Benway's Deathbed

A tragic tale. One night at the Swiss Hut someone gave me a puppy. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old. My lifelong dream of my own dog came true at last. I named it Benway, after the character in Naked Lunch. What idiots we were. That damn dog was too young to leave its mother. We were all too young to leave our mothers, obviously. I didn’t know what to do. The dog got sick within two days. I went to a payphone in the middle of the night (phone was cut off again) and called the SPCA for advice. They were no help. The next morning Benway was dead. I couldn’t even figure out how to get rid of the corpse. It was December, probably 20 below zero outside. I found a shoebox, lay Benway in it, tied it up, and put the coffin outside where the body would freeze till the trash collectors picked it up. I swear to god I didn’t realize till Harvey came over and I told him what I’d done that he looked outside and noted that Benway was in a Hush Puppies® box. I couldn’t stand it! Benway’s death disturbed and haunted me. I thought I’d make a movie about it some day. Benway’s Deathbed (1964) 1 minute. No rating. In 1964 I talked a lot about becoming a filmmaker. I talked about it so much that, in some sense, I was a filmmaker already. My friend, Karen Sorenson, worked at the CBC, in the research department of a network public affairs and arts show called The Observer. She called to say they wanted to do a piece on an independent filmmaker - would I be interested? You bet I would! She didn't know my film career existed solely in my mind. “Independent filmmaker” was, to most people, an unfamiliar concept that was just barely starting to penetrate mass consciousness. The CBC, always on the cutting edge, wanted to do a short interview and show an excerpt from one of my films. No problem. My friend Roger was making a movie at the time and I helped him shoot some incomprehensible scene in Central Station which I'm sure never saw the light of day. Somehow he managed to wangle permission to rope off half of the busiest train station in Canada in the middle of a weekday. I asked him to lend me his Bolex and give me one reel of 16mm film so I could shoot my “excerpt”. I got Peggy (at the time a student at the École des Beaux-Arts) and Willie, and asked them to "act" for one minute. Peggy sat on the couch trying to "act" something and Willie played a game of chess with my stuffed seagull. (Very symbolic.) I told the CBC I had no money to develop my film and made them develop and print the one reel. In the editing room I acted like Akira Kurosawa, threatening to pull the whole thing if they didn't give me final say on the editing. The director's cut, so to speak. They thought I was a lunatic, but were committed by then. They showed the clip (the whole friggin movie was a “clip”) and interviewed me on network TV for 5 or 10 minutes. The next day Karen called to say the response to my bit had broken records. The phones had lit up like a . . . whatever. The Toronto producer was on the phone one tenth of a second after my segment wanting to know, “What the hell was that?” Update [June 19, 2007]: See the digitally remastered movie.