Roger Keith Coleman I: Lives In Transition
The American Gothic tale of Roger Keith Coleman: West Virginia coal miner convicted of and executed for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law. Part of the Hatfield and the McCoy clans simmering in an endless feud. Soulful. Articulate, desperate, of clear conscience on the subject of his innocence. I know this because I have his private, unpublished diary, typed single space on hundreds of sheets of prison-issue paper. His views on life, so colored by the injustice of his dark prospects, are testament to the illusions we can weave into the fabric of our lives with such passion and complexity that they eventually become truth. But to the beginning....
And so many years later.
I have a photograph that comes to me once in a while when I'm cleaning. Sometimes I find it in with other papers in my collection of orphan 'to do' items somewhere in the back of my desk drawer, other times in odd places, slipped down crookedly into the back of my DVD cabinet or at the bottom of a box of dusty old paintings I keep revisiting for a Goodwill run.
It's a photograph of a young man at a wedding, and with him is his beautiful Nob Hill bride and another equally young man from my past who has just caught the garter and is obligated to dance with the wife of this now-married stranger. They are all supremely beautiful, caught in the flash of an onlooker's camera.
Like so many reminders of past relationships this image brings back a lot of unwanted memories, because to all the people captured in this moment, everyone rich with promise and serenely content, so much unhappiness has visited in the intervening years. And they are all ghosts to me now. I haven't seen the married couple for over ten years, we parted without a whisper one afternoon, phone numbers falling into disrepute, erased, and then, finally, lost in the onslaught of new experiences, new people, new ideas. The other man slipped away many years later, but this story isn't about him.....
The man in the photo who had just married his prize, Paul was his name, was not a former lover or even much of a friend. He was someone I met through an acquaintance, soon after I finished The Big Picture, fled a marriage, a city, a career, and then returned to Los Angeles at odds with too much to really know where to begin again.
I had met the acquaintance, a trust-fund kid with an eye for playing the market, in dance class. He had recognized me from The Big Picture (how extraordinary, I thought) and we started having lunch after class. His friends were also wealthy young turks, some by family money, some self-made, like his friend Paul, who had started a Silicon Valley software company and sold out for multiple millions. Eventually we partied together, both at loose ends and searching for distraction.
I hadn't thought much about how I was going to make a living once I'd been cut loose from my own version of a trust fund: a successful writer/producer husband who had used his considerable assets to leverage me out of his life with barely a dime to my name. For a time I lived in the unheated attic of the carriage house on our property while I scrounged for temporary jobs. Prospects are scarce for a producer without projects to pitch around town and I discovered quickly that I was too far up the ladder by then to go back to working as a production coordinator or, God forbid, someone's assistant.
So when I met Paul I was pretty much like Blanche Dubois, countin' on the kindness of strangers and plotting my escape from the downward spiral. Friends helped me get a car, a bit of a cash flow, and eventually I was able to move into a decent house in Hancock Park with two guys I met through the Recycler. Feeling my oats, I had managed to score a job writing and directing a documentary about a Disney-sponsored school in SouthCentral Los Angeles and I was in pre-production on this project when Paul called me to ask if I would be interested in partnering up with him to produce films.
Hmmmm, let me think about this for a second. Yes. Hell yes! Here was Hollywood's version of a ringer (more commonly a suburbian dentist or a group of dentists who would pay anything to get their name on the opening credits). Paul was bored, he was fascinated with the film business and was itching to do something interesting with his cash windfall. We met over a few meals at fabulously expensive restaurants (I'm back!) which he paid for, of course, and after some dickering about profit-sharing and who got what credit, we were in business.
So, I asked him, what kinds of films do you want to make? He looked at me in that canny way that fabulously successful, ruthless businessmen have, and said to me, "Something that will sell. Something really, really hot."
I'm a realist when it comes to Hollywood. Unlike my new partner, who had not the slightest inkling about the politics and the pecking order here, I thought that 'hot' projects would be very dim prospects indeed. I didn't fancy getting into a spitting match with my old boss, former studio chief Robert Shapiro, or any other of the hundreds of blood-thirsty, ADD types who had clawed their way into producer stardom. But I decided to keep my mouth shut and try to find something more reasonable.....say a juicy novel that no-one had discovered yet. I had an eye for that kind of material and wanted to start fairly modestly.
Two days later while I was turtling my way along the race to success, Paul called me up.
"I've got the project for us," he said. Then before I could ask what it was he was at my door (rich people had cell phones back in 1992 but they were as big as military walkie-talkies).
As soon as I opened it up he shoved a magazine in my face. It was the latest issue of Time. And on the cover was Roger Keith Coleman, who was just about the biggest media celebrity in the nation because he and a lot of other people believed he was about to die an innocent man.
"You have got to be kidding," was all I could manage.
Next: We start looking for our way through the media frenzy into Coleman's inner circle.
And so many years later.
I have a photograph that comes to me once in a while when I'm cleaning. Sometimes I find it in with other papers in my collection of orphan 'to do' items somewhere in the back of my desk drawer, other times in odd places, slipped down crookedly into the back of my DVD cabinet or at the bottom of a box of dusty old paintings I keep revisiting for a Goodwill run.
It's a photograph of a young man at a wedding, and with him is his beautiful Nob Hill bride and another equally young man from my past who has just caught the garter and is obligated to dance with the wife of this now-married stranger. They are all supremely beautiful, caught in the flash of an onlooker's camera.
Like so many reminders of past relationships this image brings back a lot of unwanted memories, because to all the people captured in this moment, everyone rich with promise and serenely content, so much unhappiness has visited in the intervening years. And they are all ghosts to me now. I haven't seen the married couple for over ten years, we parted without a whisper one afternoon, phone numbers falling into disrepute, erased, and then, finally, lost in the onslaught of new experiences, new people, new ideas. The other man slipped away many years later, but this story isn't about him.....
The man in the photo who had just married his prize, Paul was his name, was not a former lover or even much of a friend. He was someone I met through an acquaintance, soon after I finished The Big Picture, fled a marriage, a city, a career, and then returned to Los Angeles at odds with too much to really know where to begin again.
I had met the acquaintance, a trust-fund kid with an eye for playing the market, in dance class. He had recognized me from The Big Picture (how extraordinary, I thought) and we started having lunch after class. His friends were also wealthy young turks, some by family money, some self-made, like his friend Paul, who had started a Silicon Valley software company and sold out for multiple millions. Eventually we partied together, both at loose ends and searching for distraction.
I hadn't thought much about how I was going to make a living once I'd been cut loose from my own version of a trust fund: a successful writer/producer husband who had used his considerable assets to leverage me out of his life with barely a dime to my name. For a time I lived in the unheated attic of the carriage house on our property while I scrounged for temporary jobs. Prospects are scarce for a producer without projects to pitch around town and I discovered quickly that I was too far up the ladder by then to go back to working as a production coordinator or, God forbid, someone's assistant.
So when I met Paul I was pretty much like Blanche Dubois, countin' on the kindness of strangers and plotting my escape from the downward spiral. Friends helped me get a car, a bit of a cash flow, and eventually I was able to move into a decent house in Hancock Park with two guys I met through the Recycler. Feeling my oats, I had managed to score a job writing and directing a documentary about a Disney-sponsored school in SouthCentral Los Angeles and I was in pre-production on this project when Paul called me to ask if I would be interested in partnering up with him to produce films.
Hmmmm, let me think about this for a second. Yes. Hell yes! Here was Hollywood's version of a ringer (more commonly a suburbian dentist or a group of dentists who would pay anything to get their name on the opening credits). Paul was bored, he was fascinated with the film business and was itching to do something interesting with his cash windfall. We met over a few meals at fabulously expensive restaurants (I'm back!) which he paid for, of course, and after some dickering about profit-sharing and who got what credit, we were in business.
So, I asked him, what kinds of films do you want to make? He looked at me in that canny way that fabulously successful, ruthless businessmen have, and said to me, "Something that will sell. Something really, really hot."
I'm a realist when it comes to Hollywood. Unlike my new partner, who had not the slightest inkling about the politics and the pecking order here, I thought that 'hot' projects would be very dim prospects indeed. I didn't fancy getting into a spitting match with my old boss, former studio chief Robert Shapiro, or any other of the hundreds of blood-thirsty, ADD types who had clawed their way into producer stardom. But I decided to keep my mouth shut and try to find something more reasonable.....say a juicy novel that no-one had discovered yet. I had an eye for that kind of material and wanted to start fairly modestly.
Two days later while I was turtling my way along the race to success, Paul called me up.
"I've got the project for us," he said. Then before I could ask what it was he was at my door (rich people had cell phones back in 1992 but they were as big as military walkie-talkies).
As soon as I opened it up he shoved a magazine in my face. It was the latest issue of Time. And on the cover was Roger Keith Coleman, who was just about the biggest media celebrity in the nation because he and a lot of other people believed he was about to die an innocent man.
"You have got to be kidding," was all I could manage.
Next: We start looking for our way through the media frenzy into Coleman's inner circle.
posted by vallie at 10:21 AM
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