Beauty in an American Winter

It is now three weeks into my time off from the last film I worked on, which I believe has the potential to be a cinematic gem, if not a classic.  So much depends on so many things that will take place in the editing room, in the decisions about what to lop off and what to leave in and how to weave one thing into another with beauty and skill that I cannot predict what the outcome will be.

Deep into winter, the Northwest has darkened into near-constant rainy days, and even though the physics of our solar system says the days are getting longer, they still feel too short and dim to get anything accomplished.  But every so often a bright, sunny respite beams out from the clouds, melting them away into mist over the river.  Gifted with a suddenly blue sky, I spend time on the deck watching my hawk Tennerin, who has been harassed now for several days by a single crow, which follows the hawk from tree to tree, and branch to branch for hours at a time.  All the birds, including the blue jays and the doves have been chasing each other and riding the blustery winter winds, living their lives mostly unseen by the rest of us humans.  I have to make the effort to look.  Now my hawk friend is sitting high above me as I write this, waiting on his fir tree for me to stop writing and play with him down on our empty field next to the river.

I’ve become contemplative and odd things catch my attention, surprising me with their own kind of brightness shining through in the winter doldrums.  I recently found myself watching the movie American Beauty and noticed how everything from the furniture to the music to the colors of the costumes worked to make that movie what it is: a classic and one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.  Another aspect of this film that made it work was not clear to me until I tried to explain it to a friend afterward.  I was forced to put into words what I had previously only felt, a deep kind of emotional understanding.

There is the dialogue (or monologue, really) by Ricky Fitts, who is Lester (Kevin Spacey) Burnham’s young neighbor, when he is talking about his video of “the most beautiful thing he’s ever filmed”, which is a plastic bag dancing in the wind. He begins by explaining that the bag was playing with him, begging him to dance with it, like a little kid.  Then he goes on to say, “And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” 

There are the voiceover monologues of Lester Burnham, who at the end describes life as “an ocean of time”, and reveals, “There’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”  

These are monologues that are right “on the nose”, which is a no-no in writing, especially screenwriting. But they worked wonderfully in American Beauty because in counterpoint, the ironic, comedic characters played against it in a weird dynamic that forced you, (ironically?) to take the unabashedly spiritual words seriously.

And why not?  Annette Bening’s Carolyn Burnham, is a shrill termagant, highly colored and stylized.  Her musical loves, though, hint at a deeper longing in her than simply controlling her American Beauty roses and becoming a powerful and fulfilled real estate agent.  She forces her husband Lester and daughter Jane to listen to Bali Hai every night at dinner, and Bali Hai has a power, too, as silly as it is. Even if it is from an unreal musical that is stylistically and politically dated and expired, it still says out loud what deep inside we might truly feel:

Your own special hopes,
your own special dreams,
Bloom on the hillside
and shine in the streams.
If you try, you’ll find me
where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me.

  You hear Bali Hai and know that there is a connection between this song and a beautiful, divinely-moving plastic bag. After all the two are neighbors, in an American suburb.

Carolyn’s bold colors, red and blue, cool white in her immaculate kitchen, and Lester’s yearning for a nostalgic version of first, true love all over again in a rock and roll past are given soul-searing force by using music to fix their emotions throughout the film.  The actual soundtrack music, composed by Thomas Newman, made the plastic bag scene effortlessly touching.  Before I knew who was behind the musical selections, I marveled at the perfection of the pairings between character, plot and popular songs.  When I found out Chris Douridas was the film’s music supervisor, I remembered his wonderful, wonderful radio show on KCRW, Morning Becomes Eclectic, where he would pair selections as disparate as a Disney instrumental from Pinocchio and readings by Jack Kerouac with a Bollywood female pop star’s danceable ballads, creating incredible musical journeys with every new show.

Repeated throughout American Beauty, punctuated by the color of vibrant, vicious red, is the notion of your heart opening, stopping, caving in, the roses bursting in nearly life-stopping beauty from the breast of a dancing cheerleader, while the choreography reflects the lights of Broadway in a song that connects, in all its smarmy ‘80’s gilded showbiz glamour with something almost terrible in its secret force: rose petals that for no reason spin out from us at the most surprising, least-provoked moment.

Like the movie I just wrapped, American Beauty changed dozens, perhaps hundreds of times with every decision by writer, director, actor, and editor.  It could have been as many as a thousand different movies at the end of the process.  Through creative synchronicity, or fate, or simply a connection to something unfathomably beautiful— maybe even that unseen “entire life behind things”, American Beauty went on to win five Oscars, including best picture, director, cinematography, actor, and original screenplay.

This time seeing the movie, I couldn’t, as usual, stop the tears from forming when I heard the plastic bag monologue.  Because I knew at the moment, through the process of watching it in creation on film (how I love film, the beauty of it separate from the story, in a way) that it is true, all of it.  There is an entire life behind things.

  

One Degree of Separation

Probably all the bloggers on this site and anyone who works in Hollywood or New York in the great business of Show Business knows the name Bernie Brillstein.  Bernie was legendary, managing many of Saturday Night Lives’ stars, including SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels and cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Phil Hartman. Bernie ran Lorimar for years, managed Jim Henson of Muppet fame, produced network and syndicated television and feature films with all the major movers and shakers of Hollywood, and founded the top production-management company of the nineties, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment.

I was stuck in the hospital last week for an hour-long visit that turned into a boring limbo of waiting for my ride to pick me up, some twelve hours late (thanks to a freak snowstorm and trapped traffic frozen to a stop on all highways).  I had no computer, no cell phone, and nothing to do but read Bernie Brillstein’s book, co-written with David Rensin: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead: Where Did I Go Right?

Before reading the book, I sort of knew who Bernie was, but he was in the agent/manager/producer end of the big blue Show Business Pool, the deep end, millions of dollars deep, while I am in the technical/camera/set/crew end of the Pool, where the dollars flowing past rarely reach your ankles.  Because we’re at such distant ends of the Business, my not knowing him personally isn’t surprising.  But what is surprising, though, is how many people he names in his book that I have actually worked with or met in the course of my little nothing job.

So with not much else to do in my hospital room, I went through the names in his book’s index and tagged those that Bernie Brillstein and I both have connections to.  Here are a fraction of those:

Matthew Broderick, Ed Burns, Chevy Chase, Dabney Coleman, Harrison Ford, Jim Frawley, Brian Grazer, John Landis, Rob Lowe, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Ivan Reitman, George Schlatter, Tom Scott, Martin Short, and Bruce Willis, for a start.

Bernie Brillstein’s stories of how the deals were made that led to the eventual production hierarchies that spawned, finally, the movies I’ve worked on were enlightening.  I’ve never had occasion to ponder who first got the money together that brought the ideas or the scripts into the arena of reality, with dollars going out to everything from producers to actors to writers and from them on down to the physical manifestation of the actual making of the film.

But the myriads of decisions based on money were (and are) the foundation of everything I eventually work on, whether it’s an independent film, a big budget feature, or a television series.  This book provided a window into how the films I’ve worked on came to be, and where the millions of dollars came from that it took to produce them.

After reading the book, what’s scary, I suppose, is to know how big decisions are made: so many potentially wonderful ideas are thrown away based on a conversation, a misunderstood premise or promise, or simply one guy’s dislike of another guy.  Also what’s scary is how it’s almost always guys doing the deciding.  Even now.

But as I said, I’m at the far end, the shallow end of the Pool—a long way from big decisions or power and wealth.  Even so, there are great leveling forces that connect us all, whether we haul in $35 million for a film or $3500.

What I didn’t mention at the beginning of this blog entry is that I got Bernie’s book for Christmas from my mother, who had found it where many obscure books go to die—-at the Dollar Store.  And when I got home from the hospital, I looked up Bernie Brillstein on IMDB and found out that he died in August of 2008.

Near the end of his book, Bernie said: “The other day someone asked me why, after all I’d been through, I even bother to come to work. Easy. I don’t know where else I could have more fun.  …And for nearly forty-five years I’ve laughed more than most people I know.  Isn’t that what it’s all about—or at least supposed to be?  I think so.”

Speaking as a mere shallow-end-of-the-pool, dog-paddling, filmmaking drone, I can’t say whether or not Bernie is right.  I just know that, however many degrees of separation connect us, sooner or later we all have to get out of the pool.

Home After the Holidays

Back from the holidays and they spun past without my noticing, because in spite of Gus’s film having wrapped, I have been caught up in a non-stop work tornado of to-do lists and long-delayed projects.  In fact, I will simply have to check in with this short entry on my way out the door to deliver a countertop to the shop that will alter it so it will fit the island in the kitchen of my latest design job: my flip house.

Meanwhile, though, I am thinking (as always) about where that next job may be.  There is a television series coming back this month for another season, and they may need painters—just a couple of them.  I am ambivalent about trying to be a part of this, as it will make getting on the next feature very hard to do.

But will there be a “next feature”?  With our improved Oregon film incentive, I would have thought so, but the horizon, at least the near horizon, appears alarmingly empty.  This is the nature of my business, though, the uncertainty.  I have grown used to it, and actually it is a good Zen exercise.  Lose any attachment to outcomes as much as possible.  I definitely have many things to do to keep life moving, and now is the time to let go of the worry about the next job and just work on those things close to my heart.

So, I wake up every morning to see my hawk Tennerin sitting outside of my bedroom window waiting for me.  Then I go down to the river, put some food out for him and spend some time hanging out and filming him.  After that, I go back to work on the flip house, which is just down the street.  I’m trying to get Tennerin to follow me over there, but he seems to have hawk business across the river most of the time.  I also have to get back to my nonfiction writing and the research and reading that goes with it.  Through all this, I rejoice in the knowledge that I no longer have to get up at 4:00 am these days.

Next time I will discuss a book written by someone at the other end of show business, on the management/agent/producer side and how much we happen to have in common, but for now, it’s off to the countertop shop.

PS I would like to thank both of the people who commented on my last blog entry.  I’ve checked your websites just briefly, but I will be back, and will be in touch.  Synchronicity rocks!