Written in February, 2018
Austere, snow-capped mountains surround a plateau in the high desert. As I descend into the rugged terrain ripe with sagebrush, foxtail pines, rolling hills, and tumbleweeds, all of my deep-seated cinematic spidey senses kick into high gear. Where’s that red-tailed hawk screech? Ah, there it is. Good. Now I know I’m in the Wild West. Well, at least it seems that way until something strange catches my eye on the horizon in the midst of this frontier vista: the unmistakable hazy neon glow of Reno, Nevada. The sight of its lines of casinos and smatterings of civilization surrounded by endless miles of open wilderness is both forlorn and bewitching. Who the hell put Frank Miller’s Sin City right in the middle of this John Ford Western anyway? It isn’t difficult to imagine cheap hookers and two-bit crooks lurking in the shadows, and yet somehow, I don’t fear them in this quiet, picturesque gambler’s oasis. Reno’s squalor is utterly fused with its mythic beauty; remove one from the other and the entire place would instantly implode back into the dark, interdimensional portal from which it sprang. Indeed, Reno’s mystique derives from its paradoxes, and virtually everything here is a paradox, even the goddamn city slogan. I see it spelled out with big, bold neon letters that glow shamelessly as I pass through the Reno arch on Virginia Street: “The Biggest Little City in the World”. Christ, Reno, you really got a hold on me. I’m not entirely sure why just yet, but I can’t escape the feeling that I’m here to find out.
If my a posteriori purpose for being in Reno is to discover why it beguiles me, my original rationale for coming here is decidedly less romantic. I’m taking a lengthy detour from my trip to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to pay a little visit to someone I’ve barely spoken to in six years: my father. To be honest, the reason for the estrangement is difficult to pinpoint. There was no big, melodramatic fight or single, highly traumatic incident that drove me away; just an accumulation of broken promises, non-explanations, disappointments, and angst associated with being in the orbit of an eccentric, unmedicated, bipolar enigma of a man. His pernicious psychic vortex was more than I could take on as I stepped out into the daunting reality of adult life, resolved to retain the last few scraps of my sanity so I did the only thing I knew how to: run the hell away.
Of course, if there were nothing redeeming about my father or my relationship with him, then I wouldn’t be here. When I was a kid, my dad was the coolest person on the planet and the respite to all my tumult. He would show up to pick me up every other weekend in bright tie-dye shirts and whisk me off in his zoomorphic “dire wolf” jeep. We would watch cartoons, attend concerts, ride bikes, invent games, and go on long road trips. I always had at least ten thousand questions about everything, and he was a human encyclopedia. I was a nomad and the perpetual “weird new kid” in school, and he was my consistent friend. I was a misunderstood ball of anxiety, and he had x-ray vision that cut straight through to my emotional core and enabled him to tell me exactly what I needed to hear.
Our idyllic relationship began to fray when I reached Jr. High. That’s when my dad started a new family and assumed primary custody of me for the first time. During those years, I underwent a disillusionment that went beyond the usual process of transforming my parents from archetypal authority figures to flawed human beings. I discovered that my dad was a pretty deranged and sometimes abusive man, which was a heart-wrenching thing to reconcile with the “cool best friend dad” from years past. Consequently, over the years, we let each other down in a variety of ways and drifted apart.
By the time I graduated from college, the great six-year silence had commenced, and I was determined to become a wunderkind independent filmmaker. I worked in Hollywood for a stint, but I wasn’t going to wait around for somebody to give me a break, so I scraped together a little cash and put together a ragtag collection of actors and filmmakers to make an ultra-low-budget, feature-length thriller set in one of the Northern California towns I had lived in as a child. In retrospect, I think this choice derived at least partially from my admiration and envy of filmmakers who could brilliantly capture a specific sense of place in the films they made about the hometowns where they lived out all their formative years. Martin Scorsese and Manhattan’s Little Italy and Paul-Thomas Anderson and the San Fernando Valley are a couple that come to mind. Like the films of my heroes, I wanted my locations to vivify my story but ultimately, I realized that I don’t really have a hometown, the setting wound up coming across as fairly generic, and the entire production was a soul-crushing, disaster-ridden, and personally costly one that stretched out for several years and left me with a film that is still collecting dust on my hard-drive.
It was only after this grand quixotic quest that I began to open up the lines of communication to my father. I suppose it took being conquered by my hubris to look inwards and recognize the empty spot in my heart that I had extricated him from. I began to wonder if I was strong enough to take the bad with the good. It is on that note that I now find myself in Reno for this silver state reunion, albeit with considerable trepidation.
As soon as the door flings open, my dad diffuses the tension by breaking into a manic, improv routine in which he’s a brash real estate agent pushing this hot property on me, which is a cute satirical deflection given the place is a disintegrating hoarder’s paradise. I knew that my family had fallen on hard times in the years since I have been here but I am still caught off-guard and disconcerted by what I see, which I will refrain from describing. After some awkward pleasantries, we proceed with a little “show and tell” ritual. My unfamiliarly post-pubescent siblings show me some of their art projects and my dad shows off his most recent self-carved jade jewelry and I do what I can to be supportive and inquisitive. Afterward, I hold a screening of my film, and my dad can barely sit down for more than five minutes; he spends most of the time pacing around the house and doesn’t offer feedback. Initially, I am resentful but then I pay a little more attention. Beneath his usual exuberant madman persona, I detect a palpable sense of weariness, despair, and perhaps even remorse in him that is alien to me. I no longer see someone that’s just being a passive-aggressive asshole critic, but somebody that can’t bring himself to face something painful. Could it be that in my flawed little film, he sees the failures of his own quixotic quests reflected back at him? After all, you don’t exactly have to be Jane Goodall to observe that these past few years haven’t been good to him. I don’t know the whole story but from what I have pieced together, he inherited a fortune from his parents’ estate, bought a house in Reno, got involved in the jade business, blew his fortune on God knows what, staged a protest occupation on a joint family property over alleged violations of forestry law by other members of the partnership for which he was sued, defeated, and forced to vacate. It appears that he’s been stuck in exile here in Reno ever since. Lots of questions come to mind but I have no idea how to confront him while he’s in this dreary state, so we just hug it out and say goodbye.
Although there were no yelling matches or weepy heart-to-hearts, as I leave the house, I feel that a hefty load has been lifted from my shoulders. Perhaps this is because by simply witnessing my dad as a wounded fool like me, I was able to begin to reorient him from the monster I had built up in my imagination over the years to someone that was recognizable as my father. With this wave of relief, I find myself in a welcome interlude from my pathological self-involvement and my eyes are wide open to the other occupants of this offbeat environment. They say Vegas is “the devil’s playground” but I heard he lives here in Reno. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I catch a glance of him on the third floor of a seedy apartment building by the Club Cal Neva. I also see eighty-two year-old gamblers with oxygen tubes working the penny slots, despondent cowboys knocking down two-dollar beers at a dive bar, and street musicians that look like they just hopped off of Tom Waits’s carnival wagon. I see beautiful, tragic stories written on the faces of all of these people; they have a vulnerability about them that borders on poetic without any of the pretense that I’ve grown accustomed to in California. It occurs to me that what binds these Reno-ites together is the same thing that binds me with my father: the spirit of a wistful dreamer that has been displaced from or eternally without home. I am not referring to “home” only as a spatiotemporal location but as an existential orientation that resembles something like inner peace or absolution. The best term I can think of to describe all of us is “drifters”. These drifter characters are familiar to me because as someone that grew up splitting my time between a hippie new age mom and a Deadhead dad in a nexus of countercultures, I have always been surrounded by many flavors of drifters, all lost children that quell their pain by turning the world inside out looking for home. The burning question that emerges from this reflection is: How do these drifters ever find their way home?
With that question lingering in the back of my mind, I return to my geographic home in Los Angeles to take inventory of ideas for my first professional feature film as a writer-director, I find myself consumed by the spectre of Reno and all of its glorious cinematic possibilities. As a lover of westerns, the mystique and sheer physical landscape of the greater Reno area inspires me with awe and teases me with its secrets. There are leftover landmarks from the western frontier, abandoned mining communities, ghost towns, underground tunnels, subterranean bases, the Southern Pacific Railroad, former nuclear test sites, the Paiute Tribe of Pyramid Lake, small-town brothels, and of course, the Extraterrestrial Highway. Right at the center of it is Reno itself. The Reno I envision is more of an impressionistic landmark in my imagination than a realistic recreation. I see an isolated city in the desert wilderness that like the Mos Eisley spaceport in Star Wars, is a kind of “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. A place with sky-high suicide rates. A place where dreams go to die. A place full of con men, small time thieves, and degenerates. A place where practically everyone is a pathological liar out to fuck you or fuck you over. My Reno is an Island of Misfit Toys that belongs only to the drifters. Like the city they inhabit, they are islands unto themselves.
Having created a cinematic incarnation of Reno in my imagination, I realize that I have a useful setting to explore the burning question of how I should go about finding home, which I now recognize as the preeminent unresolved quandary of my own life. After all, since my Reno is full of nefariousness and treachery, then if a drifter’s salvation is possible here, maybe it’s possible anywhere. Since my Reno is a mystic realm of the unknown, it is the type of place where transformation is possible. And since my Reno is a desert island of drifters like me, then perhaps I have finally found a surrogate home that I can put on the silver screen with verve. With this setting in place, I draw inspiration from everyone from Robert Altman to Anthony Mann to Sergio Leone and tap into the rich history of the archetypal drifter in western cinema, which ranges from Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to Eastwood’s Unforgiven and beyond to populate my Reno with a stable of drifter characters. Like my father, my drifters were snatched up by Reno like moths in a light trap. Like true Reno-ites, my drifters are gamblers that will push all their chips on the table if they think the upside is getting closer to home. All I ask of them is that their lives unfold along subplots that revolve around my protagonist, a nostalgic photographer from California that returns to Reno to search for his long-missing and presumably dead father. If that sounds self-serving, it’s no accident. I intend to set this photographer alter-ego and all the satellite drifter characters on a journey where they will have to confront the truths that threaten to dispel their illusory dreams. Through working out this story, I have a broad, conceptual answer to the question of finding home: home is not a destination but a truth that for drifters, is buried deep down in our psyches. Of course, the journey home is different for each drifter but in general, it involves bringing this truth into the light of consciousness. The grace and courage with which each drifter meets this truth determines whether or not he makes it home. With that, the germ of Reno Drifters was born.
In the months that succeed the conception of Reno Drifters, I do write a treatment for it but the project loses steam after I have my heart broken in more ways than one. Perhaps I have lost my personal connection to the story or the strength to face it so I put it back on the shelf. In the ensuing years, I work on other projects, take some time for self-improvement, and continue to work toward identifying the story that will be the basis for my first professional feature film. As I develop different ideas, I find that I am either unsatisfied with the quality of the work or that the timing isn’t right given my current experience, expertise, and interests. This frustrating holding pattern persists until I hit a breaking point where I recognize that my work lacks the meaning I crave because like a classic drifter, there is something important but painful that I’m avoiding through my cloistered lifestyle. Almost simultaneously, I also realize that Reno Drifters is luring me once more only this time, I’m answering the call.
To that end, in January of 2018, I walk away from my comfortable bubble in Los Angeles, pack up my car, and head right into the heart of darkness. That’s right, you are reading an entry written by one of the newest residents of Reno, Nevada. Of course, the simple explanation for why I am here is to add urgency to the project, express a fuller commitment to my craft, and cloak myself in inspiration. The more profound explanation is that like my photographer protagonist, I am here to reckon with the unfinished business I still have with my father. Undoubtedly, this unfinished business must relate to the hold that Reno had on me in the first place. Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”. Perhaps by confronting the truth I’ve been sheltering myself from, I’ll finally find my way home and get a descent film out of it while I’m at it. Call it “method filmmaking”, I guess. I hope that whatever blog entries and films that come out of this little quest will be of some value to all you cinephiles, drifters, and bemused masses out there or at least provide a little entertainment so they aren’t grotesquely masturbatory. In any case, I’ll catch ya later on down the trail.
Grahamblings 
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