The Truth About Tom

Totally Random

2008-05-12T21:05:00.001-07:00

You know the Bible 100%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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Briefly Checking In

2007-05-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

I haven't posted in forever. Nothing going on in my head that I can find words for other than a kind of low-grade lament about the state of work things with occasional waves of determination ruffling the glassy sullen waters. I ran across this stupid where-have-you-been map thing and thought I would post it for no particularly good reason whatsoever.

I trust you are all well?

The Next Indicated Step

2007-04-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

This is something a very wise person I know speaks of: taking the next indicated step. A godsend of an idea for people who feel overwhelmed. Don't climb the mountain or fight the army of ten thousand, just take the next indicated step.

Right now I'm not sure what that is.

My agents and managers (yes I signed with managers in a moment of panic and we'll see how that turns out beyond costing me another 10% of my income) are out there drumming up staffing meetings for new series. I have meetings scheduled. Having hired people to staff my own shows I know what a crapshoot those meetings are. But at any rate that's out of my hands right now--the sales team is at work and I'm just the merchandise.

And so, for the first time in a long time, my days are completely my own to do with whatever I want.

What do I want?

Here are the choices:

1. I can work on the screen adaptation of a play I optioned. I got a two year free option which I am one year into. So to really have a go at trying to get it made I need a script in three months. I'm 24 pages into the adaptation and to be honest I just can't see this thing actually being in a theater. I've pretty much fallen out of love with the play while in the process of adapting it. It's neither a really deep meaningful indie like sex, lies and videotape, nor a fantastically fun indie like Little Miss Sunshine, nor a big studio pic. It's just sort of...there. But I'm afraid to drop it. I'm afraid that's just fear winning. I don't know what I feel.

2. I can start writing a spec pilot which is different in tone from all the writing samples I now have to show. One way or another everything in my arsenal is a family show, more emotion than big plot stuff, no thrillers or procedurals, nothing really hard and edgy. This cuts me off from a lot of shows I'd actually like to write for. I have no ideas in my head so this one fills me with even more panic than adapting the play.

3. I can work on my novel. Oh God what a cliche that sounds like. I'm about 40 pages into a novel I've been working on for decades. Yes decades. I write it a couple of pages at a time between paying jobs. I tell myself that's all the time I have. Even as I tell myself that I know it's bullshit. I just read through what I have after not seeing it for a few months and I will tell you cautiously and yet with some confidence that it is publishable. That it is entertaining. That it is good by my true personal standards of what makes writing good. I don't know that I've ever felt that to this degree about one of my screenplays. All I have to do us keep up the quality I've got for another couple of hundred pages. The shape of the story, if not the details, is before me. I believe that I have the goods to do it.

Truth is, the next indicated step is 3. But I have to earn a living. I have to stay in the game. Many times I have resolved to keep working on the novel every day even if all I do is a little editing and fixing. Just to keep the fire burning under it. I'm resolving that right now. Will I stick to my resolve? Every time I say it I believe that I will. And now?

Drop the play? Not drop the play? Am I working hard enough to get rich? Is rich the point? It's certainly the point of the game I'm in. My whole life I've skiied and I've never gotten past intermediate, with a few brief powder runs where I felt like I was flying and everything fell into place--and then was gone again. That's fine with me. I like the view, I like the pine trees, I like eating chocolate on the lift. My whole career I've been intermediate, with a few brief powder runs where I felt like I was flying and everything fell into place--and then was gone again. Why can't that be okay?

Ah for the carefree days of elephant polo...

Be It Ever So Humble

2007-04-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

Well and it does seem rather humble after all the pleasures and palaces through which I have roamed in the last two weeks. In fact I have succumbed to the worst kind of brooding gloom over my work prospects, my house and my self. Maybe I'm gearing up for some kind of big change. Or maybe it's just jet lag. Either way, it's time to post some photos, which I couldn't do on the ultra-slow connections over there, so here goes.

This is a picture of a shelf at a bookstore in Jaipur. Note the titles on the upper left and the lower right. It appears that the books of Mr. Hitler are very popular in areas of India with large Muslim populations. I'm not commenting. I'm just reporting what I was told by the bookseller.

What do you see we all take up a collection and buy the Palace of the Maharajah of Udaipur? There's bound to be room enough in there for all of us.

This is the door to the dwelling of a holy man in a temple in Udaipur.

A couple of my new friends lounging at cocktail hour. Note the pervasive air of langour and indolence.

This is the second hotel we stayed in, and my favorite. The lower picture is the view upward from my bed. When I checked into the room I noted a heavily padlocked double door with wooden carvings of what looked like maidens or goddesses on it. I asked the guy who brought my bags what it was and he just shook his head and waved his hand as if to say: don't ask. The next morning I was sitting in the little patio outside the room reading and one of the staff guys came up and said in rocky and heavily accented English, "Excuse please, may I have keys to your room?" I asked him why and he answered "God. God in your room." When I looked puzzled he kept repeating "God. In your room. God." I figured I couldn't have been hearing him right, but nevertheless giving him the keys seemed to be the only thing to do. We went into the room where he unlocked those double wooden doors to reveal a beautiful shrine, three carved idols and lots of intricate painting on the wall of the alcove. He explained in his rough English that here resided the household god, and every day at 10 A.M. they gave him flowers and lit candles, and that's what they did, they all took off their shoes--as did I--and lit the candles, and scattered the flower petals, and made homage to the household god, and told me how fortunate I was that this was my room. And I certainly was very fortunate to have god in my room.

More to come.

How The Other .00000001 Percent Live

2007-04-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

I won't bother telling you about the 17th century palace we're staying in, or how last night we were driven in a fleet of cars out to the desert where dozens of children bearing torches and men playing horns and drums led us in a procession to the camels harnessed to velvet-tented many-cushioned carriages, or how the camels carried us to the top of a torchlit hill, or the bagpipers and whirling dancers and sitar players that met us there, or the lambs roasting on spits, or the tables set with china and crystal, or the floodlit castles atop the mountains that rose all around us against the star-filled sky. I won't bother telling you about playing polo on elephants the night before that--yes, Tom scored a goal!--and I won't tell you about the banquet in the torchlit 15th century moghul garden and the fountains and the marble pathway lined by geometric patterns of rose petals and marigold petals, and I won't tell you about the formal gala tonight, the birthday celebration itself, and the greatest firework show I have ever seen, and the birthday boy's name bursting out in letters of fire on the mountainside across from the palace, and I won't tell you how I walked down into the village before dinner and ended up playing cricket with the locals on the cobble-stoned main street--yes, Tom actually hit the ball with the funny flat-ended bat! I won't tell you about any of it, because how could you possibly believe it?

The internet is slow here, so only one picture tonight, but more promised as soon as I get back to broadband.

Exotic London

2007-04-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

London is many things. London is glamorous and grungy, cosmpolitan and stodgy, imperial and workaday, futuristic and ancient, exhilarating and oppressive. But one thing London is not is exotic.

Highlights so for: stopping on a country road to go into a stone church where one wall and window date from 800 A.D., and where I stroked my hand over the smooth alabaster effigy of the sister of Richard the Third that sleeps in peaceful eternity on top of the stone sarcophagus which conceals her bones; walking among the ten thousand daffodils in a friend's garden; lively dinners with a variety of hyper-articulate, enthusiastic and most of all very funny British friends; trudging through rainy London byways under my black umbrella with the Beatles blasting on the iPod; hearing the bells peel from the spire of a 15th century church late one evening and following the sound up a narrow stone spiral staircase to the bellringers loft, where for a happy hour I watched the motley collection of parish bellringers--grandmothers, hipsters with piercings, slick attorneys--pulling on the ropes and ringing the changes as they have been rung in that church for 500 years.

Today is laundry, maybe a little work, and my flight to Jaipur, India at 5 P.M.

Tom Hits The Road

2007-03-26T22:44:00.000-07:00

One year ago this week, the invitation in the picture arrived in the mail. It began: "Our dearest and most auspicious friends..." and proceeded to invite the wife and me to join a college friend of mine and his relatively new second wife, along with a party of their "dearest and most auspicious friends", for eight days in India, in celebration of our friend's 50th birthday. At their expense. We knew that our friend's second wife was wealthy. We thought maybe sixty, seventy million dollars. But after we got the invitation we googled her and discovered that no, it isn't sixty or seventy million dollars, it's five billion.

Yes. She has five billion dollars.

And here's the switch. She was raised going to the local public school, her father drove an old sensible Volvo, she got her Phd in history, is a university professor, writes serious scholarly books, donates hundreds of millions of dollars to various environmental and educational charities, and has an irresistable, uninhibited laugh. All of which is to say that, believe it or not, my friend didn't marry her for the money.

And she is taking me and one hundred of her closest friends on a chartered jet from London to Rajasthan for a week. And you, dear readers, are coming along for the ride, because where there are upscale hotels there is internet. I've got my typhoid shots, my malaria pills, my sunscreen and my Lonely Planet guidebook, and I leave Wednesday morning.

More news from London.

P.S. The wife, unfortunately, is on that job in Louisiana, so I'm doing this one alone.

P.P. S. Because I'm using frequent flyer miles to get to London, and staying with a friend there, the whole thing will end up costing me a little bit less than staying home.

P.P.P.S. What did I do to deserve this?

P.P.P.P.S. Or, perhaps more to the point, what's the catch?

Let It Stand

2007-03-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

After I got Troll's comment on my last post I re-read the post and just about keeled over from the fumes of high-octane self pity. It's not just that two weeks after finishing a movie that everybody loves is just a leeeeeeeeeetle bit early for all the melodrama about un-ringing phones. It's that self-pity is a waste of time, energy and all of God's other gifts, no matter when. It's that the real problem is all the scared lazy procrastinating I am doing on all the new projects and ideas I should be working on. I almost deleted the post. But then I thought: let it stand as a reminder to myself of where not to go.

Silence

2007-03-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

Here's me, walking away from set on a quiet snowy night in Winnipeg, just before Christmas.

It's quiet where I am now, too. In the hotel room where I am writing while my wife is away on her set, here in Louisiana.

Very very very quiet.

I've been told that if I want to parlay my recent movies into work directing episodes--which is where the work is--I need a reel. I spent the morning looking at reels. I looked at reels of directors who've done three Sopranos episodes, a half dozen Six Feet Unders, multiple West Wings. Directors who've directed well known features and also been nominated for Emmy awards for directing half hour comedy. First of all, I am blown away that some of these people would need reels at all. When I had my own show on the air I was hiring directors by the handful and believe me, by me none of these people would have needed a reel--I would have hired them off their resumes. So what's the deal? A changing business. Fewer jobs. More directors. Younger producers.

I don't have Sopranos episodes or 30 Rock or The Practice. I have four pretty good cable movies. And with those movies I'm going to shell out the 5K it's going to cost to get a reel that at the end of the day will be right there in stack with the reels that are bulging with high-end episodic and features and.....

A scary step to be taking.

Scarier, though, not to take it.

And then there's the silence as I sit at my desk and write and the phone is not ringing, the email box is empty and there is just the blinking cursor.

Here's my prayer for today:

God help me see this silence as a gift. A space in which to write the next wonderful thing. Help me see that God. Help me.

After The Ball Is Over

2007-03-12T02:01:00.000-07:00

The picture, taken a few years ago on a retreat in central California, is all about serenity.

Which I don't have an ounce of right now.

I put the last touches on the sound mix of my movie a week ago Friday at 11:30 P.M. Tossed and turned all weekend (this music cue should have been louder, that off screen siren should have been quieter, yammer yammer yammer), then declared "the next chapter of my life begins now" and got to work on a new script, had a week of lunches and meetings with my agents and with various friends, producers, executives, and then left for where I am right now, visiting my wife who is working as a makeup artist on a movie in Louisiana. It's a beautiful place and we're having a wonderful romantic time.

But I'm a wreck.

To which you might want to say: oh give me a great big fucking break to go. You just finished directing two cable movies. The first one was a big success, everybody loved it, it got great ratings and it instantly got you a second job. Everybody loves the second one too, it's a big tearjerker just like you wanted it to be, you're having a romantic interlude in a faraway city with your wife, the world is your oyster.

To which I'd say: if the world is my oyster, I seem to have lost the shucking knife, or whatever you call the thing you use to pry the oyster open so you can eat it.

For one thing, the sound mix really isn't great on the movie. I checked out the DVD they gave me and the music sounds muffled. It sounded way better on the mixing stage. Is it just the transfer? Did I make a bad guess as to how it would all sound once it was compressed? Am I just paranoid? Is there anything at all, given that the production is basically now over and shut down, that I can do about it? These are the thoughts that keep a newly unemployed director awake at night, and awake, and awake, and awake. And on Thursday I gave a copy of the movie to my best friend, a brilliant director herself, a deeply warm, supportive and loving person. Who hasn't called or emailed yet. YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER. She hated it! She doesn't know what to say! Sleep, here in this faraway city at 1:10 A.M. a very very faraway thing.

For another thing, I've just broken through as a working director in long form television. That would be grandissimo if long form television hadn't just gone the way of hoop skirts. Remember when CBS, ABC and NBC all had movies of the week, sometimes two a week, and there were frequent movies on Showtime and USA and FX and Fox? CBS will make maybe three or four in the coming year. Not one of the others makes ONE SINGLE MOVIE anymore. Not one. A&E will make maybe one a year. My most recent employer is just about the only game in town now. I love them and they seem to like me but I just did two movies for them. They don't have in-house directors. They like to use lots of people, as they should.

Okay, so direct features!

Oh yeah Paramount and Warner Bros are LINING UP AROUND THE BLOCK TO HIRE TV MOVIE DIRECTORS TO DIRECT THEIR MOVIES. Next question, please.

Well, episodic! Grey's Anatomy, Brothers and Sisters, One Tree Hill!

Capital idea. Shared by every other underemployed feature and long form director in the state of California. It's a mad rush for those jobs. I'm part of that rush, but--???

And then there's the script I'm writing right now. I optioned a play on my own and I'm doing the adaptation on spec, as we say, that is, instead of being paid to write it I write it first and then try to sell it after. The reason I'm doing it that way is that nobody would buy it up front. It's a period piece, it takes place over a span of 40 years, it's an unconventional love story, it deals with themes of history and destiny, it's... independent. So here I sit in a hotel room in a faraway city working on a movie which at the moment I do not believe that anybody will ever want to buy.

And that, friends, is today's news from Lake Wobegone.

Hollywood Be Thy Name

2007-02-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

Oy.

And again, oy.

You will recall that the Astonishing Actress who took the role of the older woman in the movie had memory problems on the set and took long pauses as she tried to grope for the next word and that I had to feed her many of her lines from off camera a few words at a time, creating quite the editing challenge once it was all over. Well it all worked out, it's all been neatly sewn together with invisible stitches, and you would absolutely never know. The performance flows. The performance glows. The performance makes people cry.

That's what my wife was telling a Fellow Crew Member on the movie she's working on right now in Louisiana. That her husband had just made a movie with this Astonishing Three Time Oscar Nominated Actress and the performance was awesome, that it made her cry, but how challenging it had been, with the memory problems, to get there. "Oh!", said Fellow Crew Member, warmly. "Astonishing Actress is one of my closest friends!"

Well guess what Fellow Crew Member did. She called her "closest friend", Astonishing Actress, and told her that the wife of the director on her latest film was complaining that she had come to set without knowing her lines and was a big problem.

We should all have close friends like that, huh?

Controlling Husband of Astonishing Actress calls Producer and says Astonishing Actress is terribly hurt and upset and it's all lies, lies, lies. Of course Producer knows it's not lies, he was there with me every day commiserating about the problem and reassuring me that I was doing great with her and that in the end I would have everything I needed on film.

Producer calls me and says "we have a problem."

Why a problem, apart from the fact that a lovely and loving and loveable 76 year old actress's feelings have been hurt?

Because at 8 A.M. the following morning said actress is scheduled to come into a sound studio and spend a few hours with me doing looping--that is, re-recording some of her dialogue for reasons of sound problems or performance adjustments.

So I had to call. Not Astonishing Actress herself, of course. No, I would be calling Mr. Astonishing Actress, who will not let anybody hand Astonishing Actress a cup of tea. You have to hand it to Hubby, and then Hubby hands the tea to his meal ticket, excuse me, I mean wife.

I went into a sound-proof room at the studio and took deep breaths and said a very quiet prayer or two and called.

It was pretty grim at first. I said I was ripped up that this had happened (the truth: I love this woman) and he said, as tersely as terse can be, "So am I." My through-line was this: That the Closest Friend had left out the part where my wife said that the performance was magnificent and had made her cry. That in the madness and tension of making the movie I would call my wife after shooting and talk to her about the day and part of what went on during those days was the Astonishing Actress's problems with the lines, and she shared that with a co-worker, who passed it on, and I was terribly terribly sorry, as was my wife, that that had happened. Of course Hubby, who was there every second, even in private rehearsals, couldn't see that there had been a problem and blamed me for being "one of those directors who wants the lines said exactly they way they are written." As that insult would also apply to Mike Nichols, Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, I'll take it. Apart from the fact that it's not strictly true. I just want the lines said SO THAT THEY MAKE THE LEAST BIT OF SENSE AND AREN'T FULL OF AWKWARD GROPING PAUSES. In the end he really heard me telling him that the performance is awesome and that that's all I ever tell anybody. He ended the call reasonably warmly, saying "Thank you for calling, I really appreciate that, and let's just leave it behind us and move on."

Of course the next day for the first time in my entire career I went to the wrong sound facility and was 15 minutes late to the looping. Arrghgghggh. But the good news there is, I called ahead and told them to start running the movie for Hubby and Actress and that changed everything. She saw how good she is, and how good the movie is, and then we had a couple of hours of working smoothly together, and it was hugs and kisses in the end. Feigned, or real? Well who knows. It's Hollywood, man.

Leaving me, being a creature of Hollywood, with one remaining bit of uneasiness: this whole business rides on what people say about you. What will Hubby and Actress be saying about me?

And then there's the question of which circle of hell has been reserved for the "friend" who relayed the gossip to her in the first place.

Three Quarters Of A Loaf

2007-02-12T20:08:00.000-08:00

They approved three out of the four cues in contention. You'd think I would have danced for joy when I got the call. No. I didn't. I STUPIDLY began arguing for the 4th cue, then mercifully caught myself, apologized, thanked the head of music at the network and said I would figure out what to do about that final cue. Well I found a song that works unbelievably well--Eva Cassidy's cover of Sting's Fields of Gold. Anybody know it? Wow. Problem is, it's--well--I mean, it's Sting, for Gawd's sake, and that means (well-deserved) $$$$$. I guess I have expensive taste--for two other spots in the movie I have found that a couple of Damien Rice songs work perfectly. Now, on one side, I have the studio telling me the songs are too expensive, and on the other side I have the network saying nothing at all: they got the DVD's of song-and-picture on Friday morning and as of close of business on Monday there has been deafening silence emanating from their direction. Hate the songs? Love the songs? Haven't gotten to them yet? Couldn't care less that the final sound mix is theoretically a week from Wednesday?

I'm going quietly out of my mind.

Up Against It

2007-02-07T22:41:00.000-08:00

The network is torturing me about the music. They didn't like my approach (after approving the picture aspect of my cut almost without any changes at all) so I cheerfully dumped all but about four cues. Those four cues really work. They make people cry. I've seen it. But the network wants them "younger", whatever that means. They want to "go against the drama", whatever that means. As in "This works. Hm. Let's change it."

Today we had the big music conference call. I will admit: I played the emotion card. I got emotional. Not a tantrum, nothing loud or obnoxious: I'm too smart for that. I just got...sad. which made, I think, though I could be wrong, a slight chink in the armor of their self-convinced-ness. At one point I said I was sorry for taking such a strong position and after the call I got an email from the head of movies at the network: "You need never apologize for passion... that's what makes you so amazing creatively..." Which sounds nice, but it wasn't yet: "Yes, you're right, the final cues can stay as you have them." My poor executive producer was literally in tears after the call because she felt so bad that she couldn't fix this for me, that she had no power to set it right. The head of the studio may come in and argue my case, if it comes to that, though in the studio/network showdown the network always walks away blowing the smoke off the muzzle of its gun. For the moment what we seem--I stress seem--to have gotten is that they'll wait to hear the other cues the composer is working on before they make a decision.

This one I want to win.

What the hell is wrong with me?

2007-01-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

The network loves the movie. I had a terrific dinner with my agent yesterday talking about all sorts of new ventures and avenues. I had an especially wonderful and loving night with my wife last night. My kids are happy and working hard at their various endeavors. I left the house feeling good about the movie and about life, and was looking ahead to all the uncertainties of being in this business with a sense of excitement and expectation. Then a friend called to whom I hadn't spoken in many months. A talented (in fact Oscar-winning, for a short subject) director and writer. He just called to check in and to hear about my adventures on the movie. I was happy to hear from him as we see each other far too infrequently. But as he started talking about his various projects, and the pilot he is going off to Africa to shoot, and this star he is working with and that star he is working with, my state of mind started to crumble. I may not have shared this previously in the blog but I am a terribly jealous person. I fight it, I meditate on it, I pray to have it lifted from me, but there it is. I got to the cutting room a rather reduced version of the me that had left my house half an hour earlier.

Then I settled down with my editor to some little tweaks we wanted to make, and we were enjoying ourselves, and the phone rang and it was the word from the network that they loved our last set of changes and are enthusiastically sending the the cut off to their bosses in New York for the final sign-off. All good. All good. Just one proviso. They want the music to be more "contemporary." They feel the drama is all working very well and they want the music to play against that. They want more songs and source cues. They are okay with the classical music in the piece as it relates to the older classical-music-loving character. They just want the main character's cues more contemporary. More Gray's Anatomy. More ER. I was assured that the music person at the network is talented, filmmaker-friendly, lovely to work with and has flawless taste. So why am I all crumbled and panicky again? Panicky that I'll lose a couple of cues that are making people cry and working wonderfully. Panicky that I'll have a score I don't like. That they'll plaster some kind of horrible pop crap all over what I've done. Panicky that they'll take so long to schedule the music meeting we're going to have that my composer won't have time to do the score. And on and on and on. Yes, there's another level of uncertainty here, but also a lot of reason to believe it'll be fine. So why the insta-crumble on my part? What's the answer here? Depakote, the mood stabilizer that I've been prescribed and stopped taking? More therapy? What kind of therapy? Auggghhhhhhh!

I know what answer I'm going for right now: I'm getting back to work on my next script this very second.

(He said, wondering if that was really going to happen.)

And then, out of the blue...

2007-01-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

About an hour after I wrote the previous post I got a call: they watched it over lunch and they're giving the notes at 3:30. Well whaddaya know. So I high-tailed it back to the cutting room and the conference call came in and they loved it. Loved it. Cried multiple times. The head of movies for the network says the film should be used as a psychological test: anybody who sees one particular scene and doesn't cry is officially a sociopath. The underling who had called in the morning and seemed a little negative apologized, saying "I loved it and cried three times but I couldn't say that until I knew what my boss thought." Ah Hollywood. But all's well that ends well. The only criticisms were the placement of a couple of the act breaks, a couple of small moments they wanted to clarify (they were right on all counts), and the choice of music in the temp--which is okay--the music I really want to keep is staying and they're probably right about the rest. They'll take a look at the changes tomorrow night and then it goes to the big bosses in New York. One more gate to get through...

Arrgghghhhh

2007-01-26T12:54:00.000-08:00

The post production schedule was agreed upon by the producers, the studio and the network weeks ago. The schedule is of particular importance to the studio because the network only gives them X amount of dollars to make the movie and anything above and beyond that amount comes out of the studio's pocket and delays in schedules cost $$$. The schedule called for the movie to be delivered yesterday and for notes to be given today. So last night I zenned myself into some kind of calm and yes a glass of pretty damn good red wine didn't hurt and I woke up today reasaonbaly ready for the notes. Which didn't come. Because the network didn't watch the movie last night. That is, the head of movies didn't. Her frightened underling did and all she said (pending finding out what her boss thinks) was: "Um, I think there may need to be more contemporary music in the, um, temp score," and that was it. This sends horror to my soul because in this spiritual story about life, death, dying and acceptance the music of Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart that I have used tells the story better than anything written after about 1805 possibly could. So we'll see what happens with that. The problem is that I SUCK AT WAITING. We're told we'll hear Monday. My mind is racing about the ways in which unskilled underling is going to transmit her fear and bad ideas to her boss. My mind is racing about oh, all kinds of grim eventualities. For better or for worse, my mind has no future-reading skills at all, as has been proven many times. So will somebody please tell my mind to Shut The Fuck Up for a minute so I can get something done between now and Monday and maybe even have a good time with my wife who is coming back from a week away and my kids who are both home this weekend?

When Will I Ever Learn

2007-01-22T20:45:00.001-08:00

You have no idea what it's like to look over after the end of a screening of the movie you've just directed and see three people sitting on the couch in your cutting room with tears running down their eyes. It's....very very nice.

On the music front: on my last movie I had a composer crammed down my throat with a baseball bat. I went into the relationship (silently) seething with resentment. At the end of the day he totally kicked in and the score was awesome.

On this movie I got exactly the composer I had wanted the lasyt time. I went into the relationship (audibly) bursting with excietment. Today I heard some music. Among the first batch of cues there was some good stuff but a lot of it was wildly wide of the mark. I'm thinking the score is doomed. When will I ever learn?

On the last movie, the week before the network saw the cut I was gripped by anxiety. I walked around arguing in my head with this note or that note I was sure they were going to give me. I was terrified they would mess it up. I was terrified they wouldn't think it was great. The loved it, the notes they gave me all made the movie better, and they gave me another movie right away.

On this movie, it's now the week before the network sees the cut and I am gripped by anxiety. I walk around arguing in my head with this note or that note I am sure they are going to give me. I am terrified they will mess it up. I am terrified they won't think it's great. When will I ever learn?

What We Do This For

2007-01-15T22:01:00.000-08:00

Today I spent the day in the cutting room with my fantastic composer talking about where music should and shouldn't go in the movie. We're using some Bach, some Mozart, some Vivaldi, and or course the composer's original music which will tie it all together. Lots of solo cello and in some places a great big choir. We got to talking about the dub stage (see lower photo), on which all the sound is mixed together, and how fantastic the movie sounds on the huge speakers, and how lousy it sounds when it's all compressed and broadcast in mono and comes out of a TV, and the composer, who has done tons of movies, said "Oh, I never watch the things on TV. You kill yourself if you do that," and I said "Then what do we do this for?" and she said "For this. For sitting around today talking about music and trying things out. For the joy of making this thing together." And I realized: the suffering I feel when I watch the movie with people--what are they thinking? why did he cough? why didn't they laugh harder at that joke?--is something I can choose not to undergo. The awful feeling of hearing the sound tinny and small and the picture weirdly re-framed by the way its broadcast--the same. I never have to watch the damn thing once it rolls out into the world. I can do it for the parts of it I love: the haggling over exactly which frame a music cue should start on for maximum emotional effect. The glory of looking around at the crew and seeing that they are crying because of what the actress is doing in front of the camera. The awe of going outside the church you've been shooting in for six hours (see upper photo) and discovering how the camera crew has pulled off the miracle of turning night to day. This is enough. This is enough.

Why I'm Not Blogging Right Now

2007-01-09T20:03:00.000-08:00

So I took the rate-your-life quiz posted over on Bigg's blog and here's how it turned out:

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8.4
Mind:	7
Body:	7.1
Spirit:	8.8
Friends/Family:	7.8
Love:	9.1
Finance:	8.8
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

What can I say? I have a really good life. It feels like a crazy thing to say (especially today when I scarfed down tons of 72% cacao chocolate this afternoon and now feel kind of crashed-down-low) because my mindset has always been so focused on what's broken about me and what therapy or philosophy or achievement might be the right fix. I know that's no excuse not to write about the stuff of my life. I'm sure Barista Brat also has a really good life and somehow or other she manages to find something witty, biting, insightful and funny to say about a whole bunch of stuff practically every day. And I can't say I don't want to blog because hey, busman's holiday, I write all day long every day anyway, because John August is brilliant and successful and an internationally acclaimed artist and he, too, always finds something witty and insightful and illuminating to blog about. I think I'm not blogging because I thought it would be one area of my life which wasn't competitive, which just WAS, but in fact I end up reading lots of blogs that are so much more focused and funny and narratively suspenseful than mine that I end up going, why bother? And it's hard enough for me to keep writing screenplays and directing them with that feeling always lurking just at the edges of my field of vision--why add another you're-not-good-enough endeavor?

Who knows. That's why I haven't been posting. But I sure love reading all your blogs.

I will say one thing: I think the movie I'm making right now, based on evidence to date, is an authentic class-A four-hankie tearjerker, and that's something I'm damn proud of.

The Fawn and the Sailors

2006-12-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

In one of Aesop's fables, a young deer's eye is pierced by a hunter's arrow. The deer survives but is now blind in one eye. How is she going to know when hunters are coming? How is she going to protect herself? She decides to graze near a cliff by the sea, with her good eye toward the land, which is where she knows the hunters are. Then one day some sailors on a passing ship see a lone fawn grazing on the edge of the cliff and decide to use her for target practice.

Astonishing Actress reported for duty. I can not begin to tell you the reactions I have gotten when I have told people she is in my movie. My hopelessly jealous and competitive sister in law, also a writer and director, was struck dumb. Literally. She just couldn't handle the fact that I was working with this woman. She had to get off the phone. The young actors in the film started shaking at the news: I'm going to be in a scene with HER? People immediately started talking Emmy Nomination. I thought: all I have to do is stay out of the way and magic will ensue.

Then, as I said, she reported for duty.

She's in her 70's. There are memory problems. There is lack of focus. The acting energy goes into struggling to remember the line. Most of all, there is a husband who stands not more than eighteen inches from her at all times, even during private rehearsals with me and the other actors (I have never, ever seen this), subtly and adoringly letting her know that everything, but everything, is okay, even her memory problems and her lack of focus.

It is a line by line process. I sit beside the camera on the floor and as patiently and calmly as I possibly can feed her the lines and then she says them. Sometimes she blows me away with the depth and subtlety of the work. Sometimes it is flat and overwrought at the same time, with long pauses that are about the mind groping for the line, not the character experiencing the moment. She puts in a lot of "I means" and "you knows" that absolutely shouldn't be there. Interestingly, I looked at one of her acclaimed performances from 40 years ago and she did the same thing then. Didn't stop her from getting nominated for two Academy Awards, mind you.

Today we shot a six page scene which was all Astonishing Actress the whole way. I feel like a wrung-out washcloth. Did I get it? I'll tell you after I've spent two days in the cutting room with a pair of scissors and a tweezers picking out the good bits and splicing them together.

Why There Is Suffering In The World

2006-12-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

I know why there is starvation and suffering and genocide in east Africa. I know why there is evil and pain and loneliness in the world. It's all because God is too busy making the weather on my set go perfectly right. I keep telling God honestly, we can shoot in any weather, really, we can! East Africa needs you! But nevertheless, God keeps doing things like this:

We already shot the wake after funeral for the cop shot down by two gangbangers. It was snowing hard--perfect for the gloom and sadness we needed. We also already shot the scene immediately following the funeral for the woman who dies happily and peacefully after a long, full life. For that we had a brilliant blue sky. The problem was, we were shooting both funerals on the same day, which meant that one of the after-funeral scenes wouldn't match its funeral. We shot the cop's funeral first. Gloomy grey sky, old tombstones edged in snow, everybody's breath showing, bare snow-dusted branches. Perfect. Then while we were moving to the other location for the happy funeral, the sun came out, and we shot it under perfectly blue skies.

!!!!!

Also that day, I got The Moment in the church described in the previous post. It's not 100% joggle-free but it's close enough. The way it ended up working is that at the beginning of the shot the actress is standing with the arched roof of the church perfectly framing her and then, as the camera zooms in and pulls out, the luminous stained glass windows, at first hidden by her head, grow out from the background and ultimately fill the screen behind her. Could be an amazing moment.

The photo above is us setting up the shot in the church, with the stand-in doing the boring part--standing there while the camera crew sets lights and tests the move--while the actress chills. Actually, she doesn't chill at all--she's prepping to make the magic happen, and make the magic happen she did.

The Moment

2006-12-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

Today I shoot the most challenging scene of the movie. A young woman wracked with unacknowledged grief and guilt, full of anger at herself and the world, comes by chance on a weekday afternoon into a church in which the choir is practicing Bach's "Sleepers Awake." It is the turning point of the story--the point at which she begins her difficult uphill climb to peace, acceptance and understanding. And it all happens because a few chords of music strike her heart and her soul in a particular way.

How do you shoot a thing like that? How do you convey what is going on without subtitles?

We're putting her in the center of the aisle with three tall--and very beautiful--stained glass windows behind her, and we are doing a very tricky thing where the camera pulls back from the actress at the same time that it is zooming in on her. This keeps her the same size in the frame but makes the background--the stained glass windows--appear to be getting bigger and closer. This technique was used in The Mask the first time Jim Carrey sees Cameron Diaz, to underscore just how knocked out he is by her. It's hard enough to get dolly-out-zoom-in right on a feature with a 70 day shooting schedule. On a 19 day schedule, with all the work I have to get done today? The actress has to stay EXACTLY the same size in frame or the whole thing looks joggly and the trick is blown. How many tries will it take???

And beyond that--will anybody buy that a few bars of soaring Bach can really have that effect on her? I'm going on the knowledge that a few bars of soaring Bach have had that effect on ME.

And what else do I have to go on?

A Star Is Cast

2006-11-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

Astonishing Actress loved the script, the deal was made and she's on board. All in 24 hours. When I told Young Star and Young Leading Man they went insane. She's that kind of icon to actors. Even grips and guys on the lighting crew said they were getting chills when they heard she was doing the movie. My wife yelped in excitement. I started to well up and get a lump in my throat. This could really be great. She could bring a level of depth to this project that I got in the plane in L.A. thinking it could never really have.

Whatever happens, at this moment, on the last day of really wonderful, fun and productive first week, this is good.

Next Diva In Line

2006-11-30T07:05:00.000-08:00

The Divine Miss M., as anybody with their eyes open might have noticed, is promoting a new Xmas album, appearing daily on talk shows, and was never actually available for the movie, million bucks or not. I called my executive at the network and asked her, perhaps a shade too firmly, to help us cut through the corporate slo-mo and get another offer out, like, NOW. She and I were both hoping for Ann-Margret. What her boss, the Head of the Network, decided may be even better. The Head of the Network authorized an offer to a truly Astonishing Actress, an icon of prestige and artistry for four decades. The offer went out last night, in record speed. Astonishing Actress was to have looked at a DVD of my Young Star and read the script last night. I am to be on call all day, at lunch and between shots, to speak to Astonishing Actress if she should so desire. I think I would jump off Half Dome if Astonishing Actress should so desire.

Light your candles for me, gentle reader.

The Burning of Atlanta

2006-11-29T05:24:00.000-08:00

Today I name names. Nicely, though.

On the morning of the third day of shooting we still do not have our second lead cast. A woman in her 60's or 70's, full of verve and vinegar and dying of lung cancer. Jewish. Caustic. Funny. The prototype for the role, Anne Bancroft, sadly left us a couple of years ago. We've made an offer to aLiving Legends who, as discussed in this blog, passed. We gave The Network a list of available goddesses. Ten of them, any of whom I would leap with joy at the idea of working with. You would think they'd be quick to approve one or another of them. You would be wrong. The Head of Casting was unable for a few days to get the Head of the Network's attention. When he did, most of the names were crossed off the list as being "not promotable" "too episodic TV" or "we used her in a movie three years ago." Then, finally, the news came down.

"We authorize an offer of one million dollars to Bette Midler."

Gentle reader, I would walk a thousand miles on my knees to the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadelupe in Mexico to get Bette Midler for this movie. But you don't send Bette Midler a script and say "you need to read this tonight and give us an answer by 10 tomorrow morning." You. Just. Don't. And what you most especially do not do, after the agent has very clearly said, "If you want Bette to even THINK about this, offer a million", get cold feet and offer $725,000. The agent hollered in indignation at the news. "I fucking told you that if you were serious you had to offer a million!!!" The offer was not upped. Here's the really nasty part: with the clock ticking away, and with an actress needing to land in Winnipeg to perform this part no later than 12/7, the offer was not officially made as of close of business last night. The network moves in slow motion. Actual time in the real world does not.

How long will Bette take to play out? (And by the way, if she does the movie, which strikes me as spectacularly unlikely, I delete this post.) On top of that, the network refuses to approve another name to go to in the case that Bette doesn't go for it. So that's potentially a day or two of more dicking around before we can make the next move.

Here's what I remind myself: when you watch Gone with The Wind, notice that as Rhett whips his horses and drives Scarlett through the chaos of the burning of Atlanta, Scarlett has a blanket over her head. Not to protect her from smoke inhalation. She's wearing the blanket because Scarlett had not yet been cast, and Selznick just plain had to start shooting. In fact, it was on the set, during the shooting of the fire, that a casting director introduced Selznick to a promising but relatively unknown British actress names Vivien Leigh.

And by the way: the first two days have gone wonderfully well. More on that later.

Towering Genius

2006-11-26T20:06:00.000-08:00

I just saw Babel. Make that I just stumbled out of the theater where I saw Babel. Now I'm listening to the score, just downloaded from iTunes. Have any of you seen it? Or Amores Perros, another movie by the same director, Innaritu? Wow. With cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, who also shot Brokeback Mountain. And music by Gustavo Santaolalla, who did the music for Motorcycle Diaries. Wow. Wow.

Tomorrow I start shooting my little 19-day-shoot cable movie in Winnipeg. I could go either way with this. I could say: in the face of Innaritu, why bother? Why not just lay down the camera? Or I could go: I'm not Innaritu, but I do get to play with a camera and actors tomorrow. And look what you can do if you catch the wind of a little inspiration! So I'll go with the latter and say: God, hear my prayer, and fill my sails.

The Nerve

2006-11-23T16:55:00.002-08:00

So I find this amazing actress to play the lead--we'll call her Amazing Actress--on whose resume you will find wonderful indies, a much-beloved TV series and a universally acclaimed teen hit of a couple of years ago. She's 24. She's gorgeous. She's a big talent. I give the demo reel to the producers, who flip. They pass the reel on to the head of casting for the network. He flips. He tries for days to get the head of the network to watch it. She finally watches it. She flips. She says: okay. We cast her. We send Amazing Actress the script. She loves it. She tells her agents "please get me this movie." We close the deal today. She's in my movie.

Then Head of Network says "let's go back to Major Historic Star who passed because she didn't like TV-Semi-Star and see if she'll do it with Amazing Actress." Head of Network writes a personal note to Major Historic Star--heads of networks basically never do this--we send her my new draft of the script, we send her Amazing Actress's demo reel. All of this ascends to Major Historic Star through various levels of agents, managers and assistants. We are all thinking: how can we lose? She's in the bag.

Then today around 5 my cell phone rings. I answer. "Hello," says Major Historic Star. It's herself, calling me, Tom, who when he was ten years old used to sneak an extra half hour of television time to watch her show when his parents went out. Calling to say: "I loved what you did with the script. I don't think Amazing Actress can handle the movie. I'm not going to do it." All of this is fine--her right. And in fact I thought it was very gracious of her to call me to say no before she had even called her legions of agents and managers etc. But she doesn't stop there. She goes on to say that she thinks I have talked myself into something, that Amazing Actress has no colors or range at all, and then, to quote, "I wanted to do this movie, I had the part memorized, but at my age I can't go into a movie that will end up getting bad reviews, which is what you are going to get."

What!? Please, tell me you don't want to be in my movie, but don't insult my taste and prophesy doom for my project!

The nerve!

The older lead doesn't start work for two more weeks so there's time to cast the right now. The problem is morale. My very excited young leads fly up on Friday. We'll be rehearsing all weekend and start shooting on Monday. Because of the holiday the producers and I won't even be talking to the network about what actress we go to next for the older lead until Monday. How do I keep my actors from getting nervous about that? How do I keep them happy and secure, which is what they need to be to do their best work?

Dodging a Cannonball

2006-11-20T17:09:00.000-08:00

TV-Semi-Star, blessed be The Spirit That Animates The Universe, has passed on the project. In the meantime I found the exact right actress for the role. A host of leads in really interesting indies, member of a beloved TV ensemble cast as a kid, an indelibly funny role in a recent teen hit. Made my impassioned plea to head of casting for the network, he looked at her demo reel, fell in love like I did, all is looking good, then: head of network calls, very excited about offering it to a Genuine Authentic TV Star, currently the highest paid woman in television. (You are all going to know who this is, I think. I'm not hiding the names to be coy. I'm hiding them so people don't google their way through the stars' names to this blog and blow my anonymity and my freedom to be as scathing as I wanna be.) She's great, actually. She's incredibly funny. But can she cry? Can she undergo a spiritual transformation? No reason to think she can't. So we all sign on. An offer is going to go out.

But--

And this is a really good but--

She was just at Tom and Katie's wedding in Italy and has jetlag and--with five days until I shoot and Thanksgiving smack in the middle of them--SHE IS TAKING A NAP AND HER AGENT DOESN'T WANT TO WAKE HER UP.

That's where we are at this moment.

Whiter Knuckles

2006-11-18T13:31:00.000-08:00

Now it's getting serious. Young Starlet Who Everybody Says Is About To Pop passed on the project. After much campaigning on my part. Actually I thought I was brilliantly persuasive on the phone. Not.

An offer is now out to a TV-semi-star, statuesque, blonde, big-featured, sexy, funny, but: can she shed honest tears? Can she convincingly undergo a spiritual transformation? I've been combing clips of her on YouTube all morning searching for clues. None have been conclusively forthcoming. We've set an ultimatum: an answer by first thing Monday morning L.A. time or we move on. She has lots of dough and her live-in girlfriend has even more and it won't be about needing the gig. So what will entice her to fly away to the frozen north and miss Thanksgiving with friends and family? Chance to be taken more seriously as an actress? Frankly I'm hoping for one of the back up choices. But time is truly truly running out. Last night I took the executive producer, the producer and my assistant out to a dinner where many cosmos were consumed and yes, the following words were uttered: if the production has to shut down, or push (movie lingo for "be delayed") until January, who covers the MILLIONS that will cost, the studio or the network? Nobody knew the answer. And we can't just push a week or two because we can't film over the Christmas/New Years holidays--actors won't go for it.

I remain, however, weirdly calm.

Maybe because they have to pay me no matter what happens?

Not really. It's never really about that for me: it's more about the adventure. And building up foundations for more things to be built on. Pay-offs and buy-outs don't do that.

I think I'm calm because we can't crack the shell of the future. Because we can't know how the billiard balls will hit each other. Because we can't know which eventuality will lead in the long run to hell or which will lead to wonderfulness.

So why fret? Instead I will take a nap, do some work on the script, (the male lead still comes off as a simpering doormat), go see Flags of Our Fathers for inspiration, and then sit at my desk and dream my way to what, shot by shot, I actually want the camera to see.

NEWSFLASH: EVEN WHITER KNUCKLES

I was just woken up from my nap by the news that Major Historic Star, with her deal all-but-closed, and following her agent's assurances that she would be fine working with TV-Semi-Star, has announced that she doesn't like TV-Semi-Star and is pulling out of the project.

We now have no leads at all. And we start shooting on Sunday.

I love the executive producer who called to tell me this. Love isn't too big a word. I never met her before 12 days ago and already she is a friend and somebody I can't wait to work with again. I love her patience, her humor, her kindness, her excellence with script and story. And I was bad with her on the phone right now. She said the plan was not to tell anybody about this until Monday morning when the offer to TV-Semi-Star played out one way or another, because if the network gets word now it could truly make everybody hysterical and derail the project. At first I said of course of course. Then the rising tide of a hissy fit took over. I said I had to tell my own agents. I said that I had pulled out of meetings to staff (lingo for "become a writer/producer on") two network shows in order to direct this movie and I needed to get those meetings back on track if this fell apart. That was reasonably true: the meetings were in the offing. But true or false isn't the point. Bad faith is the point. Abandoning ship before the ship has even sunk is the point. Being a fickle friend is the point. I feel guilty and sad that I went immediately to that. Fortunately I saw right away what I had done and told her she was the captain and I had faith in HER, if in nothing else, and I would follow wherever she would lead.

Her plan now is to try to put together a package of TV-Semi-Star for the young lead and a certain beloved Major Stage and Screen Genius for the older lead, both repped by the agent who reps the project, if TV-Semi-Star is at all inclined to do it. As for Major Stage and Screen Genius, gentle reader, I would be EXTREMELY EXCITED to work with her. Her work truly does border on genius. I mean: wow. So this may yet all come around for the best.

Why I Love My Job

2006-11-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

Why I Love My Job #1:

My favorite character in the movie is the antagonist. She's about 40, a financial consultant who's mother is dying of cancer and wants to go out peacefully, no extraordinary measures, but the daughter, being the controlling, stick-up-her-ass person she is, as well as sad and scared about her mother's impending death, is threatening to use her power of attorney to force her mother to undergo radiation therapy. Part of the daughter's back story is that she was a talented singer, her mother gave her 15 years of lessons, had the money saved for Juilliard, and she gave it all up for finance. Through a series of events and encounters she finally accepts the inevitable and at the bang-up birthday/farewell party at her mother's house she stands at the piano and sings a song. So here I sit late at night in Winnipeg wondering: what song? There are limits. We have no budget for this. Anything from Rogers and Hammerstein would cost us not a dime less that sixty grand. West Side Story? 100K, minimum. But the studio owns a few songs and one of them is Love Is A Many Splendored Thing. And then there's Danny Boy, in the public domain. Which should it be? A sweet, sad ballad about love and farewell (Danny Boy) or a schmaltzy rollicking showtune about the glory of love? I'm downloading version after version of both songs on iTunes--Dinah Washington, Andy Williams, Judy Collins, Barry Manilow--and seeing the scene in my head and getting tears in my eyes at the thought of how wonderful both could be, the beautiful warm house packed with guests and the mother, frail, in her last hours, ecstatically happy to see her daughter in an evening gown, with bare shoulders, standing at the piano singing her heart out...

Why I Love My Job #2:

In one scene the mother vomits and goes into a seizure. Yesterday we had a whole meeting on who would handle the vomit. Props? Set dressing? Special effects? Mark Props (in production you refer to people by their first name and their job) said to Deanna Set Dressing: If it's projectile, it's me, but if it's just on the floor, it's you. Deanna Set Dressing felt otherwise. A lively discussion ensued. In the end they decided to work on the vomit together. Would it be oatmeal? Campbell's Soup? What did we think the character had been eating in the last few hours?

What could be a more wonderful way to spend a day?

White Knuckles

2006-11-15T22:13:00.000-08:00

One week from Sunday I will be standing on a street in Winnipeg with twenty trucks around me and fifty crew members and generators and props and wardrobe and catering and many many lights shedding beautiful expressive light on---

---nobody.

Because I have not yet cast the movie.

There are two leads. The 70 year old female and the 30 year old female.

The Major Historical Star who has agreed to play the 70 year old now feels, after we arrived at a salary figure that seems acceptable to all, that she is not comfortable changing planes ( there are no non-stop flights to Winnipeg from anywhere; I actually think that people driving here from other cities in Canada have to change cars to get here) and has asked for a private jet in her deal. The network has already balked at paying $5300 for her to bring a private assistant, and has compelled us to pay that out of the budget of the movie. But $50,000, the price of the private jet? Tomorrow we'll find out what's going to happen with this. Wait, did I say tomorrow? First the question goes to the studio. Then the studio asks the question of the out-sourced business affairs office hired by the network. The then out-sourced business affairs office asks the question of the network. This could take four days. Next week is Thanksgiving, and after lunch time Tuesday the entire business of Hollywood shuts down. We start shooting a week from Sunday.

But that's not all.

For the young lead, Big Deal Comic Second Banana, familiar as the funny foil to the plucky heroine in many films, but who has never carried a film on her shoulders, turned us down. The old "Did not respond to the material." Fine, neither did I when I first read it. That, given the tortuous process described above, took just about two weeks to play out. Then we offered it to Extremely Promising Young Starlet Who Everybody Thinks Is About To Pop and she is reading it tonight, but may have conflicts with another movie even if she loves it. And we start shooting a week from Sunday.

So it's white knuckle time.

But not, oddly, for me.

I'm just prepping my movie. Picking locations, choosing props, and most important of all, and most challenging, designing the shots with my director of photography. Today we obsessed for almost on hour on how best to bring two people through a graveyard to a waiting limousine. The options are limitless. I find that limitlessness much scarier than having no stars a week and a half before shooting.

But one way or another, a week from Sunday, the cameras will role.

On somebody.

A Very Good Day

2006-11-10T06:16:00.000-08:00

I arrived in cold grey stone and brick Winnipeg, where I am shooting the new movie, in a state of advanced and possibly mortal Buyer's Remorse. WHAT THE HELL HAD I DONE!? I had said yes to directing a meandering, repetitive, sentimental, unfocused script based, of all things, on a book by an outrageously fraudulent pop psychic. I had barely three weeks to prep it. What actor of quality would ever say yes to being in it? What would happen when the thing actually spilled out onto the airwaves? I knew I would be rewriting it, but I had a whole big whopping four days--really three nights--to do that, while simultaneously carrying the 24/7 job of prep. Then, the first night, atrial fibrillation struck--what else? AAUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Then I got to work. I set up in my hotel room and had my assistant (on this movie I have an assistant of my own, an unheard of luxury in movies for television, but Winnipeg is Canada's bargain basement city, and quite a wonderful place by the way) bringing me Vietnamese takeout and miso soup, and I just started on page one and started re-writing. I slept 7 hour in four nights--that's 7 hours altogether. Page by page, I had no confidence that another idea would come into my fuzzed-out panicked brain. At all times I felt the pressure of an art department, wardrobe department, assistant directors and location scouts wondering what exactly they were supposed to be doing as day after day of undirected prep ticked by.

I'll cut to the chase. When the producer of the movie called me yesterday, after reading the script, she was sobbing. Not just crying. Sobbing. Gentle readers, I seem to have pulled off an authentic tearjerker, which was exactly the goal. The script is still sentimental, it's still based on a book by an outrageously fraudulent (though apparently personally quite sincere) pop psychic, but it's a movie I'm excited about making now.

On top of that a Major Historic Star, 70 years old, winner of one Oscar and an entire raft of Emmys, expressed interest in playing one of the two leads but needed to talk to me about her concerns. We got on the phone. She opened quite bluntly: I love the character, I hate the script. I spent twenty minutes pitching my rewrite and at the end she said yes. Basically the producers gave me a tickertape parade.

So it was a good day.

But for one thing. My daughter had called saying she missed me and wanted to catch up and I called her and we were having a great time and I told her the Major Historic Star was doing my movie and said "She does a lot of TV movies, doesn't she?"

It was quite the pin in the balloon--the implication behind that--(though in fact she has done only a few). I don't think it was said with hostility--was it? No: worse than that. A shade of disappointment. And I can't entire fault her for it. We had all been hoping for an Even More Major Historic (and newly sober) Star, winner of an even earlier Oscar (for a movie which my wife and I saw on our first date in 1972), who would have been the next offer if Major Historic Star had said no.

Fact is, I was slightly feeling the same thing as my daughter.

Welcome to the brain of yours truly. A day as good as can be had by a living organism on planet Earth and there's still a cloud of "Yeah, but..." over the whole transaction.

Only one cure for that, after a terrific nine hours of sleep: Shut up, Tom, put on your sixteen layers of warm clothing (it's 10 below zero centigrade today, which I think is about 20 farenheit), have some breakfast, drive into the office and GET THE HELL BACK TO WORK.

I'm on it.

Movie Star

2006-11-03T22:44:00.000-08:00

I couldn't have been more flattered. She read through a big stack of writers and chose me. We met for coffee today at a sort of hip/Latino/intellectual cafe near my house. She's an authentic movie star. An Oscar all her own. At least two genuinely iconic roles. Every single one of you has seen both of those movies. Then her star fell a little. Well, more than a little. For a season she starred in a TV show. For a while it was a sensation. Then it fell apart and was cancelled. Like I said, I was incredibly flattered that she wanted me to write something for her. But my heart sank when I found out what it was: she wanted to go to the network that canceled her show and get them to redevelop it. To try another pilot with the same character and setup. Yes, the head of the network had said to her "Sure, sure, absolutely, bring me an interesting writer and we'll give it a try. " Who isn't going to say that to an authentic movie star? Who isn't going to let her go through the exercise? She looked small and pale without the makeup and the gorgeous lighting and she was a little nervous as she read her ideas to me out of a scribbled-in notebook. A friend of mine who happened to be stopping by for a latte came up to me with a huge "Hi! You'd better introduce me!" smile. Out of respect to my new friend, the authentic movie star, I didn't bite. I just said "Hi, Bob," and he went away un-introduced. She called our mutual agent after the meeting and told him she was in love with me. Why? Because I told her what a fan I am, how brilliant and funny I think she is, how the show did not do her incredible comedic talent justice, and every word of that was true. Because I listened to her sad hopeful bring-Lazarus-back-from-the-dead ideas with open eyes and yes, even an open heart. But I went away sad. Ten years ago--or is it fifteen by now?--she got up and thanked the Academy and her parents and her agent and her husband. I told her I needed to decide if I could really do her and the show justice and I'd call her in a week when I was settled into pre-production on my movie. And so, like the head of the network, I won't actually tell her what I really think. I'll call her in a week and tell her that with everything I have going on right now I don't think I can do her or the series justice. Truth is, I'm a little in love with her too. I have been since the first time I saw her in a movie and fell out my chair at how funny and moving and real she was. But today I came home sad.

Holy Fucking Shit

2006-11-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

I said yes. Well I didn't exactly say yes. At the beginning of the phone call with The Network I opened with the word "Okay!" which I meant as the opening gambit of a discussion and which The Network, I now realize, took as "I'm aboard!"--so that at the end of a two hour call haggling page by page over what I want to change and what they love just the way it is The Network said "Well I am soooo excited that you are doing this."

And I didn't open my mouth.

So I didn't say yes. I got yessed.

What have I just taken a big gulp of--champagne, or the Kool-Aid?

So now I'm back in it. With even more anxiety than the last round. Because not only do I have a WEEK LESS TIME TO PREP, I have a MAJOR REWRITE TO DO. And nobody cast, and no locations chosen, and and and and and...

Weren't we just here a few months ago?

I need to take a moment, though. I need to take a moment to

A: be grateful

B: remember that as queasy and uneasy as I'm feeling right now I'd be feeling just as queasy and uneasy if I had said no

C. also remember that all my anxiety the last time led nowhere and predicted nothing

D: and also remember that there's no knowing, but NO knowing, what decision is the right one and what's the wrong one, ever, even after the fact, so I should just go with the decision I've made and DIRECT THE MOVIE!

To put the gratitude issue in a brighter light: in terms of directing gigs, between my short subject and my first movie was five years. Between my first movie and my second was six years. Between my second and my third was eight years. Between my third and my fourth was no time at all--not a second in between.

Of Proofs and Puddings

2006-11-01T06:13:00.000-08:00

If I had any doubts as to whether the network liked the movie, they are at rest: as I was finishing my sound mix yesterday--the final step in making the film--I got an offer from the network to direct another movie, starting immediately. In fact, more than immediately: the director fell out, it's already in prep and starts shooting on November 27th. I went slightly and quietly insane with relief and was very happy as I finished the mix and waited for the script to be delivered.

Ah, but then the script came. Why is there always a catch?

It's an insanely shoddy script. Mumbo jumbo about coincidences and visits from the dead (WHY CAN'T THE DEAD STAY DEAD ON TELEVISION ANYMORE! IT'S A FUCKING PLAGUE OF SUPERNATURAL RETURN! SOMEBODY HAS TO NOTIFY THE FBI!). Plotting that can't find its way from A to B with a map and a flashlight. I'm up at 6 A.M. re-reading the script and seeing if there's any way I can make an edible dish out of it while racing through a three week prep, and I have to answer that question for myself before 9 A.M. which is when I have a conference call with the producers. They already know I have script issues. I'm going to raise them on the call. But the decision is in my hands: do I take it on or not?

The adventurer in me says NO. Stay open. Something cooler might--or might not!--be around the corner.

Stay tuned.

Foreign Sales Rides Again

2006-10-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

In addition to Foreign Sales Lady there is Foreign Sales Guy, and the simple fact, as I have learned today, is that Mr. and Mrs. Foreign Sales don't like the movie. They were expecting a THRILLER. That's what they sank their Euros into. The movie is, and always was, from the time it was just a little mega-bestselling-novel waiting to grow up into a cable movie, a romance with a light bit of thriller shot through it. They read the book. They read the script. They were still expecting a THRILLER. And somehow they think it will be more of a thriller with slower, more "European" cutting and those dag-blasted Wide Vistas they will NOT SHUT UP ABOUT. Here's what I don't get about the Foreign Sales Duo: F.S. Guy was born in New Jersey and is as American as Mt. Rushmore. F.S. Lady was born in NYC and is as NYC as Nathan's hot dogs. So why, why, tell me, please, WHY, do they now speak with the cultivated Euro-Germanic accents of reception clerks at an upscale boutique hotel in a newly gentrified neighborhood of Berlin? I lived in France for a while. Did you catch me talking like LeBeau in Hogan's Heroes?

Truth be told: it hurts. I want everybody to love my movie. EVERY SINGLE PERSON EVERYWHERE. And here's a confession that's not easy to make: after my transatlantic call this morning I went to www.imdb.com, source of all things movie and TV, and looked up every movie on which Mr. and Mrs. Foreign Sales are credited as producers, and gloated over the horrible reviews and low user ratings they received. And got all unhappy that there was one movie on there that people actually seemed to like. That's how much of a grown up I am!

Locked!

2006-10-12T21:47:00.000-07:00

Last night at about 9:15 PM I locked picture. No more cutting, no more editing: the movie is what it is. From now on it's just people asking me which bird sounds I want in which forest scenes and deciding on exactly what frame the music cue should start in a love scene. And yes, one frame one way or the other can have a huge impact on what you, the viewer, will feel watching the scene. The big surprise at the end of the process was that the head of programming for the network had no notes on the cut she saw. None. Zero. We asked the underlings at the network: is that common? The underlings at the network said: No, she always has notes, lots of them. My mind, wouldn't you know, went straight to thinking that she watched it, threw up her hands, said "It is what it is, I don't even know where to begin, just air the goddam thing." But you know what? Most likely she thought it was working fine and didn't need any messing with. Which, by the way, is not quite the same thing as loving it, or thinking that yours truly she might want to hire to direct another movie for her network...

Regardless of all that: My movie made it through. The notes I got only made it better. Anything that's on screen or not on screen I can't blame anybody for. So when you watch it, address all complaints not to the management but directly to your waiter.

Tomorrow I cut the international version, which has to be five minutes longer. That means putting back in five minutes of stuff we cut out because it was dull, or didn't work, or wasn't needed for the story. The Foreign Sales Lady, who lives in Munich, tells us that we need more scenes with big wide vistas because Europeans, when they watch American movies, want big wide vistas, which they don't get in Europe. Yeah. I can just see some guy standing in a video store in Dusseldorf trying to decide which video to rent and going "Wow, Helga, let's get this one, it's got big wide vistas in it." An agent I know once told me that she and her husband were going out to dinner with Foreign Sales Lady one night in Munich and she went to meet Foreign Sales Lady at her office and walked in the door and saw her husband extravagantly fucking Foreign Sales Lady on the rug, an image I can not get out of my head every time I see or talk to Foreign Sales Lady. When Foreign Sales Lady says wide vistas I just see a wide vista of Foreign Sales Lady, who is herself something of a wide vista, to be honest, riding some guy on the rug in a slick Munich foreign sales office while the guy's wife stands at the doorway wondering what just happened to her life.

The big question, now, is: what's next? I'm pitching three pilots this week. I'm sitting here at my desk prepping the pitches. Sketching out the characters. Coming up with possible episodes. Figuring out how I can gracefully cancel the meetings because I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT ANY OF THEM. They're not show ideas. They're hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes. Maybe I'm just tired after the intense rush of work on the movie. Maybe I'm genuinely evaluating my life and my work. But either way all I want to do is NOTHING. I've actually spent the morning calculating how long until I can retire (I think 13 years) and how much a month I'll have to retire on at the current rate of income and pension and social security etc. etc. etc. Does anybody else feel this way about their career? That they're ready for the golden pastures?

One More Wicket

2006-10-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

I got my grade from the L.A. office of the network today (that's the second level of command, not the top.) I think it was an A-. It might have been an A. Hard to tell. But definitely above B+. I'm happy about that. I think I'm employable in the future on that network. There were, however, two performances they had a problem with.

One of them they're right about and I'm embarrassed by it: it was the first day of production and I let the heroine's angry, sad, abused, white trash mother run too hot--that is to say, she was picking splinters of scenery out of her teeth when she was done. We went back in today and played some of her lines off camera, found other takes, cut a few things. I think it'll work now.

The other performance they're wrong about. Universally, with only one exception--and you, a reader of this blog, know who you are--everybody thinks the sexy rich spoiled-yet-vulnerable sister of the hero steals the movie. That she lights up every scene she's in. That she's going to be a star. But one of the L.A. Executives has never been crazy about her, not from the first moment she was cast. This would be fine except that this Executive asked me to delete or trim my favorite moment in the movie, when the character improvises a country western song about her recently dumped country western singer husband. I think it's totally winning. It also happens not to be trimmable--the way it's shot you can't cut into it. In the email I just sent the executive listing all the changes we made and how WONDERFUL her notes are and how much BETTER the changed scenes are (true, actually, but you have to lay it on really thick in these cases) I snuck in a mention that the country western song moment wasn't trimmable. We'll see what the fallout is from that one.

So all's good. And now it goes to New York. To the Big Cheeses with whom there isn't, I don't think, much discussion. In fact I'll most likely never talk to them--I'll be talking to underlings who live in fear of them and need to come back to them with a great big YES to everything. Or that's where my mind's going right now. I'm probably wrong, as I am in most of my predictions. At this very moment--6 PM PST--the movie is being dropped at Fedex for the eastbound flight. They have, contractually, two business days to respond, so what with Columbus day and the weekend, I'll get the notes on Wednesday.

You'll be the first to hear what they say.

LATE BREAKING NEWS

This email just in from the Executive after she got my email about the changes we made today:

This looks fine... thanks for such a thoughtful, visually rich movie..your vision both in the adapting and directing of this book are really inventive and masterful..a pleasure.

Other Hands, Other Paths

2006-10-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

La International Star is doing a guest run on a high-end dramatic series right now. I saw an episode tonight. She was STUNNING. A fantastic performance, controlled, nuanced, deep. So now I can't lay all the blame on her for the fact that she wasn't entirely any of those things in my movie. Because in other hands she shone. I'm in a quandary over this. Was it the nature of the role? The inherently melodramatic nature of the character she played in my movie? Or did I somehow simply not find the key?

Plus. Plus. During the episode the network ran mini-promos for the high-end series I turned down a co-executive producer gig on in order to direct the movie. The movie's winding down, that show's gearing up... I'm not really regretting the choice. Just realizing that we never know which life path a decision will lead us down, and seeing those promos was a view through the veils of fate at a might-have-been alternate destiny. Was that the way to early retirement, a full time gardener, a little apartment in Paris? Or was it the way to an unhappy season on a so-so show?

What DO I want from my future? Screw the full time gardener. Yeah, I'd like an apartment in Paris. But a hotel room there every five years will do fine. (More time than that between visits to Paris and I start to get the DT's.) (I know how obnoxious that sounded but guess what, I'm not deleting it.) So what DO I want? I don't need a bigger house than the nice, not-very-big, comfy homey one I live in. (I bought it twenty years ago so my mortgage is lower than the rent on a one bedroom apartment.) I'm dumping my fancy car this week for something smaller, more sensible and with better mileage and I will never go back to fancy. I live in blue jeans and shirts bought on sale at the Gap and probably always will. My union pension, just as it stands, will enable my wife and me to live at the level we live at now if we're reasonably careful. So, given all of that, what does it matter how well I direct international stars or whether I choose to produce a big-deal series or go off to direct a mid-deal movie? Really?

What right do I have, ever, to complain about anything?

Report Card

2006-09-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school I used to get nervous to the point of sweating over what grade I was going to get when Teacher was handing back tests and papers. An A and a smiley face meant hours of happiness and pride. Anything B+ or lower and the absence of a gold star or a smiley face meant gloom and shame. Do you think anything has changed? The day before yesterday EP #1, the lovely, warm one who is my friend, gave me five notes on the whole movie, said only nice things about it beside those notes--which were small, detailed and very very smart--and then went on to talk for an hour about the temp score--the music from other movies which we've put on the film until our composer has finished his cues--also in a detailed and intelligent manner. She liked the movie and it was all very positive. She even said "What kind of notes will the network possibly have on this?" So why am I on the gloomy side? Because I didn't get an A+, a smiley face, a "this is brilliant and perfect." Then yesterday EP #3---the famous one, the one who ran two studios and a big record label into bankruptcy in the 80's and 90's and made several hundred million dollars in golden parachute fees along the way---spent a few hours in my cutting room being condescending, vague, and, truth be told, quite sharp and creative. And also quite positive about the movie: almost all of his comments had to do with ideas about the music. All in all, with a couple of exceptions which I will deal with, his comments will make the movie better. So why am I so low? Again: lack of a big hug, a YOU ARE BRILLIANT. So grow up already, Tom! You're a grownup professional, not a first grader whose entire ego is wrapped up in his precocity. In the land of grownup professionals it's about getting the job done, not about petting the cute little A student on the head. Basta, basta, basta,. I'm cross with myself for so easily giving in to feelings of insecurity, hurt feelings and fear of never working again (have felt that one since my first job 28 years ago) to the degree that I am.

Here's my biggest problem with EP #'s notes. It has to do with romantic music--music that expresses love. I feel that all the great love songs ever written are about yearning, longing, aching, not about happy happy triumph. Think of Unchained Melody. It's not a Sesame Street alphabet song. It's a ballad. There's a sadness to it, a sadness that makes you happy. EP #3 wants all the love music to be positive. First I have to not throw up at the thought of it. Then I have to figure out how to win on this one without making any enemies.

Oh For Crying Out Loud

2006-09-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

You'd think this was the first piece of work I had ever turned in to a producer. You'd think I just fell off the Hollywood apple cart. You'd think my survival depended on what I am going to hear tomorrow at 10 A.M. when Executive Producer #1 comes into the cutting room and gives me and the editorial team notes from herself and Executive Producers #'s 2 and 3. They all watched the film today. I've heard nothing. I'm dyin' here.

EP #1 is a very warm and good person, my agent's wife, always supportive and intelligent in her note-giving, though in some cases driven more by second guessing of what the network will say than by her own gut. That said, she has a good gut and never, in all the work I've done for her, have I ever been forced into a creative move I didn't embrace.

EP #2 is a deal making guy, an administrator, an exceptionally calm and supportive person who, as far as I can tell, has little creative sense in these matters and tends to defer to those who do. Yes, he's the guy who helped spearhead hiring a composer based on the famous name of the composer's mentor, but I like him a lot. And he has always treated me with great respect and warmth.

EP #3 is famous. Famous for being involved with 4 best picture Oscar winners, famous for running three studios into the ground and walking away with a few hundred million dollars for his trouble, famous for being a big talker. Along the way of making this movie he has contributed several truly excellent ideas that have become effective moments in the film. He has also come up with some howlers, such as: "In order to really sell the Southern setting, can we see Confederate flags flying here and there?" I kid you not. And this story is no period piece, this story is 2007. He was gracefully dissuaded from this notion by the entire team, not just me. He also prefaces all his notes with "Take what works for you, leave the rest."

I'll also be getting notes from Foreign Financier Lady. FFL, in the script notes, suggested that in order to sex up the international version of the film I should have the heroine start out in her underwear as she dresses for her mother's funeral. For her mother's funeral! She was dissuaded from that by the whole team. (The weird post script to that one is that the always classy and ultra modest La Starlet, when shooting the scene, started out in her underwear, completely unbidden! Classy guy that I am, in the film I cut into the shot when all that's left to do is tie the belt of her elegant black dress.) FFL is a little crazy but in an appealing way, we've worked together before, and I've never had a problem with any creative note I've ever gotten from her.

So why am I scared shitless about tomorrow morning? More scared, maybe, than for any notes-session I've had since my early days in the business? Does it have something to do with the fact that it's my 25th anniversary and my wife and I are going out to get matching tattoos of love tonight, and it's the needle I'm really afraid of? No. It's about the notes tomorrow. It's my fear of being asked to do something that won't work and that the film will be stuck with. And, more than that maybe, it's my fear of being asked to do something that I know is right: that shows me a flaw in the film that I didn't see. And even more than that: a flaw that might not be fixable.

Oh shut up, Tom. Go get your wife some flowers and celebrate. Celebrate the 25 years, the wonderful kids we've produced, the life we lead, how happy we are together these days. Go!

Well, maybe two glasses of wine will get me there.

Note to Self

2006-09-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Self:

Do not, NOT, show unfinished copy of movie to nervous star. NOT.

La International Star called me last week in the cutting room. Of course I could barely hear her over the voice that was yelling SHE IS CALLING ME! IN MY CUTTING ROOM! SHE OF WHOM I USED TO DREAM WHEN I WAS TWENTY! IS CALLING ME! IN MY CUTTING ROOM! Still, somehow, I did manage to hear that she was concerned about the southern accent she had adopted for the film, and was it sounding all right, and she didn't want people to see it and say "she can't do accents". My reassurances that it was all fabulous (said with my fingers slightly crossed, I'll admit) did no good, so then I, Mr. Genius, said "I'll show you a cut of the film!" Any thoughts that I might have made a mistake were swept away by her closing words: "I hope to see you soon. I don't want you going out of my life." Meltsville!

So I sent her the film.

Today she called. Using her full name to identify herself, when the other day she had used her popular affectionate nickname. She is disappointed in how I edited her performance. She feels I put 20% of what she gave me on the screen. There was no emotion, she felt. I had cut all of her closeups, she said. I had her standing there motionless, she lamented.

Oh what I wouldn't give for five minutes on the planet where it's always okay to say the truth no matter what. Here's what I would have said on that planet:

You weren't emotional in the takes and closeups I didn't use in the film: you were overwrought, melodramatic and forced. I didn't use the closeups because this just intensified the problem. And if you didn't want to be seen as motionless, why didn't you move around? I'll tell you why: you didn't move around because you didn't want to risk leaving the perfect star-close-up halo lighting you had asked for. In the one scene where you did suddenly start moving--wonderfully, I thought--you were still overwrought and melodramatic, which again limited my choices of takes.

But of course I don't live on that planet so I said "Oh, I'm so sorry you feel that way, I think you are so wonderful and strong and I see all the emotion in your eyes and I feel the character is stronger if she doesn't let everything show etc. etc. etc." She wasn't buying any of it. I told her I was heartbroken that she didn't like her work in the film (and I was, in a way: I want her blessings and approval!). I told her I would look at everything again and try to use more closeups. And I will look at all the takes again. Part of me wants to cut together a version of her scenes with all the worst over-acting in them and send them to her with a sweet little note saying "Is this more along the lines of what you were hoping for?"

But here's the truth about why this upsets me. I'm afraid I've lost that "I don't want you going out of my life." I'm afraid that I, the nerd, have lost my big shot at getting invited to sit at the popular kids' table.

I'm afraid that my chance to invite her to a dinner party and impress all my friends has just gone out the window.

And that's something I would only, ever, admit to you guys.

Here There Be Monsters

2006-09-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

That's what they used to put at the edges of old maps, before the continents were charted and we settled into the current boring state of knowing where everything is: Here There Be Monsters. The idea being, if you don't know, expect the worst. I'm coming to the edge of the map of the world of my movie. A week from yesterday, on the day of my 25th wedding anniversary, I hand it to the producers, and a few days after that to the network. At that point I go from King to serf. I can argue my case, I can make my point, but at the end of the day I don't have final cut. What am I worried about? That they will soften the edges? That they will demand clarifications of things that I already know, from showing the movie to people, are already clear? That I will hear things I know are true and won't want to hear? That they won't like it? That they won't hire me again? All of this adds to the general feeling of post partum letdown and creeping anxiety that has taken hold of me. The party is winding down...

The pad in the picture is the apartment they rented for me while I was making the movie. It was virtually never as neat as shown--I am a domestic slob and I cleared everything off the surfaces before I took the picture. I loved that apartment, and it actually makes me happy to look at it: the party may be winding down, but its been a damn good party and I think I've gotten everything out of it, and put everything into it, that I possibly can.

Sad Dad

2006-09-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

My father--now 93, retired, and suffering from non-Alzheimer's dementia--was very successful in his career. He won awards, raised his kids in affluence, traveled the world. But he had the misfortune to have started out in his career with three other men who went on to become not just rich, not just famous, but household names. Every single one of you who is reading this knows all three names. My father never recovered from their mega-success. For decades he brooded on it, gnawed on it, raged at it. When one of them spoke in the press about the project they had all started on and failed to mention him, or did not give him sufficient credit for what they had all created together, he would call them up and rage at them on the phone, guaranteeing an end to what might have been lifelong friendships. This is sad enough. What is sadder is that now, with 90% of his memory gone, the faces of his grandchildren only vaguely familiar to him, unable to read a newspaper or carry on more than the simplest conversation, he still remembers, and talks about, and broods on, and gnaws on, the three famous friends and how much more successful they became than he did. Yesterday he told me that he wakes up in the middle of the night and tries to think of anything about himself that makes him important. I tried to tell him that nobody is important, everybody is just a normal person living their life and getting by, because I knew where this was going, but he said no, no, and mentioned the name of one of the three friends, and said "He's an immortal." All of this detailed recall from a man who, just after eating dinner, will ask when he's going to have his dinner. And here is what is sadder yet: I talked to him about all the other projects he has worked on through the years, the awards he has won, the beautiful things he has created. But all he remembers is the work he did in the early 50's with three men who went on to become immortals. He has, it now appears, no recollection of anything else he did for the rest of his career.

Here's where all this really hits home for me:

I also started out in my career with somebody who has gone on to become more famous and successful than I am. And in my case, it's my brother.

He has a new project out that is getting all sorts of attention in the press and last week my mother said "I have a question and I hope it doesn't offend you." And then proceeded to ask, "All this hoopla around your brother, does it bother you? Does it give you a twinge?"

And you know what? The answer was honestly no. At first I couldn't figure out why it was no. And then I realized: years ago I took a vow not to carry on my father's sickness and sadness. I prayed to be released from it. And apparently the vow and the prayer worked.

Thank God. Literally.

I'll tell you what did bother me, and did give me a twinge: the fact that my mother would ask me that question.

But that's another story.

First Screening

2006-09-14T18:31:00.001-07:00

Today my baby went to its first day of nursery school. I called one of the executive producers into the studio--the one I like and trust the most--and ran the whole movie without interruption. Also without sound effects (birds in the forest, chatter and clatter in restaurants, traffic on the streets, etc.--you have no idea what a difference these things make) and only a few music cues. I was weirdly un-nervous--I guess I know the movie is in good shape and what it's going to rise or fall on at this point is the story itself.

Her reaction?

The comment when the lights came up was "Very nice. You should feel good about this. Very good first-showing-it-to-me." I take that as a B-. She had only three or four small notes, all of which I thought were very good and all of which we executed. Except, of course, the recurrent one about making Le Star more sexy. I'm sorry, he's exactly as sexy as he is; short of plastic surgery, three months in the gym and a total reshoot there isn't much I can do.

Of course I wanted her to leap to her feet and hug me and say "that's the best director's cut I've ever seen." So why didn't I get that?

Because it's a nice enough story with terrific performances well told. She did admit that she has trouble seeing movies clearly without music and effects, which she'll have in about 10 days. Still...

Tomorrow is the real test. I'm showing it to a couple of strangers. To people who doesn't know the story or anything about it and aren't in the business. Then I'll find out if there's anything compelling about the characters and all their running around.

That one I'm nervous about.

A Small Thing

2006-09-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Going back to the composer who was crammed down my throat with a baseball bat by the producers:

I went to his studio yesterday to hear his first try at a few of the cues.

Auggghhhhhhhhhh!

We have ten year old children playing in a pond in the woods. There's somebody else in the woods, watching them, unseen. We don't know how much of a menace the watcher is, or if the watcher is a menace at all. I talked to the composer about a single sustained string line, maybe a couple of tentative piano notes, a sense of mystery, of anticipation.

I got a cue that wouldn't have been out of place in the climactic battle in Alien vs. Predator. Booming drums, screaming strings, wailing synths. I sat in the big comfortable chair in his studio listening to this and desperately trying to come up with what to say. I realized that if I had hired him, if he knew that I thought he was great, if there was trust between us, I could have said "Oh, man, that is waaaaay off the mark," and we would have gone from there. But he and I aren't there yet. So I had to say "That is so beautiful, but I'm not sure it's exactly right for this moment in the film." The good news is, he's smart enough to have been able to translate that to THAT CUE SUCKS THE BIG ONE, CHARLIE. The even better news is, he's extremely eager to please and get it right so he got right to work on a hugely scaled-down version. I listened to other cues. The ones that weren't entirely wrong were...what's the word?... Pallid. Fine. Good enough. In the past I've taken cassettes home from music sessions and played them in my car and for my friends and bragged about what an amazing composer I had. I don't think I'll be doing that this time...

Here's the capper. There are four movies in this series, of which mine is the first. After I went quietly ballistic at having my composer chosen for me (which is in contravention of the rules set by the Directors Guild of America, though those rules are in most cases unenforcable), they went to the next director, gave him this guy's music and said "What do you think of him?"--without telling him the guy had already been hired--hoping, I suppose, that the director would love the music and they wouldn't have to admit that they had screwed up. When the director came back with "I don't think this guy is great at all", all they could say was "Um, he's already on the payroll..."

Why would a producer who has made about two hundred million dollars in this business feel the need to lie to the director of a cable movie? Why be sheepish when you've got all the cards in your hand anyway?

Blind Pilot

2006-09-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

In the strange language of the land called Hollywood the term "blind pilot" does not, as you might assume, describe somebody quintessentially unsuited for their job. It describes a deal in which a studio agrees to pay a writer X dollars to write a television pilot (first episode of a series) whether or not the studio and writer actually sell an idea to a network. I have such a deal and it sounds like an amazing thing except for two little catches:

1. Nobody ever actually makes the studio pay the money if an idea isn't sold to a network. Well, not nobody, but it's not smiled upon and, to me, it doesn't even really feel right. Or maybe I've just never had the guts. If no idea is sold the deal usually gets "rolled over" to the next development season.

2. I have NOT A SINGLE IDEA IN MY HEAD for a series right now. I've written eight pilots, three of which have gotten on the air, which is an extremely high ratio--and the source of getting the deal in the first place. But my head is blank. No, worse than that. It's full of REALLY BAD HACKNEYED IDEAS. Yesterday I pitched one of them to the studio over the phone and felt that sick creeping embarrassment you feel when you realize that something stupid is coming out of your mouth and real actual human beings are hearing it and losing their faith in you as you speak.

The simplest explanation for this is that my head is, appropriately, filled with the movie I'm in the process of editing. But it's worse than that. I've never been a flood-of-ideas guy. Good ones come to me rarely, though when they do come they roar into my head like a Category 5. But let me tell you, south Florida wishes it had my hurricane frequency. Ai ai ai. The whole thing feels EXACTLY like the dream where you are standing in your fifth grade classroom with no clothes on.

I am tempted to end this post with FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR REWARD TO ANYBODY WHO SENDS ME AN ORIGINAL SERIES IDEA LEADING TO A NETWORK PILOT DEAL FOR THE 2006-2007 DEVELOPMENT SEASON but I'm at least clear headed at 5:25 on this warm August morning to know what a legal tangle that would be.

So unfortunately you'll have to keep your no doubt way-better-than-mine ideas to yourselves, leaving me to beg God for inspiration.

Let me tell you, given that I am seen as something of a TV series idea machine by some people (people who don't realize that two of my three series were based on ideas given to me by the networks that hired me) what I feel like right now is a blind pilot.

And...cut

2006-08-30T22:56:00.000-07:00

My editor was here in L.A. cutting while I was up in Calgary shooting and though we talked a lot on the phone and sent long emails back and forth during production I didn't meet him face to face until today. I had a great first day with him in the cutting room. He's a warm-hearted guy with a quick mind and excellent instincts, plus he's easy to work with, I.E.: he'll work an idea of mine until either we get it right or it turns out to have been a dead end.

Except I don't like the cutting in the first assembly of the film.

Strange ineffective ideas, odd pacing, a few things that make no sense at all. (I'm saying this apart from the errors I made on the set, which have become glaringly clear in the cutting room: that's another topic.) So basically as we work together I'm more or less completely re-cutting 80% of the scenes. I can only imagine how I'd feel if an executive sat in my office and directed me line by line through an 80% rewrite of a script. Auggghhh!!! I hope I'm handling this okay. Actually the nature of the set up, the hierarchy, the process, is that I don't really have to worry about how I'm handling it. I just have to say what I'd like to see. So why can't I move forward without worrying about his feelings? Am I afraid he'll do less good work if he feels offended? Not usually the case: people work extra hard to please if you tell them clearly what isn't working. Why do I so often forget that? Some of my own errors, mentioned above, came from not wanting to offend, I think--I could have been tougher on my actors in many moments. Well, live and learn.

On somebody else's nickel.

Make that somebody else's eight hundred thousand nickels.

De-Snarkification

2006-08-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

With the stress and noise of production fading away in the quiet and calm of my own tree-shaded office I felt I had to briefly set the record straight on a couple of things.

I had fun posting about La Starlet's temper tantrum on the set but the fact is from that day on she was unassailably professional and hard working and turned in a brilliant performance and I will love her forever. I know that makes for a much less fun post, but there you are.

After Le Star's day of forgetting his lines and giving the appearance of being generally uncommitted he snapped into focus, kept the crew and all of us laughing at the toughest of times, and in the assembled film he is solid, charming and true in every moment. I can't wait to work with him again.

By the end of La International Star's last day she was not only no longer insisting on that special halo of light, she was being positively aggressive in charting an unpredictable and dyanamic path through the scene. It was all a matter of trust, like so many things.

Okay. End of boring post. Have a nice day.

Re-entry

2006-08-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

As it happened I flew back home with Le Star and La #2 Startlet, which made the return something of a party and softened the post partum blues. What was even better was that Gary Busey, an actor I've been a fan of since The Buddy Holly Story, was in the row in front of us and instantly took over the business class cabin (oh the perks of a union contract), delivering what was basically a ninety minute revival meeting on spiritualism, AA and what he learned about life from crossing over to the Other Side after a this-close-to-fatal motorcycle accident (without a helmet) in 1988. He started rattling off 12 Step acronyms, including FEAR=False Evidence Appearing Real, and a flood of others that went by too quickly for me to remember but which were just want I needed to hear as I sail on into the cutting room. Thank you Gary Busey for the sermon against the power of fear.

And I'm needing a lot of help today with one little detail. One of the executive producers of the project, a man known for nearly sinking a major studio and walking away with a fifty million dollar severance fee for his troubles in the late 80's, decided who my composer was going to be and made a deal with him and that's that. No director I know has ever ever been handed a composer without input. It doesn't happen. It's completely outrageous. And the composer he chose is best known as the writer of brain-eatingly sappy 80's pop/rock songs. He's also an extreeeeeemly rich guy and that always scares me: how much is he going to be willing to role up his sleeves? How collaborative? How open to my extremely specific musical ideas? Well, at the moment all of my projections are just False Evidence Appearing Real. And he has among his credits scores for film directors I admire, so--I could be all right.

The fact is, on this first morning back home with my wife and kids--who polished the house top to bottom and filled it with flowers and wine and hugs for my homecoming--if I didn't have the composer issue to gnaw on I'm sure I'd be digging up something else.

Oh, by the way. I watched a cut of 85% of the movie last night. Billy Wilder, the greatest American filmmaker (Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17) once said that a director should never bring arsenic or razor blades to a rough cut screening. But you know what?

If the arsenic had been there I don't even know that I would have reached for it.

That's a Wrap

2006-08-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

I finished shooting tonight at 1 A.M, two and a half grindingly screamingly out-of-the-question hours into overtime. Or so I was made to feel. Fact is? They probably have it in the budget.

When I look back at the first day of shooting it feels like something that happened in third grade. Like years and seasons presidencies have gone by between my first "action" before a shot of a truck passing by as seen through the spider-web draped windows of a rusted, abandoned car to my last "cut" after a shot of a menacing intruder's pov of a moonlit cabin the woods. But the whole crazy wonderful tense uncertain adventure only took four weeks. In my trailer when I went back to base camp tonight there was a package with some framed photographs of me directing, including one of me and La International Star, and one picture of me sitting on a ladder in the woods reading the script and looking very intense, and on the back of the picture were signatures and notes from the whole cast and crew--very moving and uplifting. And I need uplift because I'm feeling both good sad--that sweet nostalgia of saying good bye to great new friends who feel like family, like on the last day of summercamp--and also uneasy about the next steps of cutting, scoring, actually making it a movie. But when will I learn? When will I learn that I panicked about casting and ended up with a full house of dream actors? And on and on and on?

How about if I learn right now?

I did it, folks. I shot the movie, and it's looking good.

Onward!

Still Shuddering

2006-08-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

We were shooting a very emotional scene between La Starlet and La International Star and we were racing to finish the day without going overtime and there was a palapable but manageable level of tension on the set and at a quiet and intense moment in the scene somebody's cell phone went off. Well, not just somebody's cell phone.

My cell phone.

I had forgotten to turn it off after lunch.

Being the director it was up to me to say call out "cut" and then, of course, I had to say "that was me." It wasn't a very big deal because I admitted it right away, turned off my phone and we got right back into the work and started another take. After that we broke for a lighting change and I turned my phone back on and made a couple of calls. Then we went back in and finished the scene. The second we were done my phone rang. I had forgotten to turn it off again.

I know this doesn't sound like a bad thing because it rang after the danger point and nobody even noticed but the fact is it could have rung during the scene again and for some reason this got to me: the fact that I could be so unconscious in a moment when consciousness -- of performance, lighting, timing, the framing of the shot -- is everything. That combined with the fact that La International Star was not doing a good job, and that we ended up going ten minutes into overtime anyway, made for a gloomy finale to the day.

The bad performance thing is rankling badly right now. It's there in the movie. Melodramatic. Forced. I can blame the rush--a few more takes and I might have broken her down. I can blame her--oh no wonder she's been famous for forty years without ever becoming a truly big star. But none of that sticks. She's done great work in other films. She's shooting an arc on a big presitigious cable series right now and will probably be brilliant. It's simple: I didn't find the key with her. I didn't think to run it with her before we shot. I didn't make it happen.

Today is the second to last day of shooting. Both days ahead are killer days. Sex, explosions, romance, emotion, night scenes. I don't see how I can do it without overtime.

It's a gloomy morning. But I'll tell you one thing about the next two days:

I'll be leaving my cell phone in my trailer.

The Power of Love: Derek Part II

2006-08-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

When I'm directing I don't feel the cold until I'm frostbit or the heat until I have sunstroke. I also don't notice that I haven't peed for six hours until I'm walking away from the set at the end of the day and feel the knife-like pain in my kidneys. I was feeling that at the end of the massively overtime Friday described in the previous post and expressed the pain to nobody in particular as I was walking to my car, not really aware of who was or wasn't within earshot.

On Saturday morning I got a phone message from Derek. Concerned that I hadn't been feeling well the night before and he was going hiking (we're an hour from the Rockies here) and would call me later. Such warmth and affection you have never heard in a phone message. I didn't return the call because, as my wife warned me, over-friendliness can be passive aggression's ugly cousin, and I needed to decide what I was going to say to him before he called back. And I was just too damn pissed off. He called again while I was having dinner with La Starlet that evening and I didn't take the call. But I called him back after dinner and got it all out, using the magic formula for all difficult inter-human encounters:

"When you__________, I feel_____________."

I used no sentences that began with "You." I told him that when he got irritated with me when I simply wanted help or information I felt scorned and hurt. I gave a couple of instances, always talking about what I felt, not condemning his actions.

Of course he had called in the first place not because he was worried about my health but because he wanted to work it out, so he was wide open to what I was saying. And work it out we did. It turns out the overpopulation of producers and production supervisors, and the frantic energy they channel through me, has been making him feel like he's being treated like a beginner or a naughty child--which has made him act like one. So he copped to his immaturity and I copped to my franticness and today on the set we were back to being the great team we started out as, he answered all my questions patiently and fully, we laughed, we devised great shots together, and we finished fifteen minutes early! The whole set felt different. Everybody was in a better mood because Derek and I were having a love fest.

Now how about that?

Rough Week aka Why I Don't Like My Director of Photography Anymore

2006-08-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

EXT. FILM LOCATION IN THE WOODS - DAY

TOM, the director, carefuly, expecting the worst, approaches his Director of Photography. We'll call the Director of Photography DEREK. Because that's his name.

TOM
Um, Derek, do you think maybe we should shoot this scene
from this side, so we can see the sad lonely cabin behind the little boy
as he stands there sad and alone watching the little girl drive away?

DEREK
(pissy indignant tone of voice)
You want to take two extra hours to shoot this? Fine. Sure.
(shouting out to his crew in a
pissy indignant tone of voice)
Okay, everybody, move all those trucks, clear all those
lights, we're going to the other side, the rest of the crew, take
an hour break!

TOM
(desperately trying to be conciliatory)
Derek, Derek, I was just asking the question, all you have to
do is tell me it'll take two extra hours...

INT. THE CABIN - NIGHT

TOM carefully approaches Derek who has just given his lighting crew instructions that seem time consuming and not entirely logical.

TOM
Derek, I'm just asking the question, wouldn't it make more sense
to cover the whole scene in this direction before we turn everything
around and shoot the other way?

DEREK
(pissy indignant tone of voice)
Oh, well, you seem to have your own plan, so just tell me what
to do.

TOM
Derek, Derek, you've made forty movies and I've made three, I'm
just asking for your expertise.

Derek stares at Tom with quiet passive aggressive venom.

******************

And I started out loving him. And I know how things got to the point they've gotten to. The first time he started pulling this shit, very early in the shoot, I should have taken him quietly aside and said "Derek, do not pull that on me, I think you are an artist and a brilliant DP and I couldn't be happier that you are here, and the crew loves you too, we're going to make a very nice movie together, so just cut the crap, okay?"

But I didn't. Just like I did with my mom and my older brother when I was a kid, I played appeasement. I played Chamberlain at Munich over and over again thinking that would buy peace in our time. With both mom and bro I finally stood up for myself, shockingly late in life, and you know what? I now have truly great relationships with both. But with the DP on a movie you don't get a three decade learning curve. You get days to get things right. Aieeee.....

That aside it was a good week until yesterday when we went into a frightening soul-twisting HOUR AND A HALF of overtime. I think the studio is going to come and take away my house for this one. It was a grim one thirty in the morning drive away from set last night after shooting a very fast two-shot version of a scene that Derek and I (in our harmonious earlier days) had planned to do in six glorious and dramatic shots.

On top of his aliens-just-took-over-my-DP's-body personality, he routinely takes two hours to get the first shot on interiors and an hour on exteriors. Those times should be half that on a 19 day schedule and since he has done countless brilliantly shot 19-or-20-day schedule movies I don't understand why this is happening. We're getting 20 setups a day and should be getting 35.

So anyway the Derek thing built up and built up and last night I lost it on a portion of the crew. At least I did it quietly so the actors wouldn't hear. I was bad, gentle reader. I used the F word more than once. It happened because I suddenly realized a scene that we should have been shooting wasn't on the schedule--not Derek's goof, of course--and that if we didn't get it right now we simply wouldn't get it. So God sent me an instant and really very nice solution to the problem that could be implemented right in the scene we were shooting without changing hair, makeup, wardrobe, lighting or anything. I ran and got the page from the script, put it in front of my two wonderful actors, quickly told the camera operator to just start shooting, no time or desire to run to the camera tent and consult with Derek, and the actors pulled it off brilliantly and just as I was going for take 2, to make sure it was absolutely right, I get sternly called to the camera tent by the producer and various department heads wanting to know what I was doing, how could I do this, nothing would match, yadda yadda yadda, and when I tried to say, "come on, we're getting two hours worth of work done in five minutes", they kept going at me with questions and "calm down" (those words are Bic lighter to gasoline for me) and... well... I had a lot of apologizing to do after wrap.

Interestingly, Derek had vanished from the camera tent before I got there, though I had heard him on the walkies a second before saying "I have no idea what he's doing" in a "don't come complaining to ME about this debacle" tone of voice a second before.

But I got my scene. I got my scene.

Broken Promise

2006-08-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

Long ago I promised myself I would never shoot a rape scene.

Now I'm making a movie which concerns, partially, a rapist and murder, and at one point we see into his mind and are treated to a flood of incredibly fast images of the many crimes he has committed. So over the last couple of days we have been grabbing, alongside our main scenes, shots of a woman screaming as she is dragged down a gloomy flight of stairs, a woman having her head bashed against exposed framing in a construction site, a woman clawing at the gravel in an alleyway, a woman sobbing into her pillow as hands close around her neck, a knife tearing through the cloth of a woman's jeans. The movie isn't exploitive. Honest. And these are very fast pieces. But still. What happened to my allegiance to Gandhi's command to be the change you want to see in the world?

Meanwhile on the set, Le Star and La Starlet have decided that it's FUNTIME! and several takes were wrecked today by uncontrollable fits of giggles, sometimes--and worst of all--while they were off camera and other actors were on. Then La Startlet suddenly explodes at the crew that she is fucking working herself into tears seven times today and fucking going out on this huge emotional limb and how is she supposed to do that when people are fucking talking to her yatta yatta yatta before every take! When asked later who the offending parties are, so that their heads could be chopped off and shipped to Argentina to be sold as cattle food, she declined to name names--not suprisingly because there really weren't any names to name, just the crew going about its business around her. Recently I suggested to Barista Brat that she might actually, if she does it simply and calmly enough, tell her annoying customers what she really wants to say to them. Ha! Do you know what would happen to me if I told a tantrumizing actor what I really wanted to say them? If I said, simply and calmly, "Well I don't know, I'm paying you FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR NINETEEN DAYS WORK, do you think maybe you could suck it up FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND!?"

Muggles

2006-08-11T23:23:00.000-07:00

My wife is the Harry Potter person in the family but I have overheard enough of the books on tape to know that in Rowling's universe there are the people with magical powers and then there are the prosaic unmagical masses out there, the normal people, us: the muggles. Today we were shooting on a public road and a car came through and one of the AD's (assistant directors) wanted to know if it was a car and driver hired for background to the scene or if it was just a passerby, and to find out she asked "Is that us, or is that a real person?" In the same location a bicyclist started biking lazily and without hurry down a road we were about to shoot on, at which another AD announced "We have a bogey in the shot." Real people. Bogeys. Lookey-loos. The normal people out there living their humdrum everyday nine to five lives while we, the crew, the moviemakers, willingly spend insanely long hours fighting time, the elements, the budgets and the utmost limits of our energy and abilities to maybe, hopefully, bottle a few ounces of magic. We were in a very stressful moment today--and it was a stressful and not entirely succesful day--and a veteran local producer who I like a lot said to me "Every time I ask 'why do I put myself through this,' all I have to do is drive by downtown and think of all the people working in those little cubicles in all those towers..." And I feel the same way. It's part of the reason I gave up architecture. Couldn't deal with nine to five under flourescent light. Couldn't deal with being normal.

Yesterday when I was high and happy it felt great to exist outside the grey reality of the muggles. But today when a rain shower cut short my time on a crucial shot, leaving me with only one very approximate take, and when a series of miscommunications and miscalculations put me into another half hour of overtime and left me with another scene pulled off in at best an approximate manner, I realized something critical:

The muggles have the last word.

Right now we the wizards are reveling in the magic making but come a few months from now the muggles get to turn on their TV's, take a quick look at a couple of scenes, say "oh give me a break" and move on.

And that includes you, gentle reader.

So when the day comes, be kind, okay?

The Best Job In The World

2006-08-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

After coming off Wednesday when I went one full hour plus five minutes into double-plus-extra-forbidden overtime due to an inordinate amount of trouble getting a fake bleeding wound on a real dog leg to bleed convincingly on camera I knew that today I had to nail everything within my duly appointed eleven hours or risk slipping into the "you're fucking up" zone. The day started out well enough until it started to rain which would have been fine, it was a funeral scene and what could be better, but because of actress availability we had shot one part of this scene already last week in brilliant shining golden sunlight and there was no way it was going to match but we were able to crank in some astonishingly convincing artificial sunlight for the relevant moment and as we were moving on to the next piece the heavens opened and a storm right out of the Bible came down upon us, hail the size of I kid you not robin's eggs blanketing the entire cemetery in white, and we all sat shivering under little plastic tent shelters for an hour contemplating the majesty of God's awesome power to wreck our shooting day and feeling actually quite calm because really, what the fuck are you going to do? Finally the rain slacked off a bit and we got all the prop guys out with rakes raking up robin's egg sized hail and we got our shot, once we got the strange swarms of pit flies to stop swarming strangely in front of the actors, and then had to scramble up the rest of the schedule to move all our shots inside for the rest of the day and my ace locations department made a deal with a nearby coffee house in about six minutes--normally this takes weeks of negotiatons-- to shoot our big first date scene there instead of the outside cafe the art department had spent the last week creating out of nothing and the actors jumped into scenes they had been intending to shoot next week and the art department magically turned the coffee house into an Italian restaurant seemingly in one magic poof and everybody scrambled and improvised and reconceived every possible part of a carefully worked out plan and I did two more big scenes, scenes of confrontation and love and suspicion and eating burgers and we shot 5 and a half pages of script and finished barely fifteen minutes over schedule. And the best news? This was the day the network executive flew in from L.A. and got to see me being superman (actually relying on an ace producing and assistant directing team) and the whole thing was just absolutely wonderful. Especially sitting cross legged on the floor behind the camera watching actors be intimate, close and real with each other under the glow of my genius cinematographer's illumination.

Peeking Between My Fingers

2006-08-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

Carol Littleton, the great film editor who cut E.T. and The Big Chill among other movies, once said to Lawrence Kasdan, "Before me, everything is theory." Meaning: you can write whatever you want in the script, you can shoot whatever you want on the set, but until an editor starts putting pieces of pieces of film together and seeing if there are actual scenes in it, and a story, it's all wishing, praying and guessing. Which leads me to:

I just got, from my editor in L.A., a DVD of the cut-together scenes from the first three days of shooting. I've been putting off taking a look at them but it's time to act, I'm going to do it now. It's a scary moment. Is he any good as an editor? Is this movie coming together? How will I be able to tell what's him and what's what I'm doing? Well: hang on for a few minutes and we'll have some answers.

*********************************

Okay I watched it and the editor knows what he's doing. It's not too bad. I let one performance on the first day go way out of control but the character is kind of off her nut so in the context it'll work. I hope. Well, let's face it, I let her go over the top and there you are. Other than that, in terms of reaching my goal of a nice effective melodrama that will make its inteded audience happy, I'm on the way.

Or am I just saying that because I know none of you want to hear any more "oh woe is me why aren't I making The Godfather or at least Sideways" handwringing?

Director to Director

2006-08-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

I had dinner last night with a director who is in town to direct another one of the movies in the set of four of which I am doing the first--all adaptations of books in the same genre. He has directed thirty movies to my three, he's good at it, and I look up to him a lot. He wanted to ask me about the local crews, who was good, who wasn't, and where the good places to eat were. I wanted to ask him why he was doing one of these movies, given, as I had heard, that he didn't like the novel or the script and was furiously rewriting it himself. He told me it was a good question and the answer, basically, was that there isn't a lot out there. Then it hit me: I am unbelievably lucky to be working. This guy who is an A+ TV director is getting the same level of job that I'm getting. The TV movie business, cable and broadcast, has shrunk to a shadow. CBS no longer makes movies regularly, NBC almost not at all, ABC a couple a year, etc. The director told me that as he called various other directors to get references on potential crew he could hear in their voices the unasked question: How the hell did you get a movie?

Then the director knocked me over with this statement: At this point I'm just hoping to make something I'm not ashamed of. Which is really several steps below what the great French director Francois Truffaut said: Making a movie is like riding a stagecoach. You start out hoping to have a great ride. You end up just hoping you get to your destination.

And what am I hoping for? A well-made entertaining romance that delivers the goods to its intended audience. Am I pulling that off? I watched all my dailies today and it was a pin in the bicycle tire of my end-of-the-first-week high. So much slow pace, so many camera moves that don't deliver as I'd hoped they would, so much acting that is overwrought, so much that is prosaic and just there. Sometimes when we're on the set the actors and the crew and I talk about our favorite movies, particular scenes and moments that we love, and I think: nobody here, me included, thinks that what we are making will ever be a movie that people talk about that way.

All of that said, the big truth is that only a quarter of the movie is in the can. I have three more weeks to pick up the pace, move the camera in more dynamic and effective ways, tone down the overwrought performances, coax the poetry out of the moments.

Onward!

At The End of Week One

2006-08-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

This will probably be a very boring post because all I have to say right now is that I just had the most wonderful couple of days. We were shooting in a massive--I mean like 14 bedroom--mansion, probably the largest and grandest in Calgary, which is standing in for the ancestral North Carolina plantation home of one of the families in the story. (Why people as wealthy as the homeowners want to allow the trampling army of marauders that is a film crew into their art and antique filled home is a question I can't answer.) We moved fast, the lighting was great, the actors were having a great time, there were no more costume disapprovals from the network (actually the producers have wisely told the network "we will accept no more such calls"), and even thunder, hail, sound-wrecking airplanes, power problems and too much work to get done didn't dampen anybody's spirits. Which is not say that every second of it wasn't tense. It's just that way on the set. Time is speeding by, the physical world generally refuses to fall in line the way I want it to, and there's always the question "am I doing this right?"--but like I said, it's just that way.

Here, possibly, is why the days felt so good to me. I was looking at the referrals on my site meter--always curious how people find their way to places in blogland--and one of them was a google search for the phrase "director's prayer." I saw that something from Shekhar Kapur's blog had also turned up in that search. Kapur directed "Elizabeth", the one that starred Cate Blanchett, which I thought was directed about as well as a movie can be directed. Masterful. So I clicked on the link and discovered that he's writing a blog about a movie he's shooting, too--the sequel to Elizabeth--and that he is feeling just as squeezed by his schedule (80 days) as I am by mine (19.) It's a terrific blog but the best part of it is this prayer that he wrote, which has now become my anthem. It is titled "At The End of Week 2", and it goes like this:

Hanging on,
to the slim thread of instinct
which is lost so easily
if cut by arrogance

for in this punishing schedule
where there is not a moment to think
like a soldier in the middle of battle
dodging bullets and moving blindly forward

Be one with the bullet

live by pure instinct
no time for logical thought
tap into something that is more immense
than yourself

do it quickly
impulsively

listen to your heart
amid all the fear of
that pervades the set,
be in love

never, never
not be in love

trust
that somehow,
you are loved
by God

and be pure of heart,

shekhar

Is that great or what? "Be one with the bullet." I should have that tattoed on my arm so I can look at it whenever things get crazy.

Maybe I actually will.

The Man In The Mirror

2006-08-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Today was, well, not a train wreck, but we fell two ENTIRE SCENES behind (on a 19 day shoot for a cable movie this is fairly serious.) Here were the highlights of what was conveniently at hand for me to blame for the delay:

1. The middle aged actress who in her youth was routinely named as one of the most beautiful women in the world today would not shoot any scene until she had been lit directly from the front by a huge soft light that took the DP thirty minutes to rig up. Plus she wouldn't do any moving-around blocking: she basically had to stay in one place where the beauty light was.

2. We shot two scenes with a fantastic sexy actress playing the slightly trashy rich sister of the hero in which she is wearing a tight white blouse over a bright red bra. At one point in one scene she takes off the shirt, revealing a jaw-dropping cleavage cupped in scarlet, and puts on a leather jacket, all while chatting away in front of her brother. Anyway we shoot the two scenes and suddenly one of the executive producers (a friend and somebody I love) runs in and says "The network called and they aren't approving the red bra." So we had to reshoot both scenes with a less thrilling beige bra, because there would have been a matching problem.

But screw all that. Directors routinely shoot six pages in 12 hours and I barely got through 3 today. And there are ALWAYS delays. The problem runs deep. The problem is that while all of this is going on I'm writing my excuse story in my head instead of facing the problem. The problem is that I'm not leading strongly enough on the set. I'm not demanding quick transitions, I'm not studying the plan carefully enough before it's launched, I'm not being the Captain. And while I have lots of little ideas and am working fairly well with the actors, I'm not really drawing strongly enough on vision.

And there's more than that. I did my first movie, the HBO one that did not go well, in a distracted and unspiritual state. I made my second movie, that went like a dream, in a focused and prayerful state. This time I'm somewhere in between. A director friend of mine said to me while I was making my second movie "God does not want us to make movies." To which I added "Without him."

I have to remember that now. I no longer feel the presence of a Big Guy up there watching over me. But I sure do feel the presence of Something. So right now I'm going to get down on my knees, quite literally, and pray to that Something for help and guidance in getting my movie back on the smooth track to beauty.

BTW, the network was very happy with the first day's dailies. This is good. They had a couple of notes on the over-intensity of a couple of performance beats and they were right on every count.

Fuck, what's the line?

2006-08-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

He's young, he's handsome (in a scruffy hey dude kind of way), he's talented. The problem? Everybody in his immediate family--and I mean mom, dad, sibling, everybody--is a megastar, while he's a reasonably well-thought of actor who's been in a couple of movies and a series that was canceled in its first season. (The reason I have to be coy with his identity is that in the age of search engines if anybody is at all interested in him they'll find their way to this post and I may be eager to bare my own secrets but it's not my place to bare his.) Yesterday we shot a big romantic marriage proposal scene in a stunning location--fields of barley and wheat stretching away to forests and mountains in all directions--and he couldn't get through two sentences without breaking off--and this is on camera, mind you--and going "Fuck, what's the line." I tried to have the script supervisor throw him the line and keep the film rolling because every time you say "cut" thirty people run out and start primping hair and touching up makeup and fussing with costumes and refocussing lenses and there's seven minutes of our strangle-tight schedule down the drain. But ultimately he'd get so stuck and frustrated that he'd say "let's stop" and I'd have to cut. It all added up to about an hour and a half of accumulated delay, and having to shoot the scene in cloud instead of sun (which may actually be more interesting, I'm telling myself). Plus I'll be forced into lots of cuts when I'd rather have let the scene just flow. But beyond all that, what's the deal? Didn't his megastar clan teach him about the simplest, barest, most basic ABC's of being a professional actor?

The challenge for me goes back to third grade. He's, you know, the rich popular kid, and I'm the smart nerd from the south side of town who knows his place in the playground pecking order. It's all fine for me to go up to him and say "I think you'd hold back our feelings a little more there," because that's my assigned position in this game of handball, but to actually go up to him and say "We need to talk about the problem with the lines"--??? I can't muster it. Star to the rescue: my leading lady and I confabbed on this last night (back to third grade again: easy for me to talk to girls, terror of the wrath of boys) and she will run lines with him instead of chatting before they shoot.

To all of this I will add that I am paying this young man A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS for four weeks of work.

No word from the network yet on the dailies but my editor down in L.A. is thrilled with the first scene we shot yesterday, says it's intense, looks great and cuts like butter. So the early returns are good.

One Down

2006-07-31T22:52:00.000-07:00

Then there was the actress with the broken foot so we gave her a cane because it goes really well with the character and the network wants some line that explains the cane but it isn't needed because for God's sake she's an abused woman her husband beat her she walks with a cane and then there's the shot I dropped of the main character looking at the lemonade pitcher from her childhood that the executive producer asked for because for God's sake the scene isn't ABOUT that and the executive producer wants me to some how go back and get that and how do I do that on a location I will never ever be going back to on a schedule that is already so jammed it's coming out my ears and then there's the three shots we didn't get and then there's the half hour of overtime I went into and then there's the rushed wild way I covered some of the scenes and then there's the FEAR: WHAT WILL THE NETWORK SAY ABOUT TODAY'S DAILIES TOMORROW!?

And so the first day passes.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

2006-07-30T21:21:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I start shooting. I have been telling myself that it's just another day at work. Yeah just another day at work with a hundred people waiting for me to tell them what to do and time ticking by at thousands of dollars a second and no overtime allowed and a dozen nervous executives in Los Angeles and New York waiting for the dailies that will be streaming on their computers by ten Tuesday morning. This is anxiety making for every director, at some point. But it may be extra heightened moment for me. I think I have already told you about my first movie when I was shooting in New York City, a script I had nourished and cherished and dreamed of making for five years, and I had Cuba Gooding Jr. (fantastic person by the way) in the lead role and the best director of photography imaginable and I totally absolutely screwed up in every way possible. I just had no idea what I was doing and the folks at HBO, for whom I was making the film, were totally and ominously silent the whole first week (to me, anyway; they were on the phone to the producers every second screaming WHAT THE FUCK HE IS DOING!?) and on Friday at end of shooting it was announced to me by the main producer, a dear friend, that they had "serious concerns" and there would be a Meeting the next morning at 10. That Meeting--being called seriously onto the carpet on the top floor of HBO's Manhattan headquarters--was one of the scariest loneliest coldest moments of my life. I was saved from being fired by a hair's breadth, mostly intense campaigning by my friend, and though the movie went on to be successful and received some very good reviews (along with some very bad ones) I went on to get such bad references from HBO that I didn't direct another movie for five years. On my second movie nothing like that happened, I went away with everybody loving me, but I accomplished that partly by playing it very safe on the set--got everything accomplished but didn't go out on any cinematic limbs. This time I want it to be both smooth and good.

Oh but I'm prattling on. Let's get to the heart of the matter. Tomorrow I get to move a camera around wonderful actors saying lines that I wrote and I have a wonderful cameraman to help me to do it. So all I really should say before I go to bed and hope to get some sleep is:

Thank You and Amen.

Dream Come True

2006-07-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago I saw a film about a film being made in which the director of the film, himself playing the director of the film within the film, goes to the actress playing the star of the film within the film and, just before getting a shot, carefully rearranges her hands on the sill of the window she is leaning on. That moment blew me away. To think that you could have a life where what counted was attention to a detail like that. To think that you could be somebody with the eye to know that it was the right thing to do. The director became my hero and the actress has remained--not just for me--an ideal of beauty and sexiness.

I just cast that actress in my movie.

She has had thirty years of being an international star (with ups and downs, of course) since then and has become a kind of friendly empress--but an empress. She's 63 years old now. I'm sure her sense of personal body space is acute. And the moment in that long-ago film was rehearsed and scripted. So what are the chances that I will actually be able to walk up to her before a shot and arrange her hands into a more elegant position? Probably nil. But I'll sure as hell have my eyes open for an opening if it presents itself.

Or maybe I'll just tell her the story over dinner.

On the health front: the heart rhythm went back to normal after about 30 hours leaving me, as usual, with a great sense of elation and relief. If there are any medical personnel out there--maybe one who lives in, say, Alabama--maybe they could share any ideas they might have for long-term approaches to the problem. Lord knows the cardiologists in California have f*** all to say about any thing like that.

Fibrillation

2006-07-26T05:38:00.000-07:00

Two or three times a year--more if I'm not exercising or fall prey to the evil ways of caffeine, less if I ride my bike every day and live clean--I have an episode of atrial fibrillation, that is, my heart goes all wonky in the rhythm section. Sometimes this lasts two hours, sometimes three days. Today, five days before I say "Action" on my first shot, with a sixteen hour day ahead of me, I woke up at 4:30 A.M. with my heart pounding wildly (the subonscious getting its timing off and screaming IT'S LATE! THEY'RE ALL ON THE SET WAITING FOR YOU! DISASTER DISASTER DISASTER!) and when the heart had calmed down, sure enough, my pulse sounded like the rhythm stylings of a ten year old who had simultaneously gotten hold of his older brother's drum set and his dad's Jack Daniels. This means that today I will tire easily, I will get short of breath, I will be extra prone to irritability and bouts of pissy righteous indignation. And nobody can know why. Nobody. There may even be insurability issues. Yowee!

Everything on the production seems to be falling into place. Locations, cast, wardrobe, sets. The fewer things there are to angst over the more it all comes back to me: time to deliver.

With a drunken heart.

Envy

2006-07-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

As I sit here in Calgary directing an underbudgeted 3.7 million dollar cable movie starring very good actors you may or may not have heard of, one of my best friends is in London producing an 80 million dollar movie starring Vince Vaughn, and another one of my best friends is in Los Angeles executive producing a new series for FX that has every chance of being right up there with The Shield, Rescue Me and Nip/Tuck when it goes on the air next year.

These friends are so close that I normally don't feel jealous of their good fortune when it comes, and they don't feel jealous of mine--we all root for each other, and that's a blessed thing.

But right now, maybe as a bi-product of the general anxiety of prepping a movie, I'm feeling that awful crawling unease that makes the food on your own plate taste bad no matter how good it is because the food on somebody else's plate looks so much better. Which is a luxury I can't afford because I start shooting a week from Monday and my job is to inspire everybody, actors and crew, to their best possible work.

Hopefully this awareness will steer me clear of the shoals.

End of the Week

2006-07-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

Ooooh the network is getting a little pissy. I cut a character for length and because I thought she wasn't needed in the story and the network wants her back and I sent them emails and we discussed and I won but the price of winning is that now they are pissy. Partly because of that and partly just because, today I felt the icy cold shot of fear: what will they think of the movie when I turn it in? On my last movie I had somebody from the production office go out and get me all the dark chocolate she could find and when I got the call from the head of movies at the network after he had seen my first cut of my movie I ate chocolate and gritted my teeth at his notes and tried not to throw a tantrum and ended up having to make some changes I hated making.

And guess what happened then?

The head of movies at the network got canned the next day and I put the movie back the way I wanted it.

The point is that now, with urgent tasks of casting, choosing locations, planning shots, hiring an editor and a composer before me, here I am living in a moment that is two full months away. INSANITY!

So it's back to the prayer from last week: Please God let me be HERE.

Prayer o' the Day

2006-07-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Please God help me stop being pissy and indignant at the frustrations that every director faces, many of them with far more grace than me. Help me stop complaining endlessly to anybody who will listen about the inanities and insanities of the executives with whom every director has to deal. Help me remember that all the pissiness and indignation and complaining is all really just a way of covering up how nervous and I am about how good a job I will do come a week from Monday when the cameras role.

Amen, and thank you for putting a movie into my hands.

That's all for now, God. Have a pleasant night, and I'll talk to you in the morning.

Fringe Benefits

2006-07-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

I have the good fortune to be in Calgary the week of the Calgary Stampede, the greatest rodeo on earth. Today, as the director of a film in town, I was invited to watch the finals from the super-luxe right-on-top-of-the-action viewing suite rented by one of the big film caterers in town. Promotion, you know. There was sushi and bloody marys and lots of fancy cowboy folk including a guy who did all of John Wayne's horse stunts for years and as the whole thing began I was planning shots in my head and obsessing on whether or not I'm going to get enough rehearsal time and worrying about making the kid versions of the actors match the people they grow up into and what if that little girl won't wear contact lenses so her eyes match my star's eyes and yada yada yada and then it occured to me, no, this is a special thing, I'm doing this wrong, and I offered up a simple prayer to Anybody who might be listening, which went like this: Please God let me be here.

And God said yes.

A minute later the noise in my head went away, I dug into the sushi and watched the bareback riders get tossed around like rag dolls on the bucking broncos and the gals in their sparkly Western bling riding their hearts out in the barrel race and cheered and whooped and chatted and had a great great time.

And now I'm back in my hotel room getting down to work and thinking: that's what I want my prayer to be every day on the set.

Please God let me be here.

And then there was the actress who...

2006-07-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

...made it clear in her deal that she wants healthy food on set, and 24 hour access to the gym--and a room with windows that open, because she smokes.

...expressed horror at the terrible treatment of animals in polo and rodeos while ordering eggs and sausage for breakfast.

...expressed outrage at the horrors of capitalism and its mistreatment of the working class and then not six minutes later complained that the airport in Los Angeles is the worst worst worst because there are no priority security lines for first class passengers.

I will say that she's a good person who loves her family and her friends and when an excited fan called out "Oh my God it's [name of actress]!" as we were going into the hotel tonight she handled it with grace and clearly doesn't let that aspect of the whole thing go to her head or factor into her thinking at all. I think the reason I'm snarking on her at all is that we had a good first day of hanging out and getting to know each other but now I'm worrying that I was too democratic, too "what do you think." I haven't quite found the director voice in this relationship yet. Haven't quite found the way to be The Man. Or maybe I'm looking at that the wrong way. Maybe I should just say: this is The Man that I am, just the way I'm being it, and I'll find a way to get what I want on film as the The Man that I am, not The Man I think I should be. Yeah. That's the mantra for today.

While I call room service to make sure I have her eggs and sausages delivered all hot and ready for our 8 A.M. wardrobe meeting tomorrow morning.

Star

2006-07-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

The t's on the deal haven't all been crossed but it looks like I have a star for my movie. Here's where I run into the tricky part: so far exactly what the movie is and who it's for has been kept vague; oce I tell you the name of the star I'm blowing my anonymity, because in a little while the movie will be easy to look up, and sometime next year it'll be on TV, and then all of this isn't private anymore. The decision to do that isn't one I'm yet ready to make. so: suffice to say that the actress who is coming on board is fantastically beautiful, relatively untested as an actress, but very good. And also no household name, to be honest--the network's notion that she will bring eyes to the TV screen may be unfounded, and there were better known actresses they nixed in favor of her--stuff over which I had no control. Be all of that as it may--she is aboard!

Now here's what I've learned about myself: for a few weeks all of my anxiety was focused on hiring an actress, all of my annoyance was directed at the network for dragging their feet and making unerealistic offers. Now, without those convenient targets outside myself, I'm stuck with---ME! A me whom I find plunged into gloom particularly focused on a sense that my finale with a mean guy holding a knife to the neck of a vulnerable woman WHOM WE KNOW PERFECTLY WELL IS GOING TO BE FINE is going to come off LUDICROUS.

And once that worry is behind me, what then will I find to gnaw obsessively on?

What The F*** Is Love

2006-07-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago as I was preparing to shoot my first movie I sat at my desk faced with exactly the same problem I am faced with now, which is that the lovers in my story aren't really and truly, on the evidence of what's on the page, in love. Oh, sure, the plot moves them to all the places they would go if they were in love. But that feeling? That actual real thing which will make the audience root for them to join their lives together, which will leap off the screen as actual love? Not there. Fourteen years ago I brought in two other writers to fill in what wasn't there and neither of them really added anything. Fortunately I had two awesome actors who managed to come close to pulling it off on the force of the chemistry between them. But it still didn't exactly work. So knowing my own history I can't entirely blame the author of the flawed and schematic book I'm adapting for my inability to bring love to the page.

The good news is it's three weeks until I shoot. I can find it. I know that I love my wife and that there are a few scenes I could excerpt from my life that would make any audience go "Yes, absolutely, their being together will add to the sum of light and happiness in the world." But we've been together for over thirty years, since we were just out of high school, and while there was an immediate jolt of connection it took a year before we were actually romantically a couple. The script in my hands gives the lovers a couple of weeks. So I have just a few encounters out of which to build the magic. I know it can be done. I've seen it in other movies. I'm just up against it right now.

Dear readers, if any of you can think of moments in your lives when love blossomed quickly and with great intensity, even quiet intensity, or moments when you suddenly realized you were in love, and what those moments sounded, looked and felt like, I would be infinitely grateful if you would share them with me.

I Was Bad

2006-07-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Alicia Silverstone passed on the project. The comment was "Did not respond to the character." A polite way of saying "What, you think there's something there for an actor to actually play?" That's not the worst part about yesterday. The worst part is that I went infantile. I got pissy and told the producer we were wasting time offering it to stars who weren't going to do it and we should just give up and tell the network we want to cast it with good unknowns and how stupid it was to go through the Sarah Michelle Gellar exercise in futility and how if we wait any longer I'll be left with the dregs of the earth for all the other roles (can't cast most of them unti the lead is cast) and generally did all this in a righteously indignant and whiney tone of voice and at the end of it felt so bad I just went back to my hotel and pulled the covers over the head.

The truth, of course, is that who will be in the movie is an unknown, and it might not be good, but it also might be really really good, and since I don't know which one it will be, why bother reacting to it at all? Just keep working, do the very best I can with what's right in front of me, and deal with whatever happens when it happens.

Now why does that wisdom go right out of my head so many times when I need it most?

Day One

2006-07-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Active prep started today.

Here's when I'm happy and positive and having a great time doing this: when somebody--anybody--an assistant, a designer, whatever--says they think my script is wonderful.

Here's when I'm low and asking myself why bother doing anything: when somebody makes no comment on the script at all, or says "I liked a lot of it" (auggghhh!), or says the words that are a sure sign that they thought it was crap: "I enjoyed it.'

How do I get off that roller coaster?

What's It All About?

2006-06-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

I feel that I am streamlining and strengthening the script in many ways. It's getting better. There's just one teensy weensy question I have.

What's it about?

The book it's based on is about stringing together some heavy-breathing sex scenes--lots of melting and thrusting--in a stitched-together mystery plot packed with aimless detours and suspense that never quite builds. It's vaguely about friendship and love but if you want to make a story about things like that you'd better have something new or at least powerful to say.

My first movie was about resistance fighters in a fascist America. So it was about freedom and the way like-minded souls find each other in adversity. That it wasn't a very good movie isn't the point. The point is that while I was out there making a not very good movie I at least knew what I was saying. And the loftiness of the theme got me an amazing name-brand cast.

My second movie was about vigilantism. It was a better movie than the first one partly because I really had something to say about the topic, which is that vigilantism may get a certain kind of crowd cheering for you but it doesn't do anybody you love any favors.

And what's this movie about? I just. Don't. Know.

P.S. Sarah Michelle Gellar passed! What a shocker! I had to grit my teeth and smile my way silently through the producers and casting directors being surprised and disappointed. Now we're out to--well, I won't say, because this one might happen (partly because we're offering in the area of a half million dollars) and I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Stuff I Really Shouldn't Say

2006-06-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

When the producers of movie first sent me the book the movie is based on I read it in awe at how thin, contrived, repetitive and illogical it was. How inconsistent the characters were--how in some cases it would be hard to come up with a simple list of adjectives to describe them. How shoddy and undirected the plotting was. But I still couldn't quite say no. I hadn't directed a movie in eight years. Given the popularity of the book there was an enormous chance the movie would be made. When I called the producer the next day I said "It's the worst book I've ever read," to which she calmly replied "Well we'll move on then," to which I quickly said "No no no. I think I can do it. I think I can find something in there."

Not all leaps into the dark are brave. That one was made out of fear. Fear of not getting another directing gig. Fear of somebody else doing it and making it great.

I suffered through the adaptation. I couldn't make the ill fitting pieces work together. While all the time thinking: this woman is a mulitmillionaire, there are 65 MILLION COPIES OF HER BOOKS IN PRINT, and who the hell am I? I finally hammered out something that people seemed to respond to--mostly because I wrote the screen directions in between the dialogue so seductively that it all seemed more exciting than it was--and that got the greenlight.

Then, as I said, I read it through and saw that it was still the book I had started with. It's not about anything. Things don't flow with tension and drive from one thing to the next. So here I sit, late on a Chicago night, trying to make it something I love. I had a good day, thought I was getting somewhere, and now? I'm scared. Scared that I'll have a movie on my hands that I'm going to have to ask my friends and family not to watch. But it'll be out there... for all to see... for you guys to see!

I'm sane enough to know that I'm not really at the end of the story, as vividly as I may be able to conjure that end before me. The script is still in my hands. I can turn to God/higher power/muse/better self for inspiration in the night and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning and re-attack.

But still, for right now, I am scared.

Like the title of post says, I shouldn't have said all that. It's secret. It's the stuff you don't tell anybody.

But I guess you guys aren't just anybody.

Uh-Oh

2006-06-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on the plane to Chicago to visit my daughter before taking off for the whole summer to shoot the movie, I read the script for the first time since I finished it a couple of months ago. It's a good thing I wasn't sitting in an exit row because I would have opened the door and thrown myself out and who knows many people would have been sucked out along with me. The first act in particular really really sucks. Slow. Expository. Endless. Now I'm sitting in a big empty high-ceilinged classroom with arched gothic windows at the University of Chicago rolling up my sleeves, tearing it apart and hoping I can write something worth putting on film. Or, more important, worth watching on film.

Lord be with me.

Excuse me?

2006-06-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

One of the roles in my movie is a psycho-alcoholic-white-trash North Carolina loser who beats his daughter half to death. The Germans who are partially financing the movie today announced that they were strongly suggesting that we hire, for that role...

...Hart Bochner.

You may remember Hart Bochner as the yuppie who collaborates with the bad guys in Die Hard. Hart Bochner is a very good actor who never fails, in every role he has ever played, to embody elegance, charm, wealth and urban sophistication. Whatever those Germans are smoking, I want some. And beyond that, in what universe does Hart Bochner, twenty years after an appealing supporting turn in Die Hard, attract any kind of audience to a film, in Germany or anywhere? "Oh, wow, Helga, we better turn on the TV tonight, Hart Bochner's on!"

!!?

In other casting news, the network has decreed that our first offer for the lead role must go out to...

...Sarah Michelle Geller.

That's right, the same Sarah Michelle Geller who earned possibly a hundred million dollars or more playing Buffy for nine years and picked up some more loose change in Cruel Intentions and I Know What You Did Last Summer and other feature films. Oh yeah she is definitely going to play Hart Bochner's daughter in my perfectly fine little cable movie for three hundred thousand bucks.

In the end, though, I strongly believe there is a God of Casting, who has always been with me on every movie I have ever made, and that in the end the right actors will fall out of the sky and onto my set.

Stay tuned.

A Director's Prayer

2006-06-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

God, Higher Power, Force of Healing and Joy In The World, or whatever Your name may be:

Let me not approach this great opportunity with complaint, annoyance, agitation, doubt and that hideous general feeling that the whole situation isn't as good as it could or should be. Let me take joy in having an opportunity to move images, words, sounds, music and most of all people across a screen. Let me be grateful and have faith. I know that the last time I made a movie I really and truly felt Your presence with me in a very traditional big-guy-up-there-helping-me-out kind of way and I know that I can't grasp or believe in that now, but I also know that there's Something coursing through the Universe that can help lift me out of this weirdly grim state of mind I find myself in about the whole thing and I am looking to you, oh great something-that-courses-through-the-Universe to fill me with your Light.

Amen.

A New Turn of Events

2006-06-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

Well I'm off to direct a cable movie. Off to Calgary, Alberta, to be precise. Is the movie set in the Rockies? No, actually, it's set in North Carolina. But, you know, global economics strikes again: it's cheaper to shoot up there. The budget is low but non insanely low, the script is okay but not great--wrote it myself, so I know. Am I nervous? Well, it's my third movie, so I know exactly how much there is to be nervous about. But I'm excited to. So now this is going to be a new kind of blog.

This is going to be a blog about directing a movie.

Casting started today. I got a list of the names of a hundred actresses for the lead role. The really really good ones, the ones you would slobber over, are all listed at the end under "not interested." But there are still some really good ones up front. Ones that frankly I could die happy having worked with. I know who I want. Now I wait to hear who the producers, the network, the studio and the foreign investors want. An offer goes out to one lucky actress this weekend. Wish me luck!

And stay tuned.

Hiatus

2006-04-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Just a thought here:

We can all understand why the price of oil is going up. The world situation, increased demand in India and China, the uncertainty of supply. Fine. And we accept the fact that Exxon etc. have to raise their prices to maintain their profit margin. No problem. But does it take a genius or a congressional investigation to see that if an oil company's PROFITS, not revenues, are doubling and tripling during this period, somebody is, um, taking advantage of the situation to anally rape each and every one of us? And isn't asking Bush and Co. to investigate the situation a little like asking Goldfinger to head up the investigation into who messed with the gold in Fort Knox?

WHEN, OH LORD, WHEN WILL WE BE RELEASED FROM SUCH PATHETICALLY TRANSPARENT EVIL? HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

Okay. I feel better now.

I also want to say that I'm going on hiatus here with the blog for a while. After thinking about a recent comment exchange with [sic], I'm realizing that I need all my concentration and writerly energy for the two projects I'm working on now and looking down the list of things to temporarily excise from the time/energy/concentration budget it seemed that blogging could easily take a break. So--I'll be checking back with all of you as time rolls on and blogging once again when my projects get written, and can always be reached at tomjay5@hotmail.com.

With love to all,

Tom

Dear Abby

2006-04-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

I have blogged a lot about my relationship with my wife of almost 25 year, my wife whom I met the summer after my freshman year at college. We are now at a crossroads in the marriage--though she would claim that we are not, that everything is fine if I would only see that. For me the crisis feels less about what I should do about the relationship than what I should think or feel about it. But maybe not. Maybe I do need to do something about it. One way or another, it scares me to think of going on the way we're going without something changing, inside or out. I'm posting this as an open Dear Abby letter to all of you. Read the tale and then tell me: what path, kind readers, should I take?

In the picture you see us on a perfect day in the summer of 1976. I'll call that a starting point, though she had already been my girlfriend for three years. It was a day full of adventure, discovery and romance, and it was only one of many. Within six years of that perfect day we were married, with our first child, our first underpaying jobs, living in an apartment we could barely afford--in short, within six years of this picture being taken, our childhoods were over. With responsibilities, bills, early hours at work, late night breastfeedings and our collective and individual anxieties about our future, things began to change. Gradually, we began to have less sex. But the fact remained that when we did have sex it was as close and romantic as it was the day the picture in this post was taken.

Now, several chapters later, we still have sex. But the fact is, the sex isn't good. It's bad. I never thought there could be such a thing as bad sex, but there is. The heart of what's bad about it for me is that my wife will not take pleasure from me. It's all about getting me off, which may sound good to somebody whose spouse doesn't even do that. But my wife has now openly and calmly declared that she loves me, loves our life together, loves sleeping pressed up against me, but isn't interested in having orgasms anymore. She used to come easily and freely but, interestingly, only from intercourse--at our hottest and most sexual, as I've blogged before, I wasn't allowed to go down on her or any other kind of direct intimate contact--just screwing. And when there was lots and lots of that I certainly wasn't complaining. But I'm complaining now.

Maybe what I'm complaining about most of all is something very small and very simple: she won't kiss me in bed anymore. Ever. Not all the toothbrushing and flossing and shaving in the world makes any difference. We used to make out endlessly in bed. We haven't kissed in bed in years.

I remember the first time, a couple of years ago, when I realized that I wasn't reaching her sexually any more. Of course I went straight to blaming myself. But now it's becoming clearer that this is her choice. Or maybe just where she is in pre-menopause. But either way: I've tried to talk about it, I've tried to get her into therapy, but she's not budging, and I'm not taking the rap anymore. She went for therapy once, very briefly---about five years ago I found msyelf writhing happily around in a bed in a Washington D.C. hotel room with an old girlfriend and then walking around for a week in a blissful erotic haze from the experience and then getting back to L.A. and dragging my wife to counseling--without, by the way, telling her about the old girlfriend and the hotel room--because I wanted that erotic haze to be about her again, about my wife. She bolted from the therapy after a few weeks--when we were actually getting somewhere, I thought-- and now categorically refuses to consider going back, and gets so pissed off when I bring it up that I now know that's over: I'm not bringing it up again.

Both my wife and my therapist say the problem is my mindset---that if I love her I can love her as she is and find joy and pleasure in the setup as it is. And there are days when I think they are right, and days when I can talk myself into that, and days when we have sex that I can enjoy in spite of the one-sidedness of it.

But I finally admitted to myself this week that I don't like having sex with her anymore. Too much inequality, too much trying to make something happen which isn't going to happen, no savoring of the moment, no discovery. I'm actually losing my attraction to her. I'm not getting as turned on. It just isn't feeling good, either physically or emotionally. There was a great time in the shower a few weeks ago, which I wrote about here, but the fact is I was mostly happy that I was actually able to enjoy it so much--because it had been a while since I had.

Every time I actually think about leaving her over this, about telling her that I'm not ready to settle into what we've settled into for the rest of my life, the thought feels ludicrious: are things really bad enough to warrant shredding up my life like that? But every time I think about never having that feeling of her being turned on under my touch, never feeling her come, never kissing her in the dark of our own bed in our own home--that feels equally untenable.

So what do I do?

Created By

2006-04-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

If you go to the Internet Movie Data Base you'll find a fair number of listings under my name. I've had "created by" credit on three network series. I've had my name in one way or another on 50 plus hours of television. The range in quality goes from please-don't-watch-it-awful to sort-of-fun-but-cheesy to not-too-bad-with-a-few-nice-moments. And at the end of the day all of it added up isn't worth five minutes of tonight's episode of The Sopranos.

And that's something that, as I sit down at my computer to get a couple of hours work in before bedtime, I know I just have to live with.

More Fearless Moral Inventory

2006-04-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

With respect to the last post--while I have yet to do a formal Al-Anon 9th Step amends on that one, it's been six years now, I've apologized many times, and my daughter and I have gotten to the point where we can laugh about my insane behavior. She and I have a great relationship, we talk and email all the time, and at age 23, living 2000 miles away, she has announced that if any family vacation plans are happening she wants to be included indefinitely, which of course she will be. But as long as I'm on the subject of Things I Will Need to Apologize To My Daughter For, there is one more event that needs Fearless Moral Inventory-ing.

This one happens in Cajun country. During the year she took off between high school and college she was headed back east and I said, why don't we take a trip to New Orleans and drive around the bayous and then you can continue on east from there. We were staying in Breaux Bridge and for breakfast I had way more Louisiana chicory coffee than I should have, I know what that stuff does to me, I was driving badly all morning, turning the wrong way down one way streets and missing stop signs, in spite of my daughter's repeated warnings and offers to take the wheel, and sure enough about half way to New Orleans--we were rushing to make it in time for our dinner reservations at Antoine's--I started into an intersection without looking, thinking or really being present at all, and our little rented Hyundai Santa Fe got clipped by, yes, an 18 wheeler going 60 MPH. The front end of the Hyundai was sheered right off, the battery was found in a field a hundred yards away, we did a few high-speed 360's, but by some miracle which I have yet to fathom my then 18 year old daughter and I walked away from the twisted wreck with a couple of scratches, mostly from airbag impact. After an aggravating series of less-than-compassionate Louisiana state cops and surly tow truck drivers we made it to the French Quarter in time to shower, change and get to Antoine's in time for our reservation. I thought the timing was critical; little did I know that the bloom has long been off Antoine's rose and we were sitting in a nearly empty restaurant. Didn't matter to me--I was still completely rattled and basically out-of-body from the accident and I went straight for the Sazeracks, a New Orleans concoction of whiskey and God alone knows what else, Huey Long's favorite, and after the second of these I turned to my daughter and asked "So have you slept with (name of her boyfriend at the time)?" Arrrgggghhhh! She was terribly embarrassed and I realized immediately what I had done and what can I say... I shudder at the memory of it. She handled it great, we went on to have a wonderful few days biking around that great city--a little like remembering Pompeii before Vesuvius now--but-- but-- it was bad, and I found out later how upset she was by it. She did not, by the way, dignify the question with an answer, or feel she had to. She's got way too much self respect for that. So I must have done something right...

The good news is, that really cleans up the 4th step on my baby girl.

The moral of this story is: ALWAYS take the Collision Damage Waiver on your rental car insurance. I dropped off a hunk of crushed smoking metal at the Avis office in New Orleans and walked away without having to pay one single dime.

Fearless Moral Inventory

2006-03-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

Fortunately I can't top the revelation in the last post: I never did anything that horrible again, but I certainly learned what I was capable of, and I certainly lost my ability to feel total moral superiority to anybody, concentration camp guards included.

But as I plunge onward in my Al-Anon 4th Step--my fearless moral inventory--that is far from the end of the story.

Let's just deal with one thing tonight: snobbery.

I may very well be the worst snob you have ever met. This is simply true and I am not looking for anybody to say no, no, not true. I realize that by sharing this sin I am also practicing it. So don't say you haven't been warned.

My snobbery of course is born of an all-encompassing and often crippling envy but we'll get to envy next because envy really is the big one. I'm starting with the effect and then getting to the cause.

If you have met me more than twice I will without fail have found a way to work the conversation around to my world-class education. There's no question that you've heard of the place I went to college and grad school. And I'll make sure you know that I went there. And know it. And know it. See? I just did.

And my travels? Oh you'll hear about it. Can't get to the third time meeting me without intimate remembrances of at least three European and/or Asian capitals entering the conversation. I make myself puke with this stuff. But I can't stop myself either. It "just happens."

Then there's the reverse snobbery--worst of all. I live on the East side of Los Angeles--theoretically hipper, more bohemian, more of a melting pot than the all-white West. Oh listen to Mr. Boho's contempt for those whitebread soulless Westsiders! Listen to him brag how much more a Man of the People he is, because he has Armenian neighbors and shops at a Thai grocery! And oh, those soulless Westsiders, when they travel, they stay in cookie-cutter luxury hotels while our Working Class Hero stays at rustic eco-lodges that can only be reached by boats piloted by picturesque natives with whom he is soon conversing on a first-name basis! Watch Tom reach out to the noble savage! Watch Tom eat their humble native foods!

Let's not even get started on the famous and semi-famous friends thing. Let's, just, not.

And the way I conspire to make sure people see the car I pull up in? Sometimes I think that's worse than torturing rats.

On the plus side, I will say that the awareness that is leading me to share all this is a healing thing, and on a good day I may not be as bad as I once was. But can I accept a challenge to simply leave the fact of where I went to college out of my conversation entirely for a six month period? And park my car around the corner where nobody will see it for the same length of time? And make not one mention of any trip I have ever taken? And express not one word of contempt for my wealthy neighbors to the west who know not the joys of the get-down Guatemalan joint on the corner? Maybe I should try it, as a kind of moral sobriety pledge.

I'm not going to stop there tonight. I'm going to share one really really bad thing I did in regard to all this.

When my daughter was applying to college I put on a whole Eastsider act of hey, it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you're happy. Yeah, so why did I take her on a little trip to visit my college, and lead her through the august Gothic halls in which I had passed my own, if truth be told, miserable undergraduate years, and take her to afternoon tea at my, you know, club, and get all teary-eyed at the grand tradition of it all, and end with her feeling that she had to get into this school or else? This was all particularly cruel on my part because while she was a good student she really didn't have the grades or scores for it: it was a stretch. So she applied. And got waiting listed--I think as a courtesy to a legacy, not with any intention that they would accept her. That was rejection number one. Then she didn't, of course, get in off the waiting list, which was rejection number two. She did get into a good school only slightly outside the top-ten glow, but one which afforded me scant-to-zero bragging rights. Then she took a year off (just because she wanted to), and, at my passive-aggressive urging, reapplied to my alma mater, this time for early decision, with new essays and another A or two and some more data on the resume. On this round she got "deferred" and put back into the big applicant pool for spring decision. That was rejection number three. Then I "encouraged" her to get teachers to write additional letters of recommendation etc., which she wanted to do like she wanted to drill a hole in her own skull (one teacher emailed back and said "what do you want to go to that overrated place for?"), and in the end she got the skinny envelope in the spring. So, in essence, I made sure that she got rejected not once but four times from the school I went to.

When I get to making my amends--the 9th Step--the first call is to my daughter. Because that was baaaaad.

Unspeakable

2006-03-26T23:20:00.000-08:00

There was an interesting cross-blog discussion recently about the issue of self-censorship in blogland. One cool blog friend went so far as to take down her blog because she felt she wasn't being totally honest in it, so why bother? I miss her blog, but I admire and even envy the integrity of the move. When I started blogging I thought: wow, I can say anything, because nobody knows who I am anyway! But then you make cyberfriends. Cyberfriends you really like. And you want them to like you. So you start to issue press releases instead of genuine messages from the heart.

Tonight I make a move toward real honesty. I tell something really horrible about myself. In sophomore year of college I had two roommates. One was as lost and sad as I was, but with even bigger shames and secrets. One was a player, outrageously good looking and at ease, with more girlfriends than he could handle. Note that during this year I didn't just have acne, I had cystic acne, which means big red weeping golfballs under the skin, always where it counted most: nose, jaws, between the eyes. The good looking confident roommate (for whom I ghost-wrote a paper once in exchange for a few hits of windowpane acid) had two gerbils and a white rat named Henrietta. He'd go to classes with Henrietta on his shoulder. They were very close, my roommate and that rat. I tortured the rat and the gerbils. It was my revenge on my roommate for being good looking and getting laid all the time. I would poke the gerbils with sharpened pencils and once, or maybe more than once, I swung Henrietta around my head by the tail. The other roommate did these things too, but I wasn't a follower in this. I would get sexually turned on by torturing the animals. I'm sitting here thirty three years later trying to remember if one of the pets died from this. I think maybe yes, but that may just be guilt talking. I was never found out, though the other sad roommate and I used to talk freely about the fact that we were doing it. My only defense here is that it happened over three decades ago and I haven't done anything remotely like it since, or wanted to. But that doesn't change the fact that I did it. The good looking roommate is now a big deal real estate guy in Manhattan. We had lunch a few years ago and he seemed happy. He does, however, carry a certain amount of anger at me---because I talked him out of being pre-med. (I did this because he was miserable and hated and couldn't pass organic chemistry and didn't want to do it anymore. He didn't take much convincing.) He thinks he would have made a good doctor. The other sad roommate was a gifted pianist with hopes of a solo career but he would get extremely nervous playing for people, his hands would go all to spaghetti, and I may be the only person who knows that he really had a measure of genius. Now he teaches piano at a girl's school in Canada. He says that in twenty five years of teaching he has never had a talented pupil. And many years ago, while Richard Nixon was president, he and I tortured our roommate's pets.

Now: will I have the nerve to press "publish post"?

Go Figure

2006-03-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

So there I was last week in the middle of the blackest broken glass depression I have ever known. Like, lying in bed in the middle of the night howling at the blackness of it all, but silently, so I wouldn't wake up my wife. My inner monologue basically one unbroken litany of you're no good as a writer, you're no good as a husband, you're no good as a man. With extra focus on the tangled mess of my marriage. The tiny voice trying to say that at least some of that wasn't completely true went unheard in the howling hurricane of BLECCHHH.

Then came Sunday morning. My wife said she wanted to go to India Town to replace her wedding ring which she had lost some weeks ago and did I want to come? She has always loved India Town, which is a huge, very active commercial district of Indian restaurants, clothing stores, jewelry stores, grocery stores, etc., about ten miles from us, and she has been trying to get me to go there for years. Bleak as I felt, it didn't seem right to let my wife go off and buy a replacement wedding ring on her own, so I said I'd go, in the afternoon, after I got some work done. (Read: after I stared pointlessly at the screen for a few hours.) When she came home she was getting ready to go into the shower and I was sitting at my desk and I reached up and put my hand on her breast. Now you may know that depression is very hard on the libido and sexual desire was, I thought, the last thing I was feeling, or ever would feel, but for some reason the feeling of her still-clothed breast under my hand sent a hundred octane shot of desire through me that was all the more intense for being completely unexpected. Then she got into the shower and some force--well we know what that force is--picked me up from my chair, took off my clothes and put me in the shower with her and--well--I'll draw the curtain there and leave the rest up to your wildly overactive imaginations. That was good enough. But something else happened. As we emerged from the shower all dripping wet and moony-eyed I realized that the entire cloud of shadow that had been hanging over me and getting darker and darker for weeks had lifted away and vanished like smoke.

And that was only the beginning. We drove out to Artesia, where India Town is, and got off the freeway early so we could drive through neighborhoods we had never seen, and commented and exclaimed at everything, and then got to India Town and went to ten jewelry stores looking for just the perfect ring, and stopped for various amazing Indian snacks every ten feet, and finally found such a beautiful (and cheap!) ring in that super-yellow-glowing Indian gold that I decided to get one to match, and we were hugging and holding hands the whole time and being just ridiculously lovey-dovey. Because we were married on 9/27/81 -- that is, three squared, three cubed, three to the fourth -- our wedding rings were inscribed 3²3³3⁴. On the new rings we had the same inscribed and added + 5², because this year we will have been married for 25 years. Then we went to this great cheap all-you-can-eat Indian buffet place and got big plates of chickpeas and cauliflower and best of all goat stew and sat there over the paper plates and plastic forks and did a little improvised ring-exchanging ceremony, complete with vows. In the picture, the new ring is the one on the bottom.

That was Sunday, and now it's almost Thursday, and the depression has not shown its face since.

Is this just a manifestation of the fact that my self esteem is overly tied up in sex and sexual performance, meaning the high will last only until that shot of confidence has eroded? Is it the start of a new manic phase, as predicted by the Depakote-prescribing shrink I saw last week, that will lead to another crash? Is it the new meds already working? Is it the healing power of sex? Is it love?

Does it matter?

Garden Variety

2006-03-16T21:04:00.001-08:00

My whole life I've thought of myself as a garden variety neurotic guy. You know, high functioning but with a lot of crazy noise in my head (and the occasional leap into OCD lunacy) that I could handle by staying busy, or venting in therapy, or, for the last twelve years, those twenty magic milligrams of Prozac. Last summer I decided there was a level of anxiety and self doubt the Prozac wasn't getting at and went off it to see what would happen. What happened is a head full of broken glass and a sense that nothing in my life is any fucking good at all and, worst of all, never will be. There is always the possibility that that is simply an accurate perception and not depression talking. I don't really know right now. Look at it all one way and the guy has a great career, great wife, great kids, house full of books and music and friends and pets. Look at it the other way and the guy has a list of TV credits he's more inclined to apologize for than brag about, a wife whose interest in sex has long been on the wane, a house full of clutter, friends he would be fine never seeing again and pets that only pretend to like him so he'll feed them and take them on walks. (The kids, thank God, look the same through both lenses.)

Is my despair causing my dissatisfaction or is my dissatisfaction causing my despair?

And then there are the all too brief vacations in the land of elation. I'll have a wonderful night of lovemaking with the wife, or a script will get picked up, and for a few days the world shines like the first day of creation--and then they turn the lights down again. So last week I thought "enough of this shit" and went to see somebody about getting back on the meds. With typical OUTRAGEOUS snobbery I went down the list of doctors on my health plan and chose the one who did MIT undergrad and Harvard med school. And got pretty much what I should have expected: somebody reasonably smart and unreasonably stuck-up--rather like myself. Anyway, Dr. Harvard listened very closely and asked many questions and then said the last word in the world I wanted to hear.

He said bipolar.

I said great, when do I get the manic phase?

Ah, he said, Bipolar II. Smaller manic component. And all that elation you feel after sex, the elation that crashes after a few days? There's your manic phase. No, I'm thinking, that's afterglow. But then I thought: he's absolutely right. I use sex as an antidepressant. In fact I was going to do a post on my blog about that! How did he know!

Then he said another word I truly didn't want to hear. I wanted to hear Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Lexapro. But he didn't say those words.

He said Depakote.

I took the second 250 mg dose tonight. Possible side effects include weight gain and hair loss. If you see the fat balding guy in the robe that ties in the back shuffling down the corridor in his slippers, that's me.

The operative wisdom of the moment is: can't hurt to give it a shot.

But does the hair grow back?

Holy Moly

2006-03-08T22:38:00.000-08:00

Here we have two relatively obscure passages from the Bible:

Leviticus 11:7-- And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, he is unclean to you.

Leviticus 11:12-- And all that have not fins and scales in the seas...ye shall not eat of their flesh.

Because of those passages, for reasons that involve a moment in my life at which I prayed fervently for something, and was granted it, and felt that I had to do something for God in return, I haven't eaten pork or shellfish for almost eight years.

And then we have:

Exodus 20:13--Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Number seven in the Ten Commanments! You can't get any less obscure than that!

So why is it that I wouldn't for any reason eat bacon or scallops but tonight, just now, I met a woman I met on line, who does not happen to be my wife, for drinks, in the sexiest bar that I could think of?

Part of the answer is here, under Resentment the Fourth.

Beyond that--?

A year ago a married cousin I'm close to told me he had met a woman on an adulterer's website and was having a wild affair with her. I was at that point in a particularly something's-gotta-change-here mode with my wife so I posted a profile on that website, which is exclusively for married people looking for married people to have adventures with. I got some responses (if I had lied about my age I would have gotten more), there were a few flirtatious emails back and forth, and then I decided I wanted to make it work at home and stopped checking the secret email account linked to that website. Last week I thought, hm, wonder about that email account. And what should I find but a handful of messages in the inbox, one of them posted, strangely, the day before I checked, from a smart and interesting woman who lives very nearby. So--a few more emails back and forth, and last week we agreed to meet for drinks.

Needless to say, during the week I formed a very clear picture of her in my head, and of what would happen on our date, and would slip into a pleasant erotic haze over it whenever I let myself.

When she walked into the bar my eyes went straight to her lips and I thought: when I look at my wife's lips I HAVE to kiss them. It just sweeps over me. And her lips? Kinda thin, to tell you the truth. Didn't bode well. We talked, we had drinks, we did so-why-are-you-here, we ended up kissing and it was--I don't know--it didn't go through me. Thirty three years I've been with my wife--from when I was a sophomore in college--and whatever the problems are in our bedroom--whatever I feel I'm not getting--when I kiss her it goes all through me like electricity. Not metaphorically: actually. And as we sat there after the kiss drinking our drinks I thought: Holy Moly, I'm in love with my wife. It's not just a word or a concept, it actually IS, and it goes way beyond the resentment I feel when we're kissing and I'm aching to touch her breasts and she pushes me away yet again, or the ridiculous fights over money, or any of the little day to day annoyances of life. It's bigger than all of that.

On the drive back from the sexy bar I kept thinking, with typical nattering self doubt, did I blow it? Should I have gone for more? Who cares about the thinness or thickness of lips? And then I got home and in the kitchen were five bags of dried Thai jackfruit from the Thai desserts place around the corner, our favorite crunchy snack food, and my wife asleep in the bed with the dog and the cats piled all over her feet, and I thought: what am I doing? Do I really want to have an affair or do I just think a man who isn't getting what I think I'm not getting at home should have an affair?

Am I being guided by love here, or by fear? How can I tell the difference?

Maybe the answer to that is what I'm looking for.

Though as a very smart therapist/philosopher I've been reading says:

There are no answers, only choices.

Meme Response

2006-03-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

The deal here is you answer a question posed by the person who tagged you and then tag somebody else to answer a different question. The question from Bigg was : if your adolescent child came to you at some point in the indefinite future and told you he/she was gay, what would your reaction be?

I hope my reaction would be: Cool. What would you like for dinner? But who really knows how I'd actually react? A friend of mine from grad school, in this position, gave his son a big hug, told him he was proud of him, they cried together a little, and that was that.

The question, which I pose to anybody who feels they have any kind of answer to share, is:

Is this all there is?

This Isn't Working

2006-03-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

I took my last hit of Prozac at the end of September, after twelve years of pretty steady on-and-off mainlining of the stuff, and the last molecule of it drained out of my brain around the middle of December. I stopped because Prozac wasn't working: I didn't exactly feel depressed, but the constant low-grade buzz of dissatisfaction with my work and my marriage wasn't going away so I thought I'd try something else, and in order to assess whether that something else was working or not I had to strip all the paint and wallpaper down to the bare sheetrock. So now I'm trying cognitive therapy, and homeopathic treatments with a reportedly gifted (we'll see) doctor, and prayer, and working my al-anon steps, and writing my blog.

But none of it's working.

I wake up every day scared of the work ahead of me, certain that I'm not going to pull off either of my scripts, guilty about my treatment of my wife and irritated at her for her treatment of me and right back to guilt again for being irritated. My brain is such a swirl that I don't even know what's true on the simplest factual level. Do my wife and I get along wonderfully or are we miles apart? Is our sex life going through a relative downswing in the big picture of things and actually way better than my depressed thinking will allow, or is it doomed? Am I a successful writer tackling a couple of challenging scripts or am I a hack once again trapped in projects I have no idea how to carry off?

There's more evidence in support of the good than the bad on all the above counts, but one of the insidious aspects of OCD is that in the shadowy, Kafka-esque courtroom of the brain the evidence for the prosecution is always admissable while the evidence for the defense is invariably struck down. (Yes: you DID kill an Italian climber, and the fact that the entire fantasy is preposterous is BESIDE THE POINT!) The worst part is that when I look back in my journal, which I've been keeping for 6 years now, almost daily, I invariably see that I was writing about the same grinding conundrums in 2000 that I'm writing about now. And when I see that, you know what I feel?

Panic.

Right now I feel lousy in a way that I can't see any way out of.

Except, check this out: I wanted to close this with an old entry from my journal to prove that I've been in this same intractable state forever and that all is bleak in all directions, but in fact on this date five years ago, 3/7/01, I just found this entry:

Wonderful wonderful lovemaking this morning. Flowing from the idea of making (wife's name here) feel good in ways that she likes, not ways that I want her to like.

I'll enter that in evidence and see if the judge will cut me a break this time. Because right there is illumination in an area where I could definitely use some illumination right about now.

Yet More of the Other Side of the Story: MONEY

2006-03-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

Before I move forward I have to finish up the Al-Anon 4th step--sorting out my side of the resentments I am carrying against my wife. This has been helpful so far but not helpful enough. Like we say in the program: progress not perfection. A terrific motto for all--but sometimes an invitation to laziness.

This one has to do with finances. I'm always giving her grief over expenditures. The thousand dollars she spent buying two straw hats that I covered in the linked-to earlier post is an unusually large example. Usually it's smaller things. Just this morning she said that IKEA has new slipcovers for the sofa in her office in a terrific sea-green color and I HAD to open my mouth and say "Not right now, okay?" which led to a fairly big blow up and the ultimate secret weapon being slung at me: HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU SPEND ON YOUR THERAPIST EVERY WEEK!? Low, low, low. Plus--as I made sure she knew--insurance covers a chunk of that.

Well, a small chunk.

Now to my side of this long-running story, which quite frankly began thirty years ago when she was my college girlfriend and we were living in our first apartment and each making about three dollars an hour on our summer jobs, and even then I was giving her grief about eating lunch out when there was food in the refrigerator. And it continues now when I am a working writer/director and she makes good money at her own job.

I don't have to dig far to find my side of this one. I'm a weird combination of wildly extravagant spender and cheap bastard. She buys a couple of crazy straw hats because it will make her happy to see her two guys--me and my son--wearing them. She buys extra slip covers. And flowers for friends who I think don't deserve them. And takes broke friends out to dinner, frequently. INCREDIBLY SMALL POTATOES next to what I've spent on my addiction to exotic travel in the last two years. Leaving specific numbers out of it, how would you weigh my Greece with daughter + Costa Rica with whole family + Chile and Easter Island with brother and mother + Biking in France with friends from grad school + three trips to New York--all in the last two years-- against her couple of hats, generally loose attitude toward cash and a few bouquets of maybe not indispensable fresh flowers?

I am awash in shame. As I should be.

What's happening here is a combination of monumental selfishness and self-indulgence on my part plus the OCD of hearing every report of a penny she spends as a sure sign that we will die poor and hungry and living on the street. All while I'm staring glassy-eyed at travel websites choosing which rainforest eco-resort we're visiting next like some gambling psycho in front of a slot machine in Vegas. The traveling thing is beyond our means, and I feel that I've finally been able to put the brakes to acting out that particular addiction. But I'm really bad with how I treat my wife in this regard. Why couldn't I keep my FUCKING MOUTH SHUT about the IKEA slip covers this morning? WHY!!!????

Five Weird Things

2006-02-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

Thank you for the tag, Bigg. Here are Five Weird Or Random Things About Me:

1. I have never in my entire life won a game of chess against anybody.
2. No member of my family, going back as far as great grandparents and outward in all directions all the way through brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all the way to all known second cousins has ever been divorced. (2a: My family is living proof that this is not necessarily a good thing.)
3. My favorite food is Brussels sprouts.
4. Whenever I am singing Happy Birthday To You with a group I feeled compelled to harmonize on the last four words of the song, loudly and badly. I am not musical and can't sing on key and I know I should stop myself from doing this but I can't.
5. I doodle so much while I'm on the phone or supposedly working that I can go through all the ink in a ballpoint pen in a day.

Having been tagged, I hereby tag Anna (who we all hope is feeling better), Marco (who blogs seldom and may not see this), Bill, Jason and Facets of V. Simple instructions:

1. Thank the person who tagged you.
2. In your blog post five weird, strange or random things about yourself.
3. Tag five people.

Yes I know this is the 21st century equivalent of a chain letter. Fortunately it comes with neither a promise that you will win a million dollars if you do it nor a threat that terrible things will happen to you if you don't. It seems to be some kind of harmless community ritual, and that is all.

The Heart of the Problem

2006-02-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

I started three-day-a-week psychoanalysis at the age of six. Yes, three days a week a lady my parents hired (both parents worked during the day) picked me up from first grade in a big old car that smelled of gasoline and drove me to the psychiatrist's office where I talked about--what? What does a six year old tell his analyst? I'd give anything to get hold of his notes and find out.

That's not the point: the point, as I noted in my last post, is that the inside of my head has never been a nice place to be, and clearly that fact became apparent at an early age. I'm now approaching this blog in much the way one of my favorite bloggers approaches his: as a way of telling his own story to himself in the hope that as it unfolds he will have a better understanding of how he got to where he is now and how he should face the present. For me, I would add another dreadedly overused and loaded word: I want to heal. I don't want broken glass in my head anymore. And whatever turns out not to be sickness, but is just the workings of me, I want to be able to serenely accept.

To that end, I'm going to tell a story which, though it took place 33 years ago, illustrates the nefarious workings of my brain more graphically than some of the more complicated and multi-faceted battles of adulthood.

It was the summer after my sophomore year in college. My parents had offered me as a graduation present from high school a thousand dollars to be used for a trip anywhere in the world I wanted to go. (If any of you ever hear me complaining about my parents, you are under orders to kill me at once.) I didn't take it right after graduation because I was in the seriously dark period that descended on me in senior year of high school and I didn't want to waste my big trip being near-suicidally depressed. But two years later I was beginning to feel good enough, or more accurately resigned enough, to say hell with it, I'll take the chance, and I went to Europe, alone, on a budget, after airfare, of exactly five dollars per day, all in: food, lodging, transportation, drinks. As part of the trip I spent three weeks on an archaeological dig in northern England and there I met Mary--that's her real name--a shy, beautiful red-headed artist from Philadelphia with a great imagination, a fanatical devotion to the paintings of Egon Schiele, and just as much insecurity and trepidation about sex as I had at the time--in short, a perfect match. We hitchiked to Edinburgh and arrived there just as a band of a hundred bagpipers were marching out from the castle gate in the golden light of a summer evening, pipes blasting a Highland tune... We found cheap lodgings at the out-of-term university and bought strawberries and thick fresh Scottish cream and a bottle of the local whiskey and poured all the above ingredients into a bowl to let them soak while we went hiking to the top of Arthur's Seat, the great green sheep-dotted hill that overlooks the city, and we kissed and looked out at the crags and battlements of the castle, and then we we went back to the room and ate the scotch-soaked strawberries and drank the cream and the whiskey and made love. We had no condoms so there was no penetration allowed which took all the pressure off and we did absolutely everything else and woke up both feeling that we had passed the fiery gate, alive.

This went on for a couple of spectacular days, and then it came time to go our separate ways. She went south to catch her flight back home and I went north, to the Highlands. And as I hitchhiked out of the city I felt, for the first time maybe ever, just plain simply boringly good.

That lasted for about a minute.

A few days later I spent a day hiking in the magnificent valley of Glen Coe. There were signs posted all over the youth hostel that said SCOTLAND'S MOUNTAINS ARE KILLERS: DO NOT HIKE ALONE but I was young and invincible and had just had a passionate romance so I went hiking alone anyway. I got way up high to a waterfall that fell into a deep pool and took off my clothes and swam in it, freezing cold, fantastic, and then a fog came up and I was trapped on a very steep slope, couldn't see to go up or down, and I took out a pen and paper and wrote a letter to a girl I had met back home the summer before, and seen on vacations home from college, and to whom I've now been married for almost 25 years, and told her I was trapped in the fog on a high Scottish peak and would she still like me with two broken legs? (She still has this letter.) Finally the fog cleared and I got down the hill and headed back to the youth hostel, exhausted, happy, my mind clear, my future ahead of me.

Then:

I heard a voice calling from the mountain above me, like somebody calling out "Orin!" or "Go on!" and the thought came to me: is that somebody calling for help? I couldn't see anybody on the mountain at all. I decided to tell the warden at the youth hostel what I had heard but when I got back to the hostel I ran into some people I had met in another youth hostel, and made dinner with them, and then went to write postcards on my bunk in the dorm, and an hour and a half had passed before I suddenly remembered the voice. I went downstairs and told the warden what I had heard, and where. This was the man in charge of mountain rescue operations for the valley so he took what I said seriously. He asked me, very solemnly: did it sound like a cry for help? I thought hard for a moment and said: no. Then I went to sleep.

The next day, hitchiking back to Edinburgh, the mental hurricane hit. Clearly, obviously, a fallen climber had died on that mountain last night because I had forgotten to tell the warden what I had heard right away. I tried to reason with myself: it hadn't sounded like a cry for help, certainly not in English. But reason, you see, has no power whatsoever against those kinds of voices. None. Right there, with my thumb out on a Highlands road, Loch Lomond on one side, the mountains on the other, I sank into a nightmare state of blackest guilt: how could I possibly enjoy my trip? What right did I have?

After all, I had murdered somebody.

In Edinburgh I looked up the word for "Help!" in various languages in a book store and found soccore in Italian. Yes, it could have been "Soccore!" that I had heard. S0 now I had more information: I had murdered an Italian climber.

Why didn't I just call the youth hostel and see if any climber had been reported missing? Because I knew it wouldn't have done any good. If there was no report, that's because it was a solo Italian climber, none of his friends or family knew he was even in Scotland and his body wouldn't turn up until spring. I sat in my room in Edinburgh for a couple of days shivering and weeping and wanting to die. Then it came time to catch my flight to Rome for the next chapter of my trip.

I had another month to go. Rome, Florence, the Italian Riviera, the Swiss alps. All the places I had spent my childhood dreaming of visiting. And not one of them could I enjoy. Because always between me and the Colosseum or me and the clear emerald waters of Portofino or me and the flowering meadows of the high Alps was the face of the Italian climber whose death I had caused. I cried every few nights. I couldn't make friends--I didn't deserve them. I doggedly kept trying to enjoy myself and to be fair there were some good days in there, when the beauty of what was around me somehow burned through the veil. But all in all? I was a murderer who deserved no joy or pleasure.

It took me A YEAR AND A HALF--until well into my senior year in college--and that includes a summer living with my future wife back home--to come to the simple thought that may have occurred to some of you already, and which finally set me free:

If had told the warden the second I got back to the hostel he would have asked me the same question, and I would have to have given him the same answer: no, sir, it didn't sound like a cry for help. To do otherwise would have sent search parties up a mountain for nothing, with night coming on. Which meant that the hour and a half delay which was Exhibit A in the murder case against me meant nothing. As soon as that thought came to me--suddenly, out of nowhere, while rushing to a class--the whole thing went away like smoke. A year and a half after the fact.

Unforunately that was far from the last incidence of my brain taking revenge on me for feeling good, happy and free. That's how my mind works, in large and small ways, way too much of the time. It turns out there's a name for it: OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder.

And as I hope I've just demonstrated to you, it's a soul-killing demon.

Enough

2006-02-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

It has been suggested by a respected blogger that I'm circling my point here and not getting to it. This is true. So I'll get right to the point, right now, although I don't have the energy or will to elaborate tonight.

I'm writing this blog because since the later years of the Eisenhower presidency--that is to say, since my earliest memories--I have experienced life way too much of the time as a pain-based, broken-glass-inside-the-skull dance of anxiety, dread and doubt. Or to put it another way: since about the time Sputnik was launched I have been one considerably screwed up, if apparently high-functioning, individual. Throwing myself into the 12 steps of Al-Anon, resuming work on a long ago set-aside piece of writing, beginning a new and powerful kind of therapy and, yes, blogging, are all part of my decision to make this, my 52nd year, the year that I say ENOUGH and begin to find a way to live without broken glass inside my skull.

You may ask what the significance of the photo is. Very simple: I took it one morning on one of the best bike rides I've ever taken in my life and I put it here to cheer myself up. No, that's not true. I put it here to show off to you that I've been to Easter Island, I can afford to take big trips, and so, you see, I can't be that messed up after all, can I?

Rowing Upstream

2006-02-21T20:23:00.000-08:00

In Hollywood you take writing gigs for all kinds of reasons. You take them because you're passionate about the subject matter; because they're paying you a ton of dough; because there's a good chance it'll get made; because you need the work; because there's a producer or actor involved that you want to work with. One thing I've learned, or tell myself I've learned, is that no matter what the reason, if you don't feel the story somewhere in your gut it's going to be hell to write the damn thing, because trying to come up with it out of the frontal lobes of your brain with no help from the muse or the subconscious or the wellsprings of inspiration or whatever you want to call it is like carrying boulders the size of Buicks up hill all day long.

Here's the situation: Not long ago I got offered a job adapting a novel by an author I had never heard of but who turns out to sell more books than Dean Koontz and Stephen King and falls only slightly short of Nora Roberts and J.K. Rowling in the Amazon rankings. You've seen his books in the supermarket. Maybe you've bought them and read them. Maybe it's only the snob in me that doesn't love them. They strike me as essentially soft core--some kind of hazy love story/mystery wrapped around a few chest-heaving bodice-ripping sex scenes. I took the job because if it gets made I get to direct it and I haven't said "Action" or "Cut" for almost six years now, except to members of my family, and they don't obey the way actors do. So that means lots of fun once I'm out there in the forest with headphones on and a hundred people waiting for me to tell them what to do. But now I have to write it. I have to fill 100 or so pages with sharp witty dialogue and big emotional scenes and steadily building tension. So here I sit trying to do a great job with something I don't think is great, and the worst part, the very worst part of all, is this: since the book hasn't found a foothold in my heart, my inner compass isn't working right. I don't even know if my perceptions of it are correct. Maybe it's better than I think. Maybe this is just a new kind of procrastination and resistance. Maybe I should stop rowing so hard, turn the kayak around and let the current carry me. Or maybe that's just my laziness talking. Maybe I need to row harder. Maybe I need to light candles and chant and tell the muse I'm sorry I took a job I didn't really believe in and beg her to come back. Sometimes she does, you know, if you ask nicely.

And most of all I gotta ask myself: if hundreds of millions of people all over the world love this guy's books, who the hell am I to say they're wrong?

Important thought here: MASSIVE GRATITUDE that I have the job at all. I'm just saying...

More of the Other Side of the Story

2006-02-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

My sponsor has wisely given me a deadline on the 4th Step, so: back into the water, back into getting those resentments on the run. What was my part in the two incidents in which my wife followed up an exceptionally nice romantic/sexual moment with a royal fit of unyielding irritability? This is a tough one because on some level I feel like she really did do that in those instances, and didn't have to. But that's her inventory, not mine, so: I'm looking at what I did wrong in those cases. At those times when my wife really lets go, gives herself over to physical abandon, drops her inhibitions, she becomes, understandably, extremely vulnerable, and that vulnerability doesn't go away right away. For me, being a, you know, guy, there's a great feeling of love, release, oneness and elation and then--what's for breakfast? Looking back at those romantic hotel rooms in Idaho '01 and Utah '04 I know that I was full of excitement for what the day ahead might bring--we were in great travel destinations both times--and didn't take into account my wife's vulnerability, and where she was left by how fully she had exposed herself. She needed protection, reassurance, she needed me to say that I loved her and that she was safe--and while I thought I was expressing that in my happiness at sharing the day ahead with her--I wasn't. So she reacted the way people react when they're hurt. And I only reacted back in a defensive manner. I didn't trust that my wife is actually is a sane and loving person, and so I didn't take the trouble to read the deeper cues.

I sure as hell hope that's a lesson I've learned by now.

You know, until I started writing this I wasn't really sure what my side of this one was going to be? Right here before me, the miracle of the act of writing something down.

The Other Side of the Story Part Three

2006-02-11T17:41:00.000-08:00

Now to a resentment which I've long ago let go of--but which I haven't yet looked at my part in--the one about the time when our six year old son was starting to show the first major signs of the emotional trouble that would overtake him in a big way at age thirteen, the time when my wife, frustrated and at her wits end, struck him pretty damn hard across the face, leading to the cops at our door and all kinds of craziness. It's twelve years ago now, my son's doing great, he and my wife are super close, but: where was I in this?

In my office, working, head in the sand. Hoping it would all go away. Cleaning up his room instead of making him clean it up because it was easier that way. Telling everybody that peace was more important than victory. I think that's what Chamberlain was thinking in 1938 when he flew to Munich to tell Hitler it was just fine if he marched into Czechoslovakia and then flew home to England and said "I have secured peace in our time."

Peace. Right.

I was a F***ING SCARED WIMP who couldn't hold my son to a responsibility, who in the name of being "the good guy" left my wife to face the onslaught on her own.

I've forgiven her a long time ago for the slap. I hope when I get to the amends stage in this process that she forgives me---most of all for waiting this long to look at the other side of the story.

The Other Side of the Story Part Two

2006-02-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

On to resentments three and four: The thorny issue of when sex slacks off, and the way my wife from the outset made that my problem instead of our problem. And what's my part in that? Maybe there was an entirely different path for me to take through the whole thing. Like:

Accepting the natural cycles of more sex and less sex and not getting all damaged-male-ego about it in the first place.

Seeing the fact that we were having less sex as something that was happening in the relationship, rather than something that she was doing to the relationship.

Not making every gap between times of lovemaking a great big reenactment of my own youthful miseries and adolescent agonies.

Not making her the means by which I was proving to myself and to the imaginary jeering crowd in my head that I had put all that behind me.

Listening to her, sensing her, instead of expecting her to say the lines and carry out the actions I had written for her in the script in my head, a script for a drama played out for the benefit of that imaginary jeering crowd.

Learning to be in the moment at all times, whatever that moment might bring.

Acting from love instead of need.

On the upside of this one? I think I'm getting better at all of the above.