The centerpiece of Tom Noonan's relentlessly real-time, two-character, one-room black comedy is a creepy children's story that Jackie, a legal secretary from Queens, reads to her uneasy dinner guest. Full of cannibalism, incest, infanticide and topless go-go dancers, her reading is the unsettling dessert after an excruciatingly awkward dinner date.
But when Tom Noonan, who wrote, directed and stars in "What Happened Was . . . " brought his screenplay to a prospective producer, he was told, "Eh, throw the play out, shoot this story, that's a movie! You got girls, you got car crashes, it's great!"
Needless to say, Mr. Noonan did not heed the advice. Winner of the 1994 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Scott Screenwriting Award, "What Happened Was . . . " might not appeal to the car-crash crowd.
Awfully tall first-time feature director Noonan may be known to action-genre zealots as the character who has his brain removed in "RoboCop 2" or the ax-wielding fiend in "The Last Action Hero." But "What Happened Was . . . " is more in the genre of "My Dinner With Andre." Actually, Mr. Noonan was inspired by "Andre" star Wallace Shawn, whose sedentary solo performance, "The Fever," "blew his mind."
Most of the revelations that Mr. Noonan's character, Michael, discloses are from Mr. Noonan's past. "Looking back, I had kind of a nervous breakdown in college," he says of his years at Yale. "I was hearing things and couldn't get out of bed, and voices sounded too loud to me. I'm perfectly fine now, but it does leave its effect on you. It unnerves you in a way that doesn't go away so quickly."
Although Mr. Noonan, who spent his bachelor days as a hippie on a commune, never actually "dated," he says the dynamics of this movie date are quite familiar. Most of the time, he says, "I don't understand what is going on and I feel like I'm on Mars."