One of the biggest creative talents behind Zack Snyder’s new movie Watchmen is absent from the credits: Alan Moore, the author of the original graphic novel on which the film is (by early accounts, faithfully) based. Moore, who also penned V for Vendetta, From Hell andThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,is the visionary often credited with changing the face of comic books.Over the years he’s become disdainful of celebrity and dismissive of movie adaptations of his work. A new 2-disc DVD set,The Mindscape of Alan Moore –billed as “a psychedelic journey into one of the world’s most powerful minds”–is an engaging introduction to the colorful recluse and his artistry.

Not a documentary as much as an evocative monologue stylishly filmed by director DeZ Vylenz, Mindscape quickly and neatly covers Moore’s youth in the working class section of the British city Northampton (where he still lives) and his early embrace of literature, mythology, science fiction, and comics. When he moved on from a local grade school to a posh institution of higher learning, the former star pupil found himself outclassed by his more privileged classmates. He acted out, was expelled, and seemed doomed to a series of menial jobs when he began writing and drawing for U.K. comic publishers.

“Quitting my job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool’s leap, a shot in the dark,” Moore says, his eyes locked to the camera. “But anything of any value in our lives–whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship–will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding.”

His early underground comics in the late 1970s led to a weekly newspaper strip, and as the Eighties progressed, his work reflected the anxious climate of the Reagan-Thatcher era and he became more overtly political. He abandoned drawing to concentrate on writing for increasingly wider audiences. The dystopian Watchmenseries was his breakout work, and “also grew out of the politically shadowy landscape of the 1980s, when the Cold War was probably at its hottest in 20 or 30 years, and when nuclear destruction suddenly seemed a very real possibility,” Moore recalls. “Watchmen used the clichés of the superhero format to try and discuss notions of power and responsibility in an increasingly complex world.”

Partly because he saw movies as part of the dominant power structure’s mass marketing apparatus, Moore devised his comics to be “un-filmable,” as he told Terry Gilliam back when Gilliam was being considered to direct a movie version of Watchmen.

As entertaining as such backstage anecdotes are, far more hypnotic are Moore’s riffs on magic and spirituality, the relationship between alchemy and science, the mechanization of society that began with the Enlightenment, and the disastrous triumph—as he views it–of the culture of information. He’s as potent a wordsmith on camera as he is off, his flamboyantly be-ringed fingers and wild shocks of shoulder-length hair adding to his intensity. Director Vylenz illustrates Moore’s wide-ranging reflections on mysticism and post-industrial anomie with cutaways to tarot cards, antique Kabbalah charts, dreamy reenactments, and, less successfully, a low-tech pulsing “brain” meant to symbolize (I’m guessing) Moore’s notion of an “idea-scape” (itself essentially a variant on the Jungian concept of a collective subconscious).

The DVD extras on Mindscape include an interview with Dylenz, a native of Surinam now working in the Netherlands, whose University of Amsterdam thesis was on Watchmen. The second disc is devoted to interviews with those who know Moore well, including his Lost Girlscollaborator and second wife, Melinda Gebbie; publisher and graphic novels expert Paul Gravett; and illustrator colleagues David Lloyd, Kevin O’Neill, Jose Villarubia, and Dave Gibbons.

Watchmen’s Gibbons describes how he would have to pare down Moore’s densely detailed scriptsbefore he could begin drawing (“I think the first page of Watchmen ran to four or five typescript pages”) and opines that no matter how “fantastic” a film adaptation of a graphic novel may be, something is likely to get lost in translation, and “it will be a different thing than the comic book.”

I haven’t yet seen the movie, but judging from the photos of Gibbons on the set that are included prominently in Peter Aperlo’s gorgeous new book, Watchmen: The Art of the Film,it would appear that Snyder and company deemed it very important to court the artist’s approval and support. How closely the movie follows the book we all will soon see; in the mean time, The Mindscape of Alan Moore is likely to please the prolific author’s fans and create some new ones.

– Andrea Gronvall
March 3, 2009

Andrea Gronvall is a regular contributor to the Chicago Reader, a frequent speaker for Harlan Jacobson’s Talk Cinema, and teaches film at the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies.

..Alliance of Women Film Journalists ..MCN Reviews

by Adipiscing Elit

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August 2, 1982

Redoing Nick’s side of the conversation on the phone to Elaine.

Walter’s lack of interest in certain kinds of inferiority, leads him to have characters repeat themselves.  Of course in the correctly woven fabric repetition can be sublime.

Walter friendlier again today.

When he lets an actor buddy come on for an extra days pay I tell him how nice a thing that was of him to do.

“I’m a nice guy” he says “despite what you think.”

“I never thought you were not a nice guy” I  practically scream.

“You’re sure you haven’t had enough of this abuse.”  He wonders

“It’s a question of whether you want someone around like me who inspires this much abuse.”

It’s the first day of the last week on studio sets.

We start out at the interior of Torchy’s which is now referred to as “The Country Western Bar.”

The set gets noisy as several other quick things have to be picked up.  Besides redoing Nick on the phone, there’s a brief scene of Eddie bidding Candy, the girl he met at Vroman’s, goodbye after spending the night with her.

Sozna asking for quiet: “Jokes later folks, News at eleven.”

We’re sitting waiting for them to finish lighting, Walter, Joel, and I.

A girl passes by and Joel mutters “She’s built like a glass shithouse.”

“It’s a brick shit house Joel” says Walter…

I ask Walter how it’s going.

“It’s going slow, we’re grinding,” he replies, then after a pause, “It always goes slow…anything worth doing is slow.  I hate movies.  How did I get into this.  It’s so slow,”  this all said in a  low comic pell mell rush as if  a wave were rolling over his head.

An actor named Peter-something who Walter will use as the bartender in the country western bar scene, comes to hang around the set a day before he works.

Peter tells of working with Orson Welles and can’t resist trying to imitate him.  He goes on to talk of his own past as a sloppy drunk.

“That was a different me,” he murmurs with quiet insistence.

“The old Peter,” Walter says, both supportively and maintaining a soupcon of doubt that there are any different selves or variegated persons within the self.

“I was a sloppy drunk, and some people didn’t care for me and I didn’t even know it, but then I was too drunk to see.”

Walter nods in agreement.

“Some of us were there, Peter,” Walter comments mildly, “We remember this.”

Overhearing Larry Gordon barking over the phone… “…It’s reached the point of stupidity…” He’s being kept on hold on a call to Sherry Lansing, who is a production executive over at Fox:  “Can’t get Sherry Lansing on the phone?  What, has she only got one line?”

August 4 , 1982

Eddie’s moment in the Country Western Bar scene.  This was the one thing he was excited about getting a chance to play the first day I met him.

Walter watches Eddie roust the rednecks at the bar.  He turns to Joel at the end and says of this “money” scene, simply, “I’m rich.”

Much of Eddie’s improvs are wonderful here.

Walter really warm today.  He senses that the strategy of waiting and keeping this scene till the end of the shoot when Eddie is a million times more confident has paid off.

“I gotta get busy and get this scene done so this kid can jack up his price.”

We go over to the editing room and see the scene between Eddie and the girl cut together.  He’s not satisfied.  I beg him not to think of cutting it.

He points to the boxes of film that sit over Freeman’s shoulder.

“What you don’t understand is, it’s not a theoretical decision. By the time the decision is made, if the scenes are out, you will want them out.  You don’t really make the film back on the set, you make it in here with those hundred or so white boxes. The film is in there in those boxes somewhere, and its gotta be what they tell ya it is.”

August 6 , 1982

(GROSS NOTE: Poltergeist And E.T. Have Dominated The Summer Box Office So At Times Doing A Police Thriller Has Seemed Irrelevant.)

Walter on Speilberg:  “Speilberg likes making films about kids and aliens, and ghosts, and I like to make ’em about men.  He’s probably the smart one.  Audiences seem to agree with him.”

“Victor makes films where boys are boys and men are boys.”

Walter and Joel both enthuse, “I love that we call him Victor.”

Ric Waite pretends doing a redneck teasing Debbie Love.

Last night after dailies  Walter sighs… “I’m done in boys.”

“Only half an hour more” Joel says.

Walter says to me “You’re supposed to stay watch these and learn.”

I say to Walter “I need a ride home more.”

Joel remarks, “He doesn’t want to learn what he learns from walking all the way home.”

Walter and I stop off and have a drink at the Improv.

August 8 , 1982

Watched on the Kem, bits of Vromans and the punchout in the alley between Nick and Eddie.

Later in the day, drinks with Eddie, Baird, Donald, Bairds friends, Baird’s wife at Eddie’s palatial estate.  It’s only with a bit of a shock that I realize how rich Eddie Murphy is when the kid’s only like twenty one or something.  It’s just not a bad life being a twenty one year old t.v. and movie star.

August 10, 1982

History is nothing but a dialogue with special cases.

Special cases reveal the nature of norms. Or perhaps norms are illusory and there exist only more and less emphatic instances of special cases.

August 12, 1982

Fourth night shooting in Chinatown.  Watching Nick attack Margot Rose on her way up to her place.  And then all the mechanics of finally killing Ganz.

Larry Gordon brings a lot of chinese food back for the crew to snack on after eating lunch at one of these places with Joel.  As typical, Joel’s eating habits come in for drollery.  There’s Larry’s eating to avoid a heart attack and Joel, from Larry’s point of view, overeating.

“The guy running never saw a check that big in the history of the restaurant…he just couldn’t get a load of Blutto over there…he was always coming over to us, going ‘Maw?  Maw?”

Later watching all the moves of Remar going around corners gunning for Nick and Eddie:  “Always remember.  You must improvise.”

At the beginning of the night before shooting starts, Walter presents me with a page of notes he’s prepared for a new script.  It will be the first in a series of adventures of an action hero he’s had it in his mind to create for a long time.  The character’s name is Tom Cody.  And Walter has it in his head to create a franchise about him…introducing him as The Stranger.

He asks me if I’m interested in writing the script with him…I ask him is the Pope Catholic?  Larry and Joel would be along on this ride.  Suits me.

WATCHING JOHN HUSTON’S FREUD Sexuality is that violence, and the escape from it, the force more powerful than violence–that violence is suppressive, rejecting yet produces fragments breaks things up.  The force that rejects violence, the force that overcomes violence, the force that transcends violence. “You mustn’t stop.”  Mrs. Freud helping Siggie, a moving scene.  No matter unpleasant the discoveries you are making are you have to continue trying to make them. As if the “whole way” was simple and straight forward.  As if only straight forward effort was required–as if the quantity of effort was identical with its result. “The time comes when one must give up all ones fathers and stand alone.” This is the key line of Freud’s played brilliantly byMontgomery Clift, living with the fear of his discoveries is forced by his discovery of the oedipal climax, to say.  I weep.  I think of my own reluctance to elude or escape or reject my own father, who I love so much. You can see in this scene and throughout , traces of Sartre’s conceptions of authenticity and bad faith, in the drama of Freud’s evolution, he’s the person who did the first draft of the screenplay. STAND ALONE (how) Stand alone in accepting something as well as rejecting something. It gets later and later.  The time for my trip grows later and later.  The time to see these people. When you know yourself.  The notion that outside forces “beyond our control” are forces within us–is ultimately a service to vanity rather than a rebuke to it.  Whatever widens our power over that which had hitherto been beyond control makes us greater.  The ego conserving Freud. The other Freud is the student of our dispersal, the analyst of our self-misinterpretation, the way we misconstrue our identity,  the prophet of the fact that we can never be with ourselves…the story of Freud is the story of his differentness from his father-mentors and his children–patients…his “standing alone” is his non-identity with these groups, his being-himself is his not-being, someone to other.

August 18 , 1982
THE LAST NIGHT OF SHOOTING

The last night–around twelve shooting days later than expected. Or originally scheduled.

The movie has had good luck throughout and continues too — dawn shot done at dawn, gets lucky darkness lasting long enough for six takes.  The freeway lights go on when needed

Joel responding to inquiries from me a  in a manner a little more hostile than usual: “Get outta the business — just go into another profession.”

The essence of Joel, is that he remains, at all times and all costs unconscious of his own aggression.

My friend  Corrine, who originally introduced me to Walter about seven months ago,  sends a “cookiegram” to the set, a fabulous giant cake–cookie, with Walter, Nick, Eddie, Larry, Joel and me depicted.  Corrine’s conception of the movie gives me a prominent place in it.  You know.  From her mouth to God’s ear.

Now we go to our last night:  The “tag” is what we’re shooting…Nick and Eddie coming away from the girl’s apartment and then discussing what they’re going to do with the money.

At lunch, the cast and crew picture.  I ask Larry Gordon how everything’s going.  He gives his stern indifferent look, “Everything’s normal.”

Katzenberg shows up to shake Walter, Nick and Eddie’s hand. Suddenly everyone wants to be Eddie’s friend.  That whole situation has turned around totally.  I ask Katzenberg what Paramount has coming up. He mentions An Officer and a Gentlemanwith Richard Gere which he describes as a coming of age story, “I’m very proud of it.”

As we’re preparing to do some of the last shots, I sit with Walter.

I comment on the fact that the studio is starting to seem more confident about the film.  That of course doesn’t reassure him in the slightest:

“I worry that this thing is gonna be called ‘two guys in search of a story.’  I know that barely worries you at all.”  Then he sighs.  “Six movies…it takes a lot out of ya.”

Sometimes during in this process Walter was irritated at me as at someone there to take things out on.  Sometimes he simply ignored me, because he was busy, tired or had more important things to do than explain whatever moves he was making to me.  Then he sometimes, out of left field, wanted to announce conviction about a scene.  There were still other times when he wanted, from me, a sort of gestalt view.  The whole of how I looked at things, since I had the luxury of not having to be on the line to make choices every six seconds.  Walter would, under these circumstances, lose interest in his superiority to me in movie politics or the detail of filmmaking and ask questions of a speculative kind — the arena in which we were more equals.  “Whaddya think” he would ask, and I wold start shooting my mouth off which is basically what I’m good at.

Of course we often talked about whichever girls he found attractive on the set, wondering aloud if I did as well.  We had talks about girls that were retrospective, speculative and competitive.

August 19 , 1982

People ask if this is my first film.

I explain it isn’t really “mine” — it’s been in development with Walter  in form or another since l973, the draft he did with Roger, was finished in l976…and that I was hired only three weeks prior to production commencing.

Will it be my first credit they ask?  I don’t even know if I’ll get credit.  The Writers Guild credit process is so screwed.  I’ve been gypped out of credit on a number of things I worked on that got made where I was sure I deserved it…the whole credit deal for rewriting scripts is just completely illogical.

Walter and I amidst our discussions of work on The Stranger, talked about credit.  He suggested, we identify ourselves as a writing team, Walter Hill & Larry Gross, that that would increase my chances of getting credit.

It was exceptionally generous of him.  As a first writer his sole credit was a lock…but by putting himself with me, he was risking his own position in the credits…this is all too arcane and weird to explain but I composed this letter a few nights ago to the Writer’s Guild.

This was the first draft of a letter I wrote to the Writer’s Guild asking for credit on the movie:

To Whom It May Concern:
I worked on the script of this film everyday from About April 25 through postproduction…it is hard to disentangle my contribution to the script from that of Walter Hill, since he revised, rewrote, and added to and improved everything I did.  Some of what he did, has become half mine.   Everything of mine is at least half his.  If any other writer other than Walter gets credit than I deserve to as well.  That’s a fact but I know facts never enter into these deliberation.

(GROSS NOTE: Eventually The Writer’s Guild Assigned Screenplay Credit To
Walter Hill, Roger Spottiswoode. Myself And Stephen De Souza.

In December Of 1982, The Film Opened To Generally Favorable Reviews And Decent Business That Hung On Through A Significant Part Of The Next Year. The Film Was Perceived To Be A Hit

In February Of 1983 Universal Bought The Script That Walter And I Had Begun In August, Now Entitled Streets Of Fire. With Joel And Larry We Were In Production By March Of 1983.
But That, As They Say, Is Another Story)

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published October 2, 2008

July 17, 1982

Today, we’re seeing strung together footage of almost what should play as at least half an hour of the movie.  Probably more.

The big problem is when does the movie begin…what should Annette’s role be…

Some scenes that I classified as “mine” especially scenes between Annette and Nick are gone.

(Gross Notes: One Long Take Dialogue Scene Was Reinstated For The T.V. Version When We Had To Make So Many Cuts Because Of Bad Language.)

So my presence in the film is more diffused, in glints, hints, nudges, the aura of it, I’m present but not present.  I’m freed of my some of my sense of  responsibility for the movie, while having a hand in some of its good stuff.  My accomplishment is pleasanter but more trivial.

When you want to want success a great deal…it’s not fair or appropriate to want what success will “get you” more.

…the real things you want.

Reading Nathaniel West’s unbelievably great “Miss Lonelyhearts” …

“He stood greatly against a wall, trying not to see or hear.  Then he remembered Betty.  She had often made him feel that when she straightened his tie, she had straightened much more.

Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column.  Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.  Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her order was not.”

Our lives.  Us losing our soul.  The loss of it.  Giving our souls up.  Losing.  Submitting to Fascism.  Submitting to terror.  Everything given up.  Flying from our hands unreachable.

Going wrong.

Bad.

Our lives.  The trashing and twisting of the nice things. The nice things don’t seem as durable or as survival oriented as the shitty things that bend and mutate to meet the onset of crap.  Are nice people intrinsically weaker than shitty people?  If so, how to live?

Relentless noise and light. Our city straight streets interesting with movies of our city streets.

Devilish development.

July 19, 1982

Sozna gets to boss one hundred peole working as background at the music club, Vroman’s…he’s in heaven.

An awful orange stickum pertains to the afternoon.  Sunset, formerly the province of elegiac feelings and utterance, is nothing other than the descent of this shit.  The eyes go filmy.  Citizens, guys, people-in-cars, seem to move in a soggy slow motion.

At Vroman’s, we have five days of filming, a blackrock group singing over and over again, a song called “The Boys are Back in Town.”  Eddie has dialogue with a number of people on this set.  And he dances.

Walter is happy here.

They pump endless amounts of that b-smoke that makes the set more interesting to photograph.  Extras complain about how it makes it hard to breathe.

Sozna replies through his bullhorn, “Call your congressmen folks, real men love smoke.”

July 20, 1982

Sozna organizing dancing in Vroman’s.

“Jokes are great, but when I’m not permitted to hear them, I know they’re hot.”

Walter Hill expressing interest in a book I brought him, Blue City.

Hill blistering me for taking a long lunch.

Much dancing.

Walter does his own country-shuffling-dancing feet number.  “I used to win dance contests,” he says with some pride, “I got ribbons to prove it.”

The montage possibilities for this swirl of colors and bodies is quite wonderful.

All of us white guys tap our feet on the key bits.  The cliché term “infectious” applies.

Performances and details, whether they survive in the film, follow the aegis of a tonal determinant, intuited by the director.  Those choices are what filmmaking is.

Directorial personality is the cohesion of this thematic authority, this dominance of a distinctive tone, and whatever complexity it can achieve.  That which governs choices in art works must some combine variety and complexity, unity and force.

Authorization by tonal dominance has been purchased at times by narrowness in Walter’s case, in the past.  He has won authority, unity, and cohesion, but lost on palpable multiplicity of content, therefore the excellence of his films as made objects has run the risk of irrelevance.

Sometimes the films seem to have been about little other than his skill in making them.  It’s possible that I’ve had some part in enriching the nature of the dominant themes in this particular film, but the will to accept or use that contribution, is a choices that is all his. And finally, Walter is like anyone else in that personality ultimately has the will to be itself.

July 21, 1982

Walter says he’s going to date GB

“Who?,” Joel asks perking up, turning from his entertainment page of the LA Herald Examiner.

“Don’t tell Joel, he’ll twist, burn and fry up.” says Walter laughing.

“Who? Tell me,” Joel says.

Walter walks away.

I smile and say nothing.

“Tell me who.  Tell me who it is” Joel says repeating, “Tell me who.”.  thirty times.  “You want to tease old Joel, huh?  You like to tease old Joel.  You’ll never work in Hollywood again, I’ll tell ya.”

“It’s no one, Joel,” I say, “just someone Walter’s someone going to dinner with.”

I have been annoyed at Joel for days for no particular reason, just a general feeling of being slighted, which he is always good for inspiring if you like feeling it.

“You don’t understand,” he insists, “I wanna know ESPECIALLY if it’s unimportant. ”

Walter drifts back.

We watch the crew push lights around.

“It’s nothing Joel.”

Joel is giggling now.

“So you wanna tease old Joel.  You awaken a sleeping giant at your peril.  Don’t wake a sleeping giant.”

Later he refers to the DWTSGC — Don’t Wake The Sleeping Giant Concept.  He says that this follows my not having understood STBP, See The Big Picture.

Walter on the phone while they set up an insert remarks to me “You do it, direct the shot.”

He means I get to call action and cut.

I do it.   Rick Neff, the operator, kids me later for not looking through the lens.

Kim, the Busboys manager, (The Busboys Are The Group Performing The Musical Number At Vromans), my tongue is on the floor for her.

I say to Joel, “Will you take me to N.Y. on the publicity for the film if I tell you who the girl Walter’s dating is?”

‘You got it,” he says.

“In that case you should tell him,” Walter says.

Oh boy what a deal.

Today my friend Henry Bean’s novel “False Match” is reviewed in California Magazine. By Greil Marcus. A rave review.  Stark shot of jealousy cuts through me.  I have not the discipline Henry had to nurse his obsession.  So whether I remotely have the talent doesn’t even arise as a question or a possibility.  I feel poised in the middle-mediocrity–between whoring and artistry.  Not committed to a single identity supporting an extreme.  The appetite to transcend a tag is part of greatness but so is coalescing into that mold.  Settling.  Settling as the imprimatur of discipline and form, it is of course the imprimatur of tragedy and failure–reduction.

July 22, 1982

Nick and Eddie and Olivia in the sweating crowds at Vroman’s.  One of Eddie’s very very best improvisation moments.  “Lack of pussy make you brave!”

Extremely difficult for Walter and Sozna to match backgrounds.

Gary Franklin comes to cover the movie for CBS T.V.

Walter pretty unreceptive today.  When I praise the bedroom sequence we cut out between Annette and Nick, he claims it was a bunch of crap.

I awake with a headache, I think a cold.  Ugh.  A summer cold is an ugly animal.

Walter makes a demand of  a member of the camera crew, “Get me a still of the club as seen from the stage…”

Then he sits back and gives a very interesting account of why he’s enjoying this location,

“Smoke and backlight are friends of the director.  In addition, stairwells, corridors, trains, mirrors, staging things in these places you are hard put to put the camera in a bad place.  Remember always to stage in depth.  Foreground pieces and tight overs are preferable to closeups  for this reason.  They always involve composing shots in depth.”

This place gets very warm.

Later lunch at Martoni’s in Hollywood.  So New York in décor that my heart did contractions of nostalgia and remorse. The people who entered seemed to have souls and bodies changed the moment they entered the joint.  Remade instantly into New Yorkers.

July 23, 1982

Wrap up Vromans.

They have to reshoot the shot I suggested because of poor lighting.

“Everything in life for power, isn’t it Joel?,” I say to him, appropos of something.

Joel stares, a little puzzled. “Of course” he says quietly as if he couldn’t quite understand why I asked the question, or rather curious as to how it could be that I didn’t know the answer without having asked.

We have to overcome the vanity of our separateness, to do this takes the maximum presence of the will we generally associate with vanity. It takes special strong and terrible will to give up the cheap gains which they can grant.

The creative terror a man finds when he descends into himself is not a terrfic tool for taking with him. When he beats a man up in a negotiation…it is not like the literal terrors of poverty, war or jil–but it isn’t deforming or terrifying terror either–the terror you create binds death to life and leaves you free to relate to entirely fresh and unpredictable combinations of meaning that arise truly in life.

Vicious powerful men, hardened on actual cruelties done to them and done by them, have it over imaginative men in many situations.  But mentally they are muscle-bound, locked in what they know, forced to force everything in to their narrow box of suffering and victimization and aggression.  There are grim times when life is nothing but that box, and the most ruined of those men, with a grain of imagination do function very effectively in those times.  Whenever life reduces freedom, those used to being unfree feel comfortable with it, fare better.  But of course the minute some freedom comes back, that limited perspective goes back to being a diminution of life.

Actually everyone has been brutalized once and has an instinct for returning to the scene of the trauma and submitting everything to its map or rules of order.  The people who  have really been fucked over feel the compulsion to impose this order on others.  The artist has the same will to impose as the victimized cruel man, but weirdly what he wants to impose is exaclty opposite–he wants to instill the subversion of orders and the recovery of the sense of ongoing complete unpredictability.  He wants an order that is a release from order, a form that routs form.  An artist takes a left turn from the labyrinthe of cruelty he must be second to no one in taking orders from.

July 24, 1982

MONOLOGUE
I can only impress other fakes like myself.

The impossibility of loving an artist, the drama of trying to love an artist.

I see you failing me:  How am I going to get you to take me seriously, even the whole institution of being taken seriously is no longer serious.

Things you’re not supposed to know crowd up around you and abolish the whole school of certainties you’d been lead to.

The things you don’t know about me…

The ways I disappoint myself…

A whole life crowds around a point of pressure, usually revealed to have been absent.

The light, paler in the back of the room, here bleeding up to brighter.

I can’t describe the moves light except from more to less, from there to here, duller to brighter, further away to closer.

Walter Hill said, “We’ve gotta turn this kid into a famous writer.”

Fame is nothing, fame is lies.

You have to know what you mean and who your responsibility belongs to.

Everybody belongs to someone.

The eyes break.  The window break in sympathy with the eyes that can suddenly not see through them.  The light changes into a strange language.  Stay here and be deceived.  Be estranged and blinded as you actually are.  Listen to the way mistakes are made and then systematized into real life.

Life is erosion–all you are doing is fighting to make Something life conspires to unmake.

This right now might be confused ambivalent moment where I see it clearly for the firs time.

I might have the nerve to see everything as it really is with all divergent trips of intelligence in play at each other’s throats, competing for life, producing life, screwing it up making it possible it might be right now I might be at the height of my powers.

I can remember how at the beginning of filming, all the moves Nick and Annette made in their scenes and how some of them were right, but ultimately it didn’t make a bit of difference.

I could be seeing everything as it really is.

Now, for the first time, the world might be coming into view.  As some arty queer might say, “The whole mad whirl. ”  Maybe I’m supposed to be that arty queer in this or another life.  The ghosts of earlier periods of fragmentation absorbed magnanimously:

We want the whirl and we want it now.

Some us have made a whole livelihood out of disappointment.

You think grimly of what you haven’t had.  But was what you sacrificed that which you feel bad about having missed.  If you hadn’t given up what you did, wouldn’t you still feel that you’d missed something essential?

July 27, 1982

Sometimes it seems like you have to consent to becoming inhuman, insensitive, in order to survive.

Certainly you have to be interested in cruelty if you want to say something true to the nature of this world.

The feeling more and more powerless

Fifth and Broadway, downtown LA at Night. In front of Torchy’s. The generic name of every rough Walter Hill bar.  There was a Torchy’s in The Driver, and there will be more Torchy’s if Walter gets to make any more urban thrillers.  When we first met, his first expressed regret at Hollywood was that they weren’t making westerns any more.  But now he’s decided, he’s said, that he can put all the things he liked in western’s into urban thrillers.

We’re not quite in the pits of skid row, but close.  And it’s the middle of the summer, so crowds of bored, sad street people stand glued to us and our somewhat awkward work.

People go to bars to do what people go to bars to do.

Overheard on the set, “Even though she’s right she’s wrong.”

Sozna sits next to Gene Levy.  I ask him what’s gong wrong and he says it’s too technical to explain.

Then he adds, “The only way to make this film was if we could start with more weeks prep (I protest that I understand this) so we couldn’t come here and prepare this street and be all set to deal with it.”

Eddie sitting waiting.  Tells me he fucked five girls this weekend.

“Pussy is pussy” he says, “except for one girlfriend.”  He pauses and thinks back nostalgically to the weekend, “She’s got a special sorta pussy.”

“Do all these girls feel bad about not being our only girl?” I ask.

“They don’t know,” he says.  “Five of em,” he adds.  He’s impressed himself. “Hope I don’t get no diseases.”

A rough night on the street. Sozna and the sound guy are elsewhere.

People start talking to me so naturally I start lying to them. It’s spontaneous. I don’t’ see why I can’t step boldly from lies to intimacy.

July 28, 1982

Extraordinary flash of neon sign arrangement on an alley between Spring and Broadway.

Earlier, Eddie had to throw his gun away in disgust after Nick removes the clip.  Craig Raiche: Propman’s job is to catch the gun when Eddie tosses it, so it won’t break and have to be replaced when it hits the ground.  Guns are costly.  Craig wears a baseball mitt to do it and we all cheer when he catches it.

Bruce Feirstein, Friend of Joel’s, a writer, author of the bestselling humor book, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche…appears on the set as Joel’s guest.  Big admirer of Walter.

Usual comic quarrel between Joel and Walter.

Walter claims Joel is responsible for the commercial disaster that was Xanadu.

Joel points out that Walter’s last movies have been commercial failures.  “Bomba-bomba-bomba” he chants mockingly.

The debate that is also going on now is how hard is Katzenberg trying to squeeze us, on budget issues…he’s been president of  production for about a month now and he seems to be getting pissed at our bookkeeping tactic   of asking for money than what’s in the budget and calling that “negotiated overages.”

“AO” is Joel’s other phrase, “Approved overages.”  Which is a brilliant piece of paradoxical or oxymoronic language, I guess, you know like a married bachelor or a legal crime, or a truthful lie, or I don’t know…

The controversy such as there is, deals with how much trouble this form of tampering with the budget is going to get our film into.

“You don’t know.  You don’t understand,” Joel nearly shrieks at Walter.  “This kid is crazy.”  The kid being Katzenberg.  “Michael loves him.  He’d love to shut us down.  He’d love to prove how tough he his.”

What we have known from day one is that the boss of the studio Barry Diller spends a minute of every day eyeballing budget reports and insisting that movies have to and can be done cheaper here, and that enraged demand gets passed along to Eisner who passes it along to Katzenberg.  Larry has warned us of this.

“He’s not going to shut us down,” says Walter, “We’ll refuse to promote the movie.

“Just now, he says no to a band at Torchy’s and that’s it…” Joel is listing his latest triumphant battle, “I got him to give us back a band, but he says twenty five hundred bucks is all you’ve got.”

Joel’s unique ability to find a source of drama in any detail of his life.  There’s always some arena of intrigue in anything he puts his attention to.

Watching Bruce McBroom, the production photographer, set up his camera so that he can press the button on the shot from a safe  distance.

Walter describes this procedure as “Discretion before dishonor.”

July 30, 1982

Walter about his own ambitions to innovate:  “I thought I invented some shots on The Driver but it turns out the camera man tells me, they’ve been doin’ ’em since 1915…it’s awful hard to invent something…I always thought you could have a tremendous impact on showing a fight by a lateral movement of the camera to the side of the action, joined with a zoom in…you need very large objects in the foreground or background for that to work.”

“Maybe it’s real hard to invent things,” I remarked back, “all you can do is make original combinations of old things.”

July 31, 1982

Many guests on the set, last night.  Mysteriously, a more relaxed and festive mood starting to appear.  Maybe as a movie comes closer to completion people get more sentimental about each other.  Also, mysteriously, the studio’s opinion of our film has started to rise.

Walter’s completing the fight in the alley between Nick and Eddie.

I met a publicist from New York, who has gone to work with Spielberg, named Peggy Siegel.

Joel is suddenly under a lot of pressure from the music department of Paramount, a man oddly namedJoel Sill.  He’s being hit about overages on the money spent to get certain “Busboy” tapes.

Roger Spottiswood, who edited Walter’s first film and co-wrote the first draft of this film, visits with his girlfriend, Holly Palance, who it seems has a part in the next film he’s making.

“What,” says Walter, “Is Roger casting with his cock?”

“Of course,” someone says.

“That’s one thing I never do,” Walter says.

Joel bursts into peals of ironical “oh no?”‘s… I have to join.

Walter blushes and says, “Fuck you guys. I can’t forgive you two for getting me on that..”

“There was Frizzy,” I point out.

“She was perfect for the part.”

I offered my opinion.

“When you nail the lead actress it’s cause you’re crazy for her, when it’s bits, that’s what casting with your cock is.”

It’s bad when the girls at the bar can’t get the words to R-E-S-P-E-C-T right.

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published August 25, 2008

July 7, 1982

It’s the costumer Dan Moore’s birthday party thrown by the crew.  He’s a smart, thoroughly Irish guy, so I buy him some Irish whiskey. He got  a graduate degree in literature and did his thesis on Joyce!  The people who stumble into the movie business!  Also I keep pressing him if one day he could let me have one of the doubles for the hat Ganz wore in one shot, a brown felt hat I’m crazy about.

July 8, 1982

Dan Moore got his bottle of whiskey from me but he barely he had time to notice, because his crew mates doused him with meringue pie.

He retreated to one of the trailers to recuperate.

July 9, 1982

Celebrations at the studio continue:

Ric Waite’s birthday- The camera crew with Baird in command, gets him a chocolate cake.  Sculpted onto the cake, is a cinematographersetting up a shot in the jail.  Rick’s backlit shot of Nick and Eddie quarreling in the prison, was superb, his finest hour yet, three days ago.

Printed on the cake a statement attributed to Ric.

“Does it have to be this hard?  Yeah, so it can be this much fun?”

Denise Crosby (Bing’s granddaughter) and Margot Rose (a woman I briefly nearly dated more than two years ago) play the two girls Eddie and Nick question looking for Billy (Sonny.)  We refer to them as the two dykes.

Walter invents a bit for Denise to do with a baseball bat, hitting Eddy, that improves the scene.

When we get to the hit, Eddie is comically fearful.

“I’m not gonna hit you” Denise promises urgently.  “I’m not worried about you, it’s your arms holding the bat that worries me” Eddy moans.

Eddie for the fourth day in a row is quite good, about a thousand percent improved on the early scenes in San Francisco that worried the studio.  The proverbial chemistry between Nick and Eddie together in scenes has taken a mysterious quantum leap.  Basically they’ve gotten to like and trust each other in “real life” and it affects their scenes.  I don’t know who wouldn’t become a better actor opposite Nolte, and Eddie said the same thing.   He shook his head a couple of days ago and he said, “Nolte, man…he makes you act.”

But what exactly is the reason for the huge improvement?  There’s Nick, there’s Walter’s prodding, there’s the studio’s pressure… and there’s simply Eddie’s raw talent urging him forward.  You can see him get more into it moment by moment.  It reminds me that he’s a comedian and with comedians on stage, they sometimes hit a groove where they become confident of their rapport with the audience and suddenly the littlest thing they do works and is funny and extends their control of the audience.  Eddie’s at least glimpsed that groove, or else he’s hitting it.

Walter and Joel and Larry have started to completely change their tune about worrying about Eddie or what the studio thinks of him.  Whatever problems we face suddenly Eddie is ceasing to be one of them

Walter’s concentrated attention pays off.

Margot Rose turns to me and expresses amazement at Walter’s “guidance.”

Today on set a big moment for me.

Craig Raiche, the prop guy whose domain it is, had, for me, made a chair with brown leather backing and my name on it.  The absence of this had helped me appear and be treated as silly for some time.  Had made me the butt of countless jokes, plus snarls when I sat in people’s chair.

(Luca had been particularly annoyed at finding me in her chair.)  Not being involved in the Chinese laws of Court Etiquette I’d been slow to grasp the significance of people’s chairs.  But gradually I got the message.

So getting this is a big thing.

I had walked into being made to feel silly yesterday when Dan Moore got me the ganz hat I had been bugging him about.  Three days ago, when I asked him about it the last time, it was at a bad time in the middle of working to fix Nick up during a difficult long take.  Dan embarrassed me effectively by pretending he should stop what he was doing, postponing the doing of his job, because I was asking him to sluff purely for the purpose of dealing with my trivial request.

I wanted to cut my tongue out.  I did not make my request vehemently or harshly enough to quite merit the ripping Dan Moore gave me but I was insensitive to his ego about his job, I later realized.  I made it seem like I thought my trivial requests for a favor was more important than his job.

At Ric’s cake ceremony, Nolte shouts, “Bring on the transvestite!”

The other day, at Dan Moore’s more orgiastic birthday celebration, a stripper gave him a strip-o-gram.  Huge blow-ups of her, her huge tits and ass, were posted on the outer wall of the dykes apartment set.

There is much infantilism, obviously, among film people. It is the synthesis between razor sharp workaholism, the pressure of so much daily rigor, the need to escape all that, and claims of simple egocentric vanity.  These traverse and contradict each other’s claims to produce “antic disposition.”

Today Walter, Joel, and Larry lunch with President Katzenberg.  The gist of their discussion is, “if it’s necessary to spend a lot more money to make the ending spectacular, spend a lot more money.”

Hilariously, six weeks earlier I had been assigned the job of creating a cheaper ending, which moved it to the roof of the Dyke’s apartment.  Now that’s not considered elaborate enough.  Walter is emboldened.  The studio is hungry to spend more money.  They like what they see

Walter, today, unhappy with me.  Why?  No particular reason.  Some days Walter is happier with me than others.  Grim truth?  I’m less exciting news to him that I was.  My promise is no longer unlimited.  We know a bit more of each other’s frailties and vanities.  The moment Walter discerns a man’s weakness, limitation, he experiences a bit of disappointment.  Why not he’s only human.  Disillusioned idealist, a name for all directors I suspect.  I stress both sides.  The fantasy and the girl awareness of how the fantasy suffers perpetual defeat.

FASSBINDER – IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS Got a chance to see Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, a film he made apparently as a rapid response to the fact of his own lover committing suicide.  The central character is a transsexual who commits suicide at the end of the movie. It’s a film which fuses an “abstract” and “personal” character study, where a soul is studied in its idiosyncratic and culturally typical forms, where every attempt at understanding are further examples of the cruelty which the story attempts to understand. The sadomasochistic topic reveals itself formally in the aggressive or coercive relationship between the story and language.  Everything in Thirteen Moons is a blatant case of something being forced upon us, everything is bout the inner heterogeneity that constitutes it.  The relation of narrators, a nun, a mystic weird with candles, Elivira in the slaughterhouse to what is narrated is sadistic. The slaughterhouse scenes takes out of the realm of psychological consistency into the realm where symbolic content manifests the violence of its distance to what it refers to. The problem of authorial distance and point of view is emblem of a conception of disassociation, discontinuously and strangeness within the dimension of personal identify involved first with Elvira’s sexual doubleness and then related as well to the progressively  more inconclusive relationship between victim and victimizer. Elvira’s distinction is that he undermines the extreme simplicity of the power set-up he never less can never cease to be the emblem of. Thirteen Moons like Artaud speaks in egotistic voice to abolish a sense of the survival of ego, mixing an obsession with violence and purity  establishes an extreme disjunction between sound and image, present activity and past determination. In thirteen moons everything has already happened before the movie’s action starts.  Elvira’s marriage has failed, his relationship with the guy who suggested he become a woman, has happened, and failed, and another relationship is ending…choices, catastrophes have already happened.  The chaos of discursive rationalization attempts to unify the bloody active past with the exhausted impotent  and incomplete present.  The present is nothing but its deteriorating crumbling complicity with the past violence that engendered it. I saw this film last night for the second time, became further convinced it’s one of the great works of narrative cinema, of our time.

July 13, 1982

Today, visitors to the set, Tracy Tynan, an old friend of Walter’s, who is now going out with a director I know slightly named Jim McBride. I had met them awhile back through my friend Evelyn Purcell.  Another friend of Walter’s I knew vaguely, a woman namedBrooks Riley.  Like Audie Book, she does subtitles for foreign films.  I had once had a meeting with her in New York when she was working at Film Comment magazine.

Unformulated moments of social consciousness are more accurate than more clearly formulated intended ones.

A visitor to the set I am awed to be introduced to, the great English Director Lindsay Anderson.  (His This Sporting Life,  If, and Oh Lucky Man were among the first  films that  made me care about movies when I was a teenager.)

(GROSS NOTES: Years Earlier I’d Been Invited To A Screening Of A Short T.V. Film Anderson Had Directed And Had Come To Introduce…And I’d Noticed Walter Hill Was There. Subsequently Walter Had Quoted Lindsay’s Opinions On The Subject Of John Ford, Who Anderson Had Written A Book About.  Walter Had A Great Enthusiasm For That Book, Enjoyed Quoting It, And Felt It Was The Best Thing Written About Ford. And I’d Seen A Postcard From Anderson That Walter Kept On Prominent Display On His Desk. One Of The Many Surprising Terrific Things I Had By Now Learned About Walter Is That He Had Many Friends Among Quiet Intellectual Often Politically Left Wing Brits — The Fact That These Guys Liked His Films A Lot And Saw The Connection Between Walter And John Ford Meant A Great Deal To Walter. But Only A Short Time After Walter Introduced Me To Lindsay Anderson, I Could Tell They Had A Terrifically Sincere Closeness That Went Further Than Their Mutual Professional Respect.)

Lindsay Anderson watching Walter shoot, and I’m actually instructed by Walter to be his guide around the set and make sure he has someone to talk to.

I commit a horrible blunder by misnaming his newest film, Brittania Hospital, referring by mistake to the title of another smaller film on the same subject, The National Health…Anderson corrects me in an acidic tone of voice…it would be the same as if I insulted Walter by confusing The Warriors with The Wanderers.

Wrong, faux pas.

Lindsay Anderson

Anderson is a short egg shaped man round around the belly but not fat sensing because of the tautness of his eye and the sharpness of his long beak like nose.  The comfortable power of his glance makes the term “intense” misleading if inevitable to describe his way of looking his manner.  But he has none of the juvenility, none of the uncertainty that one usually equates with the term “intensity”.  His air of command is amused, credible.  One can see him up stepping up on the platform  of the crazed and maniacal given any adequate provocation, and certainly his reputation for acerbic vitriolic anger is somewhat legendary.  But today he’s mainly nothing but amused, curious, and intelligent.

We watch a scene where Eddie bursts into Billy’s room and confronts him, asking him to give up without a fight.  Billy refuses, pulls a knife and Eddie has to shoot him to death.  I watch Proval coaching.  Essentially it boils down to encouraging Eddie to view it like it’s an athletic event.  He’s telling him to bear down and  take a lot of deep breaths, a moment before they call action.

I explain basically to Anderson what the scene is about, and he squints.  “What is it like I wonder” he says quietly “having to shoot someone?”

The scene comes off pretty well.  Actually doing a physical action scene, is in fact a bit like doing a pole vault, or some type of performance on the parallel bars.  So Proval’s simplistic advice actually is pretty sound.

July 14, 1982

Followed Walter to editor Freeman Davies’ suite, saw Cut footage.

Reggie’s first appearance at the jail, leading to the beating up of Luther.

I am pleased by a sense of the “push” of the narrative.  I am nervous that in some scenes characters behave in emotional routines or attitudes that have not been sufficiently prepared for.  Never the less the “push” or “drive” I notice is more decisive.  The shades of emotional clarity I am referring to… the absence of them may have their noticability collapsed by narrative urgency.  (Hope.)

Joel’s birthday.  Larry Gordon’s cake for him has a massive erect penis and the words Happy Birthday You Putz, on them.

Another cake is a gargantuan imitation hamburger.  A third cake has a an icing depiction of Joel and a naked bimbo.  A massive striptease dancer follows the unveiling of the cake.

Yesterday had one of the best moments for me in the making of this film.  Lindsay Anderson and Walter Hill stretched out on the prop bed, musing about John Ford’s My Darling Clementine.

Who thought of the title?  What did the project mean to Ford?  Did he have to use Linda Darnell as Chiquita because she was banging Zanuck, the studio executive on the film.?

I flirt with Denise some more.  I would say I’m getting exactly nowhere.

First Through The Door

Nick blasts (!) through a glass window barrier, today.  This time, in that jacked up doing an athletic mode, he’s got a tremendous urgency to do it.  Quite stunning.

Also squibs exploding all over the dyke apartment.

Is yesterday’s revolutionary truth discredited because the world was not reformed along its precepts?  Today has not been the perfect tomorrow.  That was foreseen.  The Final Conflict, awaited and wished for (a consummation devoutly to be wished) has not arisen.

The “truth” disproven by today’s failure to live up to it may be revivified tomorrow.

The idea that change is actual view with the idea that no particular instance of change is decisive–

That charge is actual is what determines whether or not the perceptive modality is intelligent or not.  How someone evaluates it, how he wants to deny it after acknowledging it .  that’s anybody’s business as long as the reality of the phenomenon of change is acknowledged.

I got suddenly intoxicated thinking about Melville and the stupefying ingenious chutzpah of his desire to be Shakespeare.  The transparent wish to emulate him.

Then depressed considering Melville’s nerve.

A writer with writers block, that’s my topic.

July 16, 1982

Wrapping the dyke apartment, through the beginning of the final shootout.  Walter exclaims “There are so many fucking locations in this movie, god, will I be glad to be through with this one.”

Denise Crosby, this beautiful sort of Wagnerian Valkyrie type blonde screams and yells first at Remar than at Nick.

Crosby Attacks!

She has to be topless for this.

Elaborate joke for this with Joel.

Walter keeps insisting these girls are happy to strip till Joel talks to them, “explains” about it to them, at which point they all want to put back on their blouses.  Or quit the movie.

I have likened it to Bogart chiding nervous publicistEdmond O’Brien when they come to a little Spanish café to talk Ava Gardner into  making a movie in Hollywood.  Bogart tells their boss that this time O’Brien has “charmed the birds back into the trees.”

Anyway, Walter sends Denise to Joel to tell him that she had been all set to strip until she looked to Joel, Joel anguishedly repeats this, Walter chortles, Joel catches on that’s being joked on.

Joel yells for the rest afternoon:  “She fooled me, but you blew the joke W. Hill! You’re such a lousy actor, I was a convinced, but you blew it.  YOU!”

“Joel,” Walter responds, “you don’t understand.  I’m not an actor.  I prepare actors.  I don’t act myself.”

Rumor floats.  Getty Oil is purchasing MCA universal.  Rastar President McElwaine is replacing Frank Price.  Our publicist Rafe drops this in a conversation with an LA times arts reporter.  Deborah Caulfield.  She flabbergasts Price in a conversation about knowing this and Caulfield is so grateful to us for lending her to a scoop that she vows to do a Times article about our movie.

Walter and I go drinking after the days shooting.

Walter offers me this warning about craft and style in screenwriting.

“You gotta do things ten times and try different ways of sayin ’em.”

We talk about who among directors is macho and who is anti-macho.  How Ford and Hawks are sophisticated civilized men who can psychically afford to criticize machismo.

Peckinpah is difficult, Walter says

“Peckinpah you know, he really is Hal Needham… He’s smarter.  He’s warier.  He is worried about people knowing more than he does, and he has this incredible pure ability like a great athlete to direct, to go out and make shots.  But he hates and fears women.  Hates him. With a vengeance.  He wants to hang with the guys, hunt, drink, fuck whores.  Never read a book in his life.  Is so scared.  Finally he doesn’t believe machismo works but doesn’t have any belief in other values..”

The subject turns to working all the time or not.

“You know, every time you start one of these damn things, you’re scared you forgot how to do ’em.  A few days into it, you know that you do know how, but it’s a worry till then.”

He remarks how lucky he’s been to do a job he likes and get paid well for it, but insists things weren’t so bad before.

“When I was poor, I didn’t feel like I was missing so much…”

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published August 8, 2008

June 25, 1982

L.A.

“I stay awaked baffled by the problem of Ric Waite’s car”…this is a comic monologue byJoel Silver… “I keep turning it over in my mind.  The day he didn’t brings his car to location.  In Modesto.  In Modesto.  It was five weeks ago but it perplexes me to this day.  Sometimes I like awake and think about it.”

Nick, a few seats down, is talking about playing Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar.  Doing farcical plays, something he liked doing called Catch Me if You Can.

Talking to extras.

Shot on the worst LA street I’ve ever scene:  Tumorous necked dead eyed men, cracked eyes, cracked voice cracked skin and bones.  Humans blown around by trash. The weird darkness. Inconsolable

Benny Dobbins stages the car stunts with toy cars, for Walter and all the camera men and operators to see.  This is high splendor.

Remar’s hands are cut by the breaking glass during a take of the bus shooting.

The dilemma Walter faces and all director’s face: Making a film is so much more powerful a phenomenon than talking about it…and of course this aspect of things stifles to some degree the art element in a film…the force of the collective experience allows the filmmaker to imagine that speculative intelligence is unimportant.  Continuing to make films becomes its own self referring rationale.  Movies are capitalist individualism in system, you are a quality individual if you work the system to supply yourself with a steadily better place in the system — there is no “goal” of work beyond maximizing ones’ functional capacity to make work.

The work is its purpose in an essentially mechanical and not sublime sense.

We work till dawn.  All dawns are powerful.  Even tawdry LA streets are disclosed in their shade of hope and still at dawn.  At this withdrawing of darkness, tentative jibs and gestures of hope.

Night lights go out, protection against darkness relaxes, frazzled nerves of fear poke their heads up.

A week of night shooting everyone is turned around and dazed, from breaking glass, speeding along in the insert cars, playing bumper cars with stunt cars.

Walter remarks at one point: “I’m trying to turn you into an action director kid.”

The week of nights seems like a whole movie in itself with memories of what other nights were like seeming to be memories of weeks or even months ago.  When things actually happened in relation to each other is readily lost.

“Nights are tough” Walter says, “but on these thrillers you gotta have m”

How hard and dangerous things are.

I don’t sleep when I come back from these shoots the way I’d like to.  So I make up excuses not to sleep.

JUNE 27, 1982 – DAY OFF

Israel’s unbelievably arrogant cruelty.

The mobility of aggression and territoriality, the inability to map this phenomenon in an intellectually meaningful way.  The impossibility of the phenomenon shaking down to divisible opposable elements.  Pynchonian “in the zone” ness.

The absurdity of religious mysticism diminishes as all efforts at understanding come to appear absurd and mystical..

Legions, armies, of smartly dressed fags of a Sunday, tastefully consuming in West Hollywood  restaurants.

West African children mournfully starving under brutal suns, must all by their interest ignore what’s going on in Beirut.

Action disappears, crimes disappear by virtue of that endless diversity of the circumstances out of which their commission has arisen.

Our life is all about living the loss of original meaning and a lot of our urge for purity is the futile attempt to erase this defeat, this loss, by claiming that original meaning never existed in the first place.  Forgetting, a losing of grip occurs, and then a second stage, the act of forgetting accomplishes its own being forgotten.  First we forget.  Then we forget that we forgot.

Walter and I about Godard.  Walter attacks vehemently: “He lacks the craft to tell stories properly.”

I argue that what Godard relies on is the presence of  stories, and genres in the audience’s heads, and then he improvises from there, not unlike Altman.  The subject ofTout Va Bien, the film that Godard made with someone else that Walter hates, Jane Fonda.  The hollywood liberal  specimen at its most gaseous and odious.

“Godard and Jane Fonda, boy that truly was the marriage of Marx and Coca Cola.”

When Walter talks about the movie, what he continues to be not one hundred percent certain on is when he has narratively — emotionally — made the point he wants to make.  He believes correctly that implicitness is better, but some levels of implicitness leave the room open for wrong secondary implications.  Some times you want to state the meaning more explicitly in order to rule out others.

Went to Blade Runner that we’ve all been looking forward to for so long.

Ford, Cassidy, Snake

My favorite line, the dancer-replicant to Deckard:” You think I’d be working n a place like this if I could afford a real snake?”

There’s rich thematic possibility in juxtaposing, the sci-fi future with old fashioned film noir and making that duality, an analogy with the duality of human/inhuman.  It was Godard by the way who invented this future/self-consciously noir past juxtaposition, with Alphaville. Point Blank, Roeg’sPerformance, and Altman’s The Long Goodbye all played this game to a certain degree.  I wrote about this “genre” in Film Comment about eight or nine years ago.

But despite great moments and a surprisingly decent performance by Harrison Ford, the movie doesn’t quite work   There is too much obscurity for the movie’s fundamental simplicity.  There is too little emotional exposition.  Just one example:  We never see what Deckard would do or might want to do if he didn’t hunt replicants which makes his apparent disgust with his job somewhat incomprehensible. The treatment of the replicants just leaves out too much information.  Scott wants to be Kubrick and convey everything visually, but you have to know how to convey the things you leave out, and too much of fundamental importance is left out here.
JUNE 30, 1982 – THE SHOOTOUT AT THE WALDEN HOTEL

I note Walter’s upsetness, at the end of today.

He said, “Sometimes it gets annoying, irritating answering so many questions.  You just get tired of dealing with the horseshit.”

The horseshit today included delaying with a practical location.   Lighting extremely tight space.  Nudity and the skittishness of the girls involved in it.

Walter to Sonny: “The hits aren’t in the bat.”

Remar and Sosna quarrel as Remar  gets revved up to run down the hallway from the gun battle.  Sosna yells.  Remar yells back.

Walter barks,.  “Just concentrate on the shot Jimmy do your job and let him do his.”  First time I’ve heard Walter raise his voice AND THE LAST TIME I WILL HEAR IT DURING THE ENTIRE SHOOTING

Remar instantly collapses and starts apologizing.

This morning is gunfire.  Producing ample smoke.  Headache making, now.  Killing two actors.  The two cop partners of Nick, Jonathan Banks and another actor, I can’t remember his name.

The camera crew (three) in green blankets and plastic faceguards like a gun-artillery emplacement or tech soldiers facing a huge attcking.  Remar and Sonny blasting the two cops.

Remarks overheard:

Camera operator Rick Neff:  My first two wives were skinny.  Now I’m goin for the meat.

Walter Hill:  “Send in a half apple.

David Sosna when I’m whispering to someone just before a take: “They whisper over at the Desilu studios. Here, they keep quiet.”

Joel comes in announcing that he has a new movie to do at MGM.

My brother lets me know he’s been fired from the literary agency where he works.  It happens to be the one that represents me, ICM.

JUNE 31, 1982

Tara King, Nick Nolte

Walter’s little blonde squeeze, her name is Tara, works today.  Doing the same part she did in The Driver.  Joel privately announces to me that her acting is shitty.  Her part is bigger than similar role of hotel desk clerk that she had in the other film. Here she actually has lines.

This morning dominated, unspokenly, by a single controversy.  Paramount wants to make selected going-over-budget-judgments for reshoots.  Walter refuses. He must receive his not-going-over-budget bonus first.  Then he will do the reshoots.  Berg tells Walter not to consider negotiating on this issue.  Katzenberg says that going along with Walter’s carte blanche demands that going “over” be approved is impossible. The situation was complicated by Larry’s agreement to something on this question with Eisner.  To get Walter to agree with the studio’s point of view on these issues — about this there is much hysteria this morning.  Joel, Larry, Walter and Berg all accusing and being accused of underrating and undermining the other.

Ultimately, Walter wins clearly.  Walter and Berg.  At a key moment, Berg beats up onMichael Eisner, President Katzenberg’s boss.

There is a place Berg gets to that is the essence of ruthlessness.  It is a straightforward cold eyed way of him saying I-am-in-the-sole-possession-of-the-facts.  It really makes you think this is what Lenin must have been like.  It is an insight into the vanity of the notion that power is personal.  Berg embodies the knowledge that power is intimately related to perception, specifically perception of context, i.e. there is no transcending or absolute reality of power.  Yoking this observation to EGO is tricky

My brother after telling me about his work problems announces that he is having marital problems too.   Shit.  A fucked day.

Meanwhile Walter has me invent a bunch of dialogue for Tara, aka Frizzy.

I get into a fight with 2ND AD Debbie Love about my being on the set when they were lighting.  She implied I didn’t have the brains to move out of the way of the crew moving equipment around.  I’m afraid she might be right.

Michael Sragow, a decent journalist/critic visits the set, representing Rolling Stone.  Has written some of the more intelligent sympathetic responses to Walter’s work.    Actually asks me a few questions.

At the end of a long day of shooting people being shot:

People don’t want to have conversations.  They want to have the burden of having a consciousness assuaged.

JULY 1, 1982

Jonathan Banks death scene.

Sosna calling for quiet on the set. “Guys  don’t talk about the next picture you’re gonna do — concentrate on this one”

JULY 2, 1982

First of the weekend.

Yesterday shoot out in the lobby.  Ton of gunfire.  We shot from 7: 30 AM toll l0:30 p.m.

Big disagreement with Walter about how many weapons the villains should have, how tied Nick’s hands should be.  Walter here plays up the big emotional moment as simple goodness of heart on Nick’s part.  Our roles get reversed, I think his approach to this scene is too sentimental whereas usually he rejects suggestions of mine as too sentimental.

Sosna does a good practical joke on me, has me convinced that the can of soda I picked out of a box in craft services is “bad.”  Calls to the crew doctor to discuss the likelihood I have food poisoning and will need to get my stomach.  He has me going.

Remar In The Bus

Cruising

Remar cuts his hand catching a gun.  More real blood.  He, moping, after I console him says, “No one but the make up man consoles me.”

His eyes widen as they do in regular spasms.

“I don’t have to do this.”

Then he recounts how on Friedkin’s Cruising where he had a tough fight scene with Al Pacino, Pacino moped when he got a tiny bit hurt, and how solicitous Friedkin and the producer Jerry Weintraub were about his well being.  He and the danger he was in was ignored, he says.

Life is always a matter of injustice for Jimmy.

I point out to Walter that Jimmy’s suffering a bit and Walter ignores my remark.  Then he comments a little later:

“Jimmy’s a faker.”  He tells a story of a massive sprain Jimmy suffered on The Warriorsand how he cured himself miraculously when after shooting ended that night a crew softball game was announced.

Luca and I quarrel again, this because when I ask her where the trades I gave her  to read are. She says, “I don’t know. I’m working.”  I get insulted at this.

Baird Steptoe, a camera assistant, Don Thorin Jr. another camera assistant, and Luca, over drinks talk about what “this business” does to romantic relationships.

Girls pass by in the lobby of this building.  It’s owned and occupied by members of the Church Of Scientology.  Some of them stop and watch what we’re doing.

Walter casually glances at the watching girls, nudges me. “More scientological puss.”

JULY 6, 1982

Joel:  “You’re not following the law of STBP! And what is the law of SBTP? See The Big Picture.

Defending a plump famous screamer who runs Paramount t.v. Gary Nardino:  “He’s effective”

Effective for what, I ask in reply. What quality stuff is he defending, is he effective in?

“He’s in television, he’s not concerned with quality.”

Walter on the subject of Producer-studio squabbles: “You have to remember that ninety seven percent of the things that they’re concerned with are unimportant.”

Blue Thunder

I mention idly over the I had heard a rumor thatGordon Carroll, had produced the film that would be our main Christmas competition, Blue Thunder, has said the film isn’t very good.

“That’s okay” Walter says, “Gordon’s one of those producers who feel that they and the studio have started off on this wonderful adventure together, they have dreamed this noble dream – -now these so-so filmmakers have come along and screwed it up.”

This in turn causes Walter to remark about the notes we’d received from Simpson about our film before we started that he has mostly ignored.  I had turned to him at one point, holding a copy of those notes in my hand, and said, “They’re contemplating a Platonic kind of movie that resembles our script schematically, but which doesn’t have anything to do with our actual movie… It’s notes on the “type” of movie ours is, not the actual thing itself.”  The film the studio chiefs see in their head the perfect idea for a film that is unmuddied by specific choices, or the specific stylistic voice of the filmmakers.

Walter has a bad cold today. It’s the scene of Nick meeting Eddie for the first time at the jail.

Sosna barking at the crew: “Hold the work.””John you’re a good man, I’ll take you on all my big pictures soon as I get one.

Sound guy Jim Cutter back holding the door audibly mutters, “This could be your last.”

After a take fails: “Let’s go again.  Debbie picture up–picture now.”

Roxanne

Eddie, improving.   His rendition of Roxanne, by the Police, — super.

(GROSS NOTES: One Thing I Have To Take Credit For…Eddie Sang Roxanne As An Improv With No Discussion And Neither Walter Nor Joel Knew The Song. Walter Was Prepared Not To Print The Take… When I Jumped All Over Him And Insisted That The Song Had A Huge Level Of Recognition With The Audience. Walter Shrugged And Decided To Print It. Others Involved In Cutting The Film And Supervising The Music Confirmed My Opinion.)

LA is
The extra sad American dream
We all live.
The rapid impoverishment of absolutes.
Sudden senescence.
The rainbow turned into a turd.
I can’t get enough of these sudden stunning mistakes.
The way the human light is the ruination of the natural light.
The way the human work on the hill serves to wreck the hill.
The way hunger screams from the soil of scrappy attempts to keep busy.
The way thousands of dead hearts generate half alive fantasmic cheerful smiles.
The morally dead, the intrinsically dead, the overworked dead.
How to think this catastrophe LA, this energy gone awry–this massive truth consuming itself accomplishing the metamorphosis into angry error.

JULY 7, 1982

This morning, a long elaborate take of Nick and Eddie at the prison, Eddie in his armani suit for the first time in the film, Nick angrily pushing Eddie around, fluffing his lines a few times, Eddie much better still yelling at Nick.

Nick got very tense and frustrated, sluffing his lines, and oddly I think it’s because he’s reluctant to be as mean and aggressive as the scene requires him to be.  The odd thing is of course is he’s so good at it.  But I almost feel like it makes Nick feel guilty to be good at this kind of being rough and even vicious.  It’s like a part of him feels like these were the kinds of feelings he got into acting to avoid.  He’s such a gentle and not violent person.

To everyone’s despair — Walter’s, Joel’s and mine — the studio furnished us today with their list of alternative titles.  It is a long mimeographed sheet.  It makes us temporarily consider finding a loaded weapon and blowing our brains out, because we can see just how the movie is viewed by the studio when they send us these ideas.  The two ideas that we keep repeating in a depressed mantra are “hotshots” and
“runaround”.

We just shake our heads and stare at each other gloomily, not saying but thinking, “congratulations pal, you’re working on a film called hotshots”…

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published July 17, 2008