The San Francisco Chronicle
APRIL 12, 1998
S.F. Film Festival
Songwriter Hitchcock, Front and Off-Center
by James Sullivan
Seeing his image projected on a movie screen for the first time was more than a little disconcerting for songwriter Robyn Hitchcock.
"I couldn't speak for two hours," says the consummate absurdist, the subject of Jonathan Demme's new concert movie, Storefront Hitchcock. "Imagine a situation where your head is three times life size and your guitar is 12 feet high. Even for the most rampant male ego, that's more than enough."
The possessor of a British wit as dry as stale crumpets without tea, longtime cult favorite Hitchcock is the inspiration behind Demme's latest foray into concert filmmaking. In 1985, the acclaimed director of Philadelphia and The Silence Of The Lambs presented the world premiere of his landmark Talking Heads documentary, Stop Making Sense, at the San Francisco International Film Festival; later this month, Demme's loving portrait of Hitchcock's mostly solo stage show will screen at the Castro Theatre as part of this year's festival.
"He's just riveting and delightful and marvelous," Demme says excitedly, "And the songs are so great. And he's so watchable. He's got such long legs!"
Now 46, Hitchcock has toiled in semi-obscurity for two decades with his bands The Soft Boys and The Egyptians and most recently as a solo act. He's been a lifelong college-radio favorite whose career has never ventured much beyond that realm, despite collaborations with members of R.E.M. and Squeeze and a near-pop hit in 1988 with "Balloon Man".
Demme has been a fan -- if not a die-hard one -- for years. "I started having kids and listening to Raffi," he says, "and traveling to Haiti and listening to Haitian music. But for a minute there, man, I knew everything about cutting-edge music."
"I don't think he's been following my career with a magnifying glass," Hitchcock jokes.
Still, the director saw Hitchcock's unique blend of one-man Psychedelia and comic-philosopher monologues as perfect motion-picture fodder. After taking his wife to see Hitchcock perform at a hole-in-the-wall in upstate New York, an awestruck Demme appeared through a trap door in the dressing room, as Hitchcock remembers it.
"I went up to volunteer to do a video if he ever wanted to do one in America," Demme says. "We got to talking about how it's so insane that people lip-synch videos, so we agreed that it would be a synch-sound live-track video.
"And then I'm thinking, 'If you're gonna go that far, you might as well make a movie.' And here's a guy that is a movie."
Hitchcock says Demme's thoughtful, unhurried filming techniques turned out to be the perfect complement for his music. "My thoughts and stories are very ornate. Things breed very fast in my head -- they come spilling out, then they decay and they're replaced by something else.
"He doesn't attempt to match that with a Rococo background. If I was making a movie based around me and my songs, I would probably have things appearing and disappearing around me, a la [Peter Gabriel's] 'Sledgehammer' video. And it wouldn't be very original."
Demme, he notes, adds by subtraction, using little more than a mirror ball or a candle for effect. "It's the reverse of the modern video approach, where they assume that no one has a concentration span of more than 3½ seconds: each image is chased away by a new one every couple of seconds -- gloves, girls, guitars, false teeth, telephone dials, old footage of streetcars, chimney tops, condoms, people with elastic faces -- whatever it is. And the idea is you keep intercutting the artist looking soulful in the middle of it.
"Jonathan comes from a very old-world school. He'll find a good angle, and he'll just stay there for 20 seconds. It's probably illegal now."
As the title indicates, Hitchcock was filmed in performance over two days in a vacant New York City storefront, backdropped by the random actions of passersby on the sidewalk outside. The idea, Demme says, came from a play he saw in the mid-'80s produced by the Squat Theater.
That group's innovation, the director says, "was such an epiphany. The back of the stage is a window into a whole other world." At various times throughout the film, the storefront windows are covered with curtains or multicolored scrims. "We tried very much for every song to have its own visual personality."
Demme says he owes a debt to his early mentor, B-movie maker Roger Corman, for the little details of Storefront Hitchcock. "He told me, 'If you bore the eye, you're going to slide down a slope away from your audience.'" With Hitchcock as his subject, however, that was not much of an issue to Demme.
"If you gussied it up too much, then this whole idea of the one guy working his butt off out there would fall back," Demme says. "The sparseness is a tribute to our belief in his ability to carry the show."
A Pure Pop songwriter with a kaleidoscopic mind, Hitchcock crams songs such as "Glass Hotel", "I Something You", and "The Yip Song" with words that are weird for their own sake -- "viaduct" and "obelisk", "Steve" and "Bruce". Between songs, he lets his fertile imagination run even wilder, addressing career-long obsessions such as the vagaries of our existence ("If it weren't for our rib cages, it'd just be spleens a-go-go") in off-the-cuff spiels he calls "verbals".
"People can't really define what I do," Hitchcock says, suggesting that his wry observations are a sort of performance art. "Over the years, I think I've refined it. In the old days I used to meander, and now I meander but take the audience with me. And the best way to do that is to make them laugh."
Demme, who directed Swimming to Cambodia, the 1987 documentary of Spalding Gray's one-man show, says filming Hitchcock was a much less imposing challenge. "That was one guy talking. I knew this would be easier -- it's one guy talking and singing. There's twice as many things going on."
With the movie set for commercial release, Demme can't say enough about his subject. "More than anything, I think the guy is a modern Lewis Carroll. I think Robyn's brilliant.
"He'd be so offended, but I want to say that Robyn's a star, waiting to be discovered."
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