Everyone Knows That Sound

I'd venture that even if one's never heard it before, one knows that it can't be good. But living in an urban society, everyone knows that sound.

Metal meeting metal. Sometimes prefaced by a screeeechBANG. Those of you who know me, you know that to me, the sound is uncomfortably, sadly familiar. But this time around it wasn't me.

I don't know who it was. I was sitting on my couch when I heard it outside. And everyone knows that sound.

So I found my glasses and opened the sliding door and went out on the patio. Sure enough, at the intersection. A Suburban had hit a pickup. Seemed like the pickup was trying to make it through the intersection at the last second. Trying to save a minute - or, more likely, was going too fast to stop and decided instead to just gun through.

I don't know what happened. But that seems likely.

Everyone was out on their balconies or patios, standing on sidewalks up and down the street, watching. 'Cause they know that sound.

Some of you know that a few months ago, a high-speed police chase terminated in my car. A crazy fugitive woman in a stolen truck hit my car while I was at a stoplight. My car was totaled. She went running and was tackled by a police officer. I later learned that she had taken in a runaway and was beating the child in her closet.

She hit seventeen cars between Burbank, where the chase started, and that intersection in Hollywood.

I called Nikki. Asked if she could come pick me up. She turned on the TV. There I was. Live coverage, news chopper shot. My car and four others, scattered across the intersection like dropped Hot Wheels.

Hey! I was on TV!

Don't Just Shoot Me

On Monday, Brian and I wound our way toward Newhall, a small town near Santa Clarita. There, at the Oaktree Gun Club, we met people including several world champion shooters, including the 24-year-old world champion shotgun double-trap shooter and Olympic gold medalist; representatives from Glock and Smith & Wesson (the S&W guy had just returned from a hunting safari in Africa, using a .500 revolver as his primary hunting weapon); and a television producer currently putting together a season's worth of episodes on handgunning for the Outdoor Channel.

This was the National Sport Shooting Federation's media seminar, in which they invite entertainment folk (stuntmen mainly, but somehow Brian and I as well) to shoot guns all day and learn the right way to handle and treat and work with real guns - in the hopes that gun use on screen might become more accurate.

If you've ever tripped across a gun-folk message board, you might have seen how they rant about guns on film & TV. Bear with me, please; here's a few authentic excerpts:

" ... Whenever I take a new shooter to the range we start out with my lecture about forgetting everything they see on TV or the movies."

"... It is my fervent prayer that all criminals learn their shooting techniques from the movies ... I had the pleasure of witnessing four young men with Tech-9s at the rifle range yesterday. They too had learned the sideways gunhold taught by the Hollywood School of Violent Behavior ... It causes one to understand why so many innocent bystanders are killed during gang drive-by's [sic]. They hit everything except what they intend to hit."

"... when Sharon Stone picked up a Walther PPK (or /S, I forget) and shot nonstop, taking out 21 TV monitors at the end, I was just insulted. The movie was saying 'We don't have the time to find a gun that will actually shoot this many shots and you're all too stupid to notice anyway.' "

"... I'm sure you've seen enough sloppy gun handling to make your skin crawl. Why is it that the producer/director will spend so much money to make a film and make stupid mistakes that could be solved by sending a few crew members or actors to a basic NRA class for a few bucks? ... Answer: Nobody cares, at least as far as the movie-making/Hollywood crowd knows. When Mr. Director or Ms. Actress perform atrocious gun handling, do they receive bags of mail from their fans asking why? No, because nobody really notices, or cares ... I would bet if the nation's 80 million gun owners rallied and made a stink about this (through letters, e-mails, etc) things would change."

"... [Following a list of inaccuracies] Hollywood... go figure!"

"... On the Simpsons, they have shown someone pumping a round into a side-by-side shotgun more than a few times. Arrggghhh ... The episode where Homer bought a handgun was positively AWFUL."

"... There are many actors who are very good with firearms, very knowledgable [sic] people who are simply doing it the way the director wants it done ... [director John Milius] also reminded me of the MOST important factor in movies....THEY ARE FOR ENTERTAINMENT not for real life training films!"

"...I don't go to movies to see real life. If I did, all of them would be PG."

"... And it wasn't nickel, it was stainless steel. (Hollywood! Pffft!)"

And, finally:

"... I just don't care, anymore. I decided a long, long, time ago, that I would vote with my wallet, and decided not to participate in Hollyweird's latest, and greatest films. I just don't go and spend my money on them. Besides, if a person is reading what they should about firearms, and reloading like they should, and going to the range like they should-- who has time to go to the stupid movies? Hollyweird icons of the silver screen are not my heroes in life. Shoot on..."

Sorry, once I got looking for stuff, I got carried away. Aficionados of anything are of course going to point out errors that they find, and I'm sure I could find car buffs that say such-and-such car can't really accelerate that fast or that Volkswagens can't really find love or whatever, and as an aviation fan I can tell you that Airwolf's afterburners were pure hokum, but that's not the point. What, if anything, I think can be taken from this sort of criticism is that when some people notice errors in storytelling it turns them against the entire medium. That's pretty harsh.

A lot of people don't really get what movies are about. The people that want to edit out every "damn", for example. I respect your right to show your kids or to watch whatever you choose to watch, but please respect mine to make the movie I want to make. Similarly, if you don't want to go to movies because guns are treated inaccurately, maybe you're sort of missing the point of the movies. Maybe you're not the kind of person that really gets a lot out of movies. Obviously, if something so small and (in my mind) trivial is enough to break the camel's back.

Does this mean that, as storytellers, we should be sloppy with regard to accuracy whenever possible? No, of course not. Researching often makes for a better story, more rich with detail and including more of the spectrum of human existence than one's own imagination can provide.

Stephen King says in "On Writing" that when writing a book about, for example, a rural police investigation, he'll usually make everything up to serve the story best - then, in revision, go back and research the rural police department and sprinkle some tidbits of trivia back into the story. Chuck Palahniuk, author of "Fight Club" and other books, says that the myriad of factoids in his writing are invariably true - to build a foundation of truthfulness, so that the fiction feels that much more real.

Specifically, in terms of guns in the movies, a lot of simple errors can be corrected just by having someone on the set - someone that can tell the director that the actor should lock the slide when handing the pistol to someone else, or not to hug the wall when creeping around the corner, or to point the rifles at the ground, not in the back of the SWAT officer in front of you. Some things, like blowing up a spaceship with a .22 rifle, should be dealt with at the writing stage. But a little care here and there can go a long way.

I am not schizophrenic.

His every move is my instruction.

I follow him everywhere. I shake my head disapprovingly as he tunes the car radio to the talk station. I watch him surf the Internet at work or flip channels on the TV while his laptop sits open and a blank screenplay page beckons him.

He feels my glare, sometimes, and occasionally he'll even turn to look at me. But then he'll blink a few times, and go back to ignoring me.

I wonder what goes on inside his head. When he lies in bed without getting up, one hand scratching the cat's chin. He turns and looks at the clock, and I'm not sure the numbers make their way quite to his consciousness. Or maybe he just doesn't care.

I watch him stumble out of bed and find a piece of string cheese in the fridge. For the past few days it's practically the only thing he's eaten. Unless you count the cylinder of Chips Ahoy that he kept eating, one cookie after another, almost like he didn't know it was happening.

I wonder why he never goes out with friends. Sometimes he does, I guess, but usually he'll call someone up and chat for a minute and I'll kind of hear the person on the other end make an excuse.

"I'll call you this weekend, maybe we'll get together," he'll say. He doesn't throw the phone anymore, though. He used to throw the phone a lot. When he talked to Michelle, sometimes.

Sometimes he'd linger so long that their traded goodbyes would fade into whispers and nothings, and then the sharp beep of the phone turning off would startle him.

Other times he'd say, "Okay, bye" and beep the phone off and hurl it into the couch cushions. He doesn't do that anymore.

I sit next to him as he drives to work. A couple of days ago some rich woman in a BMW was looking the other way and hit his bumper. She looked horrified. He had to yell at her to back up, so they could both move, but she still didn't hear him - or was paralyzed with shock, maybe. He finally pulled forward a little bit and then just kept driving.

When the BMW woman realized he wasn't going to pull over to trade insurance information, she whipped a right turn onto another street and disappeared forever, lest he change his mind. I don't think he was going to. He's had enough trouble with car accidents.

When he stopped at Del Taco on the way to work he checked out his fender. She'd left a pretty good dent. I don't think he'd realized how bad it was. But he opened the trunk and started banging on the inside and popped the dent back out.

I wonder what the BMW woman thought about their little incident. I hope she felt guilty. I don't think he cares. But he's hard to read, sometimes.

He goes for long hours without talking. He'll sit and read for an entire day without moving. Nikki refuses to take him to bookstores, and I can see why. "I'll lose you," she says. "You'll never come out." And if she wasn't there to pull him out, I don't think he would. He's turning into his mother that way, with his stack of library books. He takes his mail into the bathroom. The trash can in there is full of envelopes and junk mail. I think that's kind of weird. But then, I follow him into the bathroom. Who am I to talk about weird?

So I wonder what he would do with friends if he had them. Sure, he laughs with the guys at work, and they look at funny websites or talk trash about the movies they're trying to con people into seeing, but then he goes home and hangs up his keys and plugs in his cell phone that never rings and checks to see what the TiVo's recorded today. By the time he gets home it's one in the morning. And he'll lie there in bed for hours without sleeping, and curse himself when he can't wake up before eleven the next day.

Once I caught his eye in the mirror. He leaned real close to me and told me how he thought that subconsciously, he was afraid of finishing his screenplays and films and such because sending them into the world would mean probably getting them rejected. I think that's B.S., though. I think he was feeding me a line. I think he was trying to rationalize his laziness. Besides, I didn't catch most of what he said. I was too repulsed by his train-wreck hairy nipples. Those things are gross.

So if he ever asks me why his friends don't call, or why he has to go out of his way to remind them that he's around, or why they they're never really more than civil to him ... I probably won't tell him what I really think. After all, I told him to open his mouth and apologize, back then. To write a letter and clear the air, or to call someone and just chat, like you used to. Back then they might have chatted. Today they probably won't.

"Hey, good to talk to you, see you around." They've already forgotten he was there by the time he turns away. I've watched them, after he's started to walk away, but I wouldn't tell him what I've seen. I think it would hurt him. And besides, I think he knows. But he's hard to read, sometimes.

He's said a few things that were wrong, here and there, but by and large, it's what he hasn't said that's gotten him to this island.

So I'll do the same, and I won't tell him what I really should, and instead, when he asks why his cell phone never rings, I'll just smile a half-smile, turn away, and tell him they're grossed out by his nipples.