War Stories

A chapter from Hollywood Samizdat: Notes From Below the Line by Rambo Van Halen

The business of Hollywood is storytelling. That’s the core of what we do.

It’s an amazing thing when you think about it. An entire industry with hundreds of thousands of workers based solely on the power of storytelling—something people used to just sit around and do for free.

At its peak in 2019, box office totals for the United States and Canada were more than $11 billion dollars. And that doesn’t include television advertising revenue, streaming service subscriptions, and all other types of visual media.

This is big business. It’s certainly real money to me.

And even though I was (and still am) a cog in this giant machine called the Entertainment Industry—an industry based on the power of story—the thing I have the most trouble with is telling my story to myself.

* * *

Many film workers—that is, the people who create movies, TV shows, and commercials—are afflicted by addiction and alcoholism. You can include me in that cohort. I’ve come to believe it’s an occupational hazard. The reasons why aren’t important for now (we’ll get to that later), but the solution is.

Every alcoholic and addict gets to a point where he can no longer continue. So how could I? Once the drinking started, it became compulsive, and I would not stop until I was so drunk that I was physically incapable of getting the glass to my mouth.

Of course everyone around you knows your secret. They know even before you do. You’re always the last one to know. That’s just how addiction works.

But when you finally realize you have a problem, and you’re free-falling at terminal velocity barreling straight for the ground, you run into a paradox: you realize you can’t go on living your life under the influence, but you can’t imagine a life of sobriety.

At this point you either find a way to get sober, or you end your life. Many do end their lives—usually by unintentional overdose or drinking themselves to death.

But fortunately for me I chose the other path and got sober. As of this writing I haven’t had a drink in more than ten years.

I did it with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This is the seminal twelve step program. The point of the twelve steps is to allow you to lead your life in such a way that you don’t need to get drunk or get high. It’s a way to “deal with life on life’s terms,” as they say in AA.

Because life is hard.

And this world can be a shitty place.

Maybe you were raised by a neurotic actress. Or your father (that you never really knew) died when you were young. And then you came down with a crippling illness at what should have been the prime of your life. And then you ended up in a so-called glamorous line of work where you’re easily replaceable and people would do anything and everything short of murder to get ahead of you and everybody else. And you have to go to work every day and deal with these people. And they’re disagreeable and dishonest and abusive and sometimes straight-up insane. But you still have to deal. You can’t walk away, because you love it. Or at least, you tell yourself that you love it, in part because you don’t have anything better to walk away to ...

So you’re stuck. And wouldn’t a drink help right about now? Wouldn’t it make you feel better? Wouldn’t it help you deal with the stress and the anger and the resentment? Everyone needs a time-out once in a while. Everyone needs a little break.

Actually, I do think I deserve a little break. I do think I deserve to feel good—right?

(Right?)

So I take a drink. Suddenly I’m drunk again. And I can’t stop. Then I’m right back where I started. It’s a nightmarish cycle, and it leads only one way.

But thanks to a twelve-step program, I killed the cycle before it killed me. Aside from finding a higher power, the most important part of it for me was this: the need to be honest. The need to be honest with myself and with everyone in my life.

In the program they call it “rigorous” honesty.

The thing I struggle with is telling my story to myself. Because sometimes I don’t know the truth of what happened. Part of that is because of time, but another part of it is because of the booze and the pills. Some things are hazy and some things are just missing.

And no, this isn’t a book about addiction and recovery. It’s a book about me. It’s a book about me telling my story to myself.

* * *

In fact, there are many stories that I want to tell. Though it’s not a “want” as much as a “need.” The Business is such a weird fucking place. Anyone who doesn’t have firsthand experience of it can’t really comprehend what goes on there. It’s too strange. Too foreign. Too out of the bounds of normal life.

Maybe it’s an experience akin to war. War is so outside the bounds of normal human experience that most people have no clue what it really entails. Only veterans can discuss it with each other in a truly meaningful way.

Ever overhear two vets talk about their deployments? I understand the words, but I don’t get the meaning. Then again, I’ve never been to war.

I had a Marine buddy. He started working for me as my assistant, but we became friends. This was Iraq War. Peak Global War on Terror.

My assistants kept burning out due to the stress of the job, so I started recruiting combat vets thinking they’d be able to handle it. A film set is nothing like combat, right? It turned out they burned out faster than the run-of-the-mill PA.

So my Marine buddy was at Fallujah. He had demons. He needed to tell his stories.

We’d be driving and he’d just gush. But the stories didn’t make any sense. It was just random disjointed vignettes of fucked-up bizarre shit. And there was no moral or meaning to any of it.

I didn’t understand this until I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. He was telling TRUE war stories, not the fake ones that have a moral and make sense. My Marine’s stories made no sense, but they were true. And they were true because they made no sense.

You can see this in the 1980 film The Big Red One, starring Mark Hamill and Lee Marvin. Veterans, including my grandfather who served in the Second World War, have told me it’s the most realistic war movie ever made. It’s based on director Samuel Fuller’s experiences in the war. But it made no sense to me. It’s just a collection of bizarre vignettes.

My Marine buddy needed to talk. And talk he did. About how the feral dogs of Fallujah would eat the dead mujahideen while he and his platoon lay prone in the sun for hours. They couldn’t move so they stayed behind cover and watched the dogs eat the dead.

There were other stories but that one sticks out.

He was transitioning into the “normal” world and he had to leave the baggage of the war behind. And to do this he had to tell his story. Not for me but for himself. He had to tell the story to make sense of what he had been through.

* * *

My grandfather never really talked about the war until he was over one hundred and going senile. He was pretty sharp for an old dude, but he started to slip after his ninety-ninth birthday.

Maybe my grandfather didn’t need to talk like my Marine buddy. The war ended and he went from the military into a world populated by men with similar experiences. Men who understood each other. Men who went on to sculpt and mold the world.

He served as a pilot in the Indo-China theater during the Second World War. He flew cargo over the Himalayas, and back again with Chinese workers heading for the Burma Road.

The stories he told were funny. Like how he and his fellow pilots somehow got a supply of fresh beef in INDIA and opened a hamburger stand at the airfield.

Then there was the time he had too much wine at Thanksgiving dinner and told the table about the night he lost his virginity at a brothel in Calcutta. He said it was a classy place for officers only and insisted the girl was half Anglo.

According to Grandpa, the most dangerous part of the trip to China was having to spend the night in the barracks with the Flying Tigers. They were a group of rough mercenaries who were pressed into the American command structure when the US entered the war. At night they’d drink and play poker, but the games would inevitably lead to brawls and actual shootouts—in the barracks.

Later, in his advanced age, my grandfather would tell me terrifying stories about being attacked by Jap Zeros over the Himalayan foothills. After he died, I read his letters home and they were disturbingly sad: “Dear Dad, Today we were bombed and strafed. Many were injured. Jimmy got hit …”

I became his caretaker just before his one hundredth birthday. At that time, my stepdad was about to leave on a trip to Myanmar. Grandpa kept asking, “Where’s he going?” and I’d say, “Myanmar.” He didn’t get it and kept asking the question, like old people do.

Finally I realized my mistake and said, “They used to call it Bur-Mah.”

His eyes lit up and he said, “Oh! I’ve been to Burma!”

Senility is a funny thing. The elderly can be completely confused about where they are and who’s who and no, we’re not in tornado country, Grandpa, we’re perfectly safe, please turn off CNN. And then they can have moments of crystal clarity.

And so, with impressive recall, down to the call sign on his plane, he told me the story.

They got an emergency call from a British airfield in Burma. They were under attack by a large Japanese force and were requesting evacuation.

Grandpa and copilot scramble and jump into their C-47 cargo plane. By the time they got to the airfield it had been overrun. The runway was cut into thick jungle and it was covered with Jap soldiers. The Brit survivors were holding out at one end of the runway.

Without hesitation, Grandpa landed the plane. Just landed right on top of the Japs. They didn’t circle and think about it. They just landed.

The plane bowled the Japs out of the way. Dead and dying Japs and associated body parts were everywhere.

They stopped at the end of the runway, turned the plane around, and the surviving Brits piled in. By this point the Japs had regrouped and were running down the runway shooting as they went. Grandpa gunned the engines and they took off right through the Japs.

They made it back to the base in Assam. The plane was full of bullet holes, and they had to clean blood and body parts out of the engines and landing gear.

I’d read Tim O’Brien by this point, and I sensed the trueness of the story from the matter-of-fact telling and lack of embellishment. And from the utter lack of a moral or meaning.

But still I pressed him to give me some sort of meaning—some sort of neat little ending.

“Did you shoot at the Japs?”

“We didn’t have guns.”

“Not even a pistol?”

“They didn’t issue pistols to pilots.”

“Did the Brits shoot out through the doors?”

“No.”

“Did they cheer when you took off?”

“No.”

“Did the Brits thank you?”

“I can’t remember.”

Then senility came roaring back and he asked, “Where’s your stepfather going again?”

He had his military records in a filing cabinet in our basement. I found the commendation. He was awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day.

Later, after he passed, I related the story to my uncle. He had no idea that his dad had a Silver Star. But he understood why he never told the story. My uncle is a Vietnam vet. He has his own stories he’s never told.

I don’t know why Grandpa told me that story. I guess it was something he needed to say before he died. Before he moved on to the next phase.

I’ll never be a war hero. I’ll never use a cargo plane as a weapon and save the good guys. I’m too old. I’m too sick.

Lee Sandlin, in his essay “Losing the War” writes, “I’m old enough now that the only way I could figure in a future war is as a victim.”

That’s me. The best I can hope for is to be a future war victim, which isn’t a pleasant thought.

However, I did try once. I tried to enlist a few days after 9/11. I had almost died from undiagnosed juvenile diabetes a few days prior. The recruiters literally laughed me out the door. So I missed out on the Global War on Terror.

In retrospect, I was damn lucky. The timing of my diagnosis was a little too perfect. The older I get, and the more I live this life, the less I believe in coincidence. And this particular coincidence is a reminder that things happen for a reason and my life isn’t my own.

* * *

Instead of going off to Iraq or Afghanistan I fell into the entertainment industry. By the end of 2001, I was working in broadcast sports. By September of 2002, I was working as a PA on feature film sets.

I knew nothing, but I was a hard worker and a quick learner, so they taught me The Business. And slowly I moved up.

I never saw a dead Arab get eaten by a feral dog, and I really don’t want to

compare my experience to going to war. But I too have stories to tell. Stories I need to tell. So I can work out the meaning for myself. So I can transition into the “normal” world. Because I want out of The Business. It’s been more than twenty years and it’s time for me to move on.

Often I tell these stories on Twitter (now called X).

Social media is much maligned, and maybe rightly so, but it’s been good for me. It can turn into a time-suck if I let it, but overall, it’s been positive. I don’t get into beefs and I’m quick to block idiots. And it’s nice to engage with people who share my skepticism about the people and institutions that run our world.

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. Initially I used it as a news feed. I’d lurk but never engage. Every few months I’d delete the account and start over.

Then I did a funny thing. I started writing about work. And apparently people liked what I wrote because they started following me.

And the writing has been helpful as I’m trying to make sense of things. Trying to process. Trying to sort things out. I can think about something all I want, but it’s not real as long as it’s in my head. And even if I write it down it’s not truly real unless someone else sees it.

So I get touched by the muse, write, post, repeat. If just one person likes it, I’m a) flattered, and b) know it’s real. And when it’s real I can file it away and move on.

Once it’s out there, once it’s real, I don’t want to look at it again. I don’t want to deal with it. Like I say, I just want to move on.

* * *

So many strange things have happened to me over the years. But then again, I’m in a bizarre business, and weird shit happens at my workplace that would never happen in any other professional environment.

One of the weirder work experiences I’ve had involved a famous lead actress getting ass fucked by a famous lead actor in her trailer while the whole crew was within earshot. We knew she was getting ass fucked because she kept screaming, “FUCK MY ASS!”

And that’s it. That’s the story.

At least, that’s the gist of it. But there’s a longer version. I could make that story as long as I want to make it. I could draw it out for thousands of words, like Karl Ove Knausgård telling the story of his teenage self trying to score beer in a frozen dumpy Norwegian village in My Struggle.

There’s an infinite number of ways to tell a story, and that’s true of this story.

I could talk about how hot it was that day. Or how the production was behind because the lead actor was a giant prick who would get fall-down drunk in his trailer. When he finally decided to do a scene the only way he could get out of his trailer was to sober up by snorting coke and huffing straight oxygen.

The movie was a period piece set in the 1970s. As such, all the props and set dressing were vintage. Things like the telephone on the kitchen wall. Props like that are one of a kind—you can’t just find props like that anywhere.

We were filming in a house on a suburban street. The scene was the lead actor standing in the kitchen pleading with his wife over the phone—the vintage one-of-a-kind phone.

The actor flubbed a line and blew the take—he flubbed it because he’d been spending too much time partying and not enough time memorizing his lines.

He knew he had fucked up. A normal person would have apologized to his coworkers and promised to remedy the situation. He would have promised to do better in the future. Because that’s what normal people do when they fuck up at work.

But this guy wasn’t normal. This guy was a celebrity. This guy had Oscars. This guy was treated like a god. And now he was angry. He was angry at himself for blowing the take. But instead of pausing and having a moment of self-reflection, he decided to take his anger out on the world.

Ancient gods would throw lightning bolts to express displeasure. All this guy had was a vintage corded house phone.

So he took the handset of the vintage phone prop and smashed it into the receiver. He smashed it over and over again. Vintage plastic was flying all over the set. When the handset finally fell apart he ripped the receiver off the wall and smashed it on the floor. Then he picked up the pieces, stormed off set, found the prop guy, and demanded he fix the phone or be fired.

The prop guy, stoically and dutifully, took the broken phone to the prop truck where he urgently glued it back together. The phone looked perfect—like nothing ever happened. Like it never had a run-in with an angry Oscar winner. We were shooting again within an hour.

Anyway, it was hot that day. We were shooting at the same house. I can’t remember if this was before or after the phone incident, but it was the same week. I was a PA. My job was to do whatever random tasks the assistant directors needed me to do. On this particular day, my job was to stand on a suburban street next to the lead actor’s Star Waggon. I was supposed to radio the assistant directors when the drunk and/or high lead actor stepped out of his trailer to come to set.

But the lead actress was there that day too. They were having an affair. A very public affair. And judging by the noise it was quite passionate.

I, and everyone else standing near the trailer, could hear it. Eyebrows were raised. Glances were exchanged. Then we all drifted away from the trailer. Some epic fucking was going down.

He was absolutely wrecking her. The trailer was rocking, visually and audibly.

She was screaming in approval and shouting for more.

The first assistant director (1st AD) came on the walkie and demanded to know what was taking so long. I didn’t know what to say. I think I replied with, “Uhh, he’s busy.”

The response on the radio was, “Busy with what?”

The director was antsy. He wanted to shoot. The director of photography (the camera guy, known as a DP) was antsy too. The light was perfect, but the sun was moving. They needed to shoot the scene now.

Again I heard the same question, only this time with anger, “Busy with WHAT?”

The 1st AD was screaming at me over the radio. He was doing this to appease the director and the DP. It was a signal to them that he sensed their urgency and was doing his best to move things along even if it meant screaming at a lowly PA.

Still, I was speechless. I didn’t want to say that our principal talent were fucking on a suburban street over an open radio channel. I’m no prude, but this was uncomfortable.

Also, there were the paparazzi. Our radios weren’t encrypted and the paparazzi had scanners. They were listening to all of this. They always do. So you never use an actor’s real name on the radio. You refer to him by his number on that day’s call sheet.

For example, you’d say, “Number One is walking to set.”

Or you’d say, “Number Two is asking Number One to put his cock in her anus.”

Fed up by my lack of communication, the 1st AD stormed off the backyard set and came onto the street to find out what was happening. And then he saw me down the block, and not standing by the trailer as I had been told.

My insubordination set him off and now the screaming really started. There were a lot of what-the-fucks? and fuck-yous! Some of it was over the radio, some of it was just shouted down the street. As a general rule, when someone starts melting down and screaming, the rest of the crew gets out of the way and makes themselves scarce, so it was just the two of us on the street.

I started walking toward him, motioning for him to keep it down. I wanted to explain the situation in person so I could keep it off the walkie. But the closer I got the more he was screaming at me to get back to my post at the trailer.

Right when I got to him, right when we met in the middle of that street at the halfway point between set and the fuck-shack, is when it ended. Maybe the screaming AD killed the mood, or maybe they were just done, but right when I was about to explain what was happening and why I really really didn’t want to stand by that trailer, the happy couple emerged from the Star Waggon.

They did the scene, it was great, and that was that.

Except, that wasn’t that. At least not for me.

I had got trapped in an impossible situation and ended up taking the blame. In the end, the lead actress wasn’t the only person to get fucked that day. I didn’t get fired, but it was close.

But at least I knew what happened. At least I had a grasp of the situation. And at least I could explain it to myself. That’s a story I can process.

And yet, it still bothers me all these years later. I haven’t let it go.

* * *

There are other stories I have trouble with. Mainly because I can’t remember exactly what happened. Because of time and the booze and the drugs.

My first crush was a girl on a wildly popular TV show. I was in grade school, she was on TV. It was a prime-time sitcom. I watched the show every week just to see her. I fantasized about her, but I never thought I’d actually meet her.

But I did meet her. This was many years after the on-set ass-fuck incident. I’d worked my way up to producer by this point.

My wife, who also worked in The Business, had just completed some shitty indie movie, and we were at a wrap party in a scuzzy restaurant off Melrose. Me and my grade-school crush were both stupid drunk and made out in a corner.

Or did we? I’m really not sure what happened.

Did I make out with the actress—or did I make out with my wife, or somebody else? I really don’t know.

I was drunk and high on painkillers, and she was hitting on me, touching me, had her hand inside my suit jacket. And she was slutty and nasty and had gone way beyond The Wall (past the point where a woman is no longer sexually desirable).

At one time she’d been an international sex symbol. At one time she’d had a great body. She had made a career out of it.

That was over, but she was still trying. She hadn’t given up.

My wife was there and she was pregnant. And I was on the verge of overdosing on Johnnie Walker and painkillers like I was most nights. I also was wearing a black suit. But other than that, I’m not sure. It’s like a dream.

Am I the type of guy who would get drunk and make out with a slutty aging actress when his pregnant wife is in the next room?

I probably am that guy. But that doesn’t help me establish what happened.

Maybe I need to elaborate on this story too. I could talk about the bad music, and the cold appetizers, and how wrap parties always have cold appetizers, or how the crush of my youth locked eyes with me from across the room.

She looked at me hungrily, like I was dinner. Maybe I looked good in that suit. Maybe it was because I was there with my wife, because there’s a large subset of women who are into married guys.

Or maybe I just looked vulnerable—like easy pickings. Some doable drunk guy who would make her feel good. Who would make her forget about her aging face and expanding body and vanishing career. Because she wasn’t aging gracefully, and she no longer had a future in this business.

The danger of not remembering is that my mind tends to fill in the blanks in such a way that the story makes sense. For example, I’d like to say I fucked her. Because that story would make sense. Grade-school crush to drunken hookup twenty-five years later after her star had seriously faded. Now that’s a story.

But that’s also the Sunset Boulevard story, which has been remade several times over. There’s a moral in that story. And it would make perfect sense if I told it.

You’d understand that story. I could connect with you over that story.

But it’s not true. It couldn’t be. I went home with my wife that night.

Of course the way to tell this type of story is to start with some throat-clearing about how much I love my wife and how beautiful she is and how lucky I am to have her as the mother of my children. That’s all true, by the way, but it’s not the honest way to tell the story.

Because the story is about me and my philandering tendencies. That’s the core of the story. Everything else is just fluff. The fluff is there to keep you occupied while I slowly stab you with the real meaning.

It’s sleight of hand. The best stories are told this way. The storyteller creates a diversion, and you don’t even notice the knife entering your back.

For now I have to ask myself, Why do I even need to tell this story? Tact and common decency would dictate that I keep it to myself. I don’t need to spread it around in a book.

Why do I feel the need to get the story out and why do I have to make it real?

I used to numb the pain with booze and pills. Now I write.

I get touched by the muse and I write.

I write to tell my story to myself. Because I need to be honest with myself.

So I’ll get the stories out. I’ll tell them to myself, and I’ll tell them to you.

Then I’ll move on.

My book Hollywood Samizdat: Notes From Below the Line is available to purchase on paperback from Passage Press or on eBook via Amazon. Audio book coming soon.