escape
In Louisville, KY, visiting an old college friend for the weekend, so blogging may continue to be sporadic until my Monday return.
where do i live again?
Just booked my next few business trips; seems I’ll be at home for a total of six and a half days over the next month. Sigh.
the joy of travel
It is 9:00 AM and I am on my way to return my rented car, a little, white, brand new Corolla that feels remarkably underpowered on LA’s fast-moving freeways. I’ve rented the car from Midway, the company from which I leased the SUV I drove during the months I was in LA for shooting; they’re a pleasure to deal with, and have cut me a great deal, but sadly don’t have an office at Long Beach Airport, the closest place where JetBlue flies. So I am returning the car to their corporate headquarters, on the corner of Sepulveda and Santa Monica Boulevard.
I’m supposed to head back to near the Beverly Center, to meet the girl I’ve been seeing for breakfast before I head off to the airport. The Midway folks kindly offer to drop me off, and though Jorge, the mechanic who takes me, speaks absolutely no English, we make it through the twenty minute drive talking non-stop, he in Spanish, I in Italian. By and large we understand each other, yet Jorge is particularly enamored with most of the women we pass, and offers a running commentary I’m afraid my rather G-rated textbook Italian leaves me ill-prepared to follow in great detail.
Breakfast itself is excellent. She and I eat outside at a small caf
back and forth and back and
Ridiculously enough, I’m out in Los Angeles, yet again, for a short stint (arrived Tuesday afternoon, head back early tomorrow morning) to deal with a couple of post-production emergencies and to begin lining up contracts and financing for our next project. Then it’s back to New York for two days before heading off to Florida for the Florida Film Festival. And then back to New York, briefly, before a trip out to San Francisco, next weekend.
By now, I have absolutely no idea where I live nor what time I’m on. But, on the plus side, I’m racking up all kinds of frequent flier miles, which means, if I’m real lucky, I can fly even more!
I remember my father once telling me about a patient of his who worked as a traveling salesman. When he awoke in the morning, the man would roll over and look at the carpet – if it was blue, he was at home; if not, he’d stay in bed until he could remember where he was and what he was doing there. For the first time in my life, that story makes a lot of sense.
helpful note
If, because the documents, clothing, and other items you’ve accumulated during two months in Los Angeles don’t all fit into your suitcase, you cleverly decide to UPS some things back home, be sure to check the pockets of any pants you ship, so that you don’t realize the following morning that you’ve actually sent your wallet out by mistake as well.
brrrrr
The snowline in Central Park, a few short blocks from my New York apartment, has hit 19 inches. I’ve been gradually turning up the AC here in LA, preparing for my return.
raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
It’s wet in LA. Which seems to have taken the city by surprise. Stores are closed, highways are flooded, old women cower in the corners of their earthquake-proofed homes. Yet I’m oddly happy. Too many sunny days uninterrupted have grated on me as much as too many days of dark drizzle would have, and today there’s something oddly pleasant about sitting inside, watching the clouds through the windows, and listening to the gentle ratt-a-tat-tat of raindrops on the roof.
when in roam
By and large, I love my cell phone. For the past six months, the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (aka the Dork-o-matic 8000) has done everything I could want from it – fielding calls, intermeshing seamlessly with my over-stuffed contact database, calendar and to-do list, checking email, and even letting me modify complex film budgets on the fly in Excel, allowing me to determine the fiscal impact of changes to production plans while still on set.
Since coming to LA, however (ah, yes, did I mention I’m back in our nation’s smog capital, this time through mid-February?), I’ve been frequently seized by the urge to drop kick the thing against the nearest brick wall. Because, though the breadth of T-Mobile’s LA coverage is indeed impressive, the depth leaves a bit to be desired; so far as I can tell, though I get strong reception in all but the deepest concrete parking dungeons, I cannot actually place a call anywhere if any other user in greater LA County has even considered turning on their phone within the last twenty-four hour period. As a result, I spend quite a lot of my time listening to apologies by soothing automated voices – they’re sorry, but all circuits are perpetually busy.
Like any problem, however, my inability to initiate or receive calls, or even check messages, has a bit of a silver lining: this being LA, people assume I’m purposefully not answering their calls or returning their messages to demonstrate my greater relative power level. Yesterday, for example, David Hillary, the other producer on I Love Your Work, was ribbing me for being “harder to get on the phone than Ovitz at his prime.” And when I called to apologize to an agent earlier today who’s call I hadn’t returned for nearly a week, I found myself instead receiving profuse thanks for taking time from my obviously busy schedule to talk through the relatively minor matter at hand.
So, while I had initially planned on picking up a second cell for the duration of my LA stay, I suspect I’ll instead be sticking with my trusted T-Mobile. If I could work up the nerve to do it, I’d actually switch instead to an exceedingly elaborate and ineffective system of smoke signal and carrier pigeon, as I can only imagine the career gains I could realize by effecting such an approach. Once I work out the details, Harvey Weinstein is toast.
a brief respite
Back to New York for a bit of a break before hurling myself into the fires of Hollywood once more for the ever-intensifying stretch that leads to the start of I Love Your Work shooting on January 8th. Too stressed out, jet lagged and sleep deprived for genuine pith or wit, I fall back upon these two passages on that most unique city of angels to summarize my thoughts.
On Los Angeles versus New York:
LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in those streets.
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
On the lovely individuals with whom I’ve interacted thus far:
The men who work in this town, and, to a lesser degree, the women, display behaviors that would undo them in any other profession. Egomania and greed that would disgrace any executive in, say, the insurance or aerospace industries are here rewarded. And even for those who run afoul of the law and are convicted of crimes, there is an apparently bottomless well of forgiveness. “Nobody cares about that shit,” one studio head said recently. “If you’re a money-maker, you could have killed and eaten your own children. It doesn’t matter as long as there is the perception that you can make somebody some money.”
-Charles Fleming, “Failing Upward in Movieland”
Boy, I can’t wait to go back.
rambling man
In a scant six hours, I head out the door to Los Angeles. Monday officially starts pre-production for I Love Your Work, so I’m heading west to meet up with the director and other producer to hammer out the details of actually pulling together the shoot. It needs to be quick hammering, though, as I’m only out West until Thursday – a stretch of agent and investor meetings bring me back to the East Coast for the weekend. Following that, I bounce back and forth between New York and LA for most of December and January. And then head off to France at the start of February for the world premiere of Coming Down the Mountain. Thrillingly jet-set, I know. But involving an ungodly number of suitcase packings and unpackings (right on the heels of packing and unpacking my entire apartment, none the less). Considering that the suitcase for my six-hours-till-embarkment trip is lying on top of my bed, completely empty, this could be an ugly couple of months.