June 13, 1982 – Back In Town

L.A.

Today with a lot of extras at the set of Elaine’s bar, we refer to it as The Chronicle Bar, It’s a practical location out in Pasadena.

Sosna yelling to the prop guy:

“Craig set you’re a card on fire.”

I think this is a discussion of Craig’s responsibility for smoking the bar up.

And we keep hearing Sosna’s chant:
“smoke us up”
“Debbie? You’re seated”
“Take ten, new deal, everybody stand down…Directors rehearsal.

A conception of the relentlesss priority of cinematic means.

To the actor playing the drunk straggler who tries to hassle Elaine, Walter says, “You’ve had a grueling night of drinking, it’s helling in the morning, there’s also no greater power on earth.”

Walter: “If you can steal a few hours now, they’ll come a time later on in the movie when you’re begging for it, a few extra hours.

Prepping the squad room location for night work, while also putting finishing touches on the commissary scene.

Running between these locations Walter says, “A forced march to outflank the enemy: TIME.”

I wonder what we’re doing making these films.
To say what we have endured and lived.
To say what we wanted to protect, to try to express why it’s loss is painful to us.
To show what our world is like, what stress, the atmosphere of our living is like.
What we go through.
What clings to us in forlorn passage,
What happens to our eyes, our minds,
everything burning to shit in front of us.

The Israelis are escalating their demand that the PLO disappear, driving their enemy into ceasing to exist — the most aggressive right-wing force since Germany in the 30’s. The word one is reluctant to use is Genocide. When I read of Israel’s rapacious destructions I feel an unprecedented metamorphosis.  None of the moral meanings are attributable to this struggle.  Everything is simply the contingent properties of force itself — what is done is simply what can be gotten away with.

The idea of political history having a teleology here has been made unprecedentedly ridiculous.

I do not think that values are a pure fiction, I think their time comes and goes, in tidal motions of absence presence, their time has gone for now.

Sosna, the AD, asks if he can be a writer, write something in one hundred and twenty pages, sell a script, make tons of money and work less hard.

Walter chimes in and makes a derisive remark in Sosna’s direction. “It’s not intelligence…it’s a way of looking at the world and believe me Sosna, you haven’t got it.”

Later I ask myself: What is our justification for this entertainment? Finally I believe in the myth of the personal code that sustains this thing.

I really think it’s true. I want to sell this proficiency.

Other Sosna statements to the crew as the day is winding down:
“This is home to mother.”
“This is the last one of the night.”

Everyone on the crew feigns disappointment. “Aww”
June 15, 1982

Pickups of the Chronicle Bar. We are dragging. Though Annette is superb.

When to put the money in the phone Vis à Vis dialing.

Sosna: “I just want authenticity Walter.”

Walter: “Why have it creep in now?,” is Walter’s ingenuous response. “The only way this show works is as a fantasy.”

Gene Levy calls set, wants to speak to Sosna. Sosna told he’s gotta call.  “Tell ‘em not now, we’re making movies, were’ not making phone calls…” and then later, “Believe it or not, the wrap party is two months away.”

Walter Hill: “Remember, punk, movies aren’t made with ideas, they’re made with gaffer’s tape… Think ahead – that’s 97% of the job”

I compliment Luca the script girl.

Walter takes what I say and turns it around.

‘You just noticed this good quality”

Luca plays along with Walter teasing me, “He’s surprisingly unobservant for a writer.”

Walter then says, “You see how I manipulated you from giving Luca a compliment into being in the shit. The capacity to do that at any time is essential to a director.”

The Studio

(GROSS NOTES: In Our Absence In San Francisco, Don Simpson Was Fired As Head Of Production And Replaced By Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Simpson Was Given The Farewell Present Of A Studio Production Deal, The First Film Of Which, Flashdance, Was With His New Partner Jerry Bruckheimer.  He Had Far Greater Success As A Producer Than As A Studio Executive, A Transition Many Executives Attempt And Surprisingly Few Succeed At.

Also The Studio Had Looked At Some Early Cut Footage. There Are Rumors That Upper Level Management Was Displeased With What They Were Seeing Of Eddie.)
June 16, 1982 — The Squad Room Set

Gordon has come to the set, and along with Joel, have stood off to the side with Walter, informing him that we are getting warnings from the studio.  The movie isn’t funny enough. Eddie isn’t funny enough.

I try to drift into this confab.

Gordon’s voice pipes up sharply, as he waves me off “Gross, I see ya, if I want you to listen I’d have called you in.”

Of course what I want to say is, “Mr. Gordon, at the prices I’m working for right now I’ll go home if I’m not wanted in these conversation.”  But I don’t.  I should say, “Dreams don’t die — we kill them.”

Walter, Larry, and Joel disappear into Walter’s trailer, don’t eat lunch with the crew.  I sit with my paper plate and stare at the empty set.

The camera mount and dolly, its strange irrelevance to the reality of the set, yet that reality is wholly invented and would not exist but for the camera’s being there to photograph it.

I, too, can have self centered fantasies.  If I’m being excluded from a conversation maybe they’re discussing firing me.

Katzenberg

Proval

(GROSS NOTES: In The Next Few Days, There Will Be A Move On The Part Of The Studio To Get Walter To Agree To Fire Eddie And Shut The Movie Down Until A Replacement Can Be Found. Walter’s Position Is That If Eddie Is Fired, He Will Quit. His Professional Integrity Is On The Line. He Believes He Can Make Eddie Work In The Movie And Refuses To Let The Studio Tell Him This Isn’t Possible.

Walter’s Bluff Succeeds. Shooting Is To Go On, On Schedule. Walter Makes One Concession To The Studio’s Concern: He Hires An Acting Coach To Work With Eddie, A Guy Named David Proval, Who I Remember From Having A Small Role In Mean Streets.  Walter Confides To Me That He Doesn’t Expect A Coach To Teach Eddie To Act Per Se, Only To Help Him Be Better Prepared In Knowing His Lines.

Walter Also Gingerly Discusses The Studio’s Doubts With Eddie And The Manager, Bob Wachs. “Tell me if I suck,” Eddie says insistently. “I know I sucked those first few days…just somebody tell me from here on out.” Walter Confides In Me That He Is Not Certain Whether He Can Get A Good Performance From Eddie, But A) He Has Seen Moments That Suggest That Its Possible, B) He Cannot Have His Essential Casting Decisions Contravened By The Studio C) When Worst Comes To Worst There Is The Editing Room. We Can Always Cut To Nick.)
Watching extras.  Plump Chinese man, stares out the seventh story window, a wispy white haired patch of beard hangs down from his chin?  Is that a dream growing from your chin or a beard.

Somebody to me on set:
“You look like you’re combing your hair to have a good time.”

Debbie Love — virtuoso 2nd Asst.  In her pink shirt that lets her tits hang right, easily, rates the new name, Debbie Nipples.

Joel and Larry’s fear of alliance — don’t make allies because it will complicate things when the inevitable need to cut these people off arises — the world is terrible so all friendliness will eventuate in betrayal — if not yours of them then theirs of you.  They are not logically wrong.  But they are probably practically wrong because the fear of alliance probably arouses the mistrust and the violence it was designed to protect against. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of defense that produces the thing it defends against. (Me, I could be won so easily, so cheaply.)

Joel gives me a blistering about using the phone to long. He goes further than he needs to and uses unbelievable justifications.

“Larry Gordon keeps me waiting for three hours sometimes but you are not  going to keep me waiting.”

Never looks back.

Greta Blackburn, who plays the hooker that is with Jimmy during the big shootout in the hotel, makes a brief appearance at the squad room set, the costumer needs to check out a piece of clothing with Walter.  Everyone gapes at Greta who is long and platinum blonde and sexy.

June 17, l982

A phrase to get crew going by Sosna.

“Tense up”

Style for Walter Hill is an interregnum between oblivions.

Analogously, in terms of the trajectory of his own life, he sometimes talks as if he imagines that having come from poverty , or at least a relatively modest working-class upbringing, he’s one day headed back to it.  I don’t believe there’s in fact much chance of that, but amuses him to contemplate the possibility.  Sort of a zen attitude   All this that he has could be swept away instantly.

Today we spent the entire day making one shot.  An elaborate nearly five minute take of Nick doing police work, and gathering clues to the case.

Walter made two reference to me about the scene, the long interrogation sequence in Welles’ Touch of Evil, and the hubbub at the station-house in Hill Street Blues.

Since many of the extra’s and background people are criminal types for this sequence I call it Sosna’s Satyricon.

Tonight after the shooting saw The Clash perform at a modest Hollywood venue The Palladium.  One thing I particularly liked was that they had themselves introduced on stage by some type of magnified piped in version of the Morricone theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly…that means they’ve got good taste in films.

JUNE 18, 1982

I quarrel w/Nick about cutting a line from the scene with Hayden — the bureaucrat who he manipulates to get Eddie out of jail — and after this tiny squabble he seems irked with me.  Walter asks me if I’ve noticed this, I say I have.

“You gotta be careful how you talk to actors,” Walter says.  He’s now irked with me.

“I collapsed pretty fast,” I say, whining a little, “will you ask him if and why he’s still upset?”

Walter shakes his head.

“My motto is do nothing until it becomes necessary.”

“Should I stay out of his way?”

“Don’t be on top of him.”

There’s a side of Walter Hill’s personality as into the art and craft of etiquette as the most poker faced English butler.

“Boys and girls and those who aren’t sure” intones Sosna after one take that Walter is not happy with.  “Crosses are looking just exactly like it’s the first shot after lunch.” “Pump it up boys, don’t fail me now.”

Between watching the magnificent four minute one-take tracking shot and watching The Clash, life has been magnificent these last thirty six hours.

Where do you honestly find any sorrow when everything is this productive?  Someone in China is watching water feed the rice on some rice paddy while you watch your mother one day, dying, swallowed by cancer.  Think about that for while, I guess, and I don’t know, maybe it’ll make you feel worse or even better.

This calm must be urgently celebrated and is never enough.

All sacred mystery time.

There is how Walter wants things to be and how thinks things are, and naturally he is glad for any evidence of the second set of terms obeying the first, yet he knows that that is not how things happen.

For Joel and Larry, it’s the color of their credit cards.  No way my compulsion is any saner than theirs.

June 21, 1982

Tonight, the first night on the street in downtown LA we are slowed down by the unfamiliarity of the new location.

Paramount wants to pull footage to arrange an NBC presale.  Walter Joel and Larry object to the notion of a peremptory culling of footage.  Word of mouth or rumors, or gossip of Eddie’s non-brilliance might hurt the film.

In fact,  Larry and Walter muse bitterly about the studio’s incoherence.  If what they’ve seen isn’t funny enough, why in their right mind would they show it to people outside the family.

Gordon is furious with his pals at Paramount.

Walter remarks “They have roused a sleeping giant.”

Hours later, Katzenberg new young production president, comes to humble himself before Gordon and Walter.  Without formally rescinding the request, he gladly takes some shit about his methods from Larry.

Everything is actually maneuvering   About appearing  or being strong or weak and the nominal topics of debate and disagreement are NEVER the real issue.  It’s who will give in and who won’t and under which circumstances, under which kind of pressure.

Eddie does quite well in a brief scene of him and Nick needling each other before they go into the bar to question some people..

Walter, high in the air for a crane shot that takes a ton of time to get.

I show Joel some pages of these notes he is surprisingly sweet in his enthusiasm about what he’s read.  Reacts fairly to estimates I’ve made of him.

I notice tonight again my turning to jelly a lot for Nolte, him not soliciting this behavior from me, him just sitting in his chair smoking a cigar.  The vacuum he lets form frightens me sometimes.

Walter’s strength are utterly genuine and genuinely a matter, sometimes, of denial and evasion.  But what accomplishment is not involved with the denial of something?  Every assertion comes at the cost of excluding something.  The sole criteria of genius, how much of what it includes mysteriously incorporates elements of the qualities it denies? A director like Hitchcock so overwhelmingly interested in visuals and plot, nevertheless getting such a great performance as Walker’s in Strangers on a Train, or Perkins inPsycho. Or a director so obsessed with performance making a film as visually exciting asViva Zapata or On the Waterfront.

Walter’s sometimes “shutting out” is an insistence of discipline and a certain element of self-denial that is part of his process.

The question remains, how can he keep the necessary force of that “shutting out”  in place, while somehow contradicting himself to the right tiny appropriate degree?

The strength that is part of this rejection has to, at the same time, make a home for what circumvents those rejections.  His choice of working with me is part of this process.  He has me around to come up with things he fundamentally plans to reject, calculating that on a few occasions he’ll discover the few things I might propose, that he will decide that it’s right to slip through this rejecting mechanism.
June 22, 1982

Second day on downtown LA streets.

Again things moving slowly.

Sense of strain between Walter and Sosna.  Sosna points out that with three bases in three different parking lots, things were bound to go slower.

Walter reports on a new batch of dailies seen.

Happy with the four minute long take.

Not happy with some of what we shot in the commissary, Nick too mean to Eddie.  Happy with Edie at some points not at others.  Nick basically good all the way through.

Joel having fun with the titles of cartoons Remar will be watching on t.v. in the Walden Hotel interior sequence.

Sosna remarks about shooting in this garage:
“Quiet please, we’re in echo central here.”

I’m yelled at by Walter for repeating a suggestion he’s rejected too often.

Did it deliberately, wanted to be sure I believed I had an idea good enough to get yelled at for presenting more than once.  Knew I would lose the point.  Tant pis.

Remar and Sonny return to our lives.  Shudder.  Already Remar is frowning at me.

People need to think highly of themselves, need to think what they do is important, need to tell themselves that they are something.

Jonas Goodman and Elliot Lewitt visit me.  Corrine and Hildy visit …(Walter’s girl and the girl who introduced me to Walter, originally, several months ago.)  Audie Bock, a journalist Walter knows for years down to visit from San Francisco…Walter holds her in special esteem because when he’s in the states, Kurosawa works with Audie as his translator.  There is no one Walter holds in higher esteem than Kurosawa.
So all of lunch when Audie’s around, all Walter wants to do is quiz her on the latest Kurosawa gossip, but of course since she’s aware of Japanese custom, she’s reticent about anything sensational.  Walter respects that.

June 23, 1982

Vladimir Berg

Jeff Berg, Walter’s agent, and the main guy at ICM visits the set on Monday.

You watch Berg and your reminded of power in a different style from Joel and Larry.  The puritanism of power.  Images of Robespierre and Lenin come to mind.  Berg would so disdain raising his voice or showing emotion against an opponent — so much more about just dismissing people from his thoughts immediately, so fast it would be instantly like you weren’t there.

The relationship of power to art is analogous to the relation of earth to heaven.  We must control earth to show our fitness to enter heaven.

Berg transfers the self-loathing and uncertainty as to function that is characteristic of agents and turns them into conscious intellectual weapons.  He has an acute sense of the potential or proximate irrelevance of everything, anything.  The fact that there is nothing but a series of laws of motion and no sensibility, no individual swelling localization of force, that is anything but the produce of these laws, this stays uppermost in his mind, Nothing is intrinsic, nothing produces something indispensable, everything is only produced by this process.  What appears effectual is always and only a result.

Therefore, never be overimpressed.  By anyone.  By anything they produce.  It’s all just endless process.

What is singularly impressive about Berg is that seems unimpressed even by himself.

If you can run with that quality, he’ll run with you…eventually you will tire and stop somewhere, be arrested by envy, awe, respect, fear. He’ll pick up the ball alone and kill both you and whoever stopped you and go on his way.  Like the commando leader who lets those who join his unit know that when they go out, there will be no stopping to help the wounded, if you’re hit badly enough to fall behind you get executed so the enemy can’t get hold of you.

Berg is a product of a sixties attitude in one limited sense: “I’m not that impressed. These guys are  who are the system aren’t  “that” terrific.”

Meanwhile, Walter overheard teasing someone:

“If…if..if…it’s always the same with you guys.  If our cocks wer longer we’d have better looking girlfriends…in Joel’s case if his cock was longer he’d have A girlfriend.”

June 24, 1982

The enigma of art–that one man’s self indulgent nonsense, the same kind of nonsense, the same rhetoric, perhaps the same vocabulary of description results in terrific work.

This movie is made by the simultaneous operation of these forces:  Larry Gordon’s relationship to Michael Eisner…Eisner’s enthusiasm for making an action film with Nick Nolte, Walter’s script and his own sudden availability to make it.  Gordon’s ability to keep Eisner remote from the process, all this utterly different from how it used to be on some other films according to both Walter and Larry..  We are making this film as well as our resources  allow.  Not against the destructive intervention of the studio taking extra energy away from it

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published July 11, 2008

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