Still from Variety.
As many people know, ghosting began as a dating term meaning abruptly cutting someone off without warning or explanation. It is not peculiar to dating either as there is professional ghosting too. I hope not to have ghosted people, as I know it can be done unconsciously. It is dispiriting when people don’t get back to you. Especially after reaching out to keep a project alive about a country mired in conflict. This in my case is Sudan and a film still in development offering a clear and objective alternative to the violence meted out there daily.
One obstacle for my production has been investors burning so brightly to begin with then never getting back. I know this is nothing compared to what over 11 million displaced people are going through, including many I have met in the region in person. Bafflingly, newspapers also place themselves not to learn about Sudan. Three times last week I heard at the end of the line: ‘The person you are trying to reach is not available. Goodbye.’ I wasn’t even trying to reach a specific person. I was trying to reach a newspaper. Talk about professional ghosting.
There are good people out there. I am presently hoping a successful TV producer I know with a brand new book out is one of them. He has been over here in London from Hollywood. Long after I first knew him, he and his partner—and what became a highly successful production company—effectively created Reality TV. He was talking about this in a recent UK podcast, the first part of which revolved first around his latest plastic surgery and fabulously fixed teeth. Though baffled by this, I was obliged to remember that even the freshly cyberattacked Roger Stone has been perfectly happy in the past to have his implanted hair dyed on camera—I refer of course to Danish director Christoffer Guldbrandsen‘s film A Storm Foretold, in which the independent filmmaker even had a cardiac arrest on camera making it.
My favourite moment of the podcast—aside from tender mention of my friend’s father in the Battle of the Atlantic—was the improbable talk of late English satirist and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge having once railed against TV, and how print, according to the podcast host, was more interactive and long-lasting than TV. My friend successfully refuted this, arguing that TV was a profoundly more revolutionary tool—and why does one media have to be better than the other, he asked?
Because I had known this person all the way back when he was a musician in New York’s Lower East Side—‘before money was trending,’ as he so neatly put it—I felt I better get in touch by email, updating him on my Sudan film and saying I was still looking for backing but had at least been formally guaranteed transmission by a major public broadcaster, who know my work and have bought it in the past: ‘I just have to find the money to complete it,’ I said, adding that the production in order to survive could benefit from any short-term help whatsoever (PayPal: pbach@btinternet.com). I haven’t heard back from him yet. Do you think he is ghosting me?
If there is one thing I feel even less comfortable about than film financing, it is patent aggression. War, naturally, comes under this banner. But I see a lot of passive aggression elsewhere and wish I could retire from ruction altogether. Even in formal correspondence there exist increasing background grunts of one-sidedness. In the mistaken and tiresome contemporary belief that there are only ever two sides to each and every issue, many of us I have noticed have become far too quick to register our own. I suppose I am not talking about the plain rights or wrongs of everyday hell but those murky areas where lurk even more more insidious arguments.
Even my recent surgeon remarked on the giant schism that he sees developing every day between polar opposites. As a result, perhaps like him, I find myself craving the company of people without neat allegiance. Even a 360-degree shower of arrows from all directions feels somehow better than something composed of only two parts. In Sudan for example there are in fact five fighting factions—two major and three so-called minor. Surely we banish nuance and complexity at our peril.
On a less vexed note, I watched Betty Gordon’s 1983 underground movie Variety last week. There is one moment when the lead character Christine—played by Sandy McLeod, an actual downtown continuity expert when I first came to New York—offers her pack of Marlboro to a colleague as barter for a fifteen minute or so break, keeping a couple of cigarettes for herself. (She is working as a ticket seller in a seedy 48th Street movie house.) The gesture immediately reminded me of just how inexpensive things were back then, indeed sending me right back to when people could ‘live’.
At the time, low-budget movies got made and created followings. No-budget movies too. Everyone was scraping around for meaning without having to dig too far. (A lot of the best seeds lay in the shallowest of soils.) It wasn’t ordinariness killing joy, it was lack of imagination. It wasn’t predictability, it was disregard for the possible. No one, it seemed, was trying to over-impress. No one dangled wealth as a carrot. The best clothes were—and still are—second-hand. All of us, if you like, were a mess.
I had also forgotten that the screenplay was written by Kathy Acker (though based on a Bette Gordon story). Okay, it lost me at times this time round. Some of the paeans to porn seemed lifeless, though that may have been their point. But oh how New Yorkers used to admire the likes of Kathy Acker, I was remembering, having attended several of her readings at St Mark’s Church on East 10th Street. This was some forty years or so before she became a pet again for one or two members of the literary bourgeoisie over here in England.
I also noted in the film Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller—‘I don’t care if people don’t have money,’ Mueller’s character says intuitively. I used to love seeing them around SoHo, NoHo, and the East Village during the early to mid-Eighties. (This just so happened to be when RFK Jr was being busted for smack.) To me, Goldin and Mueller felt powerful—Goldin still is with her activism against the Sacklers; Mueller died aged 40 in 1989. Together, I can’t help but now think, they would have eaten your Andrew Tates or Incel guys for breakfast.
Finally, there was an oddly reminiscent scene in the film at Yankee Stadium which also took me right back, this time to a cold afternoon in the Bleachers—section 39 in the old stadium—with UK cartoonist Charles Peattie, a talented man I have mentioned here before with me in the Bleachers. Yet again I was reminded that by watching it how the past really is another country.
However, in the strangest of ways, I also realised, it never ghosts you. The past always gets back. Furthermore, as once again my old New Yorker friend pointed out to me on the subject of ghosting—if people don’t get back to you, it’s because they don’t want to speak to you.
