Tag / Bat Segundo

by Edward Champion

Interview with Ralph Bakshi

I recently had the opportunity to talk with underground animator Ralph Bakshi. A portion of our conversation appears this afternoon at Vulture, where you will discover the song that was originally going to play during the finale of American Pop. (For the specific reasons why, you will have to wait for the podcast.) Unfortunately, there were space constraints. So what follows is some of the additional material that didn’t make it into the piece. The entire conversation, which includes even more from Bakshi, will be released as a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show. (Please note that edited elements of the same conversation appear both here and at Vulture.)

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about music in your films. It’s certainly important in American Pop. You pilfered from your record collection for that, as well as the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic. And there’s “Ah’m a Niggerman” from Coonskin, which you wrote. I’m wondering if you did this because you have an aversion to Carl Stalling-style orchestral music.

Bakshi: First of all, I love music. I’ve always loved music. And I’ve loved various kinds of music. Music is part of our lives. It’s part of the soundtrack that what we all grow up with. Especially in my day. I don’t know today. There’s so many things going on. I’m talking about yesterday and my day, which are the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Music is so emotionally important to the movie. It’s just as important as anything else. If the song is emotionally correct for a scene, the scene plays better. Or the scene plays better than it would have with a different song. So music is so critical to movies. I chose songs that I knew emotionally worked with these scenes that I wrote. Because whenever I listened to music while either driving in a car or sitting at a bar or listening to Coltrane or Billy Holiday – you daydream. If you don’t daydream to music, then you’re not listening to good music.

I went out and I bought every record that I’ve ever loved that was right for the scene. “Yesterday” by Billie Holiday for Fritz the Cat was perfect for Big Bertha and coming into Harlem. You know, it was a classic song. “Maybelline” and “Twist and Shout.” And all these records. “Scarborough Fair.” All these records I used, I got for fifty to a hundred bucks. They were dirt cheap. I could buy any record I wanted for under two hundred dollars. Why was that? Unbelievable.

Because everybody else was scoring their films. And why were they scoring their films? Because if they had a hit, they’d own the music. They’d make money from the score. They’d own their own records. I can’t release Billie Holiday’s “Yesterday” and make any money out of it. I never considered that. The issue was what was right for the movie. I couldn’t believe the cheap prices I was getting. And I had a low-budget film! So I could afford to get anything I wanted.

Correspondent: But you had Andrew Belling on Wizards. I’m curious if you gave these composers specific instructions.

Bakshi: Well, Andrew Belling on Wizards did an absolutely brilliant job. Let’s talk about Wizards. Wizards is very low-budget. One million two. Okay. I’m not going to fall back on my records, because it’s not that kind of movie. I need a score. But I need a score that I love. And I don’t remember how I got to Belling. I’d been to New York with a lot of other guys. But Belling came with a little synthesizer. One little machine which was a very big deal. We didn’t have any orchestra. We had synthesizers. All that music was done with Belling in the room. And he said the right things and he did the right things. And he came back and he played me a piece of music that was beautiful. I think Belling did an incredible job in that song he wrote. And the battle scenes. And the emotion. Belling nailed it. He did it himself and everything. It was all done without an orchestra. It was good.

Correspondent: This is an interesting conundrum. I think one of the reasons why the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic is so stirring is largely because of that music. But here you have a scenario in which someone else is composing music that doesn’t originate from another source.

Bakshi: I was terrified what he would do. I was scared. I was nervous. I had nightmares that it wouldn’t work. And he nailed it. I don’t know how he did it. I had nothing to do with it. How do you talk to another composer about music? Now look. Let’s talk about freedom. I demand freedom as a director. I demand the right to fuck up, to do what I want. I am not about to take that freedom away from another artist. If Belling walks in and says that he’s a composer, and I believe what he has to say and I believe that he’s sensitive enough and I believe it, man, prove it. Go do your music. It’s not my job to write the music for him.

(I also discussed with Baskhi why he hired Thomas Kinkade. In addition to the remarks at Vulture, Bakshi also had this to say.)

Bakshi: In the middle of the picture, [Kinkade] stands up and he says, “I’m going away with Gurney for three weeks. We’re traveling cross country.” And I said, “Well, wait a minute. We’re doing a picture.” “All right. We’ll be back on a certain date. We will paint enough before we go. And when we get back, we’ll double paintings.”

He worked with Frank Frazetta. Those kids, Gurney and Kinkade, painted wonderful paintings so fast. And Frank Frazetta would come in — he was a great illustrator – and show Kinkade a lot of tricks. Both of those guys, when they painted other stuff, when Kinkade painted closer to the Ashcan school, which I loved very much, wonderful. He can sell anything. He opened up galleries. He’s building a city now. He’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He owns half of California. So I have nothing against Kinkade. He’s funny. He is like Elmer Gantry. He’s ‘s a great painter. But he likes to make money. And he does. He doesn’t like the stuff he’s painting.

Correspondent: But that’s anathema to your position, which is about making it as true and as honest as possible.

Bakshi: By the time I got to Fire and Ice, I was bitter. It’s not my picture. I was burned out. I was through. Though people may like it, I don’t consider that a Bakshi film. That’s a Frazetta film. That’s me not caring. I was burned out. I was tired. At that point, I was gone. And I did. I closed the studio and then I left. I had no emotional interest in Fire and Ice to tell you the truth.

by Edward Champion

Interview with Tobias Wolff

This week, The Bat Segundo Show will cross the 200 episode barrier. A future program will feature a conversation with the writer Tobias Wolff, whose most recent book, Our Story Begins, is a short story collection containing previously collected tales — including the classics “Bullet in the Brain” and “Hunters in the Snow” — and more recent offerings like “A White Bible,” a gripping narrative that takes the notion of entitlement to task, but leaves judgment to the reader. In the New York Times Book Review*, Liesl Schillinger wrote, “To read a story is to sink into the soft seat of your grandfather’s strong, modest old Buick and let yourself be carried through an America of small towns, small joys, small struggles and small despairs — a landscape so familiar as to be invisible, the landscape of homeland.” Wolff’s stories are certainly a place to recognize readily identifiable qualities, but what makes him a fabulous writer is the way in which these quotidian moments are charged with import without coming across as overtly portentous.

I got the chance to talk with Wolff last week when he was in New York. He was a confident figure beating a bad cold. And while he was interested in how readers interpreted his stories, he had no desire to offer explanations. But I did pry further. And I was able to unfurl some of the science Wolff brings to his tales. What follows is a partial transcript of our conversation.

Correspondent: This idea of first-person narration that is somewhat removed — maybe this is more of a classical sense of the short story, in the sense that today, contemporary short stories are, as you point out, more of a gushing therapy session. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about.

Wolff: Well, I don’t know. Again, when I think, for example, of Philip Roth’s first-person narrators, they are interested in the world at least as much as they are interested in themselves and interested in other people. And that shows up in the narration. It would be a pretty boring story that was so — if I could put it this way — narcissistically defined if you didn’t get a sense of the world beyond the narrator or of other people beyond it. I would think that, unless it was deliberately taking on the pathology of narcissism, it would be a deficiency of the story. Some stories, of course — some first-person stories — rely on a very heavy colloquial. And that may be something that you’re noticing with some of the stories. Like the one I just quoted from, “Next Door,” is quite colloquial. In other stories, you get the sense that the narrator is telling the story not in the immediate moment of the story, but perhaps from a distance. Which also would give you a wider vision of the circumstances and the people involved. And also perhaps a more articulate voice. A more capacious voice. So it isn’t just a Catcher in the Rye, moment-by-moment narration, but something that would open up a little more in the way of Philip Roth or William Trevor. The way their first person stories work.

Correspondent: I’m wondering if it’s something similar to Nabokov’s idea — that he had to know the lay of the land before he could write any particular novel or short story or what not. Maybe this is your concern.

Wolff: Well, by the time I write the last draft of a story, which — well, when Nabokov wrote his first drafts, they were like the last drafts of anybody else’s. By the time I write the last draft of the story, I certainly do know more than I can ever tell about my characters’ situations. So you’re just seeing a part of it.

Correspondent: I wanted to ask about the very subtle use of symbols throughout these stories. They are essentially straightforward realism. But you have, for example, in “A White Bible,” the attention to Frontage Road. You have the light shutting off at the end of “Say Yes.” And also, I really love the tule fog at the end of “The Rich Brother.” So these are really symbolic. But also, at the same time, they come from this realism. And I should also observe that, particularly with these endings, these symbols pop up often when you have a concise story.

Wolff: Well, they’re not symbols in the way that a high school English teacher teaches symbols. They are features of the story that a reader can probably sense some consequence without being able to define it. Yeah, at the end of “A Rich Brother,” Pete’s in a bit of a fog. But it’s also a very real fog. If you drive through that valley in California — the Central Valley, that time of night — you’re going to be in a fog. So what symbolism there is simply what life itself gives us. I mean, we actually navigate our lives by symbols. That is, by the outward signs that lead us in one direction or the other. Nature is filled with these things. And, of course, writers make use of them.

Correspondent: Well, in terms of endings, I think also of “Powder” and “Say Yes,” which have endings before the endings. In the sense that we think it’s going to end at a particular point, but, in fact, it ends before that point. And we are then forced to speculate upon where these characters are going. I mean, again, this supports the theory I’m throwing out at you that these concise stories have more going on or the action needs to be stopped at intervals.

Wolff: Well, the ending of a story, I think, contains all that the reader needs to have an intuition of how the story might continue. And they shouldn’t necessarily spell those things out, as some readers do. Tolstoy, for example, writes short stories as if they were novels. But to make a contrast, Chekhov draws enough of an arc that you imaginatively complete the circle yourself. You’re given all you need to do that. And my own practice as a short story writer has tended to gravitate toward that. One of the things I like about the story form is how much it can imply. Not as a kind of guessing game or some cute riddle you’re playing on the reader, but in the way that situations in life imply other situations. I mean, we actually, in our daily lives, become quite adept at intuition, at teasing out implications of present situations in order to get a sense of how the future might unfold. When we go out with a girl on the first time, we’re doing that. We have our first week at a new job, we’re doing that. We meet a new friend. We’re just constantly in these. It’s a very natural and emotional exercise that we do. And I try to find a way of expressing that in the forms of my stories. I don’t close things down because they aren’t closed down in life. The way that Tolstoy closes things down is that he has his characters die at the end. And that is a pretty neat way to do it. But they’re not going anywhere then. I love his stories, but they aren’t the kind of stories that I write.

* — One must point to good fiction coverage in Tanenhaus’s rag from time to time, with the unrealistic hope that such plaudits will correct unpardonable oversights elsewhere.