Monday, June 02, 2003

All of my relatives from my parent's generation and even some of my cousins were born in Poland. Most of them that were trapped there during the Second World War were killed because they were Jewish. The majority of the survivors that managed to escape, mostly to America, have no interest in revisiting Poland, which they view as a graveyard for Jews, but I have a seventy-year-old cousin that would like to see it again. When I told her that I was going to the Cannes film festival she surprised me by asking if, while I was over there, I would take a side trip to Poland. Now Poland is quite a way from the French River and Cannes. Why would she think I'd want to go there? Why would she want to return herself? I asked her and she said, “Because that's where I was born, that's where I was raised. I have a vivid memory of everything having to do with our shtetl, Brzostowica." According to her, many of the Poles and Russians living in the area were anti-Semitic, but that wasn't as disturbing as it could've been because the communities didn't interact much. Apparently the things about Brzostowica that stand out most for her are childhood memories, often happy ones. Now she's older and she's having nostalgic feelings, wanting to recapture her youth. So before I went to Cannes, I told her that there was no way I could go from there to Poland. It was too far away from France and I wouldn't want to go there anyway. I was born in Cleveland, not Brzostowica, and had no memories or even fantasies about the town. After I got to Cannes, though, I found that American Splendor would be distributed and shown in Poland, and that the producers wouldn't mind sending me there to publicize it. They'd also like me to promote the movie in Israel, whose right-wing politics I strongly disagree with, Australia and Japan. My wife loves traveling, and, like a lot of people, would enjoy going to all of these places, especially on someone else’s dime. I admit it's a rare opportunity to travel, and I expect that I'll submit to my wife's and the publicists’ wishes and go on their world tour. My cousin probably feels trapped in Cleveland and wants to travel to have novel experiences. Yeah, I’ll probably go along with the program; it'll be a lot easier than fighting and kvetching about it. And in the end maybe I'll be glad I overcame my objections and went. After all, it's the chance of a lifetime. 2:49:34 PM

Decades ago I used to have a fantasy of appearing in a movie... Where I came bouncing out of my front door to take on the new day accompanied by Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar" in the sound track. Wanting to do a movie version of "American Splendor," then, has been on my mind for a long time, although this ambition has only just been accomplished. Other people have been interested in the project as well, but were unable to secure financing for it. Jonathan Demme contacted me in 1980 about doing an "American Splendor" movie, but was then virtually unknown and couldn't come up with backers for it. A guy I really liked to work with who also contacted me in the 1980s was Chuck Statler, who's been living in Minneapolis for some time, but was one of the innovators who created the rock video in Akron, where he worked with such groups as Devo. Chuck came to Cleveland to visit me, and I was impressed with him and his ideas. However, what he wanted to create would have been a cable series, which would have gotten me far less money than a regular movie. Since I still had a chance to get a movie made, I had to turn him down. But he still went ahead, and at his own expense made a video version of one of my stories, "The Last Supper." He sent me a copy and it was a gem, a virtually 100% accurate version of the Robert Crumb-illustrated story. The "American Splendor" film that eventually came out was, in my opinion, wonderful-- better than I imagined any film interpretation could be. Still, I feel sad about not being able to work with Statler as well. Films and television shows are so expensive that I was very lucky to have one made based on my work. 2:48:36 PM

As an elementary school kid I was nuts about movies. I used to go to the Saturday matinees every week and loved the animated cartoons, the comedy short subjects, the serials and most of the feature films, which were usually adventure flicks of some kind (cowboy, mystery, war) or comedies. When I got into my teens my taste broadened, so that I liked good examples of just about every genre of film. But I also became more discriminating, and rejected the cliché-ridden movies that were standard Hollywood fare. In my late teens I developed a new respect for movies when I became familiar with the foreign films that were shown in art houses around town. The realism displayed in pictures like "The Bicycle Thief" impressed me a great deal; I could identify much more strongly with the characters in them. The protagonist in "The Bicycle Thief” is driven to steal another man's bike because it will get him a job. At the time I saw it I was also unemployed, which was one reason it resonated so strongly with me. It occurred to me then that films were like novels, you could express just about anything in them and they ranged in quality from fantastically good to abysmally bad. Films cost a great deal of money to make, however, and if they failed to draw large audiences could ruin their producers financially. For this reason filmmakers were very reluctant to experiment; they stuck with the tried and true and often produced movies that were corny and predictable. As time went on I found myself increasingly drawn to innovative films. The fresher a filmmaker's work was from a technical standpoint, the more impact it would have on me. In fact, for some time now I have enjoyed innovative art in general more than stuff that has been compromised so that it has mass appeal. The innovators, the artists that push the boundaries of their forms and genres forward, keep them alive as well. 2:47:20 PM