Sending Me an Angel

I literally fell out of my chair when I read the name in the news item. I had been leaning back, far back—something my mother had warned me about—and when I saw the name in the paper I had drifted off into astonishment and lost touch the with mental subdepartment in charge of balance and safety. I fell.

Luckily there was another chair directly behind me. After only a second of pinwheeling arms and flailing legs I was lying upside down in a soft black leather affair that I had found abandoned outside a college dormitory. I read the sentence again:

"Another famous face at the exhibition was Hollywood director Trent Tonhoe, best known for his films Man Cooking Kidneys and Divine Wind."

To call Trent Tonhoe a famous Hollywood director was being a little optimistic; he was aggressively indie, strictly art house, and if Hollywood knew of his existence it would only be because one of the trade unions had his name on a list of people to be beaten up. Among movie buffs, however, he is legendary; Divine Wind is truly one of the masterworks of narrative film, a new Thesaurus for film language itself, and a glorious and powerful emotional experience. It is also one of the most notoriously difficult films to actually see, as very few prints are currently in circulation and it has never been transferred to videotape. The only reason that I am familiar with it is that I was lucky enough to be free on the Tuesday afternoon when the Museum of Modern Art screened the picture as part of its "Visions of the Prairie" series. Actually, the film that was supposed to be shown was the 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains, but there was some mix-up in the archival department; when the film turned out to be DW the audience of film nerds squealed with glee and ran upstairs to barricade the projection booth.

The artist whose exhibition Tonhoe had visited was one LaPacia Flemmaria, a hyperrealist who paints swirling, explosive still lifes of radial saws and fax machines. I got her telephone number from the gallery (La Bon Phott) by passing myself off as a marketing executive from Hewlett Packard who wanted to commission her to paint a portrait of a switching router. I had then prepared a very large amount of hokum in order to get into the artist's confidence so that I could tease out whatever information she knew about Tonhoe, but when I actually connected to her on the phone I lost my nerve. Her voice was simple, musical, and pleasant; she seemed to be perfectly happy to speak to a stranger about whatever was on his mind, and for some reason all the lies drained out of me.

I told her, simply, my story. I was reading about her one-woman show and had seen the name Trent Tonhoe. I was a screenwriter in desperate need of a director, a real director. From one artist to another: could she help me? Did she know Tonhoe? Was he retired? Could I meet him?

Ms. Flemmaria, with a voice of sweet concern, told me that she had never met Trent Tonhoe before that day, but that he had mentioned in passing that he was currently living in New London, Connecticut.

This was all of substance that she knew about the mysterious director, but some reason the conversation lasted a further twenty minutes. By the end I had not only promised to visit La Bon Phott gallery in Switchhaven, but that I would also drop by her private studio to look at her latest canvases. I hung up the phone feeling like I had been brainwashed by an angel.

New London...?

The Last Straw

The frustrations of the past few weeks finally reached the breaking point late last night. I had gone to the offices of Flaming Guerrilla Productions to complain about Brian Eggorian's latest script suggestion (a dream sequence about horses, if you can believe that), and while I was sitting at Darren's desk and waiting for him to finish auditioning yet another female college student I happened to notice the name of one of the characters from the film on some handwritten pages. I assumed that these were production notes regarding costumes or shooting schedules or some such thing, and so I picked them up and started to read. Try to imagine my horror when I realized that what I had in my hands was, in essence, an authorial hijacking of the film by my very nemesis--in other words, a completely new scene for the film penned by the psychotic Mr. Eggorian. My beloved characters were being forced to babble nonsensically at metaphorical gunpoint, and I squirmed in agony as I read an extraordinarily lengthy dialogue between Mandy and her mother in which they discussed, among other things, the emotional trauma Mandy experienced when her mother forbade her to associate with the "rough kids" from the high school marching band, the shame she felt when her mother threw a glass of water at her after her first onset of menses, and the mother's disappointment that the girl was a failure at the art of needlepoint. These pointless histrionics continued on for about seven pages, and the truly infuriating thing about it all was that in the end the two characters did not even reach any kind of accord or understanding; they both simply stamped off to their rooms and phoned their respective therapists.

Here's a brief excerpt of the drivel in question:

Mandy: It was you, mother. You drove daddy away. You and your fancy boys and your mint juleps and everything!

Diahnne: Don't you talk about your father. Don't you dare mention that saint's name, you little tramp.

Mandy: Daren't I? Daren't I?

Diahnne: And let's not bring up the fancy boys again either.

Mandy: Fancy boys! Fancy boys! All you care about are your goddamned fancy boys! They're a sad parade of broken-down pipe dreams and nightmares, they're the clattering arrows of syphilitic cupids who can't see to aim! You shame me, mama! You shame daddy! You shame yourself!

Diahnne: For the love of god, darling, be quiet. The neighbors will hear you. Please, sweetheart, just shut up and fix me a hot toddy.

All in all, it had the rhythm and tone of a Tennessee Williams play ghost written by a mental defective...and this was the new scene earmarked for my own labor of love, Night of the Lobster.

No fucking way.

When Darren finally returned from his exercises in casting and had put on a clean shirt I let him have it. "You can film Night of the Lobster written by me or you can film A Streetcar Named Diarrhea by Brian Eggorian. Take your pick."

Darren's face was fixed into a sullen stare as he listened to my tirade, but I knew that he knew that I was right. There was a long silence as he stared out the window towards the landfill next door, but finally he sighed and looked me in the eye. "Find me a director, then, Joe. Find me a real director and I'll make Night of the Lobster, just the way you dreamed it. Find me a director and we'll make the hell out of that picture, kid."

I stamped down the concrete stairs, wondering where in the wilderness of Connecticut USA I would find a real film director, and, as I opened the door onto the howling cold of the night, I heard Darren roar out one final thought behind me:

"...but he's gotta be cheap!"