“I don’t think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.” — Tom Noonan

It’s Tom Noonan’s birthday. He just died last year, a huge loss.

Most well-known for playing supernatural-style “heavies” in movies such as Manhunter and Robocop 2, he got his start in the 1960s experimental theatre scene in New York City, and in many ways he never really left that scene. He established his theatre company in 1983, and it continued to the present day, where he developed projects, produced plays, had workshops, etc. His theatre company is the background for his first feature film, a two-hander called What Happened Was… First developed and produced as a play at his theatre company, where he and Karen Sillas played the two roles, he shot it very soon after. What Happened Was… is one of the great films about loneliness and one of the great films of the 1990s.

If you’ve been around here you know the story of me and What Happened Was … It played out here, and in real time.

What Happened Was… came out in 1994, won some big awards (at Sundance and elsewhere) and then sank like a stone into obscurity. It was released on DVD, but that was in 1996, when DVDs really took over, and the film was never released on DVD. And so for almost two decades it was un-seeable. I never forgot it, never forgot its impact. Years later, 2019, I wrote about What Happened Was … for my Film Comment column. I wrote that piece when the film was unavailable anywhere except for a grainy version on Amazon (it was amazing it was even there, since in the years before I’d periodically troll YouTube looking for it.)

I wrote the essay which isn’t just about the film, it’s about loneliness and Edward Hopper and living in a city. The way the light slants on the walls. I put up a link to my essay on Twitter (when Twitter was still a thing), and someone tagged Scott Macauley, who was one of the producers of the film back in 1994. He retweeted to his very large audience, which led to a flurry of activity. Many went to watch this film on Amazon because of my piece. “Watching that felt like a nervous breakdown,” one guy Tweeted at me. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this,” he said. But I also had a long fascinating conversation with Macauley about it. The details I was always curious about. I didn’t realize that this event – my essay finding its way to Macauley – started the ball rolling.

Cut to … two years later. 2021. The news broke: What Happened Was … was being restored by Oscilloscope, and coming finally to DVD. The film would also be released into theatres again. The film showed up on streaming platforms like Criteron, etc. Oscilloscope asked me to write the booklet essay which I was thrilled to do. So. Clearly people involved in the film were “aware” of my essay. (No shit, Sheila. I’m slow to understand things sometimes.) You can purchase the film here.

The DVD release brought a lot of attention to this forgotten film. For the short run at Film Forum in 2021, the programming director invited me to interview both Noonan and the brilliant Karen Sillas on Zoom (it was still Covid-ish times). This was a major moment.

I was living upstairs at my friend’s house, and all my stuff was in storage. A very in-between and stressful time. I set up my laptop to sign on and as I got ready for the interview, I thought about me as a young woman staggering out of Facets or the Music Box in Chicago, wherever I saw it in the theatre. My reaction to the film wasn’t “that movie was good”. I honestly felt like I got a glimpse of the future. My future. The vision was not comforting, and it shook me. (I was right to be shaken. What Happened Was … is what happened. My script – July and Half of August – was, in a lot of ways, inspired by What Happened Was …). Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy but at this point who cares. It happened.) So my relationship with the film has lasted for decades now …

And there I was, meeting Tom Noonan and Karen Sillas over Zoom, doing what would have been incomprehensible to me back in the 90s, getting to participate a little bit in the long overdue release. When the three of us were chatting before the official Zoom started, I said something like, “The timing of this is so wild! I just wrote about this film a year and a half ago – and now it’s being released!” As though it was this huge coincidence. (I’m smart in some ways but dumb in others.)

Tom said, like it was nothing, totally casual, “Well, your essay got the ball rolling. It’s because of your piece that all this happened.”

He didn’t make a big deal of it. He was too dry for that. But he made sure to let me know my Film Comment piece was the spark.

How often do you get that as a writer?

How often do you get confirmation FROM the filmmaker?

Here’s our conversation on Zoom:

One lesson I learned from this experience: I don’t really write about topical news-peggy NOW subjects. Because of this I am often “left out” of the discourse. I am in my own lane. And I learned – again – because I am just this way ANYway – to just not give a shit or worry about what everyone else is doing. I don’t feel a need to weigh in on the big subjects of the current day. So what that’s what everyone else is doing?

Celebrate the art you want to celebrate, even if whatever it is is unavailable to be seen. It exists. Like Linda Loman says, “Attention must be paid.”

“Attention must be paid” is basically my credo – although I didn’t set out consciously to do that.

Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was … remains a peak movie-going experience for me and one of my favorite films ever. It reached me when I needed it, but I also feared it (rightly) and the vision of loneliness it communicated. I love art that can do this. Opening Night did the same thing and around the same time, which I wrote about for Liberties. Films that challenge, provoke, and make you look at things you don’t really want to look at or deal with. The art forces the confrontation.

This is one of the goals of art. What Noonan did with What Happened Was … – what Sillas and Noonan did together – will live forever for me as one of the best examples of it.

I am thankful for Noonan’s artistry, not to mention his lifelong commitment to downtown NY theatre, for What Happened Was… and for making sure I understand the role I played in the story of its resurrection.

The trailer back in 1994 made it look like a romantic comedy/erotic thriller – total category error. Oscilloscope’s new trailer is better:

 
 
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