From the Atelier Tovar
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From the Atelier Tovar

Selected Writings of Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin

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eBook - ePub

From the Atelier Tovar

Selected Writings of Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin

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About This Book

Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most celebrated and original filmmakers, the director of such delirious films as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg. Few know, however, that he is just as gifted a writer, and his resolutely purple prose, as eccentric and enchanting as his film work, is a true delight. From the Atelier Tovar gathers, in one volume, the best of Maddin's writing: his journalism (originally published in the Village Voice, Cinema Scope, Film Comment and points beyond), unpublished short stories and film treatments (including the riotous Child Without Qualities ), and selections, both lurid and illuminating, from the filmmaker's personal journals. Here are Maddin's feverish musings on hockey, the Osmonds, divas of the Italian silent cinema, Bollywood, his own twisted biography, and much, much more. What emerges finally is both a fragrant potpourri and a treasure trove, a singular portrait of this very unique artist.

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JOURNAL One
(1987 – 1998)

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Dream List for Dave Barber:
*Greed, Erich von Stroheim
*The Old Dark House (1932), Dir. James Whale w. Karloff, Melyvn Douglas, Charles Laughton
*Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, (1932), Dir. Rouben Mamoulianw. F. March, M. Hopkins
*The King of Jazz (1930), w. Paul Whiteman
*Broadway Melody (1929)
*Scarlet Empress, von Sternberg
*Dames, Busby Berkeley
*The Merry Widow (1934), Ernst Lubitsch MGM Mad Love, (1935), Dir. Karl Freund w. Peter Lorre
*Little Match Girl, Jean Renoir
*The Devil’s Cleavage, George Kuchar
*Fireworks, Kenneth Anger
*Any Popeye cartoons from the 1930s
Pather Panchali, Dir. Satyajit Ray
Bizarre, Bizarre [Drôle de Drame] (1937), Dir. Marcel Carné
Blessed Event (1932), Lee Tracy; Dick Powell
The Canary Murder Case (1929), Louise Brooks,
William Powell
*Umberto D., The Children Are Watching Us (1942),
Vittorio De Sica
Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda
Day Dreams (23 min, 1928), Dir. Ivor Montagu
A Day in the Country (1937), Jean Renoir
Day of Wrath (1943), Carl Dreyer
*The Devil Doll (1936), Dir. Tod Browning
Fashions of 1934, Dir. William Dieterle, Bette Davis; William Powell
Crime of M. Lange, Dir. Renoir
The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), Al Jolson, Rogers & Hart
Berlin, Symphony of a City
If You Could Only Cook (1938)
The Italian Straw Hat
Le Jour se léve (M. Carné)
Arletty; Gabin
Laughter
27 November 1987
Have to move Mom out of the house – the only home our family has ever known – tomorrow morning at eight. Last night I had the first of what I presume will be many haunting dreams concerning the shop – or whatever it is I should call it now that I write about it for the first time, ironically, upon the eve of a moment after which I shall always have to refer to it in the past tense. In the dream I discover a new room in the basement, a room which has been there all along but which I have been too unobservant to notice. A nice long bowling lane of a room with an equally long storage area clumsily grafted overtop of the concrete entrance and stairway. There is a secret panel entrance but also a door, obviously located, it turns out, beside the other, always-used door, with a window in it as well, which has led into the basement area for years. Should read that Agee/Evans book to see if lengthy descriptions of home interiors are readable even in the prose of a brilliant writer before I waste any of my little spent effort on this passage.
28 December
Just tucked Jilian in after Anne of Green Gables at Playhouse Theatre. Watched a special 1962 Untouchables episode starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ed Asner as police officers helping Ness and in the process taking over the show …
Since I last wrote in here too much has happened. I am lonely – a little – but I think it is good for me. It has been a long time since I was lonely. This period will allow me to overhaul my soul, throw together some genuine qualities and eventually dispel all loneliness with a bang.
I’ve even considered working for a charity. Other things to do: paint a picture of Cousin’s interior in Jilian’s acrylics. Hand tint that photo of Tiffany perhaps.
I slept for over two hours Xmas afternoon. My nerves completely shot. Twenty-four hours with Amma wound up tight by her organizational urges, all of us grating to each other, blasting even the dimmest recollections of the season’s traditions to oblivion. Xmas Eve in a seniors’ home; four p.m. dinner lasting seven minutes; all the presents ripped open in a piranha frenzy by kids who will never know the torture of waiting. All this leaving me exceptionally irritable. Klymkiw told me a great story about his family at Xmas. He must be near the breaking point.
I had a good day with Jilian today. But I did spank her for the first time in perhaps two years. I think we understand each other more as a result … that’s a phrase. She’s a very sensitive, feeling little girl who makes me very proud of her character, but I’ve allowed her access to my weakness, and we dislike ourselves when this access is negotiated. These are quite the phrases too. Strictness makes for happy pups. We both feel better now.
28 December 1995
Careful plays on cinema’s 100th birthday, in Paris, the city of its birth. Merci, E.D. Distribution. (Just a press screening, but a projector in Paris played it all on this holy day!)
2 January 1996
One hour with hockey at Steen. My delight. One hundred more pages of Hugo. Tomorrow I finish that and commence another draft of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Elise watched Long Day’s Journey into Night this afternoon. At dinner, we rewatched All About Eve. George has a flu for the first time in his life. He and I discussed W. Herzog and Ross McMillan as Dr. Solti. Ritchard Findlay wants Tim Roth for Glahn in Twilight – a horrible actor and fortunately out of our league.
3 January
Susan Minas at Alliance has suggested my name to the Cowboy Junkies for rock video work. Now I know where you go after you die. It is painful for artists in hard times, dead artists, artists no one wants, but in Canada we are put on life-support systems. No one lets us go to the grave. We walk the earth after midnight, howling. Won’t someone just drive stakes through us?
5 January
Spent entire day working on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs script revisions, to be sent to Keith Griffiths, but not in the streamlined form I promised him; instead I sent an all-new enriched purple edition. I now have a stack of books to read in between production designing and skating (which Rob Shaver agreed was unwise to do in –28º and 2200 windchill, a warning which suited little responsible me fine.) My book stack: Swinburne’s poems; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Savinio’s The Lives of the Gods; Chateaubriand’s Atala and Rene; Laforgue’s Moral Tales; Sachey Sitwell’s Splendours and Miseries; and Beardsley’s Under the Hill.
14 January, 11:55 pm
Glahn – (#1) Kyle McCulloch, Aden Young, Brendan Fraser?, rock star of some sort?
Solti – Maury Chaykin, Werner Herzog, (#1) Christopher Lee,John Neville, Armin Mueller-Stahl, John Colicos, Jan Rubes
Cain Ball – Jim Keller (deceased), Maury Chaykin, (#1) John Neville
Juliana – (#1) Julie Delpy, Mia Kirshner, someone from Rozema’s pic
Zephyr – (#1) Alice Krige, Mitsou, Lena Olin, Sadie Frost, Katy Gardner
Amelia – (#1) Samantha Eggars, Deborah Harry, Jackie Burroughs, Diana Rigg
Please, Guy, make yourself watch Whale Music for the two leads. Steal set designs from Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir!
15 January
Dubbed Le Plaisir. Watched Vertigo and Daughter of Horror (1955). Browsed through Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. Strongly considering showing up absent for my director-observer stint on My Life as a Dog – the TV series. Skate not yet fixed. There seems to be absolutely no progress since I got three producers for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs a month and more ago. Six weeeks! Everyone can just fuck off, fuck off, fuck off! Oh boy! They sure can help, these producers. Seventy thousand dollars each and they have other jobs, paper routes for all I know! They are fucking with me. They wank with their office overhead and they fuck with me. And there hasn’t been a movie made in this country yet that doesn’t stink more than a dogturd! (Except Léolo, which stinks of excrement in unsurpassably brilliant ways.) Have another Jaguar, boys. Good night.
26 March
Have made a Gatsby list which is far too crushing a confession even for these pages. Having turned forty recently, I may as well arbitrarily choose now as the time to assess my life: at least thirty-five years wasted, if not more. If I could pull a few productive months, or even a year, out of the remainder of my days, I think I shall shit my pants from astonishment. My Gatsby list identified the usual trouble spots, but I’m realistic about the love handles. If I can generate a handful of genuine smiles on somebody’s face without ventilating my head, my list will have done its job. I want to talk about my list, but I’m afeared it probably looks the table of contents from any self-help book at Coles. At least this much is obvious: major blocks of my life-array need to be shifted, reversed, restacked, mulched; I know what needs to be done, and where; all I have to do is do it!
29 March
Just finished a phone conversation with a Kristin Lehman, actress. Seems very nice. Wouldn’t it be nice if she just fit Juliana fine, then we could proceed with some ostriches, a studio and two actresses locked. At 4:30 I coffee with R. H. Thomson, distinguished star of Avonlea. There is a blizzard piling slush onto already six-foot-high snowbanks, and I’m wading through this shit to hobnob with Canada’s TV elite. Is that where this gooseflesh has come from?
Okay, here on the very next page is the Gatsby list of what’s wrong with Gatsby. All my diary false starts seem to have naked confessions similar to this. I need the whole page, I think.
Gatsby List
1. Lonely
2. Physically unfit
3. Unreliable
4. Chronically depressed
5. Spinelessly incapable of refusing to perform unpleasant favours
6. Don’t read enough
7. Don’t have very many real friends
8. Don’t really have many fake friends
9. Never create genuine laughter or happiness in others
10. Complain about others too much
11. Never busy enough
12. Have no financial security long- or short-term
13. Write letters too infrequently
14. Am simply not living my life (to be continued)
15. Don’t write diary entries regularly
16. Don’t write enough
17. Crummy son, father, husband
Shaping up …
Peter Glahn: Aden Young
Zephyr: Alice Krige
Dr. Solti: R. H. Thomson; Chris Lee
Cain Ball: Tom Waits
Juliana: Kristin Lehman
Amelia: Mary Walsh
Things to Do in Response to Gatsby List
1. Work hard, be thoughtful, generate activity; loneliness should disappear.
2. Eat properly, cycle, walk.
3. Be adult about responsibilities; donate $1000 to Wpg. Film Group.
4. If I address all the other points, perhaps depression will disappear.
5. You know what to do.
6. Read more.
7 & 8. You’ve worn out your personal mythologies. There are other people who might be interesting who didn’t happen to spend ‘L’Age d’or’ with you.
9 & 10. Take that hornet’s nest out of your butt.
11. When you find a couch growing out of your side, take note. If paralyzed with ennui, you can always scrawl something in this therapeutic journal-thing. Use still or video camera more.
12. Perhaps it would be nice to live above month-to-month anchorite levels of subsistence. You must learn to be more thick-skinned about the film business and treat it as a source of income. Work harder to wedge other jobs into long stretches of down time. Write for a magazine. Keep an eye open for a regular job. Pay income tax near deadline when possible. Purchase RRSPs next year. Buy Blue Bomber season’s tickets? Ah, yes, let’s buy: a fax, a turntable, an audio-cassette recorder with jacks. Start a savings plan if the movie goes. Ask Alan for portfolio advice. Let’s get some savings already.
13. Write and fax and phone people more. For friends and connections.
14. GET OUT – LIVE – WORK!
15 & 16. Write more
18. Be better.
It’s still March 29, my father’s 78th birthday, I just realized. Man, I still love that guy, dead nineteen years. Cameron had been gone fourteen years when Chas bought it. How did Dad ever get over that feeling? And all of his tears came out of one eye.
7 April
Yesterday, drove to Gimli at 8 a.m. to fetch reeds and rushes for set dressing. Snow drifts were gigantic; whiteness everywhere made the sun oppressive. Had imperial cookies, some of which I fed to a squirrel in our front yard at 22 Lake, where I also planted seed in the sunny windswept Arctic diorama that spread out around our promontory of a breakwater. Brief magic, then back to the city, where I completed a first draft of the sets for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. I ran into Ritchard at Zines; he had come down from the premiere of My Life as a Dog. He said it was quite good; he made absolutely no qualification. I’m sorry, even Derek Mazur, whom I now respect as a result, has stated the qualifications inherent in the very nature of the project. Ritchard and I will never understand each other at any level. He is alternately respectful and jealous of the press attention I have received, and he does not like my movies. To a lesser degree, this may be a problem with another, infinitely smarter man, DOP Mike Marshall. If these people, Telefilm, Alliance, etc., had simply listened to me when I tried to explain how I took a shortcut to my modest position in the film world, how I entered the industry through the back door, as a novelty act without a ticket, how I was quite clever in doing so and owed my very presence there to peculiar trickery, then these people would not be so quick to remove all these tricks from my bag: my Vaseline, scratches, monochromes and tableaux, all my mannered dialogues and feigned magic-lantern innocence. Now they want to make me pass muster at the front door, where I must check my bag. I now have a single free pass into a feature project, but I shall shortly be given a bum’s rush when what I have to show for myself proves no better than what any gate-crashing imposter could come up with when put on the spot by so many black ties. I’m simply not good enough to play by ...

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