L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  I ask where that anger comes from.

  “I am one of these people who went through a series of demon doors of my own creation. It was just like, I mean the only thing I can think of is that I have put much of it in The Indian Runner, you know, where there is a generation of us that grew up every day as my kids are today—but we had real coverage of the Vietnam War. It was real. It was my neighbors’ older brothers and shit. I love that fucking Mustang, or maybe it was a Firebird, that is now up on the blocks in the garage of my buddy’s house because his brother, whose car it was, had to drain all the oil before he went overseas and then he comes back dead, and I am seeing things that are related on television. I was growing up in the Valley at that time, and we had six or eight kids on our street that went off and were killed, and they were not kids to me at the time. They were adults to me, but they were the coolest adults on the planet because we were all about go-carts and motorcycles, and we were younger. They were just these cool guys, and they were all slaughtered.”

  So, are you suggesting that anger can be power?

  “Yes, but you can’t live alone,” he says. “There has to be balance. I could see an idealistic movement, if it just had a lot of people agreeing to go with it. Dennis Kucinich will be president. All we have to do is vote for him.

  “You know, I am shamefully Johnny-come-lately to it, in a way, but once you’ve stepped into the arena, my own experience is there’s no going back.”

  ◆◆◆

  Sean Penn’s family moved from the Valley to out near Point Dume when he was still a kid. It was the country part of Malibu back then, and he says he had a “Huck Finn kind of existence with surfing” growing up. Penn says he can handle an eight-to-ten-foot Pipeline on a good day if it isn’t too crowded.

  “I am comfortable in ten-foot surf in most places,” he tells me. “After that, I watch from the beach.”

  I tell him that five-foot is about my cutoff.

  “Well, that’s the best, the most fun, three-to-five-foot perfect waves. My favorite place still today in the world is the Ranch.”

  The Ranch is the legendary surf spot north of Santa Barbara on untrammeled, privately held land. It’s one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I have been fortunate enough to have surfed it with Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, the man responsible for Endless Summer. Dana himself directed the wonderful Step Into Liquid a few years back. It was at the Ranch where Penn made one of his most significant discoveries.

  “I had my fourteenth birthday there in a tent for four days with a buddy of mine,” he tells me. “There are two things that happened. I fell in love with the Ranch, but the other thing is, I fell in love with mustard. You know how you get a hunger like nothing else when you’re surfing? Well, we had run out of our food supply pretty fast down there. One night, we were surfing Rights and Lefts [surf breaks]. We camped right in front of Utah’s just down the beach, and some guys were camped down the beach and they’re making hot dogs. I always hated mustard. So, they go, ‘You want some hot dogs?’ We came running up there and they had already put mustard on it, and I was like, ‘No, no, no!’ But I was so hungry I ate one anyway and then I was like, ‘Aahhhh.’ Ever since then, I ate a lot of mustard.”

  For some reason, though, it seems like there’s always a dark side looming on the edge of Southern California paradise, and it soon began to envelop the beach culture Penn grew up around. By the seventies, Mike Hynson, the golden-boy star of Endless Summer, was battling with substance abuse, running afoul of the law, and even ending up on Nixon’s enemies list. Miki Dora, the dark prince of Malibu, was off on his outlaw escapades. A lot of Penn’s friends became casualties.

  “They found a reason to get into so much trouble and kill themselves and kill others,” Penn says. “It was the weirdest thing. One of my best friends from that time, whenever we got drunk, that is all we’d talk about. It’s all those guys that are gone.”

  I ask if it was just the times, or something else.

  “Well, four out of five of the things were drug related, if not drug overdoses. It was criminality based on drugs, mostly,” he says. “Yeah, it was the times.”

  Penn was lucky enough to have escaped to New York at age seventeen to pursue theater and get on the path he is still on.

  “The other stuff happened as we were becoming adults. My life moved away, so that stuff happened later to those guys. It was not part of my life. But those years, certainly, that I had were mostly positive. It was a rite-of-passage period. It was colorful at the time.”

  Rites of passage are important to Penn, not in a facile, symbolic sense, but in the way that men and women test themselves and their boundaries to find a better sense of themselves and the truths and principles by which they are going to live their lives. It’s a theme that runs through all the films he’s written and/or directed, and it’s what drew him to the plight of Chris McCandless, a young man who, if nothing else, was searching for a code by which to live.

  “The sense of traditional rites of passage are gone in our male culture, and I think increasingly there’s a hunger for it in our female culture as well,” he tells me. “And so there is not a rite of passage unless you create one for yourself. You never make that next step.”

  And we become stuck in an infantile culture?

  “Yes, exactly,” Penn says. “So the child-man who is also an economic slave goes home exhausted. He has worked his second shift in a day. His wife is now doing her shift, or something. The kids are screaming in the other room and he would rather watch Bill O’Reilly criticize Paris Hilton than think about something. It’s self-perpetuating. So I think with Chris McCandless, it was a young person taking advantage of his own wisdom, because young people still have that available.”

  It seems clear that we’re going to have to make a move soon because I’m almost out of cigarettes, and these are the types of talks that cigarettes were made for.

  “I am now returning to the philosophies I had when I was seventeen or eighteen years old,” he continues. “That is when I knew, and I was militant about it. The militancy is what makes you leave them, because that is wrong—you’re a fundamentalist-idealist, and you are bulletproof. When you are real and combine that philosophy with some humility, which comes with being forty-seven years old…I become a more mature version of [that seventeen- or eighteen-year-old], and here is how: The rite of passage is humility, one way or another. The biggest strengths in things that ever happened to me were humiliations, and humiliation is a term we always use as a bad thing. It is not a bad thing, and it contains the word, humility. You add humility to that kind of idealism. Then you put tolerance with idealism, and it makes you interested, and that is what leads to other things that are good things.”

  I ask Penn, a man who saw his father and brother die too soon and who has had his share of public struggles with the delicate art of growing up, what he considers to be his own rites of passage.

  “Well, in my case, I’d say the closest thing to a catharsis was having children. My rites of passage when I was a young man were in the water. It is not the only way to do it, but it is the way that I found myself doing it that related to Chris McCandless, not in such a long-term sort of spiritual search, but definitely the most life-changing things were the times when I put my life on the edge. I don’t think it’s because of the life on the edge, literally. I think it’s because of the humility that comes with dancing with something that shows itself to be clearly bigger than you are.”

  I tell him that I had that experience not long ago when I had to be pulled from the water by a seventeen-year-old girl.

  “Hey, you know,” he laughs, “salvation comes in small packages. Surprising packages.”

  ◆◆◆

  Penn’s main muse is language. And his love of language is evident in the journalism he’s practiced—the attention to details, the facility with structure—but even more so in the
films he’s written and directed. The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, and Into the Wild (and also The Pledge, which he directed and which, like Into the Wild, was adapted from a book)—watching those films, the thing that struck me the most was that they were first and foremost written works, an element much of modern filmmaking lacks.

  He cites movies like His Girl Friday and A Streetcar Named Desire, even with its atmosphere of working-class melodrama, as examples of an era when language reigned supreme in filmmaking, and our movie-watching experience was the richer for it. Penn tells me his literary heroes are Steinbeck, Saroyan, McCarthy, García Márquez, Dostoyevsky, Ford (“Oh, and Krakauer,” he adds, laughing), and that it is in the tradition of language that we may find some measure of hope and salvation.

  “With more access to language with television and now the Internet and everything else, the kind of lazy speech between friends is what people are now doing formally,” Penn explains. “This is how we talk, and those abbreviations are part of the culture. There is no culture in the language of the culture.”

  He asks me if I have ever read George Washington’s Rules of Civility, and it isn’t a rhetorical question. No, I confess.

  “He wrote that when he was about thirteen years old. It is shocking,” says Penn. “Television, computers, radio, what else do you have? Name it—the industrial revolution, the technological revolution, and all this stuff, and a thirteen-year-old without any of that wrote Rules of Civility. Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment without any of that. You know, without any of that. That stuff is not the answer. I think tradition is part of the answer.

  “But we do not even value language when we talk to each other anymore—this is where tradition matters. It is our best song that we can sing for each other. So if all we are going to sing is da, da, da, da, da, da…then there is no dancing in the culture, because there is no dancing in the language,” he continues, and given the levels of nicotine that are coursing through our neuroreceptors, I’m not about to stop him. “And so, the thing that I miss in my life more than anything—and by the way, I feel markedly guilty of it myself—is that we do not walk out the door in the morning with a culture that has a traditionally steep value of language.”

  I ask Penn if he sees himself primarily as a writer, a hunch I’d come to while watching his films.

  “Yeah, I think that’s most of what it is,” he says.

  “Did you ever write a novel?” I ask, on another hunch.

  “I played with one, got pretty far into it, and it burned up in this fire. At that time, I still wasn’t able to use a computer and I was just typing on an old typewriter. I had all the pages stacked up on my desk and it burned right on down. It was very nuanced, and the language of it is not something I could try to repeat. I’ve played with a couple ideas that I think I will eventually try.”

  “You’re a good writer,” I say.

  “Oh, thanks. I like doing it. I like when I catch a wave.”

  ◆◆◆

  When we’re perilously close to the end of my smokes, Penn takes me to his house later in the afternoon. It’s up a few windy, tree-lined roads in a burg that is upscale in that tasteful mid–Marin County way. Think Brentwood sans the ostentation. On the way over, Penn fields a few calls and gives me some advice about my pending divorce. It is mostly of the try-to-be-a-gentleman-and-don’t-succumb-to-the-temptation-to-blame-yourself sort. Oh, and get some Ambien. Nothing revelatory, but I appreciate the tone, heartfelt and free of empty platitudes. Standing out among the nondescript family trucksters in Penn’s driveway are a Porsche and a Ford Shelby GT500, if I’m not mistaken.

  “That’s my baby,” Penn grins mischievously, as we pass by the Shelby. A perfect quarter-pipe for skateboarding sits in the middle of what was once intended to be a basketball or tennis court.

  His house is beautiful, of course, tastefully decorated in an elegant country style. When we enter, his teenage son walks by, a blur of blond hair and limbs, already bigger than anyone else in the house. From somewhere in the deep interior, I hear the disembodied voice of Penn’s wife, Robin Wright Penn, shouting instructions as to where Penn might find the keys to one of his cars. It all seems so normal.

  Penn is eager to show me the editing house where he cut Into the Wild, which is on the second level. It looks like a really elaborate home-entertainment center to me. Of more interest is the pool table in the back of the room.

  “Wanna shoot a game?” I ask.

  Thankfully, Penn has a pack of American Spirits nearby. We light up and I break, sinking a high ball. I make a couple more shots. Penn raises that one eyebrow in the way he’s famous for and squints through his cigarette smoke. He misses. We talk about the beauty of Eddie Vedder, who did a gorgeous soundtrack for Into the Wild (“I love that guy,” says Penn), and the decision to cast Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless. Hirsch caught Penn’s eye in The Lords of Dogtown, for which he played the seminal skate punk, Jay Adams.

  “It was right in my era, and I knew those guys peripherally and everything at the time,” says Penn. “It felt pretty genuine to me.”

  Despite the spiritual and intellectual quest that was at the core of McCandless’s restlessness, playing him would require someone capable of such Herculean physical tests as running rapids in a canoe, hiking brutal desert climates, packing into the Alaskan wilderness, and basically shedding an amount of weight that would give as adept a weight-loser as Christian Bale pause.

  “We met. I knew Emile could act the part, I got that feeling pretty fast, but I did not know if he could act it for eight months under the conditions that we were going to be facing,” says Penn. “And he was amazing. He really had to live a monkey’s life for the eight months.”

  I make a couple more shots, and Penn jokes about me being a pool sharp. He sinks a couple and then I finish off the table, save the eight ball, which is stuck near the corner pocket behind one of the many, many balls he has left on the table. I take a gamble and jump his ball, miss mine, and scratch the cue ball. Penn wins.

  “That was great,” he laughs. “Perfect.”

  Indeed, a lesson in humility.

  Fucking With Drew Barrymore

  Originally published in the LA Weekly, April 22, 2009.

  Author’s note: I was (and am) a big fan of the girl-power vibe in the Charlie’s Angels movies produced by Barrymore’s production company, Flower Films. I kind of liked her style in general. She had a real up-with-life thing going on despite being raised by wolves. When I met her at her office, she was finishing up a phone call related to her directorial debut. Exhausted from some personal-life issues going on at the time, I took the liberty of lying down on her couch. If I recall correctly, her golden retriever joined me there, welcoming me to Barrymore’s world with a few sloppy licks.

  Drew Barrymore loves fucking. Mostly it happens when she gets excited. And she gets excited about a lot of stuff—movies, music, historical icons, roller derby, challenging herself. She likes fucking so much, she starts up with it before the interview. Like when I present her with an ancient Lou Reed cassette I find in a crumb-infested corner of my car while searching desperately for a tape because I seem to have forgotten one for my recorder, and Barrymore insists that no human hand can keep up with how much and how fast she talks.

  “No way,” she says, when I hand her the Lou Reed. “This is the greatest gift ever. I fucking love cassettes.”

  Dylan Tichenor, the guy editing Whip It, Barrymore’s directorial debut, and who also edited There Will Be Blood, Brokeback Mountain, The Royal Tannenbaums, Magnolia, and Boogie Nights, to name a few, is “fucking dope.”

  At one point, she’s so excited that she interrupts a discussion about Donnie Darko—the 2001 film, written and directed by a then-unknown kid named Richard Kelly, which Barrymore got made when nobody else could or would—just to start fucking with the Weekly.

  “If I could say one periodical
that is my favorite and most important, and I live or die and breathe from and can’t fucking function without, it’s the LA Weekly.”

  By my calculations, Barrymore drops an F-bomb every two minutes. “I’m a dirty girl,” she confesses with a sly grin.

  I have to admit, I’m a bit taken aback when I encounter Ms. Barrymore on a shimmering Friday afternoon at the postproduction house a stone’s throw from the Arclight Theater, where she’s overseeing the editing on Whip It. And it’s not because of the ribald language she deliciously slathers on her speech like mustard on a hot dog. Even the dirty-girl joke isn’t dirty. It’s sweet, and the slyness is about inclusion, not about using sex as a weapon. Her F-bombs are about enthusiasm, not aggression.

  What surprises me is how tiny she is. Greeting me in some sort of workout pants that look like she picked them up in the eighties and decided to remain loyal to, a concert T-shirt, and a surplus-store army jacket, with her hair undone and no makeup, Barrymore seems smaller and more vulnerable than I’d expected given her oversized personality. And she’s very skinny, most likely a symptom of the stress she’s been under while directing her first film and having recently tackled the enormous role of “Little” Edie Beale for HBO’s dramatic rendering of Grey Gardens.

  “I’ve never been so scared in my life,” says Barrymore, of taking on “Little” Edie. “She’s such an icon, and it’s the scariest part. That and directing are the two scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. If I haven’t given myself a cancer ulcer, I’ll be shocked because I’ve never been more fucking freaked out than in the last two years of my life.”

  Grey Gardens is based on the famous Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary about “Big” Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little” Edith. An appetite for the eccentric (some would say tragically so) mother and daughter and the East Hampton mansion where they went to seed, while clinging to their affectations like life preservers, has been fed over the years with numerous books, more documentaries, a Broadway musical, etc. And now, posthumously, thanks to HBO, these two collateral Kennedys have crossed over from a subcultural obsession to the full-blown stardom they so desired, perhaps delusionally, during their lives.