Citizen Kane : Shot by Shot

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

1930s : newspapers

The Pay-Off (1930), 40:29

Illicit (1931), 32:11

Three on a Match (1932), 1:19

Ladies They Talk About (1933), 6:47

Thirty-Day Princess (1934), 41:23

After Office Hours (1935), 44:51

Love on the Run (1936) , 22:17

Marked Woman (1937), 42:58

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), :59

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), 2:09

Foreign Correspondent (1940), 1:11:10

And Welles and Friends took newspapers to the next level in CK.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

Does that last Hitchcock film still recall :

Magnolia (1999), 5:16

Edited February 21, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

Dear British Sight and Sound,

I hereby invite you to gather all of your editors and every last writer for your magazine—and attempt to take me on together.

Good luck and best wishes.

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

65

Jeff Bernstein · February 21, 2023

65

The outward show of dignity behind which pustules disburse poisons.

Charles Foster Kane as the quintessential American Dream. A nobody from nowhere ends up a central talking point in the hallowed halls of Tyranny. Anyone can make it in America! Even you! Yes, it’s true : but in the first instance most everything is against you, first and foremost yourself. CK demonstrates this : Charlie Kane’s death is a lonely death. He never realizes even the first and foremost point about life. But the Reader now knows it.

Turns out Kane’s a pain in the ass of the Evil Ones who want everyone and everything calm and cool so they can keep siphoning their criminal cash from the treasuries of the world. Kane will soon be labelled a “communist” simply because he chooses to pee on the rule book that would keep him shackled to a lifetime of slavery to imbeciles. Why others follow the rule book is their own affair. Kane followed his own personal code, and it led to his lonely death. Where will your presently comfortable author end up? He's following his own personal code. Let’s just get to the end of this commentary. No other thinking required. Inside the bubble of Art. The bubble? The snowglobe. . . . Enough.

The more times a mind experiences a work of art, the more accelerated the associations and revelations when the artwork is experienced anew.

America, land of the free, home of the brave.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

More of what sounds like personal reflections but are actually general to the Situation.

By now this text has changed at least one person’s life. Eyes have been sharpened. But there is more to experiencing Art than just expansion of vision. There is also the transference of energy. One reader, at least, should be working harder now, and thinking harder now, knowing that your humble and tireless author is slaving away at this project for nothing but the comfort of satisfying a compulsion. Writing this is motivation for others, day by day. This is what an artist should be; and this is what Art is : an encourager that never stops encouraging. If I can keep it up, you can. Right?

Still and all, let’s not slap ourselves on the back for our ongoing virtuous effort of concentration. Because our striving involves probing for the Truth.

Truth hurts.

Absorbing Art can be akin to the medicine that makes your face frown, but cures you of your ills.

On the whole, let's look forward to continuing.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

65–76 Who was the public personage Charles Foster Kane?

This section of the Newsreel focuses on one specific question. The answer to this question is reduced to three choices :

(a) Communist

(b) Anarchist

(c) American

Is Kane an ally to Uncle Sam, or enemy of the state? Is he one of you, or is he a traitor? Does he want to protect your way of life, or is he intent on tearing down the System? Is he sensible, or a wild man? Is he here to hurt you, or protect you?

Reducing a person to a "one or the other" dichotomy is moronic. But this is your Media in action by the minute : it perpetuates the worst of Thinking (being kind here with that last word) and thereby contaminates an entire culture—by the minute.

No social responsibility. Why? Because Media monsters are morons. These arrogant mediocrities, whom we will soon meet, believe themselves superior to those receiving their mediocre products. The arrogant mediocrities have to posit a lower social order of "filth" in order to feel themselves superior to it. So when someone like an Orson Welles arrives and reveals that they, the Media, are the filth, well, Welles has to go. His Truth has to be swept back under the carpet. Thereby the arrogant mediocrities can maintain their folly of superiority without a meddlesome qualm haunting the blank space where their flesh-and-blood hearts should have been beating. And their worthless rubbish called "news" keeps seeping out into the world like sewage or liquid Covid. The monsters of the Media are not only silly and ignorant, but authentic human filth, because the rubbish they distribute is the result of conscious intent. The Media are criminals. The Media are traitors. The general public, however, sustains a sentimental delusion that "some people in the government and the media are essentially good and want what's best for us." Keep thinking that if you want to remain a sucker. If you want Truth, Art exists to show you a way forward.

All that in the previous paragraph requires extensive elaboration, of course. But who here wants that, just now? If ever? I can do it if you like. Don't believe me? But let's move on.

(a) Communist

(b) Anarchist

(c) American

Reducing the question to these three options is ludicrous. The Newsreel is communicating nothing of substance. We’re receiving imagery, dialogue, characters in interaction, and so on and so forth, yet everything transacted by the Newsreel is as a magic trick hiding the empty air behind it all.

One might say that the Newsreel has no idea what its subject is. But the Media gleefully barrels ahead with its “informative” infotainment product anyway, to fill a slot in a cinema programme, and people get paid. As for what is said in the Newsreel : What’s that old joke about the importance of newspapers?—you can wrap fish in it.

The Newsreel allows the question to pause temporarily on “American” : allowing the Newsreel a manipulative moment of lump-in-the-throat patriotism.

The Newsreel raises the spectres of Communism and Anarchism without much drama, but when Kane announces (in 75)

the manipulative music tugs on the heartstrings of all good Americans. Suddenly, a feel-good film!

What is one of the fundamentals that the Newsreel section conveys to the audience? A person can be hateful, but if that person is American : well, hell, things could be worse!

TOP TIP : If you let the world define you, you’ve lost.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

Two Examples of Evil and Idiocy in the Media Beyond All Measure

Hyperlink on the BBC home page : “Why you can trust the BBC.”

If a strange human being strolled up to you and said, “Hey, man, trust me. I’m about to tell you something.”—well, what would your initial reaction be?

Now the Guardian (UK) newspaper :

“Support fearless, independent journalism. Please give what you can, so millions can benefit from quality reporting on the events shaping our world.”

That bunch of words is so moronic that it leaves a thinker speechless with laughter.

Want me to prove it? I didn’t think so. Let’s move on.

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

P.S. Who is the editor-in-chief of the Guardian?

Katharine Sophie Viner.

Is that a woman's name?

gettyimages-1427292799-612x612.jpg.1d7e249e07a460971b4ce1f51f0fe06c.jpg

(Or will she sell more newspapers if she becomes a "them"? She certainly looks like one.)

Who is Chief Content "Officer" for the BBC? (Btw, Is that an honorific borrowed from the Nazis, considering—going on the evidence in the UK—Germany won WW2?)

Charlotte Moore.

Is that a woman's name?

Hey, she's married to a no-doubt weak and cowardly English cinematographer who is shooting a series called Happy Valley. On what channel is this essential watching shown? BBC1.

Welcome to the UK.

Okay, okay. Let's move on, men.

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

"I pretend I'm strong but I'm a frightened child. Thank God I have allies to watch my back." (No one wants to see a UK Media woman from the front. Perhaps that's the reason for the hell here.)

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

45 / 67 Geometry

Note the similar geometry to these two shots, both of which suggest a “peeping in” and a catch-as-catch-can position for the Newsreel camera.

(In 67, Walter Parks Thatcher, center-right, has the focus of the assembly but is captured small in the shot, which lasts for a considerable amount of screen-time : 7:01-7:20.)

67

45

This is another in the number of ongoing clever storytelling techniques devised by Welles and Friends for the Newsreel. One technique identified earlier was the shift in geometry from the Xanadu-framed shots to the Apartment Building (52). Welles and Friends are applying the same exacting care to the Newsreel as to the rest of CK. There is no less innovation and ongoing wonder in the Newsreel, even though, at face value, we the Spectator are urged to mock it as imbecilic. Complexities abound in the phenomenon. We will soon identify in Newsreel 67 sophisticated storytelling principles. Sophisticated storytelling principles, in a moronic Newsreel? This infotainment product is an intentionally-horrid film made by geniuses. Once the Spectator is on the two-fold track of "This Newsreel is both Moronic and Genius", the Spectator's mind, while absorbing the Newsreel, absorbs the Situation prismatically.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

66–70

66

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : "Fifty-seven years later, before a congressional investigation, Walter P. Thatcher, grand old man of Wall Street—for years chief target of Kane papers’ attacks on trusts—recalls a journey he made as a youth."

67

68

WALTER P. THATCHER : "My firm had been appointed trustee by Mrs. Kane, for a large fortune that she recently acquired. It was her wish that I take carge of this boy, this Charles Foster Kane."

69

MAN (continuously interrupted during this) : "Is it not that on this occasion, that boy Charles Foster Kane personally attacked you after striking you in the stomach with a sled?"

Laughter.

70

THATCHER : "Chairman—Chairman, I shall read to the committee a prepared statement which I have brought with me, and then refuse to answer questions. ‘Mr. Charles Foster Kane, in every essence of his social beliefs, and by the dangerous manner he has persistently attacked the American traditions of private property, initiative and opportunity for advancement, is, in fact, nothing more or less than a communist."

*

Fifty-seven years later : the brisk transition is a breath of nihilism on the neck. An entire life, gone just like that. In the twinkling of an eye. If one wants it sweetly put.

a congressional investigation : no further information of what this investigation might be is forthcoming, but note how the American government in CK is introduced in association with the cloud of an investigation.

grand old man of Wall Street : Thatcher is a well-liked insider. Compare that to his cold, even forbidding and antagonistic private face with the young and innocent Charlie Kane on Christmas Day at 23:15. But the man looks so distinguished here, so well-turned out in comportment and turn of phrase! Yet in private he seemed a man for whom love was as alien an emotion to him as aliens on the moon. An inhuman man, yet well-liked : a grand old man of the Tyrannical society that sensible young people now realize they want no part of, and desire change, to save their lives.

grand old man of Wall Street : we’re not done. Wall Street. Consider the cold fusion here of money and lovelessness. What if you had all the money in the world but no heart to enjoy it? (“Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him” Fargo, 1:14:50) The Inhuman realize their Situation too late, then take it out on everyone else for everyone’s lifetime. Why? Misery loves company. Money / misery : pure coincidence, the analogous sound effect there?

for years chief target of Kane papers’ attacks on trusts : This is too much information to process just here. Kane repeatedly punishes the man who raised him for years. Yet Kane is doing more than this in the same gesture. Kane is (ostensibly) fighting for Freedom. Kane is out to outdo the suckers who sucker us for a lifetime. Kane had only one way to exact revenge : words.

Words are not the best way to exact revenge. Harmonica knew that. The Japanese, too, or Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) would have required a rewrite. (“We should have fixed this five years ago”—now is that Truth or what?) But Citizen Kane is a story of the American Dream. Yet . . . Isn’t Taxi Driver (1976) a story of the American Dream? Let’s move on.

recalls a journey he made as a youth : the pathos of the long-ago. The “Dickensian note”. This sentimentality joins with the tear-in-the-throat American patriotism of 75 and the prominently aspiring church in 61.

Thatcher is a well-spoken man without a wasted word—except one. “this Charles Foster Kane.”

That one extra this conveys a haughty, acidulous dismissal of Charles Foster Kane. More revenge on a dead man! And about a child he (ostensibly) brought up as his own! Apparently Charles Foster Kane brought out the worst in people. The shock of the Truth can do that. (What is the Truth in this Situation? That question is to be explored later in CK.)

Concepts emanating from the Capitol building are Investigation and target and attacks, and Antagonism : all negative-sounding words, depending on the context.

every essence : “Well, that just about covers the motherfxcking waterfront, doesn’t it?” Stephen King, Christine, ch. 40.

attacked : whom, precisely?

private property, initiative and opportunity for advancement : is Thatcher speaking of trickle-down economics here?

private property : might he mean privatization? Collusion?

initiative : might he mean cushy bank loans and tax rebates for the wealthy?

opportunity for advancement : no comment.

in fact : emblem of logic and reason. Thatcher's so sure of himself. Reason tells itself it’s reasonable. Confidence is confident about its own confidence. But what happens in EWS?

(1:10:37) This happens in a 1930s movie, but your peaceful author cannot remember which.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

Notice a certain peripheral figure?

68

119

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

Ritual Humiliation

69

Thatcher does not hide his distaste for Charles Foster Kane. The narrator mentions “for years [Thatcher was] chief target of Kane papers’ attacks on trusts”. So, here, Kane, removing his guise as actor to reveal the director, just as Clark Kent reveals his familiar powerful colors—just here both Kane and Director get sweet revenge on Thatcher. They reduce him to the size of a pipsqueak for a running time of 6:44–6:50 in 67; then in 69 Thatcher’s reduction is sustained for about twenty unbroken seconds, with a cherry on top being the laughter of his cronies at his expense, possibly souring his mood and animus toward Kane yet further.

The concept of a storyteller reducing a fundamental character (especially at the end) is a form of cinematic storytelling humiliation.

Two examples :

Phantom Thread, 2:02:30

PTA refuses his fundamental character a significant final scene to close out her character. Instead, she is reduced to silence and the status of the hired help.

Morbid humor : Here, in Wonder Wheel (2017), 1:37:39, the storyteller refuses to give his character a memorable last line. The storyteller gives us the character and lets her produce what she produces. The screenplay of Wonder Wheel is infused from start to finish with Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Women have the last powerful word in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Death of a Salesman (1949), the three most consequential plays in American literary history—so far.

Let us compare :

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Mother : “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanche : “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Death of a Salesman

Linda : “We’re free. . . .”

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

(1:34:22) “Why don’t you kill me, and avenge her? Isn’t that the way it happened in a theatre in Athens?”

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

Uncanny Strangers

69

The audience is seven minutes into the film. Only now are, shall we say, extensive human reactions taking place : jovial laughter and speechifying and convening, all this thereby sustaining the Power of the Tyranny of the Status Quo.

Seven minutes of abstraction at the start of a movie about human beings, before human beings finally come together audibly as recognizable and theoretically approachable human beings (“And in English, too”. Lebowski, 2:02).

The doors have opened and the curtains have parted but a labyrinth has been entered, not a recognizable movie such as a Gable or a Crawford. But now, finally, seven minutes into Kane : human beings laughing!

But who are they?

Their laughing interaction is abstracting. We in the audience are not part of their joke. We're peering in from the outside, like this :

Blondie of the Follies (1932), 1:18:02

These Capitol men give off an impersonality, an inhumanness. Just when the audience is desperate, so to speak, to latch on to human characters, these, while showing characteristics of humanness, are as cold in their way as the victims in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, and the husband in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). The majority of the men in 67 / 69 are turned away from the audience. The audience is left stranded, as here :

Casino (1995), 1:56:20

Who are these people in the Newsreel laughing and having such a good time in Time? The mystery of who they are reminds us of the mystery of us. They’re others—now gone in time. The uncanny strangers remind us of our lostness in Time.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

69

MAN (continuously interrupted during this) : "Is it not that on this occasion, that boy Charles Foster Kane personally attacked you after striking you in the stomach with a sled?"

Prolepsis. We know the ropes by now. Note the nonchalance with which the magnitude of “Rosebud” is slotted into the audience’s Unconscious. Little Charlie Kane’s sled had the name of Rosebud. The sled was the emblem of his childhood : of potential. (Of lost potential.) The word “Rosebud” on the Dying Man’s lips was beatitudinous. But here the sled is simply babbled about. That is to say, a main character’s deepest Care—it’s on its mind at Death—is simply laughed at here. Such is life.

The storytelling technique of introducing a vital point casually has an early American example in “The Purloined Letter” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe. That story includes the rare word “hyperobtrusive” —btw, this word is missing a quoted source in the OED.

I noticed a typo in the OED’s entry for “innumerous”. Will they change it? Of course not; I don’t exist. But you’re reading me.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

Jeff Bernstein · February 22, 2023

GRIMWOOD : A Novel of Hollywood

I. Koona t’chuta, Solo?

One Saturday night soon after the original Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977—which is, of course, one of the most momentous dates of the twentieth century, as significant a milestone as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the Kennedy assassination, and the first astronauts landing on the moon—my parents took me to the cineplex in Seekonk, Massachusetts, where we joined a very long line and stood outside in the driving rain for an hour before we were finally herded into the theater. I was six years old, hadn’t been to the movies much, and had no idea what to expect. Ten minutes in, I was spellbound. The vast starscape, the immense spaceships, the futuristic droids, the breathtaking realism of it all—this was more than a movie, this was an event, an experience; I had never seen anything remotely like it. Star Wars was a vision of the future that my young mind would never have otherwise imagined. But, just ten minutes in, disaster struck. Having sucked up the watered-down concession stand cola drink much too quickly, I already required the relief of a restroom. A “number one,” as we innocent kids used to say. The idea of leaving the theater and missing even a minute of this astonishing spectacle was appalling to me. By the time R2-D2 was captured by the Jawas, I had decided on a course of action. I wet my pants on purpose. I wet my pants so I wouldn’t miss even one second of Star Wars.

How many Star Wars fans can say that?

Looking back with the benefit of wisdom, I consider that evening the highpoint of my life. Certainly it was the most momentous moment, and for a variety of reasons. Permit me to elaborate. Star Wars opened up for my young mind a gamut of novel conceptual worlds to explore. One, I became fascinated with so-called outer space, and began devouring books on our solar system and the universe, so that I impressed my science teachers with my broad knowledge of stars, galaxies, itinerant comets, and the topography of Tatooine. In years to come my studies in this direction would lead me to deep explorations of Cosmology, Planetary Science, and Quantum Physics. (In other words, I’m one of the few to have read Hawking’s History of Time past page ten.) Two, I fell hopelessly in love with the exhilarating enterprise of storytelling. Night after night I choreographed elaborate melodramas with my Star Wars action figures in my bedroom. My desk, my bookcase, my bed all doubled as starship interiors and planetary landscapes where my little plastic characters played out operatic adventures of Good versus Evil. (In short, I played with dolls.) I began to put my own stories down on paper which led to me shooting home movies with a Super-8 cine-camera from the age of nine, and by age eighteen I had already completed ten feature-length screenplays (all of which were prequels and sequels to the original Star Wars series, which the secretaries at Lucasfilm in Marin County kept sending back to me inked with the practical advice, PLEASE SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION). Three, I was introduced to the delights of symphonic music through John Williams’s stirring musical score, crowned by the emotional “Star Wars March” which I’m sure all my devoted readers worldwide can hum. Given the soundtrack album for my birthday, I listened to it on my record player at top volume until I had memorized every note and my grouchy dog had gnawed a paw off. What sealed for me my fondness for orchestral music was the night a Boston Pops concert was broadcast on a regional television station. John Williams led the symphony orchestra, conducting selections from his own film score, during which a glistening C-3P0 and pert R2-D2 actually sauntered out on stage, a sight which made my young heart throb with first love. My affection for orchestral music, which, as I say, began with John Williams and Star Wars, eventually led me to such master visionaries as Beethoven and Shostakovich, who have meant so much to me over the years. (I love listening to their symphonies while vacuuming my carpets and exfoliating with my loofah.) Four, Star Wars supplied for me a mythology of characters, a pantheon of gods I would ponder and reflect on day by day, as if praying. Star Wars became my religion to which I devoted myself wholeheartedly and with the utmost seriousness. I modeled myself on the heroic figures of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Snaggletooth and became a better person accordingly. In any given situation I would ask myself, “What would Chewie do?” I desired earnestly to be a “good guy” whom dynamic women like Princess Leia looked up to with admiring eyes and the heaving bosom that poets speak of; Star Wars inculcated me with a positive morality which has served me in good stead ever since. As years went by I skimmed the back covers of anthropological works of Sir James Frazier and Joseph Campbell on myths and archetypes, thereby broadening my understanding of the legendary characters and thematic structure of Star Wars, and I came to realize all the more how spiritually significant the Star Wars series is for the redemption of humankind. Five, soon after seeing Star Wars I hastened to the public library and found the film’s novelization awaiting me in the book stacks. The brown-covered Star Wars paperback would be the longest, wordiest book I had ever read up to that point, but I went on to read it dozens of times until the pages began to fall out, so that the library withdrew the damaged book from circulation, revoked my borrowing privileges, and blacklisted me as ‘delinquent’ and ‘vandal’. That one volume led me to read other wordy books, including the Star Wars spin-off Splinter in a Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster and How to Survive an Alien Invasion by F. U. Grossweiner (both of which are still relevant today). Therefore I can confidently state that my love of reading began with Star Wars. Who would have anticipated that? Six, after Star Wars I became, to put it mildly, a movie freak, and especially coveted even the slightest detail I could find on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (e.g., the former suffered from foot infections during the production shoot of Star Wars, while the latter has a preference for snow peas when ordering Chinese takeout). Obsessed with all things cinematic, I read and reread the movie reviews in my dad’s weekly Time and Newsweek magazines, watched the Siskel & Ebert movie review program on PBS (they were the Dr. Johnson and F. R. Leavis of their age), paid close attention to the movie advertisements in the local newspapers, and so on. Soon I knew more about the making of Star Wars than about any other particular subject in American history.

I cannot speak a foreign language but I can pronounce for you Greedo’s dialogue to Han Solo in its bizarre dialect phoneme-perfect.

There are countless stories about how Star Wars has touched my life over the years. That one movie, that simple two-hour event, inspired my eager advancement into the arts and sciences. Star Wars kickstarted my adolescent mind and has enriched my maturity. That one feature film inspired me more than any academic subject I was fated to endure in all of my years of public schooling. Star Wars made me a man.

Nowadays, thirty years on, whenever I watch Star Wars I shiver with tender emotion when C-3P0 and R2-D2 hustle into the Escape Pod and are jettisoned away from the Blockade Runner, heading for Tatooine. It is difficult to explain in bald words, but this short scene means so much to me; it is a mystical experience, as if the deepest secrets of my life are woven in with the shot composition and audio track. At the two-shot of the droids peering out of the pod’s window, I weep holy tears. Another emotionally draining moment is when Luke shuts off his targeting computer during his final run down the Death Star trench. This was the most significant moment of the film for me when I was a child, but only in recent years have I come to recognize the lesson it taught me and which I absorbed unconsciously. Luke opted out of the greater world at that moment, cutting himself off from mission control and its technological aid, choosing instead to follow his own instincts, winging it, being wholly himself. Luke knew the loneliness of the hero in that thrilling climactic moment. And it came out all right for him in the end.

I wish I could say the same for me.

My parents divorced when I was eleven and my mom took me across the country to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, where we moved into a drab apartment in the 6, 000 block of Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Woodland Hills. (She had hoped to bump into a movie star who would fall madly in love with her; she settled for a plumber with a speech impediment whom she met at Overeaters Anonymous.) For years I had daydreamed about the diffusely lit Spielberg universe, and suddenly there I was in the enchanted suburbia I had marvelled at in E.T. and Poltergeist, and I honestly believed that all of my dreams were about to be realized. After all, Lucasfilm was a mere seven hours away up the Pacific Coast Highway. I told everyone who would listen to me (bus drivers, Taco Bell cashiers) that one day I would be a famous moviemaker. Whenever I laid eyes on a photograph of Lucas or Spielberg I would set my face to match his expression and pretend I was fortunate enough to be his glorious self. Before my bathroom mirror I practiced delivering Academy Award speeches until I had perfected that unsung art form:

When I was a little boy, sitting on a swing in my backyard, and looking up at the stars in the night sky, I dreamt of this moment, which means more to me than I could ever say. I thank each and every one of you, all of you who love me dearly, sitting here in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the billions watching on television worldwide, I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for helping to make my childhood dreams come true. And I say this to all the kids out there now, watching this with their own dreams blossoming in their hearts: dare to dream, children, for you too might some day stand up here and hold this wonderful award, which means so much to me and which I deserve wholeheartedly. Thank you.

You may have seen me when I was sixteen years old and a contestant on NBC’s Scrabble game show hosted by television legend Chuck Woollery. I told the nationwide audience my dream was to “write, direct, edit, and cater my own movies.” I got knocked out in the first round, but it was a fulfilling experience all the same. During rehearsals on the ground floor set before the start of the show, I caught a glimpse through an open doorway of Chuck Woollery’s red Ferrari nestled in its personalized parking space; this behind-the-scenes glimpse of Chuck’s private world was a more powerful stimulus than any other aspect of the game show experience, and perhaps contributed to my distracted performance at crunch time. Sitting under the hot lights in the contestant’s chair, with large cameras rearing up on me like ferocious beasts, I kept visualizing that Ferrari winding its way along palm-lined boulevards towards mansions of glass in the Hollywood Hills, that enchanted realm where beautiful people swim nude in heated swimming pools. I longed desperately to be a part of that sensual world of lucrative creativity, not sitting in the contestant’s chair as a disposable dope equivalent in status to the television studio’s custodial staff.

My high school career is best described with abbreviated comment. During my carefree teenage years I dedicated myself to writing screenplays, shooting home movies, and collecting movie tie-in trading cards with such passion that I ignored my schoolwork and teetered constantly on expulsion. I was, however, a popular fixture in school, as evidenced by the genial nickname my classmates addressed me as: “loser.” Whenever the looming pressure of college admissions vexed me, what kept me cool and confident was the historical fact that the magnificent Spielberg had been no scholastic wonder and had ended up at California State University, Long Beach.

During this time I won free tickets in a competition sponsored by the Security Pacific bank to attend a test screening for the not-yet-released film The Money Pit, executive produced by Steven Spielberg. It was scheduled to take place at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater on the Universal Studios lot in the east San Fernando Valley. (At test screenings held for the general public, a common happening in Los Angeles, audience members fill in questionnaires after the movie—Q: What did you think of Tom Hanks’s haircut?) Riding the RTD bus down Ventura Boulevard, I arrived at Universal City an hour before the screening, which was, I admit now, part of my master plan. I knew the story, tantamount to a fairy tale, of how the teenage Spielberg had disguised himself in a business suit, somehow sidled past Universal’s security guards and audaciously installed himself in an empty office (Room 23C), pretending to work there. Lo and behold, Spielberg soon won for himself a seven-year television contract, and we all know where that eventually led—the director’s chair on an episode of Night Gallery.

Presenting my enchanted movie ticket, I got past the security gate without incident and was pointed in the direction of the Alfred Hitchcock Theater. Wandering around the back lot in the temperate dusklight, I chanced upon an entranceway identified by the sign EDITORIAL SUITES. Ah, this was the behind-the-scenes flavor that quickened my pulse and set my imagination racing! With the myth of Spielberg impelling my every step, I moved anxiously into the building, feeling akin to Christopher Columbus stepping onto the set of Gremlins. I hoped to meet an employee to whom I would spill out my guts with genuine passion: “I have come here from far, far away with a dream burning in my heart. Since I was a little boy I have wanted to make movies to uplift every being on earth. All I ask is a chance to make this dream come true. Please help me make my dream come true.”

Before I knew what was what, a heavy-set security guard had his burly arm tensed round my throat and wrestled me to the floor. Squirming in his grip, I tried to inform him about my dreams but he failed to understand the Greedo dialect. I was summarily removed from the Universal lot and the North Hollywood PD flattered me with a body cavity search for kicks.

That was the closest I ever came to Steven Spielberg.

I flattened four years obtaining an English Literature degree at Cal State Northridge, the university where Teri Garr and Richard Dreyfuss sharpened their acting skills, for which reason I consider them both personal friends of mine. In truth, my actual major, just between you and me, was hits of Northern California indica while watching Southern California movies. Movies, after all, had always been my true schooling. Out on my own in the hostile world as a hopeful college graduate, I obtained gainful employment holding the boom microphone for pornographic productions. It was ecstasy to have won a foothold in the motion picture industry—Coppola and Oliver Stone had commenced their Hollywood careers in adult entertainment—but the boom work was hell on the arms and shoulders and I soon quit. Rebuked by reality, I rebounded as a production assistant for a media company producing corporate videos, and contributed my creative skills to the shooting of instructional videos for library book shelvers and entertainment venue hand-stampers.

Then my burgeoning film career stalled. I couldn’t rise to the next level—Hollywood feature films, my marquee name “nagged by neon,” A-list parties in glassed-in VVIP rooms at private nightclubs, impudent celebrity stalkers intent on palpating my body parts. I penned a number of screenplays (sci-fi fantasies), but no agent or studio executive or waiter at Hamburger Hamlet would give even a glance at them. Disheartened, I seemed far from my childhood dream of “being in the pictures.”

Reality persisted in imposing its burdens. In desperation—my poky apartment in Van Nuys generated steep monthly expenses—I took employment teaching English Literature in a high school whose name I would prefer not to identify for delicate legal reasons. My pupils, Advanced Placement, the elite of the school, initially thought A Farewell to Arms was the memoir of an amputee. Apparently inspired by the recent catastrophe in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, my two most promising students pistol-whipped me with squirt guns in the faculty parking lot after I refused, quite rightly, to accept their essays on Milton’s Paradise Lost written in txt-speak:

10k banrz ryz n2 d air

W orient kulrs wavn: w em @}---

A 4st huJ of Britneys; & throngn helmz

Apeard, & seryd sheeldz n thik aray

Of depth imezrbl =)

This miserable circumstance emphasizes the crucial requirement for children to choose proper role models in life (e.g., Yak Face). My reaction to the thuggish assault? I quit the scholastic treadmill and lit out for Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in the epicenter of the motion picture capital of the world.

I planned on standing in line there for the next four weeks.

*

The spring of 1999 was an epochal occasion for the billions of devoted Star Wars fans around the world. In the early weeks of that long-ago year I bought tickets for movies I had no interest in seeing specifically to behold the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. This joyous procedure reiterated itself twenty-one times. Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi, sensei George Lucas had himself returned with a new visionary Star Wars installment, and his fans were experiencing an orgiastic ecstasy of outrageous expectation. The trailer itself was advertised in the newspapers. Can you believe that? I remember moviegoers breaking down in violent tears beholding that trailer. In my case, watching for the first time the teaser for Phantom Menace, a two-minute masterwork of sixty-five evocative shots, was a spiritual passage akin to, say, entering the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; I experienced a full-blown revelation. Seeing Yoda and the speeding spaceships uplifted me amorously; when R2 chirps gaily in the climactic moment (shot 58), hot tears streamed from my eyes. Afterwards, I sat there stunned, blissed in my seat, light-headed from the multitude of impressions boiling in my soul. Staggering dazed out of the cinema before the main feature began (mass exoduses often took place upon completion of the Phantom teaser), I burned with a restatement of purpose. Art stirs fundamental forces within us, and is a perpetual basis for inner renewal.

April 25, 1999, a glorious Sunday, was a most memorable date in the calendar of my life. On that day I took my place among the Star Wars fans congregated in front of the Chinese Theater, the famous Hollywood landmark where the handprints and footprints of classic Hollywood stars are immortalized in cement, including those of my idols 3PO and R2. The whimsical theater resembles an elaborate pagoda, with coral-red columns supporting a jade-green bronze roof of dynamic angles, but is incongruously set along a bland, busy street of graceless blocky contemporary buildings; most of Hollywood, in truth, is urban drab. Standing on the sidewalk I was overwhelmed with excitement. I was the eleventh person in line at the time. I and the others had chosen to wait there out in the open for the premiere showing of Phantom Menace, which was scheduled for release across the country on Wednesday, May 19. We waited, even though the manager of the Chinese Theater hadn’t yet assured us that the theater would even screen the film at all. Still, we waited. (After all, we reasoned, Star Wars itself had premiered there.) Yes, we were excited. We anticipated the glory of attending at the birth of a marvel into the public arena. But mark this well, reader: what motivated us exceeded mere fan-based hysteria. We were paying respect to the Force which had touched every aspect of our lives; the Force, which had conditioned our conduct during our advancement into adulthood. We were ready to engage in a life-experience in the manner of a Native American’s vision quest or a shaman’s days of fasting prior to the healing hallucinations. To prepare ourselves appropriately for the revelation of Episode I, we would yield ourselves wholly to the phenomenon. The Star Wars line at the Chinese Theater was a religious vigil. We were a tribe of pilgrims, our kinship forged of our shared love for Porkins.

Strictly speaking, we weren’t standing in line continuously, without pause in our devotions. Alliances of convenience were forged. In my second week I joined forces with two fellow Lucas junkies—their names, they told me, were Alexis Darby and Len Muggs—and we took turns occupying “our” spot in line, organizing each day into three eight-hour shifts. When the holy day of May 12 arrived and the cinema tickets officially went on sale to the palpitating public, the three of us together, in celebratory solidarity, eagerly surrendered $25.50 at the box office and received the three magic tickets that would admit us to the historic first screening, which was scheduled for the exotic hour of midnight. At this innocent time in my life my two new acquaintances seemed the quintessence of sanity.

Alexis Darby was a busty redhead in her early thirties. She described herself as pressing pause on her busy career as a freelance journalist to participate in the Star Wars experience. The day I met her she stood resplendent in the classic Princess Leia garb: simple white dress, seductive earmuff hair, breasts stifled with gaffer tape (“No boobs in outer space,” Carrie once quipped, perhaps while tripping on acid). Hot red lipstick intensified her freckled face. I remember noting with pleasure how otherwise plain women often look fetching when costumed in theatrical finery. Our relationship began innocently enough; we struck up an amiable, all-purpose California conversation.

“I saw Bruce Willis once,” I bragged. “Years ago when he was on Moonlighting. I was driving past a bowling alley on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana and he was standing on the sidewalk. He was having a smoke with some crew members while the production was setting up inside.”

“Golly,” Alexis crooned, her green eyes shining in admiration. To emphasize the following she touched my arm, generating instant seminal congestion: “I saw William Shatner once.”

“You’re kidding me.” I had never warmed to the Star Trek universe—Spock’s pointy hand gesture stirred proctologic nightmares—but feigned interest anyway. “Where?”

“Well,” she stammered, “it wasn’t a chance encounter. He was the guest speaker at a Star Trek convention at the airport Hilton in Baltimore, promoting Star Trek III.”

“I saw Heather Locklear walk into Crown Books in Woodland Hills wearing a pink terrycloth leotard.” I was showing off now. “Oh,” upping the ante, “I saw David Hasselhoff.”

“You did?”

“Actually it was that car. The black Trans Am? I saw, like, six of them parked on one of those car transport trucks? They were filming in front of the Sherman Oaks Galleria.”

“I just arrived from Kansas,” wide-eyed Alexis explained, “and I’m loony to see some stars! I hear Greg Kinnear shops for his own food in Calabasas?”

“God,” I said, meditating on the recent Warners release, “You’ve Got Mail. Putting him in eyeglasses was a masterstroke.”

“Yeah,” said Alexis. “Anyhows, but isn’t that movie as creepy as Creepshow?”

“I guess so.” By chance or by intelligent design Alexis had just named one of my favorite pictures.

“Didn’t you see it as a spooky exposé on obsessive online behavior?”

I nodded. “And the product placement was brilliantly done. Oh,” my heartbeat racing now, “I saw Edward James Olmos talking on a payphone in an El Torito in Encino....”

Len Muggs, meanwhile, enlivened our conversations with demanding cerebral explorations. He was tall and pale, cadaverous really, a stringy hundred pounds of body lost inside his loose-fitting clothing. Q: Identify his favorite outfit—pink shirt with black collar and T-shirt beneath, and blue jeans and white shoes. Len, looking upwards of forty years old, produced evidence of his status as postgraduate student at USC (alma mater of Lucas and Ben Burtt) in the shape of an unfinished three-hundred-page thesis entitled An architectural study of the interior design of the buildings in the “Star Wars” universe. Dazzlingly intense, Len’s icy blue eyes stared out through horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a retro Toadish affectation, as his eyesight, I later found out, was fine. His face was angular and narrow, his nose pointy, his inky-black hair was swept back from his forehead and already thinning. The sight of his ascetic face and emaciated frame suggested this sad-sack was shriveling up—his entire store of energy was fueling his intense devotion to the Lucasian universe. Len Muggs was a tortured priest of the Star Wars religion.

He was haunted by the (his words) “lack of sonic purity to Star Wars physics.”

“What do you mean by that?” Alexis Darby queried in her inquiring journalist mode.

“We hear spaceship sounds in the near-vacuum of space, where no audible sound waves can exist!” This Kantian observation gave his gawky frame the jitters. Confronted with this insuperable contradiction, Len wrung his hands in exasperation: “Kubrick’s 2001. When Bowman explodes his way into Discovery One—No sound!”

“Sure,” I said, vying for Alexis’s attention, “but 2001 is full of inconsistencies. Gravity on the shuttle that brings Floyd to the monolith? Kubrick is not half as meticulous as George is.”

Len snapped: “2001 was cited to illustrate a point about Star Wars!”

“The point being,” Alexis clarifying for the record, “Star Wars gives us sound in space where there is no sound?”

“Precisely.”

“That bothers you?” I attempted, starting over.

But the tension had dissipated; Len looked whipped, his shoulders slumped. Subsequently the three of us explored the issue in long contentious talks. Alexis decided that the question itself was immaterial because the Star Wars universe was “space fantasy” rather than “science fiction.” Len remained skeptical. Often he brooded in inner turmoil, riveted by the abstrusities produced by his overworked brain, his silent companionship exuding a constant pressure on the line, a tense rectitude. All these years later, I still don’t know where I stand on the subject.

It was pleasant to participate in the line among the like-minded souls sharing my piety. We all of us spent profitable hours celebrating the stimulating Star Wars universe. We tested each other’s mettle with expert-level trivia questions (Q: How many frames long are Lucas’s transition wipes?). We explored the philosophy of Yoda in solemn late-night talkathons. We built X-wings and TIE fighters out of Lego and choreographed solemn space battles. We indulged in high-spirited sing-alongs: “All Summer Long” by The Beach Boys, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” sung in Chinese, the funky “Lapti Nek” by the Max Rebo Band which motivated raucous dancing in the street, and, the reader will have expected this, the eloquent “Yub Nub,” whose inspirational Ewokese lyrics kindled (it never failed) deep-felt emotional nostalgia. I’m paraphrasing to dodge copyright restrictions:

Glub bub, bwee kok glub bub;

Bwa bro teet bro weegie ka,

G’loop nock bling ee rah.

Film-literate homeless persons engaged us in scholastic chats. Police cruisers rolled past dependably at least once a night, but the LAPD was unusually complacent about our presence on the sidewalk and inflicted on us no irritation at all, for which, we came to learn, there was a simple explanation. The line inspired a tremendous amount of media coverage (if you lived in L.A. at the time you might have seen me interviewed by channels 9 and 11; I was the guy in Admiral Ackbar Underoos) and the city authorities recognized that the quirky Star Wars line could serve as a favorable media bite to advertise the unique phenomenon of Tinsel Town. Hence the full cooperation of the police, the shop owners along the sidewalk, and the manager of the Chinese Theater in our elaborate twenty-four-hour-a-day street party in honor of artistic genius George Lucas.

The line was life—yet life complicates matters with commonplace demands. I would scoot back to my apartment in Van Nuys, a quick drive up the Hollywood Freeway, to swallow a fast meal; to shower and deep cleanse and moisturize my face; and nap; and rearrange my diorama of action figures. I experienced ever-growing unease, though, whenever I was away from the line, “floating free,” “off-world.” So at my earliest convenience I would rush back to the Chinese Theater, because it was there where I was most pleasantly calm, cool, and collected, relaxed in my folding lawn chair, Star Wars comic in hand, placed amid the amiable chatter of the pilgrims gathered round me. In the Phantom line I found a temporary home. So it eventuated that I spent upwards of sixteen hours a day engrossed at my spot, conferring with Alexis and Len and the other good people on salient matters (e.g., the political complexion of Endor). Finally I never left; the concluding seven days became a nonstop, round-the-clock event for us all, as the momentum of expectation grew to intolerable intensities. Eventually everyone in line heard that I would one fine day write, direct, edit, and cater a filmography of feature films designed to uplift and inspire. Surprisingly, most everyone around me conveyed the same aspiration.

Would all of us achieve our dreams? The Phantom Menace line, we suspected, would be a pivotal turning point of powerful positivity in our lives. A phrase was coined to memorialize our special fortune: Lucas is not luck (LULU).

The line grew longer by the day; Star Wars fanatics honed in from all over the country, the young and the old, from all walks of life; it was a remarkable phenomenon, journeyers arriving simply to share the love of the line. The male-to-female ratio was even along the stretch of bodies, so that our good-natured lightsaber duels, for instance, exhibited gender equality. The weather, if you care to know, was unseasonably rainy, pouring down on us for—what I recall as, embellishing perhaps—two weeks straight, but we refused to be cowed by the natural elements. We pitched tents and erected umbrellas and we remained cozy and the line transformed into an urban campsite, a tent city spread out alongside bustling Hollywood Boulevard. In this wonderland of endless fantasy even the sidewalk we occupied was famous—we were camped out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Under our feet lay squares of charcoal-gray inlaid with pink stars, sequentially stretching continuously into the civic distance, commemorating such immortals as Olivia Newton-John and Mickey Mouse. I literally wished upon a star that one day my name would be honored thus. (Impressions of the hands and feet of Lucas and Spielberg also enhance the Chinese Theater’s forecourt. My size elevens are larger than the prints of my heroes and this disproportion confuses me. I may excise this observation out of a later edition of this work.) Incidentally, arrangements with nearby businesses, including the venerable Roosevelt Hotel located right across the street, guaranteed the availability of washroom facilities to the members of the line. In one such “Jedi Throne Room” a votary had taped a photo of Walrus Man to the mirror, a ritual of wish fulfilment which captured my attention pleasurably.

Finally, the momentous hour of midnight on May 19, 1999. Twenty-two hundred of us filed into the palatial theater. We sat down in the auditorium and were blasted with John Williams’s opening fanfare and the receding Star Wars title in yellow. We knew it had all been worth it, and while our hearts were beating fast and a few of us were hyperventilating into brown paper bags, everything was right with the world. I had escaped from drudgery into the pristine, rarefied atmosphere of consummate art. The infinite starfield, the rousing music, the striking text crawl—I was six years old all over again, staring up at the colossal screen with rapt, excited eyes. Dear cinema, you returned me to halcyon childhood! Reader, I wept. Mindful of my swell of emotion, Alexis Darby, my new friend sitting beside me, reached across our armrest and took my hand into her own; intimately our fingers interlocked, and in that warm embrace together we watched the film gently in the dark, sharing the magic as one. I have to admit that I was fairly exhausted from the long experience of the line. I nodded off at more than one point during the early-hours screening, and fell asleep during the pod-race. As it happened, I didn’t begin to fully appreciate the cerebral storyline and emotional depth, the deep resonance, of Phantom Menace until my fifth viewing, two days later.

I have completed the first draft of a book, A Psychoanalytic Study of the “Star Wars” Line at the Chinese Theater, with Cogent Observations on Darth Vader’s Footwear, 450,000 words, complete with photographs, charts, diagrams, and pop-up engineering, which I hope to self-publish someday.

written 2005