Homecoming

James Gray, director of "The Yards," returns to Queens for some poking around, an ice cream shutout and a moment of "pretentious prick" anxiety.

By T. Wright Townsend

Oct 23, 2000 | The driver pulls up our Town Car to the front of the Queens Borough Elks Lodge No. 878. This is the site where James Gray wanted to film one of the final scenes in his new "corruption in the system/strife in the family" movie, "The Yards."

The Elks wouldn't allow Gray to shoot in the lodge, so he filmed the scene elsewhere, but he wants to show it to me anyway. We walk up the front steps of the building -- a gray stone monolith on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst -- and that's when we hear the bagpipes.

The bleating becomes louder as we follow the sound up a set of inside stairs. On the second floor of the lodge, in a large, gymnasium-like hall with vaulted ceilings, we find the New York Fire Department's Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Band practicing. "This is so great!" says Gray, barely able to contain his joy at happening upon something so surreal at 7:30 on a Monday night in Queens. "I'm serious. I can't believe this!"

The 31-year-old filmmaker is like a little kid, excited by what he's seeing. Which is this: a bunch of burly men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, manipulating ancient Scottish instruments, honking away at ungodly decibels. That the Emerald Society is, in fact, a band at all is a matter of faith, since each member is practicing his own chords (or whatever bagpipe notes are called) at the moment.

But Gray is deferential around these men as they wander back and forth through the lobby outside the hall. He keeps his distance, speaks only when spoken to, is overly polite. To Gray, these blue-collar guys, who go to work each day and do a dangerous, thankless job, deserve respect. They are heroes, and heroes are not to be trifled with.

But his filmmaker's sense -- that signal that goes off when a scene might be ripe for the telling -- loves the incongruity of large New York firemen heaving away at bagpipe practice.

James Gray is flummoxed

Back in Manhattan, when Gray and his publicist pick me up at my apartment, the director begins talking before I'm even sitting in the back seat. Gray has just flown in from the Toronto International Film Festival, and is dressed all in black. He has a tall, blond pompadour and long sideburns and he wears horn-rimmed, tortoise-shell glasses. He's wearing a leather jacket, but he's ready to explain it away, as if it might be offensive to someone who lives in New York.

"We were in Toronto and this woman from the Gap comes up to me and says, 'You must come by the store tomorrow,' and so we did, and we get there and she tells me to pick something out," he says. "I pick out a shirt or something and she just starts throwing stuff at me: 'Take this, this would look nice with that shirt; and here, have a jacket; and try on these pants.' I thought I was going there for a shirt, and I walked out of there with, like, $3,000 worth of clothes. I'm just a blue-collar Jewish boy from Queens -- what do I know?"

Why, he wondered, would the Gap give a young, critically acclaimed film director on the verge of releasing his second movie a bunch of clothes for free? Could he really be that naive? It's doubtful. James Gray has seen things.

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