Laurel Hardware

1.

It was a day.  Yes.  Yesterday was a long day.  Good.  Kind.  Revealing.

I walked the dogs.  Through the bourgeois streets of suburban Malibu.   Early morning.  Before the sun breaks through.

I have struggled with writing both the end of the film and the novel.  Because, I suppose, they are both so firmly planted in the experience of being me.  My Producer is fine with everything.  Everything but the last page.  He wants an epiphany.  So, that’s what I am striving for.

The film is about a sociopath, a charming sociopath.  In fact, the film is about two sociopaths.  I can’t discount my own bat shit craziness.  Let’s face it… I did some terrible things.  For those of you who have been reading this blog for the past two years… I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the balanced and sensitive way I have drawn the characters… but that is not my credit to take.. it is my dear Producers influence.

If I had my way there would have been murders my dear…  His genius for editing and re positioning.. for making me (and you) care for the person I loathed and loved.  For revealing the truth.

I headed into town at 11 to meet my assistant at the club.

I’m test shooting cast this Sunday and having informal crew meetings.  I met a very competent First AD this week.

At the club I met Scott Cooper who made Crazy Heart and we stood in the bathroom discussing his new film, Out of the Furnace with Christian Bale.   He is understandably excited.  Really lovely man.  I bumped into Nona Summers who was with a loathsome Greek from my distant past.  Kevin and I sat with Jacob Brown from the New York Times. A super cool kid who is making his second short film.  We watched his first at the table.  Enigmatic, sexy and very well shot.

Jacob has excellent taste.  He and Sean Devany are the up and coming generation of young gay film makers fearlessly re-imagining their own experience as gay men, using film for their catharsis.  I am heartened that these smart young gay men are once again beginning to tell their stories.  For the longest time young gay film makers shucked their own experience in favour of chasing a bigger, straighter audience.

As a result… our community became less vibrant.

The gay film festival circuit, until recently, was lack luster and uninspiring… this year, at Outfest, there were so many interesting and well made gay films.  It warmed the cockles of my homo heart.  Gay men want, understandably, well made films with high production values but financiers are loathed to invest… scared that the audience wont come.  The tide is turning.

2.

Brock pitched up looking incredibly sexy in a tight, pale blue polo shirt.

We ate Caesar salad with added chicken.  After lunch we met Rafi Gavron the hot, hot, hot British actor who was ass raped in the TV series Rome.   He was with his cousin Dean McKillen the owner of the super chic new restaurant Laurel Hardware in West Hollywood.  Dean invited us for dinner on Saturday.

Brock and I hung with Kevin and Fielder at their home on Martel then decided we would preempt the Saturday invite and go to Laurel Hardware.  The place was packed with a really interesting crowd.  A smattering of Young Hollywood and some cool looking gay men.  Dean made us feel very welcome, sending us delicious pizzas covered with burrata and basil.  The boys drank beer and I didn’t.

I drove Brock back to his car and met up with my night-time companion,  collapsed into bed.

3.

There is an odd collision of circumstance:  Jacob is the best friend of the best lesbian friend of you know who.  One degree of separation.  It doesn’t surprise me.  It is a very small world.  We trawled through Facebook.  I looked in awe at pictures of my ex and his new boyfriend.   They are indeed an unusual couple.  Dressed in outrageous and colorful garb.   When my ex’s bf wears his heels he must be 7 foot tall.

There was a picture of them holding each other in a bucolic setting.   My ex is quite short and his beau wore heels.  The height differential was staggering.  It looked like a post wedding picture.  You know, after the vows.  I wondered what they would wear when they actually got married.  If Thom Browne would make the costume.

They looked very, very happy.

Diane Arbus would have photographed them.  I mean, it was like that… like a Diane Arbus picture.

I expect to feel different things when I see them together but I always feel the same.  I am truly happy that he is happy.    From a distance I share their obvious happiness.  It is a relief.  I am pleased that even though we will never know each other… will never speak ever again… that I was indeed somehow, in some way responsible for forcing that boy out of the closet and into the life he should have enjoyed since his teens.

Mostly I congratulate myself for saving her.  It baffled me, for the longest time what terrified him about being gay.  I understand now.  He wasn’t scared of being gay, he was scared of being that kind of gay.  Flamboyant, creative, a dandy.  Every time I see him in the virtual street my questions are answered.  A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.  I hope that she is doing ok, that she has found a good man.  An honest man.  I wonder if she forgave him?   I mean, there’s only so long one can hold such hatred in one’s heart.

Perhaps one day she will thank me.  I don’t expect any thanks from him.

4.

My great friend, the abundantly talented Lady Rizo is off to the Edinburgh Festival.  Packing her Marchesa frocks and her false eye lashes.  I urge my British friends to urgently seek her out.

You will not be disappointed.

5.

I am headed to Provincetown to stay with Benoit.