“Y'Alternative Hollywood”The New York Times, October 9, 1997 FREDERICKSBURG, Tex. -- WHILE dining at the Russian Tea Room during a business trip 10 years ago, I looked around and discovered the Fox Commissary. Wherever I turned I saw a writer I was pursuing, agents whose calls I'd missed, a competitive producer (usually Scott Rudin). In one horrible moment New York had morphed into Los Angeles. At dinner at Elaine's, I was still in Hollywood, with the same polenta. Hollywood had ceased to be a place; it had transmogrified into a beast. No armor could be dropped. And that is how a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker self-exiled in Los Angeles found herself putting down roots in Fredericksburg, Tex., eating bratwurst and watching people in lederhosen dance the polka for Oktoberfest. I found consolation in the big sky of Texas when I found my home here in 1993. I felt wonderfully humbled and quieted by the big weather, the big friendliness. Then the fourth annual Austin Film Festival and Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference convened last weekend with plenty of Variety-carrying types and threatened to shatter the big silence. I could feel the breath of the beast. My house had been built one big room at a time beginning
in 1851 as its settler family grew. The original homestead, made of mortar,
limestone and logs -- which brilliantly cool in the summer and warm in
the winter -- sheltered all seven members of the Durst family. Its history
gives me an enormous sense of physical security: set safely on a relatively
stable tectonic plate, the same stone walls that withstood a century and
a half of lightning and tornadoes could withstand a hurricane of Los Angeles
dramas brought by Fedex each day to my front porch. The mornings are my tonic, my country doctor. I
rise early and grab a blanket, my binoculars and my ''Birds of Texas''
field guide and head for the front-porch swing. There are feeders across
my land, a kind of bird-theater proscenium on my front lawn. In the summer,
purple martins glide from condo to condo. Flocks of cowbirds harass the
neighbor's herd. I search for color: painted and indigo buntings in the
spring, a scissortail swooping off the telephone lines in autumn. In winter,
meadowlarks waddle across the ground like tiny penguins for seed blown
from the feeders. The birds and the smells announce the seasons, and I
experience the onset of each as a delighted child, bereft as I was in
Los Angeles for natural change. So I couldn't help but wonder: Are my Texas pleasures becoming an endangered species? Would the Salt Lick BBQ become a studio commissary? Would I find a Creative Artists Agency power breakfast convening at the leftist taco joint in Las Manitas? Should I dread the scene in the lobby at the Four Seasons? Or dress for it? What I found on deeper investigation was reassuring. In a typical offbeat way, the hero of the festival was the never-celebrated, often-fired and yet overcompensated Hollywood writer: bright stars like Eric Roth (''Forrest Gump''), Nicholas Kazan (''Reversal of Fortune''), Robin Swicord (''Little Women''), Andrew Kevin Walker (''Seven''), all dispensing advice to local writers-to-be. There was nary a power type in sight. The lone mogul in residence, Barry Josephson, former president of Columbia Pictures, stood in for all savvy shark types, feeding the lambs the bottom line, and the mainstream was perversely represented by Dennis Hopper and Oliver Stone. Featured film maker? Stan Brakhage, the man who in 1963 pasted moth wings onto film. I let out a huge sigh of relief. Austin had maintained its ''y'alternative'' essence. Each ''celebrity'' was in fact a rogue. AS safe as it seemed, I still hotfooted it home
for Oktoberfest weekend in Fredericksburg, 70 miles out of town and safely
inconvenient for Hollywood travelers. I try to get home every month and
spend all holidays, breaks and stolen time here, like a mistress. This
year, I made ''Hope Floats'' in Texas with Sandra Bullock and so was able
to spend five months of weekends in heaven: barbecue instead of penne,
bottled beer instead of bottled water, friends instead of enemies, even
when you lose. And no special-effects house can beat our own: In
the distance I hear rolling thunder. As if etched with Zorro's sword,
the sky is streaked with lightning. It has rained somewhere close by.
The man at the Exxon Minimart gives me a big smile under his BAN ABORTIONS
NOT GUNS sign. He doesn't ask about my last season at the box office.
(Leave that to my dry cleaner in L.A.) When I refer to last season, he
knows I'm talking rainfall. Because rain means wildflowers. And the sight
of the bluebonnets -- now that's the most thrilling spring release to
me. In "Reality and Dreams," Dame Muriel Spark
surgically dismembers the movie business personality with the kind of
lacerating insight that tends to delight those outside the business but
tends to numb the movie business practitioner with familiarity. Now, a normal person might find this reaction excessive, broad, unsympathetic. What Sparks has captured so succinctly, however, is its ordinariness, its banality. Sparks knows that Tom's profound crankiness is the whiplash of success. We see in her protagonist this malaise in all its ugliness: the loathing of others, particularly those who need something from you, get in your way or are otherwise aesthetically insulting. The story of "Reality and Dreams" extends this crankiness to irksome family members, the constraints of monogamy and the vicissitudes of the business (London style: It's remarkably similar to Hollywood). Tom's fall from a crane while making his last movie and his subsequent incapacitation lead to a family crisis: the disappearance of his daughter, Marigold. She is the lesser of Tom's two daughters, the preferred daughter being of course the more beautiful progeny of his first marriage. Marigold is a literal-minded clod who hasn't the wit to appreciate her parents' sophistication, their taking on of lovers and their total disinterest in the lovers of the other. Marigold is, in fact, appalled by her parents, Tom and Claire, who are likewise appalled by her. This state of mutual disregard is interrupted when Marigold vanishes. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Is she chasing a chimera from one of her father's movies to punish him? Is she alive and taunting him? Is she trying to disgrace him? The marriage is rocked (an English, publicity-driven
sort of rocked) by the crisis and Tom's movie falls apart and comes together--many
times, which is par for the course. Tom and Claire finally figure out
where their daughter might be--at a beach where her father became obsessed
with a simple French girl making hamburgers, whose image became the inspiration
for his last fateful movie called (though its name is changed by faceless
producers throughout the tale) "The Hamburger Girl." Sparks
finds at this moment a perfect coalescence of plot, character and theme:
The self-enthralled parents never even see the daughter they are looking
for, when they finally find her. She sees them, we see, perfectly. She
lured them there with their own narcissism and they never connect. It
is masterful. This is Tom's reaction to his daughter's plight: "He was thinking how afraid everyone was since Marigold's disappearance, to get mixed up with him . . . Tennessee Williams, he thought, would have called me from the States. . . . He would have been a true friend." Is it only in the movie business that people have friends in the subjunctive tense, theoretical friends who package well at crisis moments? The gigantic yawning abyss of self-absorption, which is part of the movie business personality, as identified by Sparks, has deeper, quasi-metaphysical aspects. When Tom meets a cop investigating Marigold's disappearance, he thinks the cop is oddly cast, and then rethinks--it's casting against type and so it works! The assumption that things are not what they appear, that what does appear must be gussied-up, prettified or distressed and grunged, that the film moment constantly requires sound, effect, light: This is filmmaking. The filmmaker's need to get closer and closer to the action is a desperate quest for authenticity, a creative engagement with the thing itself. The paradox is that the search for something real is thought to occur by getting closer and closer to its being photographed and transformed into another, slicker more beautiful thing. Spark writes, "Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams": English rationalist and Cartesian philosopher Bishop Berkeley meet the modern film director. When Tom magnifies his glimpse of a girl cooking hamburgers into myth, he denudes her of any subjectivity and he is punished, Greek style, by his fall from director grace. God is by the mighty crane. The choice Sparks makes for the accident to have
befallen her director is dead-on perfect. Directors love cranes. They
give them omniscience, and directors crave omniscience. A movie set is
the last bastion of totalitarian decision-making in the arts, and anyone
who has ever tangled with a director while shooting--a bear in a trap
of his own creation--will feel a certain guilty glee of recognition at
the aptness of the comeuppance. "There was no need, no need at all
for you to get up on that crane," his lawyer tells him. "An
ordinary dolly is perfectly all right for directing a motion picture these
days. But no, you have to be different, you have to be right up there
beside the photographer, squeezed in and without a seat-belt. You have
to be God." "Are you suggesting God wears a seat-belt?"
he answers. Sparks incapacitates Tom to show him what God is really up to. Once benched, with no work to protect him, no heights from which to fall, Tom feels, uncomfortably, what it feels like to be human, at least until he can go back to the set. "As soon as I hear a bit of news these days,
someone comes along to contradict it. My film was canceled, now it's going
ahead. My son-in-law was looking for a job but now he's left my daughter.
. . . First, I had to go back in the hospital and now I don't." "No, it's not ordinary life. But let me tell you that for people in the film business, yes, it is life. Nothing with us is consistent." Befuddled still, Tom separates himself from mere mortals, whose lives, he supposes, make sense, in an ordinary sort of way. But consistency, Tom will apparently never learn, eludes even "normal people." |
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