Heath Ledger's Final Days Among the Masses

But then there’s music through the silence. First some drums spilling from a room, then a bass, then a guitar — a band is rehearsing. It’s a three-piece called Victoria, led by Antony Langdon, former guitarist for the Brit-pop band Spacehog. Langdon and his two mates are playing songs written for them by actor Joaquin Phoenix. They’re debuting them tonight at Building 98, but first, they have to learn them. Now the scene has a soundtrack.

Ledger and Masses cinematographer Eric MacIver on the set of Grace Woodroofe's "Quicksand" video

Finding the light: Ledger directing "Quicksand"

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• Matt Amato
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Finding the light: Ledger directing "Quicksand"

Jon Ramos

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Reconnecting: Scenes from Marfa

Jon Ramos

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In the gallery, various Masses members unload their prints from the bus, and each batch of images conjures a different story. Icelandic photographer/director Borkur’s gorgeous underwater shots of floating beauty stir memories of Ramos and Amato traveling to northern Iceland to shoot Sigur Rós. As they hang little graphic illustrations of monsters by Masses designer and illustrator Daniel Auber, the knowledge of Auber’s work with director Terry Gilliam, and how he met Ledger on the set of the 2005 film The Brothers Grimm, paint the joyful little mutants with extra weight. (Gilliam’s other project with Ledger, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, was halted upon Ledger’s death but is back in production with three actors, Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp, in the late star’s role.)

“In the Masses, he wasn’t the boss,” Auber tells me later, back in L.A. “Like in the Renaissance, you have the people called mecenate. I think the translation is ‘patron [of the arts].’ It felt like that but in a really natural way. It was completely spontaneous — and so much fun. The Masses was a shelter from the bad side of Hollywood.”

When nature filmmaker Bayer sets one of his prints on a mantel — a peaceful shot of a group sitting around a campfire at night — a scene from a year prior jumps into the room. Taken from perhaps 10 feet away, all the people glow orange inside the night. You feel the warmth just looking at it.

Bayer shot it in August 2007 on a beach in Mexico during a Masses surfing trip. For the dozen or so there — including Sara Cline; Amato; Alex Ebert (a.k.a Edward Sharpe of the Magnetic Zeros) and his companion, singer Jade Castrinos; Bayer’s girlfriend, singer Mia Doi Todd; and a half-dozen others — it was a spur-of-the-moment respite, a motivator, a sort of commitment ceremony and understanding that the company Heath had decided to finance 10 months prior was more than just a company.

“Heath just kind of came in one day and said, ‘Let’s get an RV and go to Mexico,’” recounts Cline. “I said, ‘Heath, we have a company to run, and those are working days.’ And he said, ‘But it’s our company, and we can do whatever we want.’”

Over the next week, the dozen camped on the beach, surfed during the day and cooked and talked through the night. Recalls Cline: “It was free. We had only ever existed in L.A. together, and there was always a sort of nervous energy to Heath in the city. Every time he’d walk down the street, he’d get recognized, and he felt maybe a little restricted by that. [Mexico] was a place where nobody knew where the fuck he was, and it was very liberating for him. And I think it was liberating for all of us.”

“It’s very much a spirit-filled shot,” says Amato of the photo, looking at it on his computer at the office. The campers and surfers were a collection of people he and Ledger had gathered along their travels through Los Angeles — friends and colleagues who were in one way or another connected to the Masses’ ideals, which they had begun to formulate over the course of their decade-long friendship.

Heath Ledger almost always moved through L.A. on a yellow Ducati, his head encased in a full-face helmet as he zipped between his home in the hills and his Hancock Park workspace with perfect anonymity. He could put on his mask, hop onto his motorcycle, zoom down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, then leave the bike in front of the Masses’ office and sneak inside without a single person catching a glimpse of his face.

Although he was living in Manhattan to be closer to his daughter, Matilda, he returned to L.A. once or twice monthly, and when he did, he was usually working at the Masses’ office. You’d know he was inside if the motorcycle was parked out front. Upstairs, he’d sit on a balance ball in front of a workstation and edit, take meetings at the grand conference table (a glistening 9-by-4-foot piece of plate glass supported by 10 unused tin trash cans), make a move on one of the ongoing games of chess, listen to music, talk and watch movies. When Ledger got his first video camera, Amato watched as he learned to use it, and taught him to edit the footage. The actor took to it with typical passion.