From HULU.com
Hulu recently spoke to Abel Raises Cain filmmaker Jenny Abel and her father — the movie’s subject — about the film. The interview is below, but you can also check out the Abels’ guest blog entry for Hulu (http://blog.hulu.com/2009/05/11/guest-bloggers-the-abels/) — Rebecca Harper, Hulu
Hulu: Jenny, can you tell us why you decided to make this film about your dad?
Jenny Abel: Yeah, I’ve always been fascinated with my father. When I was young, I didn’t quite understand what he did. As an adult, I started to realize that what he was doing was satire, that all these pranks had an underlying message. I felt like my dad wasn’t being recognized by the mainstream media in a way that celebrated his weird form of activism. I kind of took it upon myself to be the one that finally told the story the way that I wanted it to be told, from a unique point of view. As my dad’s only daughter, I really had a behind-the-scenes view into the lifestyle that my parents led. I felt like I could tell the story in a way that no one else could. So I got to work on it. I started the movie back in 1998 by myself, then my boyfriend came onto the post-production end of things in 2003, and we’ve been doing film festivals — we’re still doing regional festivals. It’s been four years now since our premiere at Slamdance .
Alan Abel: I’d say it was a form of revenge, if I may. You see, she found out we could have sold her as a baby for $40,000 at that time, in 1972. We thought about it, my wife and I, for about five minutes and said, “Oh, well, we’ll keep her.” And then she grew up to make this documentary, this magnificent embarrassment. You can imagine a camera following you around, in front of you, on top of you, behind you… I thought I was getting a colonoscopy at one point.
Jenny: Oh, brother…
Alan: Oh, brother, yes, of course. But we’re going to do one on her called Daughter Dearest, maybe, and see how she likes it.
Jenny: Yeah, but Dad, hasn’t it been cool that more people are learning about your work, whole new audiences?
Alan: Not necessarily. I get all the telemarketers. One called the other day and offered me four free lessons at the Arthur Murray School for Dancing. And I pretended that I only had one leg. The lady apologized profusely, and I said “What about pole dancing? Maybe I could try that.” She hung up. I think she was annoyed. … But I’ve lost my point. What was your question?
Hulu: Well, we were talking about how Jenny got started, but I wanted to ask you if you’ve been making appearances at all of these festivals.
Alan: Oh yes, I travel and they pay my expenses. And if they can’t, I offer to be crated and flown by FedEx because the animals get treated much better than the passengers on board the plane.
Hulu: Do you go in character?
Alan: Oh no. What I do, I need a three-seater and, of course, you only get one seat when you buy one ticket. I always just ask for a rear window seat and then I put a string in my mouth and let it dangle. The people assigned to the two seats next to me, they come up and they see a stranger sitting there with a string out of his mouth. They’ll sit there for a while, and then they’ll get up and change their seats later. There’s something about a stranger with a string that just avoids friendship.
Jenny: Daddy, I think even without the string, you’re a little weird.
Alan: Well, yes, I manage to play that role because we need our space in life, don’t we. We’re just so overwhelmed, like the Internet. It’s like having the Smithsonian Museum in your house. You want one or two pieces of information and they give you two million in three seconds. I mean, come on. That’s like shooting a flea with an elephant gun. You get tired of that after a while. I still like the old-fashioned way of going to the library and opening a book or looking at a dictionary. You don’t have to do that anymore. You don’t even have to know how punctuate. If you do, you get slapped. There’s some old lady in my computer that says “That’s not right, you made a space. Get rid of it!” Well, I thought that you use space between words, you use commas and quotation marks and stuff, and now suddenly it’s no good anymore. It’s amazing how we all got through school.
Jenny: I was going to say, Daddy, when you go to these film festivals, you never go as one of your aliases, you’re always Alan Abel, right?
Alan: I’m always myself, but see, my credibility is zero. So it is a bit difficult to get up in front of people and talk. But I’ve done it successfully. Like that SNOB festival, that’s “Somewhat North of Boston,” it’s a very lovely affair they have up in Concord, New Hampshire. Before the election, I went up there and screened Jennifer’s documentary. All of the candidates running for office were there at that time. Barack Obama had a full force of young people up there. They all came to see the documentary, and they loved it. During the Q&A, which I always do at these sessions, they asked me how I could help their candidate win the election — this was the year before, of course. And I said, let 2.2 million people out of jail. That would solve the financial crisis because it costs $40,000 a year for each and every prisoner that our government has put behind bars. Let them all out, and give them seven days in which to be adopted by an American family or be put to sleep. Once we got rid of all the prisoners, then we could use all the empty cells for housing the homeless. Well, they laughed of course. They didn’t take much stock in what I had to say about it. But I do have lots of these ideas, and I get a platform to stand up and talk about them, like Homeland Security and the color code, for example. It goes green to red if there’s going to be an attack soon. They forget there are two and a half million color-blind people in this country who will not be protected. They won’t know we’re being attacked because they don’t read the colors. So things have to be changed, and nobody’s doing a thing about it. I go out and become, well I call myself a provocateur and doing this at festivals as well as on the street, doing this by day, whenever, whatever. In a state like Massachusetts that has same-sex marriage, well what about hermaphrodites? You know, they talk about sex being the barometer for deciding whom to marry, you know, man-woman, woman-man, or two men, two women. But hermaphrodites, they should be allowed to vote twice and file two income taxes. They’re the orphans of our society. I like to protect people like that. A film festival is a great venue, kind of like Speakers Corner in England, where you can get up on a box and talk about anything on a sunny afternoon. Crowds of people gather around to listen to you, which is a great forum. We should have it in this country, but it’d be too dangerous. I’m afraid you’ll get up on a shoe box and say that your big toe is growing only a 1/100th of an inch a year, which is one of my campaigns. I don’t do it here.
Jenny: Daddy, was that all in one run-on sentence?
Alan: That’s right, there were no spaces, no commas, no colons.
Hulu: Do you find it hard for people to take you seriously, now that the word is out?
Alan: Oh, it’s like crying wolf, very definitely. Oh my goodness, yes. People just look at me like, “Well. Who’s going to believe that guy?” But there are people who do believe me, in the sense that I have clients now that I consult with. When I get an assignment, for example one I did with Dr. Joe Vitale, who’s a motivator who’s well known in the movie Secrets. He’s also lectured ostensibly all over the world with his uplifting speeches and ideas for turning your life around. He had a book come out called There’s a Customer Born Every Minute, which is based on the theories and practices of P.T. Barnum. He wanted to promote it, so I suggested he bring it out in Austin, Texas, which is his home base, and have it promoted by holding a canine concert. This would be a concert in the park, only for dogs, because only they could hear music on that high of a frequency. Of course, the dogs all came out with their handler — you can’t send a dog to a park alone, right? And the people came with pocketbooks and wallets and they bought books, which he had laid out there. So, that’s the sort of thing I come up with to promote a product or person. If anyone needs publicity and wants to make headlines without doing anything criminal, nothing physical to hurt anyone, well, they can find me. Go to the Internet and you’ll get two million addresses where I live.
Hulu: In the film, Universal Pictures tries to buy the story of Alan’s life. Of course, as you see in the film, it doesn’t go very well. Now that Jenny’s done this documentary, is there any hope of a Hollywood version of your life?
Jenny: There now exists a comprehensive work that never was around before, so people can actually put the documentary and experience my dad’s story in a way they never had before. My parents’ archive is so immense, it’s kind of frightening. They saved everything. They had such a prolific career. Every prank produced a thousand clippings, at the very minimum. SINA alone, there must have been hundreds of thousands newspaper articles.
Alan: Well, when you consider all of the letters that we received. At one point, we were burning bags of mail that the Post Office was delivering to us, because we just didn’t have the space for them — you know, these huge manila bags that the P.O. has around. Thousands of letters and postcards would come in from people. They’d be mostly angry. Amused, yes, but then they’d turn around and say “Yeah, I laughed, I get it. A nude horse is a rude horse, and you want to Bermuda shorts on him to hide his genitalia, but I think you’re nuts, even though I laughed.”
Jenny: But Daddy, I think I used to curse the fact that you and mom were such pack rats when I was growing up. Our house always stuck out like a sore thumb in a rich town like Westport. You’d come over to the house and they’re be boxes and papers and stuff everywhere. You had to make like a path to get around everything. At the time, I didn’t understand why you guys collected so much, but when I began making the movie, I was so elated to have all this material. Even though it was overwhelming, it is always better to have more material to work with than too little.
Alan: Then why were you crying at the time?
Jenny: [Laughs.] I wasn’t crying.
Alan: I’m sitting here looking at 180 boxes and trunks in storage. It’s all our memorabilia. It goes back, you know, 50 light years. I’m going to try to place it in a collections library somewhere. I think it’d be a valuable source someday, for journalists and sociologists and psychiatrists, people like that.
Jenny: I think my dad has been on the fringe. There are a lot of people who know about his work, but he’s not a household name. But chances are, I don’t know, one out of every 20 people have possibly heard of one of my dad’s pranks. Basically, it was my hope to raise the level of awareness of his story.
Alan: And there are people who still carry a chip on their shoulder, like Walter Cronkite. When he promoted the campaign to clothe naked animals for the sake of decency, he was unaware it was a joke. Then he found out a few days later. That was way back in the ’60s. A friend of a friend had dinner with him and found out Walter is still angry over the idea that he got pranked, so to speak, or punked about that phony campaign. You’d think he’d be mad at Hitler or Mussolini and Saddam Hussein… No, no, no, he’s mad about the people who pulled the rug out from under him. I’m laughing still. It says something about the father of our news. It makes an interesting comment.
Hulu: Do you end up covering your tracks very well, in case they try to double check the validity of your campaigns? For something like SINA, do they have a legitimate phone number to call, and someone answers the phone and plays along?
Alan: Oh my goodness, yes. When I died in the New York Times, I had an obituary there. I had eight inches of space, two inches more than the guy who invented the six pack — and he never came back. When the Times reporters on the obituary desk called the funeral home out in Utah, where apparently I was found, or my skis were in the form of a cross but I’d disappeared into a snowbank, they talked to a man I’d set up in a trailer to be my funeral home. He didn’t have a phone, and I offered to pay for the phone if he set it up as a funeral home. Because you could do that, back in those days. That was in 1980, 29 years ago. All of the information that they required in order to corroborate what they’re going to publish checked out. I had the church reserved for a wake, and that checked out. I went to the bank to get the money to pay for the band and the caterer, and I couldn’t get my money out. They’d frozen my account. Banks read the obituaries, too. The first thing they do is freeze your money, so I didn’t have the money. I had to cancel the whole thing. But at least I went to print; I got in the paper. It’s interesting to hover over when you go, expire. Next time, when I do for real, no one will believe it. So that way, we become immortal. I think that’s a nice way to go, too.
Hulu: Jenny, did you learn anything new about your father while making this film?Jenny: Well, I learned that it’s very difficult to make a personal film and remain objective. I think that was probably one of the most difficult challenges in the editing process. But in terms of new discoveries, I grew up with two parents where it was not uncommon for them to walk around in their underwear, so I pretty much know every part of my parents that any child would ever hope to know. In terms of pranking, I think it was really cool to experience my parents’ pranking through an outsider’s viewpoint. I was able to go into an objective mode, even though I wasn’t totally objective. One of the greatest stories has been sharing the work with audiences and seeing how people react to my dad’s pranks. It’s very similar to how people reacted back in the ’50s. I think my dad’s work still provokes people and he still gets taken seriously, even though he says his credibility is zilch. If you just look up his Ban Breastfeeding campaign, he still gets calls for shows. And whether or not the radio person is in on the joke — and they probably are — there are people who make comments on the YouTube clip that we posted. They totally think my dad is a nut who believes that breastfeeding be — is it criminalized, or just totally illegal?
Alan: It should be illegal because it manifests in the baby, since the breasts have become a sexual object over the past 50 years, thanks to Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccioni and their magazines, that sexual object now becomes something that’s very dangerous. This baby has this oral addiction to what I call the “naughty nipple” and becomes a smoker and a drinker, even a homosexual possibly. I thought we should ban breastfeeding per se and have the milk pumped into a bottle and not allow the baby to become so addicted to the mother’s breasts.
Jenny: But Daddy, what I would say is just, my dad, he can play these characters. He really is the master at deadpan. Whatever he says, you believe. Dad, you really are born with this gift. I don’t know how it all happened.
Alan: Well, it all began back in college, when I was in the orchestra pit. I was up there giving a serious lecture on music. It was dark when I walked up on stage, and I fell into the pit. When I got back up, an audience of about 300 or 400 students had started laughing at everything I said. I’d just bruised my rib, my elbow and my knees, and I’m going on with my little lecture to introduce them to the department of music, but it became a comedy act. I realized I’m being serious, and they’re laughing at me. I decided, “Hey, I’m going to start doing this for money if I can,” which I never really have done, because no money changes hands when I do one of my pranks. I had a backer for many years. That money’s dried up, just like the economy. So we don’t do much anymore, unless somebody has deep pockets to finance it.
Hulu: So for a lot of your pranks in the past, you had a patron?Maxwell Sackheim was the man who invented the Book-of-the-Month Club many years ago. We met on the subway one day in New York. We were both hanging onto the straps and he’s laughing at those overhead ads they have on the racks above the straps, and I’m not. Next thing I know, he’s poking me on the elbow, saying “Hey, why didn’t you laugh at that ad? Isn’t it funny? For Rent: 1 Room, Seats 2, Plenty of Water, Near Bus Stop.” And I said, yeah, but I wrote those ads. They’re called Crazy Ads to fill the spaces when they don’t sell out all the space. He said, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve got to have lunch with you.” He had never ridden the subway before. That was his first time, and he was 78 years old at that time, back in early 1965. He was retiring the next day. It was serendipity because he became my benefactor on various stunts and pranks for 20 years or so. He passed away unfortunately, but he had a good sense of humor and he felt as long as the money was spent to have fun and to do allegorical satire on the world stage, which is what I did — and what the movie is all about. Jen [and her boyfriend, Jeff] found the hook. This is what others failed to find. I think Jennifer answered this, because there’s too much. I think they took a good slice and made a good documentary.
Jenny: Oh brother…
