In the 1987 movie Moonstruck, Nic Cage explains to Cher our purpose on earth: 'We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.'
Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner lived much of the 1990s according to that philosophy. But then he went one step further: he wrote about it.
Blue Days, Black Nights (Advocate Books) is a memoir of the romantic obsession, drug addiction and suicide attempts that marked the Oscar-nominated (for Jonathan Demme's 1993 film Philadelphia) screenwriter's life. It is also an elegy for a sexy, charming hustler named Johann, whom Nyswaner loved, and whom he gladly followed into a hellish year-long romance with crystal meth.
The genesis of Blue Days, Black Nights began in 1998, a year after Nyswaner had lost Johann. 'I was still trembling with grief,' he said. 'I was just exploring ways of trying to heal from this.' The first halting steps towards catharsis came from a local theater company which Nyswaner belongs to, called Artists & Writers. The group, composed of locals and New york professionals, performs pieces in the Mid-Hudson valley, where Nyswaner makes his home. At one of their public events, Nyswaner performed a 15-minute monologue recalling his impassioned dance of self-sabotage with Johann. The material was too raw for some, who rose from their seats and left.
A fellow troupe member suggested the stage was not the proper medium for such harrowing material; Nyswaner should channel his memories into a book. He began working with a local writers group to reimagine the tale.
But mere psychoanalysis on paper was not his goal.
'I really believe in shaping material as art,' Nyswaner said. 'That's really a writer's obligation. I don't believe in writing as a confessional. I'm not interested in writing that is a substitute for therapy.'
'You will never find Ron Nyswaner in the self-help section of any bookstore,' he added. 'That will never happen.'
Blue Days, Black Nights attains poetic heights in retelling a tale that would normally elicit disdain. Nyswaner recounts a year with Johann, a man he meets in a Los Angeles bar. From the start, Johann is as intriguing as he is emotionally unavailable. Nyswaner, recently separated from a longterm lover, is fascinated. Their relationship is a monetary one, but over time the rapport yields unexpected moments of affection. Hustler and john share time in New York, Key West and Las Vegas, Nyswaner dipping repeatedly into his Hollywood earnings to buy time with Johann. They hole up in hotel rooms for days of drugs, sex and occasional self-discovery, suggesting a meth-powered version of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. At times, Nyswaner strains for lyricism in his account; while obsessive love may be universal, an obsessive drug-fueled affair with a male prostitute is not. But ultimately, the story moves us. When Johann is suddenly killed, the reader is genuinely saddened. Not because we have grown to love this maddening cipher of a man, but because Nyswaner does, and his mourning possesses a fragile eloquence.
Blue Days, Black Nights is toughest on its author, who recounts the years of drugging which preceded the year with Johann. While snorting cocaine around the globe, falling off barstools and paying for sex seem like occupational hazards for the typical Hollywood screenwriter, Nyswaner insists that his demons sprang from within.
'Oddly enough, my drug addictions were completely removed from my Hollywood career. I did not snort cocaine with Hollywood hotshots.' By day, he was 'sitting in meetings, drinking Evian water and wearing Armani suits and trying to get jobs and impress people.' At night, drug binges and surreptitious sexual encounters reflected a yearning to commune with 'something that was much darker, much more dangerous'.
Maintaining such a punishing pace usually earns you little more than a hasty obit in the back pages of The Hollywood Reporter. But Nyswaner was resourceful.
'I really think that my good fortune in my career was a great enabler of my drug addiction and my alcoholism,' he said. Because the money was plentiful, he never hit rock-bottom. Moreover, as a wordsmith, Nyswaner could sweet-talk his way out of any conflicts. He once awoke to find himself in a small local hospital. Yet Nyswaner was able to convince the hospital staff to discharge him, by simply flaunting his credentials as an Oscar-nominated screenwriter—albeit one who had just attempted suicide by overdose. 'I just talked myself right past the social worker, right past the police, right past the triage nurse.'
From the start of his career in Hollywood, Nyswaner had fanciful notions that he would be openly gay and churn out screenplays with a social conscience. Anyone else might have been quickly dissuaded from this such naivete. But Nyswaner has been able to maintain his idealism. For one, he never played inside the vast Hollywood closet. Soon after the film Philadelphia debuted in 1993, Nyswaner toured the country to remind people the AIDS epidemic was far from over. Last year, his script for Soldier's Girl was turned into a powerful Showtime movie about the fatal consequences of the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy. Nyswaner used media interviews to rail against anti-gay military policies and worked with national groups seeking to overturn the laws.
Now, with the arrival of Blue Days, Black Nights, Nyswaner will ascend the soapbox again, speaking out about the gay community's crystal meth addiction, which doctors have dubbed 'the second epidemic'. 'I think I'm going to address that issue in a very personal way,' he said. 'Simply by relating my utter despair and degradation that crystal methamphetamine and the rest of my drug addictions took me to.'
Whether the book draws public attention or not, Nyswaner has been strengthened by the mere act of writing it.
Even in our tell-all society, where personal demons become standard talk-show fare, Nyswaner's candor is unsparing, unsettling. But in writing Blue Days, Black Nights he was able to memorialize Johann, as well as confront a past he needed to move beyond. Seven years later, he is drug-free, in a successful relationship and working on a movie adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel The Painted Veil. Completing the book, he said, has freed the writer from the very last closet he'd been hiding in.
'Every time I've taken a step to be more genuine in my life, I have been happier.'
