My favorite finger

The ring finger on my right hand. I've always thought it was nice. I considered why and realized that it was used to snap the fingers of my right hand, a professional snap to mark a moment in time. Standby, ready, and —*snap!* Directing the flow of pictures and sound in an editing suite is to see and hear 30 frames a second in video, 24 fps in film. It matters exactly which frame to cut and why.

 

A couple hours ago, I thought about home school. I was thrown out of high school and disliked college enough to raid it for law library access and Dean's List in philosophy, couldn't stomach any more. Every collision I had with higher ed thereafter was crummy. I lectured at a Villanova seminar, produced a video for Northern Nevada College, and installed two dozen distance learning cameras, projectors, and sound systems at UNR's vile Department of Education. I butted heads with Hospers at U.S.C. and Prof. Juhasz in Boulder, then a tenured clown from Chapman who I ordered out of my kitchen because he was sexually assaulting the cook, a married gal who was preparing lunch for houseguests. Next week was a dramatic contrast. The KGB general was a perfect gentleman, dignified and happy because Atlas Shrugged was going to be translated into Russian and the newly elected Russian president was a reformer, dedicated to capitalism. A year later it became evident that Putin and his inner circle were crony capitalists.

 

See? The benefit of homeschooling. You learn things.

 

As a teen I learned factory work, a couple gigs in a rock band, how to rip news from a teletype, how to use a variety of communications gear, how to operate a mimeograph and publish things, how to type (badly at first) and to compose artwork and text for major market rags. I learned everything involved in cinematography and sound recording. Directing and editing took decades to master, with a lot of home study, experiments, and travel. My first film projects were processed and printed at the Technicolor lab in Chicago. I rented nice Arriflex cameras, beautiful Schneider primes, a bucket crane, and a Sony sound boom. It takes time to get comfortable making filmed entertainment. At age 40, I won creative battles with TV facilities, big crews, famous people, and a Jersey Island shelf company, learning by doing it.

 

I also learned how to wrangle sheep, llamas, and chickens. I fought a forest fire. I helped a KLM stew escape Java. There's no limit to what you can learn at home, wherever home is around the world. It's hard to learn much in a small town that you never leave. Go Pirates! (my high school 's football team, bitter rivals of Cedarburg, another small town). Kids I knew as goofballs in elementary school became county commissioners and real estate salesmen, never left their familiar patch. My parents didn't go anywhere. I had to wrestle my freedom from them at age 17, eager to explore the world. I knew very little, started in urban kindergarten and took it on the chin whenever the world surprised me, which it did repeatedly as I made my way to New York, L.A., London, Sydney, Paris, and so on.

 

I don't think anybody learns anything without home school and travel. I reluctantly explored an Arab capital, no interest in visiting black Africa. I had plenty of involvement with American blacks, learned a great deal from them and about them, some of it quite sad, most of it complicated. Everything happens at somebody's home, theirs, mine, yours. Whatever we learn about romance and heartache unfolds in private. Nobody learns about life in schoolrooms, sitting in chairs, bored by the obvious.

 

I visited a high school English teacher I liked, still teaching 20 years later, and volunteered to address a sophomore class, show them what a page of screenplay looked like and what a page of literary work looked like. The kids were brain dead. They glanced at the photocopies I handed out, didn't read them, and didn't hear anything I said about writing. I should have cut the lecture to six words.

 

Writing is homeschooled. Thousands of hours.

 

I'm in a peculiar mood tonight. I laid in bed and listened to the BBC program Fixing The World, which airs once a week. It was a documentary account of Boris Johnson's 2020 "Everybody In" emergency order to pick up every bum on the streets of every city in England — tens of thousands of homeless dope addicts, drunks, and lunatics — to be housed in hotel suites like Holiday Inn Express so they didn't infect anyone with Covid. Some had to be evicted for trashing the place and assaulting others. Some went into private flats rented by the government. All of them were enrolled in welfare programs that put money in new bank accounts that the bums could spend on drugs and liquor, with regular visits by England's corps of social workers, housing officers, counselors, statisticians, and BBC reporters. A third of UK population is unemployed, elderly, handicapped, mentally ill, or incompetent, hence the vast welfare "sector" piled on top of a truly astonishing NHS army of bureaucrats, crowded GP offices, and hospital waiting lists. I had to wait six months to see a clinical psychologist when I lost all hope in Scotland. A wonderful shrink, a little Scot with a giant forehead. He asked questions, listened to me, and after two sessions declared: "There's nothing wrong with you. Finish the fucking novel."

 

That was quite a long time ago. I published 30 books since then, most of them novels and novelettes. Occasionally I get royalties when someone buys one of my self-published titles. Amazon sent me 12 cents this month, a slush fund from Kindle Prime, a penny per book downloaded free. I allowed it to promote readership. There's a $4 Smashwords anthology of The Case Files. Same strategy, give away work that cost years of dedication and love. Make a note. Free or cheap doesn't work.

 

Now that I've been canceled by Amazon, exiled to their Spanish language server, I don't see the purpose of climbing another mountain. It takes six months, working 6 or 7 days a week, to write a new novel.

 

I need to do something else. Maybe close up the tin barn and go somewhere, as soon as my dog dies, which he will soon. Losing hair, can't walk straight, gnarly skin tumors that itch. I give him a lot of help and cheerful attention. As long as he eats and drinks and pees and poops, we carry on. No dog lives forever. I need to look over the horizon.

 

I could snap the ring finger and thumb of my right hand, so to speak, go somewhere and make a movie. How to do that as an old toothless pauper is unimportant. All sorts of things are possible if you go out in the world and forage. I have video editing software on my laptop. I could borrow my daughter's digital camera. The first thing to do is to conceive a story to tell in pictures and sound.

 

Good plan, provided the dog doesn't outlive me.

 

John Huston made 'The African Queen' when he was 81 and in poor health, uninsurable. I'm only 71. On the other hand, I'm not Huston, and he had an easy job vaguely directing Hepburn and Bogart and only making two minutes a day with an army of lieutenants — a cinematographer, production team, location management, power and light, mechanical effects, a miniature river boat, studio scenes, and ordinary stuff like wardrobe, makeup, housing, security, portable toilets, and catering. I had a big crew like that in 1984, shooting 'The Marionettte,' which stopped after two weeks with forty minutes in the can, because a larcenous producer didn't pay the cast and crew. Big revolt on the set of a giant theatrical stage rigged with working fountains, an enormous staircase, and 20 choreographed dancers waiting to perform.

 

I don't want to work with a heavy crew again. It would be helpful to have a camera operator who knows where the horizon is, a sound man without peacock ego problems, a script girl to spot continuity goofs, an attentive utility hand, and a driver who can serve location food and water, put up tables and folding chairs and deal with the public. A black belt Buddhist would be ideal.

 

Art director Ruud van Dijk was a genius, died too early in life. We were about the same age, and Ruud did a spectacular job on 'The Marionette' — sets, props, artwork, period rental stuff, a life-size puppet, an infinity of custom set decor and the aforementioned stage fountains. A year or two before my project started shooting, he had designed and decorated a big budget Cheech & Chong picture that was filmed in Amsterdam. Dutch sets were wonderful, but I don't want to growl at a slow 30-man crew and paper pushers in a production office again. Once was enough.

 

Big budget A-List directors are protected by producers, production managers, and associate producers, so directing is fairly serene, spend a lot of time resting until notified by a 1st assistant director that the set is rigged and lit, camera people ready to shoot, the cast in wardrobe and makeup, ready to work. I wanted to get to the A-List and couldn't finish 'The Marionette,' which blew up my career, retreated to television, starting at the bottom again, video editing, ENG camera, little shows — then directing a big crew to make 'London By Night' in landmark venues and locations, Covent Garden , Piccadilly, a night concert at Windsor with on-stage coverage of the Gipsy Kings and an interview with Stephanie Powers. A dozen more intimate interviews were staged at little tables in a swish nightclub dining room, VIPs at other tables in the background, cocktail waitress, dignified maître d in black tux. Solid work in signature style, elegant and intelligent. William Morris said it was too British. Sky said it was too American and old fashioned. French and German television distributors don't sell anything in English language. Investors complained that I had too many black people in it, an Empire Ballroom Afro style show, sound bites of black celebs starring in West End musicals, and a Motown legend who performed on a disco set.

 

Humph. BBC liked what I did with cameras and launched Ruby Wax in a late night talk show that aped my style and bungled it. Producer Magazine ran a feature story on how I deployed SMPTE time code to sync tapes from pro camcorders on quick set up tripods, an infinity of angles that I directed in post by snapping my fingers. On the set I was able to spend a lot of time with talent, after pointing to camera coverage. DP Nick Fry and his gaffers gave me natural, dimensional light in the nightclub. We rolled for eight hours, a mountain of material to make minutes. An enormous sound crew mic'd and recorded a Latin jazz big band and a lounge combo with lovely Sue Shaddock giving a stellar vocal performance that I shot with a nylon stocking stretched behind the lens at the focal plane, a soft glamour close-up. I had some of the best camera operators in London, experienced men who understood me.

 

I like talking about this crap for two reasons. I'm proud of what I achieved, homeschooled. It's crystal clear that I don't want to do the heavy lifting of a big show involving big money again. If I make a little movie, it's going to be little. Simple sets, simple lighting, simple story, small cast, small crew.

 

Meanwhile and pending other business worth pursuing, I've been monitoring airline pilots on 132.425. To hell with BBC. Lemme think. An air drama at a small regional center. A missing plane. Stock footage of air traffic controllers. Fade to a lone wolf FAA investigator who travels by car a long way to interview a tough, adamant hillbilly logger who reported a flash of light in the sky. No crash debris. The plane simply disappeared. I need a love interest. An FBI agent, young and pretty, knocks on his hotel room door. She wants him to drop the investigation, won't tell him why. They butt heads ("Go ahead and arrest me!") while Lone Wolf studies satellite data and spots a crop circle. Sounds like a movie.