The movie producer​ , cinematographer and screenwriter Harrison Starr died in 2024 at the age of 95. Almost no one noticed. If his name was ever mentioned it was usually in connection with those of more famous collaborators. He was the producer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary flop Zabriskie Point, which came out in 1970, and the year before he made a cameo appearance in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where ‘Harrison Starr, the movie-maker’ says: ‘You know what I say to people when I hear they are writing anti-war books? … Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ I once saw that quote printed on a wall at the Tate in an exhibition on war photography. I sent a picture of it to my parents, who were visiting Harrison at his ranch in Borrego Springs, California. It elicited a groan.

Harrison was my mentor, or, as he preferred it, I was his ‘little brother’. A gap of 58 years separated our fraternal union. When I was six, he yelled at me for eating my waffle ‘like a barbarian’. When I was eight, he explained to me the concept of nuclear war. When I was fourteen, he got me drunk for the first time and asked if I was still a virgin. When I said yes, he looked over with palpable disgust at my father, smiling on the other side of the room, and said: ‘If it was up to me, I would have gotten you a nice experienced woman to break you in by now.’

He had been my parents’ landlord in New York City in the 1970s. Another of his tenants was Thomas Pynchon, who wrote some of Gravity’s Rainbow at 161 Charles Lane in the West Village. Their association was complicated by Pynchon’s fear of Harrison’s feral cat Martha, who stalked his rooms and disrupted his concentration with her demonic stare. Harrison and Tom had lunch every Tuesday with Donald Barthelme, who was at the height of his fame after being named ‘the most interesting writer of fiction in America’ in the New York Times Magazine. ‘We have a little block association,’ Barthelme told the Paris Review in 1981, listing its members as Grace Paley, Kirk and Faith Sale (she was one of Pynchon’s editors), the longtime New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell and Harrison. Barthelme and Harrison drank heavily and bickered like lovers; my father recalls Barthelme tearfully knocking on his door to ask if he knew where Harrison had gone. Something of this dynamic, along with a perfect rendering of Harrison’s diction, is captured in Barthelme’s 1968 story ‘Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’:

H. and S. came for supper … Buckets of vodka before and buckets of brandy after. The brandy depressed me. Some talk about the new artists’ tenement being made out of an old warehouse building. H. said, ‘I hear it’s going to be very classy. I hear it’s going to have white rats.’ H. spoke about his former wife and toothbrushes: ‘She was always at it, fiercely, many hours a day and night.’

Harrison spent his childhood on a ranch in northern California shooting rattlesnakes, his adolescence selling marijuana and then working in the shipyards of the Bay Area during the war. He gained admission to the New School by showing the dean his poetry, befriended Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, supposedly knocked out Anatole Broyard during a bar fight, and became the lover of the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, with whom he made The Very Eye of Night (1955). He got his break in ‘pictures’, as he called them, when Preston Sturges asked him for information about hydraulic machinery.

It’s not hard for me to imagine any of this per se, but the culture that nourished these stories feels very distant. Harrison’s life and career, like that of his friends and collaborators, was part of the postwar flowering of the avant-garde, which had an unprecedented influence on mainstream American culture. This reached its apotheosis in the 1970s. Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award; Jean-Luc Godard, Miles Davis, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin et al. were interviewed on national television. For a few years, it seemed as if Harrison would be one of the great beneficiaries of this moment.

In the first half of the 1960s he worked on several films with Arthur Penn, then secured the film rights to produce Vonnegut’s novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. The professional collaboration soon developed into a close, if imbalanced, friendship. Their correspondence provides a glimpse of a relationship just before a rapid reversal of fortune takes place. Harrison, the would-be bigshot, skilfully deflects the financial anxieties of Vonnegut, still largely unknown and supporting a large family. ‘Please do not do me out of my one good break,’ Vonnegut writes in all caps in 1966. ‘I couldn’t stand it. I get the break today or never, I’m 45 years old with six kids and a string of let downs, this time business can’t be business, no break today and I’m no use to you or anybody.’ The film was never made. A few years later, Vonnegut was one of the most famous writers in the world.

‘I’m out here for a good time with Antonioni,’ Harrison wrote to Vonnegut from Los Angeles in 1968. ‘The mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers and other such bric-a-brac didn’t fall into La Brea tar pits – they jumped.’ Fresh off the success of Blow-Up, Antonioni had been given carte blanche by MGM to produce a film that was expected to capture the countercultural spirit of the late 1960s. ‘I see ten thousand people making love across the desert,’ Antonioni is said to have told the studio executives escorting him around Death Valley. The male lead, Mark Frechette, was involved in a cult-like commune called the Lyman Family and was repeatedly reprimanded for distributing their pamphlets on set; he later robbed a bank to fund the cult and died a couple of years later in prison. Antonioni clashed with the American crew, who in turn attempted to sabotage the filming. ‘He was the only real misandrist I ever met,’ Harrison told me once. Production members thought their phones were being tapped by the FBI – the Black Panthers appear in the film’s opening sequence. Only three hundred people ended up making love in the desert. ‘Around Death Valley today,’ Beverley Walker wrote in 1992, ‘there isn’t a single reference to Zabriskie Point, not a trace. Not a single person I spoke with – rangers, personnel at the ranch, hotel, restaurant and tourist office – had ever heard of the film.’

Harrison’s third wife was the writer Sally Kempton, the ‘S.’ in Barthelme’s 1968 story. She caused a sensation two years later when she published an essay in Esquire called ‘Cutting Loose’. She denounced her husband and her father, the journalist Murray Kempton, as representatives of a stifling patriarchal society. In the essay’s most famous passage, Kempton fantasised about hitting Harrison over the head with a frying pan while he slept. She had only refrained from doing so, she wrote, for fear that he might leave her if he survived the attack. Harrison and Kempton divorced not long afterwards. She fell under the sway of the yoga guru Muktananda and began to call herself Swami Durgananda, spending the next thirty years living in ashrams.

Harrison’s Hollywood career was effectively over, but he had made one wise investment: he bought the building at 161 Charles Lane as New York’s housing market approached its low point. The bottom floor of the building housed a harpsichord kit workshop founded by Wolfgang Zuckermann, which revolutionised and democratised the instrument’s production. It later became a workers’ collective and, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, was known in my family as the ‘lesbian harpsichord factory’.

My parents’ apartment had previously been occupied by Vaughn Meader, once known for his impressions of John F. Kennedy. On the night of the assassination, Lenny Bruce supposedly walked out on stage and said: ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The colour field painter Stephen Mueller lived in the building, as did the poet Eleanor Lerman, who worked in the harpsichord factory and wrote poems on a blackboard there; Harrison saw them and encouraged her to publish. The resulting book, Armed Love, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973.

By then Harrison was married to his fourth and final wife, Sandy, whom he met through Barthelme, whose brother Steven she was dating. ‘You see that man?’ Steven said to her when Harrison walked into a party carrying a large yellow slobbering dog called Pepper. ‘That’s the man you’re going to marry.’ They were together for more than forty years. Sandy was an art historian, an American brahmin and a formidable source of anecdote and erudition. She worked as a curator in New York City and, later, in Los Angeles, where she and Harrison moved in the late 1970s, just before my parents returned to California.

We exchanged annual visits throughout my childhood. On each of them, Harrison and I would go on an excursion on our own. We went for long drives around LA, where he explained the history of the landscape and its development, and told me what I was actually looking at. We went to an electronics store to commune with the flat-screen televisions, which he said were like works of art. We went to the automobile museum to admire the ‘marvellous machines’. We went to look at sailboats when he briefly considered a life at sea in his seventies. He would recite Gaelic when discussing his Irish heritage, warn me about the dangers of American philistinism (he called it ‘Babbittry’), court my aesthetic preferences and challenge me to defend them. He taught me how to disable a man’s windpipe should the need arise. We once met an autodidact ornithologist known as Falcon Bob, from whom I was made to understand that the man on the street has as much to teach us as any professor. Wisdom is found in the most unlikely places. A kind gesture from a stranger can change your life. Stories can transcend petty fact and reach a higher truth. A thorough knowledge of rail gauges is a good entry point to modern history. These were other things I learned.

He called me young buck, young blood, young gun; he called me his little brother. He had beautiful, watery blue eyes. He was the first person I told I wanted to be a writer. I was 22 and had begun to make these visits on my own. ‘I suspected as much,’ he replied after a long pause. ‘People like us, we follow the path of the heart.’ I can still remember Sandy at the dinner that evening to celebrate my ‘becoming a writer’. You must read Proust! And Rilke! How can you be a writer without having read the Duino Elegies? ‘Simply marvellous,’ she said with her curious transatlantic accent. My grand determination was really a whim, but I began to interrogate Harrison incessantly about his better-known friends, acquaintances and collaborators, oblivious to the fact that I was sticking my finger in a wound. There is a hint of irony in Vonnegut’s description of Harrison as ‘movie-maker’, which I’m sure was not lost on him. He felt he was a failure, and yet he never ceased to make me feel that being an artist was a noble pursuit.

In his final years he wearied of telling me his stories. ‘Dead, dead, deader than yesterday,’ he’d say, though he granted me one hour of question time per visit. He was visited by ghosts for an hour every morning, he told me once. Sometimes he would recite poetry in answer to my questions – Shakespeare, especially, and, his favourite, Yeats:

Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.

I loved that, too. He always regretted that I wasn’t staying longer, a regret I now share. For fifteen years straight, he told me every year that this was the year he would die. I never conceded the possibility: he was so robust, filled with such vitality and wit and verve. He was still practising tai chi, carrying on an epistolary romance with an old fling, and had founded a gun club for women, because ‘every woman should know how to kill a man.’ And then, one morning, I was shocked to receive a message announcing his death.

I began frantically to record my memories of him, and then, abruptly, began to doubt their veracity. There were few people left, I suddenly realised, to corroborate them. The opening lines of an Emily Dickinson poem returned to me: ‘It might be lonelier/Without the loneliness …’ This poem was read at Sandy’s funeral in 2015, which I missed because I had left the United States two years earlier. The country has since been transformed beyond recognition, such that my childhood there increasingly feels like an elaborate fiction.

‘Never forget you’re a westerner,’ Harrison told me before I moved to New York. The population of California was five million at the time of his birth and 39 million when he died. He watched Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play tennis; everyone knew they were having an affair, he told me, but Hollywood was a different town back then. Preston Sturges asked him: ‘What can you tell me about an Archimedes screw?’ The last sentence he ever said to Henry Miller was ‘Fuck you, Henry.’ He once owned a painting that Lee Krasner had smashed over Jackson Pollock’s head. You should always go to bed a little hungry. His main pieces of advice to me were: (1) writing is writing and (2) learn how to cook. ‘Are you a human or a robot?’ William Burroughs asked him before they could start working on a (still unproduced) screenplay about the gangster Dutch Schulz. ‘What are your intentions?’ Harrison asked my father when he first came to look at the apartment in Charles Lane. He was one of the original producers on Bonnie and Clyde and quit over a minor budget dispute. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a cheerful man. Kurt Vonnegut was a man you could get beers with. Donald Sutherland mooned his wedding party, or maybe it was Robert Duvall. He always asked my opinion and never treated me like a child. He could drink a pint of whiskey in one go by the time he was fourteen and hanging out in Oakland’s jazz clubs. I was a hood, he told me. People like us are called ofays, he said. He didn’t wear shoes until he was eight. They dragged him kicking and screaming back to San Francisco, the city where he was born, just up the road from the city where I was born nearly six decades years later. He loved horses, machines, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘short cuts’ which took twice as long as the main roads, the adjectives ‘smashing’, ‘tremendous’, ‘marvellous’, ‘sophisticated’. ‘Well, whippersnapper?’ he’d say when I called.

He became increasingly suspicious of my artistic ambitions. One of the last times we met, he abruptly broke off my hour of question time and said: ‘I have seen a lot of people destroy their lives and the lives of all those around them in pursuit of artistic glory. The most important thing in life is to be a good son, a good husband, a good father, should you choose. These are the things that really matter, and this is how the people in your life will remember you.’ How awful it is to grow older and watch the people who populated your childhood disappear from this world into your memories, and yet how lucky I was, as an only child, to have a big brother like him.