Prelude to a Novel...

I first met Peter Altos at The Formosa Café in Hollywood in 1988. It would change the course of my life, but then you don’t know those things at the time. The Formosa had red walls hung with black and white celebrity photos, the kind you used to see in places like The Brown Derby on Vine Street, which is closed now, or Chasen’s, also closed. It featured reliably indifferent Chinese food, dim lighting, and the congealed aroma of alcohol, perfume and cooking oil. Peter was sitting in a red leatherette booth, sketching on a napkin, a cigarette in his mouth, nursing a tequila in a narrow shot glass. He looked like his photos, tall and lean and weathered, though he wasn’t that old, forty-five then, with prematurely silver hair and a large head that gave him an imposing air. Sit down, kid, he said. 

Those were his first words to me. Oddly perhaps, they would also be his last.

He was in LA to raise money for a feature drama built around the Maya of Central America, he said, but of course the studios weren’t interested. They wanted another realist suspense like Forgotten Man, shot in Italy, a sleeper hit critics still treat like biblical revelation. They’ll throw money at me to shoot in Death Valley with Charles Bronson, he said, but not a dime for something important. He was living in an old ex-convent in the Mexican mountains by a lake, he said, and he wanted to get back there and finish his Maya film. 

I was twenty-two years old, in my last year in the director's’ program at UCLA, though it was turning out I was better at writing about movies than making them. You can blame my French mother for the cineaste gene. Two years of film reviewing for The Daily Bruin had honed my chops, and a Peter Altos interview was to be my first for Film Quarterly in Berkeley, the place to publish at the time. Peter, evidently quite ripped on the tequilas, showed little interest in answering my questions, or in talking very much at all, and soon he called for the bill. 

We walked out together into the asphalt glare of the parking lot and climbed into a red Lexus the studio had rented him. Peter drove us none too steadily up Highland Avenue, then while keeping one hand on the wheel managed with the other to extract a ball of silver foil from his pocket, flick a shard of pale green hash into a little silver pipe, and light it. He took a draw then handed it to me. I thought my god, here I am driving along getting high with Peter fucking Altos. 

At the time, Peter was up there in my pantheon with Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Shirley Clarke, Cassavetes. There were the iconic, trailblazing films, of course, but there was more: architect, ethnology studies at the New School, documentary photographer, theater director. There was the notorious troupe he and his actress wife, Mina Soriana, had driven through Europe in a minibus, restaging the classics until they were busted in Greece on obscenity charges. Rebels, smashing barriers, living and working on the edge, outside the very canon they were on the verge of redefining.  

We ended up somewhere in Nichols Canyon at the end of a wooded lane before a sprawling log-cabin style house. The door was open, and inside I saw Mina, tall and dark and thrillingly present in flowing gypsy skirt and wild loose hair, stirring soup in an open kitchen, their young daughter beside her and an infant boy on her arm. A renowned Polish cinematographer was talking on a telephone. A well-known character actor watched a Dodgers game on television in the living room. Other figures wandered in and out of rooms or to a swimming pool out back. Peter lurched to the toilet and pissed loudly with the door open. Mina turned and gave me a good look, then asked me my name as if she really wanted to know. 

Remy Moran, I answered shyly.

Directors are seldom alone, their work by definition collaborative, but Peter and Mina seemed to live at the locus of an entourage, a kind of running ensemble. I can still recall from that first visit a steady stream of arrivals and departures, profferings of dubious substances, fragments of conversations, and my first encounter with poolside nudity. Heady stuff for a film school dweeb from a family of academics. That evening, after a rash of phone calls, Peter announced that the studio had committed to a film to be shot at his village in Mexico. Not his Maya epic, he said, but a remake of one of B. Traven’s Mexico novels, The Bridge in the Jungle. Rip Torn was on for the male lead, Jessica Lange the female. Production was to begin in April, the dry season there. What the hell, Peter said. A deal with the devil I can live with. Somewhere during the celebratory hours that followed he said to me: “Why don’t you come on down, kid? Should be a ball.” 

I remember little of the rest of that night save blundering in upon a couple having some sort of tantric sex in a bedroom. I must have fallen asleep on the living room floor, and when I awoke it was dawn, the house littered with inert bodies. 

Struggling up, I saw little Liana, their daughter, sitting cross-legged on the couch, wide awake, her baby brother asleep beside her. She was drawing intently in a large notebook, as if indifferent to the mad sprawl around her, or the bleary, besotted film student tiptoeing past her to the door. 

I stumbled out of the house and hitched a ride down the canyon. Climbing into my car in the deserted Formosa Café parking lot, I thought: I have just had a formative experience. Of course I had no inkling of what that might mean.

Worlds have transpired since then. I am older now than Peter Altos was then, a tenured professor of film at my alma mater, UCLA. The baby boy at Mina’s breast is a promising, if troubled, actor here in LA. And Liana, the little girl drawing in the living room that morning, is a graphic artist, married and living in San Francisco. Mina Soriana Altos drowned in Mexico nine years ago of an accident or a crime nobody was ever convicted of. And Peter Altos, as far as anyone knows, never finished the Maya film he spent decades working on. 

When news came several days ago that he was found dead at his house in Mexico, I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. But as his alleged biographer – once official, now decidedly not – I figured I’d have to find out.