William Horberg

The Long Dark Night

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This was not the epigram for this wonderful Haruki Murakami book I just read, but it could have been.

"After Dark" is a hypnotic blend of Sleeping Beauty and The Twilight Zone in the precise, beautiful prose full of pop culture references and subtle musicality that only Murakami can write. The book tells the story of two Japanese sisters, 19 year old Mari, who is pulling an all-nighter alone with her book in the local Denny's (where she meets the other main character of the novel, jazz trombonist Takahashi), and Eri, her model-beautiful sister, who a few months ago told her family she needed to sleep, and has been in her room ever since, occasionally eating and showering and changing clothes, but most of the time, sleeping. The more she sleeps, the more her sister finds herself unable to do so.

The action of this slim novel, such as it is, all takes place between a few minutes to midnight, and a few minutes after dawn, and each chapter starts with a heading that is a line illustration of a clock face ticking off our progress through the night.

But this is more of a metaphysical narrative than a plot driven book. Mari gets drawn away from the clean, well-lit sanctuary of the Denny's and into helping a Chinese prostitute who has been the victim of a brutal attack at the nearby Hotel Alphaville (one of many nods to Godard, noir, Sonny Rollins, Walt Disney, j-horror, and independent cinema peppered throughout the book), and in conversations with Takahashi, and with Korogi, the woman who runs the "love ho'" as the rent-for-sex rooms at the Alphaville are known, we learn the secret dreams and desires and nightmares that fuel these night creatures.

We also follow the business man who was the attacker, as he returns to his all-night shift at the office where he works, calmly compiling the computer coding he is working overtime to complete, while nursing his bruised hand and riffling through the bloody possessions he took off the girl; and the gangsters who run the smuggling operation that brings a steady flow of young Chinese girls into the country to service their Japanese customers hover repeatedly and menacingly in the background on their motorcycles, issuing threats on their cellphones.

Interspersed with these events and arias of fun dialogue, are scenes in which Murakami takes the role of omniscient cameraman to observe without judgment the slumber of Eri. These are eerie passages in which her room becomes the portal to another room, an exact replica of her own, where for a time she is transported and awakes, trapped, to find herself in a literal nightmare from which there is no escape.

The book ends in a Kiss, of course, and for all of his keen insight into the mechanics of the night and the sonambulists and fabulists and victims and perpetrators that inhabit it, the book has a touching tenderness, and is finally more focussed on the soul than the darkness.

I'm grateful to my friend Martin Asher at Random House books for recommending it, and happy to pass on the recommendation to you. If you are familiar with Murakami's wildly inventive and elaborate narratives like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, this is much more spare and elegant and boiled down.

Yet essential nonetheless.

william

Poem

I was looking through a book of Frank O'Hara's poetry the other night and came across this great poem with such a presciently timely title that I had to share it with you now.

Funny that this was written so many years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe "crisis" is actually the status quo of this wacky business.

Frank O'Hara

"In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love."

I second that emotion!!

william

Another Side of New York

I realize these last few posts of my New York memories may be contributing to the impression that my experiences in the Apple have been rather grim. So for my final story in my Five Most Memorable Moments, here is a tale of celebrity and celebration.

Growing up in the era of the Hi-Fi stereo and the Long Playing Record, I couldn't help but be the product of the musical tastes and influences of my parents, especially my Mom, at any early impressionable age. And no music made a greater impression on me, or was played more frequently or with more passion or appreciation in my childhood home than these two great albums:

"Down the way where the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the mountaintop...." was just one of the melodious phrases therein that could be heard wafting daily through the corridors of our apartment on Aldine Street in Chicago's Near North Side.

Harry Belafonte came from New York by way of Jamaica to take the musical world by storm in the late 1950's with his popularization of the musical style known as Calypso.

Forty some years later, we happened to be in New York City on my wife's birthday, and I organized a dinner at the Grange Hall Restaurant (now defunct) on that beautiful small tree-lined street right near the Cherry Lane Theatre to celebrate.

Among our invited guests was Elsa's longtime friend and sometimes art exhibitor Sandra Levinson, who has owned and operated the Center For Cuban Studies and the Cuban Art Space in Manhattan as a bastion of progressive ideals and a showcase for Cuban artists and ideas for decades, against all odds. Fighting against the oppression of the embargo and the policies of the Treasury Department that has limited most cultural contact and exchange with the island for years, Sandra came to the party that night with a special surprise guest and a long time friend of Cuba and ally in her struggle, Harry Belafonte. We were tickled pink (no, not pinko!) to be honored by such a special guest.

You know how sometimes when you meet your heroes you can't help but be a little bit disappointed, as they are people too, and often with feet of clay, and cannot live up to your expectations. Harry Belafonte was the opposite; however much we felt we knew and loved him and respected what he stood for as a singer and an actor and a life-long political activist and champion of human rights, he was way more cool in person than we could have imagined. He was so gracious and charming and funny. He was so real, and he gave so much warmth to Elsa as someone newly arrived in the United States from Cuba. He knew and admired her work, and he acted like SHE was the real celebrity there.

That evening will always be one of my fondest New York memories, and a fitting way to end this reverie inspired by my last trip to the city.

Tommorow: To A Film Industry In Crisis!

willliam

Just Another New York story

Here is #4. But I don't know that I can top this one.

Everyone who lived through September 11 has a story to tell. Here's mine.

2001 was a pivotal year in my life.

I met my wife, the artist Elsa Mora, in December, 2000, in Havana, Cuba. At the time, I was in pre-production on a film based on Graham Greene's classic novel "The Quiet American". We filmed the movie on locations in Vietnam and Sydney, Australia in the spring of 2001, and I was able to contrive an invitation from the government of Vietnam to have Elsa join me on location while we shot there, as it was not easy for her to travel freely then; luckily the special relationship between Cuba and Vietnam allowed us to navigate the complicated visas and permissions necessary for her to join me over there.

As things turned out, our director Phil Noyce completed the first phase of editing on the film and he brought the film to New York to screen for Harvey Weinstien and our executives at Miramax, who had bought the domestic distribution rights from our financiers and producing partners Intermedia Films. Our first audience preview was scheduled to take place in New Jersey on the evening of September 10th.

If you do not know the plot of Greene's book, it is among other things an uncannily prescient tale of the origins of United States involvement in what became known as the "Vietnam War", but at that time was a colonial conflict between Vietnamese nationalists and the French, with the US supplying covert aid and "advice". Sound familiar? Greene gives a sharp critique of American foreign policy, and talks about American innocence being "like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world and meaning no harm."

"Liberty is such a funny word" his protagonist Thomas Fowler says, "we're all in favor of democracy: the only problem is, if there were to be an election here, Ho Chi Minh would get eighty percent of the votes."

So this was the sophisticated political film we were bringing to screen for an American audience that night, not knowing that the next day the world would change forever.

Elsa and I were staying at the Mercer Hotel in Soho. Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack were also in town to attend the preview as Executive Producers of the movie. The plan was to preview that night, and then have what is called in the mordant jargon of Hollywood "the post-mortem", or meeting to discuss the results of the test audience reaction to the film, the next morning at the Miramax offices in Tribeca.

I was busy running around that day, so Elsa took the opportunity to meet for lunch with an old friend of hers from Cuba who was also in town. Their meeting place was at the Twin Towers. "Look at how small and insignificant we are compared to these giants" Elsa later told me she told her friends that day. "We'll be here for just an instant, while these buildings look like they will live forever."

That week turned out to be a convergence or confluence of several events. Elsa had a solo art show planned to open at the Phyllis Kind gallery in Soho on September 15th. Minghella and I, along with our line producer at the time, Charles Mulvehill, were also in New York to open an office for the pre-production of what was to be my next production, "Cold Mountain", based on Charles Frazier's acclaimed novel, which Anthony had adapted and was planning to direct.

The name of Elsa's solo show: "Vulnerable".

At 8:00 a.m. on the morning of the 11th, Anthony and Mulvehill ("Chuck" as he is affectionately known to all who have been lucky enough to work with this great guy) and Anthony's assistant Tim Bricknell and I were at the breakfast room in the Mercer, on the corner of Mercer Street and Prince. While we ate our eggs and oatmeal and contemplated the meeting with Harvey regarding The Quiet American, and the work ahead on Cold Mountain, Tim's cellphone rang. It was our Mirage colleague Bruna Papandrea calling Tim, and while I could not hear her side of the conversation, I could tell by Tim's response that she was distraught and he was trying to comfort her. Ringing off, he told us she had reported a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, and like so many people that day who heard this news but were not watching tv and did not have access to the media, we assumed that it was an unfortunate wayward pilot in a prop plane. Although tragic, we wondered why it had upset Bruna so.

A few minutes later, we found out. At the adjoining table, a couple were eating breakfast when their teenage son came running back inside. He was in possession of a video camera, one of those old, larger, clunky home video numbers, probably a JVC. He was really animated and we couldn't help but pay attention to him and eavesdrop of their conversation. "A plane hit the tower" he said. But when he said it, for the first time, we could look over his shoulder and see the image on his video screen. Like a bad 60's movie overusing the Zoom effect, his view of the tower shot into a huge close-up, and suddenly we saw a gaping, huge hole in the side of the building spewing smoke and flames. It was the ultimate "holy shit" moment of my life.

At what felt like the same time, out of my peripheral vision, I saw traffic halting in the street, and people frozen in position in the middle of the street, looking up, craning their necks for the view down Mercer Street, only about 20 blocks or so north of what since became known as "ground zero". All the cliches are true. Time slowed down. The sky was crystal blue. The sound in the Mercer kitchen faded into the background. All of us slowly got up from the table and filed outside. What we saw looked like a still frame from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

I don't remember much of what we said to each other. Or who went back inside first. Or who paid the bill. I had a desperate need to get back to my wife, who I thought was upstairs in our hotel room. But when I ran upstairs and went inside, there was no one there. I turned on CNN and watched the most grotesque tv show ever broadcast. I believe the second plane had already struck the tower.

Elsa did not have a cell phone, and I could not get in touch with her. I sat there and sweated it out, worried sick. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and went downstairs. Elsa was just coming into the lobby. I ran up to her with a mixture of anger and relief. "Where were you?" When she heard the news that morning, Elsa took her camera and went down towards the site and took pictures of the fleeing pedestrians and the very early rescuers arriving on the scene.

We went upstairs and resumed watching CNN, while Elsa described to me what she had witnessed first-hand. Now we joined the rest of the world who were glued to their televisions in this slow dawning realization event playing out live.

Even as it was happening, we couldn't conceive of what was about to happen. When the towers fell, it was the most disturbing thing any of us have ever witnessed.

The following weeks played out in a trance. Elsa's art show was postponed several weeks, but then it was decided to have the opening, as a way for people to congregate and share the experience and grief and loss in the context of Art. The Cold Mountain production office never opened. After a big budget battle with the studio, we started down a road that lead to Chuck Mulvehill ultimately leaving the movie and the production moving out of America altogether and to Romania, for both creative and financial reasons.

As for The Quiet American, it became the ultimate right movie at the wrong time. After scoring moderately well at that initial screening in Jersey, it was one of the few movies I ever worked on where we keep cutting and refining and making the movie better in post-production, and at every subsequent screening the scores went further down. It became a source of gallows humor with Noyce: "We'll know when we finally get this thing perfect: we'll score a zero." The mood of the country had changed precipitously, and the collective mind was closed to this kind of political discourse and critical examination of our foreign policy.

In fact, at one time the movie was not even going to be released, but Michael Caine pressured the studio to allow us to enter the film into the Toronto Film Festival, and a strong critical response there buoyed our chances.

It's strange in reading this to look back at how Greene's Cold War narrative and Frazier's Civil War narrative intersected at this awful moment in history, and lead to us having a front row seat at this most memorable day in New York history.

william

New York, New York pt.2

I'm heading home today after this whirlwind tour of meetings and screenings. Lots of nice progress to report on our "Dew Breaker" project. But as promised, here is another memory rattling around in the old noggin' box of days of New York past.

Memorable moment #3:

I can't remember whether it was 1982 or 1983. But I do remember that it was the 4th of July weekend. And it was one of the hottest, sultriest, most miserable dog days of a sticky New York summer.

I had come to New York to visit my friend Mitch Sisskind who was living way uptown at that time, in the Washington Heights neighborhood. We were both ill-prepared for the shut down of local stores and restaurants over the holiday, and ended up trekking blocks and blocks to get to a diner for something to drink and a bite to eat.

As we walked down the mean streets of a rough neighborhood, the sun was blazing so hot overhead it made it difficult to look up to the sky. Which meant we were totally unprepared for the explosion that took place on the sidewalk just ahead of us. BAM. BAM. Suddenly we were showered with what felt like stinging pebbles or rocks. BAM. BAM. I can't remember ever being so shocked or frightened in my life.

We scrambled backwards, but then there was another explosion behind us. BAM.

For a minute we thought it must be fireworks.

We heard laughter, and when we looked up, we saw some kids on the roof, and they were hurtling cement construction blocks off the roof and down on our heads, and it was these concrete blocks that were shattering on the sidewalk around us.

We took off running, yelling back at these maniacal attackers. If one of those blocks had landed on our heads we would have been killed.

It was the kind of random act of senseless violence that New York has occasionally been famous for; whether it was racially motivated, or just a prank, a kind of poor-man's fireworks, or maybe a temporary madness invoked by the same choking heat we were experiencing I'll never know.

It was America's Birthday, but it was almost my last day on Earth, and it was a memory I'll never forget of Nueva York.

william

New York, New York

Growing up in Chicago, I can't remember the first time I went to New York. My Mom's family was from Detroit so that was our most frequent destination when we traveled as a child. But whenever that first trip was, I have been here hundreds of times since.

So lying here in the dark in my friend Tom Tykwer's small 5th floor walk-up apartment in Soho which he has let me stay in on this low-budget trip for meetings on The Dew Breaker, I was thinking about all the time I've spent here over the years, and came up with this short list of my

Five Most Memorable New York Moments:

1. In 1976 I hitchhiked down to the city one weekend from Wesleyan University where I was a freshman. I was a jazz aficianado, and was about to transfer the next year to the Berklee School of Music to study jazz flute performance. That weekend I got to visit a few of the city's great jazz clubs like the Blue Note and the Village Vanguard. I think I saw South African pianist Dollar Brand at one show, and the incredible Percussionist Mongo Santermaria at another. Man, I felt so sophisticated, like a real adult, on my own in The Big Apple, listening to live jazz.

2. In the early '80's I was still living in Chicago, but I had a girlfriend who lived in Brooklyn. A long distance relationship was probably just as hard to maintain then as it is now, but back then us budget-conscious commuters had our airline of choice, or no choice, Sir Freddie Laker's People's Express! Over the course of six or eight months until this star-crossed and geographically challenged love affair hit the skids, I was regularly making the trip for what I remember as $29 one-way! She lived in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Canal so it was the first time I got to know that part of the city, but as Thomas Wolfe wrote, Only The Dead Know Brooklyn.

Tomorrow: more of my most memorable New York experiences.

William

lightning post

In honor of Usain "Lightning" Bolt, here is a quick little lightning post written from my iPhone.

Is there anything cooler than watching the natural talent of Bolt as he effortlessly wins races and shatters world records?

I have no complaint about his exuberance. I wish we were all so comfortable with who we are, and got the joke of life.

I'm in New York. Today is a big Dew Breaker day of meetings.

I'd love to see a Haitian win a gold medal at the Olympics someday.

But the World's Fastest Man is Jamaican. And his name is Bolt.

Awesome!!!

william

Air Blog

Well, it has been a month of "firsts" for me, and here is another new trick from an old dog and new blogger.

Courtesy of "gogonet", I am writing this post to you from Flight 34, American Airlines in mid-air somewhere up here over the rainbow.

Now I realize that just because I am writing from an airplane does not make what I have to say inherently interesting. "It's a gimmick, Horberg, get over it!" I can hear you shouting even from up here.

And it is true that I don't have anything startling or special to report. But I couldn't pass up the novelty of the post.

I am watching my old boss and dearly departed Sydney Pollack acting in "Made of Honor" on the in-flight movie. Even with the sound off, it's clearly not my cup of tea. He was such a great actor and elevated almost everything he was in. But despite my own elevation, this one seems stuck at ground level. Now "Husbands and Wives", that was an amazing performance.

Sydney often used to talk about watching movies with the sound off as a way of testing the truth of the performances and the strength and clarity of the visual storytelling. Who wants what? What is the basic situation of the scene? Character is Action. What are you doing in the moment? He used to teach acting, and often used the old "Candid Camera" tv show starring Allen Funt as a teaching tool. For him, there was no greater example of "behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances".

Tom Tykwer told me once about a hi-tech contemporary version of the "Candid Camera" idea that was produced for German television. I can't remember the name of the show, but the basic idea of staging an event for a real person who was an unwitting participant in the drama being secretly filmed was now pumped up on steroids in quite elaborate productions.

I'm sure I am mis-quoting some aspect of it, but the one I remember him describing was a kind of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" scenario where a pedestrian in a phone booth on the street was suddenly hoisted into the air by a huge construction crane, booth and all, and levered on to the back of a flatbed truck; he was then transported while trapped inside the booth to a large warehouse, where he was again lifted and placed into a long row of exactly the same booths, each containing a victim similarly situated, some alive and screaming, some having clearly been there for a long time, and now deceased, while the guy freaked out. What a gag!

Well, time to stretch out in the ample leg room here (NOT), and enjoy the delicious in-flight meal and service (NOT), drinking for this thermos of delicious tea my wife made for me to take on the plane (NOT)!!!

What's happened to air travel? While stripping away any semblance of ease, comfort, and amenities, at least we have this newfangled technology to be thankful for: wireless Wi-Fi.

Go. Go. Net!

william

The Face On The Cutting Room Floor

Remember The Talented Mr. Ripley?

Matt Damon. Jude Law. Gwyneth Paltrow. Cate Blanchett.

Well, here is one scene, and two extras, you definitely don't remember, because you did not see it!

Yes, that is yours truly on flute, along with our brilliant dialect coach Tim Monich on piano, who was in Italy assisting our cast with their 1950's mid-atlantic and WASP accents.

We are in the background of a scene in which Matt Damon's character Tom Ripley, having sold the sailboat belonging to Jude Law's character Dickie Greenleaf, uses the proceeds to visit a piano store in Rome and purchase a grand piano for his apartment.

This scene and storyline was a pure invention of writer/director Anthony Minghella, but it gave him another excuse to weave the musical element he invented and brought to the Patricia Highsmith narrative into the fabric of his story. In Highsmith's novel, the Dickie Greenleaf character is an artist, a painter, but in the movie Minghella made him a wanna-be jazz alto saxophone player.

Minghella's movie is dominated by Jazz, Bach and Vivaldi, as well as the wonderful original score composed by his frequent collaborator Gabriel Yared, but if I remember correctly, Tim and I were playing a Mozart Flute Concerto here on set, since it was an MOS (without sound) scene and therefore no dialogue was being recorded.

Sure enough, our scene, and many others, wound up on the cutting room floor. Minghella was a masterful filmmaker and storyteller, but like many writer/directors, he tended to shoot long films, and his first assembly of the footage he shot and Walter Murch cut together for "Ripley" was something like 4 1/2 hours!!!

Tragically, Anthony passed away this year. It was a huge shock and devastating loss that I still haven't fully comprehended or processed.

I'm glad that the film has been singled out by many writers after Anthony's death as his best work. It is hard to believe that it was ten years ago this month that we started shooting that movie in Italy.

But I am sure of one thing: my cameo appearance with Tim Monich in the back of the piano store, will remain on the cutting room floor where it belongs!

william

Not Your Father's Comic Books

From the Sunday funnies to the Daily Newspaper Strips to the EC, DC and Super-Hero comic books of my childhood, comic art was the ultimate disposable medium.

The Vault of Horror, Sgt. Rock, Peanuts, Teen Romance, Archie, B.C., Black Bolt and the Inhumans, Classics Illustrated, Nancy and Sluggo, Doctor Strange, Big George, Steve Canyon, King Kirby, Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta. Pen and ink drawings, lines on paper that conjured up vast universes of imagination and humor, and were consumed, traded around, and quickly forgotten.

I think I went to my first comic book collector's swap meet in the basement of a bank way way west on Lawrence Avenue on a quiet Sunday morning sometime in the late 60's. It took me hours to get there and back on the CTA (Chicago Transportation Agency) bus. And it took me longer to concoct the b.s. story I told my Mom about where I was going and who I was going to be with.

Ten bucks was a fortune to me back then, weeks of work on the Belmont Avenue paper route to net the cash I needed to travel out to the show, and to purchase the books I coveted. I still have the copy of Superman #5 that I bought that day, as a treasured memento from my youth, and also as a glorious reminder of W.C. Field's prophetic maxim that there is a Sucker Born Every Minute.

I hung on to this fragile comic book for decades, convinced that I had a collector's item as valuable as any Mickey Mantle rookie card, a pop culture treasury bond that I would some day bequeath to my number one son. But when I went to get this particular book graded and preserved by the CGC a few years back, I found out that there were a few pages missing from the middle of the book, which made it nearly worthless.

Oh well, still pretty cool to have.

This year I went to the annual Comic Book Convention in San Diego and there were over 125,000 people there in this giant convention hall on the waterfront. Geeks dressed up in character, fanboys, bloggers, artists, regular joes, giant media corporations, movie stars, writers, directors, illustrators, agents, mom and pop stores and international toy manufacturers. What happened?

The cultural ascendancy of comic books, games, toys, characters, what the Major Hollywood studios now refer to as Branded Entertainment has mirrored this Golden Age of Escapism we now live in. The mirror that was the Silver Screen and which reflected back to us our social, political, psychological, racial, sexual and cultural anxieties has turned into more of a Portal, a one-way ticket to another dimension.

"Check your brain at the door" is one of the most popular expressions bruted without irony to describe the goal and the experience of mainstream entertainment.

But no system exists without counterbalancing forces, and along with the rise of comic book culture has come another phenomenom - the emergence of the so-called Graphic Novel as a medium of serious artistic endeavor and expression. Dan Clowes. Chris Ware. Art Spiegelman. Seth. Eddie Campbell. Alan Moore. Frank Miller. These are some of the guys whose work commands essays in the New York Times and reviews from literary critics.

For my money, two of the most interesting Graphic Novels I have read recently are:

American Born Chinese by Gene Yang

This simple, beautifully drawn story is a deeply felt tale of assimilation and cultural identity. It weaves together three distinct story lines in a thrilling narrative that culminates in a theatrical revelation that is both surprising and profound. Great storytelling.

and:

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

Another imaginatively structured narrative that slyly unfolds as a son reluctantly searches for his estranged and perhaps missing Father, who may or may not have been the victim of a suicide bombing attack in Israel. Great moody drawings, silent panels, poetic effects. The ending is slightly abrupt and inconclusive for my taste, but the world was so vivid and real and subtle that I really appreciated the experience of reading this.

A long way from PastePot Pete or Silver Surfer or The Ancient One or some of my other childhood faves, but life is change, and this new wave of graphic novel writers and artists are producing some really cool work.

william