Ann Magnuson Directs Time Travelling Hooker: Room 8
If bossing people around makes you a director then call this typical Capricorn gal Lina Wertmuller. Or, better yet, Andrei Tarkovsky who I was obsessed with at the time we made “Time Traveling Hooker: Room 8“. (Which partially explains the extra long takes.)
This 30 minute film was made as part of an art installation I created for Andrea Zittel’s High.Desert.Test.Sites. (an art festival held in Joshua Tree earlier this year) and was made with The Masses fearless leader Matt Amato (who served as my cinematographer and editor) and Grant Leuchtner (who took on the role as “The Spirit of Gram”.)
The film played on a small TV set that always sits in the corner of tiny Room 8 at the Joshua Tree Inn. This is the room where country-rock legend Gram Parsons passed away and the installation was an imagined scene of what might have been left after that sad event. Or perhaps left after a previous happier one? The room was strewn with detritus left over from a night of classic rock ‘n roll debauchery while a cassette player outside near the home-made memorial played a recording of me reading excerpts from the book the hotel leaves for guests to leave messages to the dearly departed icon. Our film features my character, The Time Traveling Hooker, in just one of her many adventures where she pops in and out of cosmic wormholes in search of true love and redemption. Perhaps she will finally find it in the ghostly arms of Gram?
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The TTH is a character I created some years ago but only debuted at the previous High.Desert.Test.Sites. event a year earlier. In Episode #1, the TTH is born in a typical American suburb but soon finds herself at the “La Dolce Vita” premiere in Rome during the early Sixties. One thing leads to another and she lands in the Wild, Wild American West where she finds she is just another ’soiled dove’ in a dusty western town. This tale was told on the side of Highway 62 in front of the Joshua Tree Saloon and near it’s conclusion the TTH makes her way into the saloon, led by artist Kenny Scharf who was dressed in a cow costume complete with glass udders created by artist Randy Polumbo. The cow leads her to the stage where she proceeds to pole dance to hits by Metallica, Guns ‘N Roses and Van Halen. After dancing herself to exhaustion, the TTH collapses and finds herself lost, once again, in the space/time continuum.
Our film takes up where that performance ended. Besides being obsessed with Tarkovsky at the time, I also revisited the original “Planet of the Apes” and Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” for additional inspiration. Armed with a camera and an awesome zoom lens from Indie Rents, Matt, Grant and I made our way to Joshua Tree. After stopping at a few local thrift stores for additional costumes and props (and borrowing the perfect jacket and cowboy hat from Texas-born artist Blake Simpson) we made our way into the high desert to make movie magic; eventually ending it all, like Gram, in the infamous Room 8.
After much encouragement from Matt and The Masses I now plan to direct more films, with and without The Time Traveling Hooker. But do expect to see her again sometime in the future (even though she may be somewhere in the past).