February 16th, 2010

Hanging on the wall across from my desk are three pictures of the ghost town known as Bodie. I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to Bodie a few times. It’s a magnificent state park in a state of arrested decay. When you’re there you can’t help but imagine what it must have been like more than 150 years ago. You can almost hear the sound of a piano playing and laughter bursting through the swinging doors of the wooden buildings that used to be busy saloons. I always dreamed of being a part of a film that recaptured that time period. I’ve come close, but nothing yet. I guess a lot of people hope to be part of a film – western or otherwise. Everyone wants to write a book, screenplay, or act. With all the tedious, humiliating, stupid ways there are to make a living in this world, why do so many of us choose that. Maybe we didn’t get enough attention as a child, maybe we watched too much television, or maybe someone read one of my books and said, “Come on, she writes books, how hard can it be?” It seems like acting would be a constant exercise in humiliation. A “how low can you go” limbo game where it helps to have a double-jointed ego because it’s going to be bent, stretched, and forced into positions a lanky yoga instructor on Ambien couldn’t manage. You go to Hollywood to ply your craft and you get a job waiting tables at Der Wienerschnitzel in Culver City so you can network with Sony interns as they ask you to refill the relish tub. I should be content with just being able to write about people from the Old West because it seems to make it as a screenwriter or a motion picture actor you have to want it more than you want anything else in life and I just don’t want anything like that. Not true?I want my brother to live and come home, but outside of that?. Actors are always talking about their motivation, that is, what makes their character do the things he does. I think at this point and time in my life any plum role I would get I would use a special acting technique for my motivation that I call the check method. See, in every one of my movies, my “character” would know that when filming was done, I would get a big check. I know it’s so much more than that. It’s a craft, an art. You can’t watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman or read anything Larry McMurtry writes and not know that. If nothing else, most aspiring entertainers live in the “now.” For most aspiring entertainers, it goes something like this: “Now I’m broke. Now I’m still broke. Now I’m going to sell my blood so I can buy some ramen noodles.”