The Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 2

JUST A NOTE before we devolve back into the exciting adventure we began last week, which, by the way, is a true story according to the Lifetime Network Movie definition of ‘true story’.  There are some excellent, timely, incredibly interesting blogs out this week which put my little narrative to shame, so do read them, and please forgive me this temporary foray into pure entertainment.  I’ll return to more weighty filmic matters again soon.  In the meantime, I invite you to return to…

 

LOCATIONS OF THE DAMNED: Featuring the Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 2

(Yes, I swear this is a true story!)

That dark windblown night in the old, deserted insane asylum, four young women painted side by side, or sometimes above one above the other, for there were two ladders among the standby painter’s substantial catalogue of equipment.  Along with the standby painter, who if memory serves, was called DuBois, there were three other women, who answered to the names Kippy, Neaninte, and Sol, respectively aged 23, 28 and a claim of 32 (iffy—probably more like 37).  DuBois herself was ageless; that is, she wasn’t quite sure whether she was in her early twenties, or perhaps sliding down the last slopes of her eighties, or somewhere in between.

Not that the uncertainty mattered to DuBois.  She had begun to suspect age didn’t mean all that much, especially if you hadn’t done nearly as much with your life as you had planned to do, or even faithfully tried to do, before the weight and ruin of the city, which some called “Los Angeles”, and others called “The Southland”, and still others—most others, actually—called “LA”, sucked the soul out of you and you ended up painting in the dark, having squandered your youth on dreams of humanity someday talking to dolphins and from them learning how to not wage war.  No, while all these dreams passed, it was impossible to measure: age could be either an eternity or nothing at all.

One of the reasons the production company gave for the women not needing a night security guard was the fact that the government-owned complex they were working in had its own security force, and there was already a guard assigned to their complex of buildings.  Unfortunately, due to budget cuts which had led to the end of golf carts for performing rounds, the guard was not able to leave his office, which was a full quarter mile away from the old, deserted insane asylum, at the other end of the old, deserted animal testing laboratories, across from the drainage culvert that emptied into the third hole’s lush, green water trap inside the most exclusive golf course outside of Malibu that lay just on the other side of the twelve foot tall electrified razor wire fence that surrounded the  rambling, mostly deserted government complex.

The single security guard had a phone in his office that was to be used for emergencies, but the painters themselves didn’t have a phone between them, this being the era before cell phones were used by any persons outside the CIA or FBI upper echelons. Even if the women had been given the security guard’s office number (which they hadn’t because they had been told by the film’s UPM to get straight to work and not to wander through the rest of the government complex), the only phone was inside the locked ward of the still-occupied insane asylum across the street from the old, deserted insane asylum they were working in.

You didn’t want to go in the occupied insane asylum for any reason, because that’s where the most troubled and troubling insane lived, and due to budget cuts, there was only one guard on duty for the entire three floors of insane people.  And although the guard was so introverted as to be invisible, the insane people living there felt free to scream out all kinds of suggestions and anatomical observations from the windows of their wards every time they saw a visitor to the complex pull into the parking lot across the street from them.  No, visitors, such as the painters were, did not want to even acknowledge the verbal outpouring from that building, much less enter its doors.

This particular government-owned complex had once housed many, many insane people. Now it had about half the number of insane people it had originally housed.  This will figure prominently in the events that follow.

However, at the time the movie was going to be shot, the old, deserted insane asylum had been emptied of its occupants for almost ten years.  During that decade, lots of film companies had rented the place, or part of the place for their shoots, and all five floors, plus the basement of the old, deserted insane asylum had been used as background for some of the worst-written and exploitative films of all time.  The current film was certainly no exception, and it was just another part of the insane asylum’s long, less-than-illustrious history.

That’s why it wasn’t surprising on one’s travels through the building to find messages scrawled in what appeared to be fresh blood all over the white tile walls of one of the shower areas (left behind from that movie about those women in prison that got attacked by zombies), or rooms painted a solid flat black with fluorescent skulls stenciled in a long line at eye level (left behind from that movie about the punk rock band that got attacked by zombies), or even a small cell-like room with a jar of Wesson oil next to a bloody mattress and what looked like tic-tac-toe games painstakingly etched into every square foot of the moldering green plaster walls.  Actually it was all a bit surprising, really, until one got used to it.

What the women didn’t know was that the strange, cell-like room was not a set from a movie, but was, in reality, a real somebody’s real room.  And even though this person, an erstwhile inmate of the asylum, had been turned out to roam free on the streets some ten years earlier, he still lived there, in the asylum, in secret, in his old room.

But soon his secret would be out.

 

To Be Continued…

 

LOCATIONS OF THE DAMNED: Featuring the Old, Deserted Insane Asylum!

Locations of the Damned

Featuring The Old, Deserted Insane Asylum!

 

It was a dark night in a dark city, a city that some called “The City of Angels”, and others called “Lotus Land”, and still others—most others, actually—called “LA”.  It was the kind of night when the oleanders’ deadly blossoms perfume the air, the Santa Ana winds spread their poison and inspire madness, and standby painters look at their paint brushes and dream of finding another occupation, one not bound by such namby-pamby, Nancy-pants niceties as “the legal code”.

In that city, on the West side, inside a long-deserted insane asylum built on land that was worth billions to real estate speculators if they could only get their hands on it, which they couldn’t, because it belonged to the US government, the standby painter worked with her all-female crew on magically transforming the insane asylum’s second floor into another insane asylum’s second floor.

Right now, at 10:45 pm, the young women were adding grime-colored paint to large pieces of something called sandblast paper that had been base-coated with metallic latex paint, either silver or copper, and pre-cut to fit over the asylum’s many hall doors.  The sandblast paper was very thick, and it had a peel-off backing that exposed the adhesive side of the sandblast paper, allowing one to put the paper up over any surface.  Using a simple wallpaper hanging-like process, the painters were transforming simple beige doors into scary-looking apparently solid metal doors corroded and fouled with years of blood and toil.

As they fouled the doors’ metallic surfaces, they used a glue gun and hot glue to attach large fiberglass rivets painted silver to the sandblast papered doors, adding to the dungeonesque feel of the movie world’s asylum.  Lost in their process of ruination, the painters were working their way slowly down the second floor hall in the dingy little pool of their single light, leaving behind them a growing finished section of hallway that was dark, filthy, and ominous.

The unfinished unreal insane asylum would be a nightmarish place, the kind of place where a devil-child would be born (according to the script of the film she was working on) who would someday murder enough people to spawn his own life history told in a half-dozen movies and even a short-lived (or was it murdered??) television series.

The movies and the TV show weren’t part of the standby painter’s film script, of course, but that script had been created because of the movies that came before it, and now we were entering the movie world that existed before the earlier movies were made. It was the coming of age story of the devil-child, made up after he’d grown up, killed lots of people and gotten killed himself (twice).  We were telling the story of the creation of a story—the equivalent of the snake devouring itself, in imagery and usefulness, both.  I mean, it makes an awesome tattoo, but what’s the point?  What does the snake get out of the process?

These were some of the thoughts haunting the standby painter as she worked and wondered about all kinds of horrible things in the dark darkness of the night.  She wondered why the producers were so cheap they wouldn’t give her crew a decent work light.  She fretted over their miserliness at not even providing them with a security guard for the night work her paint crew had to do to keep up with last-minute changes in the shooting schedule.

In truth, the standby painter was on the brink of a whirling pit of madness, and it would have been so easy to fall in (so easy!), but she knew she couldn’t go there.  That would be self-indulgent, and she had no time for such frivolity.  Madness would have to wait.

However, as it turned out, madness wouldn’t have to wait.  It would soon find her.  It would soon find them all.

 

To Be Continued…

Dear Clint Eastwood

Dear Clint Eastwood

Hi Mister! Don’t sweat the Golden Globes thing.  It’s not the Oscars, you know?

You’ll be happy (I hope!) to hear that my blog is going well.  It seems I’ve finally got another reader or two (my friends and family) and they have mentioned that although they like the writing, the writing goes on for too long at one sitting, and I should shorten my entries.  I will bow to their wisdom.

As I’m sure you know, Clint, I need the time to do other things, like look for a film project, then work on that film project, at which time I won’t have any time, and I will resent having to drag myself out of bed after only three hours’ sleep on my one day off to write something of enduring value or at least passing interest.

In fact, I am a teensy bit resentful right now, if you want to know the truth, Clint.  Other than the friends and family I bullied into a critique over the phone or by email, nobody since the first blog entry has commented on my work (I remain grateful to Liesl and Mark).

Not even you, Clint Eastwood, and I specifically asked you for feedback.  But it’s all good—you’ve been busy, I know.  Still, I did want to ask you, if it comes down to a vote, are you going to vote for a strike, Clint?  Is that looming SAG strike why we can’t get a single show up here in the Northwest that hasn’t folded a few weeks in?  Is that why everybody I know is poised on the brink of losing their healthcare, their house, and their sanity?  Some of my union brothers and sisters are reduced to working in retail, Clint.  Retail.  None of us punks are feeling lucky these days, Clint.

I resent the Money People, too.  The Big Wheels of the AMPTP, who have apparently offered up a contract where they refuse to share the wealth of the New Media with the people who star in it.  What do you think, Clint?  I mean, you’re sort of a player in both camps, right?  Are they being fair? Of course I don’t know the details; I’m just a standby painter, a tiny cog in the gigantic machinery of the Business with no great labor relations vision to impart.  But what I do know, deep inside my LA-gone-pine-tree-country-bumpkin heart is that I saw a bumper sticker the other day that told the Truth.  It is the unavoidable, outrageous, permanent-beyond-any-contract Truth.  Here is what it said:

“Everybody does better when everybody does better.”

Hmmm… I hope somebody doesn’t come after me, now that I’ve used that quote, looking for royalties due them according to their contract because they thought up the bumper sticker.  Right now I don’t have two cents to spare, because, probably like the bumper sticker writer, I am not doing better, and haven’t been doing better for a long time.

Even so, I am still going to charge over $10.00 to my close to the limit credit card to see Gran Torino next weekend, Clint.  Because not only are you handsome, interesting, and aging well, but you are actually a wonderfully intelligent director with the ability to create images and stories that genuinely affect me, long after the screen goes dark, and I’m back home, sending off the next resume to the next production company that will offer me the absolute minimum union wage for my job, no matter how many years of experience I have, or how well I do my work.

I don’t blame the production office management—they have the bottom line to consider.  However, I can’t help noticing that I am making the same wage today that I made on non-union movies in the nineties.  The difference is that now I’m getting health care benefits, overtime, and I occasionally receive enough contributions into my 401K to cover the finance charges for handling my 401K.  Unfortunately now, after the stock market collapse, I may end up owing more money to the financial institution that handles my 401K than I actually have in my 401K.  Doesn’t that seem wrong to you, Clint?  As wrong as making the same wage for ten years?

Unions, Guilds, the Money People and the Big Wheels… Why do I get the feeling that we on the labor side of the equation have been running, as someone I know once suggested, “a race to the bottom?”

I guess we have all forgotten that everybody does better when everybody does better.

Oh Clint, I’m sorry to bend your ear for this long.  I know that things have to be shorter these days—we’re all short on everything, from time to cash to those pesky mortgage payments.  What I really wanted to tell you was this great story about when I worked on a movie in LA at an old deserted insane asylum, late at night, with an all-girl crew, and we found out that we were not alone—that one of the old inmates had returned that night…

Oops!  I’m out of time, Clint.   I’ll get back to this when I’ve got a few minutes next week.  Or you can give me a call.  Hey, maybe you need a union standby painter on your next show?  You know I work cheap.  Of course, these days, of those who are still working, who doesn’t?

Landscape in Film, Part 2 - Meaning Out of the Wilderness in the Land of Twilight: No Country for Old Paint

Disclaimer - Hey, what happened to my regular, happy fun ball episodic narration-type blog? Blame seasonal affective disorder, the blare and hoopla of the holidays, and ass-biting cold weather, but I done got deep, sincere, and philosophical for this two part blog.  Don’t worry—I’ll be back to what passes for normal next week.

Evergreen Twilight - Landscape in Film

Part 2: Meaning Out of the Wilderness in the Land of Twilight: No Country for Old Paint

 

When you grow up in Los Angeles, La La Land can mean many things, but to me, because it was the actual landscape of the television shows and movies I saw every night, it became a mythical place, where all sorts of things had happened, in different times and worlds, but still in my own backyard, or at least a short drive away.  Spending my formative years in a place like LA, where the movie and television business is everywhere, certainly primed me for interpreting the world through the images that film and TV produced.

But also, twice-yearly visits to Disneyland were the high points of my earliest childhood memories, and there was a time when I believed that the jungle in the jungle boat cruise ride was a real jungle, and that the caves on Disneyland’s “Tom Sawyer’s Island” were the real thing, with real bottomless pits and miles of undiscovered tunnels and caverns just beyond the ‘No Trespassing’ signs inside Injun Joes lair.

I took the Frontierland cruise on the sternwheeler Mark Twain and looked out at evergreen forests where bears roared and stags stood proudly at attention, then boarded a Disney train that wound through sculptured badlands bursting with multicolored geysers and hot springs.  From the time I could talk, these “real” landscapes held the potential for magical knowledge, and entry into a magical world.

Eventually (it might have been just before I started high school) I figured out that none of those Disney landscapes were real.  But it was too late to undo the mental standard that all landscapes were then measured against.  Years on, at some level during my first trips to Maui or Alaska or the Grand Canyon, a small part of my brain judges each of these places to be “as magical as Disneyland”.

Because of the place where I grew up, then, perhaps my attraction to and relationship with landscape is a strange one.  And when landscape is paired with film, the Disneyland part of my brain communicates with the artist and scientist-analyst parts of my brain, and some perception emerges that infuses my being with powerful emotions—awe, joy, longing.

Many people much smarter than me claim that we are all in search of the sacred.  And in the absence of the sacred, we seek it in the world around us.  Perhaps we even create it, if we can.  I live in a world where film and television is my job, and my source of many experiences.  I watch films and television, both because it has to do with my work, and because it informs my sense of meaning, as if everything could be understood if it were told in story.  So when I feel the sense of the sacred in a film or a television show, I look closely at it to  discover why it affects me that way.

Bonanza isn’t a spiritual television series.  Not much about it inspires a connection to the divine or even deep contemplation, although a friend of mine was inspired to keep a tally on how many people the Cartwright’s had shot and killed over the years (at last count over seventy people—but they either needed killing, or it was a tragic accident).  Yet in spite of the television show’s shallowness,  I see the landscape where the Cartwright’s rode, and I feel the power of that landscape as a spiritual force.  Is it just the beauty of it?

Possibly the beauty of the great outdoors is key.  Now when I watch reruns of the show, I finally understand why some of the scenes in every show have always seemed stupid, boring, or fake to me.  Almost without exception, those scenes were shot inside the stage, where the landscape was flat and artificial, obviously just a backdrop.  Also everybody had five shadows and there was no sky, which has always so disturbed my sense of aesthetics that I never could watch soap operas, because everything visually looked like it happened indoors, inside a garage.

Another television series, Kung Fu, did claim, at some level other than weekly ass-kicking, to be spiritual.  And to me, Kung Fu was spiritually inspiring.  I learned about Taoism from that show, which led to serious study of philosophy,  martial arts, and meditation.  But it wasn’t just the quotes from Lao Tzu’s ancient texts that made me feel spiritually uplifted.  I didn’t realize until long after the show was in reruns that it was the landscape of his travels as much as Kwai Chang Caine’s words, actions, or character interactions that caused a magical fire of feeling that I can only describe as spiritual longing.  That knowledge came to me years later during a shoot in the canyons northeast of LA proper when I realized that this longing was assuaged by returning to the landscapes where Kwai Chang Caine “walked the earth”.

I was working on a ranch (the Disney ranch, actually and ironically) filming a movie of the week, when I was asked to spray green lawn dye on some image-ruining, dead, beige reeds surrounding a small pond.  While painting the offending vegetation I suddenly recognized the place.  Though it had been filmed more than a decade earlier, young Kung Fu protagonist Kwai Chang Caine had taken lessons from his Master Po at this very spot.

Every day at that location I had felt drawn to get out and explore the ranch land during lunch, going running while most of the crew sat down to eat and take a load off.  As I ran along the little paths through the meadows and canyons, I had felt a relief inside, a feeling of ‘here is my home, and it is good’.  I also felt a certain familiar feeling of impending spiritual awakening, or a sense of longing for… I don’t know… “Tao” was the word that came to best express the inexpressible, and I had learned about the Tao from Kung Fu.  I wanted to walk the earth here, just like Caine.

When Disneyland is part of your childhood initiation into “reality”, I suppose the search for the sacred can get pretty messed up.  Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  That old childhood feeling that the landscape could bring me closer to some spiritual epiphany has in the years since served to bring on some real epiphanies and a particular understanding of some films that perhaps a lot of viewers don’t recognize or verbalize.

One of my favorite films is Out of Africa, which most people characterize as a romance, or an epic romance, or a beautifully photographed romance.  Which it is, of course.  But that isn’t why I watch that film several times a year.  Meryl Streep’s character, who is based on the real writer Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen), felt such love for her African landscape that she wrote about it over and over again throughout her life.  All her life she longed to return to Africa, but never had the means to do so.  Her relationship to the land and the landscape itself gives me a sense of the sacred, as does her writing.

One speech Blixen gives in the film is taken directly from her book, and just like visiting the Ponderosa ranch, it causes something suspiciously like tears to form in my eyes.

 

“If I know a song of Africa…Of the Giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?  Would the air of the plain quiver with a color that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?”

 

Another favorite landscape movie is Paris, Texas, a story that begins when drifter Harry Dean Stanton shows up after eight years of being gone, lost to his family.  His brother, played by Dean Stockwell, drives out to a small border town to pick him up, and discovers that Stanton can’t or won’t speak a word.  At one point Stanton stops and stares off into the distance, mesmerized.  When Stockwell follows his gaze, he sees only railroad tracks disappearing into the desert and beyond that, the empty sky.  “What’s out there?” he demands.  “There’s nothing out there!”

The camera looks again at that desert landscape, the endless, brilliant distance and the gigantic sky.  Everything is out there.

When I went to work in film, landscape became a canvas for art, as well as my home.  One of my regrets about being a painter in the Business is that nature seldom needs me (unless we add dressing to it or mess it up), whereas sets always do.  Still, there are always things for me to do outdoors, as there were in Twilight, which seemed to be shooting outdoors nearly every day after we left the dance studio set.

I still try to slip away during lunch, though, when I’m working in the woods or anywhere with a small bit of wilderness to roam in.  Out there I observe countless works of perfect art—a piece of granite with flakes of mica shimmering in it, a delicate pink cast to the stone, yet no particular spot on it is pink… how would I do that in paint?  And then I’m off imagining what materials and methods I would use to try to imitate its perfection.  I see the luminescent thalo and chartreuse greens in a certain kind of moss that grows on cedar and stone…  Where can I get the pigments to do that on command?

If I’m intently observing my landscape, whether walking through it or watching it on the big screen, at the sight of the great outdoors of this world, the familiar feeling steals over me and I feel an epiphany coming on.  Maybe just a small one, like realizing that in the right light, young cottonwood leaves actually sparkle when the wind blows through the trees.  Or perhaps I feel some deeper connection take hold.  And I think, all that TV, and all those movies helped me find a way to connect to whatever is out there.

I’m not the only person strange enough to see something of haunting importance in the most pop exercises of pop culture.  For however banal it might seem to some in the audience, others will find a portal to something bigger than themselves, a feeling of inspiration.  Possibly, today I’m inspired to be less environmentally asinine because of Kwai Chang Caine’s mythical, mystical travel itinerary, or even because of Ben Cartwright’s fictional life on the Ponderosa ranch (where he exploited more than his share of natural resources, I now know).  For every television show and movie I remembered as a fictional escape, their screen adventures held at least one truth—the landscape they moved in.

Even in a movie as fantastical as Pulp Fiction, I find landscape still shining through as inspiration.  After all, as Samuel Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield reveals at the climax of the film, he has only one great wish: “…to be like Kwai Chang Caine and walk the earth,” for the rest of his life.