The year is 1996 and The National Film Board of Canada said make a film about BEDS. 

I did!

John Williams, as he stood as a member of the right wing Canadian Alliance Party in the Canadian House of Parliament, proclaimed that this film was a massive waste of taxpayer funds. Even tho we came in well under budget.

But hey! John Williams should know. He’s an accountant by trade.

Well there you go!

‘And So To Bed’ is a film which explores the value of the bed in contemporary North America. This fifty-nine minute documentary visits the physical, mental, cultural and social experience of being in bed. At the Moonlight Bunny Ranch bordello, at the Nevada State Penitentiary and with filmmaker Guy Maddin on his lakeside cot are a few of the bedlidites who welcome us to their beds in this thoughtful show about Beds where we are literally, one-third of our lives, places in which we imagine who we are, how we should live our lives and how our lives should be fulfilled.  Beds are simultaneously a symbol of home, domesticity, and marriage – real places that make space for contentment, fear, love and violence.  The film reveals beds not just as places of sleep where we take life lying down, but as spaces of recuperation and contemplation, of dreaming and eroticism. 

“We are most ourselves in a bed”, says Dr. Peter Markenstyn, who in his work as a coroner understands it as the place where we  are most vulnerable – both emotionally and physically.  This bed-space is explored through interviews with ‘bedlidites’ – lovers of  beds, enmeshed in an eclectic array of bed lore.

Director Jeff McKay structured the film around nineteen interview segments, each one providing a different personal viewpoint  about the bed.   The film has no narration and  has intentionally been given a meditative pacing.  McKay hopes that after viewing the film one may have more appreciation of the value of the bed in our lives.  He says, “It’s where we make many of our major life decisions. It provides an oasis from the hurried and harried world around us”.

Director Jeff McKay’s bedtime background:

In 1996 I decided to make a film about BEDS.  

I structured the film around 19 interviews each one providing a different viewpoint. The film has no narration and a deliberate meditative pacing. All around me I saw people with beds who couldn’t see them for what they were…  and it was plain and simple to me that the bed was taking a bad rap. It wasn’t long ago that the bed was the preferred place to write, receive guests, conduct business, create or play music, paint or sculpt fine art.  For myself I have always gravitated to my bed to think, a place where I can collect my thoughts and if I’m lucky to dream.

By the old puritan standards the bed is seen as a place where undesirable activities take place, where slothful and lazy folk spend their lives at the cost of productivity, moral goodness and the betterment of society.

I began to look for lovers of beds or ‘Bed-lidites’ as I came to call them.

I wanted to make a film which charted the historical rise of the bed into our everyday lives. Beds weren’t necessarily always around and certainly not the way we see them today. The French really began the ‘Cult de lit’, back with Louis XVI of France who had a bed in the center of Parliament. He also had a sizable and impressive bed collection of 413 beds. He undertook a renovation of Versailles to accommodate them all. He was also in the habit of giving away beds as gifts. What a great idea!

As it turned out, my historical rhapsody of beds was not to be. I was told there would be no money for travel to Europe and only two trips outside of Canada. One was to the ‘Treemont Illinois Turkey Festival and Bed Race’. Well it did sound promising. But unfortunately it was not what I imagined, more turkeys than beds, and my sheets were metaphorically pulled out from beneath me. My other trip to the USA was a trek that began in Virginia City Nevada. An amazing place. I loved it, everything about it. Betsy Cromley flew from Boston to meet us there so she could talk about frontier beds. Betsy never made it into the final show. It’s not sounding like such a great batting average so far does it?

While in Virginia City we went down to two other locations where beds loom large, the bordello and in prison. Both of these scenes proved to be wonderful. At the time prisoner Mike Doyle was in Nevada State Pen for murder. Mike was so wonderfully open to having us film with him. He talked candidly about the bed as a space to escape from, yes escape … from prison. Well in a manner of speaking. Beds at the prison also offered another kind of opportunity. The prison has in it, a mattress factory where Mike worked everyday. This too provided Mike with an outlet for his mind and spirit.

‘The Moonlight Bunny Ranch’, is the bordello we filmed at. It’s outside of Carson City and it has since become well known through a television series.

The girls at the Bunny Ranch are a busy bunch and spoke very personally about working and sleeping in their beds there. Newfound respect for those women!

Then it was onto San Francisco to shoot with the keepers of an S&M shop there, who had an S&M bed built especially for them. But as they said for themselves, “it isn’t just all about sex and the bed”.

In my research I came upon a gifted British writer by the name of Reginald Reynolds. His book, ‘Beds – With Many Noteworthy Instances of Lying On, Under and About Them’, is a tangential wonder of anything Reynolds found that tickled his bed obsessed brain.

It became apparent that there are a legion of writers, painters, musicians and tyrants who were all at one time considered ‘bed-workers’. Van Gogh, Fantin LaTour, Rousseau, Matisse, Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mark Twain, John Milton, Groucho Marx, Voltaire, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, James Thompson, Longfellow, Sir Francis Bacon.

Composers who took to their beds: Sibelius, Rossini, Puccini, and Schubert.

Here are some fine thoughts about the bed from folks who have laid down words to sleep on…

Groucho wrote a fab book about beds which was called…”Beds”.

The bedless in Toronto. Chico and his pal J.J. tell how the street doesn’t make the best bed…

When you have no bed, you have no place to review the day, your actions or inactions. 

And slowly you spin into a timeless void.

The bed in prison.  Inmate Mike Doyle knew pretty much everything there is to know about the bed he slept on and the beds that he manufactured everyday.

Just Want to Say - When I make these films, my goal is to show you an unusual perspective on something commonplace that we see or use everyday.

Now go to bed.

This film was shot on super 16mm colour film in 1997. I cut it on a CTM which is a French made flatbed. It is a great machine! I loved that flatbed. Projection quality image, smooth and good sound to boot. This machine is presently in the hands of the Provincial Manitoba Archives.