This Kid didn’t stay in the picture

I had, like everyone, a rather complicated childhood. After my parents divorced, my mother, for reasons only she can account for, decided to move my brother and I from New York City to a small town in the Bible Belt. I split the remainder of my childhood between there and the city.

While this was unpleasant at times and always confusing, it did have a certain upside. I learned from a young age to travel, to adapt to new surroundings, and unlike most New Yorkers (and contrary to some of my earlier posts here) I learned that civilization–yes, it’s true–can exist outside of New York. Perish the thought.

One of the drawbacks, of course, was that I never really fit in anywhere. I wasn’t entirely a New Yorker, and well, no one from outside of the South ever becomes a southerner, no matter how much money you tithe to the Klan.

That said, semi-outcasts always find their niche, I guess, and I fell in with a good group of guys down south. One of them, a real Tom Sawyer type, had this fantastic idea to recruit his elementary school friends for a little movie project he was working on: a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He would play Indiana, and another friend, a year older, would be Belloq and would direct. As the sole Jew on the project (excluding my brother), I was given the role of the Nazi Toht (this could also have been because I fit into the costume better than the director’s brother; or anti-Semitism. We report. You decide). I won’t go too much into this whole thing, as there’s been loads written about it. If you’re curious, just google “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation,” or look here, or here, or here.

I’m not really interested in writing about the movie, per se (Jim Windolf did a fine job of that in his article in Variety Fair). What I’m thinking of today is the experience of being out of the city, and how important that was to me. JP’s, unlike me, is going to grow up a pure-breed New Yorker, which is good in some ways, but can also be rather limiting.

My ex-wife doesn’t really like to travel, and the custody arrangement we have with each other makes it very difficult to take JP away on my own. For better or for worse, and until he’s old enough to voice an objection, he’s going to be city-bound, and with winter hanging on with such tenacity, that makes me sad. Sorry, JP, hopefully I’ll be able to remedy the situation some day.

Why the photo above? Well, to make a very long story short, when people started paying attention to the movie a few years back, my Tom Sawyer friend had the very meta idea of making a movie about the making of our movie. I was attempting to make a go of things in Los Angeles as a screenwriter, and he asked me and my writing partner to come up with a script. As it happened, the former director, the guy on the right, didn’t like the screenplay  (admittedly, it was pretty bad), and when a major Hollywood producer came calling, the three fellas above decided to cut me out, sell their life rights to the Big Shot, and go visit Mr. Spielberg quite by themselves. Not to steal their light–they were the movers behind the film without a doubt, but it’s kind of a shame, as now I’m no longer friends with any of these fine fellows. All of which is besides the point, but figured I should explain.