Either You're in or You're in the Way

by Logan Miller

  Looking back, we wish we had seen him, but that’s how it was then.

  The holidays can be tough, and visiting your dad in jail makes them even tougher. When you leave, you always feel worse than when you arrived. We tried to see him on January 1, just before heading back to L.A. But we never saw him. His cell mate came to the visiting booth and told us that our father was sick and that he couldn’t come and see us.

  That was five days earlier.

  We called the coroner’s office and spoke to an investigator. They said they needed to conduct an autopsy. We told them our father wouldn’t want that, asked them to let him be and not cut him open. He always told us he never wanted to be gutted like a fish. They said they had to.

  When someone dies in jail, they’re still not free. The deceased is only free once the authorities say so. The body remains property of the state until the state is done. Various procedures need to be performed to determine if foul play or negligence was involved. Basically, the government needs to cover its ass.

  The coroner called after the autopsy and told us our father was being held at a local mortuary. We drove over there. We had dreamed about making enough money to get him a little apartment where he could be warm and watch TV, eat a hot meal, away from the cold and rain, where he could sleep and not worry, where he could wake up and not shiver, where he could be proud. But the dream was over now. We had failed our father. If we had been more successful, more involved with him, been around more—if we had been more than we were maybe he’d still be alive.

  We pushed through the glass doors and were greeted by the mortician. We sat in his office and discussed the financial realities of death. He started by saying that the county classified our dad as an “indigent” and as such, would pay for the services. We declined their generosity. It was our duty and we would pay for it. He wasn’t an indigent to us. He was a wartime veteran, and the government would send us a flag in honor of his service.

  “We’d like to see our father now…”

  The mortician wheeled out a cardboard coffin and removed the top. We hoped to see someone other than our father, hoped he was still alive and that the jail had made a mistake. But the man in the cardboard coffin was our father. His torso was cut open, covered with blue paper towels. There was blood smeared on his right forearm and neck where they had tried to clean him up.

  Even with the blood, there was a peacefulness about him that gave him back ten years of his life. His bloated skin had smoothed away the wrinkles and rejuvenated his weathered features. His hair was combed. But there was a yellow tinge to his face and the cold of his body was death. He was gone forever. The pain swelled and was then unleashed. We held his hand, crying, told him we loved him, told him we were proud of him…told him we were sorry.

  We thought about the last time we saw him, on that cold day in November, and what he told us in the car just before we dropped him off.

  “I wish I could’ve been better to you boys growing up…I’m sorry that I wasn’t. I’ve never been able to be there for you one hundred percent…And I know I never will be…Thanks for never giving up on me…”

  We tried to cheer him up. “We’re going to start making movies, Dad. We’re really close. We’re going to do some great things together; fishing in Alaska, camping in Montana, sailing the oceans, like we’ve always dreamed. You just gotta take better care of yourself…”

  “I know…I know.”

  Then we remembered a few months before that, the last time we visited him in jail. He lifted up his orange shirt, revealing his lean stomach, and hit his abs with his fist. “This is where you come to get fit…When are you gonna make our movie?”

  “Soon, Dad…Soon.”

  “Who’s gonna play me? He’s gotta be good-looking.”

  “Ed Harris.”

  He always reminded us of our dad.

  “Yeah, he’s good. I’ll give him permission to be me…The sheriff will negotiate on my behalf.”

  We all laughed. It was a jailhouse dream, an impossible dream, something to be accomplished in another lifetime when you could start over and make all the right decisions. Ed Harris was light-years from our moment.

  Our dad knew how hard we were working to break into the business. He wished he could help us and felt worthless that he could not. Years earlier, his heart was broken when we failed to realize our baseball dreams, not because he had wanted it for himself, but because he knew how much it meant to us. His heart was broken because our hearts were broken. And now ours were broken again.

  We always thought we could save him. And now we had to accept that we could not.

  As we continued holding his cold hand and caressing his cold head, telling him that we loved him and that we were sorry, our sadness and guilt grew into frustration and defiance.

  We wanted to prove that his life was important, that he was loved, that his final chapter was not the shameful end on a jail cell floor—that his life had been worth living.

  We squeezed his hand for the last time and made a vow. “When are we making our movie, Pops?…This year…this year…”

  In death, our father gave us what he was unable to give us in life. From now on we’d be riding with the full force of his spirit. Nothing could stop us, not fear, not money, nothing. Only God could decide otherwise, and we hoped he was on our side.

  From then on, either you were in, or you were in the way.

  THE WEIGHT

  JANUARY 2006 WAS spent on the business of death. We went to the jail a few days after the autopsy. They handed us a plastic bag. Inside was our dad’s Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots, his sweater, down jacket, and the checkered wallet we gave him for Christmas when we were eight. There was a ticket stub from King Kong in his jacket pocket. It was dated December 19, the same day he was let out of jail and then thrown back in. We imagined him riding the bus from the Sonoma County Jail, hopping out, and walking through the rain to the nearest liquor store, drinking a pint of something cheap, and then staggering across the street into a warm movie theater to eat popcorn and be carried away from the pain for a few hours.

  We cremated his body and held a wake for him at our mother’s house. A couple of Fairfax cops showed up to pay their respects, dressed in uniform and all. It meant a lot to us. They were choked up. They liked our dad and felt terrible about his passing.

  Then we tracked down our dad’s few possessions, most of which he had stored with friends. A woman retrieved his belongings from his camp in the woods and gave them to us. She made a stone circle there in memory of him.

  We knew where our dad wanted his ashes spread. But we weren’t ready to let him go yet. So we placed the urn inside a wooden box he built for us when we were born and figured we’d know when it was time to set him free.

  BURNING FOR BOOKS

  “Our movie” was Touching Home. It was about the three of us, a nine-or ten-month period after Logan was released from the minor leagues and Noah flunked out of college. We came home and worked with our dad in order to save enough money to go down to Arizona for baseball tryouts, give our dream of playing in the major leagues one more shot. It was a desperate time, lots of tension, lots of fighting. It was a candid portrayal of our father’s struggles with alcoholism and our own struggle for meaning.

  Our dad had read the screenplay and looked forward to seeing it made into a movie one day. He thought that making movies was probably the next best thing to playing baseball for a living.

  Movies, as everyone knows, cost big bucks—mountains of money. Currently, a low-budget movie is anything under $40 million. You can feed countries with those numbers. Writing, on the other hand, is comparatively free. Other than mental anguish, it costs you nothing, except for pen and paper. And if you can’t afford that, there’s always something you can find to receive your thoughts; a freshly painted wall, a park bench, a cave, the stall of a public restroom. And since the screenplay is the foundation of a movie, we figured (when we first got to Hollywood six years earlier) we should st
art at that fundamental level. After all, it was the cheapest part of the business. Start from the bottom and work our way to the top. It made sense.

  During those years we “developed” (industry jargon for exploiting young writers) several scripts with producers around town. These were our ideas, scripts that we’d written independently—by way of coffee and mental pain. Producers had read them, liked them, and wanted to “develop” them with us. So we’d have a conference call here, a meeting there, incorporating some of their “notes” into the script, writing for free of course. Eventually they would try to sell our script to a studio, and when that failed, they would fail to return our phone calls…On to the next desperate writer.

  Nothing had come of this path, largely, we thought, because someone else was in control of our future. Things were different now. We had resolved to go it alone. From now on, we’d be the producers.

  ON THE DRIVE back to L.A. we listened to Bob Dylan and stared out the window at the passing farmland. When we arrived at our apartment, we threw our bags inside and walked to the bookstore. There was no time for self-pity. It was time to find out what we didn’t know.

  One month had already been ripped from the calendar. We needed to make a battle plan, devise a strategy for the road ahead. We wanted books by people who had actually made movies, not academic works on moviemaking, but practical experience from frontline soldiers. We walked over to the entertainment section and plunged in.

  Two hours later:

  “We need to buy these,” Logan said, holding a stack of books.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Noah said, adding up the sticker prices in his head. “We came here to read, not buy. If it’s important, write it down.”

  “What do you want me to do, write down the whole damn book?”

  “I don’t know. Figure it out. You’re a smart guy. We ain’t buying anything.”

  “We’re buying them.”

  “You got money?!” Noah yelled. “’Cause I ain’t got any money! Unless you got a stash I don’t know about.”

  Noah has a flair for loud candor. He yells in public. He’s the asshole who has the argument in the crowded elevator. It’s not as if he’s deliberately rude, because as soon as you point out he’s yelling and disturbing others, he whispers. Yelling is just his habit of communication. He’s what a therapist might call “passionate.”

  “I guarantee that whatever we spend on these books we’ll make back a hundredfold,” Logan said, pounding his fist into the cover of the Guerrilla Filmmaker’s Handbook. He turned over the book and read the tagline to Noah. “The Guerilla Filmmaker’s Handbook is the definitive guide. Buy it and save yourself thousands of dollars…”

  The sales pitch hung in the air. Noah grabbed the book and flipped through it. We barely had enough money for rent. The business of death had drained our savings.

  Fifteen minutes later Noah looked up from the book, a religious transformation in his eyes.

  “We gotta buy this.”

  “All of them?” Logan said, referring to the stack.

  “Yeah…all of them.”

  We hustled back to our apartment, brewed a pot of coffee, and dove into the stack of books, highlighting the pages, writing notes in the margins, composing a strategy in our notepads and most forcefully, in our minds.

  Our mission was to obtain as much knowledge about movie production in the shortest time possible—a crash course in the business. We had the script and creative vision. Nothing happens without a script. Nothing. The script is EVERYTHING before it’s something. And even when it becomes something, the script is always the bedrock. But what comes after the script? What we lacked was the list of elements needed to assemble this giant apparatus called a “production.” We were ignorant, without experience, completely blind to the process of putting together a movie. We didn’t know where to start. Who do we hire first? Who needs what? What goes with what? But we had instincts and common sense and soon formed a parallel between baseball and movies:

  Baseball is a team sport. Making movies is team art. All we need to do is assemble the right team.

  So rather than trying to understand the micro of every department—and they are infinite, as many departments as you want to create—we determined that the quickest and most sensible approach was to understand the macro, a broad-brush strategy to the enterprise. We’d heard it said many times by successful men and women: Hire the best and let them do their job. This would be one of our guiding principles. (Admittedly, we hired some boneheads along the way, but for the most part we had a terrific team. After it was all over, we had assembled a cast and crew with eleven Academy Awards and twenty-eight nominations. But our story is a long ways from there right now.)

  THE ANGEL

  A WEEK LATER Noah was buried in the Guerrilla, reading an interview of Lorette Bayle, a Kodak film representative.

  “She sounds like a nice woman,” Noah said. “I’m gonna call her and see if she can help us out.”

  Foolishly optimistic? Sure.

  Harebrained? Yes.

  Too simple? Of course.

  But maybe, just maybe, naively brilliant.

  Logan was skeptical, irritable. The kick from the first cup of coffee was wearing off, blood sugar dropping, eyes starting to burn. “Sure, go ahead, call her, see if she wants to help out a couple of strangers with a dream…Hi, I read your interview in this book and was wondering if you could help us out by donating some film to our movie that we don’t have any money for, no crew, no cast, no nothing, other than a screenplay and a personal declaration.”

  Noah kept believing. Then Logan rolled his eyes and changed his outlook. “Why not? Let’s do it.”

  It took us several phone calls to track down Lorette’s number.

  We called her and left a message. The worst that could happen was that she would say no. Big deal. We were accustomed to no. We figured that if we got enough no’s we’d eventually find a yes. All we needed was one yes from which to build on. Only one. But we never thought the yes’s would start coming our way so quickly.

  LORETTE CALLED BACK a few days later. We were driving north on I-5 to do some location scouting back home. Cell phone reception is terrible on I-5. So we pulled off the road and into the parking lot of the restaurant with the giant windmill that serves world-famous split-pea soup.

  “Tell me about your project,” Lorette said.

  Now, Lorette gets pitched about movies every day. Every day for almost seven years. She is a keen listener and can determine within a few sentences whether or not you have your act together.

  When you’re pitching a movie, you’re selling. It’s our opinion—take it for what it’s worth—that selling a product is a war of attrition. Our primary jobs growing up were always manual labor—tearing off roofs, digging ditches, refinishing furniture, painting houses, washing dishes. There’s very little selling involved in these jobs. Start digging here, dig to there. Start painting here, paint to there. Tear off the whole roof. These dishes need washing—see me when you’re done.

  From time to time, we’d sell products rather than our labor. We’d sell mistletoe around the holidays, firewood, Christmas trees, newspaper subscriptions, board games, parking spaces. To us, it just took grinding, hustling. Knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, stand outside the grocery store and talk to enough people and we’d eventually sell our entire inventory.

  It was no different now. We had a strong hunch that the same fundamentals applied to filmmaking. We needed to transmute a textual medium, our script, into a visual one, a movie. That required film. And Lorette Bayle had access to the largest storehouse of film in the world—the Kodak vault, the Federal Reserve of motion pictures.

  Lorette listened to our pitch. We didn’t stop talking for seven minutes. For seven minutes we rambled and digressed, finishing each other’s sentences, a dizzying blizzard of swirling words and cell phone static.

  “Sounds like an interesting project,” Lorette said. “You guys have gr
eat vision. This is a project that Kodak would be willing to get behind…Now I can’t give you an exact commitment from Kodak at this point, but what you should do in the meantime is call Ric Halpern at Panavision. He runs the New Filmmaker Program out there…Are you familiar with the program?”

  “No.”

  “Have you booked a camera rental yet?”

  “No…”

  “Then call him. Here’s his number…Get back to me after you’ve spoken to him.”

  We called Ric Halpern at Panavision on February 20. He was on vacation until March 1.

  FOLLOW EVERY LEAD

  Ricardo Galé was the first “Key” to come on board. A Key is a department head. We met Ricardo through a chain of phone calls. Each phone call went something like this:

  “We’re looking for a cinematographer. Do you know any?”

  “No, call so-and-so. They might know one.”

  The first link was Gordon Radley, the only link on the chain we knew prior to the phone calls. Gordon is the former president of Lucasfilm turned philanthropist. He’s a close friend and mentor. He’s the only suit you’ll ever meet with a tribal tattoo below his right eye from Malawi and a warrior band around his left wrist and calf from Western Samoa, tokens of brotherhood from the people he lived with during his Peace Corps years. He’s read all the books on the shelf and lived in all those places too. He’s Harvard Law and jungle ambassador. He’s one of the few who have studied and lived it. And he just might be the toughest negotiator in the business.

  Several years earlier, we met Gordon after we signed what he called “the worst contract I’ve ever seen” with some crooks and cowards in Northern California who hoodwinked us for the rights to one of our scripts—the notorious first-time writers, no lawyer present, carrot-in-front-of-the-starving-donkey contract.

  Gordon took the initial meeting with us as a favor to a mutually dear friend, Gale Gough. (Gale is Coach Gough’s wife. She was Gordon’s assistant at Lucasfilm.) Gordon thought we’d go away after the initial consultation. But we didn’t. We clung to him like desperate mountain climbers hanging from a ledge. He would become one of the executive producers of Touching Home. But not early on. First we had to prove ourselves. Gordon doesn’t do anything for you that you can do for yourself. That’s the genius of his instruction. He points you in the right direction and then kicks you in the ass.