The Caller

In which friends die and new friends are made

THE CALLER (2008), my second feature film, was based on a screenplay of which most of it was written by Alain Didier-Weill (1939 - 2018), a French psychiatrist and a prominent Lacanian psychoanalyst who had done his analysis with Jacques Lacan and who became a close friend of mine. He was also a playwright whose works continue to be produced. The screenplay he showed me that became the origin of The Caller was the only one he ever attempted. 

The first time I met Alain it was at a conference hosted by the Après Coup Psychoanalytic Association in New York CIty, after a lecture he gave that I found striking. He contrasted the visual metaphors of knowledge in Greek culture—the English word, “idea,” for example, derives from the past participle in Greek for the verb “to see”—with the auditive  metaphors at the heart of Judaism, for example, the burning bush through which God speaks to Moses. This was my first introduction to the importance of Freud’s Jewish heritage to his invention of psychoanalysis. From the Jewish focus on hearing and the Jewish edict against idolatry Freud found an important source of support for his choice to sit behind the person who was being analyzed, outside of her visual field, putting the emphasis on their communication through speech.

Of course, cinema is primarily a visual art form. Nevertheless, this tension between, on the one hand, the voice, and, on the other, vision has dominated my own creative works. I had been aware of an analogous tension in my religious heritage as well. The Christian denomination in which my father was raised and for which I acquired a profound respect—even if I remain an atheist—is Greek Orthodoxy. In the Orthodox church there are a plethora of images, starting with ikons and the Iconostasis in front of the interior of the church. Orthodoxy’s own greatest internal conflict has arguably been between the iconophiles and iconoclasts. This is another form of an argument around the voice and writing versus images. One of the arguments in favor of Ikons that the Iconophiles cited was the ability of Ikons to communicate the scriptures to those who could not read. In regards to the Episcopalian denomination of my mother, into which I was baptized, there is a radical distrust of images, which have traditionally been identified as a symptom of the decadence of the Catholic Church. In the small church which I attended as a child and which I last attended for my father’s funeral (although he was baptized Orthodox he chose to be buried beside my mother in the graveyard of the Episcopalian Church), there are no images, only words. In the front of the inside of the church, to one side of the altar, in golden letters, is the Lord’s Prayer.

As a young teenager, I started to make super 8 films. Along side this emerging interest in filmmaking, for a long time I was determined to be a poet. I published my poems, gave poetry readings and corresponded with a number of poets, including with Archibald MacLeish (1892 - 1982). The private boarding school to which I had been admitted with a full scholarship had also once been attended by MacLeish. One of my scholarship jobs was working in the alumni office updating the addresses of alumni. I took the liberty of writing MacLeish. He wrote me back and we corresponded for many years. MacLeish had moved to Paris in the 1920s for the purpose of devoting his life to poetry. Although he returned to the States a few years later, this commitment to poetry would remain with him. When, after many years, MacLeish finally agreed to read one of my poems, I remember my pride when he wrote back, « Congratulations, you have succeeded in writing a Tang poem without writing a Tang poem. » As it had been for MacLeish, Paris was a catalyst for my own creativity, although spread over many more years and in a much much more picaresque style of living, as befitted the late 70s and early 80s. It was also while living in Paris in my 20s that my love of cinema began to reassert itself. Nevertheless, my love for writing and poetry has never completely left me and in my filmmaking it continues to express itself in various ways. 

When I reflect on secular manifestations of this tension, conflict or contradiction between words and images the Surrealists come first to mind and the inspiration they found in the work of Freud.  The affinity I have found with the work of contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysts and theorists therefore shouldn’t surprise me.

When I met Alain Didier Weill after I heard him speak, I felt an immediate connection with him. He was deeply involved with the arts. Over the years I have met a number of outstanding intellectuals but it’s rare that I feel a personal connection. Working with Alain’s screenplay would quickly become a daunting proposition but he assured me I had his trust. He never said anything to me afterwards to contradict this. 

At the time of the completion of my first film A Hole In One, it was screened a single time in Paris. Alain was there. We spoke afterwards. I don’t know how I received the unfinished screenplay but I remember reading it in a hotel room in Paris a few days later. Although there were sections I thought didn’t work, I remember feeling captivated by its ingenuity. Alain had previously abandoned working on it. The story of its origins, as I remember it, is that he had met the well-known French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant at a party. The actor had expressed interest in seeing the screenplay completed after Alain told him the outline of the story. Trintignant however hadn’t replied to Alain later on after receiving a subsequent draft that was also the one I had now read. In short stories and other genres that Alain published, he would retell this same story with minor revisions. In the screenplay as I completed it, I kept the basic story the same but made a few changes. The most significant of these changes was making the two main characters of the story immigrants to New York City who had been born in France. 

At the start of the story, two boys, both of them around 11 years old, are strafed by German fighter planes and separated from their parents. They wander in a forest. They come across a Dying Man (Simon Jutras)  who pleads not to be abandoned to die alone. One of the boys, who is known by his first name, Jimmy (Axel Feldmann), is afraid of the Dying Man and wants to leave while the other boy, known by his last name, Turlotte (Grégory Ravary Ellis), is determined to remain, watching the man through the moment of his death. Jimmy observes the other boy Turlotte calmly watching the Dying Man until his suffering has ended. Sixty years later in New York City, having long ago lost touch with his childhood friend and having immigrated to the U.S., the adult Jimmy (Frank Langella) spots an article in a local newspaper about an exhibition of photographs of birds taken by the adult Turlotte (Elliott Gould). Jimmy notes the newspaper article states that Turlotte is by profession a private detective. In his adult life, Jimmy, on the other hand, has become a key executive in an international corporation involved in gargantuan financial investments in Latin America, uniting private and public sources of funding. Jimmy is haunted by the knowledge of his own complicity in actions to protect the corporation's investments. These have escalated to the murder of members of local organizations opposing the wishes of the corporation. He decides to betray his business partners by revealing the actions they wish to hide but he first hires Turlotte anonymously over the phone, disguising his voice. Jimmy knows his act of betrayal will result in his own murder. Turlotte regularly reports back to his anonymous client  what he has observed. Turlotte is puzzled by the certainty with which his client over the phone attacks the seeming innocence and banality of the person Turlotte is spying on, without Turlotte knowing it is the same person who has hired him and the child with whom he once hid in the woods in occupied France. Turlotte meets Jimmy’s “Sophisticated Lady,” Eileen, (Laura Harring,) a jazz singer. He becomes entranced by her as he becomes  more deeply involved with the mystery of Jimmy’s life. When Turlotte realizes who Jimmy is, he rushes to save him from assassination by a paid killer, a US vet who is himself disillusioned (Chandler Williams). Turlotte arrives too late to save Jimmy but in time to watch him die, just as Jimmy had hoped—just as Jimmy had once marveled at the other boy who did not abandon the Dying Man—and hence “saves” Jimmy from the fate of dying alone.

The story by Alain Didier-Weill of a detective hired by a client who wants to have himself spied upon clearly had associations for Alain with his work as a psychoanalyst. However, a labyrinth of complexity inscribes this connection. For example, although the detective is clearly the character who resembles a psychoanalyst, Alain in his personal life would sometimes refer to himself as the other character "Jimmy," and never as Detective Turlotte. I think this avoidance of an identification of himself with Turlotte was part of an ethical choice in regards to how he approached analysis, reflecting the approach of Lacan. Jimmy assumes Detective Turlotte possesses a knowledge about him but this truth turns out to be elusive. 

When I read the unfinished screenplay one important association for me was my late friend Martin Koloski. Martin had died of AIDS in the late 80s. We had been friends starting at the private high school we both attended–just slightly older than the boys in Alain’s story. We had met in a class for beginning Ancient Greek. I remember Marty’s father, a physician, asking about the origins of my last name the first time I visited his home . When I told him it was Greek, he asked me, « How do you separate the boys from the men in Greece? » And then the punchline, « With a crowbar. » It was a prophetic homophobic joke from a father of a son who would have a torturously difficult path to accepting his sexuality and who would eventually die in his early 30s of AIDS. After high school, Marty and I and another friend who had started Greek at the same time were studying Greek at Amherst College. I was a student at Hampshire College and determined not to waste anymore time on dead languages. That was before I met Rachel Kitzinger, a dynamic young woman who was a Classics professor at Amherst College. She wanted to direct Greek tragedies to be performed in the original Greek. The first one was Ajax by Sophocles. She cast me as Ajax. At the college the performances were a big success. I transferred to Amherst College and began to study more ancient Greek. I still remember a few lines from the Ajax. They were among the Greek verses I whispered into the ears of each of my two children when they were born. 

The following summer a production of the Bacchae in the original Greek was produced at Stanford University in Palo Alto. I was cast as Dionysus and Marty as Pentheus. In that play–or at least in our production–which happened to take place the summer of the U.S. Bicentennial––Pentheus is a horribly repressed and defensive young man while Dionysus is a pleasant and seductive god, until at the end he shows a crueler side as the mother of Pentheus emerges with a head that her father gets her to realize is the head of her son. 

Eventually Marty came out as gay and moved to NY. He was looking for work. I suggested to my father that he hire him. This turned out to transform the fortunes of my father’s small company for a short but lucrative few years. My father had started as a book publisher with a law degree but had gradually begun to focus on publishing trade publications in the fields of fashion and cosmetics. At the private high school we attended Marty had been the only person capable of programming the IBM computer that took up a room. When he began working for my father in the 80s, computers were just starting to play an increasing role in publishing. Marty soon made my father aware that he had hired someone who could make him overnight far ahead of his competitors. Eventually Marty left New York and moved to San Francisco to study law. I was living in Paris and had been out of school for many years when a girlfriend who was in graduate school in Comparative Literature asked me if I would be interested in writing on AIDS for a new publication at a prestigious university. I accepted. I had been moving back from Paris to New York at the time. I hadn’t been in touch with Marty for over a year. I knew he was living in San Francisco and had become a lawyer. When I reached him, I asked how he was and he said, “Oh, not well, I have AIDS.” 

Over the next year he assisted me by reading a couple drafts of my article. Researching it was my introduction to critical theory. Friends in Paris introduced me to the work of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard… I wanted to save my friend’s life through the power of thinking and of writing, attending conferences, marches and other events. When someone today tells me critical theory has lost its significance in academia because it isn’t relevant to the real world I remember how real it was for me then and how real it has been for me ever since that time. He died before my article was published. The whole trajectory of my friend’s illness and my taking on AIDS and his illness as subjects on which I was writing was an amazing education on homophobia and the lethal violence of social repression and cultural norms. Reading during that period of time William Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” (1722), I began to think about how the word “intercourse” can refer to either sexual intercourse or communications between people. When I was talking about AIDS, many people treated me as if I could spread AIDS to them through speech. Although Marty was far from alone when he died, I regretted that I hadn’t been there. The theme in Alain’s screenplay of two childhood friends and of the wish by one of them to have his friend save him from dying alone felt very personal to me. 

The French filmmaker and theorist Guy Debord once wrote that, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated by images.” Of course, Debord intended to highlight how these social relations for an audience disappear and are replaced by a relation between images but in my experience of making low budget films certainly the social relations, while not paramount, have been very much in our minds as filmmakers. From The Caller I would gain two important friendships. One was with Alain and the other with Elliott Gould. With each of them I would go on to make another film. With Alain it would be V13, finished four years after he died, and, in the case of Elliott, the second collaboration in our future would be my film Fred Won’t Move Out, about which I will have more to say in another essay. 

Alain had recently remarried when The Caller premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Alain and his new wife Axelle du Rouret, who would become my close friend, were present when our film received an award for the best Made in NY film presented at that year’s festival. A lot of celebratory champagne was poured and Alain clearly enjoyed being with the stars and sharing with Axelle the limelight. 

The film’s initial success was eventually curtailed by bad luck that was triggered by the financial crash that started in the U.S. housing market just when the film was reaching the market. The losses suffered by the investors at a time when they were also losing money on all their other investments made it a risk about which they no longer felt proud or that in retrospect seemed to them remotely reasonable to have taken. For my next film I would turn my attention to the housing crisis and name it for Lacan’s principle term for the psychic structure of psychosis, Foreclosure.