In 1995, the independent feature film I wrote and starred in was accepted to the Seattle International Film Festival. Finally, after ten years struggling in the theatre, I was clearly on my way to a long, satisfying, and integrity-adorned career as a film artist. My movie was fresh, bold and brilliant, as was my acting in it. In the spring of 1995 these notions had the certainty of blue skies in May.
Of course, it should be noted, this was Seattle, where the certainty of blue skies, in May or otherwise, can prove, well, somewhat illusive.
I received an invitation to a kick-off party in the SIFF hospitality suite on the twenty-somethingth floor of the downtown Sheraton. I went with my buddy, a then Seattle actor, who now lives and thrives in Hollywood, as so many then Seattle actors do. My buddy had starred in a different indy feature accepted by the festival. I had issues with his film’s script but mostly kept these qualms to myself. I was on the edge of tremendous success, you’ll recall, so I could afford to be beneficent.
My buddy and I had fun at the kick-off party, even though we didn’t really know anybody else, the others mostly being from outside Seattle and certainly outside the Seattle theatre scene. We ate the free food and drank the free booze and jabbered at each other passionately, all in the prodigious quantities that relatively young actors and playwrights are wont to indulge free food, free booze and passionate jabbering. We laughed louder and louder as we got drunker and drunker. We started getting odd looks. International film folk, as it turns out, are not as boisterous as Seattle show folk. Lesson learned. We started to feel out of place, and then, because it was still early in the evening, started to wonder why we were lingering. We were pleasantly and sufficiently lit to go find some other fun. We wound up at The 211 Pool Hall, then located on 2nd Avenue above the Speakeasy internet café.
In my memory, the 211 Pool Hall remains one of the most beautiful and inspiring interior spaces I have ever had the privilege to set foot in. This was a pool hall, plain and simple, but its plainness and simplicity evoked something profoundly holy. This was a sanctum. Nowadays most places with pool tables crank loud music. At the 211 there was no music at all. Nothing to hear but the murmur of conversations and the soft clicks of balls colliding, occasionally punctuated by the rifle crack of some shark’s powerhouse break, all echoing off the institutional blue-green walls and double high ceilings. For a poor artist working stiff like me, the 211 was somewhere I could go for two hours of serenity and a pitcher of beer, and still not be more than ten bucks lighter when I left.
I’m not sure if that night my buddy and I went was the same that Hans Altweis was obliged to wear the “I’m a Whistler” sign. The 211’s “No Whistling” rule was prominently posted and inviolable, along with “No Massé Shots.” Today, those of us lucky enough to know Hans, or at least his work as an incomparably gifted actor, won’t be surprised to learn that he was undaunted by such a silly-seeming rule; but fewer of us are lucky enough to have known the counter-waitress Annie, the 211’s squat but fierce enforcer. Annie was even less daunted by Hans than Hans was by silly rules, and thus it was he came to wear the “I’m a Whistler” sign around his neck for the remainder of his stay in the pool hall that night. To be completely accurate, and fair to Hans, I should note that he wore his cardboard penance with the kind of gracious grin that only a man supremely confident in his charms can display, especially in the face of a starkly righteous moral authority utterly unswayed by such charms.
But I digress. As I said, I’m not even sure it was that night that Hans joined us. All I know is we had a great time playing good cheap pool, drinking good cheap beer, and when we left I went home to my studio apartment to get some sleep because my director/producer and co-producer were flying into SeaTac the next morning.
I picked them up and drove them directly to the Sheraton to check into the festival, around eleven a.m. The woman behind the hospitality suite’s greeting desk must have recognized me from the night before because she stood up instinctively and pushed her palm out like a traffic cop, saying, “The bar is closed.” Of course, my colleagues found this deeply hilarious. It was pretty damned funny, come to think of it. The woman, however, never completely lost her look of panic, even as I explained that I was simply there to help my colleagues check in. Another woman joined her and they began to help us through the process. When I gave them my name for my set of festival comps, they hunted through their roster, but found nothing. They looked again. Nothing. I tried to be cool, even helpful. “Well, I must be on some sort of list. I was invited to the kick-off party last night.”
One of them went back into the bedroom being used as an inner office. A few moments later she came back with an older guy. A fervid whispering conference simmered among the three SIFF staffers. The guy, a supervisor ostensibly, consulted the roster himself. He asked me my name again. I spelled it. They consulted another list. He looked at me. He said my name, brow furrowed in a effort to remember something.
I said, “Right. That’s me.”
And then it dawned for the guy. He turned to his colleagues and said softly but loud enough for everyone in the room to hear: “I think I know what the problem is. He’s just the screenwriter.”
And there it was, the first shoe dropping through my blue sky dream of an illustrious film career.
John Hartl, then critic for The Seattle Times hated everything about my movie except for the soundtrack, which was written by Gordon Gano of The Violent Femmes (and features, on various tracks, the lead vocal contributions of John Kale, Frank Black, Lou Reed, P.J. Harvey, The Might be Giants and the front woman for the 4 Non Blondes.) Hartl made a point of singling out my script for excoriation. “Fatally overwritten” he called it. I took this to mean that if you didn’t leave the cinema at some point during the screening—to get, say, some popcorn, or use the rest room— my screenplay could quite literally kill you. Maybe he meant something different, but I found my interpretation more consoling. I mean, come on! “Fatally overwritten!?” That’s fucking power! My wife likes to assure me that this will be the inscription for my tombstone.
“Here lies Paul Mullin. Fatally overwritten.”
