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After the war, and yet before the last of the soldiers had died, I moved back into the city. It was a cold time. The nation was divided into two deaf, insular groups and though even optimists saw a future of, at best, cordial parting along ideological lines, the entire country struggled to keep smiling voices on the radio and go through the motions of civil service. But the deeper the disparity between reality and the act, and my experience in filmmaking has reinforced this, the more tenuous the grasp; the intellectual and not so intellectual groups seemed to see the end coming. Perhaps it was this very state of limbo that attracted me back into the city, even as I was just becoming situated in the sort of large property on the fringes or upstate that had been so en vogue with artists. Some part of me wanted to hear the death rattle loud and clear.
My uncle had left me the lease to his suite in the Altoona, the “premiere” hotel/high-rise in the nation from virtually any standpoint you please. Legendary athletes, politicians, movie stars, Nobel Prize winners, scholars, scientists and industrialists; a breeding ground for high-society fashion and a retirement home for characters that regularly appear in The Times. The building itself rose like an ivory tower out of prime real estate, and from the upper levels you could just make out the poverty to the west. A sort of haze of pollution and neglect and unsightliness hung out over it and no neighbor of mine particularly wanted to see plain suffering, let alone begin that chain reaction of thoughts that may very well come back to them. I had something better than a guess to tell me that the citizens of that skid row had the vitriol to match the Altoona’s smugness; I’d grown up there and heard what passed as politics in the liquor stores and barber shops.
I had some experience with the place, having visited the Altoona once before my Uncle passed, when I was very young and interested in none of the stuffiness. Frankly, I could only remember his bookshelf. It encompassed, or rather, it was the entire west wall of his den, and all of it leather-bound and aged. The books themselves smelled strongly of the public library and I remember, a young reader myself, being profoundly sad as I left and understood that in my lifetime I could never read them all; life seemed suddenly short.
Now I lived there, and even sat in the same den looking at my several dozen books. I had written my previous two films (both virtually unknown but one at least critically successful) from various scummy apartments on the west side, and now felt detached not only from the wellspring of my inspiration but from the struggle that made me ambitious. Besides that I was trying to turn someone else’s writing into film and the subject was one I could not claim any firsthand experience with. It was a sort of coming of age novel about the apprentice son of a sword-maker during the time of Japanese seclusion. A topic Lois had balked at, and one whose thematic current I thought was ripe for distribution to a wider audience. The task had become more grueling than I expected, something so well expressed in the writing simply did not show up in my vision for the film; certainly something about the simplicity and the ritual and the people caught up in it, but something really about the sword itself. I leafed back through the book, over highlighted and notated portions, for some stronger peek at the metaphor or perhaps a sweeping vista of a chapter that explained the intangible with its structure alone. It helps sometimes to take a step back.
The day of these events was oppressively hot, and as my lack of inspiration dragged out into boredom I thought about Lois. She was probably walking someplace in this heat, in and out of the boutiques on 5th Ave. or to get a martini lunch at the café. She’d become quite cosmopolitan since we agreed that she would leave the apartment for at least 30 hours a week. When we first moved in we had the excitement and energy of a honeymoon couple, and every night was cocktails and romance. But I wasn’t getting any work done, and one day I came straight out with it. If I was going to work out of the home, and she was going to be a listless, childless housewife, she was going to have to give me some breathing room.
She’d be gone most of the day. And the day before.
I finally settled behind the typewriter for a thought I guessed could eventually be mangled into a scene and simply looked at the page for a bit. There were several quotes I could write from, dramatic ones even, dialogue that could potentially issue from the father to the son in the scene eloquently. But it was left so much better unsaid in the book. I could see this film, almost, but it was all still photography, I couldn’t make it move.
As the minutes passed, the den got warmer and thicker and I started to sweat. A failing, sweating, pretentious-ass writer with nothing to say. Sweat beaded on my upper lip and I seriously considered, in all the isolation of my room, that I might have no skill left for making these films. I was young; the neurons should have been connecting.
