From the Archives: Christopher Guest Makes his Directorial Debut.

DATE September 15, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Journalist Burkhard Bilger discusses his new book
about clandestine Southern traditions
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Cockfighting is a blood sport in which chickens fight it out while people make
bets. Because it's illegal in many places and frowned upon even in some
places where it is legal, the culture around it is somewhat secretive. My
guest, Burkhard Bilger wrote a fascinating article about cockfighting, what
the sport is like today, its history and what it says about our culture. That
article is published in his new book "Noodling For Flatheads." It's a
collection of pieces about clandestine Southern traditions. He grew up in
Oklahoma and now lives in Brooklyn. He's a senior editor at Discover
magazine. I spoke with Bilger last year when his cockfighting article was
first published in Harper's magazine.

Now I've never seen a cockfight, and I imagine a lot of our listeners haven't
seen one, either. So why don't we get to a description of what a typical
cockfight is like, if there is such a thing as a typical cockfight. Perhaps
you can describe one of the cockfights you saw at the Red Rooster(ph) in
Louisiana.

Mr. BURKHARD BILGER (Journalist): Well, the Red Rooster is a rickety little
building in the middle of nowhere next to Maurice, Louisiana, and it doesn't
look like anything from the outside. There's barely even a sign. You go
inside and it's kind of all plywood and everything's not square. And there's
a little concession stand. And you walk in and you see kind of this miniature
thunder dome. It's this amphitheater of seats, you know, kind of rickety
benches. And in the middle is this enormous two-story octagonal cage which is
made out of chicken wire, and it's elevated off the ground, and it's
completely enclosed. And that's just for a certain kind of Cuban cockfight
where they just put the chickens in and leave, and they consider it the most
natural cockfighting.

But anyway, it's enclosed mainly to protect the spectators from the birds
which are wearing these knives on their heels in most cases. So the two
handlers come in and there's a referee in the middle who's wearing black and
white stripes. And the handlers have to hold their chickens very tight in
their arms because they're already pumped up. A lot of them get testosterone
injections or digitalis to make their hearts race or any number of things to
get them up for the game fight. And so they're really raging to go at each
other. And the two handlers will stand side by side and kind of sway toward
each other and let their chickens peck at each other for a while and get their
dander up, so to speak. And then they'll put them behind two lines that are a
few feet apart made out of cornmeal. They're laid in this sandy floor of this
cage. The referee stands in the middle and he'll say, `Pit,' and then the
handlers will let their chickens go.

Up until then, it's all pretty straightforward and even pace, but as soon as
they go, I mean, the chickens move at a thousand times the pace of anybody
else in the room. I mean, it's like warp speed compared to everything. And
all you see is this huge flurry of feathers and flashing talent. And for a
newcomer like I was the first time I saw one, it's almost impossible to see
what's going on. But the people who really know what's going on and have kind
of accustomed their eyes to it can see, you know, what's happening as the
roosters are jumping up and dipping their tails down toward the ground and
then spinning their talons with these knives that are attached to the back of
their heels down in a kind of a windmill pattern at each other. And if
they're lucky, one of them will strike, you know, in the head or the eye or in
the neck. And then they'll fall down again, and the whole thing starts over
again.

GROSS: Now what are the rules of cockfighting compared, say, to the rules of
boxing?

Mr. BILGER: I mean, in some ways, they're the same, but, you know, there are
rounds. Every time two chickens get tangled up if their spurs or their gaffs
get tangled in each other, they separate them and the referee comes in there
and puts them apart, and in some places, like in Bali, they'll drop a pierced
coconut into a tub of water. And in the time it takes for that coconut to
sink to the ground, the chickens get to recuperate. And just like handlers in
a boxing match, the cockfight handlers will take the chicken and talk to him
and rub him and wash him off. And sometimes they'll stick his whole head in
their mouth and suck the blood out or even spit into his beak to give them
some refreshment.

So in some ways, it looks like a boxing match. What's different is that a
boxing match, obviously, has rules of sportsmanship. You know, they can't do
rabbit punches and so forth, but a cockfight, there isn't any. Once they're
in the pit and they're going, it's no-holds-barred. And...

GROSS: Do they fight to the death?

Mr. BILGER: Yeah, they always fight to--I mean, they don't necessarily fight
to the death, if a chicken dies and the other one has won, but essentially
they fight until one of the chickens dies or one of them runs away or refuses
to fight anymore.

GROSS: Now are there ways of playing dirty within cockfighting? I mean,
you've told us what the basic rules are. Are there...

Mr. BILGER: Oh, there are innumerable ways to play dirty. I mean, the people
in Louisiana I talked to said that that never happens, but there are a lot of
kind of ingrained rituals around cockfighting just to prevent that. For
instance, in Venezuela on the island of Margarita, people there are famous for
using stingray poison and putting that on the blades of their cocks before a
fight, or they'll throw poison into a chicken's food. Or in the Philippines,
you know, I've read that sometimes handlers have been known while the other
handler isn't looking, they'll reach over and just snap a little bone in
another cock's back, you know, tiny bone, just to cripple him a little bit.

There's one famous story from the Philippines of, you know, a local mayor went
to visit another district, and he went to a big cockfighting ring. In the
Philippines, cockfighting is enormous. It's really the national sport, and it
affects local politics and all this kind of thing. And the mayor went to
visit another cockpit and had his own chicken. And he was fighting it, and
the chicken was losing. And the mayor just jumped into the ring, pulled out
his .45 and blasted the other chicken out of the ring. And people said, `What
are you doing? This is cheating.' He goes, `Well, no, my chicken didn't
lose. You know, he was never killed by the other chicken.' And, of course,
he had 10 bodyguards with him heavily armed and everybody said, `Wow, you're
right. Actually, that's new. That's a new wrinkle. I never noticed that
before.' So there's a lot of ways to cheat.

GROSS: Now what's the state of cockfighting in America? I imagine that in
some places it's very controversial. How do the sides typically break down?

Mr. BILGER: It tends to be--I mean, it's hard to say because the natural
answer to that would be animal rights activists on the one hand and
cockfighters on the other. That's kind of deceptive because in some ways--you
know, a place like Louisiana, for instance, you know, there are a lot of
congressmen who are pro-cockfighting, who think of it as a real Louisiana
tradition and think that if you get rid of it, you're getting rid of something
like the Mardi Gras. I mean, a friend who I met there, an academic, who
said, `You know, they'll sooner get rid of Little League than they'll get rid
of cockfighting in Louisiana.'

But it tends to be animal rights activists--tend to be the goads to get the
laws passed. And the fact of the matter is, for the most part, if you can
get a state petition that says, `Do you agree with cockfighting?' almost
anyone will say, `No.' And so that has been the best mechanism for outlawing
in this country.

GROSS: Yes, so, you know, the cockfighting is very controversial. You
weren't used to going to cockfights. Give us a little bit of what the
atmosphere was like in the places that you went to. I mean, is it a real,
like, blood lust type of sport?

Mr. BILGER: Well, for some people, it is, I'm sure. I mean, I think, the
atmosphere varies from the small pits to the big pits. I mean, when I went
originally the first time, I went to that brush pit Red Rooster at midnight,
and it was a thunderstorm, and I was terrified because I had heard
cockfighting always comes with drug sales and gambling and all kinds of
nefarious activity, and that if you go there, you're among bad apples and all
this kind of thing. So I originally was fairly frightened. And I get there,
of course, and it's completely the opposite. In the small pits, the
atmosphere is amazingly homey. I mean, you get there, and the night I went,
it was--by the time that I got there, it was about 1 in the morning. And
there were two mothers nursing their babies right next to that big cage.
There were toddlers running up and down the aisles. There were teen-agers
loitering around, sipping Cokes, and it was very much, you know, family night.
It was like going to a PTA meeting. It was very weird.

And there I would say most people kind of went just for that. They went
because, `Well, this is what everybody did on a Friday night or a Saturday
night,' and they liked to be together. I talked to a sociologist later who
said that cockfighters are kind of a frozen demographic. They're like the
American from the '40s or '50s still living in these little tiny pockets. You
know, they tend to be rural and small town and church-going and, you know,
American as apple pie. So that's the small pits.

But the big pits, those are a completely different scene. I mean, I went to
one where there were 900 chickens fought in one night and there was a $40,000
purse. And, you know, people drove from hundreds of miles around. They paid
16 bucks to sit there. And that was really a gambling scene. It was--people
really didn't care about the chickens. They just came with a lot of money.
They wanted to see their chickens win. They wanted to leave with a lot of
money. And it was also a fairly--I mean, 900 chickens in a day, you can
imagine there's blood everywhere. By the end of the night, there are just
broken chickens overflowing out of the trash cans, lying in the aisles. They
tend to be very rickety structures because no one really trusts that
cockfighting will be legal for very long, so they are these kind of
claustrophobic, poorly built, you know, firetrap buildings with hundreds of
people screaming out their bets. It's not a really pleasant atmosphere.

GROSS: My guest is Burkhard Bilger. His article about cockfighting is
published in his new book, "Noodling For Flatheads." More after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Burkhard Bilger. We're talking about cockfighting, one of
the subjects he writes about in his new book, "Noodling For Flatheads."

You know, cockfighting sounds so, well, grotesque and violent, and you write
that our forefathers were cockfighters. Jefferson had game cocks. You say
Andrew Jackson was fighting cocks on the White House carpet...

Mr. BILGER: Oh, yeah.

GROSS: ...that Lincoln was a former cockfighting referee. So there's...

Mr. BILGER: Yeah.

GROSS: ...like, this whole American history of cockfighting, huh?

Mr. BILGER: I mean, cockfighting--you know, there was a time when it was
called one of the most fashionable amusements of American culture. It was the
national pastime for a while in the 19th century. It was extremely popular, I
mean, not just those guys but Grover Cleveland fought game cocks, Woodrow
Wilson gave plagues to cockfighters in the White House. There's even
second-hand stories that people on Ronald Reagan's ranch used to have
cockfights in his ranch houses. I mean, there's this kind of--it's almost
like a Thomas Pynchon novel. It's a secret history. If you start looking at
cockfighting, it threads its way all through American history. But it was a
mainstream amusement for most of the 18th and 19th century. And in England,
before that, clergymen used to stage cockfights and give prayer books as
awards to the best cockfights. I mean, Henry VIII had a huge sumptuous
cockpit built with special gilded cock cages for all his lords and so forth.
So it has this kind of prestigious history that got abruptly cut in this
country around the beginning of the 20th century.

GROSS: And what changed then?

Mr. BILGER: I think two things. It kind of got attacked from two angles.
One is what they call the anthropocentric angle which is said basically that
cockfighting is bad for people, that you go to a cockfight and you're with a
bad element and you're engaging in blood lust and you're emphasizing all the
worst human attributes. And the other one, of course, was the rise of the
humane society movement in the end of the 19th century which just gradually--I
mean, that was really much weaker than the former argument, but it ended up
being the one that really killed cockfighting.

GROSS: Well, you were interested in the ethics of cockfighting, so you spent
some time at a regular chicken farm, the kind of chicken farm where chickens
are born to lay eggs for our breakfast and to create chicken meat for our
dinners. And compare the conditions that you found on that big chicken farm
with the conditions that you found on a farm that raises chickens for
cockfighting, or roosters, I should say.

Mr. BILGER: Yeah. Well, the farms where they raise cocks tend to be--I mean,
by chicken terms, you know, they're like luxury resorts which isn't to mean,
you know, that there's, you know, bronze and gilds everywhere, but every cock
has his own little conical cage with a long walking strip in front of it.
They have these tenders that come by and rub them down every morning and give
them special feeds and exercise them. And if they get too antsy, they'll
bring in these plump little pullets and have them kind of work out their
desires with another chicken. It's just--it really is--if you're a chicken,
you want to be a game cock because--and they'll live much longer. They'll
live one to three years in most cases.

Now you compare that to a chicken factory--I mean, I went to one in Little
Rock, which is the Tyson chicken factory. And Tyson is no worse than any of
the others. They have a very, very efficient chicken-raising business and we
all reap the benefits of that. I mean, chicken used to be the luxury meat in
this country. It was more expensive than lobster. It was more expensive than
filet mignon. When people said a chicken in every pot, it was because it was
considered so outrageous that that would ever come true. And it has come
true, and it's come true because of the way people like Tyson raise chickens.
It used to be it would take 16 weeks for a chicken to reach two pounds; now it
takes six weeks for a chicken to reach four pounds. I mean, genetics and
nutrition and just raising methods have increased incredibly.

But, of course, the dark side of that is the life of the chicken. I mean, you
go to a Tyson factory, and there are these enormous sheds. And there are just
tens of thousands of chickens crammed into a shed together, shoulder to
shoulder. They spend six weeks in there, and that's not so bad, really,
because it's kind of social at least, but that's their life. That's the best
part. Then they get crammed into trucks, 7,000 at a time, carried to this
factory and dumped on this enormous conveyor belt which is a few feet wide
which just rolls them up into the maw of this factory.

And they get there and--I mean, the guy who led the tour--I'm so grateful that
he even took me there 'cause most chicken PR people don't want you to see
these factories, they just want to keep you away. But he reluctantly agreed
to take me into the killing zone. And you go in there and it's almost pitch
black except for some black lights. And the workers have top 40 music
screaming and the machinery is incredibly loud. And the workers just pluck
these chickens off this conveyor belt and reach them up very quickly and hang
them by their feet from this running chain that whips by overhead very fast.
And so the chickens are hanging upside down. They get whipped over into the
next room, and that room is a weird room. I mean, the one I saw was lit like
a Dutch painting, you know, just one lightbulb in the corner, and the chickens
come hurdling through. And they come into these mechanical bottlenecks where
their heads get squeezed together and an electric shock gets jabbed into their
head and they get stunned. And then as they hang limp, a rotor saw comes and
slashes their head off. And, you know, a few chickens will raise their heads
and get away, but then somebody reaches over and cuts their throat with a
knife.

So, you know, if you had your choice between dying in a battle in a cage or
dying that way, I think it'd be a fairly hard choice, but most people would
probably pick the cockfight.

GROSS: The article that you wrote for Harper's on cockfighting is actually
part of a larger project that you're doing. You're writing a book on
clandestine Southern traditions. What do you mean by that?

Mr. BILGER: I mean, I'm interested in traditions that are like cockfighting
that tend to be rural and have a lot of history to them and are interesting in
that sense, is that they're a rich subculture, and they tend to be outlawed or
illegal. And the reason, more often than not, tends to be--say a lot about
our values and how they've changed in the course of, you know, American
history.

Another example is a thing called noodling which I wrote a piece for the
Atlantic about, and that's where you hand grab catfish with your hands. In
the spring, you walk along a riverbank and you stick your hand into a hole and
then you wiggle your fingers. And if a catfish is in there nesting, he'll
bite your hand. And so you'll jam your arm down its throat and pull up this
fish on your forearm and it's a way of catching catfish that is very old. And
the Indians did it and it's been around forever, but it's outlawed in almost
every state. And the reason is people say it's unsporting. And again, it's a
kind of example--it doesn't really make any sense to say it's unsporting. It
doesn't make any ecological sense. It's just kind of a judgment we pass as a
culture because our values are urban and no longer rural. And so I'm
interested in traditions like that, that kind of put those things in
perspective.

GROSS: Your official paragraph-long biography says that you have a coonhound
named Hattie(ph). Is the coonhound part of your interest in these clandestine
Southern practices?

Mr. BILGER: Oh, yes, she was the goad who got me into it. I think when I was
living in Boston, I was kind of nostalgic for my Oklahoma roots, and I decided
to buy a coonhound which I'd always seen on country roads and so forth. So I
started to look around for one. I couldn't find one. And so I made a lot of
calls and finally discovered a guy who bred bluetick coonhounds in
Massachusetts. And I went to visit him and I told him that I wanted to buy a
redbone coonhound. And he lifted up his hand and he said, `Just a second.'
And he went in his house and he came back with American Cooner magazine, which
is just the weirdest magazine I've ever seen in my life. I mean, it's an inch
thick. It has a hundred thousand subscribers. It's full of pictures of dogs
jumping up trees and advertisements for chilled semen. You know, everybody's
shipping their chilled semen all over the country.

So it was, like, `Where did this come from? And since when is there this huge
coon-hunting subculture?' And so I started to make calls and I ended up
writing a piece on coon hunting and that's going to be one of the chapters in
the book. And it really kind of introduced me to the interest. I mean, coon
hunting is another thing. People go out in the middle of the night every
night. I hung out with a woman who coon hunts 350 nights a year, and every
night at midnight, she goes into the woods and she stays out till 5 in the
morning. And most of that time she's just standing in the forest listening
to her dog run down raccoons. It's just the strangest sport in the world, and
yet it's wonderful, and once you get into it, it's kind of addictive.

GROSS: So now that you're deep into all these hidden Southern practices,
you're living in Brooklyn, New York.

Mr. BILGER: Oh, yeah, the epicenter of clandestine Southern traditions.

GROSS: Yeah, absolutely. So I imagine there's a fair amount of cockfighting
there.

Mr. BILGER: There's a huge amount of cockfighting in Brooklyn. I mean,
there's so many Latin and Asian immigrants, and, you know, of course, there's
Santeria and so forth, so there's plenty of chickens around.

GROSS: Well, Burkhard, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. BILGER: Well, thank you.

GROSS: Burkhard Bilger's article about cockfighting is published in his new
book, "Noodling For Flatheads," about clandestine Southern traditions. Our
interview was recorded last year when his cockfighting article was first
published in Harper's Magazine. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Whit Stillman, writer/director/producer, talks about
his films and his life
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

In the movie "The Last Days of Disco," screenwriter and director Whit Stillman
paid homage to the dance music that many despised. Now Stillman is touring
the country reading from his new novel, which expands on the story he told in
the film. The book is called "The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at
Petrossian Afterwards."

This romantic comedy is set in the early '80s and follows a group of young
single people as they look for friendship and love at an exclusive Manhattan
disco. In this scene from the film, a young assistant DA is talking with a
friend at a coffee shop about why he loves disco.

(Soundbite from "The Last Days of Disco")

Unidentified Man #1: I was just starting law school when the first up-tempo
Philadelphia International hits broke. Some people don't consider that disco
because it's good, but I remember feeling absolutely electrified.

Unidentified Man #2: You feel electrified often.

Unidentified Man #1: No, but this was different. I loved the idea that
there'd be all these great places for people to go dancing after the terrible
social wasteland of our college years. Woof!

Unidentified Man #2: You've been to a lot of discos?

Unidentified Man #1: No. In fact, practically none. For me, law school
wasn't easy, and I haven't had much of a social life since coming to the city,
either, but I still consider myself a loyal adherent to the disco movement.

Unidentified Man #2: It's a movement?

Unidentified Man #1: Sort of. What I found terribly encouraging was the
idea that when the time in life came to have a social life, there'd be all
these great places for people to go to, because as you'll remember, for many
years there were none.

Unidentified Man #2: Yeah.

Unidentified Man #1: What I didn't realize was that they get so impossible to
get into.

GROSS: Filmmaker Whit Stillman started going to dance clubs when he was a
teen-ager, traveling in Europe in the late '60s, and picked up with them again
here in the late '70s. Stillman considers the film, "The Last Days of Disco,"
the conclusion of a trilogy about young single people and their group social
life. "Metropolitan" was about debutantes and their escorts, "Barcelona" about
Americans living in Europe.

I spoke with Stillman when "The Last Days of Disco" was released in 1998, and
he told me why he wanted to set a story in the disco era.

Mr. WHIT STILLMAN (Writer/Producer/Director, "The Last Days of Disco"): It
was when I was in the throes of trying to find the right significant other,
the way the characters in the film are. It was the sort of apex of our single
social life, and I think it's rare in our country when we have places and
moments when groups of young people congregate after college. I think we
often live sort of solitary social lives where there's a date and dinner and a
movie, or a party, but a place where you can semi-anonymously go and run into
people you like or meet new people is not something we always have.

GROSS: It's the ambition of some of the characters in "The Last Days of
Disco" just to be admitted to the club, and some of the characters are so
angry and insulted that they can't get in, or even worse, that they've been
thrown out, that they compare the bouncers and the guards to the Nazis. I'm
thinking you must have felt ambivalent about a club scene where only the
beautiful people get let in, where you have to, like, look right, and be the
right age and so on, in order to just get admitted.

Mr. STILLMAN: Well, I think there's more of extremes, so you could sort of
play the extremes. And also, I think there are times when it wasn't very hard
to get in. I think if you go at the peak time when everyone else is, it's
like a traffic jam, and you don't get in. But there were ways of slipping in,
in different moments--you know, early in the evening, very late in the
evening, the back door, etc., etc. And I think that it was justified in some
of those clubs, because it really worked, in a sense; they created a party
atmosphere inside. Unfortunately, the party invitation list was done right at
the door, so it's cruel that way, but it's very easy, also, to pretend that I
didn't really want to go, and you know, maybe it's better we go to Rex's and
have a drink, and so, I mean, I don't think we should read too much into the
rejection.

For one of the characters, it's part of his career. He feels that if he
doesn't get people into the club, he's going to lose his job, because there's
been a merger in his ad agency--we don't really talk about that; he's the last
of the old regime--and he feels if he can't get clients in, or the top brass of
the agency in, they're going to let him go.

GROSS: Whit Stillman, are you a good dancer?

Mr. STILLMAN: I think so, but it was pretty embarrassing; in our
premiere--and there were a lot of photographers, and they wanted me to dance
with Chloe in ...(unintelligible). I'm afraid whatever skills I had
disappeared at that moment.

GROSS: Is there a connection between the disco era and the debutante era for
you? And by that, I mean your first film, "Metropolitan," is about a group of
people in their late teens, I'd say--late teens, is that about right?
Mid-teens?

Mr. STILLMAN: Yeah. In--it's kind of specific in "Metropolitan," because
most of the women were between 17 and 19, and the guys would be that age, plus
a little bit older, and so there might be a two-year age difference between
the guys and the women.

GROSS: And the story is about debutantes and their male escorts, and I'm
wondering if the friends you had, in, like, the deb days are the same friends
you had in the disco days, or whether those were those two completely separate
groups of people.

Mr. STILLMAN: Well, they were different people from the same subgroup, so
there was some overlap, and I think, you know, that's a good question, because
there was, I think, a feeling of recreating the deb days in the discos, and
there was a very strong element of that in the red velvet rope clubs. I think
people, if they had to go to some dress-up party where they had to wear black
tie, they would think, `Well, let's try to go to Studio afterwards, because
maybe we'll get in if we're dressed this way, so we now become sort of special
and extreme, because we're all dressed up, and maybe we'll be able to get in.'

And so I think there's a feeling of that same alcohol-fueled, heightened
romance experience of life, late at night. You lose sort of perspective in a
nice way, and have--you can have a very good time.

GROSS: Now you make films about the children of the privileged class.

Mr. STILLMAN: No, they're not a privileged class.

GROSS: They're not a privileged class.

Mr. STILLMAN: They don't have privileges. We got rid of privileges in this
country, I think, in 1810. I think the last ancestral states were voted out
by the New York state Legislature around then. James Fenimore Cooper was very
upset about it.

GROSS: To put it another way, as one of your characters does, you make films
about the children of the haute bourgeoisie.

Mr. STILLMAN: OK.

GROSS: You like that better?

Mr. STILLMAN: I'd like someone who commented on the penuriousness of the
characters, that they're not necessarily rich, that maybe there is money
several generations ago, or the memory of money, and now it's about something
else.

GROSS: Do you think that people who are from that class, either the--you
know, the upper class or that just have the memory of money--do you think that
they're treated badly in pop culture?

Mr. STILLMAN: Absolutely. I mean, it's really like they're going to put
them in camps and re-educate them, and it's really shocking. I didn't see the
entire movie "Titanic," but I think it's pretty immoral.

GROSS: Pretty immoral?

Mr. STILLMAN: Yeah. I think it was, because they're essentially dancing on
the grave of very honorable people. The people on the ship--a lot of them
behaved very, very well. They were very honorable in the way they died, and
to have some, you know, jerk from Hollywood maligning those people, I think
was really disgraceful.

GROSS: Oh--maligning them because they were rich?

Mr. STILLMAN: Yeah, that kind of misrepresentation. I mean, I think it's
hateful when people destroy the humanity of other people based on externals,
and I think it's hateful when it's done for reasons of race or ethnic group,
but also I think people feel that they have a free pass when it's class, so if
they can identify the people as a class in the upper range of the spectrum,
then they're free to hate, and you know, kill yuppie scum, which is, you know,
kind of a joke when people write `Kill yuppie scum.' But I think there's a
lot of that emotion floating out there.

GROSS: Now I think your grandfather was president of First National City
Bank, which is now Citibank. Your father was a lawyer and Democratic county
chair.

Mr. STILLMAN: My grandfather, actually, was a research physician. He worked
at the Rockefeller Institute.

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. STILLMAN: He was a doctor, and his--I think a forming influence in his
life was the Spanish flu epidemic after the war, that killed so many people.
So he spent his life researching that, and his father was the president of
Citibank, back then.

GROSS: I see. So...

Mr. STILLMAN: So it was my great-grandfather.

GROSS: Did you have what you've described as the memory of money in your
family?

Mr. STILLMAN: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And having a divorce in the family
also meant that there's more of a separation, and for me, it was very
positive, because I think you get in very bad habits of mind when there's
inherited money in a family. I think it's a very negative thing for people to
deal with, and being released from that when my parents got divorced, I think,
was a positive growth experience, as we'd say.

GROSS: So were you, like, downwardly mobile after the divorce? Did you
have...

Mr. STILLMAN: I was very dramatically downwardly mobile. And...

GROSS: What was the experience like of having the culture and worldview of
the class that you no longer had the money to fit into?

Mr. STILLMAN: Well, I'm not sure if there is a culture and worldview of the
class. I mean, it's a grab bag of all kinds of things, and I think what
separates Tobacco Road from Park Avenue is sometimes very thin, and I think
that the upper middle class is actually much more interesting and amusing and
sort of pathetic than would be represented in a James Cameron movie. I think
there's a lot of the lost souls who have enough money from some family
connection never really to take the right chances and to touch bottom, and to
kind of build their own life and their own careers. They're sort of companies
that don't really exist, and jobs that are kind of mythical, and I admire the
will and the dedication that those people can rise up beyond a trust fund to
do creative, productive things, even though there's this huge incentive for
them to live in a kind of a world of illusion, where they just keep up
appearances and try to sound interesting.

GROSS: My guest is Whit Stillman. He's written a new novel that expands on
his movie, "The Last Days of Disco." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of disco music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our 1998 interview with Whit Stillman, recorded
after the release of his film, "The Last Days of Disco." He's just adapted
the movie into a novel called "The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at
Petrossian Afterwards."

One of the characters in "Metropolitan," your movie about debutantes and their
escorts, has to rent a tuxedo, and wear a shabby raincoat over it instead of a
Brooks Brothers overcoat. Were you in that position?

Mr. STILLMAN: I was. I mean, there was actually probably, you know, more
resources than that character had. But that was the psychological feeling.
That was exactly how it felt, and what I think I liked about it was that
rather than just being the kind of person going on family vacations, just
tagging along with my family, I was in a situation where it was incumbent on
me, I think, to make friends and to social climb, essentially, that I would be
the friend who'd go along on a vacation, the cousin who'd be brought along as
sort of entertainment for the other kids, and it imposes sort of a diss when
you have to start being with other people in a positive way and being positive
rather than negative, adding something to the equation, not just taking, and
it is good preparation for the film business. You end up being in a situation
where you're kind of the unwanted guest in a lot of groups.

GROSS: What's the difference between being a date and being an escort? I
don't really understand the process, so maybe you can describe it a little
bit.

Mr. STILLMAN: Well, a girl would call, and--I had a friend who was in the
same orbit I was, and so girls could call either him or me, and ask if we'd be
their escorts, because normally there are two guys and one girl. And
sometimes there was a mother would call and say, `Would you be my daughter's
escort to such-and-such a party?' Or sometimes a girl would call and we'd be
sort of a package deal. We'd go sort of together. And it created this
feeling of social life in a group; we were all there as friends, and we
weren't stuck with each other, there wasn't sort of the identity crisis that
we're committing to one person for this evening. We were all there together,
and I think a lot of these outdated social processes had their charms and
their virtues, and it's kind of amazing that they continue to strongly in
those places where they existed before.

GROSS: What were the sexual expectations if you were an escort? Did that
mean that you were going to have a passionate kiss goodnight, or not?

Mr. STILLMAN: Not necessarily.

GROSS: Not necessarily.

Mr. STILLMAN: No, I don't think you would.

GROSS: Right. So all the kind of, like, sexual--kind of like fears and
insecurities around first dates wouldn't exist if you were an escort, or
wouldn't exist as much.

Mr. STILLMAN: Absolutely not, no. And once I went in a situation which was
not like that, and it acquired the atmosphere of a first date, and sort of a
blind date, and that wasn't so good. Normally, I think that group feeling
really was positive, and of course, as represented in the film,
"Metropolitan," after the sort of dances week, there was orgy week, and that
was the week we hung out together in people's apartments when there weren't
parties, and that's when things got passionate.

GROSS: Right. You didn't start making movies until you were, I think, in
your mid- or late 30s, and I'm wondering if you tried different types of
writing before you tried making movies?

Mr. STILLMAN: I did, and I was really in a trap, because nothing quite
worked. I gave up writing so many times, and I only came back to it with the
idea of getting a cheap script to direct, so I could prove myself as a
director and maybe get other directing jobs later.

GROSS: And "Metropolitan" was really cheap. How much did that cost?

Mr. STILLMAN: It started out--the dream was to make it for $50,000, which
is...

GROSS: Outrageous.

Mr. STILLMAN: And then it of course creeped up from there, and I think that
to get it out of the laboratory cost $230,000, and then we paid about another
$70,000 in deferments.

GROSS: What were you trying to write when you were writing fiction--books or
short stories?

Mr. STILLMAN: Well, in--my first career path was to follow my father into
politics, to be a lawyer and work in Democratic politics. I became
disillusioned with that and infatuated with novelists such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and I wanted to write Fitzgerald-esque novels, and tried to write
fiction in college. Then I became more interested in humorous short story
writers, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and J.D. Salinger and novelists like
Jane Austen, and I tried to write humorous fiction.

I was terribly limited, because I'd always have a comical, ridiculous
first-person narrator, and have to sort of invent an apparatus for introducing
this person and have them tell the story, which is terribly limited and sort
of precious. I hated description, and to try to make description interesting,
I'd sort of write parody description, which became sort of intense and
overwritten, occasionally funny, but impossible to read. And it was a huge
release to find the comedy screenplay format, where every character is a
ridiculous first-person narrator, and they're going to be played by actors who
are going to be up there on the screen and have to take most of the blame.
And you can have a lot of non sequitur and jumping around, and you don't have
to describe anything--the camera does that. So it released a lot of my
inhibitions, but it still takes me about two or three years to write one.

GROSS: Well, I love the kind of dialogue you write and I was thinking that in
some ways you're the opposite of David Mamet, whose dialogue I also love, in
the sense that he gets to how people speak by kind of paring it down to its
essential music, you know, to its, like, minimal music, and he also writes for
very street-wise kind of characters very often. And your writing gets to how
people speak, but you do it by writing more elaborately than they speak.
Instead of stripping it down, you're kind of adding on to it. You're adding,
like, more words and more descriptions than any articulate person could
possibly pull off in real life, and I think--and it's also very entertaining,
the dialogue you write. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to
dialogue?

Mr. STILLMAN: I don't know. I try to have it all talkable and like people
talk. I think the objective is naturalism and to be truthful, and I guess I
know a lot of people who talk that way, and actually ...(unintelligible).

GROSS: Kind of hyper-literate people?

Mr. STILLMAN: I don't know. Maybe they just take phrases that they've read
and plump them into sentences, and form their sentences that way. I guess the
problem is what takes it from naturalism to sounding stylized is that there's
so much material I like to get into movies. There's so much to be said, to be
discussed, and that does change the realism of the scenes, I guess.

GROSS: Whit Stillman, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. STILLMAN: Thank you.

GROSS: Whit Stillman, recorded in 1998. He's just adapted his movie, "The
Last Days of Disco," into a novel called "The Last Days of Disco With
Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards."

(Soundbite of disco music)

GROSS: Coming up, Christopher Guest, co-writer and co-star of the heavy metal
spoof "This Is Spinal Tap."

This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.