My grandfather had been a filmmaker.
He started in Hollywood in the 1930s working as a second unit director on comedies and westerns. You’ve probably heard of some of them.
He knew John Ford, Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh.
He met John Wayne when he was still called Marion Morrison, doing a cheap Monogram picture about a singing cowboy.
My grandfather loved John Wayne.
When he began directing his own films in the 1940s, he dreamed of making one starring Wayne, a true western.
He never did get that chance—
but in 1947 he made a small picture called Dusklight, about feuding railroad barons, and through friendship and luck managed to cast Wayne in a small part as a wounded soldier grieving the changing of the west.
Although John Wayne had only one scene, it was my grandfather’s proudest moment. I’ll never forget him tell the story:
“We shot him close up. Focusing on his face. You have to give a man like that his respect. Let him take his time. Savouring the moment. Silence—but for our breathing and his voice repeating those immortal words: I still feel the goodness in this world. There was something monumental in it: in the way he acted. He was that way in everything he did. Dramatic. Full of dignity. Then we watched him go. Slowly. The place seemed empty after he was gone, like it was missing something. But we’d captured it. The essence. He was a great man and we had captured that greatness for ourselves.”
My grandfather died, but those words stayed with me.
No, I didn’t become a filmmaker.
I studied law and became a criminal defense attorney. A good one too, eventually making enough of a name for myself to land a job with the law firm Miranda Miranda Leander (MML), which at the time was one of the most prestigious in the country.
I worked on numerous well known cases, defending some of the vilest people I have ever known.
But the case that shook me—convinced me to end my legal career—was that of Jerry Ghosa, the “schizoid killer”, a man with perhaps as many as seventy-one personalities, whose most infamous crime was the murder and disembodiment of the writer Pierre Menard.
I’ll never forget meeting Ghosa for the first time.
Describing the killing—he said:
“We shot him close up. Focusing on his face. You have to give a man like that his respect. Let him take his time. Savouring the moment. Silence—but for our breathing and his voice repeating those immortal words: I still feel the goodness in this world. There was something monumental in it: in the way he acted. He was that way in everything he did. Dramatic. Full of dignity. Then we watched him go. Slowly. The place seemed empty after he was gone, like it was missing something. But we’d captured it. The essence. He was a great man and we had captured that greatness for ourselves.”