Just what is a “lost movie”?
In popular parlance it’s usually a title unavailable on streaming, Blu-Ray, DVD or VHS. But anyone who has spent serious time in the world of repertory film programming has probably found themselves enticed by at least one rarity even further afield the typical means of film distribution – say, the difference between an out-of-print DVD or VHS and a title that never made it to home video in the first place. No surprise that a lot of the work of film programming ends up being detective work: tracking down whatever stray bits and bobs of information can be located about the last known public screening, cold-messaging internet accounts who appear to have inexplicable access to a digital copy (or just some still images), knocking on the doors of museums or archives, perhaps even harassing the filmmaker (or their surviving friends/family) on social media.
The urge to organize a movie screening is inherently quixotic, and demands meeting any and all obstacles with a deranged willingness to keep pushing, to seek alternative means. There’s only one way to find out if these kinds of initiatives will get the goods, and oftentimes they don’t. Sometimes the only thing that comes to light is a hard, tangible reason why the film in question is so impossible to track down: an ancient legal contract betrayed, a few seconds of expensive private-domain music used without consent, an embarrassed actor who has since grown powerful enough to suppress the whole operation. (There’s also the issue of whether or not the film is worth a damn. Every programmer has a story like this: you spend years hunting for something, you finally track it down – possibly after soliciting the attention and interest of its makers – and then, when you finally get a chance to see it, you realize it’s not very good.)
It was (relatively) easy to find Andrew Horn’s 1984 anti-musical Doomed Love. I was first alerted to the film’s existence by the IMDb page of composer Evan Lurie, member of the seminal New York jazz outfit The Lounge Lizards (alongside his more famous brother John.) A single still image showed the actor and painter Bill Rice (another fixture of the downtown avant-garde) sitting opposite a redheaded nurse in a set that looked like something from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari – postmodern art deco in extremis. I found Horn on Facebook; in the 1990s he had relocated to Berlin after finding his beloved East Village (and the city at large) a bit too watered-down and yuppified. I realized I had already seen Horn’s Klaus Nomi documentary The Nomi Song in theaters a decade earlier, as a teenager in Seattle; its rigorous documentation of a bygone world intensified my dreams of moving East and becoming a wild bohemian. It felt like Horn and I were already connected.
“I wanted to make an opera – without much knowledge of what opera was – and it became a musical,” Horn explained via email. “I wanted to make something mythic and only later discovered just how personal it was. I wanted it to be on a grand scale, which could only play out in a confined and artificial space. In those days we perversely wanted to alienate the audience and dare them to leave. In that I (thankfully) failed miserably.” Indeed, Doomed Love played at Spectacle, the tiny all-volunteer microcinema in Brooklyn where I have done the majority of my programming, and became – to the extent possible in such a confined, off-the-beaten-path space – something of a hit. The Lurie music helped, as did the diorama-like 2D sets by Amy Sillman (who went on to become a world famous painter) and the sui generis patois of Jim Neu’s screenplay, maddeningly repetitive yet beguiling and enveloping.
So far, so good: more than a few people told me Doomed Love was their favorite of the films I had ever programmed. Horn acquiesed to reviving the film for additional shows, with Nomi Song added alongside his 2014 documentary We Are Twisted Fucking Sister!, an epic paean to the stick-to-it-ive-ness of Twisted Sister (who, like Horn, hailed innocuously from the suburbs of Long Island.) Horn came to the theater in 2018 for fervently attended Q&As. I thought the relationship was percolating beautifully, but whenever I sent questions about his followup to Doomed Love – something listed on the internet as The Big Blue, from 1988, with no images or video artifacts to prove it really existed – Horn went quiet.
I would later learn that Horn’s Big Blue suffered at least one misfortune I wouldn’t wish on any filmmaker in the world, which is the contemporaneous release of a radically different and far more successful film with the same title, in the same year. It sounds funny but is in fact sad that Horn was credited in New York Magazine as the director of a different The Big Blue, Luc Besson’s wildly popular but utterly different romance about a deep sea diver who can communicate, as if by telepathy, with dolphins. Besson’s story is well known, and the flamboyance of his fame is matched today by the alleged monstrosity of his abuses of power.
Andrew Horn’s Big Blue was a beleaguered coproduction between the German public broadcasting network ZDF and Angelika Films, a new production outfit that grew from the success of the storied (and still-open) movie theater on Manhattan’s Houston Street, operated by Joseph Saleh. In our talks, Horn alluded to tremendous frustration with the pressures of making a bigger-budget film, and – after much badgering – rather defensively deemed his Big Blue little more than a failed experiment. When we finally met in person after those 2018 screenings, he described the confusion around Besson’s movie as a sign from fate, the last nail in the coffin.
So here was a new twist, a filmmaker actively wishing I would not show (or ask them about) one of their completed works. (The only other time this has happened to me was when Louise Greaves, widow of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One director William Greaves, refused to entertain the idea of excavating Greaves’ beyond-rare contribution to the Blaxploitation genre, a Jamaica-shot thriller called The Marijuana Affair starring the great Calvin Lockhart.)
But I pressed on. And at the end of our first and last encounter, Horn begrudgingly agreed to send me a DVD of his Big Blue. “Maybe you’ll get something out of it I didn’t,” he mused. We shook hands. He never sent it. And within a year he died of lymphoma. Horn knew he was sick; he had returned to New York because he was racing against time to complete a documentary about the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the experimental theater group founded by artist Robert Wilson; this is where he met some of his closest collaborators such as Jim Neu (screenwriter/star of Doomed Love and The Big Blue.) I began contacting people about a memorial retrospective: Neu’s widow Carol Mullins (lighting designer for his Off-Off-Broadway theater works), Horn’s former partner Hisami Kuroiwa (an esteemed producer of independent film in her own right, and the driving force of our 2020 memorial retrospective), Amy Sillman and cinematographer Carl Teitelbaum, who also worked on Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971 and Landlord Blues, the 1988 feature by Horn’s downtown contemporary Jacob Burckhardt (son of the famous artist Rudy Burckhardt.)
The aforementioned parties agreed we had to include The Big Blue in our series, and the movie did not disappoint. Its vision of loneliness was even more minutely detailed than that of Doomed Love; offset with jawdropping production design and a coy, deadpan sense of humor. So much of the story is about David Brisbin’s slippery private investigator enjoying a safe remove from the people he’s surveilling; indeed, the characters speak in self-satisfied code about the walls they’ve built around their lives, and for that it’s not hard to see the kinship with Doomed Love. But crucially, The Big Blue also shows what happens when those facades come crashing down. It’s especially sad the film is so hard to see, because it represents the apotheosis of Horn and Neu’s collaboration, although Hisami Kuroiwa told me they had collaborated on one last unproduced screenplay, described as even darker and more sophisticated. The mind reels.
The version of The Big Blue screening in this year’s Weird Weekend is the cleanest the film has looked since it was originally released. (In sourcing the film, we went through three different copies – Betacam, u-Matic and VHS – before producer Yoram Mandel found this one, which is still deeply imperfect.) But what’s the lesson of this story? For me it’s a tragedy, not unworthy of Doomed Love or The Big Blue, about an artist who was not the best judge of his own work. Only fair, but now work continues to find a way to share The Big Blue with new audiences.
Steve Macfarlane
The Big Blue screens at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.
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