The auteur is present

Last night, the 25^th of February, was a big night in the big town, culture-wise. Bjork was doing her “Biophilia” show at Roseland. Philip Glass and his ensemble gave a per­haps not-to-be-repeated-in-this-lifetime per­form­ance of his amaz­ing three-hour-plus work, Music In Twelve Parts (the Glass equi­val­ent of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, essen­tially), at the Park Avenue Armory. And over at Lincoln Center, there was a spe­cial screen­ing of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, after which Lonergan and select cast mem­bers spoke of the shot-years-ago crit­ic­al cause célèbre. Jaime Christley, one of the most cru­cial of the film’s cham­pi­ons, was there (I was at the Glass con­cert myself, which was SO AMAZING), and he tweeted later that Lonergan him­self chas­tised a view­er who was loudly crink­ling a candy wrap­per dur­ing a cru­cial scene. This reminded me of a couple of things, chiefly of Frans Liebkind say­ing “You are ze audi­ence, I am ze author, I OUTRANK you.” Although I ima­gine that the candy-wrapper crink­ler was­n’t aware at the time that he was being shushed by the director.

Back in 1987 I was work­ing at Video Review magazine, and some time dur­ing my then-one-year ten­ure there I had been intro­duced to the work of dir­ect­or Andy Sidaris. Sidaris was then the king of more or less direct-to-video T&A action movies, which invari­ably fea­tured super-busty former Playmates awk­wardly car­ry­ing guns and tak­ing on drug-dealing bad guys so pock­marked they made Robert Davi look like a Proactiv spokes­mod­el. The movies were invari­ably ruth­less in keep­ing their female leads as fre­quently top­less as pos­sible; it seemed these fetch­ing freel­ance invest­ig­at­ors were con­sti­tu­tion­ally incap­able of dis­cuss­ing the day’s events without expli­citly stat­ing that it would be best to do so naked, in the hot tub, and then tak­ing action to make it hap­pen. Never any les­bi­an action, though; Sidaris pic­tures were also kind of ruth­lessly hetero-normative, as they say. 

They were also, it might go without say­ing, entirely ridicu­lous, and ris­ible. So when a bunch of the Video Review guys, most of us in our highly glib twen­ties, were invited to an actu­al screen­ing of a new Sidaris pic­ture, which I believe was Hard Ticket to Hawaii, pic­tured above, to be fol­lowed by a press din­ner at a deli across the street with the dir­ect­or him­self, we were all over that. It was at a small screen­ing room on Park Avenue, and there was­n’t enough room in a single row for our entire party to fit, so I sat one in from the aisle in the row behind my boys…and about 40 minutes or so into the movie, which we had been wise­crack­ing and gig­gling at MST3K style for the whole time, an older gen­tle­man of Greek extrac­tion took the seat on the aisle, next to mine.

It was Andy Sidaris. And he did not under­stand what was so funny. “Cool it guys,” he addressed the row in front of him. Looking at me, he asked, “What are they laugh­ing at?” I actu­ally felt kind of bad, and shrugged. “The big twist is com­ing up,” he said with some enthu­si­asm.  You have to give Sidaris this: in addi­tion to copi­ous enorm­ous boobies, his fast-moving films were packed with explo­sions, action, and, um, plot twists. I think the one in Hard Ticket involved a giant cheap fake animat­ron­ic cobra emer­ging from an exploded toi­let. Nothing funny about that. 

Fortunately it was dark enough in the theat­er that Sidaris could not later identi­fy the party of gig­glers, and he ami­ably regaled my col­leagues and I with tales of his days shoot­ing pro­fes­sion­al sports, and how he had dir­ec­ted all of the foot­ball sequences in M*A*S*H, and what a no-talent prick sonofabitch Robert Altman was. 

Now for the funny part. In the fall of 2001, I’m in the same screen­ing room, in the same row, in the same seat, about to see a pre-release, pre-New York Film Festival screen­ing of The Royal Tenenbaums. This is the cut that ends with the Anthology record­ing of The Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You,” and it’s always bugged the crap out of me that that music had to be changed for the release. In any event, who comes along and takes the aisle seat next to me but Wes Anderson. 

“This is really weird,” I said to Anderson. “I’ve only ever sat dir­ectly next to a dir­ect­or at a screen­ing of his film once before, and it was in this same screen­ing room, and I was sit­ting in this same seat.”

“Who was the dir­ect­or?” Wes asked me.

“Andy Sidaris.”

“Who?”

I began to explain, but then the lights went down.