January 1984 War in Heaven Workshops begin in Boston at ART. Michelle George who had worked with Brook a copy of Thomas' Mann's essay on Schopenhauer'.
Chaikin, "This thing that me and Sam are doing, there's no setup for this kind of impromptu work. Sam and I have a long and deep friendship. He's reeling from his different identities. We talked a lot about directions in the theater. How he feels stuck and yet excited is something we talked about all along...The way we work is I improvise once we come up with a character... Story of being in Boston of seeing Mother Courage with Lange starring Linda Hunt at Boston Shakespeare Co. Too much publicity.
March 1984 Lord Pentland the English born leader of the Gurdjieff movment in America dies.
Sam Sr. dies in Santa Fe at the age of 67. "I think there are basically two roads: You either die like a dog or you like a man. If you die like a dog, you just go back to dust...I had my dad cremated, you know? There wasn't much left of him to begin with...a little leather box Buried at veterans' cemetery in Santa Fe read Lorca. READING that he liked flag and a box are the center of the service. SS speaks very objectively about what he notices at his father's funeral. "You wouldn't think that the ashes of a man would be that heavy." His death was devastating. After much fighting he was beginning to make peace with him, to care for him, and to recognize himself in his father, with a son and to live on the desert with another woman. "It all felt strangely familiar. It felt like it had always been this way. The successful son of a man who died with no money and broken dreams. Father's example is his dark hidden side, the path not taken. Poor boy from a Calif avocado farm who never finished college and now one of the most famous writers and familiar faces of his generation. Who am I? Who is the real me-the inside me or the outside me, the person I know or the person I show to the world?"
On character in the early plays. A person and what he's doing that day, fluid images overlapping personas changing faces and ID acccording to whim survival or chemicals. 60's kids dreams in public.
Changes in England with meeting Brook like SS a student of Gurdjieff "in the work". SS quote on Peter Brook. Turns 30 with a variety of images underneath is something steady and constant, as old as the hills.
The dichotomy between the self that changes and the self that stays the same the self that you make up and the self that your family culture makes up for you. How to integrate.
While acting in films, he made up the Method narratives biography as seen in the journals. ACTING Learn about vulnerabilities and not vulnerable. "For me it had to do with opening up and there are certain dangerous areas that are very closed.
April 1984 Chakin undergoes emergency heart surgery.
July 1984 Country-Iowa with Lange conceives as a contemporay Grapes of Wrath. Script by Willim Wittliff, as co-producer and director. Disney Touchstone pictures bring in Richard Pearse Heartland to take over directing and began to shoot again and with Shep to help with last minute rewrites. Good description of the working on the set with SS trying to loosen everyone up. SS goes hunting and listens to the Stones undercover and Dylan Infidels and O-lan serves him the divorce papers on the set during the auction scene. First contemp film but like Curse a down but not out family tears itself apart from inside. Gil and his relationship to his son is familiar.
The decision to leave O-Lan had to have come from being very much in love with Jessica Lange in a renewing highly romantic way. Her pull must have been strong to force him through the pain he surely underwent.
On their love of the country of the land, even though they do not know where they fit in. In Santa Fe, they ride Indian polo. Why the big deal about his playing polo "heir to Gary Cooper".
SS deference to Lange's New Woman-Earth Mother, he banishes himself off of the screen and gives in to lots of interviews and the Weber PR shoot. He does not have Lange's courage as an actor to go into persoanl territory that he can get into as a writer.
1984 Wenders shooting Paris Texas in Texas offers SS the lead in Hammett and wants to film pieces of Motel Chronicles. A common territory low budget with out major studio backing. Script was complete before SS started on Country but uses Kit Carson for daily rewrites and SS phones in scenes from Iowa, mostly monologues in the final scenes. Adviser to Harry Dean Stanton...It's all there. Just don't act it. Don't act it...the bare unhidden sequence of the words. May 1984 at Cannes and took the Golden Palm with Country and the opening and Paris, Texas at the closing of the NY Film Festival.
Meets with Wenders in SF and Santa Fe every day for a few weeks to develop the story but the actual writing took a year and a half. Wenders = long cryptic silences and SS= long cryptic speeches.
GOOD interview by Wenders about SS getting rid of this guy he's been working with for so long and in the end the hero is Hunter.
Also the story of a man and a woman as in Fool for Love.
Press kit for Paris, Texas- "the ideal lover partner, the notion of a female psychic twin just as he used to explore the relationship of two young men the adventure of the outcasts like he and Mingus. SS "The idea that there's an imaginary partner and an imaginary life that's always superseding the real one...IN this relationship between men and women two things are always in juxtaposition with each other: you know the idea of who I'm with and who I'm actually with."
As with Aaron in the early plays and O-Lan in the middle ones, and also Patti Smith in the rock and roll here Lange has an influence on the more mature SS.
Fall 1984 War in Heaven work continues at Chaikin's bedside in NYC his self-imposed exile of almost ten years.
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