Leaping to Truffaut’s House

I had this dream last night in which I’d written a screenplay, and I thought of the screenplay as a sort of spiritual successor (not a sequel) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I guess in my dream Francois Truffaut was still alive, and also in my dream maybe he had directed Close Encounters rather than appeared in it, and I was determined that he would direct the film of my screenplay.

I was also determined that my film really feel like it was made in the late 1970s or early 80s, not in a Super 8 kind of way, a way that catalogs and commodotizes the iconic songs and clothes and cars of that era for this one, but in an E.T. or Close Encounters kind of way, inhabiting its era rather than performing it.

In my dream, Truffaut was a recluse who resided in a house that hovered like a star far above the Hollywood sky. The only way to get there was to leap up off the ground from the right spot in Los Angeles, and let the sky swallow you. I didn’t know where the spot was but somehow I encountered the writer Masha Tupitsyn and she didn’t say anything but she just pointed up at the sky and I knew she was pointing out Truffaut’s house for me glittering way up there just like a star and I leapt and the world turned upside-down and I was falling towards the star that was Truffaut’s house.

But I couldn’t get straight there, not in one leap. I crashed back down to Earth, right into a comedy club on Sunset, and it was the 1970s. And I watched the comedians interacting with each other offstage, so funny and so sad, and I thought I want to make a movie about these people but I can’t because it’s not the 1970s anymore and they don’t really exist anymore. Then I thought of Louis CK and I felt a little better. Then I left to make another leap toward Truffaut’s house.

I didn’t make it to Truffaut’s house this time, either. Instead I crashed down into a video game studio situated maybe up in Laurel Canyon that was decorated like a theme park with big phony props promoting a game, something licensed and merchandise-y, like maybe a Transformers game (but not actually a Transformers game). And a woman approached me, not a woman I know who exists in my real life but just a dream actor playing a dream role, there to add some more conflict to my dream story. She was in PR and she gave me a hard time about an imaginary feature I’d written about an imaginary game she’d worked on, saying it was too uncharitable, too negative, and I could tell she felt like my job was basically to be an arm of her PR efforts, to hype her games for my readers, and I thought but didn’t say that no, my responsibility was to offer my readers whatever truth I could. And I walked away from her, away from all of it, and I leapt again.

I woke up then. And then I saw this trailer for Masha Tupitsyn’s book Love Dog. And I thought, yes, that’s what it’s like in the pages of her work, and that’s why I feel so at home there.