“Go Irish” News and Miller’s Views on Fitzgerald

Apparently, the South Camden Theater Company in New Jersey is once again producing a short run of Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, the existential play that I wrote with Tom Flannery; the Camden has already staged the one-man show, back in March of 2007, I believe it was.

I appreciate all of the hard work that actor Bob Hughes (a friend and high school classmate of Miller’s in Scranton, PA) has put into staging the drama anywhere he can find a venue and I have no doubt that the Camden’s reprise of Go Irish is due to the new Broadway revival of Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, That Championship Season (with a cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, Miller’s son and literary executor).

And while I remain proud that the work is slowly finding an audience, the version that Bob is running with is a version of the text that has been savagely gutted by Flannery, who I drafted to add some Scranton color to the play after I had begun working on it in 2004.

Most of the material I wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, has been stripped completely, which produced the effect of removing the leit-motif of the drama: Go Irish, as I penned it, is not so much a biographical of the tragic Jason Miller’s life and career but a meditation on the myth and reality of the dissipated Catholic, Irish-American writer.

The following monologue — including Miller’s own words from a 1972 interview — is nowhere to be found in the current text, which is nothing short of a travesty. You would think that Hughes and Flannery would realize the contemporary relevance of the dialogue, which I will let you judge for yourself.

JASON MILLER ON SCOTT FITZGERALD: “A LOT OF WEEDS GOT IN THERE”

Fitzgerald … I played him in a movie once, you know, one of those made-for-TV deals, back in ’76 I think it was, when they were still making quality movies for the tube. Some critics said I was the best personification of Fitzgerald on screen – not too hard when my only competition to date was Richard Chamberlain in another TV flick and Gregory Peck in that God awful potboiler “Beloved Infidel”. The truth of the matter is I just hit my marks and said my lines and it didn’t hurt that I had Tuesday Weld for a co-star.

Only forty-four years old when he died of a massive heart attack, Fitzgerald was  desperately trying to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood, laboring under the mistaken impression that he was a forgotten has-been.

Fitzgerald — When he tried to get into films, he never felt he belonged. He never fucking belonged in Hollywood. He began to feel the fire was starting to go. He had monetary problems, a smashed marriage, a sick wife. All this, plus as ebbing talent. And the guilt. Didn’t tend to his own garden. A lot of weeds got in there.

Curiously enough, as much as he wrote about the rich, I really believe he hated them. I believe he despised them in some other level of his being. His decline really started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. You can time it. The world was no longer interested in the rich as escapists. The rich put this country goddamn near the brink of destruction. The rich were jumping out of windows. They no longer were the myths that fascinated people. We were beginning to question these people, and we weren’t liking what we found. But this was his milieu. And when that world collapsed, his talent collapsed. He couldn’t find other fertile ground to lay his seed in. He was trapped within his fatal attraction to the rich, not only in their life-style, but in their literary value to him. He mined that vein, and when that vein went, he went.

The beautiful thing about it was that he made a desperate lunge in Hollywood, a tragically sad attempt to change his life. He endured incredible humiliations to try to get back on top. The man who had been the center of the fucking world was slipping into anonymity and obscurity.

He had that kind of romantic fatalism where women became myths and goddesses to him, and then they became all too human. There was no balance. Fitzgerald was a total extremist. He was one of the last of the true romantics. His skull should have cracked open on a pyre in Malibu. He and Zelda flew too near the sun, the both of them. They flew too fucking near the sun, and whoosh! (Beat) You know, I never used to cuss like this until I went to Hollywood. It’s true. I hate Hollywood, the whole damn slippery, cash-lubricated machine. You get there by standing out….and once you make it you spend all your time trying to fit in. That should explain the extensive mental illness found there.

New York, True Grit, and Catholics

I’m continuing to enjoy the complimentary subscription to the New Yorker that some kind patron gifted me with during the holiday season. The cartoons in the magazine have always been politically and socially relevant but even more so of late, perhaps because there are so many hard and soft targets in the political and social landscape of late.

On page 48, there is a pen and ink rendering of a very small man, unshaven and in threadbare clothing, his beggar’s tin cup extended upward toward a very large, sharp-dressed Wall Street fat cat, who, eyes closed in disgust and disregards, mutters, “You can’t bully me.”

A few pages later, in the bottom left-hand panel of page 62 we find a trio of sharp-dressed, aging businessmen in confab at a cocktail party. “I’m thrilled that the aspirations of the oppressed might be fulfilled over there,” a gentleman pontificates, “but I’m very concerned that it might spread over here.”

**********

I also enjoyed Father Robert Barron’s short but insightful essay, True Grit and the Everlasting Arms, at the Catholic Education Resource Center; a favorite passage:

The next day, by the bank of a river, Mattie encounters her father’s killer and manages to wound him before being captured by Ned Pepper and his men. In the most stirring scene in the film, Rooster manages, single-handedly to take on the entire Pepper gang, holding the reins of his horse in his teeth and firing with both hands. After this encounter, four more men lie dead. Finally, Mattie frees herself and shoots to death her father’s murderer, but the recoil on the gun is so strong that she is pushed into a snake pit, where she receives a bite on the hand. I’ll get back to the snake pit in a moment, but notice first what this canny fourteen year old girl’s lust for vengeance has wrought: eight dead men. She wanted only to bring her father’s killer to justice, but the single-mindedness of her pursuit conduced toward a disproportionate, even barbaric, result, something far beyond the requirements of justice. Her excessive and one-sided passion for righteousness kicked her into a den of snakes, and no one with a Biblical sensibility could miss the symbolic overtone of this kind of fall.

Please do take the time to read the entire essay yourself (link above), particularly if you’re a fan of either the Coen Brothers’ terrific film or Charles Portis’s equally wonderful novel.

**********

Speaking of Catholic scribes, here’s a nice except from the short story Benediction by Scott Fitzgerald, one of the few rare times that FSF mined the Catholicism of his youth for his fiction:

Trees filtering light onto dapple grass. Trees like tall, languid ladies with feather fans coquetting airily with the ugly roof of the monastery. Trees like butlers, bending courteously over placid walks and paths. Trees, trees over the hills on either side and scattering out in clumps and lines and woods all through eastern Maryland, delicate lace on the hems of many yellow fields, dark opaque backgrounds for flowered bushes or wild climbing garden.

Some of the trees were very gay and young, but the monastery trees were older than the monastery which, by true monastic standards, wasn’t very old at all. And, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t technically called a monastery, but only a seminary; nevertheless it shall be a monastery here despite its Victorian architecture or its Edward VII additions, or even its Woodrow Wilsonian, patented, last-a-century roofing.

Out behind was the farm where half a dozen lay brothers were sweating lustily as they moved with deadly efficiency around the vegetable-gardens. To the left, behind a row of elms, was an informal baseball diamond where three novices were being batted out by a fourth, amid great chasings and puffings and blowings. And in front as a great mellow bell boomed the half-hour a swarm of black, human leaves were blown over the checker-board of paths under the courteous trees.

I was in the mood to read that particular Fitzgerald short over the weekend but remembered that my collection of FSF short stories is locked away in a cardboard box in storage; I was lucky, however, to locate it online at The Literature Network, a searchable online database “for the student, educator, and enthusiast” which seems to have some connection to the Jesuits.

Catholics and Catholicism abound in my life lately.

A Personal Perspective on Labor Unions

“I want you to arrange something, Cecilia — I want to meet a Communist Party member.”

Stahr’s negotiations with the Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I asked what Stahr’s “proposition” was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he had prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off Doctor Caligari and Salvador Dali’s Le Chien Andalou, possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian films back in the twenties, and on Wylie White’s suggestion he had the script department get him up a two-page “treatment of the Communist Manifesto.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let there be no doubt about it, the recent social unrest in the state of Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing a budget deficit and has everything to with union busting; like Fitzgerald’s studio boss Monroe Stahr, Governor Walker knows little of the function of labor unions outside the conservative agitprop warning that unions are filled with Commie agitators whose main goal is to dismantle the entire democratic process and unseat the status quo in the United States.

For writers in the film industry in the U.S., the Writers Guild West and East (WGA), which began as a rival of the Screenwriters Guild in 1921, is the only union in town; in order to gain admittance to the Guild and all of its protections one must have worked for a production entity that is a signatory to the Guild and its by-laws. I was never a member of the WGA because I worked for non-union production companies. But that does not mean that the union did not have my back in my days as a screenwriter of feature documentaries and adult entertainment fare for the cable TV market.

For instance, in 2004 I had a dispute with my then-agent that threatened to escalate into a small claims court affair. A colleague suggested that I take the matter to the WGA.

“I’m not a guild member,” I protested. “All of the script work I’ve done has been for non-signatories.”

That’s when he informed me that the guild has a mentor program, accessible via e-mail, where established writers volunteer to mentor and otherwise lend valuable advice to new and emerging writers. I was hooked up with a writer whose work I knew and respected and over the course of two simple e-mails I had the answer I needed to hear — which was, essentially, “This town is full of lying and cheating agents; find another one and move on.”

That’s but one example of the WGA reaching out and lending aid to a working but non-union writer. Here’s an even better one, which begins in late 2007, a year in which, due to illness and other setbacks I only earned about $5,000 as a writer:

In October of’ ’07, one month before Lela and I relocated to Las Vegas to care for my terminally ill mother, I received an e-mail from the Writers Guild Foreign Levies Department. I’ll let the WGAW explain what that arm of the guild is all about:

Foreign Copyright Levies are funds received by the Guild on behalf of U.S. writers pursuant to a program established in 1990. Foreign collection societies send the WGA taxes and levies imposed by foreign governments in order to protect copyright holders of audiovisual product made available on public television, cable television, and through videocassette rentals. The primary source of these monies is “private copy” taxes on the sale of blank videocassettes and VCRs, although taxes are also imposed for cable retransmission of programs.

Much to my shock and pleasant surprise, the Writers Guild had money for me, money owed to me in foreign copyright royalties for a not-so-bad C-grade, non-union movie I scripted all the way back in 1993. And it was a pretty good chunk of change, especially arriving, as it did, a few days after Christmas.

“This is living proof that hack writing can have its dividends,” I declared to Lela when the check arrived.

But more than that, my story should serve as an example that labor unions are on the side of all who labor in the United States, card-carrying member or not, that has been their tradition from the earliest days of the struggle for organized labor, which largely began in … Wisconsin.

Journalist and Communist activist John Reed, author of "Ten Days That Shook the World", Oregon State History Dept