The True Governor of Glubbdubdrib

Jellwagger - Episode 21: See Sharp

2010-08-29T20:50:00.001-07:00

Now just look at our man here, would ya? What a right state he was in and no mistake, his belly full of some of the most awesome Chexican cuisine you ever saw courtesy of House of Ta Ko, chased down by a few Spatens, and capped off with some awesome flan he taught himself in no time to chow on with chopsticks. I’m sure you knew about the flan already. This Jellwagger with the Donald Duck cane’s got it smeared all over his face from when he conked out at the House of Ta Ko bar.

And now here he was, still out for the count, flan all over, Donald Duck smiling that shit-eating billed smile, slouched in the backseat of a very expensive sedan with tinted windows. No, this wasn’t the same sedan in which he’d ridden to House of Ta Ko, Sam T. Lee’s tan affair. This was a different one, but in about five seconds it would become incredibly familiar to Jellwagger.

The driver turned around and smacked our drugged man hard. Like every other type of noise that happens inside a car, the slap noise was amplified about a million times. In fact, what woke up Jellwagger? The slap or the sound of it?

“Up and at ‘em, Jellwagger!”

Jellwagger woke with such a start that he bounced off the plush leather seat and smacked his noggin against the plush ceiling of the import, sending himself right back into blackness.

The driver spent a good minute or so laughing his tailored ass off. When he recovered, he slapped Jellwagger some more. No go. He considered Donald Duck for an assist, but in the end Donald wasn’t needed. After the tenth or so slap, Jellwagger woke with a start again, only this time the driver had his other hand planted firmly on our drugged man’s shoulder should he do another ejector seat impersonation. “What did he say?!” Jellwagger said with wide, bloodshot eyes. “I want to know what really happened.”

“Well, sir,” the driver said. “I was given instructions to pick you up from the House of Ta Ko and take you back to your job, as your lunch break was lamentably at an end.”

Jellwagger’s world came back into focus. Smiling at him from the driver’s seat, with his black driving cap and black leather driving gloves, was Flip. “Flip! My man!”

“Sir.”

“What are you doing here?”

“In a word, sir? My job.”

Jellwagger wiped the sweat off his forehead and was just about to ask for water when Flip handed him a chilled bottle. “Your name notwithstanding, you’re awesome, Flip.” Jellwagger sucked down the entire bottle in one pull. Flip handed him another. “My eyes weigh a ton, Flip.” Flip pulled the handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Jellwagger. “What the fuck?”

“For your face, sir. Flan, sir.”

And that’s when the memory smacked Jellwagger harder than the felt ceiling and Flip’s palm combined. “Gwak!” He looked around. Of course Gwak wasn’t there, and only now did Jellwagger see they were parked on Figueroa right outside the Sanwa Bank building. He was so groggy from whatever Gwak had put in his flan that just the mere effort of looking out the window made him feel utterly drained.

“You ever have anesthesia, sir?”

“What do my wisdom teeth have to do with anything? Oh! That’s the only time I’ve been put under. And I know what you’re going to say. This is what it’s like when you come to.”

“Yes, sir.” Flip’s placid countenance reminded Jellwagger of hot cocoa and a bedtime story, one of those Babar books Mom used to read him.

“Jellwagger!” squawked a voice over his walkie-talkie cell. Of course, only one woman with red hair would have the balls to do that, and always at the worst possible time.

“Why did the bitch drug me, Flip?”

“The methodology of the Chexican mafia, sir, has been a mystery to all but them. And even some of their number, it is said, have scratched their heads from time to time over the decisions of the higher-ups. Now you know how Mr. Dinner feels.”

“You better answer me, bitch!”

“Speaking of, where is that billionaire rascal?”

“All I can divulge, sir, is that I was taking a cat nap when I received a call from Mr. Dinner to come downtown, stat, as you would say, to pick you up from House of Ta Ko and return you to your place of employ.”

“Jellwagger!”

“Hold that thought, Flip.” Jellwagger dug his cell out and said: “Starship Carrot Top, this is Houston, what’s your status?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day, what happened?”

“Oh, just a little something called my first day back on the job after a week off. What’s up?”

“I’ve got an assignment for you. A nice important one, so that if you fuck it up, it’s your ass going to jail for stalking.”

“Golly shucks, Carla, I haven’t caught up with my inbox yet.”

“It has to do with those photos. When do you get off tonight?”

Once again Jellwagger had to plumb the depths of his short term memory, weaving through the haze of Gwak’s concoction, until he saw in his mind’s eye the photos with Pat Dinner and Kit Figures. That’s when he remembered Gwak’s gorgeous smiling face telling him about her and Kit knowing each other since college, and that those photos were taken at some point since Kit did a Greg Louganis off the Santa Monica Pier. “I’m off at six.”

“Sweet. I’ll call you then. You better not bail on me, bitch.”

Jellwagger sat there like a vegetable with the cell in his hand long after Carla hung up.

Flip’s “Sir?” brought him back.

“How the fuck did I get into all this, Flip? Wait, don’t answer that.” He pocketed the phone, grabbed Donald, and opened the door. “I’m really sorry about ruining your cat nap.”

“Not at all, Jellwagger. Have a great rest of your day. And night.”

“Say hi to Pat for me, will ya?”

“I have a feeling you’ll be able to do that for yourself very soon.” He tipped his hat. “Until the next random encounter, sir.”

Jellwagger hobbled into the Sanwa lobby, offered a nod to Dathan, who in return flashed Jellwagger a smile a bit too bright for a simple hello, pairing it with one of those finger pointing jobs, a jab with his index straight out and his thumb straight up, a pistol shot greeting you typically see between two people who know something no one else in the vicinity knew. Whatever the deal was with Sam T. Lee, Jellwagger had a sick feeling in his gut that it was only just beginning.

The nausea got worse during the elevator ride up to forty-two. For a split second Jellwagger was convinced he’d barf, less because of his fear of the near future than the lingering effects of whatever Gwak had put in his flan. The elevator chime was just the ticket to snap our limping data entry hero out of it. He offered Laura the same smile he did Dathan before heading down the hallway.

“You okay, honey?” Laura called from behind.

“Don’t get shot and don’t get drugged, kiddo, that’s Jellwagger’s free advice of the day.”

His phone rang as soon as he sat down at his desk. He didn’t have the energy to check the caller ID, but something told him he didn’t need to. “Go fuck yourself,” he answered.

“My man! Flip phoned me.”

“Nice play on words, Pat.”

“Sorry about the flan, man.”

“And again!”

“I didn’t know they’d go that far. Drugging you with flan? Jeez, talk about rubbing it in. Get it? I’m on fire, Jellwagger.”

“Hold on, you knew they’d drug me?” His phone rang again. This time he did check the caller ID. The area code was New Jersey, and it wasn’t Jo. His mouth fell open. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Now?”

“It was sort of a test, I guess you could say. Or a warning salvo. I dunno. You’re the writer, you’ll think of a good metaphor.”

“Hold that thought, Pat. I’ll be back to kick your ass shortly.” He put Pat on hold and took the other call. “Ma?”

“Michael Johnson, where have you been?”

“Is that a trick question? I told you I was going back to work today.”

“I’ve been calling you.”

“You know, it’s really too bad you don’t believe in voicemail. Or e-mail. Or technology in general. Because if you did, getting in touch with me wouldn’t be so goddam complicated.”

“The reason I called you every day last week to check up on you is because I was in such a state about not being able to visit to make sure you got better. At least Jo took care of you.”

“Sure she did. I want you to believe that.”

I know what you’re thinking. We’re twenty-one episodes into the life and times of Michael Johnson Jellwag, and only now you’re getting to meet his mom, Eugenia Murphy Jellwag, toll collector extraordinaire for the New Jersey Turnpike. Well, what can I tell you? I wanted to introduce her earlier. After all, besides Jo, she’s the only other family Jellwagger’s got back in the Garden State. Technically, I have introduced her already, way back at the beginning of the first episode. I wanted her to visit Jellwagger the way Jo did, but Genie, as her friends call her, lacked a compelling reason. Plus, and more importantly, she mans the tollbooths for the Jersey Turnpike, a gig that, like the Jersey mafia, is very hard to get time off from. That also explains why she didn’t visit Jellwagger after he got shot, although she did call him every day, as you just heard. Working the tollbooths was anything but a cake walk. It’s not just a matter of standing there in the friggin’ booth and collecting dollar bills from people. What do you do with the suckers who complain about paying? What do you do about the anarchists? The Communists? Taking toll fare is like flying a plane. It’s not the actual flying that’s hard, it’s what you do when something goes wrong, when an engine blows, when a terrorist wants to crash the plane into the water. Collecting everyone’s due takes training, dedication, and sacrifice, and the fact that Genie Jellwag’s been doing it since before her boy was born speaks volumes about this Jersey girl’s constitution.

“Oh? You mean she didn’t? Funny, I’ve heard she’s been out there a couple times in the past couple weeks. Although I don’t know why.”

“Look, Ma, the feud between you and Jo has crossed the boundaries of absurdity. You read me, Ma? We crossed those boundaries eons ago. I bet if someone asked you why you and your daughter aren’t on speaking terms, you wouldn’t know the answer, would you? Huh, Ma? Would you?”

“Skinny bitch, pick up!” squawked Comet Head’s voice from his walkie-talkie cell.

“Turn down the radio, Michael Johnson. You kids these days.”

“Hang on, Ma.” He pressed a button. “You still there, Patsy Cline?”

“Take your time, my man. I’m doing a little something called multitasking, something you kids know nothing about.”

“Then how in Bel Air do you explain what I’m doing now?”

“Don’t piss me off, bitch!”

Jellwagger put Pat on hold and dug out his walkie-talkie cell. “Comet Fuck, this is Houston, what’s your status?” And much to his surprise, she laughed.

“You know something, Jellwagger? If it wasn’t for the whole stalking thing, you’d be all right.”

“So long as you keep shouting through your precious goddam walkie-talkie cell, Carla, I will continue being an insufferable vitriolic smartass.”

“Nice use of vitriolic, dude.”

“Actually no, that didn’t quite work. I was too eager to rub your face in it. Now what’s up? My watch reads half past two. Didn’t you say six?”

“A quick heads up to be sure you get something to eat before I call. It’s going to be a long night, Jellwagger, but you know what? Before you get pissed? Think of it as getting you to your twenty-hour quota that much faster.”

“Yahoo.”

“You ready for the gravy? You’ll be doing a good deed for the law. I’m talking about catching bad guys. Not loser wannabe stalkers who couldn’t get laid if the sky rained hot chicks, I’m talking real nasty fuckers.”

“You must be taking my encounter with Aaron the wrong way.”

“I know Stefania was the one who talked him down with her awesome nunnery skills while you still somehow got your dumbass shot. You’re no tough guy, I get it. But you are one sneaky, devious fuck. And those are the skills I need. By the way, has Pale Cock given you his ol’ ring-a-ding-doo?”

“Golly shucks, Carla, no, I haven’t heard from him since the two of you used my apartment as a cheap motel.”

“And Sam T. Lee? Has he reached out to you?”

“You must’ve had one too many beers from your awesome frozen steins, Carla. I’ve just been here tap-tap-tapping away all the doo da day. Catching up on mails, catching up on life. Funny how one week of a life can seem like a lifetime. Why, I think it was Jean-Paul Sarte who said…”

“Dude, whatever! My only point in calling was to make sure you eat something tonight before I put your skinny bitch ass to work. Peace out.”

Jellwagger got his mom back on the horn. “Ma, I gotta go. Work beckons in ways you couldn’t possibly fathom.”

“You want to know what Jo said about me?”

“I have no interest whatsoever.”

“Are you okay, Michael? Jo and I do talk once in a while, you know. If the topic is important enough.”

“And you’re telling me you found such a topic?”

“Of course, sweetie. You. Jo and I may have our grudges, but neither she nor I begrudge you anything. Well actually…. Oh forget it. You’re the man of the family now, and hiding in the Valley won’t change that. Jo went out there a couple weeks ago for reasons she won’t share. When she came back, she said she was worried. She didn’t say why, just that you might give the screenwriting racket a couple more years and then, if you haven’t sold anything at that point, perhaps take stock of your station.”

“Take stock of my station? Jo doesn’t talk like that.”

I probably should’ve mentioned that Genie Jellwag was a well read woman. She read on her lunch breaks, regardless of her shift, and she read every night (or morning, again depending on her shift that week) before hitting the sack. Jellwagger, as you’ve long since learned, is a bit of a bookworm himself. And now you know where he gets it from.

“Mind you, Michael, this was before you got shot.”

“Ma, as I explained every day last week, that was a total freak accident and has nothing to do with data entry for Powell and Powler’s marketing department. Aaron’s fine, he’s just got issues. Like an estranged wife and kid in Lancaster. And this job is perfect for an aspiring screenwriter, especially one penning Bruce Willis’s next masterpiece. You’ll see, Ma, I got a good feeling about this Danish. Now I’ve gotta run. Love you.” He pressed a button. “Pat Dinner, what’s the score?”

“When you off work, Jellwagger? I’ve got a job for you.”

“What an unbelievable coincidence. I have absolutely nothing to do tonight. And might I say it’s about time you put my gimpy ass to work. It’s been two weeks since that glorious night at Spago and The Standard.”

Pat’s cackling exploded out of the phone so that our man had to jerk his head away. “You are so right, my man. Of course, your getting plugged in the thigh put a crimp in my style.”

“Mine too.”

“But not to worry! The Dinner Company will make up for lost times. I’ve got a real doozey for you tonight.”

“Do I get to hitch a ride with Flip?”

“’Fraid not, Jellwagger.” Pat’s voice dropped a few octaves. “No, tonight I’ve got Flip on a different job. Personal one. Boring, you don’t want to hear it. Now you, my man, your night will be anything but boring.”

“Do tell.”

“Two words: Poker and sex.”

“Fuck yeah!”

“You play poker before, my man?”

“Sure,” Jellwagger said before he thought about it and realized he wasn’t entirely sure. He must have, right? Who lives to be thirty-one without playing a hand of cards? Jellwagger knew he’d played blackjack before. He played at least once with Jo and their father. It was one night eons ago when his mom was working the second shift on the turnpike. Jo and the old man kicked his ass.

“That’s great. I was going to offer you lessons, a primer before sending you into the lion’s den, but if you’ve got your shit together, that’s awesome.”

“Lion’s den, huh? So where exactly am I going tonight, Pat?”

“Good question. I’m not exactly sure what time the party’s starting. And the venue might change. But it is happening, my man, don’t you worry.”

“Speaking of worrying, what’s the deal with Sam T. Lee? Why would he hire a friggin’ contractor to drug me on my lunch break?”

“Another great question. I have no idea. To be frank with you, while Sam T. Lee and I are acquaintances and have the occasional drink together, his interests and mine do overlap in certain areas.”

Well, if that wasn’t the most roundabout way of saying he and Sam T. Lee were rivals... “You’re filthy rich, he’s filthy rich, I have no idea how either of you make your filthy richness, but at a certain point, what does it matter, right?”

Pat’s voice dipped again. “It matters. Or else my business interests… Oh you don’t want to hear about that boring stuff. Anyway, I swear I didn’t know about the drugging. Sam said he just wanted to have coffee and chat with you and give his personal thanks for making our evening out such an interesting one.” Pat’s breathing sounded hoarse.

Jellwagger’s cell vibrated across his desk. Not Carla’s walkie-talkie, but his main cell. The caller ID said private. He declined the call so the private person would get his voicemail.

“I’ll call you back, my man,” Pat said. “Speaking of business interests, one is beckoning right now. You’re off at six, right?”

“You betcha.”

“Talk then.”

“Jesus fuck, can I get some peace?” Jellwagger said after hanging up. He opened up Outlook to continue catching up on mails.

His cell vibrated again with the private number. He declined.

After deleting some spam, the shiny little bastard buzzed some more. “Grand Central Station, how may I direct your call?”

“Hey now, Hank Kingsley!”

“You’ve got balls calling me like this after what you pulled, Gwak-a-Fuck-Hole. What the hell was that?”

“You’re not taking the whole face in the flan thing personally, are you? Jellwagger! Jellwagger, Jellwagger, Jellwagger.”

“Oh if you weren’t a woman, Gwak…”

“Well I am a woman and can still beat you up. Bada-bing. Joking!”

“Did I wrong you in a past life or something? I mean honestly.”

“At least Flip picked you up. He’s awesome, right? I’ve always liked Flip.”

“And to rub it in in a very literal way, you slid your half-eaten flan over just in time for my face to do a Greg Louganis into it.”

“Oh I was just fucking with you.”

“Fucking with me?!” Jellwagger looked around and expected Mahoney’s face and the face of every other attorney in the vicinity to poke out of their offices. He held the phone away while Gwak cracked up.

Grant pinged him: “Are you having a fling out there, young Jellwagging star?”

At least the guy’s sense of humor was intact.

Gwak recovered enough to say: “Okay, the flan thingee was my own personal touch. Sam didn’t tell me to do that. Having fun’s not the guy’s style, with all respect.”

Jellwagger said, “But he did want you to drug me?” while typing back to Grant: “I sure picked a helluva week to stop sniffing glue.”

“Okay, fine, it was a warning,” she said. “Happy? I hate being mean, but…”

“Warning for what?”

Grant typed: “I’m starting to wish I hadn’t spammed you.”

“I guess to show you he’s not afraid to keep you in place if you step out of line.”

“Subtle.” He typed back to Grant: “That was pretty fucked up, man. I’m still trying to catch up on mails. How many of these prospects do you want in by EOD?”

“Look, in the end, Jellwagger? It was harmless, right? You’re not hurt. We got you back to work on time. Everything’s back to normal.”

“What does Sam T. Lee do for a living? What kinds of assignments will he give me?”

“I plead the Fifth and I plead the Fifth.”

Grant typed back: “Just do what you can and run for your life at five.”

“And you’re not his hitwoman?” He typed back: “I’ll see you one better and work til six. I’ll work til six all this week, how’s that?”

“I consult for him as a communications specialist.”

Grant typed: “I don’t deserve you.”

“So that’s what they’re calling your kind these days.”

“But I won’t be contacting you in a work capacity, Jellwagger. You’re on our side. The peeps I gotta talk to are from other companies.”

“Companies whose business interests overlap with Samuel Tijuana Lee’s. Like the business of a certain Mr. Dinner.”

“Pat and Sam aren’t exactly Hitler and Churchill, Jellwagger. They probably cooperate more than they compete. Sometimes it’s good to have someone of your rank and station doing the same thing as you. You can share best practices and that kind of thing. And even drivers. I know you won’t buy it, but part of why Sam got Flip to take you back was so you’d wake up to a familiar, friendly face and not freak out. Hey now, Hank Kingsley, I sure hope I become a friendly face to you.”

“Maybe you can be useful to me, Gwak. If I need an ear to bleed into, because maybe I won’t get Sam’s style at first or whatever, you can be that ear. An advisor of sorts. How’s that grab ya?”

“It grabs me, Jellwagger. Now seriously, you gots to go, and so do I. I’ll talk at ya.”

For the rest of the day, and mercifully so, Jellwagger’s phones were silent. He never saw Stu again. Grant IMed him one more time, just before he left around five-thirty, telling him to be absolutely sure he got out of Dodge at six sharp and not a second later. As six approached, his leg started throbbing again. By now he was just finishing e-mail catch up and trying his damnedest to make a nick in the stack Grant had been saving for him. To play off the throbbing, Jellwagger focused hard on the voice of Bruce Willis reading from Civilization and Its Discontents.

“Jellwagger, this is your savior calling,” squawked Carla’s voice. She sounded tipsy.

Jellwagger could play off the throbbing no more. He dropped three painkillers. He’d taken two before lunch and two this morning. The bottle said he should only be taking two at a time twice a day, but they obviously hadn’t accounted for redheaded stressors. Regardless, he couldn’t be Carla’s gopher and a cripple at the same time. If too many painkillers knocked him off his ass, then at least that’d be one less ass doing Carla’s bidding.

“I’m on my way out.”

“Stomach full? Ready for a full night of fun?”

“Yupper and you betcha,” he lied and lied.

“Get your skinny ass out of there and let me know when we can talk in private.”

“Ten four, Frau Comet.”

Guffaws came from down the corridor, previewing the arrival of Stu, who appeared with a beet-red smiling face, his sweaty hands gripping that poor mail cart. “Michael Johnson Jellwag! You are the man with the master plan, are you not, sir?”

Jellwagger got his stuff together, grabbed the Donald Duck cane, and got up. “Stu?” He limped past him toward the lobby. “Do your best.”

“That I will, sir.”

Jellwagger waited until he was outside on his way back to the red line station before he pulled out his cell. Rivers of pedestrians flowed by him in both directions. Evening rush hour applied to the sidewalks of downtown L.A. as much as it did the streets. But if you’ve ever braved the crowds of any big city center, you know it’s perfectly safe to have a private conversation. No one’s listening because they’re talking on their own cells, deep in their own conversations. “What’s the score, Carla?”

“Good news and shitty news. First, the shitty. What I want you to do for me tonight is going to keep you up late. I’m thinking midnight. Now to cheer you up? This’ll be a nice big chunk of those twenty hours you owe me. And another awesome thing? To show you how much I love you? I’m not making you venture outside the God-forsaken 818.”

“If you really love me, this job won’t even take me outside the comfy confines of Van Nuys.”

“Of course I’m making you go outside that shit hole. That blight on a blight. Look, you stalked me, nothing changes that, but I am not, repeat not, that vindictive. I’m getting revenge just having your punk ass in my felt pocket, but I won’t rub it in.”

“You’re a true scholar. So WTF am I going?”

“Too risky. Someone could hear.”

“WTF cares what you say?”

“Won’t do it.”

“Yeah, sure, it’s all about you. Everyone walking by, with all their problems and stress and everything else, they are all just waiting with bated breath to hear the name of the lion’s den you’re throwing me into.”

“Call me back when you’re in the Valley, bitch. And the fact that you’re going there willingly, and that you’re actually looking forward to getting back to Van Not So Nuys, is absolutely sickening. Maybe when you’re no longer my vassal state, I can give you some therapist referrals. We’ve got a ton of them here on the Westside. It’s therapy capital.” She hung up.

His other cell rang as he boarded the red line subway at Seventh Street Metro. It was standing room only. Jellwagger squeezed between two impeccably dressed guys who were too busy reading their smartphones to give a shit about affording him a slightly wider berth. “You en route, my man?”

“You know what’s funny, Pat? I never thought my cell would work down here.”

“It probably doesn’t normally. My cell’s special, though. It’s got this extra strong satellite signal that links it to the number I’m calling. So right now, for all intents and purposes, your cell is as super-cool-dude as mine.”

Jellwagger laughed. Pat didn’t. “Really, Pat? Wow, that’s neat. Say, you used the word dude just then. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you say that.”

“I’ve been living in the City of Angeles a long time, my man.”

“I happen to know someone else who uses that word. You might know her. Carla Houde?”

He cracked up. Jellwagger would’ve held the phone away to spare his eardrum, but he had no room. One of the guys next to him shot him a look. “You’re thinking…?” Pat began. “Just because she and I…? Ha ha!” Fuckin’ A. The whole goddam train could hear Pat’s cackling. “Nice one, Jellwagger. But, uh, no. Hot sex a marriage makes not.”

“Well said, Yoda.”

“And sex with her has always been hot. Her being a backstabbing, conniving bitch has luckily had no effect on that. Aw shit, see what you did, you gopher? You’ve gotten me all pissed off and worked up. Fuck her up the ass, man, and this time I mean that in a bad way!”

Jellwagger hung up. He knew he was risking Pat reading him the Riot Act, but this Jellwagger, at this particular hour, simply did not have the energy to put up with some weird billionaire embarrassing him in front of a train full of people. His cell buzzed a few more times during the ride home, and each time Jellwagger pressed Decline.

When he was safe and sound in Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, he called back. “I guess your super satellite isn’t so super, Pat. There we were, having a pleasant chat, and…BLOOP! The signal dropped.”

“God damned technology, eh, Jellwagger?” He cackled. So much for the Riot Act. “So what’s the score?”

“I’m sitting in Shitty Shitty Bang Bang in the North Hollywood red line parking lot, awaiting Dinner time.”

“Awesome double entendre.”

“You can thank a bunch of unproduced scripts.”

“Check this out, my man. How’s a nice night of strip poker grab you?”

“My hearing must be failing me. At first I thought you said strip poker…”

“And you might get to fuck one of the hot chicks you’ll be playing with. And you don’t have to leave the Valley. Come on, Jellwagger, it’s a win-win all around.”

“Where exactly is it?”

Pat gave him the address. It was south of Ventura, up in the Sherman Oaks hills, off Sepulveda Blvd. During those times when the 405 was too jammed, Sepulveda was the alternate link between the Valley and the Westside. Jellwagger had driven the route enough times to have a clear picture in his mind of the houses up there. That he’d actually get to go inside one of them made him reconsider just how bad being a billionaire’s gopher could be. “Now back to the strip poker, don’t forget it’s gambling. So let’s hope Lady Luck is on your side tonight.”

“I can handle poker. And if they have booze, getting undressed in front of strangers may not be so bad.”

“When I said gambling, I was referring to the women. You need luck to score with a hot rich chick. Especially you. But if you love the underdog story, then you should be all over the story I’m making you part of.”

“Not that I’m complaining, but is there a particular reason you want me to play strip poker and get laid in Sherman Oaks?”

“I’m turning you into a super hero, Jellwagger. You’ve already got the name, now you just need the skills.”

“I knew you had my back, Dinner.”

“There’s something rotten in the state of Sherman Oaks, and you’re the Hamlet to rip shit up.”

“I never thought I’d hear someone say something like that to me.”

“Here’s what you do.” Pat explained how he wanted Jellwagger to stake out the joint and then move in at just the right time.

“Sounds risky, Pat.”

“They’ll be expecting you, my man. Just tell them what I told you, and even if they misunderstand you, which is possible in an area like that, everything should still go off without a hitch.”

“Simple. Yet ungodly complicated.”

“In a word, life.”

“Sounds like an educational assignment. I’ll talk at ya.”

“One more thing before I cut the tether. Don’t trust a soul. If you do manage to land yourself a hottie, she’ll most likely be the least trustworthy of the bunch.”

“Say, these people don’t work for any of your rivals, do they?”

“Rivals?”

“Jellwagger!” squawked the all-too-familiar madam’s voice. “Respond in five seconds or I’ll have you arrested for being the most demented stalker this side of the Pecos.”

“You’re leaving out a lot of info, Pat.”

“Your radio on, my man?”

“I thought that was from your end,” Jellwagger said. He muted his cell and picked up the walkie-talkie. “I’m flirting with a hot chick, Carla, I’ll be with you shortly.”

“You’ve got balls, dude, I’ll give you that.”

He muted the walkie-talkie and went back to Pat in time to hear him say:

“…can’t tell you too much, just be careful.”

“Oh come on, Pat, help a brother out. Who the hell are these people? Why am I playing strip poker with them? What if I don’t score?”

“Even Babe Ruth couldn’t clear the fence every game. What I want you to do is observe. Follow the instructions I gave you and play your role. Be sure to retain your observations in your noodle so you can report back to me. Coolioz?”

Pat hung up before Jellwagger could give him a coolioz in the affirmative. He hopped back onto the walk-talkie with She Who Must Not Be Named. “Okay, Madam Carla, pun intended, my shift is done, my stomach is full, I’m ready for Freddie.”

“I have a feeling my being too nice to you has thrown you off your game.”

“I’m sorry, I could’ve sworn you just said nice…”

“In twenty-four hours, I let you eat my ass and fuck me in the shower, and then I make sure you’re well fed before I send you on an important assignment that’ll bring you much closer to paying off your vassal debt to me.”

“You’re right, you’re a veritable Santa Claus, keep going.”

“To cap off the gift of giving, I’m giving you an assignment that doesn’t amount to much more than a stakeout. But it’s really important. Like, I basically need you to confirm that the pricks I suspect of stealing from Just Because are actually the ones. So here’s the deal...” Carla laid it all out.

“Sherman Oaks hills, eh?” Jellwagger said. How awesome was that? She was sending him to the same neighborhood where Pat was sending him. How awesome would it be if she wanted him to stakeout the same address? “So what’s the address?”

When she said it, he thought he was dreaming.

“Say it again.”

And she did. Yes, it was definitely the same address. “You there, dude?”

“What? Oh yeah. Sorry. My full stomach was distracting me. You’ve got friends in awesome places.”

“I would if I had any friends there. But I’m pretty sure this is home base for those fucks stealing from me.”

“Is there a decent place for me to hide out while I stakeout? And who are these people? Who do they work for? Why would they steal from you?”

“Look at it this way, Jellwagger, it’ll be a journey of discovery.”

“Jesus!”

“I’m serious. Note what you see. You want to bring something to write with, just so you don’t miss anything? Awesome. Because if you do miss something, I’ll find out in the end.”

“I feel like shit for spying on you, I want to make it up to you, but you’re being cryptic for no good reason.”

“I have very good reason.”

“And there we have a straight answer.”

“By midnight, those who are staying there for the night will be in, and those leaving will be gone. That’s when you go straight home and call me and give me a full report.”

“How full are we talking?”

“Oh shit, I almost forgot. Don’t park near the address. Park at least a mile away, maybe a bit further. Maybe you should just leave your car at the NoHo station and walk there.”

“No fucking way am I walking from here. Bye, honey.”

Jellwagger stopped at an In-N-Out Burger and grabbed an animal-style beefwich and an order of those awesome fries. Convincing Carla he’d eaten dinner and was good to go til sunup only emphasized the empty pit in his stomach. He chomped on that fat burger with a vengeance as he wound his way up the curvaceous streets into the hills above Sherman Oaks, letting the animal grease drip down his chin with impunity. He wasn’t livid with Pat and Carla so much as the situation. No, he couldn’t get too mad at those billionaires. In the end, Jellwagger was responsible for this mess, hence his punishing himself, or at least his shirt, with burger fat. God damn, though, if the fries didn’t make the whole righteous indignation shtick totally worth it.

He could still get pissed at Carla if he wanted to. Sure, he’d stalked her, but she was taking the payback thing way too far, and they both knew it. If she had a problem with where he parked Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, she could go fuck herself. In fact, if she was embarrassed about it, and these people were stealing from her, that could only mean they hated her guts. And if they hated her, and she hated Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, that meant they would either adore Shitty Shitty Bang Bang or at least not give a shitty shitty bang bang if Jellwagger parked it in their vicinity.

As it turned out, what anyone’s opinions about his car were didn’t matter. The block on which this gorgeous two-story house with the marble columns and balconies sat was filled with cars, as were the adjacent blocks. This burger-scarfing data entry clerk had to drive another quarter-mile or so up the hill, almost to Mulholland Drive on the hill’s crest. Perhaps that wouldn’t’ve been a long walk for you or me, but for Michael Johnson Jellwag, on this particular night and just barely equipped with a negligible reserve of energy, when all he wanted to do was go home and get some work done on Danish before toasting Bruce Willis and getting a good night’s shuteye to cure the lingering effects of Gwak’s drug, any appreciable walk was a five-alarm suck fest.

The walk notwithstanding, where the fuck was he going to hide during the stakeout? Didn’t cops usually conduct stakeouts from their car? Or from a conveniently abandoned house across the street? When he drove by just now, tons of cars were all over the place. No doubt everyone was worn out from horrifically exhausting days telling their production assistants to fetch coffee, so if they spotted this particular Jellwagger snooping around and spying, they’d have his balls strung up faster than you can say Jack Nicholson’s recycling container.

And that’s why this itty bitty Jellwagger swung a left at the next intersection, a couple blocks shy of the house in question. You should know that Jellwagger is not exactly dealing with your average grid layout you see in most big cities. You take our nation’s capital, for instance: Perfect grid split into four quadrants with Capitol Hill in the middle. Then you’ve got the Big Apple with her numbered streets and avenues. Couldn’t be easier, right? Well, Jellwagger was now in a realm that directly refuted the whole idea of ease and convenience. The streets lining the hills above L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, collectively known as the Santa Monica Mountains, or simply the hill if you were a yokel, must’ve been mapped out by a gang of Santa Monica ninja monkeys on acid. Seriously, it’s like they took a map and just went to town on it with crayons or what have you. And then paid contractors enough dough not to give a shit. Jellwagger was on the Valley side of the hill, specifically the Sherman Oaks section. Sherman Oaks, like all the Valley neighborhoods that abutted the hill, had a section on the hill itself, all the way up to Mulholland, which is where the rest of L.A. began with, depending on which part of the hill you were on, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Los Feliz, all those tony ‘hoods you and I will never be able to afford. Not that we’d want to, right? Not if they’re this fucked up.

As you can tell, though, Jellwagger wasn’t letting any of this slow him down. Just look at our man limp right along there, gripping Donald Duck with purpose as the two of them rounded the bend to the next intersection and swung a right. The intersection after that came quickly. The occasional Bentley or Benz zoomed by with no respect for the turns that would’ve baffled Shitty Shitty Bang Bang.

In a few minutes Jellwagger and Mr. Duck arrived at the house whose location on this side of the block corresponded to the house Carla and Pat wanted him to stake out and play strip poker at, respectively, on the other side of the block. Whoever owned this place must’ve imported a section of the Congo. Honestly, how was our favorite data entry clerk supposed to find his way to the backyard?

What would John McClane do?

And that’s all Jellwagger had to ask himself before he, with Donald at his side, or rather, in his fist, set off up the steep driveway. A spotlight flicked on when he reached the top while a dog started barking its carnivorous head off from somewhere inside. Most of the windows were dark. Jellwagger used Donald the way folks in the Congo use a machete to hack his way through the nearly impenetrable foliage along the side of the house. Donald didn’t have a blade, of course, but don’t you know our man compensated for that by beating the living shit out of each and every piece of vegetation. Judging by the steady volume of the barking, the damned man eater seemed to be following Jellwagger through the house.

The giant leaves, fronds, and bushes looked funky in the half-light. The ones that didn’t break or fall swung back at our man here, swiping dew on his forehead and cheeks. One got him right on the mouth, a nice wet kiss. Their bizarre shapes reminded Jellwagger of that little art exhibition Grant and Zach took him to, which in turn made him think of Grace, since that’s where they met. With sweat pouring down his face while he and Donald punished the brambles, he wondered what she was doing right now. Was she ringing up customers at Amoeba? Or was she at home toiling over her next opus?

The backyard was more jungle. It did have a center area relatively clear of foliage, but our man here could easily avoid that exposure. In no time he was at the back fence, a towering solid wall of ocher wood. Thanks both to the tree by the corner of the yard and the painkillers still going strong, Jellwagger got over that ocher. And apparently Scooby Doo back there had already gotten over him. The house was dead silent.

He stepped from the top of the fence right onto the thick branch of a tree on the strip poker property. This backyard was huge, and apparently the strip poker players had gotten on the Congo bandwagon as well. Shit, they were driving this wagon. We’re talking Sherwood Forest here. A good hundred feet or more, filled with nature, separated Jellwagger from the back door. While that meant it unlikely he’d be spotted, he himself couldn’t see much either. Plus, and this was always the downside to well-tended grounds, the bugs were kicking his ass up and down this overpriced block. He didn’t know what sorts of things were flying into him, biting him and sucking his blood. He didn’t want to know. There was nothing for it but to swipe them and smack them while scanning the grounds for a decent place to hide that would also afford him a decent view of the back door.

Over yonder he spotted a few bushes next to a fountain that provided a nice niche for our man to tuck himself into with an unobstructed view of the patio and sliding door and, more to the point, the hot young things coming and going. While he marveled at the gorgeous women, Jellwagger couldn’t help but enjoy the delicate sounds of the cherub pissing fresh water into the pond. And while our man was straight as an arrow, he had to give the dudes props for their pecs and six packs. Now he could see why folks like them would want to play strip poker. What he couldn’t understand, though, for the life of him, was why Pat would think him worthy of this crowd.

Two parties seemed to be in full swing here. You had the crowd on the patio, some sitting, others standing, all drinking, with the second party inside the house. Only there you had more space, so the youngsters could walk or run around from room to room, laughing, chasing each other in random spurts of sprinting, thumping up and down the stairs, and of course gravitating back to the kitchen when it was time for a refill. In college Jellwagger had heard of Bacchanals, but he hadn’t ever seen or heard of one happening in this day and age. Oh yeah, this was definitely a goddam Bacchanal, and if he wanted to stay in the good graces of the richest man in Los Angeles, our intrepid Van Nuys denizen was going to have to partake.

After a few minutes of folks coming and going, two guys and a girl were the only ones outside. They were playing cards, although Jellwagger couldn’t discern which game exactly. They chatted in subdued tones which, coupled with the trickling fountain, made it impossible for him to understand more than the occasional fragment. Maybe they were playing gin. Every once in a while, one of them, usually the woman, slammed a card on the table. Finally she ran out, for which she compensated by sliding the casual index finger on one of their arms. She played touchy feely with one, and then the other, and of course you see where this was going. Jellwagger, per that bulge in his pants, was rapt. The rest of the Bacchanalians must’ve known what was coming (no pun intended) because not a single one of them came out while these two Jacks tag teamed the Queen.

That’s when Jellwagger noticed the dress the woman had ripped off and thrown to the ocher wooden deck. It looked very familiar. The woman’s hoop earrings and sparkling necklace, which jangled this way and that while the two stallions had their way with her, also looked familiar. Hadn’t Stefania worn something like that the time she robbed his virginity from him in the most anti-climactic climax of all time?

Jellwagger thought back to when he first got here and more folks were outside. He could see some of those dresses, which may or may not have been a similar style to soundproofed gal’s dress, but Jellwagger did remember how fashionable they seemed in general, and how good they looked on those great bodies, as they would’ve on Stefania’s. Carla wasn’t bullshitting Jellwagger after all. Clothes and jewelry belonging to Just Because were being pilfered. Was there a traitor in Just Because’s midst?

Jellwagger’s cell rang.

“This is Jo Jellwag calling to see if her baby brother is alive and well.”

“You sure picked a helluva time.”

“Good timing doesn’t exist for you, kiddo, I accepted that long ago. In fact, I think the day I resigned myself to there never being a good time to talk to you was when I walked into your room and you were spanking that monkey with a vengeance that rivaled Charles Bronson’s in those awful Death Wish movies you used to watch all the time as if they wouldn’t survive the transition to the next gen home video format.”

“You promised you’d never bring that up again, the dolphin flooding incident or my past life as a Bronson fan.”

“What’s that shouting? You at a porn theater, Pee Wee?”

“I’m on the subway during rush hour. We’ve all had a long day.”

“I must’ve left a billion and one voicemails on your work number this morning. You didn’t have five measly minutes to pick up the phone?”

“As it happens, no. But guess who called? Go on, guess.”

“The gorgeous Mr. Dinner?”

“Well, yeah, but I’m thinking of someone else.”

“Does it matter to Moses?”

“Take a lousy guess, you traitor.”

“Well, if you’re calling me that, Mom must’ve called.”

“Incredible, huh? Donald Duck was floored.”

“Her son got shot, what do you expect? You’re probably the first person from New Jersey who managed to get shot in Van Nuys. And while that is definitely a mark of distinction, it’s not the kind of distinction you generally want. Although I don’t know. Play that card at any bar and I’m sure you’ll get some pussy.”

“The lust for pussy is the reason I’m caught in this tarantula’s web, Jo.”

“Did you just say that, Caligula? Wow.”

“I’m so goddam tired. Why am I here?”

“I just wanted to be sure you were alive and kicking, kiddo. No time for the existential crisis.”

“I seem to be having a lot of those lately.”

“I know, right?”

And that’s when Jellwagger noticed them, all of them, up on the second floor, crowding the windows as they took in the threesome. Some were in silhouette, but other faces he could see, including that one Chexican woman who wasn’t interested in the sex.

She was looking right at Jellwagger.

Yup, it was Gwak.

To be continued...

Jellwagger - Episode 20: House of Ta Ko

2010-08-21T20:53:00.001-07:00

Jellwagger hung up on Pat Dinner before he knew what he was doing.

“You remember!” Sam T. Lee said with a grin and a cackle. The impeccably coifed man’s teeth shone more harshly than the office fluorescence. It gave our poor Jellwagger a headache. “Muy impressive, if I may say so myself.”

“Did you just say muy? As in the Spanish for very?”

“Si, sir.”

Jellwagger had only seen Sam T. Lee once before, during that night of drunken, Lagavulin-soaked revelry atop the Hotel Standard a couple weeks ago, the night Carla sent him to Spago to surveil Pat Dinner, an escapade that ended with the intrepid Jellwagger befriending said Dinner before a certain billionaire Dinner made Jellwagger his gopher. You remember all that? I hope so, because you see this Jellwagger here? He can’t recall most of it. It’s mostly a Scotch-stained haze courtesy of the aforementioned Lagavulin. Through the haze, though, Jellwagger kinda sorta recalls Sam T. Lee’s pointed questions, which not so subtly intimated that he knew our Jersey-bred Jellwagger had a secret motive for having shown up at Spago that night. In fact, the longer Jellwagger stared at the baby-faced Mr. Lee, the more those teeth with the supernova wattage burned through the haze to make Jellwagger remember how Sam only stuck with light beer that night, while the rest of the cast and crew drowned in Lagavulin. Sam, in other words, had been sober as an IRS audit, and the memory of it gave Jellwagger a jolting, albeit fleeting, chill. What struck Jellwagger even more was the man’s face. From what he recalled, Sam T. Lee was an Asian. But here, in the cold artificial light of the law firm, he looked only sort of Asian. What was it? What Sam T. Lee said next brought it home.

“You okay, amigo?”

Mexican!

Jellwagger wasn’t a hundred percent sure—who is?—but he’d bet a healthy chunk of Pat Dinner’s bank account that Sam T. Lee was Chinese-Mexican.

“Chexican.”

Holy shit, did a certain Jellwagger just say that out loud?

Sam T. Lee’s smile dissipated as he concentrated hard on something on Jellwagger’s surround. Jellwagger tried following his line of site but was blocked by his monitor. What the hell was the Desi lookalike so focused on that he suddenly seemed to forget our man here? Finally, and ever so delicately, Sam T. Lee picked something up from the surround and held it up like an appraiser holds up a precious stone. Only, this particular stone was a pebble left over from the kitty litter Grant had scattered across Jellwagger’s desk during his week off. Sam T. Lee’s smile returned while he studied the pebble. He walked around the surround until he was on Jellwagger’s side, leaned over ever so delicately, and didn’t drop so much as place the litter pebble on the clear plastic interior lining of the trashcan.

Sam T. Lee straightened up and wiped his hands. His smile shone upon Jellwagger the way an alien spaceship shines a beam on whoever they’re about to abduct and perform experiments on. “Chexicano.”

No way, did he just say….?

“White people say Chexican, but the correct way, sir, the truly authentic way of saying this word of words, is Chexicano. Can you say this word?”

“I assume so. I mean it’s just a matter of adding that o at the end, right?”

“So you cannot say it. Not truly. This is okay. I already knew I had much to teach you anyway, as Mr. Dinner may have mentioned on the phone.”

“That filthy rich blindsiding bastard could barely get the words out that you were going to be here before you showed up, Mr. Lee. He didn’t have the time to give me a reason for your impeccable appearance. And might I say your cologne is downright awesome?”

But Sam T. Lee wasn’t looking at Jellwagger anymore. Once again his eyes and every fiber of his noodle were focused on something nearby.

This time Jellwagger could follow his gaze just fine. The new target was his Donald Duck cane.

“Yes, it’s really a Donald Duck cane. You want the short version?”

“Si, why not?”

“I took a slug in the thigh thanks to a career-misdemeanor-committing kid who sometimes shows up at my dingbat, where his mom lives, when he needs money from her. He broke into my place the morning after I had a threesome with these two hot chicks.”

“Muy bueno!”

“And he was going to shoot all of us. At least that’s what it seemed like. But one of the chicks, who used to be a nun but is now an escort, talked him out of it.”

“Fascinating. You couldn’t make this stuff up.”

“You really couldn’t.”

“So the miscreant shot you anyway?”

“Total accident. He and the ex-nun escort got along famously and cracked jokes about me.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Totally used to it. What I’m not used to is getting shot, which is what happened when Stefania had him laughing his ass off.”

“At your expense.”

“Si, Sam T. Lee.”

“So in the end, that episode was entirely at your expense in every possible way.”

“Don’t forget about the threesome, though.”

“Then perhaps the universe was keeping things on an even keel. You had more luck than most, and right after that, balance was restored when you received worse luck than most.”

“Listen here, Sammo, I’ve got a week’s worth of data entry to catch up on, and that includes over a thousand e-mails sent to me on purpose for no valid reason whatsoever by the same passive-aggressive masterpiece who convinced the alley cat near his house to perform a Broadway show on my desk. Comprendes? So if there’s nothing else…”

“I do have a valid reason for showing up out of the blue.”

“Spill it.”

“That you, Lee?”

The Titanic-sized Mahoney had been huffing it back to his office, granddaddy-sized coffee in hand from the ground floor café, when he stopped at his doorway at the sight of Sam T. Lee.

The inestimable Señor Lee took his time turning—Jellwagger had a feeling he was never caught off-guard—and raised his eyebrows, and his smile, ever so slightly. “Hola, Ricardo.”

Mahoney thumped down the way to shake hands. “You’ve got balls showing up here.”

“But Ricardo, you and I are on the same team.”

“Teammates need to look out for each other. Seriously, what the hell are you doing here, Sammy? I assume it’s important if you’d take a big risk like this.”

“I’m here to visit my amigo here, Mr. Jellwagger.”

“Just Jellwagger’s fine,” Jellwagger said.

“Only with you would a name like that be fine,” Mahoney said. “But seriously, Sammy, what are you doing here?”

“As I said.” He gestured at Jellwagger.

“This kid had cat shit all over his desk this morning. Now you’re here. Since when did our marketing department’s data entry gopher get so God damned important? You bill folks by the quarter hour, Jellwagger?”

“I won’t even justify that with a response.”

“I rest my case. Look, Sammy, whyever you’re really here, just be careful, okay? If the local papers get wind that you just walked in like this, they’d have photographers camped outside the Sanwa Bank building in no time.”

“All is well, Ricardo Mahoney. I promise you.”

“Speaking of quarter hours and ripping people off, don’t you have somewhere you need to be, Bob’s Bigger Boy?” Jellwagger said.

“Good point. I’ll see yas. Watch yourself, Sammy. I mean it, don’t let Roz know you’re here.” He thumped into his office.

Sam T. Lee turned back to Jellwagger and appeared more at ease. His smile still evoked an alien spaceship beam, but at least the smile didn’t seem so forced, even if the threat of alien abduction was just the same. “You and I are having lunch this afternoon.”

“Wow. You didn’t even ask me to check my calendar to see if I had any time today.”

“We have much to discuss, do we not?”

“Hell if I know.”

“And after we discuss all of that…”

“All of what?”

“Perhaps you can provide more background and context to the Donald Duck cane, the threesome, and your colleague convincing his neighborhood stray to, as you put it, perform a Broadway show on your desk.”

“Today’s less than ideal for any of that.”

“How about noon?”

“Sure.”

“Do you have a usual place where you luncheon?”

“I usually bring it. Saves money, you know? Although you wouldn’t believe who took me out to pizza a couple weeks ago.”

“Si, I probably wouldn’t. How about I meet you downstairs in the lobby at noon?”

Jellwagger turned to his monitor, to the one thousand plus e-mails waiting for him, and was about to suggest Sam T. Lee take a gander at it before he said adios and left. Something about the way he walked away reminded Jellwagger of Korben Dallas, Bruce Willis’s character from The Fifth Element. Awesome flick. Jellwagger watched it a few times during his week off to keep his creative Exit the Danish juices flowing. Remember that one scene where Korben opens the freezer door and takes that paper off the frozen Brion James character? That’s how Sam T. Lee seemed now, so casual in spite of the circumstances, circumstances which Jellwagger still didn’t understand fully but which he understood couldn’t be all good, not if Carla felt compelled to call him this morning, not if Pat Dinner felt compelled to call soon after that. What the hell was the deal with this guy?

“By the way.” Sam T. Lee stopped and turned back. “No need to call me Mr. Lee or Señor Lee or my full name or anything like that. Sam is fine. As is Samuel, Sammy, Sam. But please, no Sammo, I trust you will drop that shit.”

“Consider the shit dropped.”

“See you at noon, Jellwagger. Oh, may I call you Miguel?”

“Fuck no. One more Miguel out of you and Donald Duck’s getting to know the side of your head.”

“Point taken. See you soon, amigo.”

For the first time since getting here this morning, the entire coast around our limping Jellwagger’s desk was clear. Naturally that could only last so long. Barely a minute went by before Mahoney poked his head out of his office. When he saw that Sam T. Lee was gone, he crept over to Jellwagger’s desk. Jellwagger fought the urge to laugh his ass off. Rick Mahoney must’ve weighed half a ton if he weighed an ounce. He’d give Stu a serious run (or roll?) for his money, let’s put it that way. So his idea of creeping was the equivalent of Jellwagger hopping up and down as hard as he could like the Easter bunny on crack.

“Hey Jellwagger, just who the hell do you think you are receiving guests like that?”

If you take the way Mahoney asked that question and combine it with his bulldozing into Jellwagger’s personal space and the shit morning Jellwagger’s been having in general, it’s no surprise at all that our boy here would spring out of his seat, grab Donald Duck, and start whacking Mahoney in his thick side. He was skeptical Mahoney would feel anything through the lard, but sure enough, the big dude backed away immediately with pudgy paws raised. “It’s not even eleven o’clock yet, and already my first day’s gone to shit in a shit basket. There are people paying you for the time you’re giving me shit about having someone visit my desk when I had no idea that person was coming. Who are you to give me shit for that? You honestly think Donald and I are going to take that lying down?”

“Who are you now, Jellwagger? Some puny data entry hack. I’m the attorney bringing in the money.”

“And I’m the one with Donald Duck.”

“True, you got me there, but… Damn it, I had IT take care of you.”

“Roz Powler fixed everything, not you.”

Mahoney’s mouth hung open as he took a couple steps back toward Jellwagger before the latter brandished Donald. He stopped in his tracks but didn’t lose the awe in his flabby face. “Did you just say…?”

“Week before last? Before I took a slug in the thigh? I had pizza in Pershing Square with Roz Powler.”

“No you fucking didn’t.”

“Want me to call her?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Leave it to you to call my bluff, fat boy.” Jellwagger limped over to his phone, picked it up, and had his finger an inch above speed dial before:

“Okay you win!”

“Pizza with Powler, Mahoney. You know what that means, right?”

“Leave me alone! I’ve got quarter hours to document!”

Mahoney huffed it back into his office and slammed the door.

If you don’t count the thousand plus e-mails from Grant, and the few hundred other e-mails, the rest of the morning passed uneventfully for Jellwagger. And maybe you shouldn’t count Grant’s mails. At least not all of them. A healthy share, well over half, were blank. The rest were actually relevant to Jellwagger’s job and contained anywhere from a few to dozens of rows of new contacts for Jellwagger to input into the database. At first, Jellwagger was encouraged that Grant, for all his passive-aggressive indignation, hadn’t been too nasty with the spam. Nah, the cat shit took care of the nastiness in more ways than one. But then, as he sifted through his inbox, he realized the hell Grant had inflicted on him. Sure, most of the mails were blank, but because some weren’t, Jellwagger had to click on every God damned one of them. If he deleted several rows at a time, naturally he’d risk deleting one or more relevant mails.

Just then Grant IMed him and basically said the same thing.

Jellwagger had neither the time nor the patience to IM back. He picked up the phone and dialed Grant’s extension and spoke so loudly he was certain Grant could hear him in his office down the way. “The cat shit and the spam better be the extent of your righteous indignation, you deadpan West Virginian file cabinet killer.”

“Shades of Cream is just the beginning, Grass Hopper. I’m fond of how well it may be undervalued by the masses. If we get as many people to see it as there were at Sky’s that one night, it would certainly be good motivation for Shades of Creamer.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Shades of Creamer? Did you really just say that?”

“Just like you called me a West Virginian.”

“Which of course you are.”

“Not.”

“I don’t have time for this shit. Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve or don’t you? I have work to do!”

“Yeah.”

“You do? Where? Give me a head’s up.”

“Yeah. Well. I may originally hail from the Mountaineer State, but I’ve lived out here in the sunny, palm frond-lined Granola State since the beforetimes. I’d say I qualify as a Southern Californian, Jellwagger.”

“It’s going to take me for-fucking-ever to get through all this.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Jellwagger rubbed his head and could picture so clearly, in spite of himself, Grant’s caged teeth to go along with his deadpan, perfunctory “Yeah.” “So are you and Zach cool?”

Grant prefaced his answer with a pronounced swallow, which made Jellwagger’s stomach lurch. “Well, um, that’s a loaded question if I may say so myself, especially from you. Without divulging too many personal deets, let us just say he and I are still together and have no plans to be torn asunder.”

“Let’s not forget, shall we, that I didn’t make you fuck Stu in the office after hours. Not that I’m not sorry. I am, man, big time, but I want to be sure you’re not being a total victim about this.”

“I have accepted the fact that my own actions were irresponsible, yes. But I also believe in damage control. I had no intention of pursuing a relationship with Stu. Therefore, sleeping dogs should’ve stayed put.”

“That’s debatable.”

“Yeah.”

“At any rate, last week was shit for you, I get that, shittier for you than for me, and I’m the one who got shot. So as fucked up as your pranks were, and as tempted as I am to utilize my newfound contacts in this firm to have your artiste ass kicked to the curb, I’m going to let all this slide. I’m the one who was fucking shot in my own apartment and don’t really need this shit, especially since I thought the universe had restored things to an even keel, seeing’s how the bullet came right after the threesome.”

“Whoa, that’s a deep thought, Jellwagger.”

“I’m letting it all slide, Grant. In the interests of moving on. And I’m not being a smartass when I say I’m glad you and Zach are getting over this.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Well, the getting over of this, as you put it, may take some time yet, Jellwagger. Let us say I am not out of the woods. Indeed, I’m stuck in the middle of a thick wood the way the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men could sometimes get stuck in the sprawling Sherwood Forest.”

“A random analogy if I ever heard one.”

“Without divulging too many domestic deets, let us just say the domestic environment in which I dwell is, to quote kids these days, fucking awkward.”

“I refuse to apologize anymore. And if you have a fucking problem with that, I fucking dare you to pull any more shit with me, literally or figuratively.”

Jellwagger slammed the phone down, slapped on his headphones to pick up where he left off week before last with Civilization and Its Discontents (it was like he and Bruce Willis had never been apart), and continued plodding through the mails. Jellwagger was determined to keep his cool going forward. He made a conscious effort to breathe evenly while focusing every fiber of his noodle on cleaning up his inbox in a steady, methodical manner. Thinking about John McClane helped. That was one of Jellwagger’s favorite things about the Die Hards, how McClane, even, nay, especially when things looked bleak, hardly ever spoke above a whisper. He’d have a whole bunch of evil terrorists right on top of him, or right below him, depending on the film, and he’d crack jokes all calm like. Shit, if McClane could be like that in such extreme circumstances, what was Jellwagger’s excuse for blowing his top? Was his life in danger? Well, maybe two weeks ago, thanks to Aaron, but he was in the clear now.

Soon enough he didn’t have to try so hard to be nice. Betsy walked by shortly before noon and asked how the mountain of mails was going. Jellwagger told her it was all hunky-dory, and he meant it. By the time he had to head downstairs for lunch with Samuel Tijuana Lee, Jellwagger was just over halfway out of his inbox.

Jellwagger’s stomach had that oatmeal feeling that comes from being nervous, but he wasn’t nervous enough to deny his hunger. He’d been too excited and anxious about getting back to work this morning to have any breakfast or to make his lunch. He made sure Chump E. Chips had full bowls before limping out of the joint. Last night wasn’t much better. He was on his third Spaten and halfway through the microwave ‘corn before he conked out in the middle of Death Becomes Her (one of Bruce’s most underrated performances). Suffice it to say our man had a pit in his stomach that felt deeper than Bruce Willis’s resume.

When he got down to the lobby, he didn’t see Sam T. Lee anywhere. He checked the line spilling out of the café, but no go. Just as Jellwagger entertained the thought that maybe Sam T. Lee couldn’t make it—he had to be a super busy guy, right?—he heard a young man’s voice behind him.

“Don’t turn around. Pretend I’m not talking to you. Calmly walk to the doors. Thank you in advance.”

Jellwagger was too hungry to argue. He wound his way through the café line and the rest of the lunchtime crowd, which was more complicated than he’d anticipated with his cane. What made it doubly so was that the pain in his thigh decided to flare. Naturally he’d left his painkillers upstairs in his backpack.

Grant was on his way in with his lunch. As always, he’d gone to one of the fast food joints downtown, got it to go, and was coming back with the perfunctory enclosed Styrofoam tray to eat it at his desk. Jellwagger was sure he’d be able to tell whoever it was behind him was directing Jellwagger, but apparently not, judging by how Grant stopped in front of Jellwagger and addressed him directly with no indication he even saw anyone behind him. “Cat shit and spam won’t kill friendships. Not real friendships.”

“’Scuse me, sir.” The owner of the young voice appeared beside Jellwagger. “Jellwagger and I are on our way to lunch.”

“Whoa, a Chexican,” Grant said. “You don’t see you every day.”

“Judging from the way you greeted Jellwagger just now, you must be the guy who played all those practical jokes on him this morning, making his first day back after a long week of convalescence that much more stressful.”

“Were you born here after a chance meeting between two people from completely different parts of the world? Because honestly, that’s the only logical explanation. Well, not the only one, but by far the most likely.”

“Jellwagger, is this the man?” The guy couldn’t have been older than twenty-five or so. Like Sam T. Lee, his face was smooth and his hair impeccable. “The man who fed his alley cat something big, most likely a big fish, a salmon perhaps, a delicacy most cats, even those in the 310, don’t get the privilege of eating, and waited for it to come out the other end, nice and messy, before transporting it to your desk?”

“You’re good. How’d you know it was salmon?”

“What’s truly remarkable is the lengths you went to, and on a Sunday, just to lash out at the man who helped you be honest.”

“Come on, guys,” Jellwagger said. “Let’s move on. If I’m cool with it…”

“I’m not cool with it, amigo. It was petty.”

Grant’s caged teeth and deadpan look weren’t fazed. “You should be called Baby Face. Yeah.”

“Get the hell out of our way, you pathetic piece of shit.”

“Grant, we’re cool. Don’t listen to this guy.”

“I can’t stop looking at him, Jellwagger. Not only is he smoking red hot, he might just be the last Chexican I ever see. These people are fucking mythical in Silverlake.”

“I can personally guarantee I’ll be the last Chexican you ever see, you back country pissant.”

“How did you know…?”

“I swear I didn’t tell him you were from West Virginia.”

“Let’s go. Mr. Lee is waiting.”

“I have to know your name,” Grant said. “When I get home and tell my better half that I met a Chexican, he won’t believe me if I don’t give him a name.”

“Cho.”

“Just Cho?”

“First name’s Na.”

“Na Cho. Oh my God, that is so fucking perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe too fucking perfect. Zach might not believe me.”

“My sister Jo wouldn’t believe that either,” Jellwagger said.

“And by the way, asshole, I was born in China. The woman who became my mother traveled to western China with a volunteer church group to help the recovery efforts after an earthquake leveled several villages and wiped out thousands of people. She came across a small house turned to rubble when she heard a voice coming from within it. A young man her age had been in that house when it collapsed. He’d been stuck under the rubble a whole entire week. My mother dug him out. And eventually she married him.”

“That was your fucking father?” Grant said.

“Correct.”

“Jo still wouldn’t believe it.”

“I can’t wait to tell all my friends about you and your awesome fucking story. Now if you’ll pardon me, my burrito is getting cold. Or is it burri to?”

“Go chop some wood, Paul Bunyan.”

After they exited the building, Na Cho indicated south. They negotiated their way through the lunchtime crowd and the smokers and panhandlers for a couple blocks. At Seventh Street they swung a left and headed a few blocks down to the Roosevelt, a huge block of 1920s era Renaissance Revival that Jellwagger had walked past before, most recently when he and Roz went for pizza, but never knew too much about. That changed the minute he and Na Cho got into the tan sedan with tinted windows parked in front by the curb. Na Cho opened the rear passenger side door for Jellwagger, who got in to find himself sitting next to, you guessed it, a certain Mr. Sam T. Lee. Na Cho hopped in up front. As the car pulled away, the engine made nary a sound.

“Thank you for accommodating me, sir,” Sam T. Lee said. “I thought it would be nice to get you away from your place of employment and all those crowds. I’ve heard through not one but several grapevines that you are a very self-conscious, sensitive, indeed, touchy feely young man.”

“Who’s spreading gossip?” Jellwagger said.

“So I don’t want anyone who might know you to see you get into an expensive sedan with tinted windows at the direction of a smooth-faced, impeccably dressed individual like Na Cho. Plus, I live in the Roosevelt. If I was making you and Na walk, I didn’t want to make myself walk. Defeats the whole purpose of a convenient rendezvous if both parties are inconvenienced.”

“You live in that huge block of Renaissance Revival that dates back to the twenties?”

“Good for you, Jellwagger. You know your architecture.”

“I’ve worked at Powell and Powler four years now, Sammy T Bone. I don’t always bring my lunch. You walk around the ‘hood, you get to know the various joints around here. Shit, just the other week I had pizza with Roz.”

“So you like reminding everyone. Not that it’s not impressive.”

“And she divulged some pretty fascinating shit about her and her man living and working downtown. Another time, Mr. Lee, another time.”

“It’s a new time for the Roosevelt. In 2008 they turned it into an apartment building, exactly two hundred twenty-two units. Well priced, but they are new, and the location is convenient. It’s not my main home, but it’s a nice pad to have when I have extended business in the city center.”

“Where’s your main home?”

“Where we’re headed now, sir. But actually, I’m not going to take you to my house. I don’t trust you enough just yet to show you that. But we are going to the section of the city where I, Na Cho, and most of the Chexicanos of Los Angeles dwell. It’s an enclave very few know anything about. Some think it’s part of the mostly Latino and unincorporated East Los Angeles. And while it’s not too far from there, it’s nonetheless a separate and distinct entity. Tell me, Jellwagger. Have you ever heard of Chi Wa Wong?”

“What the hell is that?”

Na Cho said something to the driver in Spanish that made them both laugh. Sam T. Lee said something in Chinese which gave all three of them a good hearty laugh for a good hearty minute or two.

“If you don’t want me to get all paranoid and think you’re talking shit about me, you better tell me what you just said,” Jellwagger said.

“We won’t, if you don’t mind,” Sam T. Lee said. “If we told you the truth, we’d only feed and justify your paranoia.”

“Meaning you really were talking smack?”

The driver said something in Spanish that cracked them all up even more.

“Knock that shit off!” Jellwagger said. He brandished his Donald Duck cane at the driver. “Just because Donald and I don’t know your name doesn’t mean we can’t beat the shit out of your smug ass.”

Sam T. Lee put a hand on Jellwagger’s arm and gave a squeeze. Not a cold, threatening squeeze, but a warm, paternal, embracing squeeze. “You’re okay. Even if we are having fun at your expense, it’s harmless. And it’s not like you haven’t done the same to my kind.”

“As a matter of fact, I have not. I didn’t even think you guys actually existed until today.”

“Americans.”

“So what the hell’s this Chi Wong Wong?”

“Chi Wa Wong is an L.A. neighborhood that sits comfortably between Chinatown and East Los Angeles.”

“Perfect. So on one side you’ve got the Chinese and on the other…”

“Exactly.”

“I’m guessing it’s a small neighborhood.”

“True, you won’t find it in the Thomas Guide, but what we lack in presence, we make up for in passion.”

“In more ways than one,” Na Cho called back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jellwagger asked.

Sam T. Lee laughed his cackling laugh. Jellwagger thought it’d be awesome for Sam T. Lee and Pat Dinner to have a contest to see who could break a window first.

No one said anything else, in any language, for the remainder of the ride. If this Chi Wa Wong place was where Sam T. Lee said it was, it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to get there from downtown. And yet it was a good half-hour or more before they finally came to a stop. Thanks to the shenanigans he’d already been through courtesy of a certain on again off again billionaire couple, Jellwagger was developing a sixth sense for shady shit. He figured Sam T. Lee had told his driver ahead of time to take the scenic route to their Chi Wa Wong destination on the off chance, or perhaps very on chance, that they’d be followed.

Jellwagger stepped out to find himself in front of a restaurant called House of Ta Ko. The architecture was a marriage of Spanish adobe and Oriental temple. While you might think such a marriage would repulse, it didn’t at all. Jellwagger stood there and got lost in how the building merged East and West in a manner more subtle than at first glance. “I say,” was all our man could think of saying. Then he managed to get out, “I’ll be God damned, Na,” when Sam’s man appeared next to him. It wasn’t until they were passing through the entrance when Jellwagger noticed the restaurant’s subtitle, if you will, above the doorway in a font he’d never seen before but could only assume at this point to be a marriage of Chinese and Mexican scripts: Your Rice Cantina Home.

Sam T. Lee took the lead when they were inside. The hostess, also Chexican, nodded at Sam T. Lee and Na Cho as they walked past and into the dining room. Much to Jellwagger’s amazement, the clientele wasn’t remotely all Chexican. Almost every race that lived in Los Angeles, which was almost every race period, was represented.

They attracted a significant look from almost every table they passed. Each set of eyes would behold Sam T. Lee and Na Cho with unmistakable awe/reverence/fear, and then move on to Jellwagger with a slightly milder version of the same look. Aw yeah, Jellwagger could get used to this. What must it be like to command that kind of attention wherever you go? Pat and Carla, for all their clout, didn’t possess this kind of mojo.

Sam T. Lee led them to a round table in the center of the huge, vaulted-ceilinged dining room, directly below the skylight. “Have a seat, one and all,” he said, even though Jellwagger and Na Cho were the only others with him. No sooner were they seated than a cute young Chexican waitress brought Sam T. Lee the same kind of light beer he’d had at the Hotel Standard. For Na Cho she brought a club soda. Sam T. Lee nodded at Jellwagger. “And a Lagavulin for my main man here.”

“I resent that remark,” Jellwagger said. To the waitress: “Spaten please.”

No one said anything for the next minute or so. Jellwagger was getting it into his head that they’d eat their lunch and pretend everything was all fine and dandy before, dabbing his mouth from a delicious meal that he’d say reminded him of what his mother made back in the Old World, Sam T. Lee would reveal Jellwagger’s fate, Goodfellas style. But Jellwagger was too tired for this shit. He took a healthy pull from his Spaten before saying: “I’m not going to sit here and pretend everything’s fine and dandy, Sammy T. to the Lee. Why in tarnation have you dragged me here? And by the way, the longer the lunch break, the longer I have to stay tonight. And I really don’t want Chump E. Chips taking a shit on the carpet.”

The cute waitress came back to get their entrée orders. Sam T. Lee went first, followed by Na Cho, and then they all looked at Jellwagger.

“I haven’t a fucking clue. Order something for me, I’ll assume it’s poisoned, and we can get the show on the road.”

“Combo number seven for our guest of honor,” Sam T. Lee told the waitress before handing her the menus.

“What nonsense,” Jellwagger said. “At some point during the meal I’ll black out and wake up in a ditch or in the afterlife. Which could be one and the same.”

“So long as they serve beer in hell, eh?” Sam T. Lee said, raising his light beer.

“You’re not supposed to play along with my paranoia, asshole.”

“Do you have any idea who this is?” Na Cho said.

“Bite me, Na Cho. What, is your sidekick Guac gonna come out and pummel me to death with a Chexican baseball bat?”

“You jest, Jellwagger, but Chexicans do indeed love baseball. I and most of the folks in my employ get season tickets to the Dodgers.”

“But some prefer the Angels,” Na Cho said. “By the way, it’s Gwak with a w and k, and you’ll meet her later.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Sam T. Lee took another pull from his light beer before putting his hands flat on the table. “Now. For the sake of your dog’s intestinal tract, amigo, perhaps I should explain my last-minute lunch invite that didn’t appear in your Outlook. First and foremost, I know Carla sent some photos to you recently. In fact, I’m fairly certain you received them this morning. Am I right?”

“You know something? The first time we met, on the roof of the Hotel Standard…”

“When you were too bashful about taking a dip in the pool…”

“That’s precious, coming from you. Anyway, one of the few things I remember through the Lagavulin haze were your fucking questions.”

Na Cho said something in Chinese.

“Dude, English,” Jellwagger said. “Or, if you’re going to stick with a non-English language, could you at least be consistent? You were speaking Spanish on the drive over, were you not?”

“We choose our language of the moment based on several variables,” Na Cho said, nursing his club soda oh so delicately. “First, you have the general tone. Is the tone playful? Or is it all business? Or somewhere in between? Second, the setting. Are you inside or outside? Also, whom are you addressing? Man or woman? Is said human older or younger?”

“Jesus, really? How have you not been driven nuts by this?”

Sam T. Lee cackled for what seemed like forever. “I’m afraid my main amigo over here is yanking your Valley chain, Jellwagger. He’s not entirely kidding. We bounce between English, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese depending on a few variables, but nothing so intricate.”

Na Cho finished off his club soda with relish and sucked intensely on an ice cube before spitting it out. He signaled the waitress for a refill. “Funny. You don’t think about it, do you? The variables?”

Sam T. Lee cackled on his way to saying, “Hardly!” And then he said the rest of what he had to say in Spanish.

“See?” Jellwagger said. “What the fuck was that? What sorts of variables have to align to get two languages in one go?”

“Well, just as you say ain’t, we break our rules as well.”

“I never say ain’t, Samuel. I’m a writer, and while I remain unknown, unsold, and obscure, I hope you extend me at least a little bit of respect.”

“Back to your previous comment about our first meeting, if my questions seemed pointed to you, it can only be due to having just suffered the biggest suck-ass day ever.”

Na Cho said something in Chinese.

“Jellwagger, Carla Houde sent you some photos. These photos show Pat Dinner with an African-American woman named Kit Figures, yes?”

“Here we are!” The waitress arrived with the food. Sam T. Lee and Na Cho had each ordered tortillas, fried rice, soy sauce, salsa, black beans, and various other thises and thats which, taken together, added up to a hearty representation of their two cultures. Jellwagger found himself suddenly famished taking in the sight and especially the smell of their lunch, all the more so since his own meal looked all but useless. How in Van Nuys was he supposed to eat paper-thin corn chips with chopsticks?

“House of Ta Ko isn’t very forgiving of those who don’t abide by the cultural norms. If you so much as touch one chip with your fingers, I’m making you pay for all our meals. Now you have nice sauces in the middle of your plate there.”

Jellwagger figured he’d practice on one of the flimsy vegetarian enchiladas. It was wide and weighed down with its contents. No sooner did he pluck it up with the chopsticks, gripping it by the middle, than the sides drooped down and spilled the vegetarian innards all over his pants.

Sam T. Lee cackled and Na Cho laughed his annoying laugh which, strangely, now that Jellwagger thought about it, reminded him of Jo. Even worse, though, everyone else in the joint was getting a yuk at our man’s expense.

“Few things bring the populace more pleasure than the sight of a Chexican restaurant virgin. And maybe a restaurant virgin in general.”

“You’re supposed to spread the napkin across your lap,” Na Cho said.

The waitress brought Jellwagger another Spaten.

Jellwagger took a long pull before saying, “Fuck you people,” and picking up his chopsticks and going back at his food with gusto. Through the corner of his eye he saw Sam T. Lee, Na Cho, and seemingly every other face in the joint aimed at him, but he kept his eyes pointed determinedly down at his plate. He broke several chips and attracted more laughter. Undaunted, our intrepid Jellwagger kept it up with the concentration of John McClane crawling through the Nakatomi building’s HVAC system. That “have a few laughs” line seemed especially perfect right about now.

Just as McClane eventually nailed Hans Gruber, so too did Jellwagger finally get a chip from the plate to his mouth without a single crack. And when he did, the cheers and applause almost made it worth it. Next up, he figured out how to fold the flimsy enchiladas in half. He couldn’t put the entire thing in his mouth, but taking a bite and keeping the rest gripped between the chopsticks, sans spillage, was no problem.

“And these photos,” Sam T. Lee said, as if no time had passed since the food arrived. Jellwagger felt like he’d just completed an adventure since then. Or at least an initiation. “Why do you think Carla sent them to you?”

“She and Pat hate each other’s guts.”

“Ooooookay. And?”

“It’s obvious, right? She’s looking for any way to make him look like a fucking idiot.”

“And has she done that?”

“Well, look. You’ve got photos of Pat Dinner, billionaire extraordinaire, hanging out with another woman. Right there in the open.”

“You say other woman as if he’s leaving a woman at home,” Na Cho said.

“Well…” Jellwagger stopped. Damn, this was tricky. He was about to say something about lingering feelings between those two filthy rich slave drivers, made manifest when they fucked each other’s brains out the night he got home from Valley Presbyterian and exposed Grant’s fling with Stu. Jesus, what a night that fucking was.

“Yes?” Sam T. Lee said.

“Well, Pat Dinner’s got all the money in the world. Someone like that never has to spend the night alone if he doesn’t want to. So what if he and Carla fell through and she hates his goddam guts? Surely Pat could find another squeeze in no time. I guess I just assumed he had a special lady friend at home.”

“Money never buys love, Jellwagger. Look at all those filthy rich Hollywood celebrities, better looking and wealthier than most, and yet perfectly miserable, right? You know what that’s called? A clue. And speaking of clues, I’m still searching for why Carla Houde would send you those photos of Pat. It can’t be to out an affair. First, he and Kit Figures are not having an affair. And even if they were, Pat wouldn’t be cheating on anyone. He’s alone. Completely and utterly. It is just Pat and his chronic sickness.”

“I knew something was wrong with him.” Jellwagger was about to ask what ailed Pat when Sam T. Lee forged ahead.

“The reason for those photos, at least the main reason as far as I see it, although there may be others, is to prove to you, amigo, that Kit Figures is alive.”

“Come again?”

“Those photos were taken in the past week.”

“In other words,” Na Cho said, “since she did a Greg Louganis off the Santa Monica Pier.”

Jellwagger finished swallowing his enchilada before digesting Na Cho’s words. He took a swig of Spaten to aid in the cause. Of course they knew who she was. They knew Pat Dinner, and it was Pat who introduced Jellwagger to Kit when he had our favorite L.A.-based data entry clerk deliver that Butterfly McQueen stamp to Kit in the BonaVista Lounge. So why wouldn’t they know Kit? What was driving Jellwagger nuts, though, was the how. How did they know her? How did they know Pat for that matter? Connected to that was Kit’s job. Jellwagger had the woman in his apartment to watch The Fifth Element, and he still had no clue what she did for a living. What did anyone do, for the matter of that? Was Jellwagger the only chump here who had to drag his Jersey-bred ass out of bed to earn a friggin’ paycheck?

“Sam T. Lee. Na Cho. What the hell do you people do for a living?”

The room went silent. Even the Muzak turned off. Once again, all eyes in the joint were aimed at Jellwagger.

Sam T. Lee cleared his throat. “Is it time?”

“Time for what?” Jellwagger said. “You mean I can go?”

But Sam T. Lee was talking to Na Cho, who looked at his watch and said, “Are you ready for Freddy?”

“Listen, guys, it’s been real, but unlike you, I have a paycheck I need to earn or else how in Jersey do I keep the microwave ‘corn flowing, you reading me?”

“Amigo!” Sam T. Lee said, his smile blossoming into another cackle. “We can’t let you leave without dessert. It’ll be a small dessert, we promise, and then we’ll have you back at the comfy confines of Powell and Powler before you can say Chump E. Chips.”

“’The fuck did you know the name of my mutt? I mean, purebred beagle?”

“Hey, Na Cho, send him over,” came a tiny voice out of Na Cho’s watch.

“Copy that,” Na Cho said, still looking at his watch. “The clerk is on his way. I repeat, the clerk is on his way.”

Sam T. Lee cackled. “Oh Na Cho, knock it off. Do we really need to be that formal?”

“She likes it that way.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“What do you mean?”

Sam T. Lee finished off his light beer and signaled for another before saying, “My poor, befuddled amigo, is there a woman who doesn’t play you like a keyboard?”

“Hold up,” Jellwagger said. “Are you talking to someone with that watch, Dick Tracy?”

Sam T. Lee took a big bite of his orange chicken burrito and shook his head at Na Cho. The waitress arrived with his light beer, which he took a quick pull from before forgetting Na Cho and giving Jellwagger his full attention. “Amigo, it’s been lovely having lunch with you. Yes, you’re confused. You have much to figure out.”

“You can say that two times.”

“Not just about the complete mess you’re in with Patrick, with Carla...”

“With you, with Dick Tracy over there…”

“No, no, I don’t mean that whole drama so much as yourself. You need to figure yourself out. Know who you are, Jellwagger, the rest will follow.”

“Gracias, Yoda.”

“And your father.”

“What about the old man?”

“Make peace with his memory. That, amigo, is the first step toward knowing who you are. You can’t make peace with yourself until the decks are clear, if you catch my meaning. Even if your sister Jo is lying to you about what his last words were, so what? Maybe she has a good reason to do that, have you thought about that?”

“What the fuck, Samuel? Do you know Jo?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure. And speaking of pleasure…” Sam T. Lee nodded at something behind Jellwagger, who turned around to see the back of a woman sitting at the bar. She was the only one there. He looked back at Sam T. Lee, who smiled. Na Cho, meanwhile, had already disengaged from the whole conversation. He looked at nothing in particular and cussed under his breath in Spanish and Chinese.

In the interest of ending this weird-ass lunch break as quickly as possible, by far the weirdest lunch break he’d ever taken in his life, Jellwagger got right up and didn’t even bother putting his napkin on the table. It fell to his feet while he pushed the chair back with his legs, harder than necessary to vent some of the pent-up frustration that had been mounting since he sat down. The back of his chair bumped against the back of the diner behind him, but like the napkin on the floor, who gave a shit? The man in that chair said something to Jellwagger, who didn’t give a shit what the guy said. As he wove through the chairs and all the faces looking at him, Jellwagger had the same two words for everyone: “Fuck” and “you.” He must’ve said fuck you a dozen or more times on his way to the bar, using his Donald Duck cane to bop the occasional chair leg just to emphasize how little he gave a shit about any of these people.

“Hey now, Hank Kingsley,” the woman at the bar said as Jellwagger sat next to her. “That’s not a very nice way to introduce yourself.”

“It’s been a super long and frustrating lunch break. My leg’s killing me. I’m wiped out. I just want to finish out the day and get the hell home.”

“Cute cane.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I mean it! It’s adorable. I love Disney. Huge Disney freak, man. You know the Disney marathons? I do those. I’ve got nineteen medals so far. Gwak.”

“So you’re the mysterious Gwak. I was just joking when I said that.”

“I know, I heard everything through Na Cho’s watch.”

“Fuckin’ Gwak, man. That’s awesome.” Only when he shook her hand did Jellwagger bother giving her a good look, and it was a wonder it took him so long. Gwak was gorgeous. If Stefania were Chexican, she’d be Gwak. Jellwagger’s face must’ve betrayed that opinion. Gwak smiled a heart-vaporizing smile and said:

“My pleasure as well.” She nodded at the barkeeper, who slid across two small dishes of flan and two pairs of chopsticks. “Here’s how this works. It’s tricky.” Gwak scooped out a chunk of the flan with her chopsticks.

“Let me guess. Very delicately, lest I invite the wrath of L.A.’s entire Chexican community, I use the chopsticks to eat the flan without any spillage. Correcto?”

“Correcto! But you forgot the fortune. When you’ve eaten about half, you pull the fortune out, very gently of course, and after you read it, you can devour the remaining half of the delicious dessert. Cool beans?”

“By the way, who’s Hank Kingsley?”

“Oh you poor, culturally deprived man. You’ve never watched The Larry Sanders Show with Gary Shandling?”

“Believe it or not, I missed that one.”

“It was a sitcom on HBO. Gary Shandling plays this talk show host Larry Sanders, and Jeffrey Tambor’s the sidekick Hank Kingsley. And Hank’s always like, ‘Hey now!’” She cracked up.

Jellwagger rose to the flan challenge. In no time he was about halfway through it and had the warm, wet, soggy fortune in hand. “A close friend of yours will surprise you in bed.”

“Nice.”

“Yours?”

“Today you will make a new ally in bed.”

“Awesome.”

“So listen, Jellwagger, I didn’t want you returning safe and sound to Powell and Powler without letting you know that Kit’s doing perfectly fine.”

“And that’s why Carla sent me the photos? As comforting as that should be, it’s not very comforting that she’d know I know Kit since that could mean she knows other things I don’t want her to know.”

“That you’re just as much a gopher for Pat Dinner as you are for her?”

“That’s one example, sure.”

“Can’t help you there, Jellwagger, but listen, Kit Figures is a good friend of mine. We’ve been girlfriends since college. And you should know you’re not the reason she did a Greg Louganis off the pier.”

“Why did she then?”

“She’s going through some issues. Seriously fucked up issues.”

“I could’ve guessed that.”

“I shouldn’t say more.”

“I have to admit it was kinda sorta weird when she just showed up at my apartment that one night, but I went with it. We watched The Fifth Element. She even gave me some awesome feedback on Exit the Danish.”

“What the hell’s Exit the Danish?”

“A loaded question for another time. When I’m loaded. But seriously, we hit it off. Of course it helps that she’s from Jersey.”

“Isn’t it inspiring to see that someone can come from New Jersey and still be awesome?”

“Hey now, Hank Kingsley!”

“That was perfect, Jellwagger!”

“You’re from Jersey too, I assume, hence your awesomeness.”

“San Diego. Kit and I met at San Diego State.”

Jellwagger scraped his chopsticks along the sides and bottom of the dish to collect as much flan residue as he could. God damn, this was good.

“Kit says hi, by the way.”

“Can we go see her? I have half a mind to give her the third degree for scaring the shit out of me.”

“You’ll go easy on her, though. Remember, Jellwagger, she’s my dear friend. An offense against her is an offense against me. You don’t want that.” Her smile didn’t waver, nor did her cordial tone of voice. Nonetheless—maybe it was the eyes, although they shone bright as ever—Jellwagger could tell she meant it. If Carla Houde wasn’t someone you crossed, Gwak was someone you didn’t even want to risk blinking at the wrong way.

At this point he had completely polished his flan dish until it looked new again. “I’ve no doubt you people are not ones to fuck with, as we say in Jersey.”

“You people?”

“The Chexican mafia. That’s what you are, right? Like Sam T. Lee’s enforcer or something, the Frank Nitti to his Al Capone?”

“You think I work for Sam?” She cracked up. “Nice one, Jellwagger.”

“Who then?”

“Me, amigo!”

“Come again?”

“I’m what you’d call an independent contractor.”

“It’s funny, Gwak. When I first got here, I was sure Sam T. Lee and Na Cho wouldn’t let me leave alive. Sam T. Lee and Pat Dinner are rivals somehow. I can’t make sense of it. Yet.”

“They get along.”

“Sure, same as any two mafiosos get along since the common enemy is the law. But they’re competitors. The way Sammy T. spoke to me that night at The Standard. I’ll never forget it. He knew my tie to Pat and so accordingly viewed me as a potential threat. Or at least a pest to step on and squash with his hot leather Chexican boot. When we sat down over there, I was convinced they’d poison me. Maybe they already have, but it’s a delayed reaction. It’ll get me in my sleep tonight. And tomorrow Chump E. Chips starves.”

“Oh no, that’s not the Chexican style, Jellwagger,” Gwak said. “It’s already happened.”

“Of course it has, Gwak. Jesus, what are you thinking?” He was taking a pull from his Spaten when he choked it out. “Wait a second, what’s happened?”

“The drug,” she said. “It’s already in your system. But don’t blame Sam or Na. It’s my deal. Sam may own House of Ta Ko, but not everyone here works for him. The bartender, for example. He’s on the Gwak payroll. And I had him drug your flan. That’s why you feel so awesome. It’s a side-effect before the blackout.”

“You did not just say blackout, did you? I’ve got so much work to catch up on.”

She checked her watch. “How are you feeling?”

Jellwagger opened his mouth to say awesome, and that’s when he felt the dumbbells fall on his eyelids. Holy shit, she was right. This whole time, she was the threat. Gwak. The independent contractor.

Gwak never did eat the rest of her flan after reading her fortune. She slid it over to Jellwagger. “Want the rest? It’s not drugged.” She cracked herself up.

Jellwagger looked at the flan. And then he found he didn’t have the strength to look up. Every muscle in his body had gone to bed, which was why he was completely powerless to stop his face from falling.

To be continued...

At the Movies with Governor Tom: 10 from Your Show of Shows

2010-07-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

Now this was a special event! Tonight I ventured down to the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. to see Ten from Your Show of Shows. Ever hear of that? You've got ten skits from Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar and a cast of comedians like Carl Reiner and Imogene Coca. An unknown Mel Brooks was one of the writers on the show.

And guess what? Mel and Carl were here tonight! You believe that? It's kind of hard to emphasize how awesome that is. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks are hands down two of the most legendary comic geniuses pretty much of all time.

While you know who they are, have you ever heard of Your Show of Shows? I'm in my thirties and didn't really know what it was until a couple years ago when I watched a couple episodes on an old VHS collection at my Dad's place in Jersey during my annual Thanksgiving visit. It was a weekly show of comedic sketches. Like Saturday Night Live, each episode was ninety minutes. Sid Caesar didn't actually create it, although you could say he inspired it. The real brain behind Your Show of Shows was Pat Weaver, father of Sigourney Weaver. No, you never saw him on the show, just as you never see Lorne Michaels on SNL. The geniuses devise their plans and then find the charismatic comedians to make it happen. While Your Show of Shows would've been enough to cement Pat Weaver's name in the annals of TV history, this guy did quite a bit more. He wasn't even thirty when he was the producer of Town Hall Tonight, an extremely popular radio comedy program with maestro Fred Allen. It was a weekly show that ultimately became the longest-running hour-long comedy show in radio history. Among the recurring skits was "Town Hall News," which quite clearly had an influence on "Weekend Update" on SNL, not to speak of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In's "Laugh-In Looks at the News," and just about every other faux comedy news skit/program. Shit, just look at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. With a notch like that in his resume, not to speak of the fifteen or so years of broadcast producing experience under his belt in general, it's no wonder NBC hired Pat Weaver to take on CBS.

Pat didn't waste a minute at NBC. He created Your Show of Shows almost right away. And you know The Today Show, which airs every morning to this very day? Yep, that was his baby, as is The Tonight Show. Awesome, huh? What's ironic is that Pat wasn't at NBC all that long, maybe five or six years or so, the last couple of which saw him run the joint. And he did even more as head of NBC, not in terms of creating more awesome shows but more in the way he steered the network's ship. You take programming, for instance. Pat decided NBC should produce its own programming, as opposed to having an ad agency do it, which was common in radio broadcasting and early TV. Pat actually never worked for a radio station. When he produced Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight, he was working for an ad agency called Young & Rubicam. But at NBC he changed the system. NBC would do its own thing....and then sell ad time during broadcasts. Sound familiar? That's pretty much how it's still down today. He never meant to blaze a trail (or rock the ad world's boat). Pat's reasoning was strictly practical. By having an ad agency produce your content, if that agency decides they don't like you for some reason and defects to another radio station or TV network, your station or network's revenue could be impacted severely. Under his new system, of course, a single defecting agency or advertiser wouldn't be as big a deal. Pat was by all accounts a classy guy, a consummate professional. He thought shows should do more than entertain. They should educate a little as well. And so that's why he mandated all shows produced by NBC include something cultural. That could be tricky, right? How do you do that with Your Show of Shows? We got to see at least one example tonight. One of the skits took place at the opera. There ya go. Culture!

Now how about Imogene Coca? You heard of her? If you're a child of the eighties like me, the first time you saw her was in National Lampoon's Vacation. She played Aunt Edna, the one who kicked the bucket during the road trip. Remember when they put her corpse on the roof of the station wagon? At night? In the rain? Classic. I had no idea until much later that she was a comedy legend. About the same age as Pat Weaver, Imogene toughed out her twenties and thirties without much to show for it. It wasn't until the late 1940s, as she herself was approaching forty, that she and Sid hit it off with The Admiral Broadway Revue, which put them on the TV map. That's the show that caught Pat Weaver's eye and inspired him to create Your Show of Shows. After that show's four-year run, Imogene kept working steadily. She even had her own eponymous show, albeit for just one season. She landed a couple other steady TV gigs that carried her through the sixties. From around 1970 onward, she scaled back. Indeed, Vacation is probably the most memorable thing she did in her golden years. All told, Imogene Coca blazed a trail for comediennes. Your Show of Shows scored her a Primetime Emmy for Lead Actress in a Comedy, making her the second woman ever to get that prize. She also scored a Peabody for excellence in broadcasting and got a bunch of Emmy nominations over the years.

It would be crass for me to describe all 10 skits. I could never do justice to the hilarity. I will say, though, that the hilarity doesn't come from datedness or quaintness (i.e. unintentional hilarity), although once in a while that popped up. Most of the comedy is still fresh and clever. But not raunchy. No toilet humor here, and I can't tell you how refreshing that is. One of my favorite skits is the Bavarian clock one. You've basically got this big old clock you sometimes see in German and Swiss towns. When the hour strikes, these little toy figures dressed in lederhosen and dirndls come out and perform some simple little moves before going back into the door beneath the clock face. Well, in this skit, Sid and gang play the little toy figures. Hilarious! Pure. Comic. Genius. And no one says a word. Again, they're toys. Like most comedy, it all comes down to body language and timing. And then you've got the Verdi opera skit I mentioned above. Another skit parodied From Here to Eternity. Anyway, I'll leave you to discover the skits for yourself. I'm not sure if 10 from Your Show of Shows is on DVD, but I do know you can find several different Sid Caesar anthologies on DVD which, like my dad's VHS collection, include these skits.

And now let's get to the rowdy Q&A with two funny old guys with more energy and spunk than folks a quarter their age: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. Suffice it to say they got a standing ovation when they came up front afterward. The first thing Mel talked about was cutting his entertainment teeth at Catskills summer resorts when he was in his teens and twenties. He was what his Jewish ancestors would call a tummler, an MC. Mel became especially known for his awesome celebrity impersonations. But he didn't just do standup. Mel played drums in a band. I had no idea. That's pretty cool. And speaking of the 1940s, here's another thing I didn't know: He served in the U.S. Army during World War II. I guess it makes sense, he'd've been in his late teens in the early forties. But more than just serve, dude saw action at none other than the Battle of the Bulge. That's kind of amazing, actually.

Mel wasn't the only musician/comedian who yukked it up/jammed during the Catskill summers. A comedian and tenor saxophonist named Sid Caesar was also making a name for himself at that same place and time. This is where they met. Think about that. Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar jamming and doing standup. The Catskills must've been a really awesome place to be. Sid's four years older than Mel but was even further ahead than that in his career. He started playing the sax in the Catskills when he was all of fourteen as part of a band called the Swingtime Six. He did standup and performed in sketches as well, but he really wanted to be a musician. He sacrificed a lot toward that end, quitting his job and living poor while taking classes at Julliard and whatnot. A Swan Lake, Catskills hotel called Vacationland was where he got the most gigs. As for his involvement in the war, Sid joined the Coast Guard but didn't see any action. He was basically an entertainer, putting on military revues in Brooklyn. And you want more networking? Enlisted on the same base at the same time was Vernon Duke, the man behind Autumn in New York and Taking a Chance on Love, among other things. Sid and Vernon were transferred to a base in Palm Beach, Florida to do another military revue. The director of that show was Max Liebman...who would later go on to produce Your Show of Shows. See how it all comes together?

As much as Sid wanted to play sax, everyone, including him, knew he was better at comedy. Max Liebman became a sort of mentor to Sid following the war. He helped him develop material and land representation at William Morris, then and now one of the hottest talent agencies in the country. With reps like that, Sid landed gigs right away, mostly in New York. And then of course it was time for Your Show of Shows. Tonight Mel made no bones about it. The only reason he knew Sid was because of their jamming together in the Catskills, even being in the same band at one point. And it was only because of Sid that he landed the writing job on Your Show of Shows. Networking!

While Sid took a shining to Mel, Max Liebman didn't. Mel didn't say why, but apparently Max couldn't stand him. He'd even throw lit cigarettes at our man Mel. You might wonder why Max didn't just fire him. Well, Sid wouldn't allow it. And in the end everything went Sid's way since there'd be no show without him. Mel said his first day on the job saw him literally wander into the theater like a hobo off the street. As the producer of the show, Max was accustomed to interviewing and vetting everyone who wanted to be on the writing staff, but Sid had basically guaranteed Mel the job. The theater, by the way, was the International Theatre on Columbus Circle. Don't bother looking for it today. Like too many historic theaters, the International (also called the Park Theatre) was torn down.

Sid may have been Mel's champ, but he had quite the temper too, apparently. Mel called working for Sid "mostly heaven with a little bit of hell." One anecdote he shared was when they were touring Chicago. Mel and Sid were up late in their hotel room. Sid was chain smoking cigars. Finally, when it was really late, Mel complained that he was exhausted and couldn't breathe from all the cigar smoke. Could they just call it a night? Guess how Sid responded. He literally picked up Mel and held him out the eighth floor window until Mel agreed they could work a little more. It wasn't as abrupt as it sounds. Mel said the whole night Sid was frustrated at the tepid responses his jokes got from the Chicago crowd the previous night. You won't think the whole balcony incident is farfetched when you see Your Show of Shows. Sid was a big mutha. And if you've seen Mel onscreen once, you know he's just a little guy. Other examples of Sid's temper in action include picking up a car that was parked in a spot he considered his, by the curb in front of the International Theatre. When someone else parked there on another occasion, he didn't have the patience to pick up the car or go looking for another spot. So he double parked. Lest we think Sid was a complete monster, Mel and Carl emphasized that he had a great sense of humor about his blowups. He was terrific at making fun of his crazy temper and even parodied himself in some of the sketches on Your Show of Shows.

One big reason Your Show of Shows has become so legendary is all the genius writers who got their start there. Mel Brooks is a shining example, of course, but did you know Neil Simon was a staff writer? Yep. And so was his older brother Danny Simon. Danny didn't find the success his kid brother found in the theater, but he did okay for himself with TV. After Your Show of Shows, he eventually landed writing gigs on My Three Sons, The Carol Burnett Show as well as two shows I grew up on in the eighties, Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life. Danny was quite the influence on Woody Allen, who said about him: "I've learned a couple things on my own since and modified things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from him." Speaking of Woody, Mel and Carl said he did not in fact write for Your Show of Shows. Lots of people think Woody did because he did, in fact, help write some of those one-off specials for Sid after Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour went off the air.

Larry Gelbart was a staff writer as well. In terms of TV work, he is by far best known for M*A*S*H. He adapted the original Robert Altman film for the small screen and also wrote and directed a bunch of episodes. M*A*S*H scored Larry a Peabody as well as an Emmy. He did okay with movies as well. Larry wrote the script for Oh, God! with George Burns (I loved that movie when I was a kid) and co-wrote Tootsie, both of which earned him Oscar nominations.

Just to show you how chockfull of writing talent Your Show of Shows was, Mel and Carl said the office secretary was a twentysomething guy named Michael Stewart. Know who that is? Me neither until Mel and Carl revealed that Michael Stewart's the playwright responsible for Broadway smashes like Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly!. Wow, huh? And he wasn't even writing for the show. He was just the stinkin' typist! It paid the bills while he pursued his MFA from Yale School of Drama. He got the degree around the time Your Show of Shows ended. When Sid started Caesar's Hour the following year, he brought Michael along, this time as a staff writer.

Carl reminded us that, while Your Show of Shows was a TV hit, the TV medium itself was still very new. People weren't "obsessed" with TV the way they can be today. No, theater was the place to be. That's why most entertainers back then went to New York, not Hollywood, to get their start. And that's why Your Show of Shows was broadcast not from a soundstage in Burbank, but from a theater on Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Even today I sometimes hear a veteran actor saying that aspiring actors, even if they are aiming for TV and film, should understand the stage first. When I saw Samuel L. Jackson at the Aero for a double feature of Resurrecting the Champ and Black Snake Moan in December 2007, someone in the audience asked him what advice he had for young actors: "Go to New York," I remember him saying, just like that. Not just for the stage experience. Sam said that in New York, where everything's closer together, you have a better sense of community. It's easier to be part of a social group of actors, whereas in L.A. it's more spread out and competitive.

When asked what they like on TV today, both Carl and Mel gushed over Family Guy. As for today's comedians, Mel's a fan of Steve Carrell. He also gave a shout-out to Dave Chapelle, whom he discovered when he cast him in the early nineties for Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Chapelle was only twenty at the time. I saw that in the theater with my mom and remember cracking up at Chapelle's "White men can't jump" line. Most people of course know him from Chapelle's Show, which ran for a good three strong years before he bailed to South Africa. I really liked his Block Party film, a concert doc he made in Brooklyn about six months or so before his abrupt departure from Comedy Central but which wasn't released until after he returned to the States. He still does standup but otherwise stays out of the limelight, living with his wife and kids in the same area of Ohio where he visited his father as a child. "I miss him," Mel said.

At the Movies with Governor Tom: The Kids Are All Right

2010-07-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko arrived on my radar in 1998 with her critic-proof debut feature, High Art. The main reason I saw it was Ally Sheedy. I grew up in the eighties watching her in stuff like War Games, St. Elmo's Fire, Oxford Blues, The Breakfast Club, Short Circuit... She was awesome. I loved her smile and how she laughed. Trite as it may sound, Ally Sheedy always lit up the scene. And then the nineties happened, to her and to me. She continued working, I guess, just not in anything I was watching. Then again, I wasn't watching much. The first four years of the nineties saw me in high school. The next four, college. Luckily, studying film in college expanded my interests to include low-budget indie fare, just in time for Ally Sheedy to reemerge, so to speak. I wouldn't've blinked twice at a movie like High Art before college, but after college, I couldn't get enough indie. I was a celluloid astronaut discovering a new world teeming with ineffable life. I didn't have a chance to catch High Art during its theatrical run which, like all too many indies, wasn't very long. So I ended up renting it at some point during my first year at SC, 1998-99. I have to be honest, in spite of Ally Sheedy and all the terrific press it had garnered, High Art was tough for me to watch that first time. The plot doesn't exactly zoom ahead, if you catch my drift. Plus, Ally Sheedy wasn't the Ally Sheedy I remembered.

She plays this wreck named Lucy Berliner. The backstory has her as a photographer who became a living legend in the New York art scene. But then the fame became too much and she went AWOL in Europe. When the film starts, she's back in New York with a German girlfriend named Greta, but her (former) fans in New York have no idea she's back. Lucy just happens to live in a flat above the main character, Syd, played by the underrated Ozzie actress Radha Mitchell. Syd's an assistant editor/gopher at a photography magazine. When she learns that Lucy Berliner lives right above her, she's shocked. The legend is here! But then it gets interesting. She sees that Lucy's not into photography anymore. She's listless, idle, on drugs. Totally unmotivated. And then they start falling for each other, much to Greta's chagrin. And by the way, let me give a shout-out to Patricia Clarkson as Greta. You talk about one of the best examples of an actress cast against type. Here you have a Southern belle from Nawlins playing a smoky-voiced German junky who always seems like she's about to nod off (and sometimes does). Soon enough you forget this is Patricia Clarkson. I know Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell got the props for their performances, as they should have, but Patricia Clarkson is the unsung hero here. Her very believable jealousy helps spur the same plot I had a hard time discerning at first. Yes, I've seen High Art a few more times, and it gets better each time. The plot is actually very visible, and equally simple, as the best plots tend to be. Indeed, High Art's plot is perfect. Each scene serves a purpose when the film is viewed holistically. Not to waste a single scene is a rare thing.

Another thing film school has made me do is follow directors. Most folks don't give two hoots about the credits beyond the leading actors. I'm not most folks when it comes to movies, though, as this blog makes abundantly clear. I very much pay attention to who directed a piece, who wrote it, who photographed it, who composed the score, all that stuff. So naturally, after High Art, I had to keep tabs on Lisa Cholodenko's career. Her follow-up was 2002's Laurel Canyon, which also got rave reviews. This time I didn't dawdle. I caught a weekend matinee show of it at the local art house near me in the Valley. Two years later she did a flick called Cavedweller, produced by and starring Kyra Sedgwick (Mrs. Kevin Bacon) just before she started that series The Closer. Somehow I missed Cavedweller. It's possible it got an extremely limited run or, as happens quite a bit with indies, went straight to DVD. I keep meaning to get to it but, like a lot of things, I get sidetracked by this pest called life. I'll get to it, though. It's already on my queue. After that, I'll've seen all her films, including her fourth and, unless Cavedweller is spectacular, best one yet: The Kids Are All Right. I just saw it today at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks. And yes, Lisa Cholodenko was there afterward for a Q&A.

I won't spoil the plot for you, but if you've seen the trailer, you already know the crux of the problem here. You've got a lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. They have a daughter and son who were both conceived by artificial insemination. The daughter, Joni, has just turned eighteen and wants to take advantage of her newfound right to look up the man who donated the sperm. (Side note: That gal who plays Joni's friend Sasha is Zosia Mamet, David Mamet's daughter by Lindsay Crouse.) As luck would have it, the biological father, Paul (the always dependable Mark Ruffalo) lives nearby. He runs this great restaurant and bar with a menu entirely informed by the produce he harvests himself. Lest you think he's a total do-gooder, Paul's also a sort of Casanova. Among many other women rotating through his sex life is one of his waitresses, Tanya. He's never been married, which suits his bohemian lifestyle just fine. Soon enough, of course, he meets the two kids and takes a shining to them. They don't want their moms to know, but of course they have to know if this plot's going to get any thicker. Paul comes over and they all have dinner at the family's beautiful house. At first it seems like Paul might be just the distraction the couple needs to escape the tension we noticed between them at the start of the film. Annette Bening's Nic is a whip-smart, if high strung, doctor. Very type A and focused. Julianne Moore's Jules, meantime, is a landscape designer, a creative and free spirit, pretty much the exact opposite of Nic. During that first dinner with Paul, Jules talks about her landscaping business. This perks up Paul's ears. He talks about growing his own food and that he's all into gardening and whatnot but has never had the time to give his backyard the attention it deserves. Would Jules be interested? Sure she is! You can tell Nic's not crazy about the idea, but Jules doesn't care. So she starts working for Paul. The chemistry between Jules and Paul is palpable. For one thing, Jules loves how Paul is so interested in her work. Nic’s never shown any such interest. Can you see where this is going? Yep, Jules and Paul have an affair, which you know Nic, smart as she is, is bound to uncover.

I'll stop there. Sounds juicy, huh? You should definitely see this. Special shout-out to Annette Bening. She was absolutely brilliant. I totally forgot that she was the cutie with whom Michael Douglas's President became all smitten in The American President, or that she was Virginia Hill in Bugsy. I also liked her in Being Julia a few years ago. Her choice of roles is awesome. It's like she's always trying to throw her fans a wickedly fun curve ball.

Today's Q&A was conducted by this guy named Ari Karpel, a New York-based writer who co-runs Modern Tonic, a blog for "gay-approved pop culture gems before they've been co-opted by everyone else." He also contributes to the New York Times Movie section. The first thing he asked Lisa Cholodenko was where she grew up. As it turns out, she's a Valley girl. More than that, she's from Sherman Oaks, where today's screening took place. "I grew up five minutes from here," she said. That's cool. I'm not sure I've ever been to a screening with a director who hailed from the same neighborhood as the movie theater, not to speak of the movie itself, at least some of which was shot in the Valley.

The first movie-related question Ari asked was why Lisa hired Stuart Blumberg to help her write the script, a clear break from the trend of her earlier three films, which she wrote by herself in addition to directing. Lisa said it was specifically because she'd written her first three features by herself that she didn't want to write her fourth one alone. Now that she's done the solo thing three times, she's decided she doesn't like it. Plus, she credits Stuart, a MADtv veteran, with having a more mainstream comedy sensibility, better equipped to craft scenes with solid comedic timing that would appeal to a broad audience. Going back to how I called High Art challenging, that's another thing Lisa's gotten tired of, writing stuff that's challenging and therefore won't make much money. She stated quite bluntly how bothered she was that more people didn't see High Art and Laurel Canyon even though both did very well at the festivals and got all that great press. So for The Kids Are All Right, she stepped out of her comfort zone and took deliberate aim at the mainstream and brought Stuart aboard so she wouldn't feel too insecure.

Lisa also had personal reasons for approaching Stuart. They've known each other since their college days in New York back in the eighties (Lisa studied film at Columbia). She said that when he was in college, Stuart donated sperm to make some extra cash. As I said above, the backstory with Mark Ruffalo's character Paul is that he too donated sperm when he was in college because he was strapped for cash. And so, in addition to the reasons already given, Lisa brought on Stuart to help make the Paul character more believable. Lisa, meanwhile, drew from her own experiences for the Nic and Jules characters. She didn't go into it too much since it is, after all, personal, but she and her partner Wendy used an anonymous sperm donor to have their four-year-old son Calder. Now you'll know what it means during the credits when you see the film was dedicated to "Wendy and Calder."

The film's title was originally just a working title. Lisa liked the ironic title of the 1979 The Who concert doc. She slapped it on this project, and it stuck. One clue as to why her films are spaced so widely apart came when Ari asked her about raising money for the film. I quote Lisa when I say fundraising for Kids was "miserable." She didn't elaborate on that too much. I have a feeling having done so would've brought hard feelings back to the surface. Suffice it to say she shouldered the fundraising responsibilities by herself. And of course Calder is another reason it's been a while since Cavedweller. Lisa and Wendy have been fulltime parents since 2006.

Talk about anticlimax, Lisa said after all the time since her last film, and after all the time it took to raise money for Kids, shooting the film hardly took more than three weeks. Twenty-three days to be exact. That's incredibly fast for a feature film, but she didn't have much choice. The longer you keep stars who are in high demand, the more you'll have to pay them. The tight budget decreed a tight schedule, in other words. She stated quite plainly that if she'd had more money, she would've been happy to pace herself with a less intense schedule. She also admitted how pessimistic she was during the shoot. It could get so chaotic sometimes that she was convinced she'd miss well wide of the mainstream mark. But sure enough, as she was putting a rough cut together, she became "pleasantly surprised."

Even though it only officially came out last week, she did get to show it at Sundance six months ago. That meant working through the holidays to put the final touches on the film so it would be in tip top shape. It paid off. Focus Features scooped it up before she left Park City. Thanks to that and the week it's officially been out, Lisa said she's been blown away by the huge cross-section of people who've seen it and responded favorably. She's had kids come up to her and rave about it. That's interesting. I wonder if I would've watched this as a kid. I reckon so. Joni and Laser aren't the main characters, but Lisa still does a decent job conveying their sympathetic points of view. And so now, after all the hardship and cynicism, Lisa admitted to being "cautiously hopeful" that Kids will be her first film to achieve mainstream commercial success. With a budget of about four million, tiny by mainstream Hollywood standards, I'd be shocked if this doesn't turn a profit.

As for how she was able to corral such a great cast together, Lisa said it started with Julianne Moore. They've known each other a good while now and have always talked about making a movie together. But Julianne Moore is, after all, Julianne Moore which, coupled with Lisa's methodical MO of building a film from the ground up, meant the planets had to align just so if they were ever going to work together. When Lisa and Stuart were happy with the script, they sent it to Julianne as a shot in the dark. Julianne loved it....and was available. In fact, it was her idea to cast Annette Bening as Nic. The only problem was that Lisa didn't know Annette. Neither did Julianne, but somehow Julianne knew Annette's e-mail address and pinged her about the script. Hilarious, huh? Simple as that. Just shoot an e-mail to Annette friggin' Bening to see if she wants to read a script. I know Lisa feels down on her luck sometimes, but do you have any idea how many writers and directors would love to have connections like that?

Annette's coming aboard, though, did have its proviso: She wanted to work on the script some more. Lisa said Annette peppered her with questions about the story and the characters. With Annette's motivation, the three of them really anatomized the script, which Lisa said was another reason pre-production took a while. Someone in the audience asked if the actresses' husbands visited the set. Lisa's response: "The one you're thinking of did not." But Julianne's man, indie filmmaker Bart Freundlich, stopped by now and again.

Another person in the audience asked how the three leads prepared for their roles. Simple, Lisa said. All three actors have been married a good while now. All they had to do was bring their life experiences, which is what Lisa did when she wrote it.

An older woman in the audience was confused about how Julianne Moore's lesbian character could suddenly like a guy. "How could she suddenly turn bisexual?" she asked. I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. Lisa shot that down, albeit politely, as did Ari. They're both gay and said as nicely as they could that what Julianne Moore's character does is, in fact, very believable.

At the Movies with Governor Tom: Cyrus

2010-07-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

If you're a movie buff, you can appreciate the perk that is living in L.A. This is where all the people who make the movies live, so the fact that they appear at a movie theater following a show is no big deal, right? It's a quick and easy drive. Well, not necessarily quick and easy. Again, it's L.A. Anywho, this perk crops up time to time in the form of these impromptu, almost last-minute announcements by the ArcLight Hollywood that so-and-so from such-and-such new film will be at the ArcLight following a particular show on a Friday or Saturday night.

And so it was a few days ago when they announced on their site that actor John C. Reilly and the writing-directing brothers Jay and Mark Duplass would be at the ArcLight Hollywood this Saturday after a screening of the new film Cyrus, which stars John as well as the always adorable Marisa Tomei and the always hilarious Jonah Hill. I'd seen previews of Cyrus a few times before tonight, and it was hard to know what to make of it. Obviously it was a chance for Jonah Hill to expand a little bit, because one thing the preview made clear was that, while he was still flexing some comedic muscle, he was also supposed to make you squirm a little with his character's deadpan weirdness.

The gist of the story is this. John C. Reilly's this guy named, yes, John. Like a lot of characters the real John's played, the fictional John's sort of a sad sack who couldn't buy a break even if he had all the money in the world. When the film starts, we find him seven years divorced from this gal Jamie, played by the always awesome and dependable Catherine Keener. The way we meet John and Jamie is hilarious. It's one of those very bold, in-your-face type scenes that you'd only see in a movie starring talent like this. And that's all I'll say about John C. Reilly's intro in this film. John and Jamie are great pals. Seven years is long enough for them to get over their marriage's collapse and reestablish some amicable relations. More than that, though (and this you don't see often, in films or in life), Jamie's become his best friend and confidant.

In addition to introducing us to John and Jamie in hilarious fashion, that first scene also gets the main narrative going. Jamie convinces a gloomy John to go to the party she's throwing with her fiancé Tim, played by comedian Matt Walsh, one of the brains behind the Upright Citizens Brigade. He's always a stitch. You've definitely seen him if you've seen anything directed by Todd Phillips, one of our great comedy directors today: Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, School for Scoundrels, The Hangover. Matt's awesome as Jamie's new squeeze, and of course his character helps you sympathize with John. Not surprisingly, John gets wasted at the party and makes a scene of himself. Most folks keep their distance...

...except Molly (Marisa Tomei). She's not only not weirded out by John, she takes a shine to him. Much to the surprise of just about everyone, including and especially John, they hit it off. They start going out and eventually start sleeping together. But here's the thing: They always sleep at John's place. And then Molly gets up really early to head back home. At first, John's okay with it, but of course over time he's going to think it's kind of weird. Is she married or what? And so one morning he follows her home and stakes out the place and eventually meets the other man in Molly's life: Her twenty-one-year-old son Cyrus, played by Jonah Hill. An aspiring musician, Cyrus has this whole studio setup in the house. That scene where he plays a demo while staying so deadpan is something few people can pull off.

While at first John and Cyrus get along, Cyrus catches on that he's not going to see much of Mom anymore if her relationship with John continues. So what does he do? He becomes a masterpiece of passive aggression. I won't spoil the fun for you, but suffice it to say John doesn't take the shenanigans lying down. The meat of the film becomes this tête-à-tête of passive aggression between John and Cyrus. They use every devious and underhanded scheme they can concoct at the other's expense while maintaining a hunky dory facade for Molly.

After the show, John C. Reilly and the Duplass brothers came out for a very casual Q&A. The ArcLight didn't provide a moderator like they sometimes do. It was just the three of them standing up front taking turns with the mic. They're very down to earth dudes. John said one of the things that attracted him to Cyrus right off the bat was that it didn't take place in, as he called it, "fantasy Westside L.A.," a sentiment that struck a chord with me as well as many others in the audience judging by the laughter and applause. You know what he means if you live in L.A. It's similar to the fantasy New York depicted in Friends, where you've got young people with low level jobs living in a huge awesome apartment that you'd be hard pressed to find in the real Big Apple. And if you did find one, chances are you couldn't afford it.

John was born and bred in Chicago. He talked about that a little bit and about eventually moving out here when his career got going in the nineties, shortly after Brian De Palma discovered him while casting Casualties of War and expanded his role to accommodate his talent. One interesting thing he said was that ever since he and his wife, a producer he met during the Casualties of War shoot in Thailand, moved out here, they've lived on the Eastside. That is, the section of L.A. east of downtown and which has historically been very Latino. Of course, the city and county of Los Angeles have significant Latino populations, but East L.A. goes further. It's almost all Latino. You ever see Cheech's Born in East L.A.? Exactly. I don't think I've ever met a Hollywood star who made it a point to live in East L.A. because they considered it the real L.A. That's awesome.

As for Cyrus, he didn't say where his character was supposed to be living. In retrospect, though, I think it was East L.A. He and the Duplass brothers did point out that Cyrus and his mom lived in Highland Park. Like East L.A., Highland Park is one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, located to the immediate north-northeast of downtown. It became largely Latino in the latter half of the twentieth century but has recently experienced some gentrification. Like nearby Echo Park and Eagle Rock, Highland Park's got a lot going on these days. You've got long-time Latino families as well as the so-called hip, urban youth, dive bars and clubs that only those in the know would know about, all that stuff. It looked like Marisa Tomei's house was one of those historic homes restored in the late twentieth century at the start of the gentrification. It was a pretty nice house, actually.

So with his character living in East L.A. and his love interest in nearby Highland Park, John could relate to the fictional John. And no doubt it was nice to go to a film shoot and then go home to his family at the end of the day. That was another thing he mentioned, how he looks for opportunities to make films in L.A., not just to stay close to his family, but to support the local economy. A recurring theme in the local news is the anxiety about producers taking their projects elsewhere because it's cheaper. Speaking of which, John's about to leave L.A. for Ann Arbor to make a comedy called Cedar Rapids. He'll be in a supporting role this time, the main character played by that guy from The Hangover who had the chipped tooth. The dentist guy. Besides the fact that Cedar Rapids is set in that general vicinity, John said the main reason for the location was a 42% tax break offered by the Michigan Film Commission.

As for his fellow cast mates, John said he knew he'd like working with Jonah because they'd already worked together on Walk Hard, so it was sort of like picking up where they left off. Now Marisa Tomei, he'd never met before. Not only that, they didn't meet until two days before the shoot began. When their characters have that first dinner together, it takes some effort to feel at ease in each other's presence. According to John, that awkwardness wasn't all acting. That was the first scene they shot. John said it's one of his favorite scenes in the film. The night they shot the dinner scene was the first time they got to hang out and "look each other in the eye," he said.

When someone asked the Duplass brothers where they got the idea for the story, they said at first they weren't sure. They just sorta thought of it out of thin air. But as they continued writing and rewriting the script, they came to the uncomfortable realization that Jonah's attachment to his mother mirrored their attachment to each other. They each went through a string of girlfriends who had a hard time cracking their wall until finally finding the right gals.

All three wives were here tonight, as were the Duplass brothers' mom and John and his wife Alison's moms, sitting up at the front railing. It was actually thanks to Alison, the indie producer John fell for while filming Casualties of War, that he met the Duplass brothers. Alison Dickey is still very much in the indie scene, and she'd already gotten to know the Duplass brothers over the years due to their attending the same film festivals. The brothers made a Sundance splash in January 2005 with Puffy Chair, which went on to win the audience award at SXSW. It's got a pretty interesting premise. You've got this guy who discovers a chair for sale on eBay that looks just like an old lounge chair his dad used to have in the beforetimes. It was Dad's favorite chair. So he buys it and convinces his brother to go on a road trip with him to pick up the chair and deliver it to Dad. Mark Duplass plays one of the brothers. And the father is played by their real father. Puffy Chair has that same inspiring backstory you may have heard already if you follow indie films. Like many first-time indie features, such as Kevin Smith's Clerks, Puffy Chair was made for next to nothing, $15,000 to be exact, which barely constitutes chump change in the biz. The brothers did what a lot of first-timers do to raise the money. They used credit cards and any donations they could get from friends and family.

Alison's a big fan of the film and of the brothers’ work in general. But apparently it took quite a bit of coaxing to get John to sit down and watch Puffy Chair. She was determined to get him to watch it before introducing him. So he finally watched it, and sure enough, Alison got them all to meet at a festival. John and the brothers hit it off, and eventually they sent him the script for Cyrus. In fact, they said they wrote the script with John in mind and wouldn’t have made it had he said no. Jonah was the second one to be cast. At first, it was supposed to be more of a straight-up comedy, but Jonah surprised them with that dark edge he brought to the role. The brothers really dug it and just went with it. “It was a whole new Jonah,” one of them said.

When someone asked the brothers about their documentary shooting style, the handheld shots and shaky camera movements and how scenes are never perfectly blocked, they said it started with a short film they made in 2003 called, appropriately in light of tonight, This Is John. They only used handheld for that film because they had neither the time nor the budget for fancy setups with dollies and cranes and what have you. This Is John did well, not only on the festival circuit, but in terms of meeting their own personal standards, which is more important if you’re an artist. This Is John wasn’t their first film, but they said it was the first film they made that they thought was good. So they’ve used handheld ever since.

Another question posed to the brothers was about improv. This is something that always comes up with comedies, but no two comedies are alike. Some directors mandate their cast follow the script to the T. Others use the script less as a stone commandment and more as a general guide. Consistent with their casual way of shooting films, the Duplass brothers do allow for improv. They told John not to sweat it if he didn’t have all the lines memorized and that he could ad lib where he saw fit. One example is the scene early on where John’s spending the night at their place. He and Jonah have a little chat when Marisa Tomei’s not around. On the surface, the chat seems harmless, but the subtext is that John and Jonah’s characters are feeling each other out. And then at one point Jonah goes, “Don’t fuck my mom.” John’s response? “Actually, I already did.” That scene was almost entirely improvised.

They also talked about the voiceover that John provides now and again. I thought it worked fine. But according to John and the two brothers, the voiceover was an instance of making lemonade from lemons. The actors read all the lines right, but after the rough cut was put together, they discovered that some of the scenes didn’t work on their own. Hence the voiceover. The brothers gave a big shout-out to their editor Jay Deuby. He’s basically their unsung hero, not only on this film but in general. Jay’s been with them a while now. He edited a short they did called The New Brad, and he also did Puffy Chair. Indeed, the Duplass brothers echoed what I’ve heard a lot of directors say at these Q&As: The film is really made in the editing room. I forget who it was, but I remember another director saying that you make the film three times: Writing, shooting, and editing. The Duplass brothers said to make no mistake, Jay Deuby rescued a lot of their scenes in Cyrus.

One question I would've asked if someone hadn't beaten me to it was: How in the heck did the legendary director brothers Ridley and Tony Scott get involved? A flick like Cyrus is ostensibly miles away from the stuff they normally do. Especially Tony Scott. If you've never heard of him, I can all but guarantee you've seen something by him, especially if you're partial to action movies starring Denzel Washington. Unstoppable, Deja Vu, Man on Fire, Crimson Tide: All Tony. His first big film was Top Gun. He also did Days of Thunder, which was basically Top Gun with race cars. My favorite film from him is True Romance. Of his more recent stuff, I really liked Domino, although I have to admit some of that hyper-stylistic camera work gets a bit fatiguing. Now his brother Ridley Scott's a bit more diverse. If only a bit. He's still partial to action, only his action tends to be more epic. Think Gladiator, American Gangster, Robin Hood, Kingdom of Heaven. But once in a while he'll surprise you, like with Matchstick Men or A Good Year or even Hannibal. Alien and Blade Runner are two of my faves from his oeuvre. The Duplass brothers said their involvement was thanks mainly to an indie producer named Michael Costigan. In addition to being a producer in his own right, this guy runs the Scott brothers' production company, Free Scott Productions. With the Free Scott banner, the brothers Scott produce not only films (mostly the films they direct) but also TV shows, such as The Good Wife. Michael Costigan runs their office and sometimes exec-produces indie fare of his own, like Brokeback Mountain, in addition to stuff directed by the Scotts, like Robin Hood, American Gangster, and Body of Lies. The Duplass brothers said Michael Costigan was their champion for Puffy Chair and was the reason it achieved the visibility it did. After that success, he told the brothers that no matter what they did next, he, and by extension Free Scott Productions, wanted to be involved. Hence the Scott names appearing in the Cyrus credits. The Duplass brothers said one nice thing about Michael and the Scott brothers was that they didn't pressure them to forgo shooting in L.A. in favor of a cheaper locale.

And that does it for a pleasant night at the ArcLight Hollywood to see a great, quirky little movie. After tonight, I feel motivated to add Puffy Chair to my queue to see what all the fuss is about.

Last Remaining Seats: Peter Pan

2010-06-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

Another season of Last Remaining Seats comes to a close. Per the tradition, they capped it off at the Orpheum for a silent movie with live organ accompaniment. In this case, it was the 1924 film adaptation of Peter Pan. Robert Israel provided the soundtrack on the Mega Mother Wurlitzer (officially the Mighty Wurlitzer, but Mighty doesn't do that behemoth justice), as he always does. And as he did at the American Graffiti screening three weeks ago, he provided the pre-show music (7pm-8pm), another poignant reminder of Bob Mitchell's passing last year. If you read my post on American Graffiti, you might remember my aside on the inestimable Mr. Mitchell. Instead of hearing me gush about him again, though, let me give it to you straight from tonight's program. The L.A. Conservancy dedicated tonight's showing of Peter Pan to Bob, and inside the program they have the following obit.

Los Angeles icon and great friend of the Conservancy Bob Mitchell passed away last year on July 4, 2009 at age 96. A highly accomplished musician, Bob played piano and organ at Last Remaining Seats for years, starting with the very first season in 1987 and ending with last year's opening night, May 27, 2009, one of his last performances [Note from Tom: The movie that night was The Sting].

Born in Los Angeles on October 12, 1912, Bob started playing piano at age four and played the organ by age ten. In 1924, the twelve-year-old got a job playing organ at the Strand Theatre in Pasadena, where he improvised scores for silent films. Though his silent movie career seemingly ended at age sixteen with the emergence of talkies, Mitchell would go on to revive the accompanist's place in cinema sixty years later in the early 1990s, playing weekly at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue.

A classically trained organist, at age eighteen Bob became the youngest candidate to receive the degree of Fellow of the American Guild of Organists. He also won a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music and the New York College of Music. In 1934, Bob became the organist at St. Brendan's Catholic Church in Los Angeles. He founded the Mitchell Choirboys (also known as the Mitchell Singing Boys), which continued for nearly seventy years. The group performed in more than 100 films, toured extensively, and made thousands of radio and TV appearances. It was also one of the first racially integrated professional choirs in the United States.

During World War II, Bob served in the Navy and played the keyboard for the Armed Forces Radio Orchestra. Back in Los Angeles, he served as music director for many religious institutions, staff pianist/organist at several radio and television stations, and the first house musician for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Bob was widely admired as a man of deep faith, boundless energy, and extreme generosity. Through his performances at Last Remaining Seats, he gave countless fans a great gift beyond even his music: an authentic connection to the history of Los Angeles and the movies. The Conservancy is grateful for having Bob as part of our family for so many years. We greatly miss him.

Awesome, huh? I'm glad they chose tonight's screening for his dedication. Of course, it makes perfect sense given the venue and that they were showing a silent movie, but still, I'm glad because tonight was one my favorite LRS screenings so far. Not only was this one of the most loyal adaptations of Peter Pan, it was one of those silent films where the audience gets involved. Robert Israel gave us the heads-up about that after Orpheum owner Steve Needleman gave a little talk. After the lights went down at 8pm, Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave her welcome spiel before introducing Steve. He talked about the Mighty Wurlitzer and all the time and effort and care they've put into maintaining it. He said they're still using the original pipes that came with this bad boy when it was installed here in 1928, when the Orpheum was all of two years old. One modification they recently made to it, Steve said, was connecting said original pipes to a computer. The Mighty Wurlitzer is connected to the computer as well. In other words, the computer is now the Mighty Wurlitzer's go-between, and this apparently helps maximize the organ's sonic power. I guess that's cool. I'm not a music expert so I'm not sure I'd know the difference with or without a computer. No mistake, though, Steve went on for several minutes about how much time and effort it took to do the whole computer thing. This is the first time he's shown his face at this event since I started coming two years ago, so it must've been a project and a half.

After Steve talked, Robert Israel talked about what an awesome man and mentor Bob Mitchell was, and that any hope he had of filling those shoes were nil. I certainly don't envy him having to do the pre-show entertainment in addition to the live accompaniment. Even though he is the crème de la crème in the organ biz, he, like every other organist, is a pygmy next to Bob. This is when Robert gave us the heads-up that he was going to have us whoop like Indians at one point in the film. He didn't say when that scene would be, and quite frankly it had been too long since I'd seen any Peter Pan adaptation to remember at what point Hook's men pretend to be Indians. It turned out to be toward the end. Anyway, when that scene finally rolled around, Robert was like, "Now!" Sure enough, pretty much the entire sold-out house of about two thousand people hollered their best Native American war cries. Awesome. See? That's why tonight was one of my favorite screenings so far. That, and another interactive moment after the Indian one. It's when Peter Pan turns to the screen and pleads with the audience to save Tinkerbell. Again, the whole crowd got into it. I know it sounds corny, but at the same time it was just so cool.

After Robert's talk, they put on a vintage curtain presentation by Steve Markham. I've seen this guy before, at the final LRS screening in 2008 when they showed silent comedy classics at the Orpheum starring Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. Steve Markham's this older guy with a company called Markham Collection. From markhamcollection.com:

Steve Markham started his career in show business as a baton twirling vaudeville performer and then became the classical music radio host for radio station KFAC.

He has been collecting and restoring vintage theatre drapes since the early 1980s. He has found drapes in warehouses, old theatres, the occasional dumpster and one at a commercial dry cleaners that had been cleaned but never paid for.

His drapes have been featured in the TV movie Gypsy starring Bette Midler and the hit TV series Murder She Wrote. His drapes can be seen at the Magic Castle and numerous award shows at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. His curtain show during the LA Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats film series is an audience favorite. He has been featured in newspaper articles, on TCM and most recently in LA Magazine.

The vintage theatrical curtains in this collection are for rent on a weekly basis for motion pictures, television shows and stage productions.

Due to the vintage nature and condition of the collection, a representative for the collection will supervise the installation and strike for each rental.

Rentals are restricted to a 75-mile radius of downtown Los Angeles.

Check out his site when you get a chance. He's got full stage drapes, scrims, swags and travelers. Tonight he showed five full stage drapes. The Orpheum stage is deep enough for Steve to have all five curtains set up, one behind the other, so he could reveal them one at a time and give the history and backstory for each. One of them was this beautiful golden curtain that creased very neatly as it rose. After that was a curtain decorated with nymphs, apropos for Peter Pan. The turquoise curtain with the seal was actually found at the Orpheum. I think it had been discarded and forgotten about, but for Steve it was a gem hiding in plain sight. Another curtain featured a watercolor with a white tree.

After the curtain bit, the famous movie critic Leonard Maltin came out to give a talk about Peter Pan. I love this guy. I've been a fan since discovering him on Entertainment Tonight back in the eighties. I think one of the reasons I like him is because he's a kind critic. A lot of critics, it seems, especially in publications like the L.A. Times and N.Y. Times, can be really vicious. Maybe because they write for such reputable publications, they feel this unspoken obligation to be hard-asses, I don't know. But Leonard's never been that way. He's fair, don't get me wrong. If he sees schlock, he'll call it schlock, but he does it without the vitriol that seems de rigueur in the movie review business these days. I've also seen Leonard at a few of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. He's a great speaker, very personable and folksy.

The first thing he told us about this adaptation of Peter Pan was that the Scottish guy who wrote the original play, J.M. Barrie, was still alive when this came out. He was in his early sixties and was apparently involved in the filmmaking process. I'm not sure if that was common back then, but today that would be extremely rare. If you've written a play or a novel or what have you, and Hollywood wants to adapt it for the silver screen, your involvement would usually begin and end with selling or optioning your material. You collect your paycheck and the producers take it from there, thank you very much. Not here, though. In fact, the opposite was the case. J.M. Barrie actually hand-picked Betty Bronson to play Peter. I can't think of a single example in modern times when the writer of the original source material was granted carte blanche of that magnitude. Thank God he did for Betty Bronson's sake, right? Here you've got this teenager from New Jersey with a few tiny parts to her name, some of them uncredited at that, and all of a sudden she gets picked for a role over which the likes of Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson were salivating.

Before you ask: Yes, it was perfectly normal for a woman to play Peter Pan. This is a tradition that continues to this day. Why, just a few years ago at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, I saw a production of Peter Pan in which Peter was played by this woman in her fifties. I shit you not. She was this petite gal who even had grandkids. And she was brilliant! She did an amazing job pretending to be a teenage boy who can fly.

Leonard Maltin said it wasn't until the 1953 Disney cartoon version of Peter Pan that Peter was played by a boy, a sixteen-year-old named Bobby Driscoll. He didn't just voice the part. Disney filmed him in live action and then used the footage as inspiration for the animated character. What a tragic story he is. Here's a kid who scored an Oscar when he was 12. He didn't win in any of the traditional categories. They actually created a special category that year specifically for him, "outstanding juvenile actor" or something like that, because he did an awesome job in two movies that year. And then he parlayed that into becoming the first actor ever to sign a long-term deal with Disney. Seriously, he should've had it all, but then he suffered severe acne that put a crimp in his style. Disney nullified his contract not long after Peter Pan. That's when the downward spiral began. Poor Bobby became a drug addict and wound up homeless in New York. He was only thirty-one when he died. No one in New York knew who he was so they buried him as a John Doe in a pauper's pit. A year later they took his fingerprints and discovered his identity. Depressing as hell, huh? What a tragically ironic outcome for the first male actor to play the kid who doesn't want to grow up.

On a much brighter note, the actress who voiced Wendy in the 1953 Peter Pan was at the Orpheum tonight to watch the show with us. Kathryn Beaumont is in her seventies now. In fact, she just turned seventy-two three days ago. She didn't come up to the stage, but Leonard talked about her for a bit. She was ten when Disney cast her to voice Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Like Bobby Driscoll in Peter Pan, they used Kathryn as the model for the animated Alice. It took three years for Alice in Wonderland to come out, and soon after that came Peter Pan. At this point she was finished high school and wanted to have a normal college life. Although she was originally from England and her folks were still back there, her years working for Disney in Burbank made her a fan of Southern California. So for college, she stayed and went to USC. She worked for Disney during the summers to stay busy, but otherwise she was a normal college student. She graduated in four years with a Bachelor's in Education and teaching credentials. Kathryn became an elementary school teacher in L.A. and never looked back. Apparently her students loved asking her about her Disney experiences and hearing her do the character voices. Disney made her an official Disney Legend in the late nineties. Kathryn's retired now, but once in a blue moon she'll lend her voice to Alice or Wendy for a video game or something, which is cool.

Anyway, let's get back to Betty Bronson. That J.M. Barrie picked a nobody from New Jersey was a wee bit shocking to say the least. I'm not sure about Gloria Swanson, but Mary Pickford got over it soon enough. She even had the class to visit Betty on set to extend her congratulations. From Betty's point of view, that must've been a pretty awesome experience. Mary Pickford wasn't just another pretty face. Indeed, to this day she's one of the most powerful women in Hollywood history. She co-founded the Academy Awards. And she was one of the four, and the only woman, who created United Artists, the others being Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. In fact, she'd already helped establish United Artists five years before Peter Pan, so her fame and clout were secure.

As for Betty, her fame barely lasted the fifteen minutes eventually mandated by Andy Warhol. It wasn't entirely her fault. Part of it was that the studio and her reps weren't sure which scripts were most suitable for her. Another part of it (and this happened to many actors from the silent era) was the advent of sound. Betty's forte was pantomime. Her acting talent per se was only so so, and that becomes harder to hide when the audience can hear you. What's more, with sound came changing tastes. The public became less interested in sappy, sentimental stuff and more interested in stories with characters who were like them. It wasn't a categorical loss. Betty held her own with Al Jolson in The Singing Fool, but still, it didn't last. Whereas Mary Pickford eventually retired on her own terms, Betty had a sort of "forced" retirement, got married and, well, vanished from the limelight.

Leonard talked a little about the film itself. He warned us, if "warn" is the right word, that this film is a "delicate piece" and a "film of its time." "Just go with it," he advised. "You've already proven you're cool." He talked a bit about the cast. Apparently the actresses who played Wendy and Mrs. Darling, Mary Brian and Esther Ralston, became friends during the shoot and stayed friends for life. And get this: The guy who played Nana, the Darling's family dog, was George Ali, the same guy who originated the Nana role for J.M. Barrie in the stage production twenty years earlier. He was pushing forty then, which means he was pushing sixty when they made this. Knowing that and now having seen this, that's quite a feat. He must've been suffocating in that thing. The veteran of the cast, Leonard said, was the guy who played Hook, a Scot named Ernest Torrence. Apparently he was quite renowned for playing bad guys. He just had that look, including a rather intimidating nose. A role like this, which calls for a well-cooked ham, was right up Ernest's alley. Another role he relished was Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. You get the idea.

While they did shoot on location for a few scenes, the screen was for the most part treated like a stage. In fact, although I've never seen the original play, I wonder if they changed much of anything. As with plays, a lot of the scenes in the movie were very long, as in ten minutes or more. That's very common for stage fare, but the next time you see a movie, try to keep time for a few scenes. I doubt most will last as long as two minutes, which is why your average feature film tallies upward of sixty to eighty scenes.

None of that detracts from how much I enjoyed the film and the evening in general. It felt kind of cool seeing a version of Peter Pan made at a time when J.M. Barrie was not only still living but was actively involved in the production. And I got to see Nana played by the original actor. How cool is that? It's like watching history as it was made. And as I said above, it was neat how the audience got involved with the film. You should've heard them, they were really into it, both the Indian war cries and especially the very end when Peter needed our help to save Tink. I love that Mighty Wurlitzer.

Rest in peace, Bob Mitchell.

Last Remaining Seats: The Graduate

2010-06-16T23:38:00.001-07:00

Back to the beautiful Los Angeles Theatre we go, my favorite theater on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, where just three weeks ago Mom and I saw the 1967 flick How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Tonight they showed The Graduate, another film from '67. That's not a coincidence. If you read the How to Succeed post, you'll know that 2010 is a special year for the Conservancy. It's the year of Sixties Turn 50, a project by the Conservancy's Modern Committee, or Mod Com. As the literature says, the sixties start turning fifty in 2010, and so what better way for a group like this to celebrate it than to show movies made in the sixties? Or, in the case of American Graffiti last week, movies that take place in the sixties? The Sixties Turn Fifty is a nine-month program highlighting and celebrating sixties architecture in Los Angeles County and how best to preserve and protect it. As they were three weeks ago, members of the Mod Com were set up on the lower level of the Los Angeles, in that huge wood floor space between the men's and ladies' rooms that was originally a kids' playing area in the theater's heyday. They were manning their tables and chatting up folks while video kiosks looped footage of sixties buildings around L.A. County.

You might say L.A. is the perfect place to celebrate sixties architecture. Seriously, if you have a minute, head over to laconservancy.org and click through to their Sixties Turn Fifty site (yes, they built a whole site for this) and check out some of the landmarks. We're talking an awesome mix of styles. It's funny. When I go to Opera League seminars, sometimes they talk about these top notch European composers who moved to L.A. for the great weather and the lucrative work in the movie industry. Well, it was sort of like that with architecture. Some of the most awesome architects from around the world came to L.A. for the work and the weather. The result? While Hollywood movies were being made with some of the best soundtracks ever, some of the most awesome and unique residences and office buildings and churches and hotels were being designed and built right here. L.A. sounds like a fun place to be in the sixties, doesn't it? Folks who were around at that time, the more discerning folks at least, were getting to see the modern L.A., the L.A. we all know and love, the L.A. Randy Newman sings about, being born.

Whereas the Modesto-set American Graffiti was filmed in Northern California and How to Succeed was made in New York (or at least takes place in New York, I'm not sure where the interior sets were), The Graduate has an extra dimension of relevance to the Sixties Turn Fifty because a lot of it was filmed on location in L.A. It's not set here, mind you. Like American Graffiti, the story takes place up in the Bay area. George Lucas actually did shoot American Graffiti in the Bay area since that was his home. The Graduate director Mike Nichols, on the other hand, stayed close to the studio, and perhaps close to where most of the cast lived. As a result, the UC Berkley scenes were actually shot at USC. That hits home for me since I was a student there in the late nineties. Doheny Library really stands out, as does Von KleinSmid Hall, where the business school is based. The program I attended, Masters of Professional Writing, was based on the fourth floor of Waite Phillips Hall, next door to Von KleinSmid (since then it's moved across the way to Taper Hall). You can see the phys ed building at one point as well. Other L.A. spots used in the film include the United Methodist Church in La Verne, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley about thirty minutes east of L.A. That's where they shot the wedding at the end. As for Mrs. Robinson's house, that was actually someone's real house in Beverly Hills on North Palm Drive.

Most memorable of all, though, is that hotel where Ben and Mrs. Robinson carry on their affair. In the story, it's a fictional hotel called Taft. In real life? Mike Nichols shot all that at none other than the legendary Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. When it was demolished in 2006, many people wept. And I'm being literal. The Ambassador occupies an irreplaceable plot of L.A. history. It was built in the early twenties with designs from the same architect, Myron Hunt, who designed the Rose Bowl, Caltech, Occidental College, and the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. The Ambassador was no ordinary hotel. Taking up twenty-four acres, it was a world unto itself. Whether you were staying there or just out for a night at its famous Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador was just that: A dignitary from another land, in this case one of escapism, who knew what you wanted. The Cocoanut Grove was not only a hot spot on L.A.'s nightlife map, it was one of the most popular concert venues in the West. Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Julie Andrews, the list of legends who played at the Grove is endless. As for the hotel itself, presidents stayed there. Visiting leaders did the same. Marilyn Monroe got her start there, modeling with a poolside agency. Howard Hughes didn't just stay there, he lived there. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there (a year after The Graduate was filmed). Are you getting the picture? And as for Hollywood filming, The Graduate is, in fact, part of a long list of productions that found a use for the Ambassador. The Academy Awards were held there a few times early on, such as the 1940 ceremony when Gone with the Wind swept. So the next time you see The Graduate, you can appreciate those affair scenes, huh? Besides which, as I learned in film school, the Ambassador scenes are also awesome from a film geek standpoint. That one scene in particular where they're in bed and Mrs. Robinson spills the secret of Elaine being an accident in the back of a Ford, how that scene starts with Ben wanting to have a conversation for a change and ending with him not wanting to talk at all after Mrs. Robinson grabs him by the hair and makes him swear never to tell, they showed us that scene in film school I don't know how many times. It's a perfect scene. Well played. The beats are hit on schedule without making the whole thing seem artificial. No small feat.

So there you go. The Graduate, more than any other film in this year's Last Remaining Seats series, aligns with the Mod Com's Sixties Turn Fifty program. Watching this film means you're watching L.A. in the sixties.

Before Conservancy head Linda Dishman came out to give her welcome-and-thank-you spiel, they screened a short film by Mel Brooks called "The Critic." This marked Mel's first foray into film, and it's an awesome example of less is more. Made in 1963 with a running time of about five minutes, it's basically a series of abstract animations set to a harpsichord. Voiceover is provided by Mel as an old man who complains the whole time because he doesn't understand what the animation is supposed to be about. Mel was only in his thirties at the time, in fact about the same age as Anne Bancroft, whom he married the following year, but he totally sounds like a grouchy old geezer.

Tonight's host was Tony Valdez, a sixtysomething (there we go with the sixties again!) newscaster from L.A.'s local Fox affiliate, Fox 11. Like Charles Phoenix at last week's American Graffiti screening, Tony is a Last Remaining Seats regular. More than that, he's a Conservancy member and sometime volunteer docent for the Conservancy's downtown walking tours. Being a TV news guy, you won't be surprised to learn Tony's got a lot of charm. He's a little white-haired chubby guy who went to hell and back in Vietnam....and is probably the best, funniest, most personable host in the Conservancy's rotating lineup of LRS hosts.

Tony spent a few minutes before the movie interviewing the guy who produced The Graduate, Lawrence Turman. He's in his eighties now and has been teaching at USC since 1991. Among his former students are Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of Smallville. Lawrence was in his forties when he produced The Graduate, easily the first notable thing he helmed. Since The Graduate, he's been working quite steadily. In terms of films I've heard of, Lawrence produced John Carpenter's remake of The Thing in the early eighties, starring Kurt Russell. And then he and Kurt teamed up a couple years later for The Mean Season. Lawrence was also the brain behind the two Short Circuit movies. That's especially awesome as those were definitely among my faves growing up. I still think about Number 5 sometimes. "Input! More input!" Love it. Other eighties and nineties flicks from his oeuvre include the buddy cop comedy Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines and an unknown Jimmy Smits playing the bad guy (I haven't seen that in ages), The Getaway, The River Wild, and American History X. So our man Lawrence has been around. And for someone in his eighties, he seems like he could still produce a movie today.

I've seen producers interviewed before, and they all seem to enjoy talking about how hard it is to be a producer, how tough it is to get people, namely studio suits, to believe in their projects. Lawrence was no exception. The first thing he talked about was how hard it was to get The Graduate made. The Charles Webb novel on which it's based was published in 1964. Now to me, three years doesn't seem like a very long time to make a feature. It's almost a matter of course now'days for a feature to consume at least two or three years from pre-production to red carpet premiere. But judging by how he went on and on about it, those must've been three very long years. It sounds like the instant the novel was published, he was all over it. He said he shopped it to every studio in town, and they all said no.

In yet another example of how the most precious irony occurs in real life, The Graduate's savior turned out to be a producer named Joseph Levine from a company called Embassy. Joseph was just north of sixty and had already accomplished quite a bit. The way he started out in the biz was to buy the distribution rights to foreign flicks on the cheap and then release them in the States and support them with advertising. In fact, Joseph and his Embassy became well known for their TV spots. His first fortune came from the distro rights to the original Godzilla movie from Japan. The Italian film Hercules and the Princess of Troy was another one he nabbed. As you might've deduced by those two titles, Joseph's forte was the low-budget stuff. Lawrence called him a "schlockmeister." Other pre-Graduate credits include Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Morgan the Pirate, Where the Bullets Fly, Sands of the Kalahari, Mad Monster Party?, and The Tiger and the Pussycat. He made another fortune in the sixties with a sexploitation flick called The Carpetbaggers, which came from a novel that was a thinly disguised bio of Howard Hughes. I believe schlock is in the eye of the popcorn eater, so whatever you think of Hercules and Godzilla, Joseph certainly didn't mind the money. Nor the accolades. The same year he produced The Carpetbaggers, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the folks behind the Golden Globes) honored him with their Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures. Almost as if being jinxed by that recognition, Joseph's next movie was universally reviled: The Oscar, which unfortunately marked the movie debut of Tony Bennett, who was forty and already a name to conjure. Ol' Joseph was also known for being terrible with names. Check out how he butchered Dustin Hoffman and Simon and Garfunkel during an interview: "If Mike Nichols wants Dustin Farnum in The Graduate, I let Mike have him. Now for the music he wants Simon and Schuster." Pitching The Graduate to Joseph was a last-ditch effort. As you can now see from his resume, a guy like that is the last person you'd expect to have any interest in a movie like this. And yet he did. Joseph saved the day.

Lawrence said the screenplay by Buck Henry, who went on to do Catch-22 and stuff as recent as To Die For, one of my favorite Nicole Kidman movies, was very loyal to the novel. More than that, he said the script was all but a verbatim rewrite of the novel in screenplay format. A lot of the dialogue was reproduced "to the T," he said. And speaking of the novel, apparently Charles Webb based a lot of it on his own experiences. Charles was from Pasadena. He attended college at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Like Dustin Hoffman in the film, he moved back home after graduating and didn't know what to do. He ended up having an affair with a woman a lot like Mrs. Robinson. She was a socialite who was older, very beautiful, and very married. Pasadena was and still is a relatively conservative enclave so I can only imagine the hot water he got into. And just as Raymond Chandler wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, at Musso & Frank in Hollywood, so Charles Webb found a public place to work on his debut opus: The Pasadena Huntington Hotel.

Lawrence didn't say how hard it was to find a director. Mike Nichols had done next to nothing at this point in terms of directing. He'd done a play on Broadway, which is awesome, but that was it. He certainly knew comedy, though. Have you heard of Nichols and May? Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite the comedy duo in the fifties. They did live gigs in nightclubs and on the radio. And they made records. In fact, the two of them plus a few others were the ones who created Chicago's still famous Second City comedy troupe. And that one play he directed? Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. It was a smash. After that, Mike knew he wanted to direct. Lawrence could see it too. "I had a feeling about him," he said.

Finding an actor to play Ben was the hardest part. Their ideal candidate was Robert Redford, but he said no. And so came the auditions. Lawrence said they auditioned literally hundreds of guys before they found thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Dustin had done a few things at this point, mostly TV stuff. It's safe to say he was still waiting for his big break when The Graduate came along. And speaking of his being thirty, that's something you forget when you watch the movie, how close in age the actors are. Dustin was thirty, and Anne Bancroft, the "older woman," was thirty-five. Katharine Ross, who played her daughter Elaine, was twenty-seven. Hilarious, huh? In terms of the audition process, Lawrence said they made up a fake scene with Ben and Mrs. Robinson that had nothing to do with the movie, but they didn't reveal that to the prospective Bens. Reading the Mrs. Robinson part was Joanne Linville, a forty-year-old actress already well established in the TV world. She's still alive today and has done tons of TV work and no mistake. Lawrence said they hadn't found their Mrs. Robinson yet. They never considered Joanne Linville for the part. It's just that she and Lawrence were pals, and she agreed to help him with the readings. When it was Dustin Hoffman's turn to read with her, he made her cry. That's when Lawrence and Joseph knew they had their Ben. As a side note, Joanne was married at this time to Mark Rydell. Also still alive today (they divorced in the early seventies), Mark did TV stuff in the sixties like The Fugitive and Gunsmoke and since then has done movies like On Golden Pond and Even Money.

As for Mrs. Robinson, the actress they were gunning for was Doris Day. She certainly was the ideal age for the part, early forties. After she said no, they went to Patricia Neal, but she was recovering from a stroke and wasn't ready for the rigors of film production. Meantime, other actresses were approaching them for the role. I guess the buzz was building. We're talking the likes of Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford. Wow, huh? As for Mr. Robinson, they wanted Gene Hackman, but Murray Hamilton had to suffice. It does make you wonder, doesn't it? If they'd gotten their dream cast of Robert Redford, Doris Day, and Gene Hackman? How awesome would that've been? Although, after having seen it so many times, it's almost impossible to imagine it without Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.

Lawrence had just done a film with a Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack before The Graduate: The Flim-Flam Man with George C. Scott. The future Patton plays a con man (the title character) who meets and befriends an Army deserter and recruits him (pun intended) to be his young apprentice. It's also got Slim Pickens in it, as well as Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kubrick version of the Nabokov novel a few years earlier. Most interesting from my standpoint is that The Flim-Flam Man was directed by Irvin Kershner. Kersh, as his friends called him, directed The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of all six Star Wars films. I was lucky enough to see a Q&A with him at a screening of Empire at the ArcLight Hollywood a few years ago. Pretty cool guy. Lots of energy for someone in his eighties.

But anyway, and ironically, even though Lawrence had just worked with Simon & Garfunkel, it never occurred to him to hire them for The Graduate. As I said about the cast, I can't imagine The Graduate without Simon & Garfunkel. Their music is one of my favorite things about the film. Lawrence said we should thank Mike Nichols for suggesting them. Now get this: The song "Mrs. Robinson" wasn't really about Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson. It was about Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that? I didn't before tonight. Here's why, though. Originally Simon & Garfunkel were supposed to write three original songs for the film, but because they toured all the time and had other obligations, they only had time for one, "The Sounds of Silence." Mike Nichols didn't find this out until he was nearly done editing the piece. Naturally he became sort of stressed. In an attempt at mollification, Simon showed him this other song he was working on about the former First Lady which just happened to have the title "Mrs. Robinson." Mike took it. What a lucky break, huh? Indeed, Lawrence said The Graduate is a great example of the stars aligning.

When they had their final cut, they did two test screenings, one of them in the smallest movie theater in Chicago. Their editor, Sam O'Steen, attended that one. Afterward, he assured Lawrence and Mike they had a hit on their hands. The other screening was in New York City. Again, nothing but positive feedback. Lawrence said that, after the New York screening, he walked out into the lobby to find one of the studio moguls who'd turned down The Graduate. Apparently this particular mogul had claimed the story just wasn't funny. "Not funny, huh?" Lawrence said right in his face. That had to feel good.

Last Remaining Seats: American Graffiti

2010-06-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

Tonight, for the third of six movies in this summer's Last Remaining Seats series, the Los Angeles Conservancy screened the 1973 film American Graffiti, the second feature film directed by George Lucas. His first was THX 1138 and his third was, yes, Star Wars. Oh wait, sorry. That would be Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Funny that American Graffiti was his second feature and not his first. I've been a movie fan longer than I've been a book fan, and it's definitely the tradition that the first feature a director makes is a deeply personal one, just as a novelist's first novel is an autobiographical one. But of course, THX 1138 was pure escapist fantasy, a plot-driven eighty-or-so-minute film about a guy (Robert Duvall in his first leading role) who was tired of being a medicated number. No, it wasn't until his second film that George drew from his own life experiences. If you haven't seen American Graffiti, it's definitely worth a watch. Just know that it's not exactly action packed. It's an hour and fifty minutes chronicling the last night a bunch of recent high school grads spend together before going their separate ways.

George made it in 1973 but set the story in the spring of 1962 (the film's tag line is "Where were you in '62?"). Why '62, you ask? Because that's when George would've been the same age as the main characters, eighteen and just out of high school. The story takes place in Modesto, again no shocker there since that's George's hometown. It's up in Northern California, east of the Bay area and not all that far from Marin County, where the man lives and works today on Skywalker Ranch. One of the storylines in the film involves drag racing. As a youngster, George loved cars and dreamed of one day becoming a pro racecar driver....until an accident toward the end of high school put a crimp in that. In fact, he's lucky to be alive when you read about how awful that accident was. Not surprisingly, American Graffiti features a terrible car crash that amazingly doesn't kill anyone but does leave one of the characters with a new take on life, something George said he went through and in fact inspired THX 1138. And here's one more interesting tidbit about the film's autobiographical angle: George has said that three of the main guys we follow in the film are based on three different phases of his life. How about that, eh? Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is based on George's personality during his USC days. John (Paul Le Mat) is George Lucas the drag racer. And that nerdy guy Toad (Charles Martin Smith) apparently comes from George the high school freshman, his awkward phase when he couldn't get a girl to look in his general direction to save his life. The main character is Steve, played by Ron Howard. I'm not surprised George didn't base him on anyone. He's sort of this vanilla everyman who serves as a sounding board for the truly unique characters around him, including and especially Curt, John, and Toad.

Funny thing is, though, as personal as it is, George may not have made it had Francis Ford Coppola not challenged him to make a mainstream movie. Coppola's the reason George found a career in movies at all. While still a film student at USC, George made a short called THX 1138: 4EB (Electronic Labyrinth). He submitted it to the National Student Film Festival his senior year and scored first place. One of the judges on the festival? Francis Ford Coppola. This award meant Warner Brothers gave George the chance to spend all day every day on a film set watching a feature being born. The film in question? Finian's Rainbow, directed by....Francis Ford Coppola! No mistake, the Godfather of The Godfather took the young George under his wing and mentored and supported him. It was thanks to Coppola that George got enough money to make a feature version of THX 1138. And it was during the making of that film that Coppola challenged George to follow up that flick, about a sci-fi dystopia that probably wouldn't appeal to a mass audience, with something more palatable to said audience. George later said the reason he opted for something so personal was to show people a culture that wasn't just his culture, but a national culture, that of the hot rods and drag racing. By the seventies, that culture was all but gone, so George wanted to create a film that would serve as a cultural artifact. He couldn't've grown up in a better state for awesome cars. Then and now, California is THE place for auto enthusiasts. After living in L.A. for twelve years now, I can definitely say that if you don't have a car, you don't exist. Drive (or walk!) around any part of L.A. and you'll be amazed at the variety of cars on the road, including a lot of very handsome ones.

Tonight's screening was at the Orpheum. On Broadway between Eighth and Ninth streets, it's the furthest south (and therefore the longest walk from the Pershing Square parking garage) of all twelve theaters on Broadway. It was also the first historic downtown theater I ever visited, back in April 2005 for a Jenny Lewis concert. It was pure serendipity. I had no idea what an historical gem the Orpheum is. The concert was on a Saturday, and I remember telling someone at work Friday that I was going to see a concert at the Orpheum. The guy practically did a double take. "The Orpheum? That's cool!"

Like most of these historic downtown theaters, the Orpheum was built in the 1920s. It was originally part of a chain of theaters called the Orpheum, a popular vaudeville circuit that included four venues in L.A. The theater currently known as the Orpheum was the fourth and final one. It was designed by the same architect, Albert Lansburgh, who designed one of the other Orpheums on Broadway, which today is known as the Palace Theatre. I've never been in the Palace, but apparently both it and tonight's Orpheum have the same French style interior. According to the Conservancy, this style is specific to sixteenth century France. Both the lobby and auditorium in the Orpheum are decorated with salamanders, which was apparently the mascot, if that's the right word, of King Francis I. If you watch that Showtime show The Tudors about Henry VIII, you may already know about Francis. He and Henry were contemporaries, sometime allies and sometime rivals. Francis actually figures prominently during the first season, which starts with Henry in his late twenties, ten years into his reign, and covers a good ten years or so by season's end.

While just about all of these historic downtown theaters originally hosted both movies as well as live entertainment, the Orpheum is one of the few that still serve both purposes. Indeed, the Orpheum's got quite a live entertainment legacy. My having seen Jenny Lewis is piss in the wind compared to the legendary talent that's graced its proscenium. We're talking names like Duke Ellington, Jack Benny, Lena Horne, Burns and Allen, Gypsy Rose Lee, and even Lassie for Pete's sake. As for recent stars, Michael Jackson did concerts here. Lyle Lovett and Norah Jones are even more recent names to conjure. Cool, huh?

What I really love about the Orpheum, and why it might be my favorite Broadway theater, is that organ. The Mighty Wurlitzer! Yep, when you walk into the auditorium, you'll see way up front and center, separating the front row from the stage, this huge organ that was originally used to provide soundtracks during silent movies. And it still is! Every year for Last Remaining Seats, the Conservancy will set aside the sixth and final Wednesday for a silent classic at the Orpheum to give that Wurlitzer (and whoever's playing it) a workout. But even on nights when they're not showing silents, like tonight, they'll have someone up there belting out tunes on that bad boy during the hour between when doors open at 7pm and when the show starts at 8pm. What's even cooler is that they used to have one of the original players of the Mighty Wurlitzer, Bob Mitchell. When he was a teenager growing up in L.A. in the twenties, Bob was already getting gigs at the Orpheum and other theaters to provide soundtracks to silents. He was playing at the Orpheum, in other words, when it was brand spanking new. How awesome is that? He also played the organ at Dodgers games. I was lucky enough to see (and hear) him provide the pre-show soundtrack during the 2008 and '09 Last Remaining Seats. But finally his time came on the 4th of July last year, just days after providing the pre-show entertainment at the final Last Remaining Seats screening, when the Conservancy put on the German silent Pandora's Box. No, Bob wasn't providing the soundtracks for the films themselves anymore. For that they got a younger, more nimble guy. That Mighty Wurlitzer really is mighty and no mistake. Bob was in his nineties. It was just awesome that he could be here at all. He was near and dear to the hearts of many Angelinos. Suffice it to say the 4th of July last year was not a happy day.

Tonight's pre-show music was provided by Robert Israel, the same guy who provides the silent film soundtracks. When the program kicked off at 8pm, Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave her welcome and thank-you spiel before introducing pop culture writer Charles Phoenix. He's a Conservancy regular who hosts at least one screening a year and conducts an interview with someone related to the film in question. The program said they'd have Cindy Williams (Shirley from Lavern and Shirley), who plays Laurie, Ron Howard's love interest in American Graffiti. As it turns out, though, they were able to get a second gal from the film, Candy Clark, who plays the adorable Debbie. They're in their early sixties now and still look great. It's funny, whenever I hear Cindy Williams talk, I immediately hark back to Laverne and Shirley. She still sounds exactly the same. And yes, Cindy and Candy are still working. Candy played Matt Damon's mom in The Informant!. And she was in the David Fincher version of Zodiac with Jake Gyllenhaal. Cindy, meanwhile, does a flick now and again but mainly sticks with TV. She's done a ton of guest spots over the years, most recently on stuff like Girlfriends, Drive, and one of the Law & Order spinoffs.

They obviously had a great time tonight going back down memory lane. They said originally they were supposed to shoot American Graffiti in George's hometown of Modesto, but that didn't pan out. When George went back there in the summer of '72 to start pre-production, he decided Modesto looked too different from the town he remembered ten years earlier when he was still in high school. Next up was San Rafael, which is where George's lack of on location experience caught up with him. He didn't anticipate how long it would take to mount the cameras on the cars. And when you're shooting outdoors, you have to block off the shooting area from the fine folks who actually live there. Cindy said one of the biggest complaints from the locals was that George and crew had one of the town's favorite bars blocked off. Eventually the folks who ran San Rafael got kind of frustrated at all the disruption. What's more, one of the guys on the crew was arrested for smoking pot. Takes care of San Rafael. And so finally they landed in Petaluma, another little town in the Bay area just a few miles away. That proved to be the ticket. Cindy and Candy said they started filming the last week of June in '72 and wrapped it up in exactly four weeks. Because the story takes place over the course of one night, the cast and crew would start working at 6pm and keep going until 6am.

The budget for the film was $750K, which would be about four million smackers today. Yeah, that's a good amount, but still relatively puny by mainstream Hollywood standards. Cindy said most of the money went to the music rights. The cast wasn't that big, nor was the crew, and they were mostly young folks just starting out the industry. They came cheap. They said Harrison Ford's salary, for example, was all of $400 a week. What a difference ten years makes, huh? Look at him in American Graffiti, and then look where he was in 1983: Three Star Wars flicks and an Indiana Jones flick in the can. Anyway, for American Graffiti, it wasn't Han Solo but the soundtrack that drove up the bill. Like a lot of people, including me, George loves the music he grew up to. He was determined to get some of his favorite songs in there, but he couldn't afford all of them. In fact, I bet George had to make a lot of tough choices about what to include. Besides the soundtrack itself, another nod to George's love of fifties and sixties rock comes in the form of Wolfman Jack, the famous DJ whom you hear sporadically throughout the movie and who finally makes a cameo at the end when Curt sort of stumbles into the station and asks the guy there if he can play a song for "the blonde" and tell the blonde to meet him and all that. Not until Curt's gone on his way and hears the radio broadcast does he realize he was talking to none other than Wolfman Jack.

George was a huge fan of Wolfman Jack. When he was still a student at SC, he seriously considered doing a documentary about the guy, but it never panned out. As for the cameo, once again we have to give thanks to Coppola for making that happen. George just assumed a living legend like that couldn't be bothered with a low-budget film starring a bunch of unknowns. But sure enough, Wolfman was the man. In fact, he got pretty into it. He and George listened to a whole bunch, like thousands, of archived phone calls Wolfman had taken on the air from listeners over the years. So when you watch American Graffiti, those calls you hear are real.

Not every scene was shot in Petaluma. You take Mel's Diner for instance. The Mel's they used in the film was on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. Cindy and Candy said it had already closed down and was on the verge of being demolished when George approached the owners about using it in the film. I'll never forget the film's opening scene where Toad rides his scooter into the parking lot. Sadly, right after George was finished with it, Mel's was torn down. But you can find Mel's elsewhere, of course. We've got a few in L.A., including one in Sherman Oaks I used to drive by all the time. There's another Mel's right in the heart of Hollywood, on Highland just south of Hollywood Boulevard. And you've got the one in West Hollywood on the Sunset Strip. That's the only one I've been in. I had no idea until tonight that it was thanks to American Graffiti that all these other Mel's exist. As I said up top, it's a landmark film that impacted people in many ways, especially folks of George's generation. It revived an interest in the small-town culture the film depicts and which is represented by Mel's. In fact, get this. Cindy and Candy said that every year to this day, Petaluma has an annual American Graffiti festival. Cindy said the town hasn't changed all that much from the American Graffiti days.

When Charles Phoenix asked if they ever see Ron Howard anymore, they said no, they haven't seen him in forever. Cindy playfully bemoaned Ron's living in Connecticut (which I didn't know) and having a wildly successful directing career. I actually got to see Ron Howard in person once. Back in 2003 or thereabouts, when he made that movie The Missing with Cate Blanchett, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood (just around the corner from Mel's) had an advanced screening of it with Ron Howard in person for a Q&A afterward. Yes, Opie Cunningham is just as folksy and down to earth as you think he is.

One myth Cindy and Candy debunked was that Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley were spun off from American Graffiti. Nope, not true. That was a revelation to me, but I guess it makes sense if you actually know the plot of the film, where it takes place, who the characters are, and then see that none of it matches up with either show. They both just happen to star Ron Howard in one with Cindy Williams in the other and take place in the nostalgic past. Maybe having "Rock Around the Clock" as the Happy Days theme song, after it had just been used as the opening music to American Graffiti a year earlier, didn't help matters.

Charles asked them if they had any inkling during the shoot if the movie was going to turn out good. It's almost a useless question in my opinion. Film shoots are so long and tedious, with the scenes broken up into so many different shots after so many takes, it's always tough to tell how it's going to turn out. The first Star Wars movie is a great example, maybe one of the best, of where the cast and crew had no idea what the finished product would look like. Partly this is because George is a very quiet guy. I remember Carrie Fisher saying once that some days he wouldn't say a single word to anyone. On the other hand, Candy said that after two weeks of shooting, when they were halfway through principal photography, George showed everyone a rough edit of what he had so far. Candy said the cast was pleasantly surprised at how well it was turning out. Candy really knew they had a hit on their hands soon after the film came out. She went to some random theater in some town somewhere to watch the film anonymously, sitting in the back so she could see reactions (or if people were walking out). When people stood up to dance to "Rock Around the Clock" at the beginning, she knew everything would turn out grand.

And that about does it for another pleasant evening with the Conservancy and their Last Remaining Seats series. Not to sound like a broken record (pun intended), but if you haven't seen American Graffiti, you really need to. It's a true cultural landmark documenting a particular time and place. What's more, when you do see it, and you notice the "THX 1138" on John's license plate, you'll get it.

Last Remaining Seats: Strangers on a Train

2010-06-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

I can now check off yet another Hitchcock flick. Strangers on a Train's one of those Hitchcock classics you hear about now and again. You say to yourself, "I've gotta add that to my Netflix queue." And then you don't. This is yet one more reason I love the L.A. Conservancy and their annual Last Remaining Seats series: They feed me these classics I've been wanting to see since forever but never got around to. This applies especially to Hitchcock. While I certainly knew him by reputation as a youngster, I didn't really sit up and take notice until I got to college and majored in film. In fact, during my freshman year I did a term paper on Hitchcock's Psycho and Frenzy, two films that, while very different on the surface, take the same tack in depicting (or not depicting, as the case may be) violence and killing. Suffice it to say I watched and practically anatomized those two films by semester's end. Yes, it got kind of tedious at times, but I sure learned a lot about Hitchcock and, by extension, how to read scenes to glean the director's vision and intention.

Hitchcock's awesome, easily one of the best filmmakers ever. So you can no doubt see why I was psyched about tonight's event. The screening took place at the Million Dollar Theatre. Built in 1918, it's one of the twelve huge historic movie palaces that line Broadway between Third and Ninth Streets in downtown L.A. The brain behind the Million Dollar was Sid Grauman, legendary movie palace impresario. Even if you've never been to L.A., it's very possible you've heard of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. That's Sid's baby. And just down the road, a couple blocks east, you've got the Egyptian Theatre, also Sid's. These are easily among the most famous theaters in town. The Chinese still operates today as a first run venue. The Egyptian, on the other hand, has lived the kind of life more aligned with the life of Hollywood. It started strong and glittery in the heady roaring twenties. For decades it was one of the prime spots to see and be seen. Studios hosted premieres there. Ben Hur premiered there, among many, many others. But then, like Hollywood itself, Grauman's Egyptian fell into disrepair and decay. Its status took a full one-eighty. The Egyptian became a place to avoid and otherwise take a sideways glance at in pity. But wait! The plot takes another twist. In 1998, the nonprofit American Cinemateque swooped in to the rescue. Thanks to membership support and philanthropic pledges, the American Cinemateque bought the Egyptian and restored it to its former glory. It became the Cinemateque's first permanent venue. From the time they formed in 1981 until 1998, the Cinemateque had no home base. They showed films wherever they could, such as the DGA Theater and Raleigh Studios, both in Hollywood. Their buying the Egyptian was accordingly a win for both the theater itself and the Cinemateque. Around the time the Egyptian was reborn, the city of L.A. pledged something like half a billion dollars to the revitalization of Hollywood. Talk about awesome timing, huh? I moved here in August of 1998 and so I just caught the last vestiges of ghetto Hollywood. Man, what a difference a decade makes. It's also kind of funny remembering when the city had that much money. Yes, it's true. Before the Great Depression II, L.A. was reaping the rewards of a property tax windfall. Owning a home in L.A. is tough....for the homeowner, that is. It's awesome for the city. In addition to the half a bil for Hollywood, the city coughed up another half a bil for five one-hundred-million-dollar homeless shelters built throughout the city in an effort to clean up the concentrated homelessness on Skid Row.

I've been to the Egyptian several times. In fact, quite a few of my "At the Movies with Governor Tom" posts on this very blog are Cinemateque screenings, although I should be honest. The vast majority of the Cinemateque events I attend tend to be at their second venue, the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica's Montana neighborhood. The Aero's another single-screen movie house that goes way back, although not as far back as the Hollywood and downtown theaters. It opened in the forties and, like the Egyptian, became a blight on the landscape, in this case Montana Avenue's otherwise posh landscape. The Cinemateque swooped in and resurrected it in 2005. I tell you, whoever's in charge of programming at the Aero is right on my wavelength, as this blog attests.

The Chinese and Egyptian were built in the 1920s. The Million Dollar Theatre is where Sid's legend began. Before you ask, yes: The Million Dollar Theatre is so called because that's how much Sid paid to build the sucker. In today's dollars, that'd be about fourteen and a half million. I don't know, is that a lot for a theater? I reckon so. I wonder how much the ArcLight Hollywood cost to build? Part of the Hollywood comeback, the ArcLight opened in 2002, but I haven't a clue how much Pacific Theaters paid to build it. Nor could I hope to guess. Another question, though: If someone paid fourteen and a half mil to build a movie theater today, would it get the kind of press Sid got when he built the Million Dollar? Probably not. Movies aren't the novelty they were back then.

From the outside, the Million Dollar looks anything but. It takes up the first couple stories of an otherwise nondescript building that could either be for offices or apartments. Inside, however, is a completely different story. Once you get past the low-ceilinged lobby (it's a fake ceiling; the original ceiling, hidden above for reasons I've yet to find out, has murals inspired by King of the Golden River, an old Victorian folktale), you're in a downright cavernous auditorium. Seriously, the first time you see it is one of those times when words fail. All you can do is take it in. The sides and proscenium suggest the walls of a castle, carved and ornate. The ceiling features a dome. King of the Golden River inspired all of this as well. Here's one interesting factoid: The balcony is supported by concrete instead of the more ideal steel truss due to a steel shortage during the First World War. To prove to everyone that a concrete girder was just as safe, Sid tested it with something like 1.3 million pounds of weight. How exactly they tested it and with what, I have no clue. At first, the Million Dollar was a venue for both films as well as live stage shows. And then in the fifties it became a venue for Latin American films and theater. That lasted a good thirty years or so, until even a million dollar heritage couldn't counter the dearth of audiences. An entrepreneur named Robert Voskanian is the man who finally saved it. When I became an L.A. Conservancy member and started attending this movie series two years ago, the Million Dollar had literally just reopened.

The guest host for tonight was Leith Adams, head of Warner Brothers archives and, according to the program, co-author of James Dean: Behind the Scene and Graven Images. He gave us some backstory to the movie. For one thing, I had no idea Strangers on a Train was based on the debut novel by Patricia Highsmith. You've heard of her, right? If you've seen The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, then you know Patricia Highsmith. That was also one of her novels. In fact, she wrote a whole series of novels, five to be exact, following the trials and tribulations of Tom Ripley. The novels are collectively known as the Ripliad. Well, before she was THE Patricia Highsmith, she was just a struggling writer trying to make ends meet. Part of that meant writing comic books. No, she didn't draw. She helped script the stories so the artists would know what to draw. The funny thing is that, when she applied for the job, she thought it was for a reporter position. Only when she arrived at the office for the interview, fresh from Barnard, did she see the illustrated truth (ba-dump bump). She stuck with it, though. The money wasn't bad, and it only got better when she became a freelance comic scripter. That gave her the free time she needed to write her own fiction. Looking back, that accidental comic book gig ended up being the only job she held down for any length of time before she found success with her novels. Leith told us that it was thanks to her pal Truman Capote that she revised Strangers on a Train enough to attract publisher interest. When she thought it was finished, he told her to give it another stab, but to get away from New York City first. And so Patricia Highsmith wrote the final draft of Strangers on a Train at a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, NY called Yaddo. She was twenty-nine when it was published in 1950. Hitchcock didn't waste a minute in adapting it. The movie version came out the very next year.

Another thing I didn't know was that Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay. Like Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler hit the big time with his first novel, 1939's The Big Sleep. Here's an interesting factoid: Raymond Chandler taught himself how to write detective fiction by reading, studying, analyzing, and breaking down the Perry Mason stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. When he was working on The Big Sleep, his ritual was to go to Musso and Frank's, the very famous Hollywood restaurant, park himself in a booth with pencil and paper, and write away. The Big Sleep was not only his first novel, it was his first piece of fiction featuring Philip Marlowe as the main character. That name sounds familiar to you, I'm sure, even if you've never read a single word by Chandler. Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye are two more Chandler novels featuring Marlowe. In between novels, Chandler found demand as a screenwriter, most notably for Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.

And then he got the assignment for Strangers on a Train. In his intro tonight, Leith quoted a letter by Raymond Chandler dated November 1950, wherein he mentions September 26, 1950 as the one day that week he worked on the script but could've worked on it more. Hitchcock loved writers, Leith said. His closest friends included writers, but he and Raymond Chandler never saw eye to eye. While he got along with writers in general, Hitchcock tended to lock horns with writers whose specialty was suspense...which just happened to be Hitchcock's forte. Is that irony? Or is that to be expected? You've got to figure Hitchcock had a bit of an ego at this point in his career. Ditto Raymond Chandler. So while part of me wants to label this an irony beyond precious, a bigger part of me isn't all that surprised. Leith related to us the Hitchcock trait I've known about since college, his penchant for claiming to have a film mapped out in his noodle ahead of time, shot by shot. He claimed no less for Strangers on a Train. Raymond Chandler, upon hearing this, posed the very valid question to the auteur that, if he did indeed have it all figured out, why did he need another writer on the project? Weren't the other two, Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook, enough? Hitchcock had just worked with Whitfield Cook on Stage Fright and decided to bring him along to Strangers on a Train (Whitfield was one of three screenwriters credited for Stage Fright). Czenzi Ormonde only wound up on the project when Hitchcock's writer of choice, Ben Hecht, who wrote or co-wrote the scripts for several Hitchcock films, wasn't available. Whatever the case, I see Chandler's point. You shouldn't need a screenplay by committee if you've already got the final cut in your noodle.

Leith said Hitchcock's true secret writing weapon wasn't Ben Hecht, but his own wife. In fact, Alma Reville was his secret weapon in many ways on most, perhaps even all, his films. She got into the film biz before he did, as a film cutter (Hitchcock's foot in the door was art and production design). She eventually became a highly regarded film editor in Britain. When she married Hitchcock and his directing career blasted off, she became her man's invaluable right hand. She'd help him with story treatments, scripts, storyboards, everything from pre-production to the final cut. He took full advantage of her great ear for dialogue and her editor's eye for continuity issues. One great example of the latter comes from Psycho. Apparently in the original cut, after Janet Leigh is stabbed to death in the shower, you could just barely see her swallowing during the slow pan out from her eye to her whole face. Hitchcock never saw it, but Alma did. It was too late to shoot the scene again, so Alma tweaked the negative to mask the swallow. As for scripts, apparently Alma was quite adept at poking holes in storylines and spotting inconsistencies and what have you. Alfred and Alma were life partners in every sense. They were almost born in sync. He was born August 13, 1899. She? A day later. They married in their mid twenties and stayed together to the end. Hitchcock died in 1980, Alma in '82.

Whenever Hitchcock made a film that was based on something else, which was often, first he and Alma would hire someone to take a pass at it. His wife was key here because she was much better at getting along with people and finding quality writers. For adaptations, their main decree to the screenwriter would be to write the first draft without any dialogue. Just write the action. The dialogue and other specifics would be filled in later. With Alma's input, of course. Interesting, huh? Sort of makes you wonder what Hitchcock's oeuvre would've looked like if he'd never known Alma. Once again I'm reminded of Clint Eastwood's Oscar acceptance speech: To succeed in the movie business, it takes a little bit of talent, and a lot of luck. The day Hitchcock met Alma should probably be documented as one of the happiest accidents in the history of cinema.

Leith talked about his personal connection to Hitchcock. He was seven in 1954, the year Hitchcock delivered the one-two punch of Dial M for Murder and, one of my personal faves, Rear Window. After those two masterworks, Leith was a fan. From then on, whenever Hitchcock came out with a new film, it was a big event for Leith. He loved the suspenseful plots, but just as much he loved Hitchcock's wry British sense of humor. His fandom even extended to the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents that came along in the late fifties and early sixties. Leith is the perfect archivist. To be in a job like that, you've obviously got to be passionate about old movies. When he introduced Strangers on a Train, he said something like, "This was made back in the nineteen fifties, when movies were still movies." Not sure I agree with that sentiment, but you've gotta love the passion.

One more topic Leith covered before the movie started was the leading men of Strangers on a Train: Robert Walker and Farley Granger. Apparently Robert Walker was quite the nutjob, although it may not have been entirely his fault. His folks split when he was still a wee tot, and thereafter his home life went to shit. This translated into poor Robert becoming high strung, prone to anxiety, depressed, all that bad stuff. Sometimes he'd channel all this negativity into negative energy. He could get belligerent and downright combative at the drop of a dime. Not surprisingly, he got expelled from school a whole bunch of times. When some bright spark decided it would be best to find a hobby for Robert to focus all that energy, what do you think they decided on? Of course. Acting. And sure enough, Robert excelled. He landed the lead in a school play. He won top prize in an acting contest at the Pasadena Playhouse. After high school, he got accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met the woman he would marry, actress Jennifer Jones. Ever the committed actors, they decided to honeymoon in Hollywood so they could keep looking for gigs. Mega producer David O. Selznick took a shine to Jennifer during an audition and agreed to be her mentor. He also got Robert a contract at MGM. Sounds awesome, right? Everything was hunky-dory. Or it should've been. That shine Selznick took to Jennifer was more than a mentor's shine. He wanted to jump her bones and no mistake. This was by no means a one-way sentiment. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, not to speak of one of the wealthiest. Money and power. Jennifer was hooked. Her divorcing Robert was the beginning of the end for this guy. Remember, he was already volatile in the best of times. After his woman left him, he fell into the bottle and became a cliché. Just as he'd gotten expelled a whole bunch of times as a kid, as an adult he got arrested just as much, for DUI, hit and run, public drunkenness, you name the booze-related crime, he committed it. His career naturally suffered. The work remained steady, but he sucked in it. Perhaps to get back at Jennifer, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to marry director John Ford's daughter Barbara Ford. Poor Barbara could only tolerate Robert for five months before leaving him. Soon after this, Robert got word that Jennifer and Selznick had officially tied the knot. Cue psychotic break. Robert completely lost it and had to be committed to an asylum.

Amazing, huh? And this was before he did Strangers on a Train. He was barely thirty. Credit the guy with stamina, though. Soon as he was out of the asylum, he went right back to work. He got gigs with the likes of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster. Strangers on a Train happened when MGM agreed to loan him to Warner Brothers. Even during the days of studio contracts, actors could still find work elsewhere if the studio in question didn't mind. And thank goodness MGM had the flexibility and foresight to do that. Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train is one of the best villain roles ever, certainly one of the best villains in Hitchcock's oeuvre. It was almost like Robert was made for this role since the Bruno character is sort of, you know, nutty. Anyways, the film was a smash and Robert Walker earned kudos. He'd also just married again, but this time it wasn't a whacky kind of thing like with Barbara Ford. And right after Strangers on a Train, he landed a plum movie role opposite Van Heflin. Everything was finally starting to turn around, which makes the next part all the more tragic. Even though he was out of the asylum and working steadily again, he still had to be medicated. In fact, you could say his medication was the reason things were finally under control. But then one night in August 1951, Robert, for whatever reason, started having an episode, getting really agitated and anxious and hot tempered and all that. It must've been pretty bad if the housekeeper felt compelled to call Robert's psychiatrist. So the psychiatrist came over right away and had our man take a barbiturate to calm down. But what I guess the doctor didn't know was that Robert had been drinking a lot that night. And so the medication mixed with the alcohol, Robert passed out....and never woke up. He was thirty-two. And his poor wife was already a widow at twenty-six.

As for the other leading man from Strangers on a Train, it's pretty much the opposite. Farley Granger, who'd worked with Hitchcock once before in Rope, had a very long, steady career. In fact, he's still alive today, in his mid eighties.

Hitchcock's daughter Patricia has a supporting role in Strangers on a Train. She'd been in Stage Fright as well, but it was a bit part. Strangers on a Train was her first fairly prominent role. The fun nearly ended as soon as it began, though. She got married about a year later and didn't act as much as she probably could've. Family first, right? She ended up having three kids. You've seen her if you've seen Psycho. She was Janet Leigh's fellow secretary at that bank in the beginning. She also did a bunch of episodes for Dad's eponymous TV show. She and her hubby are still alive today. They're about the same age as Farley Granger, in fact. What's more, they live up in Solvang, this town in central California that was founded by Danish immigrants and was apparently made to look like a Danish village. It's been on my list of places to visit ever since I drove by it going to and from Heart Castle back in August 2001.

I don't want to go into the plot of Strangers on a Train, but I will say it's Hitchcock at his finest. He's terribly clever with the double imagery. It starts with double protagonists: Bruno Anthony and Farley's character, Guy Haines. Then you've got the double murder Bruno convinces Guy to participate in. You've got people living double lives, double-crossing each other, Bruno ordering a double Scotch, visual cues like the criss-crossing railroad tracks, crossed tennis rackets on a cigarette lighter, all kinds of stuff. Hitchcock even found a way to be "doubly" consistent with his trademark blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo. When he cameos in Strangers on a Train, he's carrying a....double-bass fiddle!

Last Remaining Seats: How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

2010-05-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

That's right, boys and girls, it's time for another season of Last Remaining Seats, one of my favorite things about Los Angeles. If you've been keeping up with this long-winded blog, you'll know that Last Remaining Seats is a movie series put on for six weeks every May and June by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the local nonprofit that dedicates every fiber of its volunteer soul to preserving, protecting, restoring, and otherwise promoting historic commercial and residential buildings and neighborhoods throughout the eighty-eight municipalities that make up the County of Los Angeles. With such a vast purview, the Conservancy's got all kinds of programs and projects going on at any given time, from restoring a particular historic residence to trying to save a historic commercial building from demolition. My favorite Conservancy initiative, as I've said in previous posts, is Bringing Back Broadway (BBB), the aim of which is to do just that: Revive the Broadway district in downtown Los Angeles. The stretch of Broadway from Third Street down to Ninth is home to no less than a dozen movie palaces built before World War II. It's the single largest concentration of pre-WWII movie theaters in the country. Yes, L.A.'s Broadway was supposed to be the cinematic version of New York's Broadway, and for a long time it was. But for whatever reason--shifting demographics, the suburban explosion--Broadway L.A. started going downhill in the seventies or thereabouts. You've still got plenty of shops, some storefront churches and what have you, but quite a bit of it is derelict. Not surprisingly, the BBB program will take some time.

Last Remaining Seats is the Conservancy's way of promoting BBB while shining the spotlight on these gorgeous old theaters. When they show these old classic flicks, every Wednesday usually starting in mid/late May through June, they typically use the three most fully restored theaters: Los Angeles, Million Dollar, and Orpheum. The Palace Theatre is also fit for duty, but they haven't screened anything there since I became a member in early 2008 after reading the cover story about them and Last Remaining Seats in Westways, the magazine for the Southern California Auto Club.

Up to this point, I've only ever gone to these things by myself, which is what makes tonight extra special. My mom came with me! She lives in North Carolina and is visiting me the second half of May. Usually she visits me in August. Indeed, from 2001 to last year she never missed an August (I've lived in L.A. since '98). She retired earlier this year on her sixty-fifth birthday after twenty-five years of steadfast service to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For the last thirteen of those years she was the personnel manager. No, not one of the personnel managers, THE personnel manager for the entire university. Yes, it's just as daunting as it sounds, which is why there was never a good time of the year for her to visit. August was relatively calm, nestled as it is between the summer sessions and the fall term, but that didn't stop the work from piling up. Every August for the past decade, it's been the same routine: She abandons her station for ten days to visit me....and then flies back to the suck fest backlog. But now she's retired! The icing on the cake is that her state pension and social security add up to a few ducats more than what she made during the rat race. Yes, you read that right: She's taking in more retired than she was as a working stiff. Pretty cool, huh? We should all be so lucky.

At any rate, since she's retired, we decided she could visit during the second half of May instead of waiting for the ceremonial ten days in August. We were already pondering this visit last August when she was here and I was starting to get theater brochures in the mail. At this point, after twelve years in L.A., I've attended shows at my fair share of the city's venues. You only have to go once to end up on their mailing list. And since most theater seasons are structured like school years, from September to June, that makes August a busy month for my local USPS carrier. And it's become a ritual for my mom over the years during her August visits to peruse and salivate over the brochures while bemoaning the lack of such culture in her area. That said, though, her area of North Carolina, called the Triangle (Chapel Hill along with Durham and the state capital of Raleigh) is doing much better than when I lived with her in the late eighties (my middle school years). That they can't compete with L.A. just makes the Triangle part of a large club. A lot of the best actors live here. Lots of people move here to attempt a career on the boards, not to speak of film and TV. So of course we've got a ton of theaters here. Anyway, when Mom was here last August, she looked over all the brochures and saw several shows she was interested in seeing, all being staged in May. We didn't iron out anything, it was just talk at that point.

When I visited her during the holidays four months later, we sat back down to take another look and decided the second half of May would be ideal. By the time she goes home next week, we'll have seen four plays at four different theaters. One of the plays was this past Sunday: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Freud Playhouse on UCLA campus. When not being used by the students, Freud Playhouse is home to the Reprise! theater company led by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld). In fact, that one guy from Seinfeld who played J. Peterman, John O'Hurley, was in the production. He was a stitch as J.B. Biggley, the boss man who heads the World Wide Wicket Company. Rudy Vallee played him in the movie we saw tonight. This was the first time we saw John O'Hurley on stage, but it should've been the second. When Mom was here last August, we saw Spamalot downtown at the Ahmanson. John O'Hurley was cast in one of the main roles. I forget which one. It was either the role played by Eric Idle or Tim Curry in the original Broadway production. Unfortunately he was sick the day we went. We forgot about that soon enough, though. Spamalot was a side splitter. If it comes to a playhouse near you, get ye there post haste.

On our way to the movie tonight, I decided to take Mom to my favorite watering hole in all of Los Angeles: Ye Rustic Inn in Los Feliz. I have to admit I was vacillating about taking her there. It ain't exactly Spago. Or even The Cheesecake Factory. It's a hole in the wall in one of those nondescript stripmalls that seem to exist outside of time. The ceiling's low, the lighting's shitty, and the jukebox is jammin' with the best selection of tunes of any bar I've ever been to. It's just a really fun place. The vast majority of the barkeeps are young women aspiring to be actresses. Read: They're all adorable. Oh yeah, the drink selection is pretty good too. And the food menu's got great variety considering it's just a bar. Indeed, if you ever make it there, try the Buffalo wings. I work with this guy from Buffalo, and he's one of the daintiest, pickiest eaters I've ever known. Team lunches always promise drama when he comes along. His home town is of course the birthplace of the eponymous wings. And he says that Ye Rustic Inn has hands down the best wings of anyplace outside Buffalo. Considering his picky taste plus the fact that he visited many a spot during his touring musician days back in the eighties and nineties, that is extremely high praise. Mom and I got there just before Happy Hour, hence the vacant booth right in front of the bar. We decided to go the sampler route: Six wings, a few cheese sticks and some other stuff. If you're ever there and you want a hearty meal, try the Myrtle burger, named after the woman who founded Ye Rustic. I had that the first time I went there about five years ago. Taking Mom to Ye Rustic wasn't as awkward as I thought. She's a pretty cool and laid back kat. In hindsight my vacillation seems kind of silly.

So with our bellies full, we took the surface streets from Ye Rustic to downtown. It was the first time I'd taken this route, but I knew Wilshire Blvd. was south of Ye Rustic, and once you're on that, it's a straight shot east into downtown. We parked in that garage beneath Pershing Square, right in the heart of downtown. Since tonight's screening was at the Los Angeles Theatre, the closest Last Remaining Seats theater to Pershing Square, the L.A. Conservancy had volunteers outside the parking structure handing out validation stickers to slap on our parking machine tickets so that we'd only have to pay five dollars instead of the usual weeknight flat fee of six sixty. Not a huge difference, I know, but the Conservancy tries.

The Los Angeles Theatre is my favorite theater on Broadway. So far, anyway. A bunch have yet to be restored, but of the few that have been, this one's tops. It doesn't look like much from the outside. It's got a tall, thin, townhouse-type facade with glittering gold and red signage. But when you walk in, as the below photos attest, it's like, "Whoa!" Los Angeles is actually the "newest" of the twelve Broadway "cinema playhouses," as they were called in the beforetimes. It opened in January 1931 with the Chaplin movie City Lights, and when you go in, one of the first things you see on the wall is a photo of Charlie himself attending the City Lights premiere with Albert Einstein of all people. No joke. They're the last people you'd expect to be pals. Anyways, back to the jaw-dropping lobby, the first thing that strikes you about it are those grand, gargantuan chandeliers, right out of a period movie. You've also got mirrors, that crystal fountain up on the second level, and a sunburst motif that supposedly alludes to Louis XIV, France's so-called Sun King. The restrooms downstairs are humongous. If only all movie theater restrooms were that big. That might be another reason I prefer the Los Angeles over the other Broadway theaters. The other ones have much smaller restrooms. Lines are inevitable. Hey, this might be a fine point to you, but you're not the one with the micro bladder.

When the Los Angeles originally opened, it had all kinds of interesting features that hadn't been heard of before and for the most part haven't been heard of since. I'm guessing that's because movies just aren't the big events they obviously were in the thirties, so why spend all that money on something like an electric sign outside the auditorium that tells you how many vacant seats are left? Although I have to say that sounds incredibly convenient. I mean, even today I think people would appreciate knowing, as they hurry into the auditorium with their 'corn and soda pop, how packed the place is so they can brace themselves (or not) accordingly. That lower level where the restrooms are used to have a playroom for the kids, and what is now the ladies' room used to be much more posh, with sixteen private "compartments," as they used to say, each one finished in a different marble. You believe that? Another world back then, kids. But wait, it gets better. Let's say you had to get up to relieve yourself in the middle of a show. Have no fear, movie fan, because when you descended to that super lounge below, a periscope-type apparatus projected the film onto a smaller screen so that you could catch the action on the way to and from the restroom. Is that not awesome or what? Again, like the seat vacancy sign, that would be so bloody handy today. But I reckon that type of thing would only work in a single-screen theater. How the heck would you handle that in today's zillion-screen gigaplexes?

Interesting backstory about Mom's connection to How to Succeed in Business. She actually got to see the original Broadway production back in the early sixties. It was a smashing success and ran for several years. Mom's dad, the grandfather I never knew, died in September 1962. How to Succeed in Business opened about a year before, so she must have seen it in that window. Certainly not after her dad died. The family pretty much went to shit after that (more on that some other time, some other place). Anyway, tonight when we were at Ye Rustic, Mom said that their trip to New York to see the Broadway show was her introduction to the East Coast. They had such a great time that they came back just a few months later to see I Can Get It for You Wholesale, another successful Broadway show that starred an unknown nineteen-year-old named....Barbra Streisand. And just to show you that Mom's dad did okay for himself, on both of those trips they stayed at the St. Regis. You ever stay there? Unless you've got money to burn, probably not. What's more, Mom's family was from L.A., which makes such a trip all the more ambitious. I've been to the St. Regis a couple times to have drinks in the King Cole Bar on the ground floor. It's funny, the first time I went there, in 2005 or thereabouts, I had no idea the place had been Mom's East Coast home away from home. I only heard of it thanks to the James Bond novel Live and Let Die (1954). The plot of the novel, which bares only a skeletal resemblance to the 1973 film (Roger Moore's first outing as Bond), is roughly divided into thirds, and that first third sees Bond staying in New York to investigate the Harlem gangster Mister BIG. Well, when he arrives in New York at the beginning, he holes up in a top-floor suite at the St. Regis. After freshening up, he heads down to the ground floor to have drinks in the King Cole Bar with his American spy pal Felix Leiter. When I read that scene, I knew I had to get to the King Cole Bar somehow, someway.

Interesting how life brings you full circle, isn't it? Mom was tickled to death at seeing the play again as well as the film, both in the same week, back in her hometown. And the gravy, ladies and gentlemen? Before the movie started tonight, there was a Q&A up on the stage with the two leads from the movie: Robert Morse and Michele Lee. And conducting the interview was Matthew Weiner, the brain behind the TV show Mad Men. That makes sense, right? One of the reasons that show's all but critic proof is due to how well it evokes the sixties, the same era as How to Succeed in Business. Not that I would know. Neither my mom nor I have ever watched Mad Men, but it's cool the Conservancy got Matthew Weiner to host tonight's event.

I forgot to mention that the Conservancy started a new initiative this year called the Sixties Turn 50. They set up a whole website for it and everything, separate from their main laconservancy.org site. Tonight before the show, when I went down to use the restroom, I noticed over in that area between the men's and ladies' rooms, that spacious plot of wood flooring that was originally the kids' play area, the Conservancy's Modern Committee (or Mod Com, as they call it) had a bunch of tables set up with various pamphlets and brochures plugging the Sixties Turn 50. Standing around like robotic Conservancy volunteer greeters were those black kiosks, each with a flatscreen monitor looping footage of various sixties architecture around L.A. County. Last fall the Mod Com put on a sixties tour in L.A.'s South Bay area. I kind of wish I'd gone now after seeing the Mod Com's setup tonight. The tour was called "It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod City." I love that. Extra props for alluding to a popular movie...from the sixties! Anyway, the tour, as I later read in a recap in the Conservancy newsletter, took folks to sixties gems such as St. Jerome Catholic Church, the LAX Theme Building (I've always wanted to go in there!), IBM Aerospace HQ, The Proud Bird Restaurant, Imperial Terminal Flight Path Learning Center & Museum, and Northrop Grumman Space Park Campus. These were among the buildings being looped on the kiosks. Bravo to the Mod Com! It really was an impressive setup and a great use of all that space downstairs.

When the lights went down at 8pm, the first item on the program, as always, had Conservancy head Linda Dishman come out and welcome everyone and give a special thanks to the sponsors, the companies and wealthy individuals who sponsored both tonight as well as the Last Remaining Seats series as a whole. After that, she invited Matthew Weiner out to the stage to interview him for a few minutes.

The man in charge of one of the most popular shows on TV today, Matt Weiner is a humble, unassuming guy. He's in his mid forties and balding. He smiles easily, but you can tell he's a smart, serious guy as well. Linda asked him a bit about his background and particularly his interest in conservancy. Matt said that, while he's originally from Baltimore, he did a good bit of his growing up in L.A. When he was eleven (in 1976, the same year I was born), his family left Baltimore and settled in L.A.'s Hancock Park neighborhood. That right there tells me his parents must've done okay for themselves. He didn't mention what they did for a living, but Hancock Park is a beautiful historic neighborhood created in the 1920s by an oil magnate named George Hancock. It's 4400 acres of land George inherited from his dad, who in turn bought up the land when it was part of the larger Rancho La Brea. I know this thanks to the book Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles by Valley native--and sometime Book Fest attendee--Kevin Roderick. Hancock Park really is a gorgeous neighborhood. It's one of those neighborhoods you've probably seen in a movie or TV show, with those manicured lawns and palm trees lining the broad streets in perfect symmetry against the clear blue sky and, if you're facing north, the Hollywood sign off yonder. But seeing it on screen doesn't do it justice. When you're in L.A., it's definitely worth a drive-through and a look-see. Matt credited his growing up in Hancock Park with his interest in preserving historic architecture. It was during those years that he watched a lot of historic structures around L.A. fall into disrepair and decay. I reckon that makes some sense, sad as it is. The Conservancy wasn't founded until 1978, and of course it took them a while to find their legs. Until they came along, L.A. didn't have an organization to protect its history.

Even though Mad Men is set in New York, Matt said he shoots quite a bit of it in L.A. That's not exactly rare. CSI New York is shot entirely in L.A., the Valley specifically. That was why Gary Sinise agreed to do it. The producers wanted to shoot in New York, but Lieutenant Dan didn't want to be away from his family for big chunks of the year. CSI Miami, meanwhile, is mostly shot in Long Beach. So Matt's shooting here isn't unprecedented or anything, but it's nonetheless a very conscious decision on his part to support his adopted hometown's economy. He did share a New York shooting story, though. When he shot the Mad Men pilot in 2006, he used a building on Lexington St. When they returned the following year to shoot the rest of the first season, that building had been demolished. Suffice it to say he was indignant, not just from a producer's standpoint, but from the standpoint of someone who cares more and more about historic preservation as he gets older. I loved what he said when Linda asked him what the message of Mad Men was: "Stop tearing shit down." That got a lot of applause and no mistake.

Okay then, that brings us to the next item on tonight's bill before the movie started: Matt Weiner interviewing Robert Morse and Michele Lee. Matt and Robert already have a strong, friendly rapport from Mad Men. I didn't know until tonight that Robert Morse is on that show. He's been in nearly every episode apparently. For someone turning eighty next May, he sure has a lot of energy. He's still sort of like his character from How to Succeed, all smiling and friendly, but with a shade of mischief. I'm not sure why I say he's mischievous, although that gap-toothed grin sure doesn't help. He talked a little about how he fell into acting, and he certainly fell in early. He saw a play when he was a wee tot and knew acting was his calling. He studied with Lee Strasberg when he was still in high school(!) before scoring his first theatrical role in On the Town when he was eighteen. The only film work worth mentioning from those early years are roles that carried over from his theatrical gigs, playing a character he himself originated in the play on which the movie was based. We're talking flicks like The Matchmaker (he played Barnaby Tucker) as well as Say, Darling, Take Me Along and, of course, How to Succeed in Business. This is why Mom was so tickled to see him in person tonight and why tonight completes a circle of sorts. She saw him when he originated the role of J. Pierpont Finch, the role for which he won the first of his two Tonys (the second one didn't come until about thirty years later, for playing Truman Capote in Tru).

While Robert Morse is an East Coaster born on the New York stage, Michele Lee is L.A. born and bred. She's about ten or so years younger than Robert and looks even younger than that. Although I couldn't tell looking at her (Mom and I were only a few rows from the stage), I have a feeling she's had some work done. I could be wrong, she might just have awesome genes, but someone pushing seventy doesn't usually look so pretty. At any rate, she's definitely got class. While Robert's got the whole playful imp shtick going on, Michele is very composed and mature with a dynamite smile. Like Robert, she starred in the original Broadway version of How to Succeed. Unlike Robert, though, she didn't get her part until about a year into the run, after the original Rosemary dropped out. So Mom didn't get to see Michele Lee on stage. Another difference between her and Robert is that she didn't do much formal acting study. She said the best education she ever got was understudying Rosemary that first year and then playing Rosemary for the rest of the run. "Broadway was my education," she said. Her reprisal of the Rosemary character for the film was her film debut. She was in her mid twenties at that point, and there was no looking back. Her bread and butter didn't come from film, though, but from TV. She worked with legends like Danny Kaye and Dick Van Dyke. She even had her own eponymous show for a year or so in the mid seventies. But it was in the late seventies, when Michele was in her late thirties, that life, and TV, changed forever with the debut of a nighttime soap called Knots Landing. I never watched a single episode during its time on the air, and that's no small feat. You try avoiding one of the most popular shows on primetime that starts when you're three and ends a year before you graduate high school. Wow, that's hard to wrap my brain around. It was a spinoff from Dallas, another popular primetime soap from my youth. I'm not sure why they spun it off Dallas since Knots Landing, from what I've gathered, had virtually no connection in terms of plot or anything. The title refers to the setting, a coastal California town that's a fictional version of Malibu or some such place. It follows a bunch of couples and their various trials and tribulations. One of the couples is related to the Ewings from Dallas, and that's pretty much where the connection begins and ends. See what I mean? What was the point of the Ewing connection? Marketing purposes so people would watch the show? Dallas was pretty popular, after all. That "who shot J.R.?" episode still has some of the highest ratings TV's ever seen. Anywho, suffice it to say I didn't appreciate seeing Michele Lee remotely as much as my mom did, or as much as the older TV buffs in the audience. Michele Lee's a TV legend thanks to Knots Landing.

Matt's interview with Robert and Michele was the last item on the agenda before they started the movie. Pretty interesting stuff, huh? Events like this make living in L.A. fun. And I'm really happy Mom got to be here to see it. She was tickled beyond words at all the memory lanes she got to stroll down. Speaking of strolling, as we were strolling up the aisle after the show, she tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to our right. There was Robert Morse, smack in the middle of a throng of fans, chatting them up, flashing that signature gap-toothed smile. We slowed a bit, and for a second I thought Mom was going to elbow her way in to get Robert's attention. She didn't in the end. Too many people.

Ring Festival LA - At Burbank Library - Wagner vs. Tolkien: Who's the Real Lord of the Rings?

2010-05-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

And the Ring Festival continues. I'm still six or so weeks away from seeing the Ring Cycle itself, and I'm still on target with the Ring Festival, the county-wide celebration of LA Opera's first-ever staging of the entire Ring. If you read my recent Getty or MOCA posts, you know all about the Ring Festival and my quest to do one thing per week from the Ring Festival guide. Last week, it was the Getty's thing on mythology. This week, it's the Burbank Library for a lecture on Wagner versus Tolkien.

Tonight after work I drove the couple miles from the Yahoo! office near Burbank Airport to downtown Burbank, one of my homes away from home thanks mainly to the AMC 16 Gigantaplex. The Burbank Library has three or four branches around this fair little city just outside L.A. Tonight's Ring Festival event was at the main branch. It's close enough to the AMC and all the other stuff downtown that I could simply park in the same public garage where I always park.

As soon as I entered the library and saw the middle-aged gals at the front desk, with the library proper on the other side of them, and the folks sitting at all the tables surfing the Web or looking up books or whatever, and the rows and rows of books further beyond them, I was immediately smitten. Not bothering to think how realistic it would be that I'd come back to check something out, since I usually just buy books I want to read, I went up to the desk and asked to become a member. This one gal was all over it. She gave me a brand new card, a copy of the May newsletter, and a little foldout thingee talking about how I can access their system from my home computer using the new PIN she wrote on the front. She also took my e-mail address so I could be on the mailing list for the newsletter going forward. They e-mail it out as a pdf attachment, she said. Awesome.

I almost forgot why I came tonight. Then I wondered where the LA Opera folks would have the room to put on an event here. The library was packed with folks of all ages, which I have to admit inspired me. I may not have much use for the library, but you should've seen this place. And on a Monday night to boot. Whoever says the library is dead obviously hasn't been to the Burbank Library.

The opera lecture was taking place in this big room they have on the second floor. It's one of those catch-all rooms you could use for lots of things. When the woman at the front desk told me how to get up there, she mentioned that it's the same room they use for movie screenings a few times a month. And if I was interested in that, a new movie schedule is published each month in the newsletter.

I was one of the first people in the upstairs lecture/screening room. Several rows of chairs with an aisle in the middle had already been set up. At the front of the room the floor is elevated maybe half a foot to create a sort of makeshift stage. The guy giving tonight's lecture was already there. John Spear is a sixtyish pudgy guy who works for the LA Opera Speakers Bureau as a Community Educator. He also volunteers for the Opera League of Los Angeles as an Assistant Committee Chair. John had already finished organizing his lecture materials, so he killed time chatting with the handful of us already there. He asked us if we had plans to see Die Feen (The Fairies) next month at the Pasadena Playhouse, produced by the Lyric Opera of Los Angeles. I probably won't see it, but that's not my point. With that one question, I could already tell John was a Wagnerite. You know he plans to see Die Feen, and he made sure we knew that.

It is sort of a big deal, though. Die Feen was the very first full-length opera Wagner wrote. And next month's production in Pasadena marks its very first performance in the United States, John said. Wow, really? We are talking about Wagner, right? The Ring Cycle guy? The man behind Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and a whole bunch of other legendary stuff? Well, I guess even Einstein can make lemons. But John insisted Die Feen's not a lemon. It may not be Tannhäuser or anything, but critics generally agree it's half decent. I doubt it'd get any attention at all if it wasn't by Wagner, so I suppose the appeal for folks like John is seeing, or rather, hearing, the kinds of stuff this mad genius wrote before he officially became a mad genius.

Wagner wrote the thing when he was all of twenty, but it was never produced in his lifetime. He subtitled it a "grand romantic opera," which tells you his ego was already in full bloom at that green age. It didn't have its world premiere until the summer of 1888, a good five years after Wagner's death. The opera company that finally took the big risk was Munich. That's not too surprising if you know anything about Wagner. Munich's the state capital of Bavaria, the southern-most state in Germany and the one that's pretty much claimed Wagner as their own ever since Wagner himself started the Ring Festival, THE Ring Festival, in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in August 1876. The festival's been held there every August since then except for a "hiatus" during World War II.

Anyway, it seems it's taken Die Feen a while to catch on. Not only is it just now reaching our shores, it only made it to France last year. That's kind of amazing considering how much closer France is to Germany and that opera's huge in France. While the opera itself is obscure, the overture's been doing pretty well as a standalone piece for orchestra. The New York City Opera was already performing it back in the early eighties. Suffice it to say any Wagnerite would be just as giddy as John about Die Feen's American debut next month.

Interesting trivia about Die Feen. Wagner gave the original score and libretto to Bavarian King Ludwig II (there we go with Wagner and Bavaria again). King Ludwig, by the way, was the guy who "invented" the Oktoberfest (not intentionally) when he married Elisabeth in 1810. After he died, the score and libretto were left to one person after the next and guarded very carefully. Finally, in the 1930s, about a hundred years after it was written, it was given to Hitler as a birthday present. For whatever stupid reason, he kept it with him in that underground bunker where he and his closest people lived toward the end of the war, when it was obvious they were going to lose and it was only a matter of time before the Allies showed up to blow Berlin to shit. And so the Die Feen materials went up in flames along with Hitler, his fellas, and their not-so-bomb-proof bunker.

On a roll with early Wagner, John moved on to the man's second opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). John just saw the USC opera company produce it and thought it was awesome. Wagner wrote it right after Die Feen, when he was twenty-one. Based on Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, this time Wagner didn't have trouble finding any takers. When he was twenty-three, the opera company in Magdeburg produced it. The first performance was a complete disaster. Indeed, it went down so poorly that the second night had to be canceled when the lead soprano's hubby got into a backstage fist fight with one of the lead tenors. By the time it was performed a second time, Wagner was already dead.

It's interesting with these earlier, not-so-great operas. Even though Wagner still had quite a ways to climb to reach his zenith, you can already see him exploring stuff that shows up in his later, much better operas. Stuff like redemption, long-winded expositions, mysterious strangers telling their lovers not to ask about their past, and people throwing themselves headlong into love without considering the consequences. That kind of stuff's all over the Ring Cycle, not to speak of Lohengrin and a bunch of other Wagner gems. John couldn't say enough about the USC version of Das Liebesverbot, especially the production values. He's convinced that if Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot were afforded those same production values when they were written, they would've fared much better with the public.

This led him to talk about the lack of Wagners in our own time. Or rather, classical music composers in general. My father, one of the biggest classical music buffs I know, talks about this every time I visit him, how we don't see any innovation in classical music anymore. Those who study classical music don't really contribute to it. Those who try usually compose stuff that's so atonal that listening to it could be hazardous to your ears. John said that as well, that those who do study classical these days don't seem to be fans of melody, of music you can hum to yourself after you listen to it. "Does anyone write melody today?" John asked. "Or want to?" He bemoaned how musicians who seem to have any interest in melody usually gravitate to movie soundtracks and pop music. He's got a great point. You want a composition that sounds like classical music and has a melody you can hum afterward? Hollywood, baby. This is not a new phenomenon either. If you read my post last month about the Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten, you would know that the composer of that piece, Franz Schreker, wrote music that we would today call cinematic. A lot of his pupils left Germany for Hollywood. Lots of European composers from the early twentieth century, including famous ones, came over to sunny L.A. to find work. Even Arnold Schoenberg came over. He taught at USC and UCLA and settled in the Brentwood section of the Westside. USC and UCLA both named a building after him. UCLA's Schoenberg Hall is one of the venues they use for the Book Fest.

As more folks trickled into the room, John switched from talking about the dearth of classical talent to discussing my single least favorite opera ever: Wagner's Parsifal. Actually, I'm not sure I should say it's my least favorite, but I'll say this: The one production I have seen, which LA Opera put on four years ago, was awful. From what I gather, the guy who directed that version, Robert Wilson, put such a unique stamp on it that it may not be accurate to say I don't like Parsifal. I just hated Robert Wilson "remake" of it. When I attended the Opera League's Backstage Magic seminar a couple months ago, I sat next to Ed Schaff, who volunteers as the League's communications manager. He told me that Robert Wilson basically threw out Wagner's libretto and wrote his own. Man, it sucked bad. The longest five hours of my life. John must be a hardcore Wagnerite if he liked it. He saw that production, understands it was on the slow side, but said it had its own strengths. He described watching it as a Zen experience. He actually had one benefit I didn't have: Before he saw it, someone told him to expect an opera with the pace of syrup in the North Pole. He also heard how LA Opera director Placido Domingo, who played the title character in that production, got all excited that he got to move an arm at one point. That, more than anything, tells you how ungodly slow it was. Not only did the plot not move, the singers didn't move, and when anyone moved so much as an arm, "Alert the media!"

I have to admit, though, that maybe Robert Wilson was onto something. Ed Schaff complained that opera has become a stage director's medium, but that's not Robert Wilson's fault. If you're a director and someone taps you to do an opera, especially if it's a reputable big city company like LA Opera, you sure as shit don't say no. If they approach you, it's safe to assume they like your vision. So what do you do? You stick to your vision. Robert Wilson did that, and he seems to have driven a wedge straight through the audience. It's been years since he did Parsifal, and folks are still talking about it. Tonight's event is like the third or fourth time in the last year or so where Robert Wilson's version of Parsifal came up in the conversation. If you're Robert Wilson, that must feel good.

Alright then. It was a few minutes past the hour. About twenty or so people had shown up at this point. John was ready to begin. He started out with some biographical tidbits. He's originally from Seattle, and one piece of Wagner trivia about him is that, of all the various versions of the Ring Cycle he's seen all over the world, he still hasn't seen the Seattle opera company's version. His first musical love was jazz. John was a jazz drummer in New Orleans in his "former life," he said. His initial entry into the operaverse was as a singer. John was a bass-baritone partial to Verdi operas. He retired from singing ages ago but still has a license plate that says "Verdi Lover." In his later years he worked on the administrative side of opera, eventually landing the role of general director of Long Beach Opera. They did the Ring Cycle under his leadership. John said to this day, LBO's Ring remains one of his favorite versions of the Ring. Well, I guess it would be, huh? Regardless of the version, John said his favorite Ring character is Wotan, god of the gods. He loves how mortal and flawed Wotan becomes over the course of the Cycle. How, by the end of the second one, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Wotan's become this broken-hearted dad forced by his own laws to imprison his baby girl Brünnhilde in a ring of fire atop a desolate mountain. Recall that John used to be a bass-baritone. Wotan, you won't be surprised to learn, is a bass-baritone role. Like all opera singers--well, performers in general--John likes those meaty, complex roles. Wotan's about as meaty and complex as they come.

In terms of tonight's theme, juxtaposing the Ring Cycle with The Lord of the Rings, it first occurred to John that such a theme would make good fodder for an opera lecture back in December 2001, when the first of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, The Fellowship of the Ring, came out. Today, after nearly ten years, John said he's got the lecture down pat. He's written and rewritten it to the point that it's now been published twice. He considered it a good sign when, soon after he finished the initial version in 2002, he got something like ten requests right away to give the Wagner-Tolkien spiel. The idea for this lecture should've occurred to him, he said, back in the seventies, when he left jazz for opera. It was around that time when he read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He's been a fan of Tolkien ever since.

To kick things off, John mentioned the obvious parallels between the two opi. Each work is split into four parts. Each was written out of order. Each consumed the life of its author for many years. Each author took long breaks while working on it. In Wagner's case, after he composed the score for act two of Siegfried, twelve years went by before he got around to act three. Tolkien, for his part, worked on The Lord of the Rings in fits and starts and could sometimes go years without touching it. It drove his agents crazy to the point that they became convinced he'd never finish it.

John saved the biggest parallel for last. Both the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings take their themes and plotlines from three principle sources: The Edda, the Nibelungenlied, and, perhaps most of all, the Völsungasaga.

I remember the Völsungasaga (Saga of the Völsungs) being discussed at the Getty Center event I attended about a year ago called German Art and Opera. It's basically a great big huge novel. Similar in size to The Lord of the Rings, now that I think about it, the Völsungasaga is an epic tale of this very unfortunate family called the Völsungs. It's like their rise and fall, if you will, starting with Völsung himself. We start with him, and then follow his descendants. Völsung is killed by King Siggeir of Geatland. Recognize Geatland? If you read Beowulf, you should. Beowulf was from Geatland, an ancient kingdom in present-day southern Sweden. So anyway, Geatland's King Siggeir kills poor Völsung. Völsung's two kids, son Sigmund and daughter Signy, want to avenge dad. Sigmund eventually has a son named Sigurd, and it's Sigurd who eventually serves as the model for Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied and ultimately the Ring Cycle. Signy, meanwhile, just to make things incredibly complicated, marries her father's killer, King Siggeir, proving that the Icelandic bards were pretty good at juicy plots.

While this originally dates back to Iceland, the other Scandic and Germanic countries took the Saga of the Völsungs and made their own versions of it. In fact, the earliest drawings and carvings giving us a visual representation of the tale's eventual tragic hero, good ol' Sigurd (Siegfried), date back to Sweden. Speaking of which, the Beowulf connection to Völsung is greater than Geatland. The character of Völsung himself is, in fact, mentioned in Beowulf. Early on in the story, when all is fine in the state of Denmark, you've got a bard singing in the court of the Danish King Horthgar (the guy who eventually hires Beowulf and the Geatish warriors to deal with Grendel). Among other things, the bard talks about Völsung and his avenging son Sigmund. In the original Old English, Völsung is spelled Wæls.

The Völsung story also has the inspiration for the Ring Cycle's number one Valkyrie Brünnhilde. In the original Icelandic, her name's Brynhild. Wagner makes Brünnhilde a daughter of Wotan, the god of gods. In the old Icelandic story, she's the daughter of some other guy, but she still knows Wotan, or Odin, as he's called in Icelandic. Odin tells her at one point to help this one king kill another king, but Brynhild likes the other king better so she helps him instead, thus pissing off Odin. He exiles her to this castle behind a wall of shields on top of this one mountain in the Alps, where she has to sleep inside a ring of fire until someone with big enough cojones braves the fire to wake her up. Who do you think that is? Yep. Sigurd. It's clever how Wagner takes bits and pieces of this and melds them together. In the Ring Cycle, he makes Brünnhilde the daughter of Wotan, which makes things simpler and less hokey that they can talk to each other. And instead of messing up a fight between two random kings, Wagner has her deciding the fight between Siegfried's dad Siegmund and the husband of Siegmund's twin sister. Wagner, in other words, streamlines everything. Indeed, as long as the Ring Cycle is, Wagner had to leave out quite a bit of the Völsung story.

Now let's talk about the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This baby is a huge epic poem like Beowulf. John called it the Iliad of Germany. The story is taken from a mishmash of stuff, fiction and non. It started with something that actually happened circa 400 A.D. or thereabouts, somewhere in present-day Germany, something that probably wasn't remotely as dramatic or interesting as the poem turned out to be. As people talked about the event(s) over the years, they naturally embellished and made stuff up. By the time the poet in question came along, the story was a rip roaring yarn. As for when the poem was written, scholars have nailed it down to sometime between 1180 and 1210. They're also fairly certain the poet was someone who worked at the court of this one bishop named Wolfger von Erla, who presided over this town called Passau in present-day southeastern Germany, right on the Austrian border. This was still a couple hundred years before Gutenberg, so they didn't have the printing press. If you wanted to make copies, you had to write everything by hand. Ouch, right? The oldest Nibelungenlied manuscript dates to 1230.

The plot overlaps somewhat with the Völsungasaga's plot. You've got a guy named Siegfried. He's famous for killing a dragon, just as Siegfried kills the dragon Fafner in the third Ring opera. You've got a woman named Brünhild, but she's not Siegfried's love interest. Instead, Siegfried's with this gal named Kriemhild. Brünhild, meanwhile, marries this other guy named Gunther, who I think is Kriemhild's brother. Unlike the Ring Cycle, this has a very specific setting, a kingdom called Burgundy. No, not the Burgundy of present-day France, but a kingdom over in present-day eastern Germany. As I said above, the Nibelungenlied is inspired by real events, and some of the characters are based on real people. For example, after Siegfried is betrayed and murdered and Kriemhild plots her revenge, she marries a Hun named King Etzel, who's based on Attila the Hun. Etzel helps her get back at the folks who killed Siegfried, which includes Kriemhild's brother Gunther. I'm skipping over huge chunks of time that include a lot of political wheeling and dealing between the two power couples. Suffice it to say the ending is a blood bath.

In case you're interested, the kernels of truth out of which the Nibelungenlied was born date to the Roman conquest of the Burgundians in the fifth century as well as a spat between this one queen named, yes, Brunhilda (c. 540-610) and another queen. Attila the Hun did marry a Burgundian woman, but it wasn't Brunhilda or anyone named Kriemhild. Anyway, as I said above, it was mostly boring stuff, but it was enough to light the spark. Those German poets took it and ran with it.

And finally we have the Edda, which I've saved for last because, according to John, it's the most important source we have today of Norse mythology and Germanic legends. The Edda's got a lot of that fantastical stuff we know and love from Tolkien, like orcs and what have you. The Edda actually comes in two parts, a Poetic Edda and a Prose Edda. Like the Nibelungenlied, they were written in the 1200s. And just as the Nibelunglied was taken from German oral traditions, the two Eddas were based on stuff the Icelandic people had been telling their kids at bedtime for hundreds of years. The Poetic Edda is not a single giant poem. It's a collection of poems. Some of the poems talk about how the gods created the world and then didn't get along with each other. Other poems talk about human heroes, including characters the Icelandic folks would've recognized from the Völsungasaga, like Sigurd and Brynhildr.

While no one knows who wrote the Poetic Edda, we do know who wrote the Prose Edda. It was this Icelandic scholar/writer/historian/politician named Snorri Sturluson. He wrote the Prose Edda in four volumes (a prologue plus three main books) around 1220. There we are with four parts again, right? Just like the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings. The Prose Edda has less to do with humans and more to do with the Old Norse deities and all their drama. Snorri took it even further, though. Instead of having separate characters for the gods and the mortals, he combined them. Snorri posited that the gods we all know and love in Norse mythology were based on real people, kings and generals and whatnot. After they died, their followers and subjects started worshipping them. When they went into battle or faced some hardship, they would invoke the names of these dead leaders. They'd venerate them to such an extent that in due time they became akin to gods. And so, for example, when one tribe beat another in battle, the explanation was that the winning tribe's god beat the losing tribe's god in battle up in Valhalla.

This brings us back to Wagner and how he tried to make sense of that wealth of material. John told us about this essay Wagner wrote in the 1840s, when he was in his early thirties. In typical Wagner fashion, it was very long, and he wrote it in dribs and drabs over the course of a few years. It was called something like "World History Saga," and it focused on a conflict over a horde of gold. Other than that, John said most of it wouldn't make sense to anyone today. He said it wasn't historical fiction so much as a warped history. I'd guess in Hollywood parlance, the "World History Saga" would be considered a treatment for the eventual final product, or the first draft of a treatment. To me it sounds like Wagner had soaked up those three main source materials I talked about above, mixed them all up in his mental pot, and tried to give his own spin. He was bursting with story ideas but didn't know which direction to go in.

In the fall of 1848, by which point he'd been kicking around this mythological stuff for some time, Wagner sat down and wrote the first official Nibelung sketch. This was a more organized distillation of those ancient sources into a coherent plot outline for what Wagner thought would be just one opera called Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death). This is the opera that eventually became the fourth Ring opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

One interesting tidbit I didn’t know until tonight is that, in addition to the Siegfried/Sigurd character from the myths, Wagner also based his Siegfried in part on Frederick Barbarossa (officially Frederick I), a German king who ruled the Holy Roman Empire for most of the twelfth century. I first learned about this guy in high school German class. Mr. Wallace introduced him to us by explaining the Barbarossa nickname. It comes from the Italian for "red beard," which is what the Italians, a lot of whose territory was part of the empire, called him. Not to make fun of him, mind you, but because they were scared shitless of him. Fred's being German meant there was tension between him and the Italians almost by default. Ultimately the Italians were quite right to be scared of him, as his reign was defined quite a bit by the military campaigns he launched down there, and how he stole a bunch of sacred stuff from the Vatican.

The whole Vatican thing makes it ironic that Fred was a Crusader, as in the Holy Crusades. In fact, the particular Crusade he went on (there were several) coincided with the one Richard the Lionheart (Richard I) went on. Richard's the king you might remember from the Robin Hood stories. It was Fred and Richard and the king of France, all leading their armies into the Holy Land. Things went great for a while. Fred, like Richard, was a natural-born leader. But he was old at this point, pushing seventy. That's long in the tooth by today's standards, let alone back then. Almost a year into the Crusade, he and the men were crossing some river in present-day Turkey. It was sort of rocky, at one point the horse faltered or something, Fred fell off, and that's that. Like everyone else, he was decked out in heavy armor, which makes it impossible to get back up when you've fallen into deep enough water.

I wish John had gone more into what exactly Wagner was thinking when he connected Fred to Siegfried. On the surface, it's hard to see. Siegfried is basically a giant man-child who grows up isolated from society. In fact, think of Siegfried as the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from Twins. Remember how he was raised on that tropical island and becomes sort of a fish out of water when he ventures to the mainland to reunite with his twin Danny DeVito? That's basically how Siegfried is. He's a big strong guy who's very naive in the ways of the world. When he kills the dragon Fafner, it's not because he's brave, it's because he's an idiot who doesn't know that a massive fire-breathing dragon is generally to be avoided. So again, the question is: What are the parallels between Siegfried and Frederick Barbarossa?

His innocence aside, Siegfried is a natural-born leader, you could say. He's superhuman, charismatic, and knows how to whoop some ass. The same could be said for Fred. He, too, was a natural leader, had great charisma, and was indeed thought to be superhuman by his contemporaries. Most folks pushing seventy back then could barely walk. This guy strapped on armor, hopped on a horse, and led thousands of people across the continent to the Middle East. I should also mention that since Fred was a German king, and that he was phenomenally successful as a war leader/politician/all that stuff, folks in Wagner's time would've naturally clung to him as an ideal. As I've mentioned in other Ring-related posts, when Wagner wrote the Ring, the German states were riven with strife. Lots of war, lots of conflict, with people fleeing in droves. Those who stayed were very proud of their past. The period of Fred's reign, indeed the German Middle Ages in general, were viewed through very thick rose-colored lenses by Wagner and his contemporaries. So even if the parallels between Siegfried and Fred aren't obvious, the fact is, Fred was viewed as the ideal leader they were sorely missing in Wagner's time. And so in creating the character of Siegfried, Wagner was, in essence, creating this ideal heroic figure who literally didn't have "fear" in his vocabulary.

John added that Wagner also based Siegfried partly on Jesus Christ. I don't get it. What was Wagner thinking about specifically? How Siegfried dies tragically at the end, betrayed by those he thought were his friends? And how he's the offspring of gods? He's not Wotan's son, but he is his grandson. I dunno. It just seems that if you look at a lot of tragic heroes, one could argue they were all based on Jesus.

Speaking of sacrifice, John now jumped forward a good sixty-plus years, from mid-nineteenth century Germany in turmoil to the 1910s, when all of Europe was in turmoil with World War I. If you've studied that war for even five minutes, you know what a complete bloodbath it was, a total waste of millions upon millions of lives, young men in their prime being fed--no, stuffed, crammed, jam-packed--into a mechanized meat grinder. This was when Tolkien found his fantasy legs.

Tolkien was in college when the war broke out. England was feeling very full of herself at this point. No one had a clue about the coming nightmare. Men of all ages were enlisting in droves. Apparently Tolkien wanted to finish college first, which pissed off his parents because they wanted him to enlist right away. He finished college about a year into the war and spent the following year in training before being deployed to the continent in the summer of '16. Tolkien saw lots of action. Almost all his pals from childhood were killed. Eventually he got sick with what they called "trench fever," which meant he had lice snacking on him. And so he went back to England and got bounced from hospital to hospital.

This is when he started writing fantasy. Have you heard of Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales? It's basically a collection of short stories that, big picture wise, served as his initial exploration of Middle-earth, the same place where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place. The one story in particular he wrote during his convalescence was called "The Fall of Gondolin," about the rise and fall of this Elven city called Gondolin. It's quite dark. A whole bunch of the good guys die at the end after being betrayed by one of their own.

Like Wagner, Tolkien created mythological worlds with mostly non-human characters through which he could exorcise his demons. John told us about how, later on after World War II, scholars and critics kept looking for traces of World War II in Middle-earth. Tolkien was like, "Are you kidding? Wrong war!" When the second edition of The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien decided to write a preface to address the war question. "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

As for World War II, John talked about how the Nazis, including and especially Hitler, adopted Wagner as one of their own, even though Wagner died a few years before Hitler was born. Just as Wagner viewed the Middle Ages as the German ideal, so too did the Nazis. And since Wagner's operas had a lot to do with old German myths, the Nazis not only championed Germanic legends, they championed the man who championed Germanic legends. In fact, a lot of people actually think Wagner was, in fact, a Nazi, when of course simple chronology renders that impossible. Of course, it doesn't help matters that Wagner was an unabashed anti-Semite.

Tolkien himself weighed in on the matter. John told us that Tolkien wasn't surprised the Nazis appropriated Wagner and specifically the Ring Cycle for their sinister purposes. Tolkien was convinced the damage inflicted by their appropriation was irreparable. At the time, that may have seemed likely. The fact that Wagner is still omnipresent, though, speaks volumes about how awesome his music is. Say what you will about Wagner the man (and we all do), but you can't deny the man's artistic talent. In an Opera League seminar last year, one of the speakers said Wagner was "incapable of writing a single boring bar of music." True dat.

Just as they do at Opera League seminars, John played musical excerpts. The first two excerpts were from scene three of the first Ring Cycle opera, Das Rheingold. This is one of my favorite scenes in the whole Cycle. The dwarf Alberich, the Ring Cycle's arch villain (tragic hero?), ventures down into Nibelheim, the underworld where the dwarves live and work under the lashes of Alberich's whip. I love how LA Opera evoked Nibelheim. They do something clever with that huge stage rake to make it look like Alberich's going down. And all that hammering, the steady clanging, is integrated into the music. In terms of the plot, the point of the scene is to introduce Alberich's brother, Mime, the dwarf who eventually raises Siegfried in the woods between the second and third operas. Mime is the best of the metalsmiths. When we meet him, he's just finished making a magical helmet called the Tarnhelm. Don the Tarnhelm and you can either become invisible or change shape. Soon Wotan, god of the gods, and his lawyer/god of fire Loge show up. Now that Alberich has both the Tarnhelm and the all-powerful Ring, his ego has grown bigger than Valhalla. He tells Wotan and Loge straight up that he'll be taking over the world in due time. Loge, like any good lawyer, turns passive-aggressive. He pretends to doubt the Tarnhelm's power. Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to turn into a huge dragon. Loge's unfazed. Alberich then turns into a little toad. And that's when Loge and Wotan grab the little shit and whisk him up to Valhalla as their prisoner.

John's main point in playing this excerpt was to talk about leitmotifs. You know what a leitmotif is, right? Watch any movie and you've most likely seen it. Or rather, heard it. You know how in movies, when a certain character shows up, the same series of musical notes or the same part of a song plays? Like in Star Wars, composer John Williams came up with a whole slew of leitmotifs for most of the major characters. Princess Leia had that same little delicate tune. When Darth Vader or the Emperor or the storm troopers were approaching, you always heard that very sinister orchestral piece which has by now become ubiquitous. Sure, you know leitmotifs. Well, Wagner was the leitmotif master. John said he may not have invented the idea of a leitmotif, but with the Ring Cycle, he advanced the cause of leitmotifs by leaps and bounds. This excerpt introduces us to a few leitmotifs. First and foremost, you've got the "Ring" leitmotif. This is at the very beginning of the scene, when Alberich brags about having used the Ring to enslave the dwarves. That leads to the "Woe" motif. I remember that from the LA Opera production, how the dwarves don't sing so much as wail in response to the whip's lash. This takes us to the "Gold's Dominion" leitmotif, Alberich's response to the wailing. And finally the scene comes full circle back to the "Ring" motif when Wotan and Loge show up.

Before continuing with the excerpts, John talked about the stark contrast between how the two epics begin--Das Rheingold and The Hobbit--and how these beginnings tell us a lot about the two authors. He picked up the copy of The Hobbit he brought with him and read us the first page.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats--the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill--The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it--and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage...

I hadn't thought about it before, but John's dead on. When you look at how The Hobbit begins versus Das Rheingold, right away it seems Tolkien is the noon to Wagner's midnight. Of course it's more complicated than that, but anyways. John didn't play us the opening to Das Rheingold, but that's just as well. When he said the beginning of the Ring Cycle, he didn't mean the first page of the score. He meant the entire first opera. Whereas Tolkien was content giving us a quick rundown of Bilbo's house before diving into the plot with the arrival of the dwarves, Wagner snowed his audience under the complete portrait of the Ring's mythological origin. That's basically what Das Rheingold is: A one-hundred-sixty-minute exposition in four acts.

The next excerpt was the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" song from the beginning of the third and last act of Die Walküre. Even folks who know nothing whatsoever about Wagner or the Ring Cycle have heard "Ride of the Valkyries." It's in that one scene in Apocalypse Now when Robert Duvall leads a chopper attack. Otherwise, it's a pretty ubiquitous song. Seriously, if you think you've never heard it, go to YouTube and do a search for "Ride of the Valkyries." When you hear it, you'll be like, "Of course!"

In the context of act three, the song usually starts as a prelude. In the opera lexicon, a prelude is similar to an overture. Only, an overture is the piece they play before the opera starts. The prelude is what they play before act two or act three or whatever. Not to be confused with an interlude, which is played between scenes. Anyway, "Ride of the Valkyries" starts when the curtain is still down, but that's only for a few seconds. Soon enough the curtain rises to reveal the divine sisters. Not all of them yet. At first we've got four who've gathered on the mountain. See, what the Valkyries basically do in Old Norse mythology is, they fly back and forth from Valhalla and earth to collect heroes who've died in battle. Accordingly, each of these four Valkyries has a dead warrior in her steed's saddlebag. Soon enough, four more Valkyries show up with dead heroes of their own. Finally, they're joined by the ninth and final Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde's sisters are shocked to see she's brought a human woman with her, Sieglinde, the gal from act one who fell in love with her long lost twin brother Siegmund. Gross, I know, but let's get past that. Anyway, what no one says in this scene, but what you would know if you've been following the Cycle from the beginning, is that Sieglinde is half-sister to the Valkyries. Right? The Valkyries are the divine daughters of Wotan. He had them with, I think, Freia or someone. One of the goddesses. But the twins Sieglinde and Siegmund? Wotan had them with a mortal woman. Despite this kinship, the Valkyries are totally against protecting Sieglinde even though she's pregnant with the third opera's title character. This is where Wotan shows up and gives Brünnhilde the third degree. The other eight Valkyries fly away. Most we never see again except for Waltraute, who figures more prominently in the fourth opera.

John mentioned another pop culture touchstone where you may've heard "Ride of the Valkyries": What's Opera, Doc? It's one of those Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd shorts from the fifties. You've got Bugs as Brünnhilde and Elmer Fudd wearing that Viking helmet and singing, with the same "Ride of the Valkyrie" notes: "Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da waaaaaaabbit, etc." John related seeing Robin Williams at the Hollywood Bowl several years ago. "Don't ask me why he was there," he said. It wasn't a one-man show but was part of a larger program. The Hollywood Bowl is primarily the summer home of the LA Philharmonic, and I'm guessing they must've played Wagner that night, perhaps even "Ride of the Valkyries." When Robin Williams took the mic, he said it was impossible to think of Wagner without thinking of What's Opera, Doc?

Part of John's point in playing "Ride of the Valkyries" was to introduce us to yet another leitmotif, called "Walkürenritt," which literally means "Valkyrie Ride." The end of act three, which is the end of the opera, sees Wotan stripping his daughter of her divine Valkyrie status, rendering her as mortal as her half-sister Sieglinde. Then he leaves her asleep and surrounded by fire, saying she'll be stuck there until someone's got the cojones to brave the fire. The way John described his relationship to the end of Die Walküre comes close to mine. It's very effecting, especially the way Achim Freyer stages it with the scrim. There's Brünnhilde, asleep in the fire, no longer a mighty warrior. And there's Wotan, just outside the fire, reluctantly turning his back and stalking away, from his daughter and from the audience. He too seems human. And to us, at that moment, he is. This isn't Wotan the god of Norse gods. It's Wotan the heart-broken dad, decreed by his own laws to abandon his baby girl. John said he always cries when he sees that. If I ever become a father, I'll probably cry too.

From Wagner we go back to Tolkien. Just as Wagner was part of a group of artists espousing the Medieval German and mythical German as the ideal, so too did Tolkien belong to a clique of minds like his. In this case, I'm referring to writers who promoted narrative fiction, especially fantasy. You know C.S. Lewis, right? The Chronicles of Narnia guy? Well, he and Tolkien were pals. They hung out at the pub every week. John talked about their being part of this group called the Inklings, a bunch of writers and professors who gathered regularly at this Oxford pub called the Bird. You had Tolkien as well as his son Chris, C.S. Lewis and his older brother Warren, and a whole bunch of others. The way Warren Lewis described it was: "Properly speaking, the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." Right. It was like a Sunday book group or something. Only, instead of gabbing about a book they'd all just read, they'd talk about and read from books they were in the process of writing. This is where Tolkien read early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Is that not awesome or what? To be a fly on the Bird's wall...

John went into how Tolkien used archetypes in The Lord of the Rings to prefigure some of the great cultural and historical events. So for starters, you've got Númenor as Atlantis, right? It was this island west of Middle-earth that basically sunk and killed most of the folks who lived there. Then you've got Aragorn kissing the hot elf Arwen when she's asleep, which alludes to Sleeping Beauty, of course. And finally, we have my most favorite allusion in The Lord of the Rings: The Crack of Doom. Tolkien's Middle-earth wasn't as overtly Christian as Lewis's Narnia, but the Crack of Doom is a glaring exception. In the Christian mythos, the Crack of Doom is when they play the trumpets announcing the Day of Judgment. Well, Tolkien took the Crack of Doom and made it literal with Mount Doom, that volcano in Mordor where Sauron forged the Ring. That's where Frodo has to get to to destroy the Ring. He has to venture into the bowels of Doom and drop the Ring through the literal crack in the floor so that it'll fall into the lava. Those are but three of several examples of Tolkien alluding to stuff in our culture. John said Tolkien, in plotting the Middle-earth timeline, drew from archetypes residing in the British subconscious and made them conscious.

This led John to talk about a lecture Tolkien delivered in 1936 called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." He was in his mid forties at this point and had been teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford's Pembroke College for about ten years. The Inklings were in full swing. The Hobbit was a year away from publication. Tolkien was on a roll. The gist of the lecture was that Tolkien was taking to task the majority of Beowulf critics, who insisted on viewing the epic poem purely as a historical document, to be used for studying Norse life while completely ignoring the fantasy elements. Like, say, Grendel. And the dragon. Both of whom constitute a fairly significant portion of the story. Scholars also used the poem as a vehicle for studying Old English. Don't get Tolkien wrong, he was definitely a language man. He invented Elvish for Pete's sake. And of course he had nothing against history. Dude invented the most comprehensive history imaginable for Middle-earth. His point was that the critics shouldn't stop there. Beowulf, he said, has tons and tons to offer from a fantasy and artistic standpoint. He said Grendel and his mom and the dragon were totally key to the poem and that the writer was using them as an allegory for human destiny. "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," Tolkien said.

This lecture was a watershed for Beowulf scholarship. It's been reprinted and republished innumerable times. The first I heard of it was in the summer of 2000 when I read Irish poet Seamus Heaney's then new and very well-received translation of Beowulf. In his introduction, he cited and praised Tolkien's lecture for drawing everyone's attention to the poem's literary qualities, validating its inclusion not just in history classes, but in English lit classes as well. Suffice it to say Beowulf's influence is fairly stark in the Middle-earth stuff. In 2003, the same year The Return of the King came out, they found literally two thousand or so pages of Tolkien's handwritten notes about, as well as his own translation of, Beowulf, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, thus revealing the extra dimension of his fandom (fanaticism?).

The Beowulf critics Tolkien was taking to task reminded John of one of his English teachers, who apparently missed the point of Poe's "The Raven." Of course, "The Raven" is much shorter and less complicated than Beowulf, so I'm not sure how anyone could screw it up. But apparently John had a teacher who was more interested in "The Raven" for strictly linguistic and historical purposes while completely ignoring the horror and fantasy aspects.

With the next pair of excerpts, John compared and contrasted the scene in The Hobbit when Bilbo first meets the dragon Smaug versus Siegfried's meeting the dragon Fafner in Siegfried. He picked up The Hobbit and flipped open to chapter twelve ("Inside Information"). Chapter eleven ("On the Doorstep") ends with Bilbo going down into the Lone Mountain. John started reading about two or three pages into chapter twelve. Bilbo's been venturing deeper into the mountain and has now reached, as Tolkien wrote (and about where John started reading):

...the great bottom-most cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain's root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!

There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.

Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed.

To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.

And then Bilbo, invisible thanks to the One Ring, steals a cup or something, which Smaug soon detects when he wakes up and "smells" the fact that his horde is now less one cup. Bilbo and the dwarves haul ass out of the mountain as Smaug rips shit up. Our heroes spend the next few pages camping and debating their next move. Bilbo, who at this point in the adventure has become the group's undisputed leader, proposes to go back down there, invisible, to see if he can find a weakness with Smaug that they can exploit. This time Smaug only pretends to sleep as the invisible Bilbo enters his chamber. Smaug smells him and starts talking to him. The conversation they have is hilarious, although I'm not sure how much of that hilarity is intentional. It's just the way this huge scary dragon talks like a very proper Englishman. Here's an excerpt, starting toward the beginning of the conversation.

"No thank you, O Smaug the Tremendous!" he replied. "I did not come for presents. I only wished to have a look at you and see if you were truly as great as tales say. I did not believe them."

"Do you now?" said the dragon somewhat flattered, even though he did not believe a word of it.

"Truly songs and tales fall utterly short of the reality, O Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities," replied Bilbo.

"You have nice manners for a thief and a liar," said the dragon. "You seem familiar with my name, but I don't seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?"

"You may indeed! I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen."

"So I can well believe," said Smaug, "but that is hardly your usual name."

"I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number."

"Lovely titles!" sneered the dragon. "But lucky numbers don't always come off."

"I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me."

"These don't sound so creditable," scoffed Smaug.

"I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider," went on Bilbo beginning to be pleased with his riddling.

"That's better!" said Smaug. "But don't let your imagination run away with you!"

This of course is the way to talk to dragons, if you don't want to reveal your proper name (which is wise), and don't want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also very wise). No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it. There was a lot here which Smaug did not understand at all (though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo's adventures to which he was referring), but he thought he understood enough, and he chuckled in his wicked inside.

"I thought so last night," he [Smaug] smiled to himself. "Lake-men, some nasty scheme of those miserable tub-trading Lake-men, or I'm a lizard. I haven't been down that way for an age and an age; but I will soon alter that!"

You get the idea. Now let's compare that to when Siegfried confronts Fafner in act two of his eponymous opera. If you've followed the Cycle from the beginning, you know that Fafner was one of the two giants who built Valhalla in Das Rheingold. And then at the end, in a squabble over the Ring, Fafner kills the other giant, Fasolt. Now we get to see what Fafner's been up to. He's taken the Ring and the Tarnhelm and found this cave where he can guard them in the form of a dragon. As I said above, Siegfried's an innocent kid in a man's body. He's not a courageous hero in the traditional sense. While waiting outside the cave, he forgets about the dragon and fiddles around with his reed pipe. He tries and fails to mimic the song of a bird in a nearby tree. The racket wakes up Fafner. The ensuing fight is very short. Siegfried takes his sword Nothung (yes, even swords have names here, as they do in The Lord of the Rings) and stabs Fafner in the heart. Just before he expires, Fafner warns Siegfried about people who will betray him to get the Ring. When he tastes the dragon's blood, Siegfried can suddenly understand the bird he'd been trying to imitate. The bird tells him to go get the Ring and the Tarnhelm.

One obvious difference between the two scenes is that, in The Hobbit, we get some insight into Smaug's thoughts. Smaug is also friendlier, even playful. He loves that riddling talk. Fafner, meanwhile, has no humor whatsoever. It's all gloom and doom with Fafner. Also, Biblo's confronting Smaug is a clear act of bravery. He uses both his courage and his wits to get Smaug to lower his guard. He's got no choice, right? He's a tiny little hobbit. Certainly he can't rely on brute strength like the borderline idiot Siegfried. This makes the Smaug scene a tête-à-tête filled with both humor and suspense. Night and day from Siegfried versus Fafner.

John switched gears to talk about Fafner from the point of view of stage design. He said that if the stage designers aren't careful, the Siegfried-Fafner scene can turn into a Chinatown parade, with the dragon looking more hokey than threatening. This is when he brought up Stacy Brightman, PhD. Stacy's head of LA Opera's Education and Community Programs. Among other things, she's the one who partners with schools and volunteer groups to promote LA Opera. She's also an adjunct professor at USC's music school, specializing in the music industry, arts management and education and community programs. John told us that when she was getting her doctorate at UC Davis in theatre research, half the work she did was on Wagner. From Stacy's point of view, Wagner changed stage design forever when he wrote the Ring Cycle. That's why he started the festival in Bayreuth, right? Specifically because, in his opinion, there didn't exist at that time any theater on earth that could handle it.

John went a bit more into the differences between Wagner and Tolkien as people. Well, mainly he talked about Wagner, telling us stuff that I've by now heard at just about every Ring-related seminar or lecture I've ever attended: Wagner was an asshole. "Despicable" was the word John used. He "ruined a lot of people." And, of course, as I've heard umpteen times by now, Wagner was an egomaniac. "Exhibit A: Bayreuth," John said. "Exhibit B: Every Wagner society on Earth was created by Wagner." Then he talked about Wagner as the bold-faced anti-Semite and womanizer. Among many other affairs, he slept with this one woman named Cosima, who was the daughter of Franz Liszt and wife of Hans von Bülow, one of the greatest pianists/composers/conductors of his day. Wagner and Cosima had two kids before she finally divorced Hans so she could marry our man here. This is all smothered with irony since Hans was a big promoter of Wagner's work and did quite a bit to get the work known. Even after Wagner stole his woman, Hans didn't hold a grudge, and was even sad when Wagner died. Cosima ended up in charge of the Bayreuth festival and ran it for another thirty years after her husband's death (she was twenty-five years younger than him). Hans wasn't the only ironic supporter of Wagner's. John told us that even Jews stood by Wagner and supported his work.

Now and again throughout his lecture, John talked about the centennial Ring Cycle production at Bayreuth in August 1976. I remember one of the speakers talking about it at a recent Opera League seminar. It was the one directed by a thirty-two-year-old prodigy named Patrice Chéreau. Patrice's vision for the Ring came from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, a book-length essay wherein Shaw talks about how awesome Wagner is, especially the Ring Cycle. He posited that the Ring Cycle is an allegory about Communist revolution. The dwarves are the workers who are oppressed, tormented, and motivated to keep going only by the "invisible whip of hunger" and the chance that their rich bosses will free them someday. Shaw looked at Wotan's family as representing capitalism. So just as Wotan's family eventually implodes from greed and jealousy and betrayal, so, thought Shaw, would capitalism, due to its "internal contradictions." He said the Ring Cycle shows "the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today."

And so when they tapped him to direct the centennial Ring at Bayreuth, Patrice, drawing inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, set the story during the Industrial Revolution. The gods and goddesses were factory bosses in business suits. The dwarves were the workers. The Rhine River was a hydroelectric dam. John referred to Patrice's Ring as the "Red Ring." Adding to the fun was the casting of European rock star Peter Hoffman to play Siegmund. Hildegard Behrens, a German soprano who just passed away last August at 72, played his twin Sieglinde. She eventually won a Grammy for Best Opera Recording for Die Walküre at the Met. As you can imagine, audiences were a little perplexed at first by Patrice's vision, but it worked. The Bayreuth organizers called Patrice back four more times. At the final performance in August 1980, the audience gave a ninety-minute standing ovation.

When someone in the audience asked John about character development in the Ring Cycle versus The Lord of the Rings, John referenced Patrice Chéreau's production yet again as a great way of seeing how Wagner developed character. He specifically referred to the way Patrice staged the last scene in act two of Die Walküre. This is when Wotan, at the behest of his wife Fricka, lets his own son Siegmund get killed by Sieglinde's husband Hunding. Fricka was mad at the twins for having sex because A) It's adultery, and B) It's incest! Here's how Patrice staged the scene. After Hunding cuts down Siegmund, Sieglinde kneels on the ground next to him and wraps a sheet around him several times to create a makeshift shroud. He'll be dead any minute. With what little strength he has left, Siegmund says he won't go to Valhalla without her. Sieglinde stops winding the sheet abruptly. And then Siegmund expires. "Well, at least he gets to see Valhalla now," she says. Watching all of this play out, Brünnhilde sees true human love for the first time. "Brünnhilde's world is rocked," John said. This is more than just character development. This is what Wagner liked to do: Develop character while at the same time forever altering the course of the story due to the character's new trait/new way of seeing the world.

This is when John talked about different singers he's admired in the role of Wotan. He specifically called out this fortysomething Welsh bass-baritone named Bryn Terfel. Bryn has apparently specialized in Mozart stuff since his first big break twenty years ago. But he's branched out and done other stuff, including Wagner, Strauss, and Puccini. This fall he'll be tackling Wotan again at the Met in a brand new Robert Lepage version of the Ring Cycle. The best Wotan John's ever seen was a German bass-baritone named Hans Hotter, a suitable surname, I reckon, since this guy's practically a legend to Ring fans. He lived almost a hundred years, from 1909 to 2003. In the early sixties he sang the role of Wotan in the first-ever commercial recording of the Ring. You can also hear live recordings of him as Wotan from Bayreuth in the fifties. John said it was not only his powerful voice but incredible height that gave him that god of gods quality. Hans epitomized the concept of stage presence.

John talked about this timeshare he's got in Hawaii where he's been going every summer since 1980 or thereabouts. Originally this timeshare was next door to a bar called Tom Bombadil's. And next to that was a bookstore called Middle-earth. Both bar and bookstore were owned by the same guy, and both went belly-up about seven or eight years ago. John still has Tom Bombadil's T-shirts that he jogs in wherever he goes. At this point the shirts have been all over the country, including New York City. This tells you what a hardcore Tolkien fan John must be. Only the true fans know who Tom Bombadil is.

Speaking of true fans, John told us that Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh have read The Lord of the Rings twice a year every year since they were fourteen. They truly love the language of the books, which made them the perfect couple to make the films, I now see. While John loves the films (he's seen them many times and has all the special editions), he's worried people will lose access to that language. When they want to experience The Lord of the Rings, they'll skip the books and go straight to the awesome movies. He told us that Amazon.com and the magazine Bibliophile cited The Lord of the Rings as the most important fiction of the 20th century. Here's hoping that'll keep the books on people's radars.

He ended the lecture by coming back to LA Opera's current Ring Cycle. He's seen all four productions and thinks Achim has done a terrific job. He also loves how candid Achim is about the work. Some artists do stuff that's really clever and artsy fartsy and open-ended, and when you ask them what the hell it all means, they refuse to say. Of course, sometimes it's because they don't know. Achim knows, though. John said that when someone asked him about the weird light that changes colors at the beginning of Das Rheingold, Achim was like, "Oh, that? That's just my way of showing Loge being born." If you think about it, John said, Achim's got two separate productions going on here: Singing and painting. The constantly moving elements add up to a series of paintings, inhabited by the singers and accompanied by the gorgeous music. The painting angle makes sense. Achim Freyer is first and foremost a painter. That's pretty cool how unpretentious he is. In fact, genius artists who are straightforward and down to earth seem very rare.