The Day Of

First screening of the first day (of the rest of our lives!) is in four hours. No, five hours, I just can't count. You'd think I'd be better at that by now.

I'm in San Francisco for the first time, which turns out to have been a good idea in all sorts of ways: because San Francisco is just plain fun, because the trip lends an extra sense of occasion to this first day, and because coming to a different place has lent that little extra sense of transformation to the experience. I am not in my comfortable every-day environment, I am somewhere else, doing this different thing, putting the movie before people who are entire strangers to me. A tiny little rite of passage; even when I go back to L.A. and return to my every-day environment, no matter how much the same it is, there is still that new fact: that I helped produce a motion picture that played in theaters across the country, and I know it did because, at least this little bit, I went out and saw it happen.

And then, yeah, with that new fact in my life, I go home and do the usual stuff and work hard on the next project. Just last night I worked on the "Beaudry" script, here in the hotel room. It felt like a very sound thing to do.

But of course, who wants to go through something like this without his people around? So I'm way-happy that my brother and sister flew out, and that Adam's girlfriend Lauren came as well. For them, it was a fairly outrageous trip: since Lauren is in school in Tallahassee, they all decided to meet in the middle of the state, in Orlando, and to fly out from there. So they did that drive, then had the long flight to L.A., arriving late Wednesday night; the next morning came, for them, another even longer drive, up to San Francisco. It was a long enough trip for me, and I didn't have to do any of the rest of what they did. And then, of course, they'll have the whole process in reverse starting tomorrow night.

Marc Rosenbush drove up yesterday as well, separately, dealing along the way with a bit of last-minute drama that added some bizarre suspense to the trip, but eventually it all got sorted out and then we were in San Francisco. He went off and met up with an old friend; we set out from our hotel and just kinda wandered, being tourists. The kids are much better at being tourists than I am, they're less self-conscious about it, unafraid to pull out a map in the middle of a street and try to figure out where the hell to go next, and completely happy staging goofy pictures in front of Grace Cathedral, or posing in front of one of those completely insane downhill ski-slopes of a street. (I'll get copies of their pictures later and see if I can post one here.)

Eventually we wandered over to Fisherman's Wharf, enjoyed the crowds, tried to get tickets for Alcatraz (they'll be able to go but I won't), tried to spot some sea lions but didn't (wrong time of year?), and had an unexpectedly great meal at Boudin's. Then they went out late at night, trying to find some nightlife, and I stayed in the room and worked on my script. A bit of club-hopping made them happy, and spending time with words (after a lovely day with the family) made me happy. Good things all around.