FELLOW CENTAUR / BROTHERMAN
-by Blair Murphy, 2008

The last time I saw the filmmaker Baird Bryant was here in Windber, PA, as we stood at a car door and said good-bye to one another. I think we knew we wouldn't see each other again by the way of our deep complimentary goodbye. We complimented the fifteen year friendship we had shared and how good it had been to have known one another. My life is richer because of you, we told each other. I am proud to have witnessed your spirit here on this Earth, we told each other. I am proud of the path you have lived and how you have grown, he told me. I am honored to have known you, I told him. Brotherman, I love you, we each said. I think we just knew this was it.

Baird passed just the other day. A Buddhist service is being held for him Friday in California. I don't think I'll make it. For tonight, right now, I'll type out a few rambling memories of this wonderful soul. I have so many fun stories about Baird over the years. Every one of them makes me laugh.

So Baird Bryant, I loved him SOOOOOO dearly. He was always a blast. I remember studying his work in film school, in particular the Gimmie Shelter stabbing footage and the LSD graveyard footage from Easy Rider. And then one day, a few months later, I was hanging out in Los Angeles in a friend's kitchen, and in walked this man...the cinematographer Baird Bryant. "Hey man," he said. I was eating spaghetti. He sat down at the table next to me and started eating a bowl of spaghetti as well.

His girlfriend at the time was a woman named Lucy Mack. She worked for the Hollywood Reporter. She was floored when she found out Baird and I had the same birthday. It was one of those moments meeting like a wrapper pealing off some fresh new fruit or sweet food and you could suddenly smell the new mix in the air. We hit it off instantly. "I hear you're making a film. Mmm. Good good," he said. "Maybe I can help. Tell me about it..."

Baird went on to shoot my first feature film, Jugular Wine. I was crazy as a director. I saw the film as a kind of massive holy adventure that must be completed at all costs. I took Baird everywhere from the East Coast to Alaska. He was a real trooper. He owned his own 16mm camera and carried it like a well-worn soldiers weapon. He knew his camera inside and out. He loved hand-held. He actually didn't like tripods, I saw. Instead, he struck me as a kind of athlete who liked to be flexible with his camera, like it was a hockey stick or some other tool that he wanted to take into the action of the event. And he would attempt anything! He never said no. I could say, "Baird, run out there in that field of snow, over there over the frozen water, on the ice, and grab the shot of the polar bear before he moves." And Baird would respond like, "Hey man! That's a great shot!" And he'd start racing toward it.

For years I didn't even know the half of Baird's stories. I didn't even know Jack Kerouac had come to his apartment in Paris for about ten years. (When I learned that one I begged him to write some of them down and he eventually wrote a fun Paris years memoir.) He had so many fun stories about Hollywood and life in the trenches of documentary and independent film. Before we actually shot Jugular Wine I spent a few days on a documentary Baird was shooting about the Dalai Lama. I was so young and fresh out of the dark halls fo film school I didn't even know who the Dalai Lama was at the time. He walked up and smiled and nodded to each of us. Between Baird and his girlfriend Lucy I met a great many interesting people in Hollywood. The three of us had a lot of fun together over the years.

Baird was always cool. The first time we got in the car together he was turning the radio dial and I worried he was going to put on some dry station. He found a Jimi Hendrix tune and cranked it up, "Alright, Jimi!" Then he told a Jimi Hendrix story, of his assisting in sound editing a Hendrix concert film. While shooting Jugular Wine Baird would entertain our crew every night with his wonderful stories late into the night. That particular day we were coming from some wacky UFO group out in the desert. After snacks the group conversations were about talking ESP dolphins and horny gay men's wigs catching on fire, or something ridiculous like that. Who knows. Everything was always sooo California. Later I would see these folks on the news or in other documentaries. Many a day I would go to some really goofy event and bump into Baird there filming it. There was so much adventure and fun to be had across the city of Los Angeles, and Baird was out and about, filming around the clock always at these cultural edge events. He had adventures with Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda while working on Easy Rider. Every film project had a different cast of wonderful adventures. Once Baird even mentioned filming the devil. "What? Him too?!" My friends roared. And it turned out Baird had gone to some weird group across the globe who were digging for buried treasure, and they thought their leader was the son of the devil, and Baird was hired to record them uncover this great inheritance. That adventure got weirder and weirder and he left running.

Baird spoke French too, and he was beautiful to watch and listen to. He spent a long adventurous season in France with his pal the then young jazz singer Chet Baker, who sang the famous song My Funny Valentine. Baird said Chet had the most beautiful voice all the women would just fall to pieces in his presence. In those early days Baird would play his 16mm movies in apartments and Chet would play trumpet live to accompany the footage. Can you imagine? All the 1950 American Beat writers crossed paths with Baird. Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and David Amram are in his pictures or memoirs. I went to France with my girl Genevieve and sat in little un-airconditioned hot theaters watching American Cassavette's movies, drinking red wine at night, walking the streets by day, and Baird was everywhere in our romantic adventures there, his stories painting yet another layer of riches to this new city we were visiting. I couldn't help but feel a real parallel to our lives. He was always laughing and calling me "brother". I just loved his buddyhood. What glorious days of art and making life richer on nothing.

Baird was also a tad naive in a good way. He had this beautiful soul naive quality to him, at times, which was a real treasure. He could look at something and you could see him nodding, appreciating it, like a child still charmed with finding new things in the Universe. You could see it in just the sweet precious way he held a cat.

I had this little tiny hut of an apartment in Venice Beach, right on the canals. It was surrounded by mansions and superstars. But my place was the bohemian nightmare that was always awake all night and entertaining nutbags and artists. We had a glass jar for the coffee pot. We even had baby pigmy goats in the yard for a while. It was insane!

Baird eventually moved about two hours outside of LA. So every time he came into town he'd just stay at my place. It was that kind of place where the door was always open and there was always a circulating entourage of guests. The line of up of crazies you see in footage of Venice along the beach, lots of them hung out at our place. Baird's son Pablo would join us, he looked like a young Paul Newman. Cirque du Soleil performers would be there. Singer songwriter Baron Stewart, who sang with the Beach Boys for a while, was our neighbor and would come out back play in the yard for us. Playboy Playmate of the Year Corinna Harney hung out with us for a while. Poet Manuel Ibarra would be there. B Actors from Hollywood would end up at our parties. Film students and just flat out Venice crazies would fill my yard. This would go on for days. It never seemed to stop, this revolving swirl of guests. And Baird was a Hollywood legend to everyone for his associations and work in the 1970s. Somewhere in the last few years premier American filmmaker Martin Scorsese even mentioned and gave tribute to Baird on some show. At my little Venice apartment Baird was our personal delight. He'd show up at random with bags and a camera. Our guerilla style of filmmaking and easy bohemian living was a perfect match to his earlier days of passion and roar. I think we reminded him of himself pounding the artistic curb in an earlier Hollywood, an earlier Greenwich Village, an earlier Paris. He was still so young at heart and up for anything, even in his mid-sixties. I'd cheer, "Baird? You're back? How long are you in for this time?" And he'd say, "Oh, about two weeks." I'd give him my bed because he was the older man and I'd simply sleep on one of the sofas or next door at my girlfriends. My bed was about eight feet in the air. It was this big bunk built way up by the ceiling of my hut. A cool sea breeze wafted in every morning and the smell of the ocean on soft crisp air was perhaps my most favorite daily memory of living in Venice. Fresh California ocean every dawn... (Then I would hear a goat start bleating followed by my neighbors cursing them.) I remember one night asleep next door at my girlfriend Genevieve's and we heard through the wall something that sounded like, "Ruahh, ruaghhh AHHHH! Thump!" I fell back to sleep. In the morning I came over into my apartment and there was Baird laying on the floor, "Oh man," he moaned from the hard ground, "I fell off the bed." He'd dropped eight feet!

Baird had a secret laboratory of his own hidden in another town outside of LA. It was filled with used old film equipment. My god, we were fun mad scientists building our Frankensteins of low budget film. Everything was laughter and hiding from women and sneaking beers and appreciating films. I deeply appreciated the time he spent with me. We would go to an old black and white movie in a small theater and he would know the actors, or have his name in the credits. He shot the award winning Cool World. He won a Golden Lion for his first short film, The Vipers. At the Italian award ceremony they told him and his friend they were giving them the prestigious award but not to tell anybody. And then at the announcement -before the announcement- Baird and his friend stood up prematurely... then they quickly sat back down, only to be announced the winners and had to stand back up. His secret lab had all kinds of little memorabilia and film moment treasures. I loved it.

There was something about our mutual birthdays that said it all between us in some unspoken way, both of us being Sagittarius, born in December on the same day, staggered a few decades apart. Sagittarius being the archer, the centaur, the consummate optimist, the fountain of unlimited energy, spontaneous, free-spirited, the perhaps not wisest of risk-takers but certainly the wanter and lover of life. Bring it on. It set the tone of our Venice household and the pace of the road shooting for Jugular Wine. I would just look at Baird and a transported smile from his eyes would match my own and our behaviour was instantly understood between us. If you've never met a Sagittarius, they love to run and play with each other. Just imagine centaurs running with delight in the wild. If ever a Disney character was a Sagittarius, it would be Tigger the Tiger. Anyway, with Baird, I found a wonderful friend to race with across the American cultural landscape of the Arts. Hoof beats, all heart.

One night I was out at this bar way South. It was a surf bar along the beaches I worked in at times. Anyway, I got off my shift and drank so much I called my own home. Baird was at my home! "Hey man, I'm in town!" He'd been drinking at my place. So he got a ride and rushed down to the surf bar I was at. By the time he got there I'd drunk even more. To the horror of the bikini-clad locals Baird and I erupted with so much enthusiasm we jumped out on the floor and started dancing like crazy men. Finally my friend Louis quit his shift and drove us all the way back to Venice. It was about this time that Baird had shared all his Beat stories with me about living in Paris. So I was hooting them at top volume for everyone in Venice to enjoy, but doubling their scandal. "Baird Bryant and William Burroughs back in Paris did this- !" Blah blah blah. And Baird was laughing, "No I didn't! I didn't say that!" My girlfriend Genevieve was so pissed at us. But we just laughed and laughed. Baird's girlfriend Lucy called and she would have been doubly pissed but Baird was holding his jaw in some funny furious tight grip trying to sound sober over the phone. It was a blast. Silly hours, good times. I'm sure all of Venice Beach was awake to hear it too, along with the goats.

All of my memories of Baird are accompanied with laughter. He was a dear soul and very generous man. From the stories I heard of his earlier days a lot of people thought he was crazy. He even said he was crazy, perhaps, certainly some of his adventures and decisions were. Sometimes when we were editing he would call the craziest artistic decisions, "Crazy wisdom. That's what the Buddhists call crazy wisdom, man!" I can't tell you how many crazy wisdom moments I shared with Baird Bryant, laughing. My friend Ken, another Venice Beach filmmaker, always called Baird, "Beautiful." I watched Baird grow older and frailer, until he was this little sweet old man, and then everyone was calling him simply "beautiful". I remember once a group of us were hanging out in my place, just sharing stories after a long day of low-budget shooting, and laughing, and Baird ended the moment with the line, "When you're laughing you're next to God."
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Last photo:

(Light painting of Baird Bryant taken at Grand Midway by Adam Blai, "leaving the wheel of karma")
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David from New Jersey writes:

Contemplation on No-Coming and No-Going

This body is not me.
I am not limited by this body.
I am life without boundaries.
I have never been born,
and I have never died.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,
manifestations from my wondrous true mind.
Since before time, I have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,
sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.

So laugh with me,
hold my hand,
let us say good-bye,
say good-bye, to meet again soon.

We meet today.
We will meet again tomorrow.
We will meet at the source every moment.
We meet each other in all forms of life.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

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beat legend

It was a true honor for me to have met Baird and spent some time with him at the kerouac fests. Talking with and videotaping his beat tales was a once in a lifetime occurrence that I will remember the rest of my days. One time calling me by name he gave me advice on film lighting. Another time he evaluated one of my films. He liked it, but felt it could have been shot in another style. I appreciated his honest opinion and his fatherly advice. He treated me with respect and as a equal, even though we all knew he was the master and I the student. I will miss Him. My deepest sympathy goes out to his family and friends.

-Jaemi

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He was an incredible person and will be missed greatly.
-Leah
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Baird Bryant -- He worked on edgy films
(LA Times obit)

Baird Bryant, 80, a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer who made his name on edgy films such as "Easy Rider" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," died Thursday [November 13, 2008] from complications after surgery at Hemet Valley Medical Center in Hemet [California], his family announced.

During the Stones' performance of "Under My Thumb," Baird turned his camera toward a scuffle at the foot of the stage at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California. Only later did the filmmakers realize that he had captured a stabbing on film, and the inclusion of the violent scene in the 1970 documentary was controversial.

The filming of 1969's "Easy Rider" was chaotic, and many crew members had quit by the time the scene showing the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda characters on an acid trip was filmed in a New Orleans graveyard, Bryant later recalled.

"I showed up with my camera, and nobody else was there," Bryant told the New York Post in 1998.

"The whole crew had just had it," he said.

Bryant made more than 20 other movies, including "The Cool World," a 1964 movie that grittily portrayed juvenile delinquency in Harlem, and "Broken Rainbow," a 1985 Oscar-winning documentary about the Navajo.

He also worked on "Heart of Tibet," a 1991 documentary on the Dalai Lama.

He was born Wenzell Baird Bryant on December 12, 1927, in Columbus, Indiana, and was a graduate of Deep Springs College in Inyo County [California], and Harvard University.

Since 1991, he had lived in Idyllwild [California].