Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

In the dog days of the summer of 1996 I arrived back in New York, with a plan to move back into the Chelsea studio apartment and reoccupy my old relationship with Sarah. I found to my dismay that she was ambivalent about both ideas, viewing me with an attitude of semi-detachment – she was thinking of moving on. ‘You need to get serious or hit the road,’ she didn’t say, but that was the subtext. But we still loved each other – I more than I realized – and we were also alone, knowing barely another soul in the city in any intimate way. After a few days of importuning on my part, I prevailed on her to think about her own creative projects – a book she was working on, her lack of funds. In a purely pragmatic way it made sense for us to live together, and, you know, probably continue the relationship, too, ‘or whatever’. And so, in this spirit, not quite knowing how committed we were to one another, but carrying on regardless, we found a new apartment in a semi-desolate but supposedly up-and-coming area of Brooklyn just across the East River called Williamsburg, which was then being settled by a small vanguard of artists and urban pioneers.

We borrowed a van from a friend and moved one afternoon with the help of a couple of Sarah’s colleagues from Riddler, then sat amid the boxes that evening, eating pizza that had to be delivered from ten blocks away and listening to the Biggie Smalls CD that was blasting from a stoop across the street.

David, who was coming on as my series producer, had by now moved himself and his girlfriend from London for the nine-month duration of the production – the BBC was paying for some sweet digs in Greenwich Village. Alongside our production, he was also working on a BBC-funded film with Michael Moore, which would later come out as The Big One. Making this only slightly awkward was that my getting my own series – and the BBC’s and my failure to keep Michael informed – had apparently annoyed him. I once heard the process of hiring me from TV Nation to do my own series referred to as an ‘extraction’. In a way, the dental metaphor is apt; it was painful but I suppose necessary, though probably it could have been handled better. At one point, it was mentioned that lawyers might get involved, since some of my Weird Weekends ideas were similar to segments I’d pitched at TV Nation, but no suit ever materialized. It was about twenty years before Michael and I spoke again.

David would be a close collaborator for seven years and would guide me, with varying degrees of involvement, through three series of Weird Weekends, the When Louis Met . . . documentaries, and a period of confusion afterwards. Tall, lantern-jawed and perma-stubbled, he looked undeniably like a TV executive, and it was easy to forget that he was only in his twenties. He shared a quality of many of the best producers: an ability to absorb anxiety, to keep the faith in dark times, and recognize when decisions needed to be made. His natural authority was the inverse of my total lack of authority. Along with it came a taste for the perks of senior office, like fine dining and taxis. I only once saw him on public transport, on a subway in New York, and he made the best of it but I had the impression he felt like he’d been dropped at midnight in a favela in Rio.

While I was in LA, David had found two assistant producers, Jim Margolis and Simon Boyce, and in them may have been our best hope of salvation. They were both whip-smart, and funny, and excited about whatever ill-defined comedy-documentary-travelogue project it was that we imagined we were working on. Jim was small and a little neurotic, hailing from Ohio; Simon, tall and skinny and fastidious about his appearance, came from Oxford. They were like a transatlantic cop team, a Dempsey and Makepeace of the lower echelons of the TV world. Both could also shoot with the small cameras that were then still relatively new as a format. David had had the idea of using them on location, supplementing the material from the ‘real’ camera to get more intimate after-hours footage or shots from hard-to-reach spaces.

A director named Ed Robbins came on, a thoughtful and urbane collaborator of a slightly older generation. Ed’s strength was a contemplative approach, a feel for mood and nuance. On occasion this tipped over into a certain dreamy, spaced-out quality. Sometimes the delays in his replies meant it was like conversing with someone on a long-distance crackly phone line – or possibly an astronaut in orbit. He’d look at you expectantly after you finished speaking as though one more word or phrase was still needed for everything to make sense.

Huddled in three small windowless rooms on a high storey of a tall office building in midtown Manhattan, three thousand miles from the documentary unit in Bristol, we spent those first few weeks developing our ideas. My years of accumulating cuttings and zines on the offbeat and bizarre finally paid dividends as I brought in a pile of manila folders stuffed with research and shared them with the team.

It was clear from the off that our two strongest ideas were the militia/survivalist story and porn. David made the decision to do survivalists first. This made sense for a couple of reasons. One was that porn, given the sexually charged material, was easier to get wrong. It was also a more confusing world to penetrate (pardon the pun) – there were too many directions to go in: fetish films, fans, awards shows, sex toys, magazines. It stood to reason that we would fare better if we worked out our style and approach with a story that was more manageable and less high-risk.

Militias and the associated community of ultra-constitutionalists and patriots had been thrust blinking into the spotlight of national media attention in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people had died in 1995. There had been a wave of shock and outrage, news stories and TV profiles, but by late 1996 the movement seemed somewhat in abeyance. My main aperçu regarding that world was that its true believers, while undoubtedly dogmatic and paranoid, were slightly less hateful and less racist than was commonly understood. The idea of someone putting all their noble qualities of dedication and bravery at the service of a cause that was so weird struck me as funny but also touching. I saw an opportunity to create a mood in the show that was weird, comic, and moving by turns.

David said he shared the same ambition for the programmes, though occasionally I sensed he was troubled by my enthusiasm for showing contributors with unsavoury political views in three dimensions. I told him it was important that in the mix of characters we find a ‘bigot with a heart of gold’. I was aware this was a ridiculous phrase; I’m not too sure how seriously I took it. I just knew we needed to challenge viewers’ prejudices and that a moment in which an interviewee went from being cartoon-like to something more rounded, and eliciting compassion, would create an interesting emotional tension.

Many long conversations were had trying to figure out the degree of my participation. I wanted to show willing in the worlds I was investigating but I also didn’t want to hijack the narrative and I was aware that, while it might be funny to see me running around with a gun and pretending to declare war on the federal government, it would also be an odd break in tone. How involved could I get in something I was personally opposed to? How did the idea of me ‘going native’ in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way jibe with our deeper ambition for the programmes, of giving time and consideration to people putting their lives at risk for ridiculous dreams?

The focal point of the militia episode was to be Almost Heaven, a purpose-built ‘covenant community’ in the central Idaho panhandle, founded by a much-decorated ex-army colonel called Bo Gritz. In the media, Almost Heaven had been characterized as a semi-apocalyptic gathering of fire-breathing zealots who’d moved up there, seduced by Bo Gritz’s canny exploitation of their bible-based fears, to be safe when the end times came. There was much talk of a UN-backed plot to take over the world. We hoped Bo Gritz might be a central character in our episode.

Ed and Simon went on a recce – a pre-filming trip to scout locations and characters. A week or so later, they returned sounding broadly positive about what they’d found. The only hiccup was that many of the hours of tape turned out to show thin air or ground or background. ‘I wasn’t looking through the viewfinder,’ Ed said by way of explanation. ‘I like to maintain eye contact.’

Then we learned that Bo had a narrow window of availability. He spent his winters in Nevada, whereas we needed him to be in Idaho at his home in Almost Heaven. We rushed to ready a first filming trip. I wrote a sheet of humorous questions to ask Bo. We also added a stop-off in Beverly Hills. In my reading of militia literature, I’d come across a Hollywood producer called Aaron Russo who’d produced Trading Places and managed Bette Midler but more recently had devoted himself to promoting quasi-apocalyptic militia-tinged views that the Feds were taking over and eroding the precious right to carry firearms and not to pay income tax. He lived in LA in Beverly Hills. I liked the odd contradiction of his Hollywood connections and his militia leanings, and I lobbied to interview him on the same leg of filming.

I have vivid memories of that shoot. Not good ones.

Three of us – me, Ed the director and Simon the AP – flew out to Lewiston, Idaho, then drove an hour and a half through a rough-hewn landscape of farmland, rolling hills and sinuous rivers to Kamiah, a scenic little logging town on the banks of the Clearwater River, population 1,100. It’s the kind of town where they have jell-o at the salad bar. We’d arranged to meet Bo at his house early the next morning. The call time was five a.m. In order to give myself more of a lie-in, I’d decided to shave the night before. In hindsight, this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do.

We drove up a narrow winding country road in the early morning darkness. It was November and snow was everywhere. Almost Heaven lay on a small plateau: 200 acres, divided into thirty or so lots, a motley scattering of unprepossessing homes. We arrived at Bo’s house, an incongruously bland and suburban triple-wide trailer. He answered the door – white-haired, well built, in a tight black t-shirt and big buckled belt – and growled in way that wasn’t entirely friendly: ‘What’s goin’ on?’

‘Colonel Gritz. How are you doing? We’re from the BBC.’

‘Well, you’re too early, it’s tomorrow, isn’t it?’

Later I was grateful that we had captured this bit of unintended comedy on film – it was a perfect illustration of Michael’s documentary precept about always filming the ‘hello’ for real in case something unexpected happens – but at that moment I was confused. In the footage you can see me glance off camera for help.

‘No, it’s supposed to be today,’ I said.

‘Well, you can come in but I’m supposed to be doing my radio show in just a couple of minutes. And I was told it would be Tuesday!’

‘OK, well, sorry about that . . .’

‘Take your shoes off!’

When the radio show was over, the delays, the sense of occasion, the undeniable fact that I was now starting filming on my own TV show – after a break from being onscreen of a year and a half – combined to create a sense of pressure that momentarily disabled my faculties. Shaking Bo’s hand emphatically, I began: ‘Well, let me just say, General Gritz – Colonel Gritz, excuse me, it’s a real pleasure for you, for me to—’ I sputtered to a halt and Bo peered quizzically into the camera as if to say Who is this moron?

We resumed, I tried again, and the interview proceeded. He took us on a tour of the house, which I can only assume was decorated to his wife’s tastes, with cute little bits of Christian kitsch, figurines of angels, framed inspirational messages, and paintings of Jesus that looked like adverts for shampoo. It was an odd contrast to the gruff macho figure Bo cut. He had supposedly been the real-life model for Rambo, though I had the impression it was mainly him who put that rumour about. He had had a distinguished career in Special Forces, as attested by his forty or so medals framed on the wall. His war exploits had naturally made him a hero and role model to many on the far right and, combined with a commitment to a fringe brand of evangelical Christianity, he had built up a devoted following of listeners to his short-wave radio broadcasts, which were big on cataclysmic events and signs of the end.

One of Bo’s promotional spiels was that he had settled on Kamiah after taking a map of America and crossing off every area associated with any kind of risk. I proposed that we re-enact this exercise, for illustrative purposes, and I pulled out a map and magic markers.

‘OK, so you founded a patriot covenant community here in rural Idaho, would that be correct?’

‘You’d be exactly correct,’ Bo said. ‘I went to every state and everywhere I went I saw people afraid. They were paranoid.’ He enumerated the various sources of the people’s paranoia – the government, natural phenomena, nuclear power plants. ‘So I went to FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They have a great database of catastrophic events. And I started taking a magic marker . . .’

At this Bo began scrawling over great swathes of the country, ruling out areas in the ‘tornado belt’, the ‘giant flood belt’, ‘the blizzard zone’, nuclear waste in Nevada, earthquakes in California. ‘What could be wrong with North Dakota? You’ve got NORAD!’ This went on for several minutes, after which the resulting map was a mess of scribbles of torpedoes, tornadoes and other hazards.

‘So it doesn’t leave that much, does it?’ I said.

‘Well, we ended up with a little tiny spot up here – we are right here,’ he said, making a little cross in northern Idaho. ‘This place is the safest place in all of America.’

In the afternoon we took a drive to the far side of Bo’s ‘constitutional covenant community’, to Almost Heaven ‘Too’ – ‘That’s T-O-O,’ Bo felt impelled to point out. The bizarre details piled up: the shock troops of the UN might be planning try to grab Americans’ guns or implement a mass programme of computer-chipping the citizenry; there was also the possibility of a UN military assault, though it was all rather vague and I wasn’t sure how much of it Bo really believed and how much was a marketing pitch designed to help him make money selling parcels of land to the credulous. But if the extent of Bo’s good faith was hard to figure out, what was more worrying was a more basic issue: the growing sense as we filmed that Bo’s steamrolling style was simply a bit boring. My sheets of amusing questions were redundant – they either led to rambling, unfunny answers or simply went unused. Bo was right in his comfort zone of delivering a kind of ad hoc radio show to an audience of one.

The shoot with Aaron Russo was even more lamentable. We met him at his Beverly Hills mansion. He had the over-tweaked attitude of someone who has seen through the matrix of programmed reality and can liberate you from your brainwashed, sheeple consciousness, if only you’re brave enough to follow him down the rabbit-hole. He made it his project to school me on the dishonesty and inherent instability of the Federal Reserve. In hindsight, I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting. I just know it wasn’t this – a tubby Hollywood producer delivering a learning annex style lecture about the US treasury in his pool house. I have a recollection of Ed – God bless him – stepping in about fifteen minutes into a Russo monologue, confessing that it was a primetime show for a general audience and we would have to be realistic about how much detail about the US financial system we would be able to get across.

The experience of watching the rushes with David back in the office was funereal. I looked a mess: unshaven with long floppy hair. The supposed presenter, I was the least presentable person anywhere near the camera. This might have been excusable but the conversations were borderline unwatchable. Bo Gritz never shut up. The Aaron Russo material was so poor, I don’t think we ever spoke about it from that day on. It was like a national tragedy or a terminal illness: just to mention it would have been bad juju, eating away at our fragile production morale.

The elephant in the room – which no one mentioned but to my mind was all but snorting and hosing us with its trunk – was my total incompetence. Any other job, I might have been fired at that point. I realized there was an advantage to having my name in the title after all. And yet, along with the feelings of doom, and the embarrassment, was a vague sense of relief. I cycled home in the late-autumn gloom, down the concrete defiles of Manhattan, thinking at least it was all out in the open now. No longer was it my solitary concern. There was a general awareness that it was possible we were embarked on a monumental folly. A failure. We were all thinking it. Everyone was worried, which meant maybe I could worry slightly less.

Over the following weeks, we retooled our efforts, focusing more on the need to make the programme a coherent whole. We started with a sense of location. No more jetting off to Hollywood – Aaron Russo was off the menu. The whole thing would be shot in and around Idaho. It was also clear Bo couldn’t be our main contributor. Instead we committed two days to filming a less elevated character, an Almost Heaven resident and true believer called Mike Cain – Ed had met him on the recce – who had a Mexican-born wife and showed signs of having the paradoxical qualities we’d been looking for of being radical and crazed but also sympathetic.

We slotted in another couple of characters. I was keen to include a lefty-hippy survivalist. We found a man who lived in an underground home named Mike Oehler, a freak-flagged Mr Natural who was also knowledgeable about the broader milieu of the radical right and happy for me to stay the night in one of his subterranean lodgings. We found another non-racist Almost Heaven-ite, a slightly crazed born-again called Don – he’d once worked in computers and donated to Friends of the Earth – who lived in a house made from straw bales. In bull sessions that stretched into the evening, we plotted a rough outline for the story and the beats of my immersion. I would overnight with Mike Cain at Almost Heaven and bunk down with Mike Oehler in his underground home, and I would help build a little straw-bale annex next to Don’s house. It wasn’t quite clear what the story was leading up to.

By the time we were ready, Christmas was nearly upon us. To squeeze in the shoot and still make it back home to England on Christmas Eve, I realized I’d have to fly straight from Idaho. The night before I was due to leave, after the disaster of the first shoot, I was crazed with anxiety. I was packing and planning, cursing the world for putting me in a position that was, in fact, entirely of my making. I made my TV segments for TV Nation, a nasty part of my brain was saying. I have nothing to prove. If my show is a disaster, it’s on David and my new collaborators.

As I packed, along with my clothes, I also had some Christmas gifts I’d bought for family members back in England. Rather than drag them around with me on the shoot, I thought it might make more sense to send them via FedEx. I took them down to a local office and then later I realized that, in my heightened state, I had accidentally included my airplane tickets in the package of gifts.

The production had to pay for new flights.

Hindsight has telescoped that second militia shoot into a golden idyll of productive days and cascading good fortune. From our first scene in a Montana survivalist store (where I indulged in some good-natured teasing of the owner while he showed me his emporium of preparedness items: imperishable meals, night-vision goggles, guns, and his ultimate safety item – a kind of habitable plastic pod that you were supposed to bury in the ground), through the subsequent days in Idaho, at Almost Heaven among the militia families, then further north in a visit to a neo-Nazi compound and a drunken night with Mike Oehler the underground hippy – those days stay with me as a redemption from all the doubt that preceded them.

Without thinking about it too much, I took on the persona of a slightly hapless but enthusiastic reporter who was intent on making friends and also getting his questions answered, but equally awkward at both. Though it would be just as true to say that was who I was. I still chuckle at the moment in a wide shot (to signal it is ‘overheard’) when I plead with Steve, the owner of the survivalist store, to let me know where his survival shelter is so I can join him in the event of the apocalypse. There was also a bizarre encounter on a visit to the headquarters of the Aryan Nations, a White Power group, where my elderly neo-Nazi chaperone and guide around the compound, ‘Reverend’ Jerry Gruidl, turned out to be a huge fan of Benny Hill and Are You Being Served?.

But what made the shoot – and subsequently anchored the TV episode when we came to edit it – was the time we spent with Mike Cain, the Almost Heaven survivalist. Shooting over the course of two days, giving his story a chance to breathe, we were able to allow Mike to reveal himself in surprising ways. The man who’d stopped paying his taxes and was intent on declaring war on the federal government, turned out to be warm and welcoming, a self-described ‘ex-hippie’ who loved his Mexican-born wife and was by turns comical and self-deprecating, friendly and unhinged.

By prior arrangement, we’d shot a greeting on a hillside, where Mike and his friend Pat were building a house – wearing carpenters’ overalls, clambering amid a carcass of two-by-fours, surrounded by a dirty sea of snow and fields, and lit by the lowering sun.

‘What do you want?’ Mike asked.

‘We’re doing a little story on Almost Heaven, finding out what life’s like up here,’ I replied.

He drove us back to the homestead: it was dark when we arrived, but the lights on Mike’s battered truck lit up a ramshackle construction of breezeblocks and logs. Inside was a basic country dwelling with a freestanding stove in the middle. Mike’s wife Chacha had prepared an evening meal of Mexican food, and while we ate Mike outlined his unlikely vision.

‘There has been a conspiracy for some years by a group of people that have become known loosely as the New World Order,’ he said. ‘The problem with the New World Order and the one-world government is that it requires a benevolent dictator. You show me in history any time when there has been a benevolent dictator ever. And if you don’t have a benevolent dictator you have a tyrant.’

Over that night and the following morning – when we went out on a dawn patrol of the local area, presumably looking for the advance guard of the UN invasion – I grew to like Mike, enjoying his strange combination of qualities, his warmth, his ability to see himself as he described it as ‘a radical nut’. He told me his story: a building contractor in Las Vegas, he’d struggled financially. The IRS had raided his bank accounts. He’d also been one of Bo’s shortwave radio listeners, and Bo’s pitch of a mutually supporting ‘patriot’ community geared towards communality and self-defence in the end times had appealed to him, though I had the feeling that Mike viewed Bo as a disappointment – that, having encouraged them all up there, Bo wasn’t doing enough to organize the patriot believers and provoke the feds.

On our last afternoon, he took me target shooting.

‘When’s it all going to happen, do you think?’ I asked.

‘Maybe before the year two thousand,’ he said.

‘And what will it be?’

‘All-out war. I’m sorry. One day. We’ve all fought wars before. But one day it’ll happen.’

‘You against who?’

‘Us against the New World Order.’

‘I’ve really enjoyed being around you and it just makes me worried because, the more convinced you are that this is going to happen, it seems in a way the more likely it is that it will happen.’

‘Louis, I appreciate what you say, I really do. I can promise you this: if it happens, it won’t be because we started it . . . We pray daily it doesn’t take place. We lift a standard of peace always. But if they’re going to have a war then let it begin here.’

Mike was cradling his rifle all through the conversation. His delivery was utterly poised and he gave the impression of having waited years for this moment to make a public declaration of his willingness to violently resist those who would deny him his free-born American’s right not to pay taxes or have a social security number. His dignity was so seductive, it created an odd dissonance between the power and the emotion of what he was saying – the very real sense of connection I felt with him – and the fact that it was fundamentally nonsensical: a quilt of overheated far-right rhetoric and paranoid religious craziness.

Mike’s hillside declaration of war gave us our ending. We filmed a goodbye at his house, where I hugged him and Chacha and thanked them for their hospitality. As we were leaving, the camera operator let me know he was running out of tape. I liked the authenticity of the video stopping mid-goodbye. We did in fact have other blank tapes. Later, back in the office, David Mortimer was perplexed that we hadn’t bothered to reshoot the scene to cover ourselves in the edit.

I don’t think I said anything in response, but I remember thinking, in my almost fanatical zeal for realness: You really don’t get it. The idea of going back inside and re-enacting a heartfelt farewell would have struck me as almost sacrilegious.

And in fact, my obsession with authenticity, while it occasionally went overboard, was probably my greatest asset. When I look back at what worked in that first episode about militias and survivalists, what strikes me – other than my questionable wardrobe, the leather donkey jacket that is several sizes too big, the wonky wire-rim specs, and a faint mid-Atlantic twang in my accent – is the sense of there being something true in the relationships.

The planned bits of comedy had mostly fallen flat. The clever questions I’d written had mostly gone unasked. What had saved us was a quality of relaxed intimacy with our contributors – how they felt licensed to express themselves, be affectionate, laugh at my lame jokes, occasionally bully me. Shooting using the small cameras – on car journeys, in hard-to-reach locations – had also allowed us to expand the frame and include moments of unselfconscious actuality.

I felt pleased with how it had all gone. I felt something real – almost magical – had taken place and for the first time I felt that it was possible my series might be a success.