By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on January 22, 2011)

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

–Spalding Gray

Who was it who once dismissed the art of the monologist as “comedy, without punch lines”? Oh…it was me. OK, I confess-when I used to work as a stand-up, I always felt a bit envious of my more long-winded show-biz cousins, because generally, they get to sit down (I’ve always been a lazy bastard). Not only that, but they get to sit behind a desk, upon which they are allowed to keep notes (in case they lose their place-which probably makes actors jealous, too).

They could get away with using props-without being accused of “hiding behind them”. Also, why is it that when a stand-up comic does a long-form piece with props, it’s a “one person-show”…never a “monologue”? Who, or what, officially certifies you as a monologist?

As  I allegedly became older and wiser, I came to admire the monologists, once I gleaned what separates them from stand ups. Stand-ups are insecure and desperate for acceptance. That’s why we’re willing to go out there “naked” with only a microphone in hand, performing the same 20 minute act night after night for roomfuls of hostile drunks, collect $50, and dash for the exit, before the sense of shame and humiliation over what we do for a living sinks in (Jay Leno once cleverly likened the life of a stand up to that of a hooker).

A monologist, on the other hand, has to have a strong sense of confidence. Confident enough to believe that the minutiae of their lives is so fascinating, people will pay good money to sit in rapt attention for 90 minutes while they prattle on about themselves.

Whether or not you are going to enjoy And Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about the life of the late Spalding Gray (king of all monologists) largely hinges on how open you are to paying good money to sit in rapt attention for 90 minutes while someone prattles on about themselves. That’s because Soderbergh is shrewd enough to let a man who was nothing if not a compulsive (and gifted) storyteller tell you his own story, in his own words.

For Gray’s fans, Soderbergh’s film could be what the Beatles Anthology was to Fab Four aficionados-a masterfully edited and chronologically assembled compendium of clips from TV interviews and performance excerpts spanning the breadth of his career, spiced throughout by rare and previously unseen footage. What emerges is a portrait of the artist, narrated by the artist.

Like many moviegoers, my first awareness of Gray was due to Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s wonderfully realized 1987 film version of Gray’s stage show, in which Gray was able to weave a mesmerizing and entertaining monologue from his experience working on the 1984 film, The Killing Fields. He had a relatively minor part in that film, but the stage piece it inspired is a veritable epic; it may begin like just another backstage tale, but  somehow ends up touching on life, the universe and everything.

The film was a surprise hit, and although he continued to take acting roles, he was always best at  “playing” Spalding Gray, particularly in subsequent film versions of three more stage shows, (the 1988 HBO presentation Spalding Gray: Terrors of Pleasure, and two feature films-Monster in a Box from 1992 and Gray’s Anatomy, released in 1996).

There is an elephant in the room that Soderbergh largely sidesteps, and that is Gray’s tragic end. In March of 2004, after a two-month disappearance, his body was recovered from the East River, off Greenpoint in Brooklyn. It was a presumed suicide, as Gray had been suffering from severe depression (and had made several attempts to take his own life) since a 2001 car accident that left him with a fractured skull and shattered hip. There is some footage of Gray recounting the accident, and hobbling around on crutches, but not too much further elaboration on what it eventually may have led to.

Perhaps the director does broach the subject in his own oblique fashion; in one interview clip Gray jokes about how Soderbergh had talked him into taking a “perfect part” in his 1993 film King of the Hill-playing a depressive who eventually kills himself. And there are several clips (from tinterviews and stage shows) where Gray refers to his mother’s suicide; perhaps the most revealing quote comes when he says “I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.” We can never know who or what Gray thought might be waiting for him when he took that plunge into the watery depths, but if dead men really could tell tales, I’d bet his would be the best.

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on August 7, 2010)

Many years ago, when I was working at my first radio job (OK, Gerald Ford was in the White House…happy now?) a fellow announcer pulled me aside one day, took me into the production room and revealed a dirty little secret. In those days, when we did our audio production, we would master onto reel-to-reel. Once you had a satisfying take, or had cut and pasted your session into that perfect 30 second commercial (using an actual razor blade and splicing tape), you would then transfer the audio onto a cart (sort of like an 8-track) that the DJs would then be able to play on the air.

Now, we would all use, and re-use, the same “work tapes” on the reel to reel. What my co-worker had been doing for some time was listening back to the previous jock’s raw production session, and saving some of the more amusing outtakes onto a blooper reel. I picked up on this, and over the years I would compile cassette collections of outtakes for the amusement of my friends.

More often than not, what made an outtake a “keeper” was the creative use of profanity and the degree of verbal self-abuse that perfectionists tend to heap upon themselves. And of course, there’s something intrinsically hilarious about listening to a dulcet-toned broadcast professional launching into a tirade that would make a Tourette’s sufferer blush, in perfectly metronomic pentameter. Over the years, I’ve heard (and said) it all myself-which is why I was somewhat ambivalent when I first saw this on YouTube:

It’s all “been there, done that” to me, but that particular collage of blue-streaked verbal self-flagellation by a Mr. Jack Rebney, (aka the “Winnebago Man”) has for some reason captured the imagination of many YouTube fans over the years and spawned its own devoted cult of personality. I think it’s safe to say that most people would take a look, have a chuckle and leave it at that. However, for filmmaker Ben Steinbauer, that was not enough.

For his documentary, Winnebago Man, he wanted to dig deeper and discover the back story. So why would he bother anyway? Would anyone really care? After all, the YouTube clips were taken from VHS copies that had already been circulating amongst “found footage” festival curators and private enthusiasts for years, long before the term “viral video” had entered the lexicon-and certainly prior to YouTube’s existence.

For all anyone knew, Rebney was long in his grave. It took the assistance of a private investigator and substantial digging, but Steinbauer discovered his quarry was above ground; indeed way above ground-living the hermit life in an isolated mountain cabin.

Any attempt to summarize further risks spoiling the mildly surprising twists and turns that ensue in this slight yet engaging film. In some ways, it’s more about the filmmaker than his subject; especially when it depicts Steinbauer wrestling with his own motivations for making the documentary in the first place. Is he ultimately exploiting Rebney, who alleges having no idea of his cult celebrity prior to the posting of the outtakes on the internet? Or is Rebney playing him like a violin?

I was reminded of Ross McElwee’s 1996 documentary, Six O’clock News. In that film, the director chose several people at random (most of them beset by personal tragedies) who were featured in TV news stories in an earnest attempt to reveal the living breathing human beings behind the sound bites (while attempting to remain sensitive to their feelings and as unobtrusive to their lives as possible). McElwee encountered the same conundrum as Steinbauer; how do you make a statement about an exploitative and self-aggrandizing media (or web culture) without in essence coming off to be as equally exploitative and self-aggrandizing yourself? Discuss…