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Tom Noonan Tries to Figure Out What Happened
“It wasn’t really a breakdown. I started to get all these symptoms—I felt stressed out, I was really tired all the time.”
Tom Noonan, the actor best known for his roles as principal bad guy in Last Action Hero and F/X, is remembering the “breakdown” that led to his writing What Happened Was..., the low-key, two-person play he first produced for his own Paradise Theater in New York, and that he made into a film of the same name.
“I’d always said I was going to write something about what I really feel,” he continues. “But when I sat down two years ago I didn’t know anymore. I’d spent time doing something I didn’t really love. I got sick, it was more of a physical thing. I started having these weird twitching feelings, my ears were ringing all the time. So that kind of precipitated a change in my life, and the end result was writing the script.”
This was late May, a Saturday morning, at the Sheraton Hotel in Seattle. He had flown in from New York where, two days before, his most recent play Wifey had won an Obie. What Happened Was... (his first feature) was playing to capacity crowds at the Seattle International Film Festival; in February it won the Grand Jury Prize as well as the Waldo Salt Award for screenwriting at the Sundance Film Festival.
Noonan is a huge man, 6’5” or 6’6”, and much more physically present in a room than the sepulchral figure he cuts in What Happened Was... would lead you to believe.
He describes himself as an old hippie who dropped out of college after hearing The Grateful Dead one night, and like his character, Michael, he has spent periods of his life watching “way too much TV.” Yet here is clearly no slacker, and his soft and curious voice is one that has been to some school. He wore a Last Action Hero jacket (“I have great affection for John McTiernan, so I don’t mind wearing this jacket”), and an overgrown Robert Altman beard, and he seemed relaxed and surprised that his little movie had gotten such positive reaction both at Sundance and the Seattle Film Festival.
“I had no idea this was going to happen to me. I was lucky I got in Sundance, I was barely accepted, and I barely got it in on time.” He financed What Happened Was... with his own money ($100,000), all of which went into film stock, set design and things you see on the screen. Panavision donated the camera because they liked the script, and Karen Sillas (from Hal Hartley’s Simple Men), who plays opposite him, worked for free, as did the film crew. All of the post-production cutting and editing work was done in his East Village apartment in New York on his own equipment.
Noonan said that he did not set out to write a play that would become a film. He did not foresee doing anything, really, beyond writing a play about small details and seeing where it would go as an exploration of “the dreams, fantasies and nightmares [that] people . . . keep hidden underneath their prescribed identities.”
He wrote the original play, he said, in 10 days, after hearing about a friend’s brother who went to a woman’s apartment, not realizing that it was a “date,” with all of the expectations and baggage that go into that particular social institution. The film is being marketed as a comedy of manners, about “a mismatched couple” on a “painfully nervous and awkward first date at her apartment” (I am quoting from the press kit); that’s probably true enough if you pass by the film on horseback at night in a drizzle. Sit through more than the credit sequence, however, which begins with an overhead “crime scene” shot of Jackie sprawled across her bed, and you know this will be film about a date in the way that The Return of Martin Guerre is a film about 15th century French peasants. It aims to put all the twitching feelings that presage collapse into a context of syntactic as well as synaptic disconnection. All those details that Noonan wanted to get down, that he gets down, begin to shift the film into a liminal, edge-of-night place where two people talking takes on all the characteristics of a fevered dream.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Lewis on 2/23/11 at 7:12 am
Directed by tom noonan with tom noonan, karen sillas 1 as this ‘first date’ plays out, the audience is realizing her feelings that she had for him, and tries.
cheap hotels | cheap handbags- Comment by Lewis on 2/23/11 at 7:15 am
Tom noonan watch movies online from tom noonan for free 150031 peggy noonan tries hard to impress that she is now a solutions to what i still can t figure out ) isn i thought that tom ashbrook brought out a side to her that was. Peggy noonan wbur and npr discount shoes on point with tom ashbrook she takes a pathetic cake out of a box, tries to tuck her hair into “what happened was “ starring tom Go Seeq Search Engines noonan and karen sillas directed by tom noonan.
- Comment by Fun Online Games on 4/19/11 at 12:35 pm
Hitchcock was a great director because he was so different making his movies unique.
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- Comment by alarabforum on 6/18/11 at 4:40 pm
Hitchcock was a great director because he was so different making his movies unique. Technical revolution
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This story was published in the November 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Tom Noonan Takes a Night Job / Financed with his own money, What Happened Was... has become another 1994 indie success story.
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