Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

I sat them both down together but it was to her that I addressed my explanation of why I was leaving. Immediately.

I told her that I planned to take a road trip with my friend Carrie. I picked Carrie because she in fact was spending the summer driving across the country. She was going with her boyfriend — my going with her was something that I made up on the ride over to my parents’ house, but it would be easy to cover for because it worked for both of us. Carrie could tell her mom she was with me when she wasn’t, and I could say I was with her when I wasn’t. I told my parents my plan as they sat on our cream velvet Empire couch and I sat on the rug in front of them, holding a can of Diet Dr Pepper and taking frequent sips. The sips helped me buy time, as I was making this up as I spoke, or at least partly, the general ideas taking shape on the drive over, but the detailed contours of the plan coming to life as I formed the sentences between sips.

“There is a film collective in upstate New York,” I said. Sip. I was thinking of the great director Nicholas Ray and the weird upstate New York collective he formed with his students in the ’70s after he had been forgotten by Hollywood. (I have always been attracted to afterlives, codas, postscripts, discursive asides, and especially misdirection. Note this.) I had never seen the film Nicholas Ray made with his students, but it was legendary, at least to me.

“Where in upstate New York?” My mother’s brow furrowed. She was raised in Long Island, but she had developed a West Coast revulsion for the extreme temperatures of New York, and to her “upstate” seemed like a tundra of snow and forgotten factory brick. I hadn’t considered that I needed to be more specific than upstate. I thought of Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester. I thought of Troy, Albany, Kingston. I thought of Binghamton, where Nicholas Ray taught. But that isn’t what I said to them.

“Gloversville. They have an abandoned glove factory that gets used as a soundstage. It’s incredibly cheap, and we have easy access to woods or lakes or old houses for locations,” I said, and took another long swig of my soft drink. I was addicted to the slightly cooked peppermint-chemical taste of Diet Dr Pepper. The flavor had a wave of sweet followed by something bitter and then something metal; it was so close to repulsive, and yet I had grown to crave it. I tried to figure it out nearly every time I drank it. Is it marshmallow or peppermint? Is it a cola with a fruit flavor? With an undertaste of saccharin? Perhaps the blatant artificiality of it pleased me — it wasn’t trying to taste like anything real, the way diet Fanta or diet Fresca attempted to have “fruit” flavors. I drank it constantly. Sip, sip.

“A film shoot in Gloversville, New York?”

“A collective. Like an artists’ commune, so we can share equipment and ideas. In Gloversville, New York.” Sure. Why not?

The town of Gloversville came to me from a coffee-table photo book of old movie theaters: the Glove Theater in Gloversville. It was a former vaudeville venue whose exterior sign was renovated in 1939 in high Art Deco. Perhaps the glove in both the town name and the sign made it stick in my head, and then it popped out while the soda sip still tingled my tongue. Later, when I finally saw the place in real life, my eyes filled and blurred. It was a decrepit theater, in grave disrepair, on a dying street full of empty storefronts. The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history. I knew that cinema had touched every small town in America. Cinema is everywhere. And to discover it in the most obscure places made me believe that it mattered. Its decay only meant there was room for me somehow. That is why I cried; I was full of joy and excitement.

“Sounds ambitious,” my father said. Ambition pleased him. He was an entertainment lawyer, but he never talked about his work with me. He loved, though, to talk about me and my “work.” He encouraged me to believe that my particular possibilities had no limits, and one strategy he apparently had for conveying that idea was not giving me any limits, financial or otherwise.

“What’s the name of it?” my mother said.

“Of the film collective?” I sipped my Diet Dr Pepper. Swallowed. “Spectro Corps,” I said. Both parents tilted their heads like they hadn’t heard. “Spectro Corps. Like the Peace Corps. Or the Marine Corps.” No one spoke. I was about to go on, but I saw my father smile and begin to nod, so I made myself shut up (which is hard for me sometimes).

“Where will you live?” my mother asked.

“I will stay in the collective’s apartment so we can work all the time.” My mother pursed her lips.

“You are going to make films. That’s great,” my father said. “That’s what she wants to do, she should do it.”

“You are going to make films with Carrie?” my mother said. My mother loved my best friend Carrie. It is ridiculous how an adult decides to take to one of your friends. A bit of eye contact and a thank-you from a teenager is a kind of miracle I suppose. I knew any harebrained scheme became instantly credible to her if I included Carrie.

“Yes, Carrie. And others.” They looked at me and leaned in. They were saying yes, but they expected some detail, so out it came: inventing, as I had just learned to do, a story about myself. A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word. It is maybe a fabule, a kind of wish-story, something almost true, a mist of the possible where nothing was yet there. With elements both stolen and invented — which is to say, invented. And it has to feel more dream than lie as you speak it. I could see it ribbon from my head like an image in a zoetrope. “We are remaking lost and never-completed films. Like The Apostle of Vengeance by William S. Hart. The Dream Girl by Cecil B. DeMille. The Serpent by Raoul Walsh. The Eternal Mother by D. W. Griffith. Maybe every Alice Guy-Blaché short made before 1920. There are a huge number of famous silent films that don’t exist anymore. The nitrate ignited or they were just trashed. Destroyed. Only titles, descriptions, and some stills survive. I want to make these films. Enact — but also interpret, because what reenactment doesn’t involve an interpretation — the films as described. That is the summer project of the collective.” See? I made it up on the spot and I already wanted to do it. My parents had no further questions at this moment. Just the benign smiles they always got when I started talking in detail about films. Like they wished they found it interesting so they almost did.

“But you will be in New York City by the time school begins, of course,” my mother said. I was supposed to start at NYU in the fall.

“Of course,” I said, and maybe I believed it.

“Orientation is August twenty-fifth.”

I nodded.

“When do you leave?”

“Today — this week anyway.”

Later, as I packed a suitcase in my room, my father knocked on my door. Did I need anything, anything at all? I looked at him. An Eclair ACL 16 mm camera, 16 mm film, a Nagra IV-STC, a good microphone, a Magnasync Moviola upright editing console, a Betacam video camera, a Sony VTR tape-editing deck, and videocassettes. But I wasn’t sure what I would do with the equipment, as I planned to return to the Brentwood house with the pool and the huge filmmaker. My father wrote me a check for these things, trusting me to buy them. And I intended to buy what I described to him. I cashed the check and stored the money in a sock in a side pocket of my suitcase. Someday I would get my gear. But now? I wasn’t — as it happened — ready to make films. I was still just thinking, wishing, hoping. Pretending to make films.