Alcott Held Hostage, Day 5 : The Look of Lorne
My kids attend preschool nearby.
The school is in this weird kind of mini-mall. The mini-mall has an two parking lots. One is very small, like 15 cars, and on street level. The other is two levels deep and holds plenty of cars.
The first day I came to drop my kids off at school, there were no parking places on street level. I didn’t know where the school was located (it’s deep within this odd, twisty inner-court) so I figured I’d better park in the underground lot.
Parking in Los Angeles is a constant hassle. If they’re not trying to rip you off, charging you eight bucks an hour for parking your car, they’re trying to park it “for” you, so you have to tip the valet guys too. So there’s always a little tension around parking lots.
I pull into this parking lot. There’s an attendant there, looks like Lorne Greene, but older, maybe 70, with a grey moustache. He’s got a little desk in the middle of the entrance to the parking garage. It’s his job to hand out tickets to cars coming into his lot. Some garages have a little robot machine on a post doing this job, this place has Lorne Greene.
I roll down the window and say, perfectly cheerfully, “Hi, I’m just dropping my kids off for school.” Lorne Greene smiles at me and waves me in. No ticket, no paying. I park, I take my kids upstairs to the school, I leave, I get my car, I pull out of the garage, I wave to Lorne Greene as I go out.
Next time I go to deliver my kids to the school, I pull up to the entrance, Lorne Greene sees me coming and takes out a little ticket to give me. I roll down the window and say, again, perfectly cheerfully, “Hi, I’m just here to drop off my kids off at school.” This time, Lorne Greene gives me a look that could pierce tin. He waves me in with a wave that indicates that, if he chose to do so, he would crush me like a bug and eat my children while my severed head watched. This time, while leaving, I make a special point of trying to catch his eye so I can wave cheerfully at him. He makes a special point of avoiding looking at me altogether.
Every time after that, it’s the same thing. Lorne Greene hates me. Every time, he sees my car coming, takes out a little ticket, I roll down my window and say “Hi, I’m just here to drop my kids off at school –” and he gives me another tin-piercing look. He never says “Doesn’t matter, you have to take a ticket,” never says anything. Just that look. Every time, he hopes I’m there to park for money, and every time he’s thwarted, his unused ticket clutched useless in the iron fist of his Lorne Greene-like hands.
I know what happened. That first time, he saw a dad with a car full of kids, it was their first day at school, and he thought “Hey, I’ll givethis guy a break, show him what a swell guy I am.” But then I pulled the same stunt again and again and again, and now he feels like I’m taking advantage of his good nature. He feels like I think I’m some kind of landed gentry, rolling into his domain in my fancy carriage, doffing my snuff tin to him as he grovels in the filth for roots and berries. I can see it in his face. He’d like to murder me. He’d do it too, if he thought he could get away with it.
Look. I’m not a praying man, but this look from Lorne Greene has so unnerved me that every time I go to drop off my kids at school, I pray, I pray there is a street-level parking space available, and I rejoice whenever there is. It isn’t often.
This relationship, which has, to date, taken up a total of about 35 seconds of my life, has been haunting me all out of proportion. I’ve developed a Larry-David-level anxiety about what I’m supposed to do to make this man happy, and why he won’t tell me why he hates me so much. My wife, of course, thinks I’m crazy and imagining the whole thing.
Then, the other day, I’m hanging out with my son and a friend of his from school, and I’m talking about the school and the parking lot and his friend’s mother (her name is Susan) starts talking about Lorne Greene. Apparently I’m not the only one who approaches this man’s podium with fear. Apparently he puts the heebie-jeebies into everyone who parks there. Susan has taken it upon herself to learn the man’s biography, in the hopes of better understanding him.
It seems that Lorne Greene is Afghani, a doctor by trade, and fled his homeland during the Russian invasion back in the 70s. He came to LA with the intent of bringing his family over with him, but they were captured and killed by the Russians. Either from heartbreak or bad planning, he’s unable to practice medicine in the US, speaks little English and works at this podium in this mini-mall, handing out tickets to motorists all day. Apparently he’s one of the angriest, most miserable men on the planet, for good reason, and every time I pull up to his entrance I diminish him that much more by denying him the one miniscule action that American society has deemed him worthy to do.
Strangely, Lorne Greene is not the only “sole survivor” we know about in our neighborhood. Apparently the West Side is teeming with Iranians who fled Iran when the Shah got kicked out. My son has a friend at school whose father is a sticker magnate (yes, he manufactures stickers for a living, and a good living it is) and whose mother is some kind of actual Iranian royalty, again, whose entire rest of family was killed trying to escape on camelback.
And all I ever escaped from was Illinois. 
Kit’s favorite joke:
Kit: Knock knock!
Dad: Who’s there?
Kit: Yellow.
Dad: Yellow who?
Kit: Yellow banana!
(repeat fifty times.)
(Kit is three.)
http://images.kodakgallery.com/photos1620/3/93/58/9/47/6/647095893305_0_ALB.jpg
Sam’s favorite joke:
Sam: Knock knock.
Dad: Who’s there?
Sam: You.
Dad: You who?
Sam: You spaz!
Alcott Held Hostage — Day 2
Finally losing hope that my projector bulb might spontaneously repair itself, today I emerged from my pitch-black screening room and blinked, pale and squirming, into the sunlight on this, the first day of summer.
The grass was green, jasmine wafted on the breeze, a child batted a barrel hoop down the street, laughing and gamboling as his tiny legs pumped in joyous fury.
Not only was this all in high-definition, it was in 3-D, and interactive.
Thrilled at my discovery of this new entertainment medium called “the real world,” I hopped in my car and went for a drive.
Hit standstill traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Some kind of construction. Turned around and went back home.
Maybe I’m taking things too fast.
Tragedy strikes
Yesterday, during a routine viewing of an episode of Transformers, my 5-year-old son Sam called to me from the screening room. I came to his call, as is required of me, and he reported that the “picture had gone out” on the TV.
My son is quite keen to learn about remotes and my home theater system is complicated and persnickety, so I assumed that he had hit some button he should not have.
Closer inspection revealed that, in fact, the bulb had blown out on my projector. Exploded even. Its little housing filled with grains of shattered glass.
Well, no problem, think I. I’ll mosey on over to my local home theater store and pick up another.
I call to make sure they have them. They do not. Nor do they think anyone in the area will have them.
They offer to order one. They say they can have it maybe by next Monday. Cool, says I. How much does that run?
$635.00.
! “Really?!” Keep in mind, I did not purchase this home theater system. Rather, it came with the house when I bought it. I know nothing about its history, legacy or place in the hierarchy of home theater systems. All I know is that I love it like I have never loved another collection of machines before.
Oh yes, the man tells me. My projector, he tells me, was top-of-the-line 4.5 years ago (when the house was built and the theater installed). The previous owner was a stickler for quality and he was willing to pay top dollar. $635.00 might sound like a lot to pay for a light bulb (in fact, it’s more than I paid for my last TV set), but (the home-theater-guy continues) keep in mind that the projector cost $10,000.00 when it was new.
Now then. Looking around my office, I’m seeing the stack of components that make up the rest of the system and doing some quick seat-of-my-pants math, and I realize that my home theater system probably cost more than my car.
Well now. What can I do? It costs what it costs. I would have said the same thing if they were talking about a pacemaker. What am I going to do, stop watching DVDs on a high-definition projector?
Born Yesterday
Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford are riveting, jaw-dropping, heartbreaking and mesmerizing in two of the most detailed, lived-in performances I’ve ever seen committed to film in a Hollywood picture. In comparison, William Holden seems smug, condescending and two-dimensional. Holliday and Crawford mop up the screen with him.
Based on a play, it’s still a little stagebound in its execution, and its narrative strategies feel a little rushed and convenient.
Part Educating Rita and part Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The movie has a “serious message” about influence peddling, corrupt congressmen and the effect of corporate power on lawmaking. At the end, it appears that all that is on its way out, due to a popular revolt led by a newly-smart populace and the newspapermen who have educated them.
Glad that was all taken care of 56 years ago.
The picture was remade in 1993 with Melanie Griffith (way too on-the-nose), John Goodman (mmm, maybe) and Don Johnson (coffee-spit-take) . Anyone seen this?
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
A better film than The Secret of My Success.
For a drama as behavioral and character-based as this, there is an impressive number of process shots. Bogart and friend sit on a bench in a town square and chat, but the bench is on a soundstage and the town square is in a city a thousand miles away. Then, seconds later, Bogart and friend walk down the street in that same town, and there we are on a meticulously detailed set designed to emulate the town square we saw in the background in the previous shot. It’s all seamlessly done and seems impressively complicated.
My guess is that Bogart (or Huston, or both), for whatever reasons, didn’t want to travel to Mexico to shoot anything, so a crew was dispatched to shoot the background plates in the Mexican town square. Meanwhile, a section of the town square was built on a soundstage where the light and the action could be more closely controlled (and probably still be cheaper than a location shoot). But that means that the entire sequence would have to be storyboarded in advance, so that the second unit could get exactly the shots they needed for the background plates, all so that Huston could shoot Bogart and friend chatting casually and not have the audience think for a moment that they weren’t in a town square in Mexico.
But it’s not just the town square. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre takes place almost entirely outdoors, and yet the demands of light, actors’ schedules and control of elements demands that the bulk of the outdoor locations be built on indoor soundstages in Hollywood. So campgrounds and hiking trails are built in convincing detail and their scenes are cut seamlessly into outdoor scenes shot probably in the suburbs of LA. So the entire movie is this complex interweaving of studio scenes, outdoor scenes and location shots, all of which had to be planned in absurd detail beforehand to make sure it would all match and cut together. Which it does.
So you’ll have, say, Bogart and company hiking on a real trail on a real hillside somewhere, then you’ll cut to the reverse angle and they’ll be on that same trail, but now it’s on a soundstage and there’s a background plate of a mountain in Mexico in the background, then they’ll come around a corner and there they are on a campground set complete with hills and trees and rocks and dust and grit and shifting patterns of light, all in the same conversation, and it all matches and cuts together and you’re paying attention to their casual, low-key conversation instead of thinking “why does this campground look like a set?”
My two favorite moments in this exemplary American drama:
1. Walter Huston, as the old man, at one point is mistaken fora god by the natives. As is the custom. We find him lying in a hammock, kicking back and accepting gifts from the Indians. They give him a slice of melon, a piglet, a drink of tequila complete with salt-lick and squeeze of lime. A gorgeous senorita bends down to wipe his chin and lingers on his eyes. Huston then, inexplicably and completely out of character, does a take to camera, his face saying “Not bad, huh? My son directed this. Knows how to treat his old man.”
2. The Mexican bandit played by Alfonzo Bedoya (“we don’t need no stinking badges” is his classic misquoted line) casually, cheerfully, asks a firing squad if he can put on his sombrero before they shoot him to death, suddenly elevating one of the most despicable characters in the history of film into a charming rogue who’s philosophy suddenly seems to be “eh, you win some, you lose some.”
Interestingly, Bedoya’s film just previous to Treasure is an adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Pearl, a story which raises almost the exact same questions regarding the value, danger and purpose of material goods.
A note on Walter Huston: he’s very good here and deserved his Oscar, but for my money the Walter Huston performance to see is his Abraham Lincoln in DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. The movie has no plot, being a pageant-like selections of “famous scenes from the life of our greatest president,” but Walter Huston is the only actor to have ever played the part and made his a living, breathing, actual person instead of a plaster saint, a cigar-store Indian or a Guy Wearing A Lincoln Beard. When I watch John Ford’s Young Mister Lincoln, I spend the whole movie saying “Why is Henry Fonda’s voice coming out of the mouth of that wax dummy of Lincoln?” Watching Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln I feel like I’m actually watching the great man himself on film.
The Secret of My Success
As in Working Girl, the secret of his success is that he gives himself an unofficial promotion. And hilarity ensues.
(One day, I promise, I will write a comedy called Hilarity Ensues.) (And also one called Suitcase Full of Money.)
Herbert Ross directed many fine character-based comedies. And also this.
The 80s, it seems, were not good for him. His direction here is arch, self-conscious and brittle.
Don’t get me started on the music. Clangorous, deafening 80s arena rock by bands with names like Night Ranger and Restless Heart. Not what you want for an office comedy, romantic comedy or farce, all of which Secret of My Success tries to take on at different points.
Michael J. Fox, bless his heart, looks all of 17, Helen Slater looks like Princess Di (in linebacker’s shoulder pads) and Richard Jordan does an uncanny (if inexplicable) impression of Willem Dafoe.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright and national treasure Christopher Durang logs many days as an executive with a lot of screen time but few lines. He and David Mamet and Wallace Shawn and Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter should all do a movie together. Actually, I guess I mean the exact opposite of that.
Mark Margolis, who made such an impression in Scarface as the Peruvian assassin with blood of icewater, here is reduced to muttering and looking hapless as an elevator maitenance man. I guess after Al Pacino splatters your brains all over the side window of a station wagon, you take what you can get.
A young Mercedes Ruehl plays a dotty waitress.
The zany comedy drags. Faces are pulled, doors slam, clothes come off, elevators are stopped (much to the consternation of the ex-Peruvian assassin with blood of icewater).
Usually in movies like this they put off-brand art on the walls because the originals would cost to much to procure and insure for the shoot. I give this movie credit for having its walls festooned with genuine 80s art instead of just knockoffs, mostly bold geometric assertions by the likes of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt. However, I take away points for having a Josef Albers hanging sideways through the whole movie. Sideways! Albers must have been lying sideways in his grave. People, people, you turn “Homage to the Square” sideways and it makes no sense at all!
Working Girl, even with its big fake Warhol, crushes this like a grape.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
This is the best written, best acted, best executed American situation comedy since All in the Family.
Oh, I know, there was another well-written, well-acted, well-executed show somewhere in there, a little bauble called Seinfeld, but I honestly see Curb Your Enthusiasm as the more refined, better-formed show.
Legend has it that The Dick Van Dyke Show originally starred Carl Reiner, and that a pilot with him as the star exists somewhere. I think if that show had gone forward as planned, it might have turned out something like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The show has its drawbacks. For instance, if I want sex from my wife, we cannot watch Curb Your Enthusiasm before bedtime.
Three different times, American television has tried to re-make Fawlty Towers, once with Harvey Korman, once with Bea Arthur, and most recently with John Larroquette. I don’t advise against a fourth attempt, but if they should want to try it again, Larry David could be their man. He doesn’t have anything like Cleese’s towering presence or exquisite physicality, but no one else currently in American TV can be as unapologetically unpleasant as he is and still have the audience on his side.