The Tory Party

Johnny Depp, eyes on set, and eight-year-olds

It has been a hella educational Kreesmas. I present three salient points, only one of them pertinent.

• I should not be allowed to meet famous people I have a story about spotting Bill Maher in a pub in Dublin and rather failing to leave him alone. I have a follow-up story about spotting Rob Schneider in a gelato shop in San Francisco and exercising better restraint — aided by being stone cold sober, which is always a decision-improver. Anyhoo, I hope I’ve learned a permanent lesson about not feeling entitlement just because I recognize a person’s face. I managed to give a cranberry dream bar to Adrian Paul once without insisting he buy me a pony.

  Except. I cannot be allowed to meet certain famous people, and Johnny Depp is one of them.

  In 1988-89, two movies came out that illustrated what movies could be: Beetlejuice and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Glee, anarchy and animation. I was bought and sold. I was ten, and stationed with my family in Okinawa.

  I was connected to certain elements of Roger Rabbit — Roger, who homely, ill-dressed but cheerful loose cannon I related to impossibly well; Jessica, who promised I could have a huge rack and good posture; and a tidy, speedy story. But Beetlejuice was a line directly into my inner life. I filled a notebook with drawings of my memory of the movie. I listened to Harry Belafonte. To pass the time on 13-hour flights from Okinawa to the states and back, I played the movie over and over in my mind. I was plagued by jokes I didn’t get — mauve? The white leisure suit? Beetlejuice’s obscene gesture, which I wouldn’t get for another five years.

  It couldn’t have correlated for me that the same person directed Beetlejuice *and* Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which had enjoyed frequent play and joke-explanation at the Hoke house for a couple of years. I think, when I was in middle school, it was my mother who pointed out that, hey, there’s a movie coming out I think you’d be into. Here’s this thing they sent to the newspaper where I work. You want it?

  Of course I brought it to school. Of course I was in a state, waiting for this thing to come to the theater that looked half as good as this glossy black and blue fold-out castle with a little figure in it with a thrusting gait and really pointy fingers.

  I went. I loved. I went two more times. I cried my ass off, at intervals, as early as the snow dance scene.

  That’s the first good cathartic cry I can remember in a theater. Sure, I got worked up at the end of Neverending Story, but it felt wrong somehow. Edward Scissorhands — with Danny Elfman and star-crossed lovers and a woman who, Age of Innocence-style, would rather be remembered as she was than get a second chance as she is — illustrated that movies are where good Americans are *supposed* to cry, and felt so, so right.

  I think it’s why even today I don’t see the point of a drama that doesn’t make me cry. That’s why it’s so hard to get me into a theater for a political thriller, or a straight action, or a science fiction with no robots and no Whedon. I go to a comedy to laugh out loud, dammit, and I go to a drama to at least get nose prickles. If you can leave me gibbering into a Kleenex even when the lights come up and my heckling companion is ready to go, then I will praise you with high praise. Otherwise I don’t know why we met.

  I’m getting to Johnny Depp.

  My mother also brought me a black-and-white (natch) publicity still of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. I may have understood that this was the same guy my sister was so into from that show, because he was beautiful and had shiny hair and cheekbones and a sort of stern but non-threatening ethnicity. But mostly I just put that picture by my bedroom door and looked at it way, way too much.

  You’ve probably seen it. It’s THE Edward Scissorhands still. Just Johnny Depp. White background. Two-Ts, dewy expression, scars, looking slightly left of frame.

  I drew it! Of course I drew it. I wonder where that drawing is now.

  Anyway. Fifteen years later, I see a candid photo of Johnny Depp, I feel an unsettling sense of… ownership. As if, if I saw him coming out of a Rite Aid, I’d be like, “Oh, there you are! Where have you been? Come on, come with me.”

  And that must be eerie for an actor. Any public figure, really, but especially an actor, where you put yourself forward as a character, and somehow a photo of you ends up on a thirteen-year-old’s wall, or the cover of a magazine the day someone has a frightening visit to the doctor, or on a TV show on a VHS tape right after someone’s favorite recording. And somewhere there’s a recipe in a cabinet, and you’re on the back of it. There’s a coffee ring on your face. There’s your face at a yard sale, on a dorm wall, above a toilet so your roommates can look at it when they pee.

  God love ‘em, actors have a hard, weird job.

• Tim Burton looks sleepy in photos I haven’t seen him interviewed that much, which is shameful, and it’s this Burton on Burton book my Seestor and her husband and new baby squirt got me that’s got these wheels turning. I know he’s got a heavy-lidded, sort of Dave Grohl thing working, but I think photos exaggerate it. I have a hard time believing the conceptual artist behind Large Marge has a presence so somnambulant.

  
  Looking sleepy (images used without permission)

  Not to presume my own behavior in Tim Burton’s (though I see — certainly in part because I choose to — some similarities; I am like Tim Burton if he were raised on a military base and fed corn), I’ve noticed pictures of me on set as director tend to look pretty sleepy. Eyelids at half-mast, like I got caught pre-blink. Every damn one is like this. Very hard to make a press kit.

  
  Must cut back on corn

  This could be because, you know, filmmakers don’t get a lot of sleep. Maybe it’s like being drunk — you might look OK in the flesh, but photos tell on you. I can tell you I have no memory of a camera being around at the moments these pictures are taken. I get the stills back, I’m all like, really? I would have stood up straight. Oh well.

  What I want to believe is that it’s a sign of peaceful focus. That the wheels are constantly turning, and the eyes are just dimming the lights so the hamster can work. But I could just be thinking about ponies. That happens.

• I met an eight-year-old this weekend. I never met one before when I wasn’t one myself. For a movie I got trained on ten-year-olds by Jenn, my co-Tory and camp instructor of many years experience. This was possibly the most enlightening thing I’ve done this year — and I’ve done some enlightening crap.

  The ultimate secret is that the same things that work for an eight-to-ten-year-old — team-building, setting her up for success, redirection, enthusiasm, scales from one-to-ten — work for everyone else. The basic human drives stay the same: wanting to evaluate, succeed, belong. Of course, now I imagine I know something, so the next time I try to relate to someone I will somehow light my own hair on fire.

• I need to set up an “explaining the shot” clinic sometime this term. Get some cinematographers and directors together, try some things. Just writing it down so I don’t forget — I ain’t got Stickies on this computer.

**Update 12/28**

Just saw Sweeney Todd and much enjoyed it. Research on actors led me to this — Tim Burton doesn’t have sleepy eyes! He has the eyes of Christopher Lee!

He says in Burton on Burton that if he could come back as an actor, it would be Christopher Lee. Well, I got good news.