The Mirror Screen

Certainly people grow tired of mere contraptions. But they never grow weary of imagination. —Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture

One summer I met with a gentleman named Harley Buckwilliams, a tall fellow bent with osteoporosis and pigeon toed, a wanderer and would-be filmmaker from Topinabee, Michigan, on Mullet Lake. Buckwilliams–I never got to the bottom of whether that was his real name or a nom de plume–had seventeen minutes of what was to have been an epic feature film called Vachel Lindsay Will Trade Bread for Photoplays. How he came across my name I’ll never know, but it was this strange request which prompted me to drive the two hours from a visit with my mother in Mt. Pleasant. I arrived at a dilapidated clapboard farmhouse in the middle of a forest that looked as if someone had hacked down the trees twenty years ago and replanted evergreens in very straight lines. Harley met me out front, offered me a bottle of homemade beer, and then welcomed me around the back to a shack barely big enough to hold two people, much less a projector and screen. The place smelled not unpleasantly of metal and dust and old wood. Above the entrance was a sign that read Gryphon Theater, and inside and on shelves above our head were rows and rows of film canisters, a collection from over thirty five years. It included the usual found footage–old educational films, (Paddle to the Sea among them), footage of Flint for that city’s Chamber of Commerce, advertisements, and, he claimed, a copy of the Lyman Howe’s old silent Moving Day that Lindsay enjoyed. Buckwilliams refused to show this last one to me “for fear of enchantment”–I would, like Lindsay, take to the roads, hoboing, trying to encourage my fellow man to fall in love with poetry and the moving picture.

We sat on a pair of old kitchen stools, and he projected his film onto the back of an ancient high school school map of the United States. “My original idear was to cast Rich Brautigan in the role of Vachel Lindsay. You can see him there.” Quickly, there was a shot outside of what looked like a steep San Francisco street, and Brautigan, with his characteristic mustache, smiling and then flipping off the camera. Then the projector died. Buckwilliams cleared his throat as he tried to fix it. “He agreed at first. I get to keep this footage ’cause of that. I kept after him but then he died. Both Vachel and Richard killed themselves. One with Lysol, one with a pistol. I’d go with the pistol myself.”

The crux of the film was this: Brautigan was to wander from Illinois to New Mexico, as Lindsay had, preaching the gospel of beauty. As time progressed, Brautigan would gather poor souls to a makeshift theater by every town–merely a sheet strung up between birch trees, at dusk, hopefully by a river or railyard–and screen what had already been shot. All the while, characters in the background would be reciting Lindsay’s Art of the Moving Picture in its entirety. There was really no plot, except that Brautigan needed to get to New Mexico and there the film would be seen in its entirety. “The movie would sink into your head,” Buckwilliams said, as he fiddled the projector, blowing dust out of the guts of the machine. “I’m not talking the garbage you see today. But the movies that come out of your every waking day. That’s what V. saw in poetry and movies. This thing,” he said, slapping the reel, “is about life. What other movie can say that?”

I scoffed at that overblown statement, and asked him how he planned to get the financing to finish it–or was it already completed? The film would not lose money, he claimed, because barter would rule–for every time they needed film, or to use an editing studio, or to eat, Buckwilliams and his crew (one brother serving a year for vagrancy, and two pals of Harley’s from his very brief time in the Coast Guard before he was tossed out for desertion) would trade what they need for the promise of a spot in the motion picture. “Of course,” Harley said, in a voice gouged by cigarettes and no doubt shouting over trains, “that meant you had to find someone with imagination. Someone who’s brave.” Then he asked me if I would fund part of it, and I gave him thirty dollars and the promise of helping him screen what he had if he made it to Minneapolis.

With that he turned the projector back on and we watched the remainder of Vachel Lindsay Will Trade Bread for Photoplays. What remains is a thing of beauty. Whatever’s going through Mr. Buckwilliams’ head, no matter how scatterbrained he appeared, he does has an eye for the people he’s shooting. They are weary, most are drunk, the dregs of society beaming at the camera, no doubt shocked that someone wants to take a movie of them, and not just some tv crew out to capture the plight of the homeless. One fellow does a little jig, another tries (and fails) to juggle, one woman kisses at the lens and winks, smiles and then her instincts react and she immediately covers that happy grin with her hand and her eyes lower. Hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, with a little murmur of someone reading, I assume, chapter one of The Art of the Moving Picture. “But what’s important,” Buckwilliams added, “is that we don’t get anyone else talking. Talking ruins the Hieroglyphics of the individual. Film reveals the language. It reveals the person. It is, as Vachel said, the mirror-screen. It will make all of us happy, all of us equal.” He seemed to be suddenly aware of the gravity of the statement, for he shrugged and gave me a sideways smile. “Anyway, that’d be nice wouldn’t it?”

A little tipsy from the combination of strong beer and an empty stomach, I watched this little movie, impressed with Buckwilliams’ triumphant close to the picture: in 2018, when Lindsay’s vision of the arrival of a winged book should appear in Springfield, Illinois, the filming will cease. Harley would then show the world premiere of the film that day as well. The movie will be shown in the center of town, and maybe, just maybe, the spirit of Vachel Lindsay will rise to greet the new Millennia of the city of Springfield, which was holy to Lindsay.

Thanking Harley for his hospitality and the clip of his movie, I retreated to my car, a little overwhelmed. What I had just seen was as gossamer as a spider web on a tomato plant–here one day, gone the next. No one will bother to save Mr. Buckwilliams’ precious canisters of film; needless to say it will never make the switch to DVD and the film itself will eventually decay to nothing. Perhaps that is as it should be, like Lindsay’s impromptu poems recited for a meal or a night’s sleep in a hayloft. I felt a bit guilty with my promises to screen his movie if he ever made it out my way, for I knew that we both knew that that was an empty promise, that he would probably never leave Topinabee alive. And when he died, the movie would die with him.

…As we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other’s eyes, in pictures and in fact. –Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture.