“Go Irish” in Stage Magazine: “A Stirring Examination of Celebrity Madness”

I don’t know how the hell this flew under my radar, but my play (with Tom Flannery), Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, received a rave review from veteran theater director and critic Jack Shaw in the March 19 issue of Stage magazine.

Reviewing a performance of Go Irish at the South Camden Theatre Company, Shaw calls the play “an intellectual exploration of a man’s mind as he unravels how he came to be in Purgatory when he already came from Hell … It is a sad tale how celebrity can bring down the greatest of greats … how it tears a man down as well as his art, his family, and ultimately his very life … It is so intellectual and emotionally draining … it does that job of making us think but it is a flood of information and emotion that you have to sort out later.”

Read the whole review here … and thanks, Jack.

“Go Irish” News and Miller’s Views on Fitzgerald

Apparently, the South Camden Theater Company in New Jersey is once again producing a short run of Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, the existential play that I wrote with Tom Flannery; the Camden has already staged the one-man show, back in March of 2007, I believe it was.

I appreciate all of the hard work that actor Bob Hughes (a friend and high school classmate of Miller’s in Scranton, PA) has put into staging the drama anywhere he can find a venue and I have no doubt that the Camden’s reprise of Go Irish is due to the new Broadway revival of Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, That Championship Season (with a cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, Miller’s son and literary executor).

And while I remain proud that the work is slowly finding an audience, the version that Bob is running with is a version of the text that has been savagely gutted by Flannery, who I drafted to add some Scranton color to the play after I had begun working on it in 2004.

Most of the material I wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, has been stripped completely, which produced the effect of removing the leit-motif of the drama: Go Irish, as I penned it, is not so much a biographical of the tragic Jason Miller’s life and career but a meditation on the myth and reality of the dissipated Catholic, Irish-American writer.

The following monologue — including Miller’s own words from a 1972 interview — is nowhere to be found in the current text, which is nothing short of a travesty. You would think that Hughes and Flannery would realize the contemporary relevance of the dialogue, which I will let you judge for yourself.

JASON MILLER ON SCOTT FITZGERALD: “A LOT OF WEEDS GOT IN THERE”

Fitzgerald … I played him in a movie once, you know, one of those made-for-TV deals, back in ’76 I think it was, when they were still making quality movies for the tube. Some critics said I was the best personification of Fitzgerald on screen – not too hard when my only competition to date was Richard Chamberlain in another TV flick and Gregory Peck in that God awful potboiler “Beloved Infidel”. The truth of the matter is I just hit my marks and said my lines and it didn’t hurt that I had Tuesday Weld for a co-star.

Only forty-four years old when he died of a massive heart attack, Fitzgerald was  desperately trying to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood, laboring under the mistaken impression that he was a forgotten has-been.

Fitzgerald — When he tried to get into films, he never felt he belonged. He never fucking belonged in Hollywood. He began to feel the fire was starting to go. He had monetary problems, a smashed marriage, a sick wife. All this, plus as ebbing talent. And the guilt. Didn’t tend to his own garden. A lot of weeds got in there.

Curiously enough, as much as he wrote about the rich, I really believe he hated them. I believe he despised them in some other level of his being. His decline really started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. You can time it. The world was no longer interested in the rich as escapists. The rich put this country goddamn near the brink of destruction. The rich were jumping out of windows. They no longer were the myths that fascinated people. We were beginning to question these people, and we weren’t liking what we found. But this was his milieu. And when that world collapsed, his talent collapsed. He couldn’t find other fertile ground to lay his seed in. He was trapped within his fatal attraction to the rich, not only in their life-style, but in their literary value to him. He mined that vein, and when that vein went, he went.

The beautiful thing about it was that he made a desperate lunge in Hollywood, a tragically sad attempt to change his life. He endured incredible humiliations to try to get back on top. The man who had been the center of the fucking world was slipping into anonymity and obscurity.

He had that kind of romantic fatalism where women became myths and goddesses to him, and then they became all too human. There was no balance. Fitzgerald was a total extremist. He was one of the last of the true romantics. His skull should have cracked open on a pyre in Malibu. He and Zelda flew too near the sun, the both of them. They flew too fucking near the sun, and whoosh! (Beat) You know, I never used to cuss like this until I went to Hollywood. It’s true. I hate Hollywood, the whole damn slippery, cash-lubricated machine. You get there by standing out….and once you make it you spend all your time trying to fit in. That should explain the extensive mental illness found there.

Miller’s Ghost

(Originally published at Hollywood Elsewhere, March 2004)

MILLER’S GHOST

By

Rodger Jacobs

“You stumbling and reeling through the streets like some broken thing, hearing people laugh at you, breaks my … you were such a gifted boy.”

With those twenty-four simple but powerful words from his 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning play “That Championship Season” Jason Miller prophesied the sad arc his own life, both personal and professional, would take.

“He’s quite fascinating,” film journalist and author David Ehrenstein (“The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese”) remarked to me when I told him about my new play based on Miller’s turbulent but very private life. “You don’t find too many people who flame out two careers at once.”

I have been haunted by Jason Miller for fourteen years, since the first day I met him in early 1990 when I was a stage manager at Hollywood Center Studios – formerly the ill-fated Zoetrope Studios – where William Peter Blatty was hastily shooting new footage for “Exorcist 3” to include Miller’s character of Father Damien Karras at the studio’s insistence.

Until the day I encountered Miller I had only read about – and foolishly admired – dissipated, hard-drinking writers. Seeing the real deal up close and personal was another matter entirely. He had eleven more years of life ahead of him but there was already a look of whipped misery in his eyes. There was a rumor floating around the production unit that Blatty had to fly to Miller’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, sober him up from a drunken binge, and escort the brilliant playwright and actor to the set for the short but hellish shoot.

On the set Jason and I spoke on brief occasions about his passion for Notre Dame football, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

And I have been haunted ever since.

“I’m not surprised he haunts you,” distinguished character actor John Mahon (“L.A. Confidential”) and life long Miller friend told me via e-mail. “He would have that effect.”

When I urged Mahon to divulge more, to explain in greater detail why my abbreviated encounter with this dissipated genius left such a scar on my psyche, he simply fell silent and the e-mail dialogue ceased.

As of this writing, it has been six weeks since John Mahon contacted me in response to my posting on the Craig’s List online forum looking for friends, acquaintances, and co-stars of Miller’s as research for the play, “Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller.”

“Miller and I went to school (University of Scranton) together in the 50s,” Mahon wrote me in early September. “We did plays while in school. In 1965 he came to New York City and moved in with me. We worked as bus boys together in the Met Museum, worked as welfare workers together, did plays in NYC for years together. I directed ‘Championship Season’ with Broderick Crawford three times. In 1976, Miller and I roomed together until 1981 … we then parted ways.”

“I know Jack Miller probably as much as anyone ever knew him,” Mahon wrote in closing. “The problem is I know too much.”

Friends knew Jason Miller as “Jack” or “Jackie.” He was born John Anthony Miller in Long Island City, N.Y., the son of John A. and Mary Collins Miller. He later took the name Jason because he “always liked that story in mythology.”

When Miller, an only child, was still a baby the family moved to the predominantly Irish Catholic anthracite mining town of Scranton, PA. Scranton would remain home to Miller his whole life, as beloved as his Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

Miller was a standout basketball player at West Scranton’s St. Patrick’s High School, an experience he would draw upon for “That Championship Season”, a bleak and intense drama that used the occasion of the twentieth reunion of the Pennsylvania Champion high school basketball team at the home of their coach as a catalyst to explore the hopelessly fleeting nature of fame, pride, and youth.

“I’m writing in ‘Championship’ about men going into their middle age with a sense of terror and defeat,” Miller wrote for the dust jacket of the Antheum Press release of his play. “They’re desperately holding on to their youth. The only thing that holds them together is the memory of when they were together. The play is a rite of passage. Every man is looking for his father. The best I could do with these people was to admit their mystery … They’ll be back next year for another reunion. They’ll come back to live out their myths.”

His own myth began in May, 1972, at the New York Shakespeare Public Theatre when “That Championship Season” opened under the guiding hand of legendary Broadway producer Joe Papp. Two years prior the struggling stage actor and playwright – who earned a master’s degree in drama from Catholic University – had two original works produced off-Brodaway, “The Circus Theatre”, a series of one-act plays, and a full-length play, “Nobody Hears a Broken Drum.” In 1963 he married Linda Mae Gleason, daughter of actor and comedian Jackie Gleason. He worked a series of odd jobs while pursuing his career.

In September, 1972, “That Championship Season” moved uptown to Broadway and was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Award for Best Play and the Outer Circle Critics’ Award.

1973 saw Jason Miller’s golden year, the championship season of his own. He was awarded the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. His film debut as troubled Jesuit priest Father Karras in the Warner Bros. release “The Exorcist” garnered Miller a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 1973 Academy Awards (He lost to John Houseman in “The Paper Chase.”)

And then the party was over. 

“Jason was a complex individual, haunted by demons, real and imagined,” wrote Joseph Flannery in the Scranton Times-Tribune one week after Miller died in May 2001 from a massive heart attack while reading the Sunday papers and enjoying brunch with his girlfriend Dana in a Scranton pub.

Flannery enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Miller and – unlike other locals who have now lionized him beyond comprehension, refusing to admit post-mortem that a curse had fallen over his head – he has no qualms about speaking the truth.

“No doubt, he was a genius with words who should have been enshrined in the Pantheon of the greatest American playwrights, but he drank too much, much like some of his heroes: actor John Barrymore, the subject of one of his plays (“Barrymore’s Ghost”); novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he played in a television drama (“F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood”), and author Ernest Hemingway, all of whom liked their liquor.”

When I partnered with Pennsylvania playwright and song writer Tom Flannery, the son of Joseph Flannery, to bring Jason Miller, the man and the myth, to life in a one-man show Tom was met with great resistance from old friends of Jason’s in Scranton.

“If you weren’t Joseph Flannery’s son I’d hang up the phone right now,” one Miller confidant told Tom when he called seeking information about Scranton’s beloved, Pulitzer Prize winning son. The year before Miller died, he staged a production of Tom Flannery’s original play “The Driveway” at the Scranton Public Theatre where Miller served as the artistic director.

“Jason’s drinking was overblown,” said another. “He just had a low tolerance for beer. He didn’t have a backyard and a family, so what else was a poor lonely Irish Jesuit supposed to do with his time after dinner anyway?”

Jason bonded better with “ordinary people”, says Joseph Flannery. That’s why he returned to Scranton in the early 1980s and never returned to Hollywood except for brief excursions. When Paul Sorvino and Gary Sinise bought the film rights to “That Championship Season” in 1999 (Miller directed his own version for Golan-Globus in 1982 – the less said about that disastrous voyage the better) Miller refused to come to Hollywood, sending the pages of his screenplay adaptation via fax machine.

At the time of his death at the age of 62, Miller was writing a screenplay for Showtime about his former father-in-law, Jackie Gleason. But no matter what he did he would always be Father Karras from “The Exorcist” and the hometown hero who won a slew of trophies for his brilliant dramatic skills.

Miller was an intensely private person, an element of the man that one of his sons, actor Jason Patric, confessed once to admiring. You can count on one hand the number of times Patric has spoken of his famous father in interviews. Like a lot of areas of Jason Miller’s life one is left to speculate.

With “Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller” I would like to think that I have exorcised the man from my life but now Tom Flannery and I begin the process of finding an actor equal to the task of bringing this dynamic and sadly pathetic man to life on the stage.

It won’t be an easy task. There was only one Jason Miller.

William Valentine Shakespeare: The Merchant of Menace

On Wednesday night, while doing some online research for the Jason Miller novella, I discovered a bit of fascinating ephemera that borders the sports and literary worlds: William Valentine Shakespeare (1912-74) was a a famed halfback for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team from 1933-35.

Because of his shared name with the other William Shakespeare, the sporting press dubbed Bill The Bard of Staten Island, The Bard of South Bend, and The Merchant of Menace. Shakespeare was a key player on November 2, 1935, when Notre Dame faced the undefeated 1935 Ohio State Buckeyes in front of a crowd of 81,000 at Ohio Stadium:

The 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State match was regarded as one of the greatest comebacks in history of the sport. Red Barber, who broadcast the game on radio, later called it “the greatest college football game I ever called.” In The New York Times, Allison Danzig opened his report on the game by writing, “One of the greatest last-ditch rallies in football history toppled the dreaded Scarlet Scourge of Ohio State from its lofty pinnacle today as 81,000 dumbfounded spectators saw Notre Dame score three touchdowns in less than fifteen minutes to gain an almost miraculous 18–13 victory in jammed Buckeye Stadium.” Radio announcer Tom Manning added, “I always said Shakespeare had a pair of rosary beads and a bottle of holy water in his back pocket.”

The media picked up stories of the Catholic faithful praying for Notre Dame as they listened to the game on the radio. One nun told a reporter of overhearing a colleague in her convent “gamefully bargaining” and eventually “threatening” the Poor Souls and saints for another Notre Dame touchdown. The Chicago Tribune later noted the irony that it was a truly ecumenical group that combined for the famed “Hail Mary” pass: “Manziotti a Catholic, handed to Shakespeare, a Protestant on a fake reverse. Shakespeare passed to End Wayne Millner, a Jewish boy.” In 1969, as part of the centennial of the first college football game, the Associated Press conducted a poll to select the “game of the century”, and the 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State game was chosen as the best game in the first 100 years of college football.

But that’s not the most interesting aspect of Bill Shakespeare’s career as an American football player for the Fighting Irish. No. It gets better:

The week after the Ohio State game, Notre Dame faced Northwestern featuring All-American end Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Before the game, the Associated Press carried a story profiling the two players: “Shakespeare and Longfellow will meet tomorrow —- not to trade verses, but to play all the football they know.” Longfellow later recalled, “Shakespeare and I played against each other for three years. Each year, because of our names, we got a terrific buildup. It was a natural, I suppose. All through my college days I never heard the end of it. The writers went wilder each year.” Longfellow got the better of Shakespeare in 1935, as he caught a touchdown pass to help Northwestern win the game, 14-7. Shakespeare attempted to lead the Irish to another come-from-behind victory, as he ran 48 yard to the Northwestern ten-yard line late in the game, but the Northwestern defense held. On the last play of the game, Shakespeare threw a “long, desperate pass”, but it was intercepted as time ran out.

This is research material that is definitely going in the novella; fact is truly stranger than fiction.

 

Purgatory Diaries: The Novel

“… plenty of booze but I can’t catch a buzz, cartons and cartons of cigarettes and not a match in sight.”

Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller

Jason Miller’s original play, That Championship Season, following the reunion of four high school basketball players and their coach long after the applause — and their youth — has faded, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1973, as well as the Tony Award for best play. After that overnight success, Jason Miller, as a writer, was finished, as essayed in the 2007 play I wrote with Tom Flannery, Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller.

There is now a new Broadway revival of Championship starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patrick (Miller’s son), Chris Noth, Brian Cox, and Jim Gaffigan, which is sure to renew interest in Miller’s astonishing work as a playwright. For this, and a few other reasons, I have decided to sit down and a novel-novella based on my original play, with the title truncated to The Purgatory Diary of Jason Miller.

One of those “few other reasons” is that, to be honest, I’m still smarting over a newspaper review of a Bob Hughes production of the play in Pennsylvania, wherein the critic writes that Go Irish was “written with the help of L.A. playwright Roger (sic) Jacobs … (the play) shares Flannery’s perspective without asking us to toss out preconceptions.”

Horseshit. As I essayed for Hollywood Elsewhere in 2007 in an article titled Miller’s Ghost, the play originated with me after a chance encounter with Miller on the set of Exorcist III. I sought out Flannery, a Scranton playwright (Miller’s home town) to add some local flavor to the brew. Now, there’s a hell of a lot more than that to the story but I’ll save that for another time, except to say that the novel will help me reclaim my original vision of the story, free of Flannery’s input (and when I resurrect the original text of Miller’s Ghost in the next day or so, it will be apparent that the spirit of Jason Miller did not much care for Tom’s efforts, as I chronicled in the story).

So, for the next couple of months, when my attention isn’t distracted by Popmatters essays and paying journalism gigs when I can find them, I will be immersed in online footage of Pathe News reports of 1930s Notre Dame football games, explorations of Dante’s Purgatorio, the plays of Jason Miller, Jesuit mysticism, New York’s Cedar Bar in the early 1970s, production notes from The Exorcist, Brian Moore’s novel Catholics, and a fascinating essay by Gregory Rich titled The Skeptic’s View: Life After Death in Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop.

Because the book is lit-fic with limited commercial appeal where the New York literary trend setters are concerned, I will be going the self-publishing route with this title, both print and electronic download versions, which will also get it to the market in a much more timely fashion; the other novel that I have on the back boiler for the time being is still intended as a mainstream marketplace manuscript.