My sister died during the morning of Friday the 8th of November. She was in hospice. She stopped breathing. She slipped away peacefully. Since that time, I have been struggling. It is not my first trip round the dance floor with grief, however. In fact, with my mother dying this very month in 2019, and my father dying in June of 2020, grief has been positively dominating my dance card during much of these past five years.
I will have thoughts to share about my dance partner in the coming weeks. For now, I will only express that because my sister’s death had been such a long time coming, I had thought it would be easier to handle than it has been. Reality has proven to be quite the opposite, however, as I have been forced to feel all that I could not for the bulk of the time I witnessed her mental and physical descent into illness. And as hard as that has been, the physical component of grief is worse still. It comes and goes like the wind, leaving me hollowed out. I will find myself with sudden focus and “wind in my sails” and then just as suddenly, the wind will die down and I will find myself floating aimlessly on deep, dark, cold waters in uncharted territory. Fortunately, many kind and loving souls are holding onto the rope that prevents me from sailing off into that part of the map labeled, “dragons”. For although I have slayed dragons before, in my diminished capacity, I fear I would be no match for them at present.
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We are well past Halloween now. Thanksgiving is next week, and my birthday before it. Yet, I can’t quite let go of memories of events that took place at the end of October. Maybe this is because my sister was still alive then, and had decided to undergo a life-prolonging surgery. She came through the surgery, but although her will to live was strong, her body had other ideas.
Halloween is a great time for confronting and celebrating our fears. Long ago, only a couple of years into our courtship, I was strolling with my beloved Lily and her mother, Betsy, in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When we came close enough to spot the absolutely horrifying The Thinker on the Rock, I exclaimed, “That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen!” I immediately ran forward to get a closer look at this work, which replaces Rodin’s Thinker with a nasty, skinny, demonic 28 foot-tall rabbit.
After I had departed, Lily turned to her mother and said, “That’s one of the reasons I love him. Most people run away from the things that scare them. He runs right towards them.”
More than fourteen years later, I like to think I am still proving Lily right in her estimation of me. On Halloween night, I found myself standing on stage in front of several performers I absolutely revere, trying to entertain them. It was a show at the Glendale Room billed as a “comedy séance”. I was invited by the show’s organizer, Fernando Funes, a brilliant performer and a bit of a comedy impresario.
Much of my lead up to the end of October had been occupied by my duties to my sister and to preparing for the October 30th “Viva Los Feliz: Haunted” show I hosted at the Autry. Those factors, coupled with knowing that Lily would be out of town, left me utterly without Halloween plans. So, when I received Fernando’s invitation, I quickly let him know that I was most eager to attend. He immediately wrote back asking if I wanted to tell a story appropriate to the season. A true-life story, a true-life ghost story, immediately sprang to mind. It was a story I had never before shared publicly, and indeed, a story I had never even written down and so despite being a professional storyteller and stage performer, this would be something new, something genuinely scary for me to attempt. It wasn’t improvisation, but it would be extemporaneous. What follows is essentially the tale I told that night, committed to paper (or digital 1s and 2s) for the first time …
In 2003, I directed a feature film called Spectres. The goal on the part of the producers was to make a scare-the-pants-off-you thriller with healthy elements of sci-fi and mysticism. During the photography of a key scene, my approach to the material indelibly changed the course of the movie. The scene involved the lead character, a sixteen-year-old girl, looking in the mirror in her bathroom, examining the scars on her wrist caused by a failed suicide attempt. It represented a moment of growth, of her being ready to come to terms with what she had done, and attempted to do. Unbeknownst to her, behind her, spooky goings-on were taking place, such as cabinet doors opening and closing on their own.
The filming of this scene was brought to an abrupt halt by a loud burst of laughter. Who had done it? Who had ruined the take? I was ready to be furious. Until I realized it had been me. I was the one who found what was taking place so ridiculous that I simply had to laugh.
We were showing a beautiful 16 year old for whom life had become so engulfed by darkness that she had tried to kill herself and I was supposed to believe ghosts were scary? Through the years people have frequently wanted to know if I believed in things like ghosts or aliens or UFOs, and I tell them I don’t know if they exist, and honestly, I don’t much care. My work won’t change! A UFO could land on our front lawn tomorrow and I will still have an enormous to-do list. I have enough on my plate just trying to be a decent friend, neighbor and husband to worry about ghosts and aliens.
What absolutely does scare me, however, are the things we do to each other and to ourselves in the name of “relationship”. I explained this to the producers and told them that if I don’t find something scary I don’t know how I am supposed to make it scary to an audience. Maybe I was the wrong director for the project. I do know that our “scare-the-pants-off-you” ghost story became a drama about an estranged teenager and her workaholic mother. It still had ghosts, but instead of being bought by a horror distributor, or the Sci-Fi Channel (which would later changed its spelling to “SyFy”), it was picked up by Lifetime (and shown under the title Soul Survivor).
Now, I do take seriously the fact that we show business folk are pretty darn superstitious and more than that, we are participating in a tradition that finds its origins in ritual magic. The earliest productions were those put on by tribal priests. Something might have been threatening the well being of the community, so the priests would stage a ritual, where one of them would embody the entity or idea causing such threat. Others would play those threatened by the entity. Someone would play the hero tasked with driving the entity from their midst. If the ritual was well-produced and effective, the audience witnessing it would experience “catharsis”. The community would be healed.
On theatrical stages, on soundstages, on location, I have witnessed how the particular energies being explored in the pursuit of telling a story have a way of attracting an energetic response from all that is surrounding that work. We were filming our mother-daughter drama ghost story in a very old (by L.A. standards), and most peculiar house in a part of town we will call for the purposes of this story the Hollywood Hills (for that is precisely where the house was located). On a street with many other houses, this one, nevertheless, felt quite isolated, with a huge wrap-around yard, and no view of other homes. It had three stories, with the top floor and the bottom floor genuinely unsettling at most times. Odd things would happen during our time there, and of course, the inclination would be to declare, “it has to be the ghosts!”
The most troubling thing that happened to me there was when I was staying alone at the house in anticipation of shooting there. One night I was strolling the house, thinking about what should be shot where, listening to any advice the house itself might have for me. On the staircase down to the truly creepy basement, my foot hit the third step from the bottom of the stairs, and I fell, hard. It was as if something had grabbed me by the ankle and tripped me. Again, I tend to believe that anything I believe probably isn’t that interesting, but I have become quite adept at picking up on my cues. And so, several key and quite odd passages of the film took place in that basement.
One of the characters in the film was a paranormal sensitive. I had struck up a friendship with a real-life sensitive and I would consult with her from time to time, just to make sure that I was being respectful to the real-life counterparts of the character in the film. When principal photography had concluded, I invited my friend to the house one night and she took a great deal of time exploring. I walked with her and she would tell me what she was sensing, and would ask me questions about the house. When we got to the upstairs bathroom where we had shot the mirror scene I described earlier, my friend stopped and asked, “A girl killed herself in there?”
“Not that I know of,” I replied. She explained what she was seeing and she proceeded to do an exact imitation of what the young actress had done in revealing and inspecting her own scars. “Oh, that’s my movie! Maybe you are picking that up from me?” I suggested.
“Maybe,” she replied, and she entered the bathroom. She looked down at the tub and asked, “You are sure a girl didn’t kill herself in this tub?”
I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know the history of the house prior to its current owners, but I did know that we had actually filmed the suicide attempt in that very tub, and so I was fairly certain that my friend was seeing what she was seeing because I had filmed those sights. Don’t get me wrong, that would still be remarkable insight, but it would hardly mean ghosts. She then asked me a question that definitely gave me pause: “Had the writer seen these locations before he wrote the script?” Indeed, he had. The script was tailored to the location. Photos of each room were taped around his computer station. “Maybe the film is based in part on what really happened here,” she offered in such a chipper fashion that it bothered me.
When we got to the basement stairs, her demeanor changed. She almost pounced onto the third step from the bottom and looked at me with great concern. “You were injured?” she wanted to know. I shook my head. I had not been. “But you WERE tripped?”
“I fell,” I corrected.
She told me that she saw a man in a chair, reaching through the banister and grabbing me by the ankle. Honestly, what does one say to something like that? She continued to the main room downstairs, where we had filmed one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie, a scene involving a piano, which we moved into the house and which I gave to the owners as a personal thank you gift for their incredible generosity in not only allowing us to shoot with little supervision, but in allowing me to stay there before, during, and after doing so.
Somehow, my friend knew that prior to our filming there, the room had been quite unsettling, but that now, the mood, the energy, the feel of the room had shifted. I agreed with all of her assessment. “It’s because of the piano,” she said. “He loved the piano.”
After the owners returned, I asked them questions about the house’s history. No, there had never been a suicide, or suicide attempt in the upstairs hall bathroom. There HAD been a suicide in the master bath, however, and when the current owners learned about that, they moved that tub into the hall bathroom! At my behest they did some research about previous occupants of the house. In so doing, they learned that a piano teacher had once lived there, and that he had taught his own daughters how to play the piano in the house. As an old man, he became wheelchair bound, and spent the rest of his days in the basement, the same basement where a “man in a chair” had supposedly tripped me, and where a piano had completely transformed the dreary, unsettling atmosphere.
The completed Spectres was to have its world premiere in London as the closing night screening of the Sci-Fi London Film Festival. Before departing to show the film for the first time, we knew we had to have a test screening here in Los Angeles, while we would still have (barely) enough time to address any technical changes that might be required. For although I just called it a film, this was actually the first feature length motion picture any of us had been involved in that didn’t actually use film at any stage of the process. We shot the film on high definition, and would be projecting the film the same way. And sure enough, seeing our work projected onto a big screen for the first time, we did notice a couple of shots that needed to be “tweaked” or altogether replaced due to flaws that would only have been apparent on a big screen.
We had the test screening at what I had always known as the Hollywood Pacific Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It had originally been known as the Warner Bros. Theatre (or Warner Hollywood Theatre to avoid confusion with another Warner Theatre downtown). It had recently been taken over by the USC School of Cinema and had been converted into a state-of-the-art theater capable of digital projection. Unfortunately, they had not worked all the bugs out of the new sound system.
It was January and the cavernous theatre was cold, the perfect atmosphere in which to see a ghost story, I suppose, but sort of uncomfortable. My discomfort left my mind, however, as the lights dimmed on the several hundred of us in attendance, and I immediately realized the surround sound mix was way off. Audio channels were coming out of the wrong speakers. We had painstakingly crafted the surround mix, so this was more than disconcerting, especially with the world premiere fast approaching. I tried to tell myself that the problem must be with the house system, and not our movie, but even though that proved to be the case, it was really disappointing not to get a test of how the film’s mix would actually play.
My dismay must have been visible, because pretty soon, a nattily attired gentleman standing in the aisle tried to get my attention. Through non-verbal mouthing, I asked what he wanted and he let me know he knew there were problems with the sound and wanted to discuss it. I assumed that he must work for or run the theater, but I was only the film’s director. He should take up this conversation with the producers and let me watch. Yet, he was persistent. In fact, he was so persistent, that I began to worry that he was disturbing the enjoyment of all those sitting around me and certainly those people sitting between the aisle and me. I decided to just ignore him.
This man’s behavior struck me as odd. Also odd was the fact that as I interacted with him, albeit without making any sound, no one around me looked at him. I stole another glance in his direction, and much to my relief, he had departed. I exhaled and relaxed back into my seat. My relief was so palpable, that the woman sitting next to me, who just so happened to be my paranormal sensitive friend, asked, “What was it, the man at the end of the row in the aisle?”
I nodded and whispered, “Yeah. Thank god he’s gone.”
She whispered back, “Oh, he’s still there. You just started to think it was strange that he was there in the first place.”
The movie ended and immediately my now longtime producing and podcasting partner Dean Haglund, who acted in the film, leaned forward in the seat behind me and demanded to know what had caused my intense distraction earlier in the screening. The paranormal sensitive and I explained, rather reluctantly on my part. Dean and the others who heard suggested, or rather insisted, that I tell what had happened to the theater management. So, I did.
“Oh, that’s Sam,” I remember one of the management team saying, and explaining to all my associates who had grown interested that he was regularly seen still coming to work in the theater. That’s all I remember. In fact, as I disappeared into the night, they were all still behind, discussing this “Sam” and I, honestly, never thought about it again. After all, no matter what had just happened, it did not change what I had to accomplish in the days leading up to London, and during those days, weeks, months and years that would follow.
Years later, however, Dean, because of his longstanding affiliation with “The X-Files” got a call about hosting a “Haunted Hollywood” type special for some cable network (possibly the Discovery Channel). He wanted me to share my account of what had happened at the old Warner Hollywood Theatre. I was reluctant to do so, and, indeed, I did not end up participating in the project. Nevertheless, before fully deciding against it, I thought I should at least do some research to make sure I would not come off as some crackpot if Dean was successful in talking me into telling my story.
It turns out that the “Sam” in question, was Sam Warner, one of the Warner Brothers. For all those decades since his death in 1927, there had been sightings of him at the theatre. At the time of his death, he had been in charge of supervising the production on the first Warner Bros. sound film, The Jazz Singer (remembered almost as much today for its star Al Jolson appearing in black face as for the movie’s technological achievement). He also was put in charge of supervising the construction of the Warner Bros. Theatre, where it was hoped they would be able to hold the world premiere of their movie that was going to change the art of motion pictures forever.
Unfortunately for Sam, problems with the theater’s sound system prevented it from being ready in time to host the premiere, which ended up taking place in New York City on October 6, 1927. Having worked non-stop for many months to both complete the picture and the theatre, Sam’s health was in rapid decline. He died at the age of 40, one night before the world premiere of The Jazz Singer. This story moved me because this man, who had spent the last part of his life worrying about sound, had been drawn to me three-quarters of a century later because I had been worried about the same thing.
The past really is a living thing, all around us, offering itself to us. I think the past is there because it wants to help. Even if it’s just to say that we’re not alone. No matter what we are going through, someone before us has faced similar challenges. I also think it is possible to heal the past. I don’t know for a fact that it was a piano that made a wheelchair bound man who lived in a basement feel better about things, but I do know that whatever wound had led to suffering in that space had, in fact, been healed.
So, when Fernando asked me if there was a story I wanted to share on Halloween night, I thought back to what happened more than twenty years ago now, in that cavernous, cold theater in Hollywood. Sam Warner wanted to, at the very least, commiserate with me about the frustration I was suffering. We were two filmmakers some 75 years apart, brought together by a shared pain. As I wandered around the streets of Glendale before the show on Halloween night, I found myself wishing that I could help Sam Warner.
What could I do that might ease his suffering? What could I say to this man who spent much of the final years of his life, and all the years of his death, worrying about sound?
I think what I would say to him is this: Instead of spending his entire death and much of his life leading up to it worried about sound, he really should have always been far more worried about the whole black face thing.
Sorry for the long delay in releasing a new essay. I promise that you will hear from me again real soon …
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