Miller Time

UNITED STATES—My parents and sister showed up on my doorstep in Los Angeles to tell me Mick, my cousin had died.  I didn’t even know he was sick. No funeral, they told me; the preacher at the gravesite made mention of how young he was— the Savior’s age, 33. A lot of things have gone my way, but Mick’s going...

UNITED STATES—Film historian Peet Boggs concludes his conversation (part three) with the director of perhaps the most famous movie never made. Jules Kaminsky: Benjamin and his party, led by their Nita, had made it to Spain from Nazi occupied France. Nita had to turn back now. She didn’t want to get caught in Spain without papers. The mother, son and...

UNITED STATES—Peet Boggs: So Nita stays behind to accompany Benjamin, the refugee with a heart condition? Jules Kaminsky: The film is about a hopelessly naïve artist/intellectual/philosopher caught in the jaws of cataclysmic events totally unequipped to deal with them. He still has one tool: his crystal-clear reason. That first night he planted himself in the clearing and wouldn’t budge, he...

UNITED STATES—Peet Boggs, the film historian and schnorrer manqué, interviewed filmmaker Jules Kaminsky many times starting in the mid-70s. The two first met when Boggs had a part as a scrub pine in Kaminsky’s long-awaited masterpiece, “Masterpiece.”  In the lore of unfinished film, this work is a holy grail, occupying a place equaled perhaps only by Orson Welles’, “The...

UNITED STATES—It was a Thursday afternoon and ostensibly my “day off.” I was refuging into a movie theater, the Vista, to escape the unfolding crime and consequences. Nobody knew how Moorehead was going to react to the discovery that his belongings had been surgically ransacked. From the bright spring afternoon, I glided into the shadowy recesses of the Vista, watched...

UNITED STATES—The sun can, at times, be so raw and unforgiving, it can give you a toothache. And the survivors of the dreams and plans stand stunned in the blinding blaze: what happened? what went wrong? They say we’re living in a desert, and the desert will make you crazy . . . A lot of things happened at Manhattan Place that spring....

UNITED STATES—A dispatch from the fifth day of the Gulf War, “I picked up Betty to clean this house (on Manhattan Place). A crew of Mexicans are digging in the basement of Van Buren, raising the supports, and now the old house is maladjusted: you can barely close the doors. During the day, I showed the room to three...

UNITED STATES—A kid in South Los Angeles saying with no particular somberness, sidelit by a TV set, “The war will start in 18 minutes,” blew open the thing that had been building since last August; the moreso since November when the United Nations set a January 15th deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Or else. Now the world was...

UNITED STATES—Crazy thing. One of the residents of Manhattan Place recognized a woman who’d left a deposit on a room I had shown. The woman had been a mental patient four years earlier. Now this great tenant, Dee, who recognized she didn’t want to live in our house any more. Go ahead, tear me apart: gain one loony and...

UNITED STATES—I get a kick remembering when Maya turned to me with the Wooster, Massachusetts edge and the fleeing r’s in her voice and said, “Are you a cynic?” It was a treat to have somebody close enough to observe that; it’s the bonus togetherness. Well, calling me cynical was like accusing Husserl of being a logical positivist. Time...