When he’s not fronting the band Danger Muffin, my pal Dan Lotti is a partner in a film company that acquires screenplays. Several months ago at Chico Feo,^[1] Dan was all hepped up about a script that his company had optioned called Late Fame. It was in production, and they had landed Willem Dafoe to play the protagonist, Ed Saxberger, a mildly successful 1970s poet who now sorted letters in a post office. Like virtually all poets, even semi-famous ones, Saxberger had been all but forgotten. Nabbing Dafoe for the role seemed like a towering home run. If you’ve seen David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and remember the villain Bobby Peru, you know what I’m talking about. 

DANGER MUFFIN, DAN LOTTI SECOND FROM THE LEFT

Dan offered to send me a PDF of the screenplay, and, of course, I jumped at the chance to read it.

I’ve only read three screenplays that have made it to what we once called “the big screen.”

Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing

David Boatwright’s Summerville ‘70

Samy Burch’s Late Fame

***

Set in the Village (of course), Late Fame’s opening shots eschew dialogue:

ED SAXBERGER, 70s, sorts the mail. More mail than you could ever imagine. Underground, in the bowels of the post office, basically alone. 

He is so comfortable sorting letters it almost seems like a ballet. An art. But not a joyful, playful one– he looks exhausted. 

He wears a uniform, eats a tuna fish sandwich on his lunch break, sorts more letters, and clocks out. 

Elegant.

The screenplay was written by Samy Burch and adapted from a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. When Dan described the movie at Chico, before I’d read the script, I imagined Saxberger as a Bukowski-like wild man who wears his badly damaged liver on his sleeve. Instead, he’s a modest, mild-mannered loner who doesn’t take himself seriously. Then a pretentious gaggle of NYU wannabe artists “rediscover” him and enlist him in a series of self-promotional readings, prompting him to revisit his writing and the press clippings he’d saved but hadn’t looked at in years.

As it turns out, Saxberger’s “late fame” is fairly meager—no Time covers, merely the adoration of an opportunistic, ambitious, but ultimately amorphous literary movement intoxicated by the idea that they’re creating something consequential.

***

Caroline, my expat son Ned, and I finally got to see Late Fame last week at the Terrace, and we thoroughly enjoyed it, a refreshing antidote to the 78-rpm mayhem of The Odyssey.  Everything in the film complements everything else—the muted, brown-dominated palettes of the street scenes, Saxberger’s obsolescent stereo equipment playing Ezra Pound reading from one of his Cantos, the vague echoes of Weimar Germany with Gloria vamping “à la Sally Bowles.  A fresh breath of stale air, you might say.

It’s the type of movie that stays with you even days later.  In the theater, it didn’t occur to me that the down-to-earth guys Saxberger hung with at the pool hall were the complete opposite of the up-in-the-air artistes he was now wasting time with. The deliberate movement of the plot’s gentle arc offered silences that are so rare in contemporary movies. This gave me hope for my current project, Winter Break, which features an ensemble cast and doesn’t follow what I think of as the Twelve-Dead-Cats template. Life is more complicated than that, and much richer for the complications, I might add.

***

After the movie, some of us gravitated next door to Bar George to talk about the film. Come to think of it, Bar George as a set would have worked for Late Fame with its sofas and tables and quirky artsy décor (see below). When Dan asked me what I thought, I told him how much I enjoyed it, especially the comic Greek chorus of the wannabes. They reminded me of so many of the self-proclaimed poets I encountered in college and graduate school.

I told Dan that even if I’d ever thought I had something important to say, I would never have uttered it aloud. In truth, I’d never thought in those terms. I’d merely hoped my writing might somehow entertain somebody.

He laughed, nodded his head, and Caroline, Ned, and I headed for home.

On the way back to Folly, passing beneath the arched oak tunnel of Riverland Terrace, I thought about the film and Winter Break and the beauty of the late afternoon sun strobing through the leaves and the whole pretentious business of bringing words to life.

DIGITAL COLLAGE: BAR BOY GEORGE BY WESLEY MOORE III

---

^[1] Oops, oh-me-oh-my-oh, rhyming prose is a no-no.