AOL News
By Charles Evered
It amazes me when I read accounts today of the comparatively non-acrimonious relationship that existed between the military and the Hollywood establishment of yesteryear, particularly before the war in Vietnam.
Reading accounts of major stars who joined up to fight during World War II, of socialites and actors in Los Angeles establishing the Hollywood Canteen and encouraging the mingling of those who serve with those who portray, boggles the 21st century mind.
Charles Evered wrote and directed the film “Adopt a Sailor,” about a sailor from Arkansas who spends the evening with a sophisticated couple from New York City.
One need not go into a long treatise about why this doesn’t happen anymore. Wars are different now. It is — at least on the surface — a more complicated time.
So when I started to travel with a tiny budgeted film I wrote and directed called “Adopt a Sailor,” I girded my loins and readied myself for a gauntlet of rolling eyes and exasperated sighs of indifference.
I had myself lived in both worlds, having joined the U.S. Navy Reserve at a comparatively old age (in my mid-30s). My recruitment began as I toured an aircraft carrier in San Diego while writing a script called “Carrier” that I had sold as a pitch to DreamWorks. I met kids on that ship who were just 18, making an annual salary of what would constitute a week’s stay at a high-end hotel on Central Park West or in Santa Monica. I was humbled by their dedication — and since my life had become nothing more than sitting around and whining at Starbucks about the state of my career, something in me seized on a chance to break out of my own complacency.
After I joined, some of my friends were supportive, while some of them where aghast. One asked why I would “want to take a step back like that.” An actor (and ex-friend of mine) said that he thought my joining was the same as “ending up a garbageman or something.”
So when I got the opportunity to write and direct a little film about a sailor from Arkansas who spends the evening with a sophisticated couple from New York City, I harbored no illusions about it jumping into a “Juno” stratosphere.
On paper, the film is almost unmarketable — mostly dialogue, no overt political ax to grind, no drug deals gone bad, no effects per se, no sex, no overt auteur directing style. (I studied with George Roy Hill at Yale, who said, “If you want to direct, find a compelling story, hire great actors and get out of the way.) My expectation was that we’d screen the film for patient friends and my stunned agent on a white sheet strung across the living room at my producer’s house.
Miraculously, however, great actors did agree to appear in the film, including Emmy winners Bebe Neuwirth and Peter Coyote, who worked for about one-sixtieth of their usual salary.
Charles Evered wrote and directed the film “Adopt a Sailor,” about a sailor from Arkansas who spends the evening with a sophisticated couple from New York City.The film features Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Coyote, and Ethan Peck as the sailor.
And then it went on to screen at more than 20 national and international film festivals, won a couple of festival awards, garnered a distribution deal of its own and actually started to get seen by people. Was it “Juno”? No. But it wasn’t on a white sheet in the living room either.
My heart was reinvigorated by the number of people who gave our “little film that could” a chance. People who put aside their own sometimes reflexive aversion to all things military and related to our little story.
The truth is, “Hollywood” — or what that word has come to represent — isn’t as close-minded as lots of people make it out to be. The town was fair to us.
And for a brief moment in time, I thought I saw — reflected in the response to my little film — a vision of what our country could be. Less divided. More integrated philosophically and, more important, on the mend.