“I Don’t Know What To Do!”

I have a complicated relationship with the work of director Michael Bay. While he is often skewered by film school types as having no talent, I think his early films are pretty good. The first Bad Boys is infinitely watchable. Armageddon and The Rock are both pretty good. People hate Pearl Harbor, but I always tell them, sit down and watch it with no sound. It is one of the most beautifully shot movies ever filmed. I’ve never understood how audiences and critics are willing to forgive Titanic for its flaws but not Pearl Harbor. 

The director/cinematographer relationship is very flexible, and some directors are practically doing the cinematographer’s job, and some cinematographers are practically directing, at least as far as the camera work is concerned. It very well may be that much of what was good about Bay’s early films was due to his then-cinematographer John Schwartzman, who is one of the best in the business. 

But even post-Schwartzman, he’s done some okay work. I recently watched Pain and Gain and it’s pretty good, thanks in large part to great work by Mark Wahlberg. I’ve criticized the Transformers movies, but I don’t like comic book movies in general. 

But there is another issue, an “elephant in the room” issue with Michael Bay. Every single thing that I have ever heard about him as a person is bad. It seems that he is despised around Hollywood and that the view that he is a scumbag is widespread. Sean Penn made an alarmingly vicious statement about him some years ago. Back in his early days, I was told by a Hollywood insider, “The only reason Michael Bay keeps getting work is because he always turns in his movies on time and under budget.”. I don’t know if that was true then or if its still true now, but it makes sense. 

I have to say, based on what has been publicly reported, I’m surprised that the #metoo movement has gone on as long as it has without Michael Bay’s name being mentioned.  I don’t know if he can legally sue me for saying that, but I don’t have anything for him to get, and that wouldn’t work out for him. 

I read Megan Fox’s interview about his behavior, and I believe what she said, and while what she reported isn’t illegal, it’s damn sure creepy. I would bet that someone who did that has done worse. It certainly seems that big name actresses are not eager to work with him, and if they do, it seems they only do it once. It’s interesting because nearly all of his female stars are near the top of my smoking hot list. Michael Bay and I clearly share nearly the exact same idea of what a smoking hot girl is, but apparently we don’t share the same ideas about how to treat them. 

I’m in no position to judge the state of Michael Bay’s soul. I don’t know what he’s done or not done. But if he hasn’t been asked any tough questions yet, Hollywood still has a LOT of work to do. Obviously, I’m not in favor of destroying people with accusations without a thorough investigation, but I sure do believe in investigating things that don’t look right. He could always come back with “You’re the guy that got convicted of a sex crime.”.  My response to that would be, let’s convene a private jury trial and see whose record in life looks more like a sex offender. Put up ten million bucks on the verdict. I’m broke right now, but I’m sure I can find one of the girls you’ve worked with who would be willing to cover that bet for me. 

But with all that said, I always like to give credit where credit is due, even if it is to someone I have issues with. Otherwise, we lose track of what reality is and the world just becomes a collection of cults of personality like our political realm has become. In my view, Michael Bay does have real talents that get overlooked because of his music video style and apparent bad personality. He’s very good at pacing. His movies never drag and he works in long dialogue scenes and plot-driving sequences without the noticeable “slow down” feeling most action movies have at those parts. He’s very good at shooting moving action scenes in creative ways. 

Bay’s obvious huge weakness is that the acting in his films is almost universally bad, and I know a lot of the people in them are good actors. He even made Scarlett Johansson bad!  I bet that scene at Steve Buscemi’s house bothers her to this day. She must have been begging for another take!  I’m guessing a regular occurrence on the set of Bay films is actors asking for another take and him saying it’s fine. That would make sense if he’s obsessed with staying on time and on budget. 

But I recently noticed another talent Bay has. In the last few months, HBO was showing The Island in heavy rotation. I watched a lot of it because, duh, Scarlett. I can’t take the whole thing, but I love the bar scene. She’s so cute. Random questions for Scarlett Johansson: Is that your voice saying “Two Delta” when the guy asks for your number?  It sounds like someone else. I didn’t know you could sound that cute!

The Island is actually not bad, either. Great cast. Really great. Too bad they didn’t have a director who knew how to use them. It’s just that it is literally the most derivative movie I’ve ever seen that isn’t actually a remake. But if you’re young, or not a huge movie buff, and you haven’t seen all the 70s and 80s sci-fi flicks that it borrows from, you’ll think it’s pretty good. I guess there is nothing wrong with that. 

But I noticed watching The Island and thinking about Bay’s other films, the small part players in his movies are usually very good. Perhaps this is a product of his background making commercials and thus he knows how to get actors to make a big impression in a short period of time. One day, if I live long enough, I’d like to write a book about great little scenes featuring actors who are not stars. 

One of the great little parts in Bay’s work is Jennifer Garner in Pearl Harbor. You know what’s funny?  I’ve warched Pearl Harbor probably thirty times, and I actually didn’t realize that was Jennifer until just now. I had gone to look up the actress’s name for the purposes of this piece. Oh, 2001, she wasn’t famous yet, so I didn’t know her when I first saw it and that’s why I never connected the dots, kind of like Melissa McCarthy in Go.

The scene with Jennifer and Kate Beckinsale where the wounded soldiers are flooding into the clinic is probably the best scene Michael Bay has made. It’s one of the only Bay scenes that has genuine emotion in it, and Bay’s frantic camera style fits perfectly in this situation. That one scene does a lot to help a film that is otherwise emotionally dead. 

Until I started working on my book about the MAT Girls and how they influenced my life, I never fully realized the importance that movies play in our society. I knew of course that they were a bedrock part of popular culture, and probably, with due consideration to sports, music and television, the entertainment outlet that we value most. But I didn’t appreciate the extent to which we use scenes in movies as an emotional reference point, a way of communicating to others how we feel. 

This is the real brilliance of the job actors do. Because of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and the fact that so many of them are smoking hot, we’ve forgotten who our actors really are. They are in the same tradition as the players in the old Greek theaters, the same as the actors at Shakespeare’s Old Globe. They are artists who amplify real life and play it back, so that we can all understand ourselves and each other better. 

That’s why so often on this blog, I quote lines of dialogue, using the screenplay format as an inside joke on the fact that I am a screenwriter. But it is infinitely useful to convey the exact emotional tone I am trying to evoke by thinking of a scene where an actor expresses it. 

At the end of that clinic scene, frustrated at the overwhelming hopeless of the situation, Jennifer says, “I don’t know what to do.”. The way she says it is exactly the way I feel right now. 

At this moment, it is 11:30pm, Thursday, August 27. I have to check out of my hotel in the morning and I cannot afford to book another. So once again, I will be out on the street. Unless something changes, I’ll be stuck homeless for the next two weeks until, hopefully, my next disability check comes. Life on the street is utterly destructive to the body and mind. A few weeks in a hotel room is not enough time to recover. I need about two months of bedrest to get back to health...if I can. The fact is, I haven’t felt the same since I spent most of the month of March living in Balboa Park. I have all kinds of alarming physical problems right now, and I’m not only worried I’ll never be healthy again. I’m worried I won’t survive if I have to go back to the street. 

I feel permanently crippled physically and psychologically.  I may have COVID. Three nights ago, I felt certain I was dying. I didn’t go to the hospital because I’ve totally lost trust for everyday doctors after what I’ve experienced over the last eight years.  I’m sure you rich people have really good doctors, but those I’ve been seeing have been so wrong about so many serious things that I consider them little more than quacks. 

But I’m not afraid of death anyway. At this point, if I’m never going to get my life back, I might as well die. This life I have now is not worth living. It isn’t life at all.  Perhaps I can convey to you what I’ve been through in the last eight years by telling you that I literally contemplate the question of whether I died and went to hell on the day that I was arrested, or the day of my kidney failure. My life has felt like that kind of inescapable downward spiral for these last eight years. It’s easy for you to second-guess me and say I should have done this or should have done that. It’s easy for YOU to say things will get better. Live one month of my life and come back and tell me that. Spend a month in prison. Spend a month living on the street. It won’t get better for me until someone fights for me. I don’t know, I feel like I have a substantially better life record than a lot of the guys I see people marching for and fighting for on television, but no one seems to care about my plight. 

For eight years, my life has been a literal living nightmare. I’ve tried everything to turn it around. I tried appealing to family for help, and even my parents seemed to want me to go to jail. I asked my father to help by contacting some of his friends. He told me he didn’t know anyone to call. My father was friends for fifty years with one of the most powerful men in America who could have come to my aid then or now. But my father wouldn’t ask him. 

I tried calling and writing lawyers. If you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to retain them, they don’t care. I’ve tried social media. I tried just being the good soldier and trying to comply with parole until it was over, but it’s designed to be impossible. I’ve tried prayer. I’ve tried this blog and one before it. Nothing makes any difference. Things just keep getting worse no matter what I do. What else is hell?  The worse part is, I don’t know what I did to get here. I’ve made my mistakes, sure, but I’ve never deliberately hurt anyone and I’ve always tried to have a positive impact on the world and those around me.

I think about the scene in the classic television series Homicide: Life on the Streets. It was either Bill Duke or Andre Braugher recounting a story about a man in the basement of a police station being beaten by police officers. The man is crying out for justice, and one of the officers beating him says to him, “There is no justice. There’s just us.”. That’s how I feel. That’s how I’ve felt for seven years. 

There has always been a strange contradiction in American society to me. I noticed it early because I grew up in church. Most Americans claim to be Christians, and almost everyone claims a belief in some kind of spirituality.  But yet, if you start living your life, making your decisions, based on anything but a purely practical materialist basis, you are automatically labeled insane.  We say we believe in religion, but it is actually totally unacceptable socially to truly make your decisions based on spiritual principles. 

It is this combined with my observations of human behavior and my realization of what phonies most people are that have led me to conclude that most Americans are actually nihilists.  They use claims of belief in spirituality as a game theory strategy to gain an advantage by making others think they are better people than they are. In reality, they believe in nothing except trying to grab all they can and hoping they can win the race to the grave before they get found out. They don’t believe that they will ever have to face any universal arbiter of justice, whether it be called God, Allah, Gaia, karma, E.T. or even science. They don’t even believe in the laws of the universe. 

A lot of people will never be able to understand the decision I’ve made. I’m not suicidal, though I would never say if I was in a society that treats feeling suicidal like a crime. But I’ve decided to draw the line that there is a minimum quality of life that I will accept, and that really isn’t much, but I demand it. My life has been far below that line for seven and a half years. This has gone on long enough. I don’t have to have a job in Hollywood or a smoking hot wife, though I want it. I don’t have to have millions of dollars. My demands are as simple as saying that if America thinks I’m a bad person, and doesn’t want to let me have my life back, then let me go. Surely, xenophobic, Isolationist Americans who want to build a wall around their country can’t object to a convicted felon leaving for one of the countries that our president called “shitholes”. 

But it seems I won’t even be allowed to do that. It doesn’t just seem that the world has turned its back on me. It seems like the world is watching my destruction eyes wide open and sadistically cheering it on. 

At first, the silence of everyone from my past seemed strange, but now I get it. They are planning to work the plausible deniability trick. If they have never communicated with me at all since my arrest, if my life turns around, they’ll say “I had no idea you went to prison! I would have helped you.”.  Spoiler alert: that shit won’t work. I KNOW you are all aware of the predicament I’ve been in. I’m not stupid. People talk. Someone like me doesn’t get arrested and sent to prison without word getting around. My first question to anyone from my past who ever tries to come back in my life will be, “Why didn’t you fight for me?”.  Only a couple of smoking hot girls I loved have an exemption on that. 

My favorite director Andrew Niccol said in an interview that he sometimes feels like he is living in The Truman Show. It makes sense he would feel that way since he wrote the script. But lately I feel like something equally bizarre must be happening in my life. It seems simply unbelievable that with all the out-and-out scumbags in this world who still have their faction of supporters, I wouldn’t have even ONE person truly on my side, not even my mother. It seems impossible that not one of the thousands of lawyers that I know or have worked with would offer their assistance. I can’t believe that out of all the people I know in San Diego who are doing well financially, no one has offered me a place to stay other than gay guys on the street trying to pick me up. It seems supernatural that there are two accused sex criminals running for president, each supported by millions, and I don’t have ONE supporter. I mean, most incredible of all, no one has seen the pure self-interest in helping me, that I would practically make myself a slave to the person who took up my fight and had the resources to win it...if it was a girl. 

It just can’t be real. It’s like I’m the subject of some kind of bizarre unethical social experiment. These are the things that make my life feel like literal hell. I don’t know what to do. 

Every moment, I’m afraid that I’m going to snap psychologically, especially if I have to go back to the street. I see disheveled homeless people with long beards, barefoot and filthy, covered in sores, shuffling along talking to themselves, and it seems that the world is trying to push me down until I become one of them. I know that I can’t take this forever. I’m damaged already. I don’t know what it will take to bring me back...if I can be brought back. If this is a project or a game, what’s my safe word?  This needs to end NOW!

The worst part is, I can’t stop hoping. And hope is torture when it feels like false hope, when it seems there is no reason to believe anything will change. I know how easy it would be for everything to turn around, TOMORROW. For a lawyer to come forward and take my case. For a news outlet to pick up my story. If either of these things happened, the case against me would disintegrate like Charmin in the toilet.  It could be tomorrow that someone I can trust (i.e. a girl I can trust) appears to help me out with a place to stay. It could be tomorrow that someone from the movie industry cals to offer me a job and puts their lawyers on the case to sort out my legal problems. Or for someone else to offer me a job worthy of my talents that pays me enough to hire a lawyer myself. I could meet my future wife...

But the fact that none of this has happened yet leaves me feeling like there is some universal rule against helping me, as if I’m wearing the mark of Cain.

I turned on my television while writing this, and Jennifer’s Body was on, just at the beginning of the make-out scene.  That scene was never hot to me before, but it’s hot right now. No matter what is happening in my life, seeing Amanda Seyfried’s face always makes me feel better. Girls are my only hope, my only reason for continuing to exist.  I tell myself every day that girls are coming to rescue me, but my God, are they taking their time.