Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [151]
“I’ll put a reel together for you,” he said. “When can you come to New York?”
“Whenever you say,” I said.
Three weeks later I revisited his editing “suite” in the Village. I sat down and watched the fifteen minutes of my movie he had put together. I was blown away. It looked like a movie! He showed me how the Steenbeck worked. He showed me his editing system and how I could create my own. I spent hours watching him as he worked on his Nazi film, how he made decisions, how he knew just how long to hold a scene and when to get out. He did not believe in narration, or himself being on camera, or using music.
One day in the edit room, I asked him how he learned how to do all this.
“Well, I got a film degree.”
“From what film school?”
“I didn’t really go to film school,” he said.
“So where did you go?”
He paused. “Harvard.”
“The Harvard?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Yes, that Harvard,” he answered, not wanting to.
“Shit. I mean, wow. Cool.”
How on earth did this guy get into Harvard? I didn’t want to pry, especially into matters like how the hell could he afford it. After all, Harvard has scholarships, too. Not everyone who goes there is rich. Don’t be a bigot! One thing was clear: the dude was smart, very smart, and so that was clearly his ticket.
I set up an edit room in Washington, D.C., and hired a close friend from Flint and a local woman from suburban Maryland to be my editors, even though neither of them had ever edited a movie. So the three of us taught ourselves, with Kevin’s guidance, how to edit a movie. Our edit room was a cut above the ambience of Kevin’s, yet we did have our own cockroach-and-rodent problem. We had a room on the ninth floor of a dilapidated building on the corner of Pennsylvania and Twenty-first Street, about four blocks from the White House. There was a Roy Rogers burger joint next door to us, and the exhaust from that spewed into our edit room on a daily basis (that alone should have made the three of us vegans on the spot, had such a thing existed in those days).
Bit by bit, we figured out how to put the movie together. My two friends became amazing editors. The film was funny and it was sad. We stopped making a “documentary” and decided to make a film we’d take a date to on a Friday night. It would have a point of view, but not the point of view of the rigid, unfunny Left. I felt no need to fake the sort of “objectivity” that other journalists deceitfully hid behind. And I could sit there in our cramped edit room and see an imaginary audience in a big dark theater howling, cheering, hissing, and leaving the movie house ready to rumble.
We were working ’round the clock in the edit room, trying to finish the film before the bill collectors shut me down. And then, on a cold morning in January 1989, a new president was to be inaugurated at noon that day. His name was George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day, so I bundled up and headed over to the National Mall, where anyone from the public could watch the swearing-in of President Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. It was not very crowded, and I found a way to get closer to the Capitol steps than I thought would be possible. Looking up at the stage, at all the muckety-mucks sitting behind the new president, it was there that I saw Kevin Rafferty.
“Jesus,” I thought, somewhat in shock. “I think that’s Kevin up there!”
It did, in fact, look like him—but this guy was dressed up in a suit and tie and a fancy winter overcoat. There was no way this was him. Or if it was him, well, he’s got a good gig for the day, filming an inauguration! But I didn’t see any equipment.
A few days after the inauguration of the elder Bush as president of the United States, I tracked down Kevin at home. I had to know if that was him.
“Kevin,” I said into the phone, “I was at Bush’s inauguration the other day and I could have sworn I saw you up by