TOP OF THE WORLD
ALTHOUGH I’VE MADE FILMS ABOUT MEN WHO KEPT JOURNALS, I never kept one myself. I was not a collector. I have director friends who still have the first scrap of toilet paper they ever used. But not me. I threw my past out the window like a greasy wrapper.
I regret this. More and more so as I look back on the times and events I’ve witnessed. But recently I came across a window to those missing memories. My brother Leonard died in 2006. Recently his widow, Chieko, became seriously ill and needed to dispose of 20 boxes of stored possessions. My brother, unlike me, kept things. In those boxes I found 50 letters I had written to him between 1966 and 1970.
Because Len was teaching at Doshisha University in Kyoto for most of this period, it was too costly to speak by phone. So we wrote. I didn’t keep his, going to AFI, and seeing many, many movies. Len’s collection of letters ends abruptly in June 1970, even though the correspondence continued.
