Café Hungaria-3
“I’d like to be a writer,” Gustáv said musingly, trying to refresh himself at least a little with a cold beer. He said it as if it were something he did not do daily. Despite his promise to himself that he would not write that evening, he had turned on his laptop for lack of anything better to do.
He once expressed his desire to write to an ex-girlfriend. When he did, she looked at him puzzled. “You are a writer,” she said.
Gustáv knew others thought of him as a writer, and to be sure, he identified himself as one whenever asked “what he did,” mainly because he couldn’t think of anything more accurate. Nonetheless, he never thought of his reviews as real writing. “Dostoyevsky is real writing,” he told himself. “What you do is mark time and get paid for it.”
But if his notion of “real” writing was fiction, he knew he had no talent for it. Or rather, he did not have enough talent for it. Or better still, he did not have enough patience for it. He could come up with ideas and map them out but he would get lost and irritated in the details, bogged down deciding what was and was not important enough to include. Trapped in the miasma of description and contradictory motivations, he would abandon his stories with a regularity that eventually convinced him he should cease the effort. His imagination was cluttered with the bits and pieces of false starts that lay in a kind of mental limbo like ruins scattered across a landscape or dead soldiers littering a battlefield.
It was the combination of a good story sense with difficulty with details that made screenwriting attractive. That was what brought him to Los Angeles and got him into film school. He quickly learned that screenwriting presented different problems, however. He no longer faced the laborious effort of figuring out what to include, since extraneous detail was the first thing you were taught to eliminate. But demonstrating character through often silent action eluded him. The inability to write “he thought” was crippling.
Worse, when he tried to get around that limitation by having characters say “I think…” as might be acceptable in the theater, he would be criticized for not being “visual,” a term he quickly learned to hate. He could spend days finessing fine, literate speeches, subtle, understated, high-toned explications of the script’s themes that he could point to with pride, only to be deflated by a tut-tutting, head-shaking, self-satisfied professor who told him that the dialog was not “visual.” Of course, no one ever really explained what “being visual” meant, probably because they didn’t know. As far as Gustáv could tell, it boiled down to the writer giving the director the opportunity to play around with the camera like a two-year-old in a sandbox.
When Gustáv tried to be visual, what he “saw” was a blank piece of paper or a glowing computer screen. That was probably the most frustrating thing of all, for he knew that at some level, those people who insisted on the “visual” in a film were right. Thus, criticism. For the more he struggled to refute that prejudice, the more he recognized that the films and filmmakers he loved exceeded his ability to describe them, that even the most astute analysis of a film could never come close to evoking, much less duplicating its affect, that indeed the “visual” did contribute something maddeningly elusive, evanescent, irrational, indescribable, undeniable.
≈
Alone with his thoughts in the bosom of the dark, Giorgio did his best to wait out The Call of History for the umpteenth time. Whenever in situations like this, he recalled Robert Altman’s lament that he envied an audience’s ability to see a film for the first time. That was especially true with The Call, on which he had been working intermittently for years. He knew immediately when he read the novel on which it was based that it was what he had been searching for his entire career. And when he watched the film, hints and glimmers of what had attracted him in the first place still poked through. Those moments almost made it worse. They were like witnesses for the prosecution, proof that it was possible to do something of value with the material.
Unfortunately, even more apparent were the compromises, the glaring impositions, the false emphases to please an actor, the simplification of complex ideas and the vulgarization of simple ones. He wanted to blame someone, but he knew that he had made the choices, that the wreckage on the screen resulted from him wanting things too much, from saying “yes” when he should have said “no,” from telling himself that every bad decision he was making was for the good of the project, when it really was made in fear of doing something that would sink it. By the first day of shooting, the compromises were fixed in concrete. The shooting was little but compromise, while the post-production quickly devolved into trying keep the audience from recognizing that the material simply did not flow.
As a result, he couldn’t help wondering what was going through the heads of the eager young things in this audience. He looked out at their faces from the wings of the auditorium where he awaited his call to the stage as the images from the screen reflected back on to them, dancing like specters. Their faces offered no clues, only the nearly uniform, impassive expressions of spectators awash in flickering light. Did they see what he saw? He did not expect the uncritical applause he had experienced at the press screening, but he could not help wonder: was he about to be roasted alive?
“Awesome!”
(“God how I hate that word,” Giorgio thought.)
“I love it!”
(“Then clearly you have no taste.”)
“Your camera moves are so sexy!”
(“Is that what your girlfriend says?”)
“Were you using diffusion on Anna’s close-ups?”
(“Why are you referring to her by her first name? Do you know her?”)
“Where do you get your ideas?”
(“The trash heap of history.”)
“That sequence in Prague was unbelievable!”
(“Praise be to the second unit. I had nothing to do with it.”)
“The editing was incredible!”
(“That’s one word for it,” Giorgio thought, remembering the cuts demanded by Victor and the smooth, MBA sharks at the studio. “Maybe I’ll send them gold-plated meat cleavers for Christmas.”)
The eager, smiling faces, the abject surrender to the seductions of fame, the superficiality of the comments that strove to sound intelligent, they all made Giorgio sick to his stomach, unable to decide what was more depressing, his film, or the mindless praise. “Surely,” he thought, “there has to be someone in this town who isn’t afraid to tell me the truth.”
He didn’t drink much, but if he did, he would have gotten drunk. When he awoke the next morning, he couldn’t force himself to face what he knew would be yet another day of double-dealing hyenas smiling from ear to ear in the Southern California sunshine that danced on the waves outside his bedroom with a kind of mocking glitter. But even a successful movie director has obligations and so, mustering all the energy he had left, he forced himself out of bed, took a long shower, ignored the news and breakfast, folded himself into his regulation German import and sped to work.
When he arrived at the studio, he couldn’t take advantage of the one concrete perk of being a director, a reserved parking spot on the lot, because workers were busy changing the space’s outlines to make it bigger. “The price of fame,” he joked to himself. Parking in one of the guest spots, he slammed the door to his car just as the secretary he had seen the day before crossed in front of the building where he had his office. She saw him too, and smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Remenyi,” she said, continuing to walk past him.
“Good morning,” he answered. Then on an impulse, he continued. “We seem to keep running into each other.”
She smiled again. “I’m working in Ralph Portman’s office,” she said.
“Ah,” was all he could think of to say.
“Congratulations!” she said cheerfully.
“Congratulations?” he asked, not sure what she was referring to.
“I hear your new film is quite a smash,” she said.
“That’s one word for it,” he muttered, amused at the pun she couldn’t recognize. And then, despite himself, he asked. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “At the studio screening last week.”
There was an awkward moment’s pause. Should he ask? Should she say? Both were caught on the Hollywood tightrope of what to say about a new film. It was Giorgio who took the plunge because no matter how successful the artist, no matter how much the fame or the exaggerated reputation, there was always a childish need to please and to know he had. “What did you think of it?” he asked. Even if he thought his film was tripe, he wanted someone, anyone to tell him what they really felt about it, good or bad.
“Not much,” the secretary said, smiling. “Sorry.”
Giorgio was stunned. Not by her negative reaction, but by her total confidence in saying it. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She giggled. “Oh my, are you going to have me thrown off the lot?” she asked in a mixture of humor and honesty.
“No, no, of course not,…” he said, trailing off, not knowing how to address her.
“Susan,” she said.
“No, I’m not going to have you thrown off the lot Susan,” he said. “It’s nice to have an honest reaction. That’s pretty rare in Hollywood.”
She laughed again. “I guess that’s because I’m a temp,” she said.
He had to laugh. “That explains it,” he said. “Picking up a little extra pocket money?” he asked.
“No, not exactly,” she said. “I’m working my way through grad school.”
“Oh, what are you studying?” Giorgio asked, genuinely interested.
“Medical sociology,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What do you do with that?” Giorgio asked.
“I want to be an epidemiologist,” she said.
Giorgio gulped. “Yikes,” he finally said weakly. “I guess you put me in my place.”
She smiled again. “Anyway, I’m still happy for your success. Maybe I’ll like your next film more. Good-bye, Mr. Remenyi,” she said, continuing on her way.
The winds had died down, the air was clear and Susan’s white business suit glowed in the sun as she walked away. She cut a trim figure and Giorgio knew that if he gave into his desire to call her back, that would be the beginning. He opened his mouth but then, thinking better of it, he muttered to himself. “Jesus Christ, let her have a life without worrying about weekend grosses.”
“I’d like to be a writer,” Gustáv said musingly, trying to refresh himself at least a little with a cold beer. He said it as if it were something he did not do daily. Despite his promise to himself that he would not write that evening, he had turned on his laptop for lack of anything better to do.
He once expressed his desire to write to an ex-girlfriend. When he did, she looked at him puzzled. “You are a writer,” she said.
Gustáv knew others thought of him as a writer, and to be sure, he identified himself as one whenever asked “what he did,” mainly because he couldn’t think of anything more accurate. Nonetheless, he never thought of his reviews as real writing. “Dostoyevsky is real writing,” he told himself. “What you do is mark time and get paid for it.”
But if his notion of “real” writing was fiction, he knew he had no talent for it. Or rather, he did not have enough talent for it. Or better still, he did not have enough patience for it. He could come up with ideas and map them out but he would get lost and irritated in the details, bogged down deciding what was and was not important enough to include. Trapped in the miasma of description and contradictory motivations, he would abandon his stories with a regularity that eventually convinced him he should cease the effort. His imagination was cluttered with the bits and pieces of false starts that lay in a kind of mental limbo like ruins scattered across a landscape or dead soldiers littering a battlefield.
It was the combination of a good story sense with difficulty with details that made screenwriting attractive. That was what brought him to Los Angeles and got him into film school. He quickly learned that screenwriting presented different problems, however. He no longer faced the laborious effort of figuring out what to include, since extraneous detail was the first thing you were taught to eliminate. But demonstrating character through often silent action eluded him. The inability to write “he thought” was crippling.
Worse, when he tried to get around that limitation by having characters say “I think…” as might be acceptable in the theater, he would be criticized for not being “visual,” a term he quickly learned to hate. He could spend days finessing fine, literate speeches, subtle, understated, high-toned explications of the script’s themes that he could point to with pride, only to be deflated by a tut-tutting, head-shaking, self-satisfied professor who told him that the dialog was not “visual.” Of course, no one ever really explained what “being visual” meant, probably because they didn’t know. As far as Gustáv could tell, it boiled down to the writer giving the director the opportunity to play around with the camera like a two-year-old in a sandbox.
When Gustáv tried to be visual, what he “saw” was a blank piece of paper or a glowing computer screen. That was probably the most frustrating thing of all, for he knew that at some level, those people who insisted on the “visual” in a film were right. Thus, criticism. For the more he struggled to refute that prejudice, the more he recognized that the films and filmmakers he loved exceeded his ability to describe them, that even the most astute analysis of a film could never come close to evoking, much less duplicating its affect, that indeed the “visual” did contribute something maddeningly elusive, evanescent, irrational, indescribable, undeniable.
≈
Alone with his thoughts in the bosom of the dark, Giorgio did his best to wait out The Call of History for the umpteenth time. Whenever in situations like this, he recalled Robert Altman’s lament that he envied an audience’s ability to see a film for the first time. That was especially true with The Call, on which he had been working intermittently for years. He knew immediately when he read the novel on which it was based that it was what he had been searching for his entire career. And when he watched the film, hints and glimmers of what had attracted him in the first place still poked through. Those moments almost made it worse. They were like witnesses for the prosecution, proof that it was possible to do something of value with the material.
Unfortunately, even more apparent were the compromises, the glaring impositions, the false emphases to please an actor, the simplification of complex ideas and the vulgarization of simple ones. He wanted to blame someone, but he knew that he had made the choices, that the wreckage on the screen resulted from him wanting things too much, from saying “yes” when he should have said “no,” from telling himself that every bad decision he was making was for the good of the project, when it really was made in fear of doing something that would sink it. By the first day of shooting, the compromises were fixed in concrete. The shooting was little but compromise, while the post-production quickly devolved into trying keep the audience from recognizing that the material simply did not flow.
As a result, he couldn’t help wondering what was going through the heads of the eager young things in this audience. He looked out at their faces from the wings of the auditorium where he awaited his call to the stage as the images from the screen reflected back on to them, dancing like specters. Their faces offered no clues, only the nearly uniform, impassive expressions of spectators awash in flickering light. Did they see what he saw? He did not expect the uncritical applause he had experienced at the press screening, but he could not help wonder: was he about to be roasted alive?
“Awesome!”
(“God how I hate that word,” Giorgio thought.)
“I love it!”
(“Then clearly you have no taste.”)
“Your camera moves are so sexy!”
(“Is that what your girlfriend says?”)
“Were you using diffusion on Anna’s close-ups?”
(“Why are you referring to her by her first name? Do you know her?”)
“Where do you get your ideas?”
(“The trash heap of history.”)
“That sequence in Prague was unbelievable!”
(“Praise be to the second unit. I had nothing to do with it.”)
“The editing was incredible!”
(“That’s one word for it,” Giorgio thought, remembering the cuts demanded by Victor and the smooth, MBA sharks at the studio. “Maybe I’ll send them gold-plated meat cleavers for Christmas.”)
The eager, smiling faces, the abject surrender to the seductions of fame, the superficiality of the comments that strove to sound intelligent, they all made Giorgio sick to his stomach, unable to decide what was more depressing, his film, or the mindless praise. “Surely,” he thought, “there has to be someone in this town who isn’t afraid to tell me the truth.”
He didn’t drink much, but if he did, he would have gotten drunk. When he awoke the next morning, he couldn’t force himself to face what he knew would be yet another day of double-dealing hyenas smiling from ear to ear in the Southern California sunshine that danced on the waves outside his bedroom with a kind of mocking glitter. But even a successful movie director has obligations and so, mustering all the energy he had left, he forced himself out of bed, took a long shower, ignored the news and breakfast, folded himself into his regulation German import and sped to work.
When he arrived at the studio, he couldn’t take advantage of the one concrete perk of being a director, a reserved parking spot on the lot, because workers were busy changing the space’s outlines to make it bigger. “The price of fame,” he joked to himself. Parking in one of the guest spots, he slammed the door to his car just as the secretary he had seen the day before crossed in front of the building where he had his office. She saw him too, and smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Remenyi,” she said, continuing to walk past him.
“Good morning,” he answered. Then on an impulse, he continued. “We seem to keep running into each other.”
She smiled again. “I’m working in Ralph Portman’s office,” she said.
“Ah,” was all he could think of to say.
“Congratulations!” she said cheerfully.
“Congratulations?” he asked, not sure what she was referring to.
“I hear your new film is quite a smash,” she said.
“That’s one word for it,” he muttered, amused at the pun she couldn’t recognize. And then, despite himself, he asked. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “At the studio screening last week.”
There was an awkward moment’s pause. Should he ask? Should she say? Both were caught on the Hollywood tightrope of what to say about a new film. It was Giorgio who took the plunge because no matter how successful the artist, no matter how much the fame or the exaggerated reputation, there was always a childish need to please and to know he had. “What did you think of it?” he asked. Even if he thought his film was tripe, he wanted someone, anyone to tell him what they really felt about it, good or bad.
“Not much,” the secretary said, smiling. “Sorry.”
Giorgio was stunned. Not by her negative reaction, but by her total confidence in saying it. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She giggled. “Oh my, are you going to have me thrown off the lot?” she asked in a mixture of humor and honesty.
“No, no, of course not,…” he said, trailing off, not knowing how to address her.
“Susan,” she said.
“No, I’m not going to have you thrown off the lot Susan,” he said. “It’s nice to have an honest reaction. That’s pretty rare in Hollywood.”
She laughed again. “I guess that’s because I’m a temp,” she said.
He had to laugh. “That explains it,” he said. “Picking up a little extra pocket money?” he asked.
“No, not exactly,” she said. “I’m working my way through grad school.”
“Oh, what are you studying?” Giorgio asked, genuinely interested.
“Medical sociology,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What do you do with that?” Giorgio asked.
“I want to be an epidemiologist,” she said.
Giorgio gulped. “Yikes,” he finally said weakly. “I guess you put me in my place.”
She smiled again. “Anyway, I’m still happy for your success. Maybe I’ll like your next film more. Good-bye, Mr. Remenyi,” she said, continuing on her way.
The winds had died down, the air was clear and Susan’s white business suit glowed in the sun as she walked away. She cut a trim figure and Giorgio knew that if he gave into his desire to call her back, that would be the beginning. He opened his mouth but then, thinking better of it, he muttered to himself. “Jesus Christ, let her have a life without worrying about weekend grosses.”