For my daughter's eighth birthday, she's decided she wants to take one friend - "just one, Mom, it's easier that way" - to a taping of her dad's Nickelodeon show. We will have a drive-on pass at Paramount, be toted around in the show golf cart, escorted backstage, probably sing happy birthday with a flavor-of-the-month teen icon or two. Just like my mom would occasionally take us to visit my dad at the junior high school where he was grading papers, I occasionally take S to her dad's work, which just happens to be on a show he created for Nickelodeon. Until several months ago, we were both unemployed writers struggling through the apathy of the industry. My husband, at least in this moment, has a true magic Hollywood story. He gives all our friends hope.
Yesterday we had a playdate with a five year old who spoke into his play telephone about the zombie movie he's making, telling another five year old (apparently, his business partner) that they were going to have to "push the release date. We wanted it for Christmas, but we're going to have to move it back to Valentine's Day." So believable was his conversation I almost broke in and advised him to re-think the V-Day release, as Zombie Slicers didn't sound like such a great date movie. Maybe wait til Spring break? "Wait a second, you don't have a movie! You're a Five Year Old!" An L.A. five year old.
When I was on the cusp of eight years old, I eschewed the big birthday party with homemade twister board based on theme of unicorns or rainbows or Wizard of Oz - my mom's wheelhouse was themed birthday parties in the basement - for a trip to the movies with a few girl friends. We saw Annie. I had seen the Broadway show too, somehow convincing my opera-fanatic parents to tolerate the nasal belting whine of an 11-year-old who would decades later deeply amuse her same audience, now well into our 30s, as Carrie Bradshaw. Come to think of it, Sarah Jessica Parker has great symbolism in my life: she was a young Broadway star when I was dreaming of being a child actress, the geeky star of Square Pegs right when I was entering awkward brace-face adolescence, Carrie Bradshaw when I'd just moved to L.A. and was trying on fashion, fabulousness, seeing what it felt like to wear tight sparkly Betsy Johnson pants, order cosmos, and go to movie premieres. I can't really find the parallels in my 20s with Honeymoon in Vegas or the other forgettable movies she did, except perhaps for the fact that her mid-career and my 20s both have a hazy, unsuccessful fog around them. I didn't see her last movie - How Does She Do It? or whatever the name of that book-turned-movie piece of crap that served only to make women who can't do it all (read: all women) feel shitty whether they are stay-at-home moms, insecure about their worth, or full-time working moms, guilty over not being enough. I think that was the premise of the book/movie, yet because this is Hollywood, I know it ends with her finding the perfect balance, the perfect job that allows her to be a present mom who makes gourmet meals for her husband and still have a satisfying work life. Fuck that noise.
It was a big deal to take a few friends to the four-plex movie theater in our suburban New Jersey town. My family didn't really go to the movies except maybe to see a deeply inappropriate (not to mention tedious) version of the opera Don Giovanni at an art house on the Upper West Side. A huge treat was a showing of Star Wars the day it rained on our yearly vacation on the beach in Maine (which would be sacrificed by the time I turned 11 to yearly vacation trips to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival).
Opera, Shakespeare festivals, museums: yes. Television twice a week: one Yankee game and the Sunday night showing of Monty Python, yes. But movies? Not so much. We were not a movie family, save a drive-in double feature from time to time of Pink Panther and early Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run era). My parents imagined that my brother and I would be fast asleep in the pile of blankets in the back of the VW Squareback before the Woody Allen movie began, but I always stayed up, riveted, my chin perched on the row of back seats. We had to stop going to the drive-in when they switched from piping the sound through those crackelly CB radio receiver things perched on your window to a station on your car radio. We didn't have a car radio.
When VCRs emerged in my early teens, I discovered movies. Films. Cinema. I remember the first time I saw Spinal Tap in Marcia Teusink's living room. We were 13. It was the most revelatory 82 minutes of my young life. I would never live without comedy again. At 15 my friends and I snuck into the city to see Syd and Nancy, then somehow cross-wired our sleepovers so we could see a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the 8th Street Playhouse without our parents having any idea. My first semester of college is marked by a winter break spent with my best guy friend engaging in a "DeNiro Fest," sitting in my parents' basement, forcing ourselves through everything from Mean Streets to New York, New York. Cringing through Deer Hunter, staring in disbelief at Taxi Driver. These are movies? People make these? These exist? Spike Lee rocked my world, then Singleton's Boyz in the Hood, then Thelma and Louise.
Post-college I moved to New York, and night after night as I walked home from my job in the East Village I'd stop at the sticky-seated, cleanser-scented 13th street quad to see whatever was playing. By myself. I grew up in the dark, discovering festivals of kink, tributes to gay auteurs, short films by young black filmmakers: all these people exist; all these worlds are out there. The Public Theater, where I worked, still had a little movie theater, run by an old film buff with a thick Italian accent, who'd lasted through several administrations, one of the original Joe Papp crew. He'd pop by the box office and tell me to come by after work, to make sure not to miss the Bernado Bertolucci festival or the first showing of My Beautiful Launderette. I sat in the darkened theater alone, jaw dropped, eyes wide, skin on fire. This exists?
I just read yet another New Yorker article about how impossible it is to make any movie that is not a blockbuster, that won't play in the "foreign market," that isn't part of a franchise. The articles are relentless and though one might ostensibly be about Ben Stiller and the next about a reformed gang member in the Sundance Film Lab, they all end up being about audience testing and sellability. They all leave me with the same apathetic, depressed, who-cares feeling. When my friend and I circulated a screenplay we wrote earlier this year, the notes on structure and relationships were addressable, helpful. I would have been excited to address those, if the notes on the industry hadn't made me want to go back to bed far far away from L.A. My old manager at Brillstein-Grey actually said, "this screenplay would have been pretty easy to sell, the movie would even have been made several years ago just on the strength of the writing. Smart. Funny. Now it needs to be attached to someone who is already box-office proven and even then...unless you're Judd Apatow..." "Well, um, I'm not."
Back home, under covers, or more likely, back to the stuff that isn't so depressing: build S's school, plan our move out of Hollywood, do some low-paid but real freelance writing, help someone out, troll real estate listings far from here. I wonder if the people who are not disheartened by notes like that and New Yorker articles like those ever loved movies like I did. I wonder if the ability to see art as commerce from the get-go makes it a lot easier to be successful. I wonder if I was ruined by those heart-pounding moments in the 13th street quad when I didn't know that the funding for those type of independent movies was drying up and usually came from rich parents anyway. One of my best friends back in those Public Theater days had graduated from NYU film school with a girl who made an iconic if simplistic lesbian film. When I mentioned how much I enjoyed that film, he grimaced. What? He told me how rich she was, how bankrolled, how her story about making it despite all the odds was bullshit. How the odds were always in her favor. He was barely thirty and so bitter, so done. Right when I headed out to LA, my first pilot in hand, he found a job writing copy for a bank, found his joy in yoga and a lovely boyfriend, a lovely life. I always felt sad that he hadn't pursued filmmaking. Now I feel a sense of relief. He chose a happy life. He chose a life.
I wonder how my almost eight year old will feel about the business of making movies. Having spent her early years in LA with an industry-tinted family, will she understand the commerce of it on a cellular level? Unlike her five-year-old friend, she never discusses pretend release dates with pretend collaborators. She did, however, recently say it would be fun to make movies, "but just for my friends. I don't want anyone to tell me how I need to make the movies. I just want to do what I want." Amen, sister. Too bad it's not the early 90s. I think she must've heard Jon and I bitching about network notes. I think she is already clear that she does not want to waste her life having those kinds of conversations. She must sense my disgust with the way it all works out here. She knows I'm champing at the bit to move to a small town back east. She knows there's something about this world that makes my skin crawl. She knows Hollywood has left me soul-sucked and sad even as TV pays our mortgage. And she knows I still love movies.
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