![]() Michels’s manner is meditative to illustrate his points, he draws slow circles in the air. He looks uncannily like Barry Landes, the psychiatrist on “24,” who was patterned on him by Howard Gordon, an executive producer on the show and a former patient. Michels is fifty-seven and trim, with a clipped beard surrounding his mouth and silver hair that ripples back in waves from a high forehead. If he could expose himself to his wife and really let go, I knew he’d be able to speak publicly.” He hands out three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like “ THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.” His starting rate is three hundred and sixty dollars an hour. “He had to learn to make more passionate love to his wife. “I had one guy who was terrified of public speaking,” Michels says. Their brand of therapy is heavily prescriptive and not always intuitive. “They say that the dreams will tell you what to do, and that’s bullshit.” Instead, he and Michels tell their patients what to do. “The Jungians I’ve always been uncomfortable with, because they kind of drift,” Stutz says. Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, he and Phil Stutz, a psychiatrist who is his mentor, have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry. Michels, in the words of a former patient, is an “open secret” in Hollywood. Six months after that, the script was shot, and when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award. Six weeks later, he had a hundred-and-sixty-five-page script. He went to his computer, which was on a folding table in a corner of the room, and began to write a scene. Michels told him to keep doing it.Ī few weeks later, the writer was startled from his sleep by a voice: it sounded like a woman talking at a dinner party. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Barry Michels tells his clients that success in the movie industry can entail confronting their darker selves.
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