6/11/2022
Newsletter8
At 5:21 AM the blue gels are just appearing in the sky above the trees. I can’t tell if it will be clear or cloudy at this point.
The shortest paratrooper in the American military during WWII, at 5’4”, was Rod Serling. He may well have also been the only Jewish paratrooper during the war.
In 1852 when Thomas Edison was a five-year-old he lived in Milan, Ohio, near the shore of Lake Erie. A crazy old inventor in town built one of the earliest hot air balloons. The whole town came out to watch his first flight. The ropes were cut and the balloon floated up into the air. It then caught an air current, drifted off over Lake Erie and was never seen again.
I was 21 years old and living in Hollywood for the second time. I lived in a shitty little apartment with no furniture and a Murphy bed on Whitely Ave. just above Hollywood Boulevard. It was just beginning to dawn on me that I didn’t have the first clue how to even begin getting into the film business. I became glum and morose; a common condition in Hollywood. As I trudged up the hill toward my apartment in state of gloom, I saw a single piece of three-holed paper laying in the middle of Whitely Ave. It was page 10 of Alvin Sargent’s Oscar-winning screenplay for the movie, “Julia,” with Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards. Sargent, Redgrave and Robards all won Oscars for the film. The page is dated 1.9.75, the movie came out in 1977, and I found that script page in 1979. The scene is Lillian Hellman (Fonda) struggling to write her first play and complaining to her lover, Dashiell Hammett (Robards).
LILLIAN’S VOICE (O.S.) [off screen] (shouting): I am a cocker spaniel and I’m in trouble and you won’t listen to me. (Exasperated) I can’t work here.
HAMMETT: Then don’t work here, don’t work any place, it’s not as if you’ve written anything before. Nobody’ll miss you. It’s the perfect time to change jobs.
LILLIAN’S VOICE (O.S.) (louder): You’re the one who talked me into being a writer. You’re the damned one who said stick with it, you have talent, kid! You soft soaped me with all that crap and look where I am now.
HAMMETT (standing up): You want to cry about it, stand alone on the rocks, don’t do it around me. If you can’t write your play here then go someplace else! Give it up! Open a drugstore! Be a coal miner! Be a six day bike rider! Anything, but don’t snivel over it.
I hold that framed page in my hand right now. It’s yellowed with age – it’s 47 years old – and I’ve hung it on the wall in front of first my typewriter, then my computer, my whole life.
Two interesting final notes: 1. “Julia” was Meryl Streep’s first movie, 2. The late Alvin Sargent ended his career co-writing “Spider-Man 1,2 & 3” with my good old-time buddies Sam and Ivan Raimi.
The sun has arisen and it is a lovely day in the neighborhood.