* * *
The producer graduated from the ranks of hot agents to become a man who packages his own deals, often involving his own clients. In the last five years, he and some of his famous clients have bottomed out together on cocaine, have been through treatment, and are now ex -users.
“I used to put together deals where we would close the door and put out the cocaine and talk about the terms of the contract, and cocaine would be part of the movie from beginning to end. Now I recently put together a movie where the director and both stars are recovering substance abusers. They held little AA meetings on their lunch hours.”
“Is there any way to look at a movie and tell that cocaine was involved in its filming?”
“Not really, except that if enough coke was around, the movie probably isn’t very good. It will have vast grandiose movements leading to nothing.
“One thing, though, that I used to notice. If the people making a movie are deep enough into cocaine, they have a very hard time keeping it off the screen. There will be a scene where a character snorts cocaine, and you won’t be able to explain why it’s in there.” He named a particular movie in which a jazz musician snorts cocaine in a movie set in the 1920s, years before coke snorting was introduced to the jazz milieu. “Heroin would have been historically accurate,” he said, “but they weren’t interested in heroin.”
* * *
The writer has a punk chic look, with a wild hairdo. She says she has been in Alcoholics Anonymous for five years. She recently moved from one coast to another, and while unpacking some old scripts, she started to read them.
“It was amazing,” she says. “I wrote them behind [on] cocaine. The first draft of a scene would be fine. Then I would go ahead and rewrite the same scene 20 times, compulsively, over and over, and it would get worse and worse. On some of the ‘rewrites’ I would simply be re-typing the same stuff, with no changes. I had all this cocaine energy but absolutely no critical judgment. The problem with coke is, how can you tell if something is good or bad, when everything makes you feel ecstatic?”
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