Day: April 22, 2012

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) dropped acid with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Jane (Peyton List) on Mad Men this evening. It amused him for the most part. He didn’t appear to experience the exhilarating first hour (i.e., elevator in the brain hotel) and he didn’t travel inward in any noticable way, much less get “beautiful” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term. He held onto himself, kept his distance. Stared, listened. Which I found comforting and disappointing. Roger just wasn’t made for those times. And he doesn’t know or care all that much about Jane.

You don’t have to drop acid to realize that we’re all intertwined and vulnerable, so delicate and ethereal and humming the same ohhm, sharing the same pulse…everything and everyone in ways that defy strenuous attempts to explain. And all you have to do is let it in. Or not. But it’s there either way. For this and other spiritual “aha!” moments and sink-ins I have LSD to thank. I wouldn’t touch it with a 20-foot pole today, but without it I never would have known what I know or at the very least remember, for whatever that’s worth.

“I know, I know, you’ll probably scream and cry that your little world won’t let you go…”

I don’t know if Devin Faraci has been “beautiful ” or not, but he understands the LSD thing pretty well.

Sasha Stone and I had an okay time on the phone today…mostly. It all started with my telling her about Richard Linklater‘s Bernie, which I really liked after seeing it the second time last week. But I wasn’t getting through. I tried but I couldn’t explain it right. Which is a way of saying that Bernie, a perfectly made film that doesn’t fit into any one category, is probably toast.

Then we talked about the Cannes lineup, and in so doing revealed that we’ve read very little so far and haven’t thought much about the selections. But it was a start.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

For what it’s worth, I finally caught up tonight with Game of Thrones (the second episode apparently), and it might be the most intriguingly acted and smartly written drama of this type that I’ve ever seen. I loathe the idea of any medieval fantasy TV series based on a series of fantasy novels blah blah, but Thrones operates on a somewhat more refined and cultivated level. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have created a literate and semi-upscale (as far as it goes) HBO series about grimy, cynical, ruthless people walking around in tunics and carrying swords. This level of accomplishment is unusual, it seems, for a property that has a related merchandise line (action figures, etc.), two video games and a ready-to-wear Helmut Lang collection about to hit the market. Seriously — medieval CG fantasy bullshit isn’t my cup and this wasn’t too bad. And the gratuitous nudity was okay.

In a 3.26 New Yorker profile of Veep creator Armando Ianucci, Ian Parker reports that Ianucci, for research, toured the White House with Reggie Love, who was then President Barack Obama’s special assistant. And Love, Iannucci recalls, “referenced The West Wing — the show — by saying ‘This is the Roosevelt Room…this would be where Josh and C.J. would…’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why couldn’t you say this is where President Obama sat with Hillary Clinton?'”

At Seville’s Plaza de Espana, the officers’ club in Lawrence of Arabia — i.e., the palace-like buidling where T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) first arrives after being driven into “Cairo” following his trek across the Sinai desert with Farraj (Michel Ray) and Daud (John Dimech).

I’m with Reggie. I do this all the time in my head. To me famous buildings and locations aren’t so much about their own history as backdrops used by great or significant movies, or the basis for sound-stage or CGI duplications.

When I visited a section of Belgium’s Ardennes forest, site of the Battle of the Bulge, in late ’99, I didn’t say to myself ‘this is where the American troops incurred heavy casualties from the German counteroffensive” as much as “this is where Van Johnson and John Hodiak and George Murphy fought the Krauts in William Wellman‘s Battleground.” Yes, I know that film was shot on Hollywood sound stages and against locations in northern California, Oregon and Washington state.

When I visited the United Nations building in Manhattan in the early ’80s, I remember thinking, ‘These are the steps that Cary Grant walked up after getting out of the cab in North by Northwest…and here’s the main entrance hall he walked into…now, where’s the lounge where he met Lester Townsend?” I’ve never been to Mount Rushmore but that, to me, is a total North by Northwest touchstone, and secondarily a famous mountainside monument. All I would want to do after seeing the big faces would be to find James Mason‘s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home (which of course doesn’t exist).

When I visited Spain’s southeast coast with my two sons in late May of ’09 my plan was to visit the a beach called Playa del Algarrobico, which is where the seaside town of Aqaba was built for Lawrence of Arabia. Except I didn’t get there, and I deeply regret that. But I did visit other Lawrence locations in Sevilla.

In early 2000 I drove out to Glendale to visit the JFK Oval Office set of Roger Donaldson‘s 13 Days, and every last detail has been recreated even though the camera couldn’t hope to capture these particulars. Same thing with the West Wing set built to duplicate the Nixon White House in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), which Stone and publicist Stephen Rivers allowed me to visit. To me visiting these sets was just as cool and in some ways better than if I’d been allowed to tour the actual West Wing.

If I ever get out to Dyersville, Iowa, you can bet I’ll visit the Ray Kinsella farm where the cornfield baseball diamond was built.

I could go on and on. Whatever and wherever, what matters to me is what film was shot here and whether or not the actual locales used for the film still exist, or if the geography of the actual locales resembles the sound-stage replications.

Veep premieres tonight on HBO at 10 pm.