Not Just Blowing Smoke:
‘Smoke Signals’
Reveals a Star on the RiseSmoke Signals, the first movie made entirely by
Native Americans, is the latest independent David to take on the Hollywood
Goliath. Shot largely on location on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation
in North Idaho, it first earned popular acclaim by winning the People’s
Choice Award at the Sundance Film Festival and recouped its original
investment only two weeks after its release.
But don’t think lightning struck without warning for
screenwriter and co-producer Sherman Alexie, whose 1993 collection of
short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,
provided the story line. As the saying goes, the hardest-working people
are the luckiest.
The Spokane-Coeur d’Alene Indian estimates he writes
“fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week.” And he types ninety words a
minute. Such a prolific nature has resulted in eight books of poetry, two
novels, and the above-mentioned short story collection—all published
since 1992.
“I’m not as talented as many writers, but I worked
harder than most,” Alexie says. “I hate to sound like a Republican,
because I’m not, but there’s no substitute for hard work. There’s nobody
lazier than writers. A lot of writers spend a lot of time talking about
writing.”
Alexie calls the desire to be a wordsmith “a
sickness,” and half-seriously says he would rather see happy, healthy
people raise kids than become writers.
“It’s a lonely, lonely practice, writing,” Alexie
says. “You spend most of your time alone reading and writing. I don’t
think most people like to spend much time alone. You have to be a selfish
bastard—if the curse word fits, wear it.”
Over the years, Alexie tried just about everything else,
from studying premed and law to delivering pizzas. “I wasn’t good at
anything,” he says. “I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had, or asked
to leave.” When he rediscovered his second-grade report card, he wasn’t
surprised to read, “Junior has a problem with authority.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alexie says. “I distrust every single
institution out there, Indian or not, and there’s nothing I hate more than
someone trying to tell me what to do. Oh, I hate that.”
But his father, Sherman Sr., wasn’t anything like
Arnold, the runaway ’rent of rebellious lead character Victor in Smoke
Signals. “He was always my father, and he always provided,” Alexie
says. “I’m not saying he didn’t disappoint often. On the plusses and
minuses, he was on the plus side. Now that I’m older, I’m realizing more
and more how much he did do.”
That included raising six kids “who, if nothing else,
are incredibly nice, decent people.” Still, life on “the rez” wasn’t
always easy. “When you’re four or five years old and you’re standing in
line to get food, you realize something is wrong. You have to stand in
line for everything, like you’re in Russia or something.”
The Spokane Indian Reservation where Alexie grew up was
much like the fictional one portrayed in the movie, “quiet and simple
and hilarious,” he says. “It’s Kafka and the Three Stooges in
braids—existential slapstick.” Indians learned to cope that way, he
believes, because “there’s nothing funny about oppression and genocide.
The two funniest groups of people in the world are Native Americans and
Jewish people.”
Alexie calls himself “the least funny” of his own
family, of which he’s a middle child. “I never laugh more than when I’m
with them,” he says, noting that family dinners find him “spewing
fluids out of my nose all the time.”
This may surprise those who find Alexie’s
script-handling of his own stories whimsical, even laugh-out-loud
hilarious. Alexie cites exit polls that have shown 90 percent of those
who’ve seen the film like it, and jokingly attributes that appeal to the
approaching millennium. “It’s a good time to be an Indian,” he laughs.
♦♦♦
Ever since his first book was produced by Brooklyn’s
Hanging Loose Press, Alexie has been a champion of small, independent
presses. Of his many books of poetry, two have been published in limited
editions by Boise’s Limberlost Press, Water Flowing Home (1996) and
The Man Who Loved Salmon (1998).
Because he’s a well-known name, his limited-edition
chapbooks, as they’re called, sell out; signed copies are worth hundreds
of dollars. “It supports him [Limberlost publisher Rick Ardinger] and
the publication of other poets who may not sell as well,” Alexie says,
singling out Pocatello, Idaho muse Margaret Aho as “incredible.”
His favorite authors include a bevy of screenwriters in
addition to the usual literary suspects, from the Cohen Brothers and
Carrie Fisher—whom he calls an excellent script doctor—to poets James
Wright and Emily Dickinson.
“Good art always influences me, challenges me,”
Alexie says of his wide-ranging list. “I’m one of those people who
happen to believe there’s more great art being produced now than anytime
in history. It’s funny when people get nostalgic about art, like ‘that
time was better.’”
Alexie himself received a National Endowment for the
Arts grant in 1994, which he acknowledges was “fortunate” for his
career, but he still feels that “to expect the support of the government
is dangerous.” Doing so fosters a sense of entitlement and forces
artists to rely on that funding rather than seek avenues in the private
market.
While Smoke Signals promises to be a financial
success, Alexie says the making of it cost “less than one chandelier on
the Titanic. It looks like it cost much more than it did, somewhere
between one and two million [$1.7 million].”
Its success has brought fame unknown even to a writer
whose first book of poetry was selected as a 1992 Notable Book of the Year
by the New York Times Book Review; who won the 1994 Great Lakes
College Association Award for Best First Book of Fiction; and who was
chosen one of Granta magazine’s “Twenty Best American Novelists
Under the Age of Forty” in 1996.
“I participated in roundtable with President Clinton;
I was on Good Morning America,” Alexie enthuses. “That never
happens with books. I’m no longer a literary writer. Now I’m a literary
writer with a movie.”
♦♦♦
In many ways, Smoke Signals is a classic American
road movie, but Alexie is impatient with reviewers raving about its
universality while overlooking its particular Native American
sensibilities. “I think people are tired of good-looking white guys
shooting each other… saying clever things and pulling triggers,” he
says.
On the other hand, Alexie admits the power of
storytelling crosses cultural boundaries. “Look at the TV,” he says.
“How many hundreds of thousands of people are watching ER at ten
o’clock? That’s storytelling.” And while he believes shows such as ER
and Law and Order are better than most movies being produced today,
the big screen can lend itself well to telling stories.
“Movies have more communal power. When people gather
in a movie theater, it’s more akin to people sitting around a fire
listening to an elder tell stories. Writers like to go on and on about
books being an oral tradition, but books are written by solitary
individuals and read by solitary individuals.”
Alexie loved the collaborative effort of making Smoke
Signals, of two thousand people working toward a single vision to be
seen and felt by millions. “It was fun, although in movie-making the old
cliché is, ‘Fifty-nine minutes of boredom for one minute of panic,’” he
says of his co-producing duties. “It’s like being on a basketball team,
that’s what it felt like.”
In his high-school days, the athletic, six-foot-two-inch
Alexie was a good basketball player. “Give me the ball!” you can
almost hear him shouting throughout the movie. His fingerprints are on
everything. He even wrote the lyrics to many of the songs on the
soundtrack. He’s eager to do it all again.
“I’d love to make the Indian Citizen Cane, the
Indian Godfather,” Alexie says. “I hope I get that good. I hope
I get that lucky.”
As with his writing, it isn’t luck that’s pulled him
through alcoholic recovery for eight years now, it’s perseverance. Alexie
drank heavily from ages eighteen to twenty-three, but being a writer was
so much a part of his personality, he literally wrote unconsciously. In
the Boston Phoenix he’s quoted as saying, “I’d get up and there
would be twelve pages by my word processor, and I wouldn’t remember
writing them.”
“He [the journalist] left out the second part of that,
‘Most of it was shit,’ but yeah, that’s who I am,” Alexie says. “It’s
what I enjoy most. There’s nothing I’d rather do than writing. I have to
be reminded not to.” When he’s deep in a writing jag his wife has to
tell him to eat and even go to the bathroom. “I’m one of those guys who
seriously thinks about getting Depends so I never have to leave the
desk.”
Alexie’s second novel and current bestseller, Indian
Killer, is in pre-production at ShadowCatcher, the company that
produced his first film.
“The door’s open,” Alexie says. “I’m running
through.”
Originally published in the Boise Weekly
Copyright © 1998, 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
