Cinema L'Euphorie

In my 7th year of unwavering devotion to heroin, I enrolled in City College of San Francisco’s Film School. Considered third-best in the nation, it bowed low to the King Kong and Godzilla of film schools, UCLA and USC, with NYU and our CCSF tying for third. And I did pretty well for a junkie. Learned basic motion picture fundamentals, concealed needle tracks, collected hefty grant and loan checks and, like Elvere, received praise for my work and so mastered only what interested me. Only the insecure, the less-talented needed to learn more, right? I had no doubts whatsoever of being able to juggle the twin vocations of student filmmaker and smackhead because, like Elvere so long ago, I stumbled thru a tear in the dimensional fabric transcending logic, education and the laws of both man and God.

We knew secrets.

See, children growing up on drugs live life inside an enchanted box where everything is permitted. It’s a little like having your very own movie theatre. True, sometimes the pictures are so excruciatingly harsh, you squirm in your seat and stretch your t-shirt up over my eyes ‘til they stop. But even these early torture pornos are silver-lined with a fatherly voice-over reminding, “This is good for you. Your Boot Camp, son. Toughen you up into a man”, it’s my very own Hollywood Ending reminding me to hunker down, grit my teeth and wait for the marquee to change, as it always does. And isn’t that half the fun anyway, never knowing what auteur/smuggler/chemist’s bronco will be bucking you next? Sometimes, a soft-focus sexy dream would draw me up high onto clouds infusing every synapse and molecule, then waft me down onto a sensual forest floor where gentle giant bunny tongues massaged my mind, chakras, balls ‘til The End. Or a beloved epileptic double-feature comedy awash in God-sized laughter spasms so enormous, they caromed off near-by planets on a propellant of arcane details only me and a few special others really understand. Teenage living high ‘n inside Cinema L'Euphorie, where anything is possible and there’s never any real pain, no real fear. Just awesome fascination and all-encompassing bliss. Well, ‘til the shit wears off. And when it does, I’ll just get myself another ticket.

By the time I method-acted my way into Film School, my pre-incarnations included: gypsy wrapped in a cloak of invisibility clearing shelves of wine, cigarettes, bread and cheese in broad daylight. I’d lived inside the skin of a society-shunned black man in white-face, shilling smack in bars while meeting your instinctive sneer of distrust with flaring superiority. I’d taken a whirl as a full-tilt rock star whalin’ songs of ‘nobody loves me, so fuck you, too’, embodied a free-wheelin’ nomad blowing over boarders with the sovereignty of the wind and even dabbled in a few Mansonesque creepy-crawl break-and-enters to liberate valuable coins, jewelry and liquor.

And, of course, always and forever, no matter who or what I became, at my essence, I am a movie star, being whoever I choose with a twinkle and a wink.

Ironically, the one place my magic bag of tricks and secrets fails me is Hollywood.

The first time I live in Hollywood instills in me a Healthy Respect for the town. Maybe not so much respect as fear - too often the same thing to me. It’s the same Healthy Respect I have for the ocean. Like my respect for Hollywood, I found my respect for the ocean the same way: The Hard Way. Back when I was 7 and a great swimmer – aren’t all native Californians? - I devised my own version of boogie-boarding by holding onto a beach-ball and riding the waves to shore. Ball-surfing. My own sport! Rising up to the top of the wave’s crest, my stomach dropping out and replaced by a sensation that lives exactly in the middle of fear and excitement, I’d slide down the face of the wave while simultaneously being shot all the way in to the beach. Then I’d swim back out to catch the next wave. Shoot in, swim back out. For hours. I am doing exactly what I want to do and nobody’s stopping me – a rare situation. Then the Big One hits. I know it’s the Big One because, as I’m lifted to the top of the Big One’s crest, before beginning my slide down it’s face, it looks like I’m higher than the roller coaster that dominates the boardwalk of the Santa Cruz horizon. I think, “I’m higher than the roller coaster and no body will believe me”. Next, I’m free-falling through the wave’s curl, and I know I’m in trouble because now I’m tumbling, with no sense of direction. Which way’s the beach? The enormous tube of water I’m caught in slams me down into the gravely ocean floor, the bottom of the ocean. Isn’t it a couple of miles deep? I’m at the bottom of the ocean! I swallow a belly-full of Pacific. I try to swim toward what I think is up and am sucked into another tumble, this one underwater. I don’t know where the surface is. I open my eyes and all I can see is dark green-brown water and bubbles and some sand, like the inside of a polluted washing machine. Then it’s over. I’m lying near the shore, throwing up bitter salt water, bleeding from little cuts on my stomach and chest, my beach ball gone. When I reach my mother, crying and still gagging on saline, she says the words I’ll always remember:

“You have to have a Healthy Respect for the ocean”.

The first time I lived in Hollywood became the same respect-inspiring experience. I moved there after finishing film school. Not graduating film school. Not completing film school. Finishing. I was finished and it was time to claim my birthright. After all, was I not Hollywood Royalty in exile? To The Manor Born? The determined slave, battle scars running up his left arm, returns to claim his rightful throne.

I take an apartment on Western Avenue, between Sunset and Hollywood Blvds. managed by an ancient French morphine addict, Maurice. Hookers, pimps and dealers run the block. My apartment sits directly above an Italian bakery with 8x10 glossies of Sly Stallone, Dean Martin and other famous fratelli mounted screen-left of the cash box.

To complete my seedy masterpiece, to put my final polish - my Director’s Cut - on this hybrid Film Noir/Cinema Verité smog-hued opus, I secure employment at United Color Lab, the pornographer’s choice for the very best in post-production services.

United’s bread and butter are big-budget feature-length smokers. Before porn went fully video, the industry’s best product was still shot on 35mm, just like legit theatrical-release motion pictures. Half-million dollar budgets. Big stars (Marilyn Chambers, Georgina Spelvin, Linda Lovelace). Trailers. 100-frame fades, long dissolves, arty freeze-frames, title treatments – the whole gooey 9 inch double-D enchilada. My job at United is to prepare original negative (still hot n’ fresh from a sweaty shoot somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills) for Work Prints – raw, unedited prints the director and editor screen to be sure they’ve got what they want on film. Work Prints get beat-up in projectors, editing blocks and Movieolas. Original negatives, on the other hand, are treated like the sleeping baby Jesus because, with one scratch, tens of thousands of dollars in actor’s fees, location rentals, sound recording, crew salaries, makeup, hair, food, truck and lighting leases are lost, ruined, shit-canned. And when a neg is ruined, that means only one thing: Re-shoot – the dirtiest word in the dirty movie business. For some unknown reason, United issues me a box of white cotton gloves, size: large, and trust’s me to handle their gilded chattel. It’s either me or the kids that work in shipping, who drive in from the Valley every morning, with names like Valerie and Bobby and Kev, kids who look like Malibu Barbie and Ken dolls, with creamy tans and bright Lacrosse shirts and stone washed jeans and expensive sneaks and perfect teeth and dead eyes. United doesn’t know I’m a junkie, and why would they? I haven't connected with LA junk yet - and, I'm thinking, maybe I won't. I’m still enthusiastic and optimistic and full of “I’ve got a job in Hollywood!”, still awed as I walk past Todd-A-O’s lobby each morning, with their display case full of Academy Awards, still thrilled to work across the street from Deluxe (Color By Deluxe!) Film Laboratories, still fully sure that someday in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be sitting at a bar up on Wilshire Blvd., telling some friendly guy one of a thousand movie ideas I’ve got boiling behind my blue eyes and he’ll give me the kind of smile a wise man gives a child genius and pass me a card that says, METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER or WARNER BROTHERS or, no, of course, it’ll say PARAMOUNT PICTURES at the top, and under his name will be his title: HEAD OF PRODUCTION. Then he’ll speak the words I’ve been waiting my entire life to hear:

“We want to make your movie”.

It’s not long before I reasonably figure that no Production Head’s going be popping into United Color Lab anytime soon. Everybody knows that the really big deals in this crazy town are done at parties and restaurants and bars – hell, it’s a cliché – that’s the venue artists are most comfortable in, not some sterilized, dust-free, white-gloved room with the professional sounds of sexual ecstasy leaking in from the projection booth next door. No, true art – my art – can never take wing, will never fly up onto the world’s movie screens from a place like this. I need to be with other artists, out there where I can relax and share my avant garde ideas (I’m tumbling - which way’s the beach?) and talk Truffaut and Hitchcock and connect and belong and thrive. And drink (I don’t know where the surface is). And buy drugs (I’m at the bottom of the ocean). And even though it’s August, I, true motion picture heir and living magician, create my own personal winter: A season of my own design, a carefully tailored solar orbit defying law and conventional reason, in which United’s days get shorter and my Hollywood nights turn very long and pitch black.