Sobre Roderick Jaynes, o la valentía de los Doppelgängers

Poner títulos a las películas no es fácil, dice Periquito, naaaahh

Sino miren las peripecias de Joel & Ethan y su díscolo montajista Roderick Jaynes, para dar nombre a la mejor película (hay que ver No Country for Old Men, que viene con muy buenas críticas) que los Coen han hecho a la fecha -horrible cacofonía, diría la Pí más prrrreciosa-.

Escribió Jaynes:

(las mejores partes con letra morena. Negrita en la jerga, pero mi para nada hipócrita correctismo político no admite voces racistas)



Friday September 28, 2001The Guardian

One of the hallmarks of old age is the gradual realisation that one is no longer conversant with, or even much aware of, the surrounding culture. Living in Haywards Heath these past 30 years, largely retired from the movie business, I must confess that until recently I hadn't heard of - let alone seen -Pearl Harbor, The Klumps, Vertical Limit, or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Well, Pearl Harbor I'd heard of, of course, in its geographic and historical sense, but the motion picture was not on my radar, so to speak. Someone told me that its star was Ben Affleck, which I asked them to repeat a number of times in the belief that they were trying to expel phlegm. Other sources confirm that such is in fact the name of a contemporary cinema star. Live and learn.

I mention this to explain my puzzlement at many of the candidates for the title of the movie whose script these remarks introduce, candidates bandied back and forth by the film-makers as I tried to concentrate on the picture's montage. I am something in the nature of a film editor emeritus, and brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are self-styled cinéastes who had begun shooting this, their latest movie, with little concern as to what it might ultimately be called. "Pansies Don't Float" was an early working title that, thank goodness, they were prevailed upon to discard. They had likewise been coaxed away from more opaque titles aiming to peg the movie generically as a noir : "I, the Barber," "The Man Who Smoked Too Much," and "The Nirdlinger Doings". The Coens entertained (or entertained themselves with) "Missing, Presumed Ed" and "Mr Mum" -both references to the alienated and closemouthed central character Ed Crane, played by William Thornton. They rejected as "too 60s" the one candidate of theirs that I found not uninteresting: "I Love You, Birdie Abundas!"

At first I kept my head down as they argued, struggling to make simple match cuts in footage shot by people patently ignorant of the simplest mechanics of scene construction. The chore was familiar to me, this being my seventh picture with these film-makers, and prompted me to wonder whether a deft and resourceful film editor mightn't sometimes be less the director's friend than his enabler, licensing the sloppiness and ineptitude of he who might otherwise reform. This is a theme upon which, sadly, I could at this point write a book. Friends at Faber & Faber, take note.

As I mentioned before, I am retired. I now unsheath my scissors, as it were, only to work for les frères Coen. They pay well, no doubt of necessity, since their footage, or their persons, frighten away those editors not in their golden years who would be more willing to trade some salary for a feature film on the old résumé. In the case of this film, they promised to sweeten the pot with a paid holiday weekend in Blackpool if I should come up with a title they would end up using. I was happy enough to give it some thought.

Titles, I believe, should be straightforwardly descriptive. Gimmicks, whimsy, and effortful grandeur are simply not on. Accordingly, my suggestion was the direct and unfussy "Edward Crane". Imagine my surprise when the film-makers called as I was stuffing seaside togs into my valise, to say that they felt "we" still hadn't "nailed it". I offered what I thought was a sensible amplification, "The Barber, Crane." When this too was rejected I began to question my own decision to engage with cretins. All the more when they explained that they were looking for something poetic, like "The Other Side of Fate", which they both found appealing but were disinclined to use because of their uncertainty as to whether Fate had more than the one side. "None Know My Name" was another of their favourites, rejected only because of its superabundance of m's and n's. They had solicited my advice, they now told me, because they thought that, being British, I might know some "Shakespearean stuff that might work". They propounded the theory that a good title intrigues, is suggestive, allusive, and makes one want to know more. I was going to suggest "The Man with the Gas Hearth" but, mindful that they also wanted something that savoured of pulpy confession, proposed "My Hearth Is Gas". This prompted a few minutes' thought from Ethan at the end of which he asked: "Is that from the sonnets?"

Perhaps one should not draw back the veil from the creative process. Here are two men respected in the arts about whom it is possibly not necessary to know that they are in fact clods. But on the other hand this knowledge might be tonic to a general public imbued with perhaps too much awe for creative personages. At any rate, my musings on their personal vacuity bore me to what I thought was not a bad title for their film: "The Man Who Wasn't There."

And indeed, the brothers received it with enthusiasm. But the next day a crestfallen Ethan told me that the title had already been used: it was the name of a Steve Guttenberg comedy of the 1980s. When I asked the obvious question, to wit, "Who is Steve Guttenberg?" Joel giggled, and Ethan stared. "Duh," he said. "Police Academy?"

Well, I will take their word that there is such a person who starred in such a movie; as I confessed at the beginning of this introduction, I am hardly an authority. At any rate, Joel proposed that, to avoid infringement, my title be amended to "The Man Who Wasn't All There". When I pointed out that the added word, though short, significantly altered the title's meaning, Ethan bellowed that I was a "pedant". (Both men tend to become tart when challenged.) They came up with two other choices that I found obscure: "I Will Cut Hair No More Forever", and the puzzlingly verbless "Ed Crane, You So Crazy!" There matters rested, in uneasy contemplation of unsatisfactory alternatives, until the two decided to "call Steve" and ask for permission to use my clearly superior nomination.

It was a no doubt bemused Mr Guttenberg who received an incoherent phone call (of which I heard the one side) that began with the brothers simultaneously, fulsomely, and at length setting out how much they "dug" his work, and ended with them asking if it would be all right if they used "The Man Who Wasn't There" as the title for a movie about a barber who really wants to be a dry cleaner, and so many people meeting violent death. Once he'd sorted out what they were after, Mr Guttenberg informed the brothers that he himself was not the proprietor of the title in question, and advised them to ring up his movie's producer, Universal Pictures.

Intimidated by the mention of Universal Pictures, they handed the matter over to the phalanx of lawyers whose full-time job it is to protect the two brothers from themselves. Securing rights in the title was achieved in one short and businesslike phone call. I had my holiday; you see the film.




Si usted, improbable lector, tuvo la paciencia de llegar hasta acá, se preguntará seguramente porqué los hermanos Coen trabajan con un montajista que los desprecia y odia sus películas. En realidad, ellos mismos editan sus films: el inglés semiretirado Jaynes es un seudónimo y además, una esquizofrénica creación de sus mentes, con una ficta biografía y un mal genio de empleado del ANSES.


¿Se imaginan si llegaran a ganar un oscar por mejor montaje?

La Historia tiende a ser cíclica: un momento kodak siglo XXI sería la remake del episodio Marlon. En no-me-acuerdo-qué-año, Brando ganó el oscar por mejor actor. Lo entregaba el bueno de Roger Moore. Una mujer de sangre cherokee o siux o qué se yo subió a recibir el premio, y a rechazarlo en nombre del ganador, a modo de protesta por el "maltrato de la industria a la comunidad indígena" ("¿Acaso no les alcanza con Thanksgiving Day?", se preguntaban, indignados, los progres de la Academia).

La remake sería:

2008. Los Coen ganan el oscar, pero al escenario sube un viejo decrépito con bastón que afirma ser el auténtico Roderick Jaynes, y vocifera, ante la mirada atónita del auditorio, su rechazo a la estatuilla por el maltrato de Hollywood a la comunidad mexicana, que "tan bien mantiene limpios los baños de los sets y tan mal se les paga", y además... Y justo ahí se cierran las cortinas bordó, aturden los violines y se apaga el micrófono del premiado -es vox pópuli que, desde el papelón de SHAME ON YOU, MR PRESIDENT de Michael Moore, la transmisión de los Oscars tiene el más rápido y eficaz sistema de censura del mundo-. En la conferencia post-ceremonia se amontona la prensa; para sorpresa de todos, no es Jaynes sino un funcionario californiano el que se planta frente a los micrófonos, y con la economía verbal que caracteriza a la administración Terminator, anuncia que el valiente inglés ha desaparecido y se desconoce su paradero.


Telón.