Miller Time

UNITED STATES—I’m keeping my eyes on my clothes tumbling in the laundromat dryer. What do you think about separating clothes? I really don’t believe in segregation for fabrics unless there’s one T-shirt that’s bleeding all over the place and will make your whites look like they were marinated in iodine. What’s with that, China? Me, Giselle, would like to...

UNITED STATES—Whenever we were on a trip my dad would get anxious and phone the drug store. This seemed a gross interruption of our vacation time, reinforcing the ill feeling for the drug store. As I child, to tell you the truth, my sister and I loathed the drug store as something that robbed our dad from us. And...

UNITED STATES—One night in New York we went to the Angelica Theater in the Village and saw David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart.’ I got to see that scene where Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage come across a dead-still single car crash in the middle of the desert, the headlights still on. The tires still slowly spinning. Amazingly, a couple weeks...

UNITED STATES—Newton was in the mist of a siesta, recovering from a rigorous morning of sun and much traffic, dropping off a screenplay with his agent and doing a couple errands. He was just pleasantly drifting off. Max came and shook him by the shoulders. In one hand, he held the feeding bowl he had dug out, still specked...

UNITED STATES—My jailhouse visit to Mac reminded me of the beauty of being free. But all was not free; only my fake walnut-paneled room with the sexy Budweiser poster and the panaderia calendar, charting out the new concept of 1990--that was free. I have an acute sense of survival. I knew I had to get some more money action going...

UNITED STATES—Listen, I’m wearing a mask, er bandana until I can find a mask. It’s been weird and amazing these last eight days of quarantine. I see it all from my pinhole, onto the world, Hollywood, USA. Weird times. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody stopped me at Hollywood and Vine and offered to sell me a circus. But I...

UNITED STATES—February 3, 1975...7:53 a.m. EST. I’ve hurled myself at approximate 8 a.m. this Monday into the smutty white void. The speed of the vertical plummet is petrifying, scraping hard against by skin comically kneaded by the muscular wind. My black fedora floated off and is bouncing around the gibbous clouds. I who still answer to the name Max...

UNITED STATES—The Cinerama Dome is a geodesic souvenir. The Buckminster Fuller thing was supposed to run wild, architectural hubris being what it is, so it is unique, modest, and iconic in terms of what the sequel to 1962 brought us. It has been immortalized in Quentin Tarantino’s valentine to Hollywood and the summer of 1969—and now young hip tourists...

UNITED STATES—Working for Wylie, a door opened at Fraser Bros. Boiler Company, the ersatz office of Wylie properties. The location next to a beauty parlor on La Brea had been adopted because the wife of the owner was doing accounting, straightening out the business of Jim Wylie. According to Cheryl, the receipts for the first year had previously been housed...

UNITED STATES—A warm bath can be the most alluring thing in the world after a night’s filming in a makeshift football field, up in the mountains of the high desert, where the fierceness of the sun is matched only by the fierceness of the evening chill. A warm bath—that’s all I wanted. We worked from 7 a.m. to 7...