Saturday, June 14, 2003
This all started, the writing part, with a story I wrote to Elsie back in the late 90's. I called the little story I told her Goldyn's Shoes. Elsie mislaid the letter and then in 2000 she found it again. That letter serves as a good introduction to Casting Reflections because that communication between Elsie and me lead her to begin relating her casting stories to me via the US Mail. (That story is placed at the end of this page.)
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I have transcribed ELSIE'S LETTERS as truly as I can from the handwritten pagejmt
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This is Wednesday. In the wee hours. Sept 4, 2002
Dear James Michael,
Life has been hitting me some knock-out blows so I have to get back to something joyful.
You would think that at almost 82, "What can life do?" It’s like “Let me go, let me go, let me go lover.” But it won’t let me go. But I am OK. I will survive.
I’ve been thinking of a fun time. Way back when. I’m sure I can find the year if I look. There was a lady producer, Doro Bacarach, who talked Shari into casting for no money. And Shari, of course, talked me into doing extras for no money. Except expenses.
I adored Doro, so Charlie and I set out for Natchez, Mississippi in my 1983 Chrysler that I bought after I did the extras in Houston for “Terms of Endearment” January to March or April 1983 and didn’t get credit for.
Charlie and I were familiar with that part of Mississippi because he had worked at a nuclear power plant (shame, shame) in at Port Gibson on the Mississippi River, just north of Natchez.
It is a spooky drive from Port Gibson to Natchez. The trees meet over the road. I’ve forgotten if it was a H. Inn or what. It was okay, because it was next door to a Hardy’s and Charlie walked over and bought us bisquits and gravy for breakfast. Still hot.
The movie was something like “Mary Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn”. An after school movie. With precious Drew Barrymore. Drew would come into my office and eat all the candy off my desk. Then on Sunday everyone was invited to a pool party. Charlie wore Levis but he iorned them himself. A sharp creese. (He owned a cleaners once.)
So we started to the party. Drew and about seven of her local friends (my extras) jumped out of the swimming pool soaking wet and went screaming to Charlie, “Elsie’s husband!” and hugged him and got him soaking wet. You know Charlie love it but with chagrin went back to the room and changed into dry Levis before the party.
I haven’t thought of this in years.
In a week or two Charlie and I drove to Florida. If you love mountains, the drive from Natchez to anywhere in Florida will almost do you in. All you can see is trees. And I love trees. I collect trees and books about trees. But you would have to experience it. It’s like “too many ruffles.”
We drove to our rendevous. If I had a map before me I could tell you exactly where. I’ll tell you later. It was south of the capitol of Florida- about 20 miles- in the pan handle. Such a beautiful place. Tiny baby deer came up in the yard and racoons were there. I love racoons, especially baby ones (I’ll tell you someday).
We met Elyn, Shari, Phalia (Remember Paris, TX and the PTA). How in the world did we all get to the Florida Pan handle?
This house was perfection except I bumped my head on the ceiling when I stood up in bed. There were tiny houses all over. Like a compound. A young man was there as caretaker. He made good bisquits from Bisquick! There was a gas stove on the front porch. Shari, Phalia, Elyn, Charlie and the young caretaker wanted to walk a mile to the ocean and beach and fish and I declined. Not my cup of tea to walk so far.
So I drove to the nearby town and bought groceries fior dinner and went back and cooked on the back porch. I cooked “comfort foods,” steak, gravy (Smashed potatoes, as Tim said, "Nothin better than smashed potatoes.”) salad and bisquits.
Home were the fishermen. Home from the hill. They came yelling. They told me that they never smelled any food better than that in their lives. They had come up starving and wanting to take me to eat somewhere. That was one of my best memories: To give my grownup kids comfort food!
But this trip is not over.
Charlie and I drove to key West. I drove. It makes me dizzy. Seven miles of bridges. There is nothing in this world when you are in any kind of work force, free lancing, than having another job to go to. We had “Hemmingway.” We had all expenses paid. Ramada Inn. “Those were the days my friend. We thought they’d never end.”
Hiring extras is an enviable job. Everyone loves you. I loved my job. I loved the people.
When you put out a call for extras you meet the most interesting people in town. The most alive, the most adventourous. The people who want to have fun. The people who are alive. It’s been the same kind of people from small towns in Texas to small towns in Michigan. I love these people.
Back to Key West.
Director was named James Cellan Jones. He was British. Cellan was and is pronounced Kethlan. We, Phalia & I remembered it because of my sister Ethlyn.
In a casting session he remarked on my Texas accent and I told him that he was the one who talked funny. Not me. I adored him.
But he lost the Hemmingway story to some Germans. Politics and money etc. The Germans were horrible except for one producer that I liked. I went to Michigan to do extras. Another story! Love,
Til later,
Elsie
contact Elsie: pyropool@earthlink.net
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Goldyn’s Shoes
Promise Goldyn was the fifth born. The third little girl. It was 1977. Big old crapped-out white frame two-storied house on a hill about three miles toward Lillian out county road 917 from Mansfield, Texas. Up a dirt road a piece from the lake and across the road from a big old barn where her older brother and sister had painted a sign that said:
BISICL REPARE
The afternoon before Goldyn was born, I had taken a Southwest flight to Midland where I was to spend the evenings of the week playing my guitar and singing my songs at a place called Cody Cattle Company. It was a fancy steak house in north Midland.
Midland was a town where there was negative unemployment. Oil was booming. Midland was in the middle of the Permian Basin. That’s the place along Interstate 20 where you think there’s a leak somewhere. The while place was leaking. Natural gas. A lot of people could afford a singer/songwriter with their steak and Lobster dinner. There were cul de sacs where each address had one number and every resident was a millionaire.
I was eating dinner at Cody’s and we were watching the World Series on the big screen when someone said there was a call for me. Barbara had started labor. I got someone to take me to the bus station and we snailed our way thru a lot of little towns I had never heard of toward Fort Worth. I probably could have gotten home sooner if I had hitch hiked. Rick Babb saw me walking as I was starting to do just that out of Fort Worth and we got back to the farm in time to join the celebration.
Cute, cute, cute. She was like a little pixie. A tan little cupid. And all the little details that we take for granted except in those first few moments when we are agog at the absurdity of it all. Toes? Yes. Fingers? Yes. But first of all, every time: “Is it a girl or a boy?”
The kids were all high on the moment and Barbara was happy. This wasn’t your everyday home birth. This little creature was filling a hole in our life that she could not have known about. And then again, she had gone thru everything we had been thru in the past three months. How could she not be affected, there inside of Barbara’s body? There inside where the anguish must have pressed on her. There inside where the tears welled up and spilled out until there were no more. There inside when Barbara had fallen to the ground that night when what she saw hit her like a fist to the jawbone.
She was already one of us. We could always see that in them. The kids wanted to call her Rainbow. She had come out purple and then turned red and then pink and then yellow and cream.
We named her Promise Goldyn because the rainbow is a promise that the world will never be destroyed by water again and because gold is not destroyed by water or fire. The “y” was for “Yes”. There was Wyn and Ra Byn and Embyr. Eagle Arrowbrook had had no “Y”, though one of his favorite words was, “Yowie!” That was how he had said, “Yes.”
***
We knew from the time we first put shoes on Goldyn that there was something strange with her and shoes. Goldyn would struggle to get her shoes and socks off long before she had words to explain why she hated them. We thought this was one of her little idiosyncrasies. Every new child seems to have something in their head sideways.
Wyn would never eat eggs. She’s thirty now and she still will not eat an egg. Ra Byn won’t eat meat. He still offers me milk made from soybeans and doesn’t remember that I’d rather drink the juice off of steamed spinach. Goldyn would not wear shoes. She said her socks felt funny.
***
Goldyn would take her shoes off when she got on the bus. Now she says she just took her shoes off so she could get her socks off. She says that she would put her shoes back on and wear them all day without socks. She says, on the way home from school, she would take her shoes off and put her socks back on and then put her shoes back on.
***
Goldyn’s feet problems didn’t register very high on the list of our concerns sometimes. We were trying to make a living singing and often it was buy equipment or buy food. We learned where the supermarket dumpsters were that offered a few morsels and made the rounds two or three nights a week. Let the kid go barefooted.
In the beginning there were weeks when we played only one gig. The Bass Buildings were on their way up down tow For Worth and on Friday afternoons all the hardhats would let it hang out at a place called Yesteryear across from the courthouse in Fort Worth. We were paid $100 plus tips. It was Barbara and Peggy and me. Barbara played the bass and Peggy the guitar. I played guitar mostly but stuck in a little fiddle and harmonica and banjo and mandolin. We weren’t much of a band but we could sure sing. We called ourselves Texas Water.
It got better. People who liked beautiful harmonies and beautiful voices told others and within a year or two we were filling the White Elephant Saloon out at the Stock Yards. Every seat reserved. Some weeks we played every night.
Goldyn first got up and sang with us at the White Elephant Saloon Beer Garden. She sang a song called TEDDY BEAR. She was precious. She was four. She learned about tips and was always ready to sing. One night a fan brought her a teddy bear. A forty-dollar teddy bear. One night we made enough in tips to buy all the children a new bicycle.
We moved into town and bought a house when the singing got to be real regular.
When Goldyn was eight she would stand with her toes drawn together. Little knotted feet. Her toes overlapped. Her feet pinched. Barbara took her to a doctor who referred her to a foot specialist and he prescribed custom orthotics, little plastic forms that went between her feet and the souls of her shoes. The doctor said they would help hold your feet in a neutral position. He said she had Hallux Hammertoe. The foot doctor told her that she would need surgery if she were going to escape the chronic pain. He told Barbara that it would be best to wait for the surgery until her bones had reached their full size.
Goldyn got her orthotics and Barbara would buy new ones every two or three years at $400 a pop. We discussed the possibility of finding a way to pay for the surgery to correct Goldyn’s problem. Her big toes, both of them, bent back in on the rest of her toes and that big joint beginning at the big toe stuck way out. The foot doctor explained that he needed to take a wedge of bone out of the bones on either side of that joint.
***
Texas Water played a place called THE RIG for about six months in the winter of 1983 and into 1984. One night we got a napkin with a request written on it. “PLEASE LET LINDA SING A SONG?” We invited Linda up on stage and she sang Silver Threads and Golden Needles. The girls sang harmony. She sounded great and her friends were thrilled. The next day Linda Scott called me from work and said I should get my boots and hat on and grab my fiddle and come audition for a part in a movie. She was calling from CELEBRITY TALENT in Dallas.
I went to the library and looked thru a couple of books on acting for film. Two things impressed me. One was: Act naturally. The other I have forgotten now.
That afternoon I read for Rody Kent and she said I should talk to David. She said I was very natural. Soon after that she put me in the choir that really sang the hymns in Places In The Heart. We were not on screen.
***
CELEBRITY had been a caldron. I started to say cesspool, but I didn’t come to think of it that way until I had been there for a while. Things happened at CELEBRITY. There was probably no more bullshit there than there was at any other… No! I believe there was more bullshit at CELIBRITY than at any other agency in Dallas at the time.
It was a perpetual pep rally. Head-in-the-clouds innocents, greedy, stupid, vain, no-talent posers and some real talent that had been waiting for an open door in Dallas, flocked into the welcoming arms of CELEBRITY. That meant into the arms of David and his mother, Mary Jo, for the most part. Nobody was too bad to be offered acting lessons and a chance to do extra work that could lead to “upgrades” if they would just get their contact sheet of pictures to David and let him pick the magic shot and sign up for some lessons.
It was a glorious ride for the kid from Preston, Oklahoma: David Payne. It was his chance to “help” everybody who walked thru the door while making a name for himself and, hopefully, a lot of money. Walt, David’s dad had been a shoe salesman and he was the “financial advisor”. It was a big excited family.
One day I got a call from CERLEBRITY. Because I was over forty I was especially valuable to CELEBRITY. I was invited to an over-forty get together.
I signed up for beginning acting with Melody Brooke. One half hour doing some kind of meditation and another half doing exercises. When I got home after the first night of lessons I told Peggy, “I can do this.”
***
Right off I was cast as the chicken wrangler in a movie called BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE. I wanted that title on my resume. What resume? One day I called to ask what day I was scheduled to shoot. I was told that David had called and insisted on so much money that they had decided to use someone else. That didn’t make sense to me. That would have been a credit for someone who had no movie credits. That would have been a real beginning of a resume. Why had David done that? He didn’t ask me about it. He had just cost me a job and himself a commission. That was the spring of 1984.
About a month later, it was a Sunday afternoon, I got a call. A director from The Netherlands was auditioning John Wayne types for a roll to be shot in west Texas. I wasn’t a John Wayne type but David called me in and I got to read for George Sluizer. Nobody knew anything about George Sluizer.
I read a scene with George and we had fun. I didn’t read for the lead part but I read for the screenwriter character and I thought that was cool because I am a writer.
The next day I got a call to read with a girl at the Stonley P. George handed me the script and asked me to read a scene with the action between the lead, Danny McMann, and a girl named Myrna Greenbaum. That was fun too. David was there with a good-looking brunette he wanted George to take a look at. George spoke to her for a moment and as we left told me he would never cast her. “She doesn’t listen.”
Days passed and I heard nothing. Finally I got a call from George, personally. He told me that David was insisting to make a deal with him and until they could make a deal David would not involve me. David was doing what he had done with BLOODSUCKERS: losing me a job. I had one acting credit to my name: I played a bad guy in a CRIMESTOPPER piece on Channel 5. I didn’t think of that as giving me a lot of leverage.
George found my phone number somehow and called me personally because he saw “something” in me that sparked him.
Later I learned that George was willing to offer me $8000 for doing the part at that time and if David had brought me in we would have been able to make a deal that would have been acceptable to all. David would have gotten to deal with George and I would have gotten the part.
So George called me at home and made an appointment to read with another lady for a screen test. We met at an apartment over on Inwood right off of Lemmon and we taped a scene. Later, George called and said he had a problem:I had lost the freshness he had liked from the start. Oops. He needed to determine why things had changed and decide if the problem was fixable.
I invited George to come and see Peggy and me sing that night with Will Barnes at the Texas Tea House. During a break we talked. He asked my where the twinkle had gone. I told him that I had decided I had better get serious about the part if I was going to get cast. He told me that the opposite was true. The movie was a very heavy piece and that my character had to be played lightly for it to work. I said, “Cool.” We taped again and, indeed, it was cool.
Meanwhile David is out of the loop. My concern is getting the job. Talk about starting a resume! The lead roll in a feature! Four months earlier I hadn’t even dreamed of acting in movies. I would have paid to do the part.
Besides, this guy, George, was one of the most intense, interesting, intelligent, dynamic people I had ever met. He seemed to see more in me than someone to sell lessons and head shots to. He seemed confident that I could carry his film.
That was scary. That was exciting. To collaborate with a man like George Sluizer: what a thought.
So David is pissed. He won’t have anything to do with this deal. He’s not going to get any money. 15% of nothing is nothing, you know.
At this point I didn’t know that George was willing to offer me $8000 up front to play the roll. So, I made a deal with George to get four points on the film
Eventually I got an additional four points because after filming was completed, George asked me to write the music. What he said was, “I would like to continue our collaboration.”
So I got a trip to Amsterdam in 1984 to work with George and the editor on the music and I got another trip to The Netherlands in 1985 to attend the debut of Red Desert Penitentiary at The Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. George presented me for publicity pictures and interviews with the European press. Red Desert Penitentiary showed at a few film festivals. Ones I remember were Rotterdam and Montreal and Los Angeles. It had it’s American debut in Sweetwater, the town we worked out of while we were shooting it, and then it showed in Abilene because a lot of the talent was from there and we had shot some scenes there. One afternoon there was a showing at the Inwood in Dallas.
There is a film critic in New York who calls himself the Phantom and he has a little movie newsletter in which he asked, “Whatever happened to that fine little film called Red Desert Penitentiary?” He added that he hoped it would be reissued with liner notes by someone who had actually seen the film. He thought it was a good film. He thought it deserved a chance.
***
So I go off to the desert to work for six weeks in front of Toni Kuhn, an award-winning Swiss-German camera man and an international crew and don’t have to pay a cent. I get fed. I get a room in a nice hotel and every day I learn more about acting, really acting in front of a real camera. Film making. The days I’m not acting I’m working as a grip or whatever is needed. The learning curve points to the sky.
Peggy would bring the kids out on Saturday nights after she got finished playing in Dallas and they would hang around the motel and watch the movie making.
When we had finished shooting the movie I return home filled with excitement and sure that the experience and the credit would serve me and David well. I called David and he said he wanted to see me. At the appointed time I was seated across the desk from David. He says, “You don’t take direction. You’re fired.”
Bewildered, I take my sparse credentials to KD Studios and they offer to let me join their extra pool. I don’t get to talk to KD. I go to several agents and they don’t need someone like me.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t sure that I had actually done any acting out there in the desert. I had just been myself doing what I was told. I had effected nothing. I hadn’t changed my voice. I had warn my own clothes. I had never put on any makeup and I had never combed my hair. Was that acting? Do you have to be unrecognizable to be acting?
So, I auditioned for a play. It was a two-man play and after I auditioned I was asked which part I wanted. There was a cruel guy and a cripple guy the cruel guy beat up on. I chose to play the slow-witted cripple. A lady came from the paper and wrote that I was “outstanding as John.” She didn’t know that I was actually acting with broken ribs because the guy I was paired with sometimes lost track of the line between acting and whatever else we do.
We took a scene from the play to the NOON PREVIEW in Dallas one afternoon and I was rushed by agents after I got my real clothes back on. Maybe I could act.
The next week I interviewed with several agents. I chose Tony Cobb. “She listened.” Tony worked at an agency called Montage. Before long Tony tells me she is moving to the new and improved DAVID PAYNE AGENCY. I wish her the best.
I attend classes at Adam Roark’s school and one day Lou Diamond Phillips, one of Adam’s teachers watches a playback and turns to me and says, “I can’t see it when you are acting but it is there on the tape.”
***
Years later, David Payne called to say that there would be a reunion of CELEBRITY TALENT at the Bennigan’s out on Restaurant Row in Dallas. It wasn’t exactly the sort of affair I would skip work to attend but I had nothing that night. I called Baskin Newman and we decided to meet there and see what we could see.
So, here I am sitting at Bennigan’s with Baskin and the memories are getting all stirred up. All those X-hopeful stars telling what they have been up to. David bragging in the corner with a couple of hunks about all the girls they had had. In common.
As I left, David told me he wanted to talk with me so the next day I picked him up in Dallas and we drove around for a long time. I brought him over here to the house. Peggy made it clear that kissing up to David Payne was the last thing she thought I would do.
David was down. He had pretty much been run out of Dallas and then, he had been pretty much run out of Tulsa. He had been badly shaken when faced the real prospect of going off to prison. David was living on what was left of the family farm with his two Eskimo dogs in his grandma’s old frame house, drinking Doctor Pepper and smoking a cigarette for breakfast and breathing dog hair all day. He umpired girls high school soft ball games for gas money.
David told me he had learned a lot since we had last talked. He hoped our friendship would continue. He had a screenplay idea. He told me his idea and I packed up my 286 PC with a monitor and printer and said, “Take it for six months and write your screenplay.”
David called me one night and told me the computer was broke. I drove up to Preston. I couldn’t fix the computer so we talked. David told me his dream and we remembered some of his nightmares. He told me he was going to L.A. He was going to make his fortune as an agent or a manager. It was his destiny. I asked how he was going to buy gas for the trip and then get started. He said he had saved enough for gas. I said, “Sell me some stuff.”
The next morning we took a little tour of his shed and his mother’s garage. David showed me stuff he was willing to part with: his piano, a monitor, his couch, a refrigerator, a tripod or two , an old cassette machine and some odds and ends. I went to the bank in Preston and got a cash advance.
When I got the stuff home, Peggy threw the couch away. Too much dog hair. The refrigerator didn’t work. Peggy asked me why I would haul crap like that three hundred miles.
But David and I weren’t finished. I loaded up my camera and a tripod and a black cloth for a backdrop and some lights and a pile of clothes and headed back to Oklahoma. If David was going to L.A. to become a famous agent or manager he was going to need some talent to represent and he was going to need a head shot of that talent. He could start with me. Besides, there was something I wanted David to understand. I could be directed. Not bullied. But I could be directed. He got the shot he wanted and the next morning I went home.
I had the film developed and sent David a contact sheet and he made his choice and I sent him some pictures and we went on about our lives.
***
Meanwhile, I go to pyro camp and get my Texas Special Effects license so I can do pyro on shows like TOMMY and CATS. I get a job as sound man on a movie called STRIKING POINT in Dallas and begin working as a sound man on feature after feature. I get together with family and friends and shoot a black and white 16mm feature in which I share the lead with a vulture named Edgar. Bret MacCormick starts casting me in his movies and I write music for another Glen Coburn movie.
I work as a stage hand to make a living and I buy an old house down the street that they were about to bull doze because it caught on fire and I begin to fix it up. George Sluizer makes another movie in Holland and France called Spoorlos, known as “the original Vanishing.” It gets nominated as BEST FOREIGN FILM by the Academy. That leads to George redoing it in English with American actors. George uses one of my songs from RED DESERT PENITENTIARY in the American version and I get a check. $8000. Plus quarterly checks that range from $30 to $800.
And then one day I was up on the cat walk of the Tarrant County Convention Center Arena wrestling with this spot light and I felt this bee buzzing in my pocket. My pager. When the Baptists took a break for dinner I went to a phone and dialed an 818 number that I didn’t recognize. David answered and said, “I have one question for you, and you better have the right answer.” I thought, “Oh, shit. Someone has told him what I said to George about him still being pretty much the same David and he’s going to fire me. Again.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you S.A.G.?”
I said, “No.”
“Wrong answer.”
He told me he had met Sheri and she had looked at my picture and suggested that I might be right for a movie she was casting. But it was a union film.
I don’t need to tell you the rest of that story. Just to note that I grossed over $15,000 and that made me eligible for medical coverage for all my children. And that was the year Goldyn’s feet reached their full size and that was the year that she got her surgery. Over $20,000 in bills all paid by the insurance I had because Sheri cast me in WILD BILL.
(I would be glad to tell you what a harvest that month was but it will have to be in another piece.)
I called this piece Goldyn’s shoes. You know what is so special about Goldyn’s shoes? Nothing. That’s what’s so special. She doesn’t need special shoes or special orthotics or special socks. Now what’s special is Goldyn’s feet.
P.S. Goldyn will graduate from Southwestern next spring with double majors. One in biological Sciences and another in Kinesiology. Kinesiology is the study of the performance of the human body.
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I have transcribed ELSIE'S LETTERS as truly as I can from the handwritten pagejmt
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This is Wednesday. In the wee hours. Sept 4, 2002
Dear James Michael,
Life has been hitting me some knock-out blows so I have to get back to something joyful.
You would think that at almost 82, "What can life do?" It’s like “Let me go, let me go, let me go lover.” But it won’t let me go. But I am OK. I will survive.
I’ve been thinking of a fun time. Way back when. I’m sure I can find the year if I look. There was a lady producer, Doro Bacarach, who talked Shari into casting for no money. And Shari, of course, talked me into doing extras for no money. Except expenses.
I adored Doro, so Charlie and I set out for Natchez, Mississippi in my 1983 Chrysler that I bought after I did the extras in Houston for “Terms of Endearment” January to March or April 1983 and didn’t get credit for.
Charlie and I were familiar with that part of Mississippi because he had worked at a nuclear power plant (shame, shame) in at Port Gibson on the Mississippi River, just north of Natchez.
It is a spooky drive from Port Gibson to Natchez. The trees meet over the road. I’ve forgotten if it was a H. Inn or what. It was okay, because it was next door to a Hardy’s and Charlie walked over and bought us bisquits and gravy for breakfast. Still hot.
The movie was something like “Mary Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn”. An after school movie. With precious Drew Barrymore. Drew would come into my office and eat all the candy off my desk. Then on Sunday everyone was invited to a pool party. Charlie wore Levis but he iorned them himself. A sharp creese. (He owned a cleaners once.)
So we started to the party. Drew and about seven of her local friends (my extras) jumped out of the swimming pool soaking wet and went screaming to Charlie, “Elsie’s husband!” and hugged him and got him soaking wet. You know Charlie love it but with chagrin went back to the room and changed into dry Levis before the party.
I haven’t thought of this in years.
In a week or two Charlie and I drove to Florida. If you love mountains, the drive from Natchez to anywhere in Florida will almost do you in. All you can see is trees. And I love trees. I collect trees and books about trees. But you would have to experience it. It’s like “too many ruffles.”
We drove to our rendevous. If I had a map before me I could tell you exactly where. I’ll tell you later. It was south of the capitol of Florida- about 20 miles- in the pan handle. Such a beautiful place. Tiny baby deer came up in the yard and racoons were there. I love racoons, especially baby ones (I’ll tell you someday).
We met Elyn, Shari, Phalia (Remember Paris, TX and the PTA). How in the world did we all get to the Florida Pan handle?
This house was perfection except I bumped my head on the ceiling when I stood up in bed. There were tiny houses all over. Like a compound. A young man was there as caretaker. He made good bisquits from Bisquick! There was a gas stove on the front porch. Shari, Phalia, Elyn, Charlie and the young caretaker wanted to walk a mile to the ocean and beach and fish and I declined. Not my cup of tea to walk so far.
So I drove to the nearby town and bought groceries fior dinner and went back and cooked on the back porch. I cooked “comfort foods,” steak, gravy (Smashed potatoes, as Tim said, "Nothin better than smashed potatoes.”) salad and bisquits.
Home were the fishermen. Home from the hill. They came yelling. They told me that they never smelled any food better than that in their lives. They had come up starving and wanting to take me to eat somewhere. That was one of my best memories: To give my grownup kids comfort food!
But this trip is not over.
Charlie and I drove to key West. I drove. It makes me dizzy. Seven miles of bridges. There is nothing in this world when you are in any kind of work force, free lancing, than having another job to go to. We had “Hemmingway.” We had all expenses paid. Ramada Inn. “Those were the days my friend. We thought they’d never end.”
Hiring extras is an enviable job. Everyone loves you. I loved my job. I loved the people.
When you put out a call for extras you meet the most interesting people in town. The most alive, the most adventourous. The people who want to have fun. The people who are alive. It’s been the same kind of people from small towns in Texas to small towns in Michigan. I love these people.
Back to Key West.
Director was named James Cellan Jones. He was British. Cellan was and is pronounced Kethlan. We, Phalia & I remembered it because of my sister Ethlyn.
In a casting session he remarked on my Texas accent and I told him that he was the one who talked funny. Not me. I adored him.
But he lost the Hemmingway story to some Germans. Politics and money etc. The Germans were horrible except for one producer that I liked. I went to Michigan to do extras. Another story! Love,
Til later,
Elsie
contact Elsie: pyropool@earthlink.net
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Goldyn’s Shoes
Promise Goldyn was the fifth born. The third little girl. It was 1977. Big old crapped-out white frame two-storied house on a hill about three miles toward Lillian out county road 917 from Mansfield, Texas. Up a dirt road a piece from the lake and across the road from a big old barn where her older brother and sister had painted a sign that said:
BISICL REPARE
The afternoon before Goldyn was born, I had taken a Southwest flight to Midland where I was to spend the evenings of the week playing my guitar and singing my songs at a place called Cody Cattle Company. It was a fancy steak house in north Midland.
Midland was a town where there was negative unemployment. Oil was booming. Midland was in the middle of the Permian Basin. That’s the place along Interstate 20 where you think there’s a leak somewhere. The while place was leaking. Natural gas. A lot of people could afford a singer/songwriter with their steak and Lobster dinner. There were cul de sacs where each address had one number and every resident was a millionaire.
I was eating dinner at Cody’s and we were watching the World Series on the big screen when someone said there was a call for me. Barbara had started labor. I got someone to take me to the bus station and we snailed our way thru a lot of little towns I had never heard of toward Fort Worth. I probably could have gotten home sooner if I had hitch hiked. Rick Babb saw me walking as I was starting to do just that out of Fort Worth and we got back to the farm in time to join the celebration.
Cute, cute, cute. She was like a little pixie. A tan little cupid. And all the little details that we take for granted except in those first few moments when we are agog at the absurdity of it all. Toes? Yes. Fingers? Yes. But first of all, every time: “Is it a girl or a boy?”
The kids were all high on the moment and Barbara was happy. This wasn’t your everyday home birth. This little creature was filling a hole in our life that she could not have known about. And then again, she had gone thru everything we had been thru in the past three months. How could she not be affected, there inside of Barbara’s body? There inside where the anguish must have pressed on her. There inside where the tears welled up and spilled out until there were no more. There inside when Barbara had fallen to the ground that night when what she saw hit her like a fist to the jawbone.
She was already one of us. We could always see that in them. The kids wanted to call her Rainbow. She had come out purple and then turned red and then pink and then yellow and cream.
We named her Promise Goldyn because the rainbow is a promise that the world will never be destroyed by water again and because gold is not destroyed by water or fire. The “y” was for “Yes”. There was Wyn and Ra Byn and Embyr. Eagle Arrowbrook had had no “Y”, though one of his favorite words was, “Yowie!” That was how he had said, “Yes.”
***
We knew from the time we first put shoes on Goldyn that there was something strange with her and shoes. Goldyn would struggle to get her shoes and socks off long before she had words to explain why she hated them. We thought this was one of her little idiosyncrasies. Every new child seems to have something in their head sideways.
Wyn would never eat eggs. She’s thirty now and she still will not eat an egg. Ra Byn won’t eat meat. He still offers me milk made from soybeans and doesn’t remember that I’d rather drink the juice off of steamed spinach. Goldyn would not wear shoes. She said her socks felt funny.
***
Goldyn would take her shoes off when she got on the bus. Now she says she just took her shoes off so she could get her socks off. She says that she would put her shoes back on and wear them all day without socks. She says, on the way home from school, she would take her shoes off and put her socks back on and then put her shoes back on.
***
Goldyn’s feet problems didn’t register very high on the list of our concerns sometimes. We were trying to make a living singing and often it was buy equipment or buy food. We learned where the supermarket dumpsters were that offered a few morsels and made the rounds two or three nights a week. Let the kid go barefooted.
In the beginning there were weeks when we played only one gig. The Bass Buildings were on their way up down tow For Worth and on Friday afternoons all the hardhats would let it hang out at a place called Yesteryear across from the courthouse in Fort Worth. We were paid $100 plus tips. It was Barbara and Peggy and me. Barbara played the bass and Peggy the guitar. I played guitar mostly but stuck in a little fiddle and harmonica and banjo and mandolin. We weren’t much of a band but we could sure sing. We called ourselves Texas Water.
It got better. People who liked beautiful harmonies and beautiful voices told others and within a year or two we were filling the White Elephant Saloon out at the Stock Yards. Every seat reserved. Some weeks we played every night.
Goldyn first got up and sang with us at the White Elephant Saloon Beer Garden. She sang a song called TEDDY BEAR. She was precious. She was four. She learned about tips and was always ready to sing. One night a fan brought her a teddy bear. A forty-dollar teddy bear. One night we made enough in tips to buy all the children a new bicycle.
We moved into town and bought a house when the singing got to be real regular.
When Goldyn was eight she would stand with her toes drawn together. Little knotted feet. Her toes overlapped. Her feet pinched. Barbara took her to a doctor who referred her to a foot specialist and he prescribed custom orthotics, little plastic forms that went between her feet and the souls of her shoes. The doctor said they would help hold your feet in a neutral position. He said she had Hallux Hammertoe. The foot doctor told her that she would need surgery if she were going to escape the chronic pain. He told Barbara that it would be best to wait for the surgery until her bones had reached their full size.
Goldyn got her orthotics and Barbara would buy new ones every two or three years at $400 a pop. We discussed the possibility of finding a way to pay for the surgery to correct Goldyn’s problem. Her big toes, both of them, bent back in on the rest of her toes and that big joint beginning at the big toe stuck way out. The foot doctor explained that he needed to take a wedge of bone out of the bones on either side of that joint.
***
Texas Water played a place called THE RIG for about six months in the winter of 1983 and into 1984. One night we got a napkin with a request written on it. “PLEASE LET LINDA SING A SONG?” We invited Linda up on stage and she sang Silver Threads and Golden Needles. The girls sang harmony. She sounded great and her friends were thrilled. The next day Linda Scott called me from work and said I should get my boots and hat on and grab my fiddle and come audition for a part in a movie. She was calling from CELEBRITY TALENT in Dallas.
I went to the library and looked thru a couple of books on acting for film. Two things impressed me. One was: Act naturally. The other I have forgotten now.
That afternoon I read for Rody Kent and she said I should talk to David. She said I was very natural. Soon after that she put me in the choir that really sang the hymns in Places In The Heart. We were not on screen.
***
CELEBRITY had been a caldron. I started to say cesspool, but I didn’t come to think of it that way until I had been there for a while. Things happened at CELEBRITY. There was probably no more bullshit there than there was at any other… No! I believe there was more bullshit at CELIBRITY than at any other agency in Dallas at the time.
It was a perpetual pep rally. Head-in-the-clouds innocents, greedy, stupid, vain, no-talent posers and some real talent that had been waiting for an open door in Dallas, flocked into the welcoming arms of CELEBRITY. That meant into the arms of David and his mother, Mary Jo, for the most part. Nobody was too bad to be offered acting lessons and a chance to do extra work that could lead to “upgrades” if they would just get their contact sheet of pictures to David and let him pick the magic shot and sign up for some lessons.
It was a glorious ride for the kid from Preston, Oklahoma: David Payne. It was his chance to “help” everybody who walked thru the door while making a name for himself and, hopefully, a lot of money. Walt, David’s dad had been a shoe salesman and he was the “financial advisor”. It was a big excited family.
One day I got a call from CERLEBRITY. Because I was over forty I was especially valuable to CELEBRITY. I was invited to an over-forty get together.
I signed up for beginning acting with Melody Brooke. One half hour doing some kind of meditation and another half doing exercises. When I got home after the first night of lessons I told Peggy, “I can do this.”
***
Right off I was cast as the chicken wrangler in a movie called BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE. I wanted that title on my resume. What resume? One day I called to ask what day I was scheduled to shoot. I was told that David had called and insisted on so much money that they had decided to use someone else. That didn’t make sense to me. That would have been a credit for someone who had no movie credits. That would have been a real beginning of a resume. Why had David done that? He didn’t ask me about it. He had just cost me a job and himself a commission. That was the spring of 1984.
About a month later, it was a Sunday afternoon, I got a call. A director from The Netherlands was auditioning John Wayne types for a roll to be shot in west Texas. I wasn’t a John Wayne type but David called me in and I got to read for George Sluizer. Nobody knew anything about George Sluizer.
I read a scene with George and we had fun. I didn’t read for the lead part but I read for the screenwriter character and I thought that was cool because I am a writer.
The next day I got a call to read with a girl at the Stonley P. George handed me the script and asked me to read a scene with the action between the lead, Danny McMann, and a girl named Myrna Greenbaum. That was fun too. David was there with a good-looking brunette he wanted George to take a look at. George spoke to her for a moment and as we left told me he would never cast her. “She doesn’t listen.”
Days passed and I heard nothing. Finally I got a call from George, personally. He told me that David was insisting to make a deal with him and until they could make a deal David would not involve me. David was doing what he had done with BLOODSUCKERS: losing me a job. I had one acting credit to my name: I played a bad guy in a CRIMESTOPPER piece on Channel 5. I didn’t think of that as giving me a lot of leverage.
George found my phone number somehow and called me personally because he saw “something” in me that sparked him.
Later I learned that George was willing to offer me $8000 for doing the part at that time and if David had brought me in we would have been able to make a deal that would have been acceptable to all. David would have gotten to deal with George and I would have gotten the part.
So George called me at home and made an appointment to read with another lady for a screen test. We met at an apartment over on Inwood right off of Lemmon and we taped a scene. Later, George called and said he had a problem:I had lost the freshness he had liked from the start. Oops. He needed to determine why things had changed and decide if the problem was fixable.
I invited George to come and see Peggy and me sing that night with Will Barnes at the Texas Tea House. During a break we talked. He asked my where the twinkle had gone. I told him that I had decided I had better get serious about the part if I was going to get cast. He told me that the opposite was true. The movie was a very heavy piece and that my character had to be played lightly for it to work. I said, “Cool.” We taped again and, indeed, it was cool.
Meanwhile David is out of the loop. My concern is getting the job. Talk about starting a resume! The lead roll in a feature! Four months earlier I hadn’t even dreamed of acting in movies. I would have paid to do the part.
Besides, this guy, George, was one of the most intense, interesting, intelligent, dynamic people I had ever met. He seemed to see more in me than someone to sell lessons and head shots to. He seemed confident that I could carry his film.
That was scary. That was exciting. To collaborate with a man like George Sluizer: what a thought.
So David is pissed. He won’t have anything to do with this deal. He’s not going to get any money. 15% of nothing is nothing, you know.
At this point I didn’t know that George was willing to offer me $8000 up front to play the roll. So, I made a deal with George to get four points on the film
Eventually I got an additional four points because after filming was completed, George asked me to write the music. What he said was, “I would like to continue our collaboration.”
So I got a trip to Amsterdam in 1984 to work with George and the editor on the music and I got another trip to The Netherlands in 1985 to attend the debut of Red Desert Penitentiary at The Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. George presented me for publicity pictures and interviews with the European press. Red Desert Penitentiary showed at a few film festivals. Ones I remember were Rotterdam and Montreal and Los Angeles. It had it’s American debut in Sweetwater, the town we worked out of while we were shooting it, and then it showed in Abilene because a lot of the talent was from there and we had shot some scenes there. One afternoon there was a showing at the Inwood in Dallas.
There is a film critic in New York who calls himself the Phantom and he has a little movie newsletter in which he asked, “Whatever happened to that fine little film called Red Desert Penitentiary?” He added that he hoped it would be reissued with liner notes by someone who had actually seen the film. He thought it was a good film. He thought it deserved a chance.
***
So I go off to the desert to work for six weeks in front of Toni Kuhn, an award-winning Swiss-German camera man and an international crew and don’t have to pay a cent. I get fed. I get a room in a nice hotel and every day I learn more about acting, really acting in front of a real camera. Film making. The days I’m not acting I’m working as a grip or whatever is needed. The learning curve points to the sky.
Peggy would bring the kids out on Saturday nights after she got finished playing in Dallas and they would hang around the motel and watch the movie making.
When we had finished shooting the movie I return home filled with excitement and sure that the experience and the credit would serve me and David well. I called David and he said he wanted to see me. At the appointed time I was seated across the desk from David. He says, “You don’t take direction. You’re fired.”
Bewildered, I take my sparse credentials to KD Studios and they offer to let me join their extra pool. I don’t get to talk to KD. I go to several agents and they don’t need someone like me.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t sure that I had actually done any acting out there in the desert. I had just been myself doing what I was told. I had effected nothing. I hadn’t changed my voice. I had warn my own clothes. I had never put on any makeup and I had never combed my hair. Was that acting? Do you have to be unrecognizable to be acting?
So, I auditioned for a play. It was a two-man play and after I auditioned I was asked which part I wanted. There was a cruel guy and a cripple guy the cruel guy beat up on. I chose to play the slow-witted cripple. A lady came from the paper and wrote that I was “outstanding as John.” She didn’t know that I was actually acting with broken ribs because the guy I was paired with sometimes lost track of the line between acting and whatever else we do.
We took a scene from the play to the NOON PREVIEW in Dallas one afternoon and I was rushed by agents after I got my real clothes back on. Maybe I could act.
The next week I interviewed with several agents. I chose Tony Cobb. “She listened.” Tony worked at an agency called Montage. Before long Tony tells me she is moving to the new and improved DAVID PAYNE AGENCY. I wish her the best.
I attend classes at Adam Roark’s school and one day Lou Diamond Phillips, one of Adam’s teachers watches a playback and turns to me and says, “I can’t see it when you are acting but it is there on the tape.”
***
Years later, David Payne called to say that there would be a reunion of CELEBRITY TALENT at the Bennigan’s out on Restaurant Row in Dallas. It wasn’t exactly the sort of affair I would skip work to attend but I had nothing that night. I called Baskin Newman and we decided to meet there and see what we could see.
So, here I am sitting at Bennigan’s with Baskin and the memories are getting all stirred up. All those X-hopeful stars telling what they have been up to. David bragging in the corner with a couple of hunks about all the girls they had had. In common.
As I left, David told me he wanted to talk with me so the next day I picked him up in Dallas and we drove around for a long time. I brought him over here to the house. Peggy made it clear that kissing up to David Payne was the last thing she thought I would do.
David was down. He had pretty much been run out of Dallas and then, he had been pretty much run out of Tulsa. He had been badly shaken when faced the real prospect of going off to prison. David was living on what was left of the family farm with his two Eskimo dogs in his grandma’s old frame house, drinking Doctor Pepper and smoking a cigarette for breakfast and breathing dog hair all day. He umpired girls high school soft ball games for gas money.
David told me he had learned a lot since we had last talked. He hoped our friendship would continue. He had a screenplay idea. He told me his idea and I packed up my 286 PC with a monitor and printer and said, “Take it for six months and write your screenplay.”
David called me one night and told me the computer was broke. I drove up to Preston. I couldn’t fix the computer so we talked. David told me his dream and we remembered some of his nightmares. He told me he was going to L.A. He was going to make his fortune as an agent or a manager. It was his destiny. I asked how he was going to buy gas for the trip and then get started. He said he had saved enough for gas. I said, “Sell me some stuff.”
The next morning we took a little tour of his shed and his mother’s garage. David showed me stuff he was willing to part with: his piano, a monitor, his couch, a refrigerator, a tripod or two , an old cassette machine and some odds and ends. I went to the bank in Preston and got a cash advance.
When I got the stuff home, Peggy threw the couch away. Too much dog hair. The refrigerator didn’t work. Peggy asked me why I would haul crap like that three hundred miles.
But David and I weren’t finished. I loaded up my camera and a tripod and a black cloth for a backdrop and some lights and a pile of clothes and headed back to Oklahoma. If David was going to L.A. to become a famous agent or manager he was going to need some talent to represent and he was going to need a head shot of that talent. He could start with me. Besides, there was something I wanted David to understand. I could be directed. Not bullied. But I could be directed. He got the shot he wanted and the next morning I went home.
I had the film developed and sent David a contact sheet and he made his choice and I sent him some pictures and we went on about our lives.
***
Meanwhile, I go to pyro camp and get my Texas Special Effects license so I can do pyro on shows like TOMMY and CATS. I get a job as sound man on a movie called STRIKING POINT in Dallas and begin working as a sound man on feature after feature. I get together with family and friends and shoot a black and white 16mm feature in which I share the lead with a vulture named Edgar. Bret MacCormick starts casting me in his movies and I write music for another Glen Coburn movie.
I work as a stage hand to make a living and I buy an old house down the street that they were about to bull doze because it caught on fire and I begin to fix it up. George Sluizer makes another movie in Holland and France called Spoorlos, known as “the original Vanishing.” It gets nominated as BEST FOREIGN FILM by the Academy. That leads to George redoing it in English with American actors. George uses one of my songs from RED DESERT PENITENTIARY in the American version and I get a check. $8000. Plus quarterly checks that range from $30 to $800.
And then one day I was up on the cat walk of the Tarrant County Convention Center Arena wrestling with this spot light and I felt this bee buzzing in my pocket. My pager. When the Baptists took a break for dinner I went to a phone and dialed an 818 number that I didn’t recognize. David answered and said, “I have one question for you, and you better have the right answer.” I thought, “Oh, shit. Someone has told him what I said to George about him still being pretty much the same David and he’s going to fire me. Again.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you S.A.G.?”
I said, “No.”
“Wrong answer.”
He told me he had met Sheri and she had looked at my picture and suggested that I might be right for a movie she was casting. But it was a union film.
I don’t need to tell you the rest of that story. Just to note that I grossed over $15,000 and that made me eligible for medical coverage for all my children. And that was the year Goldyn’s feet reached their full size and that was the year that she got her surgery. Over $20,000 in bills all paid by the insurance I had because Sheri cast me in WILD BILL.
(I would be glad to tell you what a harvest that month was but it will have to be in another piece.)
I called this piece Goldyn’s shoes. You know what is so special about Goldyn’s shoes? Nothing. That’s what’s so special. She doesn’t need special shoes or special orthotics or special socks. Now what’s special is Goldyn’s feet.
P.S. Goldyn will graduate from Southwestern next spring with double majors. One in biological Sciences and another in Kinesiology. Kinesiology is the study of the performance of the human body.
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