Screening Times: Apr 24th 7:30pm (19th St. AMC), Apr 30th 9:45pm (AMC Village VII), May 1st, 4:00pm (Village VII), May 2nd 8:30pm (19th St. AMC), May 4th 4:45pm (19th St. AMC)
For her debut feature,
Julie Checkoway, a Salt Lake City based ex-radio reporter and writing professor, chose to follow the ten year struggle of Maryland artist Billy Pappas, as he attempted to create the world's most detailed portrait. This fascinating
2005 New York Times article details just a portion of the long journey Checkoway's film took to find the screen.
Filmmaker: Tell us about the history of this project and how you initially became involved with Billy Pappas.
Checkoway: A writer is always hungry for a once-in-a-lifetime story. I was initially introduced to the story of Billy Pappas in 2002 by Dr. Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Vikan, who had known Billy for nearly 8 years, had already recognized a story of mythic dimensions, at that time purely because Billy had undertaken the Herculean and hubristic task of trying to invent a new art movement with a single pencil drawing. But the more I got to know Billy—I called him up from my then-home in Houston and eventually met him for lunch in a Baltimore restaurant---I realized that it wasn’t only the making of the drawing that was epic, but the search for someone to validate it. Billy and I seemed to bond pretty quickly. He was naturally suspicious of someone who wanted to hear and witness his story but he was also starved for company and desirous of confiding his methods, his years of suffering, and his aspirations. After a little dancing around each other, Billy allowed me to audiotape him talking about the project, and eventually, after a year, he allowed me to begin filming.
Filmmaker: You come from a literary and academic background - how have these informed your filmmaking?
Checkoway: Hugely. I had to make sure that what I had was not only a film but also a novel, a Bildungsroman, or in this case a Kunstleroman (the story of the making of an artist). Before I could fully attach to this project, I had to make sure it had all the elements of a solid narrative---a central character in a state of flux with the possibility of change; a cast of supporting characters whose central concerns would, taken together, reflects the gestalt of the protagonist. As my former writing professor John Berth used to say, in quite a wordy way: I wanted a story in which would occur the “incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a more complexities equilibrium.” A mouthful, no? More simply said, I wanted a story in which there was certain to be movement forward and significant consequences as a result of that movement. Stories---good ones---catch characters at the point at which their habitual ways of being are about to meet their greatest challenge and---perhaps---give way. Which way the character gives is the difference between comedy and tragedy.
Filmmaker: The absolute control one is able to exhibit as a novelist seems to be in opposition to the working style of a documentary filmmaker, whose main currency is often the spontaneous and unexpected, or do you find the two crafts to be congruous in some ways?
Checkoway: These two things are in direct opposition to one another in production but I think they must come into play in post. I did struggle during shooting not to over-influence events, force them to happen, but I often found myself interceding and trying to make the story move in directions I wanted/needed it to. That never worked. For example, on the morning Billy and Vikan and Brother Rene Sterner are having breakfast in LA, I suggested that they meet at a particular time and that we film it. The result was a forced 2 hours worth of horrible footage in which everyone was horribly uncomfortable because they knew they were expected to perform. A second time during that shoot was when I suggested we stop on Mulholland Drive so Billy could (really, so I could get shots of him) look out across to the Hollywood sign. It’s laughable now, but at the time, I was torn between intervention and witness. The looking out over the hills scene never made it into the film; rather we have the more subtle and realistic shots of Billy as the car is in motion and cutaways that are timed to what he says and feels. By god, I had a lot to learn about getting out of my own way.
Filmmaker: What is your honest appraisal of "Marilyn", Mr. Pappas' ten years in the making portrait? Is it "Art"? How has the "Art world" responded to the piece?
Checkoway: I’m completely unqualified to say whether anything is “art.” Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing the famous 87 year-old artist Wayne Thiebaud give a talk about his own work (Thiebaud is just a little older than David Hockney but is sometimes considered a proto-pop artist). What I loved about Thiebaud and I love about so many working “artists” is that they resist with vigor the notion that what they do every day is ‘art.” Thiebaud calls himself “a sign painter.” He began as a graphic artist. Hockney merely calls himself a painter. Art, Charlie Scheips, says in the film, is something that has to stand the test of time in the sense that it touches and moves people across time and space, universally. At the same time, ever since the Dadaists, the whole question of “what is art?” is a bogus one. But this I will tell you about Billy’s work: I was profoundly moved by it, amazed by it, devastated by it, and I have never, ever forgotten what it felt like when I first saw it. I was breathless, and every time I think on it again, I am breathless. What more can I say?
Filmmaker: You approached Lawrence Weschler in order to arrange a meeting for Billy Pappas with Mr. Hockney, interceding on his behalf - how does your attempt to provide your subject access effect your relationship to the piece?
Checkoway: You are no longer a passive observer at this point. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. I didn’t call Weschler to intercede for Billy, at least consciously. I called Weschler to intercede on my behalf. Everything had come to a standstill in Billy’s story, and I was genuinely uncertain whether I should continue to follow him. I had just had my second daughter in May of that year and had almost died during the pregnancy. Life seemed short, and I merely wanted to know from Weschler whether there was any chance, given what Weschler knew about Hockney, that Hockney would ever really see Billy’s work. That’s all I asked. At the end of the conversation, when Weschler asked whether Billy would come to New York to show him the portrait, I told Weschler I thought it likely. That’s when I stepped over the bounds. I called Billy and told him to call Weschler. That was my ethical and journalistic transgression. But in my defense, I become so attached to Billy that I also had begun to think it unfair not to share something that I knew that could help him. As much as I tried and tried to be an unbiased observer of Billy’s quest, it was nearly impossible not to embrace that quest, and him, and hope for his future.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges you faced when constructing the film in post?
Checkoway: The story has so much back-story----the origin of the dare, the donee of the main character, the theory behind the choice of Marilyn and not another famous person, the 8 ½ years of work and how it was done, and the conveyance of how much suffering and sacrifice Billy went through to get to the point where he had something to show. We had to get all of that in the first 13 minutes, trying to balance efficacy with the need to cover a ton of material. As a first time filmmaker I was always cheered to hear that the first third of a film is the most difficult to get right. With the extraordinary insight of Chris Peterson, who knew how to cut through the too-much that I knew and who taught me to stay with the proverbial tip of the iceberg, I think we pulled it off. That said, I know that, even though we don’t lose the audience’s attention in the first 13 minutes, I’m sure that we also chose to lose a lot of the nuances about Billy’s work---the kind of pencils he used, the optics involved, the more complex discussion of scale, etc. So letting go was a challenge in order to get the film to move into real time.
Filmmaker: If you were to make the same film again, what, if anything, would you do differently?
Checkoway: There’s so much I would do differently with this one. I think I became cavalier at some point that I was dealing with a real and complicated person’s life. I don’t mean that I was unkind, but just that it was all too easy to forget how much control Billy was giving up by allowing me to tell his story. Despite my sisterly closeness to him, there was no way that I ever could assuage him anxiety about my depiction of him, however hard I tried. For me to believe that he would embrace and love my vision of him was also foolish. Billy drew Marilyn; that was his art, but it was, as he said, a “self portrait.” I “drew” Billy; that is my art, and it would be foolhardy to fail to say that as much as I tried to “draw” Billy, I was also drawing a story about myself. How, then, could I comfort the subject of the film and make him believe that I was going to portray him as he would want to see himself?
The proposition was impossible.
Filmmaker: Do you have plans to make another film?
Checkoway: I’m producing a film called
Open Secret with director Steve Lickteig. Steve was my AD on
Hockney. He actually began
Open Secret before
Hockney and delayed work on his film to apprentice himself on mine, hoping to learn, he said, from my mistakes.
Open Secret is a gorgeous, painterly and essayistic story told from Steve’s point of view. It’s the story of how he grew up in a small Kansas town believing he was the child of one set of parents, only to discover that he the child of an entirely different one, and how every single person in that town knew that secret and kept it from him and why. As Steve says, “what if everything you thought about yourself your whole life was wrong? And what if everyone who knew you knew that before you did?” That’s what Steve’s film is about: the complex love of keeping and divulging secrets and how even the smallest of lies, once revealed, can change a person’s life forever.
# posted by Brandon Harris @ 4/23/2008 02:56:00 PM
Comments (1)
I saw the film tonight at Toronto's Hot Docs festival and will simply say it was excellent. The subject is special and the treatment even more so. Even loved the sound track.
Ralph
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posted by @ 4/27/2008 2:40 AM
