November 26–December 3, 1998

critical mass

Speed City

How legendary NYC tour guide and philosopher Speed Levitch wound up the star of a documentary.

by Sam Adams

		Personal Journey: Levitch (left) shares his unique vision of NYC.

Celebration," says Speed Levitch, "is suffering turned into transportation." Who is this Levitch? Glib pundit, obscure philosopher, or just a crackpot? The subject of the new documentary The Cruise, Levitch is all three and more. A Manhattan tour guide who has been treating visitors to his own skewed version of Big Apple history since 1992, Levitch is part Zen monk, part full-throttle neurotic, simultaneously at one with his surroundings and consumed with nervous energy. For Levitch—real name Timothy, but Speed fits better—leading tours is more than a job, more even than a way of life. It's a profound metaphysical interaction with humanity in all its splendor and degradation, the epitome of what he calls "cruising."

As filmed by one-man crew Bennett Miller, The Cruise takes its audience on a journey through Speed's Manhattan, where facts are secondary to impressions and what sounds good takes precedence over the historical record. On the top of a double-decker, with a group of onlookers at his disposal, Speed is in his element, wielding his CB microphone like a magic wand. With a delight in language that leads to the creation of phrases like "international flesh congregations" (i.e. tour bus crowds), Speed seems incapable of uttering an uninteresting sentence, even if not all of them make sense.

In person (he was in town recently at the Sheraton Society Hill with Bennett Miller), Speed is so much like the portrait on the screen that you think the director must have had the easiest job in the world; five minutes later, Miller seems like a genius. As mercurial and spontaneous as Levitch seems on the screen, he is exponentially more so in the flesh. He breaks off a response to admire the light coming through a hotel room window, and announces at one point that he is "taking notes on the present tense, because it sometimes goes by too fast for me, and I have to write it down." Curling his legs up underneath him on his hotel room couch, the scraggle-haired Levitch is a dramatic contrast to the closely shorn, sardonic Miller. Levitch's frequent laugh is a wet, snickering affair, while Miller's is a taut exhalation, a brief release.

On or off camera, Levitch is clearly a born performer. Each time he finishes addressing his tour, the film shows, he clicks off his microphone and flings out his arm like a concert pianist rolling up his sleeves. His rhythms are as intricate as any actor's. As the bus rolls through Midtown, he launches into a soliloquy on the evils of rampant capitalism, concluding, "This is ludicrousness and this cannot last." A pause, a click. "The new Ann Taylor store on the right."

More than a look at a colorful character, though, The Cruise deepens into a finely etched portrait of a delicate soul whose extroversion is only one side of a man whose wounds run deep. In the movie's most startling scene, Levitch stands on the Brooklyn Bridge, explaining that the bridge's pillars of stone are his friends and will protect him. Without warning, he then launches into a catalogue of injuries, some decades old, culminating in this remembered slight, "To Jen and Michelle—that was supposed to be an orgy, not a double date with me as a fifth wheel!"

The Cruise, as Speed defines it, is something like a state of perpetual awareness, of always being in the moment. Finding near-orgasmic beauty in the elegant facade of a well-crafted building, Speed draws pleasure from the smallest facets of the city around him. "The unawareness of the place people live in," he says, "is coupled with and is an escort to the unawareness they have about their own lives, and the emotional violence and carnage they're passing out to the world. Being a tour guide is an avaricious chase of clarity, which is the essential ingredient of ecstasy. Trying to understand the vibration of the city is trying to understand the vibration of yourself."

Culled from around 100 hours of digital videotape, The Cruise zips by in 76 minutes, the result of nearly eight months Miller spent in the editing room. He says, half-seriously, that his initial plan was to "exclude anything that would have made [Speed] eccentric. There was a fantastic amount of really exuberant, startlingly fascinating footage that just did not have a place in the arc we were trying to create, which is really plunging into an individual's persona, at least from a subjective perspective. Ultimately, I wanted to present [a picture of] this eccentric who lived his life outside the current of mass culture, in all his inspiration and all his struggle."

Miller and Levitch first met through Miller's younger brother, a classmate of Speed at Manhattan's prestigious Horace Mann. (Actually, Levitch recalls an earlier meeting some time in the sixth century B.C.) Miller, whose only description of his background prior to The Cruise is "fuck-up," cultivated a friendship with Speed, then decided "to introduce a camera into the equation" without necessarily planning to make a film. "I just thought at some point I should detach myself from what I'm doing [as a filmmaker] and devoted my energy to this relationship," he recalls. For Miller, Speed represents a "fascinating coupling of inspiration and desperation… this person who really had his eye on the ball about what he wanted out of life." Shooting with a digital video camera and a shotgun mike which together fit into a backpack, Miller began to document Speed both on and off the job, and the results gradually became The Cruise.

While the effect the camera has on the subjects of a documentary is usually a matter of speculation, both Miller and Levitch are quite open about the camera's place in their relationship. Being on camera, says Levitch, "is a craft, when you suddenly turn to a camera and start babbling directly to it. There was a long time when I was a walking rough draft, figuring out exactly how to go about such a thing. Of course, everything changed for me when I recognized the camera as a lover, as an organism I was literally falling in love with. This was also a human adventure between me and Bennett, because the camera was a conduit to our intercourse, the homoeroticism of our lives." Miller stifles a laugh, then confirms Levitch's account (at least the first part). "There was about 70 hours we shot that we just threw away, before Speed learned to let his guard down. That's in addition to the 100 hours we edited from."

During the film's run on the festival circuit, Speed found himself elevated to demi-celebrity status by audiences who responded to the film's sense of wonder and openness. While the perpetually couch-surfing Levitch still has no fixed address (although he does carry a cell phone), he now has the option of crashing at the domiciles of Hollywood actors like Natasha Lyonne and Dan Futterman, both of whom befriended him after seeing advance screenings of the movie.

Being on the big screen, says Levitch, is "just profound. I think of going to movies as being brought to the feet of our dream life. So in many ways the attachment I have experienced while watching the movie with an audience is just me reintroducing myself to my dream life, and my dreams reintroducing themselves to me. It's like witnessing aspects of myself that I am discovering for the first time—the aspects of myself that eroticize myself. Speaking loudly—it's quite an ecstasy to watch it!"

The Cruise opens Friday, Nov. 27, at Ritz at the Bourse.