I belong to a rather sketchy group, somewhere between carnival barkers and real estate developers. Only now we no longer have to resort to bearded ladies and fire-breathing pigs because technology has given us dinosaurs and meteorites, not to mention titanic sea tragedies.
We are a group with a questionable reputation, which comes from traveling players and vaudevillians, I guess. We didn’t always leave town having paid our hotel bills. Legend has it that that’s where the term “making the nut” comes from. Businesses got so burned with unpaid bills from traveling entertainers that the local sheriff, in the days of wagons, kept the wheel nut to the main wagon in his safe until all the bills were paid. No sneaking out in the middle of the night. You had to make enough money to at least pay your expenses, to “make the nut.”
Entertainers have been looked down upon since Roman times. In fact, when the Roman Coliseum was opened in AD 80, some groups were banned altogether from attending, notably gravediggers and actors.
Once we got to Hollywood, things were different. No wagons. But a common sign in the front window of rooming houses was one that said No Movies, which is what moviemakers were called. And that was really the essence of it, wasn’t it? They moved. Above all else, movies moved. The wonder of it. It reminds me of the Internet. Do you remember seeing a movie on the Web in the early days? We were all so thrilled (and some not so thrilled) even though it looked worse—much worse—than an early Edison Kinetoscope. What’s the famous line about the dancing bear? “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all.”
We are dancing very well now, and we actually have at least one PhD running a movie studio: Dr. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Is nothing sacred? Will we soon have Las Vegas casinos with PhD pit bosses? If it hasn’t happened already, I predict it.
There is one thing about movies, however, that hasn’t changed yet: They are still about people. I claim that there has never been a movie made without some variation of the line, “Are you OK?” Try to find one. That’s because movies are about us.
It is currently popular for movie tycoons to say that they only really care about the story. To me, the story is just the conveyer belt; emotion is the package being delivered. I always thought William Faulkner had it right when he said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature that the only things worth writing about were “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”
It had gotten to the point where I wasn’t OK. I didn’t want to live my life with less class than a TV dinner. The management at work actually started calling everyone artists. I had to raise my hand at a manager’s meeting to say, “I am not an artist.” There is no doubt that there were artists there—I just couldn’t accept the cheapening of the term by including everyone. As Groucho Marx once said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
My focus had changed. I had started reading Michel de Montaigne, the famous philosopher who introduced the essay to literature and whose philosophy of life could be summarized as “slow down enough to realize that you are alive and pay attention to that.” It was all well and good to work for a big-shot movie company, but what was I doing for myself? What was I doing on my own? This could all end tomorrow. I needed to make a living, but I also needed to find more about myself and where I came from. Like an adopted child seeking out his biological parents, I sought out what happened to the Kimberlin Seed Company and Mason’s Brewery.