Timothy Carey was, by all accounts, obsessed with farting (I will get to Repo Man presently, but believe it or not, this is at least somewhat relevant).
Farting doesn't come up that often in interviews, though come to think of it, Alex Cox's dog took a dump at the end of my interview with him about Straight to Hell Returns; the last words in our conversation were something like, "I've got to go, the dog is shitting on the floor!"
But Timothy Carey -- an actor whose filmography spans multiple roles for Kubrick and Cassavetes (the only directors, I believe, who cast him more than once) but also Marlon Brando and the Monkees -- apparently would have been the man to talk flatulence with. Consider this paragraph from X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, Alex Cox's career-spanning memoir, at least up to Searchers 2.0, (a film which I reviewed here, with a blog comment from Del Zamora, one of the Rodriguez brothers from Repo Man; Cox has made four features since). Cox is talking about his attempts to cast Timothy Carey in his pre-Repo Man short Edge City, aka Sleep is for Sissies, for a role that he had also tried to cast Harry Dean Stanton in (note, I believe I may have erroneously said elsewhere that Cox tried to cast Carey as Bud in Repo Man; it was in fact Edge City for which both Carey and Harry Dean Stanton were considered). From page 17 of the softcover edition:
Unlike some actors, Carey was more imposing in person than on film. He looked about six foot six, and had a powerful voice, black-and-white hair, and staring eyes. He talked constantly, a little bit about the script, but mostly about farting, about the importance of not suppressing the breaking of wind, about how Western society was doomed, due to its suppression of the fart. On and on like this he went, in the same way as Harry Dean was apt to get into a longish diatribe about the Jews, not that Harry was anti-Semitic -- he thought the Christian culture every bit as bad and stupid as the Jewish one -- but he did tend, given a trapped interlocutor, to go on about the Jews. Timothy's obsession, expressed in public, in a much louder voice, was the beauty and importance of the fart.
Carey would prove to want more money for his role than the entire budget of Cox's short, so they went their own ways, Carey never actually working with Cox. But -- I believe around the period when Cox was making Repo Man for Universal -- the two men did cross paths briefly one more time. Also from X Films:
I was going to a screening at the Hitchcock Theatre on the Universal lot. And there was Timothy, sitting in the guard's booth with the guard, singing and playing a guitar. He fixed me with an intense gaze, and serenaded me as I passed.
We can conclude a few things from these stories, but the most obvious of them is that X Films is a very entertaining read, if you like Cox's films or a smart, funny film-related memoir; there are marvelous stories throughout, like the time he walked through a riot outside a Los Angeles punk club without being beaten by cops. He was tripping on LSD at the time. After the Carey anecdote, it's my second favourite story in the book, and I type it out with Alex's blessing (from page 92, the chapter on Sid and Nancy):
I was out on the street, surrounded by raging cops, whacking punks with nightsticks. I was in no state to ride my motorcycle home; I couldn't remember where it was. I sat down on a bus bench and watched the riot.
Why didn't LA's finest beat the shit out of me? I can only conclude it was the drugs: I read somewhere in my hippy studies of LSD's effect on humans in the proximity of bees: apparently people tripping on acid are less likely to be noticed or attacked by bees than non-stoned humans. I think the same thing happened with the cops. The acid trip gave me a non-threatening, non-invasive demeanour as far as the cops were concerned, like the undercover narco's 'scanner suit' in Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. They were all primed for a frenzy, yet, like those bees, they let me wander through the hive unstung.
I do not want to bother Mr. Cox more than necessary, but, able to briefly interact with him to promote the upcoming screening of Repo Man, opening at the VIFF Centre on Friday, I have to ask him if Timothy Carey ever farted in his presence. Many people, we gather, got to hear Carey talk about farting, but getting to hear him ACTUALLY FART... would be a rarer privilege. (Bear in mind that my obituary for Doug Bennett emphasizes the likelihood that I used a toilet seat just after he did; my mind just works this way).
Mr. Cox indulges me:
No, he didn't fart as I recalled, though he discussed farting and its importance during our meeting. I'm sure he was right. Seeing him playing his guitar in the guard's booth that night at Universal was the weirdest thing. Was it a coincidence? Only a medium can tell us now.
,,,And what about Harry Dean Stanton? Did he "go on about the Jews" the way some political types might focus on the plight of the Palestinians, or was it something weirder (conspiracies, Rothschilds, blood slanders, or...?).
You would have to ask Harry what he meant, probably via that medium. I wonder what the answer would be. Like a lot of American actors, he tended to think of himself as a Tibetan Buddhist but the details of it all were quite confused.
Cox answers, "Not at all. He was most charming. The cast and crew loved him."
Does he have any stories about Müller not in the book?
"As I recall, Robby had at that time a collection of Polaroid photos of every motel room he had stayed in. In LA he stayed at the Kensington Hotel in Santa Monica, and added that to his list." (Any readers with a direct line to Jim Jarmusch should ask him if this bit of information inspired the hotel room photography in the "Far From Yokohama" sequence in Mystery Train, which Müller shot.)
Nobody has more evocatively documented the red deserts, fluorescent green dive bars, and gray urban landscapes of America than Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. In this presentation, cinematographer and professor Devan Scott will delve into the ways in which Müller, in collaboration with directors such as Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas), William Friedkin (To Live and Die in L.A.), and Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), spent the 1980s rendering visual poetry out of the dark, forgotten corners of the American experiment.
Allan: Do Devan or Tom have favourite moments in Muller's filmography?
Devan: It's got to be Paris Texas, and in particular that film's magic hour and nighttime sequences: the sequence where Stockwell and Stanton are in the diner, lit by car headlights, is incredible. I greatly enjoy his later digital work, as well: his pioneering in Dancer in the Dark is significant, but 24 Hour Party People is an unbelievably effective bit of anti-aesthetic.
Allan: Do I gather that Muller's first American work was Honeysuckle Rose? I've never seen it, but am stunned at trying to put the cinema of Jerry Schatzberg of Scarecrow and The Panic in Needle Park in the same room with what appears to be a romantic comedy starring Willie Nelson. Is it an interesting film? Will there be clips?
Devan: This is, I believe, correct. I'll be using one clip of it paired with an anecdote about how the crew doubted his magic hour lighting abilities.
Tom: I've never seen Honeysuckle Rose. I don't have anything to add, except that, I suppose, his first American work was technically The American Friend, which has some NYC sequences [Tom's got me on this - I don't recall New York in the film, though the Criterion page on the film mentions it, too, so I guess I'm just forgetting something!] and I guess Bogdanovich deserves credit for bringing him on to Saint Jack and to They All Laughed.
Allan: Does Muller's "eye" change once he starts looking at America? (I think it's fair to say he brought a European visual sensibility to his American work, but I wonder if that changes as he worked here more?)
Devan: I'd say what's especially remarkable is how little it changed: his obvious tics (practical lighting, hard sources, careful color direction, rough-and-tumble compositions and textures) emerged largely intact. Rare among European DPs, who often found themselves gradually flattened by Hollywood.
2 comments:
tim carey and joe don baker...the outfit and speedtrap...best seen on a drive in screen...through the windshield of a 1975 gran torino...
very interesting...did not know that harry could go on about the jews...i can but i rarely do go on about all kinds of believers...i will only rant to people who think like me...non-believers and atheists...i preach to the choir...but also believe everyone is free to believe whatever they want..also cool you shared a shitter seat with mr slug...i peed beside captain beefheart at a urinal at the old roller rink in 1977...i said pleased to meet you but i didn't shake his hand...not for sanitary reason...i was holding a beer...i offered to buy him a beer but he said he didn't accept drinks from anyone cuz he had been given drinks spiked with lsd in the past...i asked him about an urban legend i had heard that said he was logging somewhere in northwest in the time between the demise of the original magic band and the new band...he said..not true...he would never harm a tree...i was very drunk and don't remember much about the show...i think i remember he was wearing a wicker trash can for a hat...check with ed...his brain remember things better than me...
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