The Age of Dreaming

was inflammatory from my first reading of the script—but I was taken aback by the intensity of the public response. In my view, Sasaki’s nationality was incidental to his fundamental nature. He was, indeed, a man of questionable morals—but this had nothing to do with his being Japanese. His background was simply one of many factors that made up a whole, compelling character, and not the central truth of his existence. And while it is true that Sasaki was perhaps rather brutal, it is terribly narrow-minded to think the way he was depicted was the result of racial prejudice. Some of it was attributable to the exigencies of film, which made difficult any complex characterization. Some of it was simply custom, and once I learned the expected boundaries—both in pictures and in life—I had no more troubles of the sort I’d experienced at the Moving Image Awards. Despite the opinions of critics in Little Tokyo and elsewhere, I believe that Hollywood made the fairest films it could. And was it not a mark of progress that a Japanese actor could be accepted as a leading man at all?

After I finished my pastry and tea, I left Canter’s and ventured back out onto Fairfax. As I walked down the block, I saw that a tow truck was parked in front of my car, and that a man in dark green work clothes was attaching a hook to its underside. I closed the distance between us quickly and yelled, “What are you doing?”

The man straightened up as I approached. He was perhaps in his early thirties, and a half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. His sewed-on name panel said Dave. “It’s in a tow-away zone,” he said. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

Glancing over at the sidewalk, I saw that there was, in fact, an obvious sign: Shuttle Makes Frequent Stops. Absolutely No Parking! I turned back to Dave, who was leaning on the hood, and fought the urge to ask him not to touch it. “No, I didn’t. It is my mistake, but I am here now. Do you really have to tow it?”

Dave flicked away some ashes and sighed. “I don’t care one way or the other.” He pointed toward the building beside us. “It’s this old folks’ home that called it in. But I suppose as long as you move it, it’ll be gone and they’ll be happy. I don’t know how you drive that big old clunker anyway.”

Looking from the car to the man and back again, I said, “Excuse me, but this automobile is far from being a ‘clunker.’ It’s a 1931 V-16 Packard, the very height of elegance and prestige.”

The man shrugged, running his fingers through his visibly greasy hair. “Suit yourself. Me, I prefer the Mustang or the Viper.” With that, he bent over and disengaged the hook.

“Thank you. I appreciate it.” I gave a slight bow.

He winked and said, “No problem, old fella.”

After the tow truck had driven away, I sat in my car for a moment before starting the engine. I was troubled by the entire episode—how had I missed the sign? I did not recall there being such a sign on Fairfax, but it was true I hadn’t been there in quite some time.

I drove home thinking about the morning’s events, but I couldn’t ponder them for long. When I entered the building, George, the octogenarian doorman, handed me a package. It took me a moment to realize that it was Bellinger’s manuscript; the messenger had come while I was out. Now I bore it upstairs like a long, unwanted letter to which I was obliged to reply. I went inside and opened the package and set the screenplay on the table, wishing I had been firmer in telling him no.

As I felt the weight of it, flipped through its ninety-eight pages, it struck me how much the moviemaking business had changed. In the early years, there were no screenplays, and no dialogue in the sense there is today. Writers wrote loose shooting scripts, which described the characters’ movements and expressions, and it was up to the director to extrapolate from there. Sometimes, though, the scenarios were even simpler. Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood was shot with nothing more than a one-page outline; Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton worked with no scripts at all. In the earliest days, only William Moran began a picture with a tight, structured written format of how he wanted it to unfold. And in all these scripts, there was little mention of what the characters should say—not like the screenplays of today, where the writer has to conceive of whole conversations, entire pages of verbal exchange.

It so happened that I had nothing planned for that afternoon, so I brewed some tea and settled down in my reading chair. I had no idea what to expect from Bellinger’s screenplay, but I hoped that it would not be too painful.

Much later, when I finished the manuscript, the room was almost dark. I checked my clock and discovered that three full hours had passed—not once in that time had I stirred, except to turn on the reading lamp. Now that I had finished the screenplay, I did not want to put it down; I held it gently in my hands like a living thing. And I felt a sensation I had not experienced in decades, the unmistakable stirring of creative excitement, the quickening of artistic desire.

It was not simply that the plot was compelling, although that was certainly true. The story centered on the young Marbury family—Terrence, Diane, and their four-year-old daughter Nancy—who live in a small town in Central California. The wife is a teacher, the husband owns a farm supply store, and their lives are uneventful. But then a new neighbor moves in next door, an older Japanese man named Takano, and they come to believe that he has moved to their remote little town in order to escape some secret from his past. They grow convinced—because of his age,