Spalding Gray's Conversations with . . . The Beverly Hills Housewife
Commentary excerpted from The Journals of Spalding Gray
"From 1987 to 1987, Gray was an artist in residence at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He set out to find interesting people on the streets that he could interview onstage at the Taper. The challenge: none of them could be affiliated with the film industry. Like Interviewing the Audience (a previous performance), this project relied on Gray's creating an immediately genuine relationship with the people he found. The theater hired an assitant, a young woman who went by the nickname K.O., to drive Gray around the city seeking out entertaining interviewees. "We're going to senior citizens centers, golden-age drop in centers, high schools. We're driving down to Long Beach to look for Cambodian refugees. We're driving over to Venice Beach to talk with homeless living in lean-tos," Gray recounted in (his monolgue) Monster in a Box. "Nothing, nothing, no one." Gray finally managed to find forty people to interview -- three Valley Girls, a woman who believed she'd been picked up by a spaceship on the Ventura Freeway, and a waitress who handed her film script to Gray while they were onstage, among them. The show was called LA: The Other."
A personal note from Gary Glassman
I loved Spalding Gray. He was insatiably curious and totally open. He genuinely cared for the people he interviewed, much of that affection coming from the personal connection he made through the interview process. I was familiar with his monologue performances before we met and so I was already a fan, and honored that he wanted to work with me. He had seen Prisoners, the film I made with Jonathan Borofsky, and he liked the authenticity of the men and women we had filmed. He wanted the same authenticity in our project together.
We chose six people to revisit and film - way too ambitious for our meager budget - but both of us were genuinely interested in seeing them where they lived. One Japanese American man we visited in his SRO hotel room on Skid Row. Spalding asked what he did every day and he replied that he went to Santa Anita Racetrack to bet on the horses. Spalding asked if he wins, to which the man reached into a money belt and pulled out a wad of thousands of dollars. Spalding asked why if he wins so much does he live on Skid Row. He replied that as much as he likes to win, he also likes to lose. He believed the flow of money in and out of his life was good karma. Spalding asked why the horses and not Las Vegas to which the man said it was not so much the horses but rather Santa Anita because as a child he and his family were interred there during World War Two. Spalding understood.
It was difficult to ultimately select just one person for this film, but we had hopes, perhaps naively, that we could sell it as a pilot a create a series. Our concept was to film "ordinary" people as celebrities, highlighting their uniqueness and special qualities, and then film celebrities doing ordinary tasks like grocery shopping. I think we were about thirty years ahead of our time.
I saw Spalding a few times since LA. I had moved to Providence, Rhode Island and he had family here. Every time we immediately connected. The last time I saw him was after he had suffered injuries from a car accident. Something was not right. It was almost as if the energy was not flowing through him, like the Japanese American man on skid row spoke of. Soon after, Spalding was gone.
I think of him often, at least as often as I enjoy Laphroaig - the single-malt scotch I learned to love while making this film with him.