Lance Mannion

How Albany novelist William Kennedy got to be very big in Havana

Ernest Hemingway and friends in Spain around the time he was not meeting with novelist William Kennedy in Miami or anywhere else but was meeting in Havana with the hero of Kennedy’s latest novel in his Albany Cycle, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.

“I’m sick of Hemingway. We got too much Hemingway.”

Young journalist named Bill Kennedy, working for the Miami Herald in the late 1950s, wanted to do a story on Ernest Hemingway and got that response from his editor.

To be fair, the paper already had a reporter on the unofficial Hemingway beat.  He was friends with Hemingway, went fishing with him, with sailing with him on his boat, the Pilar.  But Hemingway was one of Kennedy’s idols and Kennedy had a chance to meet him---“maybe.”  A call came in one day when he was at work, Kennedy didn’t know the caller, but whoever it was told him Hemingway was in town and at a bar on the north side of town.  Kennedy called the bar.

“Is Hemingway there?”

“Who?”

But Kennedy figured nobody would tell him if Hemingway was there.  He ran to his editor.

His editor shot him down.

“I’m sick of Hemingway.  We got too much Hemingway in the paper.”

Looking back, the now eighty-four year old Pulitzer Prize winning novelist William Kennedy told a crowd gathered last night at the Kleinart/James Arts Center in Woodstock to hear him talk about his work and read from his new novel Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes as part of this year’s Woodstock Writers Festival, “I should have found an excuse to ‘go to lunch.’”

Kennedy never got to meet Hemingway and to this day kicks himself for the missed opportunity.  But that meeting that never happened formed the basis of the opening of Chango’s Beads. The book begins in Albany, New York in 1936 but then quickly skips ahead twenty-one years to Havana in 1957 and a meeting in a bar between Hemingway and Kennedy’s alter ego, a young reporter who’s just quit his job at the Miami Herald, Daniel Quinn.

Like Kennedy himself did, Quinn has been covering the build up to the revolution from Miami, interviewing revolutionaries, gunrunners, smugglers and spies. But Kennedy sends Quinn to Cuba while Kennedy wound up as editor of a paper in Puerto Rico where he hired Hunter Thompson who'd recently been fired from a newspaper in upstate New York. But that's another story or three.

Quinn banters with Hemingway, talks writing and women with him, then stands aside while Hemingway punches another man for singing a song Hemingway doesn't like.  One hundred pages later, with the Revolution underway, Quinn scores an interview with Fidel Castro. Kennedy never bantered with Hemingway, but he did get to talk with Fidel.  Thirty years after he has Quinn doing it.

It happened at the Havana home of the Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  He and Kennedy had become friends when Kennedy interviewed him in Spain shortly after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Marquez had come to Cuba to open a film school. Castro had donated an old public school building.  Kennedy had just finished work on the screenplay of The Cotton Club for Francis Ford Coppola.  The movie version of his novel Ironweed was about to go into production. Garcia Marquez invited him down to talk about movies with the students at the school.

So there's Kennedy in Havana, sitting in a rocking chair in Garcia Marquez' house when the phone rings.  When GM returns from answering it he tells Kennedy they're going to have a visitor.  He also tells Kennedy he'll have to find another place to sit.

"The Comandante likes the rocking chair."

A little while later Castro is occupying the rocking chair.

He occupies it for the next three and a half hours.  He and the two writers talk movies and books while the platoon of soldiers acting as the Comandante's body guard amuse themselves in the back yard.  Castro wears his field jacket buttoned up to his neck the whole time, Kennedy surmising a bulletproof vest underneath.  Castro speaks Spanish but he understands Kennedy's English well enough to correct the translator at several points in the conversation. Fidel tells Kennedy he owns copies of Kennedy's novels, the three translated into Spanish at the time, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Ironweed.  He promises Kennedy he’s looking forward to reading them.

"Do you know if he ever read them?" Kennedy was asked.

Kennedy feigned annoyance at the questioner's impatience. "That's part two of the story."

Here’s Part Two.

Some while down the road, Kennedy met with Castro again. By this time, Castro had read the three books.  He liked Ironweed and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game but not Legs because it was about a gangster. Castro didn't enjoy reading about gangsters, which Kennedy finds ironic but understandable. As a college student, Fidel had been something of a gangster himself.

The other two books, though, Castro thought very good.  He especially liked the main character of Ironweed. He thought Francis Phelan was a fascinating character, worth another book, and urged Kennedy to write about him again.  Very Old Bones isn't dedicated to the Comandante but maybe it should be.

As for Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , what was on Castro's mind was Billy Phelan's greatest game. Castro was an avid bowler. In the novel, Billy bowls a 299. Castro asked how he pulled that off. He confided to Kennedy that his own high game was 169.

Billy Phelan was based on Kennedy’s uncle, a gambler and pool hustler, who once really did bowl a 299.  For that matter, Kennedy himself once really did bowl a 299.  He rolled eleven straight strikes but on his last roll he left one pin standing.

“The number 4 pin never moved.  It was like it was cemented there.  Never even wobbled.”

When Kennedy told him about that, Castro sat there in silence for a few long seconds then changed the subject.

To duck hunting.

Castro liked to hunt ducks.

On one outing he killed 102 ducks.

With 99 shots.

The Comandante seemed confident Kennedy would understand that that beat bowling a 299.

The important thing, though, is that Castro read and admired Kennedy’s novels.

As far as Kennedy knows, that’s more than any American President has done.

“Elmore Leonard, that guy who writes the James Bond books?”  Them they’ve read.  “William Kennedy?”  Kennedy pulled a long face and shook his head.  Then, his eyes lighting up with mischief, he added, “But I’m very big in Havana.”

Photo of Hemingway in the Plaza del Castillo courtesy of LiteraryTraveler.net.  Photo of William Kennedy at Woodstock Writers Festival by yours truly.

You read it here first, folks!

You may remember---you'd better remember!---the two part interview I did back in June with Christopher Meeks, author of the short story collection The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea.

Chris' book recently got noticed by Entertainment Weekly whose reviewer called it stunning.

Not bad, not bad at all.

You may not have thought of Entertainment Weekly as the magazine to go to find out about serious fiction, but they have a good books page and when someone there calls your work stunning folks in the publishing world sit up and take notice.

So now would be a good time to go back and re-read my interview with Chris, or read it for the first time if you're new to these parts.

Part One: Harry Potter, Kilgore Trout, and The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea.

Part Two: Who writes a gladiator movie?

In other book news, my old pal, poet and memoirist Steve Kuusisto's new book of essays, Eavesdropping, has hit the stands.

The LA Times kind of liked it.

I make a point of being understated around Steve. He was born in New Hampshire of Midwestern Lutheran Stock, a Yankee Finn.  They get uncomfortable if you get emotional around them.

Kind of liked it?

This is writing that enriches the reader's life by heightening the reader's senses. Amazing to be reminded that flat, stolid letters on a page can actually course through one's veins, can cause the synapses in one's brain to transmit their hopeful message: There's more! There's more! There's so much more than meets the eye!

Steve has graciously and recklessly consented to let me interview him and I'll post the results of that in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, for a bit of a preview you can read this old post, A whole passel of swoopers.  Steve's one of the swoopers.

No magic here

Ellis was low.

There was no soya soup or lecithin ice cream.  No bee pollen, though he saw plenty of bees.  No wheat grass juice, though there was plenty of wheat.  And no tofu.  He had really done himself this time.

He expressed his feelings to Hans and was told he was "carrying the wrong baggage" and unwilling to throw it out.

"Where do I throw it to?" said Ellis.

"For extreme cases, this kind of reaction is normal," assured Hans.  "Verk hard and feel fullfillment."

"My stomach constantly rumbles.  I have gas, and I'm sure my number five and number six vertebrae are out of alignment."

"Relax, watch some TV."

"Mind warp and radiation!"

"Smoke a pipe---I find it relaxing."

"Carcinoma!"

"Have a can of beer and sit on the porch."

"Nitrosamines and aluminum alkaloids!"

"My friend, you have been Californicated.  Take the full course and you vill see such a transformation, by golly."

"And the rules.  No vitamins, no sex.  It's unnatural.  Especially with Patty working topless for an overall tan."

"Part of disciplining yourself---you can do it."

He held out his raw callused hand with dirt under the nails, dirt which he couldn't get out.  "See the break in my lifeline?  I think this farm is the break in my lifeline."

"That's yust vhere your palm folds funny," said Hans.

"I'm dying here."

"Change sometimes feels like death---but then you're reborn."

"There is no magic here," he said, too distraught to do anything about it.

"Then your eyes cannot yet see," said Hans.

---from the story "Divining" in The Middle-Aged  Man & The Sea by Christopher Meeks.

Harry Potter, Kilgore Trout, and The Middle-aged Man and the Sea

There are no witches in Christopher Meeks' collection of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man & The Sea.

No warlocks, mudbloods, boggarts, house elves, sorting hats, phoenixes, anamagi, or magic of any kind.

There's a character in the story, "Divining," who believes in magic---sympathetic magic of a New Agey kind.  Ellis Irivng, desperately and improbably combining cynicism and extreme gullibility in his search for a new job, love, happiness, and a cure for chronic anxieties of various descriptions, rejects science---"Just how is it possible that something as heavy as this multi-ton airplane can be held up by air?  Science should not be trusted."---and puts his faith in seances, the I Ching, vitamins, zinc, liquified celery, sea kelp, and foot-readers (like palm readers but offering extra services to assuage the loneliness they sense while massaging your toes).

Ellis is a believer in a magic cure for being himself.  He wants to change without having to work at it.  The story gets under way when he signs up for a seminar with a guru who diagnoses Ellis as having been "Californicated."

This is the guru's way of saying "divorced from reality and in need of a waking-up by being thrown kicking and screaming back into real life."

But while Ellis and the other characters in Meeks' stories are in one way or another, and to varying degrees, "Californicated," even the New Yorkers among them, they and the stories that contain them are firmly rooted in this universe where the only magic available to to save any of them is the only kind available to save any of us, self-awareness and self-discipline.

Still, one of Meeks' literary role-models these days in J.K Rowling.

I caught up with Meeks by phone at his house in Los Angeles---Meeks was born in Minnesota and educated in Colorado, but he's been Californian, although not Californicated, since 1977---after he'd just come home from teaching a class in Children's Literature at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasedena.  Having done my homework, I knew Meeks was teaching the course and I made him talk about it because I wanted to talk about it.  I've given my list of what I think are the best American fiction of the last 25 years, but if I had to make a list of what I think are the best books from anywhere of the last 12 years or so---the decade plus since I became a father---the list would include more than a few children's books, including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

All the books I've read to and with the Mannion boys have had a significant influence for the better on my writing, I think.  Commenter Cryptic Ned wrote once that my habit of writing in short paragraphs here is proof I've worked as a professional writer.

No doubt all the journalism I've done has had something to do with it.

But the short paragraphs are really a sign that I've read a lot of Beatrix Potter stories plus Graham Greene's essay on Potter.

So I have children's lit on the brain.

At most schools, courses in children's literature are designed for education majors and the focus is on teaching the books.  Meeks' class is for art majors who are studying illustration, and because they need original works to illustrate, an important part of their course work is writing their own stories, which makes it into a class in creative writing.

Along with Olivia, Where the Wild Things Are, The Kingfisher Treasury of Myths and Legends, and other works, Meeks has his class reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which means he's reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, again, which is fine with him anyway, but more so these days as he's putting the finishing touches on a new novel.

Meeks admires Rowling's writing for her dialogue, the way she keeps her plots moving, doling out exposition in bits and pieces as needed, and her skill at sketching characters on the fly, drawing their portraits in short but definitive strokes without slowing down her story, actually making description a part of the action.

He highlights her character desciptions and when he's been stuck writing his own novel he's gone back to Rowling to see how she's handled similar situations and problems.

Talking about Rowling, Meeks is making the case that good writing is not a matter of stringing pretty sentences together, not that Rowling can turn out a pretty sentence.  Good writing is a matter of structure, the way the elements of a story are put together, what comes next and how much, how the artistic parts, the pretty sentences and clever dialogue, move the characters and the plot forward.

Rowling knows how to put together a story.

But Meeks emphasized something else he likes about Rowling.  Her sense of fun.  She seems to him to be having a grand time writing her novels and she wants them to be fun to read.

This, says Meeks, is a trait and a talent she has in common with his first major literary influence, Kurt Vonnegut.

Back in his college days at the University of Denver, Meeks spent his junior year abroad in Denmark.  He'd stepped on the toes of a girl at a party the year before.  The girl was Danish.  It was love.  He went to Denmark to be with her.

When he got there he found she was living with another guy.

One day, searching the house he was staying at, the house of the parents of that girl, desperate for something to read, he came across a copy of Cat's Cradle.  In English.  It turned out that his hostess had an almost complete collection of Vonnegut's works to date.

What Meeks learned from Vonnegut was that writing could be fun.

Meeks describes his apprentice writer self at that time as resistant to humor.

Vonnegut gave him the freedom to be funny, even when writing about the most painful aspects of life.

End of Part One.  Part Two, Who writes a gladiator movie?, follows below.

Who writes a gladiator movie?

Ben, the leading male character in Chris Meeks' short story "Engaging Ben," is an artistically dedicated screenwriter who half-consciously, passively-aggressively trying to drive his fiancee out of his life using his dual obsessions, neatness and his work.

He's writing a screenplay about a gladiator named Dirk---yes. Dirk.  Dirk the Gladiator---who, having spent the last couple millennia frozen beneath the Roman Colliseum---Ben hasn't figured out how Dirk got frozen or stayed frozen---is thawed out by a couple of well-meaning anthropologists who find they have let loose a monster.  Dirk is horrified to find out that Rome has been Christianized since the days when his favorite emperors were tossing martyrs to the lions and sets out to kill off as many priests and bishops as he can stick his trident in.

Ben's gladiator script was an inside joke between Meeks and a screenwriter friend of his.  The friend was at work on a screenplay about gladiators when Meeks was writing the story.

"Gladiators?" Meeks asked him.  "Who writes a gladiator movie these days?"

The friend's gladiator movie turned out to be Gladiator.

Meeks is a screenwriter himself.  Two of his screenplays have been optioned, although not yet produced.  A third won the Donald Davis Dramatic Writing Award.  He majored in psychology and mass communications in college, intending to become a filmmaker.  It's why he came to California.  But he soon made plans to write other things besides screenplays.  Shortly after he'd moved to LA, a film he was working on with his roommate was shut down by the fire department because they'd neglected to get a blessing from authorities for some location shooting.

That's when he made up his mind he'd write fiction too.  Fiction writers, he reasoned, don't need permits to get their work done.

The other things Meeks has written besides screenplays include, along with his stories and two novels, three produced plays, seven years' worth of theatre reviews for Daily Variety, and four children's books, one of them a pre-governorship biography of Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Meeks believes that working in different forms has been good for his fiction.  From his playwrighting, which he says comes most naturally to him, and his theater reviewing he’s learned how to structure scenes and reveal character through dialogue.  From screenwriting he’s learned not to rely on dialogue, to think visually, and to keep his characters moving, not just to make his stories dynamic and action-packed but to show readers who his characters really are.  People are what they do, he says.  What they tell you they are, what they tell each other they are, what they tell themselves they are, is not as revealing or as truthful as what they make themselves into with what they do.

Ben, the obsessive screenwriter in “Engaging Ben” tells himself he wants to be rid of his fiancee.  She’s become too messy.  He tells himself he means she’s sloppy.  What he means is that he’s afraid of how messy and complicated life with another person can be.  He tells himself he doesn’t love her anymore.  But as soon as he realizes he may have gotten what he told himself he wants he’s propelled into comically heroic action to win her back, demonstrating his love for her to himself and the reader as much as to her by shedding himself of his neat-freak facade.

Envy is the fuel that powers the psychological engines of many of the characters in the stories collected in The Middle-Aged Man & The Sea into overdrive. Envy and its distillates, jealousy and covetousness.  Ironically, it often drives them into happiness.

The narrator of "Rotary" finds himself looking back jealously at his grandfather’s and mother’s pasts and their days of youthful bright promise.  The narrator of “Academy Award Afternoon & Evening” can’t look at much of anything—his friend’s new car, his friend’s green lawn—without despising it because he wants it for himself so much.  Nothing much good comes of his envy except for a realization of his own pettiness. 

But Ben doesn’t know he loves his fiancee, possibly doesn’t love her at all, until he leaps to the jealous conclusion that she has run off with another man.

And Vicky, the spiritually unfocused photographer’s assistant of “Shooting Funerals” who goes into business for herself taking pictures of...funerals, and who like Ben thinks she might be happier if she were out of the relationship she’s in, mainly because her boyfriend is too content with the way things are, finds the words to make him want to change things, marry her, when she grows jealous of the shared grief of the family at the funeral she’s just photographed and, incidentally, ruined.

And Ellis, the miserable New Age seeker after magic in "Divining" can’t be happy and just enjoy himself until he is overcome with jealousy at the sight of the woman he loves enjoying herself without him.

Meanwhile, Darryl, the cuckolded husband in “High-Occupancy Vehicle” may have driven his wife into the arms of another man by not being jealous or envious of anyone or anything, by being, like Vicky's boyfriend, too content with his life as it is.

If envy is a thematic thread in The Middle-Aged Man & the Sea, it wasn’t intentional.  The stories were written over a period of many years.  Meeks wrote "Dear Ma," the last story in the book, back when he was in graduate school.  The stories jump around in time and place and vary in tone and style.  Some are bleak, some are comic.   What ties them is a sense that people are part of a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together, as if the pieces were all cut by a careless hand, and it’s up to them to jam themselves together in the hope of making their lives come together in a picture that is recognizable if not quite as pretty and seamless as they’d hoped it would be.

Sometimes, no matter how hard they try, the pieces won’t connect.

These days, besides J.K. Rowling, one of Meeks’ favorite writers is Tim O’Brien.  In an email following up our interview, Meeks wrote:

I admire him, as I told you, for his sense of letting his vulnerabilty show. In a piece for the New York Times, where he revisited Vietnam 25 years after he left, he wrote how he went there with his young girlfriend.  At one point,his girlfriend was in her bikini, laughing in the surf of one beach, and he was recalling all those who had died  there and the blood in the water. His girlfriend thought he was pathetic and left him during the trip, and he wrote that he was going to kill himself with pills. He didn't, but he left those lines in.

In The Things They Carried, in one of the last stories called "Good Form," he writes about the effect stories have on people and on the writer, too. He says that as a writer, he makes things up to get at a deep truth. He says that while his stories may be based on real events ("happening-truth"), as a writer, he has to change things because the story demands it ("story-truth") and allows him to get closer to the feeling he's trying to express. Thus, he writes, "Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

He feels stories, too,can make things feel present. It's a way of  keeping feelings and people alive. That's what I feel in the best of my writing. To get there,you need to offer fresh ways of seeing, which can leap across in strong similes and metaphors. You need to be truthful and put humor as well as blood on the page.

We all like a good story, don't we? We can nod and say, yes, life is like this..

Amazon is offering a new story by Chris, "The Sun is a Billiard Ball", as one of its Amazon Shorts downloadable stories for a whopping 49 cents.

Visit Chirs' website here.

And the script for Gladiator by Chris' friend David Franzoni, and revised by John Logan, is online.

Messiah on the doorstep

See, if you're setting up shop as a messiah, you need a message.

A Messiah, you ask?

A messiah.  You probably think there is only one, the Messiah, and either he's already come and gone or he's still on the way, depending on your position on the divinity of one Joshua ben David of Nazereth.

But Jesus was only a messiah.  There are lots of others.  There are messiahs among us today.  One of them lives down in Texas.  Brian B.  He's the local messiah for the area within a hundred mile radius of his house.

Brian has gone into messiahing as the family business.  He's fourth-, possibly fifth-generation messiah.  His father was a messiah.  His father's father was a messiah.  His father's father's father...Messiahing is in his blood.

He just needs a good message and to get it out and then watch his smoke.

Brian B. is the main character of the mockumentary, The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, an independent film directed, co-written and co-produced by Chris Hansen, a professor at Baylor University.  Brian is played with nerdly charisma and a frightening monomaniacal focus by Dustin Olson.  As Chuck Tryon wrote in his review:

the comedy...derives primarily from Brian's capacity for believing himself to be a messiah without delivering any of the good works or displaying any of the generosity that one might expect out of him. This is best illustrated in a scene in which Brian is so caught up in his own attempts to locate his "higher purpose" that he is oblivious for several days to the fact that his sister has left home (...these family dynamics might also recall Napoleon Dynamite, with which Hansen's film has some afinity).

It's not just his sister he loses track of.  Brian is a husband and a father, facts about himself he doesn't like his wife to remind him of.  And he bullies and browbeats his devoted brother, Aaron, the one person who believes in him as a messiah.  But Brian is handicapped as a messiah by other things besides the lack of a message and un-Christ-like personality flaws.  For one thing, he doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what religion is or what it's supposed to do for the people who follow it.  He's nominally Christian, but his knowledge of Scripture is sketchy---his sister has to keep correcting him on little details about the life of Christ and the meaning of Christ's teachings.  He admires Jesus, but as a successful colleague, the way a salesman admires another salesman who's made his quota three years running, with a mixture of envy and an eye to picking up tips and tricks of the trade.

Brian is sure God has called him to be a messiah.  (His messiahship was confirmed by agents of the United States Government.)  It's just that when God called he forgot to tell Brian his purpose as a messiah.

In The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, an unnamed and offscreen filmmaker (played by Hansen) interviews Brian and follows him around as the novice messiah sets about discovering his purpose and finding a message.  At one point Brian decides his job is to stand on the sidewalk and shout out tips on personal grooming to passersby.  He goes to a local beach to offer baptisms, $1.18 for full immersion, exact change only, but gets no takers, except his brother, whom he almost drowns.

He goes door to door, trying to deliver his good news, such as it is, and collect some funding, but only one person lets him past the front steps, a cheerful and overly friendly lunatic played by Arrested Devolopment's Tony Hale, who has an immediate need for a messiah to drive invisible strangers out of his house.

At last Brian gets the idea to hold a rally, figuring that when he stands in front of an auditorium of new disciples God won't let him down.  God will enlighten him as to his purpose and message at the last possible moment.

God, of course, doesn't work like that.

The rally does result in a miracle, one involving the supposedly unloaded gun Aaron, acting as Brian's body guard, is allowed to carry.  It's not the kind of miracle Brian had in mind.

In what I expect will become a regular series of interviews with artists and authors and other creatures for the Arts and Leisure Suit Section of the Mannion Daily Bugle and Call, I talked by phone with Chris Hansen about The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah.

Who says bloggers aren't real journalists?

I have a calling.
___________________________

Make sure you check out the American Messiah website.

Messiahs are people too

Brian B., the an American Messiah, of Chris Hansen's film The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, doesn't know he's a messiah just because Federal agents kidnapped him and told him he's one.

He has other proofs.  His ability to perform miracles, for one thing.

(Brian B., in his kitchen, being interviewed while scrambling some eggs.)

Interviewer:  So what about miracles?  If you're the Messiah, wouldn't you be able to do miracles?

Brian:  Oh, I can.

Interviewer:  Like what?

Brian (thinking it over; there are so many examples to choose from):  Ah, well...there's the Shoe Miracle.  There's the Miracle of the Fruit.

Brian is willing to demonstrate the Miracle of the Fruit on film.  He calls for his brother to bring him a bowl of plums.  Probably thinking of Christ's turning the water into wine, the interviewer asks if Brian is going to change the plums into something else.  Brian looks disgusted at the interviewer's credulity.

"What am I?  David Copperfield?"

The Miracle of the Fruit turns out to be just a Stupid Human Trick.  Out in the back yard, Brian's brother throws the plums up into the air and Brian tries to catch them in his mouth.  The miracle is that he actually manages to catch a few.

The Shoe Miracle is even more mundane.

The indicting fact here is not that Brian's miracles aren't miraculous, it's that they aren't helpful.  He's not making the blind see or the lame walk, he's not healing anyone, literally or figuratively.  He's not doing anything for anybody and yet he is still proud of his miracles for what they are, signs of his own specialness.

Which makes him not all that much different from many self-importantly religious people who wear their belief as a badge of honor but don't seem particularly called upon to live out the teachings of their faiths.

There are plenty of "Christians" who act as if being chosen, saved, blessed by God's grace, whatever, is enough in itself.  Brian feels called by God but he doesn't feel called upon to do anything.

Chris Hansen is a Christian and he wanted to make some statements about faith and psuedo-faith in his film.

"I'm often embarrassed by the role many big-name Christians take in society," he admits, "The Pat Robertsons of the world.  I feel like they don't represent Christianity very well, and over the years, as a Christian, I've moved towards respecting and appreciating the role Christians have played in social justice issues in history."

But Brian B., as a satirical target, isn't meant to be a stand-in for those big-name Christians, except to the degree that they preach a religion of complaceny and self-aggrandizement instead of one of charity, mercy, humility, and love.

The object of satire in Brian's story is also its point of sympathy.  Brian's "folly" is his desire to feel special and important in a vast and unfriendly universe, and his quest for proof that God is out there and that he cares, while played for laughs, is still treated with compassion.

Brian really knows he's all too ordinary.  He introduces himself with a resume of a life of less than mediocrity:

Brian (speaking off camera as the opening credits roll):  All my life I kind of wondered if there was something different about me.  I had no friends, no one talked to me.  I was beaten, often going to school with bruises. I didn't smell very good.  Really no talent whatsovever.  But then I realized I was a messiah and---Wow!  Everything changed!

It's clear right from the start of his "interview" that Brian has spent a great deal of time and energy finding ways not to have to face his obscurity and the apparent meaningless of his real life.  Whenever the interviewer asks him the simplest and most obvious questions about his calling as a messiah, he reacts with a mixture of panic, hostility, and a frantic, paranoid suspiciousness.  All of this plays itself out beautifully in star Dustin Olson's beady little eyes pinwheeling in their sockets while his whole gaunt and ascetic frame---perfect actually for the role of a saint, he'd make a good John the Baptist if anyone's casting another life of Christ---petrifies.  He goes as rigid as a rabbit who knows the hunter has a bead on him.

It's very human of him to feel that Life has meaning and purpose and that an individual matters and also very human of him not to know what that is, to have no clear idea of what God wants of us, and to flail about trying to figure it out.  It's vanity but forgiveable vanity to think we are important to his purpose.

Brian's failure is everyone's existential failure.  The mistake we make is that Life is not what we're doing at the moment, it's what's going to happen.

Hansen says, "I think the main idea I went into it with was the folly of imagining you must have some huge ‘special’ purpose from God — and waiting for that, not letting your life begin — while ignoring all the little things God calls you to do every day, like caring for your family and the people who live around you, like the homeless guy who approaches Brian."

Early in the film, while Brian is out trying to find his purpose in action, a homeless man wheels his shopping cart up to him and asks for some spare change for a sandwich.  Brian snaps, "Ok, is this a soup kitchen?  I don't think so!"

The same character wanders in and out of the background throughout the rest of the film, and Brian, of course, focused on his own problem, remains steadfastly oblvious to his plight and his existence.

Hansen says, "I feel people are called by God to various things.  I myself felt like my life was on hold for years while I wondered what I was supposed to be doing — but people like Brian use it as an excuse to do nothing, and forget about the little things they’re supposed to do every day."

Brian neglects his wife and child.  He takes advantage of his sister Miriam.  He uses his brother Aaron to the point of abusing him, turning him into a personal servant and lashing.out whenever Aaron accidentally shows signs of having an ego and spirit of his own.

But Brian isn't portrayed as a monster of selfishness.  The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah isn't simply a portrait of a solipsist.  Brian is a victim of his own loneliness and sadness.  He never goes anywhere without one or both of his "disciples," Miriam and Aaron, and it's important that while Brian is named after a famous phony messiah---Hansen says that the character was named early in the writing process and he wasn't thinking about Monty Python's Life of Brian when he christened his Brian; when he realized the accidental allusion he liked it and kept the name---Miriam and Aaron are deliberately named after the siblings of a real prophet, Moses, and their devotion to their brother is every bit as faithful and faith-full as their biblical counterparts' devotion to their brother.

Aaron, as played by Joseph Frost, is an overgrown child with a childlike absolute faith in his big brother.  Ellen Dolan's Miriam, however, is a real grown up, who, while terrified of doing or saying anything that might hurt Brian's feelings, gently tries to steer him towards a more realistic view of himself and a more truly Christian way of life.  Their love mitigates against Brian's egomania.  Meanwhile, Brian unconsciously conspires with fate (or God) to bring about his own moment of crisis and truth.

A point Hansen says he wanted to make with The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah is that, while it may be true that we all have a calling and a purpose and discovering what those are can be a worthwhile quest, we need to be aware of the people right around us and the opportunities to discover a higher purpose in taking care of them.  While searching for the meaning of life we might be missing it by neglecting little tasks and duties that are pretty important.

"Maybe there is something you are called to do," Hansen says of Brian's search for a higher purpose, "But until you happen to find out what that is, you do have responsibilities."

The proper care and filming of an American Messiah

The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah is Hansen's first feature-length films.  He made a couple of shorts in graduate school and before coming to teach at Baylor he worked on instructional films, dramatized cases studies for classroom use, but looking back the difference between his earlier directorial efforts and directing his first full-length film that still strikes him is the high quality of the acting talent he now had to work with.

"Having good actors and seeing them create the character from the ground up wasn't really a shock," Hansen says, "But it was a pleasant surprise."

"I felt---I think the word is blessed that with the three significant roles that the acting was really seamless."

Those three roles, the an American messiah himself, Brian B., his long-suffering sister Miriam, and their lost soul of a brother Aaron, are played by Dustin Olson, Ellen Dolan, and Joseph Frost.  Olson and Dolan work out of New York.  Hansen was shooting An American Messiah in and around Waco.  Dolan, who does stand up comedy and improv along with her regular acting gigs and is from Texas originally, through her Lone Star State connections saw the casting call and auditioned by phone and videotaped.

She had worked with Olson before and brought him to the attention of Hansen and his co-producer Brian Elliott.

Olson had to audition long-distance too, but in his audtion tape, Hansen says, "Which I still have on the bookshelf here in my office, because I'm hoping to keep that for posterity, he just nailed it.  He nailed the character and he really nailed the style of mock documentary acting."

Hansen calls Olson an actor's actor's.  It's fascinating, and sometimes painful, as Brian is stunned into silence by what seem like the simplest and most obvious questions from the interviewer about being a messiah, questions that you would think he'd have answered for himself long ago but which have apparently never occured to him before, to watch Olson show Brian thinking on camera and show the desperation and suspicion as he tries to decide in what way the interviewer is trying to trick him with what are really harmless questions.  Here, you say to yourself, is a truly paranoid personality. 

Olson was younger than Hanson had envisioned Brian B., "So we had to age him."  Aging him meant attacking his hair.  With a combination of Nair and razors, the make-up artists made Olson completely, glowingly, hysterically bald on top, leaving him just a comical wreath of hair on the sides that gives him the kind of shiny chrome-domeyness that is usually only seen on film in the work of Hanna Barbera and Bugs Bunny.

For the character of Brian's brother Aaron, Hansen was looking for a child-like innocence, but something of a damaged child.  Although it remains mostly subtext, there are hints throughout the film that Brian and his siblings were not raised in the most functional of families.  "My mother was strange," is all Brian will say about his parents, and Aaron runs crying from the room when the interviewer asks him about his childhood.   To get that quality out of Aaron, Hansen says, "This was not an actual history of the character...but I asked Joe to perform it almost as if Aaron had abused drugs for years and years and years and this was what was left of him."

Joe Frost isn't from New York.  He's an old friend of Hanson's from grad school and he teaches screenwriting and acting these days.  He was nervous about taking on the part, Hansen says.

"All through the shooting, he did not think he was doing a good job, and I could not explain to him, like in the scenes when he's just in the background staring at the ceiling, how effective that is and how hard that is for an actor to do nothing in that way.  He does it so well!  I constantly hear compliments on his performance.  Dustin's is such a showy part that it allows him to do a lot of stuff and people do focus on him.  But I think true afficianados of acting tend ot look at Joe and think, 'Wow!  How does he do that?'"

A big chunk of the funding for An American Messiah was provided by Hansen and Elliott's employer, Baylor Univeristy.  Baylor also provided equipment, studio space, and most of Hansen's crew, who were paid in course credits.

For their director of photography, Hansen and Elliott brought on board an experienced professional, Damon Crump.  Almost everyone else who worked behind the scenes was a Baylor Universtity student.  The film was shot in about three weeks during the summer of 2005.  Students who worked on the film earned the equivalent of two course credits.

Having a student crew caused fewer problems than might have been anticipated, Hansen says.  There were times when the students' inexperience resulted in some mishaps, but their enthusiasm and eagerness to learn more than made up for their few mistakes.

It made a little more work for the director.

"When it's students on the crew you really have to keep your eye on everything," Hansen says, "If you hired a professional production designer and art director, you know they're going to do (the job).  I had a great production designer who was a graduating senior and she did great work, but I knew I had to keep my eyes on certain things all the way."

He had to be a little more vigilant and directing his first feature was perhaps extra-tiring for that reason.  Still, he says, "I felt---and I say this not to sound good in an interview because I like my students---I felt really blessed by...our choices for most of the top positions that went to students."

The film was shot on location and watching it I was struck by the absence of churches in the background.  Very odd for a movie that's about religion.  I didn't see a steeple, a spire, a stained glass window,  a cross, or a converted storefront anywhere.  It's hard to walk through anyplace in the United States without coming upon a church on every other block.  That's even more true the farther into the Midwest and South you go and Hansen says the Waco area is not an exception proving the rule.

He wasn't consciously trying to exclude churches from the picture.  When he scouted locations he looked for backgrounds he considered interesting and churches, because they have as he says "a generic churchy look," didn't draw his eye.

But I liked the missing houses of worship.  I think their absence helps emphasize Brian B's essential loneliness.  He is truly cut-off from the world, not in the sense of being cut off from reality, but in being cut off from a feeling of community, of belonging.  Brian's isolation, and his alienation, make his search for a higher purpose a more universal quest.  Brian B. is not only a Christian seeking God.

Hansen, a believing Christian who did his undergraduate and graduate work at Christian schools, Lee University and then Regent University, set out to make a movie that would say some things about the nature of faith and the proper role of a Christian in the world.

The character of Brian B. was created for a script Hansen's friend, David Lovic, was working on, which wasn't going to be a mock documentary, but a straight-forward narrative film about a couple of losers who kidnap the head of a religious cult in order to ransom him back to his followers only to find out that he doesn't have any followers.

Lovic had written about half that script when Hansen read it and, Hansen says, "I loved the character, and I thought the character wasn't getting enough time.  I said, let's take the character out of this story and follow him around and learn more about him."

“When I approached writing this I wanted it to be funny and entertaining, and then it went from funny and entertaining to wanting to be a character piece about one man’s search for meaning.”

Hansen agrees that Brian’s search isn’t an exclusively Christian endeavor.  He was amused, though, when I told him that Brian, in his vanity, his certainty in the face of all evidence to the contrary that he is special, that he has been picked out for greatness, and his self-centered willingness to neglect all his responsibilities to pursue his calling, and the ways he manipulates everyone around him into subordinating their interests and egos to his own, made me think that the film was really a satire about being an artist.

He was amused but, although that wasn’t his intention, he wasn’t surprised, he said, because he based a lot of Brian’s character on some of the less appealing aspects of himself.

“I’ve had that clash in my own mind and in my own life of balancing family—because I have a wife and three kids—balancing family with career, whether it be art or now as teacher as well, wanting success, and neglecting family to get it.  I think Brian represents the worst I could be possibly in pursuing it.”

Hansen thought about this and wrote in a follow-up email, "Brian as a character (specifically his desire to have some big special purpose and needing to NOT neglect the rest of his life) was built on my own belief in my calling as an artist (and my endless self-doubt about it) and my need to, at the same time as I nurture my artistic side, to care for my family and give them the time and attention they deserve. In other words — my need to be an artist balanced against my need to be a good human being.

"So in some ways, it’s a very personal film.  Of course, I’m giving myself a kick in the pants (or, at least, I’m kicking that part of myself that often makes the selfish choice to focus on my own personal ‘special purpose’)."
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A bunch of people have inquired about DVD sales of The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah.  Hansen and Elliott have been submitting the film to film festivals across the country, hoping to attact interest from a theatrical distributor.  While that's happening, they won't be selling any copies for home viewing.  But keep checking the film's website and Chris's blog for more information and updates.