"I thought I'd move out to Las Vegas..."

Got a comment this afternoon from one Erin O'Brien, promoting her story in the Cleveland Free Times as "the real story behind Leaving Las Vegas."

At first I couldn't figure out why--because she left it on the "foxes" post, which didn't have anything to do with LLV --although I certainly could have included Elisabeth Shue (O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties...)


Then I realized she must've done a "Yahoo" search or somethin' for the title, and wound up at this blog (the film is listed in my profile).

As I think most of you know, Leaving Las Vegas is one of my favorite films. I consider it a beautifully sad movie about slow death (or, "what Roger Ebert said").

I know a little about the man who wrote the novel on which it was based (which I have read), the late John O'Brien, but not everything.

I do know that the lyrics of Sheryl Crow's hit of the same name were written, according to most reports, by David Baewald drawing from friend O'Brien's novel.

Something Crow has choosen not to mention on more than one occasion, in favor of some vague palaver about how Vegas in the song is a metaphor for L.A.

But anyway: Ms. O'Brien is John O'Brien's sister. Her story is a good memory piece, a short excerpt of which follows:

JOHN'S LIFE was peppered with periods of sobriety. Sometimes he would talk about the delirium tremens, which posed unimaginable horror for him. He muses at length on this topic in The Assault on Tony's, in scenes and exposition based on John's own DT episodes. He once recounted one of them to our mother: during the last moments before he surfaced from the live-action nightmare, everything stopped at once. Then an angelic female voice pierced the blackness, crystalline and sweet.

"We've lost you," she lilted, "but we'll get you back."