Bus, Tragic Bus

"What kind of people ride buses? Kids and poor people."

James Ellroy, the author and former Kansas City resident, stands in front of a filmmaker on a city bus that stops and starts and farts its way through downtown Los Angeles with all the unromantic herk and jerk of metro buses everywhere. "I have wheels of my own now, so I never ride the bus," he tells the camera. "This is an interesting archaeological expedition that you're taking me on. I've got some righteous, boneroo bus stories."

For the camera, Ellroy recounts filthy tales of young couples engaged in acne relief, of sex aboard criminal-transport vessels. He relates these bizarre memories with a straight face and unflinching eyes. And he keeps saying very messed-up things, things like pudenda to describe the female genitalia.

"Some things you had to watch for on the bus when I was a kid was queers and taking the Western Avenue bus back on Thursday night," he says. "The tough black kids that went to the roller rink on Hollywood and Western [would] kick your ass in a heartbeat. You had to stare in your lap and pretend they didn't exist. I always sat at the back of the bus, not out of any kind of solidarity for them but because it was easier to whip out my short dog, a Thunderbird wine, and drink it."

The filmmaker is 47-year-old Ben Meade, a film instructor at Avila University who lives with his wife and the youngest of five children in a spacious home in Lenexa near Shawnee Mission Park. For the past year, Meade has questioned dozens of Kansas Citians about what it means to ride the bus in these Hummerfied times. He began with bus drivers, shifted to bus riders, then turned his question to people visibly repulsed by the notion of boarding a city bus.

He added to these interviews a gold mine of archival footage, inane send-ups and the occasional exercise in visual flair. The resulting Das Bus proves in a cramped eighty minutes that, on any given day, Kansas City is far more interesting than one might imagine -- and far more pathetic.

Today, Meade sits in his basement studio, putting the finishing touches on one of three musical interludes in the film, using footage that merges the unholy trinity of a metro bus, Nazis, and local hair-metal band the Baloney Ponyz. Meade cackles throughout, stopping only to question his own acumen. "Bad, very bad taste, the whole thing is very bad taste," he says.

Meade calls Das Bus an "experimental documentary," a label that essentially liberates him from the truth-telling responsibility linked to traditional documentaries. "What happens is, I take real occurrences, real footage, and create a film that is part fact and part fiction," he says. "Not a docudrama, because there's really no drama to them -- it's just more of an experience where you create some reality, you create your own experiences in the film."

Creating reality, even toying with it, is a controversial enterprise. As Meade well knows. In March 2001, while he was working in Budapest, Hungary, Meade acquired a set of 8-mm film reels dating from 1948 to 1964. Once belonging to the Locsei family, the movies had fallen into the hands of a moving-company owner. Shocked by what he saw on those reels, the mover had turned them over to an acquaintance who turned them over to Meade.

Shot in a suspiciously professional style, the Locsei "home movies" revealed a family with no apparent qualms about allowing its arguably strange behavior to be filmed. (In one scene, mother Locsei appears to hold son Erno's penis as he urinates.) The reels also presented vague documentation of Mr. Locsei's livelihood as a supervisor for his government's eerie, postwar task of collecting, organizing and returning thousands of valuables stolen from Hungarian Jews who'd been sent to concentration camps.

A spellbound Meade became obsessed with the quality and ambiguity of the films and concluded that the Locsei family mystery would be the subject of his first feature-length endeavor. He returned to Budapest and tracked down the family's two living members, Erno and his sister, Atuska.

Both siblings suffered noticeably from mental illness. Only Erno, a severe alcoholic, cooperated, submitting to the film crew with the same passivity he had displayed as a youngster. (The movie suggests that Meade and his Hungarian codirector may have supplied Erno with booze.) Nonetheless, Erno was an unreliable source, unable even to identify his parents when Meade first showed him the family's home movies. Realizing he could never fully solve the Locsei riddle, Meade took another approach to complete Vakvagany.

Simultaneously informing and misleading, the film provides no answers. Instead, Meade takes the liberty of juxtaposing the Locsei home movies with modern glimpses of Erno and Atuska but ultimately leaving viewers to decide what, if anything, to believe. Meade supplies three commentators -- loutish author Ellroy, dogmatic filmmaker Stan Brakhage and overanalytical psychiatrist Roy Menninger -- each of whom volunteers his own questionable take on the Locsei images past and present.

"I lead you around in that film with three people who are all full of bullshit, and I love them all. They're all good friends," Meade says, noting Brakhage's death in March. "You don't have enough information to make a story, and you get led all over the place. That's why people come out of the theater, and husbands and wives are arguing with each other. People are mad at me -- because they were put into a very ambiguous situation with something very ambiguous, with no closure to it, and they leave, and they're upset."