The Times of Gus Van Sant

Anyone who knows anything about Gus Van Sant knows that he lives in Portland, Oregon, a good 800 miles from the scrapping of the movie business. Portland has been the setting of all his films up to Cowgirls, and its slow, rainy, recessionary atmosphere seems to be his perfect home and spiritual backdrop, skinheads and anti-gay petitions notwithstanding. Even Berkeley is probably a bit too fast and too far south for him. (Van Sant tells me that over the last weekend he escaped back up to Portland and started a new band with Mike Parker and Scott Green, the two ex-hustlers who inspired the lead characters in Idaho.) But for all the love and understanding of low-life existences you find in his movies and, to a degree, in the personal grunge-bohemia he has cultivated for himself in soggy Portland, Van Sant was not himself born into a marginal world, unless you count his homosexuality.

He's the son of a high-level corporate executive who uprooted his family a number of times during his rise to the top. The Van Sants moved every few years until settling into an infamous bastion of white upper-middle-class life, Darien, Connecticut. If Mrs. Robinson had been an Easterner, she'd have lived in Darien.

"Darien was a racy community," says Van Sant. "The kids were as racy as the parents and the parents were, like, the head of J. Walter Thompson groovy advertising, who, in 1967 was in touch with the world. These were parents who worked at the top of all the buildings in Manhattan. So their kids were products of that, whatever that is. Some of those people were making the culture, managing the Beatles, whatever was going on.

The '60s happened to me in Darien. I was really young, but that might be the best way. I was working on Madison Avenue at 16 in 1969, the summer of Woodstock. My boss wore bell-bottoms and took acid on weekends. I took acid on weekends, too. I was on my way to Woodstock, but my parents wouldn't let me go because I was 16."

"Did you go to prep school?" I ask. Everybody I ever met from Darien went to prep school.

"I wanted to go to prep school, but my mom wanted me to stay home. I was disappointed, though I didn't really know what the whole thing was about anyway, except what I knew from the older brothers of my friends when they came back from school. There was this one really bad kid who literally blew himself up in his laboratory. He designed a bomb he was gonna set off at the Darien Police Department. That's what prep school meant to me. I just thought, Well, you went away from your parents and you got to do what you wanted, and the reason you got in trouble was that you were doing what you wanted. Afterwards I realized prep school wasn't such a cool place."

"If you were working in advertising in New York in the '60s as a teenager, how much did you know about Warhol's scene?"

"I didn't know who Warhol was till about '68, in art class. I was a very devoted art student. One of my fellow students said, 'You know, Warhol, ha-ha.' And I said, 'What's so ha-ha about that?' And he explained this whole history of Warhol. Then I also ran across Warhol, studying film that same year. I bought a camera and started making films of my own. I had a book on American underground cinema that described film-makers from the '30s through the '60s. I didn't see many of the films, but I read about them, and they were a little more monolithic because I didn't see them. The descriptions were a lot more amazing than the actual movies. If someone tells you about Empire [Warhol's film in which the Empire State Building is shown in one eight-hour shot and nothing happens], it's way more cool than if you just sat through it."

"Don't you have a Warhol project in the works somewhere?"

"I kind of bailed out on the movie we were doing on him. There was a script called Art Wars."

"Who was at war?"

"The pop artists challenged the abstract expressionists. They showed up and said, 'We're the new cool thing and we're not afraid of you,' and they started taking their space in the galleries. It wasn't even that pop artists were trying to take over. It was the '60s themselves, the climate of change that needed to happen. I tried to put that in the screenplay. The pop artists were funny and irreverent--that was the tone of the '60s. In 1962, if you could find the remotest thing that was irreverent, it was appealing.

I remember actively engaging in that kind of pursuit as a 10-year-old. If somebody said, 'You can't wear this,' you'd wear it. Warhol, who was 30 then, was doing the same thing. They put up a banner that said 'Pop Art,' and people said, 'What's that?' and they said, 'It's our movement.' And people said, 'That's not a movement,' and they said, 'Yes it is.' It was in the air in those days. Any cause--a band or a motorcycle gang, it didn't matter. You just won if you joined whatever."

"Actually, it's kind of hard to explain the '60s to people now, isn't it?" I know I am looking into the eyes of an unrepentant child of the '60s.

"Is it really hard? Isn't it fun to explain? I find it fun, though I don't think people understand, because you can't understand unless you were there."

"That's what I mean. I myself find it amazing to think it was ever all right to light up a joint in a movie theater."

"You can still do that," says Van Sant. "Who's gonna get you?"

"The last time I remember smelling pot in a theater was during Jaws 3-D in 1983. When's the last time anyone lit up a joint when you were in a theater?"

"Somebody lit up in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in Times Square," Van Sant says with a slight smile. "I don't know if that counts."

It doesn't. "Let's get back to the '60s."

"When I was in junior high school," says Van Sant, "we created a gang. There were only four of us and we'd just seen West Side Story, and we decided to call ourselves the Coolies. We said, 'We're in a gang,' and when the other guys said, 'Yeah?' we said, 'Yeah!' instead of saying, 'Well, not really.'

Suddenly the whole school became concerned with our gang. It was like, 'There they go, they're a gang. They're walking down the same hallways we're walking down and they're a gang.' We didn't even wear anything different. And the school took all four of us and separated us. And other kids wanted to join us, but since we weren't really a gang we'd say, 'You can't join.' And they'd say, 'Why not?' And we'd say, 'Because you're not cool enough. We're the Coolies.' A lot of people wanted desperately to be in our gang, so that started another gang, the Anti-Coolies. These guys didn't have the wherewithal to come up with their own name. That was the brilliant thing, that we named ourselves out of pure whim, like in advertising, and they were just the anti-us."

The prepubescent hipster Van Sant paints a picture of was already headed into a life of art, not corporate climbing. But as Van Sant has said of himself, he was the son of a father who expected him to do something impressive with his life. The '60s scions of Darien might have been teenage fuck-ups, but most inhaled the work ethic right along with the pot smoke. When the Van Sant family made another corporate jump, as Gus Sr. became president of White Stag in Portland, young Gus had just enough time to check out the landscape of his future endeavors before heading off to higher education. He chose the Rhode Island School of Design, then a notorious arena of whacked-out creative types for whom "higher education" had a whole new meaning, but it was college nonetheless.

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