9/04/2011 Living the Movie

When I left the Cat and Fiddle that night more than twenty years ago, I angled through some side streets and took Cahuenga past the seedier sections of Hollywood to Highway 101 that led to the Sherman Way exit into Van Nuys.  It was around ten and the traffic was beginning to thin, but it didn’t matter what time I hit the road, in those days when I swooped into the flow of the freeway swarm it was always an adventure.  I was in my blue Toyota Corolla which I let Fabrice, a director friend of mine, have use of when I wasn’t in L.A.  Fabrice was between directing gigs which meant that her car was in the shop and she was six months behind in her rent and about to be kicked out of her apartment.  When I hit town she borrowed her sister’s pickup truck, an unreliable Dodge that she made do with until I would boomerang back to Albuquerque. 

Driving up the freeway past Universal City, I loved to feel the surge as I accelerated into the faster lanes.  The car and I were one, body and machine in the zoom, and all around us interweaving traffic rushing after prospects.  Oftentimes there was mist, or the hint of fog, and that lent a romantic, soft focus promise to all the possibilities.  I could arrive at wherever I was staying and the phone might be ringing as I walked through the door.  There was no curfew for surprises; a producer might have finished reading my script at one in the morning and have to talk, or a director might have just left a party where a star had showed interest in our project.  So every slip onto the freeway behind the wheel of my Corolla was an action picture headed for a dissolve that would ideally reveal the deal that led to a seaside celebration. 

In Albuquerque, although the freeways were swifter and there was more punch to the acceleration, my life, in those days, felt more like film noir, headlights throwing a long hard beam to accentuate the contrast of the shadows, my final destination a quick cut and fade to black.  It wasn’t that I compared Albuquerque unfavorably to L.A.; in fact, I preferred living in a smaller city that was less obsessed with advertising power, less intoxicated with promise.  Lacking grandiosity, Albuquerque seemed to bring me back to earth; L.A., lacking proportion, seemed to always inflate my expectations.  My commuting back-and-forth made me less prone to getting lost in my delusions.  If the light in Albuquerque felt sharp as a shot of tequila, at least it had the sting of truth unlike the glossy Los Angeles sun that softened the edges with the friendly fuzziness of fluted champagne. 

And so, as I sped up the 101 past Sherman Oaks, I knew that the movie I was living would have its final cut in Albuquerque, my action adventure soberly reexamined, but that didn’t stop me from feeling the heady adrenaline of being in the midst of a shoot, when even the bad takes don’t seem all that bad, and all the dailies “look fantastic.”  I was in L.A., after all, working on producing a movie which, like my being in New York ten years earlier doing theater, was tantamount to being a painter in Paris in the 1920s: the city was the world recognized capitol of my craft.  Money, talent, crew, making the most viewed entertainment on the planet, weaving in and out of the same traffic I was threading through.  I rolled down my window to let in the cool damp breeze.  It hit my face with the fizz of a sparkling drink distilled from a fragrant monoxide flower.  I was cruising through paradise taking in the scent of power.