‘Dennis Cooper’s second novel composed of animated gifs shows him progressively in command of the gif-fiction hybrid medium he first invented in 2015 with his novel Zac’s Haunted House and its more expansive follow up, the short works collection Zac’s Control Panel. In Zac’s Freight Elevator, Cooper’s employment of the gif as a language-like material is increasingly complex, poetic, and thrills-packed on the surface level, while, at the same time, offering adventurous readers a more bounteous, clear-cut, and easily accessible narrative.’ — Kiddiepunk Press
Violations: An Evening of Interpretive Readings of Dennis Cooper’s GIF Novels convenes a small handful of author Cooper’s closest friends, allies, and artists whose work he admires to imagine what it might mean to “read aloud” from these GIF texts. Cooper will emcee the evening, and a discussion will follow the readings.
The lineup for this evening includes: M. Lamar Dorothea Lasky Yvonne Meier Aki Onda Richard Hell Chris Cochrane with Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Niall Jones
The presenting artists work across a spectrum of practices and include poets, musicians, choreographers, and dancers. While the program seeks to draw attention to the vulnerability of artworks produced through social media, it will also celebrate the highly anticipated release of Cooper’s third GIF novel, Zac’s Freight Elevator (on Kiddiepunk Press), which was temporarily lost when the blog was deleted. Each artist has been invited to choose material from any of the three GIF books and do whatever they’d like with that content so as to perform a “reading” of it—in whatever sense they interpret such a task.
Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 for New Museum members.
Some background on Cooper’s ordeal with Google was provided in a recent Change.org petition: “On June 27th, 2016, the blog and personal Gmail account of writer and artist Dennis Cooper were deleted by Google for reasons that the company has failed to disclose, beyond a generic reference to a terms of service violation. This apparent act of censorship has met with widespread disbelief and outrage, and has been covered by Roxane Gay in the New York Times, by The New Yorker, PEN America, The Guardian, artnet, Artforum, and other publications around the world. For over a decade, Cooper’s blog was a central Internet gathering place for fans of underground, subversive, queer, and experimental art and writing. It was a place of community and mutual support for an array of readers, writers, and artists, queer and straight, young and old.” Only after the Change.org petition and pressure from the publication of the articles mentioned above did Google finally agree to meet with Cooper’s lawyers; they subsequently released his content back to him earlier this fall. Cooper has since reestablished his blog at denniscooperblog.com.
“Violations” is a response to Google’s recent deletion of author Dennis Cooper’s blog (for “violations of terms of service,” without further explanation), and a celebration of the innovations in writing represented by a series of GIF novels he drafted there. In a recent article for the New Yorker concerning the Google controversy, Jennifer Krasinski described Cooper’s approach to these novels: “Thinking of [GIFs] as language, Cooper places them together, stacking them or opposing them to create a story—and, in so doing, effectively forging a new form of fiction.” While the contents of Cooper’s blog were eventually returned by Google, the situation prompts urgent reflection on the borderlines of trust, interpretation, and freedoms of speech at stake between users of social media and the corporations who provide such services.
Co-presented with PEN America as part of New Museum’s Fall 2016 R&D Season: DEMOCRACY
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Blake Butler: What gave you the idea of writing a novel using only animated GIFs?
Dennis Cooper: The GIF novel evolved from this thing I was doing on my blog where I would create these tall stacks of images — maybe 70 to 120 of them — that illustrated a particular theme or idea. I began introducing GIFs into the stacks, and then I became so interested in GIFs that I started making all-GIF stacks. That’s when I started to notice all these really curious, unexpected things were happening in them and between them when they were combined.
So I started experimenting with that, trying to create really deliberate effects and to organize the accidental things that were happening. Finally, I got the idea to make fiction pieces out of them. That idea excited me, partly because, as much I love writing language-based novels, I’ve always wanted to submerge the story/characters/plot much deeper within the novels’ structures than I’ve been able to. The closest I’ve gotten was with The Marbled Swarm where the immediate story and characters are just templates of and secret entrances to this whole substructural world existing inside the novel. But they were still there, hogging the novel’s top level.
With a GIF novel, I could see the possibility of those things being built on the bottom, and that the structure and style and trickery in which they were imbedded could be the dominant aspect.
BB: It’s kind of strange how distinctly ‘readable’ the chain of GIFs in the novel is, despite being all image-based. How did you begin to construct the feel of a story underlying the organization of those stacks?
DC: I think the animated GIF is a super rich thing, mostly unintentionally? For the novel, I thought of them as these crazy visual sentences. But unlike text sentences, they do all the imaginative work for you. They render you really passive. They just juggle with your eyesight, and you’re basically left battling their aggressive, looped, fireworks-level dumb, hypnotizing effects to see the images and the mini-stories/actions they contextualize. I think, ultimately, they’re mostly rhythms, or they reduce their imagery and activity, etc. to illustrative components of these really strict rhythmic patterns that turn the eye into an ear in a way.
My idea is that if you make a novel out of them, the visuals in the individual GIFs can serve double duty in the same way that the instrumentation and vocals in music samples do. They become just the texture of the loop’s rhythm, and that somehow seems to isolate the GIFs’ content from their source material. When you combine and juxtapose the stacks, if you do it carefully, you can break or disrupt their individual rhythms in a way that makes their imagery either rise to the surface or become abstractions. Basically, you can then use their content and appearance as sets and actors and cinematography in a fiction. They can hold their references, if you organize them to do so, and you can use those associations to create short cuts to some idea or emotion you want to get across, or they can become quite malleable and daydream-like, or you can empty them until they’re just motions that are as neutral as a text.
The really exciting thing for me is that the narratives can be as unrealistic or abstract or senseless or trivial or abject or unreadable as you want, and they will always remain inherently pleasurable.
BB: You are a super intense mapper and organizer with your novels, so I was constantly looking for keys to the system, things that linked the project throughout. Is the inspiration of these thru-ways all gut, or gut at first and then figuring the gut out and building outward? Or something else entirely?
DC: It started with a series of motifs or even of things I wanted to use. For instance, I initially wanted there to be a through-line involving earth moving equipment. So I just set off in search of related GIFs. Basically, I just did what I think you can only do—use keywords plus the words “animated GIF” in a general Google image search, and also on Giphy, Tumblr, etc. And then I would add in adjectives to try to get into the less public recesses where GIFs reside. There weren’t very many interesting earth moving equipment GIFs, but I found other motifs in the garbage that ended up contextualized in that category, and those were useful and ended up mutating the original motif. It’s not really very different than the way I write text novels because I always construct dense subsystems in my novels involving motifs and images that work together via what I call “internal rhyming” of different sorts. The main difference formally is just that you’re limited by online resources with a GIF novel rather than being limited by your imagination when it’s text.
Long story short, making the novel involved a weird and excitingly difficult combination of working in an extremely planned out way and also kind of in an extremely intuitive way too. Sometimes gut came first, sometimes it was the opposite, and often it was simultaneous. This form is really new to me, so talking about it feels quite raw.
Di Mattia Coletti: You shrugged off the written word in favour of image-based works: was that a conscious effort on your part? A statement, perhaps – a final act of distrust towards verbal language?
DC: Ah, kind of. But I mean, I’m not really abandoning literature, I’m working on a text novel right now. The things is, I’ve always been a writer – I always wanted to be a writer – but I’ve always been frustrated with the limitations of it. There are many things in fiction that I’m not interested in – I’m not interested in plot, I’m not interested in stories, I’m not interested in character-develpment stuff. I’ve always used those things as devices. I did a book a few years ago called The Marbled Swarm and I was extremely happy with it, because it was the first time that I was ever really able to take the plot and story and characters and really submerge them; so they’re not on the surface, they’re not the main thing, it’s like a very complicated puzzle. And it felt like I had reached a sort of peak with it, so I needed to take a break.
I got very excited about GIFs and started working really hard and then finally came out with Zac’s Haunted House. I liked it, but I felt I could go further with it, so I started working and came out with Zac’s Control Panel; which I think it’s better, I think the pieces in there are much more sophisticated. It’s not a novel, they’re short stories, poems, documentaries…
DMC: In which way(s) is Zac’s Control Panel an improvement on its predecessor?
DC: With Zac’s Haunted House I was still figuring out what worked and what didn’t work. I feel it has a bit of a punk quality, because I was still in the process of figuring out how the visual thing worked – it’s assaultive, it has little things going on, things falling and rising, I tried to think of it as an elevator falling; it doesn’t have rest, it doesn’t have beauty. With Zac’s Control Panel I started working with things that were more subtle, just about beauty and poetry, and I realised that I could do it without bringing in the transgressive material – I do use it sometimes but some of them are actually very simple, like this one is about the wind, it’s just like how the wind works. So for me they have a much broader range, and what’s going on between the gifs is much more carefully finessed. And I was hoping to keep going on with them – I still make them, they still interest me – but I think I’ve gone almost as far as I could go with it, which is a bit disappointing, but there’s only so much you can do with gifs. I’m working on a new gif novel, Zac’s Freight Elevator, and it’s the best work I’ve managed with the material yet, and I think that will probably be it as far as working seriously as a writer with gif. I mean seemingly, but who knows.
DMC: Are they harder to control than words?
DC: You can’t change gifs – well I guess you can, but I can’t – so I was able to just completely concentrate on organising and editing, not generating. I mean, I had ideas, each one of those was generated by an idea, I would search for particular things, I would think “I want this” and I would search and search and search, but very often I couldn’t find it and I found something kind of like it and then I’d have to completely reinvent what I had planned to do because I couldn’t find the gif, the gif didn’t exist. So it’s a very complicated process in terms of constructing and making them work, because I’m not able to rely on an original idea that can stick, I have to constantly keep revising the way I want to do it. I’m a slave to the gifs.
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TESSERACT: -teaser- réappropriation du projet Zac’s Haunted House par Dennis Cooper.
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p.s. Hey. Today’s the day my new GIF novel is born. I swear it’s fucking awesome, and it’s totally free, so, even if you don’t end up thinking it’s awesome 🙁 at least you can get it and decide what you think for nothing. So, do that? Thank you.
‘Steve Buscemi doesn’t loom into view. He’s not a looming kind of guy. On an overcast day in June, as I waited on the designated corner of Union Square to meet him for the first time, I called his assistant. “He’s late,” I said. “Where is he?” Buscemi, it turned out, was standing thirty feet away from me. Round-shouldered and wafer-thin, in a gray work shirt, black chinos, and a weathered denim jacket, with a baseball cap pulled tightly over his forehead, he was virtually invisible in the crowd.
‘Five feet nine and forty-seven years old, Buscemi could be almost anybody-or everybody. Give him some tattoos and a mane of shaggy hair, and he’s the squirt-gun-toting heavy-metal doofus in Airheads (1994); put him in a blue sequinned dress, a red pageboy wig, and high heels, and he’s the world-weary transvestite taxi-dancer in Somebody to Love (1994); slick back his hair and give him a pair of brown loafers, like the ones he wore as Tony Blundetto in The Sopranos, and he has the gaunt, retro lounge-lizard look of the director John Waters. (In fact, the likeness is so uncanny that Waters used Buscemi’s image on his Christmas card one year.)
‘Nothing about Buscemi’s physical presence suggests the poetic lineaments of masculine film glamour. He is pale, almost pallid-as if he’d been reared in a mushroom cellar. In a certain light, he can look cadaverous. His eyes are large and bulgy, with a hint of melancholy. When he smiles, his mouth displays a shantytown of uneven, uncapped teeth. And yet that unprepossessing ordinariness is what makes Buscemi captivating as a performer. It gives him the unmistakable stamp of the authentic, and it helps to explain his emergence over the past two decades as an icon of independent films. (Buscemi himself understands the value of his rumpled looks. When his dentist suggested fixing his teeth, he told her, “You’re going to kill my livelihood if you do that.”) “Steve is the little guy,” says the director Jim Jarmusch, who cast Buscemi in his 1989 film Mystery Train. “In the characters he plays and in his own life, he’s representing that part of us all that’s not on top of the world.”
‘Buscemi’s persona is understated, opaque, bewildered, ironical. “You seem a little stoned. What are you on?” someone says to his character in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2000). He is in the hospital after having been betrayed, humiliated, and wrestled to the ground in a grocery store. “High on life,” he replies. “Steve’s a visitor in the world,” the director Alexandre Rockwell, who has worked with Buscemi on five films, said. “His body, his face-everything around him is whirling, but you always feel in Steve a stillness, almost a calm.” This stillness plays variously as anxiety, disconnection, and threat. Sometimes, a single character draws all three into a sort of trifecta of tension, like the silent hit man Mr. Shhh, in Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995). Buscemi’s look is deadbeat; his sense of humor is downbeat. He can play loss for laughs-in The Impostors (1998) he was Happy Franks, a suicidal cabaret singer sobbing his way through The Nearness of You — or he can play it for real.
‘All the characters whose stories Buscemi chooses to tell in his films share the same predicament: they are stuck in a purgatory from which they may or may not escape. The narratives compulsively return Buscemi to the unhappiness of his blue-collar youth; at the same time, they are a reminder of his triumph over it.’ — John Lahr
_______________ Interviewed by Quentin Tarantino from BOMB
Quentin TarantinoNow, explain to the people how you came into acting. You were a fireman. When did you know you could quit firefighting and start acting full time?
Steve Buscemi It wasn’t until after Parting Glances came out and I was able to get an agent and then start to make a living.
QTYou took a leave of absence and then decided not to go back? You put all your eggs in the same basket?
SB Yeah, my time was up and I had to go back, and the movie hadn’t been released yet, but I thought I just can’t go back. I really felt like Parting Glances was an important film. The character I played in that was probably the best character I will get to play. I just couldn’t imagine that this film wouldn’t get attention.
QTThat happens in a lot of these independent films, especially if you have never heard of the people who are in them, they make the directors known, but the actors don’t get anything. No one’s ever seen those guys who were in She’s Gotta Have It again. No one’s ever seen anyone else in Parting Glances again.
SB That’s not true. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they’re not getting work.
QTYou’ve worked in low-budget independent films and big budget commercial films. In the Soup, cost $800,000 to make, but when you were actually shooting the budget was $300,000. And you had just come from doing Billy Bathgate, which was this $50 million production. What was the difference between the two?
SB In Billy Bathgate, Dustin liked to rehearse on camera, so we’d end up doing a lot of takes. Before we’d even do the take, we might discuss the scene for a long time. The crew would be waiting around outside and we wouldn’t even be rehearsing the scene, just talking about it. Not like I had a lot to contribute to these discussions: I was a fly on the wall. Dustin Hoffman, Robert Benton, Néstor Almendros, it was fascinating to be there. They really took their time. Of course, the sets were elaborate, the food was excellent, the dressing rooms were nice. But, I don’t know if all that stuff makes a better film. It makes it all more comfortable, it’s nice to have the time to do it. In In the Soup, we tried to get things done in two or three takes. We did all our rehearsals on our own before we got there. We had to work long hours, there was no going back. When you are shooting a film like In the Soup, it gives you this incredible energy, this excitement that comes from knowing that we have to get this now. Sometimes the pressure of that bothers me. But other times it inspires me, you can’t stop and think, you are just forced to do the scene and do it right. You are forced to go on instinct more. To me, it’s a valid way to work.
QTYou have worked with a whole slew of directors, let me throw out some of their names and you give me little takes on them. Let’s start with the guy who more or less discovered you on film, the director of Parting Glances, Bill Sherwood.
SB Bill was a funny guy. He would give me very specific directions, almost line by line. And then say, “Steve, can’t you have a little spontaneity?” (laughter) Then we’d do another take and I’d be seething. It worked for that character. I don’t know if he was manipulating me intentionally, but it really did work.
QTOkay, Abel Ferrara’s King of New York.
SB I was the last guy cast for that. I remember calling the costumer to go over what I was going to wear. I said, “What do you have in mind for me?” and she said “Well, we had in mind that you were black.” I was like the token white. I would try on all these hats and Abel would come in and say, “Try on another hat, that’s not working.” We finally came up with something, but I don’t believe that he was ever really satisfied. As a consequence, I think he would position me in the back of the room.
QTWasn’t there one shot in King Of New York that you didn’t know you were being filmed for?
SB Yeah, Christopher Walken’s character was just out of jail. I thought Abel had placed me on the side of the room so that I was out of the frame. I don’t even remember being in character. And then I saw the film and I was like, “Oh my God, I was seen that whole time?” (laughter)
QT How did he direct you and Larry Fishburne and choreograph the action?
SB He lets you feel it out for yourself. He says, “What’re you gonna do here? What’re you gonna do?” “Well, I thought I’d do this.” And he’d say, “Yeah, yeah, all right. Good, good. Do that, do that,” or, “Don’t do that. Do that other thing you were doing.” He’s always moving, he’s like a kid on the set. He gets excited. He says, “All right! This is gonna be great!” I mean when he first called me about doing the movie, I was on my way to LA to see what was happening out there. I had my ticket; I was leaving like the next day. He called me the night before and I hadn’t read the script. He described to me that first scene and that’s what made me want to do the movie. (laughter) It’s just the way he is. He’s just fun to be around, you know?
QT You’ve worked two movies with the Coen Brothers: Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink.
SB I auditioned for Miller’s Crossing twice. The second time they said, “Well, you still say it the fastest.” And I was hired. (laughter) They’re really fun to work with. Joel always gave the first direction. But Ethan is right there and adds to it.
QTDoes Ethan talk to you or does Ethan go through Joel?
SB He tells it to me with Joel there. The two of them are always together. I didn’t feel like I was getting conflicting information. They really complement each other. They get such a kick out of actors. In Barton Fink, I was doing this scene where I was picking up the shoes to put on the cart, you know, and then like I hear a noise and kind of stop, and then continue. They had me do that six or seven times because they enjoyed that scene: (laughter) “Well, we got it but let’s do it again.” And after that, “Let’s just do it one more time.”
QTMartin Scorcese.
SB I felt like I had already worked for him because on Last Temptation he brought me back four times. He had already cast that movie but there was a question of whether all the apostles were available. Each time he had me reading a different apostle. Then I did New York Stories. He gave me a lot of room. When people see New York Stories, they assume my character, a performance artist, is an asshole because of what Nick Nolte’s character says about him. But I didn’t play it that way at all, and neither did Scorcese. That whole monologue I did was something I wrote. I wouldn’t do my own material in a film if I thought it was going to be made fun of. It was funny, I never quite knew where Scorcese was on the set. I would hear him yell, “Action!” but I could never find him. He’d come over after each take and maybe say something and then disappear. Next thing I knew, “Action!”
QTOkay now, Jim Jarmusch.
SB He used to come see my partner Mark Boone Junior and I perform at these small performance spaces and clubs.
QTSo you were already friendly with him?
SB Well, we weren’t really friends at that point. But he would come to the shows and we would hang out. Working with him on Mystery Train, I got to know him a lot better. He would make up scenes that weren’t in the movie for us to rehearse, to explore our characters. Stuff would happen in those improvisations that he would incorporate into the film. He trusts actors and casts people because he wants them to give more. He wants that input. Even on the set, we would do the takes as written and then sometimes have a take where he’d say, “All right. If there’s a line you want to change or something you want to add, do it.”
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Bill Sherwood Parting Glances (1986) ‘Parting Glances was the first movie about AIDS, made before Longtime Companion but around the same time as the television movie An Early Frost. But I never saw Parting Glances as an AIDS movie, just as a great character-driven New York film whose characters happened to be gay and living with AIDS. I didn’t see it as risky, because it was a wonderful part. I can’t see why anyone would turn it down just because the character, Nick, was gay. Nick is in a state of denial and shock about what he’s going through, and he doesn’t want to alter his lifestyle. It’s very important to him to keep working and not be treated as a sick person by his friends. At the same time, he feels his mortality and wants to re-establish that connection again with his former boyfriend, Michael, and let it be known that he loves him. This was an independent film and Bill had the creative freedom to do it as he wanted. Hollywood would have watered it down.’ — Steve Buscemi
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Jim Jarmusch Mystery Train (1989) ‘Like Jarmusch’s previous films, Mystery Train enjoyed a warm reception from critics. This was particularly evident at Cannes, where the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or and Jarmusch was commended for the festival’s Best Artistic Achievement. It was nominated in six categories at the 1989 Independent Spirit Awards: Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Jim Jarmusch), Best Director (Jim Jarmusch), Best Cinematography (Robby Müller), Best Actress (Youki Kudoh), and Best Supporting Actor (Steve Buscemi and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins).’— collaged
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Abel Ferrara The King of New York (1990) ‘King Of New York was released during the most productive part of Abel Ferrara’s career so far. Arriving a year after 1989’s Cat Chaser – a filmmaking experience Kelly McGillis found so dreadful that she shaved her head and vowed never to act again – and the infamous Bad Lieutenant in 1992, King Of New York ranks among the best of Ferrara’s movies, and undoubtedly one of the most interesting gangster pictures yet made. King Of New York also arrived at a unique time in American filmmaking. It was among the earlier (but by no means first) movies to prominently feature a hip-hop soundtrack, and appeared in US cinemas a year before Boyz N The Hood and New Jack City – movies which dealt with similar themes such as crime and drug dealing to a much more lucrative effect. Aside from the obvious draw of Christopher Walken in the lead role, King Of New York is noteworthy for its extraordinary supporting cast, including Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, Steve Buscemi and David Caruso – all of whom were largely unknown before this film, but would later go on to forge hugely successful careers.’ — Den of Geek
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Joel and Ethan Coen Barton Fink (1991) ‘Barton Fink won the Coen brothers the prestigious Palme d’Or when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. Starring John Turturro and John Goodman, with smaller roles filled by John Mahoney and Steve Buscemi, Barton Fink tells the strange tale of its titular character, a playwright who has just had his first major success on the New York stage, who reluctantly comes to Hollywood to write a script for a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Stuck in a dank room in an ominous hotel, he meets Charlie Meadows (Goodman), an insurance salesman who seems to embody the working class everyman whose story Fink is so anxious to tell, if not to actually hear.’— examiner.com
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Alexandre Rockwell In the Soup (1992) ‘In the Soup is a charming pipsqueak of a movie, a playful film of ragged and shaggy appeal. All its virtues are small-scale except for one, because inside this little picture is the year’s largest, most robust pieces of acting, a performance that no one can resist, Aldolpho Rollo least of all. Aldolpho (Steve Buscemi) is Soup’s would-be hero. A timid, idealistic, embryo film director, he lives in a low-rent, walk-up tenement in Manhattan, a poster from revered Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky on his wall and dreams of glory in his heart. Someday he’ll make his movies, someday tour buses will visit his apartment and a plaque on the wall will commemorate his scuffling days. Someday maybe even Angelica (Jennifer Beals), the beautiful girl next door, will do more than snarl at him. But for now, with his erratic landlords, the Bafardis, on his case, what he really needs is money.’ — LA Times
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Quentin Tarantino Reservoir Dogs (1992) ‘Tarantino’s original plan was to make Reservoir Dogs on a minimal budget on 16mm film, using friends in the cast, with himself playing Mr. Pink and regular producer Lawrence Bender as Nice Guy Eddie. Tarantino was introduced to the late Tony Scott in 1990 by a mutual friend, one of the director’s employees, and Scott read both True Romance and Reservoir Dogs. Originally, Scott wanted to make Reservoir Dogs, but was told by Tarantino that he’d earmarked it for his own full directorial debut. Scott ended up buying the True Romance script for $50,000, which Tarantino planned to use to make Reservoir Dogs. However, Bender’s acting teacher’s wife was a friend of Harvey Keitel, and gave him the script. Keitel became interested, and ended up attaching himself to produce and star as Mr. White, enabling Tarantino and Bender to raise as much as $1.5 million for the budget. As a result, the young writer-director was accepted into the Sundance Institute in 1991 (see photo), and travelled there with actors including Steve Buscemi to perform scenes from the script in front of advisers including Terry Gilliam and Two-Lane Blacktop helmer Monte Hellman. Gilliam is, as a result, thanked in the credits, while Hellman was so impressed that he attached himself as an executive-producer to the film.’ — Indiewire
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Jonathan Wacks Ed and His Dead Mother (1993) ‘There are some actors who don’t have to try very hard to convince you that whatever they say is the truth and the things they do are not out of character. Steve Buscemi is an example of an actor with this ability. Regardless of whether he is playing Carl Showalter, Seymour, or Mr. Pink, one never doubts that he is a petty thief, a record collector, or a career criminal. In Jonathan Wacks’s film Ed and His Dead Mother, Buscemi plays a mama’s boy and we totally buy it. Buscemi doesn’t always alter the timbre of his voice or even his body language unless the role demands a complete transformation. Yet, he slides into his characters and makes it look effortless. Though I might not picture Buscemi wearing overalls and a red t-shirt on my own, he dons this very outfit at the end of the film and he doesn’t appear uncomfortable or incorrectly robed. He isn’t the only actor who is at home in his role. Ned Beatty and John Glover perform nicely as two individuals trying to influence Ed to the best of their abilities. With a strong cast and a “timeless” set design—half 1950s, half 1990s— Ed and His Dead Mother is an eccentric gem.’— Film Threat
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Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction (1994) ‘Buddy Holly the Waiter is a character in Pulp Fiction, played by Steve Buscemi. It is a cameo in which he plays a waiter in Jack Rabbit Slim’s.’ — wiki.tarantino
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Michael Lehmann Airheads (1994) ‘A desperate rock band looking for a break, holds a radio station hostage in this youthful comedy. All the three Airheads Chazz, Rex, and Pip really want is a chance to play their quirky music. While they play club gigs, they have yet to drum up interest from any record companies. No one will listen to their demo tapes. After Chazz is tossed out by his girlfriend Kayla, he decides that desperate times require desperate measures and plans to break into station KPPX and play their demo on the air. The break in is successful, but they receive a cynical welcome. This drives Chazz to the edge and he pulls out a large semi-automatic and hijacks the station. The hostages are unaware that the band’s weapons are simply water pistols. They attempt to play their tape but it is destroyed by a temperamental machine. After the police and media arrive, the Airheads finally get their brief moment in the sun. A bit of a mess, but one of Steve Buscemi’s best performances before hitting the big time.’— collaged
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Tom DiCillo Living in Oblivion (1995) ‘I wrote Living In Oblivion in a state of mind teetering somewhere between homicide and suicide. After the dismissive release of Johnny Suede it was extremely difficult to get my next script, Box of Moonlight financed. And so one night, after getting plastered on martini’s at my wife’s cousin’s wedding, I stumbled into the Idea; a series of events taking place right on the set of a no-budget movie. All the things that could possibly go wrong actually do. The film is really a love/hate letter about the mechanics of filmmaking. I love this business but at times it really does feel that the entire process of making a film is designed to drive you into an insane asylum. Just when some miraculous moment is blossoming to life in front of you the camera screws up and that fragile, fleeting glimmer of beauty is gone. Of course the opposite is also true. But on a no-budget film the “unhappy accidents” can drop you to your knees.’— Tom DeCillo
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Robert Rodriguez Desperado (1995) ‘With this sequel to his prize-winning independent previous film, El Mariachi, director Robert Rodriquez joins the ranks of Sam Peckinpah and John Woo as a master of slick, glamorized ultra-violence. We pick up the story as a continuation of El Mariachi, where an itinerant musician, looking for work, gets mistaken for a hitman and thereby entangled in a web of love, corruption, and death. This time, he is out to avenge the murder of his lover and the maiming of his fretting hand, which occurred at the end of the earlier movie. However, the plot is recapitulated, and again, a case of mistaken identity leads to a very high body count, involvement with a beautiful woman who works for the local drug lord, and finally, the inevitable face-to-face confrontation and bloody showdown.’— IMDb
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Joel and Ethan Coen Fargo (1996) ‘Beautifully shot and wickedly funny, Ethan and Joel Coen’s warped homage to their home state earned nominations for everything from the Palme D’or to the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film (won) to Academy Awards (won two). The film is at times quiet as falling snow, observational; then suddenly bloody and hysterical all at once. With pitch perfect performances from Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi and a silent but deadly Peter Stormare, Fargo is everything you could ever want in a black comedy.’— pajiba.com
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Steve Buscemi Trees Lounge (1996) ‘An impressive feature debut from indie icon Buscemi, a serio-comedy and character study of a barfly (played by Buscemi) and the entourage that frequents the same working bar day after day; John Cassavetes would have been proud of this film.’— collaged
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John Carpenter Escape from LA (1996) ‘Once again, our hero does the government’s bidding by dint of an implanted ”timer” (explosives in the original; a disease here). Plissken has to rescue the President’s daughter (A.J. Langer, from TV’s My So-Called Life) and retrieve a black box the feds need (like the audiotape in New York). Once in the city, he befriends a woman who is quickly, randomly killed (Season Hubley in New York, Valeria Golino in L.A.). There’s another tough guy (George Corraface), aided by another turncoat techno-weenie played by a hip actor (Harry Dean Stanton then, Steve Buscemi now). Zonked-out Peter Fonda has the Borgnine role, as a surfer dude who helps Snake out of a jam. If not for some jibes at political correctness and a wild cameo by Bruce Campbell (Ellen) as the surgeon general of Beverly Hills, the movie could just as easily take place in Schenectady.’— EW
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Robert Altman Kansas City (1996) ‘When I worked with Robert Altman on Kansas City [in 1996], he said he didn’t care if the film made a nickel. If he wanted it to be successful, he wanted it to be successful on his terms. And then he immediately corrected himself and said, “On our terms.” To me, it meant that he cares about the films he makes and he cares about the people he makes them with. It was a philosophy he had that I think is really good.’ — Steve Buscemi
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Joel and Ethan Coen The Big Lebowski (1998) ‘Even I thought it was a weird follow-up to Fargo, and I didn’t expect anything from it. I just thought, “These guys made a really fun movie, a great character, kind of, genre, you know, weird genres that kind of mixed, and that it was really fun.” It’s probably the film that I’ve done that people have seen the most. I mean the number of times people have seen it. And I guess that started happening about five years ago, when people started to come up to me—usually it was like college guys that would tell me that they and their friends would watch it every weekend, or they had seen it five times. And at first, I didn’t really believe it, you know they say five times… or seven times. But so many people would tell me that now I believe it.’— Steve Buscemi
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Michael Bay Armageddon (1998) ‘At one point during filming, Steve Buscemi mentioned to Bay that he was going to get dental work done. Bay convinced him that he had a “million dollar smile” and that he shouldn’t change a thing. Say what you will about Bay. That was a great decision.’— Film School Rejects
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Terry Zwigoff Ghost World (2001) ‘I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor. The Buscemi role is one he’s been pointing toward during his entire career; it’s like the flip side of his alcoholic barfly in Trees Lounge, who also becomes entangled with a younger girl, not so fortunately.’— Roger Ebert
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Pete Docter Monsters, Inc. (2001) ‘Monsters, Inc. is a 2001 American computer-animated comedy film directed by Pete Docter, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton were the executive producers. It was co-directed by Lee Unkrich and David Silverman, and stars the voices of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn and Jennifer Tilly.’ — IMDb
Monsters, Inc.’s Homage to Barton Fink
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Jim Jarmusch Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) ‘Parents need to know that this movie is nothing more than people sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about various things. This film has no plot and no story structure. It’s a series of vignettes, short scenes that are like little slices of life. There is no violence or sexuality and some profanity, but the content of the film is based on conversation of rather mundane experiences.’— Common Sense Media
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Tim Burton Big Fish (2003) ‘After walking through a scary swamp, Edward discovers the hidden town of Spectre, where everyone is friendly to the point of comfortably walking around barefoot. Their shoes can be seen hanging from a wire near the entrance. When he enters the town he is greeted by the Mayor and his wife. The Mayor has a clipboard that says Edward was meant to be in their town but he had arrived early. He also tells him of the poet Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi) who was also from Ashton. While there Edward has an encounter with a mermaid. She swims away before he could see her face. Edward leaves because he does not want to settle anywhere yet, but promises to the town mayor’s daughter Jenny (Hailey Anne Nelson), who developed a crush on him, that he will return. He believed that he was fated to be there someday.’— collaged
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Steve Buscemi Interview (2007) ‘Steve Buscemi’s career is an American spin-off of the sea change in acting wrought by Alec Guinness 50 years ago. Buscemi’s sourpuss “full-on human rat mode,” as Variety put it recently, ratchets down mythic-sized characters to everyday guys working their humdrum psychopathic cons in plain sight. His characters are the alchemy of turning tragedy into dark comedy. Buscemi stars in two new films, both of which premiered at Sundance this past January: Interview, which he also directed, and, 11 years after starring in Living in Oblivion, Tom DiCillo’s Delirious. Both films are about media corruption, with Buscemi playing journalists at opposite ends of the food chain. In Interview, a remake of the Dutch film made by Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a Muslim fanatic, he’s a serious journalist who’s been sent as punishment to interview a celebrity-fluff actress (Sienna Miller) and agonizes about being inside the room.’ — Film Comment
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Steve Buscemi on ‘Interview’
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p.s. Hi. I’m in NYC. I’ll be having a conversation tonight at 7 pm at the Museum of Modern Art with my collaborator the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and MoMA curator Thomas Lax if you’re there and want to come. If so, or if not, enjoy the restored Steve Buscemi Day.
Now available in North America 