What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

The short documentary included here was shot and edited by Aaron Kemp. It is an engrossing, unsettling piece of work. Enjoy.

My Name Is The Wrath of Khan (part one)

Day 19 finds the crew of My Name Is Khan in Healdsburg, California (doubling for Banville, Georgia), a smallish town of about 11,000 people roughly seventy miles north of San Francisco. This is a Bollywood/Hollywood production of a film starring the Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, directed by Karan Johar and produced by Prashant Shah... none of whom I'd ever heard of before landing the fluke gig of Production Assistant and driver for the lead actress's costume designer, Manish Mahotra, the "Marc Jacobs of India." Kajol, evidently the Angelina Jolie of Bollywood, was very pleasant to me, even if our interactions consisted largely of polite nods - I talked mainly to her bodyguard, a big, jolly Latino dude with a girlfriend and kid on the way. He was a very nice man, from whom I learned about Kajol's crushing paranoia and fear of the kind of attention generated by Shah Rukh Khan's very presence damn near wherever we wound up shooting.

I don't blame her.

This job is just proof that you can never tell just what you'll find on Craigslist.

I had just moved to Oakland from Los Angeles. The idea was for my girlfriend and I to finish school in a place with actual meteorological changes to the seasons, a place where not everyone you meet is working on a film or about to be working on a film or trying to get the financing for a film or wants to shoot a film or get on the crew of a film or writing a goddam film. When two different co-signers for student loans were turned down, it appeared that the credit fairy had suddenly declined to furnish me with anymore magic dust. I had already dug myself a nice, deep student loan debt. The amount I owe is so absurd that it's hard to take seriously. It's almost impossible to really believe that throughout my three years of film school, I convinced myself that "just one script sale" would make it all better.

This proves that the real world does not really penetrate the wackadoo haze built over LA, like an artificial ozone layer, put in place to protect the City of Angels against the hard reality of the rest of the universe. It's not a nice place to be a writer.

Then again, most places are not nice places to be a writer. Historically, that's what being a writer was all about - making the most of a shitty situation and then, you know, writing about it. L.A. is hideously bright and feels like a never-ending parking lot. The endless buzzing of a few million hustling pricks ready to claw, stomp, fuck and suck their way to the top can be a high, a kind of psychic mindmeld. It has predictably horrifying consequences in the long run: paranoia, a heightened sensitivity to parasitic has-beens eager to try and resurrect their own smothered promise and ambition with the sweat and blood of an "up-and-comer," (which sounds a literary allusion to an early-80's San Francisco bathhouse fling, ickily enough); you become hip to the hype and then fall for said fucking hype, hook, line, sinker, and promise of a back-end percentage.

And just when you think you're out (or at least you think you want to be out) - and, oh yes, I'm gonna go there - they pull you back the fuck in.