Photography by Wesley Law
Some people rack up accomplishments with grim determination. Jay Kanzler just does stuff because it’s fun. He likes to sit outside even when it’s 40 degrees, because he can’t get enough of the outdoors. Or caffeine. Or conversation. Years ago, when he ran for state auditor, he had plenty of campaign funding and near-unanimous party backing; his only rival in the Republican primary, Al Hanson, was a septuagenarian with neither. Yet somehow, Kanzler lost. (Democrat Claire McCaskill won that election, and it launched her career.) Pundits blamed rumors that Kanzler was Jewish—even though he was studying for the Episcopal priesthood at the time.
[He grins.] I’ve never bought into the idea that that was the reason I lost—but it made zero sense. So then you think, does being first on the ballot make a difference? And then there’s the name. Al Hanson, now there’s an American name…
Did you at least have fun campaigning?
I made lifelong friends. The state of Missouri, like the Grinch’s heart, grows four times when you announce for office and have to go from St. Joe down to Sikeston.
Did losing steer you away from politics?
What steered me away from politics is what I’ve seen since.
Would you ever run again?
Nah. In ’02, my children were very young. As the years go on, they get to the age where they hear things, and politics today is “Remember in college when you did this or that?” I didn’t want to do that to my family.
C’mon. You grew up in New Hampshire, went to boarding school…how wild could you have been?
Dad was with Ralston Purina, and we ended up here the summer after I graduated from high school. I looked around and said, “Mom, Dad, you live here. I’ll come home maybe Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I’m not living in this town.” So I went to college in Florida, right on the water. My freshman year was a disaster. By second semester I had a .5 GPA.
Is this the part you don’t want your kids to know?
Yep. I went back to New Hampshire and ran a ski shop. Then I came home broke on a Greyhound bus and said, “Maybe I’ll stay a while.” I started building my grades back up, majored in business, worked a while in California, stopped drinking, came back and went through SLU Law School with a 4.0.
Why law?
Because I watched all the Perry Masons and L.A. Law. And somebody, either CBS or NBC, owes me an apology, because it is nothing like those shows.
What prompted you to become an Episcopal priest?
I’d always thought about it, but it kept getting pushed to the side. Sometime in 1999, I found out through a fluke that I had Hepatitis C, and at the time, it was not good, that diagnosis. I read that Dr. Bruce Bacon at SLU had cured Naomi Judd. I called him and said, “I can’t just sit and do nothing.” So we went through 12 months of drug cocktails. My son was about to be born, and I became very fearful that if I had it, maybe my wife did too, and our son would. I remember saying to God...
You cut a deal?
I cut a deal. “If they don’t have it, I commit myself.” Now, of course, I’ve come to a far different understanding of prayer. God is not a vending machine.
What sort of priest are you?
I’m the most human priest there is. I get called for a lot of second marriages and mixed marriages and funerals. I try to be very nonjudgmental… It’s not that I’m devoid of beliefs, but it’s very hard for me to say, “Your choices are the bad choices.” And if you hear me arguing in my law office—sometimes I talk like a sailor. I think that bothers people: “You talk to God with that mouth?” But I don’t think it bothers God. I think God would much prefer me to be passionate about what I’m doing.
So as that kind of Republican and Christian, how are you faring in the current clime?
Poorly. I’m an adamant critic of the President’s conduct. If that is the Republican party—closed, racist, willing to act in these ways—then I’m not a Republican.
How’d you get into film?
My friends said, “All you do is talk about it.” So one day I got out of the shower and told my wife, “I’m going to make a documentary about the Flying Wallendas and Circus Flora.” They were going to do the seven-person pyramid for the first time since the big fall. And my wife said, “Do it.” I bought two books from Amazon and gathered friends who knew camera and sound people, and we did it in three weeks, and I was hooked.
Of all the films you’ve since directed, what’s your favorite?
St. Benedict’s Rule. I love monasteries, but nobody wants to see a monastery film, so I found a monastery with murders. It took years for the monks to trust me and say OK.
Then you made a film about a comedian who never quite made it.
Bob Zany. Through him, I met Greg Warren, a local comedian. The St. Louis Sports Commission was bringing the NCWA Wrestling Championship here. There’s down time between the wrestling matches, so Greg wrote and I directed these short films utilizing parts of St. Louis. One with Joe Buck, one with Ozzie Smith, one about Garavelli’s, one with Greg teaching a sea lion to wrestle… We’re going to do the same thing for the Musial Awards.
You film on a pretty tight budget.
For 23 Minutes, it was $120,000. That’s a food budget for one day on a big movie. Every eight minutes, a huge tractor trailer full of coal came by on the way from the river to Granite City Steel, so we had to shoot between those trucks. A thousand times a day: “Hold for truck!” “Two minutes till truck!” Then one day, Eric Roberts was sleeping, and the phone rang. He got tangled in his covers, fell, hit his head on the nightstand, and had a big gash in the middle of his head. Suddenly, he was wearing sunglasses in certain scenes.
Isn’t there some sort of Photoshop for film?
Everybody says that: “We’ll fix it in post-production.” And yeah, you can do some of that, but it’s very time consuming. On Marshall the Miracle Dog, we had to put in a tail, because the fake dog we got didn’t have a tail. But it was only for 15 seconds—that’s doable.
And now you’re in radio, too?
My friend McGraw Milhaven kept asking me to come on his political roundtable. One day he said, “I want to go out of town—will you just do my show for me?” So every time he went out of town I’d fill in. I’m irreverent and immature—I love making fun of myself. I do commercials: “Jake and the Fat Man, Attorneys at Law.” I’ve interviewed Madeleine Albright, politicians, theater people…. I spend many, many hours combing through the internet trying to find people who interest me and tracking them down. The kid in Kansas who was running for governor at 18. The cross-country skier from Ecuador in the Winter Olympics. I interviewed the homeless woman who works the off ramp at Kingshighway. She was a cheerleader, married, had kids, her husband came back from the war, she started taking his prescription, became a drug addict, and left.
Isn’t talk radio a little…intense…these days?
People don’t want to talk; they want to yell. I did a short film, “Talk Radio,” with Rance Howard, Ron Howard’s father. In it he’s a recluse with radios in every room, and all he does is listen to talk radio. That’s where a lot of us are: We’re in these echo chambers, only wanting to listen to what we.
How do you navigate the political divide?
There’s the very right-wing talk radio, and I made it clear early on that wasn’t my platform. But when I fill in in other time slots? Oh, my gosh. It’s brutal out there. They said, “Why do you have this liberal moron on here?” I said, “I am not liberal.”
I noticed you lock your Twitter page.
I do. Social media’s fine among friends, but I don’t want 80 people jumping down my throat on a daily basis. And probably my feelings get hurt too easily. Really? I just made a comment. Could you have gone without calling me that name? I think so.
You represented store owners in Ferguson; that had to be rough.
We were repeatedly lied to by the state and the feds. When people showed up at small businesses—many of which were my clients—they were allowed to loot and burn, all after me being told, “We are going to protect them.” When my client Sam’s Meat Market was burned down, I was screaming into the voicemail of somebody from the Department of Justice, “You promised us!” One night, they were looting a store, and we went out there at 2 a.m. and stood in front of it for the next four and a half hours. The St. Louis County police were just lined up watching us. And that is not their fault—they were told to stand down.
What’s been your most frustrating case?
I give my time to the public defender’s office, and there’s a lot more to right and wrong than just right and wrong. There’s economic inequality and racial inequality, and I see that and want to fix those things too. And sometimes the best you can do is say, “I can get you five years instead of seven.” The other thing that frustrates me is that sometimes the best and brightest aren’t running things. Using a Hollywood analogy, I’ve seen great ideas get stepped over again and again, and garbage is embraced; they throw millions at it. That’s when you say, “I can’t control the world.”
