Hollywood

“Money is like sex,” I said. “It seems much more important when you don’t have any...”

“I don’t want to be famous, I just want to feel good.”

“Why did you write this movie?”
“When I write something I never think about why.”
“Who is your favorite male actor?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Female.”
“Same answer.”

I turned on the TV. It didn’t have ESPN. I shut it off.

I cracked a beer and turned on the TV. There was a fight on ESPN. They were really slugging it out. The fighters were better conditioned now than in my youth. I marveled at the energy they could expend and still keep going and going. The months of roadwork and gymwork that fighters had to endure seemed almost intolerable. And then, those last two or three intense days before a big fight. Condition was the key. Talent and guts were a must but without condition they were negated.
I liked to watch the fights. Somehow it reminded me of writing. You needed the same thing, talent, guts and condition. Only the condition was mental, spiritual. You were never a writer. You had to become a writer each time you sat down to the machine. It wasn’t that hard once you sat down in front of the machine. What was hard sometimes was finding that chair and sitting in it. Sometimes you couldn’t sit in it. Like everybody else in the world, for you, things got in the way: small troubles, big troubles, continuous slammings and hangings. You had to be in condition to endure what was trying to kill you. That’s the message I got from watching the fights, or watching the horses run, or the way the jocks kept overcoming bad luck, spills on the track and personal little horrors off the track. I wrote about life, haha. But what really astonished me was the immense courage of some of the people living that life. That kept me going.

Hell, I had been attacked continually over the years but I had somehow found this to be invigorating. I never believed my critics to be anything but assholes. If the world lasts until the next century, I will still be there and the old critics will be dead and forgotten only to be replaced by new critics, new assholes.

I didn’t like Tully’s parties and entertained myself by getting totally drunk and insulting as many people as I could.

Sarah and I were being treated like second class citizens. But then, again, what could you expect when the leading man made 750 times as much as the screenplay writer? The public never remembered who wrote the screenplay, just who fucked it up or who made it work, either the director or the actors or whoever. Sarah and I were only slum dwellers.

That’s what could happen when you had a director who wasn’t an alcoholic and an actor who hated to drink and they were both working in the same film. And an alcoholic writer who preferred to be at the racetrack rather than at the set.

I just decided that actors were different than we were. They had their own reasons for things. You know, when you spend many hours, many years pretending to be a person who you aren’t, well, that can do something to you. It’s hard enough just trying to be yourself. Think of trying very hard to be somebody that you’re not. And then being somebody else that you’re not. And then somebody else. At first, you know, it could be exciting. But after a while, after being dozens of other people, maybe it would be hard to remember who you were yourself, especially if you had to make up your own lines.