A Cold Wind Blows

A day of contradictions, as so many are. It starts with an early trip to the airport, driving my young children to their flight to visit their grandparents on one of my favorite places on earth -- Sanibel Island, Florida. I think the most recent time I have visited there was Christmas 2001.

On the way to the airport, the awful news that Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated after a political rally in Rawalpindi, a stronghold of the Pakistani Army and intelligence services that many suspect have been less than vigilant in guarding the opposition political leader since she returned to her home country earlier this fall.

Somehow, a gunman on a motorcycle with an AK-47 penetrated her security and shot her in the neck, then detonated a bomb that killed at least 22 other people. She was pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. There is no information yet about whom the assassin was, or why Ms. Bhutto, the only woman ever freely elected to lead a Moslem country's government, was killed.

So many old painful feelings came up for me, and no doubt, many others -- John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat, and Salvador Allende. Progressives, each in his own way, much as the liberal Bhutto was in Pakistan. She was not close to the powerful Pakistani military, nor to the shadowy intelligence agencies that helped sponsor the rise of the (anti-woman) Taliban that helped ruin neighboring Afghanistan, while harboring Osama bin-laden as he planned his heinous assault on the U.S.

But Ms. Bhutto had many enemies, including the terrorists of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the vicious tribal chiefs in the Pashtun borderlands that neither the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, nor the ever-present U.S. security "advisors" have been able to subdue.

Any of these may be implicated.

***

Later today, in a morose mood, I packed up the Christmas tree ornaments and set the tree itself outside. As we packed our ornaments into the plastic container on wheels that fits under my daughter's bed, my friend asked what the message on the back of one cute ornament meant. I examined it and realized that it was from my mother to my son Aidan on her last Christmas on earth...2001. She died the following October, on what had been her own Scottish immigrant mother's birthday. So this was her last Christmas gift to her grandson.

Still later, the mailman delivered a DVD, courtesy of my dear friend, of Rollover, the only movie that I ever received any credit for in my years of screenwriting, consulting, and story pitching in Hollywood. I thought about the writers now on strike, trying to gain a fair share of DVD revenues, and recalled that in my day, videos were the new thing, and we had to strike then for the same reasons.

To the owners of the studios, new technology platforms offer an opportunity for profits unfettered by responsibility to those of us who created the story in the first place.

Please remember this, the next time you rent or buy a DVD, a video, or other version of a motion picture. There would be no films if not for writers. Yet writers are among the lowest compensated of all those who collaborate on filmmaking.

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