The Old Broad Has a Good Day

Los Angeles, California.

…So I can’t sleep. Middle of the night, I turn on the TV to TCM and there is Fred Astaire dancing in his top hat and tails — played first in 1935, and I realize I saw this one in the original, sitting in a Brooklyn theater, eating a nickel candy bar. I am having a good long 2:00 AM think…

About what has changed since the leading men were all six-feet tall, broad-shouldered, classic handsome and loaded with testosterone.  I saw Clark Gable as the original Mr. Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, and the original North by Northwest where Cary Grant hits the ground to avoid the low-sweeping plane…

You know you’re way past it because all the leads today are androgynous. Leonardo de Caprio with his girlish face, slim Ryan Gosling and slender Johnny Depp… Leading men?  My day, it was John Wayne with that sore-from-the-saddle bow of his legs and the male swagger…remember the lampoon in Birdcage?

So it’s eight in the morning and what do you do when you’re 82? You get up and get out with your manuscript…and you head down to Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica to see why your brakes are making that funny squealy noise. Cars are a man thing, at least in my day. I don’t know an oil filter from a fuel injector and so I trust myself, old widow lady, to the man at Discount Tires who says he’ll take a look, no charge, and I head off to breakfast where real men eat: my favorite Mexican place — Gilberts on Pico in Santa Monica. Here, for seven bucks, you get a real breakfast with real guys who are usually unshaven, shaggy, sometimes covered with work dust.

After thirty years, they know my order: Gilbert’s huevos rancheros. (I’m not in Café 17 up on Montana where the black beans are organic, the guacamole is mixed with healthful colorful thingies, and the veggies and fruities artistically arranged…)

This is real food — a corn tortilla, a couple of eggs cooked in mild salsa, pinto beans, salad of some shredded lettuce, a slice of limpy tomato, and a dish of absolutely delicious crunchy pickled carrots which you wash down with endless iced tea. Not ginger peachy or lemon grass but just plain home-brewed, good old ice tea…

And you open your manuscript, since this is a grand place to work, and half-listen to the wonderful dialogue around you. These guys talk basketball and football and ball-ball or other manly stuff. They all love the movies, so you get a bunch of good reviews, and the brake place phones on your cell: rear brake pads at two hundred fifty bucks — do them in an hour…

This being Gilberts, it’s family, and there are three rather unshaven bushy-haired guys (half-bald here stays half-bald — none of those cleanly shaved Brentwood heads that look like heads of Roman warriors…), and I call out: is it a lot to pay two-fifty for rear brake pads? Two guys tell me it’s overpriced, one calls his own car place and quotes me one-twenty and passes me a piece of paper with an address and phone.

I ask for more pickled carrots, and the waiter, who knows I have watched movies since 1930, tells me to catch the last Mike Leigh pic which I can rent at my favorite video, Video Named Desire, out on Santa Monica in WLA — a buck for six days in a real video store, so packed with stuff and discs and boxes and dust that you have to pick your way down the aisle sideways and cautiously.

So I close up my notebook. The eggs were great, the price was good, the company and the dialogue were real, pungent, pithy and loud.  I walk back to the brake place to pick up my car. I was an easy mark — helpless old widow…but I tell them I have to ask my sons’ advice — these two testosterony males who write music and make movies and drive Porsches and BMWs…and don’t know any more about car innards than I do.

I take myself home to type out my new scenes which are taking good shape. I know that it is semi-impossible to sell a screenplay in the town of a million screenplay writers. I haven’t sold a script since 1986.

It doesn’t matter that I saw the original Philadelphia Story and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and that I wept over the death of young Humphrey Bogart as they shot him down in Petrified Forest. Okay, he was a short guy, but look at that jaw, the way his arms hung at his sides — pure animal — and that sneer…

Okay, you do have Clive Owen and Javier Bardem, but they’re not Gary Cooper — appealing maybe, but pretty scary.  So I drive home to type up my scene changes. I had a great breakfast, I didn’t get stiffed on the brakes, and hey, it might not be 1945, which was a great year for movies and dancing to big bands…it’s 2009, this old broad is still on her feet, she has a good comedy in the computer, and she’s absolutely still in the game.