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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC

Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

Powdered Sugar Paradise

INDEPENDENT FILM STARS AQUINAS GRADUATE

By James McCoy

Light becomes precious as evening falls on the movie set. Sunlight is scooped up and coddled by mirrors and diffusers, and then sent off to rest in the interior of a first-floor apartment in Los Angeles. The grip yells to the gaffer to "up three inches and pan lamp right. "Tree," Jeff Maroun mutters, "I got all kinds of problems with this tree."

Inside, two actors, knowing how wayward light can be, take these continual adjustments in stride. They also take playing the same scene fifty times in stride.

Each scene necessitates at least four shots. Since each shot in turn necessitates two to three takes at least, the actors actually act the same scene a dozen times. The make-up artist, concerned that the sweat on their faces might be glittering in the light, wants to borrow them for a few minutes.

The make-up artist, Qiana Starl, touches up the leading man Tim Cosgrove's face. When she's done, she chucks Cosgrove under the chin. With all this waiting around it's easy for him to get tired and lose focus. But while Ann Patrich, the leading lady, gets made up, the two actors keep practicing. The current scene consists of four lines:

"What are you doing here?" Ann asks.

"I'll just watch you the first time," Cosgrove replies.

"I can't work while you're watching," Ann retorts.

"You're kidding, right?" Cosgrove demands.

Having heard them catechize each other for the umpteenth time, I'm tempted to write a scene of my own:

What are you doing here?

I'm watching Tim, a practicing Catholic, work on a movie.

What's so interesting about a practicing Catholic in the movies?

Because I've been wondering: can you have your film credits...and your faith credited to you as righteousness too? For some Catholics, the answer is obvious: yes! For other Catholics, the answer is obvious: no! But I suppose that the majority of Catholics are left like me, somewhere in between, wondering.

Cosgrove has heard the film and faith question before. "I've had people in Catholic circles question whether it's such a good idea," he confides to me, "but the bottom line is that every business has its particular pitfalls. I had a friend who is a stockbroker who asked me whether it wasn't a danger. I asked him, isn't your profession a danger?

"But it's not," Cosgrove went on, "because he meshes the two: his profession and his religious beliefs." Even strictly speaking professionally, honesty for a stockbroker can be the best policy because "you want to have those clients stay with you."

Cosgrove knows, however, that a stockbroker has more in control than he in his dealings with the film industry. If he was offered a part, a part which his manager endorsed, saying, "this will really help your career," a part in a mainstream film, he would have to figure out if it's a project he can do with a clear conscience. So in a sense there's more of an opportunity to compromise, but if you make a decision to follow a standard, it'll be easier to defend it later on.

The screenplay for When Sea Turns to Lemonade, written by Adam Zbar, who is also the movie's director, measured up to Tim's standards; he plays a character who, while he initially falls morally, ultimately undergoes a redemption. A fall-and-redemption theme is a sign of true art, Cosgrove believes. Cosgrove plays Brig Hinkley, a Mormon. Young Mormons go on mission for a year, and Brig is about to go to Samoa. But the night before he leaves, he has sex with his girlfriend. The movie's action begins with Brig making this confession to his bishop, who yells at him and decides he's not fit for a mission. So Brig leaves Utah for Los Angeles, where he rents an apartment. Obsessed with Samoa, in the back room of his apartment Brig creates a Samoan paradise, using powdered sugar as sand.

The apartment complex's cleaning lady is Mabel (played by Ann Patrich). Intelligent but depressed economically, Mabel's obsession has become economics, and she has created dolls of economists such as Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and (less well known) Charles Fourier, a nineteenth century Frenchman who prophesied an economic eschaton where "the sea will turn to lemonade" (hence the title of the movie). The redemption comes when both Brig and Mabel escape their own little world. Surprisingly, this redemption is neither sealed nor delivered by a sex scene -- not even sealed with a kiss. When just before the final scene Mabel tries to kiss Briggs, he is at first kind of shocked but then decides to give her a gift. They each have something they're going to give the other person.

"When I was in New York," said Cosgrove, who learned the craft there under various masters and in various theaters, "I was offered a part in a Fassbinder play in a small theater, and I didn't feel comfortable with the themes of the play and the character. In that case it was an easy decision to make, because it wasn't a career make-or-break kind of decision."

Cosgrove grew up on Long Island, the middle child of three brothers. His parents are separated. His mother became a fervent Catholic after his older brother suffered a terrible auto accident before Tim was born. She handed down the faith to her sons, making sure that they went to solidly Catholic schools such as Trivium boarding school in Lancaster, Massachusetts and Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, where Cosgrove graduated in 1995.

Cosgrove was encouraged but not pressured by his parents into making acting his career. Looking back at it, from this point in his career, it's clear to him that God put him here to do this; since childhood, entertaining people has been his calling.

At six p.m. sharp, the crew breaks to eat. Having been asked earlier by Esra, the script girl, what I was doing, I shared my "what-has-Hollywood-got-to-do-with-Rome?" question. She had replied immediately and categorically. Now, with time to reply leisurely, she invited me to sit on the stoop of an apartment fringing the set.

My question is typical of "the big mistake of religion," Esra said. In fact, it is a category mistake: "because by believing God in the way that a specific religion believes, they separate themselves from the rest of mankind which is in the opposite category. I'm sure there's a lot of very spiritual people in Hollywood. Once they set their own paradigm, religious people can sweep away anyone who's not in that paradigm."

Yes, but couldn't Hollywood also sweep away anyone who's not in its paradigm?

"Yes," Esra allowed, "Hollywood can be anti-religious; it can also be religious!"

I read her a quote from John Paul's letter to artists: while Christian humanism has blossomed in art rooted in man yet fragrant with Christ, in the modern era "another kind of humanism, marked by the absence of God and often by opposition to God, has gradually asserted itself. Such an atmosphere has sometimes led to a separation of the world of art and the world of faith, at least in the sense that many artists have a diminished interest in religious themes."

"In terms of art not revolving directly around God," Esra replied, "that does not mean it ceases to be spiritual because in the modern era people tend to question things." When she quoted Nietzsche's "God is dead" saying, I asked Esra, who hails from Turkey, if she has studied philosophy. No, but she has been in the states for a year studying at UCLA, where many people on the set have learned or are learning film-making.

"I think art has a wider paradigm than religion does," Esra went on. "It's religion, and beyond that it's all about life, and the way life is created by God, with the good and the evil." But that seemed to paraphrase something the pope said! I read it to her: "In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption."

"Uhh huhmm," Esra agreed. "Yeah that's beautiful. That's why I wouldn't say they're 'creators of beauty' [as the pope calls artists]; they are more the expressers of what actually is. So art is not just aesthetics; but aesthetics is part of art. Aesthetics is how it looks rather than what the content is. Unfortunately, a lot of American films, especially in Hollywood, are more concerned with how things look, rather than going for a search for the levels of the forms that don't meet the eye...."

The alpha and the omega for the Holy Father's letter to artists is a line from the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid: "Beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up." Responds Esra: "I don't know I agree [that beauty] is to enthuse us. Beauty may distract us from work, instead of enthusing us for it!" The sunlight laughed in her hair. "But I do believe doing the work you enjoy does raise you up. Not the work of duty but the work of joy does raise you up," she said.

Cosgrove, having finished his dinner (actually, "lunch"; they'll eat "dinner" around midnight), took me to a secluded place on the movie set, which nevertheless had power cables running through it and an occasional prop man swinging by with a ladder, and so on. There is a smell of marijuana in the air, but that could be wafting over from one of the nearby residences. (Cosgrove has been on the set since day one; he gets there when the crew gets there and he leaves when the crew leaves (as late as 5:30 a.m., and he has not seen any drug abuse.)

"I would put films into three categories probably," said Cosgrove: "those that are just true in themselves; they're not trying to consciously be Catholic or not Catholic; they're just good films. Some have an anti-Catholic bent; and in that category I would include people who are consciously trying to go against the Church or degrade it. An example would be The Last Temptation of Christ. In the third category, I would put people who are consciously trying to make a film that's Catholic." Some films in the first category "are just about life," Cosgrove said, "and some are films that deal with the faith [unconsciously]. And of those, you have some that are anti- Catholic." The problem is, there haven't been nearly as many unconsciously Catholic films since the '60's.

Tim's mother told him how much wallop the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization monitoring movies, packed in the '50s. "And it carried a lot of weight because the film-making industry is a moneymaking industry," he said. So even though Hollywood wasn't strictly Catholic, it made movies like On the Waterfront where a Catholic priest's fight for his flock of oppressed New York dockworkers is portrayed with such nobility and beauty that it brings tears to the eyes. "Elia Kazam was not a Catholic but he made a film like that," Cosgrove said.

"In a sense anything that's good participates in the Catholic faith," he went on, "but it doesn't strictly have to be sacred. And I think that is the market that we have to fund the most."

It can be done. A few years ago The Spitfire Grill was produced with minimal funding by the Catholic organization in Alabama which promotes the Sacred Heart Auto League. The film, an audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, was snatched up by a major distributor. Audiences across America saw Ellen Burstyn starring in a movie which is about redemption, "about a second chance," Cosgrove said. "And it's about charity. And the old woman trusted the girl and saved her in a sense. The thing that will appeal to the widest audience that has a really good message like The Spitfire Grill can in a way probably do more good than a Ben Hur" (in which Charleton Heston's heart of stone is melted by a drink of water given by Jesus himself). "It's not being sneaky but it reaches an audience," Cosgrove said.

Three days later, on a UCLA soundstage, a helium-balloon-sun" floats over white-sugar "sand." The economist-dolls are about to placed on the set for the final scene, scene 40, where Brig and Mabel play with them in a world made whole. Cosgrove and Ann are dressed in swimsuits for this scene. Lying on their stomachs in the "sand," the actors find out how much sugar sticks to the human body.

During a break, Ann and I sit outside the studio picnic table as actors in costumes walk by on their way to making other movies. "Even though these days have been really long," she says, "I've thoroughly enjoyed myself because I'm doing what I want. And I think in some subconscious way that comes across in the film."

After the sugar was cleaned off his stomach by a Wash-And-Dry, Cosgrove joins us, and Ann goes on to say that "I feel like I've made new friends. I think you're a better person putting anything out there."

"You're always working with different people," Cosgrove says, "different challenges--"

"-- different body orders," Ann interjects. She is amused when Cosgrove, unbeknownst to himself, reiterates what she said before he came, almost word for word -- "part of it too," Cosgrove says, "is when you're doing something you like, even though it's a lot of hours doing it, you don't mind."

Charity, as a theological virtue, is friendship with God, a friendship which spills over to those in his image made. Do movie-making friendships lead you the other way? Do actors grow in the virtue of charity? "I don't know if you'd call it charity," Cosgrove replies. "It's teamwork." But upon further reflection, he changed his mind: "It's charity in the sense that you're doing it for the good of the other person. So yeah, it is charity."

At first Ann doesn't see that, but then Cosgrove gives an example: when one actor is being shot in a close-up, the other, even though off camera, says the lines as if he were. It's about giving the other something he can use; it's willing the good for the other person; and that's charity.

"I see that," Ann says, "you're willing for the other person to have a good performance."

In his letter to artists, the Holy Father identifies the link between the good and the beautiful. "In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good.... It is in living and acting that man establishes his relationship with the truth and the good.... Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation -- as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on -- feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbor...."

Earlier Cosgrove had been joking about wearing the swimsuit. "I can get you Speedos," Dick Mananti, the costume designer, threatened smoothly. Now when Cosgrove jokingly objects to again lying in the sugar, Dick comes back with, "I'll lick it off your stomach." Ann laughs so hard that she thinks her bladder will burst.

Just living the faith, that's the best example, Tim Cosgrove believes. Instead of being necessarily preachy or letting everyone know that he's doing this or that. When the shooting was all over, the director held the cast party at his house, a Sunday afternoon barbecue. Having gone to Mass, Cosgrove still had nice clothes on when he showed up, and people asked him, what are you all dressed up for?

Cosgrove said that he'd gone to Mass earlier that day.

Do you go to Mass every Sunday?

"Oh yeah," Cosgrove replied. Wow, the general consensus was, that's great. Once again, the Catholic actor was convinced that people do respect you for believing something and living it -- even if they don't hold what you believe.

-- from the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, July/August 1999

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