"People are so horny for this film I can't believe it!" says Chris Blum, director of the Tom Waits concert movie Big Time. At the time of its release in 1988, the film slipped through distribution cracks, making it a rare classic, but this week it enjoys an exclusive revival engagement at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California (Blum will be there tomorrow night for a Q&A session to accompany the opening night); the film will eventually see DVD release.

"I guess one of the main ingredients of mystique is scarcity; because it's so scarce, it's getting a lot of torque," says Blum of the attention the film's receiving this week, thirteen years after its initial release.

Due to circumstances beyond the filmmaker's control, Big Time went directly into the limbo-zone, which made it nearly impossible to see in theaters or on video. "I don't remember the particulars, probably because it was just unpleasant stuff," he says of the distribution foul-ups. But six months ago, he discovered the film's one and only print in an overheated attic in his nineteenth century studio situated in Healdsburg, California and decided it was time to do something with it -- like store it in a climate-controlled vault. The idea to make an event of the unearthing of the movie and to celebrate the artistry of Sonoma County residents Blum and Waits came from the director of the neighboring county's Rafael Film Center in Marin, the organization to which Blum turned to store the film for safekeeping.

Blum collaborated on the feature with his pal Waits when the musician approached him to put together a film of his album triptych, Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years. With Frank as its protagonist, the Big Time story showcases Waits in three guises: as live performer with his band (including guitarist Mark Ribot, percussionist Michael Blair and horn player Ralph Carney) and as Frank, the crusty nightclub crooner who doubles as the "all purpose schlep" who works in an old vaudeville theater and dreams of making it big time in showbiz.

"All three of those albums had to do with this Frank guy, the guy who drove a nail into his wife's forehead in the beginning of the film. I thought there was a need to weave some narrative into the experience," explains Blum. "In [Frank's] dream he's a superstar but in reality he was in a big box of a building by himself," he says of the story line he devised to tie Waits' trilogy of song together.

Unlike a lot of music movies where the crowd is an integral part of the experience, the decision to exclude audience footage within Big Time was a very conscious one for Blum and Waits. "The character was fantasizing the performance in his head, so there was no audience," he says, though the live sequences were shot in front of crowds at San Francisco's Warfield and Los Angeles' Wiltern Theaters.

"There was a major discipline that took place. Believe it or not, we had six cameras in the Warfield, and Tom could not be aware of one of them. So they were in unbelievably weird places." The props in the movie -- the junk store esthetic and bright Lucite boxes that decorate the live stage -- were things that Waits actually took on the road with him that year.

After a staging of Frank's Wild Years and the making of Big Time, Waits took a dive from the recording and touring treadmill, busying himself with composing music for visual projects, chiefly for the Jim Jarmusch movie A Night on Earth and the Robert Wilson play The Black Rider; he slipped in only two original studio albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations, in the thirteen years since the release of the film.

Blum continued to work with music videos, directing clips for Billy Joel ("We Didn't Start the Fire") and U2 ("Until the End of the World") among others, but has never felt the desire to direct another feature length piece, music or otherwise. "I guess I have a shorter attention span," he says, though he's looking forward to compiling material for the DVD version. "The pieces Tom did with Jim Jarmusch, some shorts I did with Tom, could end up on it."

"I think this film could have been viewed a hundred years ago and looked quite normal, and I think maybe it can be a hundred years from now and look quite normal," Blum says. "Believe it or not, it's very classic. There's nothing in there that couldn't have happened in St. Louis in 1928 or something. Tom's technique hasn't changed that much in the last twenty-five years. If you saw him on the stage of [Los Angeles'] the Troubadour in 1971, he looked and acted pretty much like that. I guess that makes it traditional."

DENISE SULLIVAN
(May 23, 2001)