Dec. 6, 2000

The Life-Span of Creativity

       I’m sitting here listening to Paul Simon’s great album “Graceland” for the eight-millionth time and it’s still as good as it ever was.  I purchased his new CD, “You’re the One,” yesterday and it sucks.  Not only is it the worst album of his long career, it’s just plain old bad, and I didn’t think he was capable of such a thing.  Well, not only is Paul Simon capable of such a thing, so is everybody else.  The difference between Paul Simon and most everybody else is that he did as much great work as he did.  That great work will stop is inevitable; that it ever begins is the giant hurtle.
       Age will ultimately extinguish creativity, generally a long time before physical incapacity or

Alfred Hitchcock - young	Alfred Hitchcock - old

death.  Some guys are over-the-hill when they’re twenty-five years old, like Orson Welles.  Some guys keep making quality product into their seventies, like Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler.  Rarely does anyone do anything of any value once they’re in the eighties.  Apparently, at that age just staying alive is a big enough job.
       But something makes certain people need to create, as opposed to merely procreate.  Of the six billion plus people on the planet right now, most will live out their lives without ever creating anything acknowledged as new or unique or interesting.  Them’s just the breaks.
       Perhaps creativity is simply a manifestation of a very strong sense of self-expression -- I did this!  Me!  Nobody else!  Or perhaps it’s another form of curiosity -- What if there was one of these?  Or maybe it’s just one more meaningless enterprise to amuse ourselves during our allotted life spans and really nothing means anything.
       Well, probably nothing means anything, but who wants to deal with that shit too often?  So we arbitrarily choose things that do matter to us: I like movies, my buddy likes the James Bond books, my Dad likes golf.  La!  What’s the difference?  There isn’t any.
       For some reason the films of William Wyler or Alfred Hitchcock seem more significant to me than the adventures of James Bond or the career of Lee Trevino, although the life of golfer Ben Hogan made a pretty good film, called “Follow the Sun.”
       But should you decide to create stuff, the chances are you won’t be able to keep it up for any length of time, and should you even have the ability to keep it up for a long time, it probably won’t be very good after a point.
       Let’s use Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler’s careers as the longest possible examples of sustained commercial creativity in the film industry.  Hitchcock’s first hit film was in 1926, “The

William Wyler 1926	William Wyler 1968

Lodger,” and his last hit was in 1972, “Frenzy,” which is 46 years of making commercial and critical hit films.  Wyler’s first hit film was in 1929 with “Hell’s Heroes” (after five years of directing silent westerns) and his last hit film was in 1968 with “Funny Girl,” which is 39 years.  Both men made one film after their last hit which completely dropped dead.
       The shortest important film career is probably still that of Jean Vigo, who made the classic film “Zero For Conduct” in 1933 and the classic film “L’Atalante” in 1934 and died at the age of 29 just as the latter film premiered.
       Bummer.
       Then there’s also Steve Gordon who wrote and directed the big hit film “Arthur,” then promptly dropped dead right after the film was released in 1981.
       It’s not as though Jean Vigo or Steve Gordon’s creativity inexplicably stopped, their lives stopped, and that fate lurks around every corner for everyone.
       But what about Francis Ford Coppola?  His career has been plaguing me for most of my adult life.  He was considered the film wunderkind in the 1960s, although none of his films from the 60s are very good.  Coppola was, however, the hottest, most creative filmmaker of the 1970s, which was a particularly good period of filmmaking.  In 1970 he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Patton,” (with Edmund H. North), in 1972 he directed and co-wrote the Best Picture, “The Godfather,” and in 1974 he wrote and directed both the Best Picture, “The Godfather, Part 2,” but also had another film nominated for Best Picture, “The Conversation.”  Then Mr. Coppola finished off the decade with “Apocalypse Now” in 1979.  That’s a pretty damn impressive run of films.
       In my humble opinion, Francis Coppola hasn’t made one good film in the following 20 years, although he’s certainly made quite a few films.  The best of the bunch is probably “Peggy Sue Got married” and that was certainly no cinematic milestone.
       So what happened to him?  Was it too much cocaine in the Philippine jungles?  Too much sustained stress?  Perhaps it was finally having too much money and success?  Does it matter?  I don’t think so.  His creative period ended for whatever reasons and it hasn’t come back.  Nor should we expect that it ever will.
       When creativity ends, it never returns.  It’s either sustained or it promptly dies, like a very delicate (carnivorous) flower.  But when it’s dead it’s dead.
       Hope does spring eternal, but it’s really a waste of time regarding burnt-out artists.  Creativity doesn’t return once it’s departed.  You simply have to be thankful that you ever had it to start with.
       What about one-hit wonders?  Every time I hear “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum or “Nah Nah, Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam, I can only think, they sure sound like they

Duke Ellington - young	Duke Ellington - old

know what they’re doing, why couldn’t they do it again?
       Duke Ellington wrote and recorded sharp, intelligent, interesting music from the 1920s through the 1970s, with the same guys in his band for most of that time.  Admittedly, there were stretches of his career when he wasn’t very popular, but he weathered his way through them.  The Duke’s biggest selling album, “Ellington at Newport,” came out in 1956, 25 years into his career and it swings.
       Carlos Santana’s biggest-selling record, “Supernatural,” came 30 years into his career.  But neither Ellington nor Santana had ever stopped.  They just kept on making music their own way and the audience came and went and came and went.
       Seventy doesn’t seem all that old anymore, but there are damn few working seventy-year old filmmakers.  Sidney Pollack, Sidney Lumet, and Norman Jewison, and none of those guys has made a good film in years.  Their films are all professionally made and generally OK, just like Coppola’s, but they’re just not all that good.
       Excuse me for being nasty for a second, but I can’t help myself.  Old film directors sometimes make the dumbest decisions, such as Sidney Lumet’s 1997 film, “Night Falls on Manhattan.”  The lead character is a tough New York kid of Irish ancestry, so, obviously, Andy Garcia immediately comes to mind.  As though 50- to 60-year old New York actors were difficult to find, the fine British actor Ian Holm is cast as Garcia’s father, and though there are many, many parts Holm has played convincingly, sadly, he cannot sound like a New Yorker among New Yorkers.  In the part of the talk-talking, beautiful, female New York lawyer . . . Lena Olin!  Sidney Lumet is the same guy who cast Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Connery as three generations of the same family.
       What about writers?  Novelists, seemingly yes, but not screenwriters.  Probably the only working seventy-year old screenwriter is William Goldman.  There are probably damn few working screenwriters in their sixties.  This to me seems like the biggest error the film business continues to make.  Screenwriting is so hard and so elusive that anyone that has ever displayed the ability ought to be courted and showered with money until their dying days.  Of course, I think I’m a good screenwriter and nobody gives a shit about me, so you don’t even have to be old to be unwanted.
       There have been a few playwrights, novelists, composers and conductors that kept it up until they were old, but not many.  George Bernard Shaw and Groucho Marx both still had a few sharp barbs left in them in their 80s, just as Aurturo Toscanini and Herbert Von Karajan were still kicking orchestras’ asses in their 90s.  But we’re down to counting on fingers and toes at this point.  My late grandmother, Olga, from Budapest, had some particularly snotty comments to make in her 96th year.
       The man whose career I am spiritually attempting to emulate is John Cassavettes -- who by financing his own movies got to make exactly the movies he wanted to make -- and he worked steadily right up to his death at age 59.  Well, that’s kind of frightening, and I don’t even work all that steadily.  That would give me 17 more years, but, of course, there’s no assurance I’ll even get that (having seen Woody Allen’s “Love & Death” again recently, I’m thinking, “Wheat! Fields of wheat!”).  At this point I would be hard-pressed to write and direct as many films as did John Cassavettes, forgetting all the films he appeared in.
       But I’m going to give it the old college try, gosh darn it!
       I can hardly believe that my really creative period began when I made my first feature sixteen years ago -- I feel like I could’ve easily made that movie four years earlier if I had the money -- so does that mean my creative period actually started 20 years ago?  I’d like to believe that my creative period didn’t really kick in until I made “Running Time” five years ago.  Everything before that was prelude, like the 1960s for Coppola, when he made “Dementia 13” and “You’re a Big Boy Now.”
       But if I don’t keep running with it, whatever the hell it may be, it will surely wither, dry up and blow away.  I know that because I am a student of history.  Very few people escape the precedents of history.  Sure, there was a Mohandas Gandhi, but there was only one.  For the most part we are all buried far too deep and too quickly in our own mundane circumstances to ever become another Gandhi or Alexander or Mozart.  By the time we figure out what we want to do, let alone how to do it, we’ve already pissed away a great deal of our allotted years.  Basically, we all just didn’t get started early enough (and I got started damn early).
       The average American male lives 75 years (whereas the average American female lives 80), so 37½ to 40 is legitimately the middle of life, if all goes well.  And precedents prove 70 is an absolute creative dead-end (Hitchcock was 73 when he did “Frenzy” and Wyler was 66 when he did “Funny Girl”).  In the film business, where youth is idiotically venerated, 60 is old!  Realistically, TV and movie writers rarely get past 50.
       So here I am 42 years old.  I got to Hollywood when I was 18, sneezed, and wham! it’s 24 years later.  How the hell did that happen?  I’ve got no wife, no kids, no house, but at least I have three feature films that no one gives a rat’s ass about, and a fourth coming out soon.
       And the will and perspective to keep going.
       Knock on wood.