Role as detective with "Obsessive Debunker Disorder" helps "Starry Night" win major award.
4/14/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
I think honest skepticism is healthy. All in all, it.s better to stand back and take a wait and see attitude rather than falling for something like a gullible loon. But I learned a lesson that has burned into my soul like a brand on a steer at the OK Corral. There is a personality trait that causes an ailment I like to call O.D.D. - that.s short for OBSESSIVE DEBUNKER DISORDER. There are people in our midst who are so cranky and relentless in their disbelief that they will stoop to ANYTHING and stop at NOTHING to try to discredit and disprove something that is actually true.
O.D.D. wears many cloaks. Certainly the bishops in their robes who debunked Copernicus were infected with O.D.D. Stoning wasn.t good enough for them; they preferred to burn heretics at the stake.
Back in 1988, a year after my daylight disc sighting at close range, when I was struggling with the fact that friends and relatives would almost all stoop to .humoring. me when I talked about flying saucers, there was an incredible story in the news. The story was not about UFOs, but about a man who one century ago painted the night sky in a way that depicted it as filled with vast, surging, swirling cosmic energy. The artist was Vincent van Gogh, who painted STARRY NIGHT, one of 900 paintings he created in his lifetime (and only one painting sold before he killed himself in despair at age 37). In 1988, it so happened that one of Vincent.s several paintings of SUNFLOWERS sold to a Japanese insurance company for $33 MILLION. (Some of his other paintings have since sold for more than double that, including a very small self-portrait that fetched $72 million.) I thought to myself, Vincent would be rocking and rolling in his grave if he knew. The critics hated his work during his lifetime. Bob Dylan once said .Everybody must get stoned,. and as for Vincent van Gogh, during his lifetime, they stoned him no matter what he did. They stoned him when he was an apprentice art dealer, an English teacher in London, and when he became a preacher in Belgium (he was forced to give up life as a man of the cloth because they labeled him an overzealous clergyman) - and they CERTAINLY stoned him whenever he tried to draw or paint. He was a failure at everything in life, love included, and he never made a living for himself, having to rely to his dying day on the generosity of his brother Theo, a successful art dealer who couldn.t get anyone to touch a Vincent van Gogh painting with a ten foot pole. When I heard the news about the incredible price SUNFLOWERS fetched, I got the idea for making a fantasy movie about Vincent coming back to life, briefly, for a visit to our time, so he could see the good news for himself. In the film, he would face the cynics and skeptics of our era, who are just as lethal today as they.ve always been. Now, 12 years later, the movie is finished, and it was just shown at the Newport Beach Film Festival, after having made the rounds at the Montreal Film Festival, the Boston Film Festival, and the American Film Institute Filmfest.
I came back from Newport Beach the night of Thursday, April 6th, a very happy man. I was carrying what I call a .Newpy,. the award that STARRY NIGHT won. Unlike the Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Eddy, or EBE Awards, the .Newpy. is a sand castle mounted on top of a film can, with a little flag on top that names the film festival. My film received the .Newpy. for the AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST FEATURE FILM.
The moment of acknowledgment struck me like a nebula of bursting cosmic energy. No one but me and those closest to me could ever know what I went through to get the film made. We could start by talking about the eight years my screenplay for STARRY NIGHT languished while under option to four different bona fide companies in three countries (the U.S., Japan and Australia). Everyone seemed to love the script, but no one was willing to risk making it. Various companies paid for options on the screenplay year after year but did not produce it. After almost a decade of that game (a very typical fate for screenwriters in Hollywood), I was at wits end. I was mad as hell and I wasn.t going to take it anymore.
The critical moment of decision to cast everything to the winds and make the film myself as an independent venture came to me in 1997. My wife and I had stopped off at the home of Lady Sandra Lean in the south of France, widow of David Lean, the great director of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DR. ZHIVAGO and dozens of other great films. We were en route to show my latest film, a feature documentary titled TIMOTHY LEARY.S DEAD, at the Venice Italy International Film Festival. While at the Lean estate, David Lean so inspired me it felt as though his spirit took hold of me and moved me to begin making STARRY NIGHT at once.
I know the debunkers will have a field day with that remark. Debunkers don.t believe in spirits, so they certainly don.t believe departed spirits of great human beings can influence the living. But you may take it figuratively, if not literally, if you.re infected with O.D.D.
I never really thought much about debunkers until the aftermath of my daylight UFO sighting of February 25, 1987, which took place at close range with my two kids as witnesses alongside me. The first debunker I met after that was the grand-daddy of all UFO debunkers, Philip J. Klass, the man who thinks he has proven that no one has ever REALLY seen an unidentified flying object that couldn.t be explained as a weather balloon, the planets Venus or Jupiter, the moon, a kite, a model airplane, a toy, swamp gas, or fart gas. In Phil.s old age, I have learned how to kid him and not take him so seriously, and to appreciate him for the occasional astute remark or rich acerbic observation he might come up with that surprises and amuses. But back in the days when I was first sounding the trumpet that flying saucers are real because I had seen one up close in broad daylight, things were different. I wanted to smack Phil and all his debunking brethren for having the audacity not to believe me when I REALLY meant it. I used to get into pissing contests with him, some of which can still be found using search engines of Internet archives that I wish would self-destruct because the statute of limitations has run out on them. We had pissing matches about everything ufological, beginning with my sighting and going on to Roswell. Getting to executive produce and co-write the Showtime film, ROSWELL, was the best revenge I ever had on Phil. In my mind, it erased the harm done by all his debunking UFO books, because our movie managed to convince millions that the Roswell Incident MIGHT have been an ET spaceship, and that the government probably had the means and will to lie about it indefinitely.
Anyway, to get back to STARRY NIGHT, I just knew while I was in his magnificent estate near Cannes in southern France, that the late David Lean was looking over my shoulder and whispering to me, .Lad, you don.t wait one more minute while those S.O.B..s reject your screenplay ten more times like they.ve done for the last eight years. Go do it yourself, tomorrow, I don.t care if you haven.t got production funds, find a way, but no more waiting. Absolutely no more waiting, you haven.t a minute to lose..
About ten days and one hundred phone calls later, I called in every favor I could possibly collect and was ready to begin shooting six weeks after that on a shoestring, which eventually was expanded to being an entire shoe. I never knew how many REAL friends I had until I announced an official start date - a date when I intended to show up at my first location and begin shooting my movie, even though I did not yet have budget, actors, film or camera. You would be amazed at what a difference it makes to actually declare a start date for a movie, and to tell everyone that it cannot be changed and it is written in stone, even if all you have to make the film with is your own chutzpah. A hundred people interrupted the flow of their own lives to help me and a thousand people did favors. They jumped to it, because my start date was firm (you see, I HAD to begin shooting at the Tournament of Roses Parade, a once-a-year event, to show Vincent van Gogh popping up in Pasadena on New Year.s Day). Experienced actors (including Sally Kirkland) jumped aboard quickly, and in a few weeks I had a full cast for about 30 speaking roles and about 200 extras - and I had a cameraman from Scotland, David W. Smith, my old roommate from film school at the American Film Institute, who flew to Los Angeles and brought the camera himself.
I encourage you to visit the website for STARRY NIGHT (www.starrynightmovie.com) and learn much more about the film. Under 'Foreign Press' at the site is an article that was published in the British Cinematography Magazine, ZERB, that actually tells step by step how we filmed it technically, using a new process. However, the really important point for AlienZoo readers, who may not be into making films at all, is how I introduced a detective inflicted with O.D.D. into the story in order to make it work. That.s the role of Detective Brooke Murphy, which was played by Academy-Award nominated Sally Kirkland (nominated for her role in ANNA).
You see, when Vincent van Gogh returns to earth in our present day in my story, no one believes who he is. He learns that the paintings he did which never sold in his lifetime now fetch MILLIONS, and he wants the money. He doesn.t want it for selfish reasons. He has only 100 days to spend on earth, so there.s no thought of himself. He wants to collect approximately a billion dollars that he figures he.s owed, so he can give away the money to the struggling artists of the world.
But the rich collectors who hoard his works still won.t pay him, because he can.t prove who he is, and as everyone knows, people simply do not return from the dead.
In writing the story, I created the role of the ULTIMATE SKEPTIC. The character Sally Kirkland plays -- Detective Brooke Murphy -- absolutely will NEVER believe that this man who calls himself van Gogh is really the real Vincent. She tries every alternative theory, just like Philip Klass when he.ll say a UFO is a weather balloon and if it isn.t a weather balloon, then it.s swamp gas, and if it isn.t swamp gas, it.s the planet Venus. Sally Kirkland says that this Vincent is a con-man, a fraud, a liar, a thief, and a huckster staging a hoax. She does everything she can to discredit him, even accusing him of being a KGB agent who has mastered van Gogh.s handwriting style and memorized details of van Gogh.s life like an actor rehearsing a role. According to Detective Brooke Murphy, the phony .Vincent.s. motive is to create upheaval in the art market, so as to undermine the economy of the western world. She considers him a possible .art terrorist.. Vincent becomes so frustrated that he resorts to STEALING back some of his paintings. When he changes one of them (to finish it, he says) then he.s considered a notorious art vandal who has destroyed a great masterpiece. When he steals STARRY NIGHT back to donate it for a worthy cause, Sally Kirkland dubs him .the van Gogh bandit,. and the FBI puts him on their Ten Most Wanted List. Eventually, Vincent is arrested while barging into an auction where his PORTRAIT OF DR. GACHET is about to be re-sold for one hundred fifty million dollars. .I.m ready for the money!. he declares. .I.ve waited a century, and now I.m here to be PAID!.
The irony of the story is that no matter what Vincent does to prove his true identity, Sally Kirkland rejects it, and the critics call Vincent.s new paintings .worthless trash!. Critics, don.t you just love them? The movie business has more critics than gnats around a dog pile.
In no other business in the world other than the movie business do powerful columnists and on-air personalities line up to denounce a product the very day it is unveiled for the public. Can you imagine a world in which critics attacked every piece of new clothing that.s manufactured the way they attack movies? We.d all go naked! There.d be nothing ever judged good enough to wear. In the art world, in his day, Vincent got quite a taste of the critics. With their help (and utter rejection) Vincent wrote to his brother Theo that he was finally absolutely convinced that he would NEVER become an important painter. The poor boy had REALLY lost his mind. Critics and debunkers unfortunately are two sides of the same coin. The tenacious nastiness of a pit-bull usually goes with the territory.
Without revealing all the twists and turns of STARRY NIGHT (which include a bittersweet love story for Vincent), suffice it to say that up to the very end, even when Vincent finds some of his long lost paintings of a century ago, Sally Kirkland calls him a fraud. She accuses him of having painted the paintings as recently as 1992 as a .setup. for his hoax. In the very end, when the proof becomes so positive that there is no way out for Sally, and she has to face the fact that she.s been wrong all along and that he HAS come back from beyond the grave, there.s an incredible expression on her face. It sinks in. She suddenly sees THE TRUTH. She.ll never admit it. She.ll never bring herself to actually SAY that she.s been wrong. But we see on her face that she realizes that she has lost her fight, and that she has been the fool. There is a horrible, utterly lost expression in her eyes, that reveals that she has been checkmated.
This is a parable that ufology should adopt, because we see the same message played out repeatedly. Until the debunker sees a flying saucer with his own eyes, until a real alien sits him down at the controls and lets him take a quick loop-the-loop around Venus and Mars, the debunker will NEVER accept the evidence. No matter what you offer as proof, the case will NEVER be judged sufficient. That.s why I call the skeptic.s disease .Obsessive Debunking Disorder..
Sally Kirkland was there at the Newport Beach Film Festival screening to talk with the audience, telling them how much the film meant to her. In real life, she is anything but a debunker. She is a soulful searcher, very open-minded and sensitive to energies that most people never perceive. She also offered praise to her other cast members, that included Abbott Alexander as Vincent van Gogh (his father, Philip Abbott, played the father in the Robby the Robot classic, THE INVISIBLE BOY and performs his final role as a hypnotist in STARRY NIGHT). The cast also included Vincent.s love interest, played by Lisa Waltz (you.ll remember her as the nurse in our film, ROSWELL, who became hysterical over having seen .the bodies. of the aliens). Sally also offered kudos to Lou Wagner, who played Vincent.s attorney, and the film.s District Attorney, Brian Drillinger (who appeared in Neil Simon.s .BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS. with Lisa Waltz).
On April 6, prior to the Award ceremony at the Newport Beach Film Festival, I was invited to join the other filmmakers aboard John Wayne.s yacht for a brief cruise. As I walked around on the three decks of the spacious yacht, snacking on the hors d.oeuvres and looking at all the portraits of John Wayne, I had little hope of winning anything that night. STARRY NIGHT was up against films from 20 countries. Surely the audience would prefer the classic David Lean film, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, which was in the festival, or the new Edward James Olmos film (AMERICANOS: LATINO LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES) or LONG NIGHTS JOURNEY INTO DAY from South Africa. Then there was CATFISH IN BLACKBEAN SAUCE which had walked away with top honors at the Florida and Houston film festivals, and director Hunt Hoe.s SEDUCING MAARYA, as well as Roger Nygard.s feature documentary SIX DAYS IN ROSWELL, and a new independent film that had been filmed locally in Newport Beach: HARRINGTON.S NOTES, with its ecological theme. 400 features were submitted to the festival. About 40 were selected for screening. But when they announced the Audience Award for Best Feature that night, I had the absolutely joyous experience of hearing them announce our title: STARRY NIGHT.
I certainly hope and believe that there will be yet another happy ending to this tale - that the little independent film, STARRY NIGHT, will end up playing in a theater near you, and will then be available in your local video store, hopefully also on DVD. But in the meantime, let me leave you with this thought: if you.re ever depressed and are shopping for a hero to meditate on, give Vincent a chance. Get a book of his paintings or check them out on the web (www.vangoghgallery.com) His cosmic sky appears not just in STARRY NIGHT but in many of his works. He knew something profound that you budding ufologists have also learned: that our cosmos is alive, it is the very essence of the Life Force, and it repeatedly gives birth, as it teems with millions of mansions, old and young, in the Father.s House. As a species, we humans are surely among the young.
This is Paul Davids for AlienZoo and FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!, reminding you to never give up your dreams until you Sign Off for the very last time and go to the eternal STARRY NIGHT in the Milky Way sky. But hopefully, that.s a long time yet to come, so let.s meet here again next Friday, same website, same station, and we.ll continue soaring over Hollywood Boulevard together in our search for a big juicy bite of THE TRUTH!