Dear Mr. Hockney,
It is a great honor for me to have
the opportunity to write to you.
In the purest sense, I think
that you are world class.
Like yourself, I believe that a new
way of seeing is a new way of feeling,
and that the greatest art
reaches beyond the initiated.
The vehicle for the spirit of urgency and
intensity which occupies my being is drawing.
I worked standing up, using sharp instruments
while under twenty power magnification.
My portrait is of a human figure.
This portrait took eight years and five
months of full-time work to complete.
I finished at 4:30 PM, January 2, 2003.
And Dr. Gary Vikan, Brother Rene Sterner
and I would love to show it to you.
Respectfully yours,
Billy Pappas
Today is the sixth of
October, it's Wednesday...
and, I'm on my way up to New
York to see Lawrence Weschler.
He is a former twenty-year
veteran of The New Yorker.
He is also the director of the
Department of Humanities at NYU.
What's so good for me is that he is a close
friend, champion and collaborator with David Hockney.
He's my one and only goal
to get me to the next level.
I've got Marilyn in the trunk and...
...I'm on my way up
there to show it to him.
It all came about the time right
as I graduated from art school.
I was in my mid-twenties...
there were some ideas
I had about life...
and...
I was a waiter at a restaurant.
I had always been in
the restaurant business.
Busboy.
Bartender.
People who've gone to art school,
what are they doing now?
I didn't want to wake up one day
and be well into middle age and say,
"I wonder what would have happened if
I had done what I thought I could do?"
I knew that I had to change from what I
was doing, but I wasn't sure exactly how.
I'm Dr. Lifestyle, Larry Link.
Actually, Lawrence J. Link, please.
I'm an architect, I think.
Actually, advisor to people.
I deal in fantasy.
I feel like I come kind of obliquely from
another place, not really the art world.
I know more about nature,
I know more about music,
than I do about perhaps
the history of what I do.
I needed someone to kind of cross my path,
and just take their finger and just give me
a good hard poke right below my throat.
Accident? Fate? Karma? Kismet?
Grand intent design, everything was
pre-planned, it was ordained by the stars!
This man, I thought, was clearly insane.
Sorry about that.
But, I liked where we were going.
I mean, he's my guy.
OK, fast rewind. Balaloop.
He was a waiter in a restaurant, and
he asked me what I wanted for dinner.
I found out he was an artist, a fine artist, which
is the way I was trained, as a fine architect.
I was like, "Hi, you do
things with pencil. Wonderful."
So we started a dialogue, we started to talk,
we started to say, "Let's have lunch." No.
OK. Take two. Click.
We would have these coffee sessions
and we would be scheming,
and just trying to think big.
What's the state of the
art? Well, photography?
Digital photography?
Sometimes his ideas were bigger than
mine. I thought, "Oh, that's cool."
I didn't think of that.
Wouldn't you want to just make
something that couldn't be reproduced?
He would dare me, he would one-up me.
Why don't we make reality
better than reality?
I thought, OK, I always was
really good at getting likenesses.
I mean, that's something that not
everyone can do well. I can do it well.
Billy, you're going to do a portrait.
It's going to set the
art world on its ear.
I need a mission, and
I had one, with this.
We're doing the next major
art movement in America.
When Pete Townsend was
first starting his band,
he asked this fellow Jim Marshall
to design a speaker for him.
He wanted something louder.
He said, "Here, I designed this. It's much
louder. It's the loudest thing I've ever designed."
So, he listens to it.
He's like, "How is it?"
He said, "It's perfect."
"Except, I want it ten times louder."
"I want it to sound like a machine gun. I
want to hurt people. You know, that loud."
And that's kind of where
my head was with drawing.
I wanted to make a portrait that has
the attention-commanding capability
of a bombastic live performance.
I wanted to do something unprecedented,
to prove how much more
there is to see and describe.
Precision.
It was in my mind to make
DaVinci, and Ingres, and Durer say,
"Holy Shit! You drew that?"
I wanted to make a fucking traffic-stopping
portrait that hit you like a punch.
I was thinking about
taking a very famous person
and trying to bring that famous face
something it couldn't otherwise have.
So, we're throwing around the names
of all these famous, famous people:
Elvis Presley.
Jack Nicholson.
Doris Day.
Fred Astaire.
Jimi Hendrix.
Liz Taylor.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe?
Well, she'll live probably
forever in everybody's mind.
Fabulous. The ultimate.
I found this picture of Marilyn.
I loved the photograph of Marilyn.
I was attracted to the fact that it was
blurry, it was out of focus. It was detached.
I can bring something to it
doesn't have. I can do better.
He pointed to the photograph
and looked up at me and he said,
"Can you bring that..."
"...THIS?"
This isn't in the dictionary.
"Can you bring this..."
"...presence."
At that moment, when you
said that, that was it.
The game was on.
I've gone over this short list
of things like fifty times, but...
...it's always something.
This is fine.
OK?
OK. All set?
Yep, I'm ready to go.
Around 2:30, I expect
to get down to NYU.
Then, I expect to meet Mr.
Weschler around quarter to four.
I have exhibited once
before in New York,
I exhibited at the
Society of Illustrators.
Most people who would exhibit
at Society of Illustrators,
I think it would embolden
them and give them confidence
about their chances of
making it as an illustrator.
I exhibited at both of these shows and
basically concluded I
couldn't draw that well.
Some people call New York
the epicenter of the art world.
I've spent the last seven
years in as rural a place as,
as far removed from New York, it's the chicken
capital of the world where I live, you know.
It's the place where the man and the lady in Grant
Wood's 'American Gothic' painting really live.
Let's go to my office,
my place of employment.
This is, this is my studio.
I've always loved the windows. Every night,
the sunsets here are either a 9 or a 10.
Here, I... these are all just photos
of Marilyn that I would, would find helpful.
So I'd have, you know, neck
photos, nose photos, profile photos.
Then I went from the photos and
staged models to look like her.
And then models being myself.
I wanted to make it look as if she sat inches
away from me, giving me her complete cooperation.
To make her as alive as
she's been since she died.
Cause that's life drawing.
But how do you do that?
When you're going through the academic
experience of learning to draw the figure,
you become, sort of,
a slave to tradition.
For example, you're told
to see the hair as a shape.
Fair enough, that's what it is.
But it's also tens of thousands
of these little strands.
I'm the guy on the side saying,
"OK. I'm your cheerleader. I'm
the guy that's holding your hand."
So, I set out to draw
hair the way I see it,
the way we really see it.
Good. You're on the
right track. Keep going.
I would stare all day
at my hair in a mirror,
then I'd go pick up a
copy of Vogue', and...
then I'd come back and get my
mother or my sister to say, "Hey..."
"would you sit here a minute.
I just want to look at your hair."
I would stare all day at my hair in a mirror,
then I'd go pick up a copy of Vogue', and...
And then I'd go to my table and I'd have
a pencil in my hand and I'd be like...
And I'd go back and
look at some more hair.
I began to realize that I was about to
get involved with a
very big undertaking.
I need to put my full-time
existence into this,
or it will never get finished.
Some people are driven.
And some people have chauffeurs.
Larry and I discussed it and
he said, "Well, let's try this."
Billy needed the extra help to
driven a little bit, that's all.
So, every month he would give me an envelope
full of hundred dollar bills to keep me going.
And it was on the agreement that
I would give it back
when I could afford to.
So, I got my dream, which is to do this
project. And I got the backing to make it go.
But I realized that I had to teach myself how
to draw, practically all over again.
I had to totally break myself down,
and rebuild myself.
I had lip school...
teeth school...
not dentistry, this was 'teeth' school.
And there was a school
for each thing I did.
I wanted you to know that I knew,
that I really, really
knew what I was drawing.
We're doing something on new ground,
something that's beyond drawing.
Marilyn was 14 by 17.
But I worked within the area
of the period in the newspaper.
That's how small the area was.
I would say, "OK, that's light
enough, that's dark enough,
that is part of an edge, that is not...
move on to the next area."
On a good day, I would get
which would sometimes
take 15 hours to do.
This is where we're going.
We're on to something here.
The hair took 2 years.
That's 365 times 2. You get up, you
draw hair all day and you go to bed.
"How many marks have you made
today, Billy? What have you done?"
Imagine how some people who know
and love me felt who never saw it.
"He's been working
on what for how long?"
He would really go into hiding we would call
it, you know, that he's going underground.
And then when you see him, you know, "What
have you been doing for the last eight months?"
"Um, her right eye." And
you're like going "OK..."
People would say to me, "Well, what
is with Marilyn? You know, what?"
And I'd say, "Listen, you're
asking me? Don't ask me."
I said, "All I know is, picture somebody
working for 800 hours on a mouth."
"How can anybody work
for 800 hours on a mouth?"
I mean, my own friends didn't believe
what I had going on in my life this long.
"Oh, he's drawing Marilyn
Monroe." It just sounds too insane.
He was sitting there on Christmas
Eve, and he's going into detail
about drawing Marilyn's lips.
And he's so excited
that he's like, "Jeff...
"...I can make my lips look
exactly like Marilyn Monroe."
I'm having these pictures of him
being like this cross-dressing psycho,
and he's trying to tell me, you
know, this technical process.
And he's like, "Look man, what
an asshole you are." He goes,
"This is how committed I am to my art."
All of his girlfriends have
been brunettes, dark hair,
until he met Marilyn.
And now he's had an affair with
Marilyn for 10 years.
I mean, I started signing cards, you know,
"Merry Christmas. Love ya. Billy and Marilyn."
I've seen people who
work hard all my life.
But what he's done, is just, I, I
can't, sometimes I can't bear to watch it.
There were some days where I'd work
all day and I, I would I would do well.
But then the next day
I'd come to work and
there were times where I couldn't
quite notice what I did yesterday.
It was like spit in the ocean.
You know, even where he says, "I
only have the size of a dime left."
Well, you would think someone could
fill in the space of a dime in an hour.
Well, Billy, it would
take him two months.
I think only geology
moves slower than me,
when I'm doing my work, right? I mean,
hair grows faster than I draw,
trees grow faster, everything gro...
...everything happens faster except
maybe mountains forming or eroding.
I didn't come to this with,
with all the problems solved.
I came to it with an idea and
learned to ease the pain
I had in my body every day.
I tried to make sure Billy
didn't jump of the bridge
or take up another profession
like knitting or something.
The slings for my arms...
...I didn't start working this way I
would say till about four years into it.
And now I don't know how I held
my arms up like this for four years.
When he was doing Marilyn and
he was working on it for years,
you know, you're kind of waiting,
waiting, and waiting and uh,
it's like, you know, will
this thing ever happen?
Eight years. Eight years.
The guy could have graduated
from medical school by now.
I addressed every
single speck of that paper
with that kind of intensity and focus.
Billy is one of the most
rock-solid people I've ever met.
Billy is like a laser beam.
There were no down
moments in this thing.
Everything is 'hit it hard',
like my life depends on it.
Let's let everything go
to hell, except excellence.
Excellence at any cost.
Where it says 'NYU', Bill.
OK?
OK.
Hardly anyone even knows I finished
it. I haven't gone public with it yet.
That's where I am.
The work itself is complete.
Getting to the people to move it on, that's
critical, that's crucial, that's so important.
We need help from people.
Larry and I assembled my dream team.
Well there was myself.
Impresario, friend,
buddy, Dr. Lifestyle...
I'm just there.
My wife, Stephanie,
who is his archivist.
Basically to take notes
and take photographs.
I have the director of
a museum, Gary Vikan.
He's done an Olympic thing.
It is enormously,
technically sophisticated.
It is a way of demonstrating
how good you are.
And, Brother Rene is our administrator.
Brother Rene has the prestige of being
head of a very large private school.
Um, my experience with those people
are they are movers and shakers.
And uh, how, you know... he's done
this very unusual creative work...
and also to kind of, uh...
He has the infrastructure. He has the exper...
Yeah alright, it's only a high school, but...
there are a lot of powerful people sitting
behind the desks running high schools.
None of us is trained
for this Billy Pappas stuff.
Considering that everyone is helping
out because they care about me...
and because I asked them...
...begged,
I think we're doing really well.
Where do we want to take this?
Do we want to go to a gallery?
Do we want to go to an art dealer?
Do we want to go to a critic?
We were all thinking about
taking this to the next level and,
what's the next step...
I will give credit where credit
is due. Gary indicated he thought
Hockney should look at it.
You know the pieces are right. His
temperament is right. His mind is right.
Billy's thing is provocative.
He mentioned Hockney.
I thought it was brilliant.
He's David Hockney.
He's the rock star.
Hockney's an artist...
...and a very famous one.
I can't think of a better artist in
terms of a living, current artist.
He says so many things that
are right in front of my nose,
all of my life, but I never
really thought about it that way.
This guy, this Hockney person,
has constructed art history from at least
fourteen hundred to the twenty-first century.
He owns that.
What an icon to follow. Hangs out with the
best, hangs out with all the people to be.
After reading what I've read so
many times I've stopped and said,
"Damn, he's reading my mind."
You know, he has got to see this. He's almost
calling out for someone to do a piece like this.
I think he'll understand what this is.
David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney
David
Hockney
Hockney
David
Mr. Hockney
Hockney
Hockney
Hockney
Hockney
David
Hockney
David
Wow!
I think when Billy
unveils Marilyn Monroe,
I think David Hockney - after
he picks his jaw up off the floor-
is going to turn to Billy,
Gary, Brother Rene and say,
"What do you boys want with me?"
"You're showing me this great
piece. What do you want?"
I ultimately want David Hockney to
help me make a phone call to a man,
I want that man to respond
favorably to my work,
and hire me to do a commission.
In short, we had to
get Hockney's attention.
Hence, the pursuit.
Playing tag.
Intercontinental tag.
Is he in LA?
Is he traveling?
Is he in Norway?
Is he here?
Is he there?
He's everywhere.
He was the Scarlet Pimpernel.
That damned, elusive Pimpernel.
We started writing
letters in January of'03.
The first letter we sent
had a Zeiss lens in it.
That's something you don't
get in the mail every day.
The letters start to go to Hockney.
Wonderful.
No answer.
I'm like, OK, well, you know we'll
send another letter. So we did.
No response. Nothing.
Letter number three went
out with another lens.
We decide that we're
going to go over the top.
Billy decides to build
a magnifying glass.
This lens was about seven
feet long and three feet wide.
It was this big prop that I had made.
Just to get his attention. You know,
just to screw with the guy a little bit.
We mean business, we're stubborn
whatever. But, we weren't going away.
I'm thinking, "OK, well
should I hire a skywriter?"
I was seriously thinking
about these things.
But in the back of my mind I'm thinking,
"Well, what about Ren Weschler?"
He's done a book about Hockney,
and he's done essays about Hockney.
We need his entree.
We need his help.
We need him to make a
phone call that would go
right over the red tape factory
and get me an audience
with David Hockney.
I frequently get phone calls from people
telling me about people I have to meet.
And so I got one of those calls.
It was presented as somebody who had
been working on one drawing for ten years,
and that I had to see it.
I mean, it was an
enterprise of pure inquiry.
I had a series of questions:
Is it art?
Is it outsider art?
Is it the most ecstatic adventure in
the history of scientific illustration?
Is it insanity?
I mean, on some level,
that's what I write about:
Complete,
over-the-top nuttiness.
I'm the kind of guy who
cries when he's happy.
Ah, it was great.
It was one pitch, you know, and in my
mind, I had to hit a homerun or I was out.
And, I think I hit one.
He said something that no one else has,
which was very, very important to me,
and that was, "You drew the
mammal. You drew the human mammal."
And it's like "Yes! That's what I did."
So I'm just very relieved
because this is...
another dream come true...
another step taken...
and I'm...
closer to being home.
Hi Mom, it's Billy.
No, I'm not trying to
give you a heart attack.
It was like taking an
exam and getting an 'A'.
You know, that...
that's, that's how I felt.
And then, and then he said to me,
"So what you want to do about David?"
That's exactly what he said.
"So what you want to do about David?"
In October of 2004, we had heard
from Ren Weschler, a friend of ours,
that he had encountered this boy
named Billy Pappas from Baltimore
who'd done this incredible drawing that he
thought David would have great interest in.
From the sound of it, it sounded like,
"Oh my God! This is the greatest drawing
that's been done in the twentieth century."
And if somebody like Ren
Weschler is recommending it,
who's followed David's
work for twenty odd years,
it must be something.
So I think we had a very curious,
very optimistic anticipation
for what we were going to see.
Hello Mr. Hockney?
Hi, this is Billy Pappas.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, whenever it is most convenient.
I was thinking sometime between...
or, in around three weeks...
somewhere around there?
Yes.
OK, and Mr. Hockney,
is it OK if I bring Gary Vikan and
Brother Rene along since they've been
sort of...
OK, great.
Alright, well thank you so
much, I look forward to it.
OK. Bye.
We got it!
Billy was the second.
The first one was his
older sister, Gereese.
You know how they tell you
babies are all beautiful? Wrong.
She was very skinny
and sunken-in cheeks.
Billy was born nineteen months later,
and I can still remember I was in
the hospital and they wheeled him in.
And I was coming out of the
anesthesia and I looked and I said,
"That's not my baby."
You know, and they said, "Yes it is."
I said, "It can't be my baby."
He, he was gorgeous.
When he was maybe six
or seven months old,
you know, my mother-in-law,
God rest her soul
she was on the couch and she
was rocking him back and forth
and she says, "Cook," in
that little Irish brogue,
"you know, he's something
special. He's very special."
Billy is such an emotional, sensitive,
sweet person for everything on earth,
that he, he's just been
waiting for this so long...
I just can't wait.
Waiting, waiting, waiting...
the big day is here.
The most I've ever drawn is Little Lulu.
That was about it.
I'm not artistic at all.
I sprayed starch.
Little, little stuff, little things came
out and as I ironed they got crust...
Where's the shirt? I'll do it.
...crusted, and pressed into the...
Oh glory be to God, I'm going down.
Cake mix, the sugar, the oil.
There goes the poppy seeds.
Billy?
Yeah.
Oh, glory be to God. I have your shirt.
OK, with this shirt...
The black pants, of course.
Right off the bat.
Yeah, I like this one
with the blue shirt.
Right. Right.
Julia Childs, I'm not.
You know what you are seeing?
Probably not. since
you're color blind.
Because this is olive. What
colors are you looking at?
It looks grey. Do you
know this is green?
Grey.
It's green. Oh, Mary
and Joseph... it's green.
Dear Mr. Hockney,
Just a line to let you know how
thrilled and happy I am, as Billy's mum,
to have you meet with him.
It has been his dream and mine as well
for you to see this for many years.
Since I cannot be there,
I wish I could be a fly on a wall today,
please enjoy a cup of tea with a
piece of my favorite cake to make.
You know, my favorite cake to
make, not my favorite cake to eat.
I'd rather have strawberry shortcake.
You know my, my parents
love us all to death.
If you judge a parent by how
much they love their children,
they're the best parents in the world.
But they are not artists.
They don't come from the art world.
My family owned a pizza business.
I was the maverick.
He started this very early in his life.
He always had something special about himself
in terms of the way he went about his art.
When he would do these
drawings, he'd walk in
and most of the kids come in, "I'm doing
this, I need help with this project or..."
And he'd walk in - a couple
of times now, not just once -
he came in and he showed us the
thing and we're about to say,
"Oh gee, this is wonderful."
And he would rip it up.
And it was gone. And I'd say, "Billy?"
I have a great family. I love my family.
I could tell that they care about
me but they didn't quite get it.
You'd like your son to be a lawyer or a doctor
or something that you can kind of rationalize it
to where he would make a good
living, have a decent life,
uh, contribute to mankind, you know.
I felt like in order to kind
of win their credibility
there was this unspoken, you
know, I can't just be an artist,
with modest success.
I'm... I've got to be, I've got
to try and be Michelangelo here.
Or, or not Michelangelo but Rembrandt.
I'll pick on him.
This is how I'm going to
work on the next one I do.
The first pair I borrowed
were twice as powerful here,
and I put them on and my heartbeat
kept making the camera shake.
Wow. Glory be...
So, so I called them back and I said
"These, the magnification's great,
but my heart beat is
getting in the way."
She said, "Excuse me sir but, what
are you doing with these things?" So...
Until he told me about
David Hockney, I said,
"You know, nobody's
going to appreciate this."
And I, and I don't know
anything about the art world
but I would like Hockney to be the one,
because I think he knows the secret.
"You know, no one is
going to appreciate this."
Cook! We gotta go.
Let's go. I want to go.
Mom, I wanna leave. Mom, let's go.
OK.
Scotch tape.
Alright. Here you, you can carry this.
Hockney, here we come.
Next stop: LA.
Why do you want to put her in the
back in case he gets rear ended?
Alright. Nervous?
I love you.
Just cause I'm not smiling, you know...
Alright.
I'm smiling on the inside. OK, kid.
Thanks, Dad.
Knock 'em dead.
Bye. Bye bye. Take care. I will.
Alright that's it. OK,
kid. Have a great trip.
Bye Billy.
Wave bye-bye.
To me, Billy is still a little kid.
If I thought this would change Billy,
I wouldn't give you two
cents for the whole thing.
Because Billy is Billy and
I don't want Billy to change.
And I don't want him to
change by being hurt by Hockney
and I don't want him to change by
him being a great success either.
He has a ticket to ride. He's taking
his, I'm not going to say 'entourage'...
I'm not going to even say his 'posse'...
I'm going to say his, um...
support group.
Why shouldn't I go?
I guess the flip side to
that is: Why should I go?
Ignition sequence start...
Everything's been done.
The foundations are poured.
The rockets have been lined up.
The paint's up.
The programs are all in place.
The fabrics are ordered.
The missiles are set.
The drapes have been hung
by the chimney with care.
The buttons have been pushed.
The house is complete.
They're off to the moon.
Launch commit. Liftoff. We have liftoff.
Mr. Pappas, which ones
are your bags please?
This one. The black one?
That's all. This one right
here. Just, just this one?
Just that one. Let me give
you a bag tag on this one.
OK.
I'm Billy Pappas.
Billy, nice to meet
you. Nice to meet you.
Has that ever been
through an x-ray before?
No.
Well, if it doesn't fit,
they're gonna want to open it.
That's fine.
And we can request a
private area, if you want,
to do that. That would be fine.
We're just going to hang
out here for a few minutes.
If you don't mind? No.
I'm...
It's the Chris Burden piece,
'Through the Night Darkly'
where he crawls through
glass. Do you know that piece?
No.
No, I'm sorry.
Do you know Chris Burden?
No, I don't. I'm sorry.
Just like any undertaking, right,
you have your moments of doubt.
I mean you can really get paranoid
if you think about it too much.
You know, "Oh yeah you're an artist."
"Well you don't look like an
artist, you look like a bartender."
'Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston
Exchange Business Cards'
Do you know that piece?
No, I don't.
And he made a book
called 'Business Cards'.
It is one of the rarest
of Ed Ruscha's books.
Think of how dumb Marilyn kept me.
You know, when you make a
choice, you rule out infinity.
And there I was working
on her all that time.
Most great artists are prolific.
They generate a lot of work.
So, who am I to be working
all these years on one thing.
Are my priorities all screwed up?
You know, who's the idiot here, because the
days are going by you can't get them back.
Better be a hell of a drawing Pappas.
Do you know if Hockney
likes poppyseed cake?
The idea of the cake? I think he would.
I think he'll like it because I
think he was very close to his mother.
He was. And I think if
you look at the pictures
that he took of his mother...
I think that he will think
it's a gracious gesture.
I feel like some organ
of my body is hanging out
and I gotta get it tucked
in. I, I feel exposed.
She's never been this
far from where I made her,
and she's never been in a plane and...
just carrying around, just
carrying your life in this box.
You know, you can't copy
it. You can't down load it.
I mean, it's what it is.
That's it. It's everything.
One piece of paper.
I mean, I'm human.
I have doubts sometimes, where I'm like,
"Is the joke on me?"
What is life about anyway, I mean,
I think life is about love and passion.
And, I'm a social animal.
I'm not this whacko who can
stand being by myself.
It... I never got used to it.
It was always work. And it always hurt.
I mean, this fucking drawing took
me one hundred and one months.
So, it's got to be extra
special to make it go.
It has to justify the
sacrifice, justify the effort.
It has to. It has to be that...
enormous.
Hi, this is Gordon Edes
of The Boston Globe...
Ah... imagine after
eighty-six years, The Red Sox
have finally done what a... a lot of
people had given up on them ever doing.
Well, as Curt Schilling said,
"The St. Louis Cardinals had
one shot at Pedro Martinez..."
"...and they missed."
Waiting and waiting.
Another few hours.
If he only knew what
he's putting me through.
How are you today, Billy?
Oh, I'm feeling just fine.
I slept a little. Dreamt a little.
It's Cookie.
Tell him I'm going to kill him
because he didn't call last night.
At 3 o'clock in the morning, I said,
"My God, Jim. How do I know
the plane didn't crash?"
How do I know blah, blah, blah?"
I know he's OK now because
we called the airport.
We're going over at eleven, so we're
going to leave about, I think, ten.
OK.
And, uh it'll be you, Gary, and
Brother Rene, and myself. Three of us.
And my 'wife' over here.
So, this is a huge crescendo
for you as a human being.
Yeah, it's huge.
And it's a chancy one, I mean,
Did he sleep well last night?
Does he have an appointment
at eleven forty-five?
Is he irritated by an
ingrown toenail, who knows?
Right, right. Because... I don't, I don't
know how hard he laughs, when he laughs.
I don't know how his voice
changes when he's excited.
But, but I'm hoping somehow, I can tell.
Good afternoon, TNS Health
Care. May I help you? Hi Jana.
Hold on. Tanisha. It's Lois.
We should have all been there.
That really is. We should
have all been there. Hold on.
Good afternoon. Hey...
Hello?
Lois, hold on.
Tanisha, what are you doing?
Hello? God bless you,
I almost hung up on you.
I tell you, my nerves...
this is not a good idea today.
This poor guy that works for
Pfizer, one of my biggest companies,
I've just hung up on him twice.
My mother is a nervous wreck.
She's praying for everybody twenty-four
hours a day and worrying and never sleeping.
That's basically the way she is.
Charming day, a charming
day... God help me.
If I could exist without
sleep the way my mother does,
I would have like three
of these finished by now.
Did you have some poppyseed cake?
Please, just... since it's in the back,
it's going to be more responsive
to bumps and twists and stuff,
so just try and drive...
drive like you're 80 years old please.
It's a beautiful day.
People wear sunglasses indoors... here.
I wonder if palm trees are indigenous
to LA or were they all planted?
There's a saying that
"No one in LA is from LA."
Anyone heard that?
Uh huh.
I just realized, I need dust
masks. I forgot them again.
That'll be my ice-breaker line. "Hi,
Mr. Hockney. Do you have dust masks?"
Good afternoon, TNS
Healthcare. May I help you?
Glory be to God. How are you?
My nerves are shot.
And let me clue you in.
Well, at least... Oh
shoot. He forgot the masks?
This is not... Alright,
I love you too. Goodbye.
Hello.
I'm gonna get fired on top of all this.
He did this really big, long
landscape painting called,
'On Mulholland Drive'.
And it really does, it really
does look like the painting.
It's very familiar.
Good afternoon TNS health
care. May I help you?
He's in there?
He went with Gary and 'What's his name'?
Hold on... hold on a second.
This is great.
Good afternoon, TNS
Healthcare. May I help you?
Dear Mr. Hockney,
It is a great honor for me to have
the opportunity to write to you.
Like yourself, I believe that a new
way of seeing is a new way of feeling.
And that the greatest art
reaches beyond the initiated.
I had always wanted to capture in
two dimensions, life's minutiae.
To me, it is the life itself.
So, with utter reverence for
my subjects, just as they are...
and my naive capacity to
love so much, so much...
I set out to draw such a portrait.
My portrait is of a human figure.
This portrait took eight years and five
months of full-time work to complete.
This length of time was not a therapeutic
or arbitrary path toward my goal...
...but requisite input.
Sticking with it was, at times,
excruciating and very debilitating.
But I figured that if I actually did it,
then no one could deny it.
I wanted to take a drawing where
Lindbergh took the airplane...
to take a drawing
completely out of bounds...
to give a portrait the
attention-commanding capability...
of a bombastic live performance.
It's a... an amazing
kind of thing to look at.
And part of the experience is, being
in the presence of the actual thing.
When he unveiled it, I mean, I'm
telling you, I broke out in a sweat.
I've never heard anybody describe this
thing in a way that made any sense to me.
I mean, you wanted to get
close to it, but you couldn't,
and then you had to.
And then you're like, you know,
you're covering your mouth.
And you've got this mask on
so you don't breathe on it.
You take out the magnifying
glass and the level of scrutiny...
is absolutely enthralling.
This thing was freakish, man.
I mean, you're looking at it and
the closer you look, the
more detailed it gets.
Like, he drew the
space around each hair.
Originally, we were talking
about three thousand DPI.
We think we've got
over ten thousand DPI.
I mean, you can see
inside pores. You can see,
you know, the peach
fuzz of her cheekbones.
You can see the little, minute
reflections of her eyeballs.
Nobody in Kyoto is
doing this in a basement.
Nobody in Berlin exhibited this in 1918.
It hasn't been done before.
It has acquired a kind of heroic,
almost mythical dimension.
This is not part of a
normal genre of achievement.
You spent how long on
this? And it's how fabulous?
I'm talking 'FABULOUS'
- all capital letters.
Exclamation point!
Respectfully yours,
Billy Pappas.
Has anybody called?
No.
Nobody's called?
Correct.
He's been in... Three hours!
Three hours... No. He's
been in four hours...
...and three minutes.
Wherever. But whatever is happening...
Oh. I left my coat at work.
Whatever's happening...
You left your coat at work?
It's unbelievable what's happening, Jim.
Uh huh. I'll tell ya...
It's, it's just... now
what's ever happening
I mean, just anticipation...
...now it's scary, well there's...
It can be nothing but
good. Uh huh. Yeah.
And now my whole feeling is that, you know,
I've was telling people about Billy a little bit.
And how... what... how good he is.
You know, just a good guy.
And something big must be happening,
and I find it a little scary.
And I also feel...
that...
he's been so good...
I know he's not a church-goer,
but I kind of feel I can see our Lord in
him, and our Lord must be giving him...
some kind of something saying,
"Keep doing good, Billy."
And he's going to be doing something.
OK.
You're obviously a wreck.
You're gonna need a drink.
Not really, I'm cold... You want a coat?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm gonna end
up going into shock
and Billy's going to say,
"What happened to my mother?"
He had great success
and killed his mother.
Well, it, it went absolutely...
...just great. I mean...
I'm so happy. It's just a
dream come true. I'm, I'm...
sort of stunned, you
know. It's like I...
He was very, very friendly and spent a
lot of time looking at the drawing, and
everyone there seemed to
really know their stuff.
They were kind of overwhelmed.
This one person just sat
there for about five minutes,
I was watching, just
staring at the piece.
One of them was holding
a magnifying glass
and I heard him say, "Oh my God!"
Hockney was using words
like, 'fantastic' and
'Amazing.' 'Amazing, and he said,
"I've never seen anyone
draw quite like that."
"Not that kind of rigor
and that kind of scrutiny."
He does seem very overwhelmed
that somebody has done
something so extraordinary
with a pencil.
You know, I told him what I wanted,
I told him what I,
what my mission was and,
that, that I have an, I have an agenda.
And I'm pretty hot to trot.
My takeaway was that, that you
have an advocate and a friend,
not only in this, in David Hockney,
but in a couple of people that
were ar... in the circle of his...
Right...
entourage today,
Right. Including the people there.
Yeah, they all seemed to be very,
"Wow, this is something!"
He's making a phone call to a
museum director in Washington
who is very sawy on digitization,
a personal friend of his.
He didn't "T-Bone" me with any kind of,
"Well, I hate to break
it to you this way", or
"Here's why this won't work."
I didn't hear anything like
that. All I got was, "Yeah!"
You know, support for,
for what I want to do
and how I want to do it.
"For Billy, with thanks and admiration
for showing me your terrific drawing."
David Hockney, 28th October, '04.
That's great.
Hey Mom, it's Billy.
We were with Hockney for five hours.
Yeah, he had us to lunch.
And their staff served
us your poppyseed cake.
I, I told him when we left, I said,
"Well, I mean, this has been one
of the greatest experiences of my life."
And I said that, "You have
helped explain me to myself."
I just, it's hard for me to speak right now.
I just don't know what else to say, but...
it's just a dream come true. It
was better than I hoped it would be.
Hey Dad.
Thanks.
Yeah... long haul.
To the heart, the hand and the head.
The heart, the hand and the head.
Well said. Cheers. Cheers
And this is... These
are not in order but...
Oh my God! Here he is!
Here he was...
Look how cute he's looking.
Who is he look... Who is this?
I'm sort of starting at the end.
Oh my God! Can we have copies?
Oh, look at this!
Too bad his head wasn't a little
over a little, huh? You coulda...
Yeah.
You know, look at his face.
You can see he's tickled pink.
Look at the expression
on his face there.
Yeah that's a great shot.
You can see that he is absolutely
enthralled with whatever you're telling him.
Ha. Jeepers Christmas...
Look at his body language.
I could stare at these
pictures just to watch him.
You know, his body language says a lot.
I don't know what he is saying but...
To him, he sees a whole new dimension...
Right, a whole new way of drawing.
I see him saying, "How
the hell did he do this?"
So he's all excited. I can...
You can tell the man is excited.
Yeah. Yeah.
Look at these portraits.
These are all portraits. Yeah.
Dozens of them. Right.
This guy works and works and works.
So, his time. What is five
hours of his time worth?
Yeah. He prob... he lost
track of time, he just...
Yeah, he did. Yeah, he did.
It was obvious that this
thing was really... Oh yeah.
And, and... he's engrossed in Marilyn.
I just think it's so cool that
when you started this, you know
and you said if you could
pick one guy to see it...
Yeah. Yeah.
And look: Now you've got a
whole table-full of pictures.
Does he know how important he's
been in our lives, all these years?
Four Months Later
I didn't expect it to fall...
so quietly after the
meeting with Hockney.
I wrote David Hockney, a thank you note
and I sent him a sketch as a gift.
And, he was abroad for a while,
but he's been back in LA,
and I have heard through Ren
Weschler that he is very busy...
I do want to talk to him. I've
called him a couple of times.
But my calls have not been answered.
I don't... I don't quite
understand that yet.
I hope to, but it hasn't sunk in.
Larry has been the impresario...
for this whole thing.
Lately though, he's
just been a little bit,
he's been frustrating because
he's very hard to get a hold of.
And, you know, I'm like,
"You're managing me
and I can't, I can't..."
"I can't get you on the phone."
"Hello?"
And I think there may be more
to that than, than I can imagine.
There you are!
Hey Gary.
Something really, really incredible
for me happened when I met with Gary,
right after Christmas.
I told him, "Well, this
isn't what hasn't happened."
"I'm interested in trying
to get in touch with people."
"I'm having difficulty."
"I haven't heard from anyone
at the Hockney studio."
"I just want a commission. I
want to get to the person..."
"...who will pay me to do number two."
"What are your thoughts, Gary?"
And then suddenly he said, "Well...
Ill just write Mimi Gates a letter."
"She's Bill Gates' stepmother."
I was absolutely stunned.
I mean, I wanted to jump up and down.
My mother always had this hope and
confidence that it would be Bill Gates.
I mean, it's a dream...
It is a freaking dream!
He sends a letter to Mimi Gardner Gates,
and a couple of snaps of Hockney and I.
Thirty-six hours later, he
gets an answer from Mimi Gates,
saying...
"Because you asked Gary, I asked
Bill..." - 'My Bill' - she called him.
"And he just does not
do this sort of thing."
"He made it amply clear, so
do not pursue it any further."
Right like that. Bang!
I look at this email and I'm
thinking, "No luck. Fuck! That's that."
And that was that!
I told my mom, and all she said was,
"Well, that's alright, you know."
"What matters is what Hockney thought."
Oh, I think that anybody that
presumes that they know...
what David's going to think of things,
is making a big mistake.
I had no idea who was coming.
I always try to be in the background.
It was David's meeting, it wasn't
mine. I was just a curious on-looker.
The bell rang, and I suddenly saw
feet going across to the studio door.
And, uh...
it was as if the Shroud
of Turin was arriving, uh...
replete with even its
own accompanying priest!
We were excited about
what was in that box.
You know, we had no idea
what was going to be in there.
We had no idea of the content.
We didn't know what it was a drawing of.
It was finally opened up and the
inner, uh, wrappings unwrapped and,
there was an easel set
up and then finally...
a... an unveiling...
and when it was unveiled suddenly
there we see this portrait
of Marilyn Monroe, in pencil.
You know, we started looking
at it, scrutinizing it...
Billy started explaining the
process and how he'd done it...
Personally, I didn't try
to show any disappointment
but I was a little bit
underwhelmed immediately.
But it wasn't about me.
It was about David.
And I thought that I'd leave
David and Billy and his friends
and so I went down the hill
to the Polo Lounge actually
and had lunch with a girlfriend of mine.
Nice lunch.
I don't even think I brought it up
what was happening today.
It was just a day in the
life in the Hollywood Hills.
When I got back after lunch, I said,
"Well, what did you
think of everything?" And,
I think, sooner or
later it got around to,
you know, it's a line I've
heard David say many, many times:
"It's still that fucking photograph."
It didn't turn David on.
I did think that there was a
big naivet on the part of Billy.
It's the naivet of not
understanding how the art world works.
It's just not, that's not his world.
For one thing, I think,
"Why did he pick Marilyn Monroe?"
The most famous icon image
of the twentieth century.
Secondly, the choice that it's
based on a photographic image.
We don't like the picture
that a photograph makes.
It is flat. It's boring. It's static.
So much of David's ideas
and my own ideas about
photography and its limitation
have to do with getting outside
of the box of photography.
Three, that the human eye can't
scrutinize the things
without aid of a microscope.
If you put it on a wall in a
museum or a gallery somewhere,
would you know any
of things that we know
that went into this drawing
by looking at it yourself.
And then lastly,
I think his assumptive ground that David
would be this great mentor for his work,
would you know any of
the things that we know
went into this drawing
by looking at it yourself?
Uh... was an assumptive ground
that ended up being untrue.
There was no way that,
David could live up to
the projected fantasies that
Billy had for the meeting.
Somebody at a bar
could have explained
Billy to Billy better than Hockney did
and I don't think Billy
would have heard it.
Or would have been as prepared to hear
it as he was to hear it from Hockney.
There's a chance that
if Hockney had burped,
that he would have thought
that Hockney explained him.
You know, who we pick
as our mentors are not always the people
that are in our best interests.
David did make a funny
aside, he said to Billy,
"Have you ever thought about
doing a quicker sketch?"
To the extent that he had decided,
and it seemed like he had,
that entire value of
ten years of his work
was going to hang in the balance of what
Hockney's estimation of it was,
that was way, way,
way, way, way too much
authority to be giving Hockney.
And...
You shouldn't give that
kind of authority to anybody.
This is the dictionary.
There's just a couple of words...
I was thinking about.
I just wanted to make sure that I...
was thinking about them properly.
I travel with at least one dictionary.
Lately, I've had about
three on me, usually.
I'm pretty obsessed with words.
How're you doing? Hi.
I'm wondering if you were
looking for any bartenders?
Right now? Yeah.
You never know when, so I'll
give you an application and...
OK. OK.
I'm interested...
...in applying for a job as a bartender.
You know, I feel like I'm
everywhere and nowhere.
I have a portrait,
but I don't really have a career.
Yet.
I really don't. I mean...
I'm an artist, but...
I'm not a working artist.
I've never been an
artist making a living.
Now I have borrowed a lot of money.
You know, I think it's
about, it's about $300,000.
Do you think I can pay
that back tending bar?
I'm so far out on a limb.
I mean, I can't get the last
fifteen years of my life back.
I'll be pushing forty.
I think this is just a mere setback.
I'm just looking for some cash...
until the phone rings.
So, I don't think about...
that would be failure.
I don't think about failure too much.
Now that Marilyn is finished,
I especially don't think
of failure too much.
Failure's for losers.
Is it that way?
We all decide on how we
want to spend this life.
Some people decide to devote
it to their children...
some people decide to devote
it to their art, but...
How do you value that work?
Of everything it can be said,
and specifically of works of art,
everything is...
the value of everything is
somewhere between
worthless and priceless.
I don't think for a second
the money that Billy Pappas
might end up with in his pocket
is what this is about.
The only thing that's interesting is the
pillow of air that you have in your mouth,
as a viewer.
Where you get this pillow
of air lodged in your mouth,
and you notice that...
you haven't breathed
for, for twenty seconds.
Now I had that looking at that.
I understand the role of validation, and
having other people appreciate your work,
but...
you can't let that define you either.
He alone can judge
what is validation after investing
Marilyn is his.
He has done Marilyn.
No one - except our Lord -
can take that away from him.
He's just spent ten years
doing something marvelous.
He should feel satisfaction.
Stop worrying about Bill Gates.
Stop worrying about David Hockney.
Think about what happens next.
I've been here five months.
I didn't realize how
much I needed this...
until I got here.
It's been great for me.
I'll never forget the first night,
I came home with forty
dollars in my pocket.
I mean, here I'm 37 years old,
and I'm driving home and I'm like,
"Wow, forty bucks man!"
I'm like, "I earned this."
It just felt so good...
to...
have this money come to me,
the way it comes to most of us.
With regard to my plan for Marilyn
and Hockney and everything...
I had big ideas.
And, I mean, my world
quickly turned pretty... dark.
But, you know, just
don't think about that.
Just remember what a fortune
it is to be able to draw...
imagine how you'd feel
if one day you woke up,
and you couldn't do it.
The last couple of months
I've been working on a self-portrait.
I don't particularly like
self-portraits because it's...
it's difficult for me to pose
and draw at the same time, it...
it's not like I have a philosophical
aversion to doing self-portraits.
I think everything I
do is a self-portrait.
I'm not finished my head, but...
the rest of it is finished.
I'm excited about it,
excited to see how it's
going to turn out...
how I may surprise myself.