Director Gus Van Sant relaxes after a hard day of work and explains where he was in the '60s, what Harvey Milk meant in the '70s, and why drugged whooping cranes could make for big box office in the '90s.
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Gus Van Sant sips an icy gray-green margarita as he describes, with his peculiar brand of tamped-down irony, how much this old hotel/spa he's staying in resembles the mountain resort where a snowed-in Jack Nicholson drinks himself into homicidal mania in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the Claremont, which sits in the hills above Berkeley, is a dead ringer for the Overlook. Inside where we are, though, the gaping expanses that once housed the idle rich have recently been painted a vacuous, sickly pink ("What must the designers who lost this account think?" comments Van Sant), and the elevators unleash bland conventioneers instead of Kubrick's memorable deluge of blood. Van Sant probably knows every frame of Kubrick's horror flick, because back in 1980 he was living not far from the Mann Chinese where it opened, and every morning for a week he walked down Hollywood Boulevard to the 9:00 a.m. show (talk about bygone eras). "Not because it was such a good movie, but..." he says, not finishing his sentence.
Before too long, Van Sant orders another margarita. He will go on to have considerably more than whatever it is the Surgeon General recommends. But there is no reason to think that the director of the low-budget, low-life classics Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho has been off in some wing of this white elephant typing "All work and no play makes Gus a dull boy" over and over and over. On the contrary, for the last several weeks he's been hard at work doing the postproduction on his new film, an adaptation of Tom Robbins's novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And during much of the time he was making Cowgirls, he was also working on what looked to be the Cowgirls follow-up, and his first studio film, Oliver Stone's production The Mayor of Castro Street.
Cowgirls, an indie made for $7.5 million (that's high for Van Sant), was once going to be the director's first big-studio project, back when Mike Medavoy was its shepherd. But TriStar backed off from their commitment to it and finally allowed Fine Line Features to buy it away. Castro Street, a Warner Bros. project that's based on Randy Shilts's book about San Francisco's assassinated gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, was then to have been Van Sant's big-studio debut, and in some ways this made perfect sense: Van Sant is the kind of gifted original the studios inevitably try to appropriate; moreover, as he has never advertised or hidden, Van Sant is gay and would perhaps bring insight as well as talent to the mix.
In other ways, though, the Castro Street project never made any sense at all: Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant? Sure, they're two talented film-makers who both have distinctive voices. But Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson are two talented politicians who both have Southern accents, and they know better than to run on the same ticket. Van Sant and Stone inevitably came upon creative differences. The specific differences centered on the script by Becky Johnston, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Prince of Tides.
"The thing was," says Van Sant, as night falls over Berkeley and the window next to us shows a San Francisco blinking on the whole way to the Golden Gate Bridge, "that Oliver's autonomy dictated that whatever he said went. Didn't matter what it was, so long as he said, 'This is it.' My problem was that it wasn't 'it,' and there was this guy saying, 'This is it.' So you say, 'I want it to be "it," but it's not "it."'"
Van Sant had written and thrown away one whole draft of Castro Street by himself, after Johnston's first draft. While Johnston was writing a second draft, "I kept saying, 'I want to start writing on this project,' and they said, 'No you can't, we want Becky to write.' There might have been something in her contract that said she had sole credit or she got to get her shot. It makes sense actually. A writer like she is--she was up for an Academy Award the year before--you'd imagine that she's under siege, and she gets a write and a rewrite and then that's it. She checks out and you pay her a million dollars and she's off to do the next one. She's a big ICM writer and she makes money for ICM and they keep her going. She doesn't hang around for a year. She doesn't labor over things. She's like a taxi--every second has to click. So when there's a director who says, 'I want to start writing,' they go, like, 'No, she was up for the Academy Award, not you.' And so she does her rewrite and they go, 'Perfect, we love it.' So I go, 'Okay, then go do it.'"
"How much did Oliver Stone have to do with all this?" I ask.
"The way they market the whole project is 'Oliver Stone Presents,'" Van Sant says. "I don't think Warner Bros. cared about Harvey Milk. I don't think they cared about me. I think they cared a little about Becky. They cared a whole lot about Oliver. Somebody sold me to Oliver and Oliver sold me to Warner Bros. They weren't apparently that excited about me.
I think they went, you know, 'Oliver, we don't really like this guy.' And Oliver said, 'No wait, he's gonna be great.' I never had an argument with Oliver. I don't think Warner Bros. was particularly excited about doing that story. I think Oliver talked them into doing it. I was always saying, 'If I were Warner Bros, and I was thinking of making a film with a gay subject, I wouldn't make this film.' I mean, I might make it, but I'd never design a film like this to make money. I think it was Oliver's willfulness that said, 'Dammit, this is gonna make money.' I was interested only because it was happening. But, in fact, it wasn't really happening. It was only happening in Oliver's head. And Warner Bros. let it happen in Oliver's head. Warner Bros. was just kissing Oliver Stone's ass."
As to the involvement of Robin Williams, who was the actor consistently mentioned for the title role, Van Sant explains, "He was always mentioning it himself. I met with him many times, but he was never involved. He said he wanted to do the role, but he never committed to it. But how could he commit, when I could get fired? He commits and they go, 'Your director will be Ted Danson.' And he goes, 'What happened to Gus Van Sant?' And they go, 'Well, he's just not very good, but we have Ted and he's very good and he's made a lot of money for "Cheers" and he's gonna be your director, and we have you on contract.' Guys like Robin Williams never sign anything. I've done whole films with stars that don't sign. I don't think Matt Dillon ever signed his Drugstore Cowboy contract. It's sitting somewhere unsigned."
Van Sant did not direct films as inspired and intelligent as Mala Noche (the story of a convenience store clerk's unrequited love for a young Mexican migrant worker), Drugstore Cowboy (the story of a junkie who knocks over pharmacies) and My Own Private Idaho (the story of a narcoleptic gay hustler) by lacking a point of view. These films speak faithfully of worlds that, though they may be marginal, seem oddly relevant. In fact, it's that because they are marginal, they haven't had all the reality drained from them by the withering spotlight of the popular media and so remain rich reservoirs of the pure products of America.
Idaho, Van Sant's most personal film, takes place in the milieu of homeless gay hustlers, but it is essentially the story of one person who can never have an actual home because he can't find his long-lost mother, and another who can never have an emotional home because he can't escape his powerful father. A compelling portrait of the divided, unmoored psyche of our era. Van Sant is an ambitious artist. No wonder he keeps his personal contact with Hollywood to a minimum.
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.
Van Sant's art school background has a lot to do with the look and feel of the films he makes. He resonates not so much to Howard Hawks as to the undergrounders like Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Taylor Mead, and of course, Andy Warhol. In personal demeanor Van Sant shares Warhol's eerily removed manner of implacable, ironic cool, and he also has Warhol's fondness for playing the magnet to an ongoing sideshow of street characters and putting their stories into his films. But the resemblance ends there.
The elegant eye and poetic touch that give a film like Idaho an unmistakable mind (one in which salmon leap from some distant, interior river, and houses fall from the sky) are pure Van Sant. So is the humanizing impulse that makes you curious and nonjudgmental about people that the residents of Darien, Connecticut regard as scum. The inspiration for the more refined side of Van Sant's sensibility comes from, among other places, Orson Welles, whose Chimes at Midnight influenced the Henry IV subplot of Idaho, and, especially, Stanley Kubrick, who made Van Sant's favorite film of all time.
"A Clockwork Orange is the best film I ever saw. It's hard for me to defend it, though. Kubrick is really cruel at heart. I really think he is."
Leaving aside whatever appealed to the younger Van Sant about the violent adventures of Alex, what appeals to the grown-up Van Sant about Kubrick's filmmaking is clear:
"The whole thing about A Clockwork Orange is that it was a really low budget movie, like a million-and-a-half dollar film in 1971, which was probably about the kind of film I make today. When he couldn't make his dream project, an extravaganza about Napoleon, he figured he could make Clockwork really cheap. He figured out how to light it and shoot it with a small crew--he just went back to something he'd done in the '50s when he made Killer's Kiss and all those films. It's a complete discipline, a filmmaker making do with what he has. I could never get the camera to do what I wanted on Drugstore or Idaho or Cowgirls the way I did on Mala Noche. There's like 60 people on the set. The whole thing is to get the crew smaller. Like Kubrick. But I'm not him, I just started. If you told people you were going to have five people on the set, they might think you were going crazy. I'm pretty sure if I told the bond people I wanted five people on the set they'd freak out. But maybe not next year."
If you have to have 60 people on your set you might as well make films for $20 million, instead of $5 million, and that's what Van Sant set out to do with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which he's referred to as "a great women's film...a chance to make the ultimate remake of The Women, the great film by George Cukor." Cowgirls was a big, popular stoned-out novel of the '70s, a must-read for anyone who read, "which is probably why I got it," says Van Sant. "I just barely achieved that niche."
Like Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and William S. Burroughs's Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, Cowgirls was a book the aspiring, unconnected Van Sant immediately knew he wanted to make into a movie someday. Many years later, after the success of Drugstore Cowboy, director Alan Rudolph introduced Van Sant to author Tom Robbins. "Tom and I pitched it around town and nobody cared about it. I remember meeting with Mike Medavoy when he was at Orion, and he kinda asked about it, and he had his cigar and he said, 'Yeah, I remember that book, it was a big hit, yeah.' And nothing happened until he got to TriStar. And then he called us and said, you know, 'Cowgirls. I want to do it.' And I said, 'Well, okay, but I'm busy and I don't know if I can come and pitch it.' And he said, 'You don't have to pitch it to me. Just do it.'"
When Van Sant came back with a finished script, "Medavoy said, 'Well, I can't do it.' I could never figure out why they couldn't do it."
"Maybe Medavoy didn't remember the book all that well," I suggest, "and got a shock when he saw what it's really about." Which is, by the way, a hitchhiker with huge thumbs who goes to a ranch peopled by drugged-out lesbians.
"I don't think so. I think it was just money."
"He didn't have problems with TriStar bringing out a film in which people drug whooping cranes?"
"Could be. I don't think so. I don't think those guys are all that afraid. They just want to make money."
"That's what I'm talking about."
"People drugging whooping cranes, and they're not going to make money? I don't think so. I think that might help it make money. Especially considering the spotted owl. The temperament of American society is very cruel. They'd just as soon drug everybody.
When a studio executive tells me they don't think they're going to make that much money, I understand. But with Cowgirls I think they could. It was totally proven as a novel. And now a Western has won the Academy Award, so what's the problem? There was a Japanese problem, I think."
Probably no one but Van Sant thinks Cowgirls will obviously make money because Unforgiven won Best Picture, but in any case, Fine Line Features bought Cowgirls from TriStar and it's been made. Along with surprises like Pat Morita, Angie Dickinson and John Hurt, and major question marks like Lorraine Bracco, it predictably stars some of the best of young Hollywood--Uma Thurman (in the lead, as big-thumbed Sissy), Keanu Reeves, and River Phoenix's sister Rain in a crucial role.
Van Sant is brilliant with actors, and young actors who generally have the choice between iffy independent quirk-projects or studio drivel line up for him. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves are personal friends of Van Sant's after the experience of Idaho, and they wanted in on Cowgirls. "I never talk to them about their careers. Because you figure, I know their careers and they know my career and we just know it. Keanu's involved in Cowgirls because I said I was gonna do it, and he said, 'Oh I gotta play this role.'" (Phoenix ended up not doing the cameo he'd been set for.)
If Tom Robbins's pothead fiction can be realized on-screen, Van Sant is the best bet to bring it off. But for the moment, perhaps because San Francisco is sparkling peacefully for miles outside the window next to us, I can't help thinking back to the film Van Sant isn't going to make when he's finished with Cowgirls. What might the saga of Harvey Milk have been like, run through Van Sant's camera?
"Harvey's scene was exactly like Queer Nation," says Van Sant, "only it was the '70s. Queer Nation is '90s, a bunch of kids who don't give a shit and don't care if you do either, they just want you to fuckin' listen to them. Seventies is, 'It's groovy, man,' and 'we're groovy' and 'you're groovy.' That's what Harvey was. I was interested in how the '60s segued into the '70s. There were hippies and hippie gays. Harvey was a hippie and he came to San Francisco and said, 'Castro Street is my home. These are my people. And I'm bored, what'll I do? I'll lead my people.' The rise of a gay neighborhood and the rise of the gay politician, that's all very interesting.
"I wanted to end the movie in Washington," Van Sant explains. "Because Harvey always talked about a march on Washington. There was a march the year after he was killed, and he was in the midst of the people marching. It seemed to me the ultimate extension of the story was that it should go to Washington, not just remain in San Francisco. But they weren't keen on my ending." Then he adds, laughing, "They weren't that keen on anything I'd come up with.
"I still haven't worked for a studio," says Van Sant, sipping a fresh margarita. "It comes down to fighting. It seems like Spike Lee and Oliver [Stone], they just fight. They say, 'Yeah I'll do exactly what you say,' and then they fight them and say, 'You bastard, you double-crossed me. I'm gonna fuck you.' And it's this big weird fight and the press is involved and then they get what they want by bullying. I'm not interested in that. I just wanna say, 'I'm gonna do it this way,' and they say, 'Okay, you're gonna do it this way.' And then I just do it. I don't want to get heavy."
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Virginia Campbell is one of the executive editors of Movieline.