“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.
On the fireplace mantel I have a photograph of the Dursts posed formally on the front porch, hand-feeding their pet deer. A similarly posed photo of my whole family sits next to it, taken on the same spot last Thanksgiving. The neighbors are mostly the descendants of the original settlers, many working the same fields their great-great-grandfathers plowed. Down the road is the schoolhouse that served these families for 100 years. Now it's a tiny community center, with a huge pit barbecue, that neighbors can rent for $1 a night, as I do each year for my birthday dance -- a cross between a Tijuana wedding and a Texas prom.

THE enormously forgiving umbrella that is Texas is medicine to a soul riven by the vicissitudes of conditional, Schadenfreude-driven Hollywood, where you're only as good as your last season at the box office and any failure taints you with potentially contagious ''loserhood.'' Here, the bigger the failure the bigger the party: when two beloved sons, John Connally and Willie Nelson, found themselves in hot water with the I.R.S., Texas gave each of them a benefit to help pay off debts. It is also O.K. to have a scandal in Texas, which is comforting to know.

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.
Still, I approached my recent trip home with some trepidation. Since I bought my homestead in the Hill Country, an hour outside Austin, the indigenous movie colony has flourished. Home-growners include the young independent film makers Robert Rodriguez (''El Mariachi,'' ''Desperado,'') and Richard Linklater (''Slacker,'' ''Suburbia'').
And with the gorgeous light and easy life style, new batteries of film makers are seduced every season. Last year 34 films were shot here, and Austin has ominously been called ''the third coast.''

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.
To make this trip, you have to drop the hysterical impatience to arrive and acclimate yourself to the vast distances between towns. Those with the patience to surrender to the golden hills are accompanied by that beacon of Texas sensibility, local radio. Where else can you drive further and further into the country and get better and better radio? Austin's KGSR fades out around the turn west at Johnson City -- the Hill Country's KFAN signal tells me I'm halfway home. It reconnects me to my Texas roots: food and music, music and food. Summers of fresh peach ice cream, black-eyed peas and tamales at New Year's.

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.

“The Reel Thing”
The Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1997
Book review of “REALITY AND DREAMS” by Muriel Spark

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.
"Don't your friends ring you up?" asks a friend of Tom, the novel's temporarily maimed director-protagonist. "Yes, they do. . . ," he answers. "Quite often. I don't always want to reply. They want to know if I'll be ready to give a lecture on filmmaking at some university in six months' time, they want to know if they have my permission to change some paragraphs in my film script, they want to know if they can come and see me. What do I say?--I could say, 'I've got a backache. Disintegrate. Drop dead. Do what you damn well like.' "

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.
But the real text of the piece is the family's unintentionally existential ruminations, as the parents try to figure out who their daughter is and, by extension, where she might be, and their daughter schemes to illuminate them. Marigold tells a confidant: "There comes a time when one has to see things sub specie aeternitatis. Which means . . . under the light of eternity. That is what my parents now have to do. Examine their utility, their service, ability, their accountability, their duties and commitments. . . ." Scary daughter. But she came by her desire for retribution honestly.

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.
Later he admits. "Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through the amplifier and, like God, watch the team down there group and regroup as bidden. Especially those two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far too much money, thinking they could direct the film better themselves. There was none of the 'Just a minute, may I suggest. . . .' What do they think a film set is? A democracy, or something?"

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."
"That's life," says {his friend} Julia.

"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."

by Lynda Obst, The New York Times, October 9, 1997