Made hot on the heels of the back-to-back Angel City and Last
Chants, this film spun out of a chance meeting in a Santa Monica
café, a friend from Oregon chatting with Michael Crichton’sister
and an eager wannabe hot to jump in the movie biz. I was the ticket
in. This guy (name deleted) and his friend assured that they could come
up with $35,000 with no problem; I assured I could make a film in 16mm
strictly to blow to 35mm, and get it in a good festival immediately
on completion. Needless to say $35,000 was a big jump for me from the
$3,000 and $6,000 budgets of the previous films. After some meetings,
as I had decided to largely improvise the film, we settled on a basic
theme - the producer guys being interested in counterfeiting. So I took
this topic, which I think they imagined would be of a more practical
sort, and applied it to the kind of counterfeit life which LA and the
film (and arts) biz exemplify, and which in reality these two eager-beavers
represented. Going back to Glaudini, whom I had liked working with in
Angel City (despite some problems which became clearer in making
Chameleon), I gathered a cluster of actors, mostly via Bob’s theater
connections, and we began shooting, without a clear destination. On
the first day shooting the film producer came to our setting, imagining
glamour, the excitement of actors, and seems to have thought making
films was a kind of party. I quickly disabused him of this concept as
his presence was disruptive to fast and cheap working methods and ended
up tossing him off the set. Which perhaps set-up the following months
as the “easy” $35,000 proved elusive on a week to week basis.
As the production limped along, week by week, and the relationship with
the novice “producers” grew more tense, for my tastes an
additional personal element of sourness invaded the film. It is one
of the qualities of improvisation that reality is likely to skew matters
in its direction - it certainly did here.
However, despite the endless problems with ever
elusive money, the film did get made. The blowup was done in a San Fernando
Valley porn lab, with the two technical guys puzzled over the absence
of the anticipated material. Rushing to secure a print for the Taormina
film festival, I requested - knowing my exposures were largely very
much on the money, what in the business is called a “one-best
light” - to say a print made with a single light setting, averaged
out from a quick look at the full negative. Inviting some people to
watch it with me, I was treated to a 90 minute stretch of black leader
- by any accounting a “one worst light” job. Refusing to
pay for this, and expecting that this incompetent lab would screw it
up again, I spirited the negative out of the lab and took it to Technicolor,
which struck a quick good print, and sent it off to Italy where the
festival subtitled it. I fulfilled my end of the bargain with the producers,
who, having looked at the finished film seemed, like the funders of
Angel City, simply not to get it. Somehow they imagined they
would get a full-fledged Hollywood thriller, with pumping music, etc.
and found themselves disappointed. What Chameleon does have
is a sure hand, technical sharpness, a nasty insider view of things
LA, aerials, crane shots, a few group scenes, blow-up, all for a budget
of $35,000. However the wanna-be’s couldn’t see it.
At the Taormina festival it won no prizes (the
prize was basically fixed), but received rather lavish praise from the
Italo and UK press, and went on to numerous other festivals, sharing
the first prize at the American Film Festival in Utah, which later morphed
into Sundance. A few years later, knowing I could sell it to Channel
Four, UK, I bought out the producers for $5,000 and sold it for $12,000.
With the critics suggesting Hollywood would
be knocking at my door, I turned my back on LA, having had enough exposure
in the year to make me 100% sure I wanted nothing to do with the place.
I moved to Germany, and confounding the critics (and for the most part
leaving them behind) I went and made what is perhaps my most “experimental”
film, Stagefright. Hollywood never knocked.
“Jon Jost’s Chameleon was probably the happiest
instance of a mixed marriage at the Festival (Edinburgh 1979): combining
a freak, trippy (in fact almost Corman-esque) saga of a dope-dealer
and all-round hustler with an abstract distillation of patterns of color
and light. The place of the latter in the film is both somewhere within
the drug-laced nimbus of its title character, Terry (Bob Glaudini),
and somewhere outside its ironic description of the rampant merchandising
of all other human activities. In a way, this abstract element almost
serves as a secondary narrative, or at least becomes the ‘point’
of the film. At the beginning, Terry is seen hustling a painter of just
such abstract designs to come up with six imitations of another painter
which he can unload on the art market. With some ‘persuasion’,
Terry overcomes the painter’s reluctance, and at the end of the
film returns to collect his merchandise. But the rolls of paper his
is given turn out to be blank, and the painter defiantly protests, ‘My
life is color, form, the shape of things...’ before Terry knocks
him down and leaves him lying in a pool of spilled colors that returns
us to the abstracts which were shown in detail in the opening shots.
It is probably not too deterministic a reading to see Jost as the painter
and the blank sheets as the conventional movie which he has refused
to provide for audience consumption.
But in between, his narrative not only holds together but unfolds
through a fascinating succession of moods as Terry drives about LA,
moving from appointment to appointment, from role to role. At one
point, at the end of a long sequence in which he seems to be renewing
a personal acquaintance on a hilltop some way outside the city, he
and his companion go into a brief song and dance (I want to be phony,
I want to be fake, not real). The unreality of Los Angeles clearly
serves as a prime cause, and natural cradle, for the dreaming of cocaine
dreams, and through it Jost even makes contact with a literary source...
Terry refers to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and comments,
“This feller seemed like a casualty straight from his pages.”
- Richard Combs, American Film
