Procrastination

I think if I had to name the one thing in my life that constantly defeats my best laid plans it would have to be procrastination. I'm not sure exactly why this is. Possibly an advanced case of laziness on my part. Maybe fear of the unknown. Possibly forgetfullness. Whatever the underlying reason, it is a decades old character flaw. And every now and again, I awake in the morning with fire in my gut, eyes blazing, determined to change the pattern. Like this morning. "That's it," I say to myself. "No more procrastination."

I think procrastination for the single person is one thing, but procrastination for someone part of a couple, a team, a civil union, a marriage...quite another. Because then my character flaw not only effects my own life but my wife's life, too. And then it becomes not just a character flaw but a 'thing.' And a 'thing' has to eventually be dragged into the light and 'talked about.' And once it's 'talked about' then it becomes an ongoing 'incident' that has been identified and labeled and listed as 'something to be fixed.' At that point it is a problem.

My ongoing procrastination has become a problem.

I've decided to join a gym. In fact, we went gym shopping yesterday. It is down to two. One is in downtown Burbank and has a pool, yoga classes, up-to-date weight machines, pilate classes (whatever that means), and a host of other self-improvement stuff. The other gym is closer but all it has are some weights and a big bag (in the 'boxing room'). I decided to go with that one.

But it was a long time coming, this whole 'joining a gym' thing.

Procrastination.

For one thing, I've been very lucky my entire life when it comes to 'working out.' I didn't need to, really. At least not outwardly so. I have always had the kind of metabolism or genetic make-up or whatever that insured I didn't get an unsightly premature gut or saggy 'man breasts' or any of the other countless ills that aging brings (the balding and greying thing is an entirely different story, however). And fortunately, I didn't have to work out to fend them off. But now, at 50, this is changing. My body is betraying me. After decades of abuse it has decided this is the year to pay me back. Thus, the gym decision.

At first my wife and I were discussing joining the gym with all the bells and whistles. They have a 'family plan' that we were going to subscribe to. But then I decided the other gym had all I needed and I probably wouldn't use all the bells and whistles anyway. Plus my wife has never been a gym person herself. She prefers running in the morning and doing yoga in a separate and individual class.

The other thing that came to mind is that I don't have any gym clothes. I have to get some today. You know, gym shorts, shoes, etc. I have a lot of old t-shirts so that's covered. But I don't have the other obligatory apparel.

When we visited the gym to look it over yesterday I asked the girl at the counter if someone could show me how to use some of the more 'new fangled' machinery. I'm prehistoric when it comes to being in a gym. The last time I joined one all they had were heavy rocks to carry around. She gave me an odd look and said, 'Well, sure, I guess.' I'm sure she was thinking that this gym already featured old equipment, how is it I wouldn't know how to work them? I didn't want to tell her that the last time I joined a gym people were still doing jumping jacks.

I have never met, not once in my entire life, an interesting person that works out. Oh, I've met people I consider smart and fascinating that work out now and then. But people that obsess over it? Never. Not once. They have been, to the man, pretty boring and dumb. Part of that, I'm sure, has to do with the whole narcissism thing. But I don't know. So I've been rationalizing by telling myself I'm only going to try and get rid of the gut and the upper body deterioration. Just sort of combat the aging process a little bit. Just pop in to the gym a few times a week and keep the wolves at bay.

But then I think of my lifelong history of procrastination. And I hear myself saying, 'I'll work out tomorrow.' In addition, I see myself working out like a madman for a little while and then deciding not to do it anymore. I'm childish that way. For one thing, I don't really care for pain.

So, I'm at an impasse. I have to decide whether or not to join this gym, to put some hard cash on the counter, to disrupt my lazy, life-of-the-mind existence, to get off my fifty year old ass and do something productive.

I think I'll make a decision tomorrow.

At which point I'll see you.

Tragedy and Hope

Tragedy has struck our household. The coffee pot, the actual coffee container, has sprung a leak. It won't hold coffee. The leak is near the bottom, a little below the one cup mark, so just making a cup of coffee is impossible. This is dire. Plus, we have the kind of coffee maker that does not allow foreign objects to take the place of the coffee container. I can't just stick an old Dr. Pepper bottle under there.

So it's off to get a new coffee maker today. Sooner rather than later. Everything else is on hold. Life as we know it will cease until this epic tear in the fabric of life is corrected. The earth has figuratively stopped spinning as I wait for the stores to open. My eyes have glazed like a shark's, moments away from ripping into a human leg, swimming innocently, unaware.

Fortunately, I discovered this horror as I was filling up the pot with water. At first I couldn't quite get my mind around what was happening, it was too monumental. The water spewed from a small hole near the bottom of the pot. I stared at it, frozen with shock, the meaning of it all failing to get a foothold in my conscience thought. I simply stared as the water streamed out of the hole, like a broken fire hydrant, unable to connect the dot to dot ramifications of this jagged-edge sepuku gutting my morning routine.

At times like this, the human mind ricochets around at light speed. "Houston, we have a problem," is the first thing that slammed into my brain. Second, I realized I would have no coffee this morning. A silent, Meryl Streep-esque tear silently made its way down my cheek, serpentining around the disfigurement of the muscles around my face due to the unpremeditated contortions made by my sudden and violent weeping. And then, pausing in an oasis of unexpected sanity, I contemplated the last complex-compound sentence.

Coffee in the morning has become, over the past decade or so, one of the great and holy joys in my life. Without it, the cosmic apple cart of my soul is upset. As a devout creature of habit I have come to rely on that morning cup of coffee the way a way a Republican gleefully relies on all the vengeful passages in the bible. It is something I need, damn me. Nothing else makes sense without it.

Coffee is as American as violence. It is our birthright, the latter day manna of our lives. Without it we're nothing. We're pretenders. We have no drive for greatness. All of our delusions of grandeur are whisked away and replaced with dread and pessimism. Coffee in the morning, that old devil sent, that caffiene jolt of undeserved rightousness, is the very bedrock of who we are. Nothing to look forward to, no sense of euphoria as we take that first, careful sip of steaming, black confidence. A day without coffee is like a day without resentment. It is necessary to our distorted image of superiority.

But, like a wounded Navy Seal, my mind darts and zips and staggers, hunched over, in agony, searching for a quick fix, a solution to this mind-numbing violation. Like a pedophile Christian minister, I try and find immediate justifications, a way out, a substitution, an explanation, anything that will fill this unspeakable void.

And then it came to me: Starbucks. Starbucks sells coffee. They have coffee at Starbucks. They give it to you in cardboard cups. No questions asked. No forms or background checks. Just a ration of coffee in a non-glass container. No suspicious glances, no sly comments about why you're there, no judgemental stares, slightly askance, as to why you're not making coffee in your own home. Just a quick exchange of dirty money and then, passed through the slot like a chunk of black horse, charred smack, the life-sustaining cup of java. The 'movin' kinda slow' Joe. The stuff that dreams are made of.

And they open, these Starbucks warrior angels, at some ungodly hour like three a.m. or something. They are there, first thing in the morning, the sun barely tipping the scales, ready to feed the beast, to calm the phantoms, to rectify the damage, to capture the dragons. They call themselves coffee shops but they are not. They are miracle makers, dream satisfiers, visionaries, wonder builders, hope outlets. And like the true heroes they are, it's all part of a day's work. Starbucks...the final stop before destiny.

I'm going to get some right now.

See you tomorrow.

Blackouts on the Stage Should Be Illegal

Angie and I wandered over to the The Odyssey Theatre last night to catch a new play, END DAYS, produced by my old buddy, Ron Sossi. It's a quirky little piece, written by Deborah Zoe Laufer, and it put me in mind of some of Albee's later work, skipping and darting about without any real ambition, it seems, when suddenly, near the end, it comes together in one's mind and one can see where the piece is going. The difference being Albee is a super smart playwright - Ms. Laufer, less so. Having said that, however, it's not a bad piece of work at all taken in its entirety.

I have just about had it up to my eyeballs with episodic writing for the stage. I abhor blackouts. I abhor long scene changes. I abhor seeing actors tiptoe about in plain sight, lights dimmed, acting invisible, completely out of character, doing little transitional things like setting a table or picking up trash from the last scene, and then the lights come up and the action begins again. Who started this mind-numbingly silly way to present a play? It's ludicrous.

Of course, I realize it's been around for centuries, this episodic 'time out' way of moving a play along. Some of Shakespeare's greatest soliloquies were written to hide a scenechange happening upstage. That was then, this is now. But that's not it. I've just finished two plays, both of which I truly admired the writing, take massive body blows to their integrity because of long, attention-killing scene changes.

Ultimately this has to fall on the shoulders of the director. No getting around it. I have no idea why directors don't eschew this sort of thing. Transitions are the life or death of a play, simple as that. The less of them, the better. Episodic work should have no breathing space. The transitions, regardless of how it must be done, should be seamless, almost like cross-fades, effortlessly sheparding the audience from one place to the next, almost without their knowing. Blackouts, on the other hand, should be legally outlawed from the theatre. They are a throwback to another time. They kill plays. And, generally speaking, only substandard playwrights write them. I realize all plays can't adhere to Aristotle's Unity of Time (although I wish they would...it's far and away the most difficult way to pen a script), but at the very least, get rid of the blackouts. And don't try to 'hide' transitions in 'brown outs.' It's senseless. It's the 'elephant in the living room' for live theatre. Yes, I fully understand the concept of 'suspension of disbelief' but, good Lord, what ever happened to common sense? We can see the stage! It's not as if the lights dim, the scene changes, the lights come back up and the audience gasps in awe and wonder at how it happened, how they were magically transported to another place and time. I say get rid of them all, even at the cost of sacrificing realism. And while I'm on THAT subject, there is no such thing on the stage anymore. That idea died with the Russians around 1900. It is the age of film and television, for heaven's sake, and theatre cannot now, nor ever will be able, to compete with the inherent realism in film. No one is fooled. In fact, they're offended.

So I say, no more blackouts or brownouts or blueouts or lengthy scene changes of any kind in live theatre. It's sophomoric. At the very most, under any circumstances, a cross-fade is the most a director can get away with. Why loose an entire audience for the sake of one or two massive scene changes?

Now, I, too, have reluctantly written episodic theatre pieces. With my play, PRAYING SMALL, it was unavoidable. It was the only way to tell the story I wanted to tell. But I specifically wrote the play so that all the transitions happened with a cross-fade, not a blackout. I had a terrible time of it trying to make the director of the play here in LA understand that. He wanted these massive, cumbersome, obvious, silly, long, theatre-rattling scene changes with lots of diverting music and sound effects as though the audience wouldn't notice. It was a fearsome argument trying to make him understand how self-defeating this was. Eventually, I won that argument but not without a bunch of senseless debate and yammering. One would think this stuff would be self-evident, but it is not. And I'm not sure who to blame for this silliness. Academia, I suppose. Academia could screw up a one car funeral. For whatever reason, directors are taught all across America that blackouts in the theatre are acceptable. Well, they are not. Again, they KILL a play.

Okay. Done with that. Aside from the poor directing, there were some very fine performances in this piece. Andrew Ableson, Loren Lester, Zoe Perry, Abigail Revasch and Charlie Saxton all comport themselves admirably up there on the boards. I enjoyed every single on of them at various points throughout the evening, particularly the very natural Loren Lester, who has a way of delivering a line with a very easy, unharried, energy. Much harder than it looks. That kind of work is difficult as hell. If it weren't, everyone would do it. And everyone doesn't. It's the kind of work that makes non-professional actors say to themselves, "I could do that." They can't. It's the result of years, decades of work. Kudos to Mr. Lester. Good stuff.

I must admit, this is the kind of production that could easily be elevated to the status of 'great' if only a good director would step in for a few days and eliminate all the blackout crap. But as it stands, it doesn't have a chance. Regardless how good the actors are, they are defeated at every turn by the clumsy and unnecessary scene changes. Too bad, really, because there is truly some fine work being done on that stage.

The tragic part of all this is that it is not an isolated incident. It is, unfortunately, the way of all theatre these days, it seems.

END DAYS tackles some pretty hefty ideas. Intelligent design versus logical progression. Jesus versus Stephen Hawking. Indefensible Judeo-Christianity maxims versus common sense. God versus fate. To anyone with a little education, these would seem to be foregone conclusions, a moot argument, but one only has to follow politics these days to realize they are not. We have three front-running Rebublicans who all believe the world was created six thousand years ago, and what's more, that this should be taught as fact to our children. So, as astonishing as it may be, it is not a foregone conclusion. This battle is still raging and at this point, I'm sorry and aghast to report, the outcome is still very much a mystery. And yet, Ms. Laufer has the saavy to make her imagined Jesus and Stephen Hawking characters quite flawed and silly, too. Jesus rolls his eyes a lot at the blind allegiance given to him and the Dr. Hawking character (both played by the same actor, by the way) is obssessed with capitalism, concerned with making a buck off his book, The History of Time. It works, too, dramaturgically. It keeps the play from wallowing in too much self-seriousness. And Ms. Laufer clearly has an ear for dialogue, particularly in the first act. But she reaches her catharsis about a half hour before the play ends and then tries, unsuccessfully, to stretch it out. This is one of those plays that could easily be done in about ninety minutes instead of the two hours it actually takes to unfold. The greatest mistake a playwright can make is letting the audience get ahead of the actors. That's what happens here. Her climactic second act becomes pedestrian because we've already figured out where she's going with everything.

The play was first produced in 2008, won a number of awards I've never heard of, and apparently was well received by a whole array of literary critics. I can see why that would be. I suspect this play is a lot more adventurous on the page than on the stage.

END DAYS, Odyssey Theatre, through October 16, 2011.

See you tomorrow.

The Work

Tomorrow I shoot a scene as a very loud and aggressive drill sergeant for a new television thing with Ridley Scott (he's producing, not directing). I've been a fan of Mr. Scott and his work since Alien. Or maybe since Bladerunner. Whichever came first. The director's cut of Bladerunner is a piece of genius, the studio version, not so much. In any case, I doubt he'll be on the set in his capacity as a producer, which is too bad. It's a small role, but I'm hoping it will be fun. Yesterday the costumer and I got everything worked out.

My credit card took a major beating yesterday as we had our old Saturn completely refitted. But it was necessary. It was starting to sound a lot like the truck in The Beverly Hillbillies. And after all the repair and maintenance work, we had to take it over for the mandatory, California 'smog check.' Friday we're getting the tires 'rotated.' All of this car stuff sort of depresses me. Puts me in mind of Central Missouri, where people treat their cars with the same enthusiasm the rest of the country reserves for their children.

Nonetheless, there's no getting around it, LA is a car culture and the sooner one accepts that fact, the sooner one becomes a bona fide West Coaster.

The shoot for the new Indie with the wonderful Cathy Baker is the week of September 4th. Today I've got to get that patch of dialogue under my belt. It's a fun and clever script and I'm looking forward to playing with it a bit.

Also, the up and coming director/writer Jeremy Lanni sent me his new 'thriller' and we're going to do another 'industry reading' in September. Again with Powers Boothe and my buddy, Larry Cedar, of Deadwood fame.

And this Friday I go in for yet another read for the play, Underneath the Lintel, a one-person play, being produced with the Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara. The director is being, shall we say, VERY attentive to who he eventually casts. He's already scoured every decent, 50 year old actor in LA and NYC. He keeps calling me back in, so that's a good thing, I suppose. As I said before, it's one of those gigs that definitely falls under the 'be careful what you wish for' category. So, so, SO many damn words to learn should it happen.

I've done three one-person shows over my career; Golden Eggs, Farley and Daisy and, most recently, Give 'Em Hell, Harry, about the life of Harry Truman. With the 'Harry' piece, I had about four months to learn it after which I went into rehearsal, the piece firmly under my belt already. For me, learning that many words, especially in my advance age and with my addled brain, is more daunting than ever.

So the 'Lintel' piece scares the bejesus out of me. On the other hand, a few months in Santa Barbara, one of the most beautiful spots on earth, would be really cool. Although should it happen I'm not sure I'd be of the right mind to enjoy it all. I'll be too panicky about the script.

In any event, if it happens, I'll do my best, of course, and if it doesn't, well, I'll live with that, too. I have some friends out here, film people, guys that would rather cut off their right arm before they did an actual 'play.' One said to me a while back, 'Why do you keep doing that stuff? It's a dead art. It's like cave painting.' There may be some truth to what he says. But I'm an anachronism when it comes to live theatre; I still think it's important. In LA it's tantamount to practicing voo-doo in some people's minds. I've touched on this subject many times in this blog and to be perfectly honest, I'm torn sometimes. I definitely have a problem with 'friends and family' small theatre. And, to be perfectly honest, that's what a lot of theatre in LA is, especially with the smaller theatres. It's a shame, really, but undeniable. Back in the day, during my time in New York, it was surrounded with a very noble quality. Theatre, ANY theatre, was treated with unreserved respect. Not so much here in the City of Angels, although there is some startling and exciting work being done on the small stages now and then. Mostly, however, there is not. Most actors look at theatre work on the small stages as a way to get noticed by film people. And there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, I'm just not sure it's a healthy way to approach the work.

But I've beaten that poor, dead horse quite enough over the past couple of years. I have one friend who says he only does theatre 'between real gigs.' Those are his words, 'real gigs.' It's discouraging, to say the least.

My favorite playwright, the late Lanford Wilson, has a line in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, 'Tally's Folly.' It goes like this: 'The work. The work is very much to the point.' I've taken that line to heart over the past couple of decades. Doesn't matter where it occurs...the work is still very much to the point. At least for me it is.

See you tomorrow.

Counting Coup with the Tea Party

I suspect things are going to get very ugly in the upcoming presidential election. Uglier than we've seen up to this point in our history, I think. There is a division, a pair of battle lines, the Maginot and Siegfried political trenches being drawn, that I've not seen before. Yes, there are always dirty politics at work, name-calling, sneak attacks, scrambling for the moral high ground, but nothing like this year.

As usual, the Republicans will start it because, well, they're Republicans and that's what they do. But the Democrats will very shortly be forced to wrestle in that mud, too. In years past, I've sort of enjoyed, in a 'wreck on the highway' sort of way, the coming political skirmish. This year, not so much, because I know how ugly it's going to get. Most of it will fall squarely on the shoulders of the Tea Partiers, but not all. For whatever reason, I've noticed the Democrats aren't as good at slinging shit as the Republicans. They just don't seem to have the stomach for it. For one thing, for as far back as I can remember, the Republicans just don't have many smart candidates. And I mean that literally. The guys they nominate are usually a bit challenged in the smarts department. The one exception may have been McCain, but once he became the front-runner, his campaign was pretty much hi-jacked by the GOP leadership and even though he, himself, was a fairly bright individual, his platform became dumb.

And then you have the Tea Party, fueled by the Christian Right. This is a whole new bottle of piss in the fray. These guys rely on the inexplicable party line of, "Yeah, so?" It's maddening. Not to mention an intellectual quicksand of sorts.

"There is evidence, incontrovertable, that the earth is NOT six thousand years old, but rather about five billion years old."

"Yeah, so?"

"Not taxing the very wealthy is not only counterproductive, it's inherently unfair and self-defeating."

"Yeah, so?"

"Destroying Social Security will destroy our very civilization."

"Yeah, so?"

"We must maintain separation of church and state. It is the very reason we exist as a Republic in the first place."

"Yeah, so?"

You see, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have any sort of reasonable dialogue with these people. It's like trying to talk a gangbanger out of killing you, raping your wife, and torturing your children at three in the morning on the south side of Chicago...can't be done. Civility is thrown to the wind. Reason itself is dead. These folks, these Tea Party pirates, are a very dangerous lot. Not because they're introducing anything new in the world of politics but because they are incapable of logic, of reason, of intellectual give and take and most importantly of compromise on any level. For all of America's braggadocio about doing things 'our way,' the truth is our very foundation is compromise. It's how our government works. Compromise is the bedrock of who we are.

But it's even deeper than that. The Christian Right hates those who differ from their beliefs. They hate them. Do you understand how powerful that is? They hate people that don't agree with them. It's almost impossible to get one's mind around that. In this year, 2011, we're dealing with a sizable political faction that not only refuses to bring debate to the table, they want their opponents to die. Because they hate them. It's mind-boggling. The historical parallels to 1932 Germany are so clear and recognizable as to be beyond belief. One only has to do a tiny bit of research to see this. Not even a lot of research. Just a trip to your local library and about an hour of reading. And the response to this?

"Yeah, so?"

I think this election will prove to be a savage turning point in our political process. It will be akin to a chapter in the old testament, when the Luddites have to finally take a stand against 'evil giants from the mountains.' Never before, not even in the early seventies when Vietnam hovered gargantuan over everything political, will there be such malignancy in our process. One only has to look at the group of Republicans scrambling for position; Perry, Bachman, Palin. It's truly shaping up to be a playground, gradeschool fight with the third grade bully. It's a horrible thing to say, but the Democrats have to go back to school. They have to learn to play dirty. They have to accept the idea that drawing blood is not only desirable, but practical. They have to learn to kill, not just wound.

I have read about the first white men the American Indians encountered as Manifest Destiny reared its ugly face in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in this country. The Indians would meet the interlopers, the white men, on the field of battle and attack. Only instead of killing, they would 'count coup.' That is to say, they would touch the surprised white settler or cavalry soldier on the back of the neck with a stick rather than kill him. The rules of combat would then demand that the white man excuse himself from battle for they had been touched, eliminated from the field of skirmish. Human life was too valuable to waste on actual physical conflict. It made perfect sense and the Indians had been settling their disagreements for centuries this way. Only the white man, intent upon their Manifest Destiny, didn't understand this. They shot to kill. They took the debate to a level previously unimagined. They slaughtered an entire people in their ignorance and greed.

I think this is a good metaphor for what's about to take place in this upcoming election. The Democrats have to understand that the Tea Party folks and the Christian Right are not counting coup. They're shooting to kill. And the political left has to understand this before going into battle. There will be no prisoners, no mercy and no quarter. Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and their ilk don't want to steer our nation to a new ideology, they want to destroy their desenters, eliminate debate, kill those who might engage them in civilized debate. They want to lead a political manifest destiny.

Sad as all of this is, I don't think we can avoid it. Politics will not be business as usual this time. It will be sick and ugly and stupid. And confronting stupid is far, far more dangerous than confronting a division of opinion. War, poverty, diversity, economic crisis, distrust, anger, moral outrage...these obsticles can cripple a nation, but they're as old as communication itself. But stupid? Therein lies the death of all things.

The left cannot count coup with the far right this time around. If they do, they'll be massacred. The left has to learn to fight and kill with a heretofor unimagined zealousness. They have no choice. The nation will not survive another Christian Right Chief Executive. It is that dire. We would no longer be who we were.

See you tomorrow.

The Dog Beach

Angie and I took our dogs, Franny and Zooey, to the dog beach yesterday. There's a couple around, apparently, but we took them to the one in Long Beach. Zooey, who turns 12 this year, had been to one before but Franny, who is 18 months old, never has.

The dog beach, much like dog parks, are wonderful things - unbridled, absolute and rampant joy for the dogs. The one thing that makes dogs act a little wonky at times is territorialism. They want to protect their space. You see, dogs have to have a job. They need a job. And often times their job, in their minds, is to protect the house, the land, the trailer, the shack, the yard, whatever. They truly think this is their job. It is why they get fed and are kept around. Of course, that's mostly not true, but that's what they think. For example, our dogs are under the impression that everyday around 4:00 a guy in a uniform and a pith helmut tries to break into our house. Same guy, everyday. They must keep him out. So far they've been successful. Not once has he made it past the mailbox. While they are otherwise happy, passive, loveable, kind and playful dogs, for that minute and a half or so, they gather their aggressive resources, dig deep into their genetic memories and bare their small teeth and stand immovable and determined at the front door, growling and posturing. Once the pith helmut-wearing scofflaw has retreated, they once again become the tail-wagging souls they really are. They've done their job for the day.

But at the dog beach there is no territory to defend. The dog beach doesn't belong to anyone so it's okay if other dogs and people hang out and walk around. They couldn't care less. In fact, they go out of their way to be as friendly as possible to all the other dogs and their owners. The dog beach is sort of the living embodiment of John Lennon's song, Imagine, except the lyrics apply to dogs.

Franny had never seen the ocean. He was a little bamboozled by it. Not threatened or frightened really, just wary. Zooey, having been there before, plunged right in without even a how-do-you-do. I remember the first time I saw the ocean. I was about 23 or so. As I sat and gazed over the Pacific, I remembered a line George Burns once used about it, "It's smaller than I thought it would be." That always makes me laugh.

To be honest, I was a little grouchy yesterday on the way to the dog beach. There are some professional things going on, career things, that aren't moving fast enough for me and I was having a hard time letting everything go yesterday. But the moment our dogs hit the beach, wild-eyed with joy and surprise, it all ebbed away.

Later, as Angie and I sat having lunch at a curbside restaurant, the dogs sitting at our feet, we began talking about 'what's important' in our lives. She asked me what I thought was important. I said, "this."

We've decided to make the trip to Long Beach and that stretch of doggy inhabited sand a regular thing in our schedule. Maybe twice a month or so. And I think it's worth it. Our dogs are, generally speaking, a pretty happy pair but I've never seen them quite SO happy as they were yesterday. For that alone, we'll return.

There's something terribly euphoric about watching a bunch of dogs play together. There are no agendas, no ulterior motives, no envy or mean-spiritedness, no cynicism or passive-aggression, just moment-to-moment fun. I liked that a lot. And the owners, in an unpremeditated minute of surrender, sort of fell into the same trance. At least we did. It would be nice to see that more often in life.

Today, the start of the new week, it's back to memorizing the next chunk of words for a new film I'm doing in a couple weeks and then once finished with that, laying out my 'scenes' for the new screenplay (which has me stuck at the moment) and then off to read for another possible gig. But in my mind, I'm still at the dog beach.

See you tomorrow.

THE RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

The biggest surprise that came from watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes was realizing that James Franco runs like a girl. And, oddly, it's sort of endearing. He's not bad in this film, not great, but not as bad as I've seen him be countless times before. And there are a couple of action sections in the film in which he has to run flat out. And he runs like the fat kid in 6th grade that always got picked on.

My buddy, John, and I ventured to beautiful downtown Burbank to see the matinee yesterday. Huge theatre. A handful of people. Incredible sound. Huge screen. I don't go to a lot of movies in the theater anymore, I'm showing my age here, but I prefer to wait till I can see them on cable or Netflix or what have you. I simply can't abide talking and distractions that come from seeing a film in a theater. Yesterday that was most certainly not the case, I'm delighted to say.

I think I've seen every incarnation of the Planet of the Apes franchise; The original six or seven movies, the Mark Wahlberg fiasco, even the Saturday morning cartoons of the late seventies. I was never obsessed with them like some people were, but I always liked the tight fitting timeline attached to the original films, the symmetry and backstory, that is to say. And of course, the inescapable social overtones of race relations just underneath the surface of all the earlier films.

There were several aspects of this new film I found quite appealing. I liked the way Rupert Wyatt took his time setting up the story. It's well into the film before the FX people take over. There doesn't seem to be a rush to get to the money shots. There is a sequence in 'jail' in which Caesar, the intelligent chimp, takes the time and smarts to establish himself as the Alpha Male. I liked that very much. Wyatt took a page from Speilberg's JAWS for that, and wisely so. That is to say, he doesn't 'show the monster' until about two thirds into the movie. He trusts the audience enough to allow the suspense to build betting we won't lose interest because it's not 'scary' enough early on.

At one point the film veers dangerously close to exploring the relationship between Franco and the love interest of the film, Freida Pinto. Both actors are only slightly better than cut-out pieces of wood, so the director wisely steers clear of any real interaction between them. I suspect Ms. Pinto has reached her zenith as an actress in this film.

So, thankfully, the story quickly shifts back to Caesar (Andy Serkis - also Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films) and his exploits. Serkis is quickly finding himself to be the most unsung actor since Lon Cheney.

The film is as formulaic as one might expect. Good guys, bad guys, 'all is lost' one moment, a last-minute change of fortunes, a final battle, all straight from the book 'Save the Cat,' the screenwriter's bible of penning the perfect, big-money, formula-driven Hollywood movie. That's not to say it's bad. It's just predictable.

One of the problems I had with the film (and this is quibbling, really) is the lack of really nasty-awful antagonists. There are several in the film, the worst, arguably, being Tom Felton of Harry Potter fame. He's a lower echelon bad guy, not to mention an embarrassingly bad actor, but at least his bad guy credentials are intact throughout. He's a sour puss and ends up being uncharacteristically killed by the apes for being so. 'Uncharacterisic' because the apes don't really kill that many people, they just throw them around and scream at them, mostly. The 'main' bad guy, David Oyelowo, seems more like an annoying boss than anything else. The kind of guy we've all worked for at one point or another, a tad bi-polar, some days okay and other days a real pain in the ass. But hardly the kind of guy to go down in the annals of villains in the cinema world. He's the CEO of the research tank where Caesar comes from. Even though he's kind of sassy, he hardly deserves the unreserved hatred the apes feel for him in the end. He, too, gets killed but the audience doesn't experience any great catharsis from it because he's really not all that bad. What he really deserves, like most bosses in the world, is a good ass whuppin'. And then there's Brian Cox, who it seems is in about every third movie put out these days. He's also sort of slippery as a bad guy. Not really horrible, but just a bit greedy and uncaring. Plus he's far and away the best actor in the film (not counting John Lithgow, who does a Flowers for Algernon kinda thing in the film to show his range).

So, anyway, Ceaser (who eventually TALKS, which, I have to say, caught me off guard) gets all the apes from the animal control center (jail) plus the local zoo apes (prison) and smacks around the San Francisco police department on the Golden Gate Bridge. This is where the FX people really earn their money (and incidentally, the final credits list about 1,000 people involved with realizing the apes...I think it may be the most people I've ever seen listed on a film in the credits). They beat up the whole police force and smack around their horses, too, for good measure.

For awhile I kind of got the feeling the movie was going to be sort of a cross between Marley and Me and THEM! But thankfully, the director veers away from the whole 'mistreatment of cuddly animals' theme and instead goes for kick-ass anarchy, instead.

My friend, John, said upon leaving the theater, "Well, I wasn't too impressed. I knew how it was going to end." And I guess there's something to be said for that statement, but the cool part about this particular installment in the 'Apes' franchise is HOW the story is told rather than the story itself. And of course the film is left wide open for a sequel.

So I liked this thing. Not loved, but liked it. The apes are really ape-like, which, come to think of it, might not be a bad promotional sentence for the film: "THE RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES...the apes are really ape-like!"

See you tomorrow.

Reading

Some time ago, Angie and I discoved a little thrift store over in Burbank that sells brand new and nearly brand new books for a buck. Hard covers. Yesterday, for example, I picked up a few new Bob Woodward books, a Steven Ambrose and a David McCullough. I've gotten huge tomes there on Orson Welles, Brando, Olivier and Woody Allen. New hardcover fiction from Robert Parker and Nelson DeMille (two of my guilty reading pleasures). New coffee table books, normally priced around 50 to 70 bucks, brand spanking new, for...yep, a buck. I love this place.

Through the years books have saved my life. During times of great emotional discomfort I've always been able to turn to books. I remember a particularly stressful break-up years ago in New York...I stayed in my apartment for weeks reading ALL of the Tales of the City series by Armisted Maupin. When I emerged, weeks later, I was fine. Books. Once again, they healed and comforted.

I was lucky. Early in my life my mom taught me the value of reading. She never forced it on me, she simply read to me. An early example of this was the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck. Nightly she would open the book where we'd left off and I was transported to China in the 19th century. Another was A Wrinkle in Time. And also nearly all of the Jules Verne books (Twenty Thousand Leagues..., Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Secret Island). It was a natural progression for me to start reading by myself as I got older. And unlike a lot of kids, I never saw it as something being thrust upon me, but rather a privilege, a gift.

I remember finishing Jack London's A Call of the Wild when I was about twelve or so, too excited to sleep because of the glorious story I'd just been a part of. The same was true of Kipling's Jungle Books. I can remember finishing Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove and the following morning, picking up the book again and starting over, something I've done with no other book. I recall being lost in another world for weeks at a time as I took my first foray through Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkein. I relish the time I spent with Blackthorne and Toranada in Clavell's Shogun. I very clearly remember the fear as I turned the pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I can still see myself putting the book down, pages splayed, and pushing my head in my pillow to muffle the sound because I was laughing so hard at John Kennedy O'Toole's Confederacy of Dunces. I remember weeping alone in my room as I read the closing pages to the adolescent novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die. And later, I can picture myself in confusion and awe as I finished Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, wondering how he'd managed to peak into my own life without knowing me. I can still feel the rush of adventure as I curled up nightly with the rabbits in Watership Down, cheering them on, and later, being unable to shake off the deep sadness I felt when Lenny is killed in Of Mice and Men. And as I got older still, the beauty and grace I finally grasped when I finally put down Wolfe's Of Time and the River, finally realizing how fotunate I was to live in the rural south during my formative years.

Reading saved my life. The joy of reading saved my life.

When I was teaching full time a question I often heard was 'what is the most important thing a young actor can do for himself?' My answer was always the same: read. Read everything. Read all the time. I don't care what it is; comic books, cereal boxes, newspapers, doesn't matter...read. Just read.

I guess I'm showing my age, but I am simply appalled at the lack of knowledge I see in young artists today. No idea who Herman Melville is, or Hemingway or Faulkner. No idea why they're important or, for that matter, what they had to say and why they said it.

I can remember being in 11th and 12th grade and hanging out in my drama teacher's classroom after school everyday for a couple of hours while he did paperwork, graded assignments, whatever. His room was filled with plays, crowded together in bookshelves that covered all the walls. It was my first inkling of how woefully ignorant I was when it came to theatre. I would pester him, demand answers, question him relentlessly..."Death of a Salesman...' What's that about?" "This Streetcar Named Desire play... That's a weird title. What's that about?" And on and on.

I made it my mission to learn what every play in that room was about. And a few years later I discovered Shakespeare. And began devouring that, too. And that's a whole other story for some other blog, discovering Shakespeare and leaping on the bandwagon of his genius.

The point is, not only does literature - reading - have the capacity to save our lives...it changes who we are. It shapes us and eventually plays a massive role in who we become. It certainly did me.

Every time Angie and I trot over to this thrift store, the one with all of the dollar books, I get excited just walking into the place. Where will this trip take me? What new journey am I about to embark upon? What book am I going to find that illuminates a dark corner I never even knew existed? And finally, what am I about to discover about myself?

See you tomorrow.

Road Rage

You know, I never really understood 'Road Rage' until I moved to Los Angeles. It always seemed to me a very indulgent sort of reaction. I mean, you're sitting down, there is music, or maybe a talk show, playing on the radio. You're connected to people via your phone, hell, even the internet is available as you sit comfortably in your air-conditioned, plush seat, waiting for the traffic to clear or whatever. It's southern California, so the weather is usually very nice. Yes, sometimes people drive a bit foolishly and maybe you're cut off once or twice a month. But it's all part and parcel of the hazards of driving in the twenty first century.

Well, none of that matters or is true.

Having lived fifteen years in NYC and ten years in Chicago before coming here, I never really experienced traffic like what I've seen here. The simple, inescapable fact is this: there are too many cars here. In New York I would occasionally become irritated in the back of a cab because I needed to be somewhere at a certain time and Manhattan can get very backed up, particularly around five and six o'clock in the afternoon. And midtown can be a real headache once the theatre district lets out. But otherwise, nothing to really get too exasperated about.

In Chicago, my biggest peeve was the irregular bus schedules. I didn't, or rarely, anyway, drive much in Chicago, and found myself taking the bus fairly often. Unlike LA, it's quite socially acceptable to take the bus in Chicago. The problem is Chicago busses run on some alternate universe schedule, coming when they feel like it, and are always, ALWAYS, late just when you need them the most. I have been known to spew expletives at ne'er-do-well bus drivers, which is pretty much all of them, in Chicago. But I was never really surprised because Chicago is the most corrupt, mismanaged city in the world. Chicago spends all of its time trying to convince people who don't actually live in Chicago how great it is. It isn't.

But here in LA, it's a different ballgame altogether. Last week, Angie and I drove down to San Diego for the opening gala at The Old Globe Theatre. It was a Saturday afternoon, around 1:00, generally speaking a fairly good time to travel in LA, and we immediately ran into bumper to bumper traffic on the 101 and it stayed that way FOR THE ENTIRE TRIP. Now, normally, San Diego is about a two hour trip from LA. We did it in four and half hours. By the time we got there I was shaking with rage. Who were these people? Why were they all driving at the same time on Saturday? Why was there never more than one person in the car? There was no accident on the freeway that we could see, just a gillion people out driving on the highway with the sole intent of making my life miserable. It's as though they had planned it, called each other the day before in a massive conspiracy. You see, these are the nonsensical things that go through the mind after sitting in traffic, not moving more than a few inches, for hours at a time.

And another thing that happens is a complete lack of empathy for those who HAVE had an accident on the freeway. After being backed up in traffic for what seems like weeks, by the time you get to the actual accident that caused the back up, you just look over at the poor saps sitting by the side of the road, emergency blinkers on, chatting with some other schumck that back ended you, and you think to yourself, 'How could you be so STUPID to have an accident HERE?! What the *%#! were you THINKING?!'

Some road rage incidents are actually treated as landmarks of a sort. We were driving over in Burbank the other day when Angie said, "This is where Jack Nicholson got out of his car and beat somebody's car with a golf club." I slowed down and looked at the intersection with new respect, thinking Jack Nicholson was the greatest human being since Ghandi.

In Los Angeles, people get out of their cars all the time and have fist fights. Often, one will get out and the other will lock all the doors. Usually, I suspect, because that person was being an idiot and doesn't want to get beat up because he KNOWS he was being an idiot.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that. I think there ought to be exceptions in the laws for such behavior. You get out of your car and slap some 72 year old Asian woman silly for cutting you off, halting traffic, making an unauthorized left turn in front of you, slowing down to read a sign, turning on a blinker and then never actually turning, driving in two lanes at the same time thus not letting people pass her, stop in the middle of the street waiting for a possible parking place (in which she'd have to parallel park, something she couldn't do in her wildest dreams in the first place), drive while looking around like a monkey on crack wondering where the hell she is, or any other driving no-no's. So when you get the chance, you simply put your car in park, get out, stroll up to her car, which she has stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason whatsoever, and give her a good wallop upside the back of the head. Later, in front of the judge, you explain what happened. He says, "Well, I don't see the problem here. That old Asian woman had it coming, obviously."

Of course it doesn't happen that way. Poor Jack Nicholson got into all sorts of trouble beating that car with his golf club. All I can say is, if I had been the judge I'd have given him a heart-felt handshake and possibly a coupon for Bob's Big Boy.

Yesterday I had to drive over to Hollywood for some stupid commercial audition at four o'clock. Hollywood is no place to be in a car at four o'clock. By the time I'd gotten to the studio, having screamed myself hoarse at the thousands of nitwits jamming traffic, I barely had a voice left for the audition. And what voice I DID have left was tight and angry after what I'd just gone through. So I ended up talking about shampoo much the same way Jesse Ventura might. I was the angriest spokesperson in history. I looked straight into the camera and bellowed, red-faced and choking, about how soft and light your hair feels after using it.

Here's the solution: cops should pull people over at random. Just hit the lights and siren and pull them over. Go up to the car and ask them where they're going. If it's a stupid answer, something like, I'm driving over to Hollywood during rush hour to pick up a big bag of M and M's, just shoot them. Really. Oh, don't KILL them, just wing them. A shot to the arm or right into the thigh. A new LA ordinance. Or...if it's a dumb reason, but not a super dumb reason to be on the road, something like, 'I'm going to dinner at a restaurant and I'm trying to get there for the Early Bird Special,' taze them. A quick jolt. Just enough to make them realize they're an idiot.

Also, the moment anyone turns 65, take their driver's license. Just up and yank it away. No sir, it's the bus for you. Sorry. Call it the 'Soylent Green' law.

And Armenians in luxury cars. Have a special license for them. One that only allows them to drive between midnight and six a.m.

And mothers with babies in the back seat. No driving for them. Anytime, anywhere. Just stay at home. Sorry, but it's for everyone's good. That damned baby doesn't need to be anywhere.

And no motorcycles. In LA it's legal for a motorcycle driver to zip in and out of traffic, around stopped vehicles, on the white line, the highway shoulder, whatever. And they all grin smugly while doing so. Well, that's just detrimental for the general public's emotional well-being. So, no more motorcycles at all. You wanna drive your motorcycle? Go to Utah.

And no foreigners. They rarely know where they're going anyway, so it won't be a big deal for them to stay home.

I think this is a good start. As time passes, other rules should be considered, too, of course. Eventually, only people who have lived in LA at least three years, are between 30 and 50 years of age, speak only English, are male, have at least three other people in the car with them and no babies, and are on the road for an emergency, life and death reason, will be able to drive here. I see nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Anyone who doesn't like it can move to Chicago and stand on a streetcorner for two or three hours waiting for a bus.

See you tomorrow.

A New Film

A few weeks ago my agent sent me a script for a new independent feature, sort of a cerebral 'American Pie,' if that makes any sense. A funny, witty, very clever script with the wonderful actress, Cathy Baker, attached. The role was the kind of part that Dabney Coleman would have done if it were twenty years ago. So I toddled over to Studio City and did the read and, in fact, Ms. Baker was in the room along with the producers and the director.

I've always admired Cathy Baker's work as an actress, particularly in 'Picket Fences' and a film she did with Michael Keaton called 'Clean and Sober.'

In any event, I read for them (a long, surreal monologue my character delivers toward the end of the film) and that was that. I knew I'd pretty much nailed it (sometimes actors can sense this...sometimes not), but I didn't hear anything immediately so, as often happens, I simply put it out of my mind and moved on to the next project. Sometimes, for various reasons, the producers will see a number of actors read for a role even though the role is already cast. Well, this is a very funny, very odd role, so I naturally assumed it was probably already cast.

Yesterday afternoon my agents called and told me they'd offered the role.

We shoot in September. It's what's called a 'low budget SAG' contract, so I'm certainly not going to get rich doing it, but nonetheless, it looks to be a lot of fun, at the very least. And it's a really quirky, eccentric piece of writing, intelligent and memorable stuff, so I suspect I'll have a good time doing it. Think the aforementioned Dabney Coleman in an old movie called 'Amos and Andrew.' It's that kind of role.

I suppose it's a busy time for film auditions (two more today), because they seem to be pouring in. A little while back I read for the new 'Batman' movie (didn't land it) and shortly thereafter things picked up quite a bit in the film world. That's the funny thing about this business, it can be dead for weeks, even months, at a time, and then all of a sudden I find myself bopping all over LA reading scripts. Angie says that's just the way it is. The work here seems to be quite 'seasonal.'

Also had an inordinately long callback for the play in Santa Barbara, 'Underneath the Lintel'...a one-person show. I suspect I'll hear something about that today, too. And to top things off, I was called in for 'Daddy Warbucks' in a production of that old warhorse, ANNIE. It's being done down south of LA somewhere. Nice, little Equity contract...but we'll see.

Any spare time I can find is spent re-writing the new screenplay (the producer is in Germany at the moment, talking to additonal investors) and waiting to hear about my new play going into workshop at The Old Globe. We haven't quite nailed down the exact dates for that, but it's starting to look like October. Once that opens here in LA, we're hoping to transfer it to NYC, possibly Manhattan Theatre Club. But, again, it's early and anything could happen.

So, things are busy and satisfying and I couldn't be happier about it. A far cry from a year ago this time when I had just finished a production of my own play, Praying Small, battered and bruised, discouraged and cynical.

Last night, in a celebratory mood, Angie and I sought out a new diner very near our home and were pleasantly surprised at how good it was. We're diner people, really, coming from the wilds of Missouri, so we're always delighted to find a new 'Joe's Place.' And once home I watched the ALI-FOREMAN fight in Zaire in 1974 that I'd recently saved from our new U-verse.

I've seen the fight about 50 times and still find it exciting. Angie...um...less so.

So it's off to do some more play-acting today. Unlike the rest of the country, suffering through blistering and unrelenting heat the past few weeks, LA has been quite temporate. Before dinner at the diner (nothin' could be finer') we took a very long hike on the paths around Griffith Park and The Equestrian Center with Franny and Zooey; Franny zipping around at full speed, exploring every little nook and dale, while Zooey trotted along stalwart beside us, holding up like a champ despite her advanced age (she's 13...that's 91 in people years - she pauses at every tree shadow and takes a short rest).

Life is good. The sun is shining. The world is in constant turmoil but here in our little corner, like Frodo's Shire, it's lovely and hopeful and green and peaceful and tranquil.

See you tomorrow.

Writing Screenplays.

I don't pretend to really know anything about writing screenplays other than the fact that I know what I like when I watch a movie. On the other hand, that's how I felt many years ago when I first started writing stage plays.

I've taken no 'screenwriting classes' (although it probably wouldn't hurt). I've had no formal 'training' when it comes to this sort of thing. I don't really even know a lot of the language and abbreviations and insider code words for the writing of a screenplay. I've not sat at the feet of screenwriting masters. I've not poured over Billy Wilder films or Sergio Eisnenstein or Hitchcock (although I did take a class on Hitchcock in undergrad school which I found utterly fascinating), studying the beats and arcs with a magnifying glass. I haven't done any of that. Well, not really done it, I mean.

What I have done, however, is watch a lot of film. I've seen a lot of movies. And I've studied, passively, perhaps, just how and why they're good. Or, to be more accurate, why I thought they were good. One man's trash is another man's treasure when it comes to cinema.

I've made it a point to watch the old masterpieces...the films that turned out great despite the fact that there was no blueprint for making them.

There are films I return to, films I find as interesting and exciting today as when I first ran across them thirty years ago on a Saturday afternoon in the basement of my house in small-town Missouri on what was called 'Bowling for Dollars.' Films like On The Waterfront, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Dr. Stangelove, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001, It Happened One Night, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Olivier's Hamlet, The Apartment, Annie Hall, From Here to Eternity, Cool Hand Luke, In the Heat of the Night, Streetcar Named Desire, Sparticus, Singin' in the Rain, North by Northwest, Stagecoach, and so many more. I've seen them over and over. I've tucked away in my mind the moments of brilliance in them, the unexpected plot turns, the odd camera shot, the crystal clear dialogue. That has been my training, my film school.

And, like all of us, I've seen a hundred bad films for every great film. I've slogged through the failures to find the extraordinary.

And now I find myself in the odd position of writing a screenplay with a multi-million dollar budget, a screenplay that's already been 'greenlighted,' a film that's simply waiting to be made, waiting until my untrained fingers can put it on paper. I find myself in the unsolicited position of writing pages and pages everyday, zipping them off to a far-away producer, waiting for notes and thoughts and suggestions, and then diving back in, shaping, rewriting, changing, re-inventing. It's quite heady, really. And all of this completely unpremeditated. It worked like this: the producer saw a play I had written a year or so ago and decided then and there he would like me to write a screenplay for him. Some fourteen months later, out of the blue, he contacted and commissioned me. And suddenly I found myself leaping over hundreds, thousands perhaps, of other aspiring screenwriters and writing with an actual production date set in stone. Good Heavens.

Another thing I've done, which, oddly, has proven to be almost more of a hindrance than anything, is gathered up dozens of 'how to' books on screenwriting. I've always contended, my entire adult life, that the greatest education in the world is not at any school, regardless of its prestige, but in the nearest public library. So off I trundled to the local library, picking out volumes of screenwriting tomes.

There is one in particular I read (it came highly recommended) called 'Save the Cat.' When I first started reading it I was absolutely enthralled. I couldn't put it down. Here was a 'how to' book that quite literally, page by page, gave the reader a tried and true 'formula' for writing a successful screenplay. It came with dozens and dozens of examples of successful screenplays that used the exact 'formula' for movies that this book encouraged. Actually, 'encouraged' is not the right word...demanded. The book, quite a cheeky book, remarkably, claims this is the ONLY way to write a screenplay. It tells you exactly what needs to be on page 25, page 55, page 70, page 110 and finally on the end page of 120. It has pithy names for different stages of the screenplay ('Save the Cat' refers to the early scene in which the protagonist of the story does something unexpectedly 'nice' or 'noble' in order to subliminally get the audience to root for him or her). And to be sure, there are lots of things to learn from this book. The problem is, the more I read, the more I began to wonder where the passion for writing was, the inspiration, the creativity, the originality, the sheer REASON for writing. In the final analysis, this is a 'how to' book about making money, not writing. And there's certainly nothing wrong with making money. But I began to wonder if that was the reason to write a screenplay. That is to say, should that be the professed GOAL at the outset. Yes, it would be nice to write a script, have it filmed by wonderful actors and a brilliant director and a professional crew and then find an audience that is willing to shell out twelve bucks to sit in a dark room and watch it, but is that all there is (to borrow a phrase from Peggy Lee)? Is that the light at the end of the tunnel? Is that what the writer, at the expense of all else, should strive for?

Well, in a way, yes. But to write with that in mind is lunacy, I think. And I found the more I read 'Save the Cat' the angrier I got with it. To defend why the book works, the writer continually refers back to other screenplays that have followed his advice and he then tells the reader how much money each script was sold for and how much money it made at the box office. Again, nothing wrong with that. IF that is the ultimate goal. I read this book very, very carefully, to be sure. And yes, the top two moneymakers of all time, AVATAR and TITANIC, follow this formula for writing screenplays like clockwork. It's as if the scripts for these two (and many others, by the way) blockbusters actually came as a direct result of reading this book. And let's face it, it's hard to argue with success.

But finally, I decided my cinematic education should come from whence it originally came...the films themselves. So instead of peering endlessly at screenwriting 'how to' books, I decided to simply go to the source and read the screenplays themselves. So I went back to the greatest university on the planet, my local public library, and picked up All Quiet on the Western Front, Meet John Doe, Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sounder, On Golden Pond, Arthur (the first one, the brilliant one, not the icky new one with that Russell Brand guy that always makes me want to take a shower and get clean after I watch him be profoundly unfunny), The Candidate and The Magnificent Ambersons and All About Eve. And finally, quite possibly my favorite screenplay ever, Magnolia.

And when I had finished, I began writing MY screenplay.

This time next year we'll see how that worked out. I have a long and uninterrupted history of not playing by the rules, so I may just get my ass handed to me in a handbag. It wouldn't be the first time.

See you tomorrow.

The Formula

I watched a bad movie last night and I was completely enthralled. The film is called 'The Formula' and it's from 1980 and it stars George C. Scott, Marlon Brando and John Gielgud. It's about NAZI's and oil and synthetic fuel and, oh, I don't know, it really doesn't matter because it has George C. Scott, Marlon Brando and John Gielgud. In ONE movie.

The movie itself is pretty much a mess; hard to follow, gaping plot holes, scooby-doo reveals, etc., just too much information in the final analysis. But there's Scott, in a rare leading man performance, holding it all together with a forceful, very typical George C. performance.

Early on Scott, playing a weary police detective, meets Brando, a billionaire oil tycoon, in a scene in which he explains the murders, clues, suspects, whatever to him, trying to get a handle on who he is and what he's dealing with. And immediately it's acting magic. Watching Brando LISTEN is more exciting than watching most actors ACT. We tend to forget that the reason Brando was generally considered to be our finest American actor was not just because of his slumbering volatility and his realistic, heretofor unseen naturalistic screen behavior, but also because he did EVERYTHING better than other actors including the simple act of listening. He's genuinely engaged in these scenes, carefully reacting, however subtly, to every tiny utterance of Scott. He finds unexpected interpretations of even the most mundane dialogue. Scott, who was never in the same league as Brando in terms of unpredictability, had one of the most forceful, juggernaut-type personalities ever put on screen (see PATTON). He's a force of nature with anything he does. (I had the great privilege of seeing him onstage many years ago along with John Cullum in a not-so-well-written two character play called The Boys of Autumn or The Boys of Winter or something like that. My buddy, Greg Orosz and I saw it together and afterwards I remember we talked about Scott's overwhelming PRESENCE onstage. Poor John Cullum, a very fine actor in his own right, never stood a chance.) Watching Scott with Brando is like watching Nolan Ryan pitch to Babe Ruth. And an interesting side note - they are the only two actors to ever turn down an Oscar; Scott because he didn't believe in 'competition in the arts' and Brando because, well, something to do with Hollywood shooting too many Indians.

A little ways into the film Scott has a scene with John Gielgud. For the uninitiated, Gielgud was one of the 'Big Three,' (along with Olivier and Richardson) one of the three greatest Shakesperean actors of the twentieth century on the British stage - or ANY stage, for that matter. He and Brando had actually worked together in the fifties in the film JULIUS CAESAR. Gielgud was so impressed with the young Brando that he offered to direct him onstage in HAMLET shortly after the film was made. Of course, by then, Brando was done with the stage and turned him down and a few years later Gielgud directed Richard Burton in the role. But it's fun to watch Sir John in this film (a year later he would win an Oscar for ARTHUR). He's a technical wizard of an actor, making the simplest things like coughing or sipping tea or walking with a limp utterly fascinating. He has way of speeding through his dialogue, very British, and then suddenly and unexpectedly BARKING a line out catching the audience off guard. He and Scott clearly respect each other and they play the scene like Borg and McEnroe in a long volley leaving poor Wendy Hiller, the third actor in the scene, lagging far behind. The interesting thing about watching Gielgud is noticing his complete lack of respect for 'the pause.' He doesn't like them. And when he finally uses one, it's frought with power. Watching him in this scene is like auditing a short Master's Acting Class. One can almost see Scott surpressing a smile at his work.

The film culminates in a scene in which Brando and Scott confront one another over the McGuffin of the movie, the hidden formula for the synthetic fuel. Of course, by this time, no one gives a hoot about the formula but we keep watching simply because these three titans of the craft keep throwing a dazzling array of curve balls, sliders, fastballs, knuckleballs, change-ups...well, you get the point.

Most likely, for anyone not fascinated with great acting, this film is devastatingly dull. But for those of us interested in watching three of the best actors of the past 100 years, it's tremendously compelling.

I've read that Scott and Brando got along famously and played endless games of chess during the filming...Scott constantly accusing Brando of cheating. Which he probably did. The same can be said of their onscreen work together...Brando keeps cheating. And winning. Because Brando, like no other actor, understood there are no rules in acting, there is only what works and what doesn't work, what is fascinating and what is not fascinating. It's one thing to watch him outshine a pedestrian actor in a scene, but to watch him take on Scott, one of the very best, and still come out on top is something else entirely. It reminded me of a letter the actor, Bruce Dern, wrote to Jack Nicholson after he watched a movie called 'Missouri Breaks' with Brando and Nicholson in the leads - and I'm quoting, "Just finished seeing Missouri Breaks. I felt like I was watching the best actor in the world against the second best actor in the world. Sorry, Jack, but you got your ass kicked."

My final thought on the film is this: I was curious to see how these great actors handled substandard writing. The dialogue is so bad in this film, in parts, as to be laughable. But after seeing it and thinking back I realized the writing seemed bad only when OTHER actors in the movie were saying it. When Scott, Brando and Gielgud took hold of it, it seemed like Pinter, Williams, Miller and Albee all in one script. Made me realize that acting nearly always trumps writing. It's the old adage...A good actor can sometimes save a bad play but a good play can NEVER save a bad actor. These three guys could have been reading the dictionary and I suspect it would have been interesting to watch.

In other news, entirely unrelated, I had a curious audition yesterday...got a call back for next Monday. I found out late yesterday afternoon that the role (a large one, to say the least) is down to two actors. Myself and a very well-known film guy. A little premature to comment on it right now, but I'll write about it next Tuesday...regardless which way it falls.

See you tomorrow.

Uverse - It's What's For Dinner.

In what can only be described as a hostile takeover we got a new cable/internet service called 'Uverse' a few days ago, which is done entirely with something called 'fiber optics.' We were not given a choice. Our old, apparently outdated Direct TV was 'a thing of the past,' we were told. Everyone in our neighborhood was being forced at gunpoint to get this new 'Uverse.' Cablemen in brown shirts, with Sam Brown leather holsters wandered our streets, pistol whipping kids and old ladies, forcing us to worship a cable god we didn't believe in, jamming this new technology down our peasant throats. Oh, we protested all right, we demanded our civil liberties, our basic human rights, we begged for for cable decency, but all for nought; we were told to stop whining, young parents slapped around on the sidewalk, fiber optic specialists wearing wire-rimmed, circular eye glasses and jack boots forced their way into our lives and installed this new twenty-first century voodoo without so much as a How Do You Do.

And, you know, I kind of like it.

In a pathetic attempt to apologize for their technological bullying, we got HBO and Cinamax for the rest of our natural lives, or six months, whichever comes first. We got a guaranteed rebate of hundreds of dollars, hard cash money. Of course, we have to wait seventeen years for that. And, like all new religions, we got the assurances of the high priests, in this case the cable guys, that our god was better than the old god, that this new god had more spells and potions than the old god, and that the new god cared for us more than the old god.

One of the cool things with this new set up is a channel called 'classic boxing.' It plays, nearly non-stop, great fights from the past including dozens of old ALI fights. I've been mesmerized with it, recording everything I can find. I'm glued to it in much the same way my wife is glued to OWN, Oprah's new network. So while she sobs in one room I can relive my youth in another.

Plus I like the 'On Demand' feature. I can watch any number of old films at the drop of a hat. Of coure, I could do this with Netflix, too, but with that I always had to wait a couple of days. With the new god, Uverse, I can do it immediately. The selections are limited and there are lots of old chestnuts in there that I probably wouldn't watch even if I were sloppy drunk at 3am on a Tuesday morning with nothing else but infomercials on, but nonetheless it feels powerful to have that option. I feel blessed by the new god to know I can, at any time during the day or night, watch 'Oh, God!,' (John Denver was robbed, ROBBED, I tell you, of his Oscar) or 'The Coneheads,' or 'Star Trek - the Motion Picture,' which still holds the title for most antiquated movie name ever thought of. 'Motion Picture?' They might as well have called it, 'Star Trek - the Organist Will Come To Your Own Home To Play The Incidental Music.'

And as for this 'fiber optics' thing...I have no idea what that means. Were the old 'optics' big, Anaconda-like tentacles that draped and swirled around your house? Were the 'optics' just too big before? Yes. Now they're mere 'fibers,' evidently. Can't even see them. Tiny, little optics no bigger than a world-killing new virus.

When we had it installed a few days ago I thought the cable guy might be moving in with us. He was here for hours. Days. Weeks. At one point he crawled under our house and made a fort with old sheets and window fans. We left for a weekend of R and R at Big Bear, in the mountains, and came back and he was still under the house, talking to other cable guys on his walkie-talkie..."Where are you now?" "In the front yard. You?" "I'm in the kitchen now." (Pause.) "Where are you now?" Etc.

Before he left he gave us a set of encyclopedias, which I thought was nice, until I realized they were the set up manuals for the new cable. Then he warned us not to read them while operating heavy machinery, gave us one last slap across the face to let us know who was boss, and left.

But it's all over now, the new god is firmly in place, the old god but a memory. Even as I write this I have the option of watching 'Son of Flubber' at the flick of a remote if I wanted. Just the empowering knowledge that, should I so desire, I could spend the day watching 'Carwash" makes me aware of just how powerful this new god is. Right this very second 'Silver Streak' is blaring in the background.

One of the more fascinating options on our new remote, which looks a lot like a ray gun, is the 'seven-second skip-back' button. I can push it whenever I want and re-watch the last seven seconds of whatever is on the TV. Which came in handy last night as I was watching 'Basic Instinct.'

See you tomorrow.