Bizarre things I've done

Umpired a baseball game in prison, two teams of violent felons.

Gate crashed Stanley Kubrick's mansion at night in a black taxi.

Bought country & western radio spots to elect a liberal Democrat.

Told Boris that his new machine gun was nice, but leave it in the car.

Introduced to a Sicilian, who offered: "I'll call you Count Al, okay?"

A restaurant plate of brains that a bald audiologist insisted I try.

The famous

I'd rather not discuss the abject assholes I've encountered, like Tibor Machan, Paul Schrader, Tom Brokaw, and David Copperfield. Most of the famous were wonderful.

Chrissie Hynde, so lovely, so lively. Mickey Stevenson, Fred Williamson, Janet MacLachlan, and Edwin Starr were surprisingly fun to work with. Alejandro Rey and his friend Stacy Keach inspired and illuminated my creative career. Producers Howard Kazanjian, Al Ruddy, Tony Scotti, and John Lamb gave me important encouragement as a young filmmaker. I wish I could have said something more cheerful to Zappa and Spielberg. I had no reason to be cheerful with The Gipsy Kings. I was backstage to enforce their contractual obligation to me. I wanted to strangle their French manager. I never had any luck with Frenchmen. Christian Bourguinon stuck a knife in my back, although it was worse to be kneecapped by Striesand's hairdresser, Jon Whatshisface, because I wasn't spending enough money.

Without Gerald MacCallum's guidance, I could not have undertaken an intellectual quest of much depth. Without Peter Stringfellow, I could not have spent time with Mel Gibson twice, a dinner together at Stringfellow's nightclub, then in Charlotte Street the next day. I took him to a natural food joint, ate thick avocado, cheese and sprout sandwiches together, and I had little to say while he signed autographs for blushing chicks. Mel was at the zenith of his fame, rerecording Hamlet at the time, looping his voice and coaching the other actors, everybody in headphones at a studio. Always has to be done. Production sound while shooting is a guide track, sounds fake and amateur, lots of unwanted atmos. Rerecording a movie takes a week or so, if it goes well. Other people add sound effects and music, mix it in six channel Dolby.

There were numerous B list actors, actresses, singers, dancers, and musicians whose names you might not recognize, but they were at the top of their professions in Holland, Germany, and Australia. I came within a mile or two of success with Kubrick, and many Brits gave me vast resources and privileges. Somewhere in heaven, Leonard Zrnick is smiling.

I tried and failed to save Herman Brood. Someone should put poppies on his grave in salute to a great heart and soul, rock and roll junkie.

It was a huge honor to encounter Margaret Thatcher, interesting to film Helmut Kohl, a pain to write fulsome praise for dumbshit George W., and embarrassing to witness 41 fumble at a NATO summit. People often mistake physical stature for depth, which reminds me of smiling con artists Nathaniel Branden and Emmett Miller. The Grateful Dead were as manly as female mental patients. G. Gordon Liddy's vanity was tiresome, and Wink Martindale was positively scary. No sane person is quite that mechanical, unless he's selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door, enthusiastically spilling dirt on your living room carpet.

I envied Rob for hanging out with Sonny Bono and Slim Pickens. It was sad to meet tortured clowns like Robin Williams, Norman Wisdom, and Jonathan Winters, a delight to work with Orlin Grabbe, an intellectual giant and frequently funny. When beautiful Rosemary Forsythe married a restaurant owner, I saw an exquisite flower cast aside and trampled by Hollywood. 'Poison Dwarf' Charlene Tilton was one of the happiest moms on earth, and it was a privilege to show the world her private joy. It took a long time to convince her to open up. Lon Satton was such a ham, there was no point in looking under the hood. Ditto Ben Vereen. There is something fundamentally screwy about Broadway song and dance men.

TV execs Roone Arledge and Van Gordon Sauter should have been assassinated, but no one gets everything we want in life. Few cardsharps did more harm than opaque Alan Greenspan, however it was impossible to kill someone in a short phone conversation.

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Third passport expired

I lived and worked overseas 15 years, long stretches in Western Europe, Central America, and Oz, shorter stints elsewhere, interrupted by Rand McNally road trips and cheap apartments coast to coast. Libya was the worst three months of my life. California was a close runner-up for awfulness, ten or twelve times. Money talks, bullshit walks, and ¯Nobody walks in L.A. The last time I toured the Golden State, I went $2200 in reverse for no good reason.

I felt at home in northern Nevada, 90% white, but hard to make a living. No desire to go back to the East Coast or Texas or the Rust Belt again. Scotland had the treasure of warm hearted people, excellent whisky, snooker tables, and the tragedy of unemployment, horizontal ice storms, and frightful menus. I don't know what to say about Holland and Belgium. Superb food, good ganga, generous friends, talented crews, nice spas. I lived and worked in Holland many years, more than once, shot some of my best work there. Hard to get paid by the Jews of The North, as they call themselves and laugh. They're not Jewish, that's the punchline.

Still trying to figure out the place I liked best. Certainly not France or Germany. I did a lot of work in England, terrific production crews and facilities, terrible transport, awful food, even in the best restaurants. English hotels were astoundingly bad, English apartments stupid.

Hmm. I'll have to check the map again. Costa Rica was tranquil and beautiful and dangerous, lived there a long time, multiple escapades. Australia is the Lucky Country. I lived in Perth a couple years, did my first professional film production work 25 years earlier in Sydney. Same problem with awful Pommy food, reinterpreted Down Under. Indonesia was bizarre. Worse food than Libya, worse dictatorship than Libya, worse air transport than Libya. Islam corrodes everything it touches, lethal intellectual poison when it's mixed with Javanese mysticism.

I kept returning to Colorado, but the cost of living skyrocketed. My favorite landmark in the mountains and prairies is an ugly one horse town in Utah, a bittersweet joy to visit. No jobs or business opportunity in Helper, but there's authentic Gilded Age decorations and fixtures in a spacious, high ceiling coffee shop that was a thriving hardware store 100 years ago. Excellent coffee. Beat the birkenstocks off Boulder and shames sniffy Wamego. In 1993, I was driving a '78 Chevy van that had a weak cylinder, routinely fouled a sparkplug and stole compression. The only place open in Helper was an auto parts store. The owner unlatched the van engine doghouse, reached into a difficult spot on a hot V8, and changed the plug. I worried what it might cost. At the counter in a sparsely stocked shop, he used a calculator to figure out how much I owed with tax ... $3.76 for a sparkplug. People are just, damn it, decent in Helper. I went back to Helper whenever I could, always saw something new that was there all along, like the snowplow engine that was twice as tall and twice as long as a normal locomotive, parked on a section of track that went nowhere, rails rusting slowly underneath it.

Luxembourg funded me twice, has the best pastry on earth, but they speak French and have strict rules about residing there, unless you're an EU bureaucrat. Singapore was astoundingly gorgeous, totally fascist, hard to qualify for a work visa, and I didn't want to live there.

I liked Denmark, notwithstanding thick ice and steep drifts that made fools of an IPCC global warming conference and hundreds of frozen street protesters. The downside in Copenhagen was molasses slow bureaucracy and insane rules about household trash. I had to use a key to open a tiny porthole outdoors to shove in little bags containing eggshells and used coffee filters. There was a cabin for empty wine bottles, thousands of them. Food was so-so, much of it from Africa and South America. Nice neighborhood bakeries. My daughter selected what seemed to be a chocolate ice cream bar from the freezer at a corner store, took one bite and spat it out. It wasn't chocolate. It was ice cream covered in black licorice, a Viking treat.

All things considered, I like the Ozarks best. No building codes, wild and free, huge pastures and forests that are always changing with the seasons. Strong neighbors. WalMart vittles and paper products, low taxes, nice county officials that you can count on one hand, oodles of decency, stacks of split firewood in winter. Cows say moo. Coyotes howl at night. Very little traffic on gravel roads. A great place to think and write novels. 100% white, a garden of Eden with burn piles in calm weather, fresh tomatoes, potato patches, hot chainsaws and rifles.

Good enough place to die.

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