Surviving Our Decisions in Life

There is a lot going on right now. Race relations in America are strained, most notoriously between the Black community and police. There is a lot being discussed on that topic and I needed a break from it. I will just say until we fix the systemic issues involved, simply fixing racism won't fix this issue.

Black Lives Matter. Police Lives Matter. Most Blacks are good people, most police are good people. Some of what is going on has to do with guns, which is another issue. Cops are fearful as well as some of them being racist. Some of the police departments are oriented toward negative expectations about their Black community. Some Black communities are oriented toward damaging themselves.

As I said there is a lot being discussed elsewhere, and a lot that should be discussed on this.

However for this week's' blog I'm taking a different, albeit a somewhat relevant direction....

I admit it. I've made mistakes in life. We all have. Some of us just recognize it more than others. Or at all.

I've thought I was doing the right thing in the past, or that I was doing what seemed reasonable, only to find much later that I had over time gained the wisdom to see reality more clearly with the distance I had gained from those times and events. I always reflect on things.

I reflect on them even in the moment, as they are happening, considering them through various layers of meanings, and perspectives in real time. What some friends and family have called, "overthinking". At times it is a great benefit, at times a great detriment.

Yet, no one can see everything. And we all have our filters. We all are defective. We all are capable of great harm, as well as great good. Those who do not recognize that are called foolish, if not stupid. Those who see it and revel in their great good, who seek it out at all costs are called saints. While those enraptured by their capacity for great harm, who seek it and pleasure in it are called evil.

I've been married, let's say, three and a half times. I count that one as half as we hadn't actually gotten legally married but were together longer than what common law marriage is usually considered to be, though we do not have that in Washington state. But I felt she deserved that acknowledgement for our time together, for any burden I placed on her, for the great times we shared. To be fair to myself, she was at time a burden too, she had her own demons.

I don't know how she feels about all that. Because she appears to not want to talk to me anymore. Not since our last phone call in about 1988 and in some ways, I don't blame her. Sometimes it's best to move on, to leave the past in the past. Still as I pointed out, I like to reflect and part of that is to reconnect, review and put my understanding of myself, who I have been, in proper perspective.

I want to think I'm a good or even great person, but I've fallen down on that after reflecting with others on their shared memories with me. The flip side of that coin however is that I have also discovered after years of feeling bad about something in the past, that others saw my now ancient actions as having been far above expected behavior, and greatly appreciated. You just never know.

I prefer reality, both for myself and others. I want people to have a realistic view of what actually happened in the past. I want to be seen for my actions, either good or bad, accurately. Yet, sometimes, you cannot achieve that closure. And that, can be painful. So I've learned to let it go when that happens.

Sometimes it's just not worth the damage you get in seeking closure. Sometimes it is, and yet you will never find it for any variety of reasons. Sometimes that reason is another person's misperception of what happened. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do about that and you know, they will, you will, both die one day with that having never been rectified.

So when I think poorly of someone's actions in my past I try to keep that in mind. Maybe things weren't as I had perceived them, or how I remember them. Perhaps if we talked now I would discover what damage they did to me, was damage I had done to myself. Were things as I believed them to be, as I remember them? Certainly not always as I discovered in researching for a film I have written. It's now been at one production company, oddly enough, out of London. A very American mob film being reviewed by a very British film studio.

In 1974 I was eighteen. The screenplay about it is called Teenage Bodyguard. I came up with a more poetic title with, Slipping The Enterprise. The executive producer of the film studio said it reminded him of Ryan Gosling's film, A Place Beyond the Pine. I see it in two formats, as a biopic, what actually happened, enhanced to be more entertaining but sticking mostly to the truth of what happened, or a based on type of film where we could cut loose and just shoot for entertainment.

The story goes that I had spent a week with a strip club waitress back in 1974. A friend asked me to give a woman a ride who had been staying with him. When I got her to her new residence, she asked me to stay with her until she could leave town at the end of the week. IF I had a gun. Oddly enough, I did. And she could have made a worse choice in asking me. The local Tacoma mob back then called themselves, The Enterprise. They thought she had witnessed a murder. A murder that she believed they had committed but public records, even today seem to indicate it was a random killing by an anonymous killer.

During my research I came to discover that the "friend" I helped out in giving her a ride, was actually setting me up in a way. He was eliminating a threat to his safety by getting rid of the woman, and putting that threat squarely on my shoulders, probably rationalizing that wasn't the case and that I would drop her off somewhere (he didn't want to know, what was odd and the first warning sign), and that would be the end of it.

I had gone through decades of my life thinking we were friends and finally, over thirty years later came to discover he may have been putting my head on a chopping block. Life, isn't always how we think it is. Obviously.

I'm single now, unmarried since 2002. Single again since 2010 after a few girlfriends. Single to spend my spare time on writing and building a new career in order to leave an old one.

I had originally married the first time at twenty. Proud that I hadn't gotten married in my teens like some of my friends. After that marriage failed, I avoided marriage for some years. I was devastated that I had broken a vow. "My word is my bond", was a favorite saying of mine. In divorcing, I had broken my most powerful bond to date. I was proud many years later, of not having quickly jumped back into another potential mistake as so many do. See, I never wanted to break another vow.

After some years I did marry again. It was kind of against my better desires and I was pretty much pushed into it. Or pulled into it, depending on how you view it. Partially because I thought I owned who became my son's mother, for making me smile again. Partially because the woman from the half of a marriage had told me one day, long after we split up:

"Do something for me. The next girl who wants to marry you? If she wants to get married, just marry her. OK?" That kept resonating in my head for years. I had made her life miserable in not wanting to marry again. I told her we could end up together for the rest of our lives, I just don't want to marry again. But she never understood. We were both raised Catholic, but I was further down that road of casting off that desert religion for a more sane way of viewing life.

So I married again. I married out of obligation. Even though I knew it wasn't a good match for me. However in considering those who I had thought were a good match, they hadn't been either. So I thought if I tried someone I didn't think would be right for me, maybe I could get around making yet another mistake.

Of course, that one didn't work out either. Obviously. As a friend later said, "So you went from making decisions, to making no decision, or worse. Choosing what you thought was wrong. And you thought that was a good idea?"

Dumb and dumberer.

The final time I married (so far anyway, as I guess I'm always looking for my next ex-wife....), I thought I had I had found the sweetest young lady I could ever have imagined. It was 1995. My son was five and rife with ADHD. He was difficult to parent and I desperately needed a partner in raising him.

Life was good for a few years. Then things changed as they so often do. Life as usual got in the way of romance, killing it.

In the end, or even long before that, she wasn't any longer so sweet. In fact she got rather nasty, and then downright angry. I had thought just in keeping her happy, I'd have a handle on things. But some people don't want to be happy. Their expectations are too high and no one can live up to their expectations. I used to be like that in my twenties. I probably still have some of that lurking within me in a cancerous state, waiting to leap out at all the wrong moments. But I sincerely hope not.

For years I looked back over these past relationships, consoling myself in believing that those women did better after having known me. Now with many years distance from those relationships, with having gained more wisdom, with the clarity that comes from being single for a long time, and with actually seeing how their lives have worked out for them, I can see things perhaps more as they are in reality.

Were their lives all the better, or the worse, in having known me? Or were they just as they are for people in life? We experience, triumph or fail, heal our wounds, hopefully become the stronger for it and move on knowing our lives are richer for it all. For the pain, for the love, for the confusion and the frustration.

I made some decisions correctly to be sure, with the information I had available to me at the time. With my limited wisdom. I had the intent to do good, to be a good person. But there were things I simply hadn't known at the time. Things I couldn't (yet) see, no matter how hard I tried.

It all added up in the end to who I was at the time. Had I meant well? Yes. But I was also protecting myself. I was living the life but simply hadn't known everything. Or enough of everything, anyway. But that is how life is for all of us. Isn't it?

I didn't know what charisma was about, how it worked, or that with at least some people, I had it for them and in dealing with them. I should have known it though. I should have seen it. My siblings have it. Yet my own damaged self-esteem wouldn't let me see that I too, must have it.

It wasn't until I was about thirty that I experienced someone leaving me in a serious long term romantic relationship. I always thought that was a good thing. Until it happened. Then reality rushed up and kicked me in the face. I thought, I must be worth staying with if women didn't leave me. Sure I'd had short relationships, one night stands even, but I was always the one to break it off or leave (or so I viewed it up until that time).

Finally one day, as an adult in a long term, live-in relationship, I was left. I found that in never having had the experience of being dumped, I didn't have the tools I needed to deal with it. And in this case I was dumped hard (I discovered she was having an affair). I lacked the experience to know how to handle it. How to handle it in a non self-destructive way, that is.

I spent the next year and a half trying to literally party myself to death. To numb the pain, to kill the bad feelings, the destroyed self-esteem, to just end things. It wasn't an outward expression I could recognize so much as it was an inward desire, striving to get out. I was partying hard like a pro, not partying destructively like a fool.

And yet it nearly did kill me. Multiple times I almost succeeded though I never made it to a hospital. It truly was the lowest period in my life.

And yet, I'm still here.

I've learned a few things along the way. My second legal marriage ended in a similar way. A woman leaving me for another, just as the previous time. Even though she knew my story. Even though I had asked her to just leave me if she wanted out, not to abuse me by having an affair. Because the last time that happened, it almost killed me. But she used that information as a tool to hurt me. I had inadvertently given her ammunition, and she used it.

That speaks to who she was at that time as a person, more than what it says about me. We had a child together, I was working hard, trying to make it in life, trying to support a family and love them. I tried to be a good father and husband. But the women I've been with this last half of my life, wanted a good husband and father, in that order. And that too says much more about them, than me.

In having gone through that once already, and in not really wanting to have had a second marriage anyway, the second time around I found that I much more easily survived it. I realized at some point that I had actually lucked out of that marriage. I finally had a child but not the family I had always wanted. I had made poor choices, yet again. Or perhaps, good choices but for the wrong reasons.

Either way, life tosses you curve balls. Things come out of left field that you never expect. Things you may not have the ability or the life experience to properly ascertain and react to.

Here's the thing.....

If we try hard, if we pay attention, if we consider what is important, not always just about ourselves as the primary factor, we can survive and then later reflect on it all, knowing that we did our best.

Even if we failed.

It is much like it is in parenting. We all make mistakes. None of us knows what is right to do all the time. Each child, each person is different. There really are no cut and dried answers for all situations. But especially with children. If you protect them and most importantly if you simply love them, they will forgive many of your mistakes in their life and they will love you back. They will grow up to be good people. You will have succeeded in doing your job. Just help them to be the best person they can be, and not just what you want them to be. It's about them after all, not you.

They have to find their way too. It is your job to help them in that pursuit. It is that way with those in a romantic relationship with you too, or for that matter with any person in your life. Especially with those you most love and cherish.

So it is with so much of life.

If you are the good person others know you as, if others know you as a good person and you know you try to be the best person you can be, then life, people, children, will forgive your mistakes. Even your shallow actions. Still, they will love you back and you can go on knowing that you mean well, that you do well, that you have a way of viewing life that is productive. Not just for you or yours or just for your community, or only for your beliefs or your God however you define that concept.

But for Life in general. For all of us. And so in the end and most importantly, for you. And then, you can feel good about it, without regret.

Live. Love. Learn. Repeat.

Biopic Not Documentary: Benghazi, 13 Hours, Teenage Bodyguard

I've been looking for something to blog about that is relative to my writing and art. Many of us have of late been immersed in the insanity that is national politics and international issues. I found one that was born from politics and delves directly into those things, screenwriting and film production in general.

The web site CrooksAndLiars.com recently had an article about the film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016).

In that article they claim:

"The Benghazi movie 13 Hours was supposed to help bring Hillary Clinton down, but that mission's not accomplished."

Where did they get the idea that it had anything to do with politics and not just a vehicle for talent, and to make money for a studio? Salon had an article on just that topic. Yes, it is a project filled with considerations, politically speaking. Mostly from the right wing trying to make something out of nothing. When it has been shown time and again and with each new incarnation of what was supposed to have happened, that it was simply a bad situation turned worse?

"The 2012 Benghazi attack took place on the evening of September 11, 2012, when Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith.Stevens was the first U.S. Ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. The attack has also been referred to as the Battle of Benghazi." - Wikipedia

I personally find it sickening that the right has pursued this tragedy for political purposes. Just as they have done so many others disgusting things going back to President Bill Clinton related to a personal marital issue. Something they only pursued in order to embarrass a sitting Democratic president, to push him basically into entrapment through yet another in a never ending series of fishing expeditions in order to find anything they could then pursue.

The right knows no decency in politics.

From what I have been able to gather it is typical that the right would claim Benghazi was the fault of the left, of Hillary and Obama, of the Obama administration in general. However, so much of the blame actually falls on the Republican party for previously cutting funds too much for these consulates worldwide that previous year. But we shouldn't talk about THAT now, should we?

It's repeatably been shown that all the disingenuous and disinformation from the right has no bearing in reality for what actually happened. But it served its purpose because even today it is a rallying cry among many conservatives about how the democrats are scum. Like thy bully in the schoolyard, starting a fight and then pointing at the victim and crying that they started it. It's a juvenile but effective tactic.

I'm unsure of the purpose (sort of) of that web site in decrying the film as a political statement rather than what it is, a film for entertainment to explore the types of things that happen in a situation such as this. It is not however some kind of legal document, documentary or even docudrama to explain what had happened. Those in the right who try to push it as such, are just being dull and base as usual.

Enough of politics here though. It's not why I'm writing this.

13 Hours is just a film. From what the accounts are of it so far, a pretty good film, regardless of how much money it has made. I watched it and found it a pretty good film. The truth behind it really isn't the point.

How does a screenplay get made for a film like this?

This is why I chose to blog about this film. I have myself written and am currently rewriting my own film biopic (biographical picture, first use according to Websters' is 1951 probably from Billboard industry magazine). MacMillan defines it as: "a movie based on the events of someone’s life."

I had always thought it was bi-opic ("opic" for ocular, visual, "bi" for biographical) but I think bio-pic makes more sense. Oxford defined it as: "1950s: blend of biographical (see biography) and pic." So either way.

Point being, a biopic is a film for entertainment based on real events and people. But not adhering 100% to reality and again, films are made to make money.

It is after all the, Film Industry. Not the Film Historical Society.

My friend and I back in 1974

The title of my biopic is Teenage Bodyguard. It is also known as, Slipping The Enterprise. In the photo above I'm standing in front of my parent's car. My friend home on leave from the Army, the rifle in the in front of me and the shoulder holster and .357 magnum aree all are in the screenplay.

It is about a week out of my young life at eighteen in 1974. A week with me against the Tacoma mob who called themselves, "The Enterprise", while I was with one of their strip club waitresses, a frightened "murder witness".

It seems they wanted to "talk" to her. She however wanted to get the hell out of town, For myself, she had convinced me that I just wanted to see her safe. It was an interesting week. This mob had law enforcement up to the Sheriff and Prosecuting Attorney in their pocket. It was later that decade when many of them were indicted, found guilty and sentenced to prison in a well publicized trial.

I have mentioned this story and screenplay before but I don't think I've gone into detail about how one takes history, what actually happened, and turns it into an entertainment film for audiences. Many events films have been made from would be pretty boring in a theater and would best be left for the History Channel. But even History Channel realizes the need for entertainment in their history shows if they want to survive as a network.

To make a biopic interesting there has got to be artistic licence involved.

You have to skew things a little or a lot to make a film entertaining, to entice and thrill. Otherwise it's just boring. True, some documentaries have been very entertaining. It's all about the desire and orientation of the project from the beginning. In a case like a film such as 13 Hours, or American Sniper for that matter, the purpose was to make a film for entertainment, a drama with action, essentially. As always in these projects, there is a desire to make money. Otherwise no one will touch it, produce it, I'm sure.

Military type stories are easier to make entertaining merely by their nature. But the reality of say, two men sitting in a calm during battle, who just sit there and talk with much of what they communicate coming through the shorthand of their professional orientation, where they could communicate much without a need to speak, would be quite a boring film. So you have to dramatize, make things up, use things you find from their letters, recorded voices, comments from family, friends and coworkers. Compress, hybrid things, information, situations and even people.

In essence, you make Art.

In my own screenplay for Teenage Bodyguard I was the principal character, Time was my enemy in my trying to remember things as they happened and writing it all down decades later. I had to research for months to find the associated issues that happened back then. As it turned out, through my research, reconstruction of events and reconsideration after all these years, I discovered a part of my past that I didn't even know existed.

Things happened to me during that week in 1974 that I had no clue about when they were happening.

I was lucky. Unlike those in 13 Hours, who died, I survived, obviously. Especially as I am writing the screenplay, the audience may very well know, as the film would begin in a theater, that I survived.

They do not know however, the background (as I didn't at the time either). Or if my client survived, the strip club waitress running from the mob. They believed she had witnessed an anonymous murder. She believed they had committed the murder (and probably did).

To this day the murder is labeled, "homicide by unknown suspect".

I know what I know from spending that week with her until she could escape to get on a plane, leave town and never be seen again. And I never saw or heard from her again. Did she live through the week I spent with her, armed with a .357 magnum in a shoulder holster, protecting her? Did she make it to that plane? If she didn't survive, am I still experiencing the guilt from failing at my task as bodyguard, even though I was at the time only eighteen?

If in reality and in the end I had gotten her on her flight (and I'm not saying that I did or didn't), did she survive through that next day, week, or month? Or did the mob finally catch up with her? They had to know where she came from and was probably going back to. How hard would it have been for a crime organization who had national connections, who could reach back to New York City as well as Las Vegas, to kill her any time they liked?

What I knew was pretty boring. I can't tell you here all that I knew or all that is in the screenplay but reality needs a plan to make it a film. It's all in how you tell it, what you tell, building tension, allowing limited release, injecting elements of surprise, humor, fear, and so on.

During the construction of the screenplay you have to use the screenplay format to flesh out what will work and if you have to change things for artistic license, or follow a plan that in some ways deviates from what actually happened, then that is what you have to do.

It is not a historical document after all. Speaking for myself, that is something that took me years of screenwriting to get over, and then actually get down to writing it. I first ran into the concept of staying true to the original, in doing an adaptation of a novel for another author. Then I did another for another author.

Writing an adaption is in many ways like writing a biopic.

You have a kind of blueprint to follow. Rather than historical events and people, it is a novel previously published and therefore, for some people, a kind of historical event. You have to remain true to the "event(s)", the story, perhaps for fans of the novel, and remain true to the spirit of the original.

But you have to make it entertaining for the novel reader too. You usually don't want merely to put the novel on the screen because frequently that just doesn't working. Transliteration from novel to screen (or real events to screen) can easily fail. It's easy to test out. Many times taking an original, and exactly duplicating it on screen simply fails. What works in one format for a variety of reasons just doesn't translate well to another format.

And therein lay the major disparity between what many expect and what a screenwriter and filmmaker produces in a biopic.

For instance, rather than showing a scene exactly how it happened the writer may not follow what happened for various reasons. It is the filmmaker's hope however that by the end of the scene the viewer will have experienced the same or similar feeling necessary to have understood what happened. That is, to understand the scene and in using it as set up for the next scene or for the film overall.

It may not however follow physical reality but rather emotional reality.

Therein lay the artistic license. This angers some people, annoys others, and yet has little or no bearing on many as long as they enjoy a good film and feel they have gotten their money's worth.

For others however, it becomes a political statement if not outrage.

Such is the filmmaker's dilemma and life in making a biopic. When it goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong. But when it goes right, it is Art.

In my own screenplay I had my memories to work with. What I had lived through. I had the advantage (and disadvantage) of being the primary character so I could as screenwriter query myself any time of the day or night when needed.

However there were things and information I did not have and so they required some artistic license to be able to flesh out the story. I did not know for instance, what the woman I was protecting was thinking, only things she said to me, and only as best as I could understand here at the time and eventually remember in what she said and did.

I did not know what the mob was thinking or doing, other than anything I may have seen them do, or historical references to them in documents at this point in time. And that turned out to be a lucky thing and a sticky situation.

This mob in Tacoma as it turned out was highly documented in the newspapers back then, in books and as well in court documents from trials. From all that and from what happened to me I was able to piece together quite a lot. I came to understand more and more of what exactly had happened to me. I found for instance that a "friend" of mine had basically been throwing me to the wolves in order to save himself and his housemate.

I discovered that this "mob" I was up against and who called themselves, "The Enterprise" (and thus my alternate title for the project in being, "Slipping The Enterprise" as we were trying to slip past them), were a motley and dangerous crew.

How do I explain what I was up against when even I didn't know it at the time?

How do I use exposition of the mob's activities and orientation? How to characterize them? The time the screenplay takes place is a good five or six years before their major arrests and court trials. This was a crew who had their hands into many things, as well as paying off law enforcement, judges and, arson and murdering people. Even to the point of threatening their enemy's families and children.

I really had no idea who it was up against. Though I have to say if I had known, it would only have led me to be more careful and circumspect in my actions at the time.

I had to show in the screenplay a crew's activities mostly after the fact of the time I had been dealing with them. In finding that method I found a unique and interesting kind of time shifting format. You get to see what I was going through, and who I was up against by interspersing their history with my story. All through their activities throughout the 1970s.

It was a remarkable concept once it hit me.

I researched for a long time and then wrote out specific times and events. Then I built that into and around my story as a frame beginning with my introduction and activities with the woman in question. A woman who was I see now in hindsight, kind of in shock throughout most of that week.

She would seem fine during the day but then in quiet times she would be very reflective and just...odd. A kind of Post Traumatic Shock type of condition, possibly.

After hearing from her some of her life in the strip club and around a dangerous crew of criminals, it became apparent that she was definitely afraid of them. Like a caged animal trying to get out of town, fearful in what she had seen the night she was at the club during the murder in the parking lot. Even though she claimed she had seen nothing, hadn't she?

She had entered the parking lot about 2AM when the murder went down, but said that she hadn't seen a thing. From my examination of the event and from reports, I find that hard to believe. She swore that it was done by the mob to one of their own guys, a bouncer who worked for the club. A nice guy she said who was nice to her and "the girls", meaning the waitresses and the strippers at the club. But how could she be so sure they committed thee murder unless she somehow had first hand knowledge of it?

The Enterprise had blamed it on someone else and I'm sure they wouldn't have appreciated her turning up to claim otherwise. They had killed before and they killed again. The police involved that night were potentially on the crew's payroll. Something which was later uncovered through the court trials.

Their main bad guy along with the rest of them, went to prison. Including the County Sheriff. Now most of them are dead. Except for that main bad guy. And he was a bad, guy. He is out free now, living in Tacoma, Washington. Something I hadn't expected when I started researching all this. Especially since in the screenplay I used him as the focus and fulcrum for the storyline and pivotal in the murder. Through him we experience much of who that crew was in the screenplay.

In the story I've written he does things he never actually did, but it enhances the story and brings it all together. Otherwise this would have to be a TV or miniseries. As it is it works well together.

The biggest problem I had was in the exposition of who I was at that point in time, and making in it believable. I was an unusual character myself in my past experiences by that time at eighteen. If anyone at eighteen was ready to handle a situation like that, it had to be me.

The waitress was really pretty lucky in finding me, or more precise, in our being thrown together by our mutual friends. Friends who once I had picked her up from their place, didn't want to know where she went after that and didn't want me to tell them. I should have seen that red flag. I should have seen it as not just odd, but a big flashing red light. It wasn't until forty years later that I finally realized much of what was going on back then.

As shown in the screenplay I didn't see that friend much after that week. Then we lost complete touch, until one day I accidentally ran into him and his new wife and baby at the Tacoma Mall. He acted very oddly that day and now I finally know why.

Was he surprised I was still alive that day? He acted like it. Or was he simply nervous (which I had believed at the time) in that I might let it slip that he had been a drug dealer at one time for many years? Was he afraid his family was in danger and that I might pull a gun and shoot him down for what he potentially had once done to me? Possibly in my finally having figured it all out, and then tracked him down for retribution?

Many years have passed since back in those days and I hold no animosity against anyone now about it all. I just find it all interesting academically, now. Whether or not had had expected me to get killed or whether he thought I was seeking retribution, is simply lost in the past. I only seek now to share an interesting story and hopefully produce an interesting work of filmmaking.

As for my friend and what happened to him, as for the woman I spent a week protecting from a mob of murderers and criminals? We know what happened to them, but whether she survived or not?

We may never know. Perhaps it will play out in the film once it's produced?