Either You’re in or You’re in the Way
Two Brothers, Twelve Months, and One Filmmaking Hell-Ride to Keep a Promise to Their Father
Logan and Noah Miller
FOR DAD
he always wanted the best for us
Contents
Two Guys Who Love Each Other
Part I: Holly-War (1999–2006)
The Time before Now
Part II: Out of the Ashes
Going Home
The Vow
The Weight
Burning for Books
The Angel
Follow Every Lead
100 Percent Luck
A Panavision with Vision
The Catalyst
Sound Ranger and Boom Man Voot
Part III: Desert Shoot-Out
Ponytail Dude and the Rocker
Seraphim
The Front Office
Truckin’ It in a Car
Acting School for Nonactors
Rehearsals: First, the Phone
The 10:1 to Zooma
Little Angry
Twin Chaos and the Battle of the Greasy Grass
The Stadium and a Man Called Honcho
Sombreros in the Night: Me Tequila, You Tequila
The Human Chain of Drunkenness
A Little Angry
Interdependence
Border Tango
Picture Car, the Perfect Car
Planet Zorton and Bizarroville
Don’t Know How, Where, or When
And on the Fifth Day, the Cash Was Burned and the Plastic Time Bombs Exploded
Bad Broccoli
Part IV: The Ambush
Honest Pete Deterding and the Beginning of Something Great
When Poor Is Good
The Ambush
Brad Dourif First
Recon: An Army of Two
Pushing through the Curtain
Had Him, Then Lost Him
Cornered in an Alley
The Reflecting Road
Stressful Pleasure and the Art of Pacing
Pumping Up to Pump Down
Let’s Shake on It
Agent Man
No Thanks, I’ll Take My Dinner before the Nuke
Clouds of Mushrooms
Part V: Dancing Around the Fires of Greed
Money, Where Does It Grow?
Robert Forster and the Silver Spoon
Brad Dourif and Starbucks
Head North, Son
Can You Juggle? Yes, but Only Chain Saws
The Pool That Could Sink Us
Fighting Ghosts
Bogged down in the North
Drink and Be Merry
The Six-Year Mac
Dancing around the Fires of Greed
No Ralph in This Nadir
There’s Gold in the Junk
We Didn’t Come Here to Fucking Barbecue
Soon Is Soon
Driving to Be Heard
Can’t Take Nothing from Nothing
And Away We Go
Part VI: Charging Naked
Motorbike Kid and the Ice Princess
The Ice Princess
The Naked Business
The Juvenile Crew
Our Backyard
Back to Now—Rehearsals
You’ve Met Little Angry, Now Meet Big Angry
Bring on the Sage
Week One
Day Two: Waterloo
No More Angry
The Deluge
Jeromiah Running Water Zajonc
Accounting for the Unaccounted
Sleep-Directing
Rockies Road and the Miraculous Reception
The Miraculous Reception
Call Me Ishmael
Part VII: The Resurrection
Betting It All on Ed
Scare in Redwoods
Major Major
Pigeon Stars
The Messiah in a Big Ford Truck
Getting Ready for Dad
From Pauper to King
John Ford, Movie Star
The Transformation
You Can’t Argue with Success
And Then It Rained for the Rest of the Time
The Day After
Keeping the Vow
Epilogue: Full Circle
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Seven thoughts on our first hell-ride through filmmaking…
1. Every day is the Cuban Missile Crisis: Your world could blow up.
2. Surround yourself with gray hair and listen.
3. Never wait for a phone call.
4. Stay relentless. Rely on no one.
5. There are only solutions.
6. Spend the financier’s money as if it were your own: Don’t be a scumbag.
7. Either you’re in or you’re in the way.
What follows was written from the IGNORANCE of having only produced and directed ONE film, and the ARROGANCE of having only produced and directed ONE film.
TWO GUYS WHO LOVE EACH OTHER
IT’S BEEN SAID we have an unusual relationship.
Bro is me and I am Bro. We’re identical twins. We share everything; it’s been like that since the womb. Before that it was an egg, and before that it’s hard to say. We have one cell phone, one computer, and one car between us. Not saying that it would be a bad thing to have two of each, but right now money is tight. So for now, we share. And are blessed to have someone to share with.
We’ve always been best friends and have always helped each other, except when we tried to resolve our conflicts by punching one another. We stopped doing that once we started breaking noses and knocking out permanent teeth. It got expensive. So now our arguments never escalate beyond “intellectual frustration,” if we may boldly say so.
Each of us would rather the other guy succeed. If there’s only one trophy, we want the other to have it. If there’s only one princess, then Bro can have her. We cook for each other and serve more food to the other guy.
Thought experiment: Let’s just say that we—the Bros—had only 51 percent of a brain apiece. Unfortunate, yes, but paralyzing, no, because if we work together we have 102 percent, which is 2 percent more than any human on the planet, beat Einstein if he were still around.
People often ask us, do you really share everything? Yeah, just about. Then they’ll usually say something stupid like, “Even underwear?” Chuckle, chuckle. Yes, even underwear, smart-ass. But it’s not like one of us wears a pair Monday and then flips it to the other guy on Tuesday. We wash them first. Then we flip them.
Then the most common question: “So what’s it like being twins?” And we usually reply with, “What’s it like being you?” It’s our reality. It’s what we know. What do you know? Tough question, isn’t it, it’s rather broad. Hopefully by the end of this adventure you’ll have a better understanding of what it is, and perhaps, so shall we. Bro is me and I am Bro.
PART I
HOLLY-WAR (1999–2006)
THE TIME BEFORE NOW
THE MANAGER OF the building dropped dead in our apartment the day after we moved in. He was an ex-marine, wounded by a grenade in Korea, played baseball for the San Francisco Seals in the late 1940s. We had terrible credit then. He rented to us when no one else would.
The apartment was made of bricks. During the day it became a kiln. You could bake clay pots in the freezer. At night we sweated and killed cockroaches.
Pigeons roosted above our stove. Their shit and feathers fell through the air vent. We patched it with a square of sheet metal and duct tape. Occasionally the tape would lose its stickin
Our neighbor was an old man. His TV exploded through the walls. He never turned it off. It was so loud you could see what he was watching.
We spent the first few months in Hollywood on our friend Pietro’s floor, warming up for the roach and pigeon palace. Pietro was renting a room in a two-bedroom apartment. There were three of us living in a room slightly larger than a shower stall. A rocker named Dave lived in the other room with his Japanese girlfriend, Roki or Soki, something like that. She didn’t speak any English. They were happy. It was a happy apartment. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches in those days.
We’d been on the road playing baseball for the better part of five years, lived in Iowa, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Arizona, and hung out in every state in between. But baseball didn’t work out. It had been our dream since we had dreams. We had no backup plan, limited education, no résumé for any job above manual labor. We’d never thought of the future in terms other than baseball. Now we were forced to think about it.
We didn’t want to go back home to Northern California and pound nails. We’d done plenty of that growing up. We wanted to make a living at something we loved. We needed a new dream. But what could we do?
Not much in the professional world.
So we decided to write a movie.
But we’d never written a movie before. Hell, we’d never even seen a written movie before. We walked down to Larry Edmunds’ Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard and were informed that a written movie is called a “screenplay.” We pulled the screenplay for Casino off the dusty shelf. It looked like some form of alien communication.
Discouraged, we put the screenplay back on the shelf, cursed our ignorance, and walked out.
A week later, our buddy Nicky Hart introduced us to a guy named Erik, who recommended the tool that could decipher the code: “Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434 is the book you need.”
So we walked back down to Larry Edmunds and bought 434. The book was plainly written and easy to understand. It demystified the process, cracked the screenwriting enigma.
If we ever make any money in this business, Lew Hunter should receive a percentage of our tax receipts.
We finished 434 and started writing Touching Home, a story about us and our father. We had a lot of pain. And writing helped get it out. Touching Home was written on college-ruled notepads on a park bench in the Valley. We didn’t own a computer at the time, and the park had grass and flowers and other living things that didn’t try to steal our food.
Half this book was handwritten. Noah still doesn’t type, says it “doesn’t work right with his mind,” which is probably all right, ’cause last time we checked, Shakespeare couldn’t type either.
It took us twenty-five days to complete the first draft of Touching Home. It was the most difficult thing either of us had ever done. We swore we’d never write another one…
Then we saw the road ahead. We tried to deny it, swore it was a hallucination. But it wouldn’t go away. It was there. It was our future.
We wrote twelve screenplays and a seven-hundred-page manuscript during that first Hollywood tour. Each time we completed a screenplay, we’d grab a couple bottles of cheap wine at the corner liquor store and climb the fire escape to the rooftop of our apartment and celebrate the victory. Passing the bottle back and forth, we’d stare at the shimmering city where movies are made, envisioning the day we’d be making our movies.
Sometimes we drank so much we were flammable. Coming down was tricky.
Back then, we had the worst car in Los Angeles. It looked like a crushed sardine can. The passenger side had been T-boned at 45 mph by some lady that didn’t see the red light. When she was done, the car had one working door. You had to climb over the stick shift to get to the passenger’s seat. The passenger couldn’t roll down the window because it was made of Visqueen and duct tape. There was no air-conditioning. In the summer, it became a sweat lodge; you could lose five pounds driving to the grocery store. In the winter, it became a rain forest. One night we drove in a storm from San Francisco to L.A. with a shin-deep puddle in the passenger foot bucket. It was so ridiculous we surrendered to the water and took off our shoes. Our car was so ugly people were ashamed to look at it.
Our buddy gave us the car after our other car blew up, and we abandoned it on the highway north of Santa Barbara. A salvage company sued us for $800 after they cubed it.
In those days, we worked at a bingo hall in the Valley. Our job was to walk the gymnasium floor, selling blotters, raffle tickets, fresh sheets of bingo paper, and other senile paraphernalia. One night the number caller had to use the bathroom. It couldn’t wait. So Logan replaced him onstage and started pulling the balls from the basket and calling out the numbers. Logan had never performed this task, wasn’t trained to, didn’t know the rules of the spinning balls.
Someone yelled bingo. Logan thought the game was over and released the balls from the basket. But it wasn’t over, far from it. This was a blackout game. Elderly rage exploded. Dentures shot from mouths. Words that spark riots were hurled. Our employment ended there that night.
We were fired from a bingo hall. Not many people can claim that.
Then we got suckered into the world of high fashion—modeling. It wasn’t our scene. But they said that we could make $1,000 a day…could. But never would.
Noah got hired by Dave LaChapelle. (He’s a famous photographer in his world.) Dave wanted to paint Noah gold and dress him up in a G-string for some MTV Awards photo. “Noah, you’ll be one of my golden pillars…You’ve got a few minutes before we paint you. Are you hungry?”
“I was…”
“Good. Go downstairs and eat.”
So we walked downstairs to the royal buffet and stuffed our backpacks with chocolate chip cookies, a pecan pie, turkey, smoked salmon, bagels, and about three pounds of ham. It was Thanksgiving in a backpack. Then we walked out the back door and drove straight to Northern California without the gold body-paint and G-string and went camping and fishing for a week to try and reconcile what we had almost experienced. We had plenty of food.
Then our apartment was burglarized. They stole everything we had, which wasn’t much: a glass jar of change, a VCR, and a .45 Springfield automatic. They let us keep our sleeping bags.
We got a new job at an after-hours club in Hollywood, a fleshpot called The Cosmopolitan. We worked from 1 A.M. to 8 A.M. It was Tony Montana’s playhouse. No carnal desire was out of the question. It was all for sale. At the end of the night, the black tables were dusted white with coke. Garbage bags of money were loaded into the trunk of a Chrysler every morning.
The head bouncer was the toughest man on the planet. He was a German named Rolf. He was six foot four, two hundred and thirty-five pounds of discipline and muscle. He never smiled. He could kick your ass in thirty different art forms.
We originally met Rolf at the gym. He taught a kickboxing and grappling class there. We started taking it. One time he cracked Noah’s ribs. Another time he nearly broke Noah’s jaw; it still aches on cold mornings. We never missed a class.
“I’m looking for two reliable guys to work for me,” Rolf told us one day, in a stiff accent. “You are them.”
Rolf beat us up during the day. At night, we risked our lives for him.
Bolo was the second bouncer in command. He was a heavyweight boxer. He could kick your ass in one art form, and one was enough. Back in the day, his father was a sparring partner for Mike Tyson.
The club was on the fifth floor of a high-rise near Hollywood and Vine, a few blocks from the Capitol Records Building. The second and third floors had been gutted by a fire. They looked like some apocalyptic horror movie set, exposed steel beams blackened by the blaze.
Our man-post was the underground parking garage. Jackers and crack addicts roamed the streets. They looked like white-eyed zombies in the apocalyptic movie. Some of
them lived in the burned-out levels of the building. They stabbed two people and shot another over the glorious course of our employment. Sometimes they would just appear in the hallway. We had to clear them out each night before the club opened.
Starting at 1 A.M., cars would drive up to the retractable steel gate and flash their lights. We’d ask them “How can we help you?” They’d give us some fabulously exciting name like “Johnny Eyelashes” or “Bubbles.” We’d check our clipboard for their fabulously exciting name, and if their fabulously exciting name was on the list, we’d hit the button, retract the gate, and they would drive in and park. Stand in line. Then we’d frisk them. And that’s where they would stay for a while if we didn’t know them, that is, if they didn’t give us at least a twenty-dollar bill to avoid the line and receive a direct elevator ride to the top with Bolo.
Unlike everywhere else in Hollywood, we didn’t care if they were famous. Fame didn’t pay our rent. Cheap celebrities waited in line like everyone else. ’Cause our landlord didn’t care who we saw each night. Neither did the phone man or the gas man or the cable man.
All kinds of people were fond of the club. Porn stars and strippers would stop by after a long slog in a hotel room or a long slide on a pole. They spoke about their professions with forensic clarity. To one nurse, giving a blow job was no different from drawing blood. Some of them had wild fantasies about screwing twin doormen in an elevator. Rolf wouldn’t tolerate any hanky-panky. The more we resisted, the more they insisted.
We ended our doormen days after two guys stole a car and crashed through the retractable gate at 40 mph in a failed robbery attempt. The car launched into the parking garage, feet from us, pinballed off a Benz and a cement wall, shotgunning glass and car parts and chunks of pulverized cement.
The night before that, a guy had pulled a gun on Logan in the elevator. We weren’t living in Hollywood to get killed. We were there to make movies. But we were still several years away from that. We’ve done many stupid things. Many. And working at the club was one of the stupidest.
So we stumbled around Hollywood, peddling our screenplays. We lived in six different apartments and twice moved back home to Northern California, following what we thought were writing opportunities, only to return to L.A. after the prospects vanished.