The last line in the opening to Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane, is “Then last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.” Mine came on a Friday afternoon in 2002. It was not like I wasn’t expecting it. They had just awarded me with a golden statue of the Star Wars character C-3PO to mark my twenty years. The first day of my employment, I had signed in with the receptionist, and when I walked past her, she said just loud enough for me to hear, “Day one.” It was now day 7,300 and counting.
I was like the man who came to dinner—and never left. It was originally supposed to be about an eight-month gig, but the films just kept coming. I was the chief visual effects editor and was promoted to department head, which included our commercial division. Department heads traditionally didn’t last very long, but I lasted nine years, which was a record. I survived four management changes and numerous political battles, but when the digital revolution hit with full force, my age began to cripple me. The company pretty much split into film versus digital. This was about the time when George announced to no one in particular that “editing on film was like scratching on rocks.” I became a Neanderthal.
Although I spent all day on an Avid digital editing machine, it didn’t matter. I had been using computers for writing since before hard drives; I had been on the Internet at home since about 1989 and had websites up in 1999. None of this mattered. I was “the old guy in editorial.” I became the union steward and Patty, the head of production, said apropos of nothing, “That won’t do you any good.” Allies disappeared. I asked to see my personnel file, and in it was a statement from Kim, a producer and sometimes friend, that said, “He is an old man and should probably retire.”
Fortunately I had already started preparations to retire, once again following the advice of Montaigne, “Retire into yourself, but first prepare yourself to be your own host.” In December 1999 and January 2000 I had sold all the stock in my retirement account. This meant that I completely avoided the tech wreck that cost the equity markets a loss of $5 trillion.
There is a Hollywood tale that Harry Cohn once ordered the writer of Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz, off the Columbia studio lot, ending his tirade with “and don’t bring him back ever . . . unless we need him.” On Friday, August 2, 2002, I walked out the door. I was back on the following Monday, because they needed me. But it was a brief reprieve, and I had decided to retire anyway. Still, it was a shock. I had worked for over thirty years—was I ready for this?
In 1919 Jess Willard, who had defeated Jack Johnson in Havana, Cuba, fought the much-feared Jack Dempsey to defend his heavyweight title. Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times in the first round, going on to win in round four when Willard could not continue. Someone later asked Willard what he was thinking as he was being knocked down so many times and he replied, “I kept saying to myself, I have $100,000 and a ranch in Kansas, I have $100,000 and a ranch in Kansas.” Was there something I could say to myself? I did have a small ranch in the wine country besides my home in Berkeley. So I told myself that since I knew who I was now, I could have a life rich in writing, real estate investing, and distributing my own movies.
I love the city with its cafes and bookstores, but I also need to be in nature every so often. I find the contrast in going from one to the other immensely refreshing. Each in its own way rejuvenates my spirits, and I feel fortunate to have this option.
I bought the country place as a retreat from my high-stress job and city life in general. It is on a small hill overlooking what has become a wine region. The property contains a Sea Ranch–style house built out of clear heart redwood, a separate studio building, and a small cottage-like structure with its own deck that I use for writing. There are also lots of acres to roam around on. I can run my small businesses from there or the city, but I also try to have fun wherever I am.
Most of my friends who had also left Lucasfilm trotted off to other jobs, both in and out of the film business. I didn’t feel the need anymore. I was finally ready for my close-up.
Oddly enough, one of the things I did after I retired was buy a slot machine. If there is a more clear parallel to the gambles so familiar to the moviemaker, I don’t know what it would be. It’s like a horoscope for real, but with no phony promises. You know you cannot win, only delay the inevitable. It’s a gentle reminder of the idiot’s tale we are all involved in.
Mine is one of those old-style quarter machines with a $150 jackpot. It came out of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Reno, Nevada, and is of about a 1958 vintage. I think I got it just because I could never play one when my mother occasionally took us to Reno as kids. The casinos were fascinating to me back then. Not only were there rooms full of gambling devices with bells ringing and coins crashing into payout bins, but there were also memorable displays. One casino had a museum-like room lined with artifacts from the Old West, like antique rifles, pistols, and derringers, just like I saw in the movies and on television. Another had a large glass case with a million dollars in cash on display. Cowboys and money—it doesn’t get any better than that for a kid raised on Westerns.
Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would want to play the new slots that have no coins and only pay out a little slip of paper. What fun is that? Even hitting a small jackpot on mine brings a neurotransmitter cocktail of pleasure to your brain, with its crash of quarters clanging into the metal tray. That sound, like a great movie moment, was carefully designed to pick up your spirits so you would play again.
Here I am, unemployed for the first time in thirty-two years, and I buy a slot machine. But that wasn’t all. I bought a 1947 Lionel train set exactly like the one I lost in the chaos after my mother’s death. I, like a lot of people, have a somewhat romanticized view of life. Yet, what is more appropriate? Does anyone really desire the real version? At my small ranch, my aunt’s old summer resort and grandpa’s booze truck, the REO Speed Wagon, are still within six miles of me. They say you can’t go home again. Well, we shall see about that.
After buying the slot, I took it to a guy in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, for a tune-up. Steve Squires had been working on slot machines since he was seventeen years old, and he was then seventy-six.
This guy was amazing, and his shop was filled with antique slot machines. They were everywhere, covering almost every square foot of floor space to the extent that only footpaths were left open for navigation. The walls were hung with old slot machine faceplates like mine, from every brand and year imaginable. From the ceiling hung hundreds of old slot wheels, each with varying combinations of cherries, oranges, and plums brightly printed on them. There was room after room filled with boxes, drawers, and shelves, all overflowing with antique parts. Steve told me that Lucasfilm had once asked him to rig a slot machine for a movie so that every time the handle was pulled, there would be a jackpot. That would save a lot of time in shooting a scene. He couldn’t remember the movie, and my best guess was Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
One thing I always wondered about was how they set the odds on a slot. I asked Steve and he said, “You can’t do it mechanically, which is what everyone thinks. You have to change the order and frequency of the cherries and other fruit images that appear on a given reel.” It turns out that three-reel machines have about 8,000 possible combinations of images that might appear on the payline. Alter the makeup of the reels, and you change the odds. A machine like mine could potentially earn the casino about $800 a day. A hundred working machines could pay for a lot of casino overhead back in the 1950s. The jackpot, too, was a decent payout when you consider you could buy a used car for $150 back then.
I think of my 25-cent machine as representative of the movie world’s resistance to change. I don’t want to play the new electronic slots, and Thomas Edison originally didn’t want to project his images. He preferred to sell his Kinetoscopes for private viewing in commercial parlors, which charged 25 cents to watch a few film clips. “If we put out a screen machine [projector],” he said, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States. Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” My old 25-cent machine is still an un-killed goose. Edison didn’t want to give up those quarters, and I don’t want to submit to the electronic when the mechanical is more fun. I sometimes complain about the lack of technological progress in the world yet sometimes celebrate it, and I’m not alone. We all edit our lives to some extent. We pick and choose. Many people who drive modern cars and use the latest cellphones still want to live in Victorian houses.
When I got the slot machine home, I wondered whether I should just not tell the wife and take it to Boonville on my next trip or get it over with right now. I opened the lift back and dropped the tailgate to my SUV, invited her out, and handed her a quarter. She pulled the handle, hit three cherries, scooped up the jackpot, and disappeared back into the house saying, “That was fun.” I never had a problem after that, and we both occasionally pull the handle when we are in the country. Steve had warned me to “play it often—they like that.” There is something about pulling that handle and going through this little exercise of anticipation, suspense, and surprise, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I wish I could ask Montaigne what he thought.
My machine had come out of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino, which had been started by a former butcher named Harvey Gross. He and his wife ran a popular lunch counter with a few slots back in the 1940s. With that start, they grew it into a large casino enterprise that cleared them about a million dollars a year by the 1950s. Investor types kept pleading with him to expand throughout Nevada. He always gave the same answer: “With a million bucks a year, we are doing fine. After all, how many steaks can you eat?”
Here was another story that I could use somewhere, maybe after my distribution business runs out of gas. But it doesn’t ever seem to, even though at $25, our movie is not cheap. Last Christmas alone, I mailed over 500 DVDs of American Nitro from Boonville in about three days, overwhelming the local post office. I don’t have to wait for a royalty statement and a check from a publisher to know how I’m doing. Besides, it’s more of a hobby anyway—that and my effort to keep the work alive for as long as I can. Next up to restore and distribute will be my old Jack Johnson movie.
This distribution thing all came about through a somewhat strange set of circumstances. It isn’t supposed to happen. Creative people do their work and depend on a company that specializes in distribution to handle that for a fee, a large fee. And for that fee, the publisher is supposed to do advertising and promotion for their authors. This rarely works out well for the writers and filmmakers. Unfortunately there is no alternative to this for most people, but there have always been exceptions.
Mark Twain did not do what his contemporaneous authors did. Twain published his own books and sold them door to door, hiring agents for this arduous task. His methods were far outside the conventional book publishing trade. This just wasn’t done by serious authors. It smacked of vanity publishing or cheap low-class books, except that this was also the way that the Bible was sold: door to door. Twain was very successful at this because he could laugh at any vanity publishing charge. He was Mark Twain.
His biggest success using this method was in publishing the memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, which I have mentioned before. It was one of the largest publishing successes in American history. Twain sold more of these books than anything except the Bible, and it brought Grant’s family over $500,000 in royalties, a fortune in the 1880s. I reread the memoirs myself every few years.
In 2002 I decided to follow the Mark Twain route and distribute my own movie. Like George Lucas, I felt that now no one could tell that I was too old or uncool to make movies. I was retired and was done working on other people’s projects. Besides the country house, I had a home in Berkeley, some real estate investment property, and a steady income from several sources. As Montaigne had recommended, I had prepared to be my own host.
At some point I discovered that the movie my brother and I had made, American Nitro, was being talked about in certain Internet chat groups. Long out of distribution, it had become a kind of cult film. This and the circus-like atmosphere of the whole thing made the movie a viable commercial entity and a historical document. One of the people in the film section of the Library of Congress told us that “your movie is pure Americana and will only get more and more interesting as time passes.” That was enough for me.
We pulled the original 35mm negative out of storage and had it transferred to a digital format of the highest quality available. That’s the great thing about motion picture negatives—they are of such high quality that you can keep going back to them again and again as current technologies improve. In fact, a couple of years ago I sold some of our footage to a Hollywood studio that was making a feature film on two of the characters in our movie for $100 a second.
I toyed with the idea of changing the movie, at least to the extent of trying to set it up for the non–racing fan. There was a Roman quote about bread and circuses that I tried out, but nothing seemed to improve it, so I decided to leave it as it was originally. The only thing we added was a directors’ commentary where my brother and I gave our thoughts on where the movie came from and what we had tried to do.
It was a drive-in picture and almost everyone saw it as just a drag race documentary. Which it was. But if you thought about it for a minute, who in the hell would make a drag race documentary like this? It didn’t hype its subject, it exposed it as a strange and somewhat hidden subculture—an outlaw sport which neither drag race officialdom nor the reviewers much appreciated. There were a few people who got it, however. On the high end, it was seen as “asphalt anthropology,” and on the low, “I watched it every night for a year, just ask my wife.” That’s a real fan quote, and as a friend of mine pointed out, that should read “ex-wife.”
Looking back, it seems that the art movement of the 1970s went through a kind of metamorphosis from abstraction to realism, or at least some of it did, and this was felt in filmmaking and still photography as well. I think of our movie as Contemporary Realism. Other examples are the movie Derby, a documentary on the fringe sport of roller derby, and the book Suburbia by Bill Owens, whose black-and-white still photos chronicled the early 1970s suburban lifestyles of Americans. I’m sure I would be hard-pressed to find any art critic to agree with me, but I really don’t care—they will get to it eventually. For now, Nitro has well over 800,000 fans on Facebook. I looked up the ranking of our page once and at that time we were ahead of Johnny Depp, the Los Angeles Lakers, Bonnie Raitt, Starbucks, the iPhone 6, and Patsy Cline.
It is hard to find a male (and a surprising number of females) between the ages of thirty and seventy that does not have fond memories of hot rod cars in high school, or their father taking them to the races, or going racing themselves with their buddies. It was endemic to the culture, and we had attempted to chronicle this wide segment of the population. These are the guys we send to fight our wars. They drive the long-haul trucks, snowplows, and heavy equipment. They go hunting and fishing. They like guns and motorcycles and hot rod custom cars of one kind or another. They are religious and they are patriotic. They are the first to feel some of the harshest blows due to high gasoline prices, moving jobs overseas, technological change, or economic downturns.
So in an effort to find that audience and engage with them, I created a social media page on Facebook for fans of American Nitro, but not just the movie. I wanted it to represent the zeitgeist of this particular part of our culture as well. Since I am not a participant in this world, I can only be an observer and commentator. This makes the site an extension of the movie in a way. Yet, I have never heard of anyone else doing something like this before. Sometimes it seems more like a kind of performance piece. However, if the artist Cindy Sherman can dress up as stereotypical characters from everyday life and then photograph herself as her art, I guess I can communicate with my group through role-playing.
When I started I was only able to attract a handful of people, but as I learned how to appeal to them, it soon started to grow. We currently have a very large number of fans on the site. Many of them have purchased the movie from us, and many more will in time. People hear about the movie from the Facebook page, watch the trailers either there or on YouTube, and order it through our website using PayPal. This means we don’t have to do any billing, as PayPal collects the money and deposits it in our bank before we ship the DVDs.
For the computer phobic we accept checks, and there must be some kind of economic law here or something, because we’ve never had a returned check in eight years. Apparently people don’t bounce checks for their hobbies. They may short the grocer or the landlord, but not the discretionary items that they really don’t need. Or do they? Perhaps we are just more passionate about our hobbies. Many have commented that our website is “eye candy” or even “car porn” for them. So far I have been flying completely under the radar of the studio system, hoping to remain undetected.
One thing is for sure, I’ve gotten to know how the fans think, as this is a window into their lives. I see pictures of their children and their homes, as well as their parents and grandparents. I know where they live and what they do, and can predict how they will react to most things. Their voting for Trump was one of those things. Politics aside, it is a fascinating group that is easy to like. As best as I can describe it, we are continuing the dialogue with the audience for the movie through a totally different medium.
This method of doing things was not even available just a few years ago, but it will expand for filmmakers, writers, musicians, and other artists with every passing year—that is if they are not reluctant to use technology. Many older artists and writers are especially timid when it comes to the vast array of digital resources now available to them, and I try to encourage anyone I run across to learn how it can be useful to them in their work. There is actually a Silicon Valley term that I’ve modified to describe people who shy away from these latest technologies. It’s called “tech debt,” and it translates into one’s getting behind in those tech areas that can be of immense help to them as time goes on.
So what are my lessons? You have to make a living, but you need to also do your own work. You always need a side project: a book, a film, a screenplay, photography, painting, poetry, music, whatever it is. You must not let your job make your personal work totally subservient. You will find that what you learn from your side project eventually will either make you more successful at your career or it will become your career.
That’s the story of one guy from that long list of credits at the end of the movie. It is what happened to a person who was trying to lead a creative life and still make a living. I sometimes wonder if the movie moguls I worked with ever have as much fun as I do. After all, “how many steaks can you eat?”