The Identity of Jane Galt, Revealed

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Tomorrow night marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. I never liked New Years, or birthdays. To me, they represented another year gone without achieving my goals, another year of however many I have to live lost. But now, I'm marking this occasion to take a very difficult step for me, perhaps the most difficult of my life, made harder still by the fact that I don't think anyone can comprehend why it would be so hard.

The fact is, whatever my actual personal history, and whatever actually happened, I am a man who has been convicted of assaulting a woman, and served five years in prison for it. If anyone ever chooses to fully investigate that situation, the way situations involving public figures get investigated, I think that the results would be very interesting. But as long as that stands on my record, I'm afraid to reach out to any Hollywood actress, any woman really. Hell, I was in county jail with a guy who got 19 years in prison for stalking, merely for saying some outlandish things on the phone to EX-GIRLFRIENDS! He had a criminal history, but now, so do I.

I know women often erect artificial barriers to see if a man is willing to take some risks to get to her, a throwback to our evolutionary history where it was essential that men be reckless risk-takers. But that is too much to ask of me, to risk being accused of being a stalker and having the rest of my life taken away from me when I lost so much of it already.

But I've decided to take this smaller risk of mentioning her name because so many things have happened that make me feel sure she knows about me, knows about this blog, and if she wanted to stop me, she would have had a lawyer or a representative warn me to cease and desist. So I'm gambling now that she is ready for me to identify her.

But for all the things that have happened, I still don't know Jane Galt, and I have no idea how she would react to this, or what she is capable of. And as one of my favorite movies says, “Our ability to manufacture fraud has exceeded our ability to detect it”, so these little things I've seen around me that appear to me that they might be her doing could be anybody rich and bored.

But since this is the most important thing in my life right now, I must say it. I want to reassure Jane, she doesn't have to want to marry me, or even hire me, or even speak to me. Whatever she wants me to do, I'll do. But if any women in the entertainment community want to work with me or date me, they will HAVE to make the first move. This one last thing is the most I can do while I remain under this cloud.

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Twenty-one years ago, I saw a great movie starring a fourteen year old girl who gave what I regard as one of the greatest acting performances of all time. If I'd been presenting the Academy Award for Best Actress that year, I might have gone Kanye West on Gwyneth Paltrow, even though, ironically she is probably my favorite actress of the last thirty years in terms of her actual career work output. I thought she deserved that award more for Sliding Doors that year, but maybe the Academy takes stuff like that into account, and it was really just kind of an award for her whole year of work.

But anyway, while the movie this young actress was in starred some famed veteran actors whose names were above the title, she was the real star of the movie, its emotional center and the character upon which the success of the movie rested.  I think she actually had the most screen time, though I'm not enough of a nerd to add that up.

There is a scene late in the movie where she achieves what I consider to be the highest level of acting, something that I've only rarely experienced, where a movie crossed the boundary of the screen, and evokes an emotional response that is indistinguishable from reality. Amanda Seyfried did it in a scene in Jennifer's Body. Jennifer Lawrence did it in a scene in American Hustle. Natalie Portman in V For Vendetta. It's not only girls—Sam Jackson did it in The Negotiator, Joseph Mazzello and Elijah Wood both in Radio Flyer. The first to do it to me, in one of the first movies that made a lifelong impression upon me largely because of her, was Jennifer Connelly in Once Upon a Time in America.

While I can't get a straight answer on Jennifer Lawrence's Jewishness, I know Jennifer Connelly, Natalie Portman, Amanda Seyfried and Jane Galt are all Jewish, and thinking about that was what started along the path of realizing that it was largely a group of Jewish actresses who started working young that had been at the center of the emotional impact that movies had on me, and hence, led to this blog.

After I saw that movie, I thought, in ten or fifteen years, this will be the girl getting nominated for Best Actress practically every year, starring in more great dramatic films like that one. But things didn't work out that way...

After that, she started doing a bunch of teen movies, but not big mainstream ones. Out of the way independent films and artsy stuff. Then, in her early twenties, a strange thing happened. She suddenly became a sex symbol, and I was like, “Huh? What?” I'd thought she was a kind of awkward teenager and didn't really expect her to grow up to be the hot actress. I thought she'd be like Meryl Strep, the dead serious actress.

Sure, she's cute, I thought, but not smoking hot like her predecessors in that sex symbol role, Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek. Why would she ever let this happen? She's making bad action movies and every time I open the internet, I see her on a red carpet somewhere dressed up like Marilyn Monroe. This can't be for real...

I thought, okay, this will run its course, and she'll start doing real movies. The sex symbol thing did run its course, but still, she didn't make any movies that I was interested in. She's like Brad Pitt in that she's a huge star who has done a lot of independent films, and small roles, but unlike Brad, she never seemed to do the serious big budget epic film like her debut was, and I was baffled by it. She never worked with any of the directors or screenwriters I liked. She did one movie with one of my favorite actors, and it was almost like they'd TRIED to pick a story I wouldn't be interested in. The internet says she was in one movie that I loved, but strangely I don't remember her in it.

Now she's in all these Avengers movies with a Hollywood cast of thousands.  I haven't seen any of them, because for the most part, comic books and superhero movies don't interest me, and I was baffled for a long time by Hollywood's obsession with them, especially given that Hollywood has so many Jewish people and to my eyes, so many of these superhero stories have fascistic leanings.  But I finally understand the positive goal that these movies are working to achieve, though I think the groundwork has been laid and it’s time to get back to a more realistic style of movie making.  But though I haven't watched any of the movies, it did give me a little hope when I started thinking about working with or even marrying Jane because I know from seeing her working with Robert Downey Jr. that at least she isn't scared of EVERY guy who has been to prison.

I say I don't like Jane's movies, but she's been in perhaps one hundred, and I've only actually seen six or seven.  I'm just the kind of person that I won't go see a movie because someone I like is in it, if the story isn't interesting to me otherwise.  But given Jane's acting ability, and her looks, I couldn't grasp why she would never, like not even once, do an Oscar-type movie.  Well, she did one that I think won a lot of awards but I hated it and couldn't get through it.  That director's work is not for me, like Taylor Swift's music.

Even before I saw her in Las Vegas and she struck me as embodying an Ayn Rand character, I wondered if she was doing some kind of a Randian protest like Dominique Francon or John Galt, perhaps refusing to do good movies because the Harvey Weinsteins of the world were trying to get her to fuck to get roles and she wouldn't. But she really didn't seem to me to be the kind of girl who would take that kind of stand, and she seemed to have way too much talent for there not to be somebody who would give her good roles anyway. It made me start to wonder, how corrupt is Hollywood really?!?

Then, as time went on, she started saying some rather eye-opening things in the press.  I don't recall if it was before or after I posted on my website a piece called “Monogamy Hypocrisy” in the wake of the Tiger Woods matter, but she came out in a magazine interview and said, “I don't believe in monogamy. I don't think it’s practical.” I was watching the celebrity news after that, waiting for the headlines, “Jane Galt is a whore”, but I never saw that. In fact, nobody said anything. I mean, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood comes out and says that, and there is no response.

Everybody's constantly whispering and gossiping about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's rumored swinger lifestyle, which I have no information about, but yet, this girl just flat out says that, and its like nobody responded to it. It's funny, I was at the time in my early thirties, and just getting to the point where I realized monogamy was impractical, but because she was in her early twenties, when I heard it, I thought, “She'll grow out of that. When she meets a guy she really likes, she'll believe in monogamy then. Women always do.”

But I took notice of the fact that most everything I ever read or heard her say was interesting. I took note of the fact that she never had any scandals or got into any trouble. She was never in the celeb rags with a different boytoy every month like some other actresses. She's been married twice, and those are the only guys I know of that she's been with. I never saw her pictured at Hollywood parties shitfaced. The only social event where she seemed to make a regular appearance was the MET gala.

But despite my lack of interest in the bulk of her movie work, as time went on, I found more and more reasons to think she might be someone who I would really like as a human being. I found it strange when her first husband left my favorite musician for her, and I thought at the time, “Why would he ever do that?”, and I made a reference to him that was intended to be comical in a poem that I published on my website, that I could imagine her being upset about if she saw it. But I didn't think anyone was reading my website, least of all any celebrities. But considering that my script was making the rounds in Hollywood at that time, this was not a sane assumption. In fact, there was a role in it that someone very well might have sent it to her husband to read.

Then, in 2007, I started a movie script called Groupie. I don't normally think about particular actors when I'm writing a script. It distorts the creative process. I try to write the idealized character in my head, and when I'm finished, think of actors who would best fit the role. Rarely, an actor will “take over” a role while I'm in the process of writing, as Marcus Chong and Thomas Jefferson Byrd took over the roles of Jack and Old School in my script All-Nighter.

But I wasn't thinking of Jane Galt in Groupie initially because I didn't think she really fit the part. The central idea of the character is that she is a girl that a great many men would say is the most beautiful woman they have ever seen, and to me Jane wasn't that. But then I saw one of her movies where she'd been styled to look as cute as possible, and I thought, she could do it, and this would get her the Oscar she deserves from a decade ago.

There is an easy way for anyone to find out who someone's agent is, though I won't tell you if you don't know. Hollywood bristles at unsolicited submissions, but I was a screenwriter with scripts on file with the Screenwriter's Guild, and one that had just recently been in production and had a mention in the Variety Upcoming Productions list. Her agent would have read a letter from me, and most likely shown the script to her, if she's interested in that kind of thing. But I didn't send it. Why?

If I'd had a script for Brad Pitt, I'd have been on the phone that day. But I didn't approach Jane Galt or her agent about this quite simply because even back then before my current troubles, I was nervous about adding to the mountain of unwanted attention that I was led to believe that beautiful Hollywood actresses receive. It wasn't that I was afraid of rejection so much as I was afraid of my motivations being questioned. The script by the way, is about a professional football quarterback...who is falsely accused of rape. But the woman who accused him is the main character of the story, and the point of it is to explain her history, and what leads her to do it. I'll have to check with Helen Mirren as to whether that matches the exact proper definition of irony.

Even though I was a serious professional, Hollywood put out such a strong “stay away” vibe, particularly when it came to hot actresses, that since I had other interests and other things I could do, I shelved it. Plus, I figured there were plenty of good screenwriters in Hollywood, and while I took pride in my work, I knew I wasn't the only one who could write an Oscar-bait role for her if she wanted to do that. So I assumed she must not want to do that. In fact, I left the script about 80% finished and never wrote a few key scenes, because to finish would have meant that I had to do something with it.

But still, I hoped that I would run into her somewhere. Dating an actress wasn't even on my radar. There were everyday girls—extraordinary everyday girls—who were at the top of my list. But I thought Jane Galt would be a good professional partner, and more than that, she seemed like someone who would be a good friend.

But that is the other strange and mysterious thing about Jane Galt: until I saw her in Vegas, I had no way of being sure that she even existed. I never heard anything about her in the real world. Never. I can hardly remember even seeing interviews with her. For all I knew, she could have been like the digitally created actress in Andrew Niccol's brilliant film S1mone. Even if she lived on the East Coast where she is from, she must have spent a lot of time in LA. One of my sisters worked for Fox, the other for Summit. Two people from my college freshman dorm who I had known fairly well had entered the Hollywood community. But yet, I never heard anything, ANYTHING, in the real world about Jane Galt.

I have to explain to you how remarkable this is, that no one ever told me that they met Jane Galt, or worked with Jane Galt, or even SAW her. Probably half a dozen people have recounted to me stories of personal interactions with Tom Cruise, all of them saying he was the nicest, most normal guy in the world, and not particularly noticeably short. My niece went to school with Sylvester Stallone's kids and the children of a host of other Hollywood people. Denzel Washington does or did attend a church pastored by a good friend of my father. The list of celebrities that I've seen by now is too long to recount. It is highly unusual for there to be a big actor of this generation whom I've never seen or heard a single thing about them.

It was funny, Jane Galt and Mark Zuckerberg were somewhat alike in this respect. I almost expected that it would be slightly frightening if I saw one of them, because I heard nothing about them from people I actually knew, almost like they were ghosts.

I left Groupie unfinished, and while I ran into one star after another in my sojourns around the ritzy locales of America, I never expected to see Jane Galt. Then I learned something fascinating. Both Jane Galt and that musician who her first husband had dated both have a rare thing in common—they both have twin brothers. I would always forget that, with both of them, because neither of their brothers is in the public eye. I would eventually discover that they have some other interesting things in common beyond that. And suddenly, the whole thing made more sense.

In my experience, the twin bond is the strongest one that exists in society. And in particular, mixed gender fraternal twins would very likely have unique attitudes about dating and relationships because they have that close relationship with someone of the opposite gender. It would explain for example, why Jane always had this little smile on her face, like she knew everything was going to be alright, because when you have someone in your life that you always know is with you, it is. That, combined with the unusual attitudes about men that a girl who was a teenage multi-millionaire would have, all my normal expectations about beautiful women would have to go out the window with her.

But it also made me think, perhaps it wouldn't be as easy for Jane to find the right man as I would think it would be for a beautiful, talented, rich and famous girl. There is a good chance that her relationship with her brother will always be the most important relationship in her life, and a lot of men would have a problem with that. I don't. I consider it a bonus. It's almost like getting two people instead of one.

She doesn't believe in monogamy, if that is still her position, which would be a problem for a lot of men who don't believe in monogamy for themselves, but don't want their wife sleeping with anyone else. If Jane likes me, I mean really really likes me, I'm actually the one that would want to practice monogamy myself, voluntarily, just to show her how important she is to me. But she may not think that's practical either. Makes me think of Sam Jackson in the Other Guys, “All the sex we don't want to have with women but we have to...”

But in any case, I don't want to control what she does, as long as I'm getting what I need out of the relationship. If she was leaving the house and said she was going to hang out with her first husband, my response would be, “Tell him I said hi”, and I wouldn't really care what they did, as long as his current wife didn't care.

And an actress could do worse than to have her own in-home screenwriter. And I love performing domestic tasks. I'd love cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner, cleaning the house, babysitting and tutoring her daughter, though I'd feel bad taking a job from her chef, nanny and maid, if she had that. The only part of her life that I know about that I'd be a little annoyed about is that I don't want to have to put on a tuxedo and go to Hollywood events all the time. But I wouldn't care if she took one of her current male movie co-stars. I am completely disabused of jealousy...as long as I'm getting what I need.

And well, though I have my insecurities about my appearance, she certainly didn't look at me like I was hideous. So I started to think, maybe she could be more than just my friend and business partner. Maybe in a strange twist of fate, the right girl for me was...

When I saw Jane, there were several reasons why I didn't recognize her.  She comes off on screen like a light-hearted person that I would expect to laugh and joke a lot.  The girl I saw in Vegas might have been the most serious person I've ever seen.  I think about her statement about monogamy in a different light after seeing her.  Maybe she's too busy for sex and figures she'd rather have some other woman take care of that function for her husband.  That was how dead serious she looked.

As I was walking out the door after I passed by Jane Galt in Vegas, I thought to myself, “Wait, was that...” I had noticed a resemblance, and identified her as a suspect when I thought of all the beautiful young blonde women I knew in public life as she certainly appeared to be someone in public life. But I didn't think it was her, because I simply couldn't imagine she would be that beautiful. Supernaturally so, like nothing I've ever seen.

The camera makes her look like she has an awkwardly shaped head, like an upside down pyramid, but she doesn't look like that in reality. In a minute, I'll tell you what scene in what movie you can watch to see what I saw.  But as time has gone on, I've wondered if what really happened was that the beauty I saw was something more than just the beauty of a famous actress, but that it was something that I saw because there is some fundamental thing about who she is, who she would be no matter her profession, that makes her the most beautiful woman in the world to me.  I wasn't seeing JANE GALT, with the big bright lights around her name.  I was seeing that little girl standing on the threshold of a movie set twenty-one years ago, one the first day of filming.

Then I watched another movie, and I see her in a scene with Oliver Platt.  I don't know that I would say I've met Oliver.  But I was standing outside of a theater in Century City, around 1998 I think, and he came up to me and asked me for the time.  I thought it was strange, because he had this little grin on his face like it was a joke, but Oliver always looks like that, so I didn't think anything of it.  However, it is interesting because right around that time, Oliver was in one of my favorite movies, Dangerous Beauty, and in it, like so many other movie characters, left an impression on me, in this case to remind me never to be vindictive because my heart is broken.

That was in a mall next to the building where I worked for Ernst & Young, where one of our clients was somebody that I'm sure Jane Galt knows.  And because this actor has a master's degree in chemical engineering, the tax attorneys I was working for might have mentioned to him that they had a Stanford physics student working as an assistant in the office, and he might have in turn relayed this to a ambitious young girl he might have known even back then with whom he shared a common ethnic background.  And I start to wonder, is it possible that before I knew Jane Galt, Jane Galt knew me?!?!

One of the reasons I didn't mention Jane Galt's identity is something that I haven't discussed because it would have been too big a clue to who she is, though by this point, people who really know the movie industry already know.  According to the internet, she had a boyfriend at the time, and shortly thereafter, they got married. She is divorced now, but they have a child together, so I presume they still have some kind of relationship.

It was public knowledge what day it was that I was in Vegas, because I had posted it on my public Facebook page. Suppose she had lied to her boyfriend/future husband about where she was going to be for some reason? A normal person wouldn't care about something like that from seven years ago, but suppose there is still a lot of friction in their relationship over their co-parenting, reaching back to things that had gone on in their relationship? I post the story with her identity, and then he comes to pick up his daughter and throws a copy of something I wrote on the coffee table and says, “I always knew you were a lying bitch. I thought you said you were in LA for a meeting.”

Beyond that, while I don't advertise that the look Jane gave me was romantic from her perspective, the fact that it was to me might have led her ex-husband and baby daddy to say, “And what were you doing walking around Vegas making eyes at this guy anyway when were were planning our wedding? Is there more to this story that he's telling?”

If we were talking about her first husband, I wouldn't worry about that kind of stuff because I know enough about him to feel pretty sure he's not that kind of jerk. In fact, I thought her child was his, and I was disappointed, in the context of thinking about marrying her, when I found out that was not the case. But I don't know anything about her second husband. His name and nationality is literally all I know. I've never even seen a picture of him, so I don't know who he is or what he might do.

But even beyond her ex-husband and the fact that she was attached on that night, there were many other reasons that it could somehow create an annoyance for her. So in an abundance of caution, and out of the respect that I have for the private lives of all celebrities, I refrained from identifying her, and carefully inserted her name into things I wrote about it to give the impression that it wasn't her.

You might say, she was walking through a hotel lobby in Las Vegas.  Lots of people would have seen her.  Well, she walked directly, and pretty swiftly, from the elevator to what is effectively the back door of the hotel, less than 100 feet I think, at a time when the lobby was not very crowded.  I wouldn't say she was sneaking, but she didn't look like she was trying to be seen.  And she was wearing...well, a normal thing to wear but in her case something that functions as a disguise. If there was a car waiting for her, it is possible that only a dozen or so people might have seen her, and if I, one of her biggest fans, didn't recognize her when she looked right at me, there is a good chance no one did.

Another reason that I refrained from identifying her is that for a long time, while I kind of thought it might have been her, I wasn't sure, because she looked so different than she does on screen. And my memory is more like videotape than DVD. If I replay something over and over as I did that moment, trying to remember every detail, after a while it gets fuzzy.

When I saw Jane Galt that night, during the time that I was looking at her, it never crossed my mind that she was an actress at all, let alone this famous one that I knew. She looked like a business woman or something else, the way she was dressed, the way she was talking to the woman walking with her. I would later reflect and think, “She was walking through there like she built the place.” And I thought, well, maybe she did...

I love City Centre, the complex where the Aria hotel is located, where I saw Jane. It is a beautiful, intricately designed complex, unusual for Vegas which, from an architectural perspective, is all about spectacle rather than true elegant design. I'd been trying to search out the name of the actual person who was the brains behind it, and I found out the name of the firm, but not the individual from whose mind the idea sprang. Because there is always a single person with whom a great idea starts.

So I started Googling to look for young blonde female architects, and that is how I discovered the existence of Greek European Parliament Member Eva Kaili. I thought, that is someone I would expect to have the air of importance that Jane had, and it would make sense that I didn't recognize her.  I looked a few pictures and thought, maybe.  Her eyes seemed too light, but everyone's eyes look darker from across a room. But when I watched a video of her talking, I knew it wasn't her. Eva seemed more shy, down to earth. Jane Galt was above the earth.

So I really didn't feel sure who Jane Galt was. I didn't feel sure, as sure as I'll be until she confirms it, until I got out of prison, got my apartment, and bought one of her recent movies in 4K. I actually didn't buy it for her, though I had seen the previews in jail and been mad that when she finally made a movie I wanted to see, I couldn't see it. But I mainly bought it because I like the director, and it seemed like it would be a good movie to see what 4K video quality was like.

Through the first half hour or so of the movie, she didn't look like the girl I'd seen. But there is a scene thirty seven minutes in where she is wearing the same colors, and possibly even the exact same t-shirt she was wearing that night. The scene is shot from a similar angle, her hair is styled in the same way, and funnily enough, begins just as in Vegas with her getting off of an elevator and walking down a hallway. As soon as I saw it I thought, “That's her! That's the girl I saw in Vegas!”

It was confirmed later in that same scene, a close-up of her talking, and its even more obvious. I've nicknamed her Jane Galt, and if I'd been in a theater and I'd seen just that close-up shot of her face come up, I would have assumed I was watching a preview for Atlas Shrugged and she was playing Dagny Taggart. That scene is what she looks like in real life. And seeing her face, and the particular way she was talking, just like the girl in Vegas, I knew. I'm as sure of it as I am of anything, because the recognition is in the eyes. I know those are the same eyes that looked at me. I'd bet everything on it. I already have.

That movie was Lucy. The title of the book that I've almost finished is Scarlett Blue. That is what I've named the shade of aqua-tinged sky blue that Jane Galt was wearing that night, and that the world seems to be wearing now. I named it that because the girl that I saw in Las Vegas who I've called Jane Galt is Scarlett Johansson.

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