the Envy of a nomad

I watched Easy Riders Raging Bulls yesterday. It's a documentary vaguely based upon a book of the same title. I'd read the book 7 years ago and it was a watershed moment for me. It gave a context to the lives and careers of my favorite filmmakers. I'd never been able to reconcile how the same man who made The Conversation and Apocalypse Now could become the hired hand for such clichéd fare as Jack and The Rainmaker. With the exception of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, all my heroes of American cinema had either died or apparently lost their minds. Although the book gets mired in all the fantastical gossip, it does an exceptional job of framing an era from the mid-1960's fall of old Hollywood through the rise of the Blockbuster in the late 1970's. The book is (shocker, here) far better than the film. The book was despised by Nicholson, Hopper and Spielberg as total fiction (which I'm sure is true for some of the tales). Yet, it's easy to dodge the truth when everything has to be gleaned from one or two steps away. When somebody casts such a wide net of dismissal at a book with a many corroborated truths, it's hard to know what's fiction and what might be hitting too close to home.

Still, the film is a good watch. John Milius's waves a cigar and tries to do his best emulation of General Patton. Richard Dreyfuss delivers the most entertaining recounts of Lucas and Spielberg's directorial style. There's a fleeting glance of Marcia Lucas in the editing room and a great moment where you can watch Cybill Shepherd negotiate a minefield of disclosure as she attempts to articulate her blossoming affair with Peter Bogdanovich while filming The Last Picture Show. The bonus material on the second DVD is, in many ways, more entertaining than the film. There's a great piece on George Lucas and how his lifetime of marketing meetings has resulted in prequels that contain far too many meetings. I loved the title of the Spielberg chapter - The Innocent Savant.

The material hit me very differently this time around. I used to idolize filmmakers of that era and felt betrayed when they seemingly gave up on their art. This time around, I realized what an awkward, privileged lot they were. Like The Ramones on the East Side of NY in the mid 1970's or Bill Gates buying up the first version of DOS for $50,000 at the beginning of the 1980's, these were people who found themselves standing in a giant blind spot of an industry and were smart enough to take advantage. That didn't make them bad people (well, maybe Gates). Their successes don't point to the inadeqacies of the rest of us. They are a fortunate few who happened to have their surfboards pointing in the right direction when a tsunami wave hit... and it didn't hurt that they knew how to surf.

Still, I find myself hopelessly in envy of the community in Hollywood of the late 60's/early 70's. They had found their community - their tribe, as my playwriting teacher called it. The surest path to success, my teacher argued, was to find people who responded to your experiences and fed your creativity. If you're Lucas, Spielberg and Milius standing in a beach house in Malibu, collaborating and competing to make the B-movies of your dreams, then you've found your tribe. If you're Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, sick of the Hollywood system you've known and ready to do something you want to see, like Easy Rider, then you've found it too. If you have a favorite bar, full of regulars that ask for your writings or can show you perspectives you'd never otherwise see, then you're probably drinking with your tribe.

This is my heroin. I am always trying to return to the euphoria of inspiration and self-discovery through the people around me. There haven't been many in my life and they've been spaced maddeningly-far apart, but I clutch to those memories with white knuckles. People whose faces lit at my appearance, then inspired, engaged and challenged me to give more than I imagined possible. These moments were not just about me, however. We all felt that we were working on something larger than ourselves. My last year of film school as 18 people worked on everyone else's films, sleeping in editing rooms, and never offering a 'no' - always a 'yes, and...'. A year as barfly to a Midwestern college bar filled with writers, actors, directors and two fantastic pinball machines. Two weeks at a screenwriting workshop in Croatia where flutists and violinists of a music school drank, sang and inspired a motley crew of aspiring filmmakers.

Communities can never last, though. By their very nature, they inspire people to action, then consequences and aftermath. Some ascend, others abandon or die. America thrives on the notion of individuality and I love that, but often it breeds a go-it-alone attitude. Portraits of artists often suggest that they exist in some Vacuum of Genius where they alone create. Time and again, I re-learn that the Piss-and-Shitters that I've placed on pedestals are the same sort of inconsistent, insecure flawed people as I.

Now, I just need to find My tribe of flawed people.