- Announcer: Due to language and adult situations
the following film is intended for
mature audiences and not suitable for children.
Viewer discretion is advised.
[upbeat music]
(dramatic music)
(light dramatic music)
- [Joe] Now let me tell you the truth.
Joe Frank is a character that I created
who I pretend to be.
But I'm not really Joe Frank.
My life does not even remotely resemble Joe Frank's.
Yet what I am saying now, the admission that I am not
Joe Frank, has been written for me by Joe Frank.
So my position here is paradoxical.
It's as though I were saying to you,
I do not speak English in perfect English.
I'm not free to speak my mind as I would wish,
and yet at the same time having said that,
I was only expressing Joe Frank's views.
My views you will never know.
And he wrote that line too.
So, please understand that whatever I say
during this evening's radio show
has nothing to do with me personally,
and as much as I may want to say something else,
as much as I might even detest the character I've been
shackled with, and would like to reveal to you the truth
of my life, I am bound by the constraints of my profession.
Which means that whatever words I just uttered,
including the words I am speaking right now,
are not really my own but those of Joe Frank.
Let me repeat that I am nothing like him!
I could never do the things Joe Frank says he does.
But of course, I might do them since everything I'm saying
and have said has absolutely nothing
to do with who I am in the real world.
Or, well never mind.
- Joe Frank is what radio
in its wildest dreams wishes it could be.
Ballsy, intelligent, thoughtful, dangerous.
This is not standard NPR stuff.
And I think what he explores a lot in his work is the way
that words are used to obfuscate as opposed to clarify.
- I think the very first time when I heard him.
Like, that was the thing that seemed so different to me
from anything I had ever heard on the radio,
was that I felt like, I'm listening to this thing,
I have no idea where it's going, I have no idea why I keep
listening to it, but I cannot turn away from it.
Like I had never had that experience
with something on the radio.
Like I had never heard anything that was good.
And somehow, when Joe narrates it's like he pulls you
into a dream with his voice.
Like a transmission from a ship at sea far away.
- [Joe] At a truck stop, a fly falls into my cup of coffee,
it floats on its back.
I lift it out with a spoon and lay it down on my napkin.
It dries itself off and flies away.
Later, back on the road, I see what appears to be
the carcass of a dead animal or a baby wrapped in a blanket
and I feel a shiver of fear, a hollowness in the pit
of my stomach, but it turns out to be a piece of canvas.
This hallucination of seeing a dead child or animal
on the highway happens again and again.
- If you wanna relate Joe Frank to any other current,
I think you have to go before Joe, not after Joe.
I think Joe is related to the Dostoyevsky
of Notes from Underground to the Camus of The Stranger.
Super intense stories.
- [Joe] He'll catch sight of himself in a mirror,
sitting in that unwashed and unshaven state,
and he looks like one of those weird
fat guys in a restaurant.
Passing by people in doorways never used to be
a problem, he'd just swivel to one side,
but now he takes up the entire space himself.
And he can't fit into his clothes any more.
His ties don't fall but slope outward, resting on his belly,
and when he's lying in bed eating dinner,
his stomach serves as a tray.
He can put plates, silverware and a napkin on it.
The more weight you put on, he says,
the more you surround yourself with another layer,
so you can't be reached.
It's like insulation.
He sits in a chair, holding his huge stomach in his hands.
Yes, I feel it stands as a monument to my excess.
- And he is so singular and amazing and good
at what he does, and there's never been
an episode that's like another episode.
How prolific he is, is humbling.
It's daunting.
The body of work he's created is phenomenal.
And nobody was really, that I knew of,
was really doing that kind of thing.
- [Joe] You know, when I think about myself
and the life I've led, I feel self-loathing, shame, disgust.
I'm a waste and a failure, he says.
But when I imagine myself as a character in a novel,
well, I think I'm pretty interesting,
kind of offbeat, intriguing, entertaining.
- Joe's a gateway drug.
You can actually discover an ironic sensibility
by exposing yourself to the kind of things that he does.
You'll be drawn into it and then subtly drawn
through the looking glass.
(light dramatic music)
- [Joe] Sometimes I feel I don't really exist.
That I'm a character in someone else's novel and that he,
sitting at his desk and grappling with the material
of my story is only a character in yet another person's
novel who is merely the reflection of a reflection
of reflections going on and on almost infinitely.
But concluding at last with the archetypal writer who,
at the very center of the universe,
in trying to explain himself in the world around him
through fiction is the mirror image of the ultimate
world soul struggling to transmute
the material of its own life into art.
But remaining merely a shadow on the plane of pure thought.
- Everyone has this imagination and this,
you know, intense feelings and I mean, everyone has it.
All people do.
But people don't have the need to express them.
Joe's things a different kind of existential cruel,
kind of spiritual world, and he takes you and cradles
you and nurtures you and then starts to expose you
to these particular dangers, and horrors.
- [Man] I'd like to talk about a psychological
experiment, psychological warfare.
I stuck a speaker under my five year old son's pillow.
I had a microphone and an amplifier
and at night I'd whisper to him, your mother's dead.
Your mother's dead.
She did pass away a few years ago.
And I'd also whisper, your father doesn't really love you.
Your father doesn't really love you.
I'd do this for a half an hour to 45 minutes every night,
and I noticed my son would start clinging to me.
I would, of course, withdraw.
He'd come to me and cling, and I'd withdraw.
I did this every night, until last week, he finally broke,
screamed, rolled around the floor, urinated,
and lost most of his speech control apparatus.
I'm just thinking, if we projected this over a community
or perhaps over a country,
we could do just about anything we wanted.
- When I recommend Joe Frank to others,
I can't describe him to others.
All I can say is, just listen.
Because no matter, I don't wanna create an expectation
because no matter what expectation I create,
it'll be different from what Joe Frank does.
It's just, just listen.
(light music)
- [Joe] Time is invisible and irresistible.
No matter what you do, you can't defend yourself against it.
You can't fill a moat with flaming gasoline
and stop its forward motion.
You can't sit at the top of a ridge with
a sniper's rifle and try to pick it off
as it drives by on a highway late at night.
You can't build a 19 foot concrete reinforced cinder block
wall with steel pilings sunk six stories into the ground
and try to stop time, because it will pass right through it,
and you won't even see it.
The wall will remain standing.
People will continue looking off into the horizon,
scanning the treetops with their binoculars,
and they won't even know that two weeks ago Thursday,
time rolled through at 4:00 in the afternoon,
and they didn't even notice.
- To be a great artist as Joe's become, you know,
there has to be a deep set of neuroses
that were the wellspring for his creative talents.
As a young teenager, he always was in therapy,
psychoanalysis, and he would go into Manhattan
four or five times a week for this psychotherapy.
Joe always seemed affable and good natured
and well adjusted, but he had an inner life which
was revealed of course, later in his shows.
- [Joe] Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan,
I went to a psychoanalyst four times a week.
She was a short, gray-haired middle-aged woman whose
reputation had been built on her work with children.
I remember how odd I felt sitting in the waiting room across
from a nursemaid or mother of the child
who was being analyzed ahead of me.
I'd self consciously thumb through a preschool reader,
a book of nursery rhymes or a fairy tale.
But the last few minutes before my hour
had a deeply narcotic effect on me.
The thought of telling everything,
no matter how painful was exhausting.
- You can't deny the power of the sound of his voice.
He has a fabulous voice already naked in a room,
but he also has a very clear vision of how he
wants it to sound.
It's really passionate in a very dispassionate way,
and the vocal sound is perfect for it,
for the kind of stories he tells.
- If I were a drinker, I would describe Joe's voice
as a good single malt scotch.
The way we achieved that was actually a happy accident.
Back in the old analog tape days, we recorded him and when
you record on tape, tape makes a noisy hiss, kind of.
And the way around that was back then a device called Dolby.
Joe's voice was recorded on a Dolby encoded tape,
and he removed that tape to go into an edit room
to sort of cut, and he put the tape back
on another machine that had no Dolby on it.
And when he played it back, he loved the way it sounded.
(light music)
- [Joe] In the course of a lifetime, we lose keys,
pens, wallets, pocketknives, library cards,
wristwatches, sweaters, earrings,
sunglasses, gloves and umbrellas.
We also lose our hair, our eyesight, our hearing,
our teeth, our sense of wonder.
Horizons shrink, possibilities collapse.
(light dramatic music)
- The drone is an important aspect in Joe's sound.
I loved it when the music would stop and the drone
would come up, like this sort of strange foghorn.
It's full of harmonics.
They're really complex.
He used to put 'em together with lots of different sounds.
They add a sort of a strange dither.
- Joe used to use two types of drones.
One is a synthesizer pad consisting of three or four notes.
And then we had this human choir.
Like, ah, or ooh, on the 8-track machine.
That gave us the flexibility of choosing either one note
on the drone, or two notes on the drone,
or the fourth voice in the choir, bam.
People are locked in.
- Joe Frank's music, be it a drone or a loop,
induces the listener into a type of trance.
All of that together somehow lulls the listener into
an oneiric state, a dreamlike state to receive
that narrative directly into the center of the brain.
- [Joe] Life is funny.
It's not all sweet rolls and coffee.
It's not all featherbeds and beautiful women.
It's not all church on Sunday.
You can't cup life in your hand the way you
can cup a firefly or a woman's breast.
Life is too large.
Too big.
It will crush you if you try to pick it up.
It will roll over you like mud rolling down
the side of a mountain.
It will grab you by the hand and pull you under.
Life is like some crazy mad river and carry you away
and push you up against some rock, fill your mouth with mud,
your eyes with stones.
Fish swimming through one ear and out the other.
Life can break you.
It can grab you by the collar and shake you till
all the nickels and dimes fall out of your pocket.
Life is like a huge wind that comes in off the sea and blows
the roof off your house and pins you up against the wall,
sucks the breath out of your lungs,
makes your eyes wanna pop,
squeezes you like some big hand come out of the sky,
squash you like a bug.
Life is like an endless ribbon of highway.
You think that around the next turn that next bend
is gonna be a place to sit down, to spend the night,
to buy a cup of coffee.
But no.
It goes on and on.
And It gets narrower and darker and colder.
- The art of this kind of radio is unfortunately falling
victim to the same sort of thing that so many other
art forms are, which is, everything is YouTube now.
Those people who really appreciate not having
the visual stimulus and letting your mind do that.
- Joe once said to me about a book he wrote,
and about his show, that he was afraid people
thought that these were all about him.
And I said, Joe, they kind of are.
Those shows are about you.
Maybe not exactly.
Maybe not the exact thing that happened to you,
but in the way that you tell them and the way that you
create these stories they are your personality
in this kind of abstract way, and it's beautiful.
(light dramatic music)
- [Joe] My mother and her new husband Freddy and I
moved down to the suburbs of Long Island
where I began to attend public school.
And soon, I was failing most of my courses
and attending summer school to make them up,
and I made friends with other troubled kids,
and eventually got involved with a fast crowd where
there was a lot of drinking and drugs and partying.
- You know, Joe was very ebullient,
full of adventurous fun when he was a teenager.
I think it inured to his disadvantage in school.
He had no time to study.
He might identify all kinds of problems concentrating,
but I remember that we were just always
looking for fun and had it.
And then he got sick.
- [Joe] Then in high school, after a fight in which I was
kicked in the groin, a tumor developed in my right testicle.
Surgery confirmed that I had cancer.
Shortly after the surgery,
I returned home and began cobalt radiation treatments.
This was before the advent of chemotherapy.
Three times a week, I'd be driven to a hospital where
I'd go into a dressing room, take off my clothes and change
into a gown that tied in the back.
Then I'd lie down on a gurney and an attendant would roll me
down a corridor into the radiation room and under
a huge machine like apparatus, all its power generated
through one focus point that resembled a nipple,
and a technician would line my body up and leave the room.
And out of the corner of my eye,
I could see his face in a small window peering in at me,
and the machine would begin to hum and vibrate.
And when I got home, I'd be overcome by nausea,
and soon, I became violently ill.
And as the days passed, I descended into
a perpetual seasick, vomiting nightmare.
Eventually, the radiation treatments ended
and my normal life resumed.
Though I lived under the shadow of the probable
recurrence of the disease.
- His whole demeanor changed after that.
He went through some sort of epiphany and he became
a very serious, dedicated, hardworking, diligent person.
(light dramatic music)
- I met Joe at the University of Iowa,
at a graduate, you know, writer's workshop.
I'm not sure we were in the same class.
I think Philip Roth was the teacher.
And of course, no women were teaching then.
This was back in the, you know, turn of the century.
What it did was, it gave you time to write
if you really wanted to write.
We were there for a while,
and then he apparently moved to New York and got married.
- [Joe] And here, you can see me in a tuxedo
holding my bride in her wedding gown
in my arms as if to carry her away.
It wasn't my idea, the photographer insisted on this shot
and we were divorced three years later.
- A lot of his shows speak to people
who feel similar things.
Alienation is the theme.
And everything that you associate with that,
loneliness, feeling hopeless, desperation.
Not being satisfied by anything.
I think those are the themes.
- [Joe] Over 20 years ago, I taught at a private school
on the upper east side of Manhattan.
I remember the department meetings were the worst.
We'd sit there discussing the curricula, scheduling,
book orders, study aids, classroom preparation,
tutorials, homework assignments.
I'd shift from one position to the next, stifling yawns.
I'd pass notes, whisper to colleagues, and indulge in
fantasies of making love to the women in the room.
I knew I was acting like many of my own students,
but I couldn't help it.
The meetings would drag on for hours
and it was a way of passing the time.
- Well, my first memory of Joe Frank
is WBAI at the Church at 359 East 62nd Street
off of 2nd Avenue.
The building was, a, I think a Presbyterian church
and it was de-sanctified.
Funded by Lou Schweitzer who was the original benefactor
with the Pacifica Foundation and setting up the idea
of a radio station that would be a platform
for people who couldn't be heard elsewhere.
- Wherever the rest of the radio world went,
Pacifica went the opposite way,
so it was a perfect place for Joe to develop his style.
- What Joe was doing then is I recall was kind of doing
satirical material to some degree about WBAI.
Kind of like poking fun in ways at the attitude.
For example, one of the first things we did
was panel discussions.
Everybody sort of represented a character
and Joe would be the moderator and ask questions.
- Even if the cameraman is trying to manipulate
a situation which their point of view is expressed
within the context of the photograph,
the photograph is not necessarily the expression
of that artist's manipulatory desires.
- [Man] Andre, you have a very interesting turn of phrase.
Where did you study?
- [Andre] I studied at the Academy of Bukuslov
with Blondehausen.
- [Man] He was totally blind then, yes?
- [Andre] Well he took some of his greatest
pictures at that time.
- He was not jokey.
He was not funny.
He was looking for something, and he was not resting
until he found it and he made sure that you knew it.
I really don't recall very much else that was being done
on any air that was at all similar to what Joe was doing.
We didn't even know what Joe was doing until he started
coming up with this stuff in the final edit.
- My first paid job in radio was
as Joe's production assistant.
And this was 1979.
And Joe was down in Washington D.C. and he was doing some
of his stories as part of a series on NPR that included
documentary stuff and other stuff,
and I worked for the producer of that series
and I had just started.
And Joe was sitting behind the microphone
in the studio and I was in the control room.
And I remember he was performing some story and the music
was playing off one of the reel-to-reel tape machines.
It was like somebody doing some sort of weird magic trick,
like, right in front of you, that I felt like,
I couldn't even tell how he was doing
the thing that he was doing.
- [Joe] I work hard at my job.
And I hope that by my efforts rendered faithfully over
a period of years, I'll move up through the corporate
hierarchy to a position of security, power, and prestige.
In order to improve my chances for advancement,
I dress conservatively, keep myself well informed in
the arts and in current events,
hold popular opinions and socialize in the best circles
with those who have influence.
But these efforts have been, so far, in vain.
I remain the night watchman.
- Joe Frank was guest anchoring
Weekend All Things Considered,
and he sounded like kind of an alternate universe
Noah Adams for the first 50 minutes, you know?
Just an ordinary NPR kind of anchor voice,
but a little on the non-perky side, to put it mildly.
And then the last five minutes of the broadcast,
they allowed him to do a little essay of his own,
and it was like a fistful of nihilism
just shot through the speaker.
(funky music)
- [Joe] Isn't it true that we continue to strive
all our lives in order to find peace and fulfillment?
It is like a journey on a pier that goes out endlessly
into the ocean without ever reaching the opposite shore.
And we never seem able to realize
that everything in life is ephemeral.
That new problems will always arise to meet us,
and that frustration never ends, and that all is in flux,
and that there is nothing solid to hold onto.
Not even the love you share with another person.
To understand that life may have no meaning.
To look into the abyss.
To contemplate the inconclusiveness of each person's
struggle for fulfillment is terrifying.
That there is no answer, no end.
That you'll always be on your way.
That life is not a game you can win,
but a game that has no end, and that all you do
is die somewhere in the middle of it.
(light dramatic music)
- It was, I think in the '80s, Joe was in Washington D.C.,
and Ruth Seymour, who's our former General Manager
was at a public radio conference and met him and heard what
he wanted to do and invited him to come to Los Angeles,
in essence to be like an artist in residence
and produce his work for KCRW.
And so he did, he moved out to LA.
KCRW was the perfect place for him.
Not only because the station management and structure
was completely open to an artist of his type,
but also because it's in Los Angeles.
A place where Hollywood is, where stories are.
- I remember one of the shows,
my favorite one, from the helicopter.
The traffic report over LA and it's just these horrific
accidents, and you don't know what is the angle.
It takes 15 minutes to figure out, oh, I see.
He's talking about the apocalypse and Jesus coming back
and Armageddon and it's like, lobster dipped in butter.
It's just delicious.
And good for you, it's not good for you, but you know.
(helicopter whirring)
- [Joe] On the westbound 101 around Topanga Canyon,
we have a spill of high-level biohazard waste materials
cordoning off the entire neighborhood of Woodland Hills.
And there appears to be a drive-by shooting gone
terribly wrong on the 210 westbound at Vernon.
CHP converging on that area.
And at the Corona Expressway out in Chino Hills
at Grand Avenue, a hot air balloon has been ensnared
in a high-tension wire and the gondola appears
to be melting, its inhabitants apparently incinerated.
So, there's a lot of rubbernecking that's
slowing things down, all the way to Riverside Avenue,
and you might want to avoid that.
And now, one motorist wearing a business suit and carrying
an attache case has taken a length of battery cable
from the trunk of his car and is climbing up a lamppost.
He has managed to fasten the cable to a spike
and is putting it around his neck, and right now.
Yes, he has just hanged himself,
still clutching the briefcase.
The odd thing is that the briefcase
has not dropped to the pavement.
We can only assume that he is an attorney
and that there are important papers in it.
So, I would avoid the northbound 605 near Downey.
- And when he came out to LA,
it almost clarified for me what he was about, to my ear.
He wasn't, there were no echoes of anybody else.
It was just, that was Joe.
(light playful music)
- KCRW was so wonderful in the '80s.
That place was like just some crazy Our Gang Clubhouse.
Joe, of course, fit right in, and he was immediately,
like, one of the stars of the station.
He found some actors that are just
so perfect for what he does.
- For years, you know, I'd run into somebody
and they'd say, what are you doing?
And I'd say, well, I've been doing stuff for Joe Frank,
and they would be so jealous.
And they would say, how come you get to do that?
Can you get me in?
- [John] I'm glad I got this 9 millimeter.
It's a beauty.
Once you get the clip in there, provided it's clean,
it sets up very nicely. (dog barking)
The sight's just a little bit off on this,
but I got it for, shut up, Ollie, for a bargain, but.
Ollie!
Shut up!
(gunshot banging) (dog yelping)
- [Woman] John, what did you do?
You shot Ollie?
This is my dog, John! - Yeah, well, if he's your dog
why don't you control him?
He's yapping up here like he's a maniac or something.
We'll get another dog.
- Hey, hey, hey, John. - He's just a dog.
- Your kid was barking, shoot 'em.
- Which one? - He's barkin',
they're all barkin'! - Well, bring them by
and I'll shoot 'em! (gunshot banging)
- You're always victim of his, too.
You know, he's using you.
He's, like directors use cinematographers,
or composers use musicians.
I mean, you're being used in the best sense.
But you're being used.
- [Ryan] It's just so strange to see someone
that you looked up to and taught you so many things.
That's really, losing it, you know?
And.
- [Joe] I don't know if that's tragic enough.
- [Ryan] Oh, okay, all right, um.
- [Joe] Why don't we try something that's
an active disease, I mean. - A disease, okay.
All right.
- Something. - Okay great, here we go.
- [Ryan] You know, i--
I haven't really told anyone this but...
I called my father anyway, and he's hacking on the phone
last week,
hacking away, he's been, you know,
coughing like this for a month or something.
- [Joe] You see, I think it's a mistake
to make it your father. - Oh, oh.
- [Joe] Because your father's old and he's--
- [Ryan] Oh, okay.
- [Joe] It's much more moving if it's somebody young
like a child or your wife. - Oh yeah, okay, okay.
- [Joe] You know?
Just as a backup can you do one maybe about an unborn child.
An unborn.
(Ryan laughing)
- [Ryan] Okay, great.
- It's always gonna be fun, he's always going to ask you
to do more than you think you should,
go further than you think you should,
and so you're always gonna have to stretch something
and cut something down in yourself, and it's great.
(phone ringing)
- [Arthur] Hello?
- [Genevieve] Arthur, Arthur, Arthur help.
Help.
I'm very sick.
I was throwing up all night.
I don't know what to do, and it's coming up
and I can't stop it, I'm choking on it.
- [Arthur] Well, for God's sake, call a doctor.
- [Genevieve] No, I can't.
(woman coughing)
I can't.
Arthur, when we were together, I was never sick, was I?
I'm so sick.
- [Arthur] How long has it been like this?
- [Genevieve] Hours, hours.
- [Arthur] Well, call a doctor.
- [Genevieve] I don't know any doctors,
they don't make house calls anyway.
I don't know what to do.
- [Arthur] Genevieve, call an emergency number,
get an ambulance. - Arthur, don't call.
Wait a minute, I have to go, I have to throw up.
Wait here.
- [Arthur] Oh, Jesus.
- [Cathy] Why are you doing this?
- What? - Why are you doing this?
- [Arthur] No, wait, Cathy, she might be--
- [Cathy] She is not sick.
She's not sick.
Do you really think she's sick?
She's using that as a
got to make an excuse, - Cathy, you didn't get--
- [Cathy] to keep you on the phone.
- No, you can hear. - No, I have had it with this.
- No, I know her, Cathy. - Oh.
- You didn't hear her. - But you know, but you know,
but do you know me?
Do you know that this is driving me crazy?
I want you to put the phone down now!
- I can't put it down. - Just hang the phone up!
- The prisoners in the jail.
Joe got letters from them.
That show was pumped into the recreation room,
and all the inmates would just sit around
and listen to that show, and they thanked him
for letting them take a journey outside
of the prison walls in their mind.
(light music)
- [Joe] I'm sitting at a dinner party attended by Pol Pot,
Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Seated at another smaller table are Saddam Hussein,
Slobodan Milosevic, Pinochet
and some others that I don't recognize.
And then, there's a third table, sort of a children's table.
It has shorter legs and smaller children's chairs.
And sitting there are Richard Speck, Gary Gilmore,
Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy
and Charlie Manson
and they're all wearing party hats.
They're not very much respected by the heavyweights.
They were smalltime.
They didn't get much done.
They were pikers.
Then we all get into a discussion concerning the selection
of paint colors for the renovation of the kitchen.
Hitler is partial to Bavarian creme,
and Stalin interrupts and he says he'd like to have
a dacha effect with a checkered table cloth,
louvered shutters, gingham curtains.
And then Pol Pot suggests little flower boxes
for the window sills.
Zinnias and daisies, he thinks, would be very cheerful.
And then, we talk about books.
Hitler's favorite is Goodnight Moon .
When the child comes home and says,
goodnight, to everything in the room.
Goodnight, door.
Goodnight, ceiling.
Goodnight, mother.
Goodnight, father.
And a tear comes to Hitler's eye.
His lip quivers.
And I'm sitting there listening to this conversation
thinking, why am I here with all these heavyweights?
What did I do?
- It was very underground at the beginning.
Maybe the first two or three years.
But he became kind of a celebrity in Los Angeles pretty fast
because a lot of very hip people started buying the shows.
- At one of those KCRW fundraisers some guy walked up to him
and said, so, do you just, like, smoke a bowl of opium,
and like, walk in and like do the show,
or how does that work?
And he just looked at the guy and like, uh, no.
It's a little different than that.
(upbeat music)
- [Joe] You can beat on the door of God,
howl at the top of your voice.
You can pray, sing cantatas, compose motets,
burn incense, perform passion plays.
You can stand and preach the holy word on a street corner.
You can gather the faithful in groups
by the water and perform baptisms.
You can speak in tongues.
You can hand around snakes and other reptiles.
You can mortify the flesh, kneel and bow to Mecca
five times a day on your prayer rug.
You can sit in lotus position,
hands folded neatly in your lap, eyes turned inward.
You can repeat a mantra.
You can spin a prayer wheel and recite
the 10,000 names of God.
You can throw your head back
and whirl like the Sufi dervishes.
And no one will see you.
And no one will care.
- To do those shows every week, he was completely obsessed,
and you just had to get out of the way,
you couldn't expect to see him for dinner or anything.
- I do radio in a way that I can fit it into these little
corners of what the rest of my life allows me to do.
It seemed like Joe's life was basically these shows.
- I had to be like a babysitter for him.
Because he would go hours and hours of editing,
and I had to stop him many times.
I said, just get out.
- I think Joe is a perfect example of the kind of person
who understands the work that you have to generate yourself
and figure out every step of yourself.
His shows, there was nothing like, really what he did.
He just forged a new genre; his own.
- Do you have any idea how many people
send me their short stories?
Their poems, and their journals which they want me
to critique and even read on the air?
Who don't seem to understand that these programs
are all originally created by me,
and that they reflect my sensibility?
Let me begin by saying that this is the Joe Frank show.
This is not the Hyman Kaplan Hour,
this is not the Maria Ortega Spielfest,
this is not the Steven J. Lewis Memorial Podium.
I'm the author of the material here.
It is my work, promulgated by me,
it's my show, it's not your show.
And I'm not here to read your stories.
I am not a mirror.
I am a source of light.
I am not a reflecting surface, I am heat.
My purpose is not to vibrate with your experience,
but rather to resonate with my own,
and so, do I make myself clear?
If you're beginning to work on a show the moment
you've finished the preceding show,
you don't have any time to be an adventurer,
to travel to New Guinea or live in Paris.
You're just working.
My oldest friend, Peter Grean lived his life fully,
and we sometimes talked about that trade off.
All right, you always gotta--
He was traveling, he was living a very experiential life.
And I was having no experiences except the experience of
working and feeding off of the lives of other people.
- Joe and I have a really deep connection on many levels.
I think that we were very influential on our development
and I think to this day, we are interconnected
in a very meaningful way.
- And he envied me and I envied him.
He envied me that I had a following,
he envied me that I was known
and that I was an underground celebrity and he was not.
But I envied him because he was really living.
- [Both] One, two, three, boom--
- Sometimes I don't see Joe for months,
we live in separate cities, but he's always in my head.
(Peter sighs)
I always when I do something that I know he'd be interested
in or that happen, I always say to myself,
Frank, you should be here, man.
You can't believe this.
In a way, he sort of documents my life
because he's been there through my whole life.
And I think to an extent, I'm the same for him.
- [Joe] I've drunk gallons of Chablis.
Danced the samba.
I've sat outside the casino in Monte Carlo
in the hours between closing time and dawn,
to listen to the shots of suicides.
I live in airports, in grand hotels,
in office high rises.
I serve nature.
I perform all my biological duties.
Puberty for people like me drags on.
- In many ways, Joe's exactly the person
he seems on the radio.
Although he's kind of a homebody
and doesn't run around a lot.
I think he has in the past, but the way that he's
adventurous and bold on the radio and is in real life is,
he's had very tumultuous relationships with women.
And that's something that's really central
to his shows is, the man-woman thing.
- [Woman] I've been thinking about your body,
I've been thinking about running my fingers through your
hair and touching your face, just kissing that mouth
and putting my fingers on your eyelids
and holding you really, really close to me
and having you hold me, God, I just,
that's all I think about.
I can almost feel the weight of your body on top of mine,
and it's just, I've gotta have it.
I've gotta have the real thing really, really soon
or I'm just going to do something crazy
in the office one day.
I'm gonna do something crazy.
- He's the first person who told me about
the southern California tradition of the #### buddy.
I'd never heard that before, you know, I mean,
whether this is true or not, I don't know,
but he said there was some woman who would come over
every Tuesday night and #### him.
You know and then, goodbye, you know?
- And if I can say this, Joe had told me at one point with
much pride that he got a call from a listener once who
told him that his voice was like a penis going through her.
I'm quoting now.
- [Joe] Just the idea of my head being crushed between
your thighs and looking up at your face, you know,
seeing your face from that point of view, God.
I don't want you to laugh at me, because you know,
until you try it, you'll never know what it's like.
I mean no one will love you more
than I will from that position.
- It was funny because men wanted to be him,
and women wanted to be with him.
And so whenever we would be out,
people were thrilled to meet Joe.
I've never seen so many women
throw themselves at a man before.
(answering machine beeping)
- [Woman] I just want you to know that,
I really understand you and I'm the only person
who understands you and nobody else is gonna ever love you
the way I love you and you know that
and it just scares you to death.
- He always seemed to be digging
for stuff about relationships and sex.
And I thought, well, of course.
Why, why not?
What's more interesting than that?
I mean we're all.
Especially at that time, when there was a lot of,
you know, people were just crazy.
- [Joe] Last night, after a series of phone calls
in which I was forced to listen to hours and hours
of Kate raging against me, I finally exploded.
I said, I can't take this any longer.
I've had it.
You are driving me crazy.
This relationship is over, it's finished.
I don't wanna talk to you, hear from you,
have anything to do with you ever again, goodbye.
- He's a damaged soul, and he has no compunctions
about spending valuable air time exploring
the nature of that damage.
- [Joe] And as I walk to the door,
she leaps on me, punching me.
And she's punching and punching.
And I fend off her punches and I'm saying,
what are you doing?
Stop it, Kate.
Grabbing at her arms.
Pinning her arms.
Pushing her down on the bed and holding her down.
And she grabs my head, and pushes it down into her groin,
and starts humping my head.
You know, banging her pubis against my head
and performing a fake orgasm, going, oh, oh, oh, oh.
- You identify all of the things,
the vicissitudes and you start to realize
that that's normal.
You know, the stuff that people go through,
the darkest thoughts you have,
and the level of pain that it takes to just be alive.
That's the kind of thing that he
is the sort of, spokesman for.
- I started seeing Joe in 1985.
He told me that he had had cancer in the past.
And it worried me a little bit.
But the cancer had been long ago.
Joe got sick in the early '90s.
And this time, he had bladder cancer.
They estimated at that time that Joe
had an 80% chance of not making two years.
That's when I really understood what
it means to have your knees buckle.
Those treatments were so lethal,
if you wanted to kill somebody,
that was the way to do it, you know?
But he just went through his chemotherapy
and he thought that he was gonna die.
He was sure that he was gonna die,
so he wanted to just get all of the work out.
So even though he was really sick, he was still working.
- [Joe] When a tumor grows, we bring forth our most
powerful killing mechanisms,
radiation and deadly toxins to destroy it.
But who is to say that cancer is not God growing within us?
God manifesting himself in the physical?
Some people like to think of God as an old man
with a white beard sitting on a throne in heaven.
Others see him in the mountains, the rivers and the valleys.
But why not conceive of God as the buildup of plaque
in your arteries, or the bacteria that causes underarm odor?
Or the virus that causes the common cold?
Maybe God comes out when you sneeze.
- It took a long time.
The illness kind of stuck around for the next few years.
By '94, the year that we parted was when
I felt that it was gonna be okay.
He had cleared the two year marker.
- You know, when your health is bad,
it starts you thinking about all the wrong things.
Everything changes I believe.
And you know what I said to Joe Frank?
I said, all that stuff you've done about death,
you should be okay with all of this.
You're the guy who, you taught me about death.
- [Joe] It's the closing of the book,
the slamming of the door, the quenching of the flame,
it is nothing, tangible negativity, immersion in emptiness.
It has no color, no sound, no substance, no mass.
It's the irredeemable coupon, the final handshake,
the least welcome visitor, the cruelest joke of all.
It can be fastidious, or sloppy, prissy or a mess.
It can sneak up on you or reserve its place in advance.
It is forever a great consolation and a consolation prize.
It's the last thing you'll ever do.
It's a hollow laugh, like crow's feet over broken glass,
or wind in dried grass.
It's twist no more, like we did last summer.
It makes you stop and think, makes you wonder,
makes you less attractive, makes you a member of an
ever growing majority, a member of the silent majority.
- The first time I listened to him in earnest
was when I was going through a separation
which led to a divorce, and I was in Vancouver.
And I was on my own, and a friend sent me 60 hours of shows,
and I remember listening to four, five, six, seven
hours in a row at a time.
And because of the nature of his material, you know,
all of the dark places he goes, et cetera, et cetera,
it somehow cheered me.
It made me feel better.
- [Woman] You have a lot of unresolved #### going on
and if you don't resolve it sooner or later,
it's going to pop back up again.
In addition, you have to have a job.
Some job, any job.
I don't care what job, but you have to have a job,
and you have to prove to me that you're ambitious
and that you're trying and that you plan on making something
of your life, because you're not 20 years old, you know?
You don't have time to dawdle around.
You have to show me that you have plans
and ambitions and drive.
And you have to show me that you're going to make
your best effort to take care of me
and to make this up to me, and I'm sorry if--
- Yeah, but I can't. - That's tough, I deserve it.
- [Man] But I can't do that
unless I know
what the status of the relationship is.
- [Woman] Well, we have to see how it goes,
I'm not gonna give myself.
- [Man] Well, how can we see how it goes unless--
- [Woman] I'm not going to give myself totally over
to you until I'm sure that you're completely normal.
- [Man] I don't tell you to give yourself--
- If that what you're saying. - Totally over.
- When you said, when you say, - But I need to know is--
- When you say. - There some commitment left.
- [Woman] Excuse me, when you say, resume the relationship
the way it was, that's what I need.
- Once Joe was out on the coast, he seemed to get much more
interested in dealing with actual people.
Doing long interviews with real people
about intimate stuff and putting it on the air.
- [Man] You know there was this guy traveling
along the road, right?
And he came upon this group of people beating a dead body.
And they were just beating the body, right?
It was already dead.
The guy asked the people why they
were beating the body, right?
And what they told him was that the guy died
without paying his debts, right?
And he didn't owe anybody anything because all of the crazy
#### they gave him from the time he was a baby,
was killing him and they knew it.
And so by the time his body died,
he had all of their minds wrapped up inside
of his spirit and he wouldn't let go of it.
So just because his body was dead
didn't mean that you know, he was gone.
He took off, he didn't come back.
You know what happened?
The guy paid off the guy's debts and they buried the body.
They buried it instead of letting the animals eat it.
It's like Buddha.
You know when Buddha was sitting out in the forest
underneath the banyan tree,
he just sat there until his body just let go.
You know once his body let go,
everything came back into him in, in a different way.
- I know one program we did was the OJ Chronicles.
He called me up and said, I want to do an OJ thing.
I thought, God that's great, that's great.
And then he called me back and said,
you know, this is a stupid idea.
- [Joe] We're following the route
of OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings.
I have a Glock Austrian-manufactured 9 millimeter handgun
pointed at my head, pressed against my temple.
(horns honking)
Okay, he looked over this way.
Oh, he's backing away and he's pulling off the side
of the road because he's afraid of the gun.
He thinks I'm gonna shoot him.
- It was a galvanizing event for the entire country
if not the world.
And he took that subject matter
and approached it in a very Joe Frank-esque way, you know,
which is unique and finding a completely different angle.
- [Joe] Do you have any theories about
who actually did commit this crime?
- [Man] See, my theory is it was a double suicide.
- Really? - And they was trying to frame
on their way out, they was trying to frame OJ
to make him have a miserable life, you know,
because things weren't going well for them.
So it was a double suicide.
- [Joe] That is a very interesting theory,
and that's one that I have never heard before.
How did they manage to pull it off?
- They bloodied themselves-- - Mm hm.
- Okay, then got blood on the glove
and threw it over into the yard.
- Mm hm. - And the other one then
went and messed up his truck, his Jeep.
- Mm hm. - You know, got blood all
up in it and all.
Then they went back to her place to do the final
blow-by-blow killing procedures,
which involved a knife that he had purchased earlier.
- [Joe] Mm hm.
And you're saying that they slashed themselves to death.
Is that what, that--
- [Man] Uh huh, that's right.
How come nobody explores that possibility?
That hasn't even been raised by the media.
They didn't talk about that.
Two white people trying to frame OJ Simpson is what
it could be, and I think it might've have happened.
- I think that people like to know,
just tell me whether this is real or it isn't.
I'll go with it, if it's not real, I'm cool with it.
If it's real, okay.
But don't, don't #### with me on this.
I can't take it!
- [Minister] Repeat after me.
Oh, Lord. - Oh, Lord.
- [Minister] And Clytemnestra's daughter.
- [Man] And Clytemnestra's daughter.
- Take me and heal me. - Take me and heal me.
- Let me be like a mouse. - Let me be like a mouse.
- Inside a mousetrap. - Inside a mousetrap.
- Feed me. - Feed me.
- Bread. - Bread.
- Wine. - Wine.
- Hamsters. - Hamsters.
- Bullfrogs. - Bulldogs.
- [Minister] African Eurasian tiger pussycats.
- [Man] African Asian tiger pussycats.
- And take me. - Take me.
- [Minister] And drag me into the woods.
- [Man] And drag me into the woods.
- Dig a hole. - Dig a hole.
- [Minister] And let the leaves fall on top of my body.
- [Man] And let the leaves fall on top of my body.
- And reincarnate me. - And reincarnate me.
- In the form. - In the form.
- Of. - Of.
- A. - A.
- [Minister] Hamster.
Love me, father. - Love me, father.
- [Minister] Love me like you do.
- [Man] Love me like you do.
- The little roach. - The little roach.
- [Minister] Louder, louder.
- [Man] The little roach, the little roach!
- And let me face thee. - And let me face thee.
- Towards the holy city. - Towards the holy city.
- [Minister] Of Medina near the Tesche near
the Thymes at the right end of the north corner.
- [Man] The Medina of the tenth at the right hand
on the right corner.
- [Minister] Repeat after me, (speaking gibberish).
(speaking gibberish)
- [Minister] Loud, brother!
- [Man] Gotta, well, Father,
I gotta go to the restroom right now.
- [Minister] We're almost finished.
(speaking gibberish)
- Oh man. - Loud, brother.
- Brother. - No, quick.
- Uh, uh.
- Oh, Lord. - Oh, Lord.
- Take me. - Take me.
- Into the ashtray. - Into the ashtray.
- On my head. - On my head.
- And let me swim. - And let me swim.
- In the sacred waters. - In the sacred water.
- Of the Capashu River. - For the Capashu River.
- Forever. - Forever.
- [Minister] Praise the Lord.
(light music)
- [Joe] This morning, as is my habit,
I wake up at dawn and immediately, my mind begins to spin
out one angry, despairing, ugly thought after another.
And then, I think about Ira Glass and how successful
he's been with This American Life which is on over
300 stations and has the financial support of various
companies and foundations and endowments and a staff
of I don't know how many people and how my program
languishes here in LA without one penny from any
organization, except for my ridiculous, humiliating salary.
And I think, for God's sake,
I'm doing something worthy here.
I'm creating something that's worth something, and for what?
- I mean the thing about a lot of public radio
is that it's danger averse.
And Joe is anything but that.
And so, Joe's act is, I'm more ####ed up than you are!
And here's why, and here's how it feels.
The last series I think he did for KCRW where he's mixing
in Jack Kornfield's Buddhism meditation cassettes,
that's some of the best radio I've ever heard.
- [Jack] In this human existence it is a world of opposites.
Of gain and loss, and praise and blame, of birth and death,
of pleasure and pain, of fame and disrepute.
Doesn't it happen to all of us?
It is the way that it works.
Birth is suffering, decay is suffering, death is suffering,
sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering.
Not to get what one desires is suffering.
To lose what one has gotten is suffering.
In short, grasping any of the groups
of existence is suffering.
It is part of our human condition.
- I think that really if you wanna look at the work
as a line of stuff, I would say that Joe,
he went further and further in.
- [Joe] The phone is a very intimate medium.
It's like literature in the sense
that words themselves spur the imagination.
- Well, Joe uses the telephone extensively.
He had this little Radio Shack cassette recorder
that was hooked through his telephone
and any time you called him,
if you started saying something that he found interesting.
He would just very quietly pushed down the red button,
and you'd be rolling, and you never knew that.
- [Debi] I'm really learning to be like this beautiful lotus
blossom and I'm just sitting on my pad, you know,
in the mud waiting for the, you know,
the frog to come and get me.
You know, but, it's like I have this fear that
they're not gonna come and get me and maybe
that's why I go after them.
We talked on the phone a lot as friends.
And Joe was really, really great at getting me
to disclose very intimate information.
So I sit there and we're lying in bed,
and I'm completely horny and wanting to have sex,
and you know, I end up turning around and I think
that I'm not beautiful and it's awful.
(Debi crying)
I'm just so mad at myself
'cause I get so obsessed, you know, and I.
I don't know, maybe I've just known all along that he isn't
right for me and I just keep trying to make it work.
I kind of started getting the hint
that he might be recording me.
He called me and said that he had been in fact
recording me for months, and that he had quite a few
conversations on tape and would it be okay with me
if he edited some of them together
and made a show out of it?
And I was like, of course.
No one ever knew if what we were talking about was scripted.
But not one word was ever scripted.
I just got to tell my life stories
and he made me feel really important.
- I loved the idea of just talking
about what was on my mind that day.
It felt good to do that,
but it's always understood that he's doing the work.
He's recording all this and he's gonna edit it and spend
all these hours putting, making something out of it.
But for the most part, it was real.
What I'm doing is drinking tequila
with a little lemon and salt, you see.
And then I chase it down with a little beer.
And if you do it right, it tastes a little like a margarita.
Because you lick the salt, and then you take a little bite
of the wedge of lemon, right? - Mm hm.
- And so now you've got this salty,
lemony thing on your tongue, and then you let the shot
of tequila slide down over your tongue.
And then by the time it reaches the back of your throat
and your taste buds, because by now,
you're tongue is anesthetized. (Larry chuckling)
It's really kind of nice.
You mean, how it came to be that he coerced me into
revealing my life to my great destruction?
Well, I don't remember.
But I know that I, you know,
jumped on it like a tuna on a hook.
- [Joe] Let me just ask you one question,
and don't get pissed off at me.
- [Larry] Well, if it's gonna be a challenge or something.
- It is a challenge. - Well, why bother?
- [Joe] Well I just wanna ask you this one question
and then we'll dispense with the discussion.
What distinguishes your drinking from his taking drugs?
How is it different that you're in need of drinking,
and he's in need of? - Right.
Well, he brings that up too.
He has the same question.
And as he watches me in my own despair of drunkenness
and everything. - Mm hm.
- It scares him he can see no hope for himself!
I thought initially it would only be broadcast in
Southern California, KCRW, I mean, who ever heard of KCRW?
And as it came to pass,
when the show was expanded nationally
and my little secret ramblings,
which everybody loved, you know?
Used to get fan mail from the, oh, my God,
you're the most candid person in the world.
But I was betraying people that were alive.
Ultimately, it came to be that my family
didn't like that so much.
Joe? - Yeah?
- [Larry] Real quick, you busy?
- [Joe] I'm on the other line, can I call you back?
All right, hold it, hold it one second.
Debi? - Hi.
- [Joe] Can I call you back in three minutes?
- [Debi] Yep.
- Okay. - Okay, bye.
- [Joe] Okay, I'm here.
- [Larry] Actually, I mean, it was real quick
and I finally, I wanted to tell you three things.
The first thing was, I finally figured out a way
just to talk to you without being recorded.
You can turn on your machine,
but I'm going to say (beeping) every four or five words
and (beeping) and tell you a story (beeping)
and because sometimes I wanna just want to speak
to you (beeping) and say something (beeping)
that's from my heart (beeping) okay?
- During the time that I was there at KCRW,
Ruth gave him all the backing that he wanted,
censorship was not at all in existence.
It's totally Joe Frank's stuff.
- [Joe] Hello?
- [Ruth] Hi, Joe?
- [Joe] Hi, Ruth.
- [Ruth] Listen darling, I was listening to a tape,
you'll know which one it is, I forgot.
- [Joe] Yeah.
- [Ruth] On the treadmill this morning.
- Yeah. - Joe, there's no way
we can say, suck my (beeping).
- [Joe] Actually I don't remember which, uh.
- You don't? - No.
- [Ruth] That's your mother crawling up a long corridor.
It's supposedly--
- [Joe] Oh, they're from the dream that I had, oh, right.
Yeah.
- [Ruth] There's just no way.
I mean, you know with, suck my (beeping) doesn't seem
to make any difference whether you say it.
Well, of course at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning.
- Mm hm. - But we can't say it at all.
Graphic sex, Will tells me, is not permissible.
- [Joe] I understand and I really, I guess I shouldn't have.
I thought because it was my mother saying something
like that to me in a dream--
- [Ruth] Joe, your mother saying it,
if anything, makes it worse.
I can't figure out how nobody in two broadcasts.
You have so cowed.
I mean, it's not that you have cowed your audience,
it's simply that you've cowed everybody.
- [Joe] Well, I'll never do it again, okay.
That's all I can say. - Okay, so, you understand.
- Yeah, I do. - With luck, PRI will
never hear this. - Okay.
- Okay, Ruth, I'm sorry.
- That's okay, bye bye. - Okay, bye.
- Joe had a really unusual and very complicated relationship
with Ruth Seymour because they're both very intense people.
And sometimes she would get in trouble for things
that he'd said on the air 'cause he could get pretty edgy
and she always protected him.
- She was really ruthless,
like one of the old Hollywood moguls.
You know, like Harry Cohn or one of those,
Mayer, who cosseted their stars
but then if the stars didn't cooperate, out, you're out.
One of the incidents, Joe has had a lot of medical problems
with surgery and so forth.
Joe didn't tell her that he was going into the hospital.
And this was a big insult.
And she fired him for that, you know.
- It was very hard on Joe.
He no longer had a home.
It was as though he got kicked out of the house.
- Well when I was fired, I was furious.
I was really, really angry.
It was just, it was incomprehensible,
and I was really enraged.
Later, she had another reason which was that she said that
I was played out creatively,
that my work was no longer fresh, that it was no longer new,
that I shouldn't be doing radio an longer.
(swanky music)
- [Jack] There are many ways that others have hurt
or harmed us, each of us has been betrayed, abandoned,
hurt by others, abused, it's so in every life.
Allow yourself through reflection to remember a particular
situation in your life which is most difficult.
It can be at work or in community or family relations.
The scene and the imagining and the remembering
of what is the most strong difficulty that you face.
- I have something going on inside me and I think that
all affected the way my radio programs developed.
In a way, the absurdity came from the life I was leading.
There was a certain craziness about what
was going on when I was young.
First, my parents had lived in Germany during the time
of Hitler when there was terrible anti-Semitism
and we had escaped and many of our family were murdered.
And she described Kristallnacht when the Nazis smashed,
looted and burned all the Jewish schools,
shops and synagogues.
And how that night, having planned to meet me and my nurse
at the railroad station in order to flee Berlin,
she grew frantic because she couldn't find us in the
terminal and didn't know a porter had let us through
the gate and onto the train without our tickets.
And how she'd taken a cab back to the hotel trying
desperately to find us, imagining the worst,
and then raced back to the station,
and only when the train was about to leave had taken
the greatest gamble of her life, and boarded it,
walking from car to car,
until she finally found us and broke down.
Her body wracked by sobbing.
And that was when she experienced
her first nervous breakdown.
That kind of stuff can really twist you around,
and it certainly had an effect on me.
(people talking over each other)
Tough time here, huh?
- Yeah, I didn't expect to come here and cry,
you know what I mean?
We escaped.
My parents went through Hitler,
we escaped from the Russian army in '56,
Jewish, the whole thing.
I mean, every part of it, you know resonated.
- Say again? - So all of that was so.
(crying)
- Incidentally, this is a former SS officer.
(Peter laughing)
- What do you mean, former?
(laughing) (muffled talking)
- But he allows people to experience feelings
that they wouldn't allow themselves to feel.
I think that Hitler deserves a bit of credit
for Joe Frank's success.
The refugee experience shaped
Joe's life and made him insecure.
You know, were the Nazis going to come back?
Would he go broke?
Would he get sick?
It all had to do with it.
(dramatic music)
- As I lay in bed at night,
waiting to fall asleep as a boy,
I torture myself with fantasies about being forced
to make awful, hideous decisions.
I'd imagine being imprisoned by the Nazis.
I'd be told by a sadistic SS officer that I had to choose
between having my eyes torn from my skull with a spoon
or having my parents beaten to death with rifle butts.
What would I do?
I'd wonder what it felt like to have a spoon dig into my eye
sockets severing arteries and veins,
my eyes being gauged out of my head while
I screamed in agony until they fell
to the floor with a wet plopping sound.
And I'd think of what it would be like
to spend the remainder of my life in darkness.
My father, my real father had been
the patriarch of the family.
He was a man who had started as a child,
the son of a rabbi living in a small village in Poland,
came out of poverty and through his ingenuity
and his resourcefulness had eventually come to be
a major manufacturer in Germany, Langermann Shoe Company.
My father was a German Jewish industrialist who divorced
his wife to marry my mother when he was 42
and she was a 17 year old high school senior.
But my father lost his business empire under the Nazis and
the family had to flee Germany in 1939 just before the war.
My father managed to get most of our relatives
out of Europe and came to this country with almost nothing.
But New York City bankers, knowing of his reputation
in Germany, lent him the money to rebuild his business here.
And the company opened a spacious office on the 80th floor
of the Empire State Building, at that time,
the tallest building in the world.
But during my early childhood, my father's health declined.
My memories of him are vague.
His trembling fingers and a vein on the back of his hand
that looked like a blue worm under his skin
that frightened the hell out of me.
And while my father was ill,
Mom and Freddy met and fell in love and began an affair.
By then, bedridden, my father became
so bitter and miserable, that he refused to talk
to my mother and would only communicate with her
by writing notes until he died of kidney failure.
My father died when I was five.
I was about to undergo a corrective operation
for clubbed feet.
It was important that the surgery
be performed as soon as possible.
So my mother explained my father's absence
by telling me that he'd gone to Boston on business.
The family gathered at my home.
Paintings were turned against the walls,
sandwiches were served.
Everyone spoke in hushed, muted voices.
My mother wore a black dress with a veil.
That evening, I was admitted to the hospital.
After the operation when I returned home with casts
up to my hips, my mother told me my father was dead.
The year after my father's funeral,
Mom and Freddy got married, and as time passed,
they grew increasingly unhappy and drew apart,
but neither had the courage to leave.
She got very depressed and I remember
when I was a teenager,
she would take walks sometimes during the winter
and I didn't know if she was ever gonna come back.
Because she was so unhappy, I thought I would find her
hanging from a tree in a nearby wooded area.
When my mother was depressed, you could feel her mood
spreading through the house like a foul mist.
Her face looked ravaged as if she were about
to collapse and die.
Her unhappiness overshadowed everything, crushing you.
I had an interesting revelatory experience
and it may have been the beginning of my career.
I was in my room, and their room was down a corridor,
and they were having a terrible, ugly,
terrifying fight.
And I was in my bedroom, and I was listening.
And it was like, oh, my God!
But at the same time, it was fascinating.
And I began to write down what I was listening to.
At some point, I looked at what I had written.
And I thought, this is remarkable.
All that suffering was mitigated by what you could convert
it into, a tragic situation into art.
- The Joe Frank world is very difficult
and there's no, there's no closure, you know?
There's no, it's yearning and longing for that happiness
and that desire and that satiation.
- Now by virtue of the authority vested in me
as deputy commissioner of civil marriages for the state
of California, I now pronounce you husband and wife.
You may kiss your bride. - Wow.
(guests cheering)
- The one thread of Joe that remains constant in his
personal life is that he is just full of humor,
dark humor, but it's humor.
That's what I love about him the most,
and how hopeful he really is.
- Since he met Michal, she has helped him so much to
sustain whatever those problems have been through time,
and because he has a dark, depressive streak.
I think she has worked to ameliorate a lot of that
and lift him up and keep him going.
- No, this one. - No, no, you take it with.
- The work is so important.
These other factors, they may get in the way,
they may bring you down from, like, having cancer,
or needing another kidney, or not being able to walk
as well, or not having the money, or not, whatever.
But you just do it.
- We went to one place where we went for lunch,
and there were a lot of elderly people there.
And he had a stick at the time, and I remember like his
stick got caught on someone's walker.
And he was just like what the ####?
I never wanna go there again, ever.
- Maybe the fact that he's been through
all these physical challenges have made him stronger
than the rest of us who go, oh my God.
I got a pain in my arm.
I think I'm dying.
Joe could have his legs paralyzed and think,
eh, well, what's new?
- I'm always very surprised that he doesn't know
how popular he is, how much of an impact
he's made on people's lives.
He really, sincerely, is surprised by that.
- You don't pan away when things get uncomfortable.
And I can be off-putting, but I really appreciate it,
like, you kind of hit that note hard.
- [Man] Yeah.
- I think social media is, like, perfect for Joe.
He has had a renaissance on Facebook.
It means a lot to him to have all these friends online
because he's a guy that, before it was on the phone.
- Also known as Digital Zoo.
- No! - Yes!
- Goddamn! - Damn!
Can I give you a hug? - Yeah!
- The incredible thing is, Joe stuck to what he does.
And the specificity of that is so unique.
No one else is gonna do it but him.
And it took a lot of guts, too,
because there were opportunities,
probably that he missed out on, but it never felt right.
And if it doesn't feel right to Joe Frank,
he's just not gonna do it.
- Francis Coppola has approached him, Michael Mann,
a lot of people in positions to help him.
And it makes no impression on him because it just really
doesn't have anything to do with what
he's working with in his head.
- Is Albert Camus ever gonna have as wide an audience
as some very popular, best-selling writer?
No, what Joe Frank does is literature.
(muffled talking)
- I think Joe has created this large island that
is Joe Frank and it's his own
island and it will be there forever.
And when people want to visit
the Joe Frank Island, they will be in for a wild ride.
- You make me wanna do better work.
- Oh, really? - It's just like,
for the last 20 years listening to you.
- Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome
Joe Frank, Too Close to Home.
- He got an award, a Lifetime Achievement Award
at the Third Coast Festival.
And I remember his opening line was like,
well, I guess my life is over.
You know, it's like really, really,
just like officially now I'm washed up.
I have no more career.
Um, it's done for me.
(light dramatic music)
- It's amazing to me that he's been able
to continue focusing on his work,
finding a place where he can actually live within himself
having gone through all of these things.
You know, it's intense.
It's like, he lives on a razor's edge,
and I think it informs his days in the sense
that he wants to get everything he can out.
But at the same time, I've never seen anybody have
such a compelling desire to live.
- He once said in a program of his that
he is afraid of nothing.
And the counterpart says, so you are fearless?
And he says, no, no, that's not what I mean.
I'm afraid of nothing!
- [Joe] It's odd.
You don't experience your own death.
The last thing you experience
is the last moment of your life.
When you die, you have no idea that you just died.
If you suddenly die at home,
your friends and relatives grieve and cry, and embrace.
It's very emotional.
It's a tragedy.
You're gone.
But at the same time, you're not completely gone,
because your body is still lying
on the floor of your apartment.
It's as if you've gone off on a trip from which
you'll never return and left an unseemly mess behind.
And that mess is you.
I think death is terrifying and if you have no belief
then
the thought of your extinction,
eternal extinction that you're gone forever,
is just very hard to believe!
Maybe I'll live on a beach in Rio.
I'll sit in the shade of an awning extending
from the back of my truck and just kick back and relax.
Later, at dusk, I'll take my surfboard
and swim out beyond the breakers.
I'll wait for the right moment, climb on,
and go slashing ahead of a huge, curling wave.
Then, in the evenings,
I'll play guitar and percussion in a hot samba band.
Except that it's too late.
Silence waits for the moment to reveal itself.
It beckons.
It stretches out its arms.
And I peer down into its impenetrable darkness.
A sweet wind pulling me with ever greater force.
(upbeat music)
I want what you've just heard to stay with you.
I want you to drink it in.
To let it live beneath your skin.
I want it to pulse through your veins,
dwell within your kidneys, sit on your liver.
I want you to study it, make an analysis of it,
and submit a paper on it.
You should include a bibliography of some several
dozen academic journals and scholarly books.
I expect indexes, cross references and illustrations,
as well as charts, graphs and mathematical tabulations
to prove your statistic analysis.
I want a precis before the body of the work
which must be no less than 10,000 words.
It must be typed in Palatino 12 point, double-spaced,
printed on 24 pound Hammermill bond
and submitted in three bound copies.
If I find any evidence of coffee stains, food crumbs,
whiskers, fingernails or sputum,
the paper will be disqualified.
I also want you to submit a full dossier
on your physical condition,
including x-rays of your internal organs,
the results of a CAT scan an MRI and a full blood work up.
I will need your dental charts
as well as your driving history.
No one under 18 is allowed to participate.
Married couples may file jointly.
There will be a fee of $150
in a cashiers check made out to me.
It must be submitted by Thursday.
- For more information on Joe Frank- Somewhere Out There
or to purchase the video on demand,
please go to Joe Frank movie dot com .