HE ALWAYS WANTED A POOL

"Poor dope. He always wanted a pool." - Joe Gillis (Sunset Boulevard)

In a world where dreams are manufactured, water is of paramount importance - Thomas AP Van Leeuwen

“A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.” - Joan Didion

Talking of archetypes, how about one of my own - that of the ill fated screenwriter, or the Joe Gillis complex as I now call it, that the fates have seemingly consigned me to.

We all know that Narcissus drowned having fallen in love with his own reflection, but perhaps it's also possible for some of us to drown in the reflections of our dreams up on the silver screen.

Being a Pisces, water holds an inevitable sway over my psyche and would definitely explain why I'm attracted to films with water in them, from Rebecca to Sunset Boulevard, to The Swimmer and Jaws and why Chinatown (notably absent of water) is the antithesis to my cine-aqua obsession.

But it was Sunset Boulevard (1951) with its iconic use of a swimming pool that elevated the romantic notion of screenwriting above all other roles in the film business and thus corrupted me for evermore.

In other words, any failings in my turbulent career are all Billy Wilder's fault.

Yesterday I took a young artist to meet with a veteran of the brushes and it got me thinking about how I had experienced a similar such introduction when I was a teenager.

My father, with the best of intentions, had taken me (17 years old) to meet an established Hollywood screenwriter just prior to my making formal applications to go to film school.

"There's only one thing I'm going to say to you. Whatever you do, do not become a screenwriter," the surly looking figure said in his Cotswolds mini-mansion before talking about pretty much everything else under the sun to my dad other than screenwriting.

Maybe I should have realised at the time that although he was being pithy, he was also being wise. Like an an old sea dog who's charted one too many life risking voyages, he'd warned me not to venture into the choppy waters of an uncertain future.

What he wasn't to know, of course, is that I'd already seen Sunset Boulevard and that the cocksure, screenwriting protagonist, Joe Gillis, had already become my role model for life.

For me, the character of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1951) and his Hollywood dream represented the closest on-screen mirror to my own personal ambition of writing in Los Angeles and thus it was perhaps inevitable that our shared destinies (fiction and non-fiction) would entwine, at least in my own head.

Even with his final (spoiler alert) watery demise in Norma Desmond's swimming pool, I felt attracted to the notion of a hard at heel screenwriter who somehow manages to retain his wise cracking arrogance. There was a stubborn defiance to his persona that, looking back, I perhaps mistakenly adopted.

Later, when I finally started at film school, I found I even had my own Norma Desmond in the form of a nice but crotchety landlady who owned the large house in Trebor Avenue, Farnham where I stayed for my first year at university.

Wandering down the leafy avenue on cold November mornings to the college, I thought of myself like Gillis walking to the Paramount studio lot, only for me it was the film lecture theatre, a little less glamorous.

Now, years later, having learnt the hard way about the pitfalls of a screenwriting career, I think maybe I should have listened better to that world weary screenwriter who advised me against this tumultuous path.

Trouble is.

I can't stop thinking about the pool.