Emulsional Problems by Michael Dare

Emulsional Problems Table of Contents

Intro How to do what I do I.

Monty Python’s First Visit to America – featuring John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman II. Tom Waits for No One but Me – A night on the town with Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Chuck E. Weiss, John Prine, and Dr. John III. Brushes with Fame – featuring Richard Dreyfuss and Larraine Newman IV. The Red Hot Chili Peppers – The early years V. My Best Friend Lewis Arquette – featuring the whole Arquette clan VI. The Legend of William Hjortsberg VII. Greta Scacchi Uses my Tool – No, not that one VIII. Bathing with John C. Lilly – My visit to Lilly’s isolation tank on the occasion of his 80th birthday IX. My Best Birthday Present – Featuring Timothy Leary X. How to Write Like Tom Robbins XI. Demi Moore – before and after XII. How I Got Cast in Francis – Featuring Jessica Lange XIII. My Trip to Disneyland with Eugene Ionesco XIV. Backstage with Baryshnikov – with Valda Setterfield and John Sanborn XV. Being There with Hal Ashby XVI. Porn Free – My adventures on the set of a porn film XVII. How I Saved Brian DePalma from Being Pelted with Rotten Eggs XVIII. Andy Kaufman’s Last Performance, featuring Peter Ivers, Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase, Lotus Weinstock, Lili Hayden, Robert Roll, and Cyndi Lauper XIX. The Life and Death of Captain Preemo or Bob Woodward vs. John Belushi and Me Complete List of Celebrity Polaroids for the Next Book

Emulsional Problems

Intro: The first thing you've got to know is that these are all very fast improvisations since the emulsion hardens quickly after the picture is snapped. I've got fifteen minutes, max, from taking the shot to messing it up, and once they're messed with, there's no going back. Painters do quick sketches in charcoal or pencil, then erase, recompose, make corrections before filling in the color with oils. Make a mistake? Just paint over it until it's right. Modern computer artists can achieve my effects using Power Goo and other graphics programs where they can work on the picture for hours to get it just right. Normal photographers get to play with their negatives, making multiple prints until they get it right. Not me. My positives are my negatives. What I do is PHYSICAL to the actual Polaroid. I only get one shot at getting it right.

Emulsional Problems

How to Do What I Do Get kicked out of college in 1969 and move to New York to study with Lee Strasberg. Come back to Los Angeles and do five years of underground theater with the Company Theater, the Odyssey, the Group, and La Mama. Write radio plays for KPFK. Join the Three Guys from Hollywood and do comedy news for KROQ. Go to your nephew's Bar Mitzvah. Stand around while he opens presents. See him marvel at his new Polaroid camera. Smile as he takes your picture and throws it to you. Sit down. Look at the picture. Give in to boredom. Take a swig of champagne, pull your chocolate cake encrusted fork out of your mouth, and smear it across your face in the photo - Just to see what happens. Watch your eye go traveling down your cheek towards your mouth. Start having fun. Give yourself a bigger nose and curly ears. Lose boredom. Grab your nephew's camera and take more pictures. Use every implement you can get your hands on. Turn photos into paintings. Go out the next day and buy an SX-70 Polaroid camera of your own. Take a picture of a flower...and mutilate it. Take a picture of a building...and mutilate it. Switch to people, but only strangers at first because you don't want to alienate your friends. Write a letter to the L.A. Weekly and mysteriously get hired as a film critic. Write thousands of reviews and conduct hundreds of interviews. Go to screenings and parties and openings and press conferences and junkets. Take your camera and take pictures of everybody. Discover that you can get into places other photographers can't, just because you've got a harmless looking Polaroid. Since you only have fifteen minutes to work on them, you inevitably end up doing your magic in front of your victim. They will beg you for their pictures sometimes to keep them, sometimes to destroy them. Don't give them up unless the victim lets you take more pictures. Refine your technique; switch from a fork and a plate to an awl and a slab of jade. Improvise. The SX-70 is like an oil painting with the oils still wet. You can 5

Emulsional Problems finger-paint in it. See which colors take longest to set, and work on those last. You may only want two effects, but the first will only be available at 1 - 2 minutes, and the other at 7 - 8 minutes. Have patience. Take pictures of women you want to meet, show them the pictures, give them a pen, and watch them write down their number on the back of the picture. Discover more of the wacky wonderful world of free-lance journalism. Do cover stories for Interview and Movieline, and reviews for Parenting Magazine, the Santa Monica Bay News, and L.A. Style. Become voted in as a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Write for the National Lampoon and for Stephen Spielberg’s Animaniacs. Get regular column in Billboard. Move to Seattle for a year to work on a Tom Robbins' project. Co-Produce a CBS Movie-ofthe-Week about your own life starring Scott Bakula as you. Take lots of pictures. Spend three years working on a massive show for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and sciences that's canceled because the curator dies of AIDS. Suffer frustration because no one can see your work. Wait years with your pictures ripening in the closet until someone’s got the balls to publish it.

Emulsional Problems

Emulsional Problems Chapter 1

Monty Python’s First Visit to America

I delivered sandwiches and salads for Marsha's Sandwiches from 1970 to 1972 because they gave me the coolest route, the Sunset Strip from Vine to Doheny. My first day they gave me baskets of sandwiches and a list of businesses 8

Emulsional Problems on the strip that regularly bought from them, including hair salons, record companies, production companies, and anyplace else I might care to check out along the route, all the way from the Whiskey to the Cinerama Dome. Thus I was afforded the perfect excuse to burst into any establishment I pleased as long as I had my wicker basket full of goodies. Burst I did, gathering two other jobs in the process, getting fired from both, and ending up back selling sandwiches. My first gig courtesy of Marsha's Sandwiches was receptionist for Cinemobile. It lasted two weeks until the president of Cinemobile, Fouad Said, returned from Europe and discovered to his horror that his new receptionist didn't have tits. I was immediately canned and replaced by someone of a different gender, and I went right back to delivering sandwiches. Next was Casablanca Records, the home of Cher, Donna Summer, The Four Tops, Parliament, and The Village People. Neil Bogart, the president of Casablanca, gave me a job because he clearly couldn't get rid of me without buying a sandwich or hiring me. I wanted him to listen to my music. I wanted a recording contract. I got the mail room, where it was my duty to send out promo copies of records and to help promote this new comedy group from England. Their hit show had never been shown in America, so they were total nobodies. All they had were these comedy albums that were the funniest I had ever heard. Casablanca had just bought the American rights and was breaking Monty Python's Flying Circus to America. I watched it happen. They were sold purely through word of mouth, and I sent hundreds of copies of the LPs to everyone on earth we thought had a sense of humor. Everyone liked them, though there was no airplay at all and little sales. Just to test the waters, in August of 1972 a compilation film of some of Monty Python's best TV bits was put together for the American market. It was called And Now For Something Completely Different, and it had the Dead Parrot, the Lumberjack, and the Upper Class Twit of the Year. Casablanca brought the whole group over for their American press premiere, so they spent a day hanging out at the office. There were no pictures of them on their records so I 9

Emulsional Problems didn't know what to expect. Bearded madmen, not neatly cropped normal looking guys in business suits. Cleese, Chapman, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin all in matching gray suits and ties, crammed in the mail room making fun of me. They seemed totally stunned that ANYBODY in America got what they were doing. I not only got them, I had them memorized. It WAS the right room for an argument. I ran out of Monty Python albums for them to sign, so I got them to sign albums of all the other Casablanca artists. They signed my copy of Jack (The Artful Dodger) Wild's solo album but later it was accidentally sold by a roommate under circumstances too painful to discuss. The first press screening of And Now for Something Completely Different was introduced by Graham Chapman, who apologized for all the obscure references in the film while casually mentioning that then president Nixon couldn't attend the screening because he was having an asshole transplant. Eric Idle ran down the aisle and handed Chapman a piece of paper. Chapman then announced that they had just gotten word from the hospital where Nixon was staying and that "the asshole had rejected him." And the film began.

Emulsional Problems Months later I was not so much fired as the whole company went under. Apparently Monty Python was no Village People. My quest for songwriting fame bought me a day with the reigning geniuses of comedy, then I was back to delivering sandwiches.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 2

Tom Waits for No One But Me Where were these shots taken? Christ, it was at least 20 years ago, none of these people were famous yet, and I was bombed out of my mind, every night a new club, a screening, an art opening, something new to snort, smoke, or consume, another body part to commingle with someone else's body part.

Emulsional Problems It started when I went to the Troubadour, on Santa Monica Blvd. at the entrance to Beverly Hills, to see Melissa Manchester. Please don't ask me when it was. What did I say? 20 years ago? Let's leave it at that. While waiting in line, I saw a big black '50s hearse pull up to the front of the Troubadour. Out popped this scrawny beatnik with a goatee and a shabby suit who went straight into the theater. I got out of line and looked in the car. It seemed that whoever that beatnik was, he was living in a hearse. There was no casket in back, just piles of junk and empty alcohol containers, while the front seat was covered with books of poetry by Charles Bukowski. Then it was announced that Melissa Manchester had canceled and we were all offered our money back. The whole line took the Troubadour up on their offer, got their bread, and split. I have no idea why, maybe it was the allure of the Troubadour bar which was usually pickup heaven, but I decided to stick around and see Manchester's opening act who would be headlining for the very first time. I grabbed a waitress, guzzled a drink, snuck a joint in the men's room, snervled a toot, sat in the empty house, and watched that scrawny beatnik with the goatee and shabby suit, Tom Waits, do an hour-and-a-half solo set just for me.

Emulsional Problems After the set we talked because the two of us and the waitresses and bartender were the only ones there. I don't remember if I bought him a drink because he was so fucking talented or if he bought me a drink because I was the first person on earth to actually sit through a complete set of his music, but drinks were indeed consumed. He convinced me I had to read some Charles Bukowski, and I asked him if he really lived in the hearse. He said no, he lived at the Tropicana Motel up the street and that he basically hung out there all day at the coffee shop called Dukes. Dukes became my new home. It was the greatest coffee shop on earth. Not only was the food spectacular and cheap, it was a genuine rock 'n' roll haven long before the phony Hard Rock Cafes tried to take over the world. The walls were covered with albums and signed posters of touring bands. Maybe big millionaire rock stars got put up at the Hilton by their record companies when they were on tour, but not so everyone else. Bands who weren't the Stones stayed at the Tropicana. Dukes, their coffee shop, was arranged in such a way that all the tables were pushed together like one enormous counter, so getting a private table was close to impossible. You would go there for breakfast and end up sitting next to the Cars or the Eurythmics or the Clash or Elvis Costello, but usually it was just Tom or Chuck E. Weiss because they actually lived there.

Emulsional Problems One day after a surreptitious shot of tequila and the best huevos rancheros on earth, Tom invited me to a concert that night. I wrote down the address. Do you expect me to remember where

it was? Of course not. I do know this - I

ended up backstage at a sleazy

dive just north of Sunset, a

wretched, sweaty,

incandescent cellar without

even a stage for the

performers to stand on,

bare walls making

the music ricochet

around the

room, becoming

virtually

incomprehensible, only capable of

holding about 80

people comfortably but

packed with at least 150,

circled around the

performer in the middle.

Did I say backstage? I

meant a room about the size of

Snoopy's doghouse where people

were crammed like sardines without

the wholesome pleasure of olive oil to slide around in. Tom invited me in, then introduced me to his friend Chuck E. Weiss who said he was a musician too, and his girl friend Rickie Lee Jones, who I suppose must have performed too because her name is on the door. Tom was horrified by my Polaroids as you can see by his reaction in picture #3.

Emulsional Problems Maybe a month later there was this big hit song by Rickie Lee Jones about Tom's friend Chuck E. who was apparently in love with somebody, and the Eagles recorded Wait's Ol' 55 (Freeways, Cars, and Trucks), and suddenly they were all big stars, which must be why I took these pictures, because I knew it would happen. What were Dr. John and John Prine doing there? Despite the fact that I was the only one there at his premiere as a headliner, I guess word somehow got out that this was a guy to see.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 3

Brushes with Fame I admit it, I want to be famous, though my desire for fame has less to do with any glorified ego trip than with a simple desire to never have to explain myself again to anyone new. If you’re famous, when you meet new people, they know who you are. Marlon Brando never has to say "Hi, I’m Marlon Brando" because everybody he meets already knows who he is. When normal people meet each other, they have to explain who they are, or they need others to introduce them. Bill Gates doesn’t need to casually drop hints about his employment into

Emulsional Problems conversations with people he’s just meeting because, for the rest of his life, pretty much everyone Bill Gates meets is going to know that he’s Bill Fucking Gates. One of the perils of fame is the loss of people ever taking you at face value again. You never have to explain yourself. No more "Hi, I’m Brad Pitt, I’m an actor." Of course you’re an actor. You’re Brad Pitt, for Christ sake. That’s where I want to be, not because my ego needs stroking, but because I want people to know who I am without having to explain. I’ve gone through too much. It’s just too fucking complicated. I never want to have to tell the story again. When people meet each other for the first time, there’s usually an equal sense of give and take. But as soon as you’re famous, everyone wants something from you, if only to bask in your presence. Everyone you meet after you’re famous already knows who you are, so unless they’re famous too, you’re at a disadvantage because you don’t know who they are. All you know is they want something from you so you can’t necessarily trust them. But I’m not famous so I have to keep explaining myself when I meet new people, which is really a bitch because I can’t explain me. You’re welcome to try, but I can’t. I have no idea how someone like me could have come to be. I’ve known a lot of famous people before they were famous, and once you’ve seen someone right next to you, like a fellow student in high school, suddenly get plucked from the flock of obscurity into world wide fame, you can't help thinking that you're next in line. When I see Star Wars or Saturday Night Live or Jaws, I don’t see that big movie star up there, I see the real person that I used to know before they were famous. Now, when we see each other, I’m one of those special people who knew them before they were famous, the real them, not the icons. It's a special relationship for them because there aren’t many of us left. My brushes with fame started with Richard Dreyfuss, a fellow student at Beverly Hills High School. Saw him do Puck. We became friends. He was a senior, the king of the drama department, already getting small parts in Shaw plays at the Mark Taper Forum where he invited me backstage. I followed in his footsteps in school, starring in some school plays, directing others, and getting voted in as President of Thespians. Meanwhile Richard got cast as the lead in 18

Emulsional Problems Line, a short play by Israel Horowitz produced at the New Theater for Now by Gordon Davidson. Sure, he'd already played a small role in The Graduate, but Line is why Richard Dreyfuss is a star. He was the lead and he was phenomenal. I can't imagine any Hollywood producer seeing him in it and not wanting to immediately cast him as the star of their next film. Thirty years later, I remember it like yesterday. The entire play is just five people waiting in line for God knows what. Like Waiting for Godot, it's an existential piece, taking place outside of time and space, a meditation on mankind's competitive drive to be first. A blank stage, a small white line, a woman waiting. The whole set. Richard enters, walks around her, and finally says the first line of the play, something like "Boy, I didn't think anyone else would be here before me." It turns into a giant monologue, with Richard ranting and raving about how important it is for him to be first in line and how he had gone out of his way to get here REALLY early. Then someone else enters and Richard panics and gets in line behind the women, realizing that second is better than third. The new guy gets in line behind him. Eventually, two more enter and get right in line.

Emulsional Problems They talk about everything but what the hell it is they're in line for. There are arguments and brawls, and in the course of the play everyone gets to the front of the line at least once. Finally, out of frustration, Richard gets down on his hands and knees to look at the line. He sees it's a piece of white tape. He peels it off the floor and eats it. Everyone panics. What are they going to do? Where will they stand? Richard gets sick and vomits up the line. Someone grabs it, puts it down on the floor and stands behind - beaming the first in line. Then Richard gets sick and vomits up another line. Someone grabs it and heads to another place on stage, puts it down on the floor and stands behind beaming - the first in line. Richard vomits up two more lines which are grabbed by the other two characters, leaving Richard in the middle, the only one not first in line, the only one not beaming. Then he gets sick one more time, vomiting up another line for himself. He looks around, smiles, looks at the audience, holds out the line at arm length, drops it, then walks off stage. Blackout. I kept running into him over the years as he got more and more famous, and at one point I was tempted to pitch him something. He very intensely told me not to, that absolutely everybody in his life was pitching something at him, that if I wanted to be a friend, like in the old days, just hanging out, he would have to 20

Emulsional Problems know that I didn’t want anything, otherwise I’d just be another asshole trying to get him to look at their project. It was quite a speech, one punctuated by a joint and a drink, and I took him at his word and didn’t try to pitch anything. As a result, he's still famous and I'm not, despite starring as Charlie Brown in the Beverly Hills High School production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, directed by Michael Tolkin, who went on to write The Player and numerous incredible books. Next there was this very funny, skinny little girl at my high school named Laraine, a sophomore when I was a senior, whom I directed in a school play. She was a mime intent on studying with Marcel Marceau, and she seemed to have a crush on me, which was cool but confusing. She voted for me in Thespians and hung out with me after school. We did homework together, alone in the house, but I was a virgin and didn’t have any idea what to do with her. It was getting close to the end of the year, so a friend, Larry, asked me who I was taking to the prom. I told him I’d probably take Laraine. Instead, a junior named Shelly saw me do a monologue from Boys in the Band, decided that she didn't want me to be gay, and promptly fucked me. Of course I didn’t do Boys in the Band because I was gay but because I wanted to

Emulsional Problems stretch as an actor, show how liberal I was, but I didn’t bring that up to Shelly, who added quite a spark to my senior year at Beverly. So I asked her to the prom, which was only proper. It would have been downright rude not to go with the girl who fucked me. But one day during lunch, Larry came up to me and said "Hey, I talked to Laraine and she said she’d go to the prom with you." "What?" I gasped in horror. "I’m not going to ask Laraine, I’m going with Shelly." Oh shit. I didn’t know how to deal with this. Laraine and I were in a play together. There was no avoiding her. For the next week, during rehearsals, I saw her smiling at me, giddy, waiting for me to pop the question. Finally, on the night of the final performance of the play, she couldn’t stand it any longer and she cornered me in the green room. "Who are you taking to the prom?" she asked.

Emulsional Problems I tried to be cool. "Shelly" I said, "Why?" Laraine’s heart was broken. She started crying and ran from the room, not speaking to me again for the rest of the entire semester. I graduated and didn’t see her at all until ten years later at a party after she had just spent a decade in New York as one of the stars of Saturday Night Live. She was a media goddess. Laraine entered the room and everyone turned. She was definitely the biggest star in the room. She looked around until she finally saw me standing at the opposite end. She marched across the room till she was standing right in front of me, stared me down for five seconds, then finally said "You blew it, buddy," then turned and walked back across the room without another word. Perfect revenge. Love you Laraine.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 4

The Red Hot Chili Peppers The Early Years One day around 1978 I came home to find a kid on my front porch playing trumpet. He was around 14 and he was pretty good, so I invited him in. I play piano and guitar and we played for a little while together. His name was Michael. A few days later he brought by his friend Anthony and he hung out while Michael and I jammed. They discovered my bong and we got high and made music together. This went on for about a year until I moved. I didn't see them again till many years later. Michael had changed his name to Flea. They were The Red Hot Chili Peppers. 24

Emulsional Problems

Emulsional Problems Chapter 5

My Best Friend It was the ‘70s when I went to an audition at the Theatre Vanguard for a production of a musical version of Ovid's Metamorphosis but didn't get cast. They were, however, VERY interested in the fact that I played guitar and asked me if I'd like to be in the band. I said sure and stuck around through rehearsals. I had an ulterior motive. In the cast was the sexiest woman I'd ever seen and being in the band was the perfect excuse I needed to hang around and get to know her. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that she wouldn't talk to me because she was engaged to the musical director of the show who was very protective of his prize. I made friends instead with this other older actor in the show who was one of the funniest performers I'd ever seen. His name was Lewis Arquette.

Emulsional Problems Turned out his father was Cliff Arquette, AKA Charlie Weaver, the center square in the original Hollywood Squares and regular on The Jack Paar Show. One of Lewis's dreams was to someday do a one man show of his father's letters from Mount Idy. His daughter, Rosanna, was the source of my anguish. She was a teenager, had never appeared in a film, and you can imagine how great she looked. Okay, it sounds like I was settling for a friendship with the father in hopes of hitting on the daughter, but it quickly grew into more than that. I knew his daughter was out of reach and I didn't give a damn. (She eventually married the musical director who divorced her and sued for alimony after she became a star. He actually got it. Serves her right for not dumping him for me.) Lewis and I became best friends. He was 15 years older than me but we had a lot in common. We liked the same kind of music, told the same kind of jokes, smoked the same weed, dug 28

Emulsional Problems the same movies and plays. When he graduated Hollywood High, he moved to New York to study with Lee Strasberg. When I graduated Beverly High, I moved to New York to study with Lee Strasberg. He played the ukulele. I played the guitar. It turned out I had seen him perform once before when he was in The Committee, an improvisational theater troupe that had blown my mind when I saw them in high school. I wanted to be Lewis Arquette and felt honored for every second I got to spend with him, which was a lot. For years we saw each other almost every day.

Emulsional Problems He introduced me to his world. I met Garry Goodrow and Larry Hankin and Avery Schreiber and Peter Elbling and Ed Begley Jr. and Gerrit Graham and Archie Hahn and Severn Darden and Reni Santoni and Betty Thomas and Carl Gottlieb and John Brent and William Kotzwinkle and Hamilton Camp and Mina Kolb and Murphy Dunne and Ira Miller and Paul Sills and Viola Spolin and his other kids, Patricia and David and Alexis and Richmond and dozens more of the most talented people in Hollywood. I had barbecues at my place every Sunday that were often packed with people who couldn't stop laughing. We felt like family. One day Paul Sills rented a theater on Heliotrope and invited a bunch of friends to help fix it up. He would have workshops on weekends during which the rule of the house was "Sit in the front row, you're in: anywhere else and you're audience." Lewis was one of the first, inviting me with him, getting me to sit the front row and participate. Once some heavyweight improvisers like Brent and Goodrow and Camp and Schreiber and Darden started coming, I felt WAY too intimidated to join in. Instead I sat "anywhere else," which was actually cool because I was usually the only one not participating. 30

Emulsional Problems When they needed suggestions from the audience, I was it. We need a place! "A psychiatrist's office." An occupation! "A game warden." A performance style. "Gilbert and Sullivan." Okay, GO! It was wild. For months I got to see the world's greatest comedic minds follow my suggestions. The workshops went on for nine months before opening to the public. It was called Sills and Company. Each evening followed the evolution of the human sense of humor, growing from the simplest games to the most complex, from grade school actingas-playing to action games, relationship games, emotion games, the company maturing before your very eyes but never losing their utterly innocent attitudes toward each other. Like trapeze artists, they trusted each other, so much so that it became an evening ABOUT trust - the strongest theatrical display of it that anyone was likely to see in Hollywood. Their only scripts were their brains, their only characters reflections of their true personalities, and their only rehearsal their entire lives leading up to this very moment in front of you. To achieve this in life is hard enough; to behave that way in public was either suicide or the most important evening of theater on earth. It was 100% improvised but audiences couldn't believe it. Surely something that structured and hilarious had be scripted in some way. Then they'd come back and truly freak out because not one single syllable was repeated from the performance they had seen before. It made Who's Line Is it Anyway? look like kindergarten. The audience kept coming back and the show ran for years. I can't believe I ever had the audacity to share the stage with some of those people. I'm proud I had anything to do with Sills and Company and it was all thanks to Lewis.

Emulsional Problems Then, through a savage series of personal mishaps, I found myself a single dad with a nine-month-old baby boy to take care of. The very week that the courts gave me custody of my son, Lewis's wife threw him out of the house. He had successfully raised a whole gaggle of children so he came to me with a proposition. If I would let him park his camper in my driveway while using my bathroom and kitchen, essentially move in with me, he would be my baby-sitter/parenting mentor. I agreed whole-heartedly, and for the next several years we were two men and a baby. He would put on puppet shows from the back of his camper. We'd go to Hollywood parties with our pockets full of Ziplock bags so we could steal hors d'oeuvres to bring home to the baby. I truly couldn't have done it without him. He taught me how to be a father and saved my skin on numerous occasions. While he was helping me raise my kid, one at a time we watched as his kids became stars - first Rosanna, then Patricia went from being my part time baby-sitter to an even bigger 32

Emulsional Problems star than Rosanna. It was mind boggling to watch, but behind it all was the frustration that Lewis was equally if not more talented than his offspring but his career was going nowhere. At the very least, he deserved the career of Jonathan Winters. He was that good. We became writing partners, cranking out treatments for any production company that would listen to our ravings. How about The Psychic, a TV show about a psychic with absolutely useless talents, like the ability to instantly flatten any carbonated soft drink. We wrote "The Ultimate List of Stupid Names" which became an internet sensation years later. One day we realized that our very own story was one worth telling, and we wrote a treatment called Here Comes the Son about a guy, Michael, who tries to raise a baby with the help of his wacko best friend, Lewis, who gave obscene puppet shows from the back of his Alaska camper. It came out pretty good but nobody bought it. Years later I teamed up with another writer, Billy Hayes, who had written (and lived) the book Midnight Express. With Lewis's consent we attacked the story again, this time coming up with a full length screenplay. It sold. We got an MOW deal with CBS. The problem was how to get Lewis in on the deal. The studio had removed me as writer, making Billy and I "coproducers," and hiring a "professional" to do the actual writing. Lewis told me the one thing he wanted to do was play himself. 33

Emulsional Problems Sure, he'd had lots of high profile roles, in The Waltons and The China Syndrome and Tango and Cash, but they were generally serious. He had never had the opportunity to be himself on the screen, to show what he was really capable of. Billy and I agreed and we fought for him. Luckily, Jay Thomas, the guy cast as me, knew Lewis and agreed completely that Lewis should play the best friend. He, the writer, Lewis, and I actually had meetings together. Things were going smoothly till CBS got a new president who promptly fired Jay Thomas and hired Scott Bakula to play me. Bakula was the exact opposite of Thomas. He didn't want to meet me and didn't know Lewis Arquette from Adam. I was banned from the production offices. One day I received a cast list. Lewis wasn't on it. C'est la vie. The part was rewritten to be a lawyer rather than a comedian anyway, making the role much closer to another friend of mine, Doug Knott. The role no longer suited Lewis particularly, so Lewis wouldn't have been playing himself, but that didn't make the news any easier to take. Nobody had bothered to ask me. It was clear that the project was entirely out of my hands and there was nothing I could do about it. The day I got a preview copy of the tape of what was now called The Bachelor's Baby, the first person I called was Lewis. I wanted to watch it with him, to make fun of what Hollywood had done to our lives. It was the worst phone call of my life. He told me he didn't want to see it, not now, not ever, that he never wanted to see me again, that I should take his name out of my phone book. I had screwed him over. I had gotten his permission to use the story and then I didn't fight for him to get the part. He didn't need friends like me.

Emulsional Problems I argued to the hilt. How could he blame me? He knew how Hollywood worked. I wasn't the writer or director, I was the SUBJECT. Since when do subjects have any say in the matter of casting? Did Joey Buttafuoco have any say in who got cast as Amy Fisher in the various MOWs of his sordid affair? Of course not. It was just a fluke that Jay Thomas happened to be a nice guy who got along with me and who knew Lewis and admired his work. Once Thomas was out, so was the whole plan. What was I supposed to do when I found out they were casting someone else, storm into the production office I was banned from and demand that they cast Lewis Arquette? Where in my contract did it mention I had any control over casting? Nowhere. Could I have fought for that clause? Of course not, it would have squelched the deal. There's no way in hell CBS would have given me veto power over casting. Besides, at the time I signed my contract, it looked like Lewis was in. He didn't buy any of it. He had come through for me hundreds of times, but the one time he was really counting on me to come through for him, I let him down. I asked why didn't his agent push for him and was told he did. His agent couldn't get him through the door. Why? Because there weren't any auditions for the part. The president of CBS said who he wanted cast, they called him, he said yes, and that was that. Nevertheless Lewis's agent blamed me for not getting him an audition. His family blamed me. They couldn't understand why he ever hung 35

Emulsional Problems out with me in the first place. He blamed me. I was just another Hollywood asshole who sold out his friends. He hung up. I called back. He hung up again. I tried to rectify the situation through friends, through Billy Hayes who knew it wasn't my fault, who agreed that Lewis was being unreasonable, but it was no use. Lewis badmouthed me to everyone we knew, saying I had gone Hollywood and sold him out. I heard from at least a half dozen people that Lewis Arquette hated my guts. I try to think of that one moment when I could have stood my ground, dug in my heels and said "No, God damn it, Lewis Arquette has got to play the part," but it never happened. There was no moment. I was out of the loop. It was nuts. It's like he was blaming me for the Challenger disaster when damn it, whatayuh know, nobody ever consulted me about the O-rings. I didn't give up on Lewis's friendship. Though he finally got some great parts in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, parts that at least showed a bit of his comedic genius, I kept fighting for him and my original vision of the story. CBS didn't use my script and virtually none of my dialogue survived intact. I had a clause in the contract that I still owned my script. For years I've been submitting it places, posting it to the net, trying to get the real story made, this time with MY directing. I never erased Lewis's name from my telephone book. My fondest daydream was of finally making that call, 36

Emulsional Problems telling him I was making the film, and asking him if he would be so kind as to play himself this time. Won't happen. Lewis died of heart failure and I've never felt so conflicted in my life. How can I pay my respects to my best friend when everyone knows I'm the guy who fucked him over, the guy he hated, who he ranted about as the ultimate Hollywood scumbag? Now if they make a movie about us, the title has got to be Closure: Impossible. God damn it, Lewis, I hate you for the way you ended our friendship in such an unfair way. How could you think I wouldn't fight for you given the chance? How could you think that I ever had anything but your best interests at heart? I didn't do anything because there was nothing I could do. I love you, man, more than I've ever loved another man, still do, and the fact we'll never patch it up is leaving a hole in my heart that can never be filled. Hell maybe I am an asshole. Doesn't make me feel any better. Beware, hapless reader, if they ever make a movie about your life you might not lose your soul, you might lose your best friend. When I became an interviewer for the L.A. Weekly, I thought it would be cute if there were one question that I always asked everyone I interviewed, and that question was "How do you make love last?" Tracey Ullman told me the answer was "serial monogamy," Carl Reiner told me that your partner had to grab the base of your penis in their fist really hard just before climax, but Lewis gave me the best answer. How do you make love last? It's obvious. "You get in line last." Goodbye my friend.

Emulsional Problems

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." - George Bernard Shaw -

Emulsional Problems

Emulsional Problems Chapter 6

The Legend of William Hjortsberg It's always a pleasure to meet someone who isn't normally recognized and tell them you know who they are and that you're an admirer of their work. Tell Tom Cruise how much you admire his work and yeah, so what else is new. He's heard it a million times. But I was at a party and the host introduced me to someone named Gatz Hjortsberg. I asked him if he was any relation to William Hjortsberg, one of my favorite writers. "I'm William Hjortsberg," he said, "my friends call me Gatz." Nothing like getting a compliment from someone who doesn't even know that they're complimenting you. 40

Emulsional Problems Yeah, we met cute, just like in the movies. Man oh man, have you ever read Gray Matters? Takes place in a giant repository of brains, the only remains of the human race. Since no one can move, the whole book is thought. An amazing, entertaining, and very serious piece of science fiction about the workings of consciousness. Then there's Alp, one of the funniest and most demented books ever written, featuring mountain climbing, dwarves, nuns, and cannibalism. His next book, Falling Angel was made into Angel Heart, a pretty good film by Alan Parker but, of course, not as good as the book. Hjortsberg lived on a ranch in Montana. He rarely came to Hollywood and was totally stunned to meet someone who had actually read his books, which sold dismally and were out of print. He had flown into town because Ridley Scott was making a film of his first original screenplay called Legend. I demanded a copy and damned if he didn't give it to me the next day. Still one of the greatest scripts I'd ever read, suckering you into this fairy tale fantasy world that gets progressively more bizarre, leading to a spectacular twist ending in which the hero goes to save his girlfriend who has been kidnapped by a demon from hell, only to find that the demon has changed her into a dog and is routinely fucking her, which is precisely what they're doing when he bursts in to rescue her. Not exactly what you expect to happen. We hung out a bit for the next few days and I couldn't help but ask. I looked him in the eyes. "Ridley Scott is making Legend?" "Yep." "And the heroine gets changed into a dog and is fucking the demon when the hero finds her?" "Not exactly." Hollywood rears its ugly head. He didn't have to tell me. They were going to make his screenplay while incidentally leaving out the point, the whole Orpheus thing of saving someone from hell only to find out that they've totally lost the innocence that attracted you to them in the first place. It was truly an intelligent fairy tale for adults. 41

Emulsional Problems But then Ridley Scott came aboard and it was starring Tom Cruise and the budget was $50 million which was good news because it would look great and bad because no studio on the planet earth is going to put all that money into an R-rated fairy tale where the innocent, bright-eyed, unicorn loving heroine gets fucked not just like a dog but as a dog. Just like that, the entire project lost its edge, its irony, its depth, everything that made me want to see it. Hjortsberg agreed. Scott agreed. The studio didn't and were asking him to rewrite the script so that all the kids who were coming to the film for the unicorns wouldn't be traumatized by the bestiality, integral to the plot though it may be. He did what I would have done. He took the money and ran. Hell, if he hadn't rewritten it himself, some studio hack would have done it for him. The film famously bombed and I picture him years later, a bitter old man complaining to the other octogenarian sharing a room with him in the nursing home. "Man, Hollywood fucked me over. Legend would have been a hit if they'd only ended it MY way." "And what way was that?" the tired old roommate would ask. And he'd tell them and they would slowly edge to the far side of the bed, pick up the phone, call the nurse, and demand to be moved to another room.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 7

Greta Scacchi Uses my Tool (no, not that one) As far as getting access to stars is concerned, it often makes a big difference that I work with a Polaroid instead of a 35mm camera like all the paparazzi use. Show up at any Hollywood function with a real camera around your neck and you automatically get shuffled to the side behind a rope barrier with all the other "professional" photographers. But whenever I would show up with an invitation and my "amateur" camera, I would automatically be let in as a 43

Emulsional Problems guest, just like everyone else. Since I clearly wasn't taking pictures for the press with my ridiculous Polaroid, I could snap away, taking candid shots in places where the professionals couldn't even get in. Paul Mazursky was throwing a party at his home in celebration of the opening of an art gallery and I was invited. Living art was to be displayed throughout his backyard. There was to be no press, it was just a private fundraiser for some charity, so it was nice to know that I was officially there as an artist, not a journalist. Naturally I brought my camera. It was a fun exhibit. Art was floating in the pool and a fisherman was there trying his luck. There were lots of celebrities there but I didn't give a damn as soon as I spied Greta Scacchi who entered alone. She hadn't really hit it big in Hollywood yet. Paul had invited her because she was up for a part in one of his films that she obviously didn't get. I mainly knew her from The Coca-Cola Kid which was one of my favorite films. Not many actresses can be wacky and sexy at the same time, but Scacchi was one of them. I was in love, or some other word that started with "l." I approached her and told her how much I liked The Coca-Cola Kid and she was genuinely flattered that anyone had actually seen it. I couldn't help but

Emulsional Problems wonder how strange it must be for someone's opening line to contain the subtext that I had seen her totally naked in a shower scene I'll never forget.

I got her a drink and we continued chatting, which naturally led to my asking her if I could take her picture. She flashed me a zipper-melting smile and I snapped away, then took out my tool (not that one) and started working on the picture. She was fascinated. I sat on a bench and she sat next to me with her arm around my shoulder, moving in close to see how I worked. Very distracting. She laughed and asked if she could give it a try. I said sure and handed her my camera. She took a shot of me, I handed her my tool (not that one) and showed her how to do what I do. She moved my face around. She was addicted. We wandered the party together taking pictures and distorting the hell out of them. 45

Emulsional Problems

A year later I went to see her new film The Player. In it she played a Polaroid artist who moved the emulsion around. Coincidence?

Emulsional Problems

Chapter 8

Bathing with John C. Lilly I'm pretty sure it was Doug who burst into my house that day to share a gram of something or other when he casually mentioned that he was on his way to John C. Lilly's 80th birthday party and did I want to come along. Stupid question. Did Doug know I'd read every one of Lilly's books? I don't think so. In his quest for a partying companion, he had somehow mysteriously zeroed in on 47

Emulsional Problems the one human he knew who REALLY wanted to meet John C. Lilly. Why was I so interested? Lilly is the scientist who had the strange fortune to witness his serious research in two completely different areas get turned into horror films. He discovered that dolphins were intelligent, writing about it in a book called The Mind of the Dolphin. Novelist Robert Merle took Lilly's research, added a ridiculous fictional plot, and came up with the best-selling book Day of the Dolphin, which in turn became Mike Nichols' film Day of the Dolphin starring George C. Scott as a man very much like John C. Lilly only more blustery. One day Lilly decided to explore inner space by turning off all five of his senses, all the better to do research into the nature of the relationship between the soul and the body. In order to do this, he was obliged to invent the isolation tank, a devise constructed specifically to deprive the subject of their senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. He then called up his old bud Timothy Leary, scored some pure LSD, dosed himself, got in the tank, left his body, and immediately became the world's foremost authority on the effects of isolation upon the human brain. Paddy Chayefsky apparently read Lilly's amazing book about the experience, The Center of the Cyclone - An Autobiography of Inner Space, added a ridiculous fictional plot, and came up with the best-selling book Altered States, which in turn became Ken Russell's film Altered States, starring William Hurt as a man very much like John C. Lilly only more blustery. But his masterpiece, the book that has influenced everything from The Lawnmower Man to The Matrix to the entire concept of the Internet, is Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Written, amazingly enough, in 1967, many years before anybody ever conceived of the home personal computer, Lilly's book explains the nature of hardware and software in perfect human terms. Put simply, Lilly said that computers are artificial brains designed by human brains and patterned after the workings of the human brain. Understand how artificial brains work and you'll come close to understanding how your own brain works. Learn how to program computers and you'll soon know how to program your own brain. At least that's how I remember 48

Emulsional Problems it. I do know that it inspired me to conduct some of my own experiments in the same direction, including but not limited to wandering through Central Park on LSD on the very first Earth Day in 1970. The house was large and rambling above the hills of Malibu, the food was those nutty cheeseballs with crackers, and Lilly was nowhere around. Turned out Lilly liked to sit in his living room all day and night doing nothing but watching videos of dolphins, whose constant chattering he could apparently understand. He couldn't be bothered with little things like birthday parties. Since he refused to come out, I decided to go in. There he was, sitting alone in a comfy chair, staring at the screen like it was Traci Lords disabling her gag reflex, completely fixated, oblivious to my presence. If he wasn't a vegetable, he was doing a good imitation of one. My long awaited conversation with John C. Lilly was very much not to be. I'm lucky I got him to turn towards me to take his picture, and look at the look he gave me. Could the Buddha exude more wisdom and humor? I didn't know anyone there and the food sucked so I just started wandering around the house when somewhere in back near the garage I stumbled across the original article, John C. Lilly's own personal isolation tank. No one was around. This was my chance. I took off my clothes, got in, and closed the door. Total darkness, and eventually, once I stopped splashing, total silence. I discovered the tank was like the Salton Sea. In order for you to float, the water is saturated with salt, which burns like hell if you've got the smallest cut, so I was deprived of all my senses except for total pain in a tiny paper cut on my left hand. I tried to ignore it but couldn't. Maybe I needed to be on acid, or at least valium. I considered getting up and traipsing back to the living room naked and demanding that Lilly give me some LSD. Maybe I did. Who knows? Not Lilly. Bored shitless. Here I was at a birthday party trying to lose contact with my physical body. What a party pooper. Where's Dare? Oh, he's in back trying to discombobulate himself. Totally frustrated, I got out of the tank after what felt like five minutes, but looked at a clock and discovered I'd actually been in there for an hour. I was indeed relaxed, though salt encrusted like a carnival pretzel. I took a quick 49

Emulsional Problems shower and headed back to the party to rediscover my physical body with domestic beer and bad cheese dip.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 9

My Best Birthday Present I haven't celebrated my birthday in decades. Sure, when you're a kid it's exciting to add a year to your age, have your parents gather your friends, blow out the candles, and get presents, but today I turn 49 and the last thing on earth I feel like doing is celebrating, much less blowing out a fire. Nothing very special about November 10th other than it is the day that Stanley found Livingston. Okay, I wouldn't mind a present or two, but that's more a matter of actually needing stuff 51

Emulsional Problems than thinking I deserve any sort of reward just for having survived another year. I've always felt it was a wee bit egomaniacal to throw yourself a big birthday party. Nothing wrong with celebrating others, but when it comes to celebrating yourself, it shouldn't be in public. Many years ago today it was also my birthday and, as normal, I was doing what I always do, what I still do, what I'm doing right now, writing at my computer, with absolutely no plans for the day. When you don't have a plan, there's nothing to deviate from. You can do whatever you want without fear of failure because how can you fail when you don't have any goal in mind? Whatever happens, happens, and it's good or bad on its own terms. The higher you get your hopes up, the further you have to fall, so I never count on anything. If something bad happens, too bad. If something good happens, it's a gift. There was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was Timothy Leary who said "Hi, I'm your birthday present." He wouldn't explain how or why this came to be, or who in particular was bestowing him upon me. He was simply there, and he would hang out for at least an hour. All he would tell me was that he was told I was someone he should meet. Whenever you meet someone famous in a personal situation, it's hard to know how to behave, particularly if they're enormous media stars. After all, you've spent hours gazing at them, thinking about them, perhaps days or weeks staring at their image. Imagine the hundreds of hours you've spent with certain stars broadcast regularly into your living room. They feel like a friend, like you actually know them. They're not and you don't, but it's a hard feeling to shake when they're standing right in front of you, coming into your house, sitting on your sofa, checking the place out while waiting for you to bring them a drink. No matter how many memories you have of them, they have none of you. To them, you are a total stranger. Treat them like a fan would and you risk becoming part of their teeming crowd of lookie loos. Treat them like you don't know who they are and they could get insulted. No way to make a friend. Friendships deserve an even playing field, so it's hard to think of yourself as the friend of a celebrity until they know as much about you as you know about them, which is why celebrities 52

Emulsional Problems are SO interested when you interrupt them somewhere in public and tell them about your uncle Sid's gall bladder operation. I wanted to be friends with Timothy Leary so he had a hell of a lot of catching up to do because he knew nothing about me and I knew a lot about him, or at least I thought I did. I shifted into show-and-tell mode, whipping out a book of Polaroids for him to peruse. He enjoyed my madness immensely and I proceeded to tell him something I'm sure he heard a million times. My life was profoundly changed by his research into psychedelia, combined with reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Beatles, and meeting a guy named Mario in 1970 who claimed to be the husband of the actual Alice that Arlo Guthrie sang about in Alice’s Restaurant, but who supported his acting habit by selling acid at Lee Strasberg's studio where I happened to be studying at the time. But I digress. The first and foremost influence that Timothy Leary had upon me was my art, which simply didn't exist. Before my first acid trip, I wasn't an artist. I had never played guitar, had certainly never created any impressionism, and hadn't written a single word other than school assignments. Maybe I would have discovered these talents on my own, but if my Polaroids remind you of acid flashbacks, welcome to the club. On acid, what I do to my Polaroids, you can do to reality. Move it around a little. Make big things look 53

Emulsional Problems small, small things look big, marvel at the infinite depths you're capable of perceiving, as though reality were a 3D comic book and for the first time you were looking at it with the red-and-blue glasses. Pre-acid, I was only interested in being an actor, moving to New York to study with Lee Strasberg, and getting in a Broadway play. On acid, I actually attempted to give a performance from Spoon River Anthology in front of the man himself, a performance he declared "interesting," a performance that convinced me that acting was a very strange profession. While personally communicating with the infinite miracles of the universe, I had a very hard time convincing myself that the most important thing I could be doing was pretending to be a fictional character while reciting dialogue written by a writer I'd never met. Postacid I walked home from the Village to my boarding house at 39th and Park, picked up my roommate's guitar and started playing. It wasn't long before I was a better guitar player than actor, and I ended up composing music for several offBroadway shows. Way off Broadway. The Company Theater at La Cienega and Pico in Los Angeles to be precise. Other acid trips were less eventful and I stopped taking it, but not before playing with my first SX-70 Polaroid camera and discovering I didn't need acid to change reality to my own specifications. We talked and talked. He wasn't a drug addled guru and I wasn't an acid burnout. He was extremely intelligent. My vision of Leary had been fogged by his media image, and I had forgotten that he was a Harvard professor. Luckily, some others forgot too and that's how he escaped from prison. The most amazing story he told me was this one... When he was busted by the Feds for possession of one single joint of pot and sentenced to 20 years in a Federal penitentiary, the prison officials did what they always did with new prisoners, they gave him a psychological test to determine whether he would go to a minimum or maximum security prison. He passed the test with flying colors and was sent to minimum security where he promptly escaped. What the officials didn't know was that Leary himself wrote

Emulsional Problems the psychological test for the Federal prison system when still at Harvard, so he knew exactly what answers to give. After a couple hours, my birthday present had to leave, but in his new life as Hollywood gadfly I kept running into him over the years at video shows and art galleries. I'm glad he lived long enough to experience the Internet, and if you haven't seen his site, it's still up at http://leary.com/ and well worth a peek. Excuse me, there's the door.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 10

How to Write Like Tom Robbins Twenty-five years ago, the phone rang and it was Tom Robbins, one of my all time favorite authors. He had read a script of mine and liked it. He told me he was just getting started on a script of his own when he realized that he didn’t know what he was doing. He had never written in screenplay format before, so he felt the need for someone like me to look over his shoulder while he wrote, just to 56

Emulsional Problems make sure he didn’t make any embarrassing mistakes. He would pay my way to La Conner, Washington, a small fishing village north of Seattle where he lived. He would put me up in a hotel for a month while he finished the project. I would pick up pages every afternoon and return them the next morning with comments. Was I interested? I didn’t have to think long. At the time, I was living in a photo studio above Fredericks of Hollywood, a location with advantages (living across the street from Musso & Franks) and disadvantages (street cleaners every morning at four). But the main disadvantage was the eviction notice from the landlord. A year earlier, I had read in the L.A. Times that State Senator Alan Sieroty had passed a bill allowing artists to live in lofts that were zoned for commercial use. This was in reply to the burgeoning artistic community taking over warehouses in downtown L.A. Great, I thought, I’m an artist. I can move into my loft. It was a burden paying rent on two places anyway, so the next month I moved from my home to my studio. A year later, my landlord found out I was living there and decided to throw me out. When I got my eviction notice, it was signed by State Senator Alan Sieroty. I had never known he was my landlord since I had always paid rent to a corporation. I refused to move, citing his own bill back at him, and he took me to court. While there, I told Sieroty that I had only moved into the loft because of his bill. I asked him why he wrote it. “The bill says that landlords can let artists live in their lofts,” he told me, “not that they have to let artists live in their lofts.” He went on to explain that the rest of the building was commercial, and that if word got out that I was living there, the whole place could turn residential. People would start sleeping in the toy store and camping out in Fredericks. Right. The judge saw a hippie artist and a State Senator. Guess who he found for? I had no idea where I was going to move until La Conner beckoned, though my impending eviction was not my only motivation. I felt honored. Tom Robbins is one of those reclusive writers who simply hands in finished manuscripts that get published as they are. He gave up journalism years ago because he was tired 57

Emulsional Problems of working with editors. The novel gave him complete control. He does not collaborate. I had absolutely no idea how he wrote his magical books, but if he was willing to learn from me, I was more than happy to learn from him too. I took the job. Tom picked me up at the Seattle airport in a green convertible and took me to La Conner, nearly two hours past Seattle, into the Skagit Valley, one of the most fertile farmlands in the world. The whole landscape had been memorialized by Tom in his book Another Roadside Attraction, and it was fascinating to see it for real. Like he said, it was distinctly Chinese, vast plains interrupted by sudden mountainous lumps of forest surrounded by clouds, the Cascades far to the east, giving an Alpine backdrop to the whole lush panorama. The only problem was Tom’s insistence on listening to tapes of Billy Eckstine, his favorite singer of the moment, but not mine. We drove through miles of blooming tulip fields until arriving at La Conner, which turned out to be more tourist trap than fishing village. The main street gave new meaning to the word quaint. If you are wondering where all the calico has gone, it has probably relocated to La Conner. Sure there was a local 58

Emulsional Problems yacht harbor, but the main industry of La Conner is selling knickknacks to the thousands of tourists flocking to the tulip fields. Most of the tulips are not sold but cut down and dug up for the bulbs. La Conner calls itself the seed and bulb capital of the world, and residents pride themselves on it. They repeat the apocryphal story of a local woman who ordered some tulip bulbs from Holland, only to discover a “grown in La Conner” label on the bag when it arrived. We stopped at the only hotel in town to check in. It crossed the line from quaint into dilapidated. One night was enough. The next day I called a local real estate agent who found me a furnished apartment. It was on the edge of a mammoth cabbage seed farm. The cabbages were perfect, ready to eat, but they would never be picked. I moved in that day, and for the next month I saw the cabbages grow giant stalks until they turned to seed. I’d never seen anything like it. I felt like the ultimate Hollywood city slicker in the country. The next day, I headed to Toms for my first day of work. Tom lived a couple blocks away from the main drag. The first thing I noticed was the lack of curtains in the windows. People walking by could see into the house. Tom told me he didn’t like curtains. The house was surrounded by trees, and when they were full of leaves, they provided adequate coverage to the windows. It was only when the leaves fell that he suffered from lack of privacy, though suffer is the wrong word. Tom didn’t seem to mind that his life was open to the world, that people driving by could see who he was having dinner with. He had nothing to hide. First we socialized, sharing drinks and cigars. He mentioned that one of the pleasures of living in La Conner was the giant flocks of snow geese that settled there during the spring. He told me he had just seen a new flock in a nearby field, and that it would be worth my while to seek it out, though of course they changed location all the time. The next morning on my way to his house, and every morning thereafter, I would take long scenic detours through the countryside, seeking the flock, but they always eluded me.

Emulsional Problems Finally, Tom briefly explained how he wrote his books. He treats writing like a nine-to-five job, writing eight hours a day, Monday through Friday. No writing allowed on weekends. He gets up in the morning, makes himself breakfast, lights a cigar, and sits at his typewriter. When he starts a novel, it works like this. First he writes a sentence. Then he rewrites it again and again, examining each word, making sure of its perfection, finely honing each phrase until it reverberates with the subtle texture of the infinite. Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes an entire day is devoted to one sentence, which gets marked on and expanded upon in every possible direction until he is satisfied. Then, and only then, does he add a period. Next, he rereads the first sentence and starts writing a second, rewriting it again and again until it shimmers. Then, and only then, does he add a period. While working on each sentence, he has no idea what the next sentence is going to be, much less the next chapter or the end of the book. All thoughts of where he is going or where he has been are banished. Each sentence is a Zen universe unto itself, and while working on it, nothing exists but the sentence. He keeps writing in such a manner until he eventually reaches a sentence which he works on like all the others. He adds a period and the book is done. No editing or revising in any way. When you read a Tom Robbins book, you are experiencing the words not only in the exact order that he wrote them but almost in the exact order that he thought them. But wait a minute, I interrupted. The first sentence of your first book, Another Roadside Attraction, is “The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.” Are you telling me you wrote that sentence having absolutely no idea where it was leading? Yes, he said. I knew I could explain it later. I like painting myself in corners and seeing if I can get out. This way of writing was so foreign to all my past experience that I was frozen with fear. This was no way to write a book, much less a screenplay. I had never written anything in my life that I didn’t rewrite - not a sentence at a time 60

Emulsional Problems but the whole goddam thing. You always find yourself creating something in the end of a screenplay that needs to be set up better in the beginning. If you discover you need a gun in the third act, you have to go back and introduce one in the first act. Not Tom. Tom handed in his pages every so often to a professional typist, and as soon as they were typed up, they were done. He had been working a week before my arrival, so he gave me the twenty or so pages of his screenplay that had already been written. But he didn’t want any comments on them. They were done, period, set in stone, as would each day’s work be. Once the pages were typed, they were history. No use talking about them. And no use talking about future pages either. Each day’s work consisted of that day’s work and no other. If today we were working on the robbery scene, there would be no discussion allowed of the setup to, or outcome of, the robbery. This intense focus on THE MOMENT without any consideration of THE BIGGER PICTURE infuriated me. If he hadn’t been the man who wrote Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I would have slapped him silly. No wonder he never worked with anyone else. How could anyone else work like this? How could I work like this? It went against every instinct I had as a writer. I felt I really did have something to teach him, but who was I to give advice to someone who had sold several million more books than me? It was like discovering that he typed with his feet instead of his hands. I decided that if this ridiculous writing method worked with his books, the more power to him. I’ll gladly dote on his every word when I read the books. But a screenplay is another animal. Writing a script in this way, considering each scene individually, without any thought to what comes before or after, is like doing a jigsaw puzzle by starting in the upper left hand corner and putting the pieces in - one row at a time. That’s just not how it works. You put a puzzle together by first gathering all the pieces with straight edges and building the frame. Similarly, a screenplay needs some sort of underlying structure before filling in the details.

Emulsional Problems Problem number one was the ending. We were adapting one of Tom’s books, so the story was all there, though with Tom’s characteristic anarchy throughout. I thought the climax, while satisfactory in the book, was too literary to work in the film. I came up with a new ending that was completely visual and cinematic, one that would blow the minds of the viewers while also pleasing the readers of the book by bringing the film to a new level. I tried to bring up the subject, but Tom would have no talk of the ending until we were actually working on it. We scheduled a discussion of the ending for our last day together. The problem was that my ending needed to be set up correctly or it wouldn’t work. I figured out places in the script where we could foreshadow the new ending, but once again Tom would tolerate no debate over work that was weeks away. We could only discuss the scene before us. I sublimated my natural work style and worked his way. I had to be sneaky. Throughout the month, I managed to surreptitiously insert subtle clues to my ending in various unrelated scenes. When that final day arrived and we were actually discussing the ending, I summoned up all my acting ability and said “You know, I just thought of something. How about if it ended like this?” And I told him my idea. His eyes lit up, and he immediately delineated all the clues that I had previously laid. They all added up. “You know,” he said, “it just might work.” He asked me to type up a version of the end, and I gave it to him the next day. He rewrote it and used it. I felt justified. I seriously doubt I had any further influence on Tom’s writing method, and though his style will always be one of my most profound influences, his method is one I still shun. I love cutting and pasting, and what you are reading right now was most assuredly not written in the order you are reading it. The word processor has had more influence over my method than anything else. So I departed La Conner, taking one last jaunt through the fields, and there they were, hundreds of geese settled into a field of cabbages. They took off and circled around towards Puget Sound. I smacked myself on the head. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before? I was so stuck in the literal that I didn’t even 62

Emulsional Problems realize what Tom had done. He had sent me on a wild goose chase. One with a happy ending.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 11

Emulsional Problems

Emulsional Problems Chapter 12

How I Got Cast in Francis You've got to believe me on this one. When punk first hit, I was but a lowly second string film critic for the Weekly. It took a while before punk ever hit the silver screen but I still wanted to participate, so in a blatant attempt to look fashionable and curry favor with the music department, I allowed the hippest Hollywood barber, Atila, to have his way with me, follically speaking. I sat in his chair and said "Do whatever you want," giving him the respect one would bestow upon a modern day Picasso, only instead of paints and oils, electric clippers, carving to the skull, not a haircut, a living statement, allowing this barber to totally flip out, creating out of my head a momentary moment of art guaranteed to eventually grow in. I thought I looked great, and headed to a screening at Paramount, one of my favorite lots. I purposely parked far from the screening room, allowing me to saunter, casually drop into sound stages, see what's happening, check out the scenery. Nothing more fun than sneaking into closed sets, trying to figure what in the hell is being shot there, occasionally moving things around to deliberately confuse the next day's shoot, taking pictures of myself, or others, pants down at the podium or in the captain's chair. But this time I was just walking down a street, an ordinary street in the lot when I ran into a friend who was headed towards an audition. I dropped in and found myself

Emulsional Problems herded into a group of scraggly people. The casting department got one look at me and immediately offered up the role of an inmate in the insane asylum in the movie Francis. No doubt about it. The haircut got me the gig. Of course when I showed up at the set for my first day's shooting, the local hairmeister immediately tried to fix my hair, adding his own creative embellishments to Atila's masterly original work. The costume department fit me with an appropriately seedy set of rags, torn sweater, baggy pants, slippers. The assistant director led me to the set and gave me my only instruction of the day; Hang around Jessica Lange all day and act nuts. Not much of me ended up in the picture. I'm mainly a menacing blur in the background. I did get this shot though, personally signed.

Emulsional Problems HINT #1 It's always dangerous to offer a celebrity a Polaroid you just took of them. You're offering them the option to keep it, and you may never see it again, particularly if you make them look abysmal, as I often do. Many a star has tried to hang to their portrait, sometimes because they like it and I let them, but more often because they hate it and they don't want anyone to see them looking that way. In this case, I left her face alone, and she liked it and signed it. Others have tried to grab it in order to destroy it. (Yeah, I’m talking about William Shatner. And who can blame him?)

Emulsional Problems Chapter 13

My Trip to Disneyland with Eugene Ionesco I went to Disneyland with Eugene Ionesco, his wife Rodica, and renowned mime Jack Albee. No you didn't. The Mouseketeers are scrambling for reinforcements. You mustn't say Disneyland. You must say Disneyland. Disneyland is Disneyland. No it isn't. Disneyland is Disneyland. 69

Emulsional Problems How would you know if you've never been there? The pomegranates explode with trepidation and delight. Can you tell me the way to the train station? Be that as it may, I still insist that the phone rang and it was Jack Albee, no longer trapped in an ever-shrinking box, asking me if I wanted to go to Disneyland with Eugene Ionesco. It's not called Disneyland, it's called Disneyland. Are you telling me that it's not called Disneyland, it's called Disneyland? No, I'm saying the opposite. Yes, you are saying the opposite. No I am not. Yes you are. We are both saying the same thing. We are not saying the same thing. That is not what you are saying. That is what I am saying. What is what you are saying. What is not what I am saying. I'm saying that Jack came by and took me to Ionesco's hotel and that he and his wife didn't speak a word of English. Unless they did. But they didn't. Neither he nor his wife. Neither he? Nor his wife. Nor his wife? Neither nor. How do you know? Because I was there. How could you be there if you were there? Because I sat there and we didn't talk. 70

Emulsional Problems What did you talk about? We didn't. What? Talk. About what? Nothing. What fun. Can I come too? Spending an hour in a hotel room with a mime and a world renowned playwright who wrote about the absurdity of language but didn't speak a word of English was not quite the barrel of monkeys one would imagine. Was that the same barrel of monkeys who wrote the complete works of Shakespeare? We left the monkeys in the hotel room to go to Disneyland. Why do you insist upon calling it Disneyland when you didn't even go? I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Eugene Ionesco. We communicated non-verbally through a mime. You had nothing to say to Eugene Ionesco and his lovely wife Rodica? Had anyone bothered to translate the story, would Ionesco have been interested in the fact I played the eighty-year-old lead in his play The Chairs at the ripe old age of 16 in high school? Perhaps, oh, I don't know, he would have found it absurd. Don't say absurd, say absurd. That's what I was going to say. 71

Emulsional Problems No you didn't. Yes I did. Why didn't you say it to Eugene Ionesco? I did. Where? On the Matterhorn. You and Ionesco. On the Matterhorn. An e-ticket. Very much so. On the Matterhorn. With Ionesco, his wife, and a mime who shined an apple. A real apple? A pantomime apple. You shared a pantomime apple with Eugene Ionesco on the Matterhorn? Not really. He dropped it. Ionesco dropped the pantomime apple? And the mime dropped the subject. Which was? Our trip to Disneyland. No it wasn't Yes it was. What was the subject? Yes, what WAS the subject. The hotel room. The chairs. The amusement. The park. The horn growing from the middle of your forehead. There is nothing I can do about it. Is there anything you can do around it? 72

Emulsional Problems Dance. Love to. The characters do cartwheels through the magical kingdom. My nipples contract in zestful anticipation. Forward the motion. The moon and the stars. The wonderful world of color. Have I lived it or dreamed it? Why would I lie?

Emulsional Problems Chapter 14

Backstage with Baryshnikov I'd been a fan of John Sanborn and Mary Perillo ever since I saw Fractured Variations/Visual Shuffle on Alive from Off Center, a PBS show in the late '80s that featured the work of lots of wacko experimental video artists like Laurie Anderson and William Wegman. I finally met Sanborn when he was hired to do the credits and interstitials for Overview, a TV show I was starring in for Michael Nesmith. It was great to see myself fly into the screen in a whirl of Sanborn special effects for my segment of the show, The Bottom Shelf. He called me up the next time he was in town, maybe a year later, to go to a Dodger game. He had two tickets and he didn't drive. Would I mind picking him up at the studio where he was shooting a video with Mikhail Baryshnikov? No problem.

Emulsional Problems They were between takes when I showed up. I knew enough not to bother John while he was setting up the next shot, so I stood back and waited for a spare moment. I asked if it was okay to snap some shots and he said fine, as long as it was okay with Baryshnikov and his dance partner and choreographer, Valda Setterfield. They were both waiting on the set, which was a simple green screen to be filled in with effects later. I approached

Setterfield, she acknowledged me, I asked if I could take her picture and she said sure. An elegant lady who has since danced in a couple of Woody Allen films. Baryshnikov was another matter. I was intimidated by meeting Mikhail Baryshnikov because I wouldn't know a plié from a platypus, a pas de deux from a Patty Duke, a grand jete from a grand mal seizure, or a pirouette from a pair of slacks. 75

Emulsional Problems He was sitting in a chair, facing another way, when I snapped the first shot. No acknowledgment of my existence. I stepped a little closer and snapped a second shot. No acknowledgment of my existence. I stepped closer still, right in his face, and snapped another shot. No acknowledgment of my existence. I considered saying "Hey, Mikhail, what's your problem?" I considered getting my head bitten off. I backed away. The atmosphere was like that of a concert hall. Extreme silence when the masters were at work. There was no rehearsal where I could just snap away with my flash. Camera was rolling, music was playing back, nobody was making a sound, and here I was with this clunky old Polaroid that was incapable of taking a picture without ejecting it with a mighty KAA-CHUNG, WHIRRRRR. Normally the sound wasn't too disturbing, but while they were dancing it sounded as subtle as shooting with a broken Waring blender. I stood well away from the performance area, on the other side of the camera, where I was sure the sound of my Polaroid wouldn't disturb Baryshnikov. I knew a flash would piss off everybody so I disconnected my flashbar. SNAP. No problem.

Emulsional Problems I moved a little closer, just behind one of the lights. No one seemed to mind and I snapped another shot. No problem. Then I moved close enough to take a shot without equipment in the way. Close enough for them to see me. Close enough for them to hear the camera, get distracted, slip and fall. I pictured the headlines the next day. "Mikhail Baryshnikov Breaks Leg because of Michael Dare." They went into a pose, I took the shot, without a flash the time exposure caught them in a blur, and I ran away, getting as far from them as I could before the camera spewed out the shot. No problem.

Emulsional Problems

Yep, this is the shot you've been waiting for. Murky, huh? Well it's the best I could do and I sure wasn't going to try again. You want clarity? Go to Herb Ritts. You want murky, give me a call.

Emulsional Problems Chapter 15

Being There with Hal Ashby

Hal Ashby was going to direct my screenplay adaptation of Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction. He called me out to his house in Malibu one day to discuss the script. "Did I ever tell you how I got to direct my first film?" he asked. He proceeded to tell me. Norman Jewison was set to direct The Landlord. The day before shooting, he decided not to direct the picture. "Have my editor Hal direct the film" he told 79

Emulsional Problems the producers. Hal had been his editor on The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, for which he won an Oscar. The producers had a choice. They could postpone production of the film and lose a lot of money and possibly some of the actors, or they could go ahead with Jewison's suggestion. They bit their lips and went with Hal, which turned out to be a wise choice. Hal did a great job, brought the film in on budget, and turned in an incredible film. His next, Harold and Maude, became a cult classic. "I'm telling you this," Hal went on, "because I want you to know that I'm going to do the same thing for you on this picture." "What do you mean?" I said. "I mean I'm not going to show up on the first day of shooting, and I'm going to recommend that you direct the picture." "You mean we're committing fraud?" I asked. He thought for a second. "Yep, I guess so." Of course this was a dream come true, but I pointed out to Hal that I really didn't have any idea how to direct a movie. "Don't worry," he said. "It's easy. I'll teach you." For the next two months, I went to Hal's house every weekend and he gave me my own personal, one-on-one, master's course on how to direct movies. Then he died, and it all became clear. Obviously he knew he was dying, and this was his way of passing on the mantle. A lot of good it did me. The high 80

Emulsional Problems profile actors we had were suddenly not interested in working with a first time director when they had only signed on to work with Hal Ashby. And the producers were REAL interested in my tall tale of how Hal was planning on handing it over to me anyway. The project fell apart and still hasn't gotten made. Hal's way of teaching me was to tell me stories of how his films got made. During one of our many conversations, he casually mentioned that he had saved every single take of every shot of the film Being There on videotape. I asked him why. "Because I think future film students should be able to put together their own edits of the film" he replied. Ten years after his death, I began wondering whatever happened to those tapes. I called Hal's ex-business manager, Larry Reynolds, who told me there was a storage locker they might be in. He put me in contact with Hal's frequent collaborator Pablo Ferro, and we arranged to meet there. In the back of the locker, there was a trunk that we opened. It was full of 3/4 inch tapes all marked Being There. We were overjoyed. I grabbed the first couple tapes to view and we agreed to talk later.

Emulsional Problems The tapes wouldn't play in my deck, or the 3/4 decks of anyone I knew, so I called my friend Craig Rosen at the UCLA Film and Television Archives and asked if maybe he could help. I went there and the tapes played perfectly on one of his specially modified players. It turned out the tapes were recorded at 24 frames per second instead of the normal 30 for video. The tapes consisted entirely of the television shows and commercials that appeared on TVs throughout the film of Being There. They were at 24 FPS so they would be in synch with the film cameras. When you see TVs flicker in films, it's because the video is running at 30 FPS while the film is running at 24. Pablo and I went back to the storage locker and found that all the tapes in the case were the same. We had found all the video feeds for the film, but no tapes of the film itself. Back to square one. Larry remembered that Hal's brother also had a storage locker that contained some of Hal's stuff. It took a bit of arranging, but we eventually got access to THAT locker, and we hit the jackpot. It was full of boxes of tapes. We found dozens of tapes of interviews with Vietnam veterans that Hal did in preparation for filming Coming Home. Apparently at one point, they were considering cutting them throughout the film.

Emulsional Problems We opened up one case and there they were, hundreds of tapes marked Being There. I took one from the top, one from the middle, and one from the bottom, and headed to UCLA to check them out. They were the real thing. Every take of every shot of the film, and not just bad B&W from the video feed either, but pristine color copies from the film dailies. Watching them was a revelation. I've never learned more about the art of film directing than I did by watching how Hal allowed some scenes to grow better take after take. Hal had told me that his average shooting ratio was 20 to 1, and we've all heard how directors like Kubrick do hundreds of takes of the same shot. And I've always wondered why it was really necessary. If Hitchcock could do it in one take, what was the problem? These tapes answered that question. In take one of one shot, Peter Sellers exchanged dialogue in a hallway with another actor while extras walked past. The first take seemed perfectly fine. The second take the extras came by a little bit differently and it actually worked better. The third take, the extras were a little bit different, one bumped into Sellers, who improvised a line to the other actor, who responded with the same line as the other takes. The fourth take, Ashby had obviously told Sellers to say the same improvised line, and the other actor had prepared a more appropriate response that was pretty funny, which threw Sellers 83

Emulsional Problems for a loop. The fifth take, the extras were just right, the first improv line was perfect, the response was perfect, and Sellers had a response to the response that was perfect. For the next ten takes, they tried to repeat the magic of the fifth take but couldn't. The fifth was the one in the film. After going through the three tapes, I realized that Hal was right, these tapes were the perfect teaching tool for editors. I was ready myself to start putting together my own version of the film. We put the first tape back in the player to look at it again, but we discovered to our horror that it was now full of white noise. The tapes were so old that after only one playing, the magnetic particles were coming off the tape. We stopped playing it, realizing that if we wanted to look at any more of the tapes, we'd have to do a transfer to another medium on the very first viewing. I wrote up a proposal for Rosen to try to get up money to do the transfers, but the project is problematic. Hal's dead, Kosinski's dead, Sellers is dead, Lorimar is dead. UCLA could get away with using the tapes for purely non-profit educational purposes, but any hope of actually releasing a MAKE YOUR OWN BEING THERE CD-ROM is a rights nightmare, so there's really not much hope of getting back any invested seed money. Rosen told me that Peter Guber, who is a big supporter of the Archives, is a big fan of Being There and might pick up the tab for doing the first transfers just so we can look at the rest of the tapes. So far, he hasn't, and neither has anyone else. This was ten years ago. The tapes are still sitting there in Hal's brother's storage locker.

Emulsional Problems

Emulsional Problems Chapter 16

Porn Free Count me among those fools who created a website, put it up, and just hoped that people would find it. Doesn’t happen. You’ve got to get other sites to link to you, or announce yourself to all the search engines, before you get any guests.

Emulsional Problems Once your page is attached to the search engines, you never know who is going to show up. The search engines have spiders that crawl through your site with a magnifying glass, alerting the searcher to every single noun you’ve had the audacity to post. People find you because they were looking for alien, and you happen to use the word alienate somewhere. Links work best, and I wanted one from the WGA, which I got on the new members sites page. Now people find me who are in the industry and looking for writers. At the bottom of each page on my site, there is a letter getting stuffed into an envelope, and if you click on it, you’re automatically sending me e-mail. I’ve gotten a lot of them, from God knows who, including one recent one from a director who admired one of my scripts. Turns out he’s doing a non-union porno gig in town next week. Would I like to come to one of the shoots? I’ve never been asked by a director to attend a porno shoot, which explains my immediate lack of a prepared response. A legal pad appeared in my head: on the left, all the reasons to go, on the right, all the reasons not to go. They all added up to a big Why not? A street in Laurel Canyon. Don’t ask me which one or I’ll have to kill you. Lots of street parking,

Emulsional Problems suburban neighborhood, big houses, all quiet except for the one with the truck parked in the driveway and the ten cars parked in front. There’s a woman sitting at the truck. She takes one look at me and says This is the place. Go on in. Big living room, walls covered in Renaissance art, a little alcove to the side, a crew is set up and shooting but I can’t see what. I look around. There’s a monitor set up, a guy watching it, others walking around, I look at the monitor. Is THAT what’s going on in the other room? How come I didn’t notice? I move closer and my suspicions are confirmed. What is going on in the monitor is precisely what is going on in the other side of the room. They are both pretty good looking, both totally naked, both women, both all over each other doing dialogue. Turns out they do all the dialogue first, saving the actual sex for the end of the day. The actors just want to get it over with and get it on, but the director wants them to do little things like remember their lines while constantly flashing each other and the camera. If one of them were doing to me what they’re doing to each other, I wouldn’t be able to remember my lines either. The guy next to the monitor keeps calling out to the director how much time there is left on the tape. Apparently not enough so the director never cuts, just keeps saying keep it rolling, do it again. When the tape runs out, he takes a break, notices me, and we meet. He invites me to watch the playback. I follow him, and so do the two actresses, who stand on either side of me watching the screen, giggling, totally naked, smoking cigarettes. They’re glistening with perspiration. I can feel their heat. One of them starts spraying herself with perfume, her belly just inches away. I watch her and I try to figure out whether this is one of things on the left or the right side of the legal pad. After viewing the tape, giving it his blessing, and giving instructions for the next set-up, he introduces me around. The crew are all professionals who don’t give a hoot or amateurs who are doing their damnedest. Just as I’m wondering

Emulsional Problems what it’s like to be on such a crew, one veteran explains to me that the crew never gets laid. I suppose that answers my question. The next shot calls for the male star to enter the scene. His physique and WONDERFUL way with dialogue make it very clear why they hired him. In between takes, he tries to liven things up by telling jokes to his two costars, who are very much not amused. He wants to make friends. They just want to screw him and get it over with. During the next break, the director shows me the script and asks me if I’d like to write one. Pays about $1,500 upon acceptance. Years ago I would have jumped on this, but now I’m in the WGA. I start thinking about what fake name I would have to use. For some reason the name Andy Lusiandog pops into my head just because nobody will get it. I ponder the irony of the fact that the very first gig I am ever offered as a result of my link to the WGA site is non-union. He tells me about other union guys who do this, including a porno version of a popular TV show that was written by the actual writers of the show. The union would boot us all out if they ever found out, but that $1,500 sounds pretty good. Do I forsake my fellow writers in the quest to feed my children by writing a 89

Emulsional Problems script that will actually get shot instead of languishing on my bookshelf with all the others? This demands serious consideration. Porno films are always satirizing popular films, I tell myself. I like satirizing popular films. A title pops into my head. I ask the director “How about Men in Black Women?” He immediately digs it, pictures it, we gab, and in five minutes we’ve worked out the whole picture. All black women are aliens from another planet and the only way you can tell is to screw them. He offers me the opportunity to play the Rip Torn part. Back to work, and its finally time for the actual sex when two cops enter the front door. Just as I’m picturing how I’m going to explain this to whoever bails me out, the producer walks up to them and says “Hi guys, how yuh doing?” They’ve met before. Turns out they’re not cops but fire marshals. They’ve gotten a complaint from neighbors and need to see the shooting permits, which are immediately shown. Standard stuff. Apparently this house is used for this purpose all the time, the neighbors don’t like what’s going on and make complaints. This time they complained that the crew was taking up all the parking spaces, which is obviously not true. Other than the cars parked right in front of the house, the whole street is vacant. Their job is done but they don’t leave. They hang out in the living room for the next two hours and watch the two actresses get it every which way from Mr. Talent. And they say civil servants have it bad. Finally, it’s a wrap. The director promises to invite me to the premiere and I head home for my computer. I type Men in Black Women at the top of the page, then my mind wanders. I saw Men in Black long ago and barely remember it. How can I write this? I stare at the blank page, and I remember that this is more than an offer to write a movie, it’s an offer to play a part and potentially get blown in a movie. My mind wanders further. I picture it. I’m the head of an agency that has to seek out black women and destroy the ones who are trying to take over the planet. Would I have

Emulsional Problems to have sex? In front of the camera? Well, I suppose it’s up to me. After all, I am the writer. Or am I? Can I write this? Of course I can, I can write anything. The question is, can I sell it? What if they don’t buy it? It’s hard to imagine any other market for this cracked idea. No, if I write it, I’m writing it for them. The director told me he doesn’t need a treatment, just a script. He’ll give it to the video company, and as soon as they approve, we’re off. Nobody’s paying me. It’s just like every other writing gig in Hollywood - do all the work for free and if we like it we’ll pay you. Maybe it’s just my stubborn background in journalism, but I like the idea of assignments where you KNOW you’re going to get paid. If I’m not getting paid, I write what I damn well feel like writing. I’d like my résumé to be porn free. I erase Men in Black Women and type Porn Free. I keep typing until right about now.

Emulsional Problems

Chapter 17

How I Save Brian DePalma from Being Pelted with Rotten Eggs I had been sent to interview Brian DePalma for the L.A. Weekly. My ultrafeminist girlfriend at the time considered DePalma to be the personification of all evil because of the misogynist aspects of his most recent film, which was Body Double. She had peeked into my calendar, found out where I was conducting the interview, and showed up wearing a wig and carrying a basket of rotten eggs which she intended on depositing upon Mr. DePalma's head. I caught her just in time, and asked her if she'd be placated if I just took his picture and turned him

Emulsional Problems into a dickhead. She agreed. The shot not only came out pretty good, but it actually saved DePalma from a rather messy experience.

Emulsional Problems

Andy Kaufman’s Last Performance New Wave Theatre was a show on the USA Network in the early eighties, the very start of cable TV. For a brief while, it was the most vital, cutting edge show coming out of Los Angeles, showcasing dozens of local bands like the Blasters and the Dead Kennedys who didn't have a chance of exposure anywhere else. The show was hosted by Peter Ivers, a singer/songwriter performance artist whose biggest claim to fame was having composed In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song) from David Lynch's Eraserhead. He wore outlandish clothing and spouted intellectual Zen Buddhist philosophy in between the punk bands, asking them questions like "What is the meaning of life?" instead of "Tell us about your latest recording." He came off a bit smug, so the bands tended to hate him, but his peaceful rantings lent an interesting yin to the extreme violent yang 95

Emulsional Problems of the music on the show, which was written, produced, shot, directed, and edited by a madman named David Jove. New Wave Theatre came to an end when Ivers was bludgeoned to death in his home in downtown L.A. The murderer has never been caught, though many suspect it must have been a member of a band who had appeared on the show and got pissed off at Iver's hippy-dippy questions. Ivers was a Harvard graduate, and in memory of him, they initiated the “Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Program.” He had many powerful friends in Hollywood, including Harold Ramis. Harold wanted to see the spirit of New Wave Theatre live on, so he agreed to executive produce a show called The Top for local TV, once again produced and directed by David Jove, and featuring many of the New Wave Theatre gang, including me. He also supplied Chevy Chase as a host, with guest stars Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, and Dan Aykroyd. The Peter Principle immediately came into play, and I'm not talking about Ivers. Jove, who worked well with his underground crew and punk bands, editing in his own private bay in his cave-like home, was totally out of his league in the real world of television. New Wave Theatre was shot guerrilla style, and he was in charge of absolutely everything. Faced with an actual production staff, he found himself completely incapable of delegating authority, preferring instead to 96

Emulsional Problems boss everyone around, telling them specifically what he wanted them to do, and ordering them not to do anything else. He literally ran around stopping people from doing their jobs. It was nuts. Everyone hated him. I was hired as head writer because Ramis insisted that he hire a head writer. Jove made it quite clear to me that every single word uttered by anybody on the show was to be written by him and him alone. I pointed out that Chase, Dangerfield, Murray, and Aykroyd were pretty funny guys, and he might want to give them some leeway to do their own material, but he would have none of it. No one would do any of their own material. They would only say what Jove told them to say. I was welcome to attend every conference so that it would look like I was earning my pay, but I would not be allowed to actually write anything. Thus I got to personally witness one of the greatest self-destructs I've ever seen. At the first writer's meeting, there was me, Jove, Chase, and Ramis. First Ramis introduced everybody and told his version of what the show should be, the version he thought would make the network happy. Then Chase got up, walked around the room talking, and for fifteen minutes was the funniest human being I had ever seen. At this point he hadn't done any television since Saturday Night Live, and he clearly found his role as movie star stifling. He was simply bursting 97

Emulsional Problems with hilarious ideas. I took copious notes and saw my career ahead of me in bright lights as the head writer of Chevy's comeback show, which would clearly be one of the funniest on television. Then it was Jove's turn. One by one, he shot down every single one of Chevy and Harold's ideas. He made it very clear what the show was going to be. Despite what Ramis had told the network, it was going to be the David Jove show. He then ran through HIS list of ideas, like constantly cutting back to the control booth, which would be run by animals. Like the talk show portion of the show which would feature nothing but baby ducks. Like his wife and child performing a song. One by one, Chevy and Harold shot down every single one of David's ideas. There was a horrifying silence. Chevy threw out another idea. David turned it down. David threw out another idea. Harold turned it down, throwing out another idea of his own. David turned it down. Finally, Chevy said "Why don't we satirize Thriller?" which was Michael Jackson's latest video that had just started airing that week. This was my cue. Just before the meeting, I had told David my idea for satirizing Thriller with Chevy Chase, replacing the words "it's a thriller in the night" with the words "it's a Chevy in the night," and having Chevy turn into a Chevy instead of a werewolf. Chevy and Harold looked at me and I said "That's a good idea," but just as I was 98

Emulsional Problems about to tell my concept and justify my presence in the room, I felt a kick under the table. I looked at Jove, who surreptitiously lifted up his shirt to reveal a revolver in his belt. The message was pretty obvious: if I told my idea, which Chevy and Harold would clearly like, he would shoot me. I kept my mouth shut. The meeting ended in stalemate and a death threat. Finally, it was time to shoot the opening episode with a live audience. The rehearsal with the bands had gone well. Jove had scored quite a coup getting Cyndi Lauper to perform Time after Time. She was fantastic. The audience packed in, full of punks who were fans of the original New Wave Theatre, and expecting more of the same. Jove, who was used to actually being on the stage as the main hand-held camera operator, found himself stuck in the booth in back, having no idea how to give orders to the crew on the stage. As it turned out, he wouldn't need to. There was a fanfare; an announcer said "Ladies and Gentlemen, it's THE TOP!" I had written Chevy several opening monologues. Chevy had written himself an opening monologue. But right before he went on, Jove had gone up to him and made him put on a punk costume with a spiked wig, telling him to just go on stage as a punk and wing it. Chevy came on stage in his punk costume,

Emulsional Problems looking pretty uncomfortable since he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do next. The opening music kept playing. He stood there. A bunch of punks in the front row, aroused by the music, jumped on stage and started slam dancing. A word here about slam dancing. Slam dancing consists of jumping up and down like you're on a pogo stick while bouncing off of those near you. That's it. It works particularly well on a VERY crowded dance floor with VERY loud music; everyone caroming off each other like a million balls in an insane punk pinball game. Unless you know that slam dancing is a dance, you would have no idea that you were witnessing something other than a riot. Chevy had apparently never seen slam dancing. All he knew was that a bunch of punk assholes were jumping up and down trying to bounce off him. He pushed one of them away. They pushed back. He pushed back. Chevy got coldcocked and knocked off the stage. He got up, walked to his dressing room, and didn't come out. The show was over after a full thirty seconds of production. It was a disaster and everyone blamed Jove. Chevy blamed him for not letting him do the monologue he wanted to do. He quit and refused to work with Jove again. I blamed Jove for not doing MY opening. Harold blamed Jove for inviting the punks in the first place and seating them in the front row. Jove

100

Emulsional Problems blamed the system for not letting him be on the stage where he could have stopped it from happening instead of being cooped up in the booth. The network was still owed a show. Harold Ramis took charge. He arranged for a second taping a week later, getting Andy Kaufman to fill in as host. He threw out Jove's script and got a pair of handcuffs to keep him in his seat in the production room during taping. During one production meeting, he took a phone call, walking around the room, stretching the cord of the phone as he walked. When the conversation ended, he was on the other side of the room, and he simple let go of the phone, which flew across the room hitting David Jove smack in the middle of the forehead. It was the funniest moment of the whole production. The second shooting was much more controlled. No punks allowed. Backstage before the show, Kaufman was as friendly as could be. There was not a hint of star ego as I hung out with him in the dressing room, taking his picture as they put on his make-up. As head writer of the show, I had absolutely nothing to do with the words that were to come out of his mouth, so I asked him what routines or characters he would be doing. "None," he said. "Just myself." There was a fanfare and Dan Aykroyd's voice came over the loudspeakers: "Under no circumstances attempt to watch this show without a working television set." The monitors showed rapid, one frame cuts of star fields (one of Jove's specialties), then cut to the control booth, which was manned by three guys wearing big paper 101

Emulsional Problems maché animal masks. A deep announcer's voice filled the room. "And now, from Hollywood California, the entertainment capital of the world, we welcome you to The Top!" The list of guests followed: Cyndi Lauper, The Romantics, The Hollies, special guests Dan Aykroyd, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Lili and Lotus, and Robert Roll as George Gerkon. "This is your suicidal announcer, Bill Martin," he concluded as the screen showed a baby duck walking around a miniature talk show set. Cut to a living room full of aliens watching a TV set. "And now your host, Andy Kaufman." Finally, he went on stage, doing an opening that wasn't written by me, but contained remnants of Jove reworked by Ramis. It was nothing special. "Hi everybody" he waved. "Hi Andy" the whole audience replied. Then a phone rang and Andy answered it. On the monitor, we saw a tape of Rodney Dangerfield on the phone saying "Andy, what's going on? When are you going to show Rappin' Rodney? I gotta go to the bathroom." Andy did a double, a triple, a quadruple take looking at the phone. The screen cut to a little old lady saying "Now you stay tuned to The Top." A multicolored fright wig appeared on her head. "Do you hear me?" she said shaking her finger at the screen. Cut to commercial. 102

Emulsional Problems During the rest of the show, Andy did little more than introduce the guests and take calls from Rodney. Aykroyd and Murray were wasted in a pre-taped segment which looked like Jove just got them stoned and babbling at each other. Dangerfield's segment consisted of the phone calls to Kaufman and his Rappin' Rodney video. The closest thing to comedy was supplied by Robert Roll doing a totally incomprehensible commercial satire written by Jove. When the show was aired, there was no writing credit. During the final credits, which were shown over a rather sweet performance of a song about heaven by Jove's wife and daughter, Lotus Weinstock and Lili Hayden, I was called a "Creative Consultant." Kaufman's performance in The Top seems to be unique in his career. He wasn't playing a character. He wasn't putting anyone on. He wasn't trying to be funny. There was an absolute lack of irony. It actually wasn't a performance; he was simply being himself, doing a favor for a friend, dropping every facade he had ever used, dropping any attempt at being clever or cute or even entertaining. Other than the remarkable circumstances leading to his filling in for Chevy Chase, it wasn't even worth writing about. He smiled a lot and just came off as a totally nice guy, without pretense, someone you could share a beer with. Anyone tuning in to see any of his trademark idiosyncrasies would have been pretty disappointed.

103

Emulsional Problems At the time, I saw it as a complete waste of his phenomenal talents, but looking back now, I see it as a moment of incredible clarity. He probably knew he was dying. He didn't have anything else to prove to anybody. He could afford to just be himself, and that was good enough. "I'm sorry, but that's the way it goes," he said. "Good-bye from The Top." He put his hand over his heart, looked at the audience, wide-eyed and innocent, and said "We love you" before walking off the stage. He died four months later. It was his last public appearance.

104

Emulsional Problems

105

Emulsional Problems

The Life and Death of Captain Preemo There was a knock at my door in 1979, I opened it, and there stood John Belushi. One moment earlier, I had been playing guitar on the sofa, writing a funny song, and if you had asked me who was the one person in Hollywood I wanted to meet, it would have been John Belushi, the man at my doorstep, smiling broadly. 106

Emulsional Problems "Are you Michael Dare?" he asked. "Yeah?" I replied. "Can I come in?" "You bet." Turned out that day was his first on the set of 1941. It was his first big Hollywood picture after the success of the low-budget Animal House. He was in a great mood, having just spent the day on the set with Steven Spielberg. Turned out a friend who was also working on the film had bummed a joint from me the day before. Turned out he shared it with John. Turned out John was used to New York brown Colombian dirt weed, full of seeds and sticks, and had never had anything like fresh green pungent sparkly California sensimilla. He grabbed my friend by the lapels, pinned him to the wall and said "Where did you get this?" At this point, my life could have turned out quite different, but my friend dispensed with all the standard drug protocol and just told John all about me. Armed with my address and phone number, John ignored the latter and headed towards the former. He knew he didn't have to call first. He was John Fucking Belushi and he knew he was welcome anywhere, especially somewhere that was a source of fine bud. He was right. I whipped out the bong, we both took a couple of blasts, and John headed for my record collection, complaining I didn't have enough R&B. We found stuff to listen to anyway, I sat at the piano, and he started singing. We played together for hours. Finally, when it was time to leave, he asked me if I could get more of that pot. I said sure. He pulled out a wad of hundred dollar bills two inches thick and handed them to me, saying "Take what you need," turning his back to look through records, showing not a care in the world for how much money I took, an astonishing display of trust. I peeled off a couple bills and handed back the rest. The next day, I went to my dealer and told him all about my visitor. He flipped out, took the money, gave me some pot, then asked "Do you think he might want some mushrooms? How about some hash?" before fronting me his entire inventory which I gladly accepted. 107

Emulsional Problems The next day John came by again, this time with Dan Aykroyd. They bought my entire stock. The next day, John brought by another actor from the film, then another, then an Eagle, a couple of directors, the head of a studio, and basically everybody he met in Hollywood. My house became his hangout during the whole shooting of 1941. His stamina was astonishing. He would come by after shooting the film on Friday, hang out for a few hours, leave late at night, fly to New York, rehearse Saturday Night Live the next day, and I would watch him from L.A. live that night. The next morning he'd be banging on my door. There was never a point at which I actually decided to become drug dealer to the stars. I just couldn't say no to all the fabulous people I was being introduced to, despite the fact that what they were after was more drugs than my companionship. Within months, I had to move to a bigger house which became known as Captain Preemos, a hippie Algonquin speakeasy where stars not only got high but hung out. Any paranoia I would normally have had concerning strangers appearing at my door looking for drugs was obliterated by the fact that I recognized them all. They were my heroes, people I admired, people whose doors were closed to me during the day just showing up at my house at night. Before Preemos came along, most drug deals consisted of clandestine meetings where cash and a baggy were quickly exchanged. Preemos was different. It was like a deli. Nothing was pre-measured out. I functioned like a maitre d', offering a menu and samples. Instead of just handing over $50 for a bag of something, people would order $30 worth of Hawaiian, $10 of Afghani hash, and a couple of Quaaludes. I had an employee in the back who did the measuring while I hung in the living room keeping the party going. People rarely split after their purchase, preferring to stay and share a bit with the rest of the crowd. With guitars, piano, and other instruments available, I was host to some mighty fine jam sessions. One particular star who found themselves simultaneously on the cover of three major magazines was so embarrassed by the public attention they spent the whole week hiding out on my sofa. 108

Emulsional Problems John invited me to the set of The Blues Brothers where I took a Polaroid of him in his dressing room. I got to be in the movie as one of the soldiers chasing them through Daly Plaza. He showed me Chicago. We jammed at the Blues Club, across the street from Second City, John on drums, me on Keith Richard's guitar. On the day The Blues Brothers album came out, John brought it over and sang along with the whole thing in my living room. A year and a half later a jilted ex-lover of mine wrote an anonymous letter to the LAPD telling them all about me, including bodies buried in the backyard. Two detectives showed up to check it out. They barged in and busted me, taking everything, including pictures of my cat. I was charged with five different felonies, including possession of drugs, possession of drugs with the intent to sell, and maintaining an establishment for the purposes of selling drugs. If I'd been found guilty, I'd be getting out of the slammer just about now. There was an interesting look on the judge's face when the evidence against me was presented: Bags of pot, mushrooms, hash, coke, boxes of every conceivable size of Ziplock bag, dozens of gram bottles, and a sign saying "Welcome to Captain Preemos" with a menu listing "California Sensimilla: $10 a gram, Hawaiian Sensimilla: $15 a gram, Colombian rock: $100 a gram, Peruvian Flake: $120 a gram, mystery grab-bag: $20." It would have been difficult to claim it was all for my personal use. But the most damning pieces of evidence against me were the pictures of my cat, who was their only excuse for conducting a search in the first place. They said they heard a noise. For officer safety, they had to search the house, including a tiny room hidden under the stairs where I kept my inventory. Turned out to be the cat. Pitiful. The judge called it an illegal search, threw out the evidence, and the case was dropped. It still took a while to get out of the drug trade but I got on with my life, writing scripts, becoming a film critic for the L.A. Weekly, and a successful freelance journalist. I ran into John all over the place over the years and we remained friends. 109

Emulsional Problems My scandalous past gave an interesting spin to my new life as a film critic. Hardly a week went by that I didn't see a movie or TV show in which the bad guy was not a drug dealer, and I always got momentarily annoyed because I was a drug dealer and I was not a bad guy. I didn't sell to youngsters, I didn't carry a gun, I didn't sell heroin or crack, I didn't kill anyone, and neither did anyone else I knew in the business. They were all pretty nice and honest folk. We got people high, just like a good bartender, and I made as honest a living as any of your standard vice-presidents at the WB. It was March 5th, 1982, and I was riding through the tulip fields outside of La Conner, Washington with Tom Robbins when the news came over the radio that John Belushi had died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont. I started crying. It was the worst thing I'd ever heard. Here I was on one of the primo writing assignments of all time, adapting a Tom Robbins novel with the man himself, and I was blubbering like a baby. It must have seemed a bit extreme. "Did you know him?" asked Tom. "Yeah," I said, "I did." When I got back to Hollywood from La Conner I was anxious to find out what really happened to John, so I started asking around. Through my old drug connections, I found that the drugs that killed John had come from the LAPD, that it was a sting operation gone bad. Apparently Cathy Smith, a snitch with drugs from the LAPD evidence locker, was getting high with John at the Chateau Marmont. She had told her police connection that Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro might be coming by. This bit of information tantalized them. Smith was told to keep getting John high till Williams and DeNiro showed up so the bust could be bigger and higher profile. Three for the price of one.

110

Emulsional Problems Williams and DeNiro showed up briefly and at different times, splitting out of disgust with the presence of Smith. Cathy kept getting John high till he overdosed right in front of her. She immediately called her connection, a woman who was sleeping with the officer who supplied the drugs. He got on the phone and told Smith not to do a thing, to just wait for him. He showed up at the Marmont, told her to leave and come back in an hour. He then prepared the scene the way he wanted it to be found, then went down the block and waited for the body to be discovered. Basically, if the LAPD hadn't gotten piggy for the big bust instead of just arresting him alone, John Belushi might still be alive today. Smith's early release, plus the total lack of police investigation into the source of the drugs, seemed to back this story, but with my drug past, and with none of my sources willing to go on the record, I sure as hell wasn't going to write about it. A year went by. The phone rang and whoever it was said they were Bob Woodward. "Sure it is," I said.

111

Emulsional Problems "Hang up," he replied, "call information, ask for the number of the Washington Post in Washington D.C., call the main number and ask for me." I did. Got the same guy. He told me he was writing a book about John Belushi and had heard that I knew him. I told him I did, but expressed justifiable reticence in telling him my story. He told me everyone was cooperating and I should talk to Judy Belushi, then call him back. I called Judy. She confirmed that she had personally asked Woodward to write the book, and that she was asking everyone to cooperate with him. She wanted the whole story to come out, and if I was scared to mention drugs, I shouldn't be because John did drugs with everybody. I'd be part of the crowd. I should just tell Woodward everything I knew. Bad advice. Maybe I kept picturing Robert Redford in All the President's Men. Maybe I had this fantasy of being the new Deep Throat. Hell, maybe I just wanted to be in the book. All I know is that I called him back and told him "Follow the drugs. You won't believe where they lead." "How do you know all this?" he asked. In order to prove the reliability of my information, I told him the whole back story of my drug escapades, including how I met John and the life and death of Captain Preemo.

112

Emulsional Problems Who knew he would turn the assignment around and destroy John Belushi with the same fervor he used to destroy Richard Nixon? When Wired came out, it mysteriously included absolutely none of the story about the sting operation, not even as a wacko theory. It was a vast compilation of "just the facts, ma'am" that managed to totally mistake lists of information for truth. I later found out that my version of events had been corroborated by several other sources. "It was going to be the story," one of Woodward's research assistants told me, "but Bob went to L.A. to meet with Daryl Gates, came back and killed it." (A trip where he had promised to take me to lunch but didn't.) Woodward did manage to include all of the back story concerning Captain Preemo, which did me no good to put it mildly. He somehow structured it so that I looked like the bad guy. John's life was going along just fine until he moved to Hollywood and met me. The very first excerpt from the book was printed in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. It was the story of Captain Preemo, naming me by name, clearly one of the bad guys leading to John's demise. How come the man who took on Richard Nixon refused to take on Daryl Gates? My theory? He's an alcoholic. He's never done drugs and knows nothing of the scene. Thinks booze is good and pot is bad. He's an anti-drug warrior, eager to point out that "the scene" killed John, not just the drugs. His book subtly proposed that people like John deserved to die. My picture of him as Robert Redford was quickly replaced with one of Satan. I was actually out the door on my way to the first day of a new job as film critic for a local cable channel when the phone rang and it was the cable channel telling me not to bother coming in. They never explained why I was fired. I found out hours later when I saw the Herald. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the opposing attorney in the custody case for my son walked into the courtroom with Wired under his arm and tried to introduce it into evidence, claiming it showed I was a drug dealer, therefore an improper caregiver for my children. "I've read the book," said the judge, "and you may not introduce anything from it into evidence unless you have

113

Emulsional Problems Mr. Woodward here to corroborate it." Right on, otherwise you could bring in a Jackie Collins novel or a National Inquirer to use as evidence against someone. The judge was Stanley Weisberg, who went on to judge the McMartin Preschool case, the Menendez Brothers, and Rodney King. A guy with a future history of letting people off. He ordered that any mention of Woodward's book be stricken from the record, but obviously it wasn't stricken from his brain. Opposing council got what they wanted. Weisberg now knew I had a drug history, one he could look up at home. I got custody anyway, no thanks to Bob Woodward. Then the film of Wired came out and it had one scene that wasn't in the book. John would have loved it. In the scene, John's dead body is wheeled into the morgue by an attendant who accidentally leaves a half-eaten ham sandwich on the body bag. The temptation is too strong. John unzips the bag from the inside and reaches out for the sandwich. Finally, he crawls out of the bag and says "What happened? How did I get here?" His guardian angel comes down in the form of a Puerto Rican taxi driver and gives him a tour of his life that thankfully did not include me. Meanwhile, John's widow hires Bob Woodward to do some quick detective work and try to discover the truth about her husband's death. The film is a race between Bob Woodward and John Belushi's ghost to discover why John died, building to a final showdown between the two of them. I like that idea, and there are moments in the film of Wired that are underappreciated. Woodward is accurately portrayed as the Sgt. Friday of journalism. In the movie, John gets the opportunity to tell Woodward off for only writing about the bad things. Good for him. Unfortunately, the prevailing message of Wired, the book and the film, was simple, do drugs - die. This may be a popular thing to say but it is a lie. Everybody who does drugs does not automatically die. Some people do drugs and then get on with their lives. If everybody who did drugs died a horrible death like John Belushi, illegal drugs would be a very small industry. What is the growth potential of a consumer item that guarantees certain death? Obviously 114

Emulsional Problems SOMEBODY is doing drugs and living or the enormous drug trade would have no repeat customers. I wouldn't expect a film about James Dean to be an endless diatribe against Porsches, though speeding around in one is indeed what killed him. When I remember James Dean, I like to think of that black and white poster of him walking down a wet New York street, not his mangled body in a sports car. I don't want to see a film called Speeding about Dean's obsession with driving fast and his determination to own faster cars. I would feel cheated. I would want a film about Dean to focus on his life, not his death. But Wired was almost exclusively about John Belushi's death. Without the death, there's no movie. What Woodward and the other perpetrators of Wired were inferring was that John Belushi's life was meaningless and not even worth exploring. His only use was as a momentary anti-drug poster child. They reduced a complicated man into a wretched cliché in order to further our country's ludicrous anti-drug campaign. It's years later and I can't help but think that if somebody who never heard of John Belushi looked at Wired, they would wonder why anybody bothered to make a movie about such a pathetic human being. So let me reiterate. Wired, the book and the movie, got it wrong, even though they kept sporadically reminding me of a man I loved. A man I remember. At Sunset was a secret nightclub next door to the Whiskey on Sunset Blvd. The front was boarded up, but there was a back entrance that hosted a party every weekend. The meat locker in the kitchen was the hippest place to hang out. Loud music would be playing and the kitchen would be packed. It was where you went to do drugs, so that was where you normally found John, and anywhere you found John immediately became the hippest place to be. He gave validity to a whole scene that was screaming out for recognition. Members of such obscuro L.A. groups as Fear and Black Flag would go home bragging that John Belushi had been in the audience.

115

Emulsional Problems After John died, somebody scrawled BELUSHI'S ROOM across the meat locker wall in crayon. Years later, At Sunset closed and it became the new Dukes Coffeeshop, where I have as yet to order any meat dishes. The last time I saw John, he was obviously tired. He was sitting at the back of another club, the Zero Zero, watching people dance, listening to very loud music, aware that his presence in the room was known by all. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone and TV Guide that very week, so he was royalty. He was sitting in a chair near the dance floor when somebody dancing accidentally spilt a beer on him. John did nothing, just sat there, neither indignant nor angry, no reaction at all. The dancer laughed and spilt more of his beer on him, obviously hoping for some sort of response. He got none. A bunch of others joined in, and pretty soon it turned into "Let's Spill our Beer on John Belushi Night." John became soaking wet but he took it like a Buddha. When he spied me through the crowd, he simply reached out, put his hand on my shoulder, and I led him through the rain of beers, out of the club, to his limo, and on to my place where we listened to music till four in the morning, both of us whacked out of our minds, singing songs, listening to records. These are good memories that can't turn sour just because I got high with the guy. Even before he died, John could drift off into space and become an angel, a tribal God of comedy, and I worshipped him. Today, I still do. Bye-bye John.

116

Emulsional Problems

Complete List of Celebrity Polaroids for the Next Book Jim Abrahams Brooke Adams Lou Adler Danny Aiello Steve Allen Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff Maria Conchita Alonzo Robert Altman Dave Alvin Phil Alvin Famous Amos & Andy Warhol Laurie Anderson Melody Anderson The Angry Samoans Jean-Jacques Annaud Alexis Arquette The Arquette Clan David & Richmond Arquette Lewis Arquette Patricia Arquette Rosanna Arquette Hal Ashby Ed Asner Armand Assante The Attractions Rene Auberjonois John Barrymore Jr. Paul Bartel Paul Bartel & Mary Woronov Mikhail Baryshnikov Elya Baskin Ed Begley Jr. Ed Begley Jr. & Harry Dean Stanton Jim & Judy Belushi John Belushi Peter Bergman Milton Berle Claude Berri Tony Bill Rodney Bingenheimer Juliette Binoche Richard Blackburn Robert Blake Susan Block Joe Bologna Joe Bologna & Rene Taylor Barry Bostwick John Brent John Brent & Carl Gottlieb Martin Brest James Bridges Jeff Bridges Albert Brooks Genevieve Bujold Charles Bukowski Maryedith Burrell Tim Burton David Byrne Sammy Cahn James Cameron Colleen Camp Hamilton Camp John Candy Leon Capetanos John Carpenter Robert Carradine Gerry Casale Dan Castellaneta Kim Cattrall Exene Cervenka Charles Champlin Graham Chapman Matthew Chapman

Chevy Chase Cher Rae Dawn Chong Thomas Chong John Cleese Ethan Coen Ethan & Joel Coen Joel Coen Larry Cohen Joan Collins Ry Cooder Martha Coolidge Roger Corman Stuart Cornfield Joe Cortese Elvis Costello Alex Cox Les Crane Marshall Crenshaw David Cronenberg Denise Crosby R. Crumb Tim Curry Jamie Lee Curtis Tony Curtis John Dahl Elizabeth Daily Beverly D’Angelo Severn Darden Michael Dare & Kay Lenz Gordon Davidson Brad Davis Warwick Davis The Dead Kennedys Jim Dean Rick Dees Francis Delia Jonathan Demme Brian DePalma Laura Dern Anne DeSalvo Pamela Des Barres Caleb & Zooey Deschenal Danny DeVito Leonardo DiCaprio John Doe Stanley Donan Lauren Shuler Donner James Doohan John Dorr Tony Dow Richard Dreyfuss Dr. John Murphy Dunne Shelley Duval Richard Dysart Clint Eastwood Jeff Edwards Marshall Efron Peter Elbling Elvira Cassian Elwes Gary Essert Emilio Estevez Emilio Estevez & Demi Moore Eric Estrada Robert Evans Fear Pablo Ferro Doug Fieger The Firesign Theater Eddie & Carrie Fisher Joe Flaherty

117

Flea Charles Fleischer Wayland Flowers & Madame Jane Fonda Peter Fonda Cedering Fox Michael J. Fox Dennis Franz Stefan Gierasch Philip Glass Lesli Linka Glatter Crispin Glover Menahem Golan Whoopi Goldberg Garry Goodrow Carl Gottlieb Gerrit Graham Johnny Grant Wavy Gravy Mike Gray Spalding Gray Richard Greene Michael Green Melanie Grifith Larry Grobel Nina Hagen Nina Hagen & Malcolm McClaren Archie Hahn Peter Hankoff Renny Harlin Fox Harris Julius Harris Phil Hartman & Jim Dean Billy Hayes Billy Hayes & Brad Davis Robert Hayes Christie Hefner Hugh Hefner Jerome Hellman Don Henley Buck Henry Barbara Hershey Howard Hesseman Howard Hesseman & Tom Scott William Hjortsberg David Hockney Holly Hunter & Anna Paquin Isabelle Huppert Tino Insana Eugene Ionesco & Jack Albee Eugene & Rodica Ionesco Peter Ivers Henry Jaglom Graham Jarvis Alejandro Jodorowsky Rickie Lee Jones Sam Jones Neil Jordon Janusz Kaminski Casey Kasem & Fred Segal Andy Kaufman Harvey Keitel Sally Kellerman David Kellogg Sally Kirkland William Kotzwinkle Laszlo Kovacs Ron Kovic & Bruce Springsteen Ron Kovic Paul Krassner Alan Ladd Jr. Frank LaLoggia Christopher Lambert

Emulsional Problems Martin Landau David & Cathy Lander Jessica Lange Darrell Larson Jack Larson Nicolette Larson Aaron Latham Cyndi Lauper John Philip Law Timoth Leary Spike Lee Spike Lee & Danny Aiello Jack Lemmon Kay Lenz Michael Lerner Mark Lester Eugene Levy Daniel Day Lewis Shari Lewis & Lambchop Richard Libertini John C. Lilly Christopher Lloyd Jackie Lomax Traci Lords Tine Louise Rob Lowe David Lynch Ginger Lynn Andie MacDowell Kyle MacLachlan Madonna Virginia Madsen Anne Magnesun Karl Malden Leonard Maltin Howie Mandel Michelle Manning Mickey Mantle Cheech Marin Penny Marshall & Agnes Belushi Bill Martin Steve Martin Peter Max & Swami Satchidenanda Jill Mazursky Paul Mazursky Paul & Jill Mazursky Edie McClurg Roddy McDowall Marvin McIntyre Malcolm McClaren Larry Bud Melman Robin Menkin Nicholas Meyer Russ Meyer Bette Midler Better Midler & Paul Mazursky Kim Milford Penelope Milford Dick Miller Ira Miller & Lewis Arquette Ira Miller & Paul Flaherty Andre Miripolsky Joni Mitchell Moebius (Jean Giraud) Richard Moll Demi Moore Michael Moore W.T. Morgan Greg Morris Paul Morrissey Mark Mothersbaugh Martin Mull Taylor Negron Judd Nelson Michael Nesmith Laraine Newman Rick Nielson Steve Nieve Nick Nolte Nick Nolte & Paul Mazursky

Alex North Dan O’Bannon Alan Pakula Michael Palin Gary Panter Anna Paquin Van Dyke Parks Elizabeth Pena Michelle Pfeiffer Bronson Pinchot Tom Pollack Vincent Price Barry Primus John Prine Phil Proctor David Proval Wolfgang Puck Dennis Quilley Harold Ramis Harold & Violet Ramis Nikki Randall Eric Red The Red Hot Chili Peppers Carl Reiner Ivan Reitman Paul Reubens Evan Richards Tom Robbins Isabella Rossellini Richard Rush Laura San Giacomo Reni Santoni Reni Santoni & Betty Thomas Greta Scacchi Richard Schaal Avery Schreiber Martin Scorsese Derf Scratch Dominick Sena William Shatner Harry Shearer Harry Shearer & David Lander Ally Sheedy Ally Sheedy & Rosanna Arquette Martin Sheen Red Skelton Penelope Spheeris Steven Spielberg Bruce Springsteen Harry Dean Stanton Catherine Mary Stewart John Stockwell Oliver Stone Keifer Sutherland Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino & George Sidney Renee Taylor Renee Taylor & Joseph Bologna Julian Temple Betty Thomas Betty Thomas & Daniel Travanti Pete Thomas Tiny Tim Lily Tomlin Rip Torn Robert Townsend Daniel Travanti John Travolta Peter Turman Ted Turner Tracy Ullman Danielle von Zerneck & Rodney Bingenheimer Katie Wagner Bruce Wagner & Mary Woronov Tom Waits John Waters Chloe Webb Lotus Weinstock Chuck E. Weiss

118

Claudia Wells Billy Wilder Fred Willard Fred Willard & Martin Mull Billy Dee Williams Edy Williams Robert Williams Robin Williams Allee Willis Bruce Willis Michael Wilmington Brian Wilson Robert Wilson Robert Anton Wilson Mare Winningham Robert Wise James Woods Mary Woronov Michael York Moon Unit Zappa David Zucker Jerry Zucker David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, & Jim Abrahams Daphne Zuniga

Emulsional Problems

119