R.I.P. Tom Noonan

“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

I wrote about Tom Noonan’s two-hander What Happened Was … for my Film Comment column back in 2019, written and directed by Noonan, starring Noonan and Karen Sillas. I wrote that piece when the film was unavailable anywhere except for a grainy version uploaded to YouTube. When I put up a link to my essay on Twitter someone tagged Scott Macauley (one of the producers) and he Retweeted, which led to this long fascinating conversation on Twitter about this film. So gratifying since it was basically a forgotten film, even though it came out in 1994 and won awards. Like many mid-90s films, it got lost in the technological upgrade at the time. It vanished into the maw: was never released on DVD/blu-ray which meant it never made it to streaming. It is as though it never existed. But I never forgot it.

I remember vividly going to see on its first run and being FLATTENED by it.

Cut to … two years after my Film Comment piece: the film was restored by Oscilloscope, released on DVD, and then streamed – first on Criterion Channel and then other places. Oscilloscope asked me to write the booklet essay which I was thrilled to do. So clearly people were “aware” of my essay. You can purchase the film here.

The DVD release brought a lot of attention to this forgotten film. It even had a limited theatrical run almost 30 years after its original run. For the run at Film Forum, the programming director invited me to interview both Noonan and the brilliant Karen Sillas about the film on Zoom (it was still Covid-ish times). This was a major moment.

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 wasn’t “that movie was good”. I honestly felt like I got a glimpse of the future. My future. It was not a good vision and I was truly shaken. (I was right to be shaken. Because it’s what happened. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy but at this point who cares. It happened.) I will never forget emerging from the theatre totally RATTLED. And then I basically couldn’t see it again for another almost 30 years. Which is probably for the best. I was almost afraid to see it again, whether or not I was even physically able to do so.

And there I was, meeting Tom Noonan and Karen Sillas over Zoom, doing what would have been incomprehensible to me back then, getting to participate a little bit in this 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 piece 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 does that. 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 for me is one of the goals of art. What Noonan created with What Happened Was … will live forever for me as one of the best examples of it.

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