To See Ourselves As Others See Us

We may get old, but inside our heads we must not always see clearly that we are.

The other morning I went to the nursing home early to help feed my Dad his breakfast. He can't walk anymore and he can't feed himself and after he has been showered and dressed, the nurses wheel him into the dining-room-for-the-distressed, where he must then wait for his meal and the help he needs to eat it.

After I arrived, my father's roommate was wheeled to a spot just across the table from him. Bernie is my father's approximate age and spends most of his time in dialysis. When he was placed at the breakfast table he promptly fell asleep.

My Dad raised his ancient, shaking finger and pointed at poor Bernie, snoring away, and then Dad rolled his eyes. "Look at that old guy," he said.

As opposed to you? The young guy here? I had to smile, because my Dad was also smiling.

On that particular morning, my father told me we were in Al's Barbershop and Al must be giving away breakfast to his customers while they waited.

"I'm sick of this," he told me. "All I wanted was a haircut." Still, the breakfast appeared to be free so my father, always both a thrifty and hungry person, partook heartily.

One morning he asked me if we were eating a "full English breakfast." I didn't know what to say, so I just nodded that we were. "But, have you told them we are one-hundred-percent Yankee?"

He's from Alabama and he only claims to be a Yankee if he finds himself on foreign soil. Like London. Or New York City.

When the nice young lady who serves the meals in the dining-room-for-the-distressed appeared with a warm hand towel for my father at the end of his meal, he winked at me.

"He knows how to buck for a tip," said Dad, getting his genders mixed up as he frequently does these days.

Yesterday I took my mother to the nursing home to see Dad and he was so excited to see her that they sat for a while holding hands near the nurse's station at the end of the hallway.

Mom and Dad together at Dad's skilled nursing center.



One older lady, whom I've described previously as Mrs. Anglo, sat nearby, dozing in her wheelchair.

My mother nodded her head toward Mrs. Anglo.

"Every time I see her, she looks thinner," she said. This from my mother, now so thin you can practically see the light through her body.

The good news is that in both my parents, the will to live on is extremely strong. And the feeling of youthfulness prevails, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

On Saturday my father was complaining about doing his physical therapy and we couldn't seem to talk him out of his bad mood. Then I wrote on a piece of paper for him:

"Are you through with life?"

He read it. And then without looking at me, he hung his head. Was it disgust that I would ask? Was it shame that I thought he felt that way? I don't know.

He looked up and me and smiled. And then he shook his fist at me.

And then he did his PT.

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Nursing Home Characters

My father is in a gorgeous facility, up above Los Altos Hills, that includes villas for independent living, apartments for those needing assistance, and the skilled nursing center where he is now installed. I have to admit that there are times, lately, when the place reminds me of the Noel Coward play Waiting in the Wings, which I saw in a revival on Broadway a few years ago, starring Lauren Bacall and Rosemary Harris.

That play is about a nursing home for actresses in which stars fade but old rivalries never die.

Or, to put it another way, Coward points out that people are just as petty and dysfunctional when they are old and sick as they are when they are young and healthy. Only more so.

The place where my father in ensconced proudly announces on its gate that it is a "Smoke Free Facility." And it makes me laugh when I see that, because almost every day I see this cadaverous old man sitting in his car in the parking lot, smoking away, his car door open and his head ducked down beneath the door. In spite of what he imagines, he is not invisible.

There is the old woman I'll call Mrs. Anglo, down the hall from my father, who has only recently taken to speaking in Spanish, with a very bad accent. It seems she learned Spanish as a child from a maid, didn't speak it at all during the next eight decades and now, seeing the international cast staffing all the jobs at the nursing home, has suddenly begun speaking to all of them in Spanish. Fortunately, some members of the staff can usually understand her.

She has another odd habit I forgot to mention to my sister the first night she came to dinner with my Dad and me at the nursing home. About mid-asparagus, my sister got a funny look on her face and I turned and saw Mrs. Anglo shaking her finger at my sister. She never said anything, not even in Spanish.

"I forgot to tell you about that," I said. "She scolds people."

There is another woman who always goes to the dining room alone. I suspect no one will sit with her. Every five minutes or so she calls out, "Help!" and then sits quietly for another four minutes and fifty-nine seconds until out pops "Help!" again. One night she did it a lot more than usual and they had to call a security guard.

My father's doctors have told us that his time is very limited, but the amazing thing about him is that he looks robust, says he has no pain, and is eating everything that isn't nailed down.

Today, however, when the physical therapists tried to get him to stand, he told them he just didn't want to. He was clearly able to do it. He said he felt we didn't understand how sick he was. Believe me, we understand. I've been up there for hours every single day, understanding.

"We know," I said. "We just want to see if you can get going a little. It will be good for you." But he just kept complaining and we finally took him back to his room.

It has been a contest, for the past couple of weeks, between my father and my mother as to which one of them is the most ill. Even last year, when my father was in the hospital with a broken vertebrae, my mother came down with pneumonia. I'm not saying she intended it, but there you are.

This last month, now that my father is in nursing care and getting tons of attention, my mother has had various illnesses that have kept her from visiting. She had nearly fatal stomach flu for a while and now her back is giving her nearly terminal pain. I hate to make fun of it, but the coincidence is worth noting.

Sometimes I can't decide which of them is the more spoiled.

Which brings me, I suppose, to the famous five stages of grief, first delineated by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. To wit: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

I think we can fairly say I'm in the anger stage, and usually that brings me to try to see the funny side of things, in order to dissipate my anger. Which reminds of me of a line Lauren Bacall says in Waiting in the Wings: "I'm just bristling with olive branches."

Its hard to be a good daughter-caregiver when you're bristling. With anything. And that is part of the process, too, I guess. Like the old guy smoking in the parking lot, we bring all our baggage with us to aging and dying and caregiving and sometimes, carrying it around is a very heavy load.

Makes me understand, completely, why that lady cries "help" every five minutes. I only wonder she pauses so long between cries.

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The Making of the Cult Classic "Jack-O" : A Truly Scary Tale for Halloween

A Guest Blog Post
by
Steve Latshaw


"We're going to make another movie. It's called Jack-O-Lantern."

My producing partner, Patrick Moran, clicked the line on the other end of the phone.

"OK. I'll bite,” he said. “Tell me more." Moran was my partner in crime. Together we'd been cranking out low budget horror movies in Orlando, Florida, shooting on weekends. Pat wrote, produced and acted. I co-produced and directed. Sometimes I helped write. These were real movies. Full length features, in color and in focus and available in your neighborhood video store.

It was the fall of 1994 and we'd done three since the summer of '91. The first, a horror comedy about a bulimic vampire, called Vampire Trailer Park, had finally been picked up by a Swedish distributor (only the Swedes, it seems, "got" the movie). The last two had been done for famed and prolific Hollywood independent producer Fred Olen Ray. Fred had gotten his start in Florida, too. And after directing a staggering number of movies, he'd become a sort of latter day Roger Corman, financing features for aspiring filmmakers, usually in the action, Sci Fi or horror field, and under his strict commercial guidelines.

It was like film school, plus he gave us the money to make movies! On actual motion picture film. And with real "name" Hollywood actors. All we had to do was turn in a finished movie.

"Oh, one more thing," Fred used to say. "The movies. They have to be good."

And so far, they had been. We'd made Dark Universe for Fred, with Joe Estevez. Joe was great. His name value was that he was a dead ringer for his brother, Martin Sheen. Dark Universe had originally been called Swamp Monster, and was about an astronaut in space who mutates into an alien-type creature, then crash-lands his shuttle in the Florida everglades, has flashbacks and kills a bunch of people.



We shot that one in twelve days (on weekends) plus a couple of second unit "pick-up" days, with what was becoming our Florida stock company of actors and crew: . Bentley Tittle, Paul Sanders, Blake Pickett, John Maynard, Tom Ferguson, Max "Bee Man" Beck (our Director of Photography and camera operator who was called “Bee Man" because he used to appear on the David Letterman show with a beard of bees) and Rich Davis, another Director of Photography/Steadicam Operator/Gaffer, who is now an Emmy Award-winning cameraman and a director, working steadily in network TV.

Curb Entertainment picked up Dark Universe for distribution and by the time the dust settled we'd grossed ten times our negative cost. This "little film that could" was released on video, laserdisc and played on Showtime, Cinemax and Turner. We had a hit.

We struck gold again with our next effort, Biohazard--The Alien Force. A little more money (not much more--these films were made for about 1% of the cost of an average TV movie) and a slightly longer shooting schedule resulting in what, for us, was an action-packed-mutated-creature-on-the-loose epic with locations as diverse as the fly-in airport community in Daytona Beach (where John Travolta lived at the time) and the Universal Studios back lot. We added more actors to our stock company--Susan Fronsoe, Steve Zurk, Maddisen Krowne—and secured the services of name actor Chris Mitchum to play the villain. I got the best producer notes I'd ever received from Fred on that one. His notes, after screening my first cut, always brief and to the point, were "Good job. Lock it." Which means no changes. And it was another hit.

So now we were back in business and this time, it would prove to be a major challenge. We were going to do Jack-O-Lantern, a supernatural horror thriller, new genre for us. And we'd be under the gun, forced to complete the film on a hard and fast deadline.

It was then November 1994 and the film had to be in video stories by Halloween 1995. And at that time, it took a minimum of six months for a film to hit stores. You had to edit the trailer, do the final sound mix, and in addition there was marketing, artwork, and much more, which meant we had to deliver the picture, finished, by spring 1995. It was going to take at least a month to develop the script, and another month to prep so we couldn't start shooting until February. Oh, and it was all talk show host Phil Donahue's fault.

Phil Donahue?

Exactly. For the 1994/95 season of his, then, highly successful show, Phil had decided to do something a little different. He would devote an entire hour to a "Scream Queen Contest." Celebrity judges (including our own Fred Olen Ray) would audition some young actresses for a part as a Jamie Lee Curtis-style "Scream Queen." The winner would be flown to Florida and appear in our movie. They would tape an "audition episode" then send a crew with her to film her filming with us, then do a follow-up taping where she talked about how it all went.

I was excited, despite the dangers. Fred's original concept for the film was a horror thriller about a little miniature pumpkin man who ran around rooms like a voodoo doll and killed his victims. I began suggesting animation effects, etc., until Fred gently reminded me that the budget would be very low. He confided that the only reason the film was being done was because of the Donahue show.

"If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't be making the movie."

Undaunted, I made the deal. This would be the movie that got Pat Moran and me, finally to Hollywood. And besides, Fred was providing something better than big money. He was providing big stars. Our little movie would have more stars than anything we'd done before.

So back to Pat. Always a realist, he asks me about the stars. I grinned. "Fred is going to fly down Linnea Quigley for three days!" Pat was excited. We loved Linnea, a genuine Scream Queen from such big hits as; Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Creepazoids, Sorority Babes in the Slime Ball Bowl-a-Rama, Nightmare Sisters, and Fred's own Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. She was also a fine actress and light comedian. A nice girl. And gorgeous.

Our movie centered around an all-American family and their young boy, haunted by this century-old demonic, tiny, pumpkin man. My son Ryan would play the little boy. Linnea would play his babysitter. So he'd get to do most of his scenes with this talented beauty.

Pat grins. "And the other stars? Who are they?"

I puffed myself up, triumphantly. Pat and I were big fans of classic horror and old Hollywood. I announced the next two names. "John Carradine! And Cameron Mitchell!"

Pat didn't seem to be excited.

"Come on, Pat! John Carradine? He played in the Universal horror thrillers. He was better than Lugosi. He was the huntsman in Bride of Frankenstein. Worked for John Ford. Did all those great movies for Monogram and PRC. And Cameron Mitchell is an Academy Award-winning actor!"

Pat nods. "Yeah. But they're both dead."

Well, okay, so they were. Carradine had died in Spain, back in 1988. Mr. Mitchell had passed away in the summer of 1994, just a few months earlier. But both men had been close friends of Fred Ray and Fred would periodically bring them into the studio and pay them a tidy sum to shoot some isolated scenes.

Some of this footage would find its way into Fred movies like Star Slammer or Alien Within. We would be receiving the last of the footage. Mitchell's scenes consisted of him addressing the camera, smoking a cigarette and talking about "strange tales." So in our movie, which took place during Halloween, he would become a TV horror host, introducing a marathon of horror movies. My son Ryan's character was also a horror movie fan, so he would be watching Cameron Mitchell on screen, in effect, playing his scenes with the great actor.

As for John Carradine, Fred had leftover footage of this famous character actor from the mid 1980s. Originally filmed for an unfinished project called Judge Death, the Carradine footage consisted of some silent shots of the great old actor in a wizard outfit, sitting in a clearing, in the woods. We also had some isolated dialog scraps, called "wild lines," of Carradine spouting scary, menacing threats and ominous predictions. We'd make Carradine the reincarnated spirit of an old demon worshipper who has revived the evil Jack-O-Lantern. The family, and my son Ryan, would play all their scenes with him.

For reversals over Carradine's shoulder, shooting back at the live actors, we'd have to put an actor in a robe, dressed just like Mr. Carradine. We'd also double Carradine in the wide shots (since all we had were Carradine close-ups). We'd also pepper those wild lines through the film and put framed pictures of Carradine in various shots (and his portrait in the family Bible) just to keep reminding the audience he was in the movie.

Pat shook his head. "It's Ed Wood."

He was right. Director Ed Wood had done the same thing in Plan 9 From Outer Space--a production often called the worst film ever made. He had some old footage of Bela Lugosi and used it after Lugosi’s death in his movie, calling it: "Bela Lugosi's last and greatest film!" Wood then put his chiropractor--who looked nothing like Lugosi--in a robe to double Lugosi in the long shots. It was all immortalized in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood. Now we were doing it, too. A point echoed some months later when Fred Ray, interviewed for a national horror movie magazine, referred to our movie as "Plan 9 From Out of State."

And so it began. Making a movie about Halloween in the winter and spring. In Florida. We'd need pumpkins. So we started buying, begging and borrowing, any pumpkins we could find. It was long past Halloween so they were tough to find. And most we found were either rotten or would be soon. But there was a cure for that. Somebody told me if you shellacked them, they'd hold. Just don't poke them or they explode. And rotten pumpkins smell really bad. Within weeks my garage began to fill up with old pumpkins. And yes, some of them blew.

Script-wise, we hit a wall. As I said, Fred had wanted a little tiny pumpkin man. But the first draft script didn't fit the bill. Fred now decided on a full-sized pumpkin man, something a bit easier to shoot than a midget demon. This would be a guy in a costume, with an outfit like the headless horseman: horrible, with claws and a scary pumpkin head with eyes that lit up.

This would be the latest new terror creation—the Jack-O-Lantern--a demonic, man-sized being who swirled a mean scythe and liked to lop peoples’ heads off. Pat went to work on the new draft of the script, probably not encouraged by the fact that he'd also have to play the Jack-O-Lantern, trying to see through those flashing eyes in the pumpkin head as he slashed at our actors and crew with that blood-soaked blade.

Pat's wife Cathy joined the cast. An extremely talented actress, she played a witch in our film--a "good" witch who has come to warn young Ryan about the impending arrival of the Jack-O-Lantern (which he is already aware of thanks to some scary dreams). Cathy struck the right balance of mystery and empathy with the part and, together with the comic skills of Maddisen Krowne, rounded out our cast.

February hit. Our first weekend was up and rolling. The Donohue crew had arrived with their contest winner, a New York actress named Kelly Lacy. And so, production began.

The shoot itself went surprisingly well, at first. Our crew always worked quickly, and we burned through the pages. And then things began to slow, as if we were swimming in molasses. Some of my memories:

--Donahue star Kelly Lacy was very good on screen. And quite the trooper. No complaints about this New Yorker, always eager to do anything we asked. Apparently she made a poor impression on our costume designer, who listed a series of complaints, from Kelly, about wardrobe. I sided with Kelly, which may be why I am now divorced all these years later. That costume designer was my wife, later to become my ex. As for Kelly, we lost touch. I hope she is well. She had to do the goriest death scene I ever shot: chased by the pumpkin man through a swamp, falling to her knees in twelve inches of cold water and getting her throat slashed by the creature's scythe.

--Our main lighting gaffer, Roy Webb, worked days for a major lighting company, supplying gear for various Florida productions and events. Most of our shoots were at night. I remember Roy working weekend after weekend, with no sleep, barely on his feet, sometimes in tears due to the stress. And Roy is a big tough guy.

--We shot most of the film in my neighborhood, in Apopka, Florida. We covered yards and sidewalks up and down the street with rotten pumpkins. Stole shots of our kid actors in front of a local school bus, and used my own home as the home (interior and exterior) of our movie family. By the end of too many night shoots, our neighbors were really mad at us, one night even forcing us to move the production indoors for interior scenes. Imagine that.

Steve Latshaw (at left) directs scenes for Jack-O in Apopka, Florida, 1995.

--The teddy bear clutched by Ryan as he falls asleep (only to be tormented by nightmares of John Carradine) was the same teddy bear I had as a child. This is not really relevant to the story, though perhaps its presence in the film is an indication of how deeply disturbed I might really be.

--A brutal battle between Jack-O-Lantern and Linnea Quigley (who was trying to save young Ryan from the creature) was shot at our neighborhood playground. A long, cold and windy night, with behind-the-scenes footage of same on our tenth anniversary DVD.

Ryan Latshaw, at right, with Linnea Quigley and the crew on the Jack-O set.

--Linnea Quigley was the greatest thing that ever happened to us. She was beautiful, friendly, always laughing, and kept the crew in very high spirits for the three days she worked. Part of the deal with Jack-O-Latern was that it had to have an "R" rating. So we had to do a nude shower scene with Linnea (only Linnea was nude: unfortunately we didn't all get naked with her). Apart from that, some other brief nudity of another character and some gore, this film is almost a family movie. And therein, I think, lies its charm. No pretension: just an old fashioned scary fable.

Happy memories.

--We have footage somewhere of actor Tom Ferguson, in robe, doubling for the late John Carradine, prancing around with a cape covering his face, just like Bela Lugosi's chiropractor in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

--We shot much of the film in the woods on the estate of actor James Best (Dukes of Hazzard's Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane), in Ocoee, Florida.

--Helen Keeling, playing the wife of a local neighbor in the film, was an extremely talented English actress and terrific in our film. Her character dies quite unusually--electrocuted by a toaster--while her husband is simultaneously gutted by the Jack-O-Lantern just outside. Recently, a horror movie web site called this sequence the "greatest death scene in Hollywood history."

--Late in their careers, both John Carradine and Cameron Mitchell were known for appearing in an endless array of low budget horror, Sci Fi, and action movies. Many of these movies were awful, with these two great actors hired to do cameos so the producers could take advantage of their name value. One day on our set, his wry smile perfectly in place, Pat Moran pulled me aside and showed me a book called The Guide to Splatter Films, Volume 2. In it was a list: "Top Ten Reasons You Know This Horror Film is a Piece of Sh-t." And in this book, near the bottom of this top ten list, reason three was: "One of the stars is John Carradine." Above it, reason five: "One of the stars is Cameron Mitchell." We had a two-fer. Hmmm. I'd like to think that means the negatives cancelled each other out.

--Son Ryan endured all sorts of trials and tribulations while making the film. But the toughest thing was crawling through dirt. In the film, the creature buries him. We rigged up a fake section of ground, mounted on painter's horses, a section of plastic covered by dirt with a hole in the middle that he could crawl up through. Easy and safe. But of all the stuff we asked him to do this was the one thing he wouldn't. Scared to death. And now he's a proud and tough Petty Officer (3rd Class) in the U.S. Coast Guard! I used to embarrass Ryan with the DVD: every time he had a new girlfriend, I'd wave the disc and ask the girl if she knew Ryan was a movie star. Of course, he'd have to show the movie to the girl, and it was always a hit. Now he's grown up and married and with a young son of his own. He asked me to send him a DVD. He thought his son might like to see it one day. That made me feel real good.

--Costume Designer Patricia McKiou had the unenviable task of manhandling Halloween street extras for the Halloween night scenes, as well as supplying and supervising all their costumes.

--The entire shoot seemed to go on forever, an unending series of two and three-day weekends, trying to fake Halloween in the cold winter and warm spring of 1995. And all the while, the LA office was pressing us to wrap because of the release schedule. And we were still far behind. And over budget. We had a set budget for the picture, per the contract. Anything else came out of our pockets. And it did. By the end of March we were quite a few thousand in the hole.

I turned in my cut to Fred in early April. The response was not: "Good job. Lock it." We had some problems: individual scenes were good but, overall, it didn't hold together as a film. Not enough suspense. Not enough murder and mayhem. Generously, Fred hired an editor back in Los Angeles to do a cut. It was better, but still missing a lot of stuff. And so we began a series of pickup days, shooting additional sequences, additional Jack-O-Lantern attacks, etc. We shot additional dialog and linking footage with Cathy Moran's character, Ryan's character and the family, trying to fill in missing plot points.

Everybody came back dutifully for reshoots, though in some cases hair styles had changed, actors who'd believed they were wrapped had gotten cuts or trims. This is particularly obvious in some of Gary Doles' scenes. Gary played Ryan's father.

One of the reshoot sequences involved a cable installer, out in a bucket truck at night, trying to repair some cable lines. We had a truck but no Cable Guy. So the director—that would be me—suited up, rode that bucket truck and tried to rescue fair maiden Rachel Carter from the Jack-O-Lantern. I get my throat cut for my trouble. But I worked cheap, so what the heck.

At long last the film was finished. I'd put $15,000 of my own money into the production but, I was lucky. I got it back. We ended up with another hit on our hands.

We made all the deadlines and our picture hit video stores in mid October 1995, with an all-star cast. In addition to Ryan, Cathy, Pat, Maddisen, Gary and Rachel, our little movie starred the great John Carradine and Cameron Mitchell in their final roles, plus Scream Queen Linnea Quigley and a special guest appearances from another famed Scream Queen Brinke Stevens, appearing in footage from an unfinised Fred Ray movie called The Coven. Brinke--herself an accomplished actress and marine biologist--came in and did some voice over dialog to expand her part. We also had a bit from Dawn Wildsmith, co-star of the David Carradine action thriller Warlords.

Andrew Stevens' company Royal Oaks handled distribution for Jack-O-Lantern as its first film. And, at a time when the U.S. home video market was collapsing, the movie sold over 15,000 units nationwide, unheard of video numbers for low budget horror in 1995. The film also had a title change, which, somehow, transformed it and helped to give it the cult status it has today.

During production, I was sending video dailies and rough scene edits back to Hollywood so Andrew Stevens' team could edit a promotional trailer. To save time, I labeled the tapes "Jack-O Dailies." Andrew loved the name Jack-O and that became the new title (except on pay TV and overseas, where it still plays as Jack-O-Lantern.)

It was the movie that started as an afterthought, a reason to do a special edition of the Phil Donahue Show. It was shot on an incredibly low budget--too low to make a "great" or even "really good" movie. Our only hope was to make something entertainining. It went over schedule and over budget and there were times when we never thought we'd finish.

But we did and the movie went on to cult status. It was one of the first movies to hit DVD--and a 2004 "10th Anniversary Edition" also did very well. If you can find it, that's the disc to get. It's packed with "rare footage", outtakes, behind-the-scenes video with Linnea and the cast and crew and a delightful commentary track (if I may say so) provided by Fred Ray and myself.

Like that crazy pumpkin Jack-O, the movie never seems to die, as it keeps getting rediscovered. I'm proud of the film and love the memories associated with making it. And except for that shower scene it's a nice little family picture. With gore, of course. Lots of that.

I went on Google Earth the other day to take another look at the quaint little Central Florida neighborhood where we shot the film. Nothing seems to have changed. The big oak tree is still in the backyard, towering over my old house. The small oak tree where Jack-O lops off the Biker Guy's head. If you find yourself in Central Florida someday, you can visit the location. The address, in Apopka, is 1764 Waterbeach Court. If you sit quietly you may be able to hear the Jack-O fable whispered on the wind:.

"... the pumpkin man will steal your soul... snatch it up... and swallow it whole!"

And, if you happen to see any of my old neighbors, don't tell them why you're there. I think they're still mad at me.

Steve Latshaw
Hollywood, California

More on Jack-O

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"I've Got News For You ... "

Old Blue Eyes, wearing a gown to match those azure orbs. Rumors of his demise have been exaggerated

I stopped by the hospital to see Dad, and after forty-eight hours of IV fluids and antibiotics he was a new man. Or anyway a new old man. He wanted to know what he was doing in the hospital because he didn't feel sick.

"You've been asleep for two days," I wrote him on his notebook. And then I did my pantomime of him coming into the hospital: I hung my tongue out of the side of my mouth and sunk my head into my chest and drooped my hands like a dead seal. When he is in a good mood, he loves it when I play pantomime with him, as he has no hearing left and must rely upon his eyes and his sense of humor.

"I'll bet you thought I was dead," he said. And then he paused, for effect, like the good comedian he is.

"I got news for you," he said. "I ain't dead yet."

And he ain't. He has grown mighty perky in the hospital during the last twenty-four hours, for a dead guy. You can see from the picture, he is still looking a bit ethereal. But he is happy and alert and eating all his meals with gusto.

He wants to see my Mom, but she has come down with the stomach flu and can't come to the hospital. If she loses any more weight, though, we'll have to get them a double room. Appropriate, since they've been married for sixty five years this month and haven't spent sixty-five minutes apart since World War II.

Dad has a "procedure" today to try and uncover what in his system keeps causing him to have infections. I wrote to him that they were going to put a camera down his gullet and he made a face.

"Sounds like fun," he said. I wrote that they wouldn't be feeding him breakfast and he shouldn't get mad about that.

"Mad? Me? I'm through being mad," he said.

But don't you believe it. He awoke in the night and started raising heck and asking for my Mom. Sounds like he's full of the old vinegar. He definitely ain't dead yet.

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Coco Before Chanel

Coco Before Chanel, with Audrey Tautou in the lead role.

Director: Anne Fontaine
Writers: Edmonde Charles-Roux (book)
Anne Fontaine
Costumes: Eudald Magri
Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel: Audrey Tautou
Étienne Balsan: Benoît Poelvoorde
Arthur 'Boy' Capel: Alessandro Nivola

Length: 105 Minutes
Language: French (with English subtitles)

When I saw Audrey Tautou in the film version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, I was singularly unimpressed. After seeing her in the lead role in Coco Before Chanel, I wonder if Code was just a bad film with a bad part for such a talented performer. In Chanel Tautou is in every scene, and you leave the film still feeling you did not get quite enough of her.

The rags-to-riches tale of the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel has a thoughtful subtext about how those of us not born into a life we want, are sometimes lucky enough to invent for ourselves a life we need.

And so it was for Chanel, an orphan who had a genius for seeing the world in a unique way, and who used her vision to rise above a life in which beautiful-but-poor women were handed from man to man, used as objects and discarded.

She chose that it would not happen to her. Living in a world on the edge of poverty, she used others to achieve the thing she wanted most--her independence. Unable to compete with the wealthy women of fashion around her, she chose to create a style of her own. If you are a woman, you know how much courage this requires. Women who do it often find themselves laughed at--and then, if they are lucky, find themselves imitated. And this is what happened to Chanel.

Chanel with the English lover, Alfred "Boy" Capel, from whom she borrowed the tweeds for some of her signiture suits. Here she wears a simple evening gown she designed that shocked Deauville, a city easily shocked back in the early 20th century.

Along the way she had help from men, at least one of whom she did not love, and one whom she did.

And along the way she had her heart broken, as most of us do. But like a character in a Hemingway novel, she survived and found herself stronger in the broken places. From love and loss she gained the strength to move on and to become the incredible success she later became.

Everything about this film is beautiful: the colors, the cinematography, the locations in the French countryside, the costumes, the fabrics, the lighting. Everything looks elongated, like a fashion sketch, and Tautou's eyes take it all in and give little away.

If you are an English speaking person turned off by French films, count this film as an unusual one, and one you would like anyway. There is very little dialogue, so the need for subtitles is limited. Chanel, for all her French pomposity, is a character an American can very much understand. If you had arrived with Allied forces to liberate Paris, you might have wished to march up to her shop and say "Chanel, we are here." Of course, as history would tell us, you might likely have found her in the arms of her Nazi officer lover ("collaboration horizontale" ). But she was always a practical woman.

When life gives you country linen and cotton instead of silk, there are those who can make linen and cotton the fashion. When the chic discard their frou frou for your plain straw boater, you have won a victory, as did Coco Chanel. She taught us a great deal about beauty and even more about the toughness needed in good fabric if it is to survive over time.

Audrey Tautou even makes a simple fisherman's shirt look fashionable in Coco Before Chanel.

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Standing By for Takeoff

Dad in the Hospital

A picture of Dad my sister took a few years ago. She caught him in motion as he tossed a toy glider at a local park. He was beginning to show his illness then, but he was still vertical and still, as he always had, loved airplanes of all kinds.

I know, now, why they make ghosts transparent in pictures. When you see someone who is leaving this life, he seems to be dissolving into the ether. Dwindling, a friend of mine calls it.

My Dad left the Big Fancy Nursing Home on the Hill late yesterday and is now in the hospital. Whatever it is we've been fighting--an infection?--within him for almost a month has laid him low again. A month ago, he was home, walking with a walker, sitting outside in the sun, and singing "Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here" every day when I walked in the door.

Now he is ethereal. At the local hospital he is in a private room, looking fragile and sleeping quietly. He was unresponsive almost all day yesterday, sick to his stomach, and sleeping all the time. That's why the nursing home sent him to the hospital.

Now he's getting hydrated and looks a little better. He awoke when my Mom and I walked in this morning, and when I wrote "We Love You" on a notepad, he read it and tried to clap his hands. I wrote to him that he was in El Camino Hospital and he said "I'm in a private room. That's nice." And, to see if I could get him to smile, I wrote: "No one else could stand you, so they put you in by yourself." He read this very slowly then he looked around to see my face and he cracked a smile. It's the first one I've seen from him in a couple of weeks.

He said before we had our reunion party--well, my Mom and I were there, and I guess he figured we must be having a party--he wanted to put on his shoes and use the bathroom. "I have to perform my natural functions, you know," he said, slurring his words but using the careful vocabulary he always uses in spite of his dementia. "I want to ascertain my condition," he said later. "The food here is superior. I plan to eat all day and night," and then he dozed off again, having eaten a crumb or two of a muffin and drinking a little juice.

The doctor had a long talk with me about resuscitation and extraordinary measures and I said I couldn't imagine it would come to that, yet. And he just looked at me and said Dad was very sick.

I'm trying to remember the days Dad loved when my sister and I were kids and he'd built a model plane and we took it up into the Stanford Hills and flew it all around us in the California sky, above the brown fields and oak trees. No one gave us permission. We just went up there and made sure we didn't annoy the cows. It was freedom of a kind you don't see much anymore and it involved engineering and planes and children and these were all things he loved.

Dad and me and a neighbor boy with the "Sparky K" in the Stanford Hills beyond Los Altos. The "Sparky K" was named for my sister and me, Sparky, because my grandad called me "Spark Plug" and "K" for my sister Kimberly. The "Sparky K" had a gasoline engine and we crashed it quite a lot. I guess we were lucky we didn't start any fires.

He was so happy then. Years later, when he had retired, he flew real planes for fun. He joined a flying club and he and his friends took up the Cessnas and flew from one local airport to another, had lunch, and flew home. He felt so free up there, and there were rules to it that he understood. Unlike life and people, which he almost always found annoying or frustrating.

I don't want him dissolving on me or becoming invisible, but that's what happens in life as we come to the end. In the midst of life we are in death. I just haven't wanted it. He's like a Star Trek crew member, being beamed somewhere that I can't follow. I know he'll be free then and somewhere much nicer than here.

And wherever it is, I know it will be filled with airplanes, for soaring.

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Happy Birthday Screenwriter Latshaw

And Congrats to My Successful Movie Friends

Steve, looking like the big bear he is, and his friend RC.

Screenwriter Steve Latshaw marked his 50th birthday last night at a party in Sierra Madre, and a whole cadre of his friends, who had all made zero budget movies together with him back in the day, collected around this wonderful man to celebrate.

I knew them when I was an anchorwoman in Florida and liked them all because, like me, they loved the movies. However, since I was on my own functioning career track, I thought they were all crazy to imagine they could move to Hollywood and find careers in the movie/television/entertainment biz.

At right, Robin in her Florida anchorwoman decade. It was at WESH that she met all the characters surrounding the chairman of characterville, Steve Latshaw.

And boy did they prove me wrong. All of them, to a man and a woman, have found successful niches doing what they dreamed of doing: art directing (shows like "Scrubs" and "Mad TV") scriptwriting (shows like "Tonight" and "Monk"), cinematography (one is working on a new show called "Cougar Town" with Courtney Cox) and finally Steve, who has a long list of credits for writing and directing movies.

I was wowed by them all and proud as well. They are all still the funny, nutty, big-hearted, people I loved then and the reunion was a blast.
RC and BT at Steve's party. May he live long and prosper.

Beth, one of the group's most talented writers, is still a beauty and has a home full of art. She hosted the party with her writer husband Steve, and they did it with class and style and warmth in the little town of Sierra Madre where Beth truly is its treasure. (Look for her script on the October 30th episode of "Monk".)
Steve was quiet all evening. I think he was still stunned and surprised to find so many of us really cared about him. He is so self-deprecating I sometimes wonder how he has managed to do so much.

I don't want to say a lot of adult beverages were consumed. But my old friend Bentley, who took the picture at the top of this blog post, also snapped the one at the end. And it is the one I will leave you with. Happy Birthday screenwriter and all around good American gentleman Steve Latshaw, and cheers to his gang, a truly fabulous group of talented friends.

Amateur photographer BT took this picture and I don't want to say he was partying too hard ... let's just say it was dark and my little camera was new to him. The other pictures came out just great BT, you handsome devil.

Steve Latshaw on the Independent Movie Data Base

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