garbage and I wanted to redeem myself in their eyes. Then they died in a house fire, I was a basketcase for a long time. But in the end, being orphaned freed me.”
Twenty-two months after learning his parents had left more debt than estate, Dement wrote, directed, filmed, and exhibited a docudrama about pollution in Lake Erie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Maybe it was the deliberately grainy use of black and white, maybe he was just ahead of his time; no one paid much attention to
Brown Water
.
Next came an exposé of an alleged cabal among GM, the Catholic Church, and the Zionist Organization of America.
Half of Dement’s crew quit over that one.
Several lean years followed, during which Dement, pushing forty, married to a former dancer and saddled with a slew of kids, worked as a truck driver and a drywall installer. Then a populist assembly candidate from Flint named Eddie Fixland needed someone to produce campaign commercials on a shoestring budge. Dement got the job by working for free, Fixland won his seat in the House, and though two years of scandal got in the way of reelection, his campaign’s class-warfare ads featuring long shots of dying rust-belt towns and sunken-cheeked retirees living in trailers caught everyone’s attention.
Dement became the go-to guy when you wanted hard-edged
cinéma-politique
. He grew prosperous, moved to a big house in Birmingham, rewrote and reshot his Lake Erie film using a bigger budget: full color, megadoses of the innuendo and hyperbole he’d perfected working for Fixland.
Brown Water
, version II, was nominated for an Oscar. Won a statuette. Lem made a brief, nasty speech, moved to L.A., took meetings,fielded offers. Using other people’s money, he shot an exposé of emergency room practices spiced with gobbets of gore inspired by his factory-accident flicks.
Red Rooms
was nominated for an Oscar and might’ve won if a heartrending portrayal of a nine-year-old, blind poet prodigy hadn’t surfaced just before the submission deadline.
Upon hearing the verdict, Lem was reputed to have fidgeted in his seat at the Kodak Theatre and murmured, “How can you beat a fucking walleyed Helen Keller incarnation?”
He denied the quote.
The next two years saw Dement’s fortunes dip as he tried his hand at “serious cinema.” A tale of Shakespearean lust garnered more plagiarism suits than profit. A historical action film depicting both sides in the Civil War as slavering, self-serving barbarians went straight to video, as did a “postmodern shake-up” of
Othello
that recast the tragedy as a metaphor for the Arab-Israeli impasse, with a villain named Iago Bernstein.
Lem Dement’s name faded from the buzzosphere, as did tabloid shots of the now three-hundred-pound artiste at The Right Parties, bursting out of a custom tuxedo, his trademark limp-brimmed fishing hat studded with lures perched jauntily on a massive, grizzled head.
Dement went “into seclusion to center myself.” Emerged three years later with a four-hour, unspeakably violent depiction of the earliest days of Christianity, shot during a thirty-two-month stay in Turkey.
Given its creator’s sensibilities, everyone expected
Saul to Paul: The Moment
to be an indictment of organized religion. What they got, instead, was a paean to the severest aspects of fundamentalist dogma that trumpeted the virtues of forced conversion and portrayed Arabs, Phoenicians, Mesopotamians, and Jews as hook-nosed heretics.
In a full-page
Variety
ad, Lem Dement announced, “I’ve been born again in the truest sense. My art and my heart are now focused upon sacraments of truth, purity and redemption.”
Quickly condemned as racist agitprop by the Hollywood establishment and the mainstream press, and protested serially by Muslim andJewish civil rights groups, the film enjoyed a limited release in leased art houses and church auditoriums. Word of mouth grew. Theater chains signed on. Within three months,
Saul to Paul
had taken
Twenty-two months after learning his parents had left more debt than estate, Dement wrote, directed, filmed, and exhibited a docudrama about pollution in Lake Erie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Maybe it was the deliberately grainy use of black and white, maybe he was just ahead of his time; no one paid much attention to
Brown Water
.
Next came an exposé of an alleged cabal among GM, the Catholic Church, and the Zionist Organization of America.
Half of Dement’s crew quit over that one.
Several lean years followed, during which Dement, pushing forty, married to a former dancer and saddled with a slew of kids, worked as a truck driver and a drywall installer. Then a populist assembly candidate from Flint named Eddie Fixland needed someone to produce campaign commercials on a shoestring budge. Dement got the job by working for free, Fixland won his seat in the House, and though two years of scandal got in the way of reelection, his campaign’s class-warfare ads featuring long shots of dying rust-belt towns and sunken-cheeked retirees living in trailers caught everyone’s attention.
Dement became the go-to guy when you wanted hard-edged
cinéma-politique
. He grew prosperous, moved to a big house in Birmingham, rewrote and reshot his Lake Erie film using a bigger budget: full color, megadoses of the innuendo and hyperbole he’d perfected working for Fixland.
Brown Water
, version II, was nominated for an Oscar. Won a statuette. Lem made a brief, nasty speech, moved to L.A., took meetings,fielded offers. Using other people’s money, he shot an exposé of emergency room practices spiced with gobbets of gore inspired by his factory-accident flicks.
Red Rooms
was nominated for an Oscar and might’ve won if a heartrending portrayal of a nine-year-old, blind poet prodigy hadn’t surfaced just before the submission deadline.
Upon hearing the verdict, Lem was reputed to have fidgeted in his seat at the Kodak Theatre and murmured, “How can you beat a fucking walleyed Helen Keller incarnation?”
He denied the quote.
The next two years saw Dement’s fortunes dip as he tried his hand at “serious cinema.” A tale of Shakespearean lust garnered more plagiarism suits than profit. A historical action film depicting both sides in the Civil War as slavering, self-serving barbarians went straight to video, as did a “postmodern shake-up” of
Othello
that recast the tragedy as a metaphor for the Arab-Israeli impasse, with a villain named Iago Bernstein.
Lem Dement’s name faded from the buzzosphere, as did tabloid shots of the now three-hundred-pound artiste at The Right Parties, bursting out of a custom tuxedo, his trademark limp-brimmed fishing hat studded with lures perched jauntily on a massive, grizzled head.
Dement went “into seclusion to center myself.” Emerged three years later with a four-hour, unspeakably violent depiction of the earliest days of Christianity, shot during a thirty-two-month stay in Turkey.
Given its creator’s sensibilities, everyone expected
Saul to Paul: The Moment
to be an indictment of organized religion. What they got, instead, was a paean to the severest aspects of fundamentalist dogma that trumpeted the virtues of forced conversion and portrayed Arabs, Phoenicians, Mesopotamians, and Jews as hook-nosed heretics.
In a full-page
Variety
ad, Lem Dement announced, “I’ve been born again in the truest sense. My art and my heart are now focused upon sacraments of truth, purity and redemption.”
Quickly condemned as racist agitprop by the Hollywood establishment and the mainstream press, and protested serially by Muslim andJewish civil rights groups, the film enjoyed a limited release in leased art houses and church auditoriums. Word of mouth grew. Theater chains signed on. Within three months,
Saul to Paul
had taken
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