If you had asked documentary filmmaker, Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers what he was working on in the 1980's or '90's, he would have told you, a movie about the place where he grew up, Wainscott. When he died of cancer in July 2001, that decades-old project remained in an attic in numerous boxes marked “windmill.” While we will never know how Dick Rogers would have assembled his material, a completed film, “The Windmill Movie” is now playing at Film Forum, preceded by his short film “Quarry” (1970). A fascinating narrative of Dick Rogers' life, “The Windmill Movie,” formed of the unfinished footage, excerpts from completed work, Super 8 home movies by Rogers' father, and new interviews, fulfills the post-college plan of his former student, director and necktie mogul, Alexander Olch, and the wish to ensure Rogers' legacy for the producer, his longtime partner, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, who he married as his illness progressed.
     Using his mentor's footage of Wainscott, Olch said when his movie premiered at the 2008 New York Film Festival: “A film about the beaches at Georgica is inherently a lot less interesting than a film about Richard P. Rogers. Incredibly charming, funny and intelligent, Dick had to be the center.” Olch melds Rogers's footage with the story of his own process in working with oftentimes confusing, conflicting material, or filling in the gaps. Onscreen interviews with Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban are attempts to tell Rogers' story with actors, but ultimately, “There was nothing like the raw power of seeing this guy pointing a camera at himself in the mirror,” said Olch. A young Richard P. Rogers thus confronts himself: “This is a cliché, the stock material of a personal documentary. Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” he asks. An experimental filmmaker, a documentarian for PBS, with little interest in Hollywood, his career angst sets in: why isn't he Steven Spielberg. And the burden of his WASP upbringing: So privileged, so rich, so white: “Isn't it infuriating to bitch in the

Hamptons?”
    

Bitching in Paris, Tangier, San Francisco or anywhere was never a problem for Brooklyn-born poe Harold Norse, who died last week at age 92 in his Mission neighborhood. Often associated with the beat literati, Norse, who was also associated with W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, lived at The Beat Hotel, that is, 9 Git-le-Coeur near the Seine in the early '60's when Brion Gysin famously invented the cut-up, a collage technique for writing perfected by William S. Burroughs. His own cut-up novel is called “Beat Hotel.” You can read about his unusual life in his “Memoirs of a Bastard Angel.” Lovable and curmudgeonly, Norse will be missed.

Regina Weinreich