Slow Players #6: "You Always Want to do One Thing--Or You Want to do Nothing . . ." (Clair Noto)

Hi:

(If you’re in a hurry this morning and would like a tl/dr quick shot on today’s Slow Players, click here. I have a book imminent! It’s exciting! You can preorder it HERE)

A year or two back, I received a phone call. You know how it is: you’re in the middle of one thing (opening up this email, for example) and almost before you know it you’re in the middle of something else. In this case, I was keying myself up to make a work-related phone call, mildly hungover from a pair of gin martinis at the Sunset Marquis the night before, having just brushed off the last of the morning’s fog when the phone rang just as I had begun to reach for it.

“I’d like you to write about Clair Noto,” the person on the other end, a woman, said to me. To which I responded, exactly as you are right now, Who??

Before I come back to Clair Noto, as I will in a moment: Hello! It’s been a minute since my last newsletter, and in fact I’ve been sitting on this one since the first of January. I started this year with a set of sharply-drawn intentions, intentions that have since partially dissipated, just as I started that morning with a sharply-drawn intention to call a literary agent to whom I’d recently been referred—someone I already knew, and who knew me, and who seemed likely to take me on as a client. I had a book in mind, about which there were things I knew and things I didn’t, but one thing I did know was that the book was not going to be about Clair Noto, since I didn’t know who she was. But the woman on the phone, who was also a literary agent, wanted to talk with me about Noto anyway.

(I’m writing here about decision points. How does a work of art come to exist in the world? How does anything else? You always want to do one thing—or you want to do nothing—yet you wind up doing a thing you didn’t anticipate. 212-556-5600 was the phone number for ICM in New York—I didn’t even have to look it up, it was still seared into my brain from my life as a film executive two decades ago—but . . . who on earth was Clair Noto, and why was I talking to this (other) literary agent instead of calling Binky Urban like I’d planned to seconds earlier?)

If you trawl the internet for Clair Noto, as of course I did the moment Allison (the literary agent) and I hung up, you come up with a few things: some links to a bunch of H.R. Giger art, a skeletal IMDB page for Noto—a screenwriter, you may have already half-guessed (did novelists ever slouch against their typewriters with such manicured, slightly-performative pensiveness?)—and an article or two with a provocative headline: The Greatest Scifi Screenplay Never Produced. Do an image search and you’ll come up with a single photograph of Noto herself (above), and a handful of YouTube clips telling the story of the movie—or rather, “movie,” since it was never produced—upon which Noto’s career appears to rest. The Tourist (not to be confused with a 2010 Angela Jolie film of the same title) is, or was, or would have been, a vibrant, surreal futurescape along the lines of Blade Runner, or Alien (hence the H.R Giger connection), or maybe Jodorowsky’s Dune: one part feminist noir detective story, one part psychosexual nightmare, one part The Man Who Fell to Earth-like tale of extraterrestrial alienation. Or maybe those proportions are all wrong. As with a martini—the very ones that were making my head hurt that morning—it would have depended upon a shooting script and a director to determine the extent to which an actual produced version of Noto’s original screenplay, “The Tourist,” would have been any or none of these things and to what degrees. But if you read Noto’s screenplay, which of course I hastened to do (I must say it’s a pleasure just to look at it online, in its illicit and no doubt very much unsanctioned form there, with its photocopied analog smudges, its date, 2-4-81, penciled onto its cover page), you’ll see the appeal right away. The story’s protagonist, Grace Ripley (the name seems as likely an homage to Patricia Highsmith as it may be, also, to Alien), is a kind of erotic prowler: a Manhattan executive we first see stepping out of a Times Square porn shop and whom we soon discover is . . . not a human being at all, but rather an alien who’s been exiled to Earth. This planet, it turns out, serves as a penal colony for all sorts of distant civilizations, and Ripley, like others from still other planets, must voyage into the city’s extraterrestrial underground in an effort to find her way home. Conceptually, it’s simpler than it sounds: there are many who believe Noto’s script was eventually ripped off and bowdlerized into 1997’s Men in Black. Practically, it’s bananas: a squelchy, Cronenbergian painting of erotic violence and disquiet made wilder somehow by the fact it was conceived and written by a woman. (Whatever Noto’s peers—Carole Eastman, Polly Platt, Nora Ephron, Joan Micklin Silver, etc—were doing in Hollywood in 1981, they weren’t writing too many rape/castration scenes involving an alien’s cephalopod-like tentacle, or filling their stories with larvae and weird secretions.) The script has dated a bit, but its power—and for the most part its sense of striking originality—remains.

Everybody loves a legend. The story of Clair Noto rests on a movie that doesn’t exist, and on a certain intractability, the story of her war with various producers and people who wanted her to write a more commercial movie than she did. Noto’s available biography is scant: she is credited with sound design on a 1974 prisonsploitation movie called Caged Heat (written and directed by Jonathan Demme!); she is credited as a co-writer, and in some places co-creator, of Marvel Comics’ original Red Sonja comics of similar vintage; she is credited for writing a single 1988 episode of the popular animated TV series Jem, whose title character was voiced by my friend Britta Phillips, a person who has gone on to numerous significantly better things. But Noto herself, alas, did not. Aside from a 1997 episode of the horror anthology series The Hunger (evidently predicated on the 1983 Tony Scott film of the same name, but presumably not as good), Noto’s public profile remains predicated on The Tourist. The possible-masterpiece that never was.

The person pictured there, above, is not Noto, of course, but myself circa 1982. Around the time The Tourist was still just beginning what would be its long and fruitless voyage through development hell (according to a book called The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, by David Hughes, Noto’s script was written on assignment, sold as a pitch to Universal in 1979, and then shuffled around for nearly twenty years before the success of Men in Black put a bullet in its chances), I was a teenage boy. Like a lot of teenage boys—I am sixteen, seventeen tops in that photo—I was a mess: anxious, frustrated and unhappy. Like . . . well, some teenagers, I was also pretentious as hell: my bedroom walls collaged with photographs of Edie Sedgwick, Malcolm McDowell and David Bowie, my shelves crammed with William S. Burroughs and Celine, books I occasionally merely pretended to read while filling my ears with music I bought from Rhino Records in Westwood, imports and indie 7”s, some of which I likewise merely pretended to enjoy. (I would like to tell you that I just loved this here Throbbing Gristle song, for example, but that would be something of a fabrication.) I’m not proud of it, though I suppose I’m hardly the first kid to have been, uh, something of a poseur. I was lost, and like a lot of teenagers—the ones who are lonely and operating without a lot of supervision or support—I somehow thought I could help my loneliness by affecting a bullshit sophistication. But I would, I think, have loved The Tourist for real. It would have spoken to my isolation, it would have excited me in ways that things I really did love (like Blade Runner, like Alien, like The Man Who Fell to Earth) did also. It would have blown my mind, the way it almost certainly would have blown other people’s.

I did not write a book about The Tourist. I thought about it, both because Allison’s a good talker and because I realized this was what I wanted: a book that could encode a lot of those feelings of loneliness, of shyness and shame, I’d felt when I was fifteen (and perhaps have never really stopped feeling, at least not altogether), and that might address some of those influences, the things and experiences that forged me for better and for worse, from that age forward. I didn’t want to write a novel—in fact I’d written, and at least temporarily shelved, a novel in the years after American Dream Machine, but I was sort of dissatisfied with the form, which had started to seem unballasted to me and still does. (I like novels. I’m reading at least one great one right now, but the idea of populating a narrative solely with made-up people and situations felt flimsy to me in the great wind-tunnel of the late 2010s, the vortex of nonsense that howls around us daily. Perhaps I’ll feel differently tomorrow.) I wanted a form that would allow some of the latitudes of the novel (imagination, narrative arrangement, dream) but would also cross-reference them against the specificities of geography and fact. A book that might be criticism, or memoir (or, for that matter, a certain polyglot sort of novel) without necessarily being any—or at least only—one of these things.

The book I DID write (that’s its killer cover right there, stylishly designed by the wonderful Diane Chonette and stylishly gif’d by the also wonderful Jakob Vala at Tin House) will be out in July. The pleasure I had in doing it is one thing, but like almost anything—in fact, like absolutely everything—its existence hangs on so many contingencies. What if I’d picked up the phone a few minutes earlier to call ICM in New York; what if Allison had called someone else (reader, I signed with her) to write a book about Clair Noto; what if Noto’s film had been made, or been made badly, and gone on to claim its rightful or unfortunate place in the culture? In a more just world, perhaps, Clair Noto’s movie would have been made well and there would have been no real need for a book about its legend and Allison would never have called and so (as the above book did grow directly out of our conversations that followed my telling her I did not want to write a nonfiction story about Clair Noto) it would have been some other book pictured above, or more likely I would still be struggling to tell whatever story I’d decided to proceed with instead in the absence of an agent who also happens to be (lucky for me) a first-rate and flexible literary thinker.

I didn’t write about Noto. I wrote, instead, about Tuesday Weld and Carole Eastman and Tom McGuane and Eleanor Perry; about Warren Zevon and Renata Adler, Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What do these people have to do with one another? Well . . . that’s what the book is for.

I’m proud of this one. I hope you’ll smash that preorder button, because preorders are extremely important for books like this one: they send a message to booksellers, and to press, that a book is noteworthy, they help to determine coverage and shelf placement. They make an enormous difference, so if you have a moment, won’t you? Tom Bissell, who wouldn’t steer you wrong, says: "Haunting, powerful, riveting, unforgettable—I could go on (and on) about Matthew Specktor's astounding new book about failure, writing, Los Angeles, and the movies. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists both forgotten and notorious while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it." Why not see if you agree?

(If you do preorder, email me back w/receipt and I’ll put you on a list to receive all kinds of goodies—grey-market video streams, rare bits of musical and literary arcana—that will enhance your enjoyment of the book and which will be worth the modest cost of that preorder all by themselves, I swear.)

This being a long-ish one already, I’ll leave you with a groovy playlist of songs I did love when I was sixteen (and often enough in this order—I swear I have a box of rotting Maxell C90s around here somewhere with a number of these song transitions replicated exactly). It’s good stuff, that captures the sound of being a rabbitty westside teenager in Los Angeles in the early 1980s precisely, hopped up on drugs and literature and dreams of future stardom, all things that are in the book as well. Little did he know that for him—and I hope, for you—there’s better yet to come.

Until soon—

Matthew

p.s. if you’re someone who prefers the convenience of Amazon, I get it: that button is below. I urge you to use the link above to preorder, simply because the world of independent bookstores always needs our support, and the cost differential in this case is pretty minimal anyway, but if you prefer, it’s here too: