Against the background of the ongoing hand wringing over bottled versus tap, I fell headlong into Kevin Bone’s Water-Works – The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (The Monacelli Press, 2006), a handsome volume I had purchased for my father – the retired mechanical engineer – last Christmas. Wading through 150 years’ worth of archival materials produced during the planning and construction of the Croton, Catskill, and Delaware water systems, Bone, a professor at the Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and a group of colleagues emerged with a richly illustrated history of one of the most amazing, continuing public works projects ever…one that, today, supplies over a billion gallons of water a day to the City’s five boroughs.

The book’s text provides a compelling overview of the contagious diseases, fires, and increasingly unsanitary conditions attendant to the City’s explosive growth in the 1800’s that fostered the political will needed to launch such a daunting effort…as well as the insidious forces of self-interest and corruption (hello, Boss Tweed) that constantly threatened to derail it. It describes, too, the continuing project deep below the boroughs to complete Water Tunnel #3, and the relatively recent efforts focused not on the development of new sources, but on water usage conservation and on the protection of the existing watershed.

The real treat, however, and what originally caught my eye, are the book’s pictures: the archival photographs and, especially, the elegant, painstakingly hand-drafted line drawings of structures both large and small – cross sections of dams that reveal them to be land-locked icebergs with tons of their mass buried beneath river beds; sluice-gate lifting machinery; bridge superstructures over spillways; details of giant blow-off valves; cross-sections of aqueduct tunnels; and before-and-after maps of areas to be flooded by the construction of reservoirs. Looking at these, one cannot help but re-think the water supply network as anything less than the world’s largest art installation, largely invisible (cf. Walter de Maria’s “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” anyone?), designed and executed by hundreds and thousands of men who joined form and function in ways both novel and intricate.

They knew full well the magnificence of their efforts. Approaching the completion, in 1913, of the Catskill Water System (twenty-two years’ worth of work which added 571 square miles of watershed to the system), the project’s Chief Engineer J. Waldo Smith wrote:

“The work we set out to accomplish has been very largely completed, and practically every difficulty has been overcome. With relatively little remaining to be done, it is but inevitable that many of us must seek elsewhere for places where our activities may continue and where we can go on doing good and useful work. To none, more than to me, is this parting a sorrow, as I look back over what we have together succeeded in doing and as I recall our many pleasant, useful and happy associations.

To those of us who remain the parting is as hard as for those who go, for, one and all, we realize the extreme improbability, in the years that are left to each of us, of ever again being connected with an organization of such magnitude, of such cohesiveness and unity of spirit and, withal, of such intense honesty and loyalty of purpose.”

I figured we’d end up with: “OF” – The Boston Phoenix.

Yes, I am the co-screenwriter of 2003’s The Kiss – you can look it up for yourself on IMDB or Amazon, where, as of this writing, it is the 55,384th best selling DVD they’re offering. You might even be able to find a copy in your local Blockbuster’s. My kids excitedly noticed a copy tucked into a corner of our local store here in Pleasantville (yes, I really live in a town called Pleasantville), and I had to quickly shush them lest I be outed. In Pleasantville, one must keep up appearances, you know?

That discovery led to several sleepless nights: what set of decisions had led the store to purchase that sole copy for rental? Had anyone, in fact, ever rented it? And what had they thought of it? My one experience with an audience – at the film’s premiere at the Boston Film Festival – was mystifying: a quarter-filled theater, in which my unpredictable friend Michael stood up before the film’s start and introduced a mortified me (I had already seen a copy of the move, and knew what was coming) to the befuddled onlookers. There were some overall kind words from these folks when the lights came on…one scary woman whispered to me that the movie it had changed her life…and then I was surrounded by a gang of kids in their late teens who asked for my autograph (my friends will verify that), telling me they had traveled five hours to see the film. “Why?” I asked incredulously. “Eliza!” they exclaimed in unison, showing me scrapbooks leaking Buffy The Vampire clippings.

It had all started so promisingly.I wrote the screenplay in the early 90’s with high school friend (now novelist and filmmaker) Gorman Bechard. It kicked around Hollywood for years, my theory being that it was just not quite bad enough to reject out of hand. After numerous false starts, it was finally picked up by an independent producer who committed to making it as a star vehicle for his actress wife. Titanic’s Billy Zane, Buffy’s Eliza Dushku, the Limey’s Terence Stamp, and indie-staple Illeana Douglas were soon attached. Against all odds, the thing looked like it was going to get made.

And it did: two days of location shooting in Paris…four more weeks at a soundstage in Culver City, where I caught up with the production…real sets…real crew…real craft services. But when I saw the dailies, the sad truth set in: it was real bad.

Against all hope, I prayed that, when edited and scored, the final product would be great. I’d read about how Annie Hall was a mess until they got it into the editing room…and if it had worked for Woody, why not me?

Alas it was not to be.

So what are the takeaways?

(1) Being a nobody can have its benefits: Gorman and I were paid up-front for the screenplay because we did not have the power to command gross points.

(2) Writers cannot protect their scripts from actors, directors, and producers who are all intent on making the movie their own.

(3) The catering at the soundstage was good, but not as lavish as on the set of the X-Files (according to the stand-in for the lead actress who had performed the similar function for Gillian Anderson).

(4) I wish I were a better screenwriter.

(5) It – the whole process, from the writing of the script to the writing of this post – has been some of the greatest fun I’ve had in my entire life.

Editor’s note: Steve’s film - and those of us who know him always call it “Steve’s film” - has also received more positive reviews, mostly from real people. One film-viewer on Amazon calls it “an absolutely lovely meditation on love, and what love actually means.” Another clearly had the writers in mind: “The storyline was great. Looking for the last chapter of a love story that was written years earlier had fantastic potential. I always enjoys a good romantic movie and this designed to be one.” So there. Who needs real critics at newcritics, anyway!

Under the deft hand of its creator, Frank O. King, however, Gasoline Alley was – at its early 20^th Century start – truly sublime. King’s strip dealt with real stuff in real ways…men’s relationships with their male pals, guys’ fear and lack of understanding of women, the bonds between fathers and sons, and the wanderlust that the advent of automobiles made it possible for the first time in human history for the average Joe to satisfy in a big way. (It was also about the complicated emotions and agendas related to foster care and adoption…but that’s the subject for another post…).

At the time, King’s most heralded breakthrough was that the strip’s characters aged (and have today grown old). From today’s standpoint, in the midst of comics like Doonesbury and For Better or For Worse – both fine strips, by the way – this might not seem like much of an innovation.

But in an era when the Yellow Kid never grew a full head of hair, and Ignatz and Krazy remained their ageless, sexually indeterminate selves, readers were charmed to follow Skeezix from that basket on the doorstep to adulthood. This innovation however, was merely a backdrop against which the characters’ emotions and personalities could grow, become more complex and more genuine, and become subtly more compelling.

Jeet Heer, Chris Oliveros, and Chris Ware have assembled the daily Gasoline Alley strips – not from the very start in 1918, but from when it caught its stride in 1921, the year that foundling Skeezix was mysteriously deposited at ‘Uncle’ Walt’s threshold. They’re publishing the comics, two years at a time, one volume a year – two have been issued so far.

Through the good graces of Frank King’s granddaughter Drewanna, they’ve been granted access to the family archives, which has enabled them to preface each of the books with biographical information that reveals how the personalities and events of the strip paralleled those in King’s own life – the birth of his Robert (three years after a stillborn child), his fascination with cars and cross-country road trips, and his real life friends and family upon whom he based Gasoline Alley’s characters. The collection – as was the original strip, itself – is an act of meticulous love.

Says Ware: “I am convinced that after all these books are published, Gasoline Alley will stand as one of the most individual, hum, and genuinely great works in the history of comics.” Read them, and you’ll be convinced, as well.

Thurber’s different – his short stories (especially those gathered in 1933’s My Life and Hard Times) are as funny today as they must have been when he first wrote them. I’m reminded of this over and over as I’ve read the stories out loud (on demand) over and over during the past five years to my son at bedtime.

Yes, he’s 13 now, and could be reading them to himself, but, let’s face it, the old man does a bang-up job recreating the voices of Thurber’s bewildered and beleaguered father, his senescent and bellicose grandfather, and the omnipresent harbinger of the apocalypse known as “The Get-Ready Man.”

“The Day the Dam Broke”…“The Night the Bed Fell”…“The Night the Ghost Got In” – all stories, by the way, in which none of those events ever really occur – showcase Thurber at the top of his form. Concise, sly, ironic, and, most of all, human.

This, from “The Car We Had To Push,” about his family’s early experiences with automobiles in the 19-teens:

…One of my happiest memories of it [the car] was when, in its eighth year, my brother Roy got together a great many articles from the kitchen, placed them in a square of canvas, and swung this under the car with a string attached to it so that, at a twitch, the canvas would give way and the steel and tin things would clatter to the street. This was a little scheme of Roy’s to frighten father, who had always expected the car might explode. It worked perfectly. That was twenty-five years ago, but it is one of the few things in my life I would like to live over again if I could. I don’t suppose that I can, now. Roy twitched the string in the middle of a love afternoon, on Bryden Road near Eighteenth Street. Father had closed his eyes and, with his hat off, was enjoying a cool breeze. The clatter on the asphalt was tremendously effective: knives, forks, can-openers, pie pans, pot lids, biscuit-cutters, ladles, egg-beaters fell, beautifully together, in a lingering, clamant crash. “Stop the car!” shouted father. “I can’t,” Roy said. “The engine fell out” “God Almighty!” said father, who knew what that meant, or knew what it sounded as if it might mean.

It ended unhappily, of course, because we finally had to drive back and pick up the stuff and even father knew the difference between the works of an automobile and the equipment of a pantry. My mother wouldn’t have known, however, nor her mother. My mother, for instance, thought – or, rather knew – that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves or something. “No don’t you dare drive all over town without gasoline!” she would say to us when we started off.

Maybe Thurber couldn’t relive this, as he wrote it, and he certainly can’t now, being dead more than 40 years. But my son Philip and I relive it – that “lingering, clamant crash” – every few weeks, before I turn off his light and he goes to sleep…hoping, praying, that the bed doesn’t fall.