Arguing About Iran at the Staples Center

We didn't win the battle and the war is getting hotter

    

Roger and my recollections of working on “Keys to Paradise” do not vary.  It was an intense experience from start to finish and looking back, every bit as perplexing and frustrating as it was in real time.  I do, however, have a few additional memories to share.

     In 2007, Iran was most commonly identified as one member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil.”  That phrase embarrassed a lot of Democrats and liberals, which considering the regime’s vicious treatment of women, should have been a wakeup call for the rest of us that willful blindness was the greatest threat to our Republic.

     One of the Iranian refugees we interviewed, a woman who had fled as a youngster with her mother post revolution, recounted an incident so disturbing we didn’t use it in our screenplay.  As many of you know, pre-revolutionary Tehran was about as Western as any European capital.  Plenty, if not the majority, of women there were every bit as outspoken, in some cases because of the culture of the Middle East, even more so than many of their peers in Europe.

    Most students at Tehran University in the mid to late seventies looked, dressed and behaved very much like students at American colleges.  They were duped, as has been happening in our academia for decades, into joining the revolutionary cause, only to discover almost immediately afterwards, that the promise of equality was not just a lie, but the very opposite.  They had participated in their own enslavement.

    During the violent toppling of the Shah, Tehran University was temporarily closed as the city was a battlefield.  It re-opened shortly after the Ayatollah declared victory and announced the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  But there were as we recounted in the screenplay, some big changes, not just to what was being taught, but also to the dress code.  Female students had no choice but to put on chadors, or they weren’t allowed to enter the campus.  So they did.  But these were young, liberated college students.  Young women accustomed to wearing makeup, jewelry, tight jeans, short skirts, whatever was in fashion, whatever they wanted.  So the chador was just a cloak.  Beneath it, they continued dressing as they always had, their entire lives.

     The Ayatollah had other plans.  Our courageous dissident advisor told us that within weeks, female members of the Basiji were positioned as guards at the gates of the university.  They would pull aside female students entering campus and swipe a white cloth over their faces to determine if they were wearing makeup.  This would happen randomly on city streets as well.  Sometimes, these Basiji hid razor blades in the cloth, so when they swiped it across a girl’s or woman’s face, it would slash and disfigure them.  That was what it was like going to school as a female in the newly created Islamic Republic of Iran.

     By 2007, I’d been working in Hollywood for almost two decades so I was accustomed to being the only woman in the room for many meetings, as a writer and before that, what they called a development executive, or in the unPC jargon of the time, a D-girl.  What I was not accustomed to, however, and found particularly ironic, given the nature of the project we were working on, was to be pretty much ignored, as if I wasn’t really there.  The shocking forced submission of women and removal of their basic civil liberties was arguably the most disturbing aspect of the regime and of radical Islam.  Yet that didn’t seem to be uppermost in the minds of Senator Santorum and crew.  He expressed displeasure (and I would argue a profound misreading of the story) at what he thought was our vilification of devout believers and making the culturally reformed Muslims the heroes.  I wondered darkly and probably unfairly, why he wanted to make the movie or if he even did.

     Our final discussion, long before the era of Zoom or even Skype, was an evening conference call, that remains more memorable to me because of where I was than what was said.  By this stage in the process, we knew that the project was most likely dead, that Senator Santorum didn’t like the screenplay or its writers, and this was going to be a last ditch attempt to understand what he didn’t like, why, and perhaps, miraculously, find common ground and inch forward.

     Typically, Roger and I would have been together on the call, at home, on a speaker phone.  But on this particular night, I was at the Staples Center watching a WNBA game with our 8 year old daughter, a group of her female classmates, their moms, and their beloved PE teacher, Sherry, who was an OG big time Sparks fan.  This was an all girls trip, once again, ironically enough, given the nature of the story we’d be discussing on the call.  And it was LA, 2007, not just a horrible season for the Sparks, but well into the by then very unpopular Iraq war and the deepening of political division in our country.

     Roger and I were in the thick of that growing chasm, as he has written about extensively.  I was doing my best to straddle both sides, trying to maintain relationships with just about all our friends and relations, teachers, colleagues, the parents of our daughter’s classmates, many of whom had become our good friends, and just about all of whom were, as we had been, Democrats, liberals, whatever you want to call it, but absolutely not, (the horror!) Republicans.

     So I wasn’t in the optimal place to take a call for a story meeting with Senator Rick Santorum, who to them, might as well have been Jerry Falwell.  And their paranoia upon learning that he was involving himself in the movie business (and I was participating) would have caused a game stopping eruption in the stands.  It wouldn’t matter to them that we were too “liberal” after all for the senator, and were about to get into a shouting match with him about fundamentalism and the Enlightenment.  It was a scene to be avoided, especially in front of our children.

     So I excused myself a few minutes before the call, and wandered out into the vast and deserted main concourse.  Almost none of the concessions were open, as they would have been during a Lakers or Kings match, because in 2007, Caitlin Clark was five, younger than my daughter and her classmates, and the only reason the Sparks were playing at the Staples Center was because Jerry Buss had owned them as a sister team to the Lakers until the previous year.  Lucky for me as I plopped myself down on the ground against a concrete pillar, a far enough distance away from the entrance to our seating section that even the echoes of our heated argument wouldn’t make it that far.

     I really don’t remember much of the call, except that it went on for a long time, and though Roger argued more than I did, I too raised my voice on multiple occasions.  It was upsetting and depressing and disillusioning in many ways and for many reasons.  It felt to me then that the West was a long way from winning any kind of war with Radical Islam.  I went back to my seat to join the other moms doing something we all agreed on, encouraging and supporting women’s sports.  It never crossed my mind that too might someday tear us apart.