Ceremony of the Horsemen

Action! I have been watching a film awards show with the artist. With some amusement we have witnessed like bad critics various movie stars moving silkily down the scrubbed carpets before levitating like digitally enhanced ornaments onto the thinly constructed stage to receive their peace prizes. (Not.) Actually one or two faces in the audience were half-familiar to me. One of them was a well known thespian whose diary I had to arrange over and over again a number of years ago, in what feels like another lifetime, in order to get them to do some ADR - additional dialogue recording - on an otherwise bearable film. (This person cancelled me 21 times, usually only a few minutes beforehand, and still put in a crackling performance.) It is a pompous business. A majority of schlock films aside, however, at least one or two poetic souls appear to have made that rare transition from penniless auteur to mainstream minstrel in one piece. Abstractions in some films are even acceptable. In fact, to be fair, some of the film makers and much of the public have never really been the problem. No, it has always been the money men - and they are usually men. They have this utter conviction for some reason that all members of the public are dumb, while they sit among their sunlit clouds unaware of the precise nature of what it is they are dumping on us all. Maybe I am old fashioned. I still flirt with the notion that there is an essential intelligence to every living soul. It is just a question of believing that and finding a way to absorb, enjoy, or accentuate it. Isn't it? Not so long ago - the artist was working - I took the children to the cinema. It was a good enough film, but our experience of the cinema itself was loud, garish, and cold - air-conditioning in winter is like people cleaning their houses before the maid comes round. Meanwhile on the TV screen a woman with somebody else's body reaches the stage. She struggles with the autocue. I look at the artist on the bright red sofa and I stare at my notes on the round red table. A number of people from where I am going have ripped up their contracts in the past few weeks and left. We stop watching the awards ceremony and miss the winner of Best Male Actor mentioning our children's school in his acceptance speech. Serves me right. Cut!