Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir of Desire

In the years immediately following his Academy Award nomination for Philadelphia, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner fell through the rabbit hole. This gripping, intimate, and darkly comic memoir chronicles this period in his life, a period where a raging drug addiction collided with an obsessive and almost fatal love affair. A wrong turn down a one-way street in the shadow of the Sunset Strip's Chateau Marmont leads Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner on a journey that will nearly drown him in the intoxicating, impulsive, maddening, tragic, and transformative nature of love. Despite the success of his latest film, Ron has been fighting depression and contemplating self-destruction. ''I don't want a mediocre, empty life,'' he tells his psychiatrist-acupuncturist-herbalist after halfheartedly attempting to hang himself with a belt. Then, on a trip from his home in upstate New York to Los Angeles, Ron meets and falls for world-weary Johann, a Latin-quoting, leather-clad hustler with a vague, European accent. In the next year Johann will teach him many things: how to make a crack pipe out of a soda can, how to come down from a crystal meth binge, how to walk down a city street as if he owns it, how to beg in Hungarian, and how to lose oneself utterly in reckless passion. If he can survive it, loving Johann might be Ron's salvation. This new edition of the memoir offers an introduction by acclaimed filmmaker Jonathan Demme and added epilogue by the author.