Pink House • notes
A Note From (one of the) Director(s)
One afternoon in 1997, my roommates and I were watching the NBA
playoffs when a couple in their mid-60s tentatively knocked on the
remnants of the screen door at the Pink House. They walked in,
avoiding the CDs, Duraflame logs, unwritten Pysch papers and
1/9th-sipped drinks that littered the floor. They told us they had
lived in the house as students at some point in the 1950s, and
proceeded to wander around with their mouths agape. Pretty much
nothing had changed -- the rooms, the non-working fireplaces, the way the living room bows
in the middle at a parabolic angle... they were stunned. It was the
same house.
I let them into my room, which was a sanctuary of hygiene amidst
the usual rubble, famous for a mural of the Mona Lisa that had been
painted at some point in the Pink House's distant, lurid past. Her
eyes would famously follow you through the window as you retreated down North
Street.
A typical party at the Pink House mid-'90s. Not pictured: people stealing Ian's CDs.
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As they left, our reverie was broken: one of my housemates barged
in to announce that nobody had paid rent, and we had about two hours
to raise the cash or else our landlord was going to give the house to
the sorority next door. Adding insult to injury, some dimwit had
posted on the Chapel Hill on-line newsgroup that we were having a
Cinco de Mayo party that night, something expressly forbidden by the
cops and anyone who lived within peeing radius. One more noise
violation and I'd be whisked to the police station.
They say that most art is "calamitous events recollected in a
time of relative calm," but this is an exception. As I
frantically scribbled signs that said "NO PARTY TONIGHT" and
"LEAVE US ALONE AND GO TO HENRY'S" I looked skyward and
thought this would be an excellent starting point for a
screenplay.
I wrote "The Pink House" on a Coca-Cola bender during the
late summer of 1999, half at a coffee shop called The Bourgeois Pig in
Hollywood, and the other half at a record store in the Wrigleyville
section of Chicago. Unlike other drafts of screenplays that usually
take years, "The Pink House" rushed out of me in about three
weeks, no doubt because I was relentlessly plagiarizing the lives,
idiosyncracies and direct quotes of my housemates.
The first drafts were long on personality and short on plot,
something it took ten more drafts to fix. I don't recommend writing
ten drafts of anything, but warping actual people into movie
characters can be arduous and painful. In the end, the spirit of the
house remained the same (plus a few details, such as Jiffer's yen for
German exchange students and Scott's fury at the toilet situation) but
the relentless nuttiness of the film is something none of us would
have survived in real life.
In period get-ups for the annual 1920s party, circa 1997 (clockwise
from l.): N'Gai Wright, Zia Zareem, Jiffer Bourguignon, Jay Murray,
Ian Williams and Chip Chapman. Photo taken from authentic early
20th-century camera by now-celebrity shooter
Lawrence Lucier.
The Pink House residents in May '96. On couch: James Dasher, Jay
Murray, Jiffer Bourguignon, Ian Williams, N'Gai Wright, and Grant
Tennille. On floor: Scott Bullock. Picture taken by much-lauded international photojournalist
David Suroweicki.
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Speaking of real life, we actually did end up losing the
house, and Pink House alumnus scattered throughout the world. Jay,
Grant, Linden and Chip still hold the fort in Chapel Hill; Zia's in
London; Jiffer and Fletcher are in San Francisco; Scott, Tom and I are
in New York. But we see each other all the time. And that's just
my generation. There is a cadre of Pink House folks from the
early '80s that still hang out together in Washington D.C., and
there's another bunch from the 1970s that have also written to the
website
(info@pinkhousemovie.com).
The actual house is a ramshackle, modest Southern home with
dormered windows lying on an otherwise peaceful street five minutes
from the campus of the University of North Carolina. When most folks
speak of their college group houses, it tends to be as boring as
listening to other people recount their dreams; everything has that
"you hadda be there" sheen to it. But even at the height of
its hipster coolness, the real Pink House was still infinitely
approachable. There are
other group houses out
there that are fascinating in their microcosmic culture, but ours was
way more magnanimous. We were mostly free of in-jokes, specialized
sayings, and self-referential cuteness. We were always in the middle
of seventy schemes, fiercely intellectual, desperate for fun, always
broke, achingly funny. If any of us had the money, we'd have bought
you a drink.* I hope the movie version comes close to
giving off the same feeling.
--Ian Williams
*Except for Jay Murray.
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