May 30, 1982

SF by Day

OUR DAY OFF — SUNDAY — WALKING AROUND SAN FRANCISCO

My guess is that San Francisco is the city of sexual soap opera, but this is because the power to induce sexual obligation is so diminished that everyone takes off from where they are without the slightest thought.

I am living in the era when everything is easily forgotten.  To have a memory is like having a different color skin; conservatism hasn’t fought this tendency.  The frivolous and the tradition-respecting are both unconscious.

An extra voice is need to compensate for the added silence.  It is so lonely to be alone in San Francisco working on a movie.  So nice, yet so alone.

The degree of concentration required is expressed metaphorically in the idea of the perfromative capacities of The Hero.

MAD MAX II THE ROAD WARRIOR Director George Miller brilliantly continues to discover striking new ways to make an action film.  A film of astonishing visual variety.  Like any really poetic cinematic imagination, Miller seems to find new ways of making the space of the frame dynamic and complex.  This is an amazing piece of work.  Mel Gibson obviously a movie star in this one in a way that was not so obvious the last time.  Rumor is he’s been picked to be in a bunch of new Hollywood movies, and Spielberg had already offered Miller to direct anIndiana Jones sequel. The essence of  the situations in Road Warrior:  Breaking out and breaking in, and chases.  But all given an enigmatic mythic tone and atmosphere.  Simplicity, but able to suggest going beyond simplicity. Making a whole narrative out of collision on every level. Collisions are amplified into the system of the whole work.  A violent liberalization of the system, as the plot liberalizes the wide-open spaces of Australia and its driving violence.

Last night, many takes of Frank McRae, doing many takes as Nick’s cop boss.  McRae is  wonderful actor, but he fluffs many takes.  Wonderful, how Nick throws a leg on the turnstile tugs on a cigarette and jams himself up for action even at 5 AM. Nick’s readiness to go is stupefying.

Women look at you and curse your for your lack of commitment.  How to say it’s not you and your personality that lacks commitment, intrinsically, but its them and who they are  who wholly fail to inspire it.  And is this really true?

While I went to the movies to see The Road Warrior, Walter went to the track with Sonny and Remar.

Walter won one hundred bucks, Sonny lost like crazy.

I had dinner alone at Vanessi’s and ran into a group of 48 Hours personnel Mae, Walter’s assistant, Elaine, Rafe Blasi, the publicist, Dan Moore, the costumer and his wife and Bruce McBroom and his girlfriend, all of whom went together to a special screening of ET.  Shore and McBroom had worked on the film.  People were generally euphoric except for Rafe, the most knowledgeable, who is unimpressed.  Rafe say much of it is dull and the best sequences are great, but not till the very end.  Later back at the hotel, I run into Joel, who was also at the screening. He says the film is brilliant and is going to make all the money in the world.

You know, no matter what you do in New York someone is contradicting it somewhere else in New York.  You can think you’re cool, but you can’t think you’re that cool.  By comparison, LA is this bloodless airheaded shit but BIG, so much of this is deridable abstract space, there’s no reason to be subdued by the sheer quantify of it, but people are.

Question for me as I wander around my room.

What does this film have that Walter’s films ’til now haven’t had?  A concession to the facts of failure and defeat on the part of the characters sometimes?  They were implicitly there in The Long Riders and Hard Times a bit.

Thinking Back Over The Last Few Nights

Jimmy Remar, Ganz the killer, and I have another fight, this one lasts about three seconds.

Walter jumps on it…

I say, “I wouldn’t mistrust him, Walter, if he were less paranoically quick to mistrust me.  It’s simple.  I go back to trusting him and then he loses it again.

Walter says, “It’s ever since that day in wardrobe where you called him a psycho killer –”

“I didn’t call him one, I called Ganz the character he was playing one.”

“It’s all the same to Remar”

“You’re oversimplifying,” I insist.

“You can never trust him now” Walter says, “because you know he’s incapable of trusting you.”

Walalce Stevens

The last few nights in the subway I brought with me an edition ofWallace Stevens, these old favorite bits are jumping out at me…

And yet
Except for us
The total past felt
Nothing when destroyed…

In Stevens, life is justified by these sudden accuracies of love, exemplified in the hard work of consciousness.  The highest most organized name of these accuracies, this love, is poetry.

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone
And the shaken realist
First sees reality.

I show this line to Walter and he nods approvingly .
May 31, l982

Talk w/Walter over the hotel phone, in which he asks for a quick review of the history of the term “metaphysics” I think because he’s reading Borges.

We got on the subject of David Hume.  The grimmest of all defenders of the priority of experience.  Trust experience because logic and reason turn out to be wholly unreliable.

I tried to review it in my mind.

The discipline of describing phenomena that have occurred, that’s history rather than metaphysics.  Analyzing the phenomenon of occurrence itself.  Finally, analyzing the material datum of historicity leads away from philosophy towards the mysterious dialectical concreteness of art.

Long distance phone-call to a pal of mine back in New York,  Elizabeth Kling… Beth just got finished working Andrei Konchalovsky and Ed Lachman.  Konchalovsky, a very interesting film maker from Russia.  Beth’s working as an assistant editor on a short film Konchalovsky’s involved in.

She rain into my friend Philip, who has just opened a restaurant in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street called Downtown. He’s been planning to do it for years, and now he’s into it.  He was depressed. “Mainly,” she says, “because of sheer hard work.”

At this point I launched into a discussion of how the grueling concentration, required by directing and participating in the making of a film is of itself depressing.  The sheer demand is depressing.  Every thing going outward and nothing come in at all.  All interaction is in quotes for the reality of the movie.  The draining is enormous.

I gather that after a short time in San Francisco, you run out of places to discover, you take to drugs, and you become trivial.  I gather you run out of places to quickly everywhere but New York.  New York mutates rapidly, kills, and breeds anew.  LA has the same worn-out-quickly quality as San Francisco.

Obviously, the redeeming feature about San Franciso is that the creative marginalia of the culture, the defeated bohemian, has some minimal body of support here.  Here, as nowhere else, and that is far from nothing.  The skin on my nose got burned to shreds in these spring afternoons of light and wind for all the first ten days of shooting.  Now the last six days it’s healing.  The end of this week will be the third of shooting.  There were some seven days prior to shooting where we worked around the clock.

So it’s been a total of five and a half weeks — like war.

I’m riding back to the holiday Inn in the cab. I’m hearing an old Shirelles song on the radio:
“I just can’t wait/ I just can’t wait
To be back in his arms.”

June 1, 1982

Redoing Woodward Street.

This is a scene we failed to finish our work on, on the earlier day we shot here.  It’s a complicated dialogue scene where Nick and Eddie beat up and then interrogate a former criminal partner of Eddie’s, Luther. This is David Patrick Kelly again.  The scene was complex and now in addition to not having finished it, we felt on seeing it that some of the comedy we invented for Eddie flat out didn’t work.  We also felt that Eddie could have been more rigorous in performance, so in completing it, we also reshot a good deal.

Eddie does a comedy  line about what are the odds this guy will be packing, and he says “Chances are about l00%” and gets the joke line right for the first time.

Walter waiting for his cigar to be lit reiterates his slogan to Bruce Kassan, the assistant prop-guy, who provides the match.  “Bruce… quest for fire.”

Numerous fluffs of different sorts irk Walter, as we try to do a tiny insert near the car.

“Maybe we can’t make this shot,” he remarks at one point, “maybe it’s impossible.”

I comment that the difficult gives us absolutely no problem but the simple we fail to be able to do.

To my eyes Nick and Eddie are, on this day, starting to have fun together really for the first time.

As a director you are in the middle of an orgy. You are the middle term, both passive and assertive.  You are constantly being fucked and you are constantly doing the fucking.  You are being fucked over by time, light, and money, these in constant impressive terrible dynamic interaction. Meanwhile you are controlling the lives and careers of thirty or forty people at least.  You have more brutal power than anyone in a no brutal walk of life ever has.  Material forced through you, is chastened into something less than entirely material in result. You are situated as an alchemist or magus, classically positioned to be a being of power, able to embody a myth of transcending the traps and cul de sacs of power.  To be the sorcerer who spiritualizes the brutality and coarseness of ordinary power dynamics.

You can if you choose, if you have the will, glimpse a less malignant purpose than the sheer blank continuation of your power position.  And no film even the crassest is not a little spiritual compared with other now relentless unambiguous commercial enterprises.

All of us know to mistrust practical men of power — politicians, bankers — but film makers cannot only be excepted from our skepticism, they can become the embodiment of our hope in circumstances that oppose our reasons for being skeptical.  Filmmakers can act our faith that the normal limits of reality are not final. And this ironically is related to how filmmaking partakes of the most extreme grotesques and banal cruelties we can associate with the “normal reality,” which nothing more than films help us to transcend.

Filmmaking is saturated in the grossness it is meant to transcend.  Peculiarly situated.  As if its power to transcend had ransomed it as an activity to an extra share of the horror the hope of transcendence somewhat weekly opposes.

It is not surprising that filmmakers are mad addicts of their work.  Their life is intrinsically complex at a level past anyone’s ability to resist..

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published July 6, 2008

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