The Coen Brothers Made Easy

Film Historian Leonard Maltin's ass is much bigger than I would have imagined. It's a blinding left hook for me. Not that I've given the size of his keister much thought, but if I had thought about it, I wouldn't have imagined it quite this large. I look across at oddball auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen and try to flag their gazes, to no avail. The brothers stare numbly at the middle of the room, wearing the look of postal workers listening to voices that instruct them to kill their neighbor's dog. Leonard Maltin's ass might as well be a million light years away.

The Brothers Schmooze Leonard Maltin

Yes, it's press junket weekend on the set of The Hudsucker Proxy, and the brothers Coen are primed for an afternoon of shameless showbiz huckstering. Print and video media from around the world have jetted to the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where the Coens' fifth cinematic outing is being shot on the soundstages of Carolco Studio. Entertainment Tonight, CBS This Morning and HBO: First Look are here, as are domestic newspaper journalists, the BBC and some French people who are dressed in black.

Through their first four eccentric, critically acclaimed, occasionally inscrutable movies (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink), spanning what is now a decade-long career, the Coens have not exactly established a reputation for backslapping accessibility to the media. Which isn't to say they don't sit down for interviews. On the contrary, the boys are quite generous about it. It's once they've sat down that the accessibility issue comes into play.

Bobbing pitifully in the wake of the Coens' film career is a collection of diatribes by entertainment journalists on just how infuriating they are to interview. The Coens have been described as everything from telepathic space aliens to the identical twins Poto and Cabengo, who developed a secret language that included 14 different words for potato salad.

But that was before. This time, by God, things are going to be different. The Hudsucker Proxy is the Coen brothers' biggest, most star-studded, special-effects-mad, happy-go-lucky fat-boy-of-a-movie to date, and they are yanking out the stops.

You want big? Does Die Hard producer Joel Silver make you reach for the tape measure? Star-studded? How about Paul Newman, Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and the 1993 Playmate of the Year, Anna Nicole Smith? Special effects? What comes to mind when you hear "flying angels with ukuleles"? And as for the happy-go-lucky fat-boy business, there is simply no better way to describe this slapstick morality play about a Muncie, Indiana imbecile's rise in the Fifties from New York (continued on page 118)Coen Brothers(continued from page 112) mail-room clerk to corporate president before lunchtime on his very first day of employment.

The Coens are selling this message: Hello, Hollywood! No more lengthy silences. No more monosyllabic responses. No more finishing each others' half sentences. The auteur business can go only so far. Now they need a hit. And they are ready to bow and scrape to get it.

I am here to bear witness.

Some weeks earlier I was on the phone with Ethan discussing the best time for my on-the-set visit. (I'm an old college pal of the boys', so they like to have me around.) The Sons of the Pioneers were yodeling in the background. It is a little-reported fact that Ethan, a former Princeton philosophy scholar and accomplished short-story author, is also a colossal fan of cowboy campfire music.

Ethan had paused in our conversation to ponder something I'd said, and I sat for four minutes with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to cowboys croon against the hiss of long-distance static. As he is wont to do, Ethan had slipped into a reverie, no doubt involving him wearing a Stetson and sitting beneath a starry sky with everyone calling him Li'l Pal. This was confirmed when I heard a Chill Wills-like warble escape his lips. He cleared his throat, and I heard him sit up. "Oh, listen!" he said, as if I had just asked the question. "We've got a great time for you to come out to visit."

My first reaction was one of caution. The last time the boys had suggested a great time to visit, it was for a week of close-ups of wallpaper gum dripping on the set of Barton Fink.

"What exactly will be going on?" I said. "Anything, uh, interesting?"

"Press junket weekend," he said.

Silence from my end.

"Paul Newman will be here," he said defensively. "Tim Robbins."

"What about Jennifer Jason Leigh?" I asked.

A pause. "No," he said.

I hedged. "Yeah, well...."

"Leonard Maltin will be here," he blurted.

"Leonard Maltin?"

•

As Leonard Maltin sits down beside the boys in the front row of the screening room, the Coens' gazes shift in the vague recognition that the ante of their social environment has been upped. Maltin, still aglow from his preview of a rough cut of Hudsucker, comments on the Fifties corporate-comedy genre and asks what classic movies the boys watched for inspiration.

There is a strained pause. Ethan and Joel look at each other. Ethan turns his glassy eyes back to the emptiness in the middle of the room for further scrutiny.

Joel shrugs and explains that they didn't really watch any Fifties corporate comedies, but they did study Blade Runner for the special effects used to create its futuristic cityscape. Only he goes on and on about it, launching into a teeth-grittingly dull, monotone dissertation on blue-screen effects and miniaturizations and f-stops and other technical minutiae calculated to make the average Entertainment Tonight viewer salivate with abandon--assuming he drools in his sleep.

Finally, Joel runs out of deadly details. Ethan, for his part, offers a barely perceptible head bob of affirmation. "Yeah," he says.

Ever the ebullient interviewer, Maltin grins in lunatic mimicry of fascination. He shifts in his seat--no small feat, you know, considering--and raises the subject of home movies. "When I was a kid," he begins, "I used to make movies with my friends, as you both did. When you see your movies up on the screen today, is it like you're still making home movies, only with bigger budgets and big-name stars?"

Joel furrows his brow with thought. "Yeah," he says. "What's Paul Newman doing in our home movies?"

The boys wheeze with laughter, then fall quiet. They're speaking that secret language again.

Across the room, a technician darts his eyes at the soundboard, where a solitary red needle spasms as, somewhere within the oppressive, cavernous silence, someone coughs.

The Human Coendition

Who the fuck are these guys? you may ask. It's a legitimate question. The Coen brothers' movies are renowned for their intelligent writing, quirkily inventive dialogue, tight plot construction and kinetic, hyperthyroid visual sensibilities. With stories that most often seem to be about beleaguered individuals struggling to establish personal codes of behavior in a violent universe, the Coens' movies are what Dostoyevski might have concocted had he watched too much late-night television as a child.

Well, at any rate, it fooled them in France, because in 1991, Barton Fink won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or awards for best feature, best director and best actor--the first time a single film captured all three awards. For Joel and Ethan, it was the greatest industry validation they had received since 1984, when Blood Simple won the U.S.A. Film Festival award for best feature, and Minnesota's governor Rudy Perpich wrote them a congratulatory letter that, to this day, hangs in Joel's bathroom.

To understand how these unlikely careers began--and as a service to Leonard Maltin--we must go back to St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the late Sixties, when that Minneapolis suburb was mostly swampland. Joel and kid brother Ethan were members of a small tribe of skinny Jewish kids with fantastically overgrown hair, lounging on the sofa in Ed and Rena Coen's basement den, bored beyond comprehension. But then an idea occurred to Joel of how to relieve the tedium of their meaningless teenage lives: Super-8 home movies.

The plan was to mow lawns to raise enough capital to purchase a movie camera and film stock. Ron Neter--today a commercial producer based in Los Angeles--was a principal architect of the scheme. Says Neter: "The hardest part was persuading Joel to, you know, get up and mow the lawns. He needed a big pep talk."

Whatever Neter said worked, because eventually they bought a Vivitar camera and some film. Then they had to decide what to film. To find creative stimuli, they headed back to Ed and Rena's basement den.

Their earliest explorations were, to be sure, uninspired, if not disgracefully lazy. First they shot a Raymond Burr jungle movie straight off the screen, then they shot their own feet as they went down a slide at the playground.

Finally, a breakthrough. Again, Ron Neter: "Joel just said, 'I have this idea, where I'm all over the place and I'm just moaning.' We shot all this footage. He'd be, like, sitting here or there, going 'Uouounnhh.'" Neter pauses to reflect. "I seem to remember he was doing that anyway--even before we started filming."

Moaning Joel taught the young filmmakers a valuable lesson: They desperately needed actors. Enter Mark Zimering--a.k.a. Zeimers--with his shock (continued on page 154)Coen Brothers(continued from page 118) of dark, wiry hair, orthodontic braces, shit-eating grin and, most important, eagerness to leap enthusiastically before the camera at a moment's notice. Says Joel: "Zimering was the De Niro to our Scorsese in terms of our early efforts."

Says Dr. Mark Zimering, today an endocrinology research physician at a VA hospital in New Jersey, "I don't know. I guess I was probably the one with the most enthusiasm."

Among the best of his vehicles is Zeimers in Zambezi, a remake of the 1966 Cornel Wilde movie The Naked Prey. Zeimers, fully clothed and sporting a fuzzy winter hat with earflaps, plays the Cornel Wilde surrogate, while Ethan is the angrily bellowing native who, waving a spear and sporting Buddy Holly glasses, pursues Zeimers in a relentless cat-and-mouse chase that is full of camera shots pushing through brush and gags lifted without apology from popular Loony Tunes cartoons.

Also worthy of mention is Ed...a Dog, a remake of the 1943 tearjerker Lassie Come Home that mirrors the rebelliousness of the Sixties. Zeimers, bedecked in an undersized Cub Scout uniform and a yarmulke, meets and bonds with Ed, a dog. Returning home, Zeimers approaches his parents in their basement den and asks if he can keep the pooch. He is met with blustery rejection from both the newspaper-reading father, played by Ron Neter, and the mother, who is played by Ethan, shown sitting on the sofa, wearing his sister Debbie's tutu and inexplicably banging on a drum set. Zeimers promptly lifts Ethan and hurls him across the room. At the sight of this violent act, Neter cowers pitiably and acquiesces to his son's demands. The film ends on an upbeat note, with Zeimers turning toward the camera and delivering his trademark metallic grin.

A film that has taken on mythic proportions among its participants--in part because it is lost and thus impossible to assess honestly--is the Coens' remake of Otto Preminger's 1962 political drama Advise and Consent.

The project was a departure from the Coens' other remakes in that no one had actually seen the original movie. Zeimers, however, had read the novel. As they went along, he relayed to the others the complex, adult machinations of Allen Drury's plot. What everyone seems to remember most is a sequence in which Senator Zeimers opens a letter from his mistress and has an absurdly symbolic sexual reverie involving flowers bobbing in the wind and dew dripping from branches, as well as, one can imagine, a lot of shit-eating grinning from Zeimers. That the scene as portrayed in Drury's novel actually depicted a closet homosexual government representative receiving a blackmail note seems lost on the St. Louis Park naïfs, even today.

Whatever its actual merit, Advise and Consent demonstrated to the Coens the intellectual possibilities of film. They began to mature as artists, moving on to such titles as My Pits Smell Sublime, Would That I Could Circumambulate and Henry Kissinger: Man on the Move.

But the pinnacle of the Coens' Super-8 years--the film that weaves together the comedy, tragedy, violence and esthetic esoterica that would make such a strong impression on the Cannes Film Festival jury years later with Barton Fink--is a little masterpiece called The Banana Film. Shot in a verité style and originally intended to be viewed with musical accompaniment excerpted from Frank Zappa's Hot Rats album, The Banana Film was one of the Coens' last Zeimers films.

Now showing his age but no longer his braces, Zeimers plays a hip, happy-go-lucky wandering Samaritan with a consuming passion for bananas. After a brief opening sequence in which these various traits are established, the story shifts to Ethan. Attired for the last time onscreen in Debbie's tutu, Ethan is shown hurled out the front door of his house into the snow, a shovel following close behind. Ethan staggers to his feet, begins slavishly shoveling the walk and soon has a heart attack and dies. Zeimers comes across Ethan's lifeless body. Lifting Ethan, he staggers bravely through the snow until, drained and exhausted, he dumps the body and falls to his knees in a wrenching display of biblical angst. Then he smells something. Rifling the fallen shoveler's pockets, Zeimers uncovers a banana, which he eats.

At this point the film makes a hairpin turn into destiny. Zeimers stops in his tracks, clutches his stomach, gazes alarmedly into the camera and introduces a theme that has appeared in virtually every Coen movie since.

Dr. Zimering explains: "We, uh, went into Joel's refrigerator and mixed up the most disgusting...well, you know...like ketchup and bananas and all this garbage."

"It was in a bowl," Ron Neter states flatly. "They put a lot of care into mixing the different ingredients. And then they showed him from behind, retching. It poured from the bowl onto the ground so quickly, it was just a blur. But Joel and Ethan liked the consistency of it, so we did this long, lingering close-up."

Neter pauses to reflect on what the scene represents to the Coens' body of work. "They really have had an affinity for vomit in their films, I guess. In Miller's Crossing, I remember a lot of discussion, particularly with the special effects department, about the fact that Tom didn't eat much, he just drank a lot, so his vomit had to be very runny. I think they were ultimately disappointed with the results. But Joel and Ethan entertained these kinds of conversations with a lot of attention."

•

Eventually, Joel left Minnesota for Simon's Rock, a private college in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, then NYU film school. Ethan was left to experiment alone. He conceived of a film called Froggy Went a Courtin'. It would be an artful montage of toads squashed by various means, with a recording of Odetta singing the title song in the background. But Ethan could find no squashed toads. After several weeks spent shambling along the frontage roads of St. Louis Park by himself, carting around the Vivitar, he gave up. Soon, he, too, left Minnesota for Simon's Rock, then Princeton, where he studied philosophy under Walter Kaufmann.

He would not pick up a camera again until Blood Simple.

The Rain Pelteth The Asphalt

During the summer of 1983 I stopped to visit Joel and Ethan in New York while driving home from graduate school in a beat-up Honda sagging with every one of my earthly possessions. It was during this visit that I got my first close-up look at the Coen brothers' extraordinary filmmaking skills in action.

Joel and Ethan were in the editing stages of a movie that we all felt was the first important step in what would eventually become a career making feature films for some of the more remote drive-in-theater markets in Mississippi. The movie was called Blood Simple, though at the time the boys knew this would have to be changed, since no movie executive in his right mind would tolerate such an idiotic title.

I'd been hearing about Blood Simple in one manifestation or another for eight and a half of the nine years I'd known them. During Ethan's year at Simon's Rock (the year Ethan and I met and became friends), older brother Joel would travel up from NYU for occasional weekend visits. During the tenderest moments of these visits--which is to say, after the boys had been bonding osmotically by sitting around and staring vacantly into space for an hour or so--Joel would bug Ethan once again with his scheme of squandering the recent inheritances from their grandparents' sale of land in Israel on funding for an independent movie they had yet to write.

Now, here they were, editing the finished product. The boys were excited to see me, of course--but doubly excited that I had come by automobile. It seemed they needed one more piece of film to complete the complex puzzle they had crafted in Blood Simple: a moving shot of rain pelting an asphalt road at night.

So it was that I found myself crammed in the backseat of my Honda on a moonless night, riding along the country roads outside of New York City, with Ethan soaking wet and shivering like an abandoned puppy beside me and lanky Joel folded behind the steering wheel in the front. Beside Joel, then cinematographer (today Addams Family director) Barry Sonnenfeld, dressed in a plastic poncho, was pinching together a faulty cable release connected to a huge 35mm movie camera mounted to the Honda's front bumper. We were in search of a thunderstorm.

Did I mention that the windows were fogged?

The day had started early, with a wake-up call from Barry relaying a radio forecast for rain by nightfall. It took the rest of the day to empty my Honda, then drive around New York to find film stock and a 35mm movie camera on short notice. By four o'clock, Ethan and Barry were affixing the camera to the front of the car. As they wrestled with rope and two-by-fours, the rain began to pour. Barry stood in his poncho, Ethan in just a T-shirt and jeans. I stood with Joel in a nearby doorway and watched. Joel smoked cigarettes, now and then calling out helpful suggestions. "Hey, Eeth. Why don't you tie the rope around the...yeah," he would say.

The instant the camera was attached and we scrambled into the Honda and headed for the country, the downpour stopped. We did not see rain again until around ten o'clock that night--the same moment that Barry discovered the faulty cable release.

And so we drove on, into the unlit hills of New York, far from the city lights. Who knew where we were? Time itself seemed to stop. I believe I dozed once or twice.

At one point the topic of Barry's daily vomiting ritual--bad case of nerves--on the set of Blood Simple was discussed at great length, and I remember half wondering if this tendency was part of the reason Joel and Ethan had been drawn to Barry as a cinematographer.

An all-night diner appeared, ablaze with neon. "Maybe we should stop and think about this," Barry suggested.

"I wouldn't mind a cup of coffee," Ethan said, trembling.

"Yeah, coffee sounds good," Joel said resignedly.

He pulled into the diner's parking lot and shut off the engine. We sat quietly for a moment. "Hey, maybe we should ask if they've heard of any thunderstorms in the area," Joel said.

Everyone perked up at this.

Reinvigorated, we scrambled from the car and schlepped toward the diner lights.

Inside, the waitress poured coffee. "Have you, uh, heard about any thunderstorms in the area?" Barry asked.

We all looked up at her and waited. "No," she sneered, like we were idiots. Then she walked away.

We all looked down at our coffee in silence.

I remember thinking, My God, the boys are going to be famous.

Silent Rage

The press junket now over, Joel and Ethan and I walk across the muddy Carolco Studio grounds to a soundstage to take a look at a Hudsucker set still under construction. The boys are palpably relieved. While there is not exactly a bounce to their gaits, their legs shuffle a bit faster as they walk, heads bowed, hands deep in their pockets. To the experienced eye, this is an indicator that the Coens are experiencing borderline manic highs.

And, of course, now that it is no longer expected of them, they are considerably gabbier, too. As we walk, the master storytellers regale me with the saga of their journey into the Himalayas, and the night of Ethan's silent rage.

"Ethan had a silent rage," Joel says.

"Yeah, I had a silent rage," Ethan says proudly.

"A silent rage?" I ask.

"Yeah, it was a silent rage," Ethan says.

"It was horrible," Joel says, laughing.

It was November 1991. Barton Fink had opened Stateside. After the disappointing box-office showing of the critically acclaimed Miller's Crossing the year before, the critically acclaimed Barton Fink was doing only a little better. Joel and Ethan decided to get away, to unwind and contemplate their next career move.

It was cold in Nepal. In Kathmandu, the boys rented ratty parkas and sleeping bags. At least 150 years old and never washed, the equipment retained the stench of all the hundreds of thousands of trekkers who had rented the gear before them. But what do you expect at $1.50 for three weeks? It's a long way to the dry cleaner's.

From Kathmandu, the boys took a day-long bus ride up into Langtang Valley, to an elevation of 6000 feet, and from there continued on foot with Woody, a former Peace Corps volunteer who served as their guide, and a group of Sherpas who carried their belongings. The Coens climbed up steep, rocky trails, past Buddhist shrines and yak herds, into the Himalayas, until finally they reached an elevation of 16,000 feet. There they learned an important lesson: When you're at those kinds of elevations, everybody gets sick.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"Altitude sickness," Joel says darkly.

Ethan nods. "Yeah, altitude sickness."

The first sign of trouble came when a Sherpa from another trek came running like a madman down the trail lugging upon his shoulders another Sherpa with a horribly swollen head. Altitude sickness, they were told.

"The weird thing about altitude sickness is, it affects everybody differently," Joel says. "Some people get fluid in their lungs or bad colds. I got blinding headaches, but they didn't really bother me because I get migraines all the time, so I'm used to it."

But altitude sickness can also affect you emotionally, Joel says. It can make you funny in the head. That's what happened to Ethan.

"He fell into this constant rage. But he wouldn't say anything--he'd just walk around with burning hate in his eyes, gnashing his teeth." There is a tremulous note of horror in Joel's voice.

It is an amazing image: Ethan quietly shuffling about with his head bowed, seething with homicidal psychosis. Joel and I stare at Ethan. He looks up at us and sheepishly snorts.

The episode came to a head, Joel continues, one cold, dark evening in the middle of a lecture delivered by Woody the guide. Every night of the trek, the party would eat dinner together in a tent, and afterward Woody would open a tattered spiral notebook and give talks on such topics as snow leopards and the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet. On this special night, Woody spoke of the life of Buddha. He spoke for a long time, and everyone sat and listened--sick, tired and stinking of trekkers past.

As things began to wind down and everyone, especially the mute, wrathful Ethan, was preparing to go back to his own tent, Joel asked Woody one final question about Buddha. No one, not even Joel, remembers the question. But they all remember that the answer lasted 45 minutes.

"Ethan was really pissed," Joel says.

"What happened?" I ask, a grin of anticipation on my face.

"Nothing," Joel says. "Ethan just sat there in a silent rage, gnashing his teeth, his eyes full of hate." Joel and Ethan deliver brief, asthmatic chuckles in unison at the memory; it's a good one. Then they fall silent.

I look from one to the other, waiting for the denouement. "That's the story?" I say. I turn to Ethan. "That's the whole story? You just sat there, pissed off, and you didn't say anything?"

Ethan seems mildly surprised at my irritation. "Well, yeah," he says, shrugging. "What do you think silent rage is?"

They Might Be Giants

The Hudsucker set that Joel and Ethan need to look at is a miniature of New York City--at least as the city exists in the movie's gooney, retro fantasy world--a gaggle of ten-foot-tall, streamlined skyscrapers at the end of the soundstage, with a black backdrop to mimic nightfall and carefully directed kliegs that give the buildings a sleek, urban glow. From way up high, millions of tiny white particles drift downward in a mock snowfall.

The word miniature is a misnomer. While the set is a miniature city, it is also imposing enough in its size to feel like a gigantic toy metropolis. Throw a couple of Coens into this landscape and you have a really disturbing image.

As they wander through the set, Joel and Ethan could be two waifs lost in FAO Schwarz. It is as if Japan's Toho Productions had gone nuts and made a monster movie especially for Leonard Maltin about two giant, skinny Jewish brothers who trudge through the financial district of a city, terrifying people with their unemotive behavior and obscure jokes.

I stand in the darkness, breathing through a dust mask to prevent the fake snow from entering my lungs and killing me. I watch the two repressed, passive aggressive Coenzillas wander through New York. They pause beside a building. The one with the ponytail points. The other, younger one bobs his head in agreement. The snow gradually turns their hair white.

I think about The Hudsucker Proxy. A struggle between good and evil. A Midwestern chucklehead's entry into the halls of the mighty through bizarre coincidence and happenstance, and despite his every foolish, slap-happy, self-defeating impulse.

Where, you may ask, just where in the hell do the Coen brothers come up with such wacky ideas?

"The Coens' movies are what Dostoyeuski might have concocted had he watched too much TV as a child."