A Non-Issue To Who?

Re "Skatepark Sabotage" (MetroNews, Feb. 13): As a citizen of Los Gatos for the last 20 years, I am outraged at the small-minded mentality of Vice-Mayor Mike Wasserman.

Vice-Mayor Wasserman showed complete ignorance when he stated, "Nobody knew it wasn't appropriate" to hand over private information of the voters of the opposition. Are we really supposed to believe this? If he doesn't know the law, why is he in a position of such power? Wasserman has also said that it is a non-issue. A non-issue to who? A law was broken here. Wasserman headed up a huge Down on D campaign which consisted of constant blogging, misleading campaign signs and sending letters to all the households in a mass-mailing blitz. By the way, I received one of those misleading mailers signed by Wasserman which had my full legal name, which I don't use. How did the Down on D campaign get my personal information? I think there were other politically motivated dirty tricks used by Mike Wasserman which should be looked into by the District Attorney. I think the "Good Ol' Boys Club of Los Gatos" should be held accountable. Wasserman is not the King of Los Gatos, and I for one am sick of his dirty tricks.

This skatepark was really sabotaged from the beginning by the powers that be in Los Gatos, by hiring the most expensive architect, knowingly portraying an inaccurate cost and using that as their weapon against the citizens whose only desire is to have a safe place to skate.

Interesting timing for a dogpark, do they think they will fool us again?

Laura Lee

Los Gatos

Spoiler Alert

Re your paper's review of my film The End playing next week at Cinequest (Cover Story, Feb. 27): If my career ever amounts to anything, you will be credited with my first bad review in print (I have previously had good reviews, including one for this very film in a respectable paper such as your own—which I have vainly scanned and could send to you if you wish.) I appreciate some of your review, as my work has always been divisive to audiences, and when put intelligently, as your review does, I know that my work has been given fair deliberation, which I can only grudgingly thank you for (as can your readership). But again, my vanity must prevail, and I am compelled to draw attention to two points which bother me: First, I wish that you wouldn't have revealed quite as much as you did; The End is presented as a thriller (faux indeed, but the audience should still be entitled to the fun of ignorance), and if the fact that halfway in "Joseph'" discovers he's a character in this film isn't deemed a surprise worth concealing, surely you would at least give me the surprise of Joseph finding the film's script itself.—or at least printing "SPOILER ALERT."

Secondly, a critic as film-literate as yourself must also understand that in the micro-budget film scene, wheels move slowly as few people must wrangle many resources often for no money (which is slow to gather in the first place). With that said, the first draft of The End was written and presented to my collaborators well before the release of Adaptation, when such ideas felt kind of fresh and exciting. Obviously Charlie Kaufman, whose movie Adaptation I promise you I have never seen, thought so. And why haven't I seen this modern masterpiece (or others like it)? Simply because as movies such as it, or Stranger than Fiction (which opened after the first screening on The End in Canada), surfaced, I came to the excruciating realization that my somewhat original work would be greeted less as fresh, and more as a passe imitation. Indeed, anything unsatisfying about my motion picture is the accomplishment of my lonesome, unfettered and uninfluenced by the likes of these modern filmmakers. (In theater, this genre is older than Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. In cinema, The End can mostly be paralleled to Samuel Beckett's Film starring Buster Keaton (which is referred to in The End).

Alas, I can't blame the noble and seasoned critic for calling them as (s)he sees 'em. Ultimately, better movies will arise because of such good criticism. I can only scream into my pillow one more time—time, and its neighbor culture, fly by too fast when your trying to make a movie.

Jeremy Thomas

Calgary, Alberta

Canada

Cult Research

I read with interest the "Silicon Alleys" column by Metro writer Gary Singh, titled "The Tiffany Files" (Jan. 23). While Jeffrey Deane Turner's assertions will seem bizarre and even outright zany to many, I actually looked into some of his striking assertions. Circa 1996-1997, I made copies of the Homestead High School yearbook photos of the alleged Process Church "cult priestess," and also inquired (without success) with detectives with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department and with the office of the County Grand Jury. An important assertion Turner makes is that the Grand Jury and the District Attorney's office conducted an ongoing investigation into the criminal activities of the "cult priestess" in the seventies.

In the wake of my research, my roommates received a number of anonymous phone calls in which menacing death threats were directed at me. I was soon evicted from the house at the insistence of the landlord, who cited the dangers posed to her family by my undisclosed research into a satanic cult.

Douglas Hawes

San Jose

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