The
Heart is a Sleeping Beauty
Foreword
by Bono
In the 80's I became a fan, a student
of America, it was a big subject and I was ready to put my big
foot in its mouth, to discover its extremities: idealistic,
innovative, fundamentalist, violent, a whole continent of contradictions.
It was also an island... Only 4 percent of Americans had passports.
For an Irishman this was the promised
land, for the lyricist it was just a sexy place, full of poetry,
songs and pictures. I read everything: from Tennessee Williams
to Sam Shephard, Moby Dick to Charles Bukowski. I listened to
everything, from Duke Ellington to Prince, Patsy Cline to Patti
Smith. My visual imagination was framed by the dignified squalor
of Edward Hopper, the free-basing joy of Jean Michel Basquiat,
from Buster Keaton to Madonna, Robert Mitchum to Sean Penn.
In many ways these United States of my imagination felt more
like home than Dublin, Ireland.
Around that time I read an interview
with Wim Wenders where he talked about America....
having colonized our subconscious. I knew what he meant. I loved
it but it wasn't all love... What about colonizing the conscious...
What about the other America some of us started to spell with
a "k". In the eighties this was the Amerika of 'contra
revolution' and "greed is good", an America where
any restraining arguments on the autonomy of capital were ignored.
The liberation theology of the Sandinistas was crushed with
the same tacit coercion as despots as cruel as Saddam Hussein
were fostered. Noriega, Suharto, the not so Augusto Pinochet,
all allies of the United States in this period, propped up as
bulwarks against Sovietism. The political agenda excused an
extraordinary disregard for The Charter for Human Rights. All
of course for the long term betterment of The Free World, because
in the 80's, to misquote Michael Jackson's hymn, Americans seemed
to think "They were the world".
Even in the promised land the prosperous
few were getting used to the idea of keeping the not so prosperous
many off their hissing lawns, unless of course they were watering
them. Hip Hop stars N.W.A. recorded "Fuck Da Police".
There were more gang-related murders in east L.A. than fatalities
in the Lebanon or Northern Ireland.
Reaganomics had goodfolk in their penthouses
believing that the feeding frenzy on Wall Street would eventually
'trickle down' to the expanding underclass living on the pavement.
It didn't.
The Rosslyn Million Dollar Hotel on 5th
and Main in downtown L.A. had in the heyday of Hollywood been
a trophy of that golden era. Charlie Chaplin had an office there
in the twenties, his portrayal of hobo life still hanging in
the air sixty years after the depression had left everywhere
else. The Hotel was now home to a panoply of American anti-heros:
out-patients spat out from mental hospital cut-backs, women
on the run from a beating and other sad story characters who
had fallen through the cracks of the welfare system. It was
a neo-Dickensian world where the handicapped lived alongside
pimps, hookers and regular people scavenging for the reasonable
room rates, all sailing their leaky boats on the giant sea of
oatmeal marble in the hotel lobby. Oddly and thanks to the landlord
Bob, it was not a rip-off.
It was a remarkable visual, but, more
than that, there were stories in every room crying out to be
told. Definitely not as docudrama... Any film set in this locale
would have to be as surreal as the guests in this most inverted
Hotel Cal-a-fornia.
The Eighties... In '84 Wim Wenders had
found an apt metaphor for this spiritually parched time in the
dusty throat of Harry Dean Stanton and the tumbleweed desertscapes
of Paris, Texas. We were reading the same map when U2 recorded
"The Joshuatree"...
I worked hard to get Wim to collaborate
on The Million Dollar Hotel. Myself and the gifted scriptwriter
Nicholas Klein had struck up a friendship and co-written the
story. The dirty trick was to ask Wim's advice on it. We needed
a director with an eye suspicious of easy images and obvious
Americana, a captain who could control the madhouse of characters
(Jessica, Geronimo, Dixie, Vivien, Shorty) and counsel the lovers,
Tom Tom and Eloise, down off the roof of a 'mad' love. Because
above all, The Million Dollar Hotel was a love story, albeit
a dysfunctional one, disguised as a murder mystery and a 'scam'.
Wenders surrendered.
We then had a director who is more painter
than photographer, more poet than storyteller, more filmmaker
than dramatist. A filmmaker who won't follow the obvious conventions,
but whose films hang around in your head long enough after you've
left the theater. Unusual films. Wim Wenders has many unusual
traits: a surgeon's son with a razor eye and a 'ward' walk to
go with it, a collector of stones and indigenous art, a harbinger
of new haircuts and new directions, he's hard to pin down. He
hangs out with angels. He married one. Donata Wenders' photographs
bring an old-fashioned dignity, almost glamour back to the residents
of The Million Dollar Hotel. These stills have her grace and
composure. Both Wim and Donata enjoy the genius lighting of
Phedon Papamichael, a dp who makes a feature of the flaws in
front of him.
The great director too is flawed... by
being a great and decent man. He'd do you a favor... But the
lasting impression I have of this project is that of having
been in the room with another musician. Wim Wenders is a jazz
man... He takes the melody line of your story but changes the
chords underneath, improvising on it, improving it all the time
until it is his tune. A tune no one else could play. In a time
of karaoke, it is a wonderful thing to hear an original voice.
