George Hickenlooper, Venice Beach 2000
I’m not going to pretend that George Hickenlooper and I were friends. It’s a greater tribute to the man to say that he always treated me like a friend even though we were barely acquaintances. I was a friend of a friend of a friend. I first became aware of George, like so many other people, when he made the film Hearts of Darkness which Roger Ebert put at number two on his top ten films of 1991. I ran out, bought and read his book Reel Conversations while I was in high school.
I met George almost 20 years ago when I was still a teen-ager. A friend of mine had given me an advanced copy of The Grey Knight (or The Killing Box or Ghost Brigade, depending who you ask), but I still went to see it when it screened at the St. Louis Art Museum. Me and a bunch of my filmmaking buddies hung out after the screening and George was nice enough to talk to us. He lamented the current state of independent filmmaking and how it was all just movies about navel gazing white kids sitting around and talking. Meanwhile, he was trying to sell a vampire Civil War epic.
From that point on, I saw all of George’s feature films in the theater, often at festival screenings where he was present and I put myself in front of him every chance I got. Ten years ago, I had graduated from college; I was working as a copy writer for a record distributor and writing film reviews for some local papers and national websites. I sent George an email, explaining that I was an aspiring filmmaker and writer. I worked the St. Louis connection and the two degrees of separation between us, hoping to score a phone interview with him. Instead, he suggested I come out to Los Angeles and spend some time on the set of the movie he was working on, so I hopped on a plane and spent two days with George while he worked on The Man from Elysian Fields.
My second night in LA, I was having dinner on the set with Andy Garcia, a couple off duty LAPD officers who were working security and some extras dressed as transvestite prostitutes. It was surreal. The next night George took me and some of the crew out to dinner in Venice Beach. We talked about filmmaking, and things like the importance of lens choice. He spoke candidly about his strained relationship with Billy Bob Thornton and even predicted that Thornton’s marriage to Angelina Jolie wouldn’t last.
From that point on, whenever I reviewed one of George’s movies, he would send me a “thank you” email, which I thought was really classy.
The last time I spoke to George was three years ago, after the Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl screening at The Tivoli. During the Q&A, he talked about how he despised Andy Warhol and everything that Warhol stood for. He also mentioned that he was a “George Bush Republican.” He got into it with a liberal woman in the audience over whether Sedgwick was destroyed by Andy Warhol and the crowd at The Factory, or if it was the abuse she suffered at the hands of her conservative father. If memory serves, I later found out that the women in question was George’s mother.
I got a chance to talk to him after the Q&A and thank him again for inviting me out to LA all those years prior. The last thing I said to him was, “I had no idea you were a Republican.”
I was really excited for George’s latest movie, Casino Jack. It seemed like the one that would break him to a wide audience. Just last the other night, the star, Kevin Spacey was talking about the film, and George, on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.
I was really looking forward to seeing George when the movie screened in St. Louis this week and I was stunned that he died just days before.