Kenneth Loring: the fake film historian the Coen brothers created for a DVD commentary
You’d think the Coen brothers wouldn’t be interested in conjuring another expert on cinema out of thin air after the myth of Roderick Jaynes was finally exposed, but as it turned out, you’d have been wrong.
Jaynes was credited as an editor on no less than 15 of Joel and Ethan’s films, earning two Academy Award nominations for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, despite being entirely fictitious. The siblings definitely committed to the bit, though, giving the English veteran an elaborate backstory, and he was even known to conduct interviews where he’d reflect on their lengthy creative partnership.
Remarkably, it wasn’t officially confirmed that Jaynes was a completely non-existent entity until 2001, with the Coens doing everything in their power to ensure that the world continued to operate under the assumption that their editor was a real person, and even when the jig was up, he still got a few additional credits.
Lightning rarely strikes twice in cinema, but the acclaimed auteurs simply couldn’t resist indulging their mischievous side when a restored version of their 1984 debut feature, Blood Simple, arrived on DVD. One of the special features was an in-depth commentary track from Kenneth Loring, an expert in the field and artistic director of Forever Young Films.
To promote the disc’s release, Loring hit the press trail, where he explained how he ended up with the job. “I was a film critic at the time when I was privileged to be at the preview screening,” Loring offered. “Saw the film as it was meant to be seen, and I was bowled over, quite frankly. Well, then, when I saw the movie again in a commercial cinema, I was stunned. I’d brought several friends and sung the movie to the skies, and I sat there and watched in horror as the thing played out. Completely recut. It was appalling!”
After he became “head of research and acquisition” at Forever Young, which specialised in “neglected masterpieces and a few films like this one,” his expertise saw him hand-picked by the Coens to provide a knowledgeable audio accompaniment to the crime classic, or so the story went.
It wasn’t quite a like-for-like with Jaynes, though. Whereas he was never spotted in public and only communicated through print, Joel and Ethan went the extra mile and wrote an entire script for the Blood Simple commentary, hired actor Jim Piddock to play the role, and tasked him to deliver their incoherent, pretentious, artsy, and hilariously parodical dialogue with the utmost conviction.
It’s become something of a collector’s item among Coen aficionados, with Loring delivering ludicrous facts and behind-the-scenes trivia about the film, which includes claims that the dog owned by Dan Hedaya’s Julian Marty was an animatronic, or that certain scenes were shot backwards and upside down, in the latter case because one of the actors was suffering from a severe case of gout.
There was absolutely no need to do it, which only makes it funnier. The Coens could have done the commentary themselves or politely declined, but instead, they created an entire character for the sake of a joke that would have left the people who listened to the commentary more bemused than anything else.
