Post 1 in a series created for a gift book I am writing called "The Golden Rules of Love, Life, and Meaning"
THIS THING WE CALL...LOVE
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” -Voltaire
Real love is the most sought after prize in all human endeavor. To understand it requires a lifetime of pondering, practice, and patience. Seekers and those who possess the quality of heart and soul thank God every day for this thing called love. We have witnessed its touch bring renewed hope to the disheartened, pleasure to the eye, a quickening to the soul; for love sustains mankind.
It leads to commitment, then marriage, on to families and as such creates the social bond we call community. It is The Dalai Lama of Tibet who has said: Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.
Love is the glue to every worldly society for it ultimately calls the mother and father home to nurture the rising generation, to hold it together.
True love beckons the brother, sister, friend to give, serve, lift, and care for one another. It calls out to a comrade to risk everything to save another. Of all virtues, true love is the greatest.
No other emotion so powerfully affects us day to day. Love feeds the starving, clothes the naked and cares for the poor, homeless, widowed and fatherless. Love, like fire, burns at different degrees in all of us. The most hardened criminal can be touched by it, given the right mix of feelings and compassion.
I first started reading on the philosophy of love in 1974 when a college student, I found professor of philosophy and comparative religion, Truman Madsen's words. This simple phrase has stayed with me all these years:“Love is divine fire, with a large F.”
Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato said: “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
And the eighteenth century sage, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin put it eloquently in free style verse;
The day will come,
after harnessing space, the winds,
the tides and gravity
we shall harness, for God, the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time
in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.
Love.
Written of.
Spoken about.
Reviled and reveled in.
Played out on screen and stage.
Philosophers have written tomes to fill libraries on it. The religious have enjoined it to the grand purposes of the Gods. Nations have fought wars in the name of it, and men have risked their lives to seek but a taste of its sweet and addictive flavor.
When “making love,” in the vernacular of the day, a man and women may reach the zenith of life’s pleasures through physical intimacy. In a committed marriage there is rarely anything to compare with the feeling physical intimacy may bring. Because it is done in the spirit of loving their companion in every way, it strengthens and bolsters the marriage, and increases the pleasure of the experience.
If marriage is sacred, then love making is sacred...
Happiness does not come cheaply, and perhaps there’s the rub. We often find in our present condition that the luster of fidelity has faded. Some film and publishing has elevated sexual intimacy alone to the position where real love had always reigned. As long as the uncommitted “hero” is the one engaged in the “love making” it is seen as a sweet and never ending thing.
When the theatre curtain falls and the lights come on, we awaken and are brought to reality again - life is real, earnest, with commitments to be made and kept.
Is a kiss prelude or postlude? Is the touch of skin meant to be used or shared? What if the Gods arranged sexuality (as I suppose it is) to not only be for propagation of the species but absolutely fulfilling and to be anticipated?
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." -Ingrid Bergman
Sexual intimacy in the committed path, the path of action that blends the passions with the “harnessed energies of love,” as De Chardin put it, works to bond and build and never destroy.
Do I sound like a prude or unrealistic? I'm a man...quite normal and have given this some heart-felt consideration for decades. The bottom line? I love romance and...
I believe sexual intimacy to be sacred, and "love-making" is equally had in the touch of a hand, a kiss, and emtions wrapped in faithfulness; all this to be enjoyed most fully, not the other way around.
An agent and film producer in Hollywood, once considering one of my books for a film project, came to the conclusion, "Hollywood wants hard love stories James, not soft. Sorry."
"I didn't know love was hard," I answered.
Love is a verb and a noun. To explore its dimensions in literature, song, dance, worship, art and service, is to touch the hand of the Divine Creator of the Universe and partner with him in creating a piece of heaven on earth.
Love is vital...food to the soul.
It is an elixir to the spirit.
It quenches spiritual thirst and puts a quicker beat into the heart of one experiencing its taste. The human heart so affected sends life giving fluids at a more rapid rate, bursting through and to every part of one’s being.
To love truly is to be truly alive. It excites and stimulates creativity. It is loud, happy, noisy at times.
It is also the expression of silence in deference to the bereaved.
It is reverent awe at the realization that there exists a benevolent power greater than us all to comfort us in mourning.
It is the joyful sound of children at innocent play.
It is renewal at the first sounds of birth.
It is the final kiss at the brink of death of one beloved.
It is the courage of a soldier for his comrade, and a fellow man offering safety to one he does not know.
It is the flower from the garden to brighten the table and the rose on the grave as if in soliloquy petals have a voice and can whisper for the deceased to hear the word; “I love you.”
...and it is the feeling coming from an unseen world that the deceased love you still.
The Holy Bible says; “God is love.”
Men have fashioned idols to gods they have named for love. If man alone were the final authority his very testimonial in written form and art spanning six millennia of the recorded history of worship suggest he had enthroned love as the ultimate quality divine.
And if divine, love is more than a special way of feeling...
Love is a way of being.
James M Pratt
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
IN LOVE and ROMANCE...I'm Hopeless.
ABOUT LOVE, HOLLYWOOD, and Well…LOVE
The Culture of Hollywood and Why Love Stories Become Twisted When Translated to Screen:
I’m hopeless. AND, I refuse to yeild...
This personal review of a ten year journey to get a film made, once promised to a publisher one year after the book came out, is a typical journey for stories where “love” is defined by those with the money, but perhaps not the heart for it.
In Hollywood it is a battle of, “Hard Love vs. Soft Love…” Case in point: “Jim, Hollywood isn’t really doing your kind of stories. They just aren’t hard enough.”
Suspicions confirmed, the sale of my “soft love” story, New York Times best selling The Last Valentine, was what thousands of fans had been asking about for years, and now ten years later it is where it belonged… Hallmark Hall of Fame and CBS. I never believed that “Hollywood” didn’t have interest in “soft love.” The list of enjoyable hits, even blockbusters is too long.
When it comes to love being “hard,” I realized too late, that he was speaking of the “head contrived love” stories but not the kind that comes from the heart. As long as his mental perspective was fixed, I wasn’t going to shift enthusiasm to area perceived as “not” profitable or at least “interesting” to Hollywood film making contacts.
The truth is, he and I are still friends, but live in different worlds. We come at romance from different experiences and paradigms. His world includes a lot of “Noir” (French word for “black” and meaning cynical, rough, violent, dark, etc. class of novels and film.) I refuse to allow any noir into my world. I mean ZERO. What that comes down to is differing views on “reality.” I’m in love with real love; the warm-hearted journey a man or woman makes in winning at it and…
I’m hopeless.
I’m just not interested in noir; aka “hard love.” Something is wrong with me. I want to understand (therefore explore) a love found in the most gentlemanly and heroic of characters… the kind that makes a woman swoon (and stay swooned) – a love that doesn’t demand, but gives, and then receives through no compulsion, obligation, or manipulated feelings – the soft, gentle, kind, filled to the brim with emotion that comes after the effort. It is a culture full of “we and thee,” not the Hollywood view that portrays movie after movie of a narcissist’s “about me and mine.”
Am I missing something here, Hollywood? Am I all alone on this? I don’t think so. In fact, I know Hollywood is losing money from those who WANT to enjoy a great movie filled with realism – the reality of “how love works” not “how it does not.” Even the Soaps acknowledge love affairs they portray as built upon moral quick sand leading to personal and collective destruction.
I’m hopeless, and that seems to be the bottom line to my romantic notions.
To me LOVE, “amore,” the stuff of true passion, is not the knocking around of bodies flailing away in fits of myopically narrow-minded and so-called “love-making” by the literati of cheap noir novels and film at large – but it is the committed touching of the breath and soul of a partner through willingness to believe in, and cherish her. THEN let the holding, touching, and being one with her begin. I like marriage, for example. I mean, to me that kind of commitment is romantic. If I failed at it, I would try again until I got it right. It is in the EFFORT that the reward of ROMANCE is achieved. It is in loving (the verb synonymous with giving) that loving (the verb synonymous with feeling) is received. Where am I going wrong here?
I learned late that I was dealing with one kind of producer in trying to get a beloved “soft” love story produced. The 1,000’s of pieces of fan mail can’t touch a mind whose heart is not in it. The idea of a gentle love that isn’t believed in cannot be written by even an Academy Award winning film-script writer given 2 chances (true event in the epic journey of The Last Valentine to screen) if his heart isn’t in it. The truth about love in Hollywood often is, “hard is hot” and “soft is cold.” In terms of the heart “soft” is very hot to those of us who like great story lines and don’t want orgasmic gratuity or cynicism to interrupt it.
The exception is CBS and their fabulous alliance with Hallmark Hall of Fame; a realization of what makes a great love story. Stories that have heart are remembered forever and a good story line with “heart” is what it is all about with those producers. We can all be grateful for that.
I believe Hollywood at large is missing out on huge revenue potential from those of us who have “given up” in search of something to “watch” and often just “opt out.” (Hopefully good news for publishers.) Ever said, “There’s nothing on!” or “I can’t find a decent movie!” That is really saying something when there are over 100 channels to choose from vs. the four we had when I was young.
Though I feel friendly toward them, my past book-to-film making team have a different view of what a “good love story” is made of. That’s why it took ten years. They see “hard” and I see “soft.”
Finally, years after the promises, I was able to encourage a script written by a lovely person who is now a dear friend, and she found the perfect production partner to create the long hoped for Hallmark Hall of Fame production, The Last Valentine, becoming a CBS movie of the week in 2009.
I recount this for one simple reason. I’M HOPELESS… and VALENTINE’S DAY is coming up. I’m not giving up on writing gentle love stories for book and film, nor giving up on an audience I believe in and who daily continue to express their belief in me. Love is soft… It was never supposed to be “hard.” The world in its splendor wasn’t created with tunnel vision in mind. Neither was love.
Though 4 years old now, this well thought-out news article bears review – IF Hollywood wants to thrive and enjoy our business and confidence once again.
ON FILM AND TELEVISION AUDIENCE TUNING OUT
Spring 2004 USA Today in “LIFE” section with heading CAN TV BE SAVED? 12 Ways, by Robert Bianco.
The Audience
We can find the answer, I believe, in what happened at the last Super Bowl. The Super Bowl at its height attracted 140 million U.S. viewers. On any given night, only 35 to 40 million people watch network television. That is a differential of approximately 100 million people who don’t watch. And it was, in my opinion, those people who were most offended by what they saw and it was those people who spoke out and were heard.
Therefore, network television panders and caters to the base tastes of a minority of people, the lowest common denominator. It is this minority that keeps the networks and their affiliates in business. If the networks and affiliates gave the people what they really want and not what a perverse minority demands, based on the numbers alone, their ratings would almost triple.
The Culture of Hollywood and Why Love Stories Become Twisted When Translated to Screen:
I’m hopeless. AND, I refuse to yeild...
This personal review of a ten year journey to get a film made, once promised to a publisher one year after the book came out, is a typical journey for stories where “love” is defined by those with the money, but perhaps not the heart for it.
In Hollywood it is a battle of, “Hard Love vs. Soft Love…” Case in point: “Jim, Hollywood isn’t really doing your kind of stories. They just aren’t hard enough.”
Suspicions confirmed, the sale of my “soft love” story, New York Times best selling The Last Valentine, was what thousands of fans had been asking about for years, and now ten years later it is where it belonged… Hallmark Hall of Fame and CBS. I never believed that “Hollywood” didn’t have interest in “soft love.” The list of enjoyable hits, even blockbusters is too long.
When it comes to love being “hard,” I realized too late, that he was speaking of the “head contrived love” stories but not the kind that comes from the heart. As long as his mental perspective was fixed, I wasn’t going to shift enthusiasm to area perceived as “not” profitable or at least “interesting” to Hollywood film making contacts.
The truth is, he and I are still friends, but live in different worlds. We come at romance from different experiences and paradigms. His world includes a lot of “Noir” (French word for “black” and meaning cynical, rough, violent, dark, etc. class of novels and film.) I refuse to allow any noir into my world. I mean ZERO. What that comes down to is differing views on “reality.” I’m in love with real love; the warm-hearted journey a man or woman makes in winning at it and…
I’m hopeless.
I’m just not interested in noir; aka “hard love.” Something is wrong with me. I want to understand (therefore explore) a love found in the most gentlemanly and heroic of characters… the kind that makes a woman swoon (and stay swooned) – a love that doesn’t demand, but gives, and then receives through no compulsion, obligation, or manipulated feelings – the soft, gentle, kind, filled to the brim with emotion that comes after the effort. It is a culture full of “we and thee,” not the Hollywood view that portrays movie after movie of a narcissist’s “about me and mine.”
Am I missing something here, Hollywood? Am I all alone on this? I don’t think so. In fact, I know Hollywood is losing money from those who WANT to enjoy a great movie filled with realism – the reality of “how love works” not “how it does not.” Even the Soaps acknowledge love affairs they portray as built upon moral quick sand leading to personal and collective destruction.
I’m hopeless, and that seems to be the bottom line to my romantic notions.
To me LOVE, “amore,” the stuff of true passion, is not the knocking around of bodies flailing away in fits of myopically narrow-minded and so-called “love-making” by the literati of cheap noir novels and film at large – but it is the committed touching of the breath and soul of a partner through willingness to believe in, and cherish her. THEN let the holding, touching, and being one with her begin. I like marriage, for example. I mean, to me that kind of commitment is romantic. If I failed at it, I would try again until I got it right. It is in the EFFORT that the reward of ROMANCE is achieved. It is in loving (the verb synonymous with giving) that loving (the verb synonymous with feeling) is received. Where am I going wrong here?
I learned late that I was dealing with one kind of producer in trying to get a beloved “soft” love story produced. The 1,000’s of pieces of fan mail can’t touch a mind whose heart is not in it. The idea of a gentle love that isn’t believed in cannot be written by even an Academy Award winning film-script writer given 2 chances (true event in the epic journey of The Last Valentine to screen) if his heart isn’t in it. The truth about love in Hollywood often is, “hard is hot” and “soft is cold.” In terms of the heart “soft” is very hot to those of us who like great story lines and don’t want orgasmic gratuity or cynicism to interrupt it.
The exception is CBS and their fabulous alliance with Hallmark Hall of Fame; a realization of what makes a great love story. Stories that have heart are remembered forever and a good story line with “heart” is what it is all about with those producers. We can all be grateful for that.
I believe Hollywood at large is missing out on huge revenue potential from those of us who have “given up” in search of something to “watch” and often just “opt out.” (Hopefully good news for publishers.) Ever said, “There’s nothing on!” or “I can’t find a decent movie!” That is really saying something when there are over 100 channels to choose from vs. the four we had when I was young.
Though I feel friendly toward them, my past book-to-film making team have a different view of what a “good love story” is made of. That’s why it took ten years. They see “hard” and I see “soft.”
Finally, years after the promises, I was able to encourage a script written by a lovely person who is now a dear friend, and she found the perfect production partner to create the long hoped for Hallmark Hall of Fame production, The Last Valentine, becoming a CBS movie of the week in 2009.
I recount this for one simple reason. I’M HOPELESS… and VALENTINE’S DAY is coming up. I’m not giving up on writing gentle love stories for book and film, nor giving up on an audience I believe in and who daily continue to express their belief in me. Love is soft… It was never supposed to be “hard.” The world in its splendor wasn’t created with tunnel vision in mind. Neither was love.
Though 4 years old now, this well thought-out news article bears review – IF Hollywood wants to thrive and enjoy our business and confidence once again.
ON FILM AND TELEVISION AUDIENCE TUNING OUT
Spring 2004 USA Today in “LIFE” section with heading CAN TV BE SAVED? 12 Ways, by Robert Bianco.
The Audience
We can find the answer, I believe, in what happened at the last Super Bowl. The Super Bowl at its height attracted 140 million U.S. viewers. On any given night, only 35 to 40 million people watch network television. That is a differential of approximately 100 million people who don’t watch. And it was, in my opinion, those people who were most offended by what they saw and it was those people who spoke out and were heard.
Therefore, network television panders and caters to the base tastes of a minority of people, the lowest common denominator. It is this minority that keeps the networks and their affiliates in business. If the networks and affiliates gave the people what they really want and not what a perverse minority demands, based on the numbers alone, their ratings would almost triple.
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