Deja Vu All Over Again

Visiting the 2 Blowhards this morning, I was struck by a weird sense of deja vu. Michael Blowhard's less than nostalgic waxings of how he was sent running into the night when his hopes of becoming a filmmaker crashed against the rocks of reality, struck me with the similarity of my own experience. Perhaps we should do a survey of culture bloggers. How many are simply wannabe artists, poets, filmmakers, actors, novelists, or playwrites, who lacked the ego, drive, insanity, and "rhinoceros skin" to pursue that career.

I admit, I lack most of the above. My years of trodding the boards in the Berkeley Theater Arts department in the mid '70s came to an end when I came to very similar realizations as Michael. And a few years in LA after college took care of completing the process of self discovery that taught me I was without some essential characteristics for making it in Hollywood.

This particular graf from Michael Blowhard's posting was particularity poignant in reflecting my own feelings and experience (except for the Mid-West thing), "Dreamy, polite, raised-in-the-middle-class, mid-American kid that I was, I got a look at this world and concluded, Hmmm, y'know, I don't think I'm temperamentally suited for this life. I'm barely able to yell and scream, or to take being yelled and screamed at, for instance -- and there's a lot of yelling and screaming in the moviebiz. Unrelenting tension makes me take to my bed. Power-games make me want to step aside and hand the reins to whoever happens to be standing there."

All of this is by way of Michael being prompted into a Proustian reverie by a viewing of the documentary Lost in La Mancha. The film about the filming of Terry Gilliam's ill fated Don Quixote movie. I agree with Michael that it is but a "good enough" documentary, but the subject is fascinating. Gilliam does seem to be one of the few nice guys to make it, but even he is capable of a tantrum when it suits his purposes.

Now if only Francis had included Hearts of Darkness on the Apocalypse Now Redux DVD.

Read the whole thing here.

[Update: George Wallace Comments]