My fellow editors and I used to joke about people coming to work for Lucasfilm as being “rescued.” You could make good money there as opposed to almost any other outside job. You could get promoted and move higher on the salary scale. You could buy a house and many did, especially when it became apparent that if you were asked back on new pictures, this job wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Directors were lining up to get our “secret sauce” of visual effects that would set their movies apart from the rest.
Yet, what was I involved in here? It was an exciting place to work, at least in the early days, because for the first time I was in a situation where there seemed to be no limits as to where I could go. There was a time when just mentioning that you worked at Lucasfilm would get you a job interview. Yet I wasn’t in command of the ship anymore. When I worked at Palmer’s, there was time to pursue other things. I had made two films while working there, and both got distribution. My Grandfather Mason had admonished his sons, “Don’t ever work for anybody. Work for yourself.”
There is a line in the movie The Misfits (written by Arthur Miller) that is bantered about by several characters regarding roping wild horses that will become dog food: “It’s better than wages. Anything is better than wages.” You could lose your soul taking a job. I had seen it many times. It was a dangerous thing, especially if the money was good. You could get caught as a waiter, say, making $300 a night in tips and get used to the easy money and not be able to give it up. Then you wake up one day and that is what you are, a waiter. I kept asking myself, am I doing that? Am I just a glorified waiter?
I had known guys that had it even worse. Their job became their identity. It was the first question asked when meeting someone at a social gathering: “What do you do for a living?” It was epidemic. Once you took that job, you were an employee. America had become an entire nation of employees. I used to think, what’s going to happen to these people if they lose their jobs? They think they are safe, but they are not. They’ve got a house and a car and a family. Everything depends on that job now.
But of course there was a downside to any artistic lifestyle that was perfectly expressed in the old joke, “What do you call an artist without a girlfriend? Homeless.” When I was hustling to make my own films after college, my friends all talked about it. How long can we go on doing this before we can’t anymore? How many years are we going to give ourselves to “make it” before we have to admit that it’s never going to happen? And then what? It was scary to contemplate being forty years old with no career and a thin résumé. I remember the words of Mario Puzo who, after a life of failure as a minor novelist, became a best-selling author with his book and movie deal for The Godfather. A reporter asked him how it felt and he said, “It’s like finding out you don’t have to die.”
As a guy trying to be a filmmaker, I was neither the first nor the last to waddle through this dilemma. Everyone has to find their own path. I had taken what little I knew about my family and used it as a model. As a doctor, my father worked for himself. My aunt and uncle owned and ran a summer resort. They were not employees, they could not be laid off. They could go bankrupt, but you couldn’t fire them. Was even a part of this still possible?
I thought back to my old landlords the Agneses, who owned apartment buildings. If a person could get their name on some California real estate deeds, that might just do it. So I started working on this as a backup plan while I was still hustling to make films and write. William Faulkner had said that the best job he was ever offered was to become a manager in a brothel. In his opinion, it was the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
Then I got “rescued.” I was pulled into a world that was moving so fast that there was little time for such niceties as your own life. This was more like a battlefield environment. There were generals to encourage advancing, nurses to comfort the wounded, and a firing squad for deserters. Veterans guided the new troops and recounted their past victories under George, the supreme commander and benevolent dictator. Success was our narcotic; box office and Oscars our goal. We also tried to make the coolest-looking stuff we could come up with.
Yet I was always looking for a side business or backup plan as insurance against the fickle nature of filmmaking, where you are essentially fired every Friday. Ever since 1973 when I did my first land lease deal, I had started becoming obsessed with real estate. I drove around with real estate option contracts in my glove box, just in case I saw the right property. I bought all the books and studied the tax advantages. Double declining depreciation schedules, expenses to offset income taxes from salary income, investment leverage ratios, property tax caps—I learned it all.
Real estate investing has many stories of missed opportunities. The best advice I ever got was this admonition: “The profit is made in the purchase, not the sale.” That may sound counterintuitive but it’s just another way of saying, “Buy low, sell high.” I did a few deals but I ultimately decided I would rather make a movie than repair broken plumbing, at least for the moment. Still, there was one property that got away that annoys me yet. It was on Washington street in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights district. Three four-bedroom flats for $119,000. That building today is worth at least $7 million.