Nihilism and Nightlights

In December 1984, when I was 21 and just seven months out of Mills College, I got what was supposed to be a six-week temp job at Apple Computer testing word processing software for Macintosh computers. I’d beta tested software on an early Lisa computer (the Mac’s big sister) when I worked as a Jill-of-all-trades at a computer consulting firm during and after college, so a friend at Apple thought I might be a good fit. I figured it would be a good stopgap job on the way to a career as a writer or museum curator. What I thought would be a short career hiccup grew into 7-1/2 years at Apple, first as a software test engineer and later as an R&D division newsletter editor.

While being a software test engineer was fun and enlightening and it let me play with cool prototypes for fab new products, what I really wanted to do was write, so during my months as a temp I also wrote ad copy, software documentation, humor pieces and film reviews on the side. I wrote reviews not only for actual films but also for films that existed only in my imagination. One night during the first week of my time at Apple, I got an idea for what I thought could be a funny little film review parody and I came up with a couple of ridiculous ideas for foreign films, then reviewed the fictional movies as if I were the most pompous film reviewer around. I typed up my little piece, edited it and printed it out within the course of a couple of hours. It flowed more easily than just about anything else I’ve written since. The next morning it still looked funny to me, so I decided I’d send it to The San Francisco Chronicle to see whether they might like to put it in the Sunday Punch, their popular arts and entertainment section, in the space they usually saved for humor pieces on the flipside of Herb Caen’s legendary column. Had I thought about the paper’s 750,000-reader Sunday circulation figures or the facts that I was right out of college with a background in history and art history and no journalism background, I might have been daunted. But I was 21 and my youthful belief in endless possibilities saved me from such fears, so I popped my little parody in the mailbox and drove to my supposed six-week job at Apple to crash the MacWrite application as fiercely and often as I could.

A few days later, Rosalie Muller Wright, then the Chronicle’s managing editor of Features and later the editor-in-chief of Sunset Magazine, called to tell me they liked it and would like to publish it. My first attempt at publication was accepted at a big-deal metro paper just like that. It was clear to me that this writing for publication business was much easier than everyone said it would be. (If only all my subsequent efforts could have been as popular with editors.)

Ms. Wright passed my work along to Peter Sussman, who was an editor at the Chronicle for 29 years and went on to teach journalism at Stanford and to become an important writer and editor of articles and books about California’s criminal justice system. He became my editor. I had no idea that my little parody would let me work under two such impressive and important journalists. Mr. Sussman edited my piece, calling me with small but excellent suggestions for changes, and I got my check for $50. I was hooked. It had all been so easy that I sent them another parody funnier than the first to see what would happen. They liked it so much, they offered me the chance to write a series of parody reviews. I grabbed the chance with both hands and wrote one a month for six months. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.

My favorite of the six parodies was the second one, “Nihilism and Nightlights.” Here it is.

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Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, “Ciao Chow Chow,” and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, “Nightlight.”

Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.

Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.

These influences can be seen clearly in “Ciao Chow Chow,” in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.

“Ciao” is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.

Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.

Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s “Nightlight” tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.

Filmed in black and white, “Nightlight” captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.

De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include “The Teddy Bear with No Face,” Scream, Barbie, Scream” and “Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids,” in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.

“Nightlight,” the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of “Murder on the Trampoline.”

Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of “The Music Man.”