Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast

My father, Patrick Hughes, left the priesthood in 1972 on the same day he married my mother. Then he became a documentarian, producing slideshows that exposed corporate greed, drove down stock prices of the most egregious multinational conglomerates and generally drew the ire of tall buildings and Wall Street.

His most popular title was Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast. It details the exploitation of sugar cane laborers in the Dominican Republic at the hands of Gulf+Western Corporation. Gulf+Western owned Paramount Pictures when this documentary was made in 1978, and we used to boo the mountain after Taxi and Mash.

The program features much of his photography, and the voiceover talent of Sonny DuFault, who is still working today.

Charlie Bluhdorn was the CEO of Gulf+Western during this time, and is the focus of this piece. While ever the capitalist, he did some quixotic things like greenlight Warren Beatty’s Reds. He showed up in Boston with some lawyer goons to try to intimidate my father and even sued him (to my father’s delight), but the National Council of Churches formed an amicus curiæ with my dad in court, and they were forced to back down.

My father died suddenly during a nap on October 23, 1980.

This documentary, produced by his one man operation called The Packard Manse Media Project, has sat in our attic for many years. I have spent the last few months restoring it.

I am the little boy in the yellow hat.

10 days, 9 interview subjects, 8 terrabytes, 7 holes exacto-ed into the cucoloris, 6 road boxes, 5 hundred miles driven, 4 assistants, 3 lights, 2 lenses and 1 mean camera.

It has been a very long time since The Bald Soprano opened. I directed two more plays after that, ate several more oysters and drank far too many martinis. Oysters taste like my childhood despite the fact that i had my first oyster at 33. I’m sitting in the baby’s room at my mother’s house (exactly which baby involves a hot rotation of my six nieces and nephews–I am currently the only childless sibling of the six of us, thus making me the current baby) surrounded by a slide scanner, a reel to reel tape player, a regular scanner, a mac, a PC, four hard drives and several toys. Dave Dowling remarked it must look like a Terry Gilliam movie, interacting as I am with the contraptions. He suggested a tiny monitor and a giant magnifying glass.

I now have 20 hours of footage, having interviewed 10 people for this movie:

My aunt JoAnn Hughes. My father's sister. A painter, and the gentlest and more benevolent presence you can imagine. The interview was at her house in Yarmouthport. As you can tell from my shirt, I was my own grip on this the first interview.

Anne Walsh and Bob Cunnane. They were second parents to me when I grew up on a commune in Stoughton. Anne is an ex-nun and Bob an ex-priest.

Howard Zinn at his home in Wellfleet. A few nights before our interview I went to see a screening of The People Speak--in which several actors and singer (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen who is insanely good in it and a chameleon--read documents and speeches from Howard's book A People's History of the United States, which ranks with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the pantheon of American documents.

Kip Tiernan at her little place on Commercial Street in Provincetown. Kip founded Rosie's Place in Boston, the first women's shelter in the country. She currently runs the Poor People's United Fund and has 'fought like hell for the living' for 83 years. I directed a play she wrote in 1997.

Paul Couming (with my mom and I). Paul Couming was a total badass in the anti-war movement. He took part in countless actions and was spirited into the Paulist Center for a three day stand off with the FBI when he refused to acknowledge the draft. We talked for five hours. On the left is my beloved cucoloris that I cut the night before the interviews started.

Floyd McManus. At his home in Acton. Floyd was in the seminary with my dad and was assigned to the Paulist Center along with him. He and his wife Joanne were both high school principals in their life after the Paulist Center. In the recording of the wedding, my dad is thrilled Floyd's returned for the celebration.

My godmother Christine Trufant. Christine is probably the biggest reason I stuck with directing after high school. She took me to a play every month for my entire teen years. And her interview was spectacular.

Last but certainly not least, Anne Tobin, who lived on the Manse (the "commune") when i was growing up and was the only female member of the Team ministry at the Paulist Center. She used to write greeting cards and her top seller said "Your ship will come in... but you'll be at the train station."

All of you who took part I thank you eternally. Particular my three assistants Lewis Wheeler, Chris Bannow, Norah Elges, and of course, my mom.

Lewis and the Scion. And my butt.

Chris Bannow at Howard's house. And my left half. See him now in my production of Speech and Debate at WHAT thru Sept. 27. This kid is seriously going places.

The wrap party. Lewis Wheeler and I and... I believe one of the Teamsters.

Pictures from The Bald Soprano at W.H.A.T.

The show I’m directing on the Harbor Stage of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater opened on Wednesday and here are some pictures:

 

Jonathan Fielding navigates the most awkward silence in Western theatre. I have cast him six times, and made him grow a mustache six times.

 

 

 

Amanda Collins finds she is trapped on stage.

 

Amanda endures the longest prologue to the shortest story ever told. Jonathan keeps up. Some a-hole pretends he can act. And Brenda Withers is pretty.

 

Lewis D. Wheeler finds that Shroedinger's Cat applies to language as well.

 

Dakota Shepard warns us not to trust narrative.

Brenda Withers knows much and says little. Her character, the opposite.

 

This is not in the stage directions, but is, shall we say, encoded.

Staging the discovery of a portal to another dimension is not, I have discovered, as difficult as I previously thought.

This was my dad

Act One Revised

The new structure for act one, scribbled in the Bomb Shelter Pub, Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

A new act one. Now my mom comes in at the end of this act. The big twist. Just when he sets his sights on staying, not going rogue. Whenever I do this structure stuff, there becomes necessary some serious conflating of facts. I can picture the slighted feeling of people who’s whole beings and stories will have to be combined with others who were also there and made whole as one composite. If it weren’t so absolutely necessary, I’d feel a little guilty about it.

Jami O’Brien is continuing to help me write this puppy and continuing to bring the genius she crackles with. Here’s an excerpt of an IM chat we had today…

Jami O’Brien: The quick stabs and facts and rolling footage of REDS works because the politics are all really backdrop for the love story. They stop and HAVE the love story scenes. This is a little different. It’s not JUST a love story. It’s a story about a passionate priest who falls in love and the stuff with the church, I think, isn’t just back drop. It’s an important part of the “journey.”
Brendan Hughes: And the love story here is, in a way, between him and the world, and how he learns to truly love it.
Jami O’Brien: Yes.
Brendan Hughes: so what is our twist in the end of the second act?
Jami O’Brien: that it’s actually about loving the world.
Brendan Hughes: yeah!
Jami O’Brien: that it’s actually about loving HER and loving her IS loving the world.
Brendan Hughes: that the truest love never quite fits in an extant doctrine we’ve set up for ourselves
Brendan Hughes: but requires invention…
Brendan Hughes: innovation…
Brendan Hughes: to accommodate it?
Brendan Hughes: that his true calling was to love one woman
Jami O’Brien: that’s pretty profound, i think.
Jami O’Brien: i’m sure it was pretty fucking profound to him.
Brendan Hughes: so vocation would be something he’d be aware of and draw strength from throughout the first two acts
Brendan Hughes: being born to do something
Brendan Hughes: a sense of fate
Brendan Hughes: that led him to the cloth
Jami O’Brien: it’s the same impulse that leads some (good ones) to become politicians or lawyers or social workers.

Oysters and Martinis for Every Meal

I’m on Cape Cod. I direct plays here in the summertime at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. I’m in the middle of rehearsing The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco.  It’s an absurdist romp based on language tapes, which imagines what people would be like if they actually spoke like they do in Berlitz examples.

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“I had eggs.”

“It is Wednesday.”

“The ceiling is above and the floor is below.”

Ionesco, while reading these and trying to learnEnglish, found that they contained spellbinding truths. Why are there seven days in a week? And so he wrote this play about the experience.

The whole thing ends in a cacophony of tropes and strange-isms. In my production, everything slowly turns white, slip covers are torn off couches in a fruitless search of Plato’s couch. Everything, ultimately blends into everything else as the mechanics of language fail them completely.

Today we realized that some of this has to do with the fact that in the romance languages it goes noun then adjective, whereas in English, it goes adjective noun. Thus in English, we hear the qualification first, then the thing itself. So everything enters our thought with a subjective coloring. So what can we trust? Thus the white. Thus the portal to another dimension discovered under a painting (which will actually be a camera which projects them looking into it onto their own backs in real time). Thus the bubbles machines raining down a wall of bubbles on the proscenium line.

Absurdism is a mindfuck. It’s so whimsical, yet has its roots in the atrocities of World War II. So, it’s horror-tinged laughter.

Come see it if you’re on the Cape.

Meanwhile, I got a new computer, an iMac, so that I could even open the footage of my mom. I then downloaded the software from the Red Camera website, and have been exporting little bits at a time (15 minutes takes 12 hours), so that I can actually start editing this stuff.

At long last, below you can see some footage. There’s no audio, and I recommend clicking the little “HD” button to really get a sense of it, and I also recommend looking at it on a Mac, since colors on PCs are so untrustworthy, but nevertheless, voila:

Sorry it’s been so long since I wrote. All settled in here on the Cape. Back in full effect.

A Bientot.

The first screenshot

Here’s the first image from what could be a shot in the ultimate film…

When I opened it at full size (and I had to buy a new computer to do it), I could only see the top left corner of the image. It’s huge.

Footage to follow when i master the codecs.

Dicey to the end.

You spend all your time and money getting a feature film off the ground. Risk everything. Every relationship. The dream comes true. It hits the theatres. Does well. Careers are launched. But even then, even then, you can still fall prey to hapless, random and absurdly brutal coincidences…

Visual evidence from my trip to Boston

On my first few nights in town, I was up til four in the morning sorting through old photographs that were jammed in brown paper bags into a closet and also correspondence that I’m kicking myself that i never looked at.

Two nights before the interview, I laid it all out in my mother’s office for her to sort through.

Which she dutifully did the next day. And said that it was very complicated and intense. So much so, she had to lay down for a while afterwards.

I, meanwhile, went off to meet the new love of my life, the Red Camera.

Later I set up the lights using a standing globe and the still camera to figure out what it might look like.

Which I eventually figured out by poring furiously over cinematography books.

I rented much more equipment than was actually necessary, which was a huge learning experience given how relatively cheap and also heavy the extra crap ended up being.

Then it was time (don’t worry, I didn’t frame her in the center!).

She hauled ass and talked for five straight hours.

She killed it. I was so proud. Thanks, Mom. Notice how the light gently flows across the bookcase. Fa-BAM!

I’m in the final descent…

… and i’m on line. How’s this for 21st century? Yesterday I put my mom on previously unattainable cinema quality video at relatively affordable prices, and today I file my taxes electronically from 35,000 feet above Kenosha, Wisconsin (where renowned motivational-speaker Kevin Rich lives).

I learned many things about my parents in the last few days, not least of which is how absolutely badass they were. My father arrived at the Paulist center and on his first day set about unscrewing the kneelers.

He only wore the priest outfit (habit?) three times in his entire career as a priest.

My mother had a number of Jane Doe arrest warrants out on her and an FBI dossier  tall as a shot glass.

My father arrived at the seminary, realized how boring it would be, and immediately began building a boat. He once sailed to Nantucket using only a roadmap for navigation. A roadmap. That’s 25 miles out to sea. I’ve done that trip and there is a long period of water in every direction.

They also had several close calls before they actually kissed, and had any of them happened, had phones not rung at the oddest of moments, i would be alive to blog about it, so to speak.

My mother is one of the most articulate human beings wandering this planet’s crust, and soon i will be able to prove that to you (with snippets) in this very space.

Stay tuned, amigos. And hola once again, Los Angeles.

Once Were Dowling should be at the gate. I’ll take him out to dinner for picking me up.