I’ve been drawing water from my Wes Anderson past for over 25 years now. The glorious ’90s plus The Royal Tenenbaums, I mean.
The last time I was truly delighted, Wes-wise, was 11 years ago, which is when I first saw The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s been a rough decade since. For me, at least.
Budapest aside, I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.
I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m…well, 85% to 90% certain that one day Wes will reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.
For those who’ve never watched the original 13-minute Bottle Rocket short that played at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, please give it a looksee. It boasts some of that raggedy, roughshod quality that defined Wes’s aesthetic 32 or 33 years ago…a quality that will never return, of course, but it’s a nice contact high all the same.
Here’s how I explained the genesis of the Polly Platt-produced, feature film version of Bottle Rocket. I posted this 14 years ago — 7.28.11
It’s fairly common knowledge that the key movers and shakers in turning Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s Bottle Rocket (’96) into a “go” feature were the late Polly Platt, producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and concert promoter and Woodstock ’69 maestro Michael Lang. Oh, and James L. Broooks, of course.
Alas, Platt, Carson and Lang are “all equal now” in the Barry Lyndon sense of that phrase. Brooks is still with us.
Bottle Rocket was green-lighted because Carson slipped the 13-minute black-and-white Bottle Rocket short — directed by Anderson, co-written by Wes and Owen and exec produced by Carson and Lang — to Platt in early ’94. The short had just played at Sundance. At the time Platt was involved in cutting the doomed musical I’ll Do Anything with director James L. Brooks.
A year earlier Carson had seen a few minutes of rough footage that Anderson had shot, and convinced Lang to invest $7500 to pay for the short’s production costs.
“Polly was the person who persuaded Jim Brooks to watch the Bottle Rocket short during lunch break,” says Carson. “They were in the editing room on I’ll Do Anything, and she stuck the tape into a VHS player and and made him watch it. When it ended Brooks looked up and said, ‘What’s anybody waiting for? Make a deal. This is a go picture.'”
“Wes and Owen had showed me some rough footage,” Carson recalls. ” It wasn’t even a cut-together film. I got Michael Lang to write a check for $7500, and we took that and re-shot the short.”
Former Sundance honcho John Cooper was a programmer at the time, and he told Carson’s partner Cynthia Hargrave that the short “‘has to be 13 minutes and no longer” so that’s the length they cut it to.
After the Sundance showing Carson sent the tape to Platt at the recommendation of producer Barbara Boyle, who’s now a senior professor/chair/something-or-other with UCLA’s film program.
Bottle Rocket being greenlighted by Brooks and Columbia “was a major moment….a comet coming out of the universe and hitting Wes Anderson on his left shoulder,” says Carson.
A day after Carson passed on 10.20.14, Wes and Owen assembled a few thoughts and sent them in my direction.
“We met Kit twenty years ago. Kit and Cynthia had come back to Texas to put Kit’s biological son Hunter through school there, and we submitted ourselves to be his adopted ones, hoping to become his latest discoveries. He was the only person we’d ever met who actually worked in the movie business, and we had never come across someone who so automatically and instinctively turned any idea or experience or suggestion into a story — a pitch. Sometimes it was only at the end of the story that you realized ‘this has a purpose, he’s advising us, these are ‘notes.’
“Kit had a rustic glamor, like a sort of a cowboy-screenwriter. He never told us much about his childhood except that the L. was for Louis and the M. was for Minor, two old men he was named after. What we heard about was guerilla filmmaking and gonzo film journalism and Dennis Hopper in Taos and Peru.
“We loved Kit in David Holzman’s Diary which we saw with him in Dallas, and we had already loved his work in Breathless and Paris, Texas. He had longish, stringy, sandy hair, and he clomped through the house in hiking boots all year round. He gave us a one-on-one tutorial in scriptwriting and short-film-editing (and, also, a lesson in how to hustle a project into existence). [Kit’s wife] Cynthia said to us that of all the people who were lucky to have known Kit, we were the luckiest. It certainly feels that way to us. He introduced us to the rest of our lives.
“We drifted apart over the years, but we’ve missed him, and we’ll keep missing him. He was a good guru.”
Wells note: I think Wes and Owen actually met Carson in ’93 because the Bottle Rocket short, on which they collaborated, was shown at Sundance in January ’94.