Over the past thirty years or so, William Preston Robertson has repeatedly found himself drawn to both comedy and depression. Growing up in Georgia, his childhood aspiration was to be a joke writer for a comedian. But by his preteen years, he was a serious kid, a deeply morose fiction writer dealing with subjects like racial inequality, nuclear war, poverty, injustice, and the like. He'd eventually learn to embrace the contrasts and welcome the divergences that arose in his literature and even his films.

"Sometime in my teens I started doing movies, backyard/super 8 kinds of things," he says. "I lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. So, catering to that market, I made a short called When the Jewish Dracula Stalks the Night. I followed that up with a jungle epic called Zimba, Jungle King. They were all funny in their own right, but they also had underlying political messages. I even managed to somehow work something about Richard Nixon and Vietnam into the Jewish Dracula thing.

Then I made Star Spangled Trash, a non-narrative film comprised of shots of dead dogs, pollution, and so on, set to Mary Martin's "America the Beautiful." In hindsight, all of these films follow an interesting pattern where I went through wacky phases and really morose and depressive phases. My moods have swung back and forth like that as long as I can remember and whatever I'm working on at anytime seems to reflect that."

"Then I started writing fiction again," Robertson continues, "because it was cheaper and it didn't require anyone but yourself."

He stuck with it, obtained an undergraduate degree specializing in creative writing from a school in Massachusetts where he first met longtime friend Ethan Coen (with whom he wrote a play which was produced in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater). Robertson eventually received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he obtained formal training in how to write screenplays.

Over the years, he's put all of his writing skills to good use. He's worked as a freelancer and an editor for several magazines, been hired to write screenplays for studios, adapted screenplays into novelizations, authored a book, The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film, and co-written Johnny Skidmarks, an original screenplay that was made into a feature length film directed by John Raffo. (Not to mention his acting debut in a cameo in Johnny Skidmarks or that his voice has been featured somewhere in almost every Coen Brothers project to date.)

Along the way, many people have taken the time to tell Robertson that his writing is very visually oriented and that since it has such an incredibly distinctive voice, he should consider making a film of his own. "I thought I needed to see if I have any passion for directing," he says. "So I decided to go ahead and direct this one weird little story that I'd actually written years before for someone else who didn't end up using it. I dusted it off and with the ongoing and amazing support of my wife Claire, I did it."

Now in Lexington, Robertson is currently focusing on the release of Weeping Shriner through his Bald Guy With a Dent in His Head Productions. Without the help of any investors, his $20,000 directorial debut as a serious filmmaker is an adaptation of an original story shot on 16mm that emulates the same manic traditions he's grown so accustomed to. With a running time of around fifteen minutes, the film even includes a song Robertson composed on his ukulele entitled "On the Veranda with Miranda."

The film itself is the story of an emotionally repressed lounge pianist grieving for his AIDS-ravaged partner, who becomes burdened one night with a bufoonish old shriner in the throes of an inconsolable crying fit and thereby comes to term with his own grief. As Robertson points out, "Weeping Shriner is about the nexus between the weeping and the laughing, where things are absurd and, depending where you stand, can be humorous or tragic."

The pianist has every reason in the world to grieve, but bottles it up. Enter the shriner who's absurd, wearing a fez, and making horrible noises. "He's grieving and it's not pretty. Misery is an embarrassing thing. It's unseemly, annoying. It hangs around and refuses to leave. But sometimes you just have to embrace it."

"I think laughter and sadness are part of the same picture most of the time," Robertson elaborates. "One is forever threatening to impose itself on the other: the unexpected laugh at a funeral; the sudden tears from a joke that's too painfully true. There's a tension that comes from that. My goal with Weeping Shriner was to express that tension."

Robertson's passion for the story and the message helped fuel the process. "There were things about this specific story that I loved," he states, "things that seemed to be the type of stuff I used to write about. And it was unlike anything I'd ever written in screenplay form before. It spoke to me in a legitimately artistic sort of way. And it dealt with themes I like. There's the mixture of comedy and misery, the whole comedy about depression thing. It was something I felt I wanted to work with, something I had to do."

In directing his first real film, Robertson was careful, knowing exactly what kind of results he wanted to see, from the actors to set design and production.

For the look of the film, Robertson knew exactly what was needed. "What I wanted," he says, "was an Edward Hopper look, like his painting 'Nighthawks'. There's a yellowish sort of light, with a drab, murky city environment all around. His stuff was very much about urban alienation. He used a lot of empty space and people disconnected from each other. There'll be a sparsely decorated room with one central figure, with a unique tension between the individual and the space. And he would do the same sort of thing with color, with light and shadow and darkness. I wanted that sort of look for this short film, very much an urban, shadowy, film-noirish look. Also, in keeping with the space and individual tension, I wanted something kind of static where one little touch of movement in character or change in color would be noticeable. The red fez kind of operates like that and the sound of the shriner's crying works in the same way, cutting through the silence."

The short film's main character, Lance Thornton, is also part of this scheme of sustained tension, says Robertson. "Lance Thornton, the lounge pianist, is meant to be a man undergoing a specific grief in the loss of his lover, but he's also someone who I don't think in general is a happy person. He's not a man comfortable with his gayness--as the bartender's needling of him is intended to suggest. I chose to make him this way because, in my own life, I've known men who clearly were gay and who, reacting to societal pressures, fought against it. They always seemed bitter and sad to me in a very particular way. I think there's nothing more agonizing than living every day hating who you are. It's Beckett's I can't go on, I'll go on."

The film's actors deserve enormous credit for realizing this aspect of the film, says Robertson. "Weeping Shriner was uncharacteristically spare of dialogue for me," he explains. "For the role of Lance, the pianist, I needed someone who could project complex emotion without saying anything at all. [Former Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman cast member] Geoffrey Lower, who plays Lance, is an incredible actor. His skin just sort of acts. He doesn't have to be doing anything to completely inhabit a character. And I think his subtle, smoldering kind of acting works well in this short. And it works well with Bob Larkin's rather expulsive performance as the shriner. Their acting styles are so different, but since the characters are also so different, the acting styles play nicely into the film's scheme."

Though its subject matter is grim, Weeping Shriner is very much structured like a one-reeler comedy from the 1930s. This is no accident, says Robertson, who confesses that part of this approach stems from a dream he had many years ago.

"I'm a big Laurel & Hardy fan," he explains. "When I was twenty-three, I read Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy by John McCabe. While I was reading it, I had a dream one night that I met them as old men. I sort of drew it from the photographs of each of them towards the end of their lives, human beings in business suits, smiling and enjoying life. I dreamed they were standing there looking at me. I was excited and wanted to tell them how much joy they brought to my life. But instead, in the dream, I just wept uncontrollably. I was struggling to tell them how funny they were and how much they meant to me, but it came it out in an unending flow of tears."

"I tried to bring some of what I felt in that dream to this film," Robertson clarifies. "Part of the pleasure I take from the Laurel & Hardy shorts is that they're not just comedies about people poking each other in the eyes. The thing that elevates them to a higher level is that the stories and situations seem to have a symbolic weight to them concerning all human folly. On a certain level, they're as sad as they are funny. You can almost look at their movies as these absurdist statements about the human condition. I think that that is something I respond to in their work and why my dream and the film came out the way they did."

"Later on," he states, "I realized that I had structured the film somewhat like Laurel & Hardy shtick. There's even a silent Laurel & Hardy short where they get a bunch of laughing gas at the dentist and go through the entire day laughing uncontrollably. It's the same sort of thing. In my case, there's a guy weeping uncontrollably alongside the ironic juxtaposition of a guy who can't express his emotions, who has a real reason to be expressing them, suddenly saddled with a guy that's just the opposite."

A strong suggestion of the Laurel & Hardy subtext is the presentation of the opening credits in an old deco font, one very reminiscent of the Laurel & Hardy film Sons of the Desert (a film, coincidentally, where Laurel and Hardy both wear a fez). Also, the music that plays in the introduction and credits is a composition by LeRoy Shield, who, not so coincidentally, composed most of the music for the films starring Laurel & Hardy.

Every bit of this film is exactly as Robertson wants it to be, from beginning to end-actors, lighting, music. And as he begins to send Weeping Shriner out to film festivals across the country, he looks forward to bringing his unique film to the attention of more and more people and hopes they'll find something in it, even if it's just a fraction of what went into it. "The idea is to take it to film festivals and hopefully get it recognized," he says. "I really do hope that people enjoy it and that the film gains some acceptance. With any luck, I'll be able to write and direct more in the future."

(Copyright 1999 ACE Magazine. Reprinted with permission.)