[music]

Speaker: 1107. This is not going to be easy. This stuff has been haunting this family for a long time.

[music]

Jonas: I gave her her first one woman's, one filmmaker's show at the Charles Theater in '61 when I saw her early work because that's what I wanted to do and did not maybe dare fully doing it until I saw that she was doing it. She was just doing it. Then that just helped me to make up my own mind. That's direct encouragement and influence or inspiration, whatever you think, fully. Here, Marie Menken was making little very invisible films that got no action. There was nothing spectacular. Just little flowers, some lines, some colors there.

It was like a flower garden. It's there for those who like flowers, but there is no big action, nothing spectacular, no unusual content. Everything was very usual and daily. When we walked through the garden, then the flowers are always there. Some see them, some don't see them.

[birds chirping]

Marie Menken is one of the really-- She represented some of this lyrical aspect in cinema that seems invisible. Her life was already in the local American New York art community. The Lithuanian aspect comes in only from her sole childhood memories. In Lithuanian arts, the lyrical aspect dominates and takes over. Keep doing that. This was stupid, whoever took it.

Speaker: Let's put it back.

Speaker: You get out with the mics, with everything. Out. [unintelligible 00:06:51]

Speaker: No, no, I have it.

Speaker: No, no, put it down.

Speaker: Oh, wait a second.

Speaker: I have no place to go back. All of these fragile, gentle art came from this strong woman. Physically, Marie Menken was very, very strong, tall, she's bulky, bulky woman, but her soul was very gentle.

[music]

Speaker: This is Trapeze for Angels. Some of the threads are even broken, so you'll see it ran all the way down to there.

Alfred Leslie: You cannot really say that there was any consequential or any significant interest whatsoever in abstract art. It was held to be a folly that some people engaged in because they were backward or they were illiterate or they couldn't draw. Nobody cared what artists did, except other artists. In 1951, the Tibor de Nagy gallery, I installed a show of Marie Menken's. This is Tibor. I can tell from the fixtures on the ceiling, these little lights, these little spots with the wires hanging as a decorative element in the ceiling. There, you can see how shallow the space is and there can see the size of the works.

As I remember, they had a rough surface, a little bit of crusted feeling as if it was dried pigment sprinkled into something. That may have been the stuff that gave the fluorescent quality to the pictures when the lights were turned off. That's purely a formal idea, a strategy, which has to do with finding the relish of the moment in the object itself and the beauties in the object itself through the uses of natural material that reflect light and that take light which change. The Tibor de Nagy Gallery was established by John Myers and Tibor de Nagy. John and Tibor were lovers, they lived together.

John was the creative part of this relationship and Tibor, who was a banker, would be a good front, a good public face for any enterprise because John Myers was a flaming queen. That was something that if people think it's strange today, 1950, 1951, it was virtually unheard of. John was very, very grand and very, very excessive, very, very smart. His establishing the gallery was, you might say, something that he did on the basis of his intellectual curiosity. Right after that, the gallery was established. He created his salon, something that he always dreamed about.

It was actually a convergence of the entire gay community, that to say the whole intellectual life of the gay community tended at one point or another, to converge on John's apartment. From knowing her via my connection with John Myers, that was the meilleur that I met her in. Well, it was gay. She lived entirely in a gay community amongst gay people as far as I knew.

[music]

Alfred: John needed money had no money of his own and he managed to con Dwight into paying the rent in the gallery. In today's parlance, you might say that Marie's work lacked any edge. All of this has to be seen against the backdrop of the kind of art that began to be produced at the end of World War II. Marie show belonged to another part of his sensibility. He immediately, upon making the exhibition, he regretted it.

He always liked Marie and cared for Marie, and Willard and his friends, not that she wasn't a serious artist or anything like that, but was just not a good fit anymore. I believe that he made the show essentially because he needed to honor the debt to Dwight Ripley. In point of fact, at one point, he even made a show of drawings of Dwight.

[music]

Alfred: Some artists, their fullest sensibilities are revealed when they find a medium that they're more sympathetic with. I think essentially that Marie found a richer format, a richer place for all of her demons, and all of the other elements and part of her sensibility that could come through in the cinema. I think it worked for her and brought out the richest and the fullest part of all of her ideas. Do we hear that beautiful sound? It's beautiful.

Kenneth Anger: Marie and I were invited to the Brussels World's Fair to show our films. After the fair was over, Marie wanted to go to Spain. I was very happy to go with her. In Spain, we went to the Alhambra in Grenada. Of course, that's where she had the inspiration to make this film that turned out to be Arabesque For Kenneth Anger. I was there during all the filming. In fact, I was guiding her since she loved to use a handheld camera and that was practically the only way she shot. She'd be looking through the camera, this very small little camera. I'd be guiding her while she moved around so she wouldn't trip over something or fall.

I was behind her, so it was sort of a double tandem of me behind her. I was just being sure that we didn't fall on a fountain or something. Marie was like dancing with her camera. She had a dancing eye, she had a wonderful eye for detail. It seemed like her films were almost cut in the camera because she seemed to know all the little details that she wanted to put together like a jigsaw puzzle. I was quite amazed at her mobility and quickness. She moved like a dancer and she had a feeling for movement and rhythm that was like a dancer.

[music]

Kenneth: I do recall some of her paintings, these were swirling abstractions in which she had embedded sequence and broken glass to catch the light. It seemed to me that she was always fascinated with light.

[music]

Kenneth: She was using the single frames like a kaleidoscope of flashing glittering images. It was never like a single frame, it was like hundreds of them, which when put together would create this dazzling effect. It would almost be like an explosion of poetry. Marie is in memory one of my very, very special friends and one of the most magnificent women I ever knew as an artist and as a person.

I'll almost draw a halo, around her. I mean, in retrospect, she seems very much like a saintly person. Her religion was joy. That's something that Marie had all her life was the sense of wonder of a child. The ability to be thrilled by the simplest things. She was looking for beauty. She wasn't looking for ugliness, which is another aesthetic. Marie would see a little sunlight cleaning off some broken bottles, a little flash of diamonds and she say, "How beautiful?"

Then later we went to this place in the country and she must have known about it. I don't know how she knew about it, but there were these monks who were grave diggers. That was their discipline, or their calling was, they served the people by digging their graves. Of course, Marie was Catholic so she must have known something about this. They lived in caves they had dug in the earth and their robes were brown like the earth.

They sort of blended in with these caves and each cave had a crucifix on the wall and a whip. Apparently, if they had any sinful thoughts or anything they were supposed to whip themselves. At least I didn't ask how frequently they used the whip, but it was very austere.

[music]

Speaker: Actually, it was Willard and Marie who helped organize, push the very first show of Stan Brakhage in New York at the Living Theatre.

Jonas: In a letter that she sent me some months before he died, he wrote that he was working very hard on Panels for the Walls of Heaven. When I spoke with him a month before he died on telephone, he said that he is watching on strips of film, that he is softening and scratching with his nails, lying in his bed and working with his nails scratching the film.

Speaker: Because I can say and would like to have it on the record right off the top that if there's one single filmmaker that I owe the most to for the crucial development of my own filmmaking, it would be Marie Menken.

Speaker: It's a good snow for children to play because it's very soft.

Speaker: Marie, it was who first of all of us, I think, discovered that hypnagogic envisioning need not only be done at night. She went this far with it, that she had that quick of mind that she could seize on a blink, and in a blink, she could see what the hypnagogic vision was. This led her to Eye Music in Red Major. Why red major? Because in the full of beaming daylight sun, in a very passengers way, sitting at the table drinking martinis or something normal to a penthouse in New York, just as normal as if it were like cow's milk, big meaty arms down on the table, whole Lithuanian sense coming out.

Amidst blinks in this broad daylight, of course, produced the major backing would be the orange-red that would be coming through the eyelids during the blink. This is seeing your hypnagogic vision backed by a red screen, which is the eyelid. If the light is strong enough, it penetrates the whole blood screen itself. This was going on, this kind of activity, at about the time they were studying eyelids in other senses and deriving the REM theory and it's done most especially, most clearly to me along the line of rhythm.

Because that's the only way rhythm can be articulated this perfectly or anything, as she meant. Only when the heart is breaking or bursting with joy or something, can any human being listened to the heart faster than they think they can and the fingers achieve something comparable to this. Here to me is where art is born is someone who listens to the-- Knows all these generalizations very well what he shares variously with others and then discovers the absolute uniqueness of his or her own heart beating. That's when an art is born because that's what's true that each of our hearts beat absolutely uniquely.

Peter Kubelka: Nobody before the invention of the Bolex and the usage of it by Marie has ever had in his brain material for thoughts of this kind. The Bolex is a fantastic teacher. I think that Marie learned her filmmaking from letting the Bolex talk. Her films are expeditions like Columbus into a country which she had not seen before herself. When she made these films using the catching of the now, now, now, now, now, go, go, go, go, taking in slowly and then projecting in a condensed way, she put the medium at its best usage. There, the medium film really transports the user to a new world. See and hear the sound at the same time.

Then let's imagine this is a projector because a projector is nothing else but a camera used the other way around. Lumiere's camera was used as a projector. Now, I project and listen. You can hear the rrrrrrr, this very energetic condensation of the 24 now moments, which have been directed and savored and lived in slow real time. It was a dance. It was absolutely an event of dancing, dancing around and carrying the heavy Bolex and being still light-footed. Then you could even imagine how the film would look. You see? Seeing the filming process.

Gerard Malanga: You can see the gentleness in her face. There's a kind of inner glow happening. It really conveys a very gentle soul, which is what Marie was all about. Willard was a pretty tough guy, he was like a bulldog. He was short, he was stout, he was masculine and he was a tough guy. People would steer clear of Willard. Marie was this tall woman. Marie was like six foot two and a half inches tall. When Marie walked in, she was towering. I was 17 at the time that I met Willard. I thought he was like this big, famous poet. At one time, he was, but I didn't realize that at the onset that he was basically living off his past.

Back in 1961, at the New York City Writers Conference at Wagner College, Edward Albee was the playwright who oversaw the Playwright Conference. At the end of the day, there would be these cocktail parties at a professor's house or whatever, with the students and the workshop leaders. There would be Edward sitting on the floor against a wall, taking mental notes, and there's Willard and Marie getting more inebriated as the party goes on, and getting into arguments with each other.

When Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf appears on Broadway the following year, it was unmistakable that the characters in that play who later were portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the movie version, it was unmistakable that those characters were based on Willard and Marie. As you recall, the professor and his wife have a child, but you never see the child in the play, the child is only hinted at. That's an interesting element, even though perhaps Edward Albee was not aware of the fact that Marie and Willard did have a child who died, so there was the absence of a child in the play as well as an absence of a child in Willard and Marie's life.

Kenneth: She was like a kind of mother hand to the various filmmakers. The one aspect about living there, I was able to see some of the weekends between Willard and Marie that inspired Edward Albee to write Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because they had, I guess you'd call it a symbiotic relationship, that they express themselves by drinking and shouting at each other. This was picked up by Edward Albee and turned into a very interesting play, but the kernel of the relationship, in the play the character's named Martha, not Marie, but it's that 13th letter M that's the key that it is Marie.

Of course, Marie had a job working at the cable room, and at Time Magazine, which is a lot of responsibility. Willard was a professor of English literature on Staten Island, but every weekend, starting Friday to Monday, then they would start drinking. Of course, the drinking went nonstop to Monday morning as far as most weekends. It's rather extraordinary. I don't know when they slept. I was like a referee for some of these marathon sessions. I was a little bit concerned about her, but Willard never physically threatened her, like hitting her throwing something at her. Occasionally she'd throws something at him. It's all very clear in my mind. Like I have an indelible impression.

You wouldn't call it actual fighting. It was more like jousting. Occasionally, it would go up on the roof of the penthouse, and then the two dogs would join in barking. You'd have the black dog and the white dog barking. They were protecting Marie. On one occasion, Willard and Marier climbed up on top of the parapet and they began pushing each other like Punch and Judy. There's a direct drop of 15 stories down to the street, Montague Street. I was worried, but I said if I tried to interfere, I will be the one that goes over the edge and they'll still be up there, so I said, "I'll just leave them alone."

In a way, Edward Albee had witnessed some of these sessions. I think Stan Brakhage did and I certainly did while I was living there. I think they wanted an audience because I don't know what they did alone because alone, I wouldn't have been there, but it was like their kind of psychodrama. She had accepted that he was gay or bisexual, and at least he needed to have this relationship with men. It was all out in the open. It wasn't like in the closet or something. She accepted this and she wasn't bitter about it. It was just the way he was and yet, Willard was also her husband and they had a very close relationship. This is just the paradox of human relationships.

While I was there, I went out to Coney Island one Saturday, and saw this group of fellows on motorcycles who were meeting there near the Cyclone, which was the big roller coaster. I struck up a conversation with them. I said, "Can I film your motorcycle sometime?" They said sure. They were from Brooklyn. That was the origin of Scorpio Rising. If Marie hadn't offered me to have a place to stay, I probably wouldn't have made Scorpio Rising because I had a place to stay. I made it in the fall of 1962, and then the party at the end of the film was a Halloween party.

Speaker: Look at this, oh my God. The can is like-- Holy shit. Oh my God. This is not even going on. Yikes. That can has had it. This is archaeological, that's for sure. Look at the-- Oh my God. This is very Stan Brakhage. Whoops. Oh, here's the duel. Here's Marie and Andy dueling. Beautiful stuff like they call it. You know what, this was shot at 4:30 in the afternoon. I could see where the source of the sunlight was coming from. It's coming from the west. Look at that, you could see her smiling in the back.

Speaker: It's really beautiful. Yes.

Speaker: Oh, look at this. Oh, look at this. This is gorgeous. Come here, just take a look at this. Man, doesn't she look like the [unintelligible 00:49:08] warrior. There's a lot of really nice stuff in here. You know what's so great is that-- Oh, look at this. What was Marie doing? She's just holding the camera and she's holding it like it's a feather. She's in such control of the camera and at the same time, she's treating it with such delicacy. You could see the body language. I could write a mini-essay just on this one frame. Look at this shot here. This is amazing. Basically, it's a portrait of the two of them filming each other. Oops. That's a nice piece of any wall portrait. Isn't that great? Does that say it all? That's nice too. Look at this. There I am in the background by the way. I was here for that. You see me right there.

[background noise]

Now they're bowing towards each other. The dual. This is the dual of the Bolexes.

[background noise]

This guy never even handled a camera a year ago from when this we shot last, but he was trying to learn from Marie and got it wrong. This is amazing.

[background noise]

To think that this film is resisting extinction, it's still here in its horrendous shape but it's still here. Here we go. Journey into the past. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this.

[background noise]

That was on 87th street. The building's still there. 87th street between Lexington and 3rd avenue. Andy's house was two and a half blocks away. It was on 89th on Lex.

[background noise]

Here we are. We are prepping up. This is the best document. There's very little of me and Andy. Look at that, we're putting the gloves on. Marie got the whole thing. She got the whole thing. Look at this, it's like a choreography of hands here. We're putting the gloves on to go to work. It's a silkscreen. Look at that. Isn't that gorgeous? Look at Marie, she's out of her mind. Look at us. Andy's pouring the silkscreen ink. Look at that nasty silkscreen ink. Here we're pouring here. Look at that. We're pouring this. Here is the silkscreen ink. We're pouring it in the screen over Bobby Short, the pianist who just died a couple of months ago, who was married to Gloria Vanderbilt.

This was not easy work. You could tell. This was like really grunge stuff. She was a little underexposed on here. She could have been a little bit more, but in those days, when you're shooting with a Bolex, I don't think she was doing light meter reading. That was one thing about Marie. I think she was taking a light meter reading. Here comes Andy outside. Here we are going back to Andy's house. It's already dark. I remember it was already, getting to be nighttime out When we left. I have a good memory about that. The two boys walking through upper Manhattan back to Andy's.

Andy had a lease on what used to be a firehouse, the building was owned by New York City Department of buildings. Andy had a one-year lease on the building for $100. The lease was up December 31st. I'm just going to go back. This footage was done anywhere from mid-November to late December of 1963. I would turn 21 in March of '64. Andy was 15 years older than me. Andy was basically 35. We're looking at a 20-year-old and a 35-year-old on this footage here. That completely centers, the date as to when this footage was taken because the lease was up at the end of December of '63. We didn't start working until late February, early March in the new factory, the silver factory. The chronology's interesting in that regard.

What do you think? You definitely going to get a negative imprint made. This is the original, right?

Speaker: Did you know

Speaker: We are got to get out of this rusty can. Andy adored Marie, he really did. He even gave Marie a painting. When I first met Andy at the party at Marie and Willard's penthouse, I remember distinctly Marie's chasing Andy around the dining room table because she adored andy so much she wanted to hug him. He was sort of running away from Marie around the dining room table and here's Marie trying to chase Andy trying to catch him. It was a very comical moment actually.

Billy Name: This was probably 1964 when she came to the Andy Warhol silver factory to do the film with Andy and I was there then. I was the one who designed the Silver Factory. I was the one who worked all of the lights, the sound, and the settings. If anyone was making a film, I would assist them explaining how the lights are all organized and all that kind of stuff. I met Marie and Marie came in as this lovable, wonderful, grumbly old woman who was a special friend of Gerard Malanga.

See in the art world, there's always simultaneous old and young people. That wasn't unusual. It's like they're artists who have been around longer than you and are more experienced. It is just wonderful to be with them, but she was a whole generation older than all of us. She was totally at ease at the factory. She just would prod around with her camera and wherever she wanted to go, she would go, or whatever she wanted to film she would film. She didn't ask anybody or anything, she's just like it was her house.

Much of Andy's work is mocking the surface culture. They have to present it in the sense of it being a joke. It's serious, but it's funny. We know better. Now they did that first with [unintelligible 00:59:51] for American artists. The next one they did it with was Warhol and he's painting Campbell's Soup Cans and  Brillo Boxes and they say, that's art. Again, the mass media could take on the leading American artists because they could find a gimmick in it. It was very brilliant that he made art that the public would accept. Because before the pop art movement came in, and it was still modern art, and Picasso was the lead factor figure, the ordinary American public was no longer interested in fine art.

Speaker: The screen test was a collaboration that Andy and I started in 1960, early 1964. They were basically head and shoulder shot composition, silent, black and white of 100-foot load in Andy's Bolex of someone looking into the camera for three minutes. We'd shoot it from beginning to end so there was no stopping and starting. It was just from beginning to end. That was your portrait. This was a screen test Andy and I did of Marie Menken. We did about 450, 500 of them. I basically proposed that we do a selection of the screen tests and then I ended up writing poems for the book.

Speaker: Here's Gerrard in the amp section here. Then here's Willard. That's it. You've got Willard, Gerrard, Jonas, and Marie. There's Marie. Actually, she's the last one in the book. See, the book is in alphabetical order.

Mary Woronov: We would go over there for dinner all the time because she liked me. She liked the fact that it was an image of her and Willard when they were younger. Willard was very flamboyant, Gerrard was very flamboyant. I was very tall, obviously very strong, but quiet. When Gerrard took me over there, it was like going over to see his parents. It was very funny because they immediately took that attitude that I was going to be the daughter-in-law.

What's really funny, I don't know if he told you this, but they lived across the street from my parents and me in Brooklyn. They were extremely volatile, extremely screaming at each other. In a way, it was, I don't know, they didn't play sports. That was their sport. It's like they're stuck in their house all the time. That's how they'd energize themselves. I wasn't worried. They didn't really mean it.

[background noise]

They definitely had a volatile, volatile relationship. She was very shy. She was very shy with other people. It's because of people like Warhol, gay men, who helped her, who continue to bring her into the light, who continued to say Marie Menken. She was very shy, but if you were to dinner at her house, and she was no longer shy around you, she screamed. It was amazing. She would scream and yell. Warhol caught that in Chelsea Girls. There's a part where she just doesn't shut up. She's yelling at Gerard, who she is not shy with at all, but she used to scream, "You fuck, you should marry her. You should. You don't know what you're doing." It was insane.

Speaker: All right. I've got assault with a weapon. That's Gerard. That's Gerard. That's Gerard. That's Gerard. That's Gerard. My son. [unintelligible 01:05:24]. You want to calm down? All right, I'll calm down. Marie? You don't have to wear it if you want to.

Speaker: It's pretty good.

Speaker: You don't have to wear it.

Speaker: It was like Marie had a new career. She was on the verge of a new career. Here she was years ago being a painter, and then she went into filmmaking. Then all of a sudden, in the early 1960s, she's become an underground movie star, which I think was phenomenal for her. She really enjoyed doing what she was doing because acting, for her, came so natural.

[background noise]

The idea for the for The Rio was that Marie would play my mother in the movie, because in real life, Marie thought of herself as being my mother. In fact, she mentioned on numerous occasions, "Oh, if only I can legally adopt you, but I can't because your real mother is still alive." That was pretty much the premise that Marie was more like my mother, would be my mother. Would-- I don't know if I wanted Willard to be my father. Anyway, my father pretty much ran off, so he was nowhere to be found.

I haven't visited him in his crypt, as they call it, or vault since he was there in 1983. Hey, you might as well kill two birds with one stone, excuse the pun. We'll go visit Maria, we'll go visit my dad too. Why not? When am I ever going to get out there again? You'll have the camera rolling. It'll be interesting to see that. Visiting my metaphoric mother and my real father.

That's 25. That's Queens, though. I don't know.

[background noise]

65th Street. Yes. See, we're already coming into the Lutheran cemetery. See, here's Metropolitan Avenue going beyond the cemetery. I just want to see how it comes up between the cemetery, I mean before the cemetery. [unintelligible 01:08:50]. Just look for Malanga. His name would be on the outside. It's a unit for-- is there a unit here? Section 5, unit 003.

Speaker: I am going to show me where it is.

Speaker: 220 units. That's why.

Speaker: 220?

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: The name is Malanga, and the guy is Malanga. [crosstalk]. All right. Well, we did it. Are we going to the right aisle? 372. No, couldn't be. Oh, nuts. You see there's no range 3. That's L, this is K. You know what? Maybe she was further in. Oh, wait a second. I think I see it. Yes, here it is.

Speaker: Menkevicas.

Speaker: I can recognize Marie's [unintelligible 01:11:06] Her setting is so precious. It's between these trees. She found her moments when to be creative. It wasn't like she was creative every day. She had the drudgery of working at Time Magazine from-- she was in what was called the graveyard shift. She worked from 6:00 PM until 2.00 in the morning. Then many, at times I would meet her. I would go to Time Magazine at midnight and meet her there in this huge office with big fluorescent lights. We're talking about heavy-duty corporate headquarters. A big office space that in the daytime is buzzing with activity, but at night there's like Marie, maybe one other person at another desk somewhere and that's it.

She's checking out the cables and the ticker tape and whatever, and making files and putting them together for certain people in the morning. I'd go there, like at 12, 12:30, hang out, read a book, write some poetry, use the typewriter. She had access to a huge photocopying machine. We'd be running off flyers and we'd be doing all kinds of things for ourselves. Then we'd take the subway home together to Brooklyn Heights.

Speaker: Do you believe you have a guardian angel?

Speaker: Yes, I do, actually. I wear my little, my little to ward off the evil spirits, my little evil horn. It's very Italian. Italians by nature are superstitious and my father was superstitious and paranoid. I do believe I have a guardian angel because I've had a few close skirmishes in my time. The way Willard and Marie died was very sad. Willard died of a broken heart. He was devastated beyond your wildest imaginings. Then he died two days later.

[music]

There's an angel right there. There's another one up there. There's something very comforting about angels.

[music]

Billy: Then I was reading the Tibetan book of the dead. The Evans-Wentz version and there's one section that said about controlling thought. Imagine as a thought, comes into your mind and capsule it. I was visioning a thought coming in and I then made it into a capsule and it floated right in front of me across my mind. I realized that was the first time I had ever controlled the thought. It taught me how to manipulate thought in the sense an artist would.

If you're going to go into the afterlife with any degree of control, you have to understand that all mental factors and function are illusion and fantasy, and they just dance around all the time and that's not you, it's a negative factor usually. It's like if someone dies, it's a tragedy or you try not to die or you don't want to die or you're afraid of dying, but I don't think artists are like that. I think artists simultaneously absorb all of the philosophy of the cultural world simultaneous with the aesthetics of it and are aware simply through the poetic sense of their mind, the mind of an artist, of the eternal factor. They know that this physical life experience is just one of their paintings, one painting.

[background noise]

Well, the first impression I had of Marie, the first thing I thought of was a character from American movies from the '30s, Marie Dressler, she was a comedian and she played Tugboat, Annie and her husband Wallace Beery, who was the Tugboat captain and reminded me of Willard Maas. There was this perfect couple from American 1930s movies. All of a sudden this was like Willard and Marie were these people and they were living in this great house, which I did go over to one time with Gerard and Andy. It was just like the house that Wallace Berry and Marie Dressler lived in, in their tugboat.

I thought she would like Tugboat Annie and it turns out she was. She's very, very generous, very rambunctious, and intended to experience everything that could ever be experienced. There were almost an extinct species from an old-world culture.

[music]

Speaker: They have great designs on their backs, like skeletons swimming in the water because it's like falling down into the sky.

Speaker: You haven't vertigo?

Speaker: No, I had vertigo once. I thought I was at death's door. It was so scary. It was so scary. You lose complete control of yourself. First of all, completely takes over. You do not have any choice in the matter. The room was spinning like this. Like it was just zoom, zoom, and I'm like, I was having a practice run. Well, it was the closest thing I came to thinking about death. The doctor told me, he said, "If you ever have that vertigo attack again, you have to focus on something, try and focus on the wall or something. It slows down the spinning effect."

This is all brought on by an ear infection. It's also like being on a merry-go-round and the merry-go-round is not stopping. Eventually, it did stop. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know it was vertigo or whatever. Some people have vertigo attacks that last for hours. Luckily mine only lasted for an hour at the most. Well, that's beautiful.

Do you remember that Willard and Marie had what was called a bird in Paradise? It was like a taxidermy bird of paradise. Excuse me. In a glass dome in the living room. I bought one when I was up in Hudson, New York, the weekend before last, it's a small one. It was like a real story going on. That was a dead bird that was supposed to be a dead bird and the other birds were supposed to be live birds.

There's this whole dynamic happening in this beautiful bird in the dome. What I want to do is I want to surround myself with beautiful objects, just beautiful things that I don't even have to look at, that I just mentally know that they're there. You know what I'm saying? Also, it's by buying that bird in the dome, it reminds me of my connection with Willard and Marie because they had one you see, it's a nice feeling.

[background noise]

[music]

Speaker: [unintelligible 01:27:38] to you. I'm still trying to adjust, what is going on here. Okay. I think [unintelligible 01:28:09] . I do not remember how I met Marie and Willard. Her films were about nothing, about nothing. Like lyrical form, just some little feeling, little emotion, little image. Lithuanian religion in the past before Christianity was imposed by the Kings of Lithuanian and people, but Pantheist. They were in nature. Their gods were flowers and trees and the moon and the sun, pantheistic .

There is a lot of that, I think, in Marie. Whenever I met Marie, we felt somehow very, very close because I did not know that she was of Lithuanian origin, but for actor for quite some time. Then one day she came to me and started singing in Lithuanian a little children song. The children song that went like [foreign language] It's a children's song which usually was like singing and dancing and going a little around and around children changing hands and that kind of dance. The lyrics are very simple. [Foreign language] little girl. [foreign language] like a rose. Flower, rose. [foreign language] like in the flower garden. [foreign language] lily. [unintelligible 01:30:56] [sings] little girl, I'm like a little rose, like a lily in the flower garden.

The second [unintelligible 01:31:10] says, [foreign language] it's you have to know. If you not, it's another variation of, know how to attract a young man. It's [Sings] I must know, I must know how to attract a young man. I must know, I must know how to attract a young man.

[chuckles] That's a funny song, no?

[chuckles] I am sorry, it's a really hot day, I'm sweating, it's a very hot day here. There was so much love there. Poetry, and love and cinema.

[silence]

Oh, Marie.

[silence]

[music plays]

Toot, Toot, Tootsie, why

why, why, why.

oh, why Vietnam, why.

Toot, Toot, for God's sake.

[unintelligible 01:33:24] if all you have to do is get into the army.

What are your fights for, isn't that what you fight for.

Toot, Toot, Tootsie.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Oh, too soon.

It's goodbye.

It's goodbye.

Our world is beautiful and we love it, so why should we have that.

Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.

We all want it.

Why? Why? Why?

[crosstalk]

All these are the joys of the time that we loved.

[unintelligible 01:34:16] always has fun.

And everything is [unintelligible 01:34:20] we should have [unintelligible 01:34:24]

Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.

But why? Why? Why? Why?

Oh, where is the answer?

But we are the answer.

And we'll make it goodbye for you people.

Wake up.

Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.

[machine noise]

[music]

[01:37:15] [END OF AUDIO]