Elementary My Dear School

If you can throw out the notion that many of my observations are those of a paranoid conspiracy theorist, and instead consider that close study shows the things I’ve described regarding the deaths of Princess Diana and the mother of the Duchess of York, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and other occurrences, and the conclusions that become manifest when a certain context is perceived, are all substantive, then I have another thing you may find to be material.

I begin by making mention of my “Joel’s Baby” screenplay, which I worked on in New York City for half-a-year (while on leave of absence from CalArts), a city which underwent a power blackout from July 13th to July 14th, 1977, beginning one half-hour after I went to the post office to mail the screenplay to Writers Guild of America West for the purpose of registering it. I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog how this screenplay led to Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away” and other “stuff” (including the song, “Baker Street”, which also mixed in verbatim words spoken during a personal conversation I once participated in).

In 1978, via telephone, Tom Long, the person who had suggested to me part of the premise of “Joel’s Baby”, and who appears as Peterson in my 1993 video, “Mall Man”, and as described in my earlier blog, a person connected with the movie that virtually launched the careers of Henry Winkler and Sylvester Stallone, “Lords of Flatbush”, suggested to me a new subject for me to work on: the story of a mermaid. Here one might note that six years later, Ron Howard (very Henry Winkler-connected, i.e., The Fonz on “Happy Days”) directed “Splash”, a movie about a mermaid. “Splash” also starred Tom Hanks, whose 1980s TV sitcom (and basically his introduction to the public), “Bosom Buddies”, was created as the result of something I said in a conversation in 1978 to someone in proximity to those who would be connected to his sitcom (that show also used for its theme a Billy Joel song, “My Life”, which is about someone flying to the West Coast – on Easter Sunday 1978 Billy Joel sat next to me on a flight to California). I should add that the aforementioned personal conversation that found its way into “Baker Street” was in relation to the girl with whom I had the conversation that resulted in Tom Hanks’ sitcom. She went through a period when everyone was this or that kind of buddy: her laundry buddy, her pool buddy, her clothes buddy – she once called me her Sudafed Buddy because I once gave her some Sudafed sinus tablets. Hence, “Bosom Buddies”. She was staying at The Barbizon, the famous all-girls hotel in New York City, and my description of the means by which I planned to elude security to visit her, though not intended as a serious plan, was what led to a major part of the premise of “Bosom Buddies”. Additionally, years later, in 1993, after I saw someone in a restaurant whom we both knew at CalArts who was also in the Hanks movie, “Bachelor Party”, a car with the words “Kip” as part of the license plate drove in front of me on my way home (Kip was the name of Hanks’ character on “Bosom Buddies”). Yet that CalArts person in the restaurant was nothing compared to the other people in connection to Hanks’ show that were in proximity to the aforementioned Barbizon-related conversation.

My 1978 Mermaid Idea
In my story outline about a mermaid, an environmental scientist who was deeply in love with his wife, while studying water pollution in the ocean, learns that his supervisor is having an affair with his wife. This is immediately followed by the scientist meeting a mermaid while taking samples of ocean water, leading the audience to wonder whether his perception of meeting a mermaid might not be some kind of mental breakdown in response to his wife’s affair. The pervasiveness of the mermaid in his life increases in proportion to the scientist’s emotional despair regarding his wife’s affair: his positive anima became more dominant as a fantasy taking over as the real woman in his life pulled him further and further into emotional turmoil. Water pollution begins to sicken the mermaid. She introduces the scientist to a dolphin community, which leads him to a secret, major source of pollution in the ocean, caused by a villainous company. Finally the scientist’s heart breaks when his wife seeks a divorce. The mermaid then dies from the water pollution, perhaps actually killed by a malady to his sense of anima.

A short time after I had carried the story outline to this point, there was suddenly a news story about 100 dolphins being killed. Because of my experiences with people trying to screw with me big league in this "subtle" manner (put this news story alongside 100 other such experiences), following this, I somehow didn’t feel like staying in Hollywood.

I should add that the first job I had following CalArts was for an environmental studies company, and the person whose office was nearest to my cubicle was Robert Rickles, who had been New York City’s first Commissioner of the Environment, under Mayor John Lindsey.

I should also add that this was during the period when I was about to graduate from CalArts School of Film and Video, and was looking at a letter to me from Paul McCartney about possibly working for him, received a week after Billy Joel sat next to me on a plane to California. I was also looking at the possibility of being an assistant to John Lennon on a movie possibly in the works mentioned in Rolling Stone, “Street Messiah” (though Sean Daniel, the first person from whom I had learned of CalArts, who was a friend of each of The Beatles as well as Steven Spielberg, and who was soon to become Vice President of Universal and after that head of David Geffen’s film company, said the director mentioned in the Rolling Stone “Street Messiah” paragraph was a sleazy director I didn’t want to work for). During this period I expressed to some people an idea that landed on Lennon’s next album, “Double Fantasy”, in the song, “Cleanup Time”: “However far we travel, wherever we may roam, the center of the circle will always be our home.” I expressed the idea that it would seem that I didn’t need to stay in Hollywood to sorta kinda be in Hollywood, that were I to “serve” those at the very top, wherever I went I would find access and people would find me (sure enough, everywhere I went I encountered intermediaries to Lennon and McCartney, and even now, McCartney intermediaries).

Another footnote to “Cleanup Time” is that, prior to “Double Fantasy”, when I was throwing out all of my old albums in order to start over collecting records, after all of my albums were gone, the first album I bought was, “Nilsson Sings Newman” (Lennon was a close friend and collaborator of Nilsson’s, as well as a big fan of Randy Newman), which contains a song, “I’ll Be Home”, with the line, “wherever you may wander and wherever you may roam”. I personally feel that if not for this song, which is about a super-reliable person who will always be home for you, he might not have sent out the virtual invitation to every nutcase in the world to come see him at his home, an invitation, that is, in terms of his posing in front of his home for the “Double Fantasy” album cover. People may already have known where he lived, but I believe this sort of beckoned people (“Yo everybody, this is exactly where you can always find me in person, see?”).