Eric Bogosian and the "Jazz of Language" By Jonathan Marlow December 20, 2004 - 2:30 AM PST "The only things that really ever happen are the things that I really want to do." Novelist, playwright and actor Eric Bogosian was hardly known outside the New York performance art circuit until Oliver Stone turned his play, Talk Radio into a controversial film in 1988. Jonathan Marlow asks him where his characters come from - and where they're going. In the opening titles on the Docurama release of Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, you note that the piece is no longer performed in its entirety. On your site you also mentioned that you finished your commitments to solo performing and decided to take a break. Is this an indefinite break from solo performing or are you about to get back into the game? I'm not about to get into it. I'm still on the break. But I'm starting to plan what the next show will be and it's probably about a year away. I'll probably end up breaking the ice with Elliott Sharp. We just did a piece for an album [Radio Hyper-Yahoo] he's putting together. Elliott is, you know, a musician, a composer. He does stuff on electric guitar and so forth. We did this sort of thing together, a word piece, and I liked it so much that we've decided to do a show together. We'll probably put that together and that'll lead me back into standing in front of an audience again and talking and playing characters and doing all the stuff that I do in all these shows. I needed a break. Actually, what I really needed to do was open up another show in New York, but I didn't have the time. I just finished a book and now I'm doing some other writing and I've been doing some movies. Nothing seriously time consuming, but I did this movie Wonderland and I did Blade: Trinity for two minutes and weird shit like that. I just needed some time away from it to rethink it, but the problem is that I'm like Michael Jordan playing baseball. You know, it's stupid. I should be standing in front of audiences and playing basketball, like I normally do, and so I'll go back to it. You mean if they do another Under Siege, you don't want to get back into that? I would do another Under Siege! I mean, that thing was a lot of fun. The director was cool and it paid a lot of money. You know what's good about being me? I'm very difficult to deal with, in that I pick and choose what I do. As a result, I've kind of chased a lot of people away over the years and the only things that really ever happen are the things that I really want to do. I don't end up in a lot of stuff but I get to do something once in a while, which is fantastic. I get just enough in a year to take care of my jones. Often, as far as movies go, it's been small parts but I'd rather be on a movie set with Woody Allen for one day and say that I did that Woody Allen movie [Deconstructing Harry] and it was cool, it was fun and, after a day's worth of work, I'm done. I don't have to be somewhere far away for two months. Under Siege [2: Dark Territory] and Wonderland were more fully committed things and they were exhausting. I don't know if you got to see this crazy movie, but Wonderland's a thing about John Holmes and these murders in LA and everything. It's exhausting. I got hurt, other people got hurt on the set. The director got hurt. You throw yourself around that hard and I don't know if I could do that every month or every other month. It's fine, I get to sort of have my cake and eat it, too. Your wife, Jo Bonney, directs nearly all of your stage shows. Is that right? Yes. But she's only directed one of them for television, Funhouse - an early one. She directed the stage show for Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, but the direction of the "filmed version" is credited to someone else. Basically, their decisions are the camera placement and things of that nature? Right. Am I underestimating the video director's involvement versus the... Michael [Rauch] made some choices that went beyond the framing but he didn't have enough time. As much as he was the director, he's also producer of this. I was doing the show and I was getting to the end of the run and Michael said, "So, who's shooting this?" I said, "I don't have time to think about it. I'm doing eight shows a week." He said, "Well, somebody's got to shoot the show." I said, "I don't know. I can't." I didn't have an answer. You'd worked with Michael before. Michael had done a movie called In the Weeds that I had been in. We had just sort of known each other around and, you know, hung out and smoked cigarettes together and stuff. It gets to that point with things when you like people and you get along with them. So he said, "Well, this is happening." And I said, "You can't! You'll never get past all the paperwork. My lawyers will drive you crazy." He said, "Don't worry. I'll get it done." And he did it in five days, a week or something. He raised the money, he got the paperwork cleared, he got the clearances, he shot the movie and he did a great job. This movie was shot on almost no budget as opposed to Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, which they [Avenue Pictures Productions] spent over a million dollars shooting with John McNaughton years ago. They're very comparable. There's a lot about Michael's that I like better than Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. He really just lets the show do its thing, which is all part of being a director. For good reason, Jo, the stage director, stays away from those things. She's not interested. She doesn't want to do it and it ends up being copasetic between these two parties, fortunately. Did you and Jo end up meeting on Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames or did you know each other before that? [Laughs] I met her after that. I have a very small role in Born in Flames. It's always mentioned. I think I say one word. Is Lizzie doing hardcore porno now or something? Oh, I don't know. I have no idea. I saw her name on a TV show about porno with this weird guy... this guy Black something. I'm not sure, I'll have to look into that. [On further investigation, this is all in reference to the similarly named "Lizzy Borden" (aka Janet Romano), who, in addition to her porn films, married "Rob Black" (aka Robert Zicari) of XPW Wrestling fame.] It's possible. That's really from the radical old days downtown [New York City], which is really a different film world than the LA scene. It's the same world that Arena Brains came out of? To a degree, yes. Certainly, it all happened in the same neighborhood. Jim Jarmusch's stuff, although he was more Lower East Side. We were all friends and we all knew each other then, in the early 80s and late 70s, just hanging out downtown. Usually, the way you got cast in something like that was somebody would just say, "What are you doing this afternoon? Do you want to come down and do this thing?" And you'd go off and you'd do it and then you'd go home. There were no unions involved or anything like that. It's kind of funny to me that Born in Flames continues to be on my résumé. I'll actually get autograph requests from Europe that'll say, "We love you in Born in Flames." I'm not even in the scene! My back is to the camera. I'm in a Larry Cohen movie [Special Effects], also, from around that time. That's a nonunion, totally insane movie. This is even before "independent film" or before anyone used those terms. You just showed up and you didn't get paid much and it was... I can only be thankful because I was afraid of getting hurt on the set. I was always more afraid of getting electrocuted or something. Larry Cohen was putting live wires into a bathtub I was in because he wanted to light it from underneath. I was like, "What happens if the wire comes loose?" They're like, "Don't worry about it because there's a breaker. The minute the electricity starts to go through the water the voltage will stop." I'm like, "What!? What're you talking about?" And you're nude or you're falling off balconies. It's way too dangerous. Intense, too. next >>> Index "The only things that really ever happen are the things that I really want to do." "It's a frightening experience for me to watch that movie." back to past articles

Jonathan Marlow In addition to his persistence in acquiring obscure films for GreenCine, Marlow is a writer, filmmaker, curator and occasional critic. Not necessarily in that order. He is also a dedicated skeptic. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles