By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Where There is 'Smoke'…: Auster and Lethem Talk Cinema at BAM
The Reeler procrastinated as long as it could in making its monthly journey to Brooklyn, where novelist/screenwriter Paul Auster hit BAM last night to discuss his 1995 film Smoke with fellow author Jonathan Lethem. Despite the slightly overwrought tie-in with Auster’s latest book, The Brooklyn Follies (Lethem noted it almost as an afterthought, lest the weighed-down Auster kiosk in BAM’s lobby sag from disuse), the event was another one of BAM’s dignified triumphs–not quite to the level of last year’s rapturous Gena Rowlands appearance, but somehow I doubt Auster was attempting to compete.
Smoke screenwriter Paul Auster (left) gets all filmic with novelist Jonathan Lethem at BAM (Photo: STV)
“Jokingly, we would say we were trying to make an Ozu movie in Brooklyn,” Auster told the crowd, describing his collaboration with Smoke director Wayne Wang. “It’s really about storytelling. It’s about giving people a chance to say something to each other, whereas most films seem so short and so fast–there’s no content there except the visual material. But this movie is about words as much as it’s about images.”
And anybody who recalls the film’s brilliant final act knows this to be true, from the protracted silence of the Cole family’s unplanned reunion to Auggie Wren’s even more protracted story that winds down the film. Along with the monologue’s black-and-white re-enactment, the sequence probably represents the best reel of Harvey Keitel’s career–not that Auster was about to judge or anything. “It’s a funny thing about that last scene,” Auster said. “The way I wrote it in the script, we were going to alternate Harvey’s talking in the restaurant with the black and white imagery.”
“It looks much nicer the way it plays,” Lethem said.
“Well, we cut it the original way–alternating–and it turns out that you start listening to him tell the story, and you really get involved in how he’s doing it,” Auster explained. “And it’s a long bit–I think it’s something like… five to eight minutes. It’s very long. Every time we’d hop to the other imagery, you’d lose track of what Harvey was saying for a few seconds as your eyes adjusted. And then you were losing the story. So we kept cutting out bits until we had one or two, and then we said, ‘Let’s just get rid of it all.’ I remember we were in the cutting room, and Wayne said, ‘I guess we’ll just get rid of the black and white footage.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no; I like it so much. We really have to do something with it.’ ”
Follow the jump for Auster’s solution, plus cameos from Robert Altman and New York’s other Harvey.
“And I remember leaving and feeling pretty sad about it, getting on the subway to go home to Brooklyn,” Auster continued. “This was the time when they still had telephones in the subways, and I had an idea: Why don’t we do the credits with the black-and-white imagery? So I called (Wang) form the subway platform, and he said, ‘Ah, good idea.’ Then, something further happened. We had a screening of the film, and it was before we had put the credits in. The picture was locked, and we had a screening for friends and other filmmakers, and Robert Altman happened to be there. He had read the script earlier and had wanted to see the film. Wayne announced at the screenig, ‘Well, when you see the black-and-white imagery, the credits will be running over it.’
“And Altman was sitting next to me, and right after the film was over, he grabbed my arm really intensely and said: ‘You must not run credits over that black-and-white footage. You’re going to ruin it.’ So we decided just to put the main credits, and then the crawl comes afterward.”
So perhaps Altman deserves Smoke’s second uncredited director mention behind Auster, who worked closely with Wang at the filmmaker’s request. “We did everything together,” Auster said, citing Wang’s concerns about making his first New York film an authentic one. “We cast the movie together, we did the production design together, the music, the editing, everything–except I wrote it and he directed it on the set. And all the prpearations, pre-production and the post-production we did together. He was the one who insisted on saying a film by Wayne and Paul, and he got into a lot of trouble with the Directors Guild.”
In the end, the division of labor was credited conventionally, but Auster did acquire co-directing credit on his and Wang’s Smoke follow-up, Blue in the Face. Featuring Keitel and cameo appearances by Jim Jarmusch, Lou Reed, Lily Tomlin and God knows how many dozens of others, Auster and Wang began shooting loosely scripted bits on the Monday after they wrapped Smoke. They ran out of money after three days and eventually went on to edit Smoke over the summer of 1994.
Eventually, the pair showed a rough cut of Blue in the Face to their gentle executive producers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. “They were very nice about it,” Auster recalled. “They said, ‘Good job, boys. For three days, it’s amazing, but think how much better would be if you had three more days.’ So they gave us a little more money, but then we had to rebuild the store. We had to do everything again from scratch and we only had eight days in which to do it because Harvey Keitel was leaving for Europe to do another rmovie. So it was one of the most frantic times of my life. I remember running out of that meeting and running home and writing 10 or 12 scenes in one day and then faxing them to everybody.”
Crappy reporter that I am, I never discovered whether or not Auster wrote Reed’s ungodly “lens-less glasses” monologue in Blue, but a little mystery never killed anybody. Like the films, it is not as though such knowledge will make me remember either more fondly than I do already. Now if only somebody could revive Wayne Wang’s career, I could stop dreading the abyss of The Center of the World as that eloquent credit sequence fades to black. Pray for Rocket Fuel For Winners, kids.
