On Fire

I don’t know why I’ve been waking up at one-thirty, but it’s been going on for a while now. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old, or rather, older. I really don’t like to think of myself as old. However, nothing about me operates the way it used to. Is that the way it’s supposed to be?

  I check first for signs of any possible digestive discomfort, which is what I figure I should be expecting from the gazpacho I consumed earlier. The good news is that I seem to have survived my wife and daughter’s most recent culinary escapade unscathed. For now anyway.

  I’m toasty. I roll over and I notice a slight dampness where I’ve been lying and it’s because it’s so warm in the bedroom. I like it cool and it’s usually well air conditioned but not tonight. Tonight the two sides of the bedroom that are walls of glass are opened with big glass sliding doors. We, my wife and I, are sleeping in the rather humid outdoor air of Los Angeles. No wonder I feel a little hot. I almost never cool off in LA, not even in the winter.

  This is really more like camping out, which is something I remember from being a kid in a much colder part of the country, a place where it doesn’t stay this warm for very long, making camping outside kind of a privilege infrequently granted by life. It’s Kathy who likes these warm nights with the walls pulled back.

  It’s weird. I am totally awake. It always happens like this. I weigh the odds of getting back to sleep if I stay in bed and try to focus on not focusing, but the odds of that working are not good. Better odds if I get up, even if it’s just for a short while.

  I get out of bed in one smooth motion so Kathy won’t notice. It’s a partial moon but pretty full and in a clear sky like tonight the moon can provide quite a bit of suffused light. I use it to navigate around the grouping of furniture near the corner of the huge bedroom in order to walk outside.

  I step onto the veranda and place a hand on a structural pole that supports the awning above me. I’m tempted to turn on the gentle soffit lights but again I don’t want to disturb Kathy. Instead I just look down on the lighted infinity pool below and see that there is nobody there. My kids are old enough to use the pool on their own, but I’d rather they didn’t at this hour of the night, and I’m glad to see that it is empty.

  I can see past the manicured lawn down the heavily vegetated hillside to the tennis courts, a single floodlight standing lonely vigil over them, and then back up the side of the hill to the line of tall and skinny Italian cypress that just happen to screen a spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills. The property is ringed by low landscape lighting and looks especially peaceful and beautiful at night. I am, by all accounts, a lucky man, and I know it.

  There is a barely discernable glass railing on the balcony I’m standing on. But I wonder often at moments like these, what if there was no barrier? If I were so inclined, could I get up enough speed running off this level of the house to make it over the lethally hard concrete of the patio to hit the water of my infinity pool unscathed? It’s a thought problem and it always comes back to me whenever I stand here in the lonely middle of the night.

  I come back in and walk to the adjoining bathroom. Like the rest of the house, it has a spare modernist design, a wall mirror over double sinks, a dark walnut floor, a very high tech shower stall, even a stall with a door for the toilet. I use it and it flushes with some kind of low swoosh, very quietly and entirely unlike anything that I have experienced before in my life. I congratulate myself on living long enough to take advantage of such innovation. Now I can flush without having to disturb my wife.

  Leaving the bathroom I pad quietly out to the hallway. It has sensitive lighting that adjusts to the time of day so that the beautiful abstract paintings on its fourteen foot walls can be appreciated even at night. I pay my homage and tread down the marble stair to the kitchen.

  I grab some juice and left over dessert from the frig that is disguised to look like a part of the kitchen wall and head into the living room, the one with the double height ceiling and more walls that can be pulled back to enjoy very directly the meticulous grounds. Due to the season, there is a huge, lit Christmas Tree in the most prominent place in the room. I turn on a couple lamps, in the process depositing my stuff on the coffee table. I have to pull up one of the leather sofa chairs so I can eat. I look at a reflected image of myself in the dark window pane on the other side of the room. I’m just a guy in his shorts taking a late night snack. Hi there!

  I like reassuring myself this way. I may live in LA’s Platinum Triangle. I may have at one time or another written, directed and, when younger, even appeared in some American films. I may have, but I don’t consider that that’s who I am. It’s just something I used to enjoy doing. I was lucky. I was fortunate to have the opportunities that came my way during those early days and I was smart enough to use them to become rather skilled at what I do. All the artistic stuff aside, film-making is a very complex business, and I am good at complex.

  Recently though things have become far more complicated than usual and I’m not sure if it’s really for me anymore. What I used to enjoy about making films I no longer do. Forces far beyond me seem to be intractably taking their toll on the process.

  At first it was just shaping the product for individual markets. In this country or that it came to be a rather good idea to make a few compromises with a particular piece of dialog or a particular character’s portrayal. Why go out of one’s way to offend an entire culture and not get one’s film seen there, possibly by millions, even tens of millions, of people? At the end of the day, are a few inconsequential changes really about artistic integrity? No, of course not! It’s about box office! It’s about the bottom line!

  I still tell myself that. I’m still hoping to believe it. It’s getting harder and I attribute that to the fact that though I still love what I do, it no longer motivates me with the same ease that it once did. It used to thrill me when one of my pictures would open and I would get to experience the public’s reaction to my work. Now, not so much. Now I know by detailed scientific measure of the audience who exactly I can expect will like the film, and who won’t. I know within a relatively small probability of error how well the film will do, not just in this country, with this particular set of social mores, but in virtually every country in the world.

  If a country doesn’t like my movie, they won’t let it in. I can measure how much that is going to cost me with precision. So I make their suggested changes. Does that really compromise my values? Yes, but for a time it was only the values that I didn’t care about.

  Lately though, it’s become more difficult to still feel that way. There are more countries seeking to write their own version of the world as they believe or want it to be. There are more officials who are less reluctant to tell me what they like and don’t like about my movies, what they suggest be changed or removed for their citizens.

  Heck I don’t live in these other countries. Why should I care? Isn’t it better that I can at least be seen there? Is a nip and tuck really that big a deal? Doesn’t it help open up these less tolerant societies if the people in them can learn just a little bit more about what life is like on the rest of the planet? I think so.

  If only it had just stopped somewhere, somewhere like the water’s edge. But it hasn’t. At first, it was with ratings and subtle political influence, later it was with more direct pressure. Now it is interference. It has become much more focused on the creative, on how things are written, how things are said. More and more, it affects how things are being financed, packaged and sold.

  Feeding xenophobia, glorifying armed might, stoking fear of the ‘other’, whoever that might be, just to enhance the authority of those in power, while diminishing the ability to criticize that power, these things have the ability to be expressed in a lot of ways. I’m floating on an international tidal wave of authorities pushing this kind of stuff at their own populations and I want to get off the same planet that they’re on. Only thing is, if I wan
t to stay in the game I can’t just fly away.

  I’m stuck here and wondering what I can do about it. I have to work with governments who create secrecy to protect themselves, and who mercilessly punish those who try to unveil it. In light of all this, I have to ask myself if I can I really watch a cold chill continue to descend over everything.

  Regretfully, I am beginning to see that I have cooperated too much. Without even intending to, I’ve managed to add to this age’s sense of growing darkness, a darkness made up of fading sources of illumination, strangled forms of expression, and an absence of creativity.

  And sadly, it permeates the world.

  Chapter 35