- One weekend, while I was paddling down
the Buffalo National River with Gwen the Beautiful, Brannigan the Contractor
and Brannigan's girlfriend, Sweet Jane, Jane asked me if I miss show business.
-
- It was a fair question, and I gave it
some thought. My mind went all the way back to the Prehistoric Era of the
late '60s, when I first got into the "Biz."
-
- I remembered how awed I was by everything
Hollywood. I was completely overwhelmed by the fact that entertainment
was the main business of the huge sprawl of ambition that all of Southern
California had become. I loved the fact that everyone I met was part of
showbiz in some way. Even the waiters and waitresses (we didn't have "wait
people" then) were really actors waiting for the rocket to stardom
to zoom them away.
-
- I reveled in the conversations that took
place around me at the gas station or in a department store. Words like
"deal," "option," "post-production" gave
me chills.
-
- I still remember the first time I saw
a real live star: Rick Nelson, standing ahead of me in the supermarket
check-out line.
-
- I remember the second time, too.
-
- I was stuck in rush-hour traffic on the
Hollywood Freeway, sweating in my un-air-conditioned '66 Mustang. I looked
to my left and saw a familiar face behind the wheel of an exotic Italian
car.
-
- Steve McQueen.
-
- He saw me looking and gave me his trademarked
crooked grin. And a sly thumbs-up.
-
- Only a few weeks before, I'd been living
in Iowa City, Iowa. You didn't see fancy sports cars or Steve McQueen there,
that's for sure, although there were a lot of crooked grins - deliberately
copied from the cool Mr. McQ.
-
- Through the years, as I toiled at studio
jobs that, regardless of their sometimes fancy titles, were still just
long, exhausting hours of "workin'-for-the-man-and-payin'-the bills,"
I grew disenchanted with a way of life that never went beyond who was making
what movie or TV show and how much they were getting paid. Oh, and who
was having how hot an affair with whom.
-
- Nothing else in the world seemed to matter.
Not the cure for cancer. The end of poverty. World peace. Not even taking
care of your kin.
-
- One day, I was in the office of the head
of what is now Sony Pictures. "Of course we're worth more as human
beings than doctors or scientists or even the president of the U.S.!"
he thundered. "If we aren't, why are we being paid so much more?"
-
- It was the day after Father's Day, and
I was wearing a new watch my pre-teen son and daughter had given me. The
studio head glanced down at my wrist.
-
- "Rolex?" he said.
-
- "Seiko," I told him.
-
- The studio head stared at me in disbelief.
After that meeting, he never spoke to me again. Later, when my contract
came up for renewal, he cut me loose because, he said to someone we both
knew, "He let me down."
-
- Yep. I sure had. I'd proudly worn a $50
Seiko instead of a $5,000 Rolex. How could I do such a thing?
-
- Thirty-plus years in any business can
take a huge toll. Showbiz is no different. Creatively, I did the best I
could and was part of some shows that made me beam with pride and others
that made me ashamed.
-
- Sometimes they were the same show.
-
- I did the best I could personally, too,
with similar mixed results. Most of my pride there is in how well my kids
have turned out in spite of me, and the shame has to do with mistakes that
were all my own.
-
- I've got no qualms about having moved
on to a place where the only foreign cars I see are Toyota pickups, and
instead of waiting for a rocket to stardom everyone's working hard just
to survive. Where money doesn't define a person because everyone knows
it's not what we've got that's important, but who we are inside. And where
instead of playing roles on the screen, folks are starring as themselves
in their own real lives.
-
- Do I miss show business?
-
- That weekend on the Buffalo, after Sweet
Jane asked me that question, I closed my eyes, just for a second. And during
that second, I missed the rush of the river and tangled green of the trees
growing along its bank more than I've ever missed anything about Hollywood.
-
- ***
-
- Author Larry Brody's weekly column,
LIVE! FROM PARADISE! appears on his website, www.larrybrody.com. He has
written thousands of hour of network television, and is the author of "Television
Writing from the Inside Out" and "Turning Points in Television." Brody
is Creative Director of The Cloud Creek Institute for the Arts, the world's
first in-residence media colony. More about his activities can be seen
on www.tvwriter.com and www.cloudcreek.org. Brody, his wife
and their dogs, cats, horses and chickens live in Marion County, Arkansas.
The other residents of the mythical town of Paradise reside in his imagination.
|
