A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 6

This is the fifth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:

Around 1990, writer Stephen Brill came up with this idea: “A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.” That eventually became the movie The Mighty Ducks. That seemingly innocuous family comedy grossed $51M, not bad for a movie with a reported $10M budget.

Then came D2: The Mighty Ducks. Then D3: The Mighty Ducks. Then “Mighty Ducks”, a TV series. Then Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off, a DTV animated movie. And then came this:

The Anaheim Ducks [formerly the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. An NHL franchise. A professional franchise worth an estimated $188M.

All based on the fact that one day, a writer was walking around and came up with a story idea about a youth hockey team named the Mighty Ducks.

As I said… in Hollywood, story ideas are worth gold.

Today’s story idea: Working class couple amass priceless art collection.

Herb Vogel never earned more than $23,000 a year. Born and raised in Harlem, Vogel worked for the post office in Manhattan. He spent nearly 50 years living in a 450-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with his wife, Dorothy, a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. They lived frugally. They didn’t travel. They ate TV dinners. Aside from a menagerie of pets, Herb and Dorothy had just one indulgence: art. But their passion for collecting turned them into unlikely celebrities, working-class heroes in a world of Manhattan elites.

While their coworkers had no idea, the press noticed. The New York Times labeled the Vogels the “In Couple” of New York City. They counted minimalist masters Richard Tuttle and Donald Judd among their close friends. And in just four decades, they assembled one of the most important private art collections of the 20th century, stocking their tiny apartment floor-to-ceiling with Chuck Close sketches, paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, and sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy. Today, more than 1,000 of the works they purchased are housed in the National Gallery, a collection a curator there calls “literally priceless.” J. Carter Brown, the museum’s former director, referred to the collection as “a work of art in itself.”

The Vogels had no formal training in art collecting. They didn’t aspire to open a gallery or work in museums. They bought art the way any amateur collector shops: for the love of the individual pieces and the thrill of a good deal. But you don’t accumulate a priceless collection of anything by accident. Herb and Dorothy developed a methodical system for scouting, assessing, and purchasing art. When it came to mastering their hobby, the Vogels were self-trained professionals. This is how they did it.

— —

The couple began visiting dozens of galleries and studios each week, becoming what artist Chuck Close called “the mascots of the art world.” In making purchases, they functioned as a team. Herb, the impulsive Dionysian, searched for art “like a truffle hound,” said the artist Lucio Pozzi, who has more than 400 works in the Vogel collection. Dorothy, the Apollonian librarian with the encyclopedic memory, was more passive, hanging back and calculating the financial realities. They had only a few criteria: The work had to be affordable; it had to fit in their apartment; and it had be transportable via taxi or subway. Not part of the equation? The artist’s reputation. “We bought what we liked,” Dorothy said. “Simple as that.” And they continued to lead their double life — racing from studio to studio to gallivant with artists and to scout their next big purchase every night, while keeping their passions private from their work colleagues. Still, assembling such an incredible collection on such a tiny budget required a few other tricks.

Many in the art world call the Vogels’ method cheating. That’s because the couple never dealt with galleries and art dealers. Instead, Herb and Dorothy negotiated with hungry artists directly, arriving at studios with cash in hand. Artist Jeanne-Claude, who passed away in 2009, remembered receiving a phone call from Herb back in 1971, when the creators of “The Gates” were still broke. “It’s the Vogels!” Jeanne-Claude cried to her dispirited husband and partner in art, Christo. “We’re going to pay the rent!” But the Vogels didn’t just take their cash to big-name artists; they were equally passionate about unknown talents, often helping them to develop. David Reed, now a famous conceptual artist, said the couple encouraged him to make more drawings, which later became a central part of his practice. “The Vogels made you aware of what you were doing as an artist,” he said. “They had artist sensibilities.” When they spotted something beyond their means, they’d find a way to make the purchase: They’d buy on credit; they’d forgo a vacation; they’d even throw in cat-sitting to sweeten a deal. And the artists loved them for it. As Chuck Close told Newsday, “You knew when you were selling them something it was becoming part of an important collection.”

— —

Herb retired from the post office in 1979 and, naturally, used his pension to continue buying art. But the increasing size of the collection threatened to overwhelm the Vogels, like hoarders crushed to death by towering stacks of The New York Times. In the 1980s, they were forced to admit that their apartment could no longer contain their beloved art. They began meeting with curators and evaluating their options. They knew they wanted to donate their collection instead of selling it, and they liked the National Gallery, which is free to the public and maintains a policy against deaccessioning objects, meaning the collection would never be sold. In 1990, the year Dorothy retired, the Vogels followed through on their promise: Art handlers from the National Gallery transferred an astonishing 2,400 works from the Vogels’ tiny apartment, in a move that required five 40-foot trucks. In fact, unloading the works from the trucks and into the gallery tied up the museum’s freight elevators for weeks!

Every so often, I’ll stumble across a story that strikes me as the basis for a great, little independent movie. This is one of them.

Knowing how difficult it is to get an indie movie made nowadays, I’m going to put on my producer’s hat and give this basic conceit the most marketable spin I can. Here goes.

Herb is a single guy. Works at the reference desk at the New York City Public Library. By urban standards, he does not get paid a lot, but he makes do by living frugally in a 420 square foot rent control Manhattan apartment.

The thing is, you don’t get hired to work at the New York City Public Library reference desk unless you are really well-read and know a lot of stuff.

Herb knows a lot of stuff. Plus he has a photographic memory.

He keeps pretty much to himself. Brown bags his lunch, the same thing every day (tuna on rye). He clocks in. He clocks out. His co-workers find him to be pleasant, but know him well enough to understand Herb likes his privacy.

He also likes art. Check that. Loves art. And for decades, he has spent his free time walking the streets of the city, going from one cramped art studio to the next, finding new talent, buying their art on the cheap, and storing it in his apartment.

That’s not how the movie begins. Rather we start with a man. Staring dully into space. There are paint smudges on his face. Emotionless he takes a step. It’s only then we realize he has been standing atop a 25 story building in Manhattan. Down he soars, the man’s face expressing nothing more than curiosity as he plummets toward his inevitable death. His name is Kurt Schmeichel.

Cut to the opulent estate of an heiress Estelle, probably England, maybe Germany (her name can change depending upon the country). In her hands, a newspaper reporting Schmeichel’s suicide, the well-known painter tragically killing himself while on the cusp of greatness. Estelle is on the phone with an art dealer who, while attempting to sound bereaved over Schmeichel’s death, cannot hide his excitement. Now that the artist is dead and can produce no more paintings, it means his existing art work can only go up in value.

“The Bone series will go through the roof,” he says. “Tragically, of course.”

Ah, The Bone Series. Thirteen paintings from early in Schmeichel’s career. Each a study of animal bones. Cow. Dog. Monkey. And so on. A stark expression of post post-modernism, they are startling in their visuality, Schmeichel’s genius with a brush self-evident.

Estelle owns twelve of the paintings. The thirteenth, however, is the most famous. For one thing, it is the only one featuring human bones. Also no one knows the whereabouts of the painting. Indeed, many figure “SHB” (Schmeichel Human Bones as it’s come to be known in art circles) is nothing more than a fabrication by the artist, a kind of inside joke from Schmeichel who was known as a trickster.

The art dealer blathers on, conjecturing the value of the twelve Bone Series paintings to have gone up in value overnight fifty, maybe sixty percent.

“If only we could find SHB,” he says. “We are talking tens of millions of dollars…”

Estelle hangs up on him without saying goodbye. She stares at the image of Schmeichel’s body splayed across the front of her newspaper, ironically bones sticking out of his skin, likely part of the artist’s final plan.

Where is that thirteenth painting? This is the question in Estelle’s mind as her gaze hardens.

Cut to Herb’s tiny apartment. He is seated at a chair with a TV dinner on a tray. Contentedly browsing through a 1988 Almanac, one page after the other. Flip, flip, flip.

And there hanging on the wall above him… a painting of some bones… human bones. It is the SHB.

That’s the setup. Obviously Estelle discovers that Herb owns SHB. She takes her private jet across the Atlantic to meet with Herb, offering to buy the painting. And of course, he refuses.

Thus begins a bizarre courtship with Estelle trying every way she can to wrest ownership of SHB from Herb who at every turn declines to sell.

It’s the collision of two decidedly different personalities, each of whom is going to go through a journey, Herb offered the sun and the moon for the painting, akin to Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness, and Estelle escorted by Herb into the real world of art, taking into decrepit studios of starving artists.

Might Estelle resort to hiring thieves to steal the painting? Perhaps. On the other hand, this might not that kind of movie, but rather a simple dramedy, the clash world views. Who knows? Maybe even a romance ensues.

There you go: My sixth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Now it’s your turn. What would you do with this story setup?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

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