524 - Gates of Heaven, United States, 1978. Dir. Errol Morris.
God is supposed to know when the sparrow falls, when the lilies of the field bloom. So surely at the Gates of Heaven, an all-compassionate God is surely not going to say, 'Well, you're walking in on two legs; you can go in. You're walking in on four legs; we can't take you. - Mr. John Calvin "Cal" Harberts.
San Francisco Examiner
Thursday, May 5, 1977
Daily: 20c
They're digging up dead pets, old griefs on Peninsula.
The Times-Herald
Solano and Napa County's Morning Newspaper
Valejo, Calif. -- Home of Mare Island Naval Shipyard - Friday, May 6, 1977
Pet Cemetery Reburial Due
Errol Morris sees the headlines.
A pet cemetery in Los Altos is going out of business. They are digging up 450 pet graves, placing the pets on refrigeration trucks, and moving them 92 miles north to Napa Valley. On the other side of the San Francisco Bay.
From the Foothill Pet Cemetery.
To the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park.
This idea intrigues him. So he decides to go and film it.
Errol Morris has never made a movie before. Well, he has never finished one anyway. He started a couple. And just as with his time in graduate school he has ended up abandoning them. But he has become a self-taught film enthusiast through the Pacific Film Archive, and somehow along the way he has gained the support of legendary German director Werner Herzog--with whom he collaborated on one of his abandoned projects--and Herzog has promised to eat his own shoe if Morris ever actually finishes this film.
Morris denies Herzog ever made the bet to him.
But something motivates him. He hires a film crew.
He goes to the cemetery. The Foothill Pet Cemetery. On the corner of Foothill and Highway 280 in Los Altos. Prime land. Land that will one day be high in value. Land that has "good visibility." And should have made a great location. If its owners, according to the owners of the other cemetery, had understood sound business principles.
Morris' camera operator has his own opinions about how to film what they are about to see. The bulldozers digging up the graves. The coffins going into the trucks. Using a moving camera in dramatic fashion. On a jib. On a dolly.
But Morris does something similar to Stanley Kubrick when he was starting out as a young director.
He pulls rank.
Morris wants the camera placed on a tripod. Framing the subject in a full shot. Without moving it or cutting while the person is talking. Not even zooming. Ever.
Furthermore, he does not want his own voice or the voice of any other interviewer heard on the soundtrack. Ever.
Which undermines the sound woman, who herself starts talking back to the subjects while recording them.
The cameraman protests. He knows more about movie making than Morris does. You cannot film that way.
So Errol Morris pushes him into a partially exhumed grave and fires him.
On Day 1.
This is not going well.
It appears Herzog will be spared from having to eat his own shoe.
"I went through three different camera crews before I found someone that I could work with," says Morris himself.
But he sticks to his vision.
And he films things the way he wants to film them.
A style so simple and so seemingly antithetical that it transcends its own genre. And becomes lyrical. Even spiritual.
By allowing human beings to be human. And to say whatever it is they want to say. For as long as they want to say it. Without interruption.
Opening the door for their personalities and their points of view to come through. Along with their idiosyncrasies and their shortcomings. Their malapropisms and poor grammar. Their inaccuracies and biases. Their feelings and their fears.
The honesty is at times so discomforting that viewers wonder if Morris is making fun of his subjects. "Ironic," they call it. A euphemism for condescending.
"Let us laugh at how stupid people can be."
To which Morris has spent his career denying a sense of superiority. Even putting himself under the same spotlight. Allowing himself to talk at length until his own weaknesses shine forth.
Including his hubris.
Yet one can just as easily watch his films with a sense of compassion. And humility. At what it means to be human, human, all too human.
So how does this film begin? And how does this career begin? Not with bulldozers and caskets. Not with headlines and gravestones.
But with nothing.
And then--
The credits begin in silence.
White on black.
They run for nearly a minute and a half. For 1:25.
Then--
The opening image.
A man.
Late middle-age to early elderly. Seated. Still. In a chair. Beneath a tree. A large tree. A willow tree. A large weeping willow tree.
In front of a big building. An L-shaped building. Or two buildings. Spanish architecture. Light pink. Beneath a dull blue sky.
The sun hits harshly from above-left. Casting a dark shadow on the ground to the right. While changing the hanging, slender leaves from dark green to whitish yellow.
The leaves droop evenly above him like a hair bob.
A herculean helmet. A thousand times larger than his head.
In a wide shot.
Completely still.
Completely silent.
For 21 seconds.
The man. The tree. The building. The grounds. The mown lawn. The sky.
It is with this image that Errol Morris launches his career. A career that will span decades. From here in 1978. Until today forty years later. And still going.
It is with this image that Errol Morris plants his camera on a tripod in the ground. Like a stake. A flagpole. And never moves it. But keeps it still.
Staking his claim.
And we discover what deep-down we already knew.
That people want to be seen. And to be heard. To be understood. And to be remembered. And that they will say anything if you let them speak long enough.
This man is Floyd McClure. His friends call him Mac. Which is short for McClure.
And he has found his life's calling.
Have you found your life's calling?
Mac has.
He tells us.
"Right across the street from where I lived in Los Altos was the most beautiful land, as far as I was concerned, in the whole valley. I knew exactly what to do with it. I thought, 'This is gonna be my project of life. I found the land. I found the need.'"
He understands the filling of a need.
"To be successful in this world or life, find a need and fill it. Anything I did in this life, I wanted to fulfill this dream."
And he knows what to do with the land. What is it? What will he do?
Will he build houses? A subdivision? Businesses? An office building? Shopping? A mall? Education? A school? Spiritual centers? A church? Hotels? A resort? Tourism? An amusement park?
No.
He will do something else with the land.
What?
He will build a pet cemetery.
What?
Floyd McClure will build a pet cemetery. He has prepared us for this answer with his opening story. His opening words.
"Inspiration of the pet cemetery business."
He tells us his story. He was born in North Dakota. In Barnes County. In Valley City. In 1930.
"Then the World War II started." And in 1941 he went to the farm.
He tells the story of his pet collie, and how his pet collie went with him everywhere he went. He talks about "thrashing," hauling bundles of hay, and how one day when he returned from thrashing, a Model A came driving by and struck his pet collie.
"I grabbed my collie and I held him in my arms until he died."
We are now inside the building. What may be his home. In a home. And if you look closely, you realize he sits in a wheelchair.
He sits in front of a scales of justice. Unbalanced. A lit lamp. A pair of what may be his own bronzed baby boots. And a painting of a dog on the wall behind him. Frankly, it is positioned as if coming out of his head like Athena. And one senses he would gladly play the role of Zeus to give new birth to people's pets if he could.
After his collie died, he set aside an entire acre behind his house, about a quarter of a mile away, to bury it. The land overlooked the prairie to the north where there was a lake.
He loved his dog. His heart broke. He grieved.
So now in California he has decided to dedicate his life to providing that kind of comfort to others who lost their pets. Who loved their pets.
And if you listen, you realize that the soundtrack has not been silent.
Forty-seven seconds into the credits the birds began chirping. Talking to one another. Talking to us, if we could listen.
And they continued chirping through the long take. As he sat beneath the tree. And again as we pan across the Los Altos valley in Santa Clara county.
Just as the birds might be chirping near you as you are reading these words. Unacknowledged in the human subconscious. Until made conscious of them.
Living birds. Living animals. Communicating. As he speaks of burying the dead ones. The animals themselves are speaking in this otherwise quiet film.
A couple other men will tell their stories, of how they joined Mac and helped him build the pet cemetery.
But then we switch to Mike Koewler. A different kind of animal. A different kind of man. The Rendering man. The man who makes a living boiling animals down to their constituent parts. To recycle them. To reuse them.
And Morris moves back and forth between the two men, who spoke their monologues separately, but edited together seem to be having a conversation. Good versus evil, if you ask Mac. Practical versus emotional, if you ask Mike.
Mike is practical. A businessman. Providing a service. A useful service. That people need. And he states that his business dates back to the time of the Egyptians. He seems to find people like Floyd McClure amusing. Can you believe how emotional people can be over their pets?
Mac is emotional. Compassionate. Soft-spoken. Yet filled with rage at the thought of a loving pet not respected in death.
Mike explains that the public has a new interest in recycling, and his business has been recycling for 500 years. What are you going to do if your horse dies and it is 102 degrees? What are you going to do if you are zoo and a very large animal dies? He has the resources to help you get it off your property and to dispose of it in an environmentally efficient way.
We go back and forth, between Floyd McClure and Mike Koewler, the men who helped them, and a couple of women who had their pets moved and how they felt about it.
Zella Graham. The gray-haired woman with the silver horn-rimmed spectacles, dressed in a black dress, holding her black cat, singing to her cat like a cat.
A-ha-ha-ha. A-ha-ha-ha. Sing. Sing, Babe. A-ha-ha-ha. A-ha-ha-ha.
Lucille Billingsly. The brunette rich woman with round black glasses, dressed in a white blouse, looking like the painting of her white cat on the wall behind her--and seated at the same angle--wearing her own teal-green collar, which matches her teal-green trousers, describing how she misses her cat at night. When she awakens and reaches for her.
The two women engage in a cat fight.
"She just wanted to be noticed. She just wanted to be Miss Big."
The last shot we see of Floyd McClure is from behind. Sitting in his wheelchair beneath the weeping willow tree. Having lost his life dream. Having defended himself for having had compassion. Now quiet again. Still. Sitting silently looking over his land. Carved up. Emptied. Packed down again. Barren.
No longer containing even dead animal bones.
But before we moved north to Napa, we first visit Florence Rasmussen.
One more woman who lives near the Foothill Pet Cemetery. Whose own pets no longer walk the yard before her.
She talks for 6-1/2 minutes. And shares her life with us. A raconteur. My Dinner with Florence.
We spend the remainder of the movie with the Harberts family. Owners of the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. The successful one. The recipient of the 450 pets. Which now has thousands of graves. And is still in operation today.
John Calvin, "Cal," the father. Scottie, the mother. Phil, the older son, an aspiring businessman. And Danny, the younger son but senior employee, the guitar-playing, pot-smoking casual philosopher who provides the film with its closing-credit soundtrack.
Cal asserts that The Pill is responsible for a pet explosion. Now women are working, and they are putting off childbirth. And when they come home and want someone to love but do not have a baby, they get a pet.
Their parents then, not yet having grandchildren to hold and love, do the same. They also get pets.
As more people get pets, more people have a need to bury them when they are gone.
Morris follows each member of the Harberts family, as well as individual pet owners, who discuss how they feel about their pets or about the business.
He ends with Danny playing his guitar through his amp to the valley below.
Yes, Werner Herzog ended up eating his shoe, and fellow documentary filmmaker Les Blank filmed it. But we care far less about that than we do that Morris finished this film and many others afterwards. And that we have them. And can watch them.
* * * * *
In 1978 Cal Harberts states that the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park will be around for many years to come.
In 2018 this article was published, showing younger son Dan still running the cemetery and dealing with a forest fire, rescuing his 97-year old mother Scottie, and returning to his black Labrador retriever Drake.
His son David is 29 and will one day run the business.
* * * * *
Errol Morris
That's one of the best interviews that I have ever done. It's certainly the shut-up-and-listen school. You don't interrupt.
It's a static frame. The frame has a kind of majesty. She's like in a proscenium delivering the story of her life.
The best lines I ever recorded as a filmmaker could never be scripted. They just came out of nowhere.
It's a crazy world of contradiction, of despair, of betrayal. It's all there.
I loved that family at Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. How Scottie and the two brothers . . .
Danny who had his crazy California enthusiasms, his guitar playing his marijuana plants,
Phil in the grip of this insane W. Clement Stone business success theories. I still think about them all the time. The R2/A2 formula. Recognize, Relate, Assimilate, and the call to Action. Or the want-to, the know-how, and the activity knowledge.
The same thing can be said for me as a filmmaker. I'm looking for the activity knowledge. I think I have a little bit of the know how. But I still have the want to.
There's something about the people in Gates of Heaven I'm still moved by. They're all believers.
Communication between one human being and another is tenuous. But when one of those human beings is dead, more tenuous. But what happens when one of those persons is a dog and dead. Communication very, very tenuous at best. And yet, there's this amazing kind of hopefulness of connection.
The Magic Hour properly conceived should be right at the end of day when the sun is low in the horizon, or dawn, when the light is beautiful, forgiving. For me, I called twelve noon to one o'clock my Magic Hour, because it got so insufferably hot. The light was so unforgiving that people would say almost anything.
How are you supposed to edit these sort-of tableaux. There's no coverage. There's just these individual shots of people babbling.
It took awhile just to figure out what you're supposed to do with this stuff. It's just the interviews themselves were so crazy and interesting that, I don't know, I was lucky.
I had been editing it forever. We weren't even sure that it would run through the projectors. Wim said, "It's obvious. It's a masterpiece." I've always been grateful. It meant to me there might be something there. Maybe this is not all for naught.
Floyd McClure - Founder of Foothill Pet Cemetery
Not the garbage pit. Not the garbage can. . . . God only gave us these pets to be our fellowship, our desire, our will, and what have we got to give 'em in return?
What is a rendering company? A rendering company. My mind pretty exploded with the thought, remembrance of a very bad nightmare, a dream of Hell. It took me back to this rendering company in North Dakota, where all the little pets at that time when they died, a truck would come out and a big old driver would come and grab your pet and throw him in the back of this truck and take 'em to what I would call the boiler chambers.
Here before us lies Little Toby. Little Toby was put on this earth for two reasons: to love and be loved.
Mike Koewler - Rendering Man
In the Old Testament, the guy cut off the sheepskin, put the lamb fat on him to keep him warm.
If you have a horse and that horse dies on a Saturday and it's 102 degrees and you can't get a hold of somebody to bury it, you're going to get a hold of a rendering company, because you want that horse out of there now.
I'll say, I'm in the tallow business.
I've had people call and ask if we'd bury it. We tell them we don't bury animals, and they start crying.
People are very emotional about these things. You get you some real moaners on the phone, crying.
Not the garbage pit. Not the garbage can. . . . God only gave us these pets to be our fellowship, our desire, our will, and what have we got to give 'em in return?
What is a rendering company? A rendering company. My mind pretty exploded with the thought, remembrance of a very bad nightmare, a dream of Hell. It took me back to this rendering company in North Dakota, where all the little pets at that time when they died, a truck would come out and a big old driver would come and grab your pet and throw him in the back of this truck and take 'em to what I would call the boiler chambers.
Here before us lies Little Toby. Little Toby was put on this earth for two reasons: to love and be loved.
In the Old Testament, the guy cut off the sheepskin, put the lamb fat on him to keep him warm.
If you have a horse and that horse dies on a Saturday and it's 102 degrees and you can't get a hold of somebody to bury it, you're going to get a hold of a rendering company, because you want that horse out of there now.
I'll say, I'm in the tallow business.
I've had people call and ask if we'd bury it. We tell them we don't bury animals, and they start crying.
People are very emotional about these things. You get you some real moaners on the phone, crying.
Zella Graham
She isn't gonna cause me any trouble cause I ain't gonna pay any attention to her. She just wanted to be noticed. She just wanted to be Miss Big. And here we've got all these other poor people that really needed help, and she was just trying to be Miss Big.
I don't know whether she really liked her animals or loved 'em or whether she was just trying to show off and make a big impression. This was my idea, because anybody that would come whizzing up in a Cadillac with all of her furs on to a cemetery--and you know when they're digging animals, it's gonna be an odor there--didn't have much upstairs. Cause I'll tell you, that was not the place to wear fur.
Lucille Billingsly
I think that something should be done so that it shall never happen again. I think it was a horrible thing for us in this generation to have it happen. And in a state like California, to have it happen, I think it's humane.
Florence Rasmussen
Here today, gone tomorrow, right?
Sound woman: "Wrong."
No comments:
Post a Comment