9/14/2011 Taking the High Road

By portioning off a section of my life and calling it “the festival” I not only mean the Duke City Shootout and all its transformations, but the topsy-turvy reversals I experienced during that time, the switch from writer to producer, freelancer to salaried employee, loosely married to totally divorced to totally married, like one big mid-life crisis only more festive and less angst-ridden, more inevitable, looking back on it, and less of a surprise.  (That’s looking back on it; looking forward it was one surprise after another.)  It had only taken a year after my plays started getting staged that I had tried my hand at directing, so after working with producers of all stripes for more than twenty years I was bound to take a shot at it if for no other reason than to see if I could do any better than people I criticized. 

Trying my hand at producing turned into the Shootout, which had a ten-year run.  I was aided and abetted and at times superseded by a whole passel of culprits.  And throughout I was split-screening to other producers I had worked with in L.A., New York, Austin, and New Orleans.

In comparing my experiences with Heather and Des in L.A., I’m offering a glimpse at two different to becoming a film producer.  Heather took the route of family connection riding what some refer to as the “bloodline express.”  Des, lacking nepotistic resources, bullied his way into an elite film school then from there party-crashed the circles of Hollywood power taking what others might call the “big con approach.” 

I first met Heather in a leatherette booth at an Italian restaurant next door to the Theater of NOTE on Vermont Avenue in North Hollywood.  She was part of the NOTE company that was producing a one-act play of mine called “Arroyo Repo.”  The person who had read my play and decided to direct it, Rob Hicks, was with us and had made the introductions.  Rob was a tall balding sinewy character actor with a loud strident voice and an even louder raucous laugh that caused patrons at tables across the restaurant to turn their heads.  His day job was working at a bicycle shop.  Although he had been in some shows at the Odyssey Theater and at NOTE, things hadn’t gone well for him.  Oddly enough he wasn’t comfortable around other actors.  He scorned any kind of affectation and mocked anybody who became a success.  Part of this was because he looked like Anthony Perkins but he didn’t have the star’s neurotic sensitivity, so on stage people felt that he was without nuance and came on too strong.  So he had taken on directing.  Only in working with other producers, when he wasn’t openly brimming with resentment at complying with their orders, he was jeering at them behind their backs for their presumption that they knew more than he did. 

Possibly due to my own size and cynical nature, Rob was less rebarbative around me.  His humor was biting and his laugh loud, but he wasn’t obtuse.  I could banter with him about the preposterous vanity that paraded by on the street, or the desperate ambitions of the untalented, but the wholesale denigration of Los Angeles theater wore thin fairly quickly so it was a relief to have Heather at the table.  For one, when it came to Hollywood she was more ambivalent.  She had her share of resentments, but they were less fierce.  When she smiled at someone’s pretentions you didn’t feel that she, unlike Rob, also wanted to have them drawn-and-quartered.

And her benign view of entertainment industry shenanigans was all the more remarkable considering that her brother, initially a young Hollywood success story, had ended up killing himself.  Before we met at the restaurant, Rob mentioned that her brother, a wunderkind show-runner for Peyton Place, had committed suicide a year before, so I wasn’t prepared for Heather’s seemingly bright outlook on life.  Her pleasantries made Rob’s snide remarks seem petty set against her family’s tragedy.  Between the director and the producer I was already favoring the latter.  In putting on a play or making a movie there is always infighting and clash of personalities, but taking the high road has to me seemed the most attractive option.