London:
Havoc in Parliament, Scotland Yard and the Murdoch Empire. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about, England now has American drivers on its roads. Call it collateral damage from World War Z – the movie I’m working on here. I’ve been given a car to take me to and from our multiple English locations. Not a car and driver, as has been the case on previous UK movies, but in the new fiscal reality I’ve only been able to swing what our deal memos refer to as a “self-drive.” A birdseye view of London would resemble a black widow spider’s web: no pattern, no shape, a tangle of threads that bend, then end on a drunken whim. I was told that the last American publicist who tried driving here showed up at work every day with a new dent in his car. More recently one of our American technicians, having done the torturous tour thru Central London to Elstree Studios only once, simply abandoned his car on the lot and has been getting rides to and from set with the electrical department ever since. Driving in London is not a sport for the faint of heart. I’ve driven in cities all over the world – even right hand drive (with stick shift!) in places like South Africa, Malta and New Zealand. No place scares me more than London. It’s not the slalom around buses and bicyclists, nor even (well, maybe a little) two-way streets the width of a bowling lane that allow parking on both sides. My fear of driving in London is getting lost: never finding my way back to Nicola’s flat in Shepherds Bush and being forever stuck on a roundabout with no exit.The maze of roundabouts here must have been designed by Lewis Carroll. Outside the city are the motorways: the M1, M4, M25… Let’s take the M25 for example - which I had to take to Longcross Studios the first week of work. On day 2, I overshot one turn, somehow wound up back on the M25 and drove 20 minutes before I could find a place to turn around. The M25 goes in a circle around the city – like the highway loop around DC. But if you miss your exit in DC, you can get off at the next exit. There are no exits on the M25, just options that lead to other motorways – all of which seem to be spaced 10-15 miles apart. Out of this chaos has come a deep and, dare I say, profound relationship. I call her Lily. I don’t know her real name. She is, you may have guessed, the voice on my GPS. In confident, posh tones – like a sympathetic dominatrix – she tells me what to do and I do it. And like most women telling a guy what to do, she is always right but often obtuse. “Sharp right at the roundabout, then take 3rd exit.” One, two… wait, was that an exit? Damn I’ve taken the 4th exit, which leads me onto the M1 which will take me miles out of my way. Lily neither scolds nor corrects (as American GPS systems do: “recalculating”). She merely tells me, “continue straight” and 15 miles later has me turn around. She is not a good judge of distance. “Right turn coming up,” as I’m already making the right turn. “In a quarter mile, turn left.” “Left turn coming up” and I’ve already passed it. I’m a big fan of quiet time in a car. But Lily can go for long stretches without the need to talk to me. And when she does interrupt my driving daydreams, it’s always to tell me something important. “Right at the roundabout; take 3rd exit.” One, two… yikes! Why didn’t you say I only had 30 feet to cross three lanes of traffic to exit left??? “Exit coming up.” She won’t engage in argument and she doesn’t respond to my temper tantrums. Lily is doing more than teaching me how to get around London: she’s making me a better man. I’m learning how to listen, observe and use my intuition. I think she’s teaching me how to understand women. “Straight on at the roundabout, then slight left.” Lily, you sure know how to sweet-talk a guy. Do you have dinner plans?
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I got very little sleep my last two nights in New York, then took a red-eye to London where a 10 hour layover gave me the chance to get three hours sleep at an airport hotel before catching a 3 ½ hour flight to…
Where I am now. (You see, we all sign an NDA - non-disclosure agreement - which, in my position, I have to take seriously. Even if no one else does.) Let’s just say I’m on an island. Nine time zones from home. What makes all this body abuse (and nuclear secrecy) worthwhile? The excitement of the circus tent going up: running into old workmates in the production office, in the halls of hotels, at tables in restaurants. Catching up briefly before the conversation turns to the job we’re all here for. Big job. Challenging job. How’s the family? How’s your hotel room? Looks like an ambitious schedule. You didn’t know we were working six-day weeks? She’s great, I worked with her on… There are people who have been hoisting canvas here for a year or more; others who only flew in yesterday. They came from everywhere: Italy, Ireland, the UK, Germany, North Africa, Asia, Australia and, of course, America. The best film technicians and craftsmen in the world, noted artists in their own field. And a few novices who caught a break. I arrived two – or was it three? – days ago to deal with press and public relations requests that had been coming in from this and two other countries where we’ll be filming. Plunged right into the action. Fatigue gave way to adrenaline. I have to get up in six hours and I’m still on a cuckoo body clock. But my final thoughts of the evening play over Billy Joel’s Say Goodbye to Hollywood. One thought superintends: what a lucky old hippie I am. We start filming tomorrow. Somebody please help me understand Republicans.
I had a favorite philosophy professor who told us “You can’t hate that which you understand.” A kid in class asked, “What about (name your favorite dictator)?” The professor just smiled and repeated, “You can’t hate what you understand,” then added, “understanding is not the same as approval.” I’ve been aided in my quest for Republican enlightenment by a recent study (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110407/ts_alt_afp/healthpoliticsusbritain) that indicates the brain structures of liberals and conservatives significantly differ. Science has found liberals have more grey matter in the part of the brain that deals with complexities; conservatives have more grey matter in the part that deals with fear response. That would make conservatives the ones you want to be with when your house is on fire. The problem is they’re always thinking the house is on fire. America’s social programs need “fixing.” A brilliant bit of Republican (the house is on fire!) phrasing. But Republicans don’t want to fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid: they want to end them. Been a thorn in their paw since the Roosevelt administration. They’ve planted the killer seed by fomenting fear, using projected estimates of these programs running out of money in the next 20-40 years. The logical question should be “where do we get the money?” – not whether it’s the government’s duty to provide for the public welfare. But the latter is exactly the ideological point the GOP wants to make: it’s not the government’s duty to protect citizens from anything other than foreign invasion. Not corporate polluters, not food industry health hazards, not derivative-trading bankers. Republican reasoning, as best as I can understand it, is whatever sets the free market free (see Milton Friedman) to generate wealth is cool. Cuz, ya see, those who generate wealth are gonna hire more American workers… except reducing the labor pool will drive up wages. Uh oh, that won’t do. Guess they’ll have to keep hiring cheap labor overseas. While still collecting corporate welfare here. Republican ideology has never been about giving everyone a fair share; it’s about giving the wealthy and aspiring wealthy an opportunity to get MORE than their share. The rich will save us! And you too can be one of them. Am I over-simplifying? Surely not all Republicans are wealthy. So what are struggling middle-class and lower middle-class Republican voters thinking? Are they thinking? Maybe they’re thinking that lowering Social Security income and raising the cost of medical care will neutralize the impact of overpopulation on future generations – unless they succeed in shutting down Planned Parenthood, thus offsetting the premature loss of pensioners with an increased number of unwanted babies. Or maybe they’re just so afraid the house is burning that they’re ready to follow anyone – and there are some lulus - with a large fear-response lobe? Will somebody – preferably a Republican – please explain Republicans to me? Somebody. Please. The last time I saw Cairo was April, 1999. I was on a five-day Easter break from my publicity duties on Gladiator, which had been filming on Malta for about a month with two months left to shoot.
My cab driver had dropped me in the heart of the city, outside the Museum of Egypt. I avoided the hustlers and tour guides, walking fast in no particular direction into main business district. I’d already hit the tourist spots, the Museum, the Citadel, the mosques, the tombs where living and dead shared residential space. I wanted some time on the unruly streets of this urban labyrinth. I wanted to go where tourists fear to tread. I started north along Shari Champollion, named after the Frenchman who broke the code of the Rosetta Stone, towards the Coptic section of El Azbakiya. Cutting south again, I wandered sidestreets along the spine of Shari Muhammad Farid, who was either a famous physician or one of the heroes of the overthrow of King Farouk - depending on who you talked to. Who you talked to became a bigger problem the farther I ventured into the A’bdin district where few of the shopkeepers, clerks or people on the street spoke much, if any, English. I sensed no hostility towards me as a Westerner. Only the universal frustration of people unable to understand what I was asking or to make themselves understood. I found a bookstore that had only Arabic novels in the window but sold a few books in English. I bought Naghib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk - a novel that had been banned in Egypt before he won the Nobel Prize in ’88. I took it to a large, spartan café across the street where I ordered a coffee that tasted like sweetened hot tar and examined the glass cabinets which contained a half-dozen plain rolls and as many biscotti. The only other customers in the shop were a table of four young Egyptian men, one of whom had a spiral notebook, another a hard-covered text of some sort. They might have been students, though I guessed they were in their early to mid-twenties. It was just as likely they were among the growing number of educated unemployed in this country. Egypt underwent what globalization gurus call “economic modernization” during the 1990s, ticking off the checklist of requirements for full participation in the goldrush of integrated commerce and technologies: controlling inflation, reducing debt and building reserves. The only thing they hadn’t been able to do was reduce unemployment. In fact, the new Egyptian economic model - lean, mean and ready for competitive entry into the international marketplace - had brought about a significant increase in unemployment. Between 1988 and 1998, nearly a million people a year entered a labor force that had no labor for them to perform. A large number of them were well educated – in a country where agriculture still accounted for 42% of the nation’s work force. Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman and other celebrants of global markets claim this kind of “correction” is to be expected. As an economy changes from, say, largely agrarian to mostly technical or industrial, there is a predictable disruption to the lives and livelihoods of the untrained. What wasn’t figured into the equation by most proponents of a headfirst dive into the capitalist mosh pit was an economy that educated its people faster than it could employ its educated people. This was happening throughout Egypt where levels of education had been improving at a rate independent of the economic expansion. Increasing numbers of graduates were leaving high schools with high hopes, only to find that the dropouts already had all the jobs. “Educational and training systems continue to churn out graduates, taking little or no account of the actual demand for labor,” professor Samir Radwan asserted in a study for the office of the Director General of the International Labor Organization. Consider that 33% of the people who actually have jobs in Egypt are illiterate, while 55% of the unemployed have an “intermediate” education (above 8th grade). One can only conclude that an applicant has a better chance of getting a job in Egypt today if he or she can’t fill out an application. The Globalism advocates suggest that these unemployed, educated youths will be part of the vanguard of social change. But a repressive regime, like those throughout the Middle East, isn’t going to initiate reform just because its growing intellectual underclass is growing impatient. The guy with the spiral notebook shook a cigarette from the pack lying at the center of his table and turned in my direction. He had a thin moustache and goatee, dark eyes narrow and alert. He lit up and peered through the smoke, catching me looking at him. Our eyes locked for a brief moment. Then he turned his gaze as one failing to identify anything of importance in his line of sight. I left Cairo the next day. It has rarely left my consciousness. After the events of this week, I know why. Egypt has too many smart people to tolerate a repressive regime. We can only hope that means they’re smart enough not to go the way of Iran. Let’s also hope the West doesn’t pander to Israeli apprehensions and allows Egypt to find its own version of democracy. So far, President Obama seems smart enough to recognize this. Went to one of John DeSimio’s parties recently. A stylish bon vivant, former publicity executive, John’s frequent hostings attract a diverse and brainy crowd of mainly industry types. This was a couple of weeks after Ronni Chasen’s funeral and Ronni was still the introductory topic of conversation. Her memorial was a tribute not only to one of the legends of the publicity business but – as most Hollywood events are – a celebration of this small community. Everyone was warmed in the retelling of tales about our late colleague.
Then the topic changed – as most Hollywood conversations do – to the state of the business. Everyone was also warmed by this exchange. Misery loves company? Gatherings like John’s normally produce good networking, good gossip and just good fun – for those who can follow the alphabet soup of names floating in anecdotes and updates. Not a lot of star names; these are working people – writers, publicists, journalists – who mainly talk about insider stuff: which projects have gone into turnaround, who’s changed studio’s, where so-and-so is traveling. But in the past two years, these kinds of conversations have become something akin to the bon homme in a bomb shelter. It’s been another terrible year for the movies – work wise and otherwise. We all know it and we all need to talk about it. In fact, talking about it is helping some of us get through these lean mean times in the movie biz. The film community isn’t a myth – and it’s not all about schadenfreud. At least not always. Everyone to some degree has felt the pinch of the movie industry downsizing. Even many of us who’ve been lucky enough to work regularly have taken body blows to our confidence that there’ll always be work. One can feel the eerie quiet before the next bombardment. Gatherings like these – in times like these - expose the softer side of Sammy Glick: people trying to think of ways to help their underemployed colleagues. Like a fighting unit in which some seek heroics while others are just trying to stay alive, the film community is a fractious, bumptious bunch of Me-Firsters – until the battle begins and we see our comrades fall. It’s a common fate that unites us – whether in grief or economic hard times. Even when we look around at the devastation of downsized staffs and dumbed-down films, we have a take-away: we are a community., helping our friends find work, mourning our collective losses, consoling one another and mapping out ways to fix what’s broken. So, thanks again Ronni for reminding us we’re part of a little village the rest of the world calls Hollywood; thanks John for giving some of us a place to come together. Here’s hoping 2011 brings peace and prosperity and that we carry with us the big lesson of 2009 and 2010: We are family. Sing it with me now. And Happy New Year to all. |
Anything and Everything that has Nothing to Do with the MoviesSometimes, we go to a movie to get away from the world and sometimes we go to see what’s going on in the world. This blog will offer comments on the world, the movies and their occasional overlap.
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