Friday at 5:45 pm
A Face in the Crowd
The airing of this movie couldn't be more timely. I will let the description speak for itself
I have a very special affinity for this movie. It, and a great & giving person, saved my life.
I had had two plays produced (the second in a 1500-seater in Boston) and a 2yr run w a syndicated radio comedy show before i was 25 but had never considered myself nor wanted to be a writer. I was just more or less chasing the tiger that was in my yard. I bounced around within that world for a few yrs because of the amazing amount of dough to be had but was happy to give it up after a bad experience w ABCTV in '82. Didn't look @ a typewriter for almost 15 years. I like to think - writing was like dictation, a chore.
Summer of '96. My wife had died that spring and i was fully in the grips of meth addiction. I'd become fat (yeah, go figure), sweaty, strokey and translucent and my friends had largely given up on me. Came home one night at the end of a binge and put the TV on hoping to vibrate myself to sleep. On comes "Face", which was
Network 20 yrs before
Network and i was blowwwwn away. Spent the next 12 hours lying there like a exhibit from the
Se7en museum, working that story in my head and came up with a new take - one that dealt with race, which had always been the most important poilitcs to me.
Hadda tell someone, finally settled on this gal Peggy i dealt poker with who genuinely seemed to enjoy having shifters w me and nodding @ my mad ramblings for hours on end. Told her, in my high, scattershot way, about my notes for a
Face reboot. After an hour, she gets up grabs me by the collar, she's taking me home. We'd been in the friendzone a loooong time cuz she dated my best pal when we met and she werent my type but i'm like "yeah, what the hell, we can #### this out". We get to her place, she makes some coffee, comes into the living room w a legal pad. "Tell me again" she says and starts writing down everything i said. Well, nothing except frantic party stuff had been just about me since the cancer had begun to erode my Mary into dust a couple years before and i loved it. She knew that, of course, though she made it about having wanted to be writer but not talented enough so this was her shot.
Every Tuesday and one worknight-instead-of-shifters each week for the next three months we worked on
Face and she called me every day to see if i was staying on task. I lied alot, got high alot in secret (she knew, of course), excused a lot but slowly, surely started to care about my life again. Realized i couldnt beat the drugs with all the Mary cues surrounding me in Reno so i borrowed my uncle's hunting cabin in NH for a winter and took my own cure & got my life back on track. Peggy moved to coastal GA about the same time and i visited her every year for a decade and helped her unleash her own writing skills. Neither of us have made a success of it - never even finished
Face - but we each have a pursuit that focuses and fulfills us and that i have a life at all is due almost solely to her and Lonesome Rhodes. Love you, Peg. Great flick - wikkid say check it.