Before I started in documentary I didn’t know how much time there would be adjacent to the story, in the neighborhood of the story – all sorts of non-sequiturs, things that never fit into the rigorous edit, that almost never ended up on camera, but were what actually stayed with me long after I’d finished on a project, long after I’d forgotten all about whatever the ostensible topic was supposed to be.
I was working on a film about a physicist who’d won the Nobel Prize and then retired to New Hampshire. It was pretty abstruse what he’d done, even by physicists’ standards, and I didn’t completely understand why this film, out of all films, had been greenlit, but it was funded and distribution was apparently in place and the idea was a kind of definitive biographical treatment of him and ideally to get in it just before he died.
He dropped dead midway through production, fortunately after we’d already filmed our master interviews with him, and a lot of the rest of the project was filling in gaps, digging around his house looking for old cassette tapes, shooting atmospheric b-roll. He’d had a wife who was a society type and had disappeared a long time ago – he was completely impossible to deal with, that was supposed to be part of the charm of the documentary. For the purposes of dying, he’d come back to this house in New Hampshire, which he and his wife had purchased as a country home and where his daughter was now living. She was a kind of peasant type, it was very interesting, she wore loose overalls and said ‘shoot’ and ‘dang’ and talked in a kind of drawling Southern accent even though we were five hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon line and she was the daughter of a Dutch-born, Oxford-educated physicist. And if she had gone low by the standards of her professor father – as far as I could tell, she really was a farmer, worked the land at her parents’ country house, lived off the produce that she carted twice-weekly to market in the back of a cargo van – she had married lower. Her husband was Bob, although he was perfectly indistinguishable from his twin brother Frank and one was never around without the other. They were very handy, did various repairs in the area, one I think was some kind of electrician, but mostly they sat on the porch of the old house, now, as luck would have it, fully vacated by the dead physicist. When I was there, I trooped back and forth between the attic, where the old papers and artifacts were, and the VCR and tape players downstairs and they seemed to enjoy having someone else around for their running commentary. “They ain’t bothering you?” Ruthie, the physicist’s daughter, would ask, “’cause if they’re bothering you I’ll grab something heavy and run ‘em off the porch.” But they never bothered me, just made a point of shouting something or other every time I passed by. “From the knees, city boy,’ one would shout, “’gotta lift from the knees” or “Bob, get the door for the city boy” and Bob would make a show of staggering to his feet and another show of how sorry he was that he’d missed the chance to grab the door. They were funny, they broke the monotony of archival work. They had a whole motley crew visiting them on the porch – it felt like some kind of local talk show, and every so often when one said something especially filthy, they would look at me to say, “Did ju get that for your documentary?” Frank had the better business and he regularly saw clients on the porch, even though the house had nothing to do with him, laid blueprints on the ground, chatted about all the repairs he was going to make. And in between were the social visitors who come by every day and with whom they always had the same conversation. “What are you talking about?” one might ask, swinging by. “The gov-ern-ment,” Bob would drawl like what an obvious question. Or if a girl came by, they would try to fix her up with me, sell her on all the pleasures of living in New York. If I pointed out that I was married, that didn’t bother them very much. “Charlene’s married too,” Bob would say. “Something else you have in common.”
“No she’s not, was married,” Frank corrected.
“Was married. Even better,” Bob said.
“Was married twice. She really knows how to do it. And she’d love to see a Broadway show – she knows tons about the-a-ter.”
Ruthie called them the Bobbsey Twins and they did everything together. Technically, they lived separately and worked separately, but somehow they always seemed to be ambling on and off the porch together – Frank’s business was marginally more active and on the rare occasions where someone prevailed on him to do the ‘estimate’ in person, Bob came along as another pair of eyes; Bob had the better home life – Frank had been married to a woman he always called ‘the catastrophe,’ had saved in his phone as ‘The Catastrophe,’ “so that I never get sentimental and forget,” he said – and he took just about all of his meals at Bob’s, Ruthie whipping up dinner after having spent all day in the field.
“Not what I signed up for, not what I signed up for at all,” said Ruthie every evening as she made her way to the stove.
“Not so bad,” pointed out Frank – unless it was Bob – “two for the price of one.”
For a while I went routinely to New Hampshire, set aside a weekend for it, got familiar with the treacherous section of highway where the gas stations disappeared and made sure to fill the tank beforehand, got to know the moment when my alt rock stations flickered into static and it was suddenly all country and Jesus and top 40, and then there was a break of several months where we worked away on the edit and then we needed even more archival materials and when I went back up, feeling very nostalgic and very savvy about the route, Bob had died of some ridiculous workplace accident and Frank, in a very biblical move, had taken his place and married Ruthie.
She was exactly the same. She worked, she cooked, she went to market, she complained about every step she took throughout the day. Frank was installed on the porch and now he was the one instructed to help me opening doors or carrying heavy boxes and he was the one doing the shtick, now for himself, of pretending to lunge helpfully for a door after I’d already gone through it.
The documentary had long ago lost whatever interest it had for me. Bregman, the subject, was a ‘physicist’s physicist’ – other physicists were in awe of him, his rigorous discipline, his complete devotion to his field, but his discoveries were all what had come to be known as ‘the particle zoo,’ various sub-atomic particles, with abstruse types of spin and color, that were first theorized in equations by the more far-sighted physicists like Bregman and then, as in a conjurer’s trick, spotted definitively in these high-end telescopes – each one of these spottings essentially bringing a Nobel Prize along with it like a gift receipt. The best, most characteristic stories about him all had a trail of domestic abuse, or at least negligence, in them. There was the story of how he’d achieved his breakthrough discovery – the most far-fetched of the denizens of the particle zoo – which involved his being sent by his socialite wife, in the midst of last-minute party preparations, to pick up a bottle of tonic water, and then he’d had the sudden flash of inspiration, the tickle of a new idea, as he was leaving the supermarket and he headed to his office, tonic water under his arm, to spend the night working on equations. The wife left not long after that to marry a commercial real estate developer and Ruthie, apparently, had split the difference between them as best she could, on the one hand a stalwart working discipline, on the other hand a perfect contempt for all intellectual endeavor. In the state of depression I was in at the moment, that’s what life seemed to be – certain bands, and everybody clinging to them. Bregman the physicist had been a loner happy in his lab, it had been madness for the socialite wife – mistaking physicists’ pay and institutional respect for the social stature she was after – to think that there could be some meeting of the minds, some beauty-and-the-beast romance where she would tame him and he would enrich her. And Ruthie their unhappy daughter had found the most solid, time-honored band of all – the peasant close to the land; and, once she had committed to it, and drawled her words, and unlearned everything from her fancy secondary school, she had refused to deviate from it – and, no matter how many times I had asked her for a personal, thoughtful remembrance of her father, she had always answered with the same stock phrase: “If they gave out Nobel Prizes for being a husband and father, he’d be the very last one on the list.” And I was part of a band that was fear-driven, persnickety, smallminded – constantly making safe choices, the biopic of the physicist, fussing endlessly with all details so that the curators of the Sundance Film Festival and the network distributors couldn’t possibly have any cause for complaint – and felt, irrationally or not, that I was the only one sticking out, the only one who just honestly couldn’t care less what cable channel the film eventually aired on, or how everyone was credited, and was sustained in it only by a certain adventuring that was part of the industry, the long drives I had to do every so often from New York to rural New Hampshire to deal with people who were utterly different from everyone else I knew.
The last time I was up there, there was a real party on the porch. They had a friend, who was kind of the star of the neighborhood. He was introduced to me as ‘an international arms dealer’ and wagged his eyebrows in acknowledgment of that – I think he was some kind of contractor to the Pentagon, he had a trim military mustache like he’d been carefully studying David Niven movies. When he came over he brought cases of liquor and cartons of cigarettes he’d bought duty-free and the whole neighborhood turned out. Charlene was over and Frank tried to set me up again. “Still married?” he asked and I told him I wasn’t and he made a joining gesture to the two of us like what else needed to be said – and someone had to point out that Charlene was six months pregnant; for somebody who’d lived all his life in the same place, Frank always seemed to be behind on local news. I think the way he preferred it, the way they all actually preferred it, was that nothing ever changed, it was always kind of an ongoing party, the neighborhood was always turning out, there were little bouts of work in between, as spaced-out as possible – or else a few people who were gifted at it, like Ruthie, were assigned to work the way a bunch of drunks might select a designated driver – and when the booze and cigarettes were winding down there was always some passing arms dealer, someone in the wider community, who came around to replenish. It really was beautiful – or at least had a certain charm to it – this whole other way of life. People did things like sit on porches and sing songs in groups – the arms dealer had the best voice, his wife, who was devoted to him, was always trying to get him to sing. He was talking earnestly to me – “if someone comes to you and tells you how to think, not one of these jackasses here but the government, you take out your piece and you shoot ‘em right between the eyes” – and his wife would shout to him to pick up the tune and he would do it and harmonize his part and then go right back to hectoring me. I was the guest of honor, in a sense, they didn’t have a great excuse to drink so they quizzed me about the Bregman film and when I said it was almost done, the arms dealer had solemnly raised his glass. “To Professor Juup Bregman,” he said. “To his movie,” Frank answered. “To the Nobel Prize,” said the arms dealer. And Ruthie was made again to tell the tonic water story, to tell all the absent-minded professor stories, all the carnage of her awful childhood and everybody on the porch shook their heads at the lengths some people went to for whatever they took their craft to be. I bumped into Frank when I was in the house, coming out of the bathroom. He was very drunk, which surprised me – this whole group seemed to drink endlessly without any effect at all. He was a big guy and he was staggering, moving through the house with the support of different doorjambs and counters. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said as if we were in the middle of conversation. The singing was still on from the porch, the arms dealer laying down a strong melody and various people joining in or shouting above it. I thought he might be commiserating with me that my marriage hadn’t worked out – I couldn’t tell if people had picked up on that. “You lonely people, you thinking people, I don’t know how the hell you do it,” Frank said. “A few months I’ve had to do this – had to go everywhere myself, had to finish all my sentences myself.” I had no idea who he was lumping in together, me, Bregman, everybody else working on the film? “It’s the goddamn hardest thing I can imagine,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to go through life with other people,” he said. “I mean really go through it with them, you have no idea what you’re missing out on.”
Sam, these are getting better. Fewer tricks. More integrity. Keep at it. Ways to go!