The House of Fitzcarraldo Project

The source materials, as it now stands for THE HOUSE OF FITZCARRALDO, include the following:

CONQUESTS OF THE USELESS -Werner Herzog
ALL I NEED IS LOVE - Klaus Kinski
THE CINEMA OF WERNER HERZOG- Brad Prager
FITZCARRALDO: THE ORIGINAL STORY -Werner Herzog

The following films:

FITZCARRALDO- Herzog
BURDEN OF DREAMS
MY BEST FIEND: KLAUS KINSKI

The following songs:

"Fitzcarraldo" - The Frames
"Sudsy" - James Brown
The Cheesy Theme song from the film Fitzcarraldo
"To Dream the Impossible Dream" from Man of LaMancha (I see an frustrated and sweaty Brady Blevins trying to belt this at the audience with such anger.)

ENTRY 1:
Chapter 1 & 2 from Klaus Kinsk's memoir All I Need is Love.

Klaus Kinski's memoir is asinine. (Il ike that word. If anything this project is a study in the commital to the asinine.) I have read numerous reviews that suggest the entire book is a lie, a flight of fancy. But in reading it, how could it be anything but? His ridiculous, often grotesquely fantastic images, as a disgustingly poor child in 1930's Germany - bringing up rancid images of shit-water baths in the street, biting off the notes of a scroungy deranged mutt,sexual encoutners with his mother and sister. And later in his life, the constant and brutal sexual encounters with EVERY single woman he meets.

I do not see these as some longing perversion on his part, at least it's not as interesting as what I want to think: that it is not some more deeply rooted metaphor for his insanity in this ficticious memoir.

He writes: "My mother takes everything off in front of me. Her panties, too. Then she goes to the bed. 'Come to me,' is all she says.' For three days bombs blow the house all around to pieces."

Thris trim paragraph that closes Chapter 1 took my breath away.

These sexual trists are metaphors for the extremes he lived, whether real or imagined. This is what fascinates me so much about this larger than life individual - this man that Werner Herzog made a documentary about, My Best Fiend.

For instance, he on the battlefield during WWII for two days before he was taken as a prisoner of war - his memoir does not reflect this truth, or untruth. We get a story of him wandering aimlessly on the German front, trying to eat a live cow, and yes, fucking nearly everyone he comes in contact with.

Does truth really matter at all?

It is as if he is truly making it up as he goes along. I wish I could commit to my imagination in this way - without censor, any kind of censor in the representation on a thing.

These lies, these constructions, these imagined realities are of him. We are not seeing the man, we are seeing of the man I believe.


Some quotes that have stood out in the first two chapters that might find their way on stage:

"A person might think that I only lie around in bed and pass my time fucking. -That's not true. I often seclude myself from other people for weeks at a time, lock myself into my room, and don't even go out onto the street. During this time I do my voice exercises, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Or all night."

-"What an honor," teases the meat inspector, making his rounds in the clinic, "to have such a great actor with us." I kick him in the balls.

-Why am I a whore? I need love! Always! And I want to give love, because I have so much of it to give. No one understands that I want nothing from my whoring arond but to love.

-I have to paint. I must express myself. Not like actors and pensioners or politicians do. It's mania. Obsession. An urgency, just like a pregnant woman having to give birth...I know that everything about life is erotic, everything that lives. I sculpt as well. Then I smash and tear everything up and burn it all.

-I never think of death. I haven't even begun to live.

Wow.