  Bill Hicks, the subject of Hot Docs entry American: The Bill Hicks Story. |
There are two very good, very different movies in Hot Docs about comedians dying young — American: The Bill Hicks Story by British directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, and Leave Them Laughing by veteran Canadian documentarian John Zaritsky.
Britain may be the place for Americans to go when they want to vent their spleen about their country. It’s where The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines made her infamous statement of shame over Bush being Texan.
And it was where the late Bill Hicks honed his voice railing against U.S. corporate interests — what he called The United States of Advertising. In American: The Bill Hicks Story, his epiphany saw him go “from criticizing his father to criticizing his fatherland.”
Revered by American comedians as he is — sort of the George Carlin no one knows about — the Texas-born Hicks’ influence on British comedy is less well known.
“The U.K. connection began at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival,” says codirector Paul Thomas. A U.K. production team were over there looking for comics for Channel Four, and they put him here on primetime TV.
“And he was a revelation; hugely influential on British comics over the years. People like Eddie Izzard, Mark Thomas, they all learned from his approach to the material. The American culture is very un-self-questioning. And here was an American asking questions about America. So it was what he was doing, and the craft and sheer quality of his act that blew people away.”
The Gulf War enraged him, patriotic brouhahas like flag burning brought out his spleen (“Guy says. ‘My daddy died for that flag!’ — ‘Really? I bought mine.’) Waco replaced JFK as his soapbox for distrusting the government.
And near the end of his life (he died of pancreatic cancer at 32), he was excised from a taping of Late Night With David Letterman, ostensibly for religious content (“A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment. But you think if Jesus comes back, he’s really going to want to look at a cross?”). Last year, Letterman ran the set and apologized to Hicks’ mother.
For Harlock and Thomas, American was a labour of love that took three-plus years and no small amount of their own money. It follows Hicks from his Houston boyhood and the pals who joined him on his comedy club escapades, and uses an animation technique with still photos to make that time come alive.
“You shoot it like a live film, the reverse, the side,” Harlock says. “The audience is no longer watching talking heads. You’d have been watching Bill’s friends in their late ’40s telling the story. Instead, they’re young again and Bill’s there too.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t joke about it, but people call me Dr. Death,” says the Oscar-winning Canadian documentarian John Zaritsky.
“Somebody usually dies or is going to die in a lot of my films. Missing Kid of course (the 1981 Oscar winner Just Another Missing Kid). Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo was about a couple who were shot on a bridge trying to escape Sarajevo. Born in Africa was about a Ugandan popstar who was dying of AIDS. Murder On Abortion Row was about receptionists in abortion clinics in Boston
who were gunned down. And then there’s his euthanasia doc, The Suicide Tourist.
“I’d have to say, (Leave Them Laughing) is easily the funniest film about death I’ve made.”
Based on a blog by the still-alive-and-struggling ALS patient Carla Zilbersmith, a comedian and singer, Leave Them Laughing is also the first documentary he’s made where he used actors (a stand-in for pre-diagnosis flashbacks) and a script.
“The script was Carla’s blog. And because the film was based on her blog, it isn’t the traditional ‘Here’s where young Carla grew up in Vancouver’ and a through-line to the rest of her life.”
Like American: The Bill Hicks Story, Leave Them Laughing is a case of a filmmaker contributing his own money. “She’d been diagnosed 15 months previous when I met her, confined to a wheelchair and losing physical mobility. I realized if I waited for the traditional methods of funding films — broadcasters, Telefilm, whatever — it would be too late.”
The result is a moving video diary that includes Carla’s last musical performance, rude and frank “death” jokes shared with her 16-year-old caregiver son Maclen, and general defiance and spirit.
She answers the question, “Is there anything you’d like to do before you die?” with “Johnny Depp.” Depp, it turns out, is part of her “bucket list,” spelled with an F.
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
