When Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost had its world premiere in September, 1988, at the Venice International Film Festival, it was hailed by some as both a masterpiece -- and a masterpiece of good timing.
The reason: On May 13 of that same year, the subject of Weber's film, jazz legend Chet Baker, had plunged to his death from a hotel window in Amsterdam -- just a year after Weber had spent six months, off and on, filming Baker in various locales across Europe and the United States.
Not surprisingly, Let's Get Lost came to be seen less as a portrait of a talented, troubled artist than an invitation to read every crease in Baker's once-pretty face, every lovelorn lyric he sang and every moody melody he played as an intimation of doom. Was Baker's end a suicide? Murder? An accident precipitated by the drug abuse that, along with music, had been the major motif in Baker's life?
Visitors to this year's Toronto International Film Festival get to consider all the singer's highs and lows anew when Let's Get Lost is screened tomorrow as part of the festival's Dialogues series. Weber, now 60, will be there, talking with Canadian broadcaster Ross Porter (who prepared a Chet Baker documentary of his own for CBC Radio several years ago) and Douglas Brinkley, head of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University in New Orleans. Weber is also bringing Scottish singer Angela McCluskey to perform the Baker classic, My Foolish Heart.
Weber's appearance is a homecoming of sorts: Let's Get Lost had its North American premiere, just a few days after its Venice launch, at what was then called the Toronto Festival of Festivals. The TIFF screening marks the start of a second commercial life for Let's Get Lost, for which Weber spent almost a year preparing a restored print. It's going to be re-released in theatres early next year, in tandem with the release of an expanded version (28 songs in total) of the soundtrack issued in 1989, followed by the DVD of the film.
The man who would go on to become a world-famous photographer first became interested in Baker when Weber was still a dreamy 16-year-old living in rural Pennsylvania, and spotted a photo of him in a Pittsburgh record store on the cover of the 1955 vinyl LP Chet Baker Sings and Plays with Bud Shank, Russ Freeman and Strings. Included among the 10 tracks was Baker's cover of the Jimmy McHugh-Frank Loesser composition Let's Get Lost.
Later, Weber would say that seeing Baker's chiselled features and muscular physique in a knit T-shirt "was sort of the way I always wished I had looked, or wished I had known somebody like that."
But it wasn't just Baker's looks that appealed to Weber: Playing Chet Baker Sings, he told James Gavin, author of a controversial 2002 biography of Baker called Deep in a Dream, "I heard a sound . . . that was beckoning me to go West. It was a sound you felt when you listened to the ocean, when you were at the beach late in the afternoon."
In 1986, Weber directed his first feature film Broken Noses, a documentary about a hunky Olympic hopeful named Andy Minsker and the troubled youngsters he coached in a boxing club in Oregon. When it came time to do the soundtrack, Weber went to the cool California sounds of his youth -- Joni James, Julie London, Gerry Mulligan and, of course, Baker.(It's now Weber's belief that "you can literally film anything and put Chet's music with it and it'll work, you know?" he said in our interview. "Someone will say to me, 'Bruce, I'm doing a film about my grandmother.' And I always say, 'Oh, why don't you put some Chet Baker music with it?' ")
It was while finishing Broken Noses that Weber finally connected with the object of his adolescent desire, at a club in New York. Except Weber was by then a bearish 40 and Baker a hollow man of 57 dreaming of speedballs and looking, in the words of one writer, "more like Jack Palance than Jimmy Dean."
Nevertheless, Weber was enamoured. After persuading the trumpeter to do a photo session, then a three-minute "documentary" in a vermin-infested tenement, he suggested the two of them do a longer film and Baker assented. Shooting began the following January. That May, when Weber premiered Broken Noses (whose sole opening credit reads "To Chet Baker") at Cannes, he brought Baker and Minsker along with him -- and shot footage for Let's Get Lost along the way.
Today Weber describes Let's Get Lost as "a very ad hoc film. When we had some money and some time, we'd just go and do it." By the end, he had poured more than $1-million (U.S.) of his own money into the film, which he now calls "my grad-school project."
Working with an often cranky junkie who had an ill-fitting set of dentures and "no concept of holding onto 10 cents for tomorrow," was occasionally a strain. But 20 years later, Weber confesses that he kind of misses him.
"Chet was really fun when he was in a good frame of mind," he says. "He saw the world like a kid. There was this strange kind of innocence about him. . . . He really took pleasure in simple things. He had this kind of backyard mentality, 'I'm just happy sitting under the apple tree.' When the waves are spraying just so, the wind's nice, I still like to say, 'It's a Chet kind of day.' "
One of the most striking conceits of Let's Get Lost has also proved to be its most controversial: Weber staged numerous events -- such as the visit to Cannes, a reunion with photographer William Claxton (who had immortalized the young Chet), and cruises in a convertible down Santa Monica Boulevard.
Weber also convinced Baker to don some posh threads and have himself worked on by a hairstylist, makeup artist and dresser. Occasionally, he surrounded the trumpeter with attractive young women -- the sort Baker no doubt had partied with 35 years earlier -- and men (Minsker, singer Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Chris Isaak) whose unlined good looks Weber contrasted with Baker's cadaverous visage.
Later, the filmmaker brought that same blend of fantasy and reality to bear on Baker's estranged third wife, Carol, and their three children, Dean, Paul and Melissa (all of whom are now in their 40s), when he filmed them at their home in Stillwater, Okla.
"I don't think Bruce Weber's a true documentary maker," Baker's widow told me in a recent interview. Now in her mid-60s, she met Chet in 1960 when she was a 19-year-old English showgirl in Italy, married him in 1964, and never divorced. Since this past June, she has been living in Toronto, where she is considering settling for good after meeting local promoter-artist Jhames Lee and naming him executive director of something called the Chet Baker Foundation, which recently put on a three-day tribute to the artist in the city.
"Giving you haircuts and telling you what clothes to put on and driving you around in an expensive convertible isn't about making a documentary," said Baker's widow. "A documentary, to me, is about what you are."
She is writing her own story of life with her famous husband and, Lee promises, "It'll be the definitive book . . . since there's nothing definitive about Chet out there at all," including, she says, the Gavin biography, which she characterizes as "a trash job, so disgusting -- negative, negative, negative."
Weber is quietly unapologetic. "I kind of like films where they're kind of like a project on how to live your life. . . . They're not like a tunnel view of the subject where, you know, you're locked in a chronology or you just talk with the people you're supposed to talk to and it's all about the old days."
It's likely Weber's go-with-the-flow approach will be fully in evidence in another upcoming feature: a documentary about Robert Mitchum, which Weber started filming in the mid-1990s, but put on hold when the actor died in 1997, and, he says, "I got hauled off into other stuff."
Now Weber says he's going to have that doc finished for a 2007 release and -- get ready for it -- there are going to be scenes of Mitchum singing with Marianne Faithful, Dr. John and Rickie Lee Jones. For Weber, it seems, the stranger the bedfellows, the better the biopic.
Let's Get Lost screens at 5 p.m. tomorrow at the Al Green Theatre, at 750 Spadina Avenue, Toronto.