Last Exit to…..Where?
My first complete film as a unit stills photographer was Last Exit to Brooklyn, from the Hubert Selby book that was banned in England and the United States in the 1950’s. Irony of ironies because I had spent my entire youth trying to get out of my borough of birth, Brooklyn. This was long before it was a hipster magnet. Dyker Heights, in the 70’s and 80’s, was a mob stronghold, where every muscle car’s horn played the theme from The Godfather and every other day a young woman fell off her platform shoes and twisted her ankle. People were jammed packed into semi-connected houses with a family or two on each floor. Good because you could always find a game of stickball. Bad because all that burning chunk of humanity sometimes got a little hot. I pity the soul who let their dog pee on the wheel of a GTO in sight of the owner. My grandmother took to carrying a small lead pipe wrapped in electric tape when she walked our pup.
I was 10-years-old when I knew I had to get out. I was sitting on a bench at the local high school reading the second book of Lord of the Rings when couple in their 20’s came flying out of an apartment building screaming at each other . He opened the door of his Camaro and dumped all her 8-track cassettes in the street. She, bare-footed, stooped and began to hurl them at his head. He returned fire. We were treated to this street theatre for several minutes. The crowd supplied a soundtrack of oohs and ahhs and the occasional, “Good Shot!!”
The film was shot in Red Hook which was a deserted gritty sleeping giant. The location scouts found a dead body in one of the buildings before production began. The neighborhood smelled sour and sickeningly sweet from an abandon sugar factory. We set up our trucks and tents and let the darkness several feet from our bright lights poke fun at our enthusiasm, with our newly minted film degrees, shiny multi-function knife tools…so sincere in our comically baggy rain gear.
The highlight of this film was meeting Hubert Selby. He had gone through hell because of this book. Lawsuits, bans, hate mail. I asked him how he had the strength to write his next book, Requiem for a Dream. He said after all the buckets of hate mail stopped, a steady stream of letters materialized from people thanking him. They thanked him for seeing and hearing the world they lived in. They thanked him for writing about their difficult and painful lives. They thanked him for their truth.
“I did it for them.” He said, “I did it for them.”
