Backstories: "Raze the Green Lantern"
A partial tribute to my best friend, the late Paul Mears, part two of several
(Backstory the First: The reason things have been quiet on the newsletter front lies with the loss of my oldest and dearest friend Paul Mears, who died on July 11. It’s exceedingly hard to describe how hard this hit: we had been friends for nearly 45 years, and just trying to collect a greatest hits of our exploits is both time-consuming and exceedingly painful. This is one of several Backstory installments to help fill in gaps in the main essay, as we almost literally changed history a couple of times, and the final eulogy comes out when it’s damn good and ready.)
(Backstory the Second: As can be told, this was a deliberate April Fool’s Day hoax article with the now-long-dead weekly newspaper The Met, a Southern Methodist University journalism workfare program which occasionally ran cover stories other than on cyberporn and “101 Drinks That Go Well With Rohypnol.” The backstory of how it happened and why has been chronicled elsewhere, but the particular relevance here was that when the art department needed photos for verisimilitude, Paul enthusiastically volunteered when asked to fill in as “Edgar Harris,” terrifying fright wig and all. This was just one of many stunts and pranks we pulled in 44 years of hanging out, and since the paper has been dead for nearly a quarter-century, this is the first locale since my old Web site shut down in 2002 where the article and the accompanying photos have been available online. Bon appetit.)
Underground Dallas film hero Edgar Harris takes on a major Hollywood production . . . . . . and crawls into bed with Steven Spielberg . . .
. . . Has he sold out or simply moved up?
Originally published in The Met (March 27, 1996)
Deep in the Robledo Mountains of New Mexico works a film crew in the last few days of production. Security is ultratight: the movie in question is scheduled to be one of the big releases of the 1996 summer season and nobody dares release any information that could ruin the surprise and wonder (read: the box office potential) before the opening date. A handful of actors and crew remain; the rest have already returned to Los Angeles for the grueling postproduction work, including special effects that promise to rewrite the book on computer generated imaging.
All that manages to leak out are four things. The film is a Dreamworks SKG project, with Steven Spielberg himself as the executive producer. The project itself is the much-awaited Green Lantern movie, adapted from the DC comic of the same name. The Robledos are filling in for the planet Oa, on which most of the action will take place. Finally, the director of this $80 million-dollar production is a newcomer to Hollywood, but a legend among fans of underground film. Dallas auteur Edgar Harris has finally hit the big time.
Harris refuses to be interviewed about the film, and all calls to Dreamworks SKG are answered by a secretary who says "I really don't know what you're talking about", but a few sources have pieced together the story behind one of the stranger alliances to come out of the film industry in a long time. Most unbelievable is that Harris, a known iconoclast (some say sociopath), would take an offer to work under Spielberg, a man Harris once accused of "producing more NAMBLA poster children than any human alive."
A friend of Harris', speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he told her the reasoning behind his abrupt about-face: "He said 'They offered me $5 million as a director's fee. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid.'"
MISSING THE THING
Edgar Zappa Harris was born February 27, 1966 in the town of Flint, Michigan. In his early years, he gave no sign that he planned to follow in the tradition of fellow Michiganite filmmakers Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Darkman) and Michael Moore (Roger & Me, Canadian Bacon). In fact, his interests ranged more toward science than anything else: at the age of nine, he discovered the nearly complete remains of a duckbilled dinosaur called Aachenosaurus while camping with his family. This made national news, as this was not only the first dinosaur known from Michigan deposits, but the first reasonably intact skeleton of the beast known. He went on through school with no sign of his future reputation showing until 1982, when his family moved to Carrollton and he found his destiny.
His ex-girlfriend, local poet L.A. Dorman, summed up the turning point. "He wanted to catch a preview of The Thing that summer, and he begged his parents for any opportunity to get out for it. He told them 'I'll walk back home, I don't care; all I want to do is see this movie.' Well, they said 'We're going out, but we're not going anywhere near the theater,' and late that evening they returned and said 'You didn't miss anything, because The Thing was really bad.'
"He never forgave them for that. That one incident ran his life from then on. He became absolutely obsessed with film, mostly because it drove his folks bugfuck."
After spending the summer mowing lawns and saving the cash, Harris bought a small Super 8 movie camera and started shooting demos of events. He started out simply: by his senior year at Newman Smith High School, he was well-known for his humorous shorts of events in the school, and he toyed with the idea of directing music videos for local bands. His best friend from high school, Tim Waite, remembers when Harris first brushed with the Powers That Be and won.
"It was during our senior year in high school, and he was having real problems with his girlfriend at the time. At the same time, the homecoming queen, Ellen Gudex, got on his nerves. She started calling him 'Eddie", and nobody calls him Eddie. Well, he kept talking about fixing her overbite with a two-by-four and a can of Bondo, but he wasn't about ready to hit a woman for anything. Anyway, his girlfriend left him, and he kinda snapped, so he came up with a way to get even with Ellen."
The revenge came when the school held its annual Senior Revue, a talent show consisting of the graduating class. Harris entered a lighthearted animated short as his presentation, but switched films on opening night. The revised short featured Gudex in compromising positions, and it nearly brought the law down on Harris.
"Oh, it was great," Waite said. "She was always presenting herself as the sweetest and most wholesome girl in the school, but Edgar got footage of her snorting coke at a party, and screwing two teachers and the president of the astronomy club. Her boyfriend went ballistic over it, and so did the principal. The whole thing used the Sex Pistols' 'God Save the Queen' as a soundtrack, so that didn't help. She and her family threatened a lawsuit, but that was about the time she got busted for possession of ten grams of coke, so she got expelled instead.
"The last anyone heard, she was living out in Eugene, Oregon, working as a stripper because she couldn't get anything else with her police record. Edgar still laughs about that."
Harris finally graduated, much to the relief of the Carrollton school district, and promptly went to film school at the University of North Texas. Within three weeks, he was on his way back home, expelled for allegedly assaulting his professor. "His professor was a real hardass; the sort who thinks that Citizen Kane is the be-all and end-all of human achievement", Waite said. "Well, when the professor was ranting and raving about how Bringing Up Baby was a prime example of humor in film, Edgar stood up and asked 'Well, what about Dawn of the Dead's use of satire to poke fun at consumerist culture?' The prof started choking, and said that 'crap like that was the reason nobody took cinema seriously any more' and 'if you like slasher films, maybe you'd be better off directing porn reels, too.' Well, one thing led to another, the two got into a shouting match, and it all went to hell when they started swinging. The professor started it, but Edgar whomped him about seven or eight times, so they kicked him out."
Undiscouraged, Harris took the money he saved for his film degree and started making movies. By 1986, he had his own 16-millimeter Arriflex camera, and his shorts were played every other Wednesday at the now-defunct Theater Gallery. By 1987, Film Threat, at that time a quarterly magazine dedicated to underground cinema, took notice of Harris' films, and he was rapidly compared to underground legends Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, and Joe Christ. At the same time, he met L.A. Dorman at one of his screenings, and they very rapidly became an item in the newborn Deep Ellum scene.
"I miss those days a little bit, because Edgar was always full of energy," Dorman said. "He was working for GTE during the day, and then he'd get the gang together and start filming right after he got off work. Then he and I would go out around midnight and party until daybreak. He'd get about two hours of sleep, and then he'd get up and go back to work. He'd do this for weeks, editing and writing scripts on the weekends, until he'd finally run out of energy in three months and need to take a road trip. At night, it was like being in a live version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas."
Although the schedule ultimately took its toll, Harris produced some of his best work during that period, producing some 23 shorts between 1987 and 1992. He took advantage of the encroaching yuppie horde in Deep Ellum to film Jock Feast (1987), a rather nasty view of the Deep Ellum fraternity and sorority brats as aliens "slumming" on backwater planets like Earth, a concept paralleled in John Carpenter's They Live. His first documentary, In Praise of the Second Amendment (1987), was a hilarious take on the culture that surrounds gun clubs and shows in Texas, and Genesis Flakes (1988) interviewed residents of Glen Rose, Texas, and sought their views on the claims by creationists that human and dinosaur tracks could be found together in the Paluxy riverbottom.
"We had a blast in Glen Rose," Dorman remembers. "We went out one Saturday and filmed for a while in Dinosaur State Park, and then we went up the road to the Creation Science Museum, which at that time was an old double-wide trailer with these cheesy paintings of dinosaurs and cavemen all over it. Nobody inside would speak to us because we had cameras; they knew that we weren't going to present them in a positive light. Besides, Edgar had this huge black Mohawk, too, so I guess they were afraid we were going to rob them or something."
By 1989, however, Harris was starting to get infuriated with the Dallas movie industry and the city's tendency to idolize out-of-town filmmakers while ignoring its own. In an unpublished 1993 interview, Harris summed up his situation: "Dallas has an incredible amount of talent it won't use, because the Dallas Film Commission and the City Council just wet their pants every time someone comes out from Hollywood. We have geniuses like Ken Harrison (director of Ninth Life), Jim Conrad (cameraman at large and director of Mondo Texas), and a good hundred others who have the talent and the ability to make films, and the city craps all over them. Then, when some hack like Oliver Stone or Paul Verhoeven or the shitheads who made Leap of Faith comes to town, they take advantage of local scenery, treat the locals like peons, and leave a godawful mess, and the city bends over and willingly squeals like a pig when they want all of these concessions they know they'd never get in California.
"It's pretty hard to make movies in Dallas. Pittsburgh was glad to have George Romero and Baltimore was ecstatic to have John Waters, because they were local boys who made good. Here, though, unless you go to Hollywood and come back, nobody cares. It's just like in the music industry: Dallas couldn't care about all of the local musicians in town until they started getting recording contracts, and all we got for our trouble was the Toadies, Edie Brickell, and Lisa Loeb. I'm certain the planet is doomed because of this attitude: in twenty years, radio transmissions from 1988 will be all over the galaxy, and any aliens forced to listen to Edie shriek 'What I Am' 80 times an hour are going to come to Earth and blow the planet up just to keep from hearing it again when Eighties nostalgia kicks in."
PLAYING A PRANK
Harris kept ragging on the local film industry, but he made his final statement at the 1993 USA Film Festival. Infuriated because he thought no local talent was featured in the Festival that year while the short film collections consisted of NEA grant projects ("You can always spot the NEA films because they make absolutely no sense. The NEA keeps giving funds to twits who want to make a statement, but don't have the slightest idea what the statement is"), he performed what everyone thought was impossible and hijacked a projector at the Fest. "It was really funny," he said later, after the police arrested him and charged him with fifteen counts, including assault and use of incendiary devices in a theater. "All I wanted to do was run Alex Winter's short Entering Texas because that was the only short of his you'd never see at the USA. Winter was a guest, and they ran some of his shorts, but they wouldn't run Entering Texas. It couldn't have anything to do with Gibby Haynes [lead singer for the Butthole Surfers] masturbating into a pan and the mung congealing into the word 'Satan', could it?"
After the court trial, Harris paid his fines and disappeared; the only charge that stuck was vandalism from where Harris spraypainted 'STOP OLIVER STONE BEFORE HE FILMS AGAIN" on one of the screens at the AMC Glen Lakes, where the Festival has been held since 1987. Aside from a few interviews and articles in small-press magazines such as Film Threat Video Guide, Brutarian, and Fuck Science Fiction, he disappeared from the Dallas scene. The announcement in Variety in 1995 that he was hired as director of Green Lantern: The Movie was ignored by both the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; the Dallas Observer killed the story on the bequest of editor Peter Elkind.
L.A. Dorman remembers the reasoning for the last. "It was right before we broke up, and we were at a party at the Blind Lemon. Edgar was talking to a group of people, and this asshole marches right into the middle of the group and started with "You of course know who I am, don't you?" Everyone else said "No", but Edgar said "No, and if you don't get the fuck out of my way, I'm going to shove this beer bottle up your ass and kick you in the butt until broken glass comes out your ears. I'd kick you in the balls, but I know your ex-wife took them both as a divorce settlement." Well, I found out that he'd just insulted the editor of the Dallas Absurder, but Edgar knew the whole time. I had no idea that Peter Elkind could be so petty, but then take a look at the whole paper."
GREEN COMIC ENERGY
Back in the Robledo Mountains, Harris continues working on what he plans will be the best adaptation of a comic book in movie history. According to sources, he plans a production that will make Independence Day, the other effects-laden summer release, fade like a morning glory.
The movie is based on the comic from DC, the creators of Superman and Batman. The comic follows the adventures of the Green Lanterns, a group of superheroes formed by the mysterious Guardians to protect the universe from all evil. Each Green Lantern carries a power ring which allows the wielder to create anything his or her will imagines in green energy; aside from needing a recharge every 24 hours and a vulnerability to the color yellow, a Green Lantern can accomplish almost anything.
According to a very early script written by Oscar-winners Cordwainer Bird and John Simon Ritchie, the action surrounds the three Green Lanterns of Earth: Hal Jordan (played by Mel Gibson), John Stewart (Michael Dorn, best known as portraying Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Guy Gardner (comedian Denis Leary). The plot revolves around protecting the Guardians' home world of Oa from an attack by the evil Sinestro (Edward James Olmos), a renegade Green Lantern leading a force of alien mercenaries to destroy his former masters and take their power for himself. In a tribute to his Dallas roots, local actress Brenda Susan Foster appears in her Hollywood debut as Carol Ferris, Jordan's girlfriend (Foster appeared in many of Harris' films, including Jock Feast). If the script is any indication, the film will compare in special effects usage to Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park: out of a 115-page script (where each page is roughly comparable to a minute of screen time), some 83 pages feature one major effect or another.
One source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said "It looks like Green Lantern is going to be a blowout for the summer. Edgar put everything he could into this, and he really got a lot of help from the cast and crew. I mean, Denis Leary was born to play Guy Gardner."
Whether this will happen is open to debate: few pundits in the movie industry can help but remember Alien 3 (directed by David Fincher, who went directly from directing music videos to the third Alien franchise only to watch it bomb), or the adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's book Slapstick. Likewise, few are sure that Harris is the man for the job: although the successes of Richard Linklater and Quentin Tarantino have made things easier for gonzo filmmakers to sell their projects, some wonder if hiring Harris was the same mistake as hiring David Lynch for Dune. Also, a huge special effects budget is no guarantee of success, as evidenced by the box office failures of The Abyss, Last Action Hero, and Judge Dredd, among many others.
A few wonder about Harris' motivations for working under Dreamworks SKG on a film he would have derided a few years ago as "derivative garbage". On one point, the move could be for Harris to get the respect he thinks he deserves. On another, Harris could be using the clout from a major success to direct the films he wants to make, much as Tim Burton used the leverage from Batman to get the green-light for Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. On a third, the whole story could be nothing but an April Fools' hoax by a minor science fiction writer to satirize how Dallas treats its resident artists. Whatever the outcome, people will talk about Edgar Harris for a very long time.
In his last interview before starting work on Green Lantern, Harris said "I get all sorts of smartasses who tell me 'You know, you're not as clever as you think you are.' All I say in return is 'Physician, heal thyself.' "
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.