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“An experimental filmmaker,” Sharkey answered. “One of the best.”

“An art-buggering asshole,” Clare countered. “One of the worst.” She elaborated on that description. “The best single contribution I could make to the art of the film would be to kill him the next time I see him.”

Now, no one so described by Clare should have played any part in bringing Max Castle and me together. Yet, but for Chipsey Goldenstone's invitation to a movie auction that day, I might never have had the occasion to write these memoirs. A few months earlier, I'd seen ten struggling minutes of a Castle film so close to disintegrating on the reel that it had been an eyesore to watch. Whatever Clare might have spotted in
Feast of the Undead
through that jungle of careless splices and sprocket-tremors, I hadn't witnessed much more
than an antiquated creep show. I would have come away from that brief sampling satisfied to dismiss the film as crap, trash, junk. Thanks to Chipsey, I was soon to experience my first dose of quality Castle.

Despised and rejected as he was by Clare, Chipsey could only have entered her life by the back door, that is, by way of Sharkey's fantasy world of petty vice and decadent taste. As I understood it, Sharkey had no sooner returned home from Paris than he fell in with the cast of transient hundreds that made up Chipsey's artistic-erotic entourage. “You can trust Sharkey to smell depravity a mile off,” Clare told me. “And he'll run all the way to dive in.”

For the most part, Chipsey's personal empire of sycophants and hangers-on seemed to be nothing more than a movable orgy that was in constant crepuscular migration between various seedy beach towns south of Santa Monica and many a classy canyon hideaway behind the Palisades. On occasion, this round of nonstop carousing paused long enough to produce outbursts of art, most of it financed by Chipsey and all of it (or at least as much as I had seen) excruciatingly inane. There were gallery openings for art so advanced it couldn't be distinguished from the plumbing fixtures; there were daring little magazines that never got beyond earthshaking issue number one; there were pretentious theater pieces that might be mistaken for bad burlesque; above all there were Chipsey's own movies. Years before I met Clare, Chipsey and Sharkey had dreamed up the idea of staging a festival of West Coast underground films, featuring Chipsey's work. Clare wasn't taken by the idea. She warned they'd never find enough quality to fill an intermission break.

“We have Chipsey's stuff,” Sharkey reminded her.

“That's what I mean.”

But Sharkey insisted and got his way, promising it would be a one-shot venture. The result was as dismal a collection of amateur efforts as Clare had feared. The festival would surely have been an exercise in financial masochism if it hadn't been lavishly underwritten by Chipsey and supplemented at the box office by the throng of parasitic admirers that followed him through life looking for favors or fixes or a high old time. Chipsey's cash and his pull transformed the potential disaster into an annual event that became The Classic's principal money-maker.

Grousing and grumbling, Clare accepted the money, but with it The Classic gained a certain dubious celebrity that made the profits especially galling. This had nothing to do with art, even bad art; it
resulted from the high jinx and general hell-raising that accompanied the screenings. Chipsey's soirees, staged at a rambling, rustic-chic Topanga Canyon retreat, were infamous local happenings. They took the form of one seamless drunken brawl from the beginning to the end of the festival. Anybody might turn up and anything might happen. The press quickly elevated the event to a yearly staple of the social calendar. Reporters turned out in force to sample the booze, use the pool, enjoy the grass, wolf down the refreshments, and incidentally file stories filled with sexy gossip. They could be relied upon to season the papers with rumors of alcoholic debauchery that were invariably more exciting than any of the films that were shown. To Clare's chagrin, The Classic had become associated in the public mind with stories that sported headlines like “Film Folk Throw Big Binge,” “Avant Garde Bares All at Film Fest.”

But Clare's problems with the festival went deeper than that. Every time the event rolled around, it forced her to rethink her long, troubled history with the underground film movement. All she found there were jagged memories and painful ambivalence. During the early postwar years, when the New American Cinema (as it grandly called itself) was in its talking stage, Clare had eagerly allied herself with its theorists and impresarios. She made several trips to New York (at her own expense) to take part in conferences and panels that met to issue savage indictments of formula films, the studio system, censorship, blacklisting. Finally, there was a long, hard summer's unpaid labor helping Jonas Mekas launch
Film Culture,
the underground's chief journal. As long as there was the barest hope that Mekas' Film-Makers Cooperative might one day mature into something like the French New Wave, Clare clung to the cause tenaciously, contributing more time and money than she could afford.

In opposition, the enemies of the Hollywood establishment talked a good revolution. But once their films began to reach the screen, Clare lost heart. “Delusions of grandeur,” she fumed. “A ton of pretentious self-congratulations for every minute of film, and not one of those minutes better than W. C. Fields on an off-day.” It was the erotic clichés that troubled Clare the most, the endless repetition of peeping Tom naughtiness. When she reached her limit, she fired off a wickedly critical article to
Film Culture
calling avant-garde cinema “a wasteland of voyeurist fantasies.” To Clare's angered amazement, the journal refused to print it. The result was a minor furor among the experimentalists that quickly lapped over into other journals. In
the course of the give-and-take, some of Clare's more intemperate rejoinders were construed to imply an antihomosexual bias. That reading wasn't wholly inaccurate. Clare did harbor a decided hostility toward gays in the experimental film world. She never told me why; I suspect it had to do with a traumatic love affair somewhere in her past, a man she'd lost to another man. She tried to be discreet about her feelings. That was hard enough for Clare in the best of circumstances; under pressure, she barred no holds. The implicit soon became explicit.

“If we're going to wash our dirty linen in public,” Clare charged, in a lacerating letter that was run in
The Moviegoer,
“let's be honest about the source of the stains. Wet dreams that are trying to pass themselves off as high art.”

It didn't take long for this contretemps to catch the amused attention of mainstream observers. Much to Clare's surprise,
The New York Times
offered to buy her rejected article for its Sunday magazine. Wounded and furious, she snatched at the opportunity. It became her first piece to reach a major publication. She saw this as a breakthrough; her opponents regarded it as an act of treason.

Each year Sharkey's festival recalled the hurt feelings and bitter recriminations of that episode. Worse, it entangled the unsavory memories with someone who was quite simply the quintessence of everything Clare detested in the underground film community: Chipsey Goldenstone.

To her credit, Clare never tried to conceal her loathing for Chipsey, or even to soft-pedal it. Deception wasn't one of her talents, nor was tact among her virtues. The only reason Clare showed up at any of Chipsey's parties was to get drunk enough to revile him openly. For some reason I never grasped (could it have been sheer obtuseness on the man's part?) Chipsey simply refused to be insulted by Clare. Instead, he remained determined to claim her friendship. I was present at a screening when she was asked, in Chipsey's presence, what she thought of his movie. She answered, “Maybe you've heard: there's a species of pernicious slime that attaches itself to motion-picture film stock. Nobody knows how to kill it or even slow it down once it gets started. It creeps in along with the fringes of the reel and makes everything it touches sticky, off-color, and totally vile. When it gets done devouring a movie, there's nothing left in the can but a puddle of noxious syrup where you can't tell D. W. Griffith from Daffy Duck.
That's
what we just saw. It wasn't a film, it was fungus.”

To which Chipsey replied in great good humor, “Ah, but that's just it, Clarissa. You see how you're forced to resort to organic images to critique my work. The germinal, the fertile, the seminal … that's exactly what I'm after. The fungi, for example, have always struck me as a life-affirming force. So alive, so irrepressible … ”

Whatever Clare's opinion of Chipsey's films might be, she'd resigned herself to the fact that the festival's main purpose was to showcase his work. Which was, even in my amateur judgment, nauseatingly awful. The few examples I'd seen were hours-long vistas of naked bodies tangled into various acrobatic perversions. Sometimes anemic jazz played in the distant background; sometimes French poetry was read poorly and inaudibly. Invariably there was a sequence featuring some portion of the director's anatomy, his navel, an armpit, a crotch-shot of Chipsey's minimally garbed organ in a sequined and feathered snood. Or perhaps a pore-probing close-up of his face registering boundless ecstasy. As far as I could see, Chipsey's movies were nothing better than skin flicks. Rumor did have it that they were in lucrative demand on the fraternity-house and men's-club circuit.

Even so, Chipsey's accustomed style of consumption soared well beyond anything he could earn from mere pornography. His more visible means of support came from his father, one of the original Hollywood moguls of the Golden Age. At one time or another, Ira Goldstein had bankrolled all the great studio nabobs: Goldwyn, the Warners, Selznick, Cohn. Unlike them, however, Ira never pretended to be a producer, never cared to have his name on a film. He was content to be a backer pure, simple, and silent. In that strictly mercenary capacity, he accumulated a mint. He'd also acquired a reputation. Close friends—of which there weren't many—referred to him as Ira the Terrible. By others throughout the industry he was known as The Gonif, as in the phrase, “That gonif! He wants a bigger cut yet.”

As savage as he might be in money matters, Ira was also credited with an uncanny instinct about movies. Some of his words of wisdom had become legendary. When Columbia came around looking for cash to finance a minor comedy called
Night Bus,
Ira wouldn't come across until the title was changed. “Put a name like that out front, you'll have the public lining up to catch the Greyhound for Pomona.” He didn't like the studio's revised title much better
(It Happened One Night)
but he agreed to ante up on one condition. “I hear Louie
wants to rent out the guy with the teeth—Gable, that's it. Stick him in there. Sure he can do comedy. Look at those ears. But make sure he shows his chest.”

Ira was also among the first to put big money behind Walt Disney. “He's got a great idea, this boy. Why should we pay actors when we can buy pencils?” When Disney brought him some preliminary sketches for
Snow White,
Ira had a suggestion. “Put bigger warts on the witch and smaller boobs on the girl. Remember, this is for kids. The parents don't care the kids should be scared outa their skin, but God forbid you should give one of them a hard-on.”

Chipsey's great problem in life as the unlovable son of an unlovable father was to be torn between feeble longings for artistic independence and overpowering greed. His solution to the dilemma was to anglicize the family name, then keep all the family money he could lay hands on. The money came his way, though it didn't always gush. Father Goldstein had more than once been heard openly referring to son Goldenstone as a “fruit,” a “queer,” even a “degenerate.” Still, Ira had no place else to leave his fortune, so, grudgingly, he let it trickle down to Chipsey.

Clare's policy was to have nothing more to do with Chipsey than she had to, even when the festival was in progress. She reconciled herself to taking the money it produced, but normally scheduled those two weeks as her vacation, leaving The Classic in Sharkey's care. It was a gesture of contempt and disassociation. “If he ever got too stoned to turn the camera on,” she once said of Sharkey as she made ready to clear out of town, “this crowd wouldn't know the difference. They'd think they were watching an experimental film.” Unfortunately, this hands-off policy eventually backfired, landing Clare in a moral crisis that was to have far-reaching consequences for her and for me. That was the year of
Venetian Magenta,
one of the landmark events in the history of The Classic.

Since early on, Chipsey had been using the festival to showcase a multichaptered film opus called the “Venetian series.” “Venetian” as in Venetian blind, before which a single fixed sixteen-millimeter camera was positioned to shoot a number of improvised episodes that were distinguished by nothing so much as their sheer silliness. The blind would open and we might see one of Chipsey's lovers shaving a live and clucking chicken. Maybe a half hour of that. Then the blind would close. Several minutes of that. Then it would open and we might see a gang of Chipsey's pals filling a tub with colored goo,
clowning around, making a mess. Many minutes of that. Then a naked woman might leap into the tub and splash around. Many, many minutes of that. And so forth.

Each year, as an indication of the director's artistic growth, Chipsey's Venetian blind changed color. Thus, we had
Venetian Turquoise
followed by
Venetian Amber
followed by
Venetian Gold.
Chipsey insisted that with each new installment, the boundaries of film art were being flung back still farther into the creative unknown. He could talk endlessly about the symbolic meaning of the blind, of the chicken, of the tub, of action that took place behind the blind in contrast to action that took place
through
the blind. Nobody could possibly have traced the so-called “development” Chipsey claimed for the series, except for the fact that each installment was longer than the last. By the time we reached
Venetian Mauve,
we had passed the four-hour mark; this included a final ninety minutes during which we saw the blind and nothing but the blind, accompanied by a sound track filled with orgiastic giggles and grunts. Chipsey had lots to say about that final hour and a half. “You see the air of mystery it creates. It's taken directly from Egypt, ancient Egypt. The temple veil, the cult of Isis, that sort of thing. I'm definitely into an Egyptian phase.”