Department Of Read This Book If You’ve Ever Watched TV/Seen A Movie [1]
Ed Zwick, he of the multi-slash identities, who as a creator/producer/writer/director brought us iconic/groundbreaking, continuing storyline TV series (thirtysomething; My So-Called Life) and epic movies (including Glory; Legends of the Fall; Courage Under Fire; Courage Under Fire ), has written an perceptive and entertaining memoir about his years in “the business.”
In Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, Zwick presents a behind the scenes peek into how the Hollywood sausage is made. [2] ‘Tis a world far removed from my own…or so I thought. Then I read Zwick’s book, and found moiself identifying with many of his observations and insights. His articulations of the hazards of filmmaking echoed much of what I found loathsome about the business end of writing fiction. I’ll share just two of those, and leave the rest for y’all to discover
“Praise makes you its prisoner. It’s the spike in your arm where the first taste is free. And when it comes from the critics, it’s the hangman saying you have a pretty neck. If I choose to read the good reviews, I’d better read the bad ones, too.”
In this second excerpt, replace “executives” with “publishers” and/or “editors,” and include in his crop of new phrases “content provider” and “author’s platform,” and “cultural appropriation,” and you’ve got my take of the current culture of book publishing.
“After fifty years of getting their notes, the sum creative contribution from all but a few truly gifted executives might be reduced to four words: ‘Faster. Dumber. More likable.’ Every script ‘needs work,’ every first cut is ‘eighty percent there.’ In the new millennial Hollywood, the legacy of Silicon Valley start-up culture is felt everywhere. Everything is decided by ‘the group.’ An idea needs to be ‘socialized.’ But since when is consensus the best way to judge art? Is homogeneity really the goal? Each year they introduce a crop of new phrases: ‘edge it up,’ ‘backload it,’ ‘unpack it,’ ‘lean into it’…”
( excerpts from Ed Zwick’s,
Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood )
* * *
Department Of Questions That Can No Longer Be Answered
A recent No Stupid Questions podcast has an interesting (and perhaps ultimately unanswerable) question for a title: Is It Good Or Bad To Keep Secrets?
That’s a fascinating topic for discussion, moiself thought. As I began to listen to the episode it was clear that the focus was on keeping secrets that you were holding about yourself. Nevertheless, from the first moments of the podcast, when I heard the episode’s title, my hippocampus and other temporal lobe structures [3] fixated on the idea of keeping “secrets” (or information) that, as the saying goes, aren’t yours to tell. As in, Other People’s Secrets ®.
Dateline :
… which would be my junior year in college, at UC Davis. Late one weekday evening my friend Logan [4] called to ask if I wanted to go “Jazzcuzziing.®” Backstory: Jazzcuzziing ® was a verb amongst a certain group of my friends. Founding members of this friend group had scoped out apartment complexes in Davis which had swimming pools and hot tubs (Jacuzzis) and sometimes even saunas [5] that anyone could use (translation: those facilities were intended for the renters, but the apartment complex grounds were inadequately fenced, and it was easy for non-renters who knew the layout of the complex to gain entry).
A group of us would do this about once a week, later in the evening before the facilities’ official closing times (midnight on Mondays-Fridays). Experienced Jazzcuzziers knew to only accept a Jazzcuzziing ® invitation when you were done with your homework/paper writing/exam prep, or had decided you were done with such academics for the night…because after the watery relaxation session your mind wasn’t good for anything related to scholarly assignments.
When Logan picked me up, something felt…different. I’d assumed there would be at least three others in Logan’s car, but me getting into the passenger’s seat made only two of us. I asked where brothers Nick and Mick were, and JJ, etc. – were they meeting us there? As Logan drove away from my apartment complex and headed toward our Jazzcuzzi destination he said,
I wanted to tell you…something. Privately.
He spoke in a subdued, I’m serious manner that I hadn’t known he’d possessed. I turned in the passenger seat to look directly at him; when he made eye contact with me I saw no trace of the amiable, waggish, even flirtatious look that seemed to be his default mode.
Logan began telling his something by asking me what I knew about (his former girlfriend), Kathleen.
I put his former girlfriend parenthetically because I’d never been sure what Logan’s and Kathleen’s relationship was. I was vaguely aware that, months earlier, Kathleen had seemingly disappeared from UCD; the story was that she’d transferred to another college to change her major? Yes, Logan confirmed, Kathleen had left school. But not because of her major. She’d gone up north, to Montana. A week ago Friday Logan had received a phone call from her, after which he drove all night to where Kathleen was staying. He arrived “just in time,” which was shortly before Kathleen gave birth to a child – their child – which she was going to put up for adoption.
“I have a daughter,” Logan said, almost inaudibly. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
When he spoke about how he and Kathleen had found out she was pregnant and how they’d deliberated their options I asked if they had considered keeping and raising the child, or having an abortion, or…. “Oh, no.” Logan adamantly cut me off when I mentioned the A-word. “I wouldn’t allow that.”
I remember thinking, Oh, so *you* wouldn’t allow it? But you will “allow” yourself to stay here, continuing with your life as if nothing has changed, while you “allow” Kathleen to put her life on hold, leave the state and her friends and her studies…. But I kept such thoughts to moiself. Logan was agitated and distraught, and on the verge of tears at several points. For reasons he never revealed to me he’d chosen to share his pain with me. It was no time for me to lecture him on society’s (and his) sexist expectations for what Kathleen should be “allowed” to do with her life.
One Saturday night, a few weeks after Logan’s revelation, I was with a group of friends, including Logan and the usual Jazzcuzziers, at JJ’s apartment, playing backgammon and other board games and shooting the shit. Someone said something about how they hadn’t seen Kathleen around, and Logan mentioned the college transfer cover story. Logan was sitting directly across from me; I was beyond careful *not* to make eye contact with him. I felt a tightness in my throat and gut as I thought, not for the last time, “I wish he hadn’t told me.” I wished he hadn’t momentarily relieved part of his burden by placing it on me…. And I immediately regretted having such harsh thoughts.
A few months later Nick told me that Kathleen had returned to UCD, and he repeated the story he’d heard from Logan: Kathleen had transferred to another university, thinking it would be better for her major, but after a couple of quarters she realized that Davis was the place to be. As far as I know, Logan and Kathleen did not resume their relationship.
Nick and I kept in touch after college, with phone calls and letters and occasional in-person visits. Fast-forward 20+ years, to one of the rare but wonderful times when I was reunited with Nick in person. I was visiting Nick and his family at their San Francisco home; his delightful [6] wife gave us her blessing (read: shooed us out of their house so as not to bore her and their kids) to go out and have dinner at an Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away and yak about our college days. As we were sharing antipasti and chianti and what each of us knew about what mutual friends were doing, Nick announced that he had some juicy news to tell me. He’d seen Logan recently, for the first time in years, and he’d learned something about Logan and Kathleen.
Nick:
“They had a kid, junior year – Kathleen left school, and had a baby!
And they kept that from everyone!”
Moiself (nodding my head as I reached for a kalamata olive and took another sip of the wine which impeded my intention to don my Oh-Wow-Really?!?!?! face):
“Yeah.”
Nick (looking across the restaurant table at me, surprised by my lack of surprise at what he’d just told me):
“Yeah.’? Did you hear what I said?”
Moiself:
“Yes, I know. I knew.”
Nick (incredulously):
“How did you know?”
Moiself:
“Because Logan told me. The weekend after Kathleen gave birth.”
I’m not sure which emotion was strongest on Nick’s face: shock, disbelief, pain, or disappointment.
Nick:
“He told *you*????!?!?”
Moiself:
“Yep. I was as surprised as…”
Nick:
“Why didn’t he tell *me*?! Or ….”
( He named his brother, Mick, and two more of their Close Guy Friends.® )
“We were so close – he didn’t tell his best friends?”
Moiself:
“Maybe that’s why he told me – because I wasn’t his closest friend.
I figured he just needed to tell someone, and he pegged me as empathetic, or…
I don’t know. I don’t know his reasons for confiding in me. He never told me why, and I never asked.”
Nick:
“You kept this secret, all these years? Why didn’t *you* tell me?”
Moiself:
“Because Logan asked me not to tell anyone.”
It was as simple as that. I could tell Nick wanted to press it further, but didn’t know how do so without…well, without looking like a jerk who was disappointed in one friend for not betraying another friend’s confidence.
I don’t know if Nick ever asked Logan about the part of the secret that seemed most important to Nick – why Logan had confided in me, and not his “closest” guy friends. A year or so after Nick’s and my conversation, it was too late to find out. Logan died, far too young, [7] and took whatever remaining secrets he had with him.
Well, okay. How’s about poetry?
* * *
Department Of The Poetic Form I’m Not Appreciating
I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
( John Barrymore )
I have no desire
to fit in.
No plans to walk with the crowd.
I have my own mind,
heart and soul.
I am me
And it
has taken me years
to realize
how important that is
Moiself saw the above poem recently (posted on FB). I’m not the first nor the last writer or non-writer who scorns [8] free verse as anything other than what it seems to me to be: an attempt to be poetic (for whatever reasons, perhaps to obtain what the writer feels is the artistic cred/prestige of the title, “poet,”) without being willing to put in the work of crafting poetry.
That’s not to say that I do not appreciate or understand the sentiments expressed in the above poem, or ones like it.
I just ask myself,
why is that labeled as a poem?
Why is it not,
simply and straightforwardly,
evocative
and beautiful
prose?
Is
it the
arranging?
if so, you can take any opinion,
sentiment,
or statement, and make it poetic
due to spacing
and punctuation
and
general
formatting.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [9]
“Christianity is the religion of love and forgiveness. And if you don’t believe that
you’ll burn in a pit of hell for all eternity.”
( Moiself, x years ago, when asked to give a summary
of Christian witnessing in 25 words or less )
* * *
Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I love it when the rhodies (by the pear tree that daughter Belle planted) decide to burst forth on the first day of spring.
* * *
May you choose well those in whom you confide your secrets;
May you keep
Your free verse
To
yourself;
May you appreciate the behind-the-scenes tales of art;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] A little more subtle entreaty than “Everyone Should Read This Book.”
[2] Vegans beware; it’s a backstabbing meat market in many aspects…and now I’ll stop with the butchered (oops!) food metaphors. You’re welcome.
[3] The parts of the brain currently thought to control long term memory.
[4] All names in this story are not the characters’ real names. They are, of course, some people’s real names…just not the people mentioned in this story.
[5] Or sometimes, all three! I wonder how many capillaries I burst, going from swimming pool, to jacuzzi, to sauna, to pool, and back again.
[6] Don’t you love it when your friends marry someone that you think is simply mahvelous?
[7] Cancer; lymphoma, I think.
[8] Or as a fan of the genre might say, just doesn’t “understand.”
[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
