PRIDE TV: THE QUIET GAY HEROES OF SIXTIES SITCOMS

 PRIDE TV: THE QUIET GAY HEROES 

OF SIXTIES SITCOMS

PleaseKillMe.com June 28, 2019

The faces of these three actors were familiar to Baby Boomers raised on TV situation comedies. Their private lives were not. In a way, though, they helped to blaze trails for which they were never given credit.

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

With this year’s Gay Pride Month marking the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the accomplishments of LGBT heroes of the past fifty years have been widely celebrated. But along with political activists and social revolutionaries, there were a number of entertainers who, in the decades surrounding the rebellion, brought a clear, if often exaggerated, gay presence into American homes.

 

Most did not “come out” officially, but there was no need. Even kids planted in front of the television sets in the 1960s knew there was something “funny” about Uncle Arthur and Claymore Gregg.  And these funny men were welcome. They made us laugh. They, along with other favorite sitcom characters, were influences on American punk culture and today are looked upon as pioneers.

 

What follows are the stories of three of them, actors whose roles were well-defined and brilliant in their simplicity, but whose personal lives were more complicated, full of compromising relationships, situations and positions.

 

THE STRAIGHT MAN

 

Richard Deacon was the straight man.

 

“As a straight man, I’m hired for my buttoned-down quality,” he told author Boze Hadleigh. “I’m nearly always an executive of some sort, in suit and tie, and somebody always pricks my bubble of dignity. I’ve been called every adjective — smug, lugubrious, unctuous, bland, you name it.  My character always represents the Establishment. I’m never an individualist. Not at all flamboyant.”

 

Richard Deacon

 

Deacon had a long career in television and films by the time a generation of kids got to know him as Fred Rutherford, Lumpy’s father on Leave It To Beaver. The series premiered on CBS on October 4, 1957, and switched over to ABC in its second season, where it remained until its final episode aired on June 20, 1963.  Fred was an annoyance to his neighbor and co-worker, Beaver’s dad Ward Cleaver. Tall, balding, wearing glasses and usually a suit and tie, he was not at all flamboyant, but a suburban Dave Berg character come to life.

 

Deacon was still in the Beaver cast when he stepped into his career-defining role on The Dick Van Dyke Showin October 1961. Van Dyke played Rob Petrie, head writer of a comedy-variety series called The Alan Brady Show. Richard Deacon was Mel Cooley, Brady’s brother-in-law and the show’s pompous, prissy—“unctuous”—producer.  Mel Cooley kissed Alan Brady’s ass, while serving as the constant butt of jokes and insults by gag writer Buddy Sorrell (played by Morey Amsterdam). Mel Cooley was the perfect straight man.

 

as Mel Cooley

 

Richard Deacon was not. Off camera, offstage, he was not a straight man. He was a gay man. It wasn’t something he talked about. He kept his personal life private. No one asked. He didn’t tell.  In Hollywood in the 1960s, life was played out in the shadows for Deacon and other gay actors who often played heterosexual husbands and fathers on television and movies. That was the case with buttoned-down types like Hayden Rorke (Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeannie) and Dick Sargent (the “second Darren” on Bewitched), but also flamboyantly camp performers like Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde (Jim Nabors of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. was in a class of his own). To the public, they were simply “confirmed bachelors.” (Lynde’s sexuality wasn’t even made an issue when in July 1965, after a night of drunken revelry, a young actor fell to his death from the window of Lynde’s eighth-floor room at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. The papers described the pair as “friends.”)

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“I’m nearly the opposite of Paul Lynde,” Deacon told Boze Hadleigh in that interview in the late 1970s for the book, Hollywood Gays. “Paul only has to look at someone and he’s funny. He can ridicule somebody just by looking at them. His body language is funny. It’s a gift few have…  I learned the only way I could get laughs was through a situation. I do nothing. The star or other character does it. For instance, if a female character finds me sexy and chases me, it’s funny because I’m no sex symbol at all. If I get spray-painted, like on Lucy, it’s funny as long as I don’t act as if I think it’s funny.”

 

When Hadleigh asked if he thought any of the public assumed he was gay, Deacon shook his head. “Not even gays. Most would be surprised. Only because what you see on TV — a serious guy in a suit, unsmiling– isn’t how anyone thinks of gay males.”

 

“Have you ever been cast as gay?” Hadleigh asked.

 

“No,” Deacon replied. “Asexual, often. Heterosexual, now and then — if the part’s bigger than usual.”

 

“Do you think within the industry it’s known you’re gay?”

 

Hadleigh wrote that Deacon gave a little shrug. “No idea.”

 

 

THE RENAISSANCE MAN MEETS SEÑOR NAUGLES

 

After producer Carl Reiner folded the tent on the Van Dyke show in 1966 (he wanted to go out on top), Deacon was cast as the bombastic husband of Kaye Ballard in the second season of the NBC sitcom, The Mothers-In-Law. Deacon replaced Roger C. Carmel in the role. Carmel had been ousted by producer Desi Arnaz, officially over a salary dispute, but more likely because his drug use was causing costly production delays.

Roger C. Carmel

 

Roger C. Carmel also was gay. He appeared on many 1960s sitcoms, dramas and on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and was well-known to a certain audience as Harry Mudd from two classic episodes of Star Trek. Carmel’s career suffered after The Mothers-In-Law whispers, but he did find television acting and voiceover work throughout the 1970s (including a spot on the short-lived Paul Lynde Show, in which Lynde portrayed a married lawyer with two daughters). By the mid-1980s, the six-foot-three, 260-pound actor was still hanging on. He was the voice of Smokey Bear in public service spots and portrayed the south-of-the-borderline racist character “Señor Naugles” in television commercials for the Naugles Mexican restaurant chain.

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On November 11, 1986, Roger C. Carmel was found dead in his sixth-floor condominium at 7135 Hollywood Boulevard.  His 54-year-old body was discovered by the building manager after friends said they hadn’t seen Carmel for days. Though there would later be rumors he’d committed suicide by aspirin, police said he died of a narcotics overdose. Cocaine residue and narcotics paraphernalia were found near his body. The young male prostitutes Carmel was known to cavort with were not.

 

Carmel (who fittingly was buried in Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens, N.Y.), outlived Richard Deacon by two years, but Deacon’s life was longer, far less fraught and much fuller. He worked constantly on television and in films, and became something of a Renaissance Man. He collected art and rocks, was a gourmet chef and wrote a microwave oven cookbook that sold more than 1.7 million copies. He was also active on the social scene. “Dickie Deacon” could be seen at gay bars in West Hollywood with friends like Paul Lynde and Nancy Walker, and at parties at houses like Rock Hudson’s. According to the liner notes for pianist Michael Feinstein’s first album, Deacon was so taken by the young musician and song revivalist that he “had designed and had built Feinstein a superb miniature drawing room with grand piano and antique memorabilia to match.”

 

Charles Nelson Reilly, Charles Pierce, abd David Hedison (The Fly, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea)

 

Deacon had perhaps first seen Feinstein perform at Studio One’s Backlot, a gay nightclub in West Hollywood, when Feinstein was accompanying the female impersonator Charles Pierce.  Pierce,  who referred to himself not as a drag artist but a “male actress,”  was one of the most brilliant and biting comics of his time, with hilarious impersonations of iconic actresses including Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Joan Collins.  All future female impersonator “drag” performances sprang from Charles Pierce. (Lynde and Reilly were fans and friends of Pierce, who appeared in a 1980 episode of Laverne & Shirley — along with Roger C. Carmel). One of the last circulated photos of Richard Deacon appears to be in Pierce’s dressing room.  Deacon is clowning, covering his bald pate with a short blonde wig.

 

Richard Deacon with Charles Pierce

 

In the summer of 1984, Richard Deacon’s plate was full. He’d recently revived his role as Fred Rutherford in a CBS TV movie, Still The Beaver, and thanks to its success, was invited to join the cast of the Disney channel television series, The New Leave It To Beaver, in the fall. He was also hosting a microwave cooking television show that was syndicated in Canada, while preparing to shoot home video and US syndicated versions.

 

Those plans came to an abrupt halt on the evening of Wednesday, August 8, 1984, when paramedics were called to Deacon’s home on Dalegrove Drive in Beverly Hills’ Coldwater Canyon. The actor had suffered a heart attack. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where, at 11:07 p.m., he was declared dead. He was 63.

 

Richard Deacon had requested that there be no funeral. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

 

 

“DROWN BINGHAMTON!”

 

Joe Flynn often felt scattered at sea in his most popular television role. A former ventriloquist and Republican state senate candidate from Youngstown, Ohio, we all knew Flynn as the bespectacled, fussy, Captain Wallace Binghamton — aka “Old Leadbottom” (due to a bullet wound in his rear end) —  on ABC’s wacky World War II comedy, McHale’s Navy.

 

In June 1964, two years into McHale’s Navy‘s success, Flynn “complained” to TV Graphic magazine about the amount of time he was forced to spend in the water. “The show’s writers are a lawless breed in general, but they do have their code,” he said. “It’s very simple: ‘Drown Binghamton!’ Why, in this series I’ve wrung more water out of my shirt than Ernie (Borgnine) and Tim (Conway) and the rest of the guys have sailed over. I’ve been tripped, struck, sideswiped, flung and shoved in the drink, and dropped from a balloon. I’ve landed in a parachute. I’ve gone in head-on, backward, feet first, spread-eagle, and belly-flop. I’ve been deep-sixed clutching a bottle of champagne, a camera, even a pair of nylons.”

Joe Flynn

 

Flynn added that the “drowning” scenes always seemed to be filmed when the weather was cold and windy. “I’ve lowered myself to plead to the producer, ‘Why not use a stock shot — one of my previous dunkings? Some of them are quite lovely.’ But he always has excuses.  ‘Sorry, Joe.  This time you go in wearing Eskimo mukluks. There just aren’t any stock photos of you drowning in an Eskimo suit. Happy landings!'”

 

The writer noted that  Flynn’s “tragic plight” did not elicit sympathy from the actor’s five-year-old son, Tony. “Every time he sees me take a header on the show, he complains about it: ‘Dad, you always go swimming. Why don’t we have a pool?'” Flynn said. “What the little guy doesn’t know is that his old man is not as stupid as he looks.  I shopped for my house very carefully. I had to search all over Beverly Hills, but finally found one without a pool.”

 

Ten years after that interview, Joe Flynn and his family were living in neighboring Bel Air, California, in a house with a pool.

 

McHale’s Navy had been off the air since 1966, but Flynn worked regularly on television dramas and comedies (including an episode of Jeannie in which he plays a psychiatrist brought into replace Dr. Bellows), in movies (many for Walt Disney Productions), and as a guest on talk and game shows.  He’d recently wrapped two projects for Disney: filming The Strongest Man in the World, and voicing the role of Mr. Snoops in the animated film, The Rescuers.

 

On July 13, 1974, he taped an episode as a guest on The Merv Griffin Show. The episode was set to air the following Friday, July 19.

 

In the early hours of that Friday, Joe Flynn’s nude body was found at the bottom of his swimming pool. His son Tony was the one who made the discovery. The five-year-old who’d complained about not having a swimming pool was now sixteen. He and his kid brother, thirteen-year-old Kenny, hauled their father’s naked carcass out of the water. The fire department rescue squad showed up, but far too late. Old Leadbottom had been drowned for the last time. Joe Flynn was 49.

 

 

SECRETS & SUSPICIONS

 

Police said that Flynn had apparently suffered a heart attack that led to him drowning during a late-night swim, but there were circumstances that aroused suspicion that Joe Flynn may have been the victim of foul play. For one, though it was not reported, his body was not completely nude when it sank to the bottom of  the swimming pool. Flynn had a heavy cast on one leg. At the time, most doctors would instruct a patient with a broken limb to keep the cast dry. Another issue concerned his appearances on the Merv Griffin Show. Flynn had been active in Hollywood politics and as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, led a fight for fair residuals from the studios. He’d apparently told Merv that he was holding bombshell information about the way the industry conducted business.

 

Then there was the blackmail.

 

The incident was not mentioned in Joe Flynn’s obituary. Eighteen months before his death, Flynn had been the target of an extortion plot. It began in January 1973, with a phone call to his home.  A male voice on the other end of the line said he was in possession of “revealing photos” of the actor. He offered Flynn the opportunity to buy them.

 

Joe Flynn went to the Los Angeles Police Department and reported the extortion attempt.  He agreed to pay the man seven thousand dollars and delivered the money to an agreed-upon pickup point. The police tailed the suspect from there. They arrested a 29-year-old “unemployed salesman” named Clark Worthey after phone records showed the extortion calls to Flynn’s home came from his home.

 

A spokesman for the Los Angeles District Attorney said the photos, which allegedly showed Joe Flynn “in compromising positions with a woman,” did not actually exist.

 

This leads to the question: if Joe Flynn were to be caught in “compromising positions,” would those positions have been with a woman? An intriguing answer brings us back to Charles Pierce, the “male actress” known for his Bette Davis and Joan Crawford impersonations, and social connections to Richard Deacon, Roger C. Carmel, Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, and other 1960s television stars caught in the lavender closet.

Robert Q. Lewis, Charles Pierce, Michael Feinstein, Lu Elrod

 

In the Pierce biography, From Drags to Riches, John Wallraff writes that Deacon was among the celebrities who came out to watch Pierce perform at the Gilded Cage gay nightclub on Ellis Street in San Francisco. Among the others was “Joe Flynn of McHale’s Navy, who appeared with a sexy young muscle man in a white t-shirt. Flynn, a Hollywood actor, was being very open about his ‘gayness.'”

 

(Paul Lynde’s nude body was found in his bed in his home in Beverly Hills on January 11, 1982. Though there were rumors of the circumstances surrounding his death and traces of the sex stimulant butyl nitrate in his system, the Los Angeles coroner ruled out foul play and attributed his death at 55 to a heart attack. Charles Nelson Reilly died of pneumonia in the same city on March 25, 2007.  He was 76, openly gay and had earned a reputation as an acclaimed stage director.  Jim Nabors moved from neighboring Bel Air, to Maui, Hawaii, in 1976, where he lived in privacy with his partner.  He underwent a liver transplant in 1994 after contracting hepatitis C, and “came out” in 2013, when he married his partner of 38 years.  Nabors died on November 30, 2007, having lived to the ripe age of 87.)

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BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM wrote the book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, which will be published  September 3 by Chicago Review Press, and can be pre-ordered at TheShowWontGoOn.com and DiedOnstage.com.

 

MU TUNC: THE DIRECTOR OF TURKEY’S FIRST PUNK MOVIE. OR, THE FALL OF EASTERN CIVILIZATION

 

Ceren Moray

 MU TUNC: THE DIRECTOR 

OF TURKEY’S FIRST PUNK MOVIE. OR, THE FALL OF EASTERN CIVILIZATION

 

BY BURT KEARNS JUNE 5, 2019

 

Filmmaker Mu Tunc describes his film, Arada, as “Liquid Sky meets The Decline of Western Civilization,” which, of course, automatically makes it worthy of attention. Mu Tunc will present his film at the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibit on June 6 and at the Philadelphia Museum of Contemporary Art on June 9. Burt Kearns spoke with the Turkish director for PKM on the eve of his arrival in New York.

 

The message showed up in my inbox on April 1.  “Hi Burt, I hope my email finds you well. My name is Mu Tunç, a film director from Istanbul. I recently found your insane article, ‘Zeki Müren, The David Bowie of Turkey.’ And I want to share my story with you because what you wrote was in my film and we thought the same insight… In my film there is a record store scene where they talk about Zeki Müren and compare him to David Bowie. I thought no one think it this way, however reading your article literally made me have tears in my eyes…”

 

Mu Tunç, a 32-year-old filmmaker from Istanbul, had gone online and found the PleaseKillMe.com story about the male Turkish classical singer who performed in elaborate feminine costumes, makeup and high platform shoes, who lived his life openly as a gay man in the 1950s and 1960s, and was not only accepted but revered in the macho, conservative Muslim country. In Tunç’s film, Arada,  Zeki Müren is cited as an example of the artists who foreshadowed Turkey’s punk scene. “This guy was taking the stage on platform heels way before David Bowie was even around,” the record store owner explains to a young punk. “Look at that outfit. He spreads his wings like a butterfly.”

 

Still of Zeki Muren in Arada

 

Arada, released in April 2018 in Turkey before hitting the international film festival circuit, is considered Turkish cinema’s first punk movie. Set in the 1990s amid civil unrest and the rise of Turkey’s underground hardcore scene, it tells of a young punk, the son of a former Turkish singing star, attempting to leave Istanbul to pursue his punk music dream in sunny California. Tunc describes his film as “Liquid Sky meets The Decline of Western Civilization.” It’s an accomplished work with DIY touches, reminiscent of Sean Baker’s Tangerine and John Cassavetes’ Husbands. When the music hits, it’s like the fall of Eastern Civilization.

 

Arada movie poster

 

The story is autobiographical, Tunç explained in a subsequent phone conversation hours before he boarded a plane for New York City, where he’ll present Arada at the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibit this week. Our talk has been edited for space and tweaked to avoid losses in translation.

 

BIG BROTHER

 

MU TUNÇ: My father’s name is Altan Tunç. He was a famous musician in the 1970s, performing Turkish art music. It’s what Zeki Müren was a master of. But then the coup happened, and they forced everyone to join the Army. Even though he had a university degree, that was the law. He went into the Army for 15 months, and when he returned —  this is a time there was like, only one channel on television — no one remembered him. My brother was born when he was in the Army and then basically my father just had to earn money in order to support his family. So I grew up with him saying, “I’m going to return to music one day.” But that day never came for him. I see sadness in his eyes now. He didn’t follow his passion.

 

PKM: That’s a universal story.

 

MU TUNÇ: And that’s the crazy part! My brother is nine years older than me. And he basically shared the DNA. I don’t know if it’s a curse or whatever, but he ended up with music, too. He became a drummer. However, my brother’s taste was different.  He found speed metal, and heavy metal and thrash metal — especially thrash metal.

 

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When the music hits, it’s like the fall of Eastern Civilization.

 

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PKM: This was in the early 1990s. How did American punk make its way to Istanbul?

 

MU TUNÇ:  Cassette tapes. This is crazy, this part! I put this into my movie, but it was very fast: basically, how punk entered the country is through pilots. A bunch of pilots bringing in these weird records.

 

PKM: Airline pilots, right?

 

MU TUNÇ: Airline pilots. Yeah, like normal pilots. At that time, there were not so many ways of going out and coming back. So these pilots are really special people. They were going abroad and bringing back these records with them. And they were giving them away to people who have cassette shops. Then (the shop owners) would pirate and compile songs from a bunch of artists on cassettes. So my brother went to this cassette shop one day and he finds a compilation with a couple of very important American hardcore bands. One of them is D.R.I. (Houston’s Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) and the other one is Methods of Destruction, M-O-D (laughs). Surfin’ in the USA. And through that, he found American hardcore music. My brother and his friends,  they were like 13, 14 years old, and they wanted to form a band. And they started the band Turmoil.

 

Character's wall in Arada

 

PKM: Was there a scene at the time? And was it really happening underground?

 

MU TUNÇ: The scene was so underground that no one even knew it existed. The kids were having concerts inside my family’s apartment building, in the basement without other people knowing. And they didn’t know that there were other people like them in other cities. Think about them like a bunch of kids in Harlem and a bunch of kids in Brooklyn, but they don’t even know that they exist at the same time.

 

PKM: That’s how it was in the early days of punk in the 1970s. You’d go to a Ramones concert and see somebody with a Ramones T-shirt and talk to them.  Because you knew a kindred spirit.

 

MU TUNÇ: Here there were not even concerts. They were making fanzines and putting those fanzines into the cassette shops. That’s how they first found each other. And afterwards, they sent mail to addresses they found on the sleeves of records. It was a very common thing in punk culture. You look for addresses on the album cover designs. And many American hardcore bands put their addresses on the covers. They started to write back and forth in order to find a connection. It was like searching the Internet before the Internet. These guys are understanding the idea of Internet — but through punk music! And my brother’s band found the connection and released one of the first Turkish punk records.

 

(In 1996, Turmoil split an EP with the anarcho-Mexican-hardcore band Regeneración.  The disc was released in Belgium and Mexico, and is still available online. Mu’s brother Orkan Tunc is a successful producer who’s worked with Janet Jackson and produced the Arada soundtrack.)

 

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The scene was so underground that no one even knew it existed. The kids were having concerts inside my family’s apartment building, in the basement without other people knowing.

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DIFFERENT

 

PKM: So you’re from a very artistic family. What about you? Your bio on IMDb mentioned your work with the McCann ad agency. Have you worked in the States?

 

MU TUNÇ: I’ve never worked in the States, but my way of understanding grew with McCann, which is a very important American advertisement company. I was dealing with Coca Cola, Starbucks, whatever you name, I worked it for them. Sony, Mobil — everything that is against punk, I was in it! I was not sharing my background, about me, about my family, that my brother was one of the first persons into punk music in Turkey. I was not sharing these kind of things, because I was ashamed.

Mu Tunc by Jiyan Kizilboga

 

PKM:  You put all that into Arada?

 

MU TUNÇ: It wasn’t easy, what was I was trying to tell in the movie. I grew up being different. And being different is painful in Turkey. It can be painful in places like New York. But here it’s literally double that, or even triple or four times more hard. In my film, there’s a scene, a conversation in my house, where my father — and he’s a very liberal person — tells my brother, “You’ll not going to get married if you keep on being punk.”

 

This is harsh. This is too harsh. My mother was a teacher. So (my parents) care about education a lot and they sent us to private school. And I studied with full scholarship all my life. However, when I was a little kid, I was into punk. I grew up fantasizing about Los Angeles. I was listening to Suicidal Tendencies and all these crazy bands from LA. all the time, like I was a Chicano punk.  I was listening to Black Flag, Santa Monica bands and all these San Francisco Bay area bands. I was obsessed with Dead Kennedys. I was listening to all this stuff, but my taste was also making me feel alone. Because there were no one to speak to.

 

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I was not sharing my background, about me, about my family, that my brother was one of the first persons into punk music in Turkey. I was not sharing these kind of things, because I was ashamed.

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The first girl that I liked, her name was Jamie and she was from South Africa. Somehow her family was moved to Turkey and I ended up in class with her. And the reason why I liked her so much is because she asked me what kind of music I like, and I responded that I’m listening to punk music. And she understood. She said, “Oh, something like Green Day?” And I was like, “Wow.” Like finally, a girl understands me. And Green Day is the worst thing you can say to a punk person. Green Day normally makes you vomit! But it was the most romantic thing that I have ever heard in my life. (laughs)

 

ANTI-HEROES

 

PKM: You went on to study cinema. Where did you study?

 

MU TUNÇ: Istanbul. I studied design first. I come from design perspective. And I have a master’s degree in cinema, so I understand cinemology. That’s where I actually come from, that’s why I am aware this background of punk movies, all this serious stuff. Like Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan. They were pioneers of anti-hero movies. I wanted to make an anti-hero movie. That was my mission actually in the beginning.

 

Arada star Burak Deniz as Ozan

 

PKM: Have you seen the movie Tangerine?

 

MU TUNÇ: I love Tangerine.

 

PKM: I thought of Tangerine when I watched Arada. The two main characters were on a quest — and that’s the movie they shot on iPhones.

 

MU TUNÇ: That’s what I want to do right now! Yesterday, I just finished a documentary about the whole process of making Arada. The reason why I’m doing that, Burt, is just to give hope to my younger generation. Just follow your passion, and follow your dream, you know? I know this is a very cheesy word nowadays, like all the brands are saying, “Be an influencer” or “Inspire people.” It becomes like chewing gum. But especially in my country right now, young people are really desperate. They’re even nihilist. It’s like even the nihilism is good compared to their situation, because they don’t even have a dream anymore. And I want to become a case study. That’s why I’m very passionate. And going to New York, going to all these places, I’m not earning any money, Burt. Like literally, I lost all the savings for this movie. I know money will come. But I just want to become a hope in young cinema. That’s my mission.

Record store scene from Arada

 

CASSAVETES

 

PKM: Arada played in 20 cities, in 80 theaters in Turkey, and now it’s streaming there. What’s been the response as you take the film around the world?

 

MU TUNÇ: It’s really growing in a very interesting circle nowadays.  I’ve been to a lot of film festivals.  However, more cultural and art people understand me better than the critical film people.  So it’s interesting to see this connection. It’s not like a typical movie journey that I’m experiencing. Turkish cinema is one of the most successful nowadays. It’s crazy, we’re in every major film festival in the world.  But the storytelling is not experimental.

 

PKM: That’s where you stand out.

 

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But especially in my country right now, young people are really desperate. They’re even nihilist. It’s like even the nihilism is good compared to their situation, because they don’t even have a dream anymore. And I want to become a case study. That’s why I’m very passionate.

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MU TUNÇ: You can see in Arada, I’m influenced a lot by the John Cassavetes style of storytelling. Or Harmony Korine or the old Derek Jarman, all these experimental ways of telling things. I come from that perspective.

 

PKM: Now are you part of a filmmakers community in Istanbul, or are you on your own there?

 

MU TUNÇ: Let me put it this way: Arada is seen as one of the first punk movies ever be made in the history of Turkish cinema. I mean, punk movies is a very micro genre. Also the way Arada was made is also very punk. I shot the whole movie in 13 days. Almost every person working on the film was young. The sound recorder is a young person, my film photographer, it was his first film. It’s like everyone’s first film. I wanted it to come from the punk spirit of doing things by yourself. If you want to shoot a movie, do it. I know it’s hard, but just do it. John Cassavetes really affected me a lot. The way he approached film like, “I want to do it this way and I’m going to do it.” And challenging the narrative storytelling. I don’t want you to love the characters. I want you to hate them even. It’s not just a systematic formula to get your love.

 

And in Eastern cinema, you don’t see the cultural thing like you do in American independent cinema. When you watch Clerks, you sometimes end up seeing really random bullshit talk. But behind the lines, there are a lot of important cultural elements they share with you at the same time. You don’t see that kind of genuine approaches in Turkish cinema, and I want to bring it. And what’s interesting is that people are seeing that, too. One of the first serious academic books about independent Turkish cinema is going to be released very soon. Before it was always a problematic question whether there is independent cinema in Turkey or not, and now it’s coming up in this academic book. And my film Arada is on the cover.

 

GREATEST PUNK ROCKERS

 

PKM: Now, getting back to that record store scene. The shop owner points out the traditional artists from Turkey who were influential and were very punk-like in their attitude and expressions. Like Orhan Gensebay (a music and acting star since the late 1960s).

 

MU TUNÇ: Exactly, exactly. His lyrics are insanely dark. Like insanely. Literally it’s one of the darkest lyrics that’s ever come out at that time (in the late 1960s). And it was a very problematic time because the left and right in Turkey were having a fight in the streets. Almost like a civil war going on. Every day, random teenagers were killing each other in the streets of Turkey. So it was a serious time. And Orhan Gencebay, made this music telling that this whole world is fucked up. And that’s how he became famous.

 

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It’s like everyone’s first film. I wanted it to come from the punk spirit of doing things by yourself.

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PKM: In the record shop scene, they called him “the greatest punk rocker Turkey ever raised.”

 

MU TUNÇ: No! I just tried to make people to look at themselves from a different perspective. The problem with the Turkish people is that they think that punk music is a rebellious approach. However, in the movie, I try to show that the punk aesthetic is a way of existence. Of being true to yourself and being independent. And being just yourself is an approach of punk.

 

PKM: Yes it is. And it was always there. How is that that Turkey, on one hand it’s majority is Muslim and potentially repressive, yet it opened its arms to artists like Ohran Gencebay and especially somebody like Zeki Müren?

 

MU TUNÇ: That’s the crazy part! That’s why I put that scene into the film. Right now, we are having a lot of problems, too. But what I was trying to show is that these guys were making this kind of music in the ‘60s. And with Zeki Müren’s outfits!  Guys, we’re almost in the 2020s. Just do something!  Don’t tell me, “Oh, these people are in power and doing this.” Just do whatever you can do. Don’t say, “Oh well, we are losers.” No we are not. No one is losers.

 

When I found the story you wrote about Zeki Müren, you made my tear drop. Like literally, because I said, how come on the whole planet, someone like you can find out this connection, and my people are supposed to think these things that no one is speaking. For you and I to meet up, normally in this world is completely impossible.  Fifty years ago, it was impossible. And you and I, we think alike, having completely different backgrounds. I put exactly your words into my movie, without knowing you.

 

Mu Tunc

 

PKM: It’s a small world, after all. (laughs)

 

MU TUNÇ: That makes me go crazy! Because this comparison — Burt, really, I never read it anywhere. That this guy was David Bowie before David Bowie — the first time I read it was in your article — and it was in my movie. It’s beyond wild. And think about it, this is a Muslim country, and I just want to show this to young people, teens. They need to hear these things, because whole cultures are nowadays dying.

 

PKM: Yeah. I think kids don’t have a sense of history because they’re constantly bombarded with so much information. There’s just so much going on, they don’t have time to process all of it. It’s a whole different language, it’s a whole different world with kids today.

 

MU TUNÇ: It’s a noise at the same time. When I was a little kid, I was a straight-edge punk and I was putting X’s on my hand. And my teachers were not understanding me. I was thinking, ‘if these people understand what this X is about, they will love me’. Punk and hardcore music, especially American hardcore punk, taught me so many important values that I should care about when I grew up. Such as pollution. Such as global warming. Such as human rights. Such as animal rights. That I should not use cosmetics. All these important humanistic elements, I learned through listening to punk and hardcore music.

 

PKM: It’s always been there.

 

MU TUNÇ: And when I grew up, people were telling me, “Oh, there’s global warming.” I was like, “Hello, guys! Everybody was speaking about these things more than twenty years ago.” Punk kids were speaking about these things. The first punk people were really emotional people. They were not at all into noise. Noise was just a tool to make people wake up. Like literally, wake up.

 

Mu Tunç will be there when ARADA is screened at 6:30 PM at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) New York’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibition on June 6, and at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art on June 9.

 

 

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Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.