Spalding Gray | Seven Scenes From A Family Album

Spalding Gray

Seven Scenes From A Family Album

New York City, USA: Benzene Editions, 1981

30 pp., 5.25 x 8.25”, staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Written during a trip to Amsterdam, Seven Scenes From A Family Album is the first book by American monologist, actor and author Spalding Gray. 

Gray began his theater career in New York in the late 1960s, and joined Richard Schechner's experimental troupe The Performance Group in 1970. He cofounded - alongside Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth LeCompte, Kate Valk, and others - The Wooster Group in 1975. 

He appeared in several pornographic films around this time, including Farmer's Daughters1 (1976), Little Orphan Dusty (1976), and Maraschino Cherry (1978).

Gray left the Wooster group after five years to concentrate on his own monologues, which were beginning to garner acclaim. He debuted his first solo show in April of 1979. Sex and Death to the Age 14 was well-received and played for six weeks at the Performing Garage. 

Roland Joffé invited Gray to audition for a role in what would become the director’s first feature film, The Killing Fields. “I’m not very political," Gray responded, "in fact, I’ve never even voted in my life.” Joffé reportedly replied, “Perfect! We’re looking for the American ambassador’s aide.” 

The Killing Fields2 is about the American bombing of Cambodia and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Gray’s role was small, but the experience made an indelible impression on him. 

Swimming to Cambodia, about his time on set in Thailand, became Gray’s most celebrated monologue. In 1985 he published it as a book and in 1987 it was adapted into a feature film by directed by Jonathan Demme, in between Something Wild and Married to the Mob, and just a few years prior to his breakthrough works The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.

Demme was the logical choice, as the director The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, which remains of one of the most celebrated music performance films of all time. 

The film consists almost entirely of Gray at a desk, performing the monologue, accompanied by limited sound effects and an original score by Laurie Anderson. 

I saw the film in the cinema at the time and audiences were transfixed. The New York Times declared "Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.”

This was followed by Monster in a Box, which was also released as both a book and film, again scored by Laurie Anderson. The work details the author’s failed attempts at a first novel (which would eventually become Impossible Vacation). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Award in 1985 for Monster in a Box, but the novel was quickly remaindered. 

While vacationing in Ireland in 2001 - to celebrate his 60th birthday - Gray was injured in car crash. He broke his hip and fractured his skull. Surgeons removed dozens of bone fragments from his frontal cortex and fit him with a titanium plate3. Already struggling with depression, the physical impairments exacerbated his mental health problems. 

He sought help from famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, who began treating him in August of 2003. Sacks recounted that Gray frequently spoke of suicide, often in terms of a creative act. He made an unsuccessful attempt the previous year. He proposed killing himself during a live televised interview, as the logical conclusion to his work. 

On January 10th, 2004, Gray took his two children to see Tim Burton's fantasy drama Big Fish. The film tells the story of a frustrated man trying to distinguish fact from fiction after the death of his father, a subject that would’ve resonated with the storyteller. 

Big Fish ends with the line, "A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” This reportedly moved the monologist to tears.

The next day Gray's wife, Kathleen Russo, reported her husband missing. 

An investigation was jointly conducted by the New York Police Department and the Southampton Town Police Department. The story appeared on an episode of the Fox network’s America’s Most Wanted. 

Two months later, Gray's body was found in the East River. It is believed that he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Russo connected his death to the Tim Burton film: "I just think it gave him permission. I think it gave him permission to die."

Based on his comments to Oliver Sacks, Spalding Gray’s death can be viewed alongside the suicide of Ray Johnson and the disappearance of Bas Jan Ader: as deaths that may have been intended as artworks. 

"He took the anarchy and illogic of life and molded it into something we could grab a hold of," said Eric Bogosian, the performer perhaps closest in spirit to Gray. "It took courage to do what Spalding did, courage to make theatre so naked and unadorned, to expose himself in this way and to fight his demons in public."

Gray had began writing his own obituary before his death, at the invitation of TV host Larry King, who was editing a collection called Remember Me When I’m Gone: The Rich and Famous Write Their Own Epitaphs and Obituaries.   

“He didn’t get the irony,” his widow remarked. “He was too deep into his depression to see how strange it was that he had been asked to write his own obituary.” It reads: 

“SPALDING GRAY 1941.

He was a good and devoted father and a legal husband but most of all he was known for his autobiographical monologues in which he would sit on stage at a table with a glass of water and tell true stories from his life. He could capture the details ______ of his ______ and slightly eccentric life in a way that caused audiences to laugh and relate.

Also known as the talking man, he was an American original and will be deeply missed.”

1. Gray would later write an essay titled Farmer’s Daughter about his role in the film: his initial inability to achieve an erection on set, followed by the horrifying images he had to conjure in his head to prevent premature ejaculation. The day’s entry in his journal simply read: "“I break down on the porno set because director gives me a hard time. I have tears.”

2. At the New York premiere of The Killing Fields, producer David Puttnam sat behind Yoko Ono, who had agreed to have “Imagine", the song she co-authored with her late husband John Lennon, play over the final scene. “The film ended, and she was in pieces,” he later recounted. "She climbed over the back of her chair, hugged me and cried. ‘I promise you this,’ she said: ‘This is exactly the way John would have liked the song to have been used.’ It was an amazing moment.”

3. “The operation lasts six hours. They cut me from ear to ear, peel down my forehead, and put in a titanium plate,” Gray explained in his unfinished monologue Life Interrupted. “More titanium plates in here; bone splinters are released into my frontal lobe—I think they have to try to pick those out—from the smashing of my head against Kathie’s head. They sew me up; it looks like I’ve had a face-lift.”

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David Byrne | True Stories

David Byrne

True Stories

New York City, USA: Penguin Books, 1986

192 pp., 25 x 21 x 1 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

True Stories: A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas is ‘true' in the way that the Coen Brothers’ Fargo was true.1 The feature film’s loosely connected vignettes are based on articles David Byrne clipped from supermarket tabloids while on tour with the Talking Heads, and there is no town in Texas named Virgil. 

"There is no real plot here, just wonderment,” notes Roger Ebert in his glowing contemporaneous review, which likens the 1986 film to landscape painting.2

True Stories stars John Goodman, in one of his earliest roles (predating Raising Arizona by a year and the Roseanne sitcom by two) and is narrated by Byrne, touring the town in a cowboy hat and convertible. He is there to witness the "150 Years of Specialness" celebration, and introduces us to as series of eccentric characters. 

Swoosie Kurtz plays a woman bed-ridden not from illness, but from wealth. She experiences the world through television or magazines that she reads with the assistance of a page-turning device. She meets Goodman’s character, a teddy bear of a man so desperate to marry that he advertises for a wife with a local TV ad. 

Most of the rest of the cast are non-actors, performance artists (Spalding Gray and Jo Harvey Allen) or musicians (Tito Larriva and Roebuck "Pops" Staples). 

Warner Brothers had given creative control to Byrne after the success of the Talking Head’s concert film Stop Making Sense, directed by  Jonathan Demme. It was Demme who proposed the sesquicentennial celebration. 

“He pointed out the value of having something he referred to as a 'clock,'” said Byrne. “He meant that you know something’s coming, and that as the film moves on, you know you’re going to get closer to it. You’re bouncing around, visiting all these different characters, but you have a sense that you’re headed somewhere. That helped cement the idea of the talent show at the end, and the parade and all that kind of stuff. And all you had to do was have people mention it every once in a while.”

Other influences include Robert Wilson’s Knee Plays and Robert Altman’s Nashville. Joan Tewkesbury, the screenwriter of Altman’s 1975 classic, gets a thank-you in the credits. She suggested to Byrne that he con­sider setting the film in Texas. 

“I first was lured there for financial reasons,” he told the Miami Herald in November 1986, "because it’s a right-to-work state, and they have experienced crews and a studio near Dallas.” Right-to-work laws forbid unions collecting dues from their membership, thus weakening union power and lowering worker wages. 

This rationale would land Byrne in hot water decades later, when his musical Here Lies Love (a collaboration with Fatboy Slim) came under fire for using pre-recorded music instead of live performers. Given Fatboy Slim’s role as a DJ, the pair might’ve weathered the storm of not using players from the musician’s union, had this quote not resurfaced.3 

“Most of all, Texas looked great,” Byrne wrote in the introduction to the book that accompanied the film. “It didn’t look that different from anywhere else, there was just more of it.” After his first visit to the state he found it difficult to imagine the film taking place anywhere else. 

"I started with images,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018. "I started with a big wall full of drawings and images, and I would order and reorder them until there would be a flow to them. It was pictures of people singing, drawings of their Texas landscape. As my wife and I were collecting the Weekly World News, I was grabbing articles and going, “Well, maybe one of the people could be this. Maybe one of the people in the drawings could be this person.” And it slowly evolved into having a through-line, even if it’s not a conventional narrative."

To help turn his drawings and collected tales from the tabloids into a feature film, Byrne hired playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) and her romantic partner Stephen Tobolowsky, who is now best known as a successful character actor4. During college, Henley had encouraged the reluctant Tobolowsky to monetize his psychic abilities. While working on the script, she cajoled him into sharing this information with Bryne. He recounted the story in 2015, on Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist podcast:

“Tell David. Because David wants to put all these true stories in his movie, Stephen. Tell him the true story about you hearing tones.” And I said, “No, baby, no, I don’t want” — “No, tell him the story about you hearing tones.”

So I sat and told David the story of me hearing tones. And he says, “You’re kidding!” And I said, “No, David, that’s really the story but I don’t do it anymore, I don’t like to do it anymore, it was too creepy, and I don’t like to do it anymore.”

So anyway — sure enough, a year later, David has written into True Stories a character that hears tones, and he wrote the song. That day he came over and played “Wild Wild Life.” He says, “Here is a song that I wrote for you, Stephen.” And we put it in the thing, and it was “Radio Head.”

When signing a six-album recording contract with EMI records in 1991, the band On A Friday were encouraged by the label to change their name. They settled on Radiohead, inspired by Bryne’s song.5 

It’s unlikely Warner Brothers imagined that True Stories would become anything more than a minor cult-hit, more likely hoping that it would help propel the album of the same name. The Beatles' film A Hard Day’s Night was an instant classic, and earned back more than ten times its meagre budget in box office revenues, but was originally only a secondary concern for its financiers. Bud Ornstein, the head of production for United Artists is reported to have said: "Our record division wants to get the soundtrack album to distribute in the States, and what we lose on the film we'll earn back on this disc.”

The True Stories companion album is considered minor Talking Heads, lacking the urgency and inventiveness of their debut, the production and experimentation that Brian Eno brought to the later works, or the sophistication of their swan-song (which also benefitted from guitarist Johnny Marr, who had just left the Smiths). Some of this is due to its confusing relationship to the film - it’s not a soundtrack and it’s not a stand alone LP. It can almost be viewed as a cover album, with the band that wrote the songs covering them. Byrne has gone on record calling it a mistake and regretting being talking into singing the songs himself. 

The singles are certainly not the band’s best ("Love for Sale", "Wild Wild Life") but the deep cuts are strong. "Hey Now" is better performed by the children in the film, but the Talking Heads version works well enough. “People Like Us”, “Dream Operator” and "City of Dreams” are excellent. The latter recently appeared over the credits of the (sadly overlooked) Nicolas Cage vehicle Dream Scenario6. 

Alongside the Talking Heads LP, the album Sounds From True Stories was released, but this was primarily an instrumental score record, lacking the songs performed by the characters in the film. The kids choir version of “Hey Now” appeared as the b-side to “Love For Sale” and John Goodman singing “People Like Us” backed “Wild Wild Life”. Pops Staples’ version of  "Papa Legba” would not be released until 2006, on the reissue of the Talking Heads' True Stories album.

The rest of the songs would wait even longer, until 2018, when the double LP True Stories: The Complete Soundtrack would be issued by Nonesuch records, to coincide with the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray. 

Where the soundtrack album was initially a missed opportunity, the publishing of the film’s screenplay was carefully considered. Instead of a simple transcript of the dialogue, Byrne released an artist’s book to accompany the film. In addition to the (annotated) script, the book includes photographs commissioned by William Eggleston, story boards, location shots, lyrics, film stills, drawings, and some of the original newspaper clippings from the Weekly World News. 

“Movies are a combination of sounds and pictures, and stories are a trick to keep you paying attention,” Byrne writes in the introduction, sharing insights into his craft in a way that he would return to in his 2012 book How Music Works. Then, later: “Movie making is a trick. Songwriting is a trick. If a song is done really well, the trick works. If not, people can see through it right away. Maybe this movie can be a trick and show you how the trick is done at the same time. Maybe this book can kind of do that, too”. 

The highlight for me are the sidebar texts - very brief essays about subjects touched on in the film. Every few pages features a subtitle and a paragraph or two: Dinosaurs, Food Styling, See-through Houses (“Houses look best when they're not finished”), Metal Buildings, Assembly Kines, Flat Landscapes, Twins (“Twins confuse our ideas about individuality”)7, Shopping Malls, Fashion Shows, Freedom of Information, and Conspiracies. As a fan of footnotes, these digressions in the margins are added value. 

On each spread of the oblong book, the material directly related to the film is laid out on the left: the script, storyboards and stills. On the right hand side are the “making of” materials: location shots, research clippings, and the sidebar texts.8 

“I’m hoping that this book will be the equivalent of the way we experience people and things in our environments,” Byrne writes. "Out there lots of different things are going on at the same time. You can change your focus from one thing to another and still keep the first thing in your mind. You can look through other people’s eyes, or look with a changing point of view, at the same place. You can stand in one spot and focus on different things and really look at them in different ways simultaneously. It’s an effect that can be achieved in the theatre, but it’s almost impossible to do in film. It’s easier in a book”. 

1. Fargo is introduced with a caption that reads “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” The television series in particular, leaned into this trope. After years of deflection and contradictory statements, Joel Coen revealed that Fargo is “completely made up, or as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.”

2. Ebert writes "This movie does what some painters try to do: It recasts ordinary images into strange new shapes.”

3. After damning press coverage, on June 9th, 2023, the pair capitulated and it was announced that Here Lies Love would employ twelve live musicians. 

4.  Stephen Tobolowsky portrayed “Action” Jack Barker in the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley, Ned "The Bull" Ryerson in Groundhog Day and Sammy Jankis in Memento. 

5. Singer Thom Yorke told Q magazine that the name Radiohead "sums up all these things about receiving stuff ... It's about the way you take information in, the way you respond to the environment you're put in."

6. Dream Scenario is much stronger than its gimmicky premise would suggest. The film also makes reference to Byrne’s famous oversized suit.

7. True Stories employed fifty sets of twins. 

8. Some of the texts are surprisingly prescient: “True story: I was just recently told about a man in Texas who’s soliciting funds to build a wall around the state of Texas modeled after the Great Wall of China.” 

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Tanam Press: Wild History

Richard Prince (ed)
Wild History
New York City, USA: Tanam Press, 1985
234 pp., 8.4 x 5.8", softcover
Edition size unknown

An anthology of writings compiled by Richard Prince, who also contributes a story. Other contributors include Tina Lhotsky, Reese Williams, Anne Turyn, Constance Dejong, Peter Nadin, Roberta Allen, Glenn O'Brien, Gary Indiana, Kathy Acker, Richard Prince, Sylvia Reed, Robin Winters, Tricia Collins/Richard Milazzo, Cookie Mueller, Lynne Tillman, Paul McMahon, Spalding Gray, and Wharton Tiers.