Stephen Gyllenhaal | Official Website

Behind the Scenes of Numb3rs: Point of view shot

Posted on 9 February 2010 | No responses

All’s Fair In War

Posted on 7 February 2010 | 8 responses

I was having coffee with a friend, who finally opened up and admitted she was in dire financial straits, hadn’t worked in over a year. Her features were equal parts relief and misery for she had spoken to almost no one about this. Yes, she had heard rumblings of others in similar circumstances, of course, around the edges of her life. But no one had come forward until now – until I had told her about my own circumstances – which had made me sell my homes, downsize massively and actually find wild joy in the process. She was finding no joy, had been a vastly successful part of Hollywood. (The thing about us entertainment folk is that we have all often struggled between our high-paying gigs, so the devastation had snuck up on her.)

I joked about my belief that 85% of the recent plethora of extremely expensive Bentley convertibles on the LA streets was people on their last 25k, leasing these monsters of extravagance like mental patients, hoping against hope that Obama’s hope would pull them over their approaching abyss, despite the growing “For Lease “signs from downtown LA to the Santa Monica beaches.

I then found myself talking to her about another friend who had looked at her dire circumstances, had talked to experts (she’s an up-and-coming hot lawyer in town). Armed with a careful strategy, this lawyer had defaulted on everything – credit cards, mortgages. Everything. She had renegotiated the whole mess down to paying back thirty to forty cents on the dollar (depending on the various banks). If she hadn’t done this she would have likely lost everything – house, car, grocery money, probably her job. (I should repeat that this is a brutally hard working, very successful lawyer, with a grown daughter and a top-notch mind.)

My friend with the coffee had never even imagined doing this (neither had my lawyer friend – by the way – she had gone through six months of agony before bringing herself to the kind of behavior she would have thought abhorrent a year earlier).

Funny, isn’t it, how our leaders have felt no such agony in bailing themselves out? The rich, the powerful, the arrogant who screwed up everything with their strange beliefs that they knew everything, that they had a right to everything, that they still have a right to everything and anything (even now) that they can grab.

Up at the “top of the world” everything’s still whizzing along like bang busters – massive bonuses, a (more or less) wonderful Stock Market, bigger mansions (a few of those Bentleys paid for with pocket change from these guys, I’m sure). And I’ll bet our friends over at GM and Chrysler are once again looking down at us from their Lear jets.

And yet my two well educated, highly ethical, very hard-working friends are going through agony. They may still go under. I may still go under. But I’m not going to do it without a fight, a nasty, brutal, gloves-off fight, because these guys at the top are dead wrong, They are thieves, liars and arrogant fools and they’re still running this country completely without a hint of consequence for their crimes and inhumanness.

And then I found myself drifting to another strange image with my coffee friend overlooking the hippest part of Melrose Avenue. “Do you want to just let em cart you off to a camp somewhere?” I asked when she told me she just wasn’t sure she could do what my lawyer friend had done. (I had been visualizing Nazis, of course, carting her away – I can be overly dramatic, I admit it.) Nonetheless the theme of fighting back grew stronger on my side of the table. She had smiled, had shrugged, then had laughed – had felt too embarrassed about the whole thing, I guess. But maybe that will change.

And I agree with her: there is something deadly wrong with not paying back all your debt. It eats at the soul, at the very fiber of what it is to be human. It lowers the head, makes the feet shuffle. But it hits me as I remember her now, sitting across from me at that table off Melrose Avenue that we are in a profound war today with an enemy that lies to us constantly on TV, the internet, billboards; that a kid on an airplane blowing up his pants or whatever is a small time terrorist compared to the ones running so much of our country in their fine suits and silk dresses who have their hands on the real weapons of mass destruction – just ask the people over there in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan.

Nonetheless, the last thing I could have ever imagined myself saying to a friend would have been don’t pay back your debt – default instead, finagle, renegotiate, save yourself. Be prepared to fight another day. And hold your head up high as you do it because you are living in a time that will be remembered as a war, as a civil war, perhaps, as a brutal war against the Goldman (let em eat cake) Sachs’ mindset and the Bank of (let em charge us three bucks per ATM transaction) America/Citibank/AIG. These are hard-hearted business geeks who will pull out the money they have gutted from our grand country and take it to wherever else they can dupe trusting, hard working people – China, India, Brazil, Indonesia.

Yes, it’s a war. And sadly, all is fair in war. It’s a terribly sad truth, desperately sad. But others have been here before us. Others, sadly, will most likely be here fighting after we’re gone.

Whether we like it or not, we have been drafted into this long, complicated, yet proud lineage of warriors fighting for what is right. It isn’t easy, far from it. Black becomes white, your debt becomes something you do not pay off – easy to get lost in a war of this kind, easy to be destroyed, to become soulless. But we must win somehow, as others have won before us. And we must risk our souls to do it, I suppose, for no less than the Republic depends on us. No less than the well being of our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are at stake. As for the soul, what else is it good for, but to risk it for that which we love?

Crescent Moon

Posted on 6 February 2010 | 4 responses

As Elvis Costello baptizes
the radiant morning,
blaring with the South Road sun
(my SUV windows up against the Yukon wind,
the oil of an Arabian child’s blood whistling
this empire’s chromed wheel’s glory forward)
I see her dancing.
Dancing!
A pining child with her pockets
full of daddy’s jelly beans.
Dancing
a ragamuffin’s dreams of flour
for a thousand loaves of bread.
A pine tree.
Dancing!
Jiggling every pine tree
needle of her Christmas joy.

And if it’s only a mix of Caribbean hot currents
and Arctic winter blow
then why aren’t the other trees dancing,
stamping their roots to my English rocker
as our two countries throttle through
bombs and blood and casual facts?

Why does so much else sleep
while this child of wood whiskeys
across my wrinkling face, dancing,
as if she’ll never feel the axe.

Hey, Goldman Sachs, Why Not Give Half Your Bonuses to Haiti?

Posted on 5 February 2010 | 1 response

“Haiti’s disaster, on the front of every newspaper, has given Goldman Sachsan unequalled opportunity. A simple act of generosity could bring it front-page publicity, one that would do much to allay the ontroversy on everyone’s lips. By donating just half of their bonuses to Haitian relief,they will outmatch the Haitian GDP, and improve not only their image but their tax liability. Church World Service, an efficient and experienced relief organization, for example, administering the Goldman Sachs billions, could ensure that reconstruction is not just a return to pre-earthquake squalor, but an enduring monument to the bankers’ unprecedented liberality. In this simple way Goldman Sachs alone would surpass the $100 million that President Obama has pledged to Haiti, by a monumental factor of 100.”

From http://www.ncccusa.org/news/100203hunsingerkinnamon.html:

Behind the Scenes of Numb3rs: Lottery Tickets

Posted on 4 February 2010 | 1 response

No Man’s Land

Posted on 3 February 2010 | 6 responses

I was turning left off Barham Boulevard the other evening from Warner Brother’s Studios where I had been preparing to direct The Mentalist for CBS. It had been a good day, a fun day – scouting locations, casting, going over the script. I was headed toward Hollywood, along Caheunga Boulevard West. It’s a strange road as you come through the pass from “the valley” into LA proper. On the right there is chaparral (scrub and rocks – generally bleak hillsides, but green from the recent heavy rains). Almost a wilderness, except near the top there are high-end modern and post-modern homes, looking out over the city. On the left is the Hollywood Freeway – a brutal mass of complex concrete with hurtling cars and trucks.

Caheunga Boulevard is a lot of concrete too – four curving lanes’ worth – and one can almost keep even with the freeway traffic, which makes the whole experience a bit dangerous. Street lamps zip by. There are no sidewalks. Pockets of litter swirl anxiously. Its a kind of a purgatory with hell emanating from the nasty freeway traffic to your left and heaven drifting down somewhere from up there in the hills. I was slowing for a traffic light that leads off to Mulholland Drive on the right. David Lynch made a movie, Mullholland Drive.

A bus was just in front, cars scattered around me, waiting for the light – rumbling – a slight shimmer of exhaust. It was just in front of the bus that I saw this man kiss another man, balanced on the cracked curb with only a dirt path behind him. Why did this kiss catch me – I’d seen plenty of men kiss each other before? The location was strange, sure, but that wasn’t it. The taller of the two was the one being kissed. The shorter man (a bit overweight) was also gently slipping a jacket over this taller man’s shoulders. The cars were edging forward now so my view was improving. Both men had shaved heads. Were they Buddhists? Were they gay? Their clothes seemed monkish, but maybe it was just that baggy fashion – hip, street-smart. It’s hard to remember. Actually the kisser – kissing the taller man on the face now again – then again – then again – seemed like a boy. Like a baby, even though he was probably thirty-five or forty. Too much affection for a man that age. Too much abandon. Was he retarded? Yes. No.

The cars were getting edgy. The shorter man adjusted the lapel of the taller man’s maroon jacket with the gentleness and affection of a coddling mother. It was just not right. Too intimate. Had the taller man been bare-chested before the jacket? Yes. No. Was my jarred imagination playing dirty tricks? They didn’t seem gay. The shorter one did seem retarded, though, or something, or…

The light turned. All the cars and bus quickly picked up speed as the shorter man clung to the maroon jacket, which I now saw had cowboy-like designs, stitched black and circular. This shorter man (growing smaller now) pulled the taller man’s head down to his chest so that he could kiss the top of the taller man’s shaved head over and over and over. The taller man, almost unperturbed, seemed suddenly like a big brother, but it was all too troubling and my rear view mirror was losing them. Awful. Creepy. Only now the skyline of Hollywood was rising up to greet me with its familiar buildings, billboards and neon. Off to my right was the overwhelming and comforting mall of Hollywood and Highland. A splash of lined-up brake lights turned everything red and glowing. All of it helped to pull me into the comforting, inhuman and predictable safety of concrete, steel and glass.