Gates of Heaven (1978) Frank has been for several weeks now, holed up in a dingy room above a take-out Chinese place in north Hollywood, squinting and sweating over a Pentium I Compaq laptop. His cats, Tom Horn and Junior Bonner run about the place crazily tearing at the floor and baseboards trying to find the source of the strange noises and smells coming from downstairs. And for this Frank is glad because Bonner’s otherwise favorite pastime is sitting on his keyboard and swatting (ironically) at the mouse as it tacked across the screen. It seems Frank’s generally good-for-nothing agent, Ayleen, had sold a yet-to-be written screenplay to Skull and Bones productions. Skull and Bones had in turn signed a deal for twelve straight to DVD B-movies to be distributed by Tiger Paw Entertainment. All that meant Frank had to get busy cranking out horror scripts with plenty of gore and full frontal female nudity. The only breaks he allowed himself were: 1. A trip across the street for a liter of Philadelphia Blended and a pack of Lucky’s (Both of which greatly eased the writing process), 2. Downstairs for a pint of cashew chicken for himself and some Chinese noodles for Tom Horn (Junior Bonner just liked to chase the paper fortunes across the hardwood floor.) 3. To the Errol Morris film retrospective playing a small theatre two blocks away. Thankfully, they played Gates of Heaven (1978) in conjunction with Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (Blank 1980), something MGM didn’t think to include on the DVD release (July 28, 2005). Quirky director Herzog (Fitzcarraldo 1982), had made a bet with his then student Morris, that if he got his documentary Gates of Heaven, a tale of two pet cemeteries in California, made, he would in fact (and did, on camera) eat his shoe. Since then Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) was named best documentary of the year by the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. His film about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003) more recently won the best documentary feature Oscar in 2004. Gates focuses first on handicapped and emotional Floyd McClure and his failed attempt to open and run a pet cemetery. The job of our little friends he says is “to love and to be loved.” When McClure’s fails, the deceased are dug up and moved to the Harbert’s pet cemetery. The second part deals with the Harberts and the training of their two sons to take over the family business. Gates of Heaven is emotional and at times funny. Also it is both at the same time. With a lack of exposition and by extrapolation, didacticism, interpretation is up to the viewer. McClure’s colleagues seem self-aware of their fledgling industry and are careful to sound business-like, while McClure is openly emotionally talking of his deceased collie and his hatred of the rendering plant, or “glue factory,” previously the only other option for disposing of deceased animals. At the Harberts’ Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, sons Dan and Phil are like a picture of society-to-be at the end of the nineteen-seventies, one a walking self-improvement seminar, and the other, a fading hippie jamming on his guitar amongst the pet tombstones. Thus, in its way, it is not a documentary about pet cemeteries; it is about religion, family, dreams, life death, etc. In short, it is a documentary about people. Morris’ lens is without judgment and his subjects are vulnerable and honest. It is humanity at its most touching and screwiest. Gates of Heaven is proof of what Frank has been saying all along: there is art and beauty in the everyday. The entertainment drawn from the human condition can be drawn from anywhere. Most importantly Gates of Heaven is a god-send for Frank’s unfilled script-hole, and he practically skipped back to his room and began to pound away at the keyboard. Two days later he is squashing out a Lucky Strike into a half-eaten pint of rice and ripping a floppy out of the drive. He is on his way down to Kinkos to print out the first draft of “Nine Lives,” a gory tale of a bunch of cats who get the taste of human blood when their elderly caretaker dies in her kitchen. Unlike the beloved pets in the Morris film, you never could be too sure of cats, after all. They say they’d eat your face off while you slept if you neglected their food bowl for too long…