After a week that began with getting our fourth and final wisdom tooth extracted at Park Slope Oral Surgery and continued with final classes and final exams at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The School of Visual Arts and Fashion Institute of Technology, on one of our last nights in Brooklyn,
It's a shrewd opening up of a deliberately airless autobiographical literary work -- its airlessness making the book brilliant to its champions and somewhat tedious to its critics (we liked it) -- with a dizzingly "meta" movie, which dispenses with the book's "Sam" and "Luis" characters and instead us the "actual" Tao Lin (who exists somewhat outside Kalayeh's film, mostly in his own videos),
an actor (Brad Warner, real-life subject of a documentary by the director) playing the "character" Tao Lin (Sam in the novella), and another actor (an uncanny Jordan Castro, superb at channeling the mannerisms and verbal tics of the original) as the "real" Tao Lin -- along with the "real" (actual?) Noah Cicero and the "character" Noah Cicero, played by actor James Roehl.
We don't have the critical vocabulary do a "review" (the film's Los Angeles premiere last weekend elicited some nice reviews) nor the common sense, either (we once told Tao it was our opinion as a lawyer that he should never publish anything about his arrest at American Apparel),
but it seemed to us that the financial constraints and logistical and personnel problems that limited the production -- the director at one point says something like indie filmmmaking always means things going wrong 100% of the time -- worked to the advantage of the adaptation and somehow made it truer to the vision and spirit of Lin's novella than a straight-forward retelling would have been.
By using the backstory of the writer writing about something that really happened and taking questions from both his readers and the filmmakers and actors about it, by largely abandoning the book's black-and-gray hipster New York setting for sunny Southern California and the brighter, more open bleakness of Rust Belt Ohio (in Lin's books, most of the "sense of place" is internal anyway -- or by "the soft blue light of Internet Explorer"), by calling attention to the static nature of the Gmail chats and artfully have the most self-referential, self-conscious text comment even more upon itself,
by turning hyperrealistic fictional scenes in the store and jail into surreal filmmaking challenges -- all this "gets" what made Shoplifting from American Apparel a book that spoke to many young people ("We are the fucked generation") and makes it accessible to a wider audience.
It's also laugh-out-loud funny. We broke up at a scene where "Tao" (Castro), placing fast-food chicken bits around the Hollywood Walk star of James Dean, tells "Noah" (Cicero) and director Kalayeh that he doesn't actually know who James Dean is -- but that's only one of many comic "making of" sequences that brought to mind some of the best moments of Adaptation and Annie Hall.
The film's performances from professional actors and nonprofessionals (some picked up, apparently, on the streets of Hollywood and Youngstown) range from perfectly modulated to surprisingly credible. Production values are high; even the purposefully ragged edges appear major-studio sleek (we hope that comment is not something people will take as being negative; sleek does not mean slick).
Outside, this evening, it was New York's annual Night of the Drunken Young Santas and Lubavitchers asked us four times on our walk from the Bedford Avenue L stop to the theater, "Are you Jewish?" (our responses were the lies "No," "No, I hate them," "Not anymore," and finally "Gai in drerde"). We were the first person to enter the screening room and so sat in the aisle seat of the last row (for the sake of our prostate)
in indieScreen's very comfortable sold-out auditorium and enjoyed the 1969-ish song from The Ohioans (Jordan Castro and Andrew Borstein) that preceded the film, along with the trailer for the director's forthcoming adaptation of Noah Cicero's novel The Human War.
During the Q&A session with Pirooz Kalayeh and several of the actors from Shoplifting, the director, wearing an "I ❤ KOREA" T-shirt, seemed grateful that given the film's, uh, complexities, no one had walked out, but he should have known better. Even our prostate didn't want to miss a scene. (We did notice Tao come in with a friend late in the film, stand in the back of the theater next to us with a drink from the bar, but soon turn with his back to the screen and then walk out a few minutes later. When we asked him afterwards if he couldn't stand watching his work onscreen, Tao said no, he'd just seen it several times before.)
Anyway, we're extremely grateful for having been privileged to attend the New York opening of Shoplifting from American Apparel. When we got an email on August 27, 2007 that said
hi richard, can you give me a little legal advice? i got arrested from american apparel about a week ago and have a court date, 9/11. i just have some small questions. thank you, tao
we couldn't have imagined that the incident would make for a best-selling book and now a movie that deserves a wide and appreciative audience. Of course, our imagination is limited by senescence and being a lawyer. The only friend we had who wanted to be a marine biologist was Mike, who's worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for decades.
We're from a different generation, people that got up every day, and did things, were proactive, got things done -- in other words, we're one of the people who suck. Frankly, we feel about Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Jordan Castro and Bebe Zeva the way our Grandma Ethel felt about her sister-in-law Aunt Betty: we hate them like poison.
And growing up in a Garment Center family and selling schmattes in our relative's retail outlets since age 14, we were taught to despise shoplifters.
But fair is fair, and we know enough to say that you definitely do not have to be young or alienated or a hipster (who of course must deny being a hipster) to like Pirooz Kalayeh's movie version of Shoplifting from American Apparel. Although it depicts a world in which people over 40 don't exist, it's definitely a film for intelligent moviegoers of any age and level of productivity. Go know!
This evening we had the joy of attending an entertaining and highly informative talk by theater historian Cezar Del Valle on the history of movietheaters in Brooklyn. By the time we got to the Brooklyn Collection room on the second floor of the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, we were able to find a seat, but not without difficulty, because this was a pretty hot ticket. No, there wasn't a riot like the one at the 1927 opening of the Universal Theatre on New Utrecht Avenue when 20,000 people stormed the place trying to get in, but we learned an awful lot and had a great time with a charming, knowledgeable and funny man who seems to know more Brooklyn theater history than anyone in captivity. Cezar began by showing an old photo and gauging the crowd's age by asking if everyone knew what a johnny pump was. The vast majority of the older audience did, though the term had to be explained for the younger people, most of whom were probably foreigners from places like Ohio anyway. Anyway, Cezar pointed out some clues in the background of the kids playing: an ad for a 1928 Ramon Navarro film playing at the Loews Premier on Sutter Avenue. Ken Gordon, the silent-film expert who curates a long-running silent film series at the library, added his valuable two cents, as he did at several points during the talk, with friendly joshing between him and Cezar. Cezar's slide show was amazing; our own pics here are mostly not the ones he showed, but stuff we swiped from the Brooklyn Public Library's amazing Photography Collection and from the website Brooklynpix.com. He did show photos of the Loew's Coney Island and the nearby RKO Tilyou, as well as the old Meserole in Greenpoint, which we wrote about last week. At one time, Cezar said, there were 506 theaters in Brooklyn with a total seating capacity of over 300,000. This was at the height of "the nabes," the neighborhood movie houses which usually did not advertise outside their own area because, well, they didn't need to. Cezar took us back to May 1893, when the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences sponsored a talk by Thomas Edison, who conducted the world's first public demonstration of films shot using his Kinetograph. Weirdly, the exhibited film showed three people pretending to be blacksmiths. Here's Edison's Kinetoscope for showing films to individuals, like at a peepshow; Cezar said Edison preferred that idea to showing films to big audiences because he thought it would be more profitable. So Brooklyn played a big role in the early history of motion pictures. One of the earliest films was this one by Edison taken in May 1897 at the Sheepshead Bay horse racing track.
And the year before, 1896, there's "Shooting the Chutes" at "Bergen Beach, Coney Island":
There were several competing processes of both creating and presenting motion pictures at that time, and the city of Brooklyn was home to all of them. Most of the early venues for showing films back then were not so much theaters (below is the interior of the Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn; we saw The Graduate there) but stores. These rented "store theaters," Cezar noted became larger, but the big change came in 1913 with a new law that allowed common-show licenses to have audiences of more than 300. The Regent, below, in Harlem, was one of the first "movie houses." Another was the TNF Theater, in "aristocratic Flatbush," actually Midwood at 597 East 16th Street, which offered claim-check parking, "retiring rooms" for the ladies, and ushers who would bring cake and ice cream to your seat. It closed before World War II. Sorry, we don't have any pics of it, but Cezar also talked about Feltman's aerodrome (outdoor theater) attached to his restaurant and hotel in Coney Island. Another place where people at the turn of the 20th century could watch outdoor movies was at the Venetian Gardens of Park Slope's Prospect Hall, where admission was free - "with food and drink." Prospect Hall was home to The Crescent Motion Picture Company in 1908 (Cezar said they had their laboratory underneath the stage) until legal pressure from competitor Thomas Edison forced its closing. But perhaps the largest airdrome ever, the biggest outdoor theater for the showing of films was - and this was one of Cezar's most amazing facts in a presentation full of them - Ebbets Field. Marcus Loew rented the stadium out as a theater, charged ten cents and included a vaudeville show, adding a second screen for the crowds in 1914. Cezar also talked aboutr Brooklyn as a home to early movie studios like the Midwood-based Vitagraph, which got its land only with an easement for the old property owner to move her cows through it. There was more information than we can possibly post about here, which is why you should get to one of Cezar Del Valle's next lectures. He told the audience about the entire twentieth century history of movie theaters in Brooklyn, and he touched on all the well-known Brooklyn theaters like the Kings and the across-Flatbush-Avenue legendary rival palaces the Brooklyn Paramount and the Fox. He showed the bill for one of the Murray the K shows at the Paramount (it featured "Little Stevie Wonder" billed about seventh) and explained how Ginger Rogers got from one show at the Manhattan Paramount to another at the Brooklyn Paramount by traveling in an ambulance. He had a treasure trove of anecdotes, from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's historic opening night at the Albee in 1925 (we went to this theater as late as 1969 or 1970) to material about little nabes that are probably remembered only by the very old and theater historians.
For example, we'd never before heard of the Jefferson, on Myrtle Avenue, the Jewel on Kings Highway (which we remember only as the Cinema Kings Highway, though Cezar reminded us that when it became a porn theater triplex, they had straight porn in one theater, gay porn in the old balcony, and foreign films in the last theater), the Starr on Knickerbocker Avenue, or the Marcy in Williamsburg, which Cezar said switched to Spanish movies . Loew's Pitkin was legendary, at least in the memory of our father and his parents, aunts and uncles, who lived in the neighborhood (Brownsville). We certainly remember it being open but can't recall ever being taken there. Cezar noted that Al Jolson gave his final performance here in 1949. By the way, "Loew's" was always pronounced with two syllables by everyone we knew, but Cezar said the owners couldn't stand that and gave space into their handbook for employees about the proper way to say "Loew's" (lows). The Pitkin was one of the Loew's palaces' "atmospheric theaters," with a cloudy, starry sky and romantic lighting effects. We thought we knew all the theaters around Flatbush and Church Avenues near where we grew up - and we were going to the Kings, Kenmore, Albemarle, Rialto, and Astor till the 1970s - but we didn't know about the Flatbush Theater, which closed about the time we were born. Anyway, our notes from Cezar's lecture gave us a lot of names of theaters and a lot of information. His talk was filled with anecdotes - we do remember stories of "dish night" and the other rituals of the 1930s and 1940s from our grandparents and parents, and we have first-hand knowledge of the flashlight-wielding matrons who patrolled the children's sections of the Brooklyn nabes in the 1950s and early 1960s. And we pretty much expected a double feature on Saturday morning when we and our friends would go to the movies. Of course, as Cezar explained to those few in the audience too young to realize it, the advent of TV in the late 1940s led to the decline and closure of most Brooklyn movie houses. The talk ended well after 8 p.m., and it still seemed too short. If you can ever catch one of Cezar Del Valle's lectures, you'd be smart to go. We had the feeling he was telling us only a small fraction of what he knows about theater history, and not just in Brooklyn or New York City. We wrote about our own experiences in "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," a story-memoir that first appeared at the webzine Eyeshot and is in one of our collections. And we also wrote "Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County," which appeared in the anthology Life as We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn, and also online at The Rumpus.
