When I first started collecting records like 31 years ago I had
“When I first started collecting records, like 31 years ago, I had teenage girlfriends. I knew women my own age but I didn’t have much in common with them. These teenage girls seemed much more responsive to my tastes, they were very interested in my crazy persona. They weren’t as closed off to the stuff I was interested in as older adults who were already shaped.”This explanation strikes me as a little Terry-centric But Zwigoff has already moved on. The New Yorker, he says, wrote a very “dumb” article about him, and rang old pal Robert Crumb (who now lives in a remote area of France) for a quote.”They rang him up and asked him what he thought about Ghost World and he said [Zwigoff adopts feathery whine]: ‘Oh, Terry’s got this whole fantasy of a teenage girl falling in love with him, a middle-aged record collector, and that’s what the whole film’s about.’ And he hasn’t even seen the film!” says Zwigoff, indignantly. “All he knows is that superficial fact.”What The New Yorker also chose to ignore, he says, is that he and Crumb’s relationship is “complicated”. The pair wrote a couple of screenplays in the late Eighties, one of them for porn kings The Mitchell Brothers, called The New Girlfriend – “a really X-rated, visceral, ugly, messy version of Cast Away” – but, for various reasons, neither got made.
The success of his collaboration with Clowes, Zwigoff believes, has opened up old wounds. “Crumb’s a genius,” he says, “the way I see the world was largely formed by knowing him as a friend. But to be quite honest he’s a deeply insecure guy who wants to feel…” He chuckles, “I don’t know, I shouldn’t even talk about it, but there’s this rivalry between us.. He just gave up when he went to France. The cartoons he did out there just weren’t as strong, they’ve got more and more diluted and now he just does business cards.. I told him that would happen He was completely fuelled by this culture in America. I think Robert’s rather jealous that this film worked and is getting such great critical acclaim.”Hmm… It’s not that I don’t believe what Zwigoff’s saying, more that I wonder why he’s saying it.
Even talking about the competition between him and Crumb, he sounds competitive. Later, he talks with the same flaying bluntness about another ?-nerd, Woody Allen.The latter, many years ago, asked Zwigoff to make a documentary about his jazz band (Barbara Kopple eventually took the job and it became Wild Man Blues) Zwigoff backed out of the deal “I was pretty frank with him,” he says. “I said: ‘We love the same music, early New Orleans black jazz. Even if your band were as great as those bands, what’s the story? And frankly, I find your band to be mediocre.
So then I have a mediocre film.’ ” The only part of Wild Man Blues he found interesting was the bit where we see Allen wheedling with an Italian museum curator to let him buy an antique clarinet “It’s a very telling moment. You can tell that for the last 20 years he’s been given anything he’s ever asked for. I’m surprised he let that stay in the film.”Zwigoff goes on to observe that, if he’d made the documentary, he would have focussed on Allen’s mother. “Allen is this workaholic – he told me that when he’s not working he feels so incredibly guilty he can’t stand his life So I said: ‘hmm… [he taps his lip, Sherlock-Holmes style] let’s see, you’re Jewish, the guilt would probably come from the mother.
I’ll film her!’”Which reminds me, Ghost World’s Seymour has a horrid mom. What’s Zwigoff’s like? Until now, Zwigoff’s sails have been full of wind Now they collapse. Mrs Zwigoff, it turns out, was “very critical, very negative, everything I was wildly passionate about she had no interest in whatsoever” She didn’t get to see Ghost World (“she died, luckily”). She did, however, get to see Crumb, at its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. When the lights came up, she turned to Zwigoff’s cousin, Sherwin, and said, “So, are you still awake?” I tell him she sounds hilarious He shakes his head morosely. “She was a very depressed person.”It’s the first hint of vulnerability And the last, because time’s up As for me, I’m more in the dark than ever Zwigoff’s so open, so very open.
