10/16/22
Newsletter129
The Crack of Dawn
The last time I bailed out on L.A. was in November of 2001. In a complete overreaction to seven straight years of living in L.A., I moved to Jacksonville, Oregon, a mile up the road from Bruce Campbell, in the Applegate Valley. I lived in a single-wide trailer on seven acres, surrounded by about a thousand acres of BLM land. I was truly in the middle of nowhere; me and three kittens. My next-door-neighbors were a couple in their 70s named the Rosenbergs, who also happened to be the only other Jews in the whole valley. The Rosenbergs were a wonderful, upbeat, civic-minded couple from NY who were both artists. They made these incredible, beautiful, useful, installations, like park benches made of steel and gorgeous tiles, mounted on a swiveling base, that they sold to cities all over the country. And they loved movies. So, Mr. Rosenberg (I can’t remember either of their first names because I am blocked by the Russian spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, so I’ll call them Phil and Ann) suggested to me that we put on a free film festival for the valley. Phil quickly procured the use of the elementary school (for two-and-a-half hours on Friday nights) and a video projector from the library, I wired in an old stereo with big speakers, and it looked and sounded good. Phil got a number of local women to bake brownies and cookies that would be sold and the money would be donated to the library. Now my job was curate and run the show. I suggested that since I had the DVDs of many of the Oscar-winning Best Pictures, let’s have a Best Picture Festival. They were both all for it, and I gave them a list of my DVDs. They chose: Lawrence of Arabia, Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather Part II. I sadly informed them that we only had the venue of two-and-a-half hours, and all three of those movies were over three-and-a-half hours long. Phil added that we actually needed to add an intermission to sell the cookies and brownies.
Thus, we had The Shortest Best Picture Festival. Based on the running times I worked my way backward from the shortest. Our first show was Marty (1955) at 91-minutes, then Annie Hall at 94-minutes, then Casablanca at 102-minutes. It was my job to introduce the film, then figure out where the intermission would go, which is at the end of act two, where the character makes a crucial decision that there is no turning back from. Marty says, “I’ll put on the blue suit, I’ll go to the Stardust Ballroom, and you know what I’ll get? Heartache.” Intermission. Sell brownies and cookies. Or, Ingrid Bergman falls back into Bogart’s arms on the couch and says, “You do the thinking for both of us,” and he says, “All right. I will.” Intermission. Sell brownies and cookies. And then we had plenty of time to carouse because the movies were so short. What was great, though, was that being located right there in the local elementary school, it drew out some of the shut-ins in wheelchairs who usually didn’t go anywhere. At our best we had 50 people. It was a lovely little film festival, and an eclectic grouping of films.
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to do my best to have a good day. I mean, why not?
This is an incredible story. Not sure why, but it just is. Maye because it reveals the soft sweet side of you that is so often kept under wraps. And maybe because it shows a whole different level of artistry, ie people at the local level such as the older couple and, briefly, you using their knowledge and skills to enhance the quality of life somewhere, even if it's just for 50 shut-ins. :)