Knew'm when!

The fun of finding them first

©2018 Montclair Film used under a Creative Commons license

Hey, here’s one that could be fun for Fun Friday, whether you can pitch in or not. Who’s someone — artist, actor, orator, politician, whatever — you saw, or heard, before they got big, and knew right away they had something special?

I think there’s a treat in that knew-them-when thing that goes beyond bragging rights; when I find someone pre-success and the world approves my choice, it makes me feel like neither I nor the world is entirely nuts.  

As many opportunities as I had for this sort of thing in my New York youth, I can’t say I saw many. I did see the then-unknown B-52s on a weeknight bill at CBGB with, lemme see, I think it was the Colors, a power-pop group Hilly favored; I wasn’t there to see them so much as to watch bands for cheap, as was my wont. They played after the Colors and I almost didn’t stick around, but once they got started with the toy decoder beep of “Planet Claire,” I was delighted with them. I remember they were very focused but also relaxed, not selling it as hard as at their live shows I saw later — just groovy, stylish, and hypnotic. They didn’t set the house on fire, but no one left while they were playing, which I bet some industry people also noticed.

A bigger deal were the actors I saw at the Circle Rep in Sheridan Square. I had friends interning there, and they got me into shows and sometimes threw me gigs as a fill-in assistant in the lighting booth. I saw a lot of William Hurt there, but I confess his somewhat strangulated style (which I think you can notice in Altered States, his first big movie) didn’t do much for me. It wasn’t until The Kiss of the Spider Woman that I got what was so great about him. (So I missed! Also I saw the Dead Kennedys in their first New York show, at the Fashion Institute of Technology of all places, and thought: These guys aren’t so hot. I shall adopt the head-shaking good grace with which David Johansen remembered telling Chris Frantz that the Talking Heads weren’t going anywhere: “I can’t pick ‘em.”)

Hurt’s fellow Rep member Jeff Daniels was a different story. I first saw him in a Lanford Wilson play called Brontosaurus with Tanya Berezin — which, as I recalled when Wilson passed, is “about a wealthy, worldly New York antique dealer who takes in her teenage nephew, who has become a suburban mystic-ascetic and a living rebuke to everything the dealer believes.” The dealer has an assistant who comes in and out, but it’s mostly a two-hander.

There are a lot of words in the thing — and, as I notice looking at the pieces of the script available on the internet to refresh my memory, they’re pretty over the top, because most of them belong to the dealer — that’s how she’s named in the play, The Dealer — who sort of represents everything smart, cynical, and civilized; the title comes out of her line “living in our time, my time, not yours but mine and my generation’s time — we honorable brontosaurs that are the last to die: That generation that plugged away those last few weeks before everlasting life was discovered…”

Yeah, it’s heavy sledding, alright, but the two of them made it work. (A lot of theatre is about actors making elevated speech seem not ridiculous.) Berezin had all those thick lines and opportunities for very playable fury, contempt, and bitterness; Daniels had the theatrical advantage of relative calm — in fact his presence was practically bovine until his big monologue in which, after serving as the placid butt of the dealer’s ire, he got to explain how he’d been touched by God and it had changed his life. He was slow about it and, both times I saw the play, you could feel the whole audience slow down to his rhythm, because they saw him seeing his visions as he related them; they believed that he believed it, and that was as surprising and fascinating to them as if it were happening in their own living rooms. Here’s the speech; you can imagine an actor trying hard to make you see it and failing. But Daniels didn’t seem to try at all and he was spellbinding. His success since then has pleased me greatly.

What about you? Seen any like that?