Bruce Weber is interrupted in mid-sentence.
An elderly woman in a gold lame cape points a bony finger at the photographer/filmmaker, wagging it just inches from his head, and shouts,
”Where are you from!”
Startled, Weber responds softly. ”Well, I live in New York City now.”
His eyes question the others at the table-should I tell her to hit the road, or humor her?
She`s obviously not satisfied. ”But where do you come from originally?” ”From Pennsylvania,” Weber tells her, turning back to his crayon doodling.
”But people in Pennsylvania don`t wear that on their head, do they?”
So that`s the point of her intrusion. She is simply curious about Weber`s headgear, his signature handkerchief-knotted-on-head (today it is white, with red paisley splotches.)
Satisfied that she`s not out for blood, or money, Weber explains that he picked up this style a few years ago ”in the Outback. Of Australia. We were shooting there.”
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Weber is quickly past the interruption but the irony of the old woman`s questions settles over the table. The real question is not where Weber is from, but where he is going. The most successful fashion photographer of the
`80s-the man who made the world pause and reconsider the way it looks at men, via his elegant Calvin Klein and nostalgic Ralph Lauren advertisements-is making his move into the movie business with his Oscar-nominated ”Let`s Get Lost,” which opens Friday at the Fine Arts Theater.
The 43-year-old photographer looks more professor than multi-millionaire: gray cardigan, white button-down Oxford, white T-shirt, suit pants that look vaguely polyester, white tube socks missing a bit of elastic, black loafers, topped by an elegant gray topcoat and the aforementioned headkerchief. You can be assured, though, that his own ”look,” like his photographs, is carefully fashioned.
The conversation turns to ”being famous.” Weber has played a role in fashioning and fanning the notoriety of both celebrities and unknowns-from Madonna, Jessica Lange and Isabella Rosselini to dozens of anonymous surfer boys and pouting beauties.
”I have always felt I belonged behind the camera, not in front of it,”
says Weber, who began his career in New York more than 20 years ago as a model. ”I think it`s good if you can get through life and not be worried about whether people know you or not.”
How serious is Weber`s move into movies? Might he be ready to leave the ad world behind for Hollywood? Or is he just pursuing a hobby, one shared by many talented photographers before him?
The allure is understandable. Advertising and editorial images may be seen by millions. Successful films are seen by tens of millions. Good commercial photographers command big dollars and big budgets (Weber`s advertising day rate is reportedly between $10,000 and $25,000-per day). Successful filmmakers get from $500,000 to $1 million per picture.
”I think when a photographer starts `making it,` ” says Weber, ”he thinks `Oh, god, I`ve got to make a film. And it`s got to be different! I`ve gotta put the camera on a dolly!`
”I don`t feel that way. It just seemed like a natural progression.”
Nor, adds purse-string watcher Nan Bush-who, since 1973, has been variously described as his live-in companion, agent, girlfriend, manager, executive producer, handler and wife-does Bruce intend anytime soon to give up those $10,000 to $25,000 days for Klein, Lauren, Versace and the others and jump whole-hog into the risky business of moviemaking.
Weber concurs. ”Let`s Get Lost”-the grainy, black-and-white story of the life and hard times of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker-cost the photographer more than a million bucks. (”I don`t think investors would have wanted to get involved,” he says. ”I`d tell them about the film and they`d saw `Who`s going to play Chet Baker? Charlie Sheen, Tom Cruise?` I`d say, `Well, Chet.`
And they`d say, `Ooohh . . . he`s still around?` ”)
Still, the early success of ”Lost” has bolstered his confidence. It has won awards at film festivals internationally, was well-received at MOMA`s
”New Directors/New Films” series (so far, ”self-indulgent” has been the harshest criticism) and is now beginning a nationwide crawl through small theaters.
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Weber fell in love With Chet Baker and his music more than 25 years ago, long before he ever considered photography as a livelihood and 10 years before he met Bush, though one of their shared interests turned out to be the now-deceased James Dean of Jazz.
Weber`s boyhood was hardly that of the nostalgic ”endless summer-type”
that he has so successfully fashioned for Ralph Lauren. His father was a prosperous furniture store owner. His parents loved and fought and traveled, often leaving Bruce and his older sister alone at home in Greensburg, Penn.
(He says he first heard Chet Baker when he was 16 and stumbled across a copy of ”Chet Baker Sings and Plays with Bud Shank and Russ Freeman.”
After a stint at the Hun School in Princeton, N. J., Weber majored in art and theater at Denison University in Ohio before going to New York in 1966 to study theater and film at NYU. Model-handsome and thin, he tried his hand in front of the camera with no apparent success. ”I was a bit of a party boy,” he has admitted. Encouraged by early acquaintance Diane Arbus, he studied with Lisette Model at the New School before joining the New York-Paris shuttle in an attempt to make it as a photographer.
He first tried filmmaking as a student and has made a few TV commercials, including one for Lauren, with famed cinematographer Nestor Almendros. (”We had a good time with it,” says Weber, ”but nobody else liked it, and it never ran.”) His first feature, ”Broken Noses,” was released in 1986 and resulted from an Interview assignment to photograph the Colorado Sports Festival. There, after being thrown out of the auditorium by officials for
”encouraging” a young boxer to wear skimpy shorts in the ring, he and his entourage met Andy Minsker. (Weber rarely runs alone, but is attended by a coterie of Weberettes-assistants, stylists, hairdressers and assorted hangers- on). ”Noses” traces Minsker`s boxing career, from Portland, Oregon, to Vegas, and back.
In 1987, Weber wanted to include a photo of Baker in his work hung at the Whitney Biennial. Baker, by then a worn and haggard semblance of his old self, was playing a small club in New York. The last three decades had seen the Oklahoma-born jazzman top every popularity chart in the country and Europe before falling into the bottomless chasm of heroin addiction. He had spent more nights in jail than he could remember, was barred from West Germany, Switzerland and Britain and had his teeth pulled one by one after they were busted up by a gang of hoods in San Francisco. He was barely hanging on to life when Weber et al. searched him out.
Weber arranged to meet Baker in the rundown apartment of his bass player, accompanied by cinematographer Jeff Preiss. ”There were holes in the mattress, a real end-of-the-world kind of place,” remembers Weber. The photographer lent him a car, the junkie copped and the pair`s relationship took off. Baker agreed to allow Weber to film him for a price (they originally planned just a three-minute short of Baker over his recording of ”Blame it on My Youth”). Neither Weber or Bush will say how much they paid for the
”rights” to Baker`s story, nor exactly how much they spent flying him around to the various places Weber was shooting, other than that it was
”substantial.”
”People think that paying somebody to do a documentary is wrong,” adds Weber. ”Sure, but they`re not doing documentaries about a musician who has absolutely not enough money to eat (not to mention shoot up). We were also making a record with him, so of course he should have been paid.
”Plus, people had been ripping Chet off all his life. We didn`t want to join that list. We started working with him like a lot of people did-trying to help him. We thought `We`ll give him all this money, he`ll get off drugs, he`ll get a house, that car he always wanted and he`ll finally move in with his girlfriend.` Of course that was naive . . . he blew the money. We couldn`t change that, but at least we knew we were paying him what he deserved.”
Before long-with scenes shot on the beach in Malibu, in ritzy European hotels and at the Cannes Film Festival-Weber had enough footage, mixed with well-researched stills and clips from old films and interviews (mostly with Baker`s ex-wives and girlfriends), for a two-hour feature.
”We had money problems just like most independent filmmakers,” says Bush. ”So we would just plan the next shooting when we had money. Our only restrictions were `Are we ever going to see Chet again?` We`d have a couple days of shoot all lined up, the crew hired, only to hear that Chet had missed his plane. So between Chet`s unreliability, and Bruce`s schedule, it was a bit unorthodox.”
”I actually like that way of working,” says Weber. ”I hate things when they`re too planned. That`s the way I take photographs, too.”
The resulting film is a stylized, if occasionally gritty, view of Baker`s life-and Weber`s. Instead of invading Baker`s world of seedy apartments and rundown clubs, Weber envelopes him in his traveling road show. Thus the film seems often as much about the maker as it`s star. Baker often looks bored silly, as if he`d probably split if he weren`t being paid.
The film`s accolades may explain in part why Weber, and other photographers before him, have had such a tough time making the transition to films. Janet Maslin, in a New York Times review of ”Lost,” summarized: ”He (Weber) is most effective in letting the look, the sound and the tragic mystique of his subject speak elegantly and hauntingly for themselves.” So the question remains: can Weber tell a story outside of the documentary context?
”I think this film is about self-indulgence,” argues Weber. ”Face it, Chet was very self-indulgent, so are a lot of people we know. Anybody who goes out and takes a photograph or makes a film, it`s really about self-indulgence. They are saying to the world, `This is something I love, something I believe in`-and that`s important. In fact, there are a lot of self-indulgent people who I really like.”
As for Chet Baker, who died without seeing a single foot of the film, Weber is hanging on to their friendship.
”I learned a lot from Chet,” says Weber. ”I learned that it`s a long life-that bad reviews, people not liking your show or hating your photographs are not as traumatic as we make them out to be. The key is to just keep going on.
