Memphis Movie-A Jewish Literary Discovery

I believe that when I take the time to browse in a bookstore filled with thousands of books, if I am open to the world, the one book that I need to read at that time will mysteriously appear. It has happened often and I am grateful to the muses who send me these books. Each one has changed the way I look at life. It happened once again during my last trip to Memphis.

And so, as an ethnomusicological film producer on a location visit to  Memphis to lay the foundations for a documentary on the origins and development of the blues, I celebrated Memphis Elvis Presley Week with an evening dinner paddleboat cruise with my wife, where we were entertained by a fine band who sang many Stax classics and some Elvis.

They ended with Hound Dog written by Leiber and Stoller, two American Jewish song writers who wrote many of the biggest hits of the twentieth century before the Beatles crossed the ocean. During the trip I took many pictures and suddenly on the mid deck I thought I saw something whizz past me and so I took a photo. Later, in the quiet of our Air B and B I looked at the photo, and I am sure there is something there that I captured. Please take a look at the photo that accompanies this article. Was it the ghost of Elvis conjured up during “Dead Elvis Week?”

In that bookstore I bought the novel Memphis Movie (by Memphis born and bred Corey Mesler who owns and runs the store with his wife (Burkes Books-https://www.burkesbooks.com/). We talked about books, literature, writing and music-of cabbages and kings.

One of the characters in his book is a stills photographer who seems to have a penchant for finding anomalous images in his pics. Is Elvis implied? I think so. Perhaps that is what I caught in my lens. I then binge read his novel over three days in between seeing the sites of Memphis like Graceland or the Pyramid.

The novel is about making a feature film in Memphis. But it is about so much more than that – the nature of creativity, poetry, Hollywood, actors, directors, writers, literature, love, sex, ambivalence and the roller coaster ride of film funding, which can arrive and disappear in quarter of a million to multi million-dollar chunks at the whim of an investor. For those who love and appreciate this city of many layers, a city that does not reveal itself easily to outsiders, this novel also teaches us much about Memphis today.

Eric Warburg is a born and bred film director from a Jewish family in Memphis who embraced the post war American dream of opportunity and prosperity. In the novel we discover that Eric was a wunderkind and became a successful and celebrated Hollywood Film Director with many film credits to his name.

And then suddenly, his biggest project got cancelled and he went from someone to whom all doors had been opened to one where almost all doors were closed except for one; an offer to direct a film in his hometown in Memphis, funded by a multi millionaire from Arizona who yes, made his money in cattle and wants to see his name on the credits of this film.

The beauty of Mesler’s story telling ability is that throughout the novel we learn much about the character and inner life of Eric, his colleagues, his lovers, his actors, his set people. There is his screen writer partner to whom he is unfaithful as she is to him as they are committed to an open relationship. Then there are the stars and bit people and a male super star who must sleep with every starlet that sets foot upon the set and then some.

Although we do not know much about these people Mesler manages to give us enough of their dialogue and behaviour for us to infer more about who they are and what is their desire. The answer being fame and stardom and all the money, power and excess that goes with it in contemporary America.

I once got a small taste of this strange world, and I well remember the buzz when my second film was highlighted at Hot Docs in Toronto and we laid on a wine and cheese party after the first showing. One of the key movers and shakers of the festival, thinking I was somebody important (smoke and mirrors really), purloined me and for over twenty minutes told me that Paul McCartney was truly dead and had been replaced by a double for the last thirty years.

Mesler’s novel is filled with fine writing and poetic, almost jazz like riffs from the author and his characters. As a reader I was swept along by the fine description of the emotional and social chaos that goes into the making of dramatic films and the modern cult of the director. I would have been satisfied had this novel been just a modern version of an eighteenth-century English  comedy of manners but set in Memphis.

Instead, to my surprise, and delight there occurs a dramatic event which is the climax of the novel, followed by a denouement where key roles are mythologically reversed in an ironic twist of fate.  This is made more ironic because this issue is foreshadowed when the director and his writer partner are trying to work out the plot and the arch of the film.

The most constantly amusing thing about the novel is that we never really find out what the film is about (other than sex) and what the story line is. That absence is always present.

The irony, humor and touching emotional sympathy which the author shows for almost every character, is augmented by an introduction that consists of a journalistic interview with the director. At the end of the novel there is another journalistic interview with the new director and a fake bibliography of books and articles by and about the famous director Eric Warburg.

Although the book seems rooted in the daily life of Memphis today, there are so many flights of fancy in it, that in this unconventional and un-commissioned “review” of Mesler’s book, I would like to share a few notable quotations from the pages whose page corners I turned over as I had no yellow stickies with me (I bought the book, so that is my right).

They include quotes from the ghost of Eric’s late father who appears as Eric becomes more stressed and it includes one from a (daemon?) lover whom no one in the book remembers or could identify but was real enough to Eric. Below are some choice lines which I hope will motivate you to read the book.

Here goes:

Mimsy Borogroves (we all get the Jabberwocky joke here). She is an imaginary lover of Eric who can calm him down when he is down.

Eric turned to her now. Art kills? he thought. Jesus, that’s a frightening thought. Is it true? Eric found himself in the position of being willing to believe anything Mimsy Borogroves told him. It does Eric dear. If you let it. Art, like life, happens when you’re doing something else.

Eric goes to his rented house in Memphis, and the ghost of his father appears:

His father, a stoic like his entire generation, showed little emotion throughout his life, but there, at the end, he seemed to be caving in like a poorly constructed tower, one built originally to safeguard the keep, and that now appeared to be made of decomposing pastry.

Eric is trying to figure out lines for his super sexy hyperactive male star Dan:

And practically speaking he couldn’t imagine Dan Yumont saying, “I don’t think peace is just for chimpanzees.”

Camel, the old hippie poet who adds poetry to the script is in his late seventies and his teenage lover Lorax are together in his house. The author tells us how Lorax sleeps:

Sleepy was one thing that Lorax did really well. She was Past Master at sleeping. She held a PhD in sleeping. She slept the way Jacques Cousteau sailed. She slept the way Marco Polo travelled. She slept the way Jimmy cracked corn. And she slept the way Meryl Streep acted: she put her heart and soul into it.

Lorax decides to become a painter and tells Camel:

First, I was thinking there is enough art in the world. Enough writers, painters, musicians. Enough books, paintings, songs. That they basically drowned each other out, you know? That was thought number one…Thought number three was that I want to be part of that special family…

And of course, there is the driver who is always pitching new film ideas to every new member of the cast that he picks up from the airport with his improbable film title, The Color Purple Rain.

King Solomon once lamented, ” Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” I disagree with King Solomon (or the author who purloined his name) because this novel, if it does anything, will restore your love of life and people with all their foibles. It should also at times make you laugh out loud or shed a tear.

As this novel is about the making of a film, part of Mesler’s subtlety is that it is hard not to visualize each scene of the book as if you are viewing a film in your mind’s eye. Someone should turn this novel into a screenplay, as Warburg reminds us of an American version of Duddy Kravitz the anti hero of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler whose novel was eventually turned into a film starring Richard Dreyfus.

By the way, Memphis Movie does have a climax. It is gruesome but amusing. I know that does not sound right, but that is as close as I can get to the deadpan essence of Mesler’s ability to tell a good tall tale. He deserves a wide audience but I will let readers decide or better still, the viewers of the film when it is made and it should be made soon.

And by the way, in good cinematic fashion, Mesler has just published a sequel, Memphis Movie Two. Screenwriters be advised.

(https://www.burkesbooks.com/pages/books/1041023/corey-mesler/memphis-movie-two-the-recrudescence-of-eric-warberg)