Idyllwild

This weekend Jonathan and I escaped to Idyllwild for a screenwriters retreat. Idyllwild is this beautiful artsy town two hours outside of Los Angeles, way up in the mountains, above Palm Springs. It is a little piece of the Sierras that has landed in Southern California, full of giant pines, and huge El Cap type rocks that rise over the town. It was fall there and the stars twinkled. If you climbed up Devil's Slide to the top of Taquitz peak (which I did) you could see forever--the Salton Sea, mountains, and all of San Berdu. It smelled like pine needles and the wind in the branches sounded like the ocean. I was happy.
Jonathan was a mentor to aspiring screenwriters, and I was a hanger-on. So there we were, 100 or so mentors and mentees, meeting in the wilderness and over espresso at the Cafe Aroma to talk about movies, themes, life and emotional resonance. Two of the stars of the weekend are Joe Forte and Meg LeFauve, some of Jonathan's oldest and dearest friends. Huddled in the woods these writers really talk about how to make your films emotionally come alive. Part of that, they believe, is writing from the heart, which requires you to tap into your own personal theme. The theme that colors everything you know and care about, and every story you tell.
So Meg has an exercise. She makes every student name their three favorite movies, and then she listens, evaluates, looks into their souls, and tells them their theme. Often people think they know their theme, but it takes a sage like Meg to really draw it out of them. She did Jonathan in front of a group of 40 wannabes and her insights were so profound he couldn't talk, or even hear anything that happened afterwards. I would write that here, but that is his story to tell.
I didn't get Meg to me-it's like a session with a psychic--you have to pull her aside and get her to sit down and I was not even a paying member of this retreat. But after I got home I did myself.
My favorite movies:
Sophie's Choice
Missing
The Official Story
Next you have to tell the story of the movie. Because like dreamwork, how you tell the story says as much about you as the choice. Jonathan said all three of my movies were about loss. Yes. True. But this is what I think. In Sophie;s Choice Stingo falls in love with the characters of Meryl Streep and Kevin Klein. He is in love with their love, their passion, their fun and how they live life. He loves them, and he loves their stories. It is enough just to be around them, so he can believe in that kind of love. But it all falls apart. Kevin Klein is not an eccentric genius and a wonderful lover, he is a bipolar crazyman who is deeply, and profoundly, mentally ill. In Missing the father (Jack Lemmon) goes to Argentina (?) to find his wayward son. It is a son he never understood, always thought was a slacker, and always felt irritated by, but now he has disappeared. The father believes deeply in the United States, all it does, and living by conventions, the conventions he has lived by. In the end the son has been killed by a government supported by the United States government. The father learns to love his son, but in the process he loses his faith in the United States, and is broken. In the Official Story the woman, married to a general in Argentina, desperately wants a baby. She wants a baby above all else. Finally her husband brings her one to adopt. She asks no questions, just loves the child. Later she finds out that children have been taken from families who have been murdered by the regime, the regime her husband works for. She does not dare to believe. She loves her child too much. But finally she must confront her husband. And in his rage he becomes violent, and with sudden recognition you not only know he took the child, but that he is capable of all the cruely necessary to run the regime and do the things he is accused of doing. My theme: Believing deeply, too deeply, in something I really want to be true--whether it is love, an ideal, whatever--and in the end seeing the truth, and becoming deeply, deeply disillusioned. And yet, like Stingo, the father, and the wife, I set myself up. I want so desperately to believe in some things, I cannot bear to look at the truth.
These are the stories I seem to be drawn to. Is this my story?