‘Escapes’ reflects on a ‘lucky’ life
Hampton Fancher has never seen “The Case of the Silent Six,” the 1966 “Perry Mason” episode in which he guest starred. The then-27-year-old Fancher played “Hamp Fisher,” an arrogant jazz musician with a mean streak who may or may not have committed murder.
“Hamp Fisher! I hated that so much. I felt whoever wrote that was taking a dig at me, that this horrible human being I’m playing is named Hamp,” Fancher says during a recent phone call.
But now he can’t help seeing “Perry Mason” clips, along with other excerpts from a TV movie and acting career that ended when Fancher was still in his 30s. Those are the images that make up the bulk of “Escapes,” Michael Almereyda’s documentary about Fancher’s adventurous life as told by Fancher himself that opens Friday, Aug. 18.
These days, he is mostly known as a screenwriter, famous for “Blade Runner” and its highly anticipated upcoming sequel “Blade Runner 2049.” But Fancher has packed in a lot of lives in his 79 years. The middle school dropout was a professional dancer by the time he was a teenager, traveling to Spain at 15 to study flamenco. At 25, he married 17year-old “Lolita” star Sue Lyon. Teri Garr and Barbara Hershey number among his other loves. He’s published a collection of short stories, “The Shape of the Final Dog”; he just finished a screenplay how-to book; and although he insists “Escapes” will have to stand as his memoir, there is an autobiographical novel, “What Happens When the Mad Dogs Meet the Hamburger Man,” that he’s been working on for years.
“It’s a character who I met when I was in my early 30s who intrigued me. He’s dead now. I decided to put him in a Guatemalan jail and have him write a book about me. That’s the conceit,” Fancher says.
“Escapes” arose out of nearly 20 years of friendship between Fancher and Almereyda, who is known for dramas like “Experimenter” and “Marjorie Prime” (which also opens Friday, Aug. 18), but who also has made documentaries, including “This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss.” He had just made “Hamlet” when he and Fancher met at a New Year’s Eve party in 1999. Fancher was suspicious: A lover of Shakespeare, he had no faith that this upstart could have done justice to the bard. But when his then-girlfriend made him see the film several months later, he had to admit he was wrong. He dug out Almereyda’s number and a kinship was born between the quiet filmmaker and the garrulous storyteller.
“Me talking and telling stories I think began to interest him after a while. I wasn’t aware of that until he said, ‘I’d like to shoot you telling stories,” Fancher says. “I’d told him my funny story about my jealousy over a woman, I think it was, and he wanted to shoot that. I said, ‘Sure, that would be funny.’
“I’m an actor and all of that, so it was natural for me to do it, but I was afraid. I think at one point, I said, ‘Listen, if I detest this thing, you can’t let people see it or anything.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll like it.’ ”
Fancher recalls his surprise when Almereyda brought up using clips from his acting days when he guest starred in everything from “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” to “77 Sun-
set Strip” and “Mannix.” He questioned whether the shows were available. If they were, he was certain they were just “spaghetti and worms.” The finished documentary, in which contemporary Fancher appears only sporadically, the blizzard of television and film clips making up the bulk of the images, surprised him.
“I don’t think of those dumb TV shows as my life or my work,” Fancher says. “Yet, there’s more than just a texture going on there. ... All I see is relief. I’m glad I’m not a ridiculous clown.”
“Lucky” and “fortunate” are words that keep cropping up in Fancher’s conversation in relation to a life where breaks seemed to come just when he needed them. He wonders at the title “Escapes.” Does Almereyda mean his many close calls on screen or that capacity of his to move on, a gift forged in childhood?
“I had another dream I was following always,” Fancher says. “I was always running away from home, because I thought that 10 blocks away there would be Hawaii. There would be white sand and bathing beauties and little boats. I was stupid, but I was a dreamer . ... And in my case, my dreams were not squelched by others very much. Nobody ever made fun of me. Nobody ever said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”