Less than a month after I bought that splicer from Larry Kemp, he served as cinematographer for my award-winning Project One film. He also functioned as my AD, my confidante, driver, grip, sound technician and comic relief. He stepped up and played every role that I asked him to because he was the only guy who was there. That’s not a bad description of Larry and what he meant to me. He was the guy who was there.
LARRY KEMP, circa 71-72
He was the youngest of three boys and I was the oldest of three girls. He was from New Jersey, I’d been in California (by way of Iowa) most of my life. We both loved the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel (okay, not exactly crazy choices in those days, but I doubt we’d have gotten along so well if he’d been into country.)
Laughter was easy with Larry. On the day of my shoot, we were both in hysterics when Larry leaned on Josie’s couch, causing her to almost poke her customer’s eye out with a tweezers. (Maybe you had to be there.)
Of course, it couldn’t be a real friendship without an occasional conflict or two. Larry met my Inner Brat and witnessed my pettiness up close and personal but he didn’t lecture, judge or reject me. It was the kind of friendship I expected to last a lifetime but we took different paths and lost touch after college.
We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since the 70s. We are Facebook “friends” but almost never email or message. In other words, our friendship today is nothing like what it was – but we’re not who we were forty years ago either. The knowledge those days are gone doesn’t diminish the friendship that once existed. I’m happy just to know he’s alive and living happily ever after in LA – one of relatively few people I went to film school with who actually wound up working in the film business.
If a time machine dropped me back in 1971, I’d buy Larry’s splicer all over again. It was worth every penny. I got the deal of lifetime.
Before CD could apply to UCLA, he had to survive California’s community college system. PCC (Pasadena City College) is one of its best schools – but not one of the easiest. When the state cut its budget, Chris had to battle for even his most basic courses.
For his language requirement, he chose Chinese. Unable to take Chinese 3 at PCC (due to budget cuts, not low grades) he completed Chinese under stiff competition at UCLA. This summer when we toured Russia, he astonished a group of Chinese tourists by talking to them in their language. They were so awed by the tall Caucasian speaking Chinese that they asked for his autograph and insisted on having their photos taken with him.
His accomplishments would impress me even if I didn’t know how far he’s come. He dropped out of high school halfway through his sophomore year when he turned 16 and passed the GED. We’d exhausted every educational alternative. From private school to public school – where they whisked him into the “At Risk” program for potential drop-outs – then on to boarding school followed by another private Lutheran school.
Chris was fatally shot in the play. Note bullet hole in forehead.
We sent him to private therapy and participated in family therapy. I read books about how to motivate kids determined to fail. My breaking point came when I conferenced with his math teacher to supervise every homework assignment. I verified he completed every single one correctly. Each morning I reminded him not to forget his homework. At the end of the week, his teacher informed me he hadn’t turned in a single page.
That’s when I gave up. I couldn’t read his failure to turn in completed assignments as anything but the finger. Short of going to school with him every day to ensure he handed in assignments, there was nothing I could do.
The applicable cliche here is you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. CD’s will to fail was stronger than our will to prolong this futile battle. We felt like we just failed parenting. When friends bragged about their kid’s early admission to Yale, then asked about CD’s college prospects, it painful to admit he didn’t get through his sophomore year.
Given all this, we didn’t expect him to perform in a college play or speak Chinese, let alone win a place in UCLA’s Film School, graduate first in his class and give a speech as Valedictorian.
I claim no credit for his miraculous transformation. He figured out how to change his life and followed through. His father and I always believed he was smart despite his early academic performance. Much like he opted to learn Chinese instead of Spanish, CD chose the hard way to obtain his education and succeeded against all odds.
Forgive me for bragging; I waited a long time for this. I couldn’t be any prouder of his unique journey to become the man he is today.
I don’t know where, when or even if Jack Nicholson made that comment but plenty of people relate. Consider all of the rock and pop songs about the anguish of running into your ex – Walk on By, I Go to Pieces, I Go Crazy and When We Were Young to name a few. The gut-crunching misery of realizing the heel who broke your heart is living la vida loca without you is timeless and universal.
On campus to turn in a script
When I find out an ex is getting married, my higher self wishes them well. My lower narcissistic self prefers they pine for me forever[1]. If that sounds heartless, consider this. How happy does the dude who shattered you deserve to be?
IMHO, the vengeful narcissist inside all of us roots for the bastard who dumped us to crash and burn in an epic fail. Anybody who acts overjoyed when their ex’s success far eclipses their own is a liar.
I wish you nothing but the best – as long as you don’t do better than me.
My own encounters with exes occurred in or around Melnitz Hall at UCLA where our film major brought us together. Since leaving college, I rarely run into anyone I know, not even casual acquaintances. That’s life in the big city.
However, a motivated ex can beat those odds with an assist from Google and FB. The downside is the risk of being labeled a stalker and served with a restraining order.
I’m not stalking you! I just happen to be here.
I’m a crying fool for movies (Splendor in the Grass, The Way We Were, Wild Horses) in which ex-lovers encounter each other long after their breakup. It kills me how they make awkward chit chat to hide the depth of their true feelings. Does it work this way in real life? Sometimes, probably.
What gets to me is the message that even though it’s over – their great passion is gone and it’s never coming back – the remnants of love remain in a new shape. It might manifest as love from a distance or devotion to a memory. It could come in the form of compassion, affection, concern or the deep camaraderie of people who know each other to the core. It might not be the love we’re looking for or the love we want but a little love is better than nothing.
I’ll always love the way we were.
Something about that always makes me cry.
[1] In the interest of full disclosure, even when I was the heartbreaker, I wanted them to pine for me forever.
I’d met Sharon less than a year earlier. I noticed her in my music history class and learned she’d been aware of me too. She said that if I hadn’t started talking to her soon she was going to walk up to me and say “I’d like to start a conversation with you.” As my diary entry indicates, we both felt a strong connection – so much so that even though we didn’t know each other very well, sharing an apartment seemed like a good idea.
It was not. It’s hard to live with somebody you want to impress. I was intimidated by Sharon. She knew more than I did about literature, poetry, and life. She was slim, beautiful, and ethereal – exactly how I wanted to look. Before long, I got on her last nerves. She told me I was the most unabashedly self-centered person she’d ever met. That this life must be an early incarnation for me because I was so un-evolved. We didn’t last a quarter before she asked me to move out.
After that, I felt so awkward when I saw her on campus that I avoided her. We lost touch before we graduated. For the next 35 years, I felt like a failure every time she crossed my mind. I wondered how her life turned out but her common first and last name made finding her impossible.
And then UCLA published their alumni directory. I looked her up and discovered she lived less than 5 miles away. Most likely we shopped at the same grocery store. I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. The worst that could happen was she’d say she didn’t want to talk to me.
She knew who I was immediately. We met for lunch and something amazing happened. We connected – we could talk to each other – on an intimate level that’s impossible to reach with more recent acquaintances. Maybe it’s because we knew each other during such formative years. Maybe our fearlessness about sharing intimate confidences 35 years ago made it easier to share today. Maybe we’ve always been connected, whether through a past life or something else.
Whatever it is, if I’d allowed fear to stop me from calling her, we would’ve missed the unique and special friendship we now enjoy. If there’s a similar lost connection in your life, I urge you to pick up the phone. What’s the worst that can happen?
This entry is a perfect illustration of the tricks memory plays. I would have sworn that my father came to LA to inform me of the call to San Diego and that today was the first time I was aware of the possibility. I was even more certain that it was on this day, at LAX, that he dropped the bomb – it was a done deal, they were committed to moving and I had no say in it. This, too, is apparently false. Who am I kidding, apparently? If the battle for truth is between my diary and my memory, the diary scores a knock-out.
SNEAKY FAMILY PREPARES TO ABSCOND
If I hadn’t written everything down in my diary, I’d buy my own fiction in which, not so coincidentally, I am cast as the hapless victim. Until I came across this particular entry, I believed my version was 100% accurate. It turns out none of it is factually true.
In my defense, my version was emotionally true to my feelings about abandoning Santa Clara for San Diego. I felt blindsided and betrayed. When I left to attend UCLA, I expected to return to Santa Clara every Christmas and summer – where else would I ever want to go? I didn’t remember any other home before Santa Clara. The shocking realization that – aside from a quick dash to box my earthly possessions for a move to a city I’d never seen and where I knew no one – aside from that, I could never go home again. The house I grew up in would be occupied by strangers.
If I ruled the world, my family would never leave Santa Clara (or age, for that matter). My parents would live in our old parsonage which would look exactly like it used to – but that hasn’t been true for 47 years now.
And I’m still not completely over it.
DEL MONTE THEN – We didn’t own our house; Hope Lutheran owned the parsonage, we just lived there. The new pastor thought it was too small (no duh) and the church sold it in October, 1970, for $27,700. It was your basic three bedroom two bath Lawrence Meadows tract house. My thanks to Lester Larson who posted this 1956 Lawrence Meadows brochure, below, on Facebook. The floor plan depicted in the brochure was ours; I think that may even be our house in the picture.
OUR HOUSE IN LAWRENCE MEADOWS IN SANTA CLARA
DEL MONTE NOW – This is what our house looks like today. Apparently it now has six bedrooms and three bathrooms and the estimated value is (gulp) $1, 308,597.
To put this in context – I’d just learned that my spec script, which had been optioned by Steve Friedman’s Kings Road Productions to be a feature film, was going to be re-written by another writer. Bill Froug was my screenwriting professor and mentor at UCLA.
THE LATE GREAT BILL FROUG
DRINKING IS A SHORT-TERM SOLUTION
My agent and my mentor were correct. Having your work rewritten by someone else is part of a writer’s life in the film business (less so in television but it still happens). I ended up rewriting many more scripts by other people than having my own scripts rewritten which ought to make me feel better but it doesn’t. The fact is, it always sucks to be told you’re off the project – especially when it’s your own original spec script.
I suspect other professionals would react the same way if this was routine practice in their business. Imagine a surgeon being told that a new surgeon in town had been hired to remove the heart he’s just transplanted in order to insert a better one – or an interior decorator who gives her best only to learn all of her work is off to Goodwill and a new interior decorator will start from scratch. It hurts to be replaced. And it never got easier, although I did get better at hiding my emotions. (Hint: It is considered bad form to cry like a baby when – not if – this happens to you.)
AS YOU DRINK,, BROOD ABOUT REVENGE
I understand why it sometimes has to be done. Sometimes it even works out for the best. It’s easy for a writer to get tunnel vision and see only one way to solve a problem. New eyes spot new solutions. Given the fortunes and executive jobs attached to the success or failure of a film, no wonder so many execs play it safe and bet on the flavor of the month instead of a newbie. If the “hot” writer tanks, at least they had a reasonable basis to believe he’d succeed.
If and when it happens to you, remember it’s not personal. It’s only business. And then cry your eyes out in solitude.
Let’s just say, I don’t have piles of “Employee of the Month” awards hoarded in a drawer – for starters I was rarely employed for a full month. Outside of academia, I was successfully challenged by the concept of a work ethic. I tried to get the hang of it, kind of, but I am what I am, I can’t deny it. I’ve got a real affinity for sloth. My mother complained I was lazy and inept about helping her with housework. (An effective combination. It was easier to do the dishes herself than enlist me.) Exasperated, she warned me to get rich because I’d need a maid. She intended it as a threat but I heard a swell idea.
During my high school and college years, I worked at various part-time jobs. Bulletin-folder for my father. Neighborhood babysitter. Corn dog cashier at the Santa Clara County Fair, salesclerk at San Jose State bookstore and UCLA bookstore – perfect, except when I had to wait on customers. Paper slicer for two days. UCLA Med Center OB/Gyn ward clerk. Typist at the naval base on Coronado Island.
When I graduated, I figured my days of dead end jobs were behind me. I was eager to launch myself into a fun career like Mary Tyler Moore did on her show. Something in the entertainment business with a warm family atmosphere and witty supporting characters like Mr. Grant and Murray.
At my first employment agency interview, I took a typing test and dazzled the room. (I was not Outstanding Typist of the Year at Wilcox High for nothing.)
I’ll never forget what my recruiter said next.
“Honey, if you learn shorthand, you can rule the world.”
Hmm, a lack of shorthand didn’t hurt Mary Richards. Why is it a problem for me? In a moment of clarity, the illusion of living Mary Richard’s life dissolves. I face a future as a secretary in a coma-inducing office devoid of wise-cracking curmudgeons.
I know what I have to do. There’s just one place I function slightly better than average instead of below the mean and I can stay there forever if necessary. Grad School, here I come!
Less than ten days prior, I endured graduation from Wilcox High – so how did I wind up here?
Reading my acceptance letter to UCLA.
On a rainy Sunday afternoon, months after my acceptance as a fall English major at UCLA, I got bored and flipped through the UCLA Catalog of Courses. It changed the course of my life.
UCLA General Catalog – No Math – No Science – Sign me up!
That afternoon, in a burst of clarity, I realized that simply by switching my major to Film (College of Fine Arts as opposed to Bachelor Arts), I could jettison every single math and science class – for the rest of my life! And that was just the beginning, once I viewed college like an academic Chutes and Ladders. I didn’t have to land on boring chutes like Shakespeare (I confess, not a fan) and Milton – I could climb crazy ladders instead. In addition to a smorgasbord of fantastic film courses all I needed to win a degree was a few English department creative writing courses and my choice of esoteric lit classes.
First thing Monday morning, I was on the phone with the UCLA registrar to change my major from English (already sounding dreary) to Film Writing (until now, who knew that anybody actually wrote films? Not me, but it sounded more entertaining than Chaucer in the original Middle English.)
Disclaimer: Don’t bother making the same request today. For starters, you must be a junior to apply. Once a year, the Film Department admits 15 juniors from disciplines within UCLA and 15 juniors from outside institutions. To compete, you must submit a creative portfolio, envelopes stuffed with cash (that’s a JOKE) and pray. Sixty out of thousands of applicants are selected for an in-person on-campus interview. Thirty of them move on to become next year’s film majors.
STUDENT ID CARD FRESHMAN YEAR (going for the popular Serial Killer look)
To be sure, it was not exactly a cake walk in 1969. The registrar said, “Here’s the thing, Miss Knutsen. You can do it if you start this summer instead of in the fall.”
I relate to a sculpture in the wonderful Sculpture Gardens conveniently located in front of the Theater Arts and Art buildings.
This might have given me pause had I not been paralyzed by self-diagnosed severe clinical depression. With no rainbows on my horizon, what could I lose by sacrificing a final Santa Clara summer for a new start in LA?
So I said YES and it changed my life. Plunging into college that summer opened the door to a perfect career (for me) in a field I literally did not know existed until I noticed the difference in basic course requirements between English and Film. Was it serendipity, fate, luck or the hand of God? It depends on your point of view, I guess. All I know for sure is I wasn’t searching for my purpose or a path – but it was waiting for me to say yes and leap.
Three days before she died, I received a letter from Natalie. Uncharacteristically, I wrote back immediately. I don’t remember what I said but at least I wrote back. Her brother found my letter, unopened, on the kitchen counter, when he arrived in Ukiah after she was dead. My name was on the return address. That’s how he knew where to contact me and let me know she was gone.
Fall, 1961. “A family with a daughter your age is joining our church,” my father says. Natalie is short and round with blue eyes and blonde hair in a Prince Valiant cut. I’m the fourth grade giraffe, tall and skinny with wavy brown hair. She’s an outdoor-oriented extrovert, a born entertainer. I’m a sullen sedentary introvert longing for center stage despite my lack of talent.
Obviously, we’re destined to be best friends.
Natalie far left. Me next to her. Probably.y at Mount Cross Bible Camp.
January, 1967. Natalie and I are sophomores at different high schools. We claim to be cousins and people believe us despite how little we have in common. Natalie’s in Choir and Pep Squad. She’s secretary of the Future Teacher’s Club and wins a speaking role in the school play. The Beatles reign on my stereo while she remains loyal to the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean.
We graduate from our respective high schools in 1969. She and her future first husband Bobby are voted Cutest Couple and featured on a full page in Fremont’s yearbook. I leave Wilcox as anonymously as I served my time. She goes north to college, first Pacific Lutheran in Washington and then Chico State. I head south to UCLA. Natalie majors in PE and Education, I choose Film Writing. We get together briefly every summer but during the school year we forge new friendships.
Natalie and Bobby divorce. The next time I hear from her, she’s engaged to the man of her dreams. She doesn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid in either of her weddings. The outdoor ceremony takes place on a blistering August day at the Ukiah ranch where they live
Summer, 1988. Natalie, her husband and their daughter spend two days with my family on their way home from Disneyland. Natalie’s jumpy, a restless bundle of uneven edges and darting eyes, nothing like the laughing Natalie I remember from childhood. She smells the same, a summer collage of rose-scented soap, saltwater or tears, sunblock, healthy sweat and new mown grass. She tries to hide the small scaly patches engraved on the skin on back of her hands and elbows. She isn’t any smaller, but in some profound way she is fading before my eyes.
JOYCE AND NATALiE DOING RECORD ACTS LIKE IN THE OLD DAYS
Not long after, she gets divorced again. In the spring of 1994, Natalie’s mother – in many ways her anchor – dies. Natalie spirals down, then goes into freefall.
NATALIE AND I WITH HER MOTHER AND HER DAUGHTER
While at work as a kindergarten teacher, she passes out, drunk, in the ladies room. She’s fired from her dream job. Next, she loses her driver’s license. After that she loses custody of her daughter.
Fall, 1995. I hate it when she calls late at night. She rambles, repeats herself and slurs her words. I make excuses to get off the phone.
March 26, 1996. I open Natalie’s last letter. She never learned to type so it’s handwritten like all the others. The round, precise cursive lines of blue ink on the first page remind me of the tight, controlled perfection of her record acts.
Her writing deteriorated with every line, crazily sloping out of control by the time she signed her name. I wanted to believe her but I didn’t. Even so, I never thought alcohol would kill her at 44.
I hope she knew I loved her. I know you can’t save people who don’t want to be saved but I wish I’d tried harder. Whenever her name is mentioned, I still tell people she was my cousin. She’s buried next to her mother in Massachusetts instead of Ukiah. I’ve never been to Massachusetts but one of these days I’ll go.
This was one of the worst days of my life. To set it up a little, I was at UC Santa Barbara for one quarter of intercampus visitation and this was the day I showed the film I made for one of the classes I took there.
First, I take full responsibility for this debacle. For some bizarre reason, I believed that if I made a complicated incomprehensible film that nobody could understand, the audience would be awed by my superior intellect and love me. If you doubt how pretentious and wrong-headed my film was, allow me to dazzle you with its full title – JOURNEY: A RITUAL IN FIVE PARTS.
So why do I consider this disaster one of the luckiest breaks of my life? First, I made the film in Santa Barbara, where no one from the UCLA Film Department would stumble upon it and it could die in peace. If I hadn’t launched this colossal misfire in Santa Barbara, I almost certainly would have made a similar film for my Project 1 at UCLA – which, at the time, was basically a thesis film worth 8 units of credit on which your entire career in the film department depended. The humiliation in Santa Barbara saved me a far greater humiliation.
Second, and more important, I learned in a visceral punch-to-the-gut way that obscure pretentious films are not the way to an audience’s heart. (Why didn’t I know this already? I must’ve been absent that day.) My value system changed, as is reflected in my subsequent writing career. I finally understood the most important aspects of any film, story or book are to be entertaining, clear and accessible.
And, when I made my Project 1 three months later at UCLA, it was one of four films that was awarded the Jim Morrison Memorial Grant.
