Celebrity skim
Two docs contemplate fame and obscurity.

By Johnny Ray Huston

POPE ONDINE LOVED Callas, spit witty venom, and bitch-slapped the stupid. Rene Ricard turned similar acts into poems. Edie was Edie, Joe was Joe, Candy was dandy, and Brigid Polk deserves the worship John Waters gives her. But my sentimental favorite Andy Warhol superstar was, and is, Andrea Feldman. She slowly slays the English language in Trash, she anticipates gangsta rap vulgarity in Imitation of Christ, and her wilder than punk performance in 1972's underrated Heat (a rude splash between Sunset Boulevard's and 3 Women's swimming pools) remains a touchstone for me and some choice friends. In Detroit and in San Francisco, Mark and Eric and Will and Ryan and Cedar and I have salt-and-peppered conversations with her improvised Heat quips – Yiddish-strewn harangues at Joe D'Allesandro and bratty banter with Sylvia Miles and Pat Ast. You could say we recognize that we have a little Andrea in us.

Ray Johnson grew up in Detroit, was a contemporary of Warhol's – he walked through Billy Name's silver world before it became a Factory – and had more than a little Andrea in him. One series of collages by Johnson is devoted to the subject of Feldman's suicide, that August day shortly before Heat's premiere – and exactly 10 years after Marilyn Monroe's death – when she jumped from the 14th-floor window of a Fifth Avenue high-rise while holding, according to legend, a Bible in one hand and a Coke can in the other. That same year Johnson announced the "death" of one of his signature projects, the New York Correspondence School. Decades later, on a Friday the 13th in January of 1995, he incorporated Feldman's final act into his own.

Motor City-based filmmaker John Walter's documentary, How to Draw a Bunny, is about at least three enigmas: fame, obscurity, and Ray Johnson. Everyone in Bunny has a colorful Johnson anecdote, but none of dozen or so renowned artists and dealers interviewed by Walter can confidently say they understood him. Norman Solomon, who took 10,000 pictures of the Dadaist prankster, speaks for others when he says, "I don't think I really know who he was." Even Johnson's intimate of 26 years, painter Richard Lippold, nonplussedly uses Johnson's approach to art to describe Johnson the human being. Chuck Close remarks, "Ray wasn't a person, he was a collage, a living sculpture."

What type of sculpture was Ray Johnson? Bunny effectively plots his biography. He was a student at Black Mountain College at a time when Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning taught there. Upon graduating, he occupied the same East Village apartment building as John Cage. His artwork shifted from intricate color-bar paintings to pop imagery (Elvis, James Dean) before he found his forte – collage – and pioneered the concept of mail art, a practice that, through its critical whimsy and vast proliferation of modest-scale works, teasingly countered the capitalist event-based structure of the New York City art world. Johnson's friends included Warhol, Close, Christo, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, yet he flirted with obscurity as ardently as his peers courted money.

Bunny embellishes this information with carefully selected observation, taking cues from Johnson's "exquisite" (to quote Lippold) sense of arrangement. A bald Johnson is first glimpsed standing before a Hairspray poster, explaining an idiosyncratic "psychological testing game" used to retrieve memories. And so the film's own game of Ray-retrieval begins. The opening credits include seven diagrams by Johnson demonstrating how to draw a bunny, one of his favorite animals – along with ducks – to render. Filling pages with look-alike (in the sense that they resemble each other and him) rabbit faces, Johnson usually paired each with a name, a practice that allowed him to form and lord over imaginary secret societies where Terry Southern might mingle with Ann Southern and Marc Spitz could meet Harry Smith. Though Walter's documentary doesn't linger or comment on this ritual, it exemplifies Johnson's irreverent man-who-fell-to-earth approach to networks of power. In his hands, the meaning and value of an individual's name become a punch line.

Rock stars for Rodney

In Mayor of the Sunset Strip, director George Hickenlooper assembles the commercial rock doc equivalent of Johnson's pen-and-ink bunny family trees. Post-It girls and boys such as Deborah Harry, David Bowie, Courtney Love, and Michael Des Barres (now of Silverhead, a subtitle notes, in case you want to rush out to stores) rally for yet another cause that coincidentally requires camera time. Mayor's enormous cameo constellation – a '70s-centric array of cult icons and faded footnotes, from Cherie Currie to Lance Loud, from Joan Jett to Kato Kaelin – revolves around Rodney Bingenheimer, the groupie turned club owner turned radio DJ who lends the film its title. Beatle-mopped, his mouth frozen into the frown of a sad clown, Bingenheimer remains mute when asked why celebrities are special, and his thoughts on music (it makes people "happy" and it "keeps the spirit going") won't be included in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations anytime soon.

What we have here is an emotionally reticent star magnet prone to monosyllabic remarks, and if those characteristics seem reminiscent of someone else, Loud is happy to spell out the connection: Bingenheimer is like Warhol. But is he? Warhol was frequently accused of profiting off the already famous and manipulating the almost famous. (Shortly before her death, Feldman ranted that he'd mistreated her, calling him a "War-hole.") In contrast, Bingenheimer continues to launch careers while his own notoriety has slow-dived. His '60s Monkees-shines as Davy Jones's stand-in, '70s glam heyday as owner of Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, and '80s radio trailblazing have given way to a Sunday-night graveyard shift at KROQ-FM.

Flagrant on the surface, Mayor's exploitation of Bingenheimer's "designated driver" proximity to rock stardom can be crafty. As viewed by Hickenlooper, Bingenheimer prismatically reveals different facets of famous faces. Some only see reflections: a resentful Jagger and a pseudo-enthused Bowie regard Bingenheimer as a ghost of pinnacles past, while Gwen Stefani basks in the blinding glare of a Bingenheimer-bequeathed "godhead" status she doesn't comprehend. Others are sweetly sincere in comparison. Coldplay's Chris Martin expresses gratitude for early airplay, and Brooke Shields treats Bingenheimer like a cherished classmate at a Hollywood High reunion. In one of the movie's many uneasy moments, Cher weighs loyalty against truth when asked exactly how maternal she felt toward Bingenheimer, who has just likened her and Sonny Bono to his parents. Though her expression is unnaturally frozen, her voice conveys that she suspects Hickenlooper is making sport of his subject.

To a degree, Cher's suspicions are right; Hickenlooper isn't above setting Bingenheimer up for disappointments that conveniently arrive when the cameras are rolling. Mayor may want to make a star of Bingenheimer, but it does so by casting him as a sad sack from a broken home who attempted to replace his family with celebrities. At least Bingenheimer wound up with a career in the process; the degree of his success can be measured against his number-one fan, Ronald Vaughan, a.k.a. fiftysomething pop aspirant Isadore Ivy, who dons a space suit to sing a stalker's ode to Jennifer Love Hewitt. Vaughan's shattered stare and sun-scorched skin are evidence of what too much Los Angeles can do to a gentle person of meager means. (Crocodile-like Kim Fowley, the Runaways' lecherous svengali who might have written "They're Coming to Take Me Away" in one of his saner moments, knowingly makes the most of his "Rodney's evil twin" role.)

Like most L.A. biz docs, Mayor has the ethics of a sideshow barker. Coproducer Chris Carter is featured (albeit unflatteringly) in the film, and his band Dramarama are touted as one of Bingenheimer's you-heard-it-here-first radio discoveries – right up there with the Sex Pistols and Oasis. Yet a potent sense of melancholy pervades the film. Hickenlooper spotlights Bingenheimer's bond with his late autograph-hound mother (a background similar to that of Instamatic photographer Gary Boas) so often that by the time Bingenheimer's asked whether the film should have a sad or happy ending – just after he's scattered her ashes in the English Channel – his answer is as irrelevant as last decade's next big thing. How does the song go? Fame, fame, fatal fame – it can play hideous tricks on the brain.

Return to: Ray Johnson

Mayor is a roastlike eulogy for a living person (or a personals ad: "Lonely, aged scenester seeks wife-mother"); How to Draw a Bunny is a conjuring act. If the specter of irrelevance has overtaken Bingenheimer as he's chased increasingly unfamiliar – or unfamilial – fresh young faces, Johnson's spirit has sprung to life again as acquaintances and business-minded associates have gathered his scattered, often personally addressed, output into gallery shows and at least one book (the monograph Ray Johnson: How Sad I Am Today). He's joined the admittedly varied ranks of Jack Smith and Henry Darger as an outsider whose reputation has grown while certain contemporaries have faded into near oblivion.

Bunny wrestles with some of the same quandaries found in Jessica Yu's Darger doc, In the Realms of the Unreal: a slippery biography subject and the difficulty of truly capturing static artworks with a camera. The film was produced by John Malkovich, who resembles Johnson, and in a sense, it travels through real-life versions of Being John Malkovich's portals of another chrome-domed mind. From the get-go, Walter's documentary approach is alert and playful. After the clip in which Johnson demonstrates how he used his "psychological testing game" to remember Al Green's name, Walter pairs Green's "Take Me to the River" with aerial footage of Sag Harbor, the body of water where Johnson drowned.

Additional playfulness isn't required when the film records anecdotes about Johnson's prankish relationship to fame and money: Morton Janko produces postal documentation of an extended bartering session in which Johnson added Paloma Picasso to a number of collage pieces and accordingly doubled their price; Peter Schuyff retells one of his stories from How Sad, about the time he asked for 25 percent off a collage work and soon received the piece, or at least most of it – one quarter of it had been removed. Yet cryptic clues to Johnson's death accumulate over the course of the film, appearing in assorted works and, finally, in recounted conversations. As Bunny draws to a close, Walter incorporates a police videotape so startling that it inspires the plainspoken officer assigned to investigate Johnson's case to remark, "I don't know this man, though I feel closer to him, meeting him through death."

The camera tracks into Johnson's home and finds his last and largest work, a "jigsaw puzzle" that continues to be disassembled, rather than put together, today. The house is utterly barren aside from an air mattress, art supplies, and stacks of boxes that reach from floor to ceiling. Only one of Johnson's works faces outward: a large mug shot-like self-portrait. And at the top of one stack, beneath a single sheet of paper bearing a John Hancock signature, is a box containing his collages about Feldman. "She said of herself, 'I'm as unique as an antique,' and she was," one piece notes, then adds, "She also said, 'No one takes me seriously because they think of me as a joke.' "

'How to Draw a Bunny' opens Fri/9, Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th St., S.F. $4-$8. (415) 431-3611. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times. 'The Mayor of Sunset Strip' opens Fri/9 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock.