Indiana Jones and the Clones

Today, let’s time travel to the days of yore and bad filmmaking at its best.  Here are the last emailed questions from my curious and mysterious friend concerning the incredible (as in ridiculously unbelievable) film, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold:

Renee, … you said the QUATERMAIN LA shooting was about “the grand finale in the gold mine.” …that is very interesting for me, because there is no such thing as a gold mine grand finale in the finished movie! …BUT… there are definitely scenes in the theatrical trailer that take place in the gold mine set(s) that did not make the final cut…there was some elaborate fight sequence between Richard and Sharon and some bad guys, with Richard using a bullwhip ala Indiana Jones…You can see glimpses from that sequence in the trailer here: http://www.commeaucinema.com/bandes-annonces=6247.html…Someone once suggested to me that maybe all these scenes were deleted for fear of a lawsuit from George Lucas or Paramount… was it ever a concern when you worked on QUATERMAIN? I mean, trying to avoid “Indiana Jones” similarities? When you said you worked on the gold mine set with the molten god pit, I’m a little bit confused. In the movie, I can see two separate sets:  one is the gold mine set itself (A), with some aerial tram/cable car system and another one is the big hall of the temple (B) right above the mine, with some giant circular trap door that opens and people falls into a smaller pit of molten gold, which is surrounded by some platform were golden statues are exposed (C) (which, in the story, are made from the people that fell into the molten gold).Did you work on set A or B+C…or both? Here is one of the only two scenes in the movie where set A is seen in the final cut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tkX_9N1nkE Do you remember what was occurring in the gold mine scenes that you worked on? Was the tram/cable car system used?…because, other than one establishing shot, the YouTube clip from above is the ONLY scene from the finished movie where we can see it working/operating!!! Was Quatermain maybe supposed to free some slaves from the mine at some point? Because, once again, this part was not used in the movie.  Speaking of deleted scene[s], I am also very interested in the bedroom set you built “for a love scene between Sharon and Richard.”… Cassandra Peterson allegedly filmed some seduction scenes with Richard Chamberlain (that, again, were not used), so maybe they also took place in that bedroom set of yours? Ever heard of such scenes?
I definitely remember the “gold ingots” that you sculpted. As a matter of fact, someone is still selling some of those on eBay! http://cgi.ebay.com/Allan-Quatermain-The-Lost-City-Of-Gold-Gold-bar_W0QQitemZ120000058115QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0

And now, my answers!

First, I’d like to say (in a voice dripping with sarcasm), “Thanks, Netflix, for ruining my experience of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  You sent me a DVD that failed at exactly the final two sections of the movie that mattered to me: the gold mine and the molten gold pit action.  Now I have to make do with incomplete information for my Very Important Professional Blog.  Maybe you should have checked the DVD out before you sent it, because someone apparently lit it on fire and left a spectacular melted gash.”  However, despite the failure of the DVD, I think I can safely answer the emailed questions.

Hi There, You! I didn’t know that the only set I worked on, which would be your “Set A”, the goldmine, wouldn’t be used in any but two scenes of the resulting movie.  Not that it would have made any difference in how hard and how long we worked on it.  At one point I had the sculpting crew split into two shifts, and we went almost 24 hours a day, first because of the gold ingots, and then for the big push to carve out the goldmine after the set was spray-foamed.

Yes, we had trams, cables, whip-lashings, stunts galore, slaves all over the place, lots and lots of action.  The specifics I can’t recall, but yes, there was a definite Indiana Jones vibe and it was purposely created.  Nobody ever seemed worried about copyright infringement on Indie’s moves, whip-mastery and style of dress.  We shot all of the action with trams fully knowing who and what it resembled, and Cannon, I’m sure, hoped to profit by the resemblance.

The fact that none of this stuff showed up in the film may speak to the possibilities that the lawyers for Lucas, Spielberg, et al finally caught wind of the show’s similarities to the Indiana Jones franchise, but truly, I don’t know if that mattered so awfully much.  Spielberg and Lucas have freely admitted to taking their inspiration from earlier films back in the day of the Saturday matinee serials, so why should it matter that Cannon did the same with Lucas and Spielberg’s earlier film?

Of course, being just a painter I can only speculate, or possibly make something up.  But I’ll just leave it all as theory.  I think the lawyers on both sides probably had a hand in keeping most of the goldmine scenes out of the final cut.  Which is sad, because who knows, maybe with those scenes left in, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold would have garnered a snootful of Oscars!

Hmmm… I’m sorry, I’m hallucinating.  I’ve been watching the Oscars as I write this, and I think they’ve intruded into my train of thought.  I just saw most of Lost City, and nothing about it screamed “Oscar.”

Sets B and C were filmed in Africa, as you guessed, and Cassandra Peterson never made it on to our set, which was our loss because as you may or may not realize, she is most famous for her character Elvira Mistress of the Dark, who, for pure campiness, should get some kind of award, even if by being a television personality, she isn’t eligible to take home the Golden Boy.

The bedroom scene was between Richard and Sharon, then, without Cassandra, and the room was very like the one where we see Richard’s friend meet his demise, although his scene was filmed in Africa.  I don’t remember if our bedroom was supposed to be a match for the house they were staying in just before all the adventuring started, but I assume so, since it had French doors and mosquito netting.  The scene was at least partially nude, I believe, because nobody on the crew was allowed inside, and Sharon’s husband at the time, one of the producers, sat nervously in a director’s chair in front of the stage door, guarding against intruders, appearing very uncomfortable, and frequently returning to the bedroom set to make sure everything was hunky dory.

As to why they didn’t include that scene, your guess is as good as mine.  I would think they might have wanted to spice things up.  Also, at the time, even though Sharon Stone was unknown, Richard Chamberlain was considered very hot, and he hadn’t yet come out as being gay (although we all knew and kept it a secret, as it had to be kept, sadly, at that time).

Allan Quatermain did, indeed, free the slaves who were forced to work in the mine under threat of being thrown into the molten gold.  I saw the clip you linked to on YouTube, and although I was there during most of the filming, I didn’t see the actual dunking of any slaves, but a few unlucky souls did get thrown in as part of the action. The slaves were from central casting, and I recall noticing that a few of them were a bit paunchy for being starving, overworked miners.  I think you can see a couple of them standing next to the big doorway out of the mine if you check my website portfolio at www.reneeprince.net.  Click on the Portfolio button in the box labeled “Reel Life”.

I remember toiling away in my little corner painting some ingots and seeing a parade of slaves going by me on the way to their doom, when one of them called me by name.  “Don’t you remember me?” he asked, “I was the guy that got killed by Martians last year!”  He did look familiar, even though he was only wearing a loincloth.  But I have a terrible memory for names, and to be frank, a lot of people were killed by Martians the year before.  After all, the movie was called Invaders from Mars.

I hope to get an unmelted DVD of Lost City in the next few weeks, to see the other scene featuring the gold mine, but on the part of the DVD that worked, I did notice the river rafting trip through tunnels that you mentioned before as possibly being part of the re-used set from Journey to the Center of the Earth.  That was definitely not filmed in the Journey tunnels in Long Beach, California.  They were made of plaster and not capable of being flooded with water.  I think, though, that you might want to see the story of the making of Journey for some further clarification on the chronology of that film and the real connection between it and Lost City. Here is that link: Moria - The science fiction, horror and fantasy movie review site - Journey to the Center of the Earth (1988) .  That is another film that I’ve never watched.  I’ll have to add that DVD to my Netflix queue and hope nobody has tried to set it on fire…

I also saw the “giant worms” that were supposedly re-used from Journey.  When you said “giant”, I was thinking, well, GIANT.  I didn’t realize the “giant worms” would be stuffed foam things less than a meter long.  I was laughing so hard I missed what happened to the worms.  Did they just throw the things overboard?  I’ll have to (force myself to) re-watch that scene on the next DVD.

And as for the gold ingots—I did follow your link to EBay and oh yeah, that’s them.  It would be fascinating to follow their path from an ‘80’s sound stage in California to a strange little online store in 2009 Florida.  Sometimes, lost cities of gold and center of the earth notwithstanding, the strangest stories are the true ones.

A Blind Date with Bruce Willis at the Center of the Earth

A Blind Date with Bruce Willis at the Center of the Earth

NOTE:  My curious friend from last week has emailed me with some more questions about Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, and an obscure film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth (a strange, hybrid Cannon production made in the late ‘80’s).  So, we will return later to the standby painter Dubois and her minions solving the mystery at the old, deserted insane asylum.  For now, let us travel back to wild and woolly times at the old, not deserted but definitely insane movie studio lot in Culver City, California.

First, our emailed questions:

Renee…Here are some follow up questions for you: ..You said the year of release of QUATERMAIN in the USA was 1986. …According to the IMDB, the movie was released in the USA on May 16, 1987 which concurs with various press articles I have that state the originally “planned” release date (May 86) was postponed several times… Also, you said sets from QUATERMAIN were re-used for Rusty’s JOURNEY. Are you absolutely sure about that chronology? Because I always thought it was the other way around (JOURNEY’s sets being re-used for QUATERMAIN). That’s what I read in some French magazine back in 1987. From what I know, the Zimbabwe shooting of QUATERMAIN took place during the second part of 1985 (right after the shooting of the first movie, KING SOLOMON’S MINES), from June to ??…So, would you say the LA shooting of QUATERMAIN took place around September/October 1985? …problem is: the French article that mentions Newt Arnold filming some QUATERMAIN scenes in LA clearly states that those reshoots took place “one year after principal photography had ended” (!), which would be September/October 1986. It also states that sets from JOURNEY were re-used. From what I know, principal photography on Rusty’s movie began in June 1986, and lasted maybe two or three months… so I guess around September or October 1986, left-over sets from JOURNEY would have been available for QUATERMAIN’s reshoots…Then you have the mystery (at least, for me) of Newt Arnold directing, as you said, 1st unit stuff on QUATERMAIN. If the reshoots/pick ups/additional scenes took place in Sept/Oct 1985, why wasn’t the original director (Gary Nelson) in charge? And why wasn’t the same DP and production designer used? …maybe there was 2 LA shooting “sessions”? The first, in Sept/Oct ‘85, to shoot the gold mine scenes (that you worked on), then another one, one year later, to shoot “additional scenes” (that you did not work on?)… According to the French article, creature effects (including giant earthworms and bats) from JOURNEY’s were also re-used during the QUATERMAIN “cave” reshoots scenes. 

So, to set the record straight, as you worked on both films yourself, could you please confirm… that the QUATERMAIN shooting in LA that you worked on took place *BEFORE* the JOURNEY shooting that you worked on?

And here are my EXCITING ANSWERS with TRUE STORIES to support them!

Oh darn, oh heck, oh my.  Your questions may have forced me to actually watch Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  It’s only available on Netflix, so I’m waiting on our postal system at the moment.  When I finally watch Lost City in its entirety I will answer the rest of your questions that I have not included in this blog.

Your confusion about the relative dates and usage of the sets for Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold and Journey to the Center of the Earth is understandable.  It’s confusing to me, and I was there.  Let’s start with the things I do know, and how I know them.

You are indeed right about the US release date according to Imdb; it is 1987.  Regarding the length of time between filming in Africa and in the US: could there have been two sets of reshoots?  Possibly, but I only worked on the goldmine set, and the bedroom for the love scene between Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone (more about that in my next blog).

As to the chronology of the sets built and filmed: I am sure that the Lost City gold mine set was built and used before director Rusty Lemorande’s part of the filming of Journey to the Center of the Earth.  How can I be so sure?  Because one of my crew members on Lost City had gone to high school with John Landis, the director of a movie with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short called Three Amigos!  Mr. Landis happened to be filming a musical number for Amigos! on the stage next to ours during the building of the set for Lost City, and my friend and I were invited by Mr. Landis to sit in on one of the takes of the musical number during our lunch hour.  That was a fantastic and unforgettable lunch, so it’s marked in my brain.  In fact, if you so desire, go check out the song and dance, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mw9F5zawRQ .  Three Amgios! shows a release date of December 12^th , 1986 on Imdb.  That’s about right for shooting on the lot at Culver Studios in the late part of 1985.

Later, when I was on the lot working on Journey to the Center of the Earth, a similarly unforgettable incident took place which pairs working on the Journey set with the filming of the movie Blind Date, starring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger.  I was the lead sculptor on Lost City, but had become a standby painter for Journey.  I know Journey filmed very soon after Lost City, because I still had not used my paint gun since someone had borrowed it and then “cleaned it” on Lost City.  As a result, when I was asked by the production designer to spray a section of the tunnels black when the crew was off the set during lunch hour, I plugged the gun into the air hose, squeezed the trigger and a quart of black latex paint sprayed out of the back of the gun into my face and hair.  The painter who had borrowed my gun had put it back together without any gaskets.  The gun was unusable.  This was one of my first days on the job for Rusty, and only my third film.  I was in tears when I told the designer I had to find another gun from another painter somewhere on one of the other stages.  After wiping my eyes so I could see, I started down the main drag of the studio complex in search of a gun.

Unfortunately, everyone seemed to be at lunch in the commissary, and the lot appeared deserted.  Except for one guy walking toward me with a wardrobe person in tow.  It was Bruce Willis.  He stopped me and said, “Don’t tell me, you’re a painter, right?”  I told him yes, that I was a sorry mess, and that I needed a paint gun—fast.  He pointed me to the stage next to his, where he said there might be someone painting, then told me, “ And don’t worry about being a mess, honey.  You look just fine to me.”  It went from the worst day of my life to the absolute best day of my life, just like that (imagine me snapping my fingers).

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I came back to the bemused production designer still covered in black paint, still without a working paint gun, but glowing with good will and wearing a big, dopey smile, determined to paint the tunnel section out by hand.  I never explained what had brightened my mood.  The next day I was heading down the main drag during lunch again, when Bruce Willis strolled past on the far side of the street, now flanked by his entourage.  He saw me and stopped to call out, “Hey, you ever find that gun you were looking for?”

Blind Date shows a release date of March 27, 1987.  So, the release dates of the two movies filming during each of my jobs support the sequence of: Lost City first, then Journey.  I also remember that we were only on the stage at Culver Studios for Journey a short time.  Directly afterwards we moved from there to Long Beach where we would be filming from then on, until Rusty’s part of the show shut down.  Also supporting the dates I’ve outlined is the fact that Rusty had already directed Captain Eo, which was released in1986.  Word was, his writing and producing Captain Eo was his entry into the job as director on Journey, and during our shoot he was still in contact with Michael Jackson, who visited the set on the Culver Studios lot one afternoon where, afraid to make eye contact and wearing a surgical mask, he watched us curiously as we went about repainting the old Lost City tunnels.  This I remember because that day, I, personally, began to wonder if Michael Jackson might not be a little odd.

You might be right about a second reshoot of Lost City.  The Lost Reshoot, if you will.  It could be possible.  After Rusty’s filming was stopped, the film faded into limbo.  I never even knew what had happened to it, other than hearing rumors that Rusty was trying to put it together himself in his garage.  I think that was an exaggeration, but whatever happened next, another director was eventually attached to the film and he rewrote everything (Rusty says nothing of his script was used, and only a few minutes of his footage made it into the finished film).  Meanwhile, the tunnels sat empty down in Long Beach, and if there had been another reshoot of Lost City, it may very well have been done there.  But nobody mentioned it to me.

I think that our reshoot, though, even being so close in time to the African filming, would not have necessarily had the same director in place when it came here.  Les Dilley, our production designer, was hired because the crew working on the African shoot had wrapped already.  Many times Cannon shoots would go far over time (and budget) on shoots, sometimes losing their crew to other, prior commitment jobs when they went over.  There were always re-writes, along with creative changes (and often resulting infighting) from the production side of the equation on every Cannon show, it seemed.  It could be, also, that the shooting in LA was the result of additional pages added to “fix” something that Cannon thought the original script lacked, even though the shooting was supposed to have been completed in its entirety in Africa.

So, it wouldn’t surprise me if the director or any of the other crew stepped off to do another project for one or more of the reasons mentioned above.  Now, I may remember the director as being Newt Arnold, and be wrong.  Maybe he was only the first AD, but I seem to remember he was in charge.  However, I was new to the business, as I’ve said, and maybe I didn’t get the hierarchy correctly at the time.  Or my brain cells have begun to misfire after all these years and I have forgotten all about meeting Gary Nelson.  In that case, I’m sorry for forgetting about you, Mr. Nelson.

You have several other interesting questions, and this blog is already longer than expected, so I’ll address those in the next entry.  I also want to send a long-belated shout out to Rusty Lemorande, because almost a year after filming ended on his version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I got a call from someone to confirm my mailing address, and a few days later received a beautiful leather and cloth jacket embroidered with the production’s title and my name from Rusty.  Thanks, Rusty.  I still wear it.

Thanks for the Memories

Hi everybody!  I am going to keep you in suspense as to the ending of my multi-part super-scary mostly-true story about the old, deserted insane asylum for another week.  Why?  Because this week I received an interesting request for information about an old movie I worked on and I would like to share the answers with you.  Here are the questions:

 Renee, …could you possibly tell me on which ALLAN QUATERMAIN sets you worked…? And was it in LA or Africa? I know that the movie was first filmed for the most part in Zimbabwe, but I assume you worked on the later scenes shot in LA, right? Maybe the underground gold mine set? Also, I heard about some reshoots/additional scenes done in LA by another director (Newt Arnold) than the original director (Gary Nelson)? Do you know anything about that? According to some source, parts of another Cannon production (Rusty Lemorande’s JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, which you also worked on) sets were recycled/re-used during some of those reshoots! (Cave sets, I assume?)…

And the answers are:

Thank you for your interest in the 1986 (that’s the year of release here in the US of A) film version of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  It was, of course, based on the classic novel of the same name by the famous writer H R Haggard, and it did star Richard Chamberlain and a then-unknown Sharon Stone.  It was one of those movies produced by Cannon in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s that were turned out in a hurry, and made to make money, fast.  For example, one of the executives from Cannon who was supervising a picture I worked on (which involved Martians who were living on Earth in a small town’s sandpit) was constantly annoyed at our DP’s painstaking care in lighting for a high production value.  Several times the exec would be pacing the set and could be heard muttering, “Hurry up already!  We’re not here to win any awards!”

And this was, in fact, a fair depiction of Cannon’s moviemaking philosophy at the time.  Critics almost always panned their releases; sometimes I think they did so unfairly—they heard “Cannon” and went for the throat.  However, there were certainly some questionable results on the Cannon roster.

They signed on big name stars—that was where their biggest money was invested; their crews were almost always non-union.  They figured that people would be so crazy to see, say, Sylvester Stallone, that they would pay good money to see him in a movie (I am not making this up) as a trucker who travels the country winning arm-wrestling contests.  The resulting film was as great a vehicle for Mr. Stallone as you might expect.

Cannon cranked out movie after movie with name stars and fantastic premises, often derivatives of tried and true adventure formulas or books.  And it is true that they would reuse their sets, especially if they were big builds which they could re-dress, re-plaster and re-paint to become something else.  So, to be fair, I guess you could say that Cannon set an early example for recycling materials.

They also tended to hire the same people from show to show and that, combined with the multi-tasking sets, was how I came to be standby painter for, first, the movie about Martians living in tunnels under a sand pit, which was filmed at an old airplane hangar in Long Beach, then eventually returned to the same tunnels and repainted them for Rusty Lemorande’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.  I will always be grateful to Cannon, myself, for keeping me working constantly at the beginning of my career and giving me a chance to hone my skills.

The old airplane hangar was Rusty’s second location with tunnels during Journey to the Center of the Earth. The first location with tunnels for Journey was the gold mine set left over from Allan Quatermain and the City of Gold, just as you suspected.

Which brings us back to Allan in the City.  By the time I got on to the show, it had finished filming in Africa, and was back in the US to shoot the grand finale in the gold mine.  We built the gold mine set first for Allan Quatermain, and afterwards we reused it for Rusty’s show.  I worked on the gold mine set and we also built a bedroom, for a private (closed set) love scene between Sharon and Richard.  Both sets were built on a large stage near Los Angeles, Culver City to be specific, in the old Culver Studios, which before that were the studios where they filmed Gone with the Wind, among many other Great Films.

At the time we were working on Alan Quatermain, there were different shows filming in all the other stages on the lot, and it was a very exciting place.  Plus, the lot wouldn’t usually allow outside catering trucks, but instead had one cafeteria for all the many productions going on at the same time, which made it possible to stand in line next to Steve Martin or Bruce Willis or Richard Chamberlain and, among other things, see exactly what they were ordering for lunch that day.  I’d say that was my favorite lot to work on in Los Angeles, with its history and bustling excitement.  They even had a few ghosts in residence there, with tragic show business stories behind each one.

For Allan Quatermain I was in charge of sculpting and making molds from our sculptures for the carvings and bas relief statuary framing the temple platform on the edge of the pit of molten gold.  We also sculpted the huge double doors that open into the mine tunnels.  My crew also carved the tunnels to look less like the spray foam that they were made of, and more like worked rock.  This is really very hard to do, and to this day in any movie or television show, I can spot spray-foamed “rock” caves and tunnels instantly, no matter how much they’re carved, coated or gussied up.

It was a dirty, hot, dusty job to carve out the tunnels and I shudder to think about the toxins we must have been exposed to, even with our respirators and protective gear.  Luckily, Les Dilley, the production designer for this part of the film, insisted on sculpting all the artwork in clay and plaster rather than carving green foam, which was used more often at the time.  Otherwise, we would have had that nasty stuff floating around as well.

The molten “gold” in the big pit inside the mine was some kind of oil (vegetable, maybe?) mixed with color and metallic powder, but I wasn’t a part of that concoction, so I don’t know much more about it.  However, whatever it was, it ended up leaking through part of the set eventually, which was a nightmare for the prop department, who had set up right under the leak.  Most of us on the crew really, really wondered about that awful stuff, which got all over everything…

I also sculpted and then had my crew produce hundreds of “gold ingots” out of plaster from fiberglass molds.  They’re the Egyptian-looking oblong gold blocks imprinted with a lion’s head on either end.  They look really exotic and cool, don’t they?  Everyone on the show thought so, too—at first.  In the beginning, everybody asked if they could take one the golden bricks home as a souvenir. However, they all started to turn green after a day or two (the ingots—not the crew) and the gold needed to be constantly repainted, and there were so many of the ingots that they were EVERYWHERE, always underfoot, getting bumped into and moved around, then crumbling and turning black due to some chemical reaction between the gold paint and the still-curing plaster— In the end, nobody wanted to take one of those oxidized, corroded things home.

Finally, in answer to your directors question: yes, they did shoot the LA sequences with Newt Arnold as the director.  He took over from Gary Nelson and was in charge of the entire shoot in LA as far as I remember.  He was an interesting guy, who wore an eye patch, and who had mostly done first assistant director work, so this was a higher-ranking position for him, and even though they call it “second unit” in the credits—which is considered not nearly as exciting and important as first unit—the fact that Richard and Sharon, the principles, were there made it essentially a splinter first unit.

I hope I’ve covered your questions.  Write back if you have more.  Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold was one of the first films I ever worked on, and I was so new to the whole film business that I spent a great deal of time just being amazed at everything I saw and worked to create.  It brings back a lot of memories—mostly good ones—of excitement and challenge and just plain star-struck encounters.  I’ll share more of those in another blog, though. 

The Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 3

A THOUGHTFUL NOTE: In the telling of this very true story, and recalling these times long past, I cannot help but realize how we have come to a new day in this country, with so much more hope than we had back then.  In those days, the standby painter truly loathed and feared the government and the power of this country’s president to do incredible wrongs to the people and the planet.  Today the standby painter is finally glad that the president of this country possesses such power, and has given his word he will use it for the good of the people and the planet.  For the first time since the days of Camelot, she really believes that, “Yes, we can!”

Now, let us discover some of the back-story to our story…

 

LOCATIONS OF THE DAMNED: Featuring the Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 3

Many years before the standby painter and her friends came to work at the old, deserted insane asylum, the great land of her birth had suffered under the rule of a bizarre despot who had begun his career in the very same Business as that of the standby painter.  He had worked as an Actor and had even costarred with a talented chimpanzee. Eventually, through voodoo politics, he became president of the United States.

During his time in Washington he began the budget cuts that changed the streets of the gigantic metropolis, which some called “Los Angeles”, and others called “The Basin”, and still others—most others, actually—called “LA”.  One of his most lasting achievements was that he brought about the tremendous flowering of the homeless population in LA and its surrounding environs, including the environs around the government-owned complex that housed the insane asylum.

To change the government to fit his ideas, the president decided to save money by reducing government programs that helped the people, and spend money by shooting weapons into outer space.  He also dictated that any mental patients above a certain level of functioning had to be turned out onto the streets.  The trouble was, those people weren’t really all that functional, and when they were released, they drifted close to their former home, wandered up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, crawled into boxes and under freeway overpasses, and edged out to the deserted beaches at night, unable to make a life “outside” with what they didn’t have.

No longer having a home, they didn’t know where to go, except back to where they had come from.  It was either that, the streets, or the cold, heartless ocean, which took care of her own, such a dolphins and fishes, but rebuffed humanity. The insane asylum that had sheltered them was the safest place they had known for many years, in some cases.  They really, really wanted to get back there, where they felt safe, no matter how hard the people who had once taken care of them had now made it for them to get back.

There was an emerald oasis in the city, where green meadows rolled in a lazy way under gentle palms and tiny streams trickled blue and gold in the sunlight and cat tails grew artistically here and there.  Everything was so beautiful in the oasis that it all looked as if it had been created by an artist.  And indeed, it had been.

Now the oasis was maintained by a gardening staff who had come secretly from another foreign country away to the south and who were paid half the amount of the current minimum wage to keep the golf course perfect for the top 1% of the wealthy in this country who would play golf there and take meetings while strolling and hitting and swinging and missing.

It was a crazy system, this oasis.  But it worked, somehow.  And it was quite possibly powered by irony.  In money and in status, the lowest of the people and the highest of the people, both, came here to work or play or both.  Being the meeting ground of opposites who never met, the golf course was a paradox.  It was also a kind of place between worlds, you might say, where the boundaries were warped and thin.  In truth, the oasis was a paradox and a multidimensional portal for those who knew its secret doorways.  The most secret doorway was inside a tunnel that started at the end of a culvert that began with a pond which appeared to be only a water trap, and it was, but it was also more.  The doorway was padlocked, chained and never meant to be used.  But it was used, every night.

To Be Continued…