By
JOHN SCHERBER
AN EXCERPT FROM A PLACE IN THE HEART
Here's an excerpt from my Chapter
Five book on the expatriate experience, San
Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart.
His
house is built on an uncleared cemetery. His youngest daughter disappeared
headfirst through a TV screen sometime back. On sunny summer afternoons rotting
corpses bob like apples in his swimming pool. Is it all in his mind?
Absolutely, and there’s more where that came from.
The mind in question is that of
Hollywood producer and screenwriter Michael Grais, author of the screenplay for
Poltergeist, his first big success.
It was followed by Poltergeist II and
eight other successful films. The unassuming and ironic Grais confesses to
being sometimes too frightened to watch the films made from his own
screenplays.
Jennifer Grais is a healer and former
back-up singer for Jackson Browne. Many of her days are spent on the back of
her white gelding, Solo, wandering the hilly trails and arroyos outside San
Miguel. Connecting with nature is critically important for her.
The Grais’ escape from Hollywood to San
Miguel came by a road somewhat less well-traveled than most. They started by
spending a month in India, unaware that going there opened a door that was an
exit from their lives in Los Angeles. It didn’t take the entire month for them
to realize they couldn’t go back home in any permanent way.
When it was time to return to the
States, says Jennifer, “we were ready to live somewhere else, we were fed up.
Michael especially was really burned out in Los Angeles. He just felt like he
couldn’t escape Hollywood. Everybody thinks the same there. Even in this
beautiful canyon [Topanga], a lot of the people are in the movie business.
They’d ask, ‘How far up the hill do you live?’ It was that hierarchical. At
first I thought they were really interested in where our house was, but I
realized later they only wanted to assess how high up the hill we were.” It was
a metaphor for rank in the film community. “There really was no escape from
that mindset. It was very isolating.”
But while the trip to India initially
held no suggestion of escape from Los Angeles, it did highlight some things
that were missing from their lives. “The experience in India was very mind-expanding,”
says Michael. “We were with people from all over the world. I realized how much
I missed communicating with people other than those who were talking about the
latest film grosses or whatever the constant conversation is in Hollywood, which
is only about money.”
“Or about stars,” adds Jennifer, “what
actresses are doing.”
“Or what Britney Spears is up to,” he
adds, “what underpants she’s wearing.”
“But it was amazing watching him in
India. There were park benches and people would just gather around them and
there would be somebody from Brazil or Africa. It was so stimulating, and he was so quiet and isolated in Topanga Canyon
on the hill. But there he was like the Godfather, entertaining on the park
bench, cracking everybody up. When he came home from all that stimulation and
camaraderie, that was when it just snapped for him.” A serious look comes over
her face; she is seeing it all. Again the turning point moment.
Michael nods, seeing it too. “And then
I said, ‘This is beautiful, but it’s a beautiful cage,’ and I can’t live in it
anymore. I said, ‘We’re moving, and I don’t know where.’”
Jennifer surfed the Internet in search
of a place that would restore their lives. “I was looking for a community that
would be similar to what he had experienced [in India].”
She had not found the same lack of
community in Los Angeles because she had never sought it in the same way. “I
tend to isolate [myself]. As long as I’m in nature and have a few animals and
can do some healing work I’m pretty fine. It was nurturing for me. It wasn’t
nurturing for Michael, and I wasn’t in the business in the way he’s in it, so I
could withdraw.”
No place in the States seemed right. Every
place she looked at was either too far away from an airport, or too isolated in
general. “I just couldn’t find any place that seemed easy, was walkable, that
would make life better.” Friends had told them about San Miguel, knowing about
Jennifer’s love for old buildings and culture. They came down for a week to
look at it, and they’ve been in San Miguel ever since, with brief interruptions
to rent their Topanga Canyon house and arrange their move. “When we came here,
it seemed to answer a lot of those questions,” she says.
“Every place we looked, no matter where
we looked,” says Michael, “and we looked from the east coast to the west coast,
[we found that] basically life in the States is the same everywhere. You live
in a house, you get in your car, you drive to your office, you get back in your
car, you drive back to your house, watch television, go to sleep, get up, and
do it again. There’s almost no city that’s different; everything looks the same
now.”
Now they live in a city that is radically different. When he left
Hollywood he had either produced or written the screenplay for ten successful
films and had done extensive television work as well. Although he has recently
offered a workshop in writing for films, Michael has moved away from
screenwriting himself to focus on two novels.
“The longer I’m here, the longer I’m
away from that environment, the more comfortable I feel. And the more I realize
how mentally enslaving it was being in that environment. It was incredibly
limiting, just to be on top, to have a movie in production, to drive the right
car, to live in the right house, to be at dinner with the right people, friends
with the right people. You’re always working.”
One of the first things they discovered
about San Miguel was that, while it was a fine place to work, it was not a
place that was about working. While
the Mexicans are a hard-working people, that virtue is not at the top of their
list.
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