Around
the States in Eighty Days
Being an irregular and erratic account by the
Greedy Bastard himself as he sets out to traverse America on
a comedy tour.
Day
Sixty Two. The Remains Again.
Tuesday,
December 2, 2003 - The Orpheum Theater Vancouver
I
don't sleep very well and wake up at 5 a.m. I am clearly anxious
about something and it is evidently The Remains of The
Piano. I began to write this film back in the nineties,
when a protégé I was helping, stole the idea
and ran off and made a cheap version of it, which was not
funny. I have been re-writing my screenplay ever since. It
has evolved and changed and is now quite amusing and we almost
got to make it last year. In fact some people think we did
make it, it was announced so much. But no, a Film Company
called Stratus did the dirty on us and well, you don't need
to know the details.
Tania perceived that dealing with this project made me very
anxious. In fact it was eight months of torture and she observed
how much better I felt when I dumped it. It was like a great
weight was off my shoulders. Now my Producer friend George
Horie wants to revive it. I like him very much. He is a terribly
efficient, silver haired, florid man with a soft way of talking,
who reminds me of a West Countryman. We get along very well
and we worked together for weeks, searching for locations,
creating shooting schedules, bringing in Doug Higgins a wonderful
Production designer who made the loveliest boards and sketches.
Together George and I worked on solving all the complicated
issues that filming entails, not an easy thing with five Producers,
all of whom were insisting on coming for the entire shoot,
and some of whom seemed intent on swallowing large chunks
of the budget paying off old debts. No names no pack drill,
as they say in the army, and I am confident that with George
in charge the damn movie would have run like a train if it
hadn't been for the fact that Stratus were totally lying…..
Well no good chasing after old ghosts. To accuse Film Producers
of lying is redundant. I am over that. I could sue the bastards
but have decided that abuse is more fun, feels better and
involves less lawyers. So fuck off Stratus.
George, though, really loves the project and is convinced
that The Remains of the Piano is not only hilarious
but very special. He takes me out to a fabulous dinner at
Cioppino. The food is superb. One of the reasons we get on
so well is we always eat excellently, and at our age this
is perhaps the only sin left worth pursuing. (At least you
don't have to take a pill to get your appetite up.) He kindly
buys me a fabulous dinner and takes me afterwards for gelati
to a new discovery of his Dolce Amore on Commercial
Drive where I eat a delicious blood orange and lemon sorbetto.
Putting together a film is like building a house of cards,
you have to line up every single element and hope the wind
doesn't blow it over at the last minute. The most precarious
and problematic cards are the actors, each of whom have their
own lives and careers. Trying to balance their needs so that
they are all available at the same time while not paying them
what they deserve (a given in independent films) is a major
headache, and most of the fantastic actors we lined up last
time were doing it purely as favors to me. Hard when you call
in these favors and then the damn thing collapses to go out
again and say "Here we are chaps. Trust me this time
it's for real." I certainly have a reluctance to do it.
We are of course in the city where we intended to film. Vancouver
provided us with locations as varied as Edwardian London,
the North West frontier of the Indian Empire, and Florentine
Italy. Now the ghosts are rising and I am anxious again. I
write an email to Geoffrey Rush down unda. With any luck he'll
be making Pirate sequels for the next ten years…
You can see my ambivalence bursting out in all directions.
I like this live stage business, and was thinking of touring
Oz this summer. My daughter can't wait to go down unda and
my son Carey writes me cheery email from Queensland. He says
he is proud of me for going on the bus and on the stage. What
it is to have children who like you. Even my wife seems to
like me, despite my comic abuse of the marital state. I think,
by the way, the Marital State is Poland…it is constantly
in danger of disappearing over night.
Perched in my eerie on the 28th floor of the Westin Grand
hotel on a rainy Vancouver day tapping away on a laptop I
am inevitably reminded of the days when I wrote half my novel
Road to Mars here while filming Dudley Doright. I loved
the rain then as day after day of filming was canceled and
I could stay in my suite at the Sutton Place and write. Now
that I enjoyed. I made some good friends then, one
of whom, Marty-Ann, I am meeting for lunch. Looking down on
the rainy grid of a grey Vancouver day, the cars have their
lights on, the mountains are shrouded in mist with just the
thin white streaks of the ski runs showing against their whale
like hulks. Below me the large white crane which at night
is lit up like a Christmas tree is swinging what looks like
a piano around… Surely not?
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