recognizable smell in the world? Is that why you drink so much of it? Hee hee!
Anna
If Billy and I got along better, I’d have him work with me any time that he wanted to. We could even consider starting our own production company, but of course that’s now a pipe dream. One thing that I could really use him for is help starting a foundation that will give financial assistance and legal and medical aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn’t matter how many years have passed—New Orleans still hasn’t bounced back, and it’s not going to for a while, if it ever really does. If Bourbon makes any money, once we cover our production costs, five percent of the profits will be routed to my foundation, which I’ve tentatively named Life After the Storm. If you make even a third of the kind of money I do and don’t donate to worthy causes to any significant degree, you’re a bastard.
Hollywood liberal, yes, I know, but why shouldn’t I be? I have to wonder what it is the self-serving CEOs who run our country and the rest of the world are so afraid of. With their enormous assets scattered in banks and investments across the globe and their armies of hired bodyguards and vacation homes on four continents, why do they act as if they’re more vulnerable and besieged by the world’s miseries than the poorest forty percent here or abroad? I give fifteen percent of my annual earnings to the charities I believe in. Capitalism has been good to me—I won’t dispute that—but it hasn’t been good to everyone, and the number it continues to be good to shrinks every day. If this sounds like socialism or communism, so be it.
Fifteen percent of my annual earnings is a lot of money by most people’s standards—almost five million dollars last year, which was a particularly good year. But then, most of them have been since I graduated from college thirty years ago.
Something else that has been on my mind—my ex-wife Melinda Byers’s memoir, which is mostly about our marriage, and it has a title that I can’t help but find offensive: This Isn’t Gold. She must have been very bored and embittered up there in ugly, impoverished Santa Barbara or Big Sur, whichever house it was where she wrote that book. The terms of our divorce were generous—she will be very comfortable until she dies unless she really screws things up—but she still seems intent on trying to convince the world that she is a woman scorned, misunderstood, and generally wronged by the Fates and of course by her asshole movie-star ex-husband.
I know that I must sound bitter too. No matter that I have everything society tells us that we can and should have. One thing I kept thinking about after I met those two French-Israelis in Cannes was how they reminded me of something an American director I’ve worked with said to me about American alpha males. His words won’t go away, because I’m pretty sure he’s right: “One of the reasons we dominate the film world and most everywhere else is because we’re bigger than most other men. I mean physically, not intellectually. We’re overfed, overgrown, and overconfident, and we’re so intent on winning any contest we can be a part of that if we’re not smart enough to win fairly, we’re strong enough to beat our rivals into submission.” I had the sense, standing next to the Palme d’Or-winning director and producer, that they hated me more for being a foot taller than they were than for having made a fine film, one that doesn’t feature any of the usual Hollywood crap—no guns, no drug abuse, no projectile vomiting, no car chases, no bar fights or catfights, no gratuitous cursing, no gold diggers, no midlife crises, no nine-year-olds giving their parents romantic advice. When we wrote the screenplay, Scott and I were very careful to avoid the usual stupid tropes.
Anyway, Melinda and her memoir. Isis has told me that the book has actually raised my stature in both the material and the spiritual worlds: I have acquired, at last, a fully formed soul. Because the rest of the world, if they care to look, can now see my flaws and insecurities more clearly. I have been summarily humbled, and great goodwill is coming my way as a result of this unsanctioned unveiling. I could be more skeptical about it, sure, but I choose not to