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

May 30, 1982

SF by Day

OUR DAY OFF — SUNDAY — WALKING AROUND SAN FRANCISCO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter won one hundred bucks, Sonny lost like crazy.

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

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

Question for me as I wander around my room.

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

Thinking Back Over The Last Few Nights

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

Walter jumps on it…

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

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

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

“It’s all the same to Remar”

“You’re oversimplifying,” I insist.

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

Walalce Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried to review it in my mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 1, 1982

Redoing Woodward Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published July 6, 2008

May 28, 1982
SHOOTING NIGHTS IN THE BART STATION

I have much more time to write because this a dialogueless sequence which I am not called upon to alter even in the slightest. It will take three or four nights to shoot, so Walter knows that he has some time off before he has to do scenes which might require some rewriting.

No matter what changes this will always be a visual tour-de-force moment of cutting, running, gunfire etc. And nothing either more, or less…

Lunch comes at two in the morning.

But crews call lunch “lunch,” no matter what hour it’s served. We talk about what to do over the weekend. The Road Warrior, the sequel to Mad Max, a movie I really liked, is opening this weekend and I know some people who’ve seen previews back in LA who say it’s a hundred times better than the predecessor.

Waiting on BART, pt 1

Joel returns to set, from the office, where hehas gotten some kind of message that one of the cameras used in the subway stuff we’ve been shooting, has, according to the crew, malfunctioned… After the camera fuck up in Modesto, Walter looks at me in horror and disgust… He’s starting to feel crazily jinxed.

I watch Walter and the crew in grim locations like the BART station, through which the sick of the city drift like pebbles and weeds thrown up to the surface of thesea by tides. I notice that it is impossible not to notice the gratuitousnesss of our efforts; which even allude to the urban crisis a bit more, much more than most current films; the fact that income and in prestige as moviemakers, we are sealed off from the warring battles of everyone of these streets, lives as the lives of their inhabitants.

Walter likes to say that as Hollywood storytellers we are involved, perhaps, who knows, confined, in “Myth and Archetype.” The city, this one, San Franscisco, or any one, on the other hand, breeds a billion deadly bright ant-like particularities, that teem, conjugate and multiply…at a different level of reality, beyond or at least outside the compass of our abstracting broad strokes. Nothing, no artistic method, would not be abstracting with respect to these immeasurable uncountable details. Perhaps Walter’s conception of “myth and archetype” concedes to this organic necessity of stylization more honestly than I’m able always to face up to.

Our immersion in the discipline of one angle of vision, confirms the fact that millions of things must fly by, untouched, unrelated to each in their screaming spinning orbitless darkness.

Knowledge of the kind I seek to correct our intelligence would rely eventually upon inactivity, upon sealing ourselves off from the complications of isolated acts of transformation, our will to do is hopelessly at odds with our will to know.

Even though film-making is an exquisitely knowledge-involving type of doing, even though perhaps we may learn something important, new, and exciting by foisting upon ourselves the temporary blindness, the temporary narrowness involved in absorption in a gesture, an action, a sequence, a story. Still, in all this, our immersion in “the doing” sequesters us from the static poignance of contemplation…where all loss has the privilege of being reentered into a perpetually revised conception of vision.

In this “doing,” we are compelled to acquire and possess. We are compelled in some ways to go beyond the detachmnent of art. Yet as a result, but we come more, not less, detached than ever.

We are on this set, our own world, with real material privileges for intervening in the regular world.

We can stop traffic for example.

More specifically Walter an order Sosna to order the police to.

We contravene the physics of social reality, which means our experience thrusts us into a slightly different, deviant you might say, moral system…our weightlessness, our freedom, is immediately unconsciously nihilistic…space is isolated, actions analyzed, processes repeated. We force real toads to inhabit imaginary gardens. We actually make up the substance of that toad’s body.

It’s freakily like building a Frankenstein monster, creation ex nihilo.

The sudden intimacies, bantering, then passionate, then non-existent, on a set parallel the fact that we do no know what the conditions of our grip on the attention of everyone we interact with really is. Of course this is the uncertainty of everyone’s everyday life, but the sense of the precariousness of that is actually heightened and more acute. Money, a paycheck, is of course the glue but there is also the ever-shifting trajectory of the movie’s mood, a determination of which no one individual’s consciousness can be the custodian of.

It’s not that you experience a different reality as such on a movie set, it’s that you experience all familiar realities with heightened acuteness. Not a new “thing” but a new relationship to things.

Walter sights and watches Sosna making the sea of background people in the subway sequence, dozens of them, flow back and forth in different patterns as Nick and Eddie run and chase and shoot.

Walter’s quiet authoritative command:

“Make it happen so I can watch.”

Waiting on BART, pt 2

These last three days have been a period of immense clout for the A.D. David Sosna because movement of huge numbers of extras is a substantial part of the power of the shots being made. Ironic confirmation of this: A television documentary crew decides to do a feature story on the AD’s job and Sosna who always vehemently insists in all too he-doth-protest–too much ways that he is creatively a nobody, gets to get interviewed and shoot off his mouth. Throughout the shooting I notice that David is one of the most sensitive egos in good and bad ways of all the personnel on the show, while claiming to be gruff practical man with no “higher” interests. He desperately wants to be appreciated. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just counter to his line. The truth no one on a movie is without an ego, nor could they be and contribute anything of value.

After these last two weeks of working so frantically on the script, and watching what Walter is doing, I have moments when I form two entirely different ideas of what the film will be. In the good moments, I glimpse this film as a wild-and-crazy action melodrama classic, a bit like The Wild Bunch in an urban setting. Admittedly that’s rather a grandiose fantasy. In the moments, I feel the film will be diffuse, with good action sequences, but only okay drama, and some inept drama. Since I was hired to add drama, I get these grim moments of thinking the parts I was brought to improve will be the weakest parts.

****************

An odd moment with Joel where I asked him bluntly simply what he thought this movie was, and he answered in one word that needed clarification for me to understand.

“Rehab” was the word he used.

Did he mean drug rehabilitation.?

No, he was referring to the way buildings are refurbished, and redesigned, leaving their old structure but putting new surfaces on them.

“We’re doing a cop movie that’s been done a million times before but we’re giving it all new fixtures, furnishings. It’s gonna be huge.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if he was accurate or not, but I was at least relieved to know he had a very clear, very firmly expressed opinion.

****************

Nick is so nice, that it’s easy to forget how terrific an actor he is.

Also he’s overwhelmed by how much he has to do, which allow you to forget how completely adequate to it he turns out to be. He always comes on set a little at loose ends and then it turns out all right.

Jimmy Remar, who plays the psycho killer Ganz, has this freaky temper. For about five seconds in our first night at the BART station, he wanted to kill me while we discussed what happened to his character. Walter has spent a lot of time in the last few days, teasing me about my failure to handle Remer properly. Walter has a strangely ambivalent attitude towards Jimmy, utterly respecting his talent, but condescending to him at the same time, referring to him as “a baby and a faker.” Walter is himself both impressed by and disgusted by Jimmy’s violence.

I spend the whole time never being able to get over my fear of Jimmy, which makes me somewhat awkward n accepting some of his very decent efforts to be friendly

****************

Occasionally one reads a newspaper: The Falkland Islands war is bizarre. The English appear to be winning but the Argentine non-collapse makes each days results problematic to interpret. The cost of what seems like the inevitable English victory, seems enormous, their power is something bulky and pathetic and pointless.

“This will be the end of the idea of the third world” Walter said. I wasn’t precisely sure what he meant. He was referring to the fact that the Argentine’s had shot Brit aircraft down, but I wasn’t sure what the overall point he was making was.

I am not writing this to tell anecdotes of the filmmaking process. I am writing this to see to what heights or depths an individual psyche plummets or rises under the force of this impersonal collective weight.

****************

CREW NICKNAMES:
Bruce McBroom has been renamed Bruce McStills to tell him apart from Bruce Kassan,the assistant prop-man who has been renamed Bruce McProps. Alta Loma Park, which is where we are parked with our vans, has been referred to as Alter Cocker Plaza.

Sosna has been responsible for making up all these names. Sosna passes these designations on to the Second ADs, a frail little girl Debbie Love and her assistant, a tall kid named Rob Corn. Walter simply refers to them as Corn and Debbie.

Craig Raiche, who is the main prop guy, has a nick name that stems back from working on The Long Riders…he’s called “Live Rounds” Raiche because of a mistaken rumor that live ammunition had been used in one of the big action scenes in that film. Craig is someone I briefly crossed path with on a t.v. movie I briefly worked on in a tiny capacity, a couple of years previously. He’s nice. Walter loves to retell how that completely untrue myth got started.

Indeed Walter has a tale-spinner’s love of how movie lore can be completely manipulated, made up, and the truth of the situation completely transformed. He refers to this as “The Rashomon of Movies.” The other nickname that is getting attention, is the one I came up with for Speilberg: “Victor.”

****************

Putting up with Sonny Landham has been one of the few real difficult jobs on this film so far. Everyone finds him a bit ludicrous and dangerous at the same time. When a stunt involves a car almost hitting him, which he runs through with insane bravery, there is a lot of joking about the favor the stunt guy would be doing the movie if Sonny got hit. Actually no one dislikes the guy. It’s just that on his thus-far very smooth production, he’s about the closest thing to something to complain about. Along the camera failures. Joel is particularly maddened by Sonny, because Sonny’s thickness makes him impervious to Joel’s strategy of yelling people into submission. Sonny mentally turns the ear phones off when Joel yells. He just can’t hear himself being disciplined. His brain or lack thereof simply won’t admit to it and this drives Joel nuts.

Sonny, Then & Now

Sitting in the subway station, Joel nods in Sonny’s direction: “He’s such a moping asshole” Joel says.

Joel says that he overheard Sonny rage to his agent over the phone today at the hotel. This was Sonny according to Joel: “I’m stealin this picture, I’m turning into the star of this picture, Jerry listen to me, everybody has got his or her agent down here on this thing, you gotta help me out here, you gotta get down here and do things for me. Jerry, Jerry, I’m stealing this picture.”

Joel notices that only Sonny would have his dark sunglasses on as we shoot underground. His mind, Joel remarks, is a black hole, matching the black leather he wears. And look, Joel continues, his black hair and black eyes.

Joel is right that Sonny’s attempts to be suave and funny are slow and awful. You stand there having his huge paw like hand on your shoulder and his voice drones on like a metal racket only slower.

Endlessly starting and stopping the subway trains all night long. Locating the killers, Ganz, Billy and Rosalie their hostage, as they get on to escape form Nick. Nick then blocked from following them by a BART security officer.

The real people watching us making our movie…some of them blasted or crazy or worse.
They frighten me. My feeling of distance from them frightens me more. So. My fear, then my fear of my fear. We are all these blasted inactive stupefied people we flee from…our movies have to circle back to the grim facts of defeat and failure somehow.

Our distance from defeat and failure and poverty as glowing inhabitants of the dreamworld of movies, is somehow a confirmation of that which we give the most unique impression of having escaped. Our meaningless superiority clarifies something about their meaningless inferiority. What I’m trying to say awkwardly, is that what precisely separates us is unknowable, unidentifiable. If we claim to comprehend it or be able to define it we’re kidding ourselves.

May 29, 1982

We’re in Walter’s room working and watching a t.v. presentation of The Outlaw Josey Wales. One of in my opinion the best things Eastwood ever did. Walter respects Eastwood as a movie star but wildly prefers the movies he did for Leone and Siegel to the ones he directs himself. Walter wishes that great movie stars should know their place and stay great movie stars, and not stray into his profession…why shouldn’t they stay where they are… he figures… they get paid great and all the girls they could ever want… why do they have to be directors too?

My favorite line in the movie is Eastwood, saying somberly: “Sometimes troubles just seems to follow a man.”

Some men are different than others. Some kinds of experience are different than others.

Her’s a transcription of a typical moment in the subway.

SOSNA (yelling)
This is not a Glen Larson Cocktail party
We’re making movies. Okay!
Background–watching–and settle.

When Walter has instructed the principle actors.

LOVE
Okay, starting places, back to #1.

SOSNA
Mr. Hill, go.

Walter barks:
WALTER
AND ak-shun.

****************

THE EXTRAS

People telling each other their plans. They’re camped out for four nights. They look a bit like pictures of refugees of bombings, in London and Berlin during the war, hiding in cellars and subways. Each and every one with their pride and their plans. The way they hope things will turn out or the suddenly successful postponement of these considerations.

****************

On the third night in the BART station, nothing is going quickly and plus some stuff from last night has to be reshot.

Joel, who almost never stops pursuing practical matters, starts to work on two blondes who are among the stand-ins that work everywhere we go in San Francisco, one being Annette’s stand in when the camera crew is lighting.

Joel says he wants to bed one or two of these girls in the name of the Jewish race, “I view it as practice deal-making, an attempt at negotiation.”

Xanadu

Joel and Larry continue their Punch & Judy-like quarrels. They should have their own t.v. show, The Joel & Larry Comedy Hour. A recurrent joke is quoting one of the most banal exchanges from Xanadu, their multi-million dollar music fantasy bomb:

“Dreams died!”

“No…No…We kill them!”

They enjoy blaming each other for that catastrophe… or more particularly, blaming each other for imagining it wouldn’t be the kind of bomb it turned out to be. Larry brings it up whenever he wants to prove Joel’s ignorance… as does Walter when he wants to needle Joel. Joel quotes back from insipidJekyll and Hyde Together Again, a film Larry did while Joel was away from him for awhile.

Larry pulls me in once during one of these quarrels.

“Let me ask you who know more about script” He points to Joel’s regular Amex credit card: “Him?…” he produces his own platinum Amex Card, “Or me?” But there is enough laughter and pshawing going on that everyone knows this is a feeble proof.

****************

Last night I hear about the origins of the phrase “This is the Abby Singer shot” which Sosna says on the second-to-last shot for the night. For the last shot he will say things like “This is the cocktail, fellas” or “This one is home-to-mother, guys.”

The “Abby Singer” shot refers, it seems, to a famous production manager who, whenever he said this was the last shot of the night, there would prove to be one more. “This is not a Glen Larson show,” Sosna says periodically, referring to the fact that Glen Larsonproduced shlock one hour t.v. drama in bulk. When Sosna wants the crew to smarten up and perform better, he reminds them we’re a quality feature film and not lowly t.v. one hour drama.

Another of the obsessive relationships in the process of this movie is between Joel and his assistant Elaine. EK as she’s referred to. Elaine is an attractive clever twenty-six-year-old. Joel relies on her for everything, but is also incredibly cruel to her. His yells to her “EK, EK” are sort of reiterated mantra or joke to everyone on the set. Her first assignment whenever we arrive at a new location is to find Joel a telephone.

But for all his harshness with her, the only person Joel seems to really care for is Elaine, perhaps because she is the mother who doesn’t confuse giving up everything to him with sexual interest. Joel’s own mother is apparently ill, terminally ill. He may have to go back East to where he was raised, to say goodbye to her, any day. Elaine meanwhile does whatever Joel says… Seems to barely notice his brutality. Though she complains in a bantering type of way, there is no serious tone of reproach or complaint.

I overhear Joel making a reference to Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, while he’s hustling one of the stand-in blondes. I tell him my opinion which is that that book is connected to another important American book, Naked Lunch. Both books tell the story of the body being usurped by inhuman processes. The freezing, the deadening that those two books describe is the affect loss that I am terrified of having happen to me.

The intense exhaustion of all night shooting puts this deadness right on the agenda. You feel like your soul is becoming a rock.

****************

Slept till four p.m. Am now totally turned around for nights…this night schedule is of course happily congruent to my nights-into-day proclivities.

The idea I’ve been fucking around with for a year-and-a-half is a novel taking place in motels. What walls should my fictional motel have?

You never need forget what you’re dong this for. You’re doing this for money.

Money is the ambition everyone on a movie set comprehends in common. The common denominator, whether or not “lowest.”

Grabbed my first meal off the set in an Indian restaurant off the set in four days… I am stunned when I look at my watch and see how slowly one hour and fifteen minutes passes compared with the drive to the set and opening hour there.

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published June 19, 2008

May 22, 1982

SF @ Night

Watching San Francisco unreel and unfold, my fourth day here, I get a pervasive sense of nobody in this city “meaning it” in the sense that Erik Erikson uses that phrase in his book about Luther.  People in LA vehemently, blissed out or dead-souled in their money lust, but peculiarly they mean it.  They’ve come there to throw their whole purpose behind something even if that thing happens to be slick, trivial or dumb.   People in LA are unironically, even savagely acquisitive of the things they want.  San Franciscans on the other hand seem to live saturated in an evasion of the darker elements of appetite.  It’s sort of dishonest.  All the benign aspects of appetite, and all the benign objects of it, art, food movies, are given prominent display and shown much concern, but the but the will to “go for it” that aspect of appetite is thinned out.  Some stones just cannot be lifted here.

Larry Gordon continues ribbingJoel Silver.

“With Joel, I feel like I’m Hitler’s father. I have a son and he grows up to be Adolf Hitler.”

Walter and I get into one of our polite disagreements about movie aesthetics that we have less time for now that he’s actually shooting.  In these quarrels, he invents a distinction in our positions that doesn’t actually exist.  I tolerate this rhetorical device, for the simple pleasure of hearing state his case though the lucidity with which he states it is always truistic.  He says things no one could possibly disagree with.

“What you and your pathetic European intellectual friends who make films don’t realize,” he was saying today, “is that you have to put motion into these movies.”

“These Europeans you disdain, or who you, in fact, are only pretending to disdain for the purposes of this conversation, know this,” I reply. “There’s tons of motion in the frame in say, an Antonioni movies.”

“Antonioni makes dull movies.”

“Not his good ones” I respond.

“I do remember being impressed with the soundtrack on that one where they went to the island.  That one shot I remember of the helicopter landing, he made that sound just awesome.”

L’avventura

“Antonioni’s good movies, like the one you just mentioned, L’avventura, are just like yours,” I started to say, “Minimal and architectural , not relying on dialogue…”  But then I kept my mouth shut… I didn’t want to get theoretical…. this opinion would stun Walter when I offered it and I knew why it sunned him.  He operates purely from his conscious ambitions, and think they were vastly opposed to his European peers.  He was not wrong to say he’s different. The fact that some of their tactics and effects do, in fact, coincide is not, of course, disproved by this, though I can wholly understanding his finding that fact being pointed out or proven to him to be distasteful.  To him it would mean being tarred with the unwanted brush of being uncommercial…and the truth is that whatever else Walter is or is not, he is not uncommercial..

May 23, 1982

Yesterday day spent on the thugs, Jimmy and Sonny driving up to the Walden Hotel on Hyde Street.  Then Nick and the two cops who will by in the in the interior of the hotel, which we will shoot in L.A. six weeks hence.  Then we make shots of the thugs escaping the shootout.  Then the cops streaming in.

In the first scene we invent lines for Rosalie, who I and Walter have determined must now be in this scene since the scene of her being snatched by Jimmy and Sunny is going to happen fore they enter the hotel.

In Front Of The Hotel, Before The Shooting Starts

Other additions.  Nicke and two good actors playing cops add lines and they’re pretty good.

I wasn’t there for the cops driving up. I was back the hotel making revisions.

Walter came back from the day’s work resolutely proud of the streaming around to entrance of the hotel moments after Ganz and Billy and Rosalie depart.

Walter holding a beer gives his head a proud shake.

“That was something.  Talk about ER.”  On this movie Walter’s use of the acronym ER, refers to Exaggerated Realism…the way things look in real life, but then a little more, a little over the top.  “I’m not entirely happy with that crane move we made for Nick.  We had to do it, but I don’t like unmotivated moves.  Especially I hate casing figures through an unstable visual field.  I prefer movement in the frame, moving the actors and working through composition.”

This evening we cut and paste script pages in Walter’s hotel room.  Walter calls Hildy his girl back in LA and has a teasing quarrel with her.

We find ourselves talking the subjective versus the element in the style of the film.  Roughly, this refers to seeing the movie from the point of view of the characters or seeing it from some more omniscient point of view.  I said, for instance, should we go back and forth with scenes between Sonny and Remar in counterpoint to the early scenes with Nick and Eddie.

“Once we get subjective, we can’t back to the objective?” is my question.  Walter asks himself that question in another way referring to camera style.

“Does that mean we should reciprocate with the camera style when get go to the Nick and Eddie show part of the movie.

I said I thought that the subjective style, a style of greater intimacy, should creep in to the later sections of the movie.  I know I’m not sure what I mean by that nor do I have any way of knowing if it really resonates with Walter in any useful way.  It just sounded right.  It’s weird how Walter being, relatively speaking, the most lucid, most clear creative mind I’ve ever run into during all of our “discourse” still rides on hunch, approximation, guess, suggestion.  And that I suppose is where all the anxiety of making a movie comes from, a bunch of grown adults running around trying to put a semblance of intentional rationality around or “over” a process that must be forever inchoate and at least somewhat mysterious.

“We should keep to the long lens method for all the action scenes, the Bart Train sequence, all the stuff with Luther…that depicts this urban jungle…”  Walter is answering his own question. kl.

Later That Night

A surprising opportunity to take a break from movie concerns was provided by my cousin  Joseph, who lives nearby in Berkeley.

It was the occasion of his graduating from law school with honors.  My uncle Milt, perhaps my favorite relative, had flown from the east coast to be present at the ceremony and all my cousins and even my elder cousins’ mother who had divorced my uncle when I was a child were to be at a celebratory dinner.  Also my graduating cousin’s second wife and the mother of his children, who I’d never met.  So some of these were relatives I hadn’t seen for years, and some were relatives I d never met at all.

These strange recurrent lost causes in women you run into or across, you want in a minute to have, to love, to have a whole life experience with…this woman in a red sports car with RIMBAUD printed in bright yellow letters on her license plate, driving across the Bay Bridge.  Frisco to Berkley and Oakland, I call out to her in her wind-tossed-blonde-haired-fine-feature-make-something-happen sunglasses, I cry out that I love her license plate, but who can care?  Who can arrest the motion of surging traffic pulling us in separate directions, the light dying at the end of the day?

My cousin who I haven’t seen in thirteen years, is thirty-six, thin, bearded, a calm person after the wild eyed radical he had been many years ago..  He’s just finished law-school and is this complete family man.  His oldest daughter, my second cousin, is named Jeannette is eleven.  She’s killer cute.  She was born  at my quintessential moment of horror and doubt, insecurity and hope,  l970, the year of the Fall of America I mistakenly thought but no one in those days was more convinced of it than my cousin Joey, but look at him now prepared to completely embed himself in the straight world as a lawyer.  How life keeps changing and moving completely incomprehensibly.

Everyone among my relatives is moderately or very curious about Hollywood stars.

“What’s Nick Nolte really like,” etc.  I feel embarrassed like I’m stealing Joe’s thunder.  He shrugs and smiles ands says “We’re just like everybody else, we’re star struck”

I have a moment alone with my Cousin Tony where I admit to her that I can’t necessarily make much more time while I’m working on San Francisco to see her…in fact I feel guilty taking these hours away from middle of the night thoughts that Walter might want me to go to work on…Tony responds by saying I should “assert myself” to my employers.
She speaks as if her failing to have a career is a brave, deliberate act of will opposed to the cowardice of types like me who always take order and follow routines etc.  Obviously she’s not all wrong, just mostly.  She describes her life as fundamentally about her relationship to her Cello.

“I’m trying to coordinate the body and music,” she says.  I’m tempted to say, that’s a tall order but… all this celebration and memory, approximately a million miles from the movie.

May 24, 1982

Gordon and Silver on the set with matching congruent phones.

Gordon is barking, “Women, I hate ‘em, I gotta tell ‘em, I ain’t happy ‘less I’m back in my office on the lot in Los Angeles, the whole rest of this business is a failure to me.  I’m all through with women.  Thy have never given me one day of happiness in the thirty one thirty two years I’ve been interest in ‘em, not one single day of  happiness… never… women… I hate the ground they work on, every one of ‘em.”

I say that I’ve heard that he’s married to quite an extraordinary woman.

“I am,” he says…

“Probably one of the days you were with her you were happy”

He shakes his head and denies it.

Don Simpson

Silver is trying to raise his friend, the studio head of production overseeing the project,Don Simpson.   Simpson was supposed to give notes on the script throughout the three or four weeks we were all still in LA and about ten meetings were scheduled but somehow a meeting never took place.  We were sent tons of pages of mimeographed notes that Walter just mainly shredded.  There seems no doubt that there is some reason for Simpson’s hesitation to actually physically make himself present for a meeting and Walter has taken it as an opportunity to simply treat the studio like it isn’t there.

All sorts of rumors that Eisner is going to get rid of Simpson, etcetera… Larry Gordonknows all the stuff about this but doesn’t actually say all that he knows.  He’s got his ear to the ground constantly though as does Joel.

“They’re terrible…women” Gordon continues.  “Get me back to my office where I can at least be happy at least.”

I can’t quite figure out how his office is the antithetical term to the problems posed by women.  I guess he can be reclusive when working on his office where as when he comes on location to a city like San Francisco he feels under some pressure to go out.

Eddie Murphy, the costar of the movie, shows up with his manager, a short Jewish guy like the manager types I used to see at the Improv all the time, named Bob Wachs.  Met Murphy briefly back on the lot in LA but barely got a sense of him….the truth is I’ve never seen a minute of him on Saturday Night Live, though when I tell others we’re working with him they rave about what they’ve seen him do there and insists he’s going to be a huge star.  Fine with me.

Ebony & Ivory

We get back to the office, and Eddie isquite amusing when watching some bad comic on t.v.  He is preoccupied with finding a toothbrush and deodorant.  Larry snaps at Joel to make sure every single person in the hotel is pressed into service on this.  The idea of giving a movie star everything he wants is very dear to Larry’s heart…it comes under the heading of his basic responsibilities.  Murphy takes a moment to praise a bit he did on his show, the previous night, Saturday Night Live.  He said “I don’t praise my own work much but this piece was awesome”…it was him as Stevie Wonder, and another member of the cast, Joe Piscopo, as Frank Sinatra, and they sang together.

I suddenly realize as Eddie quietly finds a way to praise his own work that this guy is twenty or so at most.  He’s very, very young.

May 25, 1982

A frivolous writer views sex or money or war or the environment as the tangible topic of his work.  Therefore a real resolution of the issues raised in what he writes can be achieved.  But to be really accurate about a topic for writing is to view it as the appropriate means of embodying the floating indefiniteness of all the things and situations in the world.  For a serious writer everything is symbolic.

Sex, for example, is enormously important to Tolstoy in Anna Karenina in order that he illustrate something about how people insist on remaining ignorant of the general forces that control them, part of that ignorance is granting sex too much or the wrong too-literal kind of importance.  Tolstoy favors activities whose structures hinges on the boundary of total meaningless.  Sex and violence are, in Tolstoy, situations of extreme sense-exertion which summon up a proximate option or possibility of oblivion.

The sense of more conventional everyday writing is someone like John Fowles, who in a book like The French Lieutenants Woman really sees sexual situations as the source of away to literal ethical judgments. The disappointments Fowles characters suffer and that he writes about are only the consequences of the intellectual falsity of the premises he starts from.

The topics of this movie, 48 Hrs.  Friendship, greed, violence and madness, should be emblems of a deeper  poetic madness, a floating perpetual motion machine of the city depicted coming unhinged, unglued.  This city is not our full topic of interest, however.  It is itself, simply a location from the world.  Walter’s not interested in the background much.

At dailies, Walter asks, or rather tells me, to start thinking about what kind of movie our footage that we’re seeing, reveals to us that we’re making.

I have an answer prompted in part by something noted by our hysterical Paramount executive boss, Simpson…

Simpson called to say “I see what Walter’s doing — I see the comedy”

So my answer to Walter’s question is “We’re making a black comedy…the film is a black comedy.”

Second I say “It’s sort of a surreal city film, sort of a less stylized continuation of The Warriors in a way…transposed on to a more apparently traditional genre film…”

But there are rapid shifts in tone, and one disconnected inchoate set piece grafted on to another.

Walter changes the subject abruptly to Annette’s character Elaine.

“I don’t see the girl, fitting into that” Walter says frowning.

I want to protect “the girl” of course because I’ve had a large hand in reshaping and expanding her scenes.  My first line to Walter had been the key to the mood and the relationship of these two men, Nick and Eddie is that neither of them is getting laid regularly and that has a lot to do with the tone of their interaction.

I tried to gently disagree with Walter that Elaine was irrelevant.

Inspiration

“Not in the way you’ve shot her so far” I said…”the way she looks, she is an icon, an inspirer or ideal, distance from is sort of like the condition of and the thing to be, overcome.  She’s Helen of Troy.

(A part of me wonders as I spoke if I were just trying to hustle Walter and would I have any luck.)

To try to clinch this argument I kept on babbling “The presence of the girl is essential Walter.  If the element of the girl had been stronger in The Driver the film would have worked with audiences better.  The erotic element in this weird surrealistic world is important.”

May 26, 1982

My watch was stolen this morning. I’m convinced it happened while I was in the shower.  Ruins the whole morning for me.

Following The Money

We shoot driving stuff all over the city.  Nick and Eddie trailing Luther played by David Patrick Kelly.  Luther has picked up only stolen money that is the macguffin of this movie.  Nick driving the beat blue Cadillac follows.  David drives the dusty Grey Porsche that Eddy’s character lives to recover.  He snakes in and out of traffic.  Long difficult to set up and make shots.  None of the suspense and diversion of watching acting.

“This is movies” says Walter. “It’s boring to do but it works like hell up on the screen.”

LATER

Walter going up and up in the air on the huge Chapman crane.

“This is the whole point of the job” he says with his best tone of suppressed glee.

What Walter has in common with many remarkably gifted people is a simple instinctive capacity to take pleasure in things.  This capacity seems childlike but its intensity and consistency and variety is a true definition of a person’s power.  Walter’s got it.

Reminiscences about actors with Nick and Walter.  They mention Strother Martin who Peckinpah used a lot.

“When he was good he was very good, but he could be just awful,” Walter says, a little perplexed in remembering it.  He had used him in his first, and to some extents still best reviewed film, Hard Times. “I said to him once, ‘Divide it in half, Strother,’ and he said ‘In half,’ and I answered, ‘That’s if you want it to be in the movie.’”

At the end of the day exhausted.

Walter says “Some days I wish I could just press a button and be finished and have it be good.  But ya can’t.”

Making a film is painfully hard work even if you’re content to do a bad job.  If upon its base difficulty you superimpose the will to be good, you have set yourself an immense task.  Actually the second ambition helps reduce some of the difficulty of the first part.

Idealism on the director’s part about making the film actually be good filters down to the crew…at least it does in Walter’s case…they are less petty and less selfish, I believe than they would be under other circumstances.  You can hear the habit of it, and watch them suppress the impulse to be selfish and petty largely because they know overall they have a good deal being with Walter they’d all in all be nuts to kick against.

I do think that bad directors are harder to work for because nothing they exude or express includes that some lightening, filling up of urgent personal need.  It’s easier to work for a man who really wants things, who is pushing his own brain, rather than simply fulfilling his contractual obligations, demanding things of you simply because that’s the schema of the professional situation.

Walter’s particular logistical skill and clarity in conveying the nature of the problems posed by a given shot, wets the crew’s appetite to speedily meet the challenge. This is one of those situations, so often the case in matters of art, where crude practical energy and subtle imaginative energy are both distinct from each other and the same time subtly interconnected and hard to tell apart.  Immediate energy about taking care of tasks veers into the taste for doing it well in a subtler more thoughtful, more conceptual sense.

Still, the element of ordeal, just pure physical ordeal is huge and can barely be overstated.

The simplest of shots requires a coordination of physical and mental intelligence.

This weird period of weeks of celibacy continues.  I don’t’ know how to say to some woman “I’m tired and worn out, would you just please take care of me tonight please?  I can’t say it, in a way that makes it sound any prettier:  Just put me to bed.

May 27, 1982

Sometime today swept over by some strange unaccountable depression.

Sometimes I feel like it should all go up in smoke.

“I’m not connected to enough” I say to myself.  Of  course, no one to say it to.  That’s the problem, huh?  I don’t know whether I really mean it or not.  Perhaps this going along with the juggernaut of the movie is enough for me, for anyone, and I don’t even want to tell myself I don’t want more. Perhaps the notion of being “more connected” is entirely mythical.  As I read this,  I suspect it simply has been a bit of homesickness.  Adjusting to being away from familiar spots and places.

I think of being connected still in terms of some adolescent reaching after unpossessable things.  The certainty about something unspecific — this “unspecific” is like the ideal that brightens everything.  The heat arriving a cold room…

Meanwhile the powerful, inarguable weight of the specifics that surround me and make demands of me and the others each and every minute of every day:  the camera, the actors, the money, the vulnerable egos of everyone, all this displaces my typical way of reacting to things.  I am less important in this busy and abundant if sometimes mechanical universe… and I enjoy my lesser importance most of the time or at least I enjoy watching this Thing, the movie.

Here’s the fear:

When I think of how gladly I accept this role in the making of the movie, it seems like I unwittingly illuminate something in myself that wants to be half dead, that wants the inhuman pursuance of money and fame and blind ambition rather than the more modest, ironic, temperate ambiguity of some more real more intelligent human appetite.  The movie is a drug and I’m too ready and willing to give my soul up to this drug.

Of course what I’m calling the half-dead aspect of me is still more alive in its effectiveness than any other part of my so-called creative life.

I can’t take much distance from it and notice anything else that I’m ready to be part of or accomplish.  I know that the sentimental wish to express “humane feelings” in art generally result in the production of rubbish.

Perhaps I regret the loss of something I should not regret the loss of, but I’m right to want to correct what is wrong with this condition.

What is wrong is my powerlessness, finally, being a cog in a wheel. So the solution to the machine is to become a bigger machine oneself.  That’s Joel and Larry’s solution to some degree.  They may have it right. It’s certainly a way of being at war for the rest of your life, but maybe nothing valid is accomplished any other way.

It’s complicated in that the solution can’t just be reduced to literal power.

Walter, for example, has to defer to many circumstances.  He, more powerfully than anyone I have ever observed, has internalized a sense of what he cannot do, as a constitutive element of what he must do.

A dialectical sense of power and powerlessness is everywhere displayed in the mysterious relationship between movies and life, perhaps everywhere in life, though movies particularly seem somehow the medium of this fact of life, this structure of life, which is even fundamentally the most privileged of facts.  As if the relationship of film to life was somehow precisely what life is, not merely a medium for dramatizing life alone, but the substance and the form of the drama of living itself.

Excuse me, but one loses the sense of the hold these mysteries have of them uniquely easily  in making films — but that too seems part of the point, part of the significance, the absolute difficulty, the absolute unlikelihood of maintaining a hold of the meaning.

A sacred key is only sacred precisely if it opens the way to many trivial bubble filled rooms, compelling ones, as well as the rooms packed with austere sacred truths.  It’s easy to get bemused by the dross the job dredges up so easily and it would be equally wrong to think that being sunk up to your neck in it is all a waste of time.  Meaningless digressions have a point too.

I found my watch n a corner of my hotel room.  No one’s being entering while I’ve been taking showers after all.

The company has now gone to shooting nights, shooting the chase of the bad guys by Edie and Nick in the BART station, interrupting the villains as they’re trying to make a money drop.  This is physically the most complicated thing probably in the whole movie.  There is a shooting and tons of screaming and running by hundreds of extras.  This is a formidable technical problem to shoot and Sosna the AD has his hands full orchestrating the background.

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published June 6, 2008

May 17, 1982

FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING

The first of two days on location, out doors, in Modesto, California, two hours south of San Francisco where we’re headed for ten days after this…

Sonny Landham & James Remar Get Dirty

Basically our job is to shoot the sequence of Ganz and his native American partner Billy escaping in a shootout from the chain gang where Ganz is serving a prison term.

This is the hometown of George Lucas, the model, I guess, for the town whereAmerican Graffitti was set… Walter had been up here a bit shooting a number of key sequences of his second to last film, The Long Riders.

Walter, Joel, and I, and Ric Waite flew up to Modesto and spent yesterday trying on hats.

Walter bought a porkpie one.  We had this opening sequence.  The way it works, Ganz and Billy must appear to quarrel and the Indian slips Ganz a gun and they shoot two guards and they’re off.

Nick and Eddie aren’t around.

First Walter makes shots of the work crew with Ganz breaking rocks.

Then shots of Sonny. (the actor playing Billy) drives up.  Remar reacting.

Then the fight.  The big event is them diving into the mud puddle before they bring their guns up to shoot.

“This is the first and the last time we’ll be shooting in sequence,” Walter chortles.

The stunt coordinator, an absolute sweetheart of a guy named Bennie Dobbins, plays one of the uniformed who’s shot and killed, falling into a mudpuddle.  Bennie and I recognize each other from a movie he worked on with Ted Kotcheff, that I was briefly involved in, called Split Image. Bennie is the senior member of the stunt crew, the coordinator, not just a participant, and Walter holds him in special esteem.  The fact that Bennie slaps me on the back and shakes my hand, gives me points with Walter.  Walter loves him.

Before doing the shots of Bennie Walter simply says “I want a dead  guard.”

Joel chortles as he observes Sosna barking orders at the extras on the chain gang.

“Look at Sosna” Joel says, “He’s like a pig in shit.”

When Remar and Sonny got wet doing their killings, Sosna said under his breath, “I want these guys to have drinks on the way home.”

The had to turn over and over in cold mud-water and come out killing and shooting.

Much of the morning was spent making one crane shot work.  Time was also lost because of people needing allergy medicine, and the heat getting to people.

Walter had said, “We’re gonna have to be in midseason form if we’re gonna make our day working this one.”  We did and he was extremely pleased.  Walter constantly makes analogies between film making  and sports.  I think he views staying on or ahead of schedule at the beginning as the equivalent of scoring first in a sporting event.  “Drawing first blood” as the sports cliché goes.

At the end of the day, we finished one shot less than planned, but that practically counted as being on schedule.

I’m very much in the “we” category.

That night, Walter has a drink in the skanky hotel bar, and then goes to his hotel room.

Before leaving Walter sums it up:  “The morning wasn’t worth shit… the afternoon wasn’t bad, not great but not bad.”

Sonny Landham, who said his lines properly and fell in the mud with great vigor, is all spruced up in the bar, patting everyone the back, feeling like a million bucks.

Everyone is warning him not to drink.  Apparently, this particularly Indian, who Walter used in a small role in Southern Comfort, his previous movie, can get strange when he drinks.
May 18, 1982
MODESTO TO SAN FRANCISCO

Sonny Landham

Wake to hear that Sonny got thrown in jail last night.

Tried to punch out a night clerk.  Something involving a hooker in the bar or something.  Cops did their best to retrain him short of arresting him and it proves he just obstinately wanted to fuck up.  Joel andGene Levy got him out.

Joel is up to his eyebrows in Indian stories.

Leave For San Fransisco.

I was sent ahead to San Francisco while the company stayed in Modesto the second and final day of work there.

My job — Dance with Nick and Annette O’Toole who plays his girlfriend in the film, Elaine.  They are meeting for the first time in real life.  I got there and learned that the company would take a third day rather than just this afternoon.

Crisis.  Camera malfunction has killed day one’s dailies.

At first, I’m in great suspense as to whether this is the real reason. Knowing as I do about Sonny’s fuck up, I ‘m wondering whether the real reason is that they’ve had to replace Sonny or restructure the scene to play without his character all.

Over the phone I get more of the details of what happened to Sonny.  Sonny gave some barmaid twenty bucks to find him two workers.  This would not get him very far in a Mexican shanty, Walter observed… in a prosperous Northern California Town, it got him nowhere.  The barmaid went off duty and Sonny ended up trying to punch out the desk clerk because a principle, services rendered for fees spent, had been violated.  The cops arrived.  Not wanting to arrest him, obviously. But he persisted in behavior that couldn’t help but lead to jail.  He couldn’t keep from being locked up and ending his onerous freedom for a second longer.

Later I’m told that the story about the camera story wasn’t a cover story for the outgrowth of the difficulties caused by Sonny.  There was some kind of camera fuck up.

I flew to San Fransisco with Elaine, Joel’s assistant-secretary, Marilyn, the costumer who will be doing more work with Annette, and Rafe Blasi, the publicists, and Eiddie Enriquez who is Nick’s make up guy.

All of this might have turned out different, still might.  None of it is for certain. All of this San Francisco weather is a nice sweet dream.  You’re working on a movie, so it could mean anything can happen in your life and don’t deny it.  Someone will be punished if there’s a mammoth fuck up, but don’t go borrowing trouble.  A lot of people start off by not being sure of what they mean.

At lunch Nick gets his buddy Bill Cross to talk about how much he hated rice in Vietnam, how pumped  up he had to get to be to kill someone in combat, and what fun it had looked like it might be at first, ’til it got awful…”I was suddenly a captain” Bill says “that sorta shocks ya…”

It got a bit more grim as it went on.  “The worst was commanding niggers” Bill said. “When I said get down they’d start dancing, lost more sons of bitches that way.”

Nick and Annette and I go on that afternoon for a drink around the corner at Houlihan’s.  Nothing but tits are on the walls.  Girls in this bar feel comfortable with that.  A meat factory, Nolte cheerfully concedes.  My thought is, let me at ’em.

Afterwards, I follow Nick and Annette around a sunshiny walking tour of Chinatown. They peruse the street vendors, everything on recession sale — I do see Nick at times thinking how to stand as a cop, be a cop in all this, how to be inconspicuous…

Nick tells us over drinks a disturbing story about hanging with Al Pacino, describing a sort of Dorian Grayish paranoia.  Nick talks about That Championship Season, a project he was almost involved in, except that William Holden died at the wrong moment. Nick mentions that there’s this superstition going around about working with De Niro, that people who do die or get into trouble… Theresa Saldana got knifed… John Cazale died of lung cancer. I didn’t think the story made too much sense.
May 19, 1982

No sex for a few days and a bit lost about it.  As always in these situations, the prior anxieties of defining my position on the job make all sexual appetite tricky. W/actresses, for instance, one is so worried about keeping them on an even keel that the getting of it, perchance, by emotional involvement, seems like suicide. Or at the very least seems like borrowing trouble.  The other women you would throw down a well with a stone tied to their necks in a second if it would make your life easier on the movie. So how do you say to them, “You’re the most important thing,” even for only that fraction of a second it takes to get them and get you to want to take them down?

I feel a lot on these jobs like a ghost that is inhabiting my body.

I don’t have to search for detachment.  The exhausting ambiguity of my role in this circus enforces it upon me.

San Fransisco and its hungry straight women is gaudy and titillating.

I have a sense of this one of the few spots remaining of erotic bourgeois adventure in this country, sealed as it is in its relativity, blissed out indifferent to the economic reality more than most American cities at the moment of this recession.  This city is indifferent to the history being made around it more than most and it became the capital of the sixties because it was always uniquely unburdened by the assumption the sixties arrived to change.  Questioning the establishment is always easier here because this place never quite cared about the Establishment position.  This city is like England in that sense.  It kind of goes on its nice delicate fastidious, somewhat trivial way.

Any second now Walter will come back with Joel with stories of the last days in Modesto.

The first days footage problem has now been defined as some “spot” on the lens.  Whether we’ll be able to make the day up or not there’s no way to know.  What I am fascinated to find out of course is whether or not something wonderful got done on the new extra day.

It’s almost seven p.m. and all this should be known shortly.

LATER SAME NIGHT

Lawrence “Larry” Gordon

Walter and Joel return with Gene Levy andLarry Gordon.

At dinner gossip was what Speilberg did or was in the process of doing to Tobe Hooperon Poltergeist, in tandem with whatever had gone on during the maknig of E.T., which numerous people on our crew worked on. E.T. will screen while we’re in San Francisco and gossip about it swirls too.

Generally there’s talk of shit Speilberg puts people through. Walter’s propguy Craig Rache was on E.T. So was Tim Kehoe,Walter’s First A.D. from Southern Comfort. And above all, the friend to everyone on this was Walter’s old pal from the days of The Driver and The Warriors, Frank Marshall.So all this is third hand, guys who told guys who told guys.

Walter is visibly restive at the concentration on Speilberg.  Larry is genuinely amused and indifferent.

Joe says, “He’ll be the biggest director in the history of the business”

I point out or try to that Speilberg’s bigness, unlike Coppolas, will be rescindable instantly because of the lack of artistic distinction his films… power that comes from commercial success alone that can’t be plausibly dressed up in artistic or intellectual importance wanes as rapidly as it arrives.  Commercial failure, which always comes by the law of averages, cancels all mere commercial success.  Chaplin or Kurosawa, these are the men whose commercial successes as such are significant because they have generated loads of intellectual response which have  a fruitful effect on the fact of good numbers.

But what if both Poltergeist and E.T. hit?

“He’ll be Victor Fleming,” I say.

“Who?” Joel asks.

“Well… Victor Fleming directed The Wizard of Oz and got screen credit for a lot ofGone With the Wind in the same year. And by the way he directed A Guy Named Joe, a movie Spielberg is planning to remake, you know, about flyers… anyway… Speilberg isVictor Fleming.”

“I like this theory…” says Walter. “I’m Howard Hawks and Spielberg is Victor Fleming.  I like this.”

Larry Gordon describing himself, “I am above. Above the line.”

For some reason, at dinner, I had a moment of pure nervous panic.  Everyone was seeming to be going out of control and if a someone asked me to say something I would be dumb or incoherent or break into tears. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the feeling passed and I felt fine.

The story was told at dinner of the expansion of one actress’ role in the film and acknowledging that this, in fact, was congruent with someone’s purpose in wanting to fuck the young actress we cast for the part.  At dinner tonight, we learned the actress has a boyfriend/lives with a guy/is married.

“Fire her!,” was shouted, in mock Gilbert and Sullivan cruelty.

In another moment at dinner, Walter started to joke, referring to the dialogue and characterization added to the script recently.

“We’re trying to load this one up with all that character and stuff that isn’t in my other movies, so it better make money guys…I’m just selling out here, trying to make a fast buck, putting n all that character that wasn’t in my other movies.”

Gordon from the other end of the table cracks, “You wanna make money, make Stir Crazy.”

Sonny Landham, who was tossed into jail Monday, was in the bar of the restaurant when our group left to go back in one of the driver captains vehicles.  We gave him a ride, cracking jokes and saying fearful things to ourselves about what Sonny let loose on the  town of San Francisco might do.

“You’re not on my team,” Joel and Walter had separately said to humiliate him after the Monday night trouble.

“I tore his head off,” Joel said proudly.

Larry Gordon offered one other remark:  “I’m at the point where I just show up, look at dailies, chat with Diller and Eisner, and that’s that.
May 20, 1982
SHOOTING BEGINS IN SAN FRANSISCO

In defense of his waistline, Walter Hill: “You can’t drive post with a tack hammer”… Hildy’s response was, “What is a post?”  (Hildy is Hildy Gottleib, a short dark cute bright New York Jewish girl who goes with Walter on and off, and is an agent at ICM, and happens to be Eddie Murphy’s agent, the person who by the way suggested Eddie Murphy to costar in this movie…)

Shooting starts well with Nic leaving Annette’s apartment, a long elaborate crane shot of his drive out.  Nick does a nice thing with throwing the traffic ticket on the ground.

Things gong, in fact, so well that we may get to the next day’s shot today. But then we don’t.  Next day’s shot is a difficult long piece out in the street that Nic and Annette have yet to learn.

Walter cedes to me the job walking Nick and Annete through the location where they’re going to do this long take dialogue while the crew is wrapping.
May 21, l982

Yesterday difficult.

Ammette O’Toole & Nick Nolte

I spend four more hours prepping Nick about what the scene means. Then Walter arrives, listens to them do it, and immediately decides it can’t be done as written and has to be reduced sharply.  The reducing I don’t mind.  What I mind is my effort going uncoordinated to the main one — his.  And Walter’s being so blasé  about all this. But of course there is no alternative  It makes me feel like a bit of a jerk.  There is truth inRobert Towne’s remark that a screenwriter’s role is archaically and archetypally “feminine” in relation to the director’s role.  That means accepting having nothing to do at times in relating to “his” – the director’s – doing.  It all involves an ambiguity of function, as opposed to sets and props that have more measurable or definable kinds of roles.

I feel like I’ve disappointed Nick and Annette terribly, which is upsetting. But I can’t apologize without saying “If it were my show, I’d run it differently,” which is precisely what etiquette requires I not say.  Walter lent me the show to run, but without really giving me anything.

Nick comes by hotel room.  I apologize.  He sensed my need to. I am knocked out by his nicenesss.  He checks which of the remaining lines are going to be read, goes over them with me.  We talk about Walter setting him straight.  It’s all intuitive and not articulated, but what it should be.  I can’t sit still and really acknowledge that Nick Nolte wants me to feel all right.  I’m grateful.  As I note it down hours later, that gratitude just keeps growing.  He seemed relieved that I gave him a chance to express his feeling bad about how yesterday turned out.

Nick is so much the vehicle of a force that happens to be him.  He is like a whole earth in turmoil… cut, a little wounded, but regenerative, constantly.

AND …

Is there a fight between Walter and Larry and Joel and the studio, about the title?

There is indeed.

Apparently Barry Diller, the Paramount studio boss, who in Gordon’s words “can be a very vindictive man,” hates the title Forty Eight Hours. Gordon says that Eisner says that Diller says Forty Eight Hours can not be the title.  Joel hears this.  As a joke he turns to his secretary/assistant:

“Elaine…get Barry Diller on the phone.”

Gordon lets loose at Joel about how to win this strategic battle, the inner battle about who knows more about how to play the game.

“Listen to me you New York Jew Kike N.Y.U. film school genius — I been doing this since before you went to piss in your N.Y.U. film school urinal.  You wait till they give you twenty five unacceptable titles, then you say Walter refuses to work and Nick won’t come out of his trailer.”

“What if they put an ad in the trades with another title?,” Joel asks anxiously.

“The trades, the trades,” Gordon fumes.  He looks like he’s going to bite Joel’s nose or beard off.

Gordon is always partly happy to have an opportunity to yell at Joel.

Gordon calls Joel “the strangest person I ever knew” and is constantly searching for new reasons to be angry with Joel or yell at him, which in turn will make it necessary to constantly be thinking about him and talking about him.  It’s an obsessive familial — seeming father-son feeling — that drives him.

Gordon sketches a broad program for maneuvering against Diller’s insistence that the title be changed for Joel’s benefit:  “They submit twenty five unacceptable titles, Nic won’t work, Walter won’t work, Eddie won’t work, Joe’, you can say you won’t work and of course they’ll fire you.”  That causes Larry to burst into a contented grin.

Joel is certainly used to Larry Gordon’s abuse and has some means of tolerating, even needing it. “He’s the greatest,” is Joel’s label phrase for Larry, and then he sits and gets this whipping. There’s something about Larry’s vehement sometimes brutal teasing and constant focussing of attention at Joel that I suspect reassures Joel…it’s a fulltime occupation being the object of this attention.  And there’s something about it that makes Joel feel better, prepared afterwards to go into battle with the rest of the business. Joel is now used to force as everything.  All qualification, all relativity, don’t exist for Joel.

The liability in Joel’s case is that he’s so attracted to the idea of simple brute force, that somebody can probably get his attention with a fraudulent form of it.  He could probably fool himself.  Then of course he would just go onto the next force-situation.  So his being fooled doesn’t have any significant consequences, doesn’t set him back that much.  He just  looks for something else to apply the same mind set to.  Joel will never learn his lesson, but he’s never totally destroyed by having failed to. He just goes on to the next prospect or obstacle.   There is either a compulsion or a purity to this depending on how you want to look at it…

Joel is a few things: Intelligent, as opposed to merely fast, or quick, the hollywood substitute that superficially resembles intelligence but actually kills it.  And he is totally committed to his own perceptions and values, as few people I’ve ever seen.  He does not doubt.  He can also be funny.  That’s the thing that relieves him a little from the burden of being so obsessive.

At the same time or relatedly, there’s some way of being connected to things outside of himself that is not sound.  It’s all motion to him.  Larry Gordon is like this too, but he lives in a slightly more complete way in the emotions that result.  Gordon’s disconnectedness is something you can see him trying to redress when he gets mad.  And you can see Gordon become sentimental to protect himself from how he might be cutting himself off from others.

Though they’re incredibly attached to each other, they’re both somehow starkly alone and lonely.  The price of defending themselves constantly.   Larry has the therapy of a couple of sons.   Larry’s loneliness has a current of genuine, sincere surprise and a genuine feeling of bitterness, as if he tastes what his life has lead him to and doesn’t fully grasp why he should be without the regular connections with things and people he doesn’t have.  It’s like he’s puzzled more people don’t like him more.  Joel is profoundly uninterested in what he gives up of genuine emotional response.  He’s a bit more comfortable being alienated from other people.

They are both intermittently rescued, and rescue themselves by being funny.

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published May 30, 2008

Walter Hill

APRIL 18, 1982

Last Thursday Walter Hill phones.  A call my agent had promised me would come but didn’t know when.  I’d hung on for four long days.

He was calling, I knew, already, to discuss my gong to work for him on a go picture in active pre production at Paramount called 48 Hours.

There are few directors in Hollywood as intelligent and worth working for as Walter. There are even few go pictures, percentage wise, and still fewer in this depressed economy, jobs at all.  So on three simultaneous accounts I’m crazed about getting the cell…

“I don’t know what you’ve heard…I’ve been working this fella and while I like em I know it’s not gonna work out….”

That’s Walter referring to my predecessor on the project Steve De Souza.

“I been reading a few things…the script needs some things you do well I always think do less well.  I gotta bunch of people   standing my office wanting know whether to make the police cars red or blue…It’s brushwork on the script that’s needed…basically this things a pounder… a shaggy dog story.  Defiant Ones plus chuckles…I’ll be honest with ya…with four weeks till we shoot you probably won’t get screenwriting credit…basically all you got time for is to do what I tell ya…are ya interested?”

I say I am, while choking on my throat.

“What’s good is you’ll get a shot at seeing one of these things actually gets done.”

I call my agent.  We can put off the thing at Warner Brothers that I’m supposed to hand in, for six or seven weeks no problem.  I say I’ll still be able to come in for meetings if anyone likes.

“No you won’t” Jane says, “You’ll be in San Francisco.”

“I will?”

“For sure”

“Fantastic.

Now I have been waiting four days for a script, Walter told me I’d get on Tuesday, two days away.

My nerves go way up.
APRIL 19, 1982

No script arrives, so no work still (inching toward it.)  Fear of work.

Fear of actually going to work.

What will happen?  What does happen?

Following Tolstoy’s extraordinary procedures in War and Peace:   The moves in scale in the story alter or conceal the problem of the sudden shifts in point of view narrating the action.  One level of “shock” displaces the more normal difficult shock of losing involvement with characters you aren’t familiar with and haven’t as yet gotten involved with.  And don’t forget that every historical-military “real” name of generals and diplomats that Tolstoy mentions has immediate resonance for his readership because of their part of his audience’s national mythology…so that the story of the particulars of the unfolding events stands out against this background of knowledge.  Kudtozov is as well known to the Russian reader as Tolstoy is to us.

APRIL 23, 1982

In Hardy’s novels, in Tolstoy’s, and in Hollywood movies it is a “necessity” that the great popular calamities of war, nature, and personal desire come along to make the intricate and more subtle problems of self-knowledge something that can avoided, postponed or realized, as the self looks away from itself onto the screen of pressing external problems as “tests.”

Hollywood is reviving in my life.  Contracts about to be signed.  Money in the bank, etc.  Who would refuse it?  Who wouldn’t be glad?  There is as yet no way for me to make careful and persistent scrutiny of the world of artistic practice beyond Hollywood.
The conceptual parameter, the positive belief with all its ambiguity in something beyond narrative fictional commercial cinema is still remote tome.

So I’m in this situation:  I hate the imprisonment in despair that is my commercial life but I can’t think beyond it. “Faith” in a dogma of some radical formalism, or some  vaguely poetic notion of  “personal” … “lyrical.”

Writing has about it the charm of its own ideological coherence and evading the compromised nihilism of ordinary cultural products.  But the problem is how do you account for the powerlessness of all the truth that supersedes the compromises of the word?  How do you come to accept that so little of human life seems to follow the most interesting programs for life?  That the more interesting work, is the less popular.  Well, not true, finally, of course.  Vanguard ideas are disseminated at last, people catch up with the genius, they are also partly responsible for creating, yet this lag say that there is something nonexistent about future existence.

APRIL 24, 1982

Wednesday I call Walter and he tells me that casting travels to New York have made it necessary for him to postpone sending the script of Forty Eight Hours to me till the weekend.  It is now the weekend and nothing has happened.

He does say that I’m to go over the script of Extreme Prejudice.   This is a secret.  Something he’s pursuing and putting me up for, he says, with Warner Brothers.  This is or is not going to screw up or get complicatedly by the other Warner Brothers situation that has been going on for Dan Blatt and Bob Singer with Mark Rosenberg.

APRIL 26, 1982

Walter goes back to location scouting and casting.  No word from him.  When there is no word I constantly imagine that something that will reduce his commitment to working with me has arisen.

This anxiety will go on until work starts.

Visited Tony Garnett’s office at Warners…arranged by his D-girl, old pal, Amy Pascal.Tony’s a Brit.   I’ve already gleaned from Walter that he has a surprising number of close British  friends from when he was over there working with Huston  on The Mackintosh Man. He’s vaguely aware of Garnett…

Tony about Walter:  “Walter and me are like chalk and cheese…everything Walter’s done has been an avoidance of the more vulnerable sensitive side of his nature.”

After the meeting walking along with Amy.  She’s asking me about the writer and producer type friends of mine I introduced her to, Nick Kazan, Marjorie David, and Elliott Lewitt,Henry Bean and Leora Barish, Richard, that whole group started when Richard Kletterand his wife Sara Pillsbury introduced me, to Nick, Henry and Leora, while I introduced all of them to Elliot and Marjorie.

She said, “It’s so nice that there is no competition and jealously among you.”  I wonder to myself, “Isn’t there?”  There isn’t to the degree that we all feel like we’re all living the same life, the enemy we share in common, the studios, unifies us, and none of us so far is so inside with the benefits of The System to such a huge degree that we feel it alienating our relation to the others…none of us has succeeded or failed enough to no longer be able to relate to any of the others.   So the thing that would generate competitive jealous anger hasn’t happened.

Sometimes I feel like we’re just all guys in a platoon in a war film.  We’re so scared of getting killed in the battle against The Opposition, we’re so eager that someone plant the flag on enemy territory, fight through the obstacle course and get a half way decent movie Made,  that it kills off whatever  personal hostility might arise among us.   We all hope at least one of us gets something to happen.  Because if one of us does it means any of us could.

Like I said, for now we’re all living the same life.

Nick Nolte

APRIL 30, 1982

Yesterday, an hour or so of talking the script with N. Nolte.

For years I have been admiring his performances, here I was stunned to find qualities of personality far from the roles he plays, yet totally commensurate with power of the performances.  Grace, gentleness and sweetness–great humility before the task at hand, total reluctance to be narcissistic…refers warmly to the cops he talked to, a phrase running around in his head about cops “guardians of the gate protectors of the innocent…”  so “fucking charismatic”

These cops he said “Hundred times more cool than actors who are supposed to be.”
He’s talking about prepping from the role: “I’ve worked from the inside out before…” talking about working from literary creations like Hicks in Who’ll Stop the Rain, like Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row…

“And I said never do it this way, from the outside in but I see there’s a way to do this…y’see, I gotta get excited or else I get lethargic…”

The room he’s staying in is lined with books, all hardcovers–“I stole ‘em from libraries.

Can’t emphasize strongly enough the great gentleness.

“I used to be narcissistic as an actor.  I mean I did a lot of work, some of it good, but one day one guy came up to me and he said ‘Nick, how comes everything you do is the same’ …he was talking about a lotta scenery chewing and all that.”

I asked him about he got into Phil Elliot, the wide-receiver in North Dallas Forty, a performance of his I really liked.

“I was talking to Freddie Biletnikoff cause I modeled Phil Elliot partly on him, partly on Caspar.  I asked about Caspar and he said ah he’s just a rich kid with a lot raw talent but he doesn’t really care…also Freddie was sayin’ how he married a woman he knew he wouldn’t get along with well, just so he’d have it for on the field.”  He goes on about how his character has a technique for work but can’t apply it in his life, can’t get the two things gong together.

He talked about how rigid he used to be about preparing, he used the example of working on the role of Hicks:  “I was at my ranch locked up pacing, getting more and more isolated in that Zen thing that was Hicks in Who’ll Stop The Rain, and then this friend of mine stops around and I say Jesse I gotta kept myself I’m trying to figure and  all he said to me was, ‘Gee Nick, if you’re not him who is?”

He goes and gets a large glass coffee mug and fills it with orange juice and vodka every ten minutes, but you barely notice it.

Suggests a man who has had roaring insane demons in total possession of his soul at certain times and his lived past that…Although Nolte’s voice is low, soft, folksy, there is also a quiet persistent drive to his conversation.  He is leading himself on, pushing himself quietly at every moment.
MAY 1, 1982

Today for the first time, I show Walter pages.

This after breakfast.  In the headlines and radio, and t.v. in his office, the Falkland Islands crisis.

From there a detailed conversation about John Ford’s The Searchers…Walter agrees with his pal Lindsay Anderson that it’s overrated, that isn’t a genuine Ford film.  I take the standard position that was this the one time Ford seriously confronted the racism implicit in westerns, and that gave it an anguish and power supreme in all his work.

“I read where somebody said it was an allegory of the Brown versus Board of Education desegregation…to me Jack was a bit lost on this one.  I think basically it was a case of a guy whose basically a fairly simple person dealing with a piece of material he doesn’t totally understand…there are so many contradictions in the way its handled, he makes all these kind of weird camera moves that are just totally untypical.”

John Wayne in The Searchers

Then the subject turned to Wayne, with me offering the typical opinion that Ethan Edwards is Wayne’s finest performance.

“I hung around Wayne a few times” Walter said…”An uncouth rough bastard, all the things left wing types fear about right wing people in this case were true…”  I said I had the impression Wayne was smart. “Well he could be charming, but basically he was a bully.

I meant, he was smart like he is in the films.

“He knew a lot about filmmaking.  He ought to have…He made about seven thousand or however many…he knew about the technical of making but that’s basically not very hard to learn.”

We went to Walter’s house.

Fabulous Library.  Including a collectedSamuel Johnson!

Walter for all his neo-populist rhetoric, none of which is wholly insincere, is also  quietly, a bookish, highly literate anglophile.

In the rest of the place, wonderful rugs from Thailand, a subdued brown/blue color scheme, and a generally Spanish quality to the décor. I had asked him why he’d spent a lot of time in Mexico and he said, “because I couldn’t afford to go to Europe.”

Also a beautiful European poster for The Warriors — actually not a poster but a painting inspired by it.

We go over six pages of mine, same as always.  He has likes, dislikes.  Isn’t totally sure that what I’m giving him is an improvement.
MAY 2, 1982

Walter’s always moving to watch.  Why? Because Walter is always in the grip of the problem of being Walter.  And really his deepest simplicity is his deepest depth and it comes downs to this conflict: that he knows more than “they” do, whoever they are — the studio, critics, other filmmakers.  At the same time he’s determined to be modest, lucid and even ironic about his own knowledge.  He would like to find procedures that he could make clear and intelligible to everyone who disagrees with him.

He’s subtly respectful of those he disagrees with.

I watch Walter:  I am torn up in the grip of the problem of being with a million vagrant ambitions.  Here in the crucible where directness is the only virtue.
MAY 16, 1982 (Day before shooting starts – Modesto, CA location)

The machine of a movie is a diffuse garrulous FIST — but gigantic.  No one does not feel sucked in.

The drama of a movie as the tangible immediate visibility of money being spent measured against the always tangible elements involved in even the vulgarest movie. In other words, the goal of the money spent in filmmaking are never as tangible as the goal of making a shoe or building a car.

The interaction between money being spent and its purpose is intransigently mysterious.

This mystery glorifies tedious, monotonous and cruel aspects of the activity.  At the same time, the tedious monotonous and cruel aspects are themselves simply seen in a new light.

We are making a movie so everything bad about it is worth it, as opposed to working in an office for faceless unnamable corporate interests…or simply selling goods and services.  At least we’re MAKING something.

Many times, most times, when I think about it and feel it, I feel lost in this process though I am grateful to it, for being bigger than me, more than me.  Being composed of what I want from life but also being disappointing in some way at the same time.  Yet the disappointment is still a fall from such a great height and fall is not too great so that the experience perhaps like war is disillusioning but also inspiring.  Productive of the necessity of hope, that this power could all be better more subtly directed, thought process reveals why this will not be so.  Selfish desires and needs and exhaustion will never quit.  Still the whole magnitude of the machinery undeniably connected to the brute fact of the quantity of dollars which always semi prevents it, but which something back the thing that is being perverted possible in a unique way at the same time.

Movies, really making them, grants you a glimpse of the utopia where money is spent on art not, where it’s simply about the procuring of more money.  That’s the addictive part of it.  The object between the money–and the making of more money is a real object.  Movies are an interruption in the continuum that they are never the less a product of.

While you watch a real film gear up to happen you begin dreaming a different dream:  What is wanted that can never be is the dream film, the dream film language, spoken in a pure cinema world, a cinema city that permits the whole fabric of the medium to speak.

What is sought after in this enigmatic dream is a completely unprecedented freedom of expression, where somehow the relationship of two in a film completely exceeds the known possibilities involved in simply “telling a story.”  This would be some magical release from the known laws of intelligibility.  But of course real films like this one face a tough enough time simply delivering a competent skillful rendering of the intelligible. So while all of us bid farewell to this dream film, we continue to live in these films that have been sacrificed, the “something” of purer vision that we cannot even begin to specify.

We start to shoot tomorrow.

David Sosna, Walter’s first A.D., remarked, sitting in the back of a station wagon we took to see farm work machines to be used in the chain gang sequence, tomorrow:  “I’m so glad we’re getting out of preproduction and into production.”

This morning went with Walter and production designer John Vallone to look for the exterior of the hotel from which Ganz will escape…in LA.  This will be complicated by the fact that Rosalie, the little girl that Ganz, the bad guy, will use to blackmail Luther with will be snatched on screen much earlier in the film.  Walter and I commiserate about now re-extending the girls part.  One of the producers dearly wanted to fuck the actress who has been cast.

Walter and I noted that she has weary readiness to go along with whatever sexual horrors and favor giving would have to be visited on her on the way to having a career…Walter, that afternoon, did grudgingly confide his conviction that at the end of the day most actresses are whores.  I can honestly say he said it somewhat sadly, as if he’d hoped or wished it hadn’t been true, but that every actress he’d suspected it not to be true of had wound up disappointing him.   What he reiterates about actors, male and female, is their ability to make things work in movies is indispensable and ultimately mysterious.

“The thing about movie stars, is that they know something about how to be a movie star, but what that thing is, nobody, including them, really knows.”

Joel Silver

Lunch with Joel, Walter, Ric Waite the Director of Photography at a goyishe yacht club.
We talk about who we hate, and who others hate.  Joel recalls Gene Kelly, the legend who he worked with on Xanadu, the colossal flop he worked on with his current boss/partner Larry Gordon that Gordon always likes to bring up when he wants to tease or pick a fight with Joel.

According to Joel, Gene Kelly hated just about everyone, but especially Frank Sinatra…first because Sinatra was so wealthy but especially because Sinatra got to be in Guys and Dolls, and losing the part of Sky Masterson a part Goldwyn had promised Kelly, was the great grief of Kelly’s life.  Joel has a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of Olde Hollywood, via his NYU film history professor William K. Everson. “Kelly” says Joel “was the bitterest man in the world.”

Later, Joel ruminates about Matt Lattanzi, a model-actor, who’s now quite publicly withOlivia Newton John, who’d been the star of Xanadu, fresh from her heat from Grease. “How do you think he fucks her?,” Joel wondered out loud.  He threatened us with speculation on the gruesome details, but then relented.

Walter in the middle of the conversation:

“An artist is first of all observant…second of all practical, wouldn’t you agree Gross?”

“Practical,” I replied, “like a scavenger, you mean.”

Walking out of the yacht club, Hill goes on a sudden diatribe against New York, and keeps monotonously but humorously referring to how much pussy there is and will be floating free on the streets of San Francisco. He starts to reminisce about his days there as a second unit A.D. on Bullit. Apparently in those days –we’re talking ’67,’68, he made out well in the girl department in San Fransisco.

We start to work on a new scene with Rosalie, Ganz, Billy, and Luther to compensate for the fact that Eddie Murphy may be late in getting to San Francisco because of some snafu involving his Saturday Night Live schedule.

Suddenly we’re facing a problem of not having enough to shoot in our first few days… a scheduling fuck up that has Joel giggling with embarrassment and panic.  What he’s legitimately concerned about is us looking like we’ve handed the Paramount production bean counters the wrong information about our budget.  This is the first time that Joel has his name above the title as producer on a movie and the one thing he cannot let happen is for the impression he’s not in control of the spending of money.

Joel has visions of an unemployed crew spending seventy five thousand dollars a day in San Francisco.  “Just shoot me now if that’s what the studio sees on the production reports” Joel says, half laughing but totally serious.

We spend an anxious hour explaining the new scenes to Sosna and the production manager Gene Levy.

Struggling we are to figure out how to do the San Francisco locations sensibly.

In a conversation with Walter, I offered a definition of an improper inference.  Using several things one notices, to weave together a conclusion too rapidly.  He says this is no error.  This is precisely how the mind of a filmmaker must work…fastening available materials and perceptions, and making a coherent something out of them, even when they’re insufficient, concealing the insufficiency of the elements by elegance.

Walter likes to tease me.  He implies he’s decisive, and I’m sort of over intellectual and therefore a bit paralyzed.

He points to himself and me…”What a pair we make, standing side by side, hate and self-hate.”  And then he says, “I despise self hatred.”  What he means is, he refuses to doubt himself.

Walter has made other generalizations about the meaning of life: “If politics were an animal, I’d kill it.”

So now for the first time in my life I am in the center of this as far as affecting the work others on a day of production will do…affecting how money is to be spent, having access to how this machine, this fist… lives.

I am right in the middle of action as far as there can be action.

The problem, if it is a problem, is the whole nature and structure of this procedure.  How simply at the level of scale it is bigger than all the individuals that comprise it.  Therefore, everything is by its intrinsic character a compromise.

– Larry Gross
Written Contemporaneously… Published May 22, 2008

By R.J. Matson