The Windmill Movie: Dying to Be an Artist

There are struggling filmmakers, and there are filmmakers who struggle to make a film. The struggling filmmaker usually has no money; the filmmaker who struggles usually has too much money. Richard P. Rogers, the subject of his own unfinished documentary (it was completed by his protégé Alexander Olch), was certainly the latter. As an artist, Rogers did not lack intelligence or culture (and culture in the older sense of cultivation); what he lacked, and what he desperately wanted, was a meaningful experience. His world (WASP, Upper East Side, the Hamptons) was too easy, too closed, too padded. And judging from the hours upon hours of footage he left behind (Rogers died in 2001 of brain cancer), practically nothing happened to him (he had an adulterous father, an alcoholic mother, and lots of lovers).

There is a moment in the documentary that shows us everything we need to know about this character: While hanging out with a banker (or something like that) in Spain (or someplace like that), the bottom of a windblown beach umbrella falls on three or so of Rogers’s toes. He is rushed to the hospital, the doctors cannot save his damaged digits, he recuperates in a sunny room and talks to the nurses in French. The bloody accident—the severed toes, the medical attention they receive—is filmed with great amazement. This is the most exciting thing to happen to him: a toe accident.

When Maxim Gorky first read the short stories of Isaac Babel, he thought they were well-written but lacked substance. Gorky recommended that Babel do something exceptional with his life. Babel acted on this advice by joining the Red Cavalry. From his brutal and vivid experiences in the army emerged some of the greatest short stories ever written. An artist must know how the world worlds.