THB: MARK 3

When we last checked in on the hapless heroes of The House Between, they were staring death in the face. Three of them had already been spirited away and the remaining three appeared to have only moments to live. Watching the final episode of season two (“Ruined”), I was amazed to find that I was 100% emotionally engaged. Although I have been involved with the production of the series since day one and know the real people behind the characters, I was still completely willing and able to suspend my disbelief. In the final moments of the show, I realized that not only did I believe in these characters… but also that I didn’t want to have to say goodbye to them.

The shooting of season two was so arduous that I think we all wondered if we’d be willing to go another round in the house between. Ultimately, writer/director John Muir was able to amass the troops for a third and final season. What he wasn’t able to wrangle was the old Victorian house where the characters first met. So in the last week of May 2008, we gathered at a new location – a run-down office building in one of North Carolina’s sleepiest old railroad towns. The building dates back to the turn of the 20th century, and was home to the first Belk department store… not that you’ll be able to tell from our footage. In season three, this husk of a building is known only as “the dark place,” and one need only glance at its crumbling walls, chipped-paint ceiling and exposed, skeletal beams to understand that this is a place with a history. It is older than the beloved “house between”… and much less pleasant.


By the end of our first day of Season Three shooting, I realized that I was allergic to something inside our new digs. I began to understand (to a lesser degree) what a few of the actors had gone through in season two when they fell ill during shooting. For me, much of the week’s activity took on a hazy, dream-like quality. I saw it all as through a glass darkly, and by the end of the week I was so bleary-eyed that it seemed no one could look at me without asking, “Are you okay?”

There were other problems too. The delayed arrival of a few actors meant that we fell behind on our very first day and never quite caught up. Out of necessity, we shot wildly out of order, creating a sense of true chaos. Then there were sound issues: Because we were shooting in a town center, we had to plan every take around traffic noises. If a motorcycle came down main street, or someone blew their car horn, or a loud drunk wandered out of the neighborhood bar, we had to scrap the take. Things got significantly worse when, on day three, a group of workers began setting up a sound stage right outside of our window. That night, the otherworldly angst of our time and space-travelers had to compete with a Memorial Day boot scoot boogie.


We waited it out, shot into the wee hours of the morning, and returned a few hours later to find the neighbors setting up for a sidewalk auction. Then there was the heat. Summer had arrived in Monroe, the building wasn’t air conditioned, and our heavy black tarps covering the third-floor windows weren’t helping with the ventilation.

I offer all of these details as explanation for our failure to shoot everything we had on our schedule. Halfway through the penultimate day, we still had big chunks of four episodes to complete. John, who somehow managed to steer the ship with steely resolve under circumstances that would have broken the spirit of a lesser director, stayed up all night to re-write the final script – combining two half-hour episodes into one hour-long finale. (Sleepless nights with his two-year-old son had trained him well for this sort of endurance test.) We managed to shoot all but a handful of scenes involving Tony Mercer and Kim Breeding, who promised to return a few weeks later for a day of pickups. After many trials and tribulations, season three was in the can. The cast and crew had risen to the challenge.

Now that John has emerged from months of editing, I’m looking forward to once again forgetting about the creative process, suspending my disbelief, and getting lost in the world of these characters. Without giving away too much, I can say that a lot of things are going to change. There will be new faces in the series, and some of the old faces will be deceptively familiar. The stories will continue to expand on an already elaborate mythology, wrapping up the three-season storyline.

In a recent blog post, Muir talks about the conception of the new season – citing the influence of Space:1999 writer Johnny Byrne (who he calls the “spiritual godfather” of The House Between), as well as a specific episode of The Outer Limits and a particular scene in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I also see shades of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which comes as no surprise since John wrote the definitive book on Wes Craven, and I’m eagerly looking forward to our most horror-heavy episode since first season’s “Visited.”

In the meantime, check out “Devoured,” the first episode of this new incarnation of The House Between. You’ll find the link on the official series website first thing tomorrow morning.

Tao Te Ching

Nothing under heaven is softer or weaker than water,
and yet nothing is better
for attacking what is hard and strong,
because of its immutability.

The defeat of the hard by the soft,
The defeat of the strong by the weak -
that is known to all under heaven,
yet no one is able to practice it.

Therefore, in the words of the sage, it is said:
"He who bears abuse directed against the state
it is called 'lord of the altars for the gods of soil and grain';
He who bears the misfortunes of the state
is called the 'king of all under heaven.'"

True words seem contradictory.

Bukowski Lives!

Over the holidays, I picked up a book that I hadn’t read in years. It was part of my college-era library, most of which didn’t make the move to Los Angeles and is still sitting in storage on the east coast. Visiting this collection is a bit like traveling back in time, because the authors of these books were among my closest friends for many years. I knew them better than I knew the people in my “real” life… or thought I did.

The book was Charles Bukowski’s Run with the Hunted (HarperPerennial, 1994), a posthumous collection of his best autobiographical work (fiction and poetry). Since Bukowski’s death in 1994, his faithful publisher has printed 13 books of his remaining poetry… more than were published during his lifetime. There’s no doubt that the poet is more popular in death than he was in life. (Perhaps because it’s easier to idolize him when he’s not hanging around to spit in your face for it...) Further proof is the plethora of biographies and occasional critical studies that have been written in the past decade or so. The biographies, from my perspective, are redundant when readers can simply turn to Run with the Hunted and the multitude of Bukowski's published works that it draws on... Nobody tells Bukowski’s story better than Bukowski. You can get a cliff notes version simply by reading pages 178 – 187 in Hunted: the author’s reaction to the death of his mother and the death of his father, followed by a staggering assertion of his own independence called “The Genius of the Crowd.”

So what, you ask, is Bukowski’s genius? He has his loyal fans, but to many he was simply an angry drunk. Re-reading some of his work, I asked the question of myself: Why was I so drawn to this man’s writing when I was in college? Was it just because I was a bit of an angry drunk myself? Maybe… but it’s more than that.

Bukowski remained, for most of his life, an angry drunk. It was only in his final years, when he became financially stable for the first time and got married for the first time, that he mellowed a bit. And then there were still periods of the old mania. Why was he so angry? Abusive father. Vacant mother. An extreme case of childhood acne that must have seemed like a curse from God, isolating him from his socially adept peers. This was a guy who watched his senior prom from outside the windows of his high school gymnasium, until a security guard sent him away. An outsider. A freak. A ghost.

But then who doesn’t feel that way at some point during their adolescence? What distinguishes Bukowski is that he remained an outsider by choice. As Russell Harrison points out in his book Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow, 1994), the poet never bought into the American ideal. He didn’t want a job; he didn’t want a career; he didn’t want a house and two cars in the garage; he didn’t want a big screen TV; he didn’t want a wife and kids and family gatherings on the holidays. He didn’t trust any of that stuff. To him, it was a con.

He wanted a simple life, away from the crowd, in which to appreciate the little things that were most important to him. As always, he explains himself better than anyone else ever could:

… I’ve lived so often and so long with this hatred
that
my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from
them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where –
some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee
is in comparison
like a fresh wind blowing.

And there were plenty of other “fresh winds” in his life: John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Carson McCullers, James Thurber, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Dos Passos, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.D., Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Tu Fu, Li Po, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Upton Sinclair, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Hardy, Guy de Maupassant, Denise McCluggage, Francois Rabelais, Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler… These people and their art made him feel alive, and he couldn’t imagine living for anything other than that kind of art. Not paychecks, not possessions, not even family. I understood that.

I am more compromising now than I was in college – by choice, not by necessity – but I still understand it. We have to do what makes us feel alive. If we aren’t honest with ourselves in that way, we crumble.

As Bukowski’s reputation grew – culminating, in his lifetime, with the production of the movie Barfly (1987) – he realized, more and more, that he wasn’t alone. The world was full of disenfranchised people (some by choice, others not) who felt the way he did. Then his writing began to turn outward, approaching cultural criticism. But it never quite made that transition, because Bukowski was a born poet, not a critic. In his poem “hug the dark,” he dismissed both politics and religion as alternatives to his art:

people who believe in politics
are like people who believe in god:
they are sucking wind through bent
straws.

And at the very end of his life, in a poem called “putrefaction," he ruminated on his ultimate inability to completely reconcile idealist dreams with the "real" world he saw around him:

now
something so sad
has hold of us
that
the breath
leaves
and we can’t even
cry.

Bukowski’s work pleads for a revolution – the creation of a world where art, rather than commerce, politics, and warped religion, sets the status quo. His writing was an unending personal effort to remain focused on the meaning he'd given to his own existence. He refused to settle for anything less, and therefore he had to withdraw from the noise and chaos of the world around him and become a ghost.

I am extremely grateful that this ghost is still around – moving like a whisper, a breath of fresh air, through my life.

Bluebird

Harry Dean Stanton reads Bukowski...