Born On This Day- July 24th... My Good Close Personal Friend Filmmaker Gus Van Sant

"Fate sucks. I swear. "

Matt Dillon as Bob in Drugstore Cowboy

If I had been somewhat clairvoyant while on the set of Drugstore Cowboy, I would have realized that one day I would someday be living in Portland Oregon, in fact, just 1 mile from where we were filming. I most likely would have dismissed the entire notion as too much candy from crafts service. I loved living in Seattle & I had the best agent in town. I had been fortunate enough to have worked in television (Murder She Wrote, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, A Day in the Life) & a whole lot of commercials & voice-overs, but the Gus Van Sant project was my first feature film. I was thrilled to be working with the talented director of Mala Noche, a film I was crazy about & that had received an enthusiastic reception at The Seattle Film Festival in 1985.

I was working in a feature! My scenes were with Matt Dillon! I have done 12 films, but this one will always be so special because the very soft spoken Gus Van Sant creates an extremely creative atmosphere for working. Many of the actors that have done films with Van Sant have remarked on how great he is to work with & how wonderful the conditions are on the set of his films. He was not big on rehearsing, but he would ask for something completely different with each take. Matt Dillon (who I have worked with twice) was such a nice gentleman. He would stay & read his lines back to me for our reverse shots & he was such a “regular” guy. He would eat lunch, sitting at a big long table, with the rest of the cast, crew & grips & rarely spent time in his trailer. The rest of the cast were fun & friendly: Kelly Lynch, James LeGross & Heather Graham. I did not get to meet William S Burroughs…my only regret from this experience.

I was invited to the premier of Drugstore Cowboy, but did not attend because I was performing in a play at the time. The film went on to rave reviews & won Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay for Mr. Van Sant & Daniel Yost, Best Cinematography, Best Actor for Matt Dillon, & Best Supporting Actor for Max Perlich. It won Best Screenplay awards from the LA Film Critics Association, the National Society of Film Critics & the NY Film Critics Circle, & Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. At the film’s Seattle premier, the Husband turned to me half way through the viewing & stated- “Oh. My. God. You are in a really GOOD movie!”

 Gus Van Zant’s films have ranged from Oscar winning studio fare: Good Will Hunting & Finding Forrester, to very experimental: Gerry & Last Days, Indies: Elephant & Paranoid Park, noble, brave & baffling experiments: the shot by shot re-make of Psycho & Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. He has done 4 films that I love & to which I award 5 Steve Stars: Drugstore Cowboy (of course), My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, & in my top 10 films of all time- Milk.

In 2002, shortly after relocating to Portland after 20 years in Seattle, I was standing with some new Portland friends & some dear former neighbors from Seattle on a street in the Peal District. My friend Susan: “oh my God… look! That is Gus Van Sant!”. The Husband: “Yeah, he lives in this neighborhood & Stephen knows him”. Our little group mumbled some- “yeah, sures & uh-huhs”. When Mr. Van Sant walked past us, he looked up, & said in his usual soft manner- “hello… there… Stephen. I haven’t seen you in a while... strange… your head looks bigger…” & then he went on his way. My friends looked baffled & everyone wanted to know what he meant. I had no idea (what could he have meant?), but I told them that it was an industry term, that good actors had heads that were proportionately too large for their bodies. It was my Gus Van Sant moment.

Born On This Day- January 2nd... Portland's Own Todd Haynes

In 1987, when Haynes was 26, he began the first film that the public really noticed, though he’d been making films since grade school. It was a film about Karen Carpenter called Superstar, with Barbie & Ken dolls as Karen & Richard Carpenter. The mock documentary was made while Haynes was working on his M.F.A. at Bard College (his undergraduate degree is from Brown, where he studied art & semiotics). To represent Karen’s anorexia, Haynes carved away the doll’s face as the film unfolded. Superstar is said to be an intellectual exercise about roles & societal pressures, & the critical reaction was characteristic of all Haynes’s films. Academics loved it. Superstar was also an underground hit, shown in museums & clubs. The Husband saw it as a “secret feature” at the Seattle International Film Festival & raved. Haynes received a cease-&-desist order from Richard Carpenter, a legal move that helped put it on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 cult films of all time.

Around that time, Haynes was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, & had been a founding member of Gran Fury, the artists’ collective of Act Up, theAIDS ac tivist group. With Christine Vachon, a Brown classmate, he ran Apparatus Productions,  a set up for short independent films that eventually produced Haynes’s first feature film, Poison. This film established Haynes as a leader of the New Queer Cinema, a movement that was as significant for the gay themed stories it told as for the way in which it told them from a gay point of view. Poison is a film with 3 interwoven stories: an AIDS-inspired horror film, a mock TV documentary & a Jean Genet-ish story of a homoerotic experience at a French prison. It won the grand jury prize at Sundance. More infamously, because Haynes had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, it was taken up by Congressional Republicans & conservative commentators, who called it “filth” & gay porn. Haynes little art film helped put a stop to federally funded films forever.

Haynes’s next film was Safe. Julianne Moore starred as a suburban woman with an undiagnosable environmental illness. It’s partly a horrifyingly intense study of suburbia,Wes Craven called it the scariest film of 1995, & a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Unlike Poison, Safe tells a straight ahead story.At the time, Haynes’s lover, Jim Lyons, was ill with AIDS, & Haynes visited him in the hospital in the mornings before going to the set.

Haynes first visit to Portland, where his sister lives, was to write Far From Heaven, my favorite of his films & his first box-office success. The film was nominated for 4 Oscars. Far From Heaven is a tribute to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, with Julianne Moore as a perfect 1950s housewife who discovers that her husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is gay; she then falls in love with a black man, played by Dennis Haysbert.

I have spotted Todd Haynes around Portland. He has come into the store that I manage. This city is a lo-fi, a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise, a place where, your career is not necessarily everything. I have known people for weeks that never asked me what I did for a living. Haynes: “When I moved to Portland, I was more social & productive than I’d ever been in my entire life. I remember being at an opening, talking to Gus, & people were just saying, ‘Hey Todd!’ ‘Hey Todd!’ I just felt available, & I loved that feeling. In New York, if someone came & knocked on your door without telling you, you’d be like, ‘Get out.’ ” Gus is my good close personal friend- Gus Van Sant, who directed me in Drugstore Cowboy; he also lives in Portland.

Haynes bought an old Arts & Crafts bungalow in the NE Quadrant, not that far from where I live. He planted a garden, painted, got out his guitar, & made movies. Portland is a cheap city, or cheaper than New York, which is a plus for the method that Haynes uses to make films. Randall Poster, Haynes music supervisor on Velvet Goldmine, another really terrific Haynes film: “He lives in a modest way and that is ultimately very powerful, because he’s kind of incorruptible, & he has people by his side who will kill for him. These movies are very hard, & it’s a long road, but it’s ultimately very fulfilling.”

I am a fan of his work. Because I am a Douglas Sirk freak, Far From Heaven is one of my favorite films ever, flawless really. I always watch his homage to glitter rock- Velvet Goldmine whenever I happen on it on cable.

We almost share a birthday. I would really love to have him over for cocktails, & he can bring Gus.