Bingham Ray, 1954-2012

I can­’t say that Bingham Ray and I were par­tic­u­larly close, but I think I can say that we were tight. This is because Bingham did me the hon­or of opt­ing to recog­nize me as a kindred spir­it pretty shortly after we were intro­duced, in 1997, I believe. October Films, the out­fit that he ran with Jeff Lipsky, was behind the David Lynch pic­ture Lost Highway, which Première had chron­icled the mak­ing of—sort of—in a 1996 piece by David Foster Wallace that some of you may have heard of. I was VERY enthu­si­ast­ic about the pic­ture and even though I had­n’t star­ted writ­ing film reviews for Première at that time, Bingham was very pleased that I saw it as I did, and he took the fact that I saw it as I did as an indic­a­tion that I under­stood the lar­ger scheme of things in a way not unlike his own, and that was that. In con­ver­sa­tion, our minds moved at the same speed and on very sim­il­ar fre­quen­cies, which had the pecu­li­ar effect of mak­ing a lot of our chats rather brief. We’d agree on some­thing being won­der­ful, or some­thing being awful, and then one of us would start to extra­pol­ate on that, and we’d look at each oth­er and it’d be like, well, I don’t need to tell YOU, and that was pretty much that. Or, after a screen­ing, Bingham: “So what’d you think?” Me: “Pretty fuck­ing great.” Bingham: “WASN’T IT?” Yeah. 

We also knew that we shared a sim­il­ar impuls­ive­ness. Peter Biskind’s book Down And Dirty Pictures drafts this gran­di­ose nar­rat­ive of October versus Miramax, indie David tak­ing on the Goliath of its par­tic­u­lar realm and not tri­umph­ing, and while Bingham cer­tainly had issues with cer­tain per­son­al­it­ies and was as fierce and as fiercely com­pet­it­ive as any­one you could name in his field, he sure as hell had, through­out his career, very dif­fer­ent pri­or­it­ies from a Harvey Weinstein. And a very dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity. While Biskind’s book squares off Weinstein and Ray as matched sep­ar­ates, as it were, the two men were…well, for one thing, Bingham cer­tainly did not have any­thing you could con­ceiv­ably call a bul­ly­ing side. A snap­pish tem­per, yeah, a bit, but it did­n’t go far in the ser­vice of push­ing any­body around. Like Harvey,though, Bingham was known for his blunt­ness, but there was even noth­ing remotely cagey about his blunt­ness, which there def­in­itely is with Weinstein. Weinstein would prefer you not recog­nize that cagi­ness, because he thinks if you don’t see it that adds to his nego­ti­at­ing advant­age (this is not entirely unlike the old Nixonian make-them-believe-I’m-just-crazy-enough-to-do-it ploy), but of course it’s there more often than not. Bingham was entirely more trans­par­ent, which was both bless­ing and…well, I won’t say curse, but you can under­stand how that can some­times be a liab­il­ity. I’ve got some­thing like that same damn prob­lem myself, and that’s anoth­er reas­on we got along, and why it was kind of automatic. 

We were also big smokers when we first met, so we logged in a fair amount of time stand­ing around out­side in places like Park City and Toronto and hav­ing cigar­ettes and being all like “What the hell are we doing?” about it. The man was an incred­ible ideal­ist about movies but also a stone cold real­ist and he nev­er com­pained, nev­er really com­plained, about the uphill battle he had with pretty much every film he believed in, every film he knew deserved a shot, and he had a healthy sense of not-quite-spite but def­in­itely defi­ance in the face of the forces that stood between him and get­ting that movie seen. By the same token, he did what he had to do when he had to do it. We once dis­cussed a gig that was less-than-optimum for him and he shrugged and said, “What are you gonna do? I gotta put the kids through col­lege.” He took ALL his respons­ib­il­it­ies ser­i­ously. And it made me shud­der, dur­ing the post-October peri­ods when I saw him in scram­bling mode. To think that a guy as sharp as that, with that kind of taste and tenacity and under­stand­ing of both art and com­merce was NOT run­ning things…I could­n’t fathom it.

Through the ups and downs, he was an invari­ably friendly face, even if in the crush of the crowd at a giv­en event all you and he could do was smile at each oth­er across a room and give a “we’re still here” shrug.  I had­n’t seen Bingham for a few years when I learned the oth­er day of his being taken ill, and then of his death today, and so now he’s not here. I sup­pose that he and I and my old friends and col­leagues are get­ting to be that age, the age when someone you prize comes to mind and you think, oh, it’s been too long since I’ve spoken/had cof­fee with that per­son, I really need to do that some time soon and catch up…and you don’t fol­low up on that thought, and then maybe the per­son is gone. It is I sup­pose com­mend­able that, as one fel­low mourn­er chose to put it, Bingham died “with his boots on,” check­ing out the Sundance Film Festival. Commendable, but hardly com­fort­ing. What are you gonna do?

In his fam­ous 1973 let­ter to Jean-Luc Godard excor­i­at­ing his one-time friend and col­league, François Truffaut wrote: “Opposed to you are the small men, from Bazin to Edmond Maire and tak­ing in Sartre, Buñuel, Queneau, Mendes-France, Rohmer and Audiberti, who ask oth­ers how they’re get­ting on, who help them to fill out a social-security form, who reply to their letters—what they have in com­mon is the capa­city to think of oth­ers rather than them­selves and above all to be more inter­ested in what they do than in what they are and in what they appear to be.” In that tra­di­tion, I can sin­cerely attest that Bingham Ray was one of the best of the small men.