“Haldeman… H. R. … asshole.” Anthony Hopkins was playing Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s film of Richard Nixon life; Enzo saw a billboard for it on the way from JFK, grunting to Giuseppe that, “Political films never sell—no, no, they never sell anymore. It won’t do business.” For once, Enzo had the right instincts when it came to the commercial film industry. Giuseppe countered that Stone’s JFK was a major success, but Enzo wasn’t convinced: “No major awards. Mockery over its length and thesis. A broad condemnation of the filmmaker that forced him to reduce himself to a piece of trash like… Natural Born Killers.” He spit out the cab window, just barely clearing the top. Giuseppe sighed and went on about how much he liked Oliver Stone’s “more personal films, like Born on the Fourth of July.” Enzo grabbed him by the throat and bellowed, “NO ONE IN HOLLYWOOD CAN MAKE A PERSONAL FILM. STOP SAYING THIS TO ME. NO ONE IN HOLLYWOOD CAN EXPRESS THEMSELVES. DO NOT MAKE ME FOOL YOU AROUND AGAIN.” Enzo’s English was never perfect.
The car crawled through endless delays, not so much traffic as obstructed roads, abandoned cars, emergency vehicles around every corner. The blizzard had turned the West Side Highway into a dune field, mounds of snow massaged by the wind and torn to pieces by the street sweepers you could hear from blocks and blocks away. Enzo and Giuseppe’s cab passed the same PATH train that carried Paul and Meredith into Manhattan; just a few miles to the south, the boys were getting ready to go out into the snow for the first time. Enzo was still thinking about Richard Nixon, and Robert Altman’s 1984 one-man-play-film Secret Honor, starring Philip Baker Hall, an impressive technical achievement and film, one that Enzo always appreciated, but quietly.
He’d stopped writing for journals and newspapers years ago. Like all Italian film directors who got started in the decades immediately after the Second World War, Enzo was highly educated and more well-read than average American PhD. Pier Paolo Pasolini wasn’t the only one reading the Greeks, Freud, and Thomas Mann before every film he made—Enzo was particularly hung up on the work of Wilhelm Reich, less a genuine passion than a reflexive bit of contrarianism against his colleagues’ unqualified love of Freud and Jung. He thought that Nixon, a man who drove his own future wife around while she went on dates with other men, was the perfect subject for him: a man so incredibly powerful, talented, disciplined, and yet so deficient and clueless in a couple of critical areas.
He stopped short of comparing himself to Nixon, instead funneling his frustration and regret into another rant about “that vulgarian” Oliver Stone. He turned to Giuseppe, already half-asleep in the cab, and shook him with another unsolicited opinion: “The man should stick to what he knows: war, and Daddy’s bank account…” Giuseppe snorted. “You know he’s involved, right? One of our cousins.” Enzo blushed. “Does he know what I’ve said about his films?” “No,” Giuseppe reassured him, “you weren’t considered a significant enough threat to the agency.”
Just a few miles to the east, Billy Corgan, James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky, and Jimmy Chamberlin were preparing for their show at the Academy; the organizers of the Fangoria convention were fretting over the total absence of fans at the Hotel Pennsylvania; and the boys’ parents were miles and miles down south, arguing in vain with airline receptionists and hotel clerks. On the way into Manhattan that night, January 1996, there were more lights than usual in the sky, but the one that Enzo locked on was the radio tower on top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a roof he had filmed on many, many years ago for Dino De Laurentiis. He wondered if he’d ever see the world from that high ever again.
—Follow Rooster Quibbits on Twitter: @RoosterQuibbits