L.A. Man Read online

  Inside the Pilot station, the Chipmunks are singing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth.” Coyotes, singing Chipmunks, the desert, it’s all part of Christmas in Southern California. No wonder Bret Easton Ellis left with a bad taste in his mouth. But the driver seems supremely untouched by it all, even the road ahead of him. He’s got the air-conditioned solution. He’s got books by Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe, Robert Evans, and Roald Dahl on tape. He’s got the LBJ tapes. He’s got a towel in the travel bag. He’s got the Pixies, Rolling Stones, Elliott Smith, and his best friend’s girlfriend (Sheryl Crow) on CD. He’s got a cooler full of sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies. For the time being, he’s got the world at bay.

  The characters populating Anderson’s movies are the same, existing in a heightened, insular world of their own making. In Bottle Rocket, the three friends at the film’s core barely come in contact with anything or anyone that could be mistaken for life as most of us know it. When they do, the outcome isn’t good.

  “There’s never a world, there’s never a real world that they’re involved with,” Anderson explains. “They’re doing their own thing. It looks kind of like this.” He waves at a flat, brown field outside the window of the Ford Explorer.

  In much the same way, Rushmore focuses on the emotional lives of the kids orbiting around Rushmore Academy, particularly Max’s schoolmates. Adults, for the most part, aren’t allowed in the game unless they play by Max’s rules. When they don’t, there’s trouble.

  “The thing I always think about with these movies, I always think a lot about Charlie Brown,” he says. “You know how in Charlie Brown, in Peanuts, they are in their own little world? There’s only a group of kids. It has a mood all its own.”

  By focusing on this alternate reality, Anderson turns his camera into a microscope and his movies into lab studies. What’s under the glass, to a large degree, is the sustainability of friendship and the things people do when friendships are tested. Max in Rushmore and Dignan (played by Owen Wilson) in Bottle Rocket are the Charlie Browns of these little worlds, where things go awry when a storm blows into the emotional harbor of friendship.

  “Both these movies are about friendships that get put through weird tests and that are renewed, kind of, you know? That are broken up and renewed, especially if you go through some big things together,” he says, “like me and my friends who all did Bottle Rocket together. Our lives are so different from what they were when we started being friends.”

  ◆◆◆

  When Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson started being friends, they were a couple of kids lollygagging through the tail end of college at the University of Texas. They met in a playwriting class and eventually became roommates. A mutual love of movies and writing proved to be a creatively combustible combination. In time, an idea for a quirky fourteen-minute short became the first installment of their eventual first script, Bottle Rocket. When the film was made, Owen and his brother Luke’s offbeat, charismatic performances landed them on the Hollywood hot list, winning them high-profile movie gigs and Sheryl Crow and Drew Barrymore, respectively. Things changed, all right.

  Even though Wes, Owen, and Luke presently live together in a ramshackle Tudor in an unfashionable part of LA, Anderson seems to understand it’s never going to be the same among the three amigos. The ride from Texas to Hollywood is over, and now that they made it, they’re certain to go in different directions. They already are. Each is looking for his own home. It’s hard not to wonder if the themes in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are Anderson’s way of addressing the fear that the real world will impinge on his friendships.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I mean, it happens. That’s the way it happens. But I don’t feel like we’re, right now I feel like our…” He searches for the right words, hands staying tight at ten and two. “The friendship that gets the most strain is the one between me and Owen. And I feel like that’s as strong a friendship now as it’s ever been, and we still have several movies we want to do together. And I just sort of feel like it’s not something that I feel worried about right now.”

  When Wes Anderson idealizes himself, it is as an artist. He sees himself in a loft in New York, perhaps, with space and light and crazy hair and a breeze through the south-facing windows and the burnished reflection of creativity, emotion, and connection bouncing back off the page through his round glasses and into his shy eyes. Something, he says, like Nick Nolte’s character in “Life Lessons,” Martin Scorsese’s contribution to New York Stories.

  “That would be something to aspire to,” he says almost wonderingly.

  Anderson’s next steps along the larger journey were little forays into the life he began envisioning for himself. In high school and into college it was time to try on the identity of an artist for size.

  At St. John’s, the prep school Anderson attended in his hometown of Houston, where much of Rushmore was shot, he withdrew from the center stage he had provided for himself with the plays and began focusing more on writing.

  “Short, like J. D. Salinger short stories,” he recalls. “At that point, I sort of felt like I was going to be a writer. Just a story writer. A novelist or something. But I was also doing little movies at the same time. Then the movie stuff just started to take over more and more.”

  During college, Anderson made creative use of the University of Texas’s curriculum policies, engineering his course load so that almost all his credits were earned in independent or conference classes. The loose schedule gave him and Owen Wilson time to mine Austin’s cultural resources.

  “We never had any money, so it was kind of limited. There was just a lot of hanging around and reading and going to movies. I was always doing some research. You know, they have this incredible humanities research center called the Harry Ransom Center.”

  All he could bring into the Ransom Center was a piece of notebook paper and a pencil, but once he was inside, a world populated by artists, writers, and filmmakers was his to explore. Some of us spent the better part of our college years pouring beers over our heads. Anderson spent hours researching F. Scott Fitzgerald, Francois Truffaut, and others who would become his cultural heroes.

  “I was interested in those people and just as interested in their lives as I was in their work,” Anderson says.

  The driver drifts off, and Amarillo is too far away for the passenger to pursue him. Conversations need rest stops, too. Inside the rented Ford Explorer, it’s basically inert. The miles roll by unheralded except by the digital miles-to-empty reading on the truck’s display panel. Finally, the shrill ring of the car phone interrupts the sound of wheels turning. It’s Anderson’s brother Eric in D.C., petitioning Wes to come home for Christmas or New Year’s or something like that. When the phone is handed to the passenger, Eric picks up where the conversation about college left off, telling of going through old stuff at their father’s house and stumbling upon a box of about twenty post cards Wes sent Eric from college. He says the post cards were bursting with enthusiasm for films and books and the lives Wes was discovering.

  “They were the most vibrant things,” Eric says. “They just got me excited about anything to do with movies and writing. That was my artistic education.”

  It wasn’t long before Anderson’s exploratory steps became more determined. He began using the local cable-access station’s equipment to make and air what he calls “little, short, stupid little movies.” This enabled him to develop basic skills and to hone his eye for the endearing idiosyncrasies of the people in his world. Starting with his landlord.

  “That was the main thing,” Anderson says, “this landlord documentary.”

  It all began when he and Wilson, who were roommates by now, started to battle their landlord over his refusal to fix their window cranks. To illustrate the gravity of the issue, Anderson and Wilson staged a break-in of their own apartment. They took some stuff out, messed the place up a little, an
d called the police, blaming it on the broken window cranks. When the police and the landlord arrived, the landlord said it looked like an inside job. The police didn’t take it too seriously, either. Things then escalated to where the guys stopped paying rent, and the landlord tried taking some of their stuff as collateral.

  “We ended up moving in the middle of the night, and he hunted us down with a private investigator,” Anderson recalls fondly. “I went to meet him, and I proposed doing this project.”

  Amazingly, the landlord agreed to fund the documentary, which would run on the access channel, ostensibly to promote Carl Hindler Properties.

  “He believed in, like, death penalties for drunk driving, burglary, and he had this pet snake that died and that he had given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which didn’t work. I said, ‘Well, what was the snake’s name?’ And he said, ‘Ah, we didn’t really give it a name, we just called it baby, or snake.’ And I said, ‘Uh, well, what did you do with the snake after it died?’ And he said, ‘I have it in the freezer in the back. I’d like to take it to a taxidermist.’”

  Anderson continues with his head slightly nodding and a smile escaping. It’s as animated as he’s been since In-N-Out. “I asked him, ‘Have you ever used a lawsuit as a method of doing business, as a way of pressuring people to get what you want?’ And he said, ‘All the time. We use it all the time. And we’re always winning, always winning major settlements.’ He had this sailboat in his driveway. He liked to just go out and sit on the boat, but he never got the boat in the water. The boat was not seaworthy.”

  Welcome to Wes Anderson’s movie milieu, where friends apply nasal breathing strips or dress in yellow jump suits to do armed robberies, as in Bottle Rocket. Or where a sophomore preppie who looks like a discombobulated teen version of Superman-era Christopher Reeve tries to build an aquarium on school grounds to express his love for an older woman, as in Rushmore. Or where, as with the landlord, peculiar individuality is exploited for humor but never derision.

  “I didn’t do the documentary in a way that was meant to look bad,” Anderson explains soberly. “I just thought he was a funny character, and I would just try to make it a truthful portrait.”

  Given all that has happened, the passenger is curious about what the hell the driver thought was going to happen when he and his friends started cooking up those fourteen-minute installments of their pet project, Bottle Rocket.

  “You know, we were hoping we were going to become huge and all that stuff,” he says matter-of-factly. “I mean, our ultimate hope was that people are going to see the movie and everybody’s going to love it. That kind of thing.”

  “So, you literally had this naive idea, ‘Hey, let’s make a movie with our friends and we’ll just throw everybody in it, and we’ll tell our story, and the world will love it’?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  ◆◆◆

  Remember when you were like that? When you and your buddies had your own language, your own style, your own way of looking at things—your own world in the larger universe? And you thought to yourself: if we could just capture this, this magic, how cool would that be?

  That’s what Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson thought during that senior year at the University of Texas, when they were hanging out and doing the landlord documentary and the Super 8 films about themselves and their friends. They finally made the declaration: We want to make movies, and this thing, this thing that is us, that’s gonna be our bottled lightning.

  So Wes and Owen went to work on Bottle Rocket with a manic determination. It would start with a staged break-in, an inside job. They wrote a 330-page script. They moved to Dallas, where Owen’s older brother Andrew worked at an advertising agency and could supply sixteen mm film, cameras, and a crew. They cast themselves and friends. And they made the first fourteen-minute installment. It wasn’t about them, per se, but it did represent how they saw themselves at the time. And it worked.

  At least to the degree that in 1994 screenwriter/indie kingpin L. M. Kit Carson passed the short on to producer Polly Platt, who passed it on to writer-director James L. Brooks, who badgered Columbia Pictures into coughing up five million dollars for the feature-length version. It would have the same cast—Owen and Luke Wilson in the lead parts, Robert Musgrave as the third wheel, Kumar Pallana as the incompetent safecracker—and the same director, Wes Anderson.

  “And you felt totally assured in your ability to do this?” the passenger asks.

  “Yeah, because there’s never any time to have too much self-doubt anyway,” Anderson says with the distant tone of someone who is stifling a post-traumatic-stress flashback. “And also, I was of the opinion that we were going to make this thing that everyone was going to love. But at that point I was operating under total naiveté.”

  “Why’d you think it was so special?”

  “I don’t know. Just because it was our thing. I mean, I had nothing else. Our whole lives were dedicated to this; it was a thing that meant something to us. It was based on our own ideas, and we thought they were different from other people’s ideas, and it was just what we were stuck on.”

  When Anderson speaks of Bottle Rocket, it’s as if he’s talking about a first love. There’s tenderness for what it was, for how it opened up new worlds, but there’s also disappointment for everything it didn’t turn out to be.

  “I was just so personally excited about what it was going to be that I thought, ‘Wait until they see this.’ That’s why I was so blindsided.”

  What blindsided him was the audience reaction at test screenings in Santa Monica prior to the film’s release in early 1996.

  “When we had our first test screening, and it was a disaster, I was just in shock, because I always felt like people were going to…” Anderson hesitates, his voice hinting at the distress he felt. “I had it in my mind that people were going to like it. I didn’t realize it was a strange movie that only certain people were going to like and a lot of people would hate. And that was the situation.

  “We just thought we’d blown the whole deal, kind of,” he continues. “I kind of always felt like if the movie’s a disaster, well then, okay, it’ll be harder to make the next movie. It’ll be very hard. There are a million ways to do it, you know? But it was sort of an awful time.”

  I mean, Owen wanted us to go into advertising at one point, and he says he investigated joining the military, which I didn’t know.”

  Anderson turns and looks directly at the passenger. It’s his grandest physical gesture in at least three hundred miles.

  “You know,” he says, “I could be a trucker.”

  For a long time now the vistas have been numbingly spare and redundant. Interstate 40, the more efficient if less resplendent replacement for old Route 66, goes on in a monochrome Southwestern blur. We’re not sure where we are on the map, but it feels as if we must be halfway to Amarillo. To combat something like the doldrums, driver and passenger down large colas and a gigantic bag of peanut M&M’s. Then we agree to take advantage of the driver’s access to ambush the notoriously inaccessible Bill Murray with an unsolicited call. Beneath road-weary giddiness at the prospect of interrupting him at home is the notion that this might not be a good idea, that if Murray is not up for it, the wind could go right out of our sails. Then what’ll we do? But the sugar and caffeine prevail, and the driver dials the secret number.

  After Anderson briefs him on the situation, Murray seems eager to talk. It’s clear he likes the idea of a couple of guys driving into the night with a fairly absurd destination in mind. Amarillo? Why Amarillo? Because that’s where Anderson made his first stop the last time he drove to New York, and it worked. Weirdly enough, as Murray warms up to the car phone, the passenger gets the idea the actor wouldn’t mind riding shotgun on this trip.

  “Is what you see with Wes what you get?” the passenger asks, looking over at the driver, who has resumed looking straig
ht ahead.

  “No, no. I don’t think what you see is what you get with Wes. You get much more,” answers Murray. In the background is the excited pitch of the family pool tournament we’ve taken Murray away from. “He looks like R. Crumb’s old drawings of himself. He looks like he’s going to be outraged, like he finally sees what’s really wrong with you, and then the horror backs off and the beauty comes through.”

  Murray goes on to say that what made the Rushmore shoot work for him, besides the quality of the material, was Anderson’s ability to stress the positive. “Wes could find the good content in whatever you were working with. That made it easy. It freed you up to work.”

  His wife’s sharp cue having hastened an early departure from the action, Murray peppers the conversation with droll commentary on the tournament’s progress. It isn’t hard to place him there as Blume, off to the side in a tux, cigarette dangling from his lips, a spectator in a tournament of his own making, tossing peanuts to the family retriever in a small act of resignation and rebellion.

  It is suggested to Murray that his characterization of Blume has an elegant, spiritually wasted quality that suits the actor.

  “I was feeling the elegance of my own spiritual wastedness. I was feeling how all the touchstones of wealth and privilege are slippery,” he says. “Those emotions are not far from anyone’s home if you’ve lived a little. Some days I came home and I felt a little sore. I felt like I’d been cooked a little.”

  What about Anderson? Has Murray seen something in him that might not be apparent to the casual observer, or even the fourteen-hour one?

  “He’s very good at what he does, but don’t be afraid to ask him if he needs a Band-Aid or some change, things you generally ask of people who look like they’re in worse shape than him,” Murray says in a way that makes you unsure how serious he is. “A Band-Aid, yeah, I think a Band-Aid. There’s some cuts there.”

  “The first night we were on the shoot, he gave me three pairs of socks,” recalls Anderson, after Murray hangs up. “Two are still in my bag.”