1 Backstory A little over five years back, I had a message on my voice mail from one Al Mac-Teer--which I heard as Almick Tear--from a number in the 310 area code. This no-nonsense woman asked me to call her back regarding a thin little memoir I had written called A Stairway Down to Heaven about my years of tending bar in a small subterranean club that played live music way back in the ''80s. At the time, I was also, sort of, a freelance journalist in and around Pittsburgh, PA. And I wrote movie reviews. These days I teach Creative Writing, Common Literature, and Film Studies at Mount Chisholm College of the Arts in the hills of Montana. Bozeman is a gorgeous if stark drive away. I get very few voice mails from Los Angeles, California. "My boss read your memoir," Ms.

Mac-Teer told me. "He says you write like he thinks." "Your boss is brilliant," I told her, then asked, "Who is your boss?" When she told me she worked for Bill Johnson, that I had reached her on her cell as she was driving from her home in Santa Monica to her office in the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood for a meeting with him, I hollered, "You work for Bi-Bi-Bi-Bill JOHNSON? The movie director? Prove it." Some days later, I was on the phone with Bi-Bi-Bi-Bill Johnson himself, and we were talking about his line of work, one of the subjects I teach. When I told him I''d seen his entire filmography, he accused me of blowing smoke. When I rattled off many salient points from his movies, he told me to shut up, enough already. At that time, he was "noodling" a screenplay about music in the transformative years of the ''60s going into the ''70s--when bands evolved from matching outfits and three-minute songs for AM radio to LP side-long jams and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The stories from my book were full of very personal details.

Even though my era was twenty years after what he was "noodling"--our club booked unheralded jazz combos and Depeche Mode cover bands--the stuff that happens in live-music venues is timeless, universal. The fights, the drugs, the serious love, the fun sex, the fun love, the serious sex, the laughs and the screaming, the Who-Gets-In and Who-Gets-Bounced--the whole riotous scene of procedures both spoken and intuitive--were the human behaviors that he wanted to nail. He offered me money for my book--the nonexclusive rights to my story, meaning I could still sell the exclusive rights, if there should ever be an offer. Fat chance. Still, I made more money selling him the rights to my book than I did selling copies of the thing. Bill went off to film Pocket Rockets but kept up with me through calls and many typewritten letters--missives of wandering topics, his Themes of the Moment. The Inevitability of War. Is jazz like math? Frozen yogurt flavors with what toppings? I wrote him back in fountain pen--typewriters? honestly!--because I can match anyone in idiosyncrasy.

I received a single-page letter from him that had only this typed on it: What films do you hate--walk out of? Why? Bill I wrote him right back. I don''t hate any films. Movies are too hard to make to warrant hatred, even when they are turkeys. If a movie is not great, I just wait it out in my seat. It will be over soon enough. Walking out of a movie is a sin. I''m guessing the US Postal Service needed two days to deliver my response, and a day was spent getting it to Bill''s eyeballs, because three days later Al Mac-Teer called me. Her boss wanted me to "get down here, pronto" and watch him make a movie.

The term break was coming up, I had never been to Atlanta, and a movie director was inviting me to see the making of a movie. I teach Film Studies but had never witnessed one being made. I flew to Salt Lake City for the connecting flight. "You said something I have always thought," Bill said to me when I arrived on the set of Pocket Rockets, somewhere in the endless suburb that is greater Atlanta. "Sure, some movies don''t work. Some fail in their intent. But anyone who says they hated a movie is treating a voluntarily shared human experience like a bad Red-Eye out of LAX. The departure is delayed for hours, there''s turbulence that scares even the flight attendants, the guy across from you vomits, they can''t serve any food and the booze runs out, you''re seated next to twin babies with the colic, and you land too late for your meeting in the city.

You can hate that. But hating a movie misses the damn point. Would you say you hated the seventh birthday party of your girlfriend''s niece or a ball game that went eleven innings and ended 1-0? You hate cake and extra baseball for your money? Hate should be saved for fascism and steamed broccoli that''s gone cold. The worst anyone--especially we who take Fountain--should ever say about someone else''s movie is Well, it was not for me, but, actually, I found it quite good. Damn a film with faint praise, but never, ever say you hate a movie. Anyone who uses the h-word around me is done. Gone. Of course, I wrote and directed Albatross.

I may be a bit sensitive." I lingered on the set of Pocket Rockets for ten days and, over the summer, went to Hollywood for some of the film''s tedious Postproduction. Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar? There you have the making of a movie, at least as I saw it at the Skunk Works. I was not on location for much of the making of A Cellar Full of Sound--which is what later became of some of my little book. My loss. Bill had me paid another bit of coin when the movie began shooting, more when the film came out--the man is generous.

I saw the first public showing at the Telluride Film Festival, where he referred to it as "our movie." In January, I rented a tuxedo and sat at a back table at what was then the Golden Globe Awards (at Merv Griffin''s Beverly Hilton Hotel, the very definition of a H''wood party). When my colleagues ask me about my weekend in Fantasyland, I tell them I didn''t get back to my hotel until five in the morning, very tipsy, dropped off by Al Mac-Teer and none other than Willa Sax--a.k.a. Cassandra Rampart--in her chauffeur-driven Cadillac Escalade. There was no other way I could sum up the experience in terms they''d understand. Willa Sex? No way! I''d prove it by showing them the Facebook photo she posted--there I am, with Al Mac-Teer, laughing our heads off with one of the most beautiful women in the world and her moody bodyguard.

COVID-19 had been dividing up our country into its Mask/No Mask politics and turned my job into online classes. Then came the Vaccine/Anti-Vax dialectic. When Al Mac-Teer called me with an invitation to join her, Bill, and his merry band to observe the full duration of his next film, I thought shooting a movie was neither legal nor possible. But her boss "had a thing" that looked like it was going to be "green-lit" and shot under "Guild protocols" and I was invited to "join the Unit" from the start of Cash Flow to the Final Dub. "You''ll have an ID badge," she explained. "You''ll be one of the crew and be tested twice a week. We won''t pay you anything, but you''ll eat for free, and the gratis hotel room will be nice enough." Al added, vividly, "You''d be a very big dope to say no.

" I asked Bill Johnson himself why he would allow an interloper like me to observe what is often treated as something akin to a top-secret project, one with badges and flashing red lights and signs warning this is a closed set. no visitors without approval of unit production manager. Bill laughed. "That''s just to intimidate the civilians." One night on location, after another long, hard, yet average day of shooting, over YouGo FroYo, Bill told me, "Journalists--the lazy ones anyway--always try to explain how movies are made, as though there''s a secret formula that we''ve patented, or procedures that are listed like a flight plan for a voyage to the moon and back. How did you come up with the girl in the brown polka-dot dress who could whistle so loud? When did you first imagine that last, indelible image of those blackbirds on the TV aerial, and where did you find trained blackbirds? Why, they ask, did this film succeed when this other film went flat? Why did you make Bonkers A-Go-Go instead of Moochie Spills the Beans? That''s when I look at my watch and say, ''Hot damn! I''m late for that marketing meeting'' and bolt the interview. Those people look at the Northern Lights as having been designed. If they saw how we movie-orphans do our job, they''d be bored silly and very disappointed.

" I never got bored. Disappointment? While hanging around for the making of a motion picture? A fig! There is always a good conversation to be had on a movie set, around the Production Office, and during the Postproduction process because most of moviemaking is spent waiting. The question How''d you get started in this racket? prompts hours of very personal, improbable stories, each saga worth a book of its own. When I said this to Al, the subject came up about writing a book to explain the making of movies through my time on the movie. I was going to bear witness to so much of the creativity, friction, surface tension, and balls-out fun on the project, what if I were to write about it all and, well, publish a book? Would her boss be enrag.