Lesson #1

Michael and me, 1995

In my last post I mentioned my old writing partner Michael Goldberg, who passed away in 2014. Michael and I (Swerdlow-Goldberg as we were known) had a strong ten-year run, collaborating on several movies and TV shows, but Michael never wrote a single word of any of our scripts. His genius was for story. He had an uncanny ability to see the piece as a whole and understanding how the separate parts made up that whole. He would guide and shape the pages I wrote, reading them like a doctor reads an x-ray and always healing the patient. I’ve been writing screenplays for thirty-five years and I can’t overstate how rare or how valuable a skill that is.

When people asked how our partnership worked, we would tell them I was the horse and he was the jockey. But he was also my teacher, and every time I sit down and work on a screenplay, treatment or outline, I apply the lessons I learned from him, and lesson #1 is: “Why does the lead character need the movie?” Meaning, what does the character need to gain, lose, realize, accept etc. by going through the events of the film?

An old broken-down baseball pitcher might need the movie to remember how much he loves the game, and therefore his life. A congressional page complicit in their boss's corruption needs the movie to find their moral center and what truly matters to them. In Ordinary People, Timothy Hutton needs the movie to forgive himself and work through the trauma of his brother’s  death. In Cool Runnings, John Candy needs the movie to find dignity and redemption in a sport he left in disgrace. “Derice” needs the movie to find out that he is enough with or without Olympic glory.

The other day I was involved in a difficult emotional situation with someone and the phrase, "maybe that's my lesson for this lifetime" was uttered. This got me thinking about Michael's question. About taking it out of the make believe of movies and applying it to real life. Now, "Why do I need my life?” is a little broad to get your head around, but asking, why did I need that marriage or that job with that awful boss that reminded me of my father or those two years I spent wandering around Japan or any of the other meaningful events (or events later revealed as meaningful) of a lifetime, with Michael's question in mind is interesting.

I think of my first marriage. Twenty-three when we got hitched, I was twenty-one when we met. She was four years older, which is a lot at that age. An actress who had starred in a couple of well-received independent movies, she was a smart, thoughtful, passionate artist, and eventually became a writer. She was a "serious" person as my mother liked to say. I, on the other hand, was an ex-juvenile delinquent, pot dealer and freebase smoker who had somehow managed to do the two-year Meisner training program in New York before heading out to LA to be an actor. I had always written poems and had some talent and charisma, but Laura took me seriously as an artist, which made me take myself more seriously. We started a theater company. She turned me onto authors like Celine and Henry Miller, introduced me to painters, writers, directors and just grew my ass up creatively in the four years we were together. We didn't make it as a couple, and it would be easy to write it off as a mistake, but I “needed that movie" to get me to the promised land or at least point me in the right direction.

And what about my open-heart surgery and emergency duodenum surgery that followed five days later. Sixty-six days in the hospital all told. A literal gutting, it was the single most intense and brutal experience of my life. Now, you might ask, why the hell did I need that? I needed it because I had to be stopped. Because I was so stubborn, so unwilling, so addicted to and overmatched by heroin and the self-mutilation that came with it there was nothing I could do. I needed my body to revolt. To say "ENOUGH!" in a voice so loud and desperate that it could not be ignored. I needed to be sawed in half to keep from going to the dealer. And I needed to be humbled. To have my ass kicked in a way that left no doubts. To stop fleeing from myself and begin the slow transformation into the sober, battle and body scarred, half-wise realist I am today. A man who registers his car on time. That catastrophic illness was a movie the lead character needed and needed badly.

I could go back to so many events in my life, and from my current perch of sixty-two years, see how they affected me and shaped my story. That’s part of the gift of getting older, you get to look back and say, “Oh, that was what that was all about.” That is not to say, everything happens for a reason, ‘cause I don’t believe that, but I do believe everything happens, and we get to decide what it means. We get to be the story guru of our lives and fit the parts into the whole.

Before I started writing this, I wanted to make it about childhood-- That the reason we all “need the movie” of our lives is so we can heal that first original wound, whatever it may be. To have the big obstacle in act one get resolved in act three, but in this movie, we don’t fix the problem, we just learn to accept it. To make as much peace as we can with the past and give up all hope that the cavalry will get there on time. It’s not a very commercial film, and will surely bomb at the box-office. But if I could take Michael’s question and universalize it, I would say the reason we all need the movie is to learn how to give and receive love, and it is how successful we are at doing that, that makes it a comedy or a tragedy (though it’s always a mix of both).

My brother, who died six years ago, was taken down to nothing by pancreatic cancer and ALS, getting both at the same time. He spent his last months withering physically and expanding spiritually. It was a cruel, ruthless piece of fate, and when he was close to the end he said, "I no longer have a use for anything but tenderness." When I heard him say that I knew he had gotten there. Responsible and capable to the extreme, he was a deeply anxious person and had been since childhood. I guess he needed the movie to find out that there was no need to worry, and that there was nothing he couldn't face.