and cops weren’t against us at first, even though we looked strange. But it got bad during the time we were there because of the way things were going in the country. Richard had a truck, and one night I went with him to a movie. When we were driving home Richard looked in the rearview mirror and there was a cop behind us. We were approaching an intersection and when the light turned yellow Richard stopped, which I guess tipped off the cops that we were nervous. So the light turns green and we go through the intersection and the sirens and the lights go on. “Pull over!” Richard pulls over to this wide sidewalk next to a high rock wall. This cop walks around to the front of our car and he’s standing in the headlights and he puts his hand on his gun and says, “Get out of the truck!” We get out of the truck. He says, “Hands against the wall!” We put our hands against the wall. They start frisking Richard, and I thought, They’re frisking Richard, not me, so I lowered my arms and immediately this hand slammed me into the wall. “Hands against the wall!” Now there’s a paddy wagon and like twenty cops, and they put us in the paddy wagon and we’re riding along in this metal cage. We hear somebody talking over the cop radio describing two guys and what they’re wearing, and Richard and I look at each other and realize we look exactly like the guys being described. We get down to the station and in comes this old man holding a bloody bandage to his head, and they bring him over to us and he looks at us, then says, “No, these aren’t the guys,” and they let us go. That made me really nervous.
I’m quoted saying that I like the look of figures in a garden at night, but I don’t really like gardens except for a certain kind. I once did a drawing of a garden with electrical motors in it that would pump oil, and that’s what I like—I like man and nature together. That’s why I love old factories. Gears and oil, all that mechanical engineering, great big giant clanging furnaces pouring molten metal, fire and coal and smokestacks, castings and grinding, all the textures and the sounds—it’s a thing that’s just gone, and everything’s quiet and clean now. A whole kind of life disappeared, and that was one of the parts of Philadelphia that I loved. I liked the way the rooms were in Philadelphia, too, the dark wood, and rooms with a certain kind of proportions, and this certain color of green. It was kind of a puke green with a little white in it, and this color was used a lot in poor areas. It’s a color that feels old.
I don’t know if I even had an idea when I started Six Men Getting Sick—I just started working. I called around and found this place called Photorama, where 16mm cameras were way cheaper than other places. It was kind of sleazy, but I went and rented this Bell and Howell windup camera that had three lenses on it, and it was a beautiful little camera. I shot the film in this old hotel the Academy owned, and the rooms there were empty and gutted, but the hallways were filled with rolled-up Oriental carpets and brass lamps and beautiful couches and chairs. I built this thing with a board, like a canvas, propped on top of a radiator, then I put the camera across the room on top of a dresser that I found in the hallway and moved into the room. I nailed the dresser to the floor to make sure the camera didn’t move at all.
I have no idea what gave me the idea to do the sculpture screen. I don’t think the plastic resin burst into flame when I mixed it, but it did get so hot it steamed like crazy. You mixed this stuff in these paper containers, and I loved mixing it hot. The paper would turn brown and scorch and it would heat so much that you’d hear it crackling and you’d see these gases just steaming out of this thing. When the film was done I built this kind of erector-set structure to take the film up to the ceiling and back down through the projector, and I had a tape recorder with a siren on a loop that I set on the stage. It was in a painting and sculpture show, and the students let me turn the lights off for fifteen minutes out of every hour, and that’s pretty damn good.
Bart Wasserman was a former Academy student whose parents died and left him a lot of money, and when he saw Six Men Getting Sick he told me he wanted to give me a thousand dollars to make a film installation for his house. I spent two months working on this film for Bart, but when it was developed it was nothing but a blur. Everybody said I was really upset when that film didn’t come out, so I probably was, but almost immediately I started getting ideas for animation and live action. I thought, This is an opportunity and there’s some reason this is happening, and maybe Bart will let me make that kind of film. I called Bart and he said, “David, I’m happy for you to do that; just give me a print.” I later met Bart’s wife in Burgundy, France—she moved over there—and she told me Bart never did an altruistic thing in his life except for the thing he did for me. That film not coming out ended up being a great doorway to the next thing. It couldn’t have been better. I never would’ve gotten a grant from AFI if that hadn’t happened.
The film I made with the rest of Bart’s money, The Alphabet, is partly about this business of school and learning, which is done in such a way that it’s kind of a hell. When I first thought of making a film, I heard a wind and then I saw something move, and the sound of the wind was just as important as the moving image—it had to be sound and picture moving together in time. I needed to record a bunch of sounds for The Alphabet, so I went to this lab, Calvin de Frenes, and rented this Uher tape recorder. It’s a German tape recorder, a real good recorder. I recorded a bunch of stuff then realized that it was broken and was distorting these sounds—and I was loving it! It was incredible. I took it back and told them it was broken, so I got it for free, and I got all these great sounds, too. Then I took everything into Bob Column at Calvin de Frenes, and he had a little four-track mixing console and I mixed it there with Bob. This mixing and getting stuff in sync was magical.
Before I got together with Peggy, I’d have brief relationships with people then move on. I dated a girl named Lorraine for a while, and she was an art student who lived with her mother in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Lorraine looked Italian and she was a fun girl. We’d be at her mom’s house and all three of us would go down to the basement and open up the freezer and pick out a TV dinner. This freezer was packed with all different kinds of TV dinners, and her mom would heat ’em up for us. You just put them in the oven and pretty soon you’ve got a dinner! And they were good! Lorraine and her mom were fun. Lorraine ended up marrying Doug Randall, who took some still photos for me on The Grandmother. There was also this girl Margo for a while, and a girl named Sheila, and I really liked Olivia, the girl who got arrested, but she wasn’t really my girlfriend. There’s a film called Jules and Jim, and Olivia and Jack and I were kind of like that—we’d go places together.
Peggy was the first person I fell in love with. I loved Judy Westerman and Nancy Briggs, but they didn’t have a clue about what I did at the studio and were destined to live a different kind of life. Peggy knew everything and appreciated everything and she was my number-one fan. I didn’t know how to type and Peggy typed my scripts, and she was incredible to me, so incredible. We started out being friends and we’d sit and talk at the drugstore next to the Academy and it was great.
One day Peggy told me she was pregnant, and one thing led to another and we got married. The only thing I remember about our wedding is that Jack wore a taxicab-driver shirt to it. I loved Peggy but I don’t know that we would’ve gotten married if she hadn’t been pregnant, because marriage doesn’t fit into the art life. You’d never know I think that, though, because I’ve been married four times. Anyhow, a few months later Jennifer was born. When Jen was born fathers were never in the delivery room, and when I asked if I could go in, the guy looked at me funny. He said, “I’ll watch you and see how you do,” so he took blood from Peggy and I didn’t pass out, and she puked up a bunch of stuff and that didn’t bother me, so he said, “You’re good to come in.” So I scrubbed up and in I went. It was good. I wanted to see it just to see. Having a child didn’t make me think, Okay, now I’ve got to settle down and be serious. It was like . . . not like having a dog, but it was like having another kind of texture in the house. And babies need things and there were things I could contribute. We heard that babies like to see moving objects, so I took a matchbook and bent all the matches in different directions and hung it from a thread, and I’d dangle this thing in front of Jen’s face and spin it, like a poor man’s mobile. I think it boosted her IQ, because Jen’s so smart!
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