Monument Valley

or Once Upon a Time at the Movies
by Douglas Brode

One of CNY's most prolific writers, both of fiction and non-fiction, is Doug Brode. An actor, a tv show personality, a writer, a professor, and an avid fan of film, Doug has investigated and written about such diverse personalities as Lee Harvey Oswald, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and Woody Allen. If you take a boy born in New York City as the world is moving on from the post-war era to the counterculture (or as Doug would suggest, Walt to Woodstock), put him in a movie theatre with a rapidly developing appetite for what movies have to "say," and sprinkle that with a fasciation with Westerns, culture, politics, and the "meaning" of it all - perhaps what you'd get is Doug Brode. But this reviewer would also note that the sheer size of Brode's oeuvre also indicates incredible scholarship and dedication to his art. He is on the shelves of mysteries, histories, graphic novels, biographies and speculative fiction. And more.

This latest venture, Monument Valley, take a near-inclusive range of his interests and passions and wraps them together in a story that is told in layer after layer after layer. It's the story of a young man, Daniel West, the script he writes, the film that's made of that script (by a John Ford-like character his friends call "Pop," and starring a John Wayne-ish leading actor), Daniel's documentary about the film, his father and mother, his loves and losses, more Hollywood-recognizable people, the counterculture, the Jewish experience in mid-century - an much, much more. Some of the characters are fictional renderings of personalities you'll recognize; some are products of the writer's personal life and/or imagination. And there are even nods to real events and odd little stories that might have had a deeper layer. The story unfolds on a number of levels, including a possible "murder" mystery that unfolds as all the other threads of the story are pulled and sorted, chapter by chapter. 

I asked the author a few questions about the meaning, the process, and the secrets hidden in such a towering undertaking.

TH: In most novels, if you take some time, you might be able to identify the author as one of the characters. Is there anything about your main character, Daniel West, that reflects you, the writer?

BRODE: That is partly true here. I’ve always wanted to write an autobiographical novel and share stories that actually happened, some pretty amazing, in my past. And others involving my family history. And the larger story of the Jewish Experience in America, what it is like to face anti-Semitism (subtle or sensational) every day. But I was never able to make that premise work to my satisfaction. I felt that a book based entirely on such anecdotes would be too self-indulgent, self-serving, so I put it aside. Then in time I came upon a far greater concept that I fell in love with and knew I would be able to write about objectively. The specifics of the story of the narrator, Daniel West, have nothing to do with myself. They are based on a critic-turned-filmmaker named Peter Bogdanovich. But to make this character three-dimensional, I needed to give him a back story. That’s where I come in. All the flashbacks, memories, etc. really did happen to me. But what Daniel West experiences in the 1968 story (the story of the making of the film/documentary) happened to Peter Bogdanovich. Daniel West is then a ‘collapsing’ of the two of us into a single narrator-figure.

TH: The Movies mean a lot to "Daniel West." They have also meant a lot to you, the author. Was your discovery of film similar to West’s? And what was it about film that so captured you?

BRODE: My father returned from WWII late in 1945; I was living with my mother and grandparents on Long Island and had to adjust to his abrupt entry into our household. I adored him at first glance as he stepped off the train; a returning hero. I soon learned that he loved The Movies. Westerns in particular. I can recall him taking me to see little ‘Oaters’ (as ‘B’ Westerns were called back then) with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy, before their appearance on TV a few years later. We would take the train from our small village into New York City. He introduced me to the magical metropolis where he had grown up. We’d catch “a show.” Then go to eat at the Horn & Hardart “Automat,” a self-serve cafeteria where you slipped coins into slots on the wall, then helped yourself to meals kept warm in little compartments behind glass windows. Then, at age five, he took me to see one of the great ‘A’ epics, “Red River.” At that moment I came to realize, at least on some primal level, what The Movies could at their most ambitious be. A father-son confrontation between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift worthy of The Bible, Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare. And such great novels as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden all of which I would eventually come in contact with. And, on a more pop-culture level, ‘Luke’ and ‘Annakin’ in Lucas’ STAR WARS trilogy.

TH: And it all began with a Western.

BRODE: An epic film. I could not imagine while watching in 1948, seated warmly beside my mentor/father, that, in time, my own adoration of my own father would dissipate into the kind of conflict and hatred that occurs between ‘Tom’ and ‘Matthew’ onscreen. It was as if RED RIVER revealed to a then-unsuspecting child what my own life would turn out to be, following what another author once referred to as “The Day the Loving Stopped.” That seemingly impossible moment when adoration transforms into enmity as the great light of bliss transforms in a single horrific moment into the darkest form of bitterness. Oedipus Rex, which you read in College Freshman English, re-imagined in the 20^th century.

TH: Your novel opens in 1968 as an old time Hollywood director and his likewise aged favorite star return to Monument Valley near The Four Corners in the southwest to make their final film together. With them is their young screenwriter ‘Daniel,’ who makes a documentary about ‘Nicholas Fuller’ and ‘Duke Shannon’ completing their last picture show. Does such a documentary exist?

BRODE: Absolutely! The film, still available, is called “Directed by John Ford.” When that great director sensed that he was dying, and that John Wayne was as well - . . . their previous films together included such towering masterpieces as ‘Stagecoach” and ‘The Searchers” (1956)—he suggested they head back together to their favorite site for filming. Peter Bogdanovich had just written a book about Ford based on The Auteur Theory: Films by a truly great director are not merely a collection of varied entertainments but form a true ‘oeuvre,’ a body of work that expresses his philosophy on life. Much as, say, Shakespeare’s plays do when taken together and studied for continuing themes and a developing study that is ideally suited to his world view, his ‘Vision.’ That’s when a popular entertainer crosses a thin red line and becomes a populist artist.  So Bogdanovich was allowed to tag along and make a movie about them making their final movie. I saw it at a Syracuse University Film Forum screening in 1971 and thought to myself: “Wow! Am I inspired to write a novel or screenplay about what might have occurred between the three. I’ll report what’s known to have happened while using my imagination to fill in the blank spots.

TH: The main characters are thinly- disguised versions of real people? (I guessed some of them to see if I was "reading" it anywhere nearly correct!)

BRODE: Which is called a "roman-a-clef" in literature and film. My director, "Nicholas Fuller," is a combination of John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Raoul Walsh, and Sam Peckinpah. All the little stories about crazy things that happen while filming are "real" and happened to one of them. Here they are collected together for a composite of those old-timers, "Duke Shannon" is, simply, John Wayne. I took the liberty of adding real people who were not there in 1968 but would enrich and expand the story. "Hannah" is modeled on Jane Fonda, who had chameleon-like just shed her Space Cadet sex symbol image, Barbarella, to become a self-styled radical for the Left. How much fun it was to create scenes in which she faces off with the ultimate war hawk, John Wayne.

TH: Which brings the Zeitgeist of that time – the late 1960s – into play.

BRODE: In my mind, 1968 was the year that changed everything in America forever. Our politics, our culture, our way of everyday living, our vision of ourselves as Americans. All this had been building up for more than a decade: The Sexual Revolution, The War in Vietnam, The Campus Riots, political assassinations, The Civil Rights Movement, the emergence of rock music, the drug plague, the feminist movement, the way we dress and speak. Step by step . . . Then, BANG! In 1968, everything coalesced, then exploded, for better or worse. So here’s Daniel West, living out his greatest childhood dream, being part of a grand tradition of film making, and perhaps picking up that torch for himself in the future. Then, he realizes that he’s living in a bubble, in an isolated little corner of the world, immortalizing the past in an historic Hollywood Western, while other people of his own age are out there trying to change things for the better. Including the re-invention of movies with ‘new’ films like “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” What am I doing here, even if here is where I’ve always wanted to be . . . at least up until now, 1968? “The time’s they are a-changin,’” Bob Dylan had proclaimed. So shouldn’t I be out there, somewhere, changing with them?

TH: Always, though, this does remain a book about the process of filmmaking.

BRODE: What I’ve learned from interviewing great filmmakers . . . notably Nicholas Ray, (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, In a Lonely Place, etc.) - whom I became close with during the 1970s – is the simple fact that no matter how carefully a director may plan out ‘the shoot,’ the moment you set up the cameras on the first day, absolutely everything that can possibly go wrong will. All hell breaks loose. Anything can happen and more likely than not will. I hoped to convey the madness not only of this “shoot” but the making of any film to the reader so that everyone can understand the magic and madness of it all.

 

TH: You said you were inspired to write this in 1971. What took so long? You’ve written more than fifty books in-between then and now.

BRODE: Think of Orson Welles’ film “Citizen Kane.” A reporter is trying to piece together the story of a fascinating man but he can’t because there’s one missing piece. Why did the title character proclaim “Rosebud!” as his dying word? The reporter never finds out and gives up on his story. But then the camera reveals to us, in the audience, what Rosebud actually was.

TH: So: You were waiting to discover the “Rosebud” necessary for your project?

BRODE: Always, there was that missing piece – the keystone event I needed for the book’s central moment. Then, I’m watching the news on TV one night a year or so ago and I see the incident on the “Rust” shoot involving Alec Baldwin and the killing of a crew member. The next day I woke up early and began writing, for here was my Rosebud. At the halfway point, my novel transforms from a docudrama about the making of a movie into an Agatha Christie like WHODUNIT?  Who  put that real bullet in the chamber where a blank was supposed to go? And WHY? I worked on it every day but it didn’t feel like work because the novel literally wrote itself. Ending with what is, hopefully, a sudden twist/reversal that – IF I  pulled off this stunt -- the reader will never see coming. But upon reaching it will say: ‘Sure. That’s what this has been leading up to all along.’”Fingers crossed” that I did so.

TH: Do YOU think that you pulled it off?

BRODE: No idea. The writer is the worst judge of his work. We’re too close to it. Love what we did one day, hate it the next. That’s for readers and critics to decide. It’s like a woman surrendering her beloved newborn baby over to others. What was all yours during the months of gestation is in the hands of the public. You can’t think about that along the way or you will shut down, suffering from writer’s block. All any author can ever do is be as honest to your own vision as possible, create a style of writing that is uniquely your own yet also appropriate to your material, then sit back and hope you created something of value.

TH: I had to laugh at myself in realizing on about page 275 that Daniel's last name is "West." Of course that was intended and a tip of the hat to "Westerns.
BRODE: Of course Daniel's last name, "West," references Western movies. But did you also notice that every single character in the novel addresses him differently? One calls him Dan; another Daniel; another Dan-O; another Danny boy; another West; another D.W. Etc. That likely won't "Jump out" and be noticed by most readers, but it is not there simply for it's own sake. The entire book is, at least on one level, the narrator's coming of age story. He is attempting to discover who he "really is." I used the different names or nicknames that people address him by as a device to suggest this, at least for anyone who picks up on it. And for those who don't, no problem.

TH: That last statement sounds very close to your heart.

BRODE: When I was in high school, I happened to pick up a novel for my book report called A SEPARATE PEACE by John Knowles. All I knew was that it was about prep school students. I read and enjoyed it until I reached the end, which I won’t reveal, and began weeping at the top of my lungs, I was so surprised and touched by what unexpectedly occurred. My father, then my beloved best friend, heard me and ran into the room. I explained what happened. He held me tenderly – the final time I can ever remember him doing so – and said: “I bet that if that author knew he had touched even one person out there so much and so deeply he would feel very proud.” I nodded. And, as I already knew that I wanted to be a writer, I   thought to myself: Someday, I’m going write a novel that will do precisely that. It doesn’t matter how many people read it. Only that, if even one person is as touched by me in the way I was by John Knowles, that I have at last truly succeeded in my lifelong quest.