Making Movies

Abstract

Computers, mobiles, and media continue to create symbioses between performance and screens. YouTube, founded in 2005 and purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion, catalyzed a tremendous global communications revolution—digital technology with virtually unlimited storage capacity greatly expanded accessibility, transforming the making of videos, movies, and their dissemination and archiving. Video and movies became virtually synonymous as 16 and 35 millimeter celluloid were replaced by HD, and further accelerated by smart phones whose advanced camera and sound technology has also been used to shoot commercial movies as well as to watch them.YouTube’s mega streaming platform is comprised of millions of free public- access channels with billions of videos, viewers, and revenue enabling anyone to have an outlet and to enjoy unlimited programs (most are free although some require a fee). The new possibilities of instant distribution and social media would have been inconceivable to the pioneering sixties underground New American Cinema filmmakers like Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Stan Brakhage.YouTube’s decentralized accessibility and corporate independence has become the most liberating democratic alternative contra broadcast TV with its commercial restrictions, fixed viewing schedules, and censorship. Breakthrough algorithms enable a wide range of instantly accessible programming—vintage and commercial TV and movie archives from Sarah Bernhardt to Carol Burnett, trailers, news, interviews, presidential addresses, TED Talks, and tutorials on a vast number of subjects including how to make videos with iMovie, etc. Hollywood has been coopted—now anyone can make a movie, supplemented by Apple’s GarageBand recording software. In addition, online performances can reach more viewers than theatre- going audiences.Confession: I never anticipated being able to make my own movies until shortly before the Covid lockdown. During high school and college, I started out as an actor and did three years of summer stock while also training in modern dance and ballet, then got hooked on dance and choreography. Antioch College’s work-study program enabled me to spend alternating quarters in NYC to further my professional dance training. During my final nine-month project leave, I appeared in movies by Warhol, Markopoulos, and Mekas. Just before leaving campus, two student filmmakers urged me to contact Markopoulos, who was looking for actors for his new movie. I did and was cast as Adonis in The Iliac Passion (1967) that featured many underground “superstars,” including Warhol, Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, chanteuse Tally Brown, Taylor Mead, Paul Swan, and the art critic Gregory Battcock. Film offered another opportunity to explore performance. Andy asked me to be in two of his early films—Boys, a series of “screen tests,” and Couch on which you could do anything. Warhol was still a novice but very shrewd—he simply set up his pricey Bolex on a tripod, turned it on without giving any direction, and enigmatically left you alone while he wandered off to paint. Having had my dance class that morning, for Couch I very slowly stretched my leg over my head while seated and staring deadpan at the camera. The simplest format of a still camera later proved especially useful.Markopoulos was more experienced and technically adept. The cinematic narrative in his prize-winning film Twice a Man is heightened by staccato flutters of single- framed sequences that amplify afterimages and poetically intensify the actors’ unspoken and subconscious psychology. What intrigued the cast while making The Iliac Passion was how Markopoulos was able to shoot a scene, carefully rewind his footage, recalculate the light and shoot an overlay of superimpositions, something no other filmmaker was doing or able to do. In Fall 1964, I also appeared in Mekas’s Award Film to Andy Warhol, shot at the Silver Factory, and in 1965 Mekas filmed my first NYC “pop art” dance cup/saucer/two dancers/radio, a duet performed with the extraordinary Phoebe Neville at The Bridge Theater on East St. Mark’s Place.Film continued to fascinate me. During the sixties Jeff Norwalk made some 8 mm movies of my early work, most notably the 16 mm film for my first solo evening- length work m-o-o-n-b-r-a-i-nwithSuperLecture (performed at the Gate Theatre in 1966 and at the Filmmakers Cinematheque on 42nd Street, Spring 1967). His “Time Capsule” footage captured my preparing for a performance at a Judson Church concert where I appeared as a Chinese dancer, Yen Ying, in a red jumpsuit, in 1968. During the following decades, while operating my own dance company (1976–1991) my choreography and multimedia dance works included projections, films, video, characters, and texts; during the eighties, Tim Purtell was our dedicated company videographer. Video was still new and a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grant enabled me to buy a Panasonic. We experimented extensively, both in rehearsals and performances, indoors and outdoors in Battery Park beneath the majestic World Trade Center.In 1978, filmmakers Robyn Brentano and Andrew Horn, set designer Richard Brintzenhofe, musician William-John Tudor, and I collaborated on SPACE CITY, a dance movie that premiered at Lincoln Center’s International Dance Film Video Conference in 1981, and is now on YouTube.In 1979, I was one of the featured postmodern choreographers in Michael Blackwood’s film Making Dances, which has had wide distribution and was shown extensively on TV here and abroad. We were filmed in the Museum of Modern Art garden preparing for an upcoming performance, outdoors rehearsing in Battery Park, and in a studio where dance writer Marcia B. Siegel interviewed me. Though I was able to see all the footage, the best of it unfortunately ended up on the cutting- room floor.More recently, despite many friends’ insistence on getting a smart phone, but put off by people’s zombie behavior obsessively glued to their hand-held gizmos, in June 2019 I finally caved, realizing the importance of a mobile in case of an emergency (and luckily just months before Covid). At the Verizon store conveniently located on the ground floor of my Kips Bay building, I purchased an iPhone, still not realizing how advanced the supercomputing video and sound technology were. Although I had purchased my Apple desktop computer years before, I didn’t realize its multimedia capacities included iMovie software.As a writer, I’ve long been preoccupied and challenged by language. Having published five novels, a book of performance texts, and innumerable essays, in addition to creating characters for the stage, all prepared me to write my own YouTube comic scripts, which also provided an unusual acting challenge. My fascination with different character voices actually began as a child with puppets. One Christmas, my parents had a varnished plywood puppet theatre with red velvet curtains and little footlights built for me. On TV, Bill and Cora Baird’s magical marionettes especially intrigued me, because of their amazing nuanced movements. I made my own homemade hand- and string-puppets and enjoyed giving them voices—the atavistic thrill of vocal mimicry comes naturally to children. Later, I realized I secretly wanted to be the puppets, hence dancing—someone else pulling the strings! Walt Whitman had also been an inspiration: “Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil.”1Recently, I began incorporating multiple voices in my solo dances. While choreographing Labyrinth with Voices (2017) seven zany characters began emerging, which prompted the idea of expanding them into a separate work—Happy Valley Retirement Village. The Construction Company presented the solo at Settlement House in downtown Manhattan. Charles Dennis oversaw the two-camera video documentation; we then collaborated on distilling the material from twenty-three minutes into a seven-minute YouTube video.I first considered staging Happy Valley Retirement Village as a dance-theatre work before realizing the production would be cost-prohibitive. Thus the iPhone became the means to play, record, and edit the cast of seven myself, and very economically. The whimsical characters included “the oldest man in the world,” crusty 150-year Ole’ Grandpa; Buddy, a surly cigar-smoking blue collar Brooklyn construction worker; Basil Wraithbone, a BBC commentator with precise, over-pronounced King’s English; acting diva Katherine Heartburn with a brittle quavering voice imperious and crotchety; Randy Pincer, a Cockney dandy and Reality TV fanatic; Foo Chi, a nasal Chinese cook; and antic Tallulah Bankhead, probably the most imitated and caricatured comedienne because of her exaggerated, deep, drop-dead voice and over-the-top wit. What started out embedded in a dance became my first YouTube movie.I had long been a big YouTube junkie—so many unexpected discoveries kept popping up: Basil Rathbone in the charming old Sherlock Holmes’s movies, late Katherine Hepburn interviews, Tallulah Bankhead, and illusionist Charles Pierce’s inimitable female impersonations. Taking on characters of both genders provided an extra challenge.Luckily, I had many of the props and costumes from Dancing Wor(l)ds, my multi-character solo evening performed at Dance Theater Workshop in 1992, but additional getups were needed. So in August 2019 I ventured downtown to the awesome block-through Halloween Adventure store on Lower Broadway at 12th Street. This blockbuster costume outlet contained everything imaginable and more. There I found Ole’ Grandpa’s long white hair and beard along with Kate’s black hat, veil, and crepe collar. Tallulah’s hat came from a local thrift shop, and Buddy’s yellow hardhat from my local hardware store where I also bought two clamp-on lights with 150-watt bulbs, and from Amazon a tripod and an assortment of colored light gels ($15). My composer and musician friend Brenda Hutchinson quickly showed me how use my iPhone to photograph, video, and transfer footage to my iMac. The experience felt like stumbling into a forest backwards.Of course, there was no way of knowing, during the latter half of 2019, that within two months a devastating worldwide pandemic was just about to shutter everything, including all art and concert venues, museums, businesses, and restaurants. Just prior, in December, I performed another dance solo, Characters in Limbo, again presented by the Construction Company at Settlement House, which reprised an early tongue-twister dance scripted for different foreign accents and character voices. Just two months before Covid, who could have known the coming pandemic would turn everyone into a character in limbo? Videographer Charles Dennis again documented the performances and we collaborated on a condensed version for YouTube. We both agreed that shorter videos worked best online. Decades before, Merce Cunningham discovered that what takes, say, thirty seconds on stage, requires only a couple of seconds on video—time and perception are completely altered, reconfigured, and compressed—as video is informational and encapsulates movement as data. During the eighties, hyperkinetic MTV pioneered our now pervasive cultural format of rapidly fragmented editing.As the Covid lockdown began, I continued improvising and scripting Happy Valley Retirement Village. Luckily, YouTube has many informative iMovie tutorials that guided me through all the complex and challenging technical aspects of importing and editing, which was certainly much quicker than slogging through technical manuals. While improvising the character voices during rehearsals, I’d jot down the material, type and edit the accumulating script, carefully condensing the dialogue so intention could be telegraphed as quickly and concisely as possible. For the first part, each character’s dialogue was initially a separate block of text that I dutifully memorized. But I hadn’t realized until just before I began shooting that the cameo monologues needed to be rescaled and intercut. The succeeding installments were subsequently tightly scripted.One idea for intercutting the different characters came from old comics. Each Sunday my grandparents got the big Herald Tribune with the color comic section featuring The Katzenjammer Kids and Blondie. But the cartoon that especially fascinated me was just one large, single picture depicting multiple characters talking with each other over the back fence, a simultaneity of verbal interactions.Voices on stage project sonic presences, whereas in a novel dialogue comes to life in the reader’s mind. But there’s a connection between both processes. Early on as an actor, I discovered Michael Chekhov’s very helpful 1953 book To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting, which encourages the aspirant to write out everything that can be known about the character. That advice helped many years later to brainstorm ideas, choreograph character behavior, body language, and gestural material, as well as different ways to format the emerging scripts.Curiously, performing in front of the iPhone resembles acting in front of a mirror. The mobile mounted on a tripod monitors exactly what will be recorded so lighting levels and angles can be checked as well as costumes and props adjusted. Importing the iMovie footage into my computer enabled me to visualize unusual options for editing and ordering the material. Video editing somewhat resembles word processing—by placing the cursor on the frame or frames, it’s possible to copy, paste, delete, intercut, and edit down to a fraction of a second. Viewer interest, especially for character close-ups, needs to be enhanced by kinetic activity— gestures, facial expressions, costume, props, etc.Once again, the eighties MTV revolution of fast-byte presentation set the precedent for how our entire media culture depends upon rapid visual intercutting. Perhaps this cultural obsession with fragmentation, interruption, and speed actually originated with the atom bomb and TV commercials—Information Theory, and our pervasive cultural attention deficit disorder! Angst and ads set the media protocol for how to perceive continually interrupted streams of data. The iPhone works best recording short thirty-to-forty-second sequences, which also transfer more easily and quickly into the computer. However, transferring each “take” requires a rather laborious and time-consuming several step process.Choreographing the kinetic action to animate the tight format of the square frame for each close-up character sequence was especially challenging: Ole’ Grandpa’s wily ironic eye expressions and whimsical hand gestures, Kate’s fussy business with teacup, spoon, and flyswatter, Buddy’s cigar, Basil’s reporter’s notepad, Foo Chi’s cooking utensils, Tallulah’s cocktail glass and cigarette, etc. Choreography not only involves movement, bodies, and gestures but coordinating words, ideas, and images. As I began editing the first part of Happy Valley, I quickly realized various ways to intercut short character sequences to heighten the humor, timing, and continuity.Covid struck in February 2020. NYC was shuttered on March 12; exactly a year later, I uploaded the first part of Happy Valley Retirement Village to YouTube, the longest of the series at almost twenty-two minutes; the second part followed in May. Basil Wraithbone’s “exclusive” interviews with Katherine Heartburn, Randy Pincer, Ole’ Grandpa, and Tallulah Bankhead followed for Independence and Labor Days. Reunion @ Happy Valley introduced another character, Boris Badenough, a scheming Russian oligarch planning to takeover Happy Valley and turn it into a sausage factory. Halloween Showdown at Happy Valley was later uploaded to YouTube for that occasion.Rehearsing and producing the voices was the biggest challenge and adventure: Buddy’s lowbrow blue collar Brooklyn speech; Basil’s polished debonair BBC King’s English decked out in a black gadfly hat and thick professorial glasses; wizened white hair and bearded wisecracker Ole’ Grandpa’s reedy and cynical drawl; Randy Pincer’s daffy and campy Cockney; Katherine Heartburn’s agitated and crabby pronouncements; nasal Foo Chi camouflaged by white cook’s hat peering over shades manipulating kitchen utensils; Tallulah Bankhead’s bawdy basso deep as a truck driver camouflaged behind celebrity shades and white boa; and Boris Badenough’s heavy guttural Russian-Slavic accent. As I learned to change vocal registers, each character quickly materialized their own identity.Then, on a jag, I adapted and recorded an earlier performance work “Ask Mr. Snail” for YouTube, retitled Mr. Snail & Mr. Parrot, “the slowest character in the world,” a goofy and lumbering gastropod wearing ridiculously oversized sunglasses, a big black top hat with two large protruding sparkling gold antennae, and accompanied by his witty squawking parrot friend Sam, uploaded for Labor Day 2021. After posting it on YouTube, dancer/choreographer friend Laura Shapiro suggested making a version for children, so I uploaded MR. SNAIL FOR KIDS for Halloween. POLITICS FOR KIDS (& adolts) WITH MR. SNAIL followed the next September.That May, I also adapted another earlier stage solo, FOREIGN FLIC★★★★ which features a mysterious shaded figure in a black trench coat who might be in or is watching the self-same movie, accompanied by a ludicrously “foreign” word salad text, a mash-up of fractured accents and languages which I recorded using GarageBand with different reverb modulations. While making it, I had a brainstorm— YouTube is also a vast online cinematic library, so I intercut vintage war footage, old train crashes, and explosions shot directly off my iMac screen to create a surreal six-minute faux-noir thriller! Mistakes and unexpected mishaps can be as important as what is planned (the shaken camera at the end). A shot of a disembodied hand led to another discovery—micro edits can conceal mistakes while enhancing delivery and challenging the viewer’s eye.A short six-minute dance video Kaleidoscoptics uses disjunctive quick-change editing and rapid intercutting to collage compositional possibilities that would be impossible to choreograph or perform on stage. A new sturdier tripod enabled me to shoot sequences from overhead as well as from below to vary spatial levels, as well as to capture and isolate legs, torso, and footwork. Juxtaposing micro-edits to create unusual illogical sequences as well as the use of found footage generated more unexpected possibilities.In August 2022, I reworked an antic eighties performance work Strung-Out Newscasters and uploaded it to YouTube. It features two dueling announcers, Chris Wallop for Cable News WCBD/New York and Basil Wraithbone, BBC/London delivering their hyperbolic over-the-top Final News Update. When it was performed live, the New York Times wrote that the piece was “a verbal tour de force … Saturday Night Live was never like this.”2 Again, each news item was visually amplified with thumbnail visuals shot directly off my computer.In our world of informational overload, the human nervous system is constantly processing streams of afterimages that mostly occur below the threshold of awareness. After Afterimages (August 2022) mirrors how subliminal clues and messages appear in the interstices between words, sounds, and images—the editing replicates the blinking of our eyes. By interrupting and intercutting rapid changes another kind of virtual continuity is produced that is more than the sum of the parts, as a dance would be impossible to perform live. In the same article, the Times reviewer commented that my dances are “exercises in perception.”Another friend suggested including and recording myself, so dialoguing with Basil Wraithbone became Kenneth King Interview in which I spill the beans about the childhood experiences that led me to become a performer, writer, and to make character movies (uploaded in November). IMPOSSIBLE TONGUE TWISTERS (January 2023) features many of my twenty-five tongue twisters I’ve danced over the years that were originally published in The Paris Review. These seventeen videos and movies complete a project cycle and were my way of working through the Covid lockdown. Despite the uncertainties about public performances going forward, our increasingly digital world luckily offers many alternatives.