On a radio show recently, the question was put forth, “does art have the power to change a life?” Although I’ve always thought a life without art is a dead life and a society without art is a dead society, I’d never considered the question quite in that way. It started me thinking about my own journey.
I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre. The plan after college was to spend a year in Northern California with my brother and his wife while getting acclimatized to life outside of school, then move to San Francisco and disappear into some rep company or other and spend my days happily ensconced in a life in theatre.
I often visited San Francisco with my brother and sister-in-law, seeing plays, visiting museums, drinking in the Bohemia of it all, preparing for my eventual move there. As Robert Burns said to the wee mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley…” Okay, so my schemes weren’t all that well laid out to begin with, but they did gang a bit agley.
Soon after lighting in Northern California, I got a job at the Round Table Pizza parlor at Brunswick Plaza, half way between the small towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City. I was quickly promoted to assistant manager and moved into a tiny house in Grass Valley. I didn’t have a car, almost everything I needed I could get to by walking or riding my ten-speed bike. Everything but movies. There was one movie theatre that served both towns. It had three screens and was fairly close to me, but their usual fair tended to ooze a little too much testosterone for my taste. The nearest alternative was in Sacramento, a forty-five minute drive down the highway. If I wanted to see something that didn’t have Sylvester Stallone in it I would need to find someone else who wanted to go who also had a car.
One afternoon I decided I needed to see a movie but no one I knew wanted to go. My friend Vern, however, who lived right across the street from me, offered the use of his car. I decided on The China Syndrome, which was playing at one of the bigger complexes in the outskirts of Sacramento, gathered up the keys and journeyed hence.
The movie, staring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Wilford Brimley, was a political thriller very loosely based on the Three Mile Island incident. A young, naive reporter (Fonda) accidentally stumbles upon evidence that the safety inspections for the building of the local nuclear plant were fudged and those responsible ranged from the halls of corporations to the government. The script was tight, the direction flawless. The tension built slowly but steadily to a fever pitch. Jack Lemmon, an actor I always admired, was never better. I was moved. Stunned might be a better world. On the ride home in that borrowed car, I decided I wanted to be part of an industry that could produce something so powerful. The next day I put my notice in at the pizza parlor.
I saw the movie two more times that week, convincing friends they had to go. None of them seemed as moved as I was, but they humored me. It wasn’t until the third viewing that I realized that there was no background music in the film, only incidental music occasionally coming from a car radio or in a party scene. How tight must a movie be to not rely on music to manipulate your emotions? How courageous must a director be to make that choice? If I’d had any doubts about my impending relocation, they vanished.
I bought a car, a Ford Grand Torino station wagon, bright orange, that I named Stanley (two points to anyone who can guess why), loaded all my belonging in back and literally a month after that initial viewing of the movie I was on my way to Los Angeles. I lived in the car those first few days, parking on side streets in this unfamiliar town, until I tracked down some friends from college and camped out on their living room couch. I stayed with them until I found a small room in a building just north of Hollywood Boulevard, got a job at an answering service and became a Los Angelian. Before watching that movie, it was completely unpredictable that I move to this town, one I’d never even visited. I liked San Francisco. Whenever I visited there, it felt like home, yet here I am. I tell people I was headed for San Francisco but took a wrong toin at Albuquoique.
That was in 1979. My acting dreams have transformed, I am now a writer, but I still live quite happily and productively in Los Angeles after all these years, working in and around the industry that made such a powerful film. I look upon that evening in a movie house in Sacramento as a major turning point in my life.
To answer the question posed by the radio show, yes, I say. Art does have the power to change one’s life. I often wonder what that original trail would have been like, but the one I chose has thus far been wildly diverting.
P.S. Along with this, a sad goodbye to Paul Newman, one the greats, who will be remembered for his incredible body of work, his humility, humor and dedication to contribution to humanity.
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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend
“You are now officially an old lady,” he said to me when he saw the pothos cuttings in a vase on my kitchen windowsill. That was five or six years ago. I told him the pothos needed trimming and it was a waste to just throw the cuttings out. He shook his head sadly. They are still there. Pothos like to grow long tendrils and look sickly odd if you don’t trim them back. If you do trim them back, the plants can become full, lush and bountiful. I liked my plants lush, so I trimmed the pothos and put the cuttings in water to root. Sometimes I then replant them. It doesn’t make me an old lady.
I went to the local library to look up some scripts and worked up a couple of monologues, the requisite comedic piece, a cut and pasted monologue from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, “Mr. and Mrs. Pew are silent over cold grey cottage pie,” and a dramatic piece from Hamlet, “Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would thaw, melt or resolve itself into a dew.” I did, I think, fairly well. Because I had already planned on moving to Los Angeles, I gave them the family homestead address in Spokane to make sure any mail would eventually get to me, then told my family to look out for anything from them. I went back to my job in Northern California, then moved to Los Angeles in another ballsy move that deserves it’s own essay.
I was told to go to the Variety Arts Center, that venerable, stately old building. The audition was in a medium sized rehearsal room upstairs. I brought in the requisite comedic and dramatic pieces, the same two I’d used in Ashland. I walked into the room and was introduced to Bill Bushnell, the artistic director of the theatre, and his assistant. I did the Thomas piece. It felt good. It felt wonderful. I peeked over at the two sitting behind the long folding table and they had smiles on their faces. I did the Shakespeare. I was dead on. I had never done it better. It rang with emotion, with betrayal. “Oh God, God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seems to me all the uses of the world that it should come to this… But two months dead. Nay, not so much, not two.” I felt it in my bones. I was Hamlet. Albeit an overweight one with dark curly hair, but I was Hamlet.
