Interview: James Schamus - Talk about their generation

Published on Wednesday 11 November 2009 18:06

JAMES SCHAMUS was just a nine-year-old kid in California when the original love generation were getting it on to Jimi and Janis at the Woodstock festival in 1969. Back then, the nearest he got to the action was his brother's copy of the famous Woodstock triple album. Forty years later, though, working with regular collaborator Ang Lee on a film about the iconic event has allowed the writer/producer, in the words of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to let his "freak flag fly".

The pair were on promotional duty in San Francisco for their controversial erotic thriller, Lust, Caution, when a fellow guest on an early morning TV show offered Lee a copy of his memoir, telling the director it would make a great movie. To Schamus's horror, Lee took it. "I was like, 'Oh no!' If you're Ang Lee it's very bad for your health for it to be known that people can just give you their book."

The "lovely elderly gentleman" turned out to be Elliot Tiber, whose Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, And a Life recounted his part in making the legendary music festival happen.

Tiber's timing was perfect. The political fallout from the big, expensive Lust, Caution had left Lee drained and depressed.

"We wanted to make something small and less ambitious. For health purposes, maybe," says Schamus. As the largest cultural event of the 1960s, Woodstock hardly seems to fit the bill. But that's "the great existential joke," Schamus chuckles. "It's not this gigantic thing, it's millions of tiny little things. You take the guy who, of the 500,000 people there, he was number 500,001, way at the outside on the periphery, and that makes it even more real."

Tiber's parents ran a rundown motel in Bethel, White Lake, called the El Monaco, and it was thanks to him, so the story goes, that the festival organisers were able to relocate the event to a new site after being run out of nearby Wallkill.

As President of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, it was Tiber (played by the comedian Demetri Martin in the film) who issued the permit giving Woodstock Ventures Inc. permission to hold the concert in Bethel.

However, his claim – repeated in the film – that he was also the man who introduced them to Max Yasgur, the dairy farmer who rented them his land after Tiber's proved unsuitable, is disputed by one of Woodstock's key founders, Michael Lang. He claims Yasgur never knew Tiber. So what really happened? "After passing on Elliot's place we got in touch with a real-estate agent called Morris Abrahams," recalls Lang, "and travelling around Bethel with him we found Max's farm. We came upon the field and I said, 'Stop! Who owns this?'"

Ironically, Yasgur (Eugene Levy) was politically very right-wing and pro the Vietnam war. "But he felt that everyone had a right to express their own beliefs," says Lang. "He believed we were mistreated in Wallkill and looked at this as a freedom of speech and right of assembly issue. Once we agreed a deal, he never wavered." Though Lang regards Tiber as more imaginative than reliable as a narrator, he says the rest of the story contains "elements of the actual events" and that the film, written by Schamus, "handles the story well".

Missing, however, are Tiber's vivid descriptions of his gay life in New York, where he claims to have had sexual encounters with Robert Mapplethorpe and Truman Capote. His is a fascinating account of the attitudes around homosexuality in pre-Stonewall America, and of the changes that the Stonewall riot, also in 1969, and the sexual liberalism of Woodstock ultimately wrought not just in the country, but for Tiber personally.

Despite coming from the director and producer of Brokeback Mountain, the film touches only lightly and – compared to the book – somewhat timidly on the subject of Tiber's sexuality. There is no mention of his proclivity for leather and S&M, nor that he turned a bungalow at the El Monaco into something resembling, in his own words, a "dungeon," complete with "whips and handcuffs".

What the film does do, beautifully, is recreate the look of the Woodstock scene and the mellow, intoxicatingly sensual Sixties vibe that Lee turned on its head in his 1970s-set film, The Ice Storm.

"Ang is so particular and so perfectionist about every detail, it's unbelievable," says Schamus admiringly. "But I kept telling him: 'Don't make a movie. Just go through the process of making a movie, have fun, and then share it with everybody else.' And I hope that spirit comes through, because we really did, weirdly, have a great time shooting the movie."

Even so, there were some surprising challenges, the biggest being finding extras who were skinny but not working out all the time, and, Schamus laughs, "who still had pubic hair. That was a generation of people who weren't fat, who were not staring at themselves in the mirror all the time, and not shaving everything off down there. It encapsulates the difference of 40 years right there."

Taking Woodstock bowed in competition at Cannes in May, a strategy which, for a comedy, Schamus admits was tantamount to "going into Sadr City with a target on your back and some Gideon Bibles". The US trade papers gave it "sh***y" reviews, with some critics complaining that we never get near the stage. Indeed, the closest Elliot gets is dropping acid in a van on the outer edges of the crowd. "The Americans, more than anybody, wanted to see the concert," Schamus sighs. "They're like, 'Why didn't I see Janis Joplin?' Is there some law that we had to show her? I couldn't believe that."

Ultimately, Taking Woodstock works best as an attempt to capture the look and feel of a moment in 1969, which it does seemingly effortlessly. It is a minor divertissement for Lee. But together, he and Schamus have created possibly the year's best feel-good movie.

&#149 Taking Woodstock is released tomorrow.