A new wrinkle has come up. With time running out before Mel Gibson's option expires and the financing collapses, Gary Oldman has

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announced his condition for playing Tom-Tom: the film must be di­rected by his great friend Phil Joanou. Sean Penn has weighed in, too, with the opinion that no one has ever given a bad performance in a Joanou film. Bono's balancing act is getting more and more difficult. Winona says she is willing to work with Oldman again, putting aside whatever tension developed over Dracula, but now Gibson must agree to use Joanou. And Gibson didn't even want to hear Joanou's name.

The stink made by the flop of Final Analysis has really soured Holly­wood on Phil. But there may be subterranean forces at work too. Rightly or wrongly, Joanou believes that Richard Gere, the star of that movie, has unfairly blamed him all over town for its failure and told people throughout his powerful circle not to work with the director. Phil says that half the things that are now cited as reasons the movie failed are things Gere asked for, but now the actor has put all the blame on him. Joanou's afraid that the fix is in, but that's impossible to prove in the town of "You scratch my back and I'll stab yours." This much, though, is clear: Mel Gibson has the same agent as Richard Gere, and Gibson has said that if Phil is in, he is out.

Phil's position has been, "Just get me a lunch with Mel and let me talk to him, just let me make my case." Bono has prevailed on Gibson to meet Joanou for lunch and give him a chance to talk. If Phil can't convince Mel to give him a shot, Bono's only option would be to convince Oldman to drop Phil—which would be ugly. Bono is hoping hard that Phil charms Mel into submission.

After striking out in our quest for eggs in restaurants from East Hollywood to Beverly Hills, we end up in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bono hesitates before going in. He reminds T-Bone of the time they were ejected from the hotel restaurant, along with Edge and Kris Kristofferson, because of their shabby clothes. Bono said, "Look, how about if you ignore the jeans and we ignore the bad fake impres­sionist paintings?" A minute later the four of them landed on the sidewalk.

Once in the coffee shop, Bono launches into a dialogue with T-Bone —another Christian intellectual in the Thomas Merton/C. S. Lewis/ Billy Sol Estes tradition—about art, faith, and the nature of knowledge. (Hey—don't let me keep you; skip ahead to Mexico if you want.) Bono says that when U2 hooked up with Eno they were modernists because they wanted to write songs and make records no one had ever made

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before. With Achtung Baby they have entered their postmodern phase because they are combining new with old, grabbing references from other rock eras, while trying to move the whole thing forward. Bono says that he had to stop and ask himself after Rattle and Hum why he had wanted to be in a band to begin with. "Was it to save the world? I don't think so. To be honest it was probably because I saw Mark Bolan on Top of the Pops." So he began trying to get back to that essence while experi­menting with new sounds.

Bono is quick to admit that many of his ideas are instinctive, not intellectual—he does not have the time to be rigorous in researching or testing them. One of the theories that gets him into great arguments is that he believes that modernism started with Luther, with the Reforma­tion, with the dismantling of the iconography of the culture and insis­tence on simplicity and function. Bono says he initially followed the modernist trail back to the Shakers. Then he got Frank Barsalona, who had a collection of Shaker furniture, to put him in touch with an authority who confirmed Bono's guess that the Shakers were influenced by European ideas and the Bauhaus movement was in turn influenced by the Shakers. Bono is convinced that all this stripping down and direct­ness goes back to the Protestant impulse, back to Luther, and that the modernists made the great mistake of taking on the antireligion of the existentialists and lost that thread. (It's one of the wonders of Bono's considerable intellect that he can construct a unified field theory of all his interests—even when they have nothing to do with each other.)

Bono's collaborator on The Million Dollar Hotel, Nicholas Klein, is a metaphysicist who uses logic vigorously applied to map out the future. Bono finds a scriptural colloquy for every equation his friend comes up with. For example, Klein offered the proposition: "Independence is the opposite of love." Bono was taken aback by that idea but followed it through and decided it was the essence of God's problem with Satan. Isn't it the desire for independence that pulls marriages apart? Doesn't a parent's overwhelming love for a dependent child often sour at the moment that child becomes independent?

Like an old Jesuit, Bono believes God can be found through pure logic. Look at the word for "The Word" in St. John's gospel: Logos. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was Logos. In the begin­ning was Logic.

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