The clip is only one minute and six seconds long, and was uploaded on September 11, 2012 by someone calling themselves guysintrouble. A young Alec Baldwin is being led in handcuffs through a hallway with two guards and his female lawyer, played by Stephanie Zimbalist, an actress I have never heard of or seen before.
The guards lead them into a room where there is a table, some chairs, a glass ashtray, a sad empty bookshelf and a painting of Abraham Lincoln. As Baldwin is pushed into a chair, and Zimbalist puts her briefcase on the table, one of the guards stands by the door, while the other looks around. He opens another door, turns on a light and walks in.
Meanwhile Baldwin and Zimbalist look at each other, both with overdone expressions of concern.
Baldwin then shouts:
You looking for Boogeymen?
(Why do I feel like this is a phrase that I’ll never forget?)
We cut to the guard, who is examining the stalls in what we now see is a bathroom.
Then back we go to gratuitous close-ups of Baldwin and Zimbalist, this time shown individually, each looking uncomfortable.
The guard reappears in the doorway of the bathroom and smart Alec says:
I could use those facilities if you don’t mind.
To which the guard retorts:
Well, come on. I’ll keep you company.
Baldwin stands up and moves over to the bathroom door, the guard unlocks his handcuffs, with an unsubtle close-up of the act of unlocking, signifying, not doubt, the impending prospect of the prisoner’s planned escape.
Then both men head into to the bathroom and the clip ends.
The TV movie from which this brief clip is taken Love on the Run, aired on NBC on October 21, 1985, and was based on a true story, the breakout of 35 year-old William T. Kirk with the aid of his 26-year old lawyer Mary Evans. Kirk was serving a 65-year sentence at the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee. He had just been charged, along with six other white inmates, with shooting and killing two black prisoners and wounding four others, and Evans helped him escape.
In an article for The New York Times (‘TV Film “Love” Altered after Threat of Lawsuit”) published before the film was aired, Stephen Farber notes how:
the threat of a lawsuit was one of the factors that encouraged the network to change the story from a docudrama to a fictitious melodrama.
Farber then describes the following changes in a section of the article called “Truth and Fiction”:
In the television film, which is scheduled to be shown in the fall season, the characters are called Diana Rockland and Sean Carpenter, and the story takes place in Ohio rather than Tennessee. These are among the many additional distinctions between truth and fiction: In the real case, Mary Evans arranged for a psychiatric interview for Mr. Kirk and then pulled out a gun in the psychiatrist’s office; in the film she leaves the gun in the bathroom of the courtroom where he is to appear at a preliminary hearing.
Ah, so that is why they are so nervous as the guard looks around the bathroom, I should have guessed! Farber continues:
In reality the prison murders Mr. Kirk was charged with grew out of racial tensions at Bushy Mountain State Prison, but that element was eliminated from the television movie.
In a dismissive review of the film, also in The New York Times (“TV Reviews; NBC’s “Love on the Run”), John J. O’Connor gives a more explicit account of the rationale for this latter change from fact to fiction:
And of course, he really did kill another inmate, but it was done in self-defense.
This was not the ‘well-planned execution’ of black inmates that Kirk was guilty of in Tennessee (as described by Steve Holland in his article from February 1982 about the prison murders – “Racial Conflict Leads to “Well-Planned Execution”). But of course, such a racist truth wouldn’t have made it onto NBC and its romantic break-out drama.
This whitewashing of the true story by TV fiction, however, was not what guided me to watch the short clip of Love on the Run, but knowing that it was filmed in Columbus, Ohio, with some scenes at the abandoned Ohio Pen. As Wikipedia tells me:
After the closure of the Ohio Penitentiary in 1984, the building stood vacant for more than a decade, though it was used as a training site for a time by the Ohio National Guard, was briefly known as “The Demon Pen” for Halloween festivities, and attracted a number of urban explorers. The building also served as the setting for the 1985 made-for-TV movie “Love on the Run“, starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Alec Baldwin.
I have no idea where exactly the scene in the clip was filmed, whether it was inside the Pen or elsewhere in Columbus, but I watched it, somewhat gratuitously, imagining I was seeing the inside of the prison, paying attention to details (that sad bookshelf) that I would otherwise have ignored if I knew for sure it was not the abandoned Pen.
The reason for my doing this and for my attention to such otherwise insignificant details, was inspired by watching another film which I knew for sure was filmed inside the ruined Pen: In and Around the Ohio Pen by Jason Simon. Simon’s 2014 eleven minute work, filmed in 1990 using Super 8 and transferred to HD video, included a soundtrack of legendary French filmmaker Chris Marker playing the piano, given to the artist in 1995.
On watching it, I wrote the following email to Bill Horrigan, who then worked with Simon at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, and who is still the Curator at Large at the same place. Horrigan appears as himself in the film, first traipsing through the open courtyard and then exploring the inside of the abandoned building. I wrote to Horrigan before I watched the clip of Love on the Run, yet there were some elements of my response to In and Around the Ohio Pen that seemed to chime with elements of that other film, and its scene set I imagined being set inside the Ohio Pen:
Around half way through the film, and its only recognizable dialogue (aside from the end where you seem to be reading some graffiti), you say “its our future…incarceration”. This curious statement (was there any context that you recall?) seemed to me to interrupt two broad ways visitors could engage with a ruin, especially a ruin that has been a site of oppression of some kind, like a prison. On the one hand, a visitor to a ruin may find themselves enacting a kind of reactivation of the space in terms of those who occupied it in the past (for the prison, it would presumably be mainly the lives and living conditions of the inmates, rather than the guards). At the same time, a visitor to a ruin may also relish the difference between their experience and the past lives of the place and do things that may seem to them mildly subversive (albeit from a secure distance) as an expression of their own freedom as not confined to the roles and lives of those who were once (imprisoned) there. I’m thinking here about the way the film both lingers over remnants of the prison’s inhabitants (graffiti, a lone shoe etc) and their living spaces (e.g. bathrooms, the dining room etc) at the same time as the jaunty Marker piano music and the somewhat stagy actions of the visitors (e.g. you throwing a brick, taking photos etc), where the latter seem in sharp contrast to and a lightening of the mood of the burden of the past lives that were imprisoned there before. I guess what I’m getting around to asking is, for want of a better way of expressing this, what are the ethics of the transformation of a site of oppression (e.g. a prison) into a work of art? Wherein the latter, must in some way be an expression of freedom, but can it also set down a marker for specific human suffering as much as a (much needed) respite from it?
Looking at them both now, Simon’s film and the clip of Love on the Run, uploaded by menintrouble, are both dominated by their musical soundtracks. The brief exchanges of the guard and Baldwin, and the fevered looks between lawyer and client, are held together by a suspenseful synth soundtrack. At the same time, Marker’s recovered piano music marks a change in tone and tempo of the action, as we move from the walls and courtyard of the prison, to the inside, halfway through the short film. Furthermore, the two snatches of dialogue that stayed with me (Horrigan’s Its our future…incarceration and Baldwin’s You looking for Boogeymen?) made me think of the way the site of the prison – as functioning institution and as ruin – holds a haunting place within our cultural imagination. Even when we are encountering works of art or other fictionalized representations of prison life and culture, we find ourselves dwelling on our own mortality and the passing of time. In other words, we are not only back with Chester Himes’ alter ego, listening to the bass notes of the youth as the prison is engulfed in flames, whether read in 1934, 1953 or 1998, but also with Chris Marker’s own cinematic odyssey’s into both the past and the future, and the ruins he found in both.
We will turn to Marker in tomorrow’s episode of Our Local Debt of Time. Don’t go anywhere!