If you view learning as a lifelong project, not just delegated to your school years, it becomes obvious fairly early on that the “history books” leave out more than they include. Why do some people “make it” into the history books – and onto syllabi – and others don’t? Who makes those calls and why?

Julia Cooke’s new book Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World examines the lives and work of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily “Mickey” Hahn, three adventurous writers who worked as war correspondents in an era when almost no women were on the front lines. They were solo travelers, novelists, memoirists, and restless spirits who never stayed in one spot for long. West has long been one of my inspirations, not just for her rightly famous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (which I carried with me on my recent trip to Croatia), but for her writings on treason and justice (she covered the Nuremberg trial, for example). Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway for seven years, but her writing career spanned six decades. She covered virtually every global conflict from the Spanish Civil War in 1937-1938 to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1990. Emily Hahn traveled alone through the Belgian Congo. She moved to Shanghai, where she palled around with spies, black marketeers, and the Soong sisters. She wrote books about all of it.

Starry and Restless centralizes these women and their contributions to journalism. Yes, it is unfair that many jobs were unavailable to women. But when you look at what these women did (stowing away on boats to get to a war front, sneaking across borders, trekking through jungles on their own and against advice) … the narrative calls the rules into question. Asking for “a seat at the table” is a necessary step but the more radical approach is: “That table sucks. Let’s make our own.”

In her poem “Oft Rebuked” Emily Brontë declares:

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.

Life might have been simpler for West, Gellhorn and Hahn if they had been able to submit to other “guides” (society, peers, men, even their children). We are lucky these women wrote so much and so well.

I met up with Julia Cooke to discuss all of this and more.

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Martha Gellhorn

JULIA COOKE: I have theories about why these women have slipped off the record. They were unruly. Their energies were dispersed. They never specialized. And yet, another thing is … they were not interested in their own legacies. Whereas the male journalists were crafting personas for public consumption, becoming celebrities. These women did not engage in that.

SHEILA O’MALLEY: Why do you think this is?

JC: For women, there’s a lack of an archetype for the world traveler, beyond the blue-stockinged rich woman on a grand tour. We have so limited of a vision of what travel for a woman looks like, and it keeps this whole realm of people from being put into one cohesive cohort. They’re hiding in plain sight. I can’t be the first one to understand they were a cohort. We were raised by Boomers who legit thought they invented this shit. And Rebecca West’s generation was arguably the first. And there were women before them.

Nellie Bly, the most famous of the “stunt girl” journalists of the late 19th and early 20th century, who ushered in a new type of full-immersion journalism with “stunts” like Bly’s trip around the world in 1889-1890.

SOM: A lot of the shit Rebecca West got was from other women. The stories she told about her fellow suffragettes!

JC: There’s an idea I explore in the book that Rebecca West had the complex loyalties of actual sisterhood, not fake girl-power sisterhood. I wrote an op-ed piece about Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. They exemplify this idea. It is not reflexive solidarity. It is about taking each other seriously. Rebecca West is hard to classify, in part, because she rejected girlboss sisterhood. She took women seriously.

Martha Gellhorn, D-day landing, 1944: Imperial War Museum

SOM: Mickey Hahn was new to me.

JC: She’s new to everyone.

SOM: Why did you pick these three women?

JC: I wanted a person with a full arc of a career. This automatically discounted a number of women who were serious about their writing, like Virginia Cowles, but who shifted gears or gave it up. I wanted the persistence of travel. I wanted women who never stopped feeling like the world was big, and that they wanted be out in it. I wanted to like their writing.

Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn covering the Spanish Civil War.

SOM: I’m reading Martha Gellhorn’s war dispatches now, and her hatred of war is so visceral, I’m surprised she didn’t give it up.

JC: Martha Gelhorn’s moral insight is peerless. Her writing is a combination of observation and moral clarity. We now understand this to be good journalism, but putting it into context for back then … picking those details and elevating them to importance was remarkable. Mickey was allergic to cliche and emotionality, and yet she was very aware of emotion. She found a way to write about her love for her daughter without being maudlin. In China to Me, there’s a wonderful section where she juxtaposes a letter she wrote to her mother, saying, “Mom, I’m staying in China” and a phone call to her daughter’s nursery school. Layering these two things is a masterclass in how to acknowledge emotion without being sentimental.

Mickey Hahn

SOM: It seems like Mickey was just naturally a rebel and outlaw.

JC: It took a long time to figure out what to include, what to leave out, because Mickey’s life was so incredible.

SOM: She looked like a movie star. What formed her?

JC: Her mother was a suffragette who worked outside the home. Mickey always said her childhood was unfashionably happy, as if it was a handicap for a writer. What formed her was just getting out there and exploring. She sought out experience. She formed herself.

Mickey Hahn and her daughter

SOM: As someone who never really checked off the boxes women are still supposed to check off, Mickey is inspiring to me. Is there a personal element in all of this for you?

JC: It is personal for me. These women fixed me in some way. I obviously identify with different elements of their stories, which is not strictly what a biographer should do, and I’m okay with that. I want to bring these women to the reader. I feel strongly that my life is different because of these women. This is where I get doctrinaire feminist because it makes me sad. These women are not taught in journalism programs. I paid how much money for a Colombia MFA and never read these women?

SOM: It’s infuriating.

Rebecca West

JC: I took the party line from Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese — who were putting out anthologies praising themselves and other “New Journalists” and maybe including Joan Didion. I’m sorry, but you want to talk about being a stylist? Rebecca West did it first. I was watching the George Plimpton documentary, and there’s a frame where he’s credited with starting participatory journalism. Nellie Bly did it before all of you were born. The stunt girls of journalism got there first.

SOM: Two male writers introduced me to Rebecca West: Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the preface to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and Robert Kaplan, whose Balkan Ghosts was about his travels through the Balkans, following in West’s footsteps, literally. People like Paul Theroux and Bill Buford and Robert Kaplan – all of them clock Rebecca as a huge influence. Leaving these women out of the story of American journalism is not an accident. It’s a choice.

Rebecca West

JC: If you think about it on a structural level, you can say, “Of course these women were doing exactly what these men claimed to be doing much later, but they did it earlier because they were outsiders.” They had to view things from an outsider’s lens. The stunt girls were stunt girls because they were girls, and the prohibitions on what they could do. Participatory journalism meant a woman could do anything. It’s maddening to have men erase them 80 years later.

SOM: It was interesting when you said Hahn, West, and Gellhorn are left off syllabi because they weren’t trying to create a legacy. It’s not that they didn’t have egos. Rebecca West had an ego.

JC: Mickey Hahn had an ego. You don’t publish 40 books without an ego.

SOM: As you said, it’s almost a plus when you’re not in the boys club.

Martha Gellhorn with the Fifth Army, Cassino, Italy, February 13, 1944. Photo by Lieutenant Gade. Courtesy Imperial War Museums © IWM NA 11895.

JC: Rebecca West was her own club. Of all these three, Martha was the one who most wanted to be in that club. You can feel her desire for approval. Mickey Hahn did not give a shit. The boys club was boring to her. It’s worth noting, too, that Mickey, more than Rebecca and Martha, struggled with mental health. This is where it gets murky. I wanted to know more about her postpartum depression, but it is nowhere on the record. I think the war in Hong Kong pulled her out of the baby blues, but when she had Amanda, she was in England and Mickey didn’t know what she was doing with her life.

SOM: Late in life, Rebecca West gave a classic interview with Paris Review. She says, “My son’s harassment of me is ruining my life.”

Rebecca West

JC: I think about this a lot. I live a much more conventional life than these women did. I live in a small town in Vermont, I love my children, but I feel that tension. I would love to have a big cinematic life, like they did, but I feel more of a domestic urge than they did. And so to me, it’s about creating space for both of these things to exist. I had an interesting conversation with Lauren Sandler, the journalist. It was powerful when she said she feels guilt sometimes about leading a slightly cozier life, prioritizing friendship and parenting in a different way than these women did. I wish we wouldn’t do that to ourselves.

Martha Gellhorn with a Chinese soldier, on assignment for Collier’s. China, 1941.

SOM: Ultimately, the three women you wrote about paid prices for their unconventionality. But … they just seemed to not care about the conventions.

JC: I think some people are born with the need to travel, to keep moving. The world is such a big place and Rebecca, Martha, and Mickey were three restless people who wanted to go out and see it for themselves.

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Starry and Restless publication date February 24, 2026.

“I am not who I am, and I am who I am not.” -- Michael Cimino, 2002

Beware theatre elders reminiscing about how great everything was “back in the day”. Back in the olden days, New York was affordable. Off-off-Broadway flourished. Ticket prices were reasonable. New York isn’t what it once was, not because the talent isn’t there, but because the city has changed. Nostalgia is toxic if it drowns the past in amber. What about now? What about the future?

Adult Film, a theatre company based in Bushwick, has been facing these challenges head-on.

Ryan Czerwonko

Ryan Czerwonko was dissatisfied with not just the opportunities afforded him but the work he saw being done. Ryan longed for an ensemble, similar to the Group Theatre in the 1930s, or what Nikos Psacharopoulos did at the Williamstown Theater Festival. And so Ryan set out to create the utopia he longed for. Adult Film was born. Ryan taught acting classes, and the small ensemble put up festivals of one-acts and short films, using the Bushwick brownstone where Ryan and his roommates live as a theatre space. (In 2022, I attended one of these festivals, where the short film I wrote, July and Half of August, was screened.)

Their goals are ambitious. Adult Film explored Chekhov’s The Sea Gull for a year, before putting up a production, creating a documentary of the process. Their Cherry Orchard got a lot of press attention for its innovative multi-media approach.

Ryan Czerwonko and Megan Metrikin in The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Joey Damore.

Their latest production, Cimino’s Defeat, written by Eric Faris and directed by Sam Cini, opens at the Torn Page performance space on January 20th. Cimino’s Defeat details the journey of director Michael Cimino, with Tad D'Agostino and Hannah Hale playing Cimino at different stages of his life.

What rich territory for exploration. Cimino became the poster boy of the out-of-control “auteur”, so common in the 1970s, following the collapse of the studio system. His second film was the mighty The Deer Hunter, which won Cimino an Academy Award for Best Director and the film Best Picture.

Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter

As most everyone knows, Cimino’s next film, Heaven’s Gate was such an expensive flop it helped sink United Artists, a production company formed in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

Heaven’s Gate

In the wild-card ‘70s, Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Dennis Hopper represented the counter-culture new guard. Cimino took the fall as the ultimate cautionary tale. His career never recovered. He died in 2016.

Michael Cimino

I interviewed Ryan for this Substack in 2023. As Cimino’s Defeat approaches its opening, I thought it would be a good time to check in.

Tad D’Agostino and Hannah Hale in Cimino’s Defeat. Photo by Matt Street.

I met up with Ryan and Hannah Hale on Zoom. Hale is Adult Film’s Associate Artistic Director, as well as a company member. Hannah recently moved in to Adult Film’s Bushwick brownstone “HQ”.

SHEILA O’MALLEY: Hannah, how did you get involved in Adult Film?

HANNAH HALE: I went to Rutgers. When I got out into the real world, it was different from what I thought it was going to be. Pre-pandemic, I had a fancy manager, and was going on a lot of auditions but it wasn’t the right fit somehow. Then the pandemic hit. I went home to New Jersey, and ended up being there for two years, dying to get back to my real home, New York. And that’s when I found Adult Film. Once I heard there was a room available at Ryan’s, I thought, “When do you get an opportunity to live in an artistic enclave where there’s art happening in the basement and everyone is working on something all of the time?” I just knew from the first class I took that it aligned with my way of thinking.

SOM: Which class did you take?

HH: I took a weekend workshop with Maria Dizzia in September of last year. Then I took Ryan’s long-term scene study class. It’s not just a scene study class. The class is really about, What kind of artist do you want to be?

RYAN CZERWONKO: And also who are you in an ensemble?

HH: Plus, these classes are affordable! It’s unlike anything else in New York City right now.

RC: And guess what the actors get to be? They get to be people around each other. They get to touch each other, they get to be funny, they get to be sexual beings, they get to be not perfect, they get to make mistakes.

HH: When I read books about repertory companies that existed in the past it sounds like a fantasy. It’s something we are trying to bring back within a culture that is very antiseptic.

SOM: It sounds like utopia, especially in a world where everything has to be optimized and monetized or whatever-ized.

RC: We do plays for the organic love of the material, not for, as you say, an optimization of our position. We did five plays last year. We’re doing five plays this year. We’re working on films. The training center has seven ongoing classes. I teach two big classes. There’s a dramatic improv class, a sense memory class, a voice class, a Michael Chekhov class, all taught by company members. My acting classes are getting insane. We’re doing late-night-speakeasy Tennessee Williams one-acts, or stream-of-consciousness plays by Bergman, Woody Allen, Strindberg. We supplement with workshops from major New York artists.

SOM: What are some of the challenges in expanding?

RC: We have high artistic ambitions but limited resources, so as the company has grown, it became apparent that anyone who wanted to be involved at Adult Film can’t just be an actor. They also have to be a producer, stage manager, administrator, director … an “actor manager” in the old style. Hannah was one of the first people who showed me how necessary this was for the survival and growth of the group. Right away, she was sending out emails where she was bolding things.

SOM: Oh my God. Bolded text.

HH: I know.

RC: She whipped the training center into professional shape. She’s helped identify our needs. I used to do literally everything. Now? Daddy delegates.

SOM: So tell me about Cimino’s Defeat.

RC: A company member came to us with this play, Cimino’s Defeat, written by Eric Faris. Eric’s been writing in the indie theater scene for a while. We did one of his plays two years ago. Cimino’s Defeat is pop in a really pleasing way. Eric often explores themes that are analogous to things we’re interested in. He’s also not ironic or satirical, but his work is very irreverent.

HH: In the play, people speak with almost no filter, and yet there is an undercurrent of everything unsaid, and it’s anxiety-inducing and addicting

Tad D’Agostino in Cimino’s Defeat. Photo by Matt Street.

RC: Cimino’s Defeat is a play about a movie and this is so what we are into. A part of our mission is to collapse the boundaries between theater and film.

HH: It seems to be taboo for the theater industry to talk about the film industry and vice versa. They have attempted it, but they don’t ever quite get it right. The first thing that struck me about Cimino’s Defeat was, I’ve never really read a play about film, particularly this era of Hollywood. I love this era of filmmaking and I can never learn enough about it.

RC: Part of what we want to do is to take our influences – like John Cassavetes – and not just make some letterboxd collection, but actually take those values and reinterpret them for right now. Our longing for the type of work they did or the lives they led, why we’re so desperate to have something like that now … How can we embody this in a way that’s not derivative or just an homage? The main ideas we deal with here about acting is to pick and choose ingredients from careers of actors who were working in the 50s and 60s and ’70s. I feel like what we’re doing is closer to how they worked back then rather than how people work now.

John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands, filming A Woman Under the Influence

SOM: How do people work now?

RC: Theater could not be less hip. It could not be less rock and roll. It could not be less interdisciplinary.

HH: It is very antiseptic and everything feels very safe. In the past several years, as a country – as a world – we have had a huge conversation about being safe. We are all entitled to safety. But when it comes to art, I don’t know how safe art should feel.

RC: Plus, the attitude of the theater establishment is one of hopelessness. For example, this safety thing: It operates from the assumption that everyone you meet is going to hurt you. And I just don’t believe it. I don’t want to see life that way. I believe in hope. And like Cassavetes – it doesn’t matter if you achieve the thing, what matters is the pursuit of hope. Our company believes in a future.

HH: Particularly in the Brooklyn indie theater world, everything is very doom-oriented and hopeless. We can read as dark sometimes, but actually we’re incredibly optimistic.

Tad D’Agostino in Cimino’s Defeat. Photo by Matt Street.

SOM: Michael Cimino is such a symbolic figure. He’s blamed for a lot.

HH: Definitely a scapegoat.

SOM: What’s the script’s point of view on him?

HH: The play is about ego. You might be right, but your ego can kill you and it can kill your artistic ideas. Michael Cimino is such a mystery. There is so much we don’t know about him. Even when you Google him, you have to specify “Michael Cimino director”, because if you just put in “Michael Cimino”, a young current actor comes up. In this play, we time travel between the late 70s-early ’80s and 2009-2012. The play is a memory play. It reminds me of Strindberg’s Dream Play. Michael looks back on his life and the mistakes he’s made. But no matter how dark it seems, the play is still very optimistic. And it’s darkly funny, which I love.

SOM: Hannah, you play Michael Cimino later in life.

HH: By that point, Cimino was in Beverly Hills, living a lavish lifestyle, and he got a lot of plastic surgery. Oddly enough, when I put on the glasses and the wig, I sort of look like him in those years, which a lot of people have said. I don’t quite know how to feel about that! Tad D’Agostino plays him in the late 70s-early 80s, and we do look like we could be siblings. Having Cimino be played by a woman was purposeful. Eric wanted to express that this is Michael’s “anima”, you know? The actress herself becomes his anima, something he could not express in his own life.

Hannah Hale in Cimino’s Defeat. Photo by Matt Street.

SOM: What are you both into now, what are you watching?

HH: I’ve been watching films by Cimino and his colleagues. I’ve been watching a lot of John Ford films because he was a big influence on Cimino. I’m in the middle of The Searchers. It’s adrenaline-inducing, which surprises me, I have to say, as a late 20something young woman. My grandfather used to say, “Let’s sit down and watch a John Wayne movie”, and it always read as very stiff to me, but now as an adult, I love it. The Searchers is the one to watch if you’re going to start.

John Wayne in The Searchers

SOM: One of my favorite close-ups in all of cinema is from The Searchers.

HH: Yes.

SOM: You know the one I mean.

HH: Yes.

SOM: Peter Bogdanovich asked John Wayne about it and Wayne said something like, “Yeah, that was a hell of a shot.”

HH: Speaking of Bogdanovich, I have recently become obsessed with Polly Platt. I listened to the You Must Remember This podcast series about her a while ago. Last Picture Show is one of my favorite films.

Polly Platt

RC: Currently, I’m re-watching Jeanne Moreau’s entire filmography. The other day I watched the documentary Tally Brown, New York. Tally was a Warhol superstar but also a legit Broadway actress and cabaret singer. Half of the documentary is her singing David Bowie covers. The blend of theatrical nods and raw emotion really moved me.

RC: I’ve also been watching what I haven’t seen yet of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I resonate with so much of his rampantly energetic output. A reviewer compared our Cherry Orchard to Fassbinder, which surprised me, since I hadn’t made that connection.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

RC: I watched two documentaries about Fassbinder’s actresses. One’s a Rosa von Praunheim documentary called Fassbinder’s Women. Rosa von Praunheim also directed Tally Brown, New York. As a bisexual man, with a pretty specific relationship and expression of both my masculinity and femininity, a lot of the things his actresses said about the way women are portrayed in his films really rang true. One of them said something like, “These women were an expression of his own personal universe.” I was like, that is so it! There are so many women inside of me. Why do I resonate with Gena Rowlands in Opening Night so much? Why do I have such an affinity for Blanche DuBois? Why do I like listening to P.J. Harvey? There are so many different men and women in all of us, and it’s beautiful to be playful with how you express that.

P.J. Harvey

RC: These people speak to me, whether it’s the Fassbinder’s actresses or P.J. Harvey in her To Bring You My Love era. P.J. Harvey is not condemning men. She’s actually roleplaying her fantasies about what it would be like to be a man. This ties to the Cimino project, with Hannah playing a man. It reminds us of Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan. Part of what I think works about our dynamic is Adult Film has a certain level of being a masculine place, which many people are not a fan of —

HH: But it’s run by many women.

RC: And I’m a very feminine man in a lot of ways. These strong feminine women with a masculine edge find that they can thrive in this space because I don’t require either gender to adhere to anything. The only requirement is that everyone must have an equal level of rigor!

SOM: I feel like the audiences at your plays are hungry for what you are doing.

RC: I think part of what you’re saying about the hunger you can feel from people … it’s like the hunger to be in your own life. Every single thing you do as an actor can’t be just an angling to get ahead so you can be bought.

HH: It’s what the kids call clout-chasing. And it is an epidemic in the New York theater world.

RC: Obviously we want to have great careers, but there’s satisfaction in doing the work with who you’re with, right now, not gearing all of it towards a product-oriented future that doesn’t exist.

HH: I felt left behind as an artist in this industry. And now, I remind myself every day, as I still go to my day-time survival job – which ironically, is being a stagehand on The Great Gatsby on Broadway – this is the work. I am actually doing the thing I set out to do right now.

RC: I’m 36, and I went to Ohio University and my teachers were old-school acting teachers. I did summer stock on Cape Cod, which was a very old-school path in a lot of ways. I had a few more experiences like that in my first few years, but between 2013 and 2017, everything shifted. I felt like I was failing, or not becoming the “major actor” I wanted to be. When I started letting the more superficial stuff fall away, that’s when Adult Film happened.

SOM: It’s hard to be present to something when it doesn’t look the way you think it should look.

RC: It’s hard because every media force is trying to tell us something different. We’re inundated with it in a way I wasn’t inundated when I graduated in 2011. We’re in a moment where many people feel a sense of alienation.

SOM: Also, if you’re young, you don’t even have the memory of another kind of theatre world. If you’re young right now, and you listen to old people, everything cool happened 50 years ago.

RC: I would not want to be 24 years old right now for anything. I think for the younger people in our ensemble, this environment gives them hope. It makes you see you can be a working artist who can survive here financially to some degree, and have a satisfying, creative career that basically has nothing to do with being famous.

HH: I’ve always thought I was born in the wrong era for this industry and now I feel actually, no, maybe I was born in the right era. Maybe we can bring it back.

Tad D’Agostino in Cimino’s Defeat. Photo by Matt Street.

Cimino’s Defeat runs at Torn Page from January 21st- February 14th.

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2024 was an endurance test. Sometimes I passed, sometimes I failed. Time sped up. But also it slowed down. January 2024 feels like it was a decade ago. Along with the political stupidity poisoning the air, there is the incomprehension poor CEOs feel at the level of hatred coming at them. I’m staggering into 2025 with ripped hosiery, like Phyllis Brooks above, in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture.

I joined Blue Sky, with millions of other refugees from what we now call “the other place”. A sense of community is, ironically, what the “social media” overlords want to deny us. They want us atomized. It benefits them if we stay on our phones all day arguing with each other. They want us to be forced to “debate” our core values and, in some cases, our humanity. I am not going to “debate” things like why we shouldn’t dehumanize other people. We don’t have to “opt in” to their rules of play.

Concentrating on work is a challenge when the world is “too much with us”. My family is going through a lot. We are doing our best.

I’ve been feeling stagnant in my writing. All that changed in 2024.

Liberties

Early in 2024, Celeste Marcus, the managing editor of Liberties Journey, reached out and asked if I would be interested in doing a monthly column. I started in April.

I launched the column with a piece on my Actors Studio background and how that informed my work as a film critic. I also wrote a piece on Carole Lombard, I interviewed Sean Abley, co-editor of Queer Horror: A Film Guide, I wrote a piece decades in the making about my simultaneous discovery of John Cassavetes’ Opening Night and Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play, I wrote another piece decades in the making about Marion Keisker’s crucial role in “discovering” Elvis, I also interviewed filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea about her documentary Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story, and, finally, my 2024 round-up of films I loved, an unranked top 20.

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Ebert

A selection of reviews I wrote this year:

Review of The Settlers
Review of The Promised Land
Review of Here
Review of Wicked Little Letters
Review of Just the Two of Us
Review of Daddio
Review of Goldilocks and the Two Bears
Review of Oddity
Review of Kneecap (included in my Top 20)
Review of Good One
Review of Sweetheart Deal
Review of No Other Land (included in my Top 20)
Review of Small Things Like These (included in my Top 20)
Review of All We Imagine As Light (included in my Top 20)
Review of The Last Showgirl (in which Pamela Anderson gives one of my favorite performances of the year)

The Sheila Variations

I decided to write about music pioneers on my site, timed for their birthdays.

Sam Phillips

“I was looking for what was coming from a man’s soul and a man’s conviction. I didn’t care about his past. If it was innate and natural and felt good to him and it communicated.”
— Sam Phillips

This essay on Sam Phillips and Sun Records was a companion piece to the Liberties essay I wrote on Marion Keisker.

Ruth Brown

“I was one of the few female artists that made appearances in the deep South. Every place that there was a stage, no matter what the economic situation was, even in the midst of the worst period of segregation–I was always there.”
—Ruth Brown

I wrote about this Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Famer (and founder of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation).

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Etta James

“You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.”
— Etta James

Etta James connected to songs like no other. Here’s a long overdue tribute to one of my faves.

Josh White

“He had a profound influence on my style. At the time I came along, he was the only popular black folk singer, and through his artistry exposed America to a wealth of material about the life and conditions of black people that had not been sung by any other artist.”
—Harry Belafonte on the news of Josh White’s death

I wrote about this radical influential folk singer , inspired by a conversation I had with my mother. She loved him and went to go see him back in the day.

Gene Vincent

“Listen, I never meant to make money. I never wanted it. I’m a singer, man.”
—Gene Vincent

Gene Vincent influenced a generation (see above picture).

Fats Domino

“This here’s the real King of Rock ‘n Roll.”
— Elvis Presley, introducing Fats Domino at a press conference in 1969

Fats Domino was a first, in so many ways. He made millions. Wrote about him.

Rufus Thomas

“Memphis amateurs are the world’s professionals.”
— Rufus Thomas

I wrote about the emcee of Beale Street.

Carl Perkins

“Sometimes I can sing it when I can’t say it.”
— Carl Perkins

I’ve already written quite a bit about him, but figured I’d put it all together .

Ricky Nelson

“A lot of people try to equate me with guys like Frankie Avalon and Fabian, but in the old days I sold a lot of records over a period of time, and you can’t sustain that by being just another pretty face.”
— Ricky Nelson

He struggled with the teen idol pretty face thing his whole life. His voice is perfect, though, so I wrote about that.

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Steve Albini

“I can’t have any respect for somebody …who’s not involved in the creative process but then decides that they wanna snipe at it from the outside and manipulate people into doing things to suit them. Fuck every one of those people.”
— Steve Albini

R.I.P. to the man responsible for the soundtrack of my youth.

Big Joe Turner

Big Joe Turner was arriving in England in 1965 for a tour. He didn’t have a work permit and the immigration officer said, “You’ve got a nerve.” Turner replied, “That’s what it takes these days, daddy.” Wrote about him.

Howlin’ Wolf

Wrote about this “early influencer”, a man with a transcendent power.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

“I can scream soprano.”
— Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

How to even explain him? I can’t! But he’s fun to write about.

James Burton

“I never bought a Ricky Nelson record. I bought a James Burton record.”
— Keith Richards

James Burton is one of the greatest sidemen of all time. I saw him in concert back in 2013.

Dale Hawkins

“The thing I really wanna say is—and really, really mean is that real things last. Any way you look at it. Real things last.”
— Dale Hawkins

Speaking of James Burton, who did the guitar lick. Dale Hawkins may be the most influential “one hit wonder” of all time.

Wynonie Harris

Wrote about this hugely influential blues shouter.

Billy Lee Riley

“[Billy Lee Riley] was a true original. He did it all.”
— Bob Dylan

What a fascinating life.

Chuck Berry

“Respect isn’t enough. You’ve got to have a proprietary interest.”
— Chuck Berry

He can’t be summed up. I didn’t even try.

LaVern Baker

“As we say in church, I look back on a job well done.”
— LaVern Baker

Tribute to this Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.

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Brenda Lee

“The music business can be very cold. And it doesn’t honor its elders.”
— Brenda Lee

I try to honor the elders, like this record-smashing artist.

Charlie Rich

Charlie Rich has one of my favorite voices in all of music.

Bo Diddley

“Everything I know I taught myself.”
— Bo Diddley

You can pick his guitar playing out of a blind sample. Wrote about him.

So. THAT ^^ is how I made it through 2024. I barely remember writing all of it but I somehow got it done.

I’ve been looking for solace wherever I can find it, mini escape hatches so I can take a mental break. I’ve found solace in Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, Anthony Jeselnik’s stand-up (finding solace in his dark prickish persona is so funny to me), Eminem’s new album (particularly the song with Jelly Roll), and then tripping over haunting moments like this one. I’ve watched it about 20 times.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work.

With apologies to John Keats, who would totally not understand why his words were being used in this context, Hundreds of Beavers is “a thing of beauty and a joy forever”.

When something is sui generis, what more can you say? Point at the thing and tell others: “See that? It’s being itself. Fully.”

Hundreds of Beavers, the brainchild of Ryland Brickson Cole Tews and Mike Cheslik, is, first and foremost, itself. This is easier said than done. How many films AREN’T “themselves”, and instead are half-baked less-imaginative imitations of some other more successful thing? Hundreds of Beavers can be compared to other things but at a certain point the comparison falls apart. A list is more appropriate: Hundreds of Beavers is sort of like Benny Hill meets Laurel & Hardy meets Looney Tunes meets Jack London meets Monty Python meets It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets a furry convention (if the furries in question were all slapstick comedians). We should probably throw a little Scooby Doo in there too. As well as Mario Brothers and maybe even Pacman.

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Filmed in splattery black-and-white, with no dialogue besides grunts, screams, and “…. huh??” sounds, peppered with visuals like intertitles and iris lens effects, Hundreds of Beavers is a throwback to silent film era comedies. There’s one moment stolen from a Mack Sennett Keystone Cops short as well as a “riff” on Buster Keaton’s famous falling-house stunt. These are homages, but without the overly respectful tone you often see in homages. Paying respect to a former time is different from inhabiting the former time to such a degree it doesn’t seem “former” at all. The “former” time required skill in pantomime, slapstick, timing … tricks of the trade used by performers in the teens and 20s of the 20th century, tools gained through years in vaudeville, and which were inheritances from commeda dell’arte, a legacy throughline. This is a lost tradition. People don’t “come up” that way anymore.

But the cast of Hundreds of Beavers seem as though they did come up this way. It’s a reminder that the old bits are the best bits because they have withstood the test of time. Some schtick comes out of a tradition 500, 600 years old. This shit worked across cultures and across millennia, in some cases. Slipping on a banana peel is a classic for a reason (it shows up here, as well, in a funny comment on the initial idea. Things go so poorly for our hero he can’t even do the ol’ slip-on-a-banana-peel correctly).

Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, friends hailing from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, have been making movies together since high school. Their first venture, made for around $7,000, was Lake Michigan Monster, about a sea monster terrorizing the Great Lakes. It’s the platonic ideal of “let’s max out our credit cards and make a movie with our friends”. They had an idea to make a movie about fur trappers, and planned it out in a series of riff sessions, where every crazy idea - like “let’s have no dialogue and let’s do it with mascots” - stuck. The whole thing is powered by “why the fuck not?”

I wish more movies were bold enough to come from a place of “Why the fuck not?”

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A pal on Facebook just posted about his annoyance with film critics who call a movie “messy”, “uneven” or “self-indulgent”, an annoyance I share. I’m annoyed because the language is lazy. It’s the language of a mediocre mindset. I left a comment along the lines of: some of the best art is messy and uneven and I want directors to “indulge” themselves. Please, please, indulge yourself. Let me see what you care about, what moves and obsesses you. John Cassavetes “indulged” himself. He had no interest outside the things that already interested him. (He said the only thing he cared about was love.) I love Cassavetes, but this goes for other directors as well, even if I don’t particularly care for their work. Who else is an artist supposed to indulge? A mediocre-minded audience who don’t like things “messy” or “uneven”?

Two childhood friends sitting in a bar saying, “let’s make a silent movie and let’s have hundreds of people in mascot costumes and let’s film it in the woods in the dead of winter” is way out on the fringes of the acceptable, and comes from extraordinary minds, not play-it-safe minds.

Hundreds of Beavers rattles along with a propulsive force, the various “bits” repeating over and over and over again, but intensifying with each repetition. The humor comes from you, the audience member, anticipating the disasters: “Oh God, he’s gonna fall through the ice again” or “Oh God, the log is going to fall the wrong way.” Anticipation of a known result is a bedrock of comedy. You the audience are superior to the idiot onscreen who believes, in delusional fashion, that THIS time, surely THIS time, his daring plan will work!

The cast is very small (if you don’t count the hundreds of beavers). Tews plays Jack Kayak, first seen in a musical number, developing an “applejack” cider, living high on the hog before quickly becoming an alcoholic, and ruining his fortunes. Abandoned in the snowy wilderness, he tries to become a fur trapper, but is stopped at every turn by Mother Nature’s brutality. He falls into holes under the snow. He can barely keep a fire going at night. He fails to catch a fish. For a while he pairs up with “The Master Fur Trapper”, a snow-encrusted beast of a man (Wes Tank) who shows him the ropes, but Jack Kayak is left on his own after a harrowing attack by a pack of wolves (first seen as glowing white cartoon eyes in the pitch black, snatching sled-dogs from the fireside, a scene straight out of Jack London’s White Fang).

Now Jack is really screwed. He chases bunnies holed up under the snow. He studies animal tracks in the snow. He experiments with different types of bait. He dodges falling icicles. He tries to fashion spears but he has nothing to cut them with. He finds his way to a trading post, run by an intimidating merchant (Doug Mancheski), who drives a hard bargain. The merchant’s daughter (Olivia Graves) is a giggly damsel peeking out at Jack from behind corners, crushing hard on him, and trying to hide it from her volatile dad. Jack gets one look at her and you can practically see his heart throbbing out of his chest, like Bugs Bunny’s.

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Jack lives surrounded by animals. These animals are all played by humans in animal costumes. When an animal dies, huge Xs appear in their eyes. (Jack’s square fur hat features X-ed out eyeballs). No attempt is made to make these animals seem like anything other than humans in costumes. There’s even a horse, like an old stage gag, with two humans underneath a blanket, as the front and back of the horse. (When someone tries to ride the horse, it does not go well.) Jack is clearly outnumbered and it takes all of his guile to survive. Even the bunnies defeat him.

The beavers are another issue entirely. They appear as a mindless almost fascistic crowd, moving as one, seen in the distance carrying huge logs across the icy white expanses. What are they building? Are they here to help or to harm? The bunnies are few and far between and easily handled. But Jack goes up against the beavers and is so outnumbered chaos ensues.

The beavers are building a dam, yes, as per their biological imperative. But the dam is as big as the Hoover, and its interior is a giant space filled with conveyor belts, pipes, interlocking wheels, and frightening drops into the abyss. Beavers stand in the bowels of the structure, wearing protective glasses, huddled over charts and plans. What are they up to? Jack is curious, but his befuddled clumsy approach shows his unpreparedness for the fight to come.

Nature is not benign in Hundreds of Beavers. The animals are not cute and/or cuddly. When they die, they become floppy stuffed animals with X’s in their eyes, and Jack hauls them off to the trading post, acquiring better weapons the more animals he brings. Meanwhile, the secret relationship between Jack and the merchant’s daughter progresses nicely, with the daughter, at one point, stripping down and doing a pole dance in the snow. Reader, I laughed out loud.

I was laughing at myself laughing. Every time Jack would let out a long agonized scream because he stepped on another giant thistle, or pierced his hand with a hook, or … or … I would start laughing, and not just because it was funny. I laughed because the repetition was satisfying. It’s Charlie Chaplin working on the assembly line. It’s I Love Lucy, where Lucy comes up with a cockamamie plan and you just know it’s all going to go to hell. I was in the hands of great schtick-makers, and I LOVE well-done schtick. I want more schtick in life. I surround myself with schtick-makers. If you don’t “get” schtick, you won’t last long in my crowd. I was a theatre kid. I majored in theatre. We were devoted to our jokes, and being as entertaining as possible for each other. (When critics betray annoyance at this kind of thing in movies, I think: “ah, so you weren’t a theatre kid obviously. It’s understandable why you would be embarrassed by goofballs doing jazz hands. You were probably the ones snickering at us in high school because we were so not cool.” In college, when we learned about commedia dell’arte, we pounced on the term “lazzi”. To this day, when someone lands on some funny bit, or acts out some eccentric human observation … we call these things “lazzis”. “Member that lazzi you did in the hotel lobby in West Hartford where you pretended to be an astronaut using the empty vase in the corner?” (True story.)

Hundreds of Beavers is one lazzi after another.

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Cinematographer Quinn Hester deserves much credit in all of this. The visuals are stunning, and the challenges of filming out in the Wisconsin woods had to be considerable. It’s wild to watch because you know all those people in animal costumes are really out there in the snowy wilderness, carrying fake logs back and forth, and having fake fist fights in the snow drifts. (There are some clearly animated sequences, as well as an an animated woodpecker). But the sheer logistics of this thing dazzle the mind.

Tews is an astonishing physical comedian. I loved the freedom in what he was doing! This is lazzi heaven! There’s one scene where he gets trapped in a big wooden box rolling down a steep snowy hill. It’s all done in one shot, and Tews is clearly doing that stunt, in real time, falling out of the box at the bottom of the hill, dazed but unscathed. The sounds he makes are practically “ruh-roh!” in nature.

There’s obvious pleasure in coming up with different lazzis and finding ways to call back to them. I read one review which called this a little tiresome, the bits wore out their welcome. I strongly disagree. Wile E. Coyote has been entertaining audiences for almost 80 years at this point, and it’s the same bit over and over again.

By the time the chase sequence in Hundreds of Beavers arrives, where Jack is pursued by the vengeful army of beavers, all as an Oppenheimer-type beaver prepares to launch some kind of perhaps-sinister rocket - (maybe that’s what they’ve been building all along?) - we’re primed for it. The final sequence made me wish I had seen the film at a packed midnight screening. The chase is thrilling, catapulting on through disaster after disaster, the beavers multiplying, Jack finding himself in increasingly perilous positions, having to fight his way free.

It’s not every day you see a fascist army of beavers played by people wearing animal costumes, running through drifts in sub-zero weather.

Why the fuck not, I ask?

Pile lazzis upon lazzis. Make us laugh by giving us what we expect in a form we’ve never seen.

I’ve watched a lot of movies this year, many of which I’ve truly loved.

Hundreds of Beavers, though, did something different. It delighted me. An old-fashioned word for something so fresh and new you almost forget there are precedents. The precedents live in us already. Slipping on a banana peel is lodged in our DNA. We could probably use that space for more meaningful work to help society.

But the banana peel will not be dislodged to make room for other things. We can’t get rid of it. The banana peel makes demands: I know I’ve been used 189 times but use me again. I’m begging you. Trust me. I work every time.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I settled in to watch Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Tyler Thomas Taormina’s new film. What I knew about it was from Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker, and Miriam Bale calling it one of the best movies of the year on Instagram. Intriguing, particularly Brody’s description of how it presents the holiday family genre in a new way: “it … provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence”. My goodness. Bump it to the top of the list.

A big Italian-American family gather together for Christmas Eve. It’s the early 2000s, judging by the “cell” phones among the teenage population. Four generations are present. The noise is deafening, the table buckles with the meal laid out, and the side conversations occur sotto voce , often overheard in fragmentary voiceover as the camera drifts over the decorations, the food, giving a strange almost dissociated experience of what is an intimate family gathering. Other more cliched holiday comedy-dramas unfurl as though they are in real time, and you are thrust into the middle of the family dynamics. Nostalgia is implicit, but it comes from the viewer only, caught up in their memories. Here, the nostalgia is in the presentation. It’s like remembered conversations, and also the sensorial memory of the noise, smells, perfume, hairspray, cologne, of gatherings from long ago. The “question marks of reminiscence” is in the form itself.

The style is introduced from the jump, where houses glimmering with colored lights float by outside a car window, reflected upside down. The upside-down-ness of it is a hint of things to come, the upending of genre expectations. The “experiments” in style continue throughout, starting with the voiceover-voices, disconnected (often) from their bodies - we hear them, but we are not zoomed on them … this calls to mind Robert Altman, where his big group scenes often involved miked actors, in character, having no idea whether or not the camera was on them.

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A family is in the car on their way to the gathering. There’s dad Lenny (Ben Shenkman), mom Kathleen (Maria Dizzie), teenage daughter Emily (Matilda Fleming), and younger brother. Kathleen sits in the back seat, already in a state of irritation and hurt at her daughter’s checked-out contempt/over-it personality, all of which seems directed at her personally. You can read into this. Emily is in puberty. Kathleen misses the engaged happy child. It happens.

They arrive with the party already at its peak. A flurry of hugs, kisses, exclamations of surprise, as though they hadn’t just seen each other last week. They are absorbed into the group. The cousins all race off with each other, the little kids in Christmas outfits, the older teenagers retreat to the basement to play video games. Francesca Scorsese plays Michelle, a cousin the same age as Emily, and they settle right in to talk to each other. They have known each other since they were babies.

Scenes are not played out in an in-depth start-to-finish way. The camera moves on by. You get to know the relationships as though you were a stranger invited to the party and you had to put it together. The adult siblings - Kathleen, Ray (Tony Savino), Bev (Grege Morris), John Trischetti (Matthew) - hole up in one of the kids’ bedrooms to talk about what to do about their mother whose health is failing. Should they sell her house? Sheould she keep living with Matthew? She’s becoming a burden, she requires more care than Matthew can provide. Tempers run high. Assisted living? Ray is adamantly against. She’s their mother, how can they do that? Selling the house is also argued over.

Great-grandmother rides up and down the stairs in her automated chair. She falls asleep in the middle of the gathering, but she’s wearing her Christmas sweater and a beloved member of the family.

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This family has rituals. There’s a Secret Santa gift exchange. There’s a group walk to the end of the block to see the holiday-decked-out fire trucks, complete with a real-life Santa tossing candy down to the crowds gathered. There’s also a long walk, everyone bundled up, paired off, having conversations small and large.

Meanwhile, Emily is itching under her mother’s control. She can’t do anything right. She sneaks out to meet up at a local diner with her group of pals. Michelle comes. There’s a shoplifting expedition. There’s a silent scene where couples pair up and go to their respective cars to make out, or not. The snow covers the car windows, leaving the couples in a disconnected quiet utopia.

The adults have rituals. The kids have theirs.

There is an ongoing side bit with two local cops - Michael Cera (who also produced) and Gregg Turkington - who shrug when a car speeds by, who shrug when the diner owner freaks out because the group of kids mess with her dumpster. Their conversations, including a confession later, have a flat-affect tone which, frankly, doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. It feels like a distraction.

But I want to say something about my critique. The “perfect is the enemy of good.” Give me a flawed over-reaching masterpiece, like Megalopolis, or The Brutalist, or Magnolia, over a safely-perfect perfectly-constructed film, the ones that win all the awards. I consider some of my favorite films to be perfect (Only Angels Have Wings), but more and more - in our algorithm “content”-driven world, where eccentric films are lost in the maw of streaming platforms, of ironed-out narratives, complacent styles, of not-rocking-the-boat, of fear-of-social-media-backlash for “inappropriate-ness”, the complete disconnect from sex … I gravitate towards the messy. I am a mess. I like challenging work. I like talented people who TRY things. Go for it. Stretch out. Give it a shot.

So the cops’ flat-affect conversations - disconnected from the Bansano home - comes from another film, or a sketch-comedy. I didn’t care about them.

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But the rest of the film is so dazzlingly confident, and almost eerie in its affects, so intimate, with affection and humor and anxiety fizzing through it … who the hell cares about a small thing that might not work? (Others may disagree with me, and of course that’s fine). The film gets all the important things right, and what it gets right is ephemeral, filled with echoes, and an inchoate sense of mortality, loss, memory.

What you sense is that what you are looking at is not in-real-time at all. The film itself is a memory, and a collective one. The conversation about the mother’s house, and the mother’s health, is a harbinger of the future. The mother will die, the house will be sold, and perhaps there will be no gatherings after this, or it won’t be the same. The teenagers will grow up and move away. Perhaps the mother is the glue (judging from her warm behavior, her care for everyone there) and without her things will fall apart. Not in a toxic way but in the natural way time does its work, good and bad.

This made me think of my own extended family. Both the O’Malley family and the Sullivan family are big sprawls. Irish Catholic, you understand. Aunts, uncles, a veritable crowd of cousins, and now the cousins have a crowd of children. We are all close. My cousins are all basically the same age as me. We grew up together. There’s nothing like cousins. (The only story I can think of that actually captures the cousin dynamic is John Irving’s Prayer for Owen Meany.) The level of fun we had … the shenanigans we got up to while the grown-ups drank gin and tonics in the dining room … was thrilling, a fever of mad fun, because we knew our time together was limited. We still reference our jokes from childhood.

But now … unless there is a wedding or a funeral, we don’t gather together all at the same time. We remain close, and social media is where I see what everyone is up to. But the older generation is leaving us. I lost two beloved aunts in 2021. A connecting thread with the past severed. Watching young people grow older.

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Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point feels like it’s a family looking back on Christmas Eves past, watching one of the home movies they bust out when they’re together, to relive the good times. There are long shots without people, lingering on the fireplace, the food, the Christmas decorations, probably made by one of the kids, or maybe made by one of the aunts and uncles in their childhoods.

The fire trucks rattling by, decked out in blazing lights, whirling in surrealistic swirls, colors, somewhat portentous music, Santa seen in a disorienting blur towering in the air … the scene is not literal. It’s how the kids will look back on it, remembering it in a wash of colors, the cold air, the mittens, the excitement. Proust was right: memories come through the senses. Lee Strasberg said sometimes you look at a pair of shoes and see your whole life.

There are touches of deep sadness and awkward tenderness (like Uncle Ray’s short story being read aloud to the group, without his consent, read at first in a mocking voice until silence descends on the group, as they realize how full of truth it is). Cousin Brucie (Chris Lazzaro) is an adult, but he’s still a big kid, dancing around in a Santa hat, loud and funny, the class clown, but perhaps to cloak what is missing in his life. A partner. Kids. Stability. The Gen-X anxiety of feeling like you’re in a state of arrested development. When will you gain the certainty of being a grownup? There’s a brief glimpse of him alone, at night, resting his head on the piano. Despair? Or just tired? Emily sees him. She will remember it.

The Bansano family is caught in a slow globe. This will be the last time. Without an explicit word said, you can feel it.

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point approaches the profundity of the famous final paragraphs of James Joyce’s The Dead, where of course snow is the main character:

From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon…

One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age…

Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling…

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Shades. They are all becoming shades. The film remembers them as they were, a long long time ago.

I went to bed after watching it, filled with the film’s mood. I woke up at 2:15. I don’t remember my dreams anymore. The bipolar diagnosis killed my dreams. The only time I remember them is when sleep is interrupted. And I suddenly was flooded with the dream I had been having, an elaborate detailed narrative. It was basically a rom-com and I was the star. It was the Hallmark version of Christmas in Miller’s Point. The dream was so much fun! The sparking chemistry, the thrill of knowing romance was in the air, of being noticed and chosen. My first sensation when I remembered the dream was such sharp sadness I could barely breathe. It was old sadness I wasn't even aware was still there. I thought I was done with all that.

I blame Christmas Eve in Miller's Point for the dream, the thrill of the experience followed by the loss of leaving it. Yearning for that feeling I felt. Memories so far away, but no less precious for that.

Williams Wordsworth, famously, said poetry came from "emotion recollected in tranquility." I love Wordsworth but I disagree with him. There is no tranquility in the present, but emotion is recollected anyway.

There's a moment in A Star is Born (1976), when Barbra Streisand sings "Evergreen", with Kris Kristofferson opposite her. She starts alone, and he then joins in. His participation feels spontaneous, like he can't stop himself from harmonizing with her. They're singing live, too. So what we're seeing is a moment in time, not a bunch of moments pieced together in the editing room.

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“I was a silent actress: a body. I belonged to dreams – to those who can’t be broken.” — Sylvia Kristel

Tomorrow is the birthday of Dutch actress and international phenom, Sylvia Kristel. In 2022 I did an interview with writer/historian Jeremy Richey on his insightful book about Kristel, Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol. I’ll share it here!

Jeremy Richey’s site Moon in the Gutter was a haven for me for years, as well as an example - when I was just starting out - of the kind of work I wanted to do. While people argued about Marvel movies on Twitter, Jeremy wrote well-researched passionate pieces on Lou Reed, Jean Rollin, or Nastassja Kinski. One of his central interests was Dutch actress and, briefly, international arthouse star, Sylvia Kristel, now known mostly for 1974’s Emmanuelle (directed by Just Jaeckin). The film traveled the world, and saddled Kristel with an unfair “soft-core” reputation. Richey feels there is restorative work to be done in regards to Kristel’s reputation. Camille Paglia agrees, and views Sylvia Kristel as a magical talisman, symbolic of an entire era:

“Emmanuelle absolutely endorses the idea of free female sexuality in that final scene. Sylvia embodies for me the spirit of the sixties and seventies youthquake.”

Richey’s book, published by Cult Epics, shines a light on this young untrained - but instinctive - actress thrust into the international spotlight via the emerging Dutch cinema of the 1970s. She made a splash almost instantly with a small role in Frank and Eva (1973). Other roles followed. When Kristel died in 2012, the obituaries led with Emmanuelle. Richey makes the case, meticulously, for her work’s unique value. Francois Truffaut was a fan, as were Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. She turned down some roles which might have been game-changers in terms of public perception (particularly in America where many of her films are - to this day - un-seeable).

Richey scored a couple of interviews with people who knew and worked with Kristel, players in the Dutch cinematic renaissance. He moves chronologically, showing the development of her raw talent. She challenged herself, she took big risks.

Richey’s moments of critical analysis are invaluable:

“Because of the Cats” walks a real tightrope throughout its ninety-eight-minute running time. While its primary function is as a crime thriller, the film also has an evident desire to appeal to a more youthful audience without making fun of them, particularly difficult for the post-1968 film market. Rademakers keeps the film’s portrayal of the young gang as grounded as possible. It never slips into the full-blown caricature it might have in the hands of a less skilled director, with no small amount of the credit going to Claus’ original script as well.

He gets so much done in one small paragraph.

Kristel’s legacy is still close to being consigned to oblivion. There is progress, however. Cult Epics recently put out a box set of Sylvia Kristel’s 1970 films.

Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol is a major work of critical and artistic appreciation and I was so happy to discuss it with Richey.

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Sheila O’Malley: Your passions and obsessions run deep and wide. It’s one of the reasons why you are such a compelling writer, and why I was so drawn to your blog, Moon in the Gutter, the moment I discovered it. Having read you all these years, I am familiar with your tastes – the people who matter to you artistically – so I am curious about your desire to choose Sylvia Kristel as the subject of your first book.

Jeremy Richey: I have a great interest in the number of artists I have written about extensively online, like Jean Rollin and Nastassja Kinski, but it was going to always be Sylvia as far as my first full book went. Something otherworldly has been leading me to this since I was a kid first seeing a photograph of her in a Frankfort, Kentucky bookstore in the early eighties. There was something about that photo of her dressed all in black, staring straight into the camera with this unnerving look of confidence, elegance, and sadness. She looked like a poet, and I love poets. Even though I had no way of knowing at the time just how much her work would come to inform my own, I still felt this sort of cosmic connection.

JR: Seeing Sylvia in Walerian Borowczyk’s La Marge in the mid-nineties was the real turning point. I was so blown away and moved by both the film and her performance. Both had a major impact on me like no other and the genesis for the book really came from that moment, which was years before I started writing online. Also, some of it was anger as well as I felt, and feel, that a truly remarkable figure in film history had been all but ignored or written out of it. I wanted to help correct that.

SOM: You use so many primary sources in the book, articles from old Dutch movie magazines and newspapers. I am so curious about how you got your hands on these things. Did you have to get things translated? Was micro-fiche involved? Where do you even begin to start reseaching this?

JR: It was a beast. When I initially started on the book, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find enough vintage material and by the end of it, I had literally crashed a computer due to how much I compiled. Key was the indispensable Delpher.nl, which offers more than 100 years worth of Dutch articles from all over The Netherlands. This allowed me the opportunity to access nearly 4,000 relevant articles, interviews, and reviews from Sylvia’s home country, which was an absolute godsend for me and the book.

Plus, I could access material on many of the great Dutch artists that she worked with throughout the early and then late seventies. This really helped flesh out the book, and it was amazing getting to read long-lost interviews with not only Sylvia but people like Rutger Hauer, Renée Soutendijk, Laura Gemser and so many of these great film figures that Sylvia worked with.

Rutger Hauer and Sylvia Kristel filming “Mysteries” in 1978

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JR: Making my fortune even greater is the fact that Delpher has their own built in Transcriber and Translator, which is how the Dutch translations began to come about. Of course, I’d always verify on a few different platforms to ensure the translations were as accurate as possible to the meaning and spirit of what was being conveyed.

My publisher, Cult Epics’ Nico B., is Dutch as well and he was able to offer up some vital suggestions and tips for the chapters in the book that cover her Dutch films. Nico was extremely helpful and supportive in general so I will always be heavily grateful and in debt.

While most of the sources came from Dutch and English language materials, I also utilized some harder to access French material since so much of her major work was in France. My French friend Marcelline Block also conducted the lengthy and amazing interview with Francis Lai for the book in French and then translated that for me as well. I believe this was the final major interview Lai ever granted and I think the first time he had ever discussed his work with Sylvia in detail. Such a great honor having him in the book, as well as her directors like Just Jaeckin and Pim de la Parra, not to mention co-stars like Joe Dallesandro and behind-the-scenes players like cinematographer Robert Fraisse, all of whom granted me lengthy interviews amongst a number of other key figures.

Sylvia Kristel and Joe Dallesandro, “La Marge” (1976)

JR: After determining I had a mountain of material to work with, the main trick was figuring out exactly what was important to the story I was telling and what wasn’t. This was an extremely difficult but rewarding process that took months on end. The research honestly never stopped and I am still coming across material, as Sylvia had such a rich life surrounded by other great fascinating artists.

It was important to me to include as much of this vintage material as I could, especially for English language fans who have always been told that she never got good reviews (a total fabrication) and also to show just how many obstacles she faced from a mostly male often hostile press. It was extremely vital for the book that I show the unnecessary obstacles she faced throughout her career, obstacles many of her peers didn’t have to suffer through. Some of the English language articles and reviews from the period are so beyond sexist that it is shocking.

The vintage interviews were so eye-opening, and I felt so grateful to have them to help tell hers and the film’s stories. I’m sure for some readers it will be too much, but I wanted Sylvia’s own voice in the book as much as possible. I already knew that my approach of not being an impartial observer, as well as offering my own critical takes of the films (especially the later American work), would turn off some folks but I just soldiered on with it. This was a very emotional and personal book to write and I hope that comes through for readers.

SOM: You start the book with a very refreshing thought: “I have zero interest in gossip, and I reject the notion that a person’s romantic relationships somehow define their life, especially in the case of a woman coming of age during the sexual revolution”. I have my own pet peeves on this score – I feel like the art is often lost in the so-called salacious details – but I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

JR: While I hate gossip in general, I’m honestly not sure why I have never had much interest in the type of salacious-driven biographies that so many seem to gravitate towards. I recall as a child being so disturbed by Albert Goldman’s criminal book on Elvis that it still angers me to this day. I was so turned off by the invasiveness of that book and honestly so many other similar hatchet jobs that I read growing up. I don’t care about people’s sex-lives or relationships in general unless they had an obvious impact on the artist’s work, like the relationship Sylvia had with the brilliant writer Hugo Claus. I will probably go to my grave not appreciating how who slept with who offers any understanding to an artist’s life and that applies to anyone I am interested in.

Kristel with Hugo Claus

JR: It’s especially true for someone like Sylvia, whose work has always been viewed in an unfairly sexualized way. The last thing I wanted to do was invade her privacy, so I tried to make sure that the biographical information I gave had some sort of impact on her work. So many just wanted her to be Emmanuelle and that just wasn’t the case at all. Sylvia’s acting, writing, painting and work in general are what interest me, so anyone looking for gossip about her and someone like Ian McShane will come away disappointed and I’m fine with that honestly.

It was necessary to not shy away from the substance abuse issues that plagued her, though, especially in the late seventies and early eighties, as it clearly affected her work and was something she never shied away from discussing. That said, her addiction issues in no way defined her and are very relatable. Who amongst us hasn’t had our own personal issues (I certainly have) with addiction or at the very least hasn’t had a friend or family that has faced similar struggles? The way some people demonize those in the spotlight for issues like this really offends me, and I tried to treat these passages in the book with great care.

Sylvia Kristel and Eric Brown, Private Lessons (1981)

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SOM: Kristel’s journey was woven into the rise of Dutch film in the 1970s. I appreciated your exploration of the political/social/artistic revolutions and how they impacted this local film industry. In a small film culture where everyone knows everyone – word got around. Kristel seems to have made a splash almost right away. Was this a “right place right time” thing? Could it have happened in, say, the 80s?

JR: I don’t think so, at least not in the same way.

I write in the book that for me Sylvia absolutely personifies the period that she came of age in, and you can see the hopes of the sixties, the liberation of the seventies to the ultimate disappointment of the eighties in Sylvia’s career like no other. Her career also coincided with both the sexual revolution along with the Feminist movement. I was so happy the day I found the quote by her from the mid-seventies defiantly describing herself as a feminist who believed in equal pay and rights for all women. That was key, as she was ridiculed by so many for Emmanuelle and her general openness towards nudity in film.

JR: Even though I do think her career happened at the ideal moment, Sylvia was far ahead of her time as well, which is one reason that later sex-positive feminists like Camille Paglia were much more accepting in retrospect than some of her peers. It is also super important to remember that Sylvia worked with and was friends with the great feminist Dutch filmmaker Nouchka van Brakel, who was actually a key member of the Dolle Mina (The Netherlands’ most radical feminist organization). It’s also worth noting that nearly every one of Sylvia’s editors throughout the seventies were women, so all of these cultural revolutions of the period powered by women were bubbling under in these seemingly male-made films.

SOM: You write a lot about her physicality, and you connect it to dance. I loved the comparison you made, too, to silent film actresses, and how they had to communicate everything with their bodies. Could you talk a little bit more about this in terms of Sylvia’s approach?

JR: One of the key things to understand about Sylvia and her work is the knowledge that she was an untrained actor, so she operated on a purely instinctual level. This allowed her the opportunity to be completely distinctive. I’m super drawn to actors like this as I often find their work much more alive, arresting and compelling than someone you can sense is falling back on tricks they have learned in acting school.

You can sense throughout Sylvia’s entire career, even in her weaker roles, that her prior experience with dance and movement was pivotal to her work onscreen. For example, if you watch Mysteries, the haunting Dutch film she made with Rutger Hauer on the freezing Isle of Man in 1978, you can see Sylvia utilizing her body much differently than her more trained peers like Hauer or Rita Tushingham. It’s all in her posture and the way she allows (and even invites) the cold to push her entire being forward.

Compare this to the other Dutch film she made with Hauer in the same year, Pastorale 1943, where she holds herself completely another way, playing someone who is trying to exude a quality of confidence. From film to film, we can watch her move entirely differently. It’s super impressive. It’s remarkable how she instinctually understood the importance of physicality, especially in film.

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Pastorale 1943

JR: She also had a great natural understanding of how important listening and reacting are to an actor. Despite her lack of training, the level of growth in her skills as an actor grew unbelievably quickly throughout the seventies so much so that it is hard to believe it is the same performer. Anyone not believing me can watch her electrifying and near feral work in her first film Frank and Eva and then compare that to her dignified and somber work in something like Vadim’s Une Femme Fidele which was just a couple of years later.

The noteworthy change is rather jaw-dropping, especially when viewed back-to-back (which critics at the time couldn’t do). Sylvia might have never performed Shakespeare in the Park, but I believe if her career hadn’t been derailed by her time in Hollywood in the late seventies there is no telling just how much nuanced and richer her performances would have become.

It was important to me to draw comparisons to the silent cinema you mentioned, as Sylvia shared so much in common with some of these earliest cinematic trailblazers. Of all of her directors, I think Claude Chabrol understood these qualities the best.

Kristel with Claude Chabrol

JR: So much so that he apparently chucked a lot of the dialogue that was originally in his incredible Alice or the Last Escapade because he understood that Sylvia didn’t need it to communicate. In fact, she could often communicate better with silence than the written word, which was truly incredible. So much so that even Truffaut immediately picked up on it when he sat in with his editor, Claudine Bouché, while she was editing Emmanuelle. It’s easy to see why he considered Sylvia for The Story of Adele H, one of the key early roles she just missed out on that would have dramatically altered her life and career.

Along with Chabrol, Roger Vadim and Just Jaeckin seemed to understand Sylvia the actress the best. She’s so incredibly earthy for Vadim especially. There is a wonderful moment in her first scene of Une Femme Fidele where she trips and nearly falls but continues with the scene. I love that Vadim kept that in. Throughout her career her best directors seemed to understand just how well Sylvia utilized her surroundings. That’s something you can’t fake or be taught.

Kristel in “Une Femme Fidele”

JR: That connection to Silent film, and early talkies, is one of the main aspects about Sylvia’s work that draws me in. As her first director Pim de la Parra notes in his interview in my book, Sylvia was a real film scholar. She adored Dietrich and Garbo especially and their influence really shows in her great performances in Alice, La Marge and even Emmanuelle 2 (which feels to me like what a Dietrich/Von Sternberg collaboration would have been like in the seventies).

Photo of Kristel by the great George Hurrell

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JR: It’s a shame that Sylvia didn’t get to make the thirties-set Madonna of the Sleeping Cars which, along with Hugo Claus’ adaptation of Madame Bovary, was her great dream project and would have allowed her the opportunity to make a film like Shanghai Express (not silent but still with many of the genre’s defining qualities). It’s also a shame that Sylvia missed out on Herzog’s Nosferatu, yet another role that went to career Doppleganger Isabelle Adjani, as Sylvia would have been perfection. She actually turned down a couple of great films due to her not wanting to work with Klaus Kinski, due to his treatment of women. She was always very upfront about who she did and didn’t want to work with, another aspect of her career that I appreciate.

SOM: There is a moment where you describe the reaction to one of her roles, in Because of the Cats, where she had to play a “blonde bombshell”, and it wasn’t the right fit for her. She loved Brigitte Bardot, but the Bardot “thing” wasn’t her “thing”. How did Sylvia think about her own persona onscreen? Or did she?

JR: Yes, she was often lazily compared to Marilyn Monroe, whom she loved and shared some in common with personally, but they were opposites on screen. Sylvia had a poetic coolness about her so even when she was playing “sexy” it had a more intellectual drive than Monroe’s flirtatious on-screen persona.

The Bardot comparisons made more sense, as they were both European and they had similar career trajectories. In fact, an early chapter in the book details how Sylvia was essentially discovered by Bardot’s partner at the time, Jaccques Charrier, and would end up making one of her great films with Roger Vadim. Despite the differences, Sylvia, of course, didn’t mind these comparisons, as she greatly admired both Monroe and Bardot. I couldn’t say how she felt about her own persona onscreen other than I think she was much more aware of what she was doing than she’s ever been given credit for.

JR: I did want to make sure, as a critic, that I was honest in my approach to each film and performance so I didn’t shy away from pointing out problems with some of the lesser work in the book, like the “blonde bombshell” role you mentioned.

SOM: In a lot of writing about, for example, Elvis, there’s a focus on what-might-have-been, the what-ifs. It’s like 20 years of triumph is erased. We have discussed this before. While I think it’s important to mourn what we have lost, I think it’s also important to turn the focus to what really matters, the work that actually happened. You seem to feel that Sylvia Kristel is long overdue for a serious re-evaluation – or maybe even just a proper evaluation, period. Your book feels like an act of redress, and I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.

JR: I did absolutely mean it as an act of redress, so thank you.

As much as I regret that she passed on opportunities to work with directors like Ingmar Bergman and Maurice Pialat, which I detail towards the end of the book, I want the proper focus to be on the great work she did. Like Elvis, her story is part tragic but mostly triumph. It’s a bummer that works like Une Femme Fidele, La Marge and Alice have yet to get their due, but they will. Great art survives and Sylvia made a lot of it, throughout a number of fields.

So, while I think it’s okay to look at missed roles in everything from King Kong to Body Heat to Once Upon a Time in America as regrettable, ultimately the great films she made make up for those. Ironically, Sylvia’s dismissal of several plum parts helped give rise to both Adjani and Isabelle Huppert.

Speaking of Huppert, probably the great role that I would have most liked to have seen Sylvia in was in Pialat’s masterful LouLou. It would have given Sylvia another opportunity to work again with the great Gerard Depardieu (who she had held her own with in the marvelous Rene the Cane) and I think would have completely reshaped her career for the eighties.

Kristel and Depardieu, “Rene the Cane”

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JR: Pialat was very vocal at the time about how disappointed he was and even had Huppert and Depardieu watching Sylvia onscreen in the film, so in a way he got her in his film anyway. Funnily enough, he had also put her image in his earlier Passe ton bac d’abord. Pialat was just one of a number of truly masterful filmmakers inspired by Sylvia, who sadly never got to work with her. Polanski was another, and of course Bergman. I look upon these missed opportunities as just adding to the richness of her story, although looking at the films she could have made in the eighties if she hadn’t mistakenly come to America and became saddled with such outfits as Cannon does leave a lump in my throat.

SOM: If someone has no idea who Sylvia Kristel was, and wants to see her in action, where would you suggest they start and why? What role captures her best?

JR: Sadly, for the most part her greatest performances in Une Femme Fidele, La Marge, Rene the Cane and Alice are currently missing in action officially. Even more regrettable is the fact that her great films that have been released on disc, like the first two Emmanuelle films, and her Dutch work (released by my publisher Cult Epics) are not streaming as of yet which sadly means that the films that are streaming here are mostly amongst her worst. Frustrating, but I know that will change.

Ignoring all that, her work in both La Marge and Alice are the ideal entry points. I highly recommend the recently released Sylvia Kristel 1970’s Collection from Cult Epics as it allows viewers not only the opportunity to see two of her finest Dutch films (Mysteries and Pastorale 1943) but also her brief turn in Playing With Fire for another one of her great directors, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

People who have always considered Sylvia as just the erotic star of works like Emmanuelle or Private Lessons have the story wrong. Sylvia Kristel was amongst the greatest and final figures of the much-missed European Art House of the sixties and seventies. That’s the main story my book tells. It’s a celebration of an extremely smart and talented artist and a period in art and popular culture that was unlike any other.

You can purchase Richey’s book at Cult Epics.

Kate Mulvany as Marion Keisker, Elvis (2022; d. Baz Luhrmann)

My new column at Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics has really filled a void left in me from the shuttering of Film Comment and my biweekly column there. In “Present Tense”, I was given pretty much free rein to follow my passions wherever they went. This is a rarity. Liberties is a quarterly journal, but they recently launched an online site, without a paywall, and managing editor Celeste Marcus reached out. She was looking for regular columnists. Celeste has been amazing, and open to my pitches. There’s no overall theme to the column or single subject matter. I’ve been writing things I’ve wanted to tackle for years, ideas rattling around in my head. Some of you may be aware of all of this, since you follow me elsewhere on social media- but I figured I’d provide some links here on the newsletter, to get the word out (not just about my stuff, but about Liberties in general). Their roster of writers is daunting and impressive, and I am proud to be a part of it.

My stuff has never really been what I call “news-peggy”. This has been an asset and a detriment (probably. I have no confirmation, just assuming). “Responding” to big news in real time, or weighing in on the hot topic of the day, has never been my thing as a writer. It’s totally fine if it is other people’s “thing”, and there is clearly a huge market for it. I’ve usually spent my time writing about long-dead actors, old movies, old theatrical productions (which I haven’t seen, since they premiered on Broadway 70 years before my birth, etc.), and all of the things I’ve basically been passionate about since I was a yearning tween discovering this whole WORLD of culture/theatre/acting/creating existed before I was born. There is an audience for this kind of thing! Those of you who were around during the “blogosphere” heyday - 2004-2008 (pre-social media) will remember! People had entire blogs devoted to trains in cinema, or pre-Code film, or different studios of the 1930s era. Film noir sites. Screwball sites. Horror sites. You could just wander around this eccentric neighborhood, stopping by each “house” to see what everyone was talking about. Very very little of it was news-peggy. It was glorious. Social media eradicated that kind of thing, at least as a collective experience.

The places where NON-news-peggy pieces can find a home are dwindling fast. There’s a kind of piece I’ve always wanted to write - and attempt to write - sort of a mixture of cultural commentary and personal writing, tilted more towards the commentary part of it, but where you can feel the writer - as an individual human - behind it. Kate Zambreno writes like this. Joan Didion wrote in this way. Olivia Laing is a great example. If you read John Waters’ essays, he writes like this: You can feel his vast knowledge of basically every movie ever made, every book ever written, and every outfit ever worn by anyone who has ever been in the news in any capacity, and yet you feel him in all his eccentricity in every line. This is not reporting. Not exactly. It’s biased, in that you can feel the obsession nagging at the writer to be investigated: like Laing and urban loneliness, or Laing and alcohol/writing. Laing was interested in those things for very personal reasons, and she went after it like an investigative reporter/archaeologist, while still including herself in the narrative. This is extremely tricky and when it’s done poorly it’s awful. What makes the difference is voice. Not every writer has a “voice”. You know it when you see it.

I am not saying I succeed in doing all of these things, but it is, at least, my goal. When editor-in-chief Nic Rapold asked me write a column for Film Comment, he explicitly wanted that from me, he liked my tendency to weave in all these different disparate elements into, say, a regular film review. Not everybody does. Whatever comes to mind. Like a Hank Williams lyric, or an aside about Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Nic liked that aspect of my writing (nobody had really called it out before). I read so much. I didn’t “go to school” for any of this stuff. I have zero academic background in cultural subjects (I think I took a poetry class in college, but other than that: no. No film studies courses either, zip, nada, zero. Everything I’ve read or seen I’ve done just because I wanted to read/see whatever it is, and I’ve got to put that info SOMEwhere. It’s a relief sometimes to include some random thing, if it fits. Like: “Oh God, I’ve been wanting to use this quote from Clifford Odets for 23 years.” Or “Ooh! John Keats’ negative capability thing might work as a reference point here?” or “Yay! I can FINALLY throw in a reference to Holly in Land of the Lost and her centrality to basically everything in my life.”

She is EXTREMELY important. CRUCIAL.

I’ve tried to do that here on my Substack in the pieces I’ve written, and it’s been wonderful, so far, to have the space to explore things in my own way at Liberties.

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The pieces so far:

I launched the column with an essay called The Question, where I discussed my early years as an actor, my time at the Actors Studio, and then segueing years later to film criticism, and how those things inform each other, my history with both. It’s something I’ve spoken about at length, or referenced here and there in pieces across a number of years, but this was the first time I really put it all together.

My second essay was on Carole Lombard, someone I adore but whom I had never really devoted much time to in print! This one was so fun to research and it gave me an excuse to watch all of her films again (which I do on the regular, anyway).

This was so much fun: I interviewed playwright/writer/horror fan (and old pal dating back decades) Sean Abley about his new book (just published) Queer Horror: A Film Guide.

I was almost afraid to write this one, since it was so personal, and because it had been percolating in my head for 15 years? Longer? It’s about John Cassavetes’ Opening Night and Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play - and how they are almost the same work of art, in my head and in my associations with them. I wrote this essay just a couple of weeks before Gena Rowlands died. I’m so glad I finally got to it.

This one just went up and it’s another piece I’d been wanting to write for about 10 years: Marion Keisker Loved Elvis First. I believe Marion Keisker was the first person to record Elvis Presley, not Sam Phillips. The image at the top of this post is Kate Mulvany, who played Marion Keisker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Luhrmann’s presentation gets at what I believe Marion’s role actually was, and her importance to the narrative.

I just returned from Scotland and promptly got bronchitis. Scotland, I love you, and I wish I could have stayed longer. I walked out of my hotel at 8 o’clock one foggy morning, looked to the left and saw …

I stood there on the wet sidewalk and just stared. In the fog, the buildings and atmosphere are so gloomy and romantic and ghostly. Rich and beautiful. I want to go back!

Thank you for subscribing. I appreciate your continued support!

Who we are when we are alone and we feel totally private is worlds away from our social selves. Even extroverts, people who “put it all on the table” out in the social world, probably also stand in their kitchen in a fugue state, eating an entire jar of peanut butter with their fingers … an activity they would never do if someone else was present.

Private moments are difficult to portray and require a different head-space. Actors are used to (and trained to) show emotions normal people subdue or hide. This is part of the job. But creating a “private moment” that feels private? That gives the audience the uneasy feeling they shouldn’t be watching? It’s so challenging that Lee Strasberg designed an entire exercise called The Private Moment.

Perhaps the most classic example of a “private moment” is Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle, talking to his reflection in the mirror, but there are many more. The genesis of all of them, as far as I can tell, is Peter Lorre’s horrifying child-killer in M manually manipulating his face while looking in the mirror.

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DeNiro as Rupert Pupkin, pretending he is talking to life-size cutouts of Liza Minnelli … classic Private Moment. Holly Hunter in Living Out Loud, drunk, in her kitchen, murmuring to herself, lost in a private zone. Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, looking at his reflection and practicing the joke (private moments often involve mirrors) he wants to tell Adrian the next day. The zone of privacy created in such moments is so vast it is impenetrable, a tough feat when key grips and boom operators surround the actor in the least private setting possible. In such moments, the person circles around himself, into himself, an ouroboros of self-reflection, self-concern, self-dramatizing, a fantasist. These private worlds are often grandiose, portraying a fantasy of ease and social comfort. It’s not just ease by itself, it’s ease that is perceived by others. (Rupert Pupkin in the basement is the perfect example of this.)

Julian, in American Gigolo, as played by Richard Gere, is all about masks and appearances. His personality has been carefully crafted so his elderly female clients feel special and cared for. When he is alone, he drops the public swagger. There are a couple of scenes showing Julian at home. His home is a fortress of privacy. He is seen working out, listening to Swedish language tapes. One scene in particular is a quintessential Private Moment, and it involves, of course, a mirror.

But Julian’s privacy is more involved than just preening in front of a mirror.

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The scene I want to discuss and examine:

A variety of ties and shirts (all Armani) lie on Julian’s bed, everyday objects transformed into glittering possibilities of persona through how Gere looks at them. His is a merciless connoisseur’s eye, but the eye does not obliterate warmth. Every tie, every shirt, opens up worlds in his head. They’re all beautiful. What matters is putting the right tie together with the right shirt. That will take some time. He has to crack the code.

Smokey Robinson sings in the background, “The love I saw in you was just a mirage …” Apt words, since Julian’s dreamspace of persona, of projected self – historically/stereotypically a woman’s realm – is also a mirage. Julian’s whole life is a mirage.

Julian, in his underwear, stands by the bed, looking down at the ties and shirts, considering the combinations, colors, textures. He cocks his head, thinking. He purses his lips after a moment. He seems pleased. There is a unique blend of laziness and focus on his face. He is like a confident athlete or an animal. He is not in a hurry, but his eventual choice is very important.

Sometimes, as he moves the ties around from shirt to shirt, he sings along with Smokey Robinson. “You led me on …with untrue kisses …”, but he appears to be unconscious of the fact that he is singing. This is what happens when we feel private. We don’t sing along to a song like we’re in a karaoke bar. There is no audience. We wander into the song, we wander back out. It’s not performative. It’s something else. Here, the song is all part of his dreamspace of self-absorption. The moment is so private that if someone walked in, he would stop doing what he was doing. He would have to grapple, quickly, for his public persona.

There’s something stereotypically feminine about such private moments of unembarrassed self-regard, which is why they can be so unbalancing and riveting when we see it in a man. In the movies, when women look in the mirror (in public or by themselves), they usually do so to check the perfection of the mask: Powder applied, lipstick applied, how do I look, all still okay? But when men look in the mirror, they attempt to either look behind the mask, trying to see the self, brutalized (and brutal) in the outside world by having to “Be a Man” all the time. OR they look in the mirror to pump UP the mask, to step into a world where they dominate. (Travis Bickle.) It’s a different relationship to Self. (I wrote an entire piece for Oscilloscope about Men and Mirrors.)

Here, Julian is engaged in the same process as a woman looking in the mirror, except that while his mask is being chosen (brown tie with blue shirt, etc.), he also communes with something intensely pleasurable. It’s visceral. He is not analytical. He languishes in possibilities. He wallows in aestheticism. He is outside of Self, outside of Thought. It’s there in the boyish cock of his head to one side as he looks over the ties, the way he purses his lips happily: it’s a moment so vulnerable that no one on the outside has ever seen him this way.

He looks like a kid considering the pedals on his bike or something.

Julian doesn’t look at women the way he looks at those ties, with the same lazy sensual appreciation. With women, he is kind, the kindness originating in extreme knowing-ness. He knows how to make them come. He is proud of this, but not in a cocky way. As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite. He knows how to serve them. Other men are selfish and don’t care. He cares and takes the time. It makes him feel like he’s “really done something”, as he tells Lauren Hutton’s Michelle in Julian’s only introspective monologue. Still, there’s a distance with women, and it is the distance which draws women to him.

The ties, though? He looks at those ties with a satisfaction so deep he’s satiated. Yes, yes, those colors are just right. Just right.

Manohla Dargis once pointed out that Gere’s “gifts as a film actor are located in his body, in his silky walk and fluid gestures.”

True, and when Gere is allowed to incorporate his own natural narcissism into a role, he shines. Narcissism is part of what he brings to the table.

He is not convincing as a conventional romantic leading man. He is too self-centered. He gives himself away in a scene in Pretty Woman where he and Julia Roberts get out of a limo together on an airfield. He gets out of the limo and then just stands there, as she, in her long gown, gets out of the car by herself. It’s an unconscious moment from him, it’s not “highlighted” as a character bit by director Garry Marshall or by him. It doesn’t even occur to Gere to lend her a hand. It would have been interesting if they made more of a point of it.

In its own small way, Richard Gere not helping Julia Roberts out of the limo obliterates the fairy-tale narrative the film is trying to tell.

I am not criticizing the moment. I think it’s FASCINATING. Julia Roberts strolls away with the movie. Gere doesn’t stand a chance. (In a way, his performance in Pretty Woman is the most generous thing he has ever done: he got out of the way to make room for the brand new powerhouse, stealing the movie from him. He LET her steal the movie. This is very very important.)

Remember: Roberts was practically an unknown. She got attention for Mystic Pizza, but … all of the actresses in that film did. It was an ensemble piece. Nobody was ready for Pretty Woman. She didn’t even do a press tour for it. She was making Sleeping with the Enemy. Even her agent wasn’t ready. So there was Gere – a MAJOR sex symbol since the 70s) – playing support staff for a much younger woman – allowing her to shine.

But let’s get back to Gere’s narcissism. I need to clarify what I’m saying.

Narcissistic self-regard is not a flaw in Richard Gere. I am not judging him. I’m not that middle-class. I’m not trying to teach him manners. I am saying that the dynamic he has with himself is interesting and important to explaining his talent and how it expresses itself.

There he was, trapped in a Cinderella story, supposedly the Prince, but he doesn’t give the Princess a helping hand out of the car! Classic Gere! but misplaced in that story, where we are supposed to see him as a “catch”, a prince. The moment is a “tell” and his most honest moment in the film. I love it. We are interesting not because we are perfect. We are interesting because we are flawed.

In Officer and a Gentleman, a love story, his isolation and self-absorption is what made the character so deadly as a boyfriend. The arc of the character is he had to give self-absorption up in order to become a “gentleman”. For almost the entirety of the film we watch him circling only himself, even when he’s with her. It is a fascinating and not quite likable combo.

This is Gere’s sweetest spot: he is fascinating and not quite likable.

He’s so activated, physically and intellectually, in The Hoax, a movie which came and went, but should definitely be accounted for in any serious discussion of Gere’s talent. He was made for a film like The Hoax. It’s perfect. He plays to his strengths: He uses himself consciously, he uses his charm, his good looks, but … he’s up to no good.

Gere needs narcissism as an actor. He doesn’t seem to register as an actor without it. Sex symbols all have a measure of it. They withhold. They are self-consumed. Narcissists drive women crazy. Women want to capture/be captured, be allowed “in there”, be allowed entryway into his precious interior space. Humphrey Bogart was a sex symbol with this kind of thing. Women go NUTS for guys like Zack Mayo in Officer and a Gentleman, and women’s lives are WRECKED in the process. In real life, run from a guy like Zack. He’ll waste your precious time. In the movies, though? As a lead? Gere crushes it.

In American Gigolo, we are given a glimpse of the narcissist “at home”. Gere the actor knows this is a glimpse only the privileged few are allowed to witness. He understands the purpose of the scene: Release the character from his public persona, unfetter him from his “role” and let us see him. Let us see what he does when he’s all alone.

American Gigolo wouldn’t be the same movie without this short Private Moment sequence. The film echoes with loneliness. Julian, sleek and perfect, maneuvers his way through the underworld, trying to maintain his standards (no “rough tricks”, no “fags”), and as he begins to lose control, as his friends abandon him, he faces the abyss at the center of his life and personality. His personality HAS no center. Maybe there’s no “there” there in the first place.

I just want to point out that in the film’s final shot, Gere presses his face up against the clear glass. Earlier, we saw him considering his reflection in the mirror, by himself. At the end, the glass is clear. He can see the person on the other side. They can’t touch. But the barrier is removed.

But in the short earlier scene, where he places ties on shirts, singing to himself, we see behind the mask, and we realize everything else we have seen, every varied role he slips into, is “just a mirage”.

Gere portrays a tailspin of increasing vulnerability over the course of American Gigolo, but nowhere is he more vulnerable and naked than in that two seconds of film when he looks down at the ties, cocks his head lazily, and purses his lips in satisfaction at what he sees.

Alain Delon heard that Gena Rowlands had died, and thought, “What even is the point anymore, I’m out.”

In 2019, I wrote a piece for Oscilloscope’s “Musings” blog, a piece years in the making: on scenes in movies where men stare at themselves in the mirror. Women looking in the mirror means one thing, symbolically, cinematically. Men looking in the mirror, traditionally, means something else. This “trope” goes back almost to cinema’s beginnings. Alain Delon has one of my favorite “staring at himself in the mirror” moments in Purple Noon, and I included a discussion in it of my piece.

I am interested in Alain Delon and how he did what he did. I have written a lot about him. There is something there to be grappled with, especially in regards to his intimidating chilly beauty and his obvious awareness of it. His beauty was an accident of genetics. He somehow seemed to feel he had nothing to do with it. (As indeed he didn’t.) He didn’t preen as an actor. And he could have! But he didn’t, he didn’t need to. He sunned himself by the pool in La Piscine and he was so beautiful it was almost off-putting. Beauty beckons but it also discourages. His was not an inviting kind of beauty. He was aware of what he looked like, and his awareness was certainly in operation in his performances, but he was not self-conscious about it. He was beyond that. Somehow. It’s mysterious.

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Maybe his strongest asset as an actor was that it was immaterial to him whether or not you loved him. He couldn’t care less about you. You were irrelevant to him.

He was capable of warmth and sincerity - see Rocco and His Brothers. It’s genuine. He was also capable of being activated and frenetic - see L’Eclisse, particularly those scenes in the stock market, where he shivers with intention and adrenaline. He’s thrilling. His charm is devilish, seductive, playful.

Beneath the beauty there was a pit of unknowability. He was almost entirely opaque. His eyes were light and icy-blue, and yet they gave an impression of pitch-black-ness. There are moments in Le Cercle Rouge where they look like dark pits in his head. Eyes are windows to the soul? Yeah, not really. His eyes told no tales. The mystery remained intact. Always. This is what made him a great movie star, and more than that, an indelible and important movie persona. Like Dietrich. Or Cary Grant. Two insanely gorgeous almost otherworldly andrognynous creatures who managed to be both transparent and mysterious at the same time. Persona as strip-tease, where the ultimate reveal STILL withholds something essential.

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Everyone has an inner life. It shows on our faces, in our gestures, in our hesitations, in the thoughts that flicker through our eyes. It shows whether we want it to or not. Alain Delon’s characters have inner lives. But the glimpses we get of it – in Le Cercle Rouge, in Purple Noon, in Le Samourai – make us recoil, rather than draw nearer. What he showed us was never explicit. It was never sentimental (“Here is the inner pain I am managing.”), it was never offered by way of explanation (“See? This is what I am dealing with.”) It was more a feeling, a sense. (I wrote a lengthy piece of “character” analysis – in quotes because there really IS no “character” and that’s the point – of Jef in Le Samourai where Delon revealed not depth, so much as nothingness.)

There was the beauty, right? Beauty seduces. We are moths to flame, and etc. With someone like, say, Marilyn Monroe … the beauty was a soft whispering entreaty to admire, to love, to protect. Her beauty was profound (and rare) in that way. The same was true of Elvis, who was so intimidatingly gorgeous in person that people HAD to address it, sometimes blurting out, “My God, you are gorgeous” right to his face. Carl Perkins shook his hand when he first met him, kept it together as they exchanged pleasantries, and the second Elvis walked away, Carl said to Scotty Moore, “That is the best-looking man I have ever seen in my life.” It wasn’t just women who felt it. Men were in thrall to it too. But, like Monroe, Elvis’ beauty gleamed, emanating from an inner spotlight, and people clustered around him hoping the light would shine on them. Maybe his charisma would rub off.

But Delon’s beauty had a forbidding quality.

It says “Stay away”.

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Delon did not always play chilly sociopaths, but smart directors understood this forbidding quality was his ace in the hole. There was something criminal about it. His beauty was indistinguishable from amorality. The beauty was not illuminated by the inner spirit and soul. The beauty covered a blank void (I have written about this “blank”-ness ad nauseum).

There was a disconnect between the matinee-idol looks and the inner life, and the disconnect did not appear to be a conscious acting choice, or anything manipulated by Delon, but rather an organic expression of his natural temperament.

This is another reason why Alain Delon was a Great Movie Star. His persona was pleasing, but it was destabilizing. Things didn’t add up. You couldn’t get to the core of it. There were gaps. The center was elusive. You could not find the bottom.

Maybe there was no bottom.

And that’s why people who got too close took one look at him, and drew back, alarmed.

It is this elusive hard-to-pin-down-ness that makes a great star. If everything is explained and revealed, then there is no mystery, and no reason to keep coming back.

Even though Delon came off as remote and unreachable, it was not because he was focused on himself. He did not emanate egotism or garden-variety narcissism. You didn’t know WHAT he was focused on. Maybe it was something existential (he was French, after all) or maybe it’s some deep psychic wound from before memory even existed.

Or maybe he wasn’t “focused” on anything at all, and that’s why we couldn’t look away, that’s why we draw closer to him, because what was it like to be focused on nothing, nothing at all?

What was it LIKE in there, behind those icy eyes?

In 2014, I attended a SAG Foundation screening of "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" at the New School on 12th Street (where I went to grad school. Walking into that auditorium was like walking into my own past). Afterwards, there was a Q & A onstage with Gena Rowlands and director Arthur Allan Seidelman, moderated by Broadway World's Richard Ridge. Rowlands and Seidelman worked together before, in 1988's "Grace & Glorie" for television, and they both expressed happiness at working together again. The QA wasn’t just about the film we had just seen. It was about her work and career, in general. It was an audience full of actors, not film critics. Therefore, the questions were better. Sorry, colleagues, but it’s true! The questions were all acting-process questions, and the answers were fascinating. An audience member asked her how she knew when she “found” a character, or IF she knew when she “found” it, and Gena’s answer was so good:

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To my knowledge, there is only one problem with music. Well, two, if you count the power of earworms, the fact that even bad songs can get stuck in your head. Okay then, three: the simple fact that once you’ve heard a song you love for the first time, you can never hear it for the very first time again. But the real problem—and this can fundamentally Fuck You, in my opinion—is the way a song or an album or a voice on the radio can fling you so authoritatively into the past. Songs are almost always slivers of souvenirs, recollections, and Nick’s are no different. Maybe this is why his voice, to me, always sounds so much like a memory.

— Liz Riggs, Lo Fi

This book review will contain personal stories. I won’t apologize. Blame the book!

Nostalgia is tricky. Writers utilize it for different purposes. F. Scott Fitzgerald was nostalgic. Laura Ingalls Wilder was too. Neither were nostalgic for the same thing or in the same way. Nostalgia can be conservative, looking backwards to a so-called simpler time. John Cheever’s short stories are filled with middle-aged men, mostly ex-jocks, who yearn for the glory days of yore, and need to show they’ve “still got it”. Cheever understood: nostalgia can poison the well. The only guarantee in this world is everything changes.

Liz Riggs’ debut novel Lo Fi lives at the complicated intersection of comedy, yearning, and nostalgia, a potent rare combination, one which I can feel almost instantly. A prickle on my skin. Lo Fi establishes its swoony vivid atmosphere so totally, it - like the excerpt above - “flings you … authoritatively into the past.”

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My response to Lo Fi wasn’t cerebral, although I did have the wherewithal to admire Riggs’ writing, and re-read paragraphs merely to revel in them. But the book exerted a strong pull, dropping me into my wild child 20s when I cavorted through Chicago’s actor/improv-comedy scene, causing trouble, making messes and not caring, fucking around, getting my heart broken, playing with fire, acting in plays, crying myself to sleep, gulping down margaritas on a Tuesday night, wearing the same outfit two days in a row to my temp job (figure it out), answering phones in an advertising agency still hungover, tripping from rehearsal to late-night bacchanal and home again (or not) … I don’t wear rose-colored glasses but there was something beautifully sharp about living in the moment. It was like there was more oxygen in the air. Lo Fi made me ache! For all of it! (My friend Mitchell said once, “Listen, Sheila, nobody can ever say your youth was wasted on the young.”) I didn’t need a mid-life crisis. I went wild back then and I don’t regret it (except when I do).

That’s the thing with Lo Fi. I took it personally.

Alison Hunter, a recent transplant to Nashville, stamps hands and checks IDs at a music club called The Venue. She’s in her early 20s. Her social life is very busy.

She yearns for Nick, a guy she had a brief fling with in Michigan. Nick is the charismatic lead singer for the band Flirtation Device. (The fictional band names in Lo Fi are hilarious.) Nick is always on tour. Every time Alison thinks she’s moved past obsessing over him, he will text her, or write a song about her, or swoop into town for a gig, pulling her back into his arms. Alison can’t resist any of it.

A freckle on his upper lip, a memory of a rainy night in Ann Arbor, cheap beer and cheaper weed, the dim light of a Michigan alley. Nick’s hands in mine, the music still shimmering on the soundtrack of the memory. He steps back and tries to explain: he’s just in town for the day, his band had a song they needed to record. Nick—in my city, wandering around just miles away, without me even knowing it…

Allison has no ambition to be a singer or songwriter, although she tries to write songs. She is adjacent to successful musicians in a city centered on music so maybe it’s intimidating to even try. She played out once at an open mic and it was such a disaster she is haunted by it months later. Her writer’s block tugs at her sleeve, demanding to be addressed. But Nashville is so all-consuming, she barely has time to focus on goals or plans.

How did I actually feel, when I pulled into town? … Relief, I think—to have put several states between me and Nick, a geographic barrier I was foolish enough to think would serve as a buffer. Relief to be surrounded by so many people with so many dreams, or rather so many people with the same dream, but so many different talents? Or maybe I was just relieved by the noise, relieved to have music playing—from somewhere, by someone—all the time, every day, no matter what. Even if it wasn’t mine.

Riggs’ writing is so evocative. You can hear the music in the air.

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Nick is not the only game in town (he’s barely in town, anyway). There’s also Julien, who stamps hands at the door beside her. They don’t flirt, not exactly, but he seems interested in her in a way Nick doesn’t. He’s curious about what kinds of songs she writes. They are overly aware of each other. She crushes on him but he keeps his distance.

—You’re so cagey.
—You think anyone who doesn’t talk all the time is cagey.
—I’m not cagey.
—Well, you talk all the time.
That seems like a joke, but when I search his face for a smile, he lifts the beer to his mouth. There’s a catch in my chest that I can’t quite control, an accidental inhalation of smoke.

You get to know the other Venue employees. Colt, the dissipated but beautiful drug-dealing barback, whom Alison hooks up with on occasion, even though she keeps promising Sloane, her roommate and bestie, she’ll stop. But …

Now I’m wet and I hate it. Fuck Colt and his pretty fucking face.

Eddie hangs around the Venue, pontificating about jazz and the Rolling Stones. Being annoyed by Eddie is a bonding agent for the Venue employees. Andy is the owner, seemingly the only actual adult in the room (even though he’s probably only 30 years old).

The book is peppered with playlists Alison makes for different moods and situations, and also paragraphs, separated from the narrative, where Alison lists all her Nashville-centric “failings”. Her faux pas.

Confusing John Hiatt with John Prine… Not knowing enough about Dolly Parton. Not worshipping Dolly Parton, patron saint of Nashville … Losing my capo … Saying I’ve heard of a band while not having any clue—any effing clue—who they are. Not recognizing a Merle Haggard song, an Emmylou Harris song, a Hank Williams song. Not being able to come up with my own melody for almost an entire year.

She careens around with Sloane, crushes on Julien, sleeps with Nick and Colt, and sometimes with bartenders and/or baristas (a rookie mistake. Don’t do it!) She’s happy to have no responsibility at The Venue: she doesn’t want to “be in charge” of anything. Even her own life.

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The tone of the book works by stealth. It starts with first-person present-tense:

I stamp hands at the Venue, off Eighth.

Alison lets us tag along, she points things out to us. Sometimes there’s a collage, seemingly written in a stupor the morning after some debauched night:

Shots of Four Roses, a Miller High Life and then another. Esther floating in the back, like a ghost. Another shot, the room warm, the music on a reverb-saturated loop. A girl onstage, sing-screaming about getting sober while I drift blissfully away from any such condition.

But then suddenly, Riggs switches to past tense. And it knocked the wind out of me.

After a drive with Julien:

Things I missed: A pewter ring he wore on the middle finger of his right hand…Cheeks flushed peach when he got too warm, most nights at The Venue. His short, filed fingernails. Green eyes, sometimes, and then other times definitively hazel. The way he was always listening, waiting, showing a patience for others that I could only aspire to.

The brief slightly mysterious interaction with Julien is suddenly ablaze with poignancy: an older Alison is looking back at her youthful shenanigans with Julien, and realizing the things she missed. Details. Textures. What was really going on. Everyone is self-consumed in their 20s. It takes time to gain perspective, to achieve enough distance to see the details, the things you should treasure, the things you can (or can’t) afford to throw away.

“Things I missed.”

This is the key to Riggs’ effectiveness as a storyteller (besides her gift with words / dialogue / character development / atmosphere). Present-tense Alison becomes past-tense Alison, and the book shimmers with profundity and yearning, acceptance and loss. What would it be like if we didn’t miss things back then when it was happening? Can’t Alison slow down just a second and see Nick is not the one, Colt is just a distraction, Julien … well, Julien might end up being very very important … but not now … not yet … What would it be like if Past You could leap forward “authoritatively” into the future and get a glimpse of what it all will look like?

Of course we can’t do that. But a novelist like Liz Riggs can.

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Getting personal. It’s not my fault.

What would be my list for “things I missed”? I am grateful for those years in Chicago, crazy as they were. I took things hard. I lacked resilience even then. My life was intense, but it was also so entertaining (my journals are evidence), and I was so consumed by it - I miss being consumed by my personal life! But what did I miss then?

With apologies for stealing the idea:

Things I missed: Miles’ husky-blue eyes as he squinted at me, deciding whether or not to reveal something personal about himself. The wooden benches we sat on at Lounge Ax every Monday night to see Pat McCurdy play. My first apartment in Chicago, a one-room dump, the sickly sweet smell of roach motels, the heavy clank of the old-fashioned elevator at the end of the hall. The fierce wind as I ran along the lake shore. Taking ecstasy for the first (and only) time at a party and being so confused as to why I didn’t feel bliss. I instead made a spectacle of myself, weeping for four hours. The next day I looked up “ecstasy” in the dictionary and saw the first entry: “state of overwhelming emotion”. Relief! There wasn’t anything WRONG with me. Thank God I fact-checked my ecstasy-taking experience! Late nights walking to the lit-up hot dog stand, with Wrigley Field looming above us like the UFO in Close Encounters.

Sheila. Go home and go to bed. Now.

Things I missed: Miles said, “I don’t have another you, you know,” squinting at me before he said it. I didn’t “get” what he was saying then. I was so into him I missed a lot. My fight-or-flight instinct was so out of control I would see him across the bar and pretend he wasn’t there. Even though he was there to see me. Mitchell would go over to talk to him: “Hey, what’s up?” Miles, deadpan, unbothered: “I’m waiting for Sheila to stop ignoring me. It takes her about half an hour.”

Things I missed: I was weird and high-strung and I ignored him when he was there to see me and he didn’t take this personally. So many others did. We were the same age, kids, essentially, but he, the wildest boy I ever met, gave me space and grace. It took me years, literally, to really get how rare and precious it was. I lived long enough to perceive the “things I missed” and I can reclaim them now.

My Chicago time lives in music. It’s not intellectual. The music “flings me authoritatively into the past.”

• Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes.

• Jellyfish’s album Spilt Milk.

• B-52’s “Tell It Like It T-I-S”.

• Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Life By the Drop.”

The response is kinesthetic. The opening strains of “Little Earthquakes” make me smell roach motels.

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Enough about me.

Riggs’ writing feels free and spontaneous. It doesn’t FEEL written at all. It made me laugh out loud and I cried twice. Twice! The last line made me cry! Rare! It’s difficult to stick the landing, and Lo Fi’s final line was a culmination of the book’s yearnings and hopes, barely spoken out loud, but present. Our triumphs don’t have to be enormous. Growing up is not a straight line.

Lo Fi is a beautiful tribute to living the kind of life that prioritizes art, whatever art it might be. Music isn’t background noise. Music is everything. It is the soundtrack of our lives, touchstones, time-markers, Proust’s madeleine. A container for emotions and experiences. Lo Fi is a tribute to those who love music so passionately they organize their lives around it, they wait in line outside a club in the pouring rain, they hang on to their CD mixes made for them by a high school crush, they appreciate the lo-fi, the analog, they make space for their love of something other than personal goals and accomplishments.

Lo Fi is an extraordinary debut novel, so extraordinary it just forced me to talk about myself. I hope that’s a compliment. It’s meant as one.

Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints is a beloved book to me, detailing the rambling adventures of a girl in New Orleans, rolling from party to party with people she’s known her whole life. She perceives kindness and sweetness in the most unlikely people. She lives in the 20th century but she yearns for a life steeped in poetry and values like “honor” and “valor”. The book is very very funny. Until it’s not. In Lemann’s The Fiery Pantheon, the narrator is, again, obsessed with the past and old portraits and people keeping up old rituals/traditions. Lemann writes: “She had a nostalgia for a life she never lived.”

Lo Fi made me nostalgic for the life I HAVE lived. Nostalgia can easily slip into self-pity. Nostalgia can be a drug. It can put you into a state of bliss or it can make you weep for four hours. I had to look up “ecstasy” in the dictionary. I didn’t need to look up “nostalgia”. The origin of the word is a two-parter, which seems appropriate: “Homecoming”/”Return” and “Pain”.

You can’t have one without the other.

Time does not heal all wounds. But time changes how things look, and it happens while you’re not paying attention. It’s like one morning you wake up and realize, “Why on earth did I lose months of my life aching for that BOZO?”

E.M. Forster’s Howards End is one of the most nostalgic books ever written. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged – well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in – to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

Consider yourself very lucky if you didn’t begin with proportion. Experience “the better things” fully. They aren’t forever. Life will get serious enough in time.

I am grateful to Lo Fi, and Liz Riggs, for giving me the space to consider my own “better things” and to revel in someone else’s.

“Acting isn't difficult. I'd never take lessons. You just do it, you know? Everybody in life acts anyhow. President Nixon, the Pope, even John Lennon.” — Shelley Duvall to Patricia Bosworth, 1971

Robert Altman was frank about his first impressions of Shelley Duvall. He thought she was full of shit. He assumed she was a hopeful actress acting “quirky” to get attention, to suck up to him, to get the part. He saw a lot of that in the business. He assumed this weird skinny girl with pasted-on eyelashes was the same. He didn’t get it.

Shelley Duvall we found down there in Houston. I had gone away for a week, and the guys I was working with, Tommy Thompson and Brian McKay, said, "Oh, we went to a party, found a girl, and you've got to meet her. She is special!" I said, "Oh, shit, these guys probably got drunk ..." When they'd seen her she was trying to sell paintings by her boyfriend. So I had her come in to see me, and she didn't know that we were looking at her for a part. But I didn't believe her. I thought it was an act… "Hi, what do you want me to do?" I said, "Oh, you'll want to read for this part." "What's that mean?" I said, "What does it mean? You know how to read?" I decided to shoot a test, so I took her out in the park and put a camera on her and just asked her questions. I was really quite mean to her, as I thought she was an actress. But she wasn't kidding; that was her. She was an untrained, truthful person. She was very raw in Brewster but quite magic.

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If Altman’s first impression was incorrect, then Duvall had an equally confusing reaction to this weird guy who invited her over, and she thought it was for one thing, and then she realized it was something else, and she had no idea what was going on. In 1981, she told the story to Cosmopolitan:

I was twenty and living with Bernard in his parents' house in Houston, and we used to give a lot of parties to show off his paintings. Friends would invite other people, and one night two guys showed up saying they knew a patron of the arts and could I bring some paintings to show him. Actually, I was pretty suspicious. I thought he was making some kind of porno movie or something. Then somebody shouted, "But this is Robert Altman. He directed M*A*S*H.” I hadn't seen the picture, hadn't heard of him and couldn't have cared less. Anyway the same person asked for my telephone number, and just to get out of there I gave it to him, figuring I was safe. After all, my father's a lawyer.

“After all, my father’s a lawyer.” is my favorite part.

Altman realized he was wrong almost immediately, and did the riskiest most wild thing possible: He cast Shelley Duvall, who had no idea who he was, and didn’t care who he was, as the lead in Brewster McCloud, opposite Bud Cort. Altman regular Michael Murphy laughed about it later:

He's intrigued by her and gives her the starring role. And she has to start shooting in like three days. The closest she's been to a movie is in the theater, sitting in a chair. Of course she was great. She had that real, natural way, and Bob was the kind of guy who could get that out of you. He had her so relaxed and easy. She blew everybody off the screen in that movie. She was such a natural.

So many people don’t interrogate their (often incorrect) first impressions. People don’t just love being right. They need to be right, and because they need to be right, they dig in their heels, and insist their first impression was correct. OR, they won’t admit their REAL first impressions so they can make it seem like they were right from the get-go: “I always knew she would be a star.” or “I knew instantly he was the next big thing.” Sam Phillips proclaimed for decades he knew immediately Elvis was going to be a star, The One. No, Sam, it wasn’t you. You were like “who the hell is this pimply kid singing Ink Spot songs? Next.” It was Marion Keisker - who wasn’t your secretary, but who RAN Sun Studio with you, who recognized - instantly - pimples and Ink Spots and all - that there was something about this kid. No shade on Sam Phillips. He was right about a lot of things. But it was Marion Keisker who kept bringing up Elvis, saying to Sam, “Let’s have him record this demo.” or “What about that shy kid who came in last year? Could we give him a try?” Sam Phillips, for very obvious reasons, had a vested interest in making it seem like he knew from the jump.

Altman got a kick out of how wrong he was at first about Duvall. He “told on himself” over and over again, a rare quality indeed.

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Shelley Duvall was a rarity, in more ways than one. She was an artist and a muse. Altman knew he could toss her into anything, and she would at the very least be watch-able. Why was she so watch-able? Because she was real. “Raw” is the word everyone uses, including Altman. But “raw” is a deceptive word. You can be “raw” as hell and still be self-conscious when everyone is looking at you and waiting for you to do something. You can be “raw” in real life and be unable to bring that “raw”-ness to the camera, to a fictional circumstance. Shelley Duvall was brilliant in that she was able to be as unself-conscious, as raw, as HERSELF, when the camera was rolling as she was in her real life. There was no difference for her. It’s like she roller-skated into the frame from offscreen and there was no boundary between the two sides. Something happens to people - even very very good actors - when they hear “action”. You go from being a real person to an actor playing a scene. There’s a little interior “click” that happens. Shelley Duvall didn’t experience that click.

This is not to say she didn’t think about what she was doing and make conscious choices. She did. This is why she is called a genius. This is why “raw” is not the best way to discuss her, because it doesn’t give her enough credit.

Think about 3 Women, and how she always gets her dress caught in the car door.

The first time it happened it was an accident, and the crew assumed they’d have to do another take. But Altman loved accidents. He asked her to do it every time she got in the car. So it became a “bit”, a continuity-marker in this very boundary-less film.

This is what I want to underline: One of the most challenging things to do as an actor is to repeat what was at first an accident. Because the first time you did it you had no idea what you were doing, it was an accident. So to then have to add a layer of consciousness to it and CHOOSE to do it, while still making it LOOK like it’s an accident …

If you don’t get what I’m saying, then try it yourself at home. When an accident occurs - you get your sleeve caught on a doorknob, you trip a little bit over the door jamb, you accidentally smudge peanut butter on your nose, whatever … take a second, and then try to repeat it. Then try to repeat it again. And make sure that when you repeat it, it feels/looks like it’s the first time.

Genius is hard to talk about, and the word is thrown around indiscriminately. If you break something down into parts, you sometimes make the organic sound mechanical. It’s one of the risks in writing about this stuff.

But Shelley Duvall getting her dress stuck in the car door over and over again is a nuts-and-bolts example of what I am talking about and what I mean by her genius. Every time it happens it seems like it’s happening for the first time, AND every time it happens she appears totally unaware of it. And yet she the actress not only IS aware of it, she is doing it on purpose. John Strasberg, son of Lee Strasberg, said that good acting was essentially being able to do things “accidentally on purpose” (the title of his book). Duvall was a master at it. You never clock the “on purpose” part.

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Sissy Spacek remembered working with Duvall on 3 Women:

There was a lot of improvisational stuff. He would give us a scene in the morning and then it would grow. It was so freeing working with him after having worked with other directors. The way he works is all very naturalistic ... Shelley always said the three women were the id, the ego, and the superego. At that time I had never heard of the id or the superego. She was way ahead of me.

Spacek’s comment gets at what I’ve been trying to say. Duvall was “untrained”, yes. She was “raw”, sure. But she wasn’t just some amoeba roiling around without any understanding of what was going on. People were baffled by 3 Women. Duvall was not. She understood it perfectly. Along those lines, Altman remembered years later:

Shelley wrote all of [Millie’s] letters, all of those recipes, all of her diary stuff. I don't know any writer who could have done it better. She was wonderful in it. She allowed the fool in her to show itself, what I call the "pink stuff", what you normally don't show people. Real actors show the "pink stuff".

While she will be forever known as the terrified wife in The Shining, not enough credit is given to her for her amazing project, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, which ran from 1982-1987. It is a far more apt legacy, and expands our understanding of this intelligent passionate woman, who had an idea and made it come to fruition, creating an archive of episodes starring some of the greatest actors of not only her time, but ours. Jeff Bridges! Gena Rowlands! The list is endless. Faerie Tale Theatre was her baby, and I feel so fortunate I watched these things when I was an actual child. I had no idea who Shelley Duvall was. I wasn’t watching Nashville or The Shining when I was a kid. But I did watch this, and I knew her name because it was in the title of the show. She was this soft-spoken gentle presence in her introductions, and she wore these long dresses in soft colors like peach or lemon, and she emanated a kind of humor and lightness that was captivating to me. She felt very safe. You could also tell she was different. I didn’t grow up in a family that prized conformity, and my aunt was a successful actress, and she was different, too, and her actor friends were different, and it was all very normal to me to be around people who were different. And Shelley Duvall seemed like that. Maybe that’s why she seemed safe to me.

Even when you’re a kid, or maybe especially when you’re a kid, you don’t just recognize authenticity. You can FEEL it.

Robert Altman didn’t recognize at first that what he was seeing when he first met her wasn’t an act, it was authentic. How can someone be that different but ALSO authentic? It doesn’t seem possible!

It was.

The industry tossed her out. It does not value difference like Duvall’s. It SEEMS like the industry should love and protect difference, but the opposite is the case. Her last years were difficult. It hurt my heart. I remember in around 2009 or 2010 when she suddenly joined Facebook, and friended everybody. She friended me. She friended my friends. It’s like she just went through every “film buff” list possible and friended everyone. She liked posts, she left comments. She responded to comments. She found a community. She left a beautiful comment on a photo I posted of my mother when she was in high school, saying something like “I love this, this is so beautiful.”

I wanted to scream SHELLEY I LOVE YOU but I did not. I just heart-ed her comment, to let her know I appreciated it, knowing, in my own heart, a “heart” couldn’t convey my appreciation of her, because of course, by then, I had seen Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, 3 Women, Popeye, The Shining … many many times over.

Shelley Duvall had no awareness that most people hide “the pink stuff”, that people would prefer it if you left “the pink stuff” out of their interactions with you. This type of conformity and repression just didn’t factor at all into how she operated. She didn’t know that hiding “the pink stuff” was even a thing. Why would you hide it? The pink stuff is the best stuff. The pink stuff is the one thing we all share. How much energy is wasted trying to hide our pink stuff, our flaws, our vulnerabilities, our smarts, our humanity.

Thank God Robert Altman figured out almost immediately he was wrong about her. He thought he was meeting a facade of a person, an “act”.

But then it dawned on him.

Wait, wait, wait … this is … authentic? … How did I get this so wrong? This is the genuine article, and she’s standing right here in front of me. Jackpot.

People are being so weird about Glen Powell.

And I’d like it to stop.

So I am now going to discuss it. And him.

Are people being weird about Powell because stardom right now is different than it used to be? It’s harder now for an actor to “break through” into anything approximating main-stream consciousness, and so when it happens … it’s perceived as bossy? We’re so used to a curated internet experience; when something else creeps in - like Glen Powell - it’s unwelcome, like he’s being shoved down your throat, like there’s trickery afoot? Is that it?

Our internet activity is dominated by algorithms, there is a lack of trust in information coming at us. A little skepticism is healthy. But Powell isn’t an algorithm: he’s currently broken through into leading man status and stardom and anybody who has been paying attention to what he’s been doing could see this coming, based on the last 7 or 8 years of his career alone (although I clocked it earlier). We are so used to phoniness and fakery that when someone “breaks through” it FEELS fake. Even though it is NOT.

I’m just guessing at the larger reasons for the weird comments I’ve seen ever since Richard Linklater’s Hit Man dropped on Netflix: “Is anyone else annoyed by this guy?” “Why is he suddenly everywhere? Ugh.” It’s perfectly fine to not see the appeal of Powell. It’s fine to wonder, “Why is he considered a sex symbol?” (even though when you do that you assume your personal preference in sexiness should be the universal. People find other people sexy for all kinds of reasons. If my personal preference was in charge of the universe, Danny McBride would be an internationally recognized sex symbol. The whole “what’s up with all the rodent-looking guys” discourse is gross and a commentary on how THE SAME actors look now. Even nerds have six packs. Once upon a time, Jill Clayburgh was a star. Once upon a time, Richard Dreyfuss was a leading man. Donald Sutherland #RIP was a sexy leading man.) Whether or not you understand “the point” of Glen Powell, he is here, and it might be interesting to talk about why.

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I am hearing a lot of “Why is he suddenly everywhere?” Powell is not “suddenly everywhere”. He’s been working for 20 years, he’s been in a lot of things, he’s been directed by big directors, and he’s usually good, and now, in his mid-30s, he’s starting to get recognized and has moved into the leading man category.

That’s it. This is how acting careers sometimes work. It’s not a mystery. He’s not been pieced together by a marketing team. He’s put in the work for many years and it’s now cracked for him. BUT. Even if it hadn’t cracked for him with the one-two punch of Anyone But You and Hit Man, he’d still be working, because he’s been working for years, since he was a kid.

It’s not HIS fault you haven’t been paying attention and only now are seeing him on the main page of Netflix and getting irritated by it.

Being caught unawares by someone blowing up is, yes, a disconcerting experience.

It’s happened to me. It’s part of growing older. You’re like, “Who is this BILLIE EILISH PERSON [or insert any other name]? WHY IS SHE EVERYWHERE?” Billie Eilish is everywhere because a lot of people love her. Newsflash. She’s everywhere for the same reason others have been everywhere in other generations. It’s fine to not pay attention to every new thing popping up. But don’t blame the person, and don’t blame the person’s fans just because you don’t see the point of the latest obsession. (I have often written about the perils of ignoring the rapturous screams of teenage girls. I was a screaming teenage girl myself and I was right about a lot of things. I clocked Ralph Macchio before Karate Kid. I clocked John Stamos from the moment - literally the moment - he strolled into a scene on General Hospital in what was supposed to be a single and he was a total unknown. I was one of the thousands and thousands of girls who wrote fan letters based on one brief look at the guy. Girls’ objects of adoration may turn out to be nothing, but 9 times out of 10 it turns out to be something. Only people who think 14-year-old girls aren’t worth listening to are then surprised - and almost offended - when someone like Zac Efron is “suddenly everywhere”. It’s not sudden. You just didn’t watch High School Musical.)

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Powell, however, is different, and this difference makes him interesting. He wasn’t clocked by 14-year-old girls. Something else is going on and the resentment towards him feels inappropriate for what is happening. It makes me curious, like something else is going on. Is the resentment because of his blonde good looks? As I said, Danny McBride is more my type, but viewing Powell as some stereotypical hunk is a category error. He’s not even getting those kinds of roles. At all. Is it that … rodents are “in”, and hunks are out, and it seems “retro” for people to be gaga over a hunk? If this is at work, my response is: Go outside. Volunteer somewhere. Laugh with your friends. People are gonna be into who they’re gonna be into with or without your say-so.

Early on, Powell was often cast as a prick. His looks are good, but they’re regular-guy handsome looks, a guy you could conceivably meet out in the wild. He’s not luscious-erotic beautiful, he’s not adorable, he’s not androgynous. There’s a pinched quality to his face, which could be read as ungenerous (I said “could be”), and he could (and did) play characters who might be deemed “punchable”. He seemed destined to play cocky arrogant rich kids. (In the 2012 film Stuck on You, just a brief 12 years ago, he appears in one scene and his character’s name is “Good-Looking Frat Guy”). As he’s gotten older he’s shown other sides: willingness to take a subordinate position, it’s not about him, friendliness to women, ease with language - he can TALK - unashamed theatricality which is almost corny sometimes, and he’s not afraid of the corniness. He instead emphasizes the corn. He’s funny. He’s not fetishistic about realism. He’s fine with being presentational.

Glen Powell could play Restoration Comedy. Believe me, not everyone can.

Powell was on the radar of some heavy-hitters when he was still a teenager, people like Richard Linklater and Denzel Washington, but he wasn’t being marketed as the next big thing. The IMDB dates tell the real story. 2003-2007 shows steady-ish work for a kid, but one gig is voicing a video game and one is an industry commercial about internet safety. He was born in Austin, Texas, and played football in high school. He had one line in Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006) when he was 18. In 2007, Denzel Washington cast him in The Great Debaters, where his character doesn’t have a name (“Harvard Debater #1”) but he has a big scene in the final sequence.

His looks are the embodiment of a WASP-prep-school background. He looks privileged. And yet, the role is not written as “cocky”, one of the more interesting quirks of the script. He’s respectful of his opponents, he is gracious in defeat. It’s a small role but important. I saw The Great Debaters in the theatre and loved it. He made an impression.

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One can understand why Powell would drop out of college and move to Los Angeles based on The Great Debaters. He had a Los Angeles-based manager now and Denzel loved him. He had every reason to be hopeful. But …. nothing happened. For a long time. He appeared in a string of television series, Without a Trace, CSI: Miami, Rizzoli & Isles, where he usually had one scene, and was usually cast as a privileged teenage prick. He hadn’t grown up or filled out yet. These guest spots happened, on average, once a year. That’s a lot of time spent hanging around, working odd jobs, and having no health insurance. After 2009 … nothing for two long years. By this point he was in his mid-20s, the time you’re supposed to “hit” as an actor (or at least it feels that way) and Great Debaters might as well have never happened for all the “good” it did him. He lost his manager, leaving him with no representation. Everything stopped.

He clawed his way back to yet another stint doing short films and one-off guest spots, like The Lying Game, where he plays the head of a fraternity who wears a pink shirt. Punchable. There’s not enough TO these roles to even be typecasting.

This is not a man being groomed for stardom.

There’s no hint of what was to come. Jobs came in at a snail’s pace. One or two a year. That’s not even a living. I reiterate this to underline what should be obvious: his stardom is the result of hard work, patience and self-belief. His stardom came the old-fashioned way. Maybe that’s why people are suspicious of it? Again, I don’t know. Stop being weird.

He had a small role in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which represents a step up from having one line in Rizzoli & Ives, but he made no impression on me in it. What DID make an impression on me was his appearance in two consecutive episodes of NCIS, where he played Evan, the brother of a Marine (Brad Beyer) so debilitated by PTSD he has psychotic episodes. Evan spent time “over there” too, but has returned stateside with psyche intact, unlike his brother. It takes a while for Evan to understand just how sick his brother is. This is exacerbated by their father (Mark Rolston), a taskmaster who never allowed them to show “weakness”. They visibly change when their dad walks into the room. They are warriors, grown men, but they are still afraid of him.

These NCIS episodes are deeper than anything Powell had been asked to do. I don’t remember why I watched. I was probably bored. I was not an NCIS viewer, but Powell caught my attention. I watched the second episode merely because he was in it. I pay attention to such moments, moments when I get interested. I felt the authenticity of what he was doing. He also brought a softness to this Marine: the contrast between the softness and the military exterior was interesting. I didn’t realize he was the glimmering prep boy I liked in The Great Debaters.

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And this, friends, is why he is where he is at right now. His looks are not of the type that pull you in in a seduction. He’s not Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise. He’s not beautiful Johnny Depp. That’s not his thing. Super beautiful people like, say, Alain Delon, have a push-pull thing with the camera, a sense of mystery and distance, the gorgeousness almost off-putting. Powell doesn’t “rely” on his looks. This is what happens when someone “grows into themselves” later instead of sooner. You have to develop other aspects of yourself - humor, smarts, charm - if you don’t skate on your looks. Except for NCIS, a fuller spectrum isn’t in evidence at all in the early roles. What draws you to Powell, what you could see in embryo in The Great Debaters, and which you can see very clearly in the NCIS eps, is his softness. You don’t expect a guy who looks like that to be soft.

This unusual combo - manliness + softness = Movie Stardom. Nobody is guaranteed stardom, but male movie stars - the ones who stick around - all have this rich-brew combination. Gary Cooper had it. Harrison Ford has it.

I’ve been trying to think of actors to compare, men who have traversed this terrain before. Bill Pullman comes to mind, although Bill Pullman didn’t have a six-pack-abs-military-dude phase. But Pullman is a blonde guy, handsome enough, who could be “written off” as some boring WASP until you perceive all the other things going on, his dry sense of humor, his abstracted quality, his thoughtfulness. In Sleepless in Seattle, Pullman played the nice but boring alternate love-interest. He brought humor to it. And in While You Were Sleeping, he was the leading man, initially perceived as the “boring” one next to the more glamorous Peter Gallagher. Pullman is the catch in While You Were Sleeping. I could see Glen Powell going the action-hero route, a la Harrison Ford, another kind-of-sort-of comparison. I could also see him joining a superhero franchise, even though I really wish he wouldn’t. William Hurt, maybe, although Powell has a loosey-goosey quality Hurt didn’t have. Hurt took himself very seriously. Powell doesn’t seem to. Greg Kinnear is a potential although Powell’s latent macho side is something Kinnear doesn’t bring to the table. Richard Gere, perhaps, although again, it’s not quite right, except for maybe something like The Hoax, one of Gere’s best, and definitely in Powell’s wheelhouse as an actor. Burt Reynolds is a KIND of precursor, although the two men are obviously very different. Reynolds was a goofball sexpot, a combination not to be tried by amateurs. Part of Reynolds’ effectiveness was how willing he was to undercut his own sexiness, and how happy he was being a supportive co-star to strong appealing women (Dolly Parton, Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn). Reynolds was happy subordinating himself to his co-stars. There’s common ground there. Reynolds was also friendly with women. Being sexy with women is easy. To be friendly with them is rare, especially if you’re sexy as hell. I’ll get to Powell’s friendliness. Eventually. None of the actors I mentioned above are quite right, in terms of comparison. Powell is his own thing which, again, makes what is happening right now with him make sense.

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It’s not a surprise that after a decade of doing one role a year in nothing guest-spots, he’d go home to Texas to work with Linklater again, this time in the glorious Everybody Wants Some!! I’ve written about Everybody Wants Some!! twice: I reviewed it for Ebert, and I also wrote about it for Film Comment’s Seeing Double column, pairing it with Shane.

Powell is pushing 30 in Everybody Wants Some!! (as are many of his co-stars), making them the oldest college seniors in history. But we’ll forgive that. Powell plays Finnegan, the motor-mouth ringleader-“philosopher” of the baseball team: he’s heard before he is seen. He chatters on and on … and on … spouting his theories on everything, whether he has anything to say or not. His language is intricate. He speaks in full paragraphs. He considers himself a Ph.D candidate in picking up women and he doesn’t do all that badly because he’s horny but he’s friendly. He takes Jake, the freshman pitcher (Blake Jenner), under his wing, passing on everything he thinks the youngster needs to know. Sometimes he talks just to talk. “Like they say, pressure’s a choice!” Finnegan declares. I don’t think “they” say that, Finnegan.

His clothes are all over the place: tiny jean shorts, a clinging silk shirt, a flowing hippie shirt, Chuck Taylors, a cut-off vest, a cowboy hat, he smokes a pipe, at one point he dons a top hat. All seem to suit him. His baseball uniform fits him so well it’s like pajamas. When Jake wonders if there’s something “phony” about changing your clothes to fit every situation, Finnegan says, “It’s not phony. It’s adaptive.” Big fluid arm gesture to accompany his words, like he’s a seasoned thespian. The pros of being adaptable is one of the themes of Everybody Wants Some!!

Side note: Zoey Deutch plays Jake’s sweet love interest. She would co-star with Powell two years later in the charming rom com Set It Up.

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Everybody Wants Some!! shows Powell’s weirdness, and why it was a little bit difficult to cast him properly before, because no role would allow him the freedom to do what he does in Everybody Wants Some!! Finnegan is the kind of person who can be exhausting because they are starring in a movie in their own heads. They are ready to monologue, provide a “quip”, they need an audience. Finnegan is “acting”. It’s obnoxious but underneath the chatter is not hostility but generosity and openness to experience. He’s a little bit distant from the shenanigans of the other guys. He observes.It’s why he’s comfortable in a disco, a country-western bar, a punk rock club, and a theatre party. Finnegan’s tactic with women is to make them laugh. You should try it. He openly admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time.

He’s got gestures too. There’s something phony about the gestures, but not phony like he’s lying, phony like Powell is being self-consciously theatrical and “presentational”: Finnegan doesn’t enter a room. He swaggers in, “presenting” himself like he’s walking onto a stage wearing a cape. Maybe Finnegan will one day have to settle down and stop “acting” but in the meantime, it’s working for him. As played by Powell, Finnegan is extremely appealing.

Finnegan was not a star-making role but Finnegan is what made me interested in Powell. That’s when I looked him up and realized he was the blonde kid in Great Debaters - I knew I knew that face! - and the angsty Marine in NCIS. You would never guess the kid in Great Debaters had Finnegan in him but Linklater knew. In another actors’ hands, Finnegan would have been a one-note pussy-hound out of an ‘80s comedy. In Powell’s hands, he’s a bullshitting maestro of chaos and fun. A master adapter.

After Everybody Wants Some!! I kept my eyes peeled for Powell sightings.

Around the same time, Powell was cast as a series regular in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens. His character’s name - Chad Radwell - tells you pretty much all you need to know. Chad is a frat boy, rooming with Nick Jonas, while also having sex with the college president (Jamie Lee Curtis). Sometimes when things get a little scary, Nick Jonas crawls into bed with Chad, which has led to too many gifs to count.

Chad is another boring role: the preppy golf-playing douchebag who only wants to date popular girls. However, unlike all of the times Powell played a similar role, here there’s some irony to it. The series is an homage to ‘80s horror movies and Powell has fun with it. He’s playing a role but he also gets to comment on the role and all other roles like it. The real test of an actor’s chops is when they’re asked to play something broad and stylized. A lot of the new crop of actors aren’t up to it at all. They don’t understand style. They’re always waiting for their close-up, Mr. De Mille. They don’t know how to act with their bodies. They have no idea how to project their energy and intention out into space. (Talk to acting teachers who’ve been doing it for 30 years. They’ll tell you.) Powell is all big hand gestures and sweeping arms, everything perceivable in the cheap seats.

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He touched my heart when he played John Glenn in Hidden Figures (2016). the same year as Everybody Wants Some!! Mitchell and I discussed Powell’s performance in depth, because he brought awareness to it of not just John Glenn but the history of the women behind John Glenn. This is what I meant when I talked about being “subordinate” earlier. He’s playing an American hero, for God’s sake, but the role is subordinate to the women. The way he plays John Glenn helps us feel that.

“Get the girl to run the numbers.”
“The girl?”
“Yeah. The smart one.”

I’ll pull out one moment: Katherine (Taraji Henson) is brought into a meeting with John Glenn and the military brass. It’s weird that 1. a woman is in the room and 2. a Black woman is in the room. It’s even weirder because she’s not a secretary but the one in charge of calculating Glenn’s eventual landing. Nobody knows how to handle it, except for John Glenn, whose instincts lead him to crack a couple of jokes. It may look like Glenn is just a jovial guy but Powell is doing something else, and it’s key to the performance. In that room full of powerful men, John Glenn knows he is the most powerful. Men know shit like this. And so he takes the lead. He recognizes this woman probably feels uncomfortable and even scared, so he cracks jokes to loosen everybody up AND to include her. This is Powell’s natural friendliness which I keep talking about.

Katherine stands at the blackboard and does her calculations. The room full of white men watch her. She finishes. Nobody speaks. Everyone waits for John Glenn, the alpha of the room, to respond. He’s already asserted his dominance (through friendliness, remember). His face is open and impressed. He says, “I like her numbers.” Big grin. He says it in that “aw shucks” John Glenn way, that milk-fed Mid-Western good-manners way, but it’s not just good manners. He takes the lead in what is an unprecedented moment, NOT just his journey into outer space, but what this woman must be feeling standing in that room filled with white men. “I like her numbers” is a moment of leadership.

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His body seems very slight in Hidden Figures. He’s lean, upright, proper. This is not the case in Sand Castle, the following year. Based on Chris Roessner’s actual experiences during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sand Castle details the chaos, as seen through the eyes of naive green Pvt. Matt Ocre (Nicholas Hoult). Powell plays Sgt. Chutsky, a trigger-happy wild man with a jacked-up body, pumping weights in the desert dust. This is, again, another route Powell’s career could have taken, if things hadn’t broken for him to a place where he has more choices. He could play wild military guys (never the lead, though), and he could play smirky Wall Street pricks (also not the lead). One note roles, all. It wasn’t easy for Powell to find a wide enough SLOT to maneuver in.

I’ve read up on him. He is extremely ambitious. He wanted a career like Tom Cruise’s. Lofty goal, yes? Yes. Unreachable? Yeah, probably. But if you’re not going to believe in yourself, then who the hell will? It’s not easy to keep the dream alive while you’re doing one-off guest spots for over a decade.

In 2018, he appeared in Set It Up, a little rom-com with Zoey Deutch which is well worth seeking out. As far as I’m concerned, this was his real “break”, this was where a little light is allowed to shine through. Powell and Deutch play Charlie and Harper, two beleaguered assistants working for tyrannical bosses. Charlie and Harper come up with a cockamamie plan to set up their bosses, to force them to fall in love. Because then … the bosses will loosen up at work? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a rom com. It doesn’t have to. Charlie wants to be a finance bro, a King of Industry, and he’s dating a model who treats him like shit, but it’s a status thing for him, and Harper wants to be a writer and is working for her idol, played by Lucy Liu, a famous sports journalist who … established her own sports news website? (Hollywood’s idea of what is going on in media right now is so out of date. It’s like it never stopped being 1999.) Regardless. Harper suggests they “Cyrano” their bosses. Charlie agrees, even though he doesn’t know what “Cyrano” means.

Charlie is a bit of a douche, and his dreams are questionable. Harper is ambitious but has no time to write. Without realizing it’s happening, the two become involved in each others’ lives. They talk to each other more than they talk to anyone else. A bond forms. This is territory Powell had not yet been given space for: a character who has to change over the course of a film. He manages it effortlessly. He’s funny and exasperated and expressive: Powell is not the strong silent smoldering Tom Hardy type. His sensibility is extroverted and comedic. In my opinion, his gift is in the comedic realm, but we’ll see how that goes, Hollywood being what it is.

There’s a moment in Set It Up where he says something cruel to Harper which he instantly regrets. The comment flies out of his mouth in the heat of the moment and Harper looks like he has stabbed her. Her eyes fill with tears. Powell has a silent brief moment where you see his regret, his sharp pang of guilt, how horrible he feels when he sees the pain on her face, knowing … that’s the kind of shit I can’t walk back. It’s small, but of such moments an effective and coherent career is actually made.

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Top Gun: Maverick was an interesting situation. Powell was cast in it! A Tom Cruise movie! He got the role of “Hangman”, the cocky daredevil! It was a dream come true. The pandemic arrived a couple months before Top Gun: Maverick was set for its big summer release into theatres. Tom Cruise made the executive decision - true to his risk-taking self - to hold off opening the film until theatres were back in operation. He refused to dump Top Gun: Maverick onto streaming platforms. It had to be seen on a big screen. The risk paid off. (Top Gun: Maverick didn’t arrive until summer 2022, which also, incidentally, was the summer of Elvis. Those two films opened and then sat there, earning money, for three straight months. It was wild.) Consider all this from Glen Powell’s point of view. Yes, he worked a lot. But he was basically an unknown as far as the larger public was concerned. Tom Cruise could afford to wait. Powell did this huge thing, and then had to sit around waiting for two years.

Because Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t just a movie, it was an EVENT, and because Glen Powell played a key role - not the second lead (that would be Miles Teller), but the third lead, the “adversary” - he started getting press. People started noticing.

He looked hot, in an American military boy kind of way, and had a nice redemption arc as well (which you could see coming from a mile away, but never mind.) Just like with Set It Up, we saw Hangman grow and change. The role was still that cocky self-satisfied thing he spent most of his 20s doing … but it was on a much bigger stage.

2022 also saw Devotion, an under-seen film (it got good reviews, it should be better known), which Powell developed and produced, after reading the book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice, by military historian Adam Makos. Devotion details the life and career of Jesse Brown, the first Black man to complete aviation training in the U.S. Navy, the only Black aviator in his particular squadron, and the first Black man killed in the Korean War. His remains were never recovered from his downed aircraft (destroyed by napalm two days after it crashed). Brown’s friend and fellow aviator Tom Hudner spent the rest of his life trying to get the United States government to retrieve Brown’s remains. Hudner died in 2017, and his children - and grandchildren - alongside Brown’s children - and grandchildren - continue to advocate for Brown’s return. Hudner faced incredible danger trying to save Brown - seriously, the story is insane - and received the Medal of Honor for it.

Powell gave the book to Black Label Media, which optioned it. Powell played Tom Hudner and the fantastic Jonathan Majors played Jesse. The narrative is split between Hudner and Brown, tilting in favor of Brown (we see Brown’s home life, his marriage, his child, we see Brown by himself, we don’t see any of that with Hudner), making this a refreshingly even story, the events not just seen through the white character’s eyes.

Hudner is ignorant to racism, or at least what it must feel like on the other side of it. He thinks it’s unfair the way the other guys treat Brown, and he’s ready to throw down if there’s an insult, but he doesn’t understand why Brown does not want him sticking up for him. Hudner’s overtures of friendship are at first rejected, and he’s clueless about certain things, like what a huge deal it is when he is invited by Brown’s wife to come inside the house and have a drink. It’s 1950. He’s not up to speed on what skin color means. This is not about Brown teaching Hudner, although there are times when Brown schools Hudner. The friendship is deep, based on shared experiences in aviation training, and also combat itself. Hudner’s heroic actions to try to save Brown is impressive, but so are Brown’s actions in the air, his bravery and skill, plus the sheer guts it took to go through with it all in the first place.

Devotion handles these issues in a sensitive manner by keeping its focus on the details of the interactions between the two men, the attempt - on both sides - to understand the other. The photos at the end of Hudner’s grandkids and Brown’s grandkids standing side by side nearly killed me. I loved the film.

For me, Set It Up and Devotion set the stage for what came next, which was Anyone But You and The Hitman. In Devotion he played another military guy but was allowed depth and character development. In Set It Up, he was a little shallow at first and gained depth by the end, and we got to see a character arc. Powell was now where he should be, playing actual people, who could grow and change.

Anyone But You seemed to take a lot of people by surprise. This is revealing and makes me think about the plight of rom-coms today, and how hungry people still are for them. People still find them cathartic and fun. It was Sydney Sweeney’s project, she produced, she picked the team, she picked Powell, saying he seemed “thoughtful, onscreen and off.” Sweeney is young, and … wow, talk about people having a weird reaction. Right-wingers are somehow using her as a cudgel in their culture war, but in such a weird gross way, i.e. “Boobs are still important to red-blooded American males”. Who said boobs weren’t attractive to men “anymore”? You’re just making that shit up. I almost miss the days when fundamentalists were like “We abhor boobs onscreen. Stop sinning.” Like Powell, Sweeney hasn’t had the chance to show much range. Maybe I assumed there wasn’t that much range to show. My bad. I reviewed 2023’s Reality, based on Tina Satter’s play of the same name (Satter also directed), and I was so impressed, not just with the end result, but with Sweeney’s participation in such a bare-bones political project. Her choice to be in Reality told me a lot about Sweeney and her interests, what she wanted for her career, and also her thoughtfulness - speaking of which - about the projects she leant her talent to.

Anyone But You is a rom-com based - loosely - on Much Ado About Nothing, where two people - Beatrice and Benedick - declare they hate each other but are actually in love the whole time. Families gather for a wedding, and the warring couple spar back and forth, stealing focus. Will Gluck was brought on to direct. Two of his earlier films - Easy A and Friends with Benefits - have a loopy hilarious energy, with zippy dialogue, and a lot of hijinx and shenanigans. They’re good. So is Anyone But You. You can’t try to bury the lede in a rom-com. You’re not re-inventing the wheel. The formula works. Use it. Don’t be shy.

Sweeney plays Bea and Powell plays Ben (get it?) who meet-cute within 5 seconds of the film opening. They have a great night together which goes south almost immediately. They are now enemies even though it turns out - what a coincidence - that they not only have friends but family in common. Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) is engaged to Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), Ben’s friend, and … the sister? Maybe? I missed it. of Ben’s best friend Pete (Gata). The wedding is in Sydney Australia for some reason and the entire crowd gets on a plane and heads off down under.

After Ben and Bea’s hostility brings the overall mood down, the family schemes to get them together, just so the wedding can proceed in peace. Ben and Bea “overhear” all these conversations (“Bea likes Ben!” “Have you heard? Ben likes Bea!”), realize what is happening, and decide to play along to get everyone off their backs. This allows for a lot of humorous sequences where Powell and Sweeney have to pretend to like each other, even though they’re grossed out even by holding hands. The situation is complicated by old love interests showing up, on both sides.

You got all that? It’s pure ridiculousness. Powell and Sweeney have a blast with it from the first sequence in the coffee shop until the final moment. They drum up real feeling, and their chemistry sizzles. It’s a human connection, not just sexual, although it is that too. They obviously are having fun. They play around. They ramp each other up. It ends, of course, with Ben running madly to find his woman, staging a dramatic rescue, so they can come together, at last.

It’s refreshing to see a couple with real heat between them. It’s refreshing to see people being silly and committing to various “bits”. Everyone participates. The “vibe” between men and women right now is so toxic, at least for the Chronically Online, and I think it has made directors shy away from rom coms. Nobody knows how to “deal” with it anymore and so romance is best avoided. A film like Sitting in Bars with Cake - I’m only mentioning it because I reviewed it - can’t even portray its own damn premise (a woman starts baking cakes and bringing them to bars as a way to meet men). It’s based on a true story. The film avoids the “longing for a boyfriend” part of the equation because … women are supposed to be “past that” now, or something? So the film erases her unhappy single state - she’s FINE with being single, she’s a strong independent woman! - which then makes it so confusing why she spends all this time baking and bringing cakes to bars to meet men. You can be strong and independent and still want a boyfriend. Shocking. I know.

It’s fun to watch a man and a woman play around like Powell and Sweeney do in Anyone But You, flirt, and fight, and bicker, and pretend to be in love, all while getting more and more attracted. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s romantic attachment in The Fall Guy - and their pretend anger at each other - is so charming it practically makes the whole damn movie (even though every other part of it is good too). People still want to connect. Let them connect in the movies. There’s no shame in it.

Even the dreaded age gap between Sweeney and Powell is acknowledged with humor and a little bit of snark.

He: “This is so cringe.”
She: “Don’t say cringe, old man.”

Powell and Sweeney are so good together, so silly, and then - surprisingly - so tender - it all works. You want them to kiss and it’s satisfying when they do. Mission accomplished.

A couple of months after Anyone But You was a surprise hit (although it’s harder to tell these days without box office receipts), Linklater’s latest, Hit Man, dropped. I’ve been looking forward to it for months. Based on an article by Texas legend Skip Hollandsworth, Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson, philosophy professor by day, and part-time New Orleans cop (sort of) by night. Gary poses as a hit man to “sting” the people trying to hire a contract killer. Gary Johnson the real guy got really into it, utilizing disguises and accents and fake noses, and his arrest record was excellent. (Hollandsworth also wrote the article that became Bernie, another great Linklater film, starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine.) Powell not only bought the rights to the article but wrote the screenplay with Linklater. He’d come a long way from having one line in Fast Food Nation when he was 18.

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Here, Glen Powell gets to put it all together, gets to show what he can do. He’s totally believable as the nerdy professor, with hair slicked down, wearing bulky khakis and long denim shorts. Of course when he eventually takes off his shirt his body is BANANAS, but we’ll let that slide. Gary is a chronically single guy who likes to go birding, feed his cats, and falls asleep with a book about Gandhi on his bedside table. I don’t question it for a second. Gary is roped into posing as a hit man when someone else is suspended from the force, and he finds he has a knack for it. Pretending to be someone else loosens him up, sets free parts of his personality he didn’t even know he had. He has fun dressing up. Then he puts on his khakis, and goes off to lecture on Nietzsche.

All of these transformations are played for laughs, and allows Powell to indulge in the broad theatricality for which he has always had a knack. He’s not trying to “disappear” into the role. It’s the opposite. His accents are not even close to being realistic, and his personae are absurd. One seems to be based on Tilda Swinton. Things gets complicated when he meets a mysterious woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who asks him to kill her husband. Gary is, of course, attracted to her and finds himself talking her out of it, much to the annoyance of his colleagues. Gary pretends to be hit man Ron: Ron is not Tilda Swinton, but a sexy swaggering confident guy. He’s hot, a sexy take-charge guy, squinting moodily into the distance over the difficulties of his life, being mysterious and charming, the Perfect Guy.

We’ve never seen Glen Powell like this before. It’s pure Harrison Ford Leading Man stuff, and yet here - there’s irony, it’s not real. Ron is a role being played by nerdy bird-lover Gary. And so there’s a wink behind Powell’s very sexy performance as Ron. We know Gary is acting. So is Powell. He’s playing a role but also commenting on the TYPE of role it is. We saw him do this in Scream Queens. It’s the layered theatrical presentational thing Powell can do very well, without - somehow - being a bad actor. Finnegan was the peak of this (but Finnegan may very well be a one-of-a-kind role).

Does Powell have movie-star charisma? I think he could, but so far that hasn’t been his thing. He’s not trying to be Brad Pitt. Like Gary Johnson, he tries on different roles, inhabits them, believes in them fully while he wears the costume, and then moves on to the next one. He can hold the screen, that’s for sure, and he’s sexy but in a very real-guy way. When he pretends to be Ron in The Hit Man, he’s sexy with a capital S. But it’s not where he operates from. Underneath is softness and tenderness, which isn’t always there (it isn’t in Sand Castle), but can be there if he needs it. He’s very smart, and sensitive to material and style. He was this way even back in the dark ages, when he got the two-episode NCIS gig, which was probably a very very big deal for him at that time. Two episodes, playing a role where he actually got to DO something. He’d never had to sustain anything, he’d never had room to develop anything.

And I watched him in those episodes and thought to myself: “WHO is THAT”.

I always pay attention when I catch myself thinking “WHO is THAT”.

It usually turns out to be something.

Nothing weird to see here.

Glen Powell is “suddenly everywhere” for a reason.

I wanted to take a moment to honor beloved character actor Dabney Coleman, who owned his slice of terrain so completely he became a “type”. You can’t get Dabney Coleman? Well then you want his type, someone who can do what he did, even though nobody could really do what he did. He was such an effective prick. Coming up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he “hit” at the right moment. The world was changing, social mores in a huge shift, and there was a lot of confusion. What were people’s roles in the new regime? How do you make sense of it all if your place in the hierarchy wasn’t set in stone through tradition? Coleman often played limited men, who seethed with barely controlled rage about losing their spot, what we would call “privilege” now (even though the word is so over-used it probably should be retired. It’s what Robert Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliche”.) Coleman understood men like this. He embodied resentful men who couldn’t stand the new era, hostile men who couldn’t hide their hostility.

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Life’s very difficult and full of surprises…To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged – well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in – to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

— E.M. Forster, “Howards End”

The Narrative Feature jury at the Florida Film Festival, made up of yours truly, Betsey Brown and Bill Guentzler, had some serious decisions to make in our deliberations since the ten films in competition were so strong, but after seeing All I’ve Got & Then Some, co-directed by Tehben Dean and Rasheed Stephens, it was pretty clear to all of us what we needed to do.

There is no agreed-upon criteria for judging festival films, but for me, in a first feature I want to see your heart, I want to see what matters to you, I want you to let me in to your world. A lot of first films attempt a genre exercise, or are a (pale) imitation of, say, Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie. Sometimes it’s obvious the director is just using the film as a “reel” to attract financial backing for the next project. All I’ve Got & Then Some has that “something else” I look for in a first feature.

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We were really inspired by the film’s heart and soul, as well as the guerrilla-style filming, the sheer willpower the team had to make something, the collective “let’s just get out there and get this done”. The end result, so satisfying and confident, suggests that Dean and Stephens, who co-directed, went into it with such a clear idea of what they wanted to make, it’s as though the project itself led them to the next step. They shot it in seven days, after a prep period of just three days. Friends in real life, Dean and Stephens called their people in, quickly gathered a team, and charged out into the Los Angeles sun to make what was in their heads. They already had their source material: Stephens’ own story of his early years in Los Angeles pursuing stand-up comedy while living out of his car.

All I’ve Got & Then Some is a hybrid, part-documentary, part-narrative. Moving from Atlanta to Los Angeles was such an impulsive decision that halfway through his drive across the country Rasheed realized, “Wait a minute … I don’t have any money … how am I going to do this?” He had done no research on Los Angeles living and assumed the rents would be similar to those of Atlanta. He was mistaken. He ended up living in his car for a couple of years, going to comedy open-mics, working on material, trying to get something going. All I’ve Got & Then Some is a presentation of real events, “acted out” by Stephens playing himself, interspersed with sequences where Stephens talks to the camera, providing background and a retrospective slant to the in-real-time action of the other sections. It’s an intimate approach. We don’t feel like we are watching self-conscious “re-enactments”, but we never forget this is a real story, lived by a real guy. There he is, performing at an open mic in someone’s backyard with five people in attendance (all of whom are also “on the bill”). Then back in his car, onto the next thing.

Pursuing the dream doesn’t look a certain way, even though we all have fantasies in our head about what it will look like. When fantasy doesn’t meet reality, when you realize how hard it will be to get anywhere … well, this is the point where most people give up. It is not “unfair”. It is a reminder of just how badly you need to want it.

Rasheed Stephens had no Plan B.

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We meet the people who make up Rasheed’s world.

There’s Rose (the wonderful Avise Parsons), a sex worker who supports him in what he’s trying to do, and he, in turn, has her back, waiting outside her appointments, making sure she gets out okay. The relationship is handled beautifully by both actors. I lost it during one scene where Rasheed needs to go over some sides before an audition and asks Rose and her roommate to read the other parts. They’re both game. Before beginning, Rose asks Rasheed, “Who am I?” A very important question! Betsey and I kept talking about how much we loved Rose.

Then there’s Doll (the charmingly open Naiya Armour), seen in the opening sequence of the movie, roller-skating down an empty sidewalk, knee-pads on, singing to herself in a beautiful clear voice. Rasheed and Doll keep running into each other. In a twist of fate, she also lives in her car, on the same street where Rasheed parks. There’s a funny moment when he “drops her off” at her car after a date, and then walks back to his own car, just down the block.

Rasheed has a manager, an eccentric show-biz type, who works out of a vintage clothing store, taking calls among the racks of clothing. These details feel very real. He has his first “paid gig” coming up. He keeps telling everyone this, including his dad (there’s a real Facetime call with his real dad). Rasheed works as a Lyft driver, meeting different people as he transports them around. Rasheed, playing himself, is an open positive person, telling people what he’s up to, no self-deprecation about it. It’s interesting to watch because it’s something we don’t often see in these narratives about someone maybe down-and-out pursuing a crazy dream. Dreamers are often portrayed as delusional, or struggling against grim reality, meeting up with the incomprehension or judgment of others. Here, reality is indeed “grim” but Rasheed’s experience of it is not necessarily grim. Positivity draws positivity to it. One of the most important things about having a dream is getting other people to believe in it.

How do you do that? All I’ve Got & Then Some suggests it’s simple. Be open to others, share yourself, don’t be embarrassed about having a dream. One Lyft encounter is an example. He picks up two rowdy girls on their way to a party, and when they learn he’s a comedian, because of course he tells them, they insist he come to the party and do a little standup for the people there. One might think this would be “cringe”, as they say. But All I’ve Got & Then Some, refreshingly, is not about “cringe”. This is not Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever (also about a hopeful stand-up comic, and it’s a film I love) or the recent Baby Reindeer, where the person pursuing comedy doesn’t seem to have the aptitude for it, or is pursuing it for neurotic reasons. In All I’ve Got & Then Some, a stranger joins a backyard party, and finds a friendly welcoming space. It just as well could go this way as any other.

There’s this annoying tendency in the last, say, 20 years, to present material in a serious (or self-serious) manner. Directors think they won’t be seen as an artiste if they don’t pile on the gloom. We see this in the choice of material (it’s all dystopia or bust), we see it in the color-grading. It’s like there’s dirt on the camera. Even James Bond has to be serious and gloomy and weighted down! James Bond! Gloomy? What? But lightening UP doesn’t mean you are lightWEIGHT.

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All I’ve Got & Then Some is deep with a profound payoff, but the mood is light and open, shot with an active flexible camera, so that the whole thing almost shimmers with possibility. The man is living in his car and being snuck into the gym by a friend so he can shower and work out. Times are tough! But Rasheed says, every day, to everyone, “Best day of my life.” It’s his mantra. This isn’t toxic positivity. This is a lifeline. Sometimes when he says it, you can tell he’s grasping at straws to even believe it. But the words must be said. Without them he’d be lost.

Post screening, left to right: festival moderator, Naiya Armour, Tehben Dean, Rasheed Stephens

Tehben Dean has directed music videos and commercials, and he shot and edited All I’ve Got & Then Some. The editing alone is a standout, as it draws together all these different strands and characters and places into an engaging whole: the comedy clubs, the backyard open mics, the car scenes, the night scenes (Los Angeles looking halfway deserted and surreal), peopled with all the “extras”, many of whom hail from the underground comedy scene in Los Angeles. The film was shot on a shoestring, but it feels very BIG. All I’ve Got & Then Some is episodic but the overall effect is cumulative. This is never more apparent than in the final scene when Rasheed finally gets onstage for that “paid gig” we keep hearing about.

Everything comes together. Every scene we’ve seen, every character we’ve met, everything we’ve learned about Rasheed - his history, his present, his anxieties, his willingness to share himself with others - be it Rose or Doll or the people in the back seat of his car - his feelings about his mom not having a headstone - everything - it’s all there in the final scene, and it was intensely cathartic. I did not expect it. I was suddenly in tears, and thinking, “Where the hell did this come from?”

All I’ve Got & Then Some worked by stealth. I was so entertained, so taken in, so involved … I didn’t realize the depths it was stirring.

As I was writing this, which I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of weeks, I thought of one of my favorite quotes from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, placed at the top. I feel like Forster expressed it better than I could, what I feel about All I’ve Got & Then Some, and what the film made me feel. So many filmmakers “begin with proportion”. They impose limits, they play it safe, they fall back on formula. Tehben Dean and Rasheed Stephens did not “begin with proportion”. They weren’t careful or safe in imagining what they wanted to do, they put no limits on the “how”, they didn’t curtail anything. Instead, they started immediately and they didn’t second guess their impulses. They traveled light and worked deep.

All I’ve Got & Then Some gives me hope.

Follow along with All I’ve Got & Then Some’s festival journey on Instagram.

Last week, I attended the Florida Film Festival in Orlando, in my capacity as a juror in the Narrative Feature category. Over the course of four days, we saw ten narrative films. All of the filmmakers were in attendance, for audience QAs following each screening. The other members of the Narrative Feature jury were actor/filmmaker Betsey Brown and Bill Guentzler, Senior Director of Acquisitions at Gravitas. I had never met either of them before, but at the end of four days it was like we had known each other always. We had inside jokes. “I like unhealed trauma,” I announced on day one, during a discussion of one of the films. “Unhealed trauma” became a catchphrase. “I enjoyed the unhealed trauma in that one.” “Yeah, it was good, but I was hoping for more unhealed trauma.”

The Narrative Feature slate was, we all agreed, very strong. It was truly an honor to witness the work being done by these artists! When we sat down to deliberate, we were happily in accord on our choices. (This doesn’t often happen with juries!) We gave All I’ve Got and Then Some, co-directed by Tehben Dean and Rasheed Stephens, the Best Narrative Feature award, and we decided to give a special jury award for screenwriting to Bonnie Gross, screenwriter of Lady Parts, directed by Nancy Boyd. Lady Parts also won the audience award in the Narrative Feature category. We felt we had to acknowledge Gross’ script, because it was such a standout!

Post Lady Parts screening. From L to R: lead actress Valentina Tammaro, screenwriter Bonnie Gross, director Nancy Boyd, producer Meghan Griesbeck

Lady Parts is based on Gross’ own experience with vulvodynia and vaginismus: the struggle to get diagnosed, fighting against taboos and the lack of knowledge about the condition, even in the medical field. “My vagina hurts” was somehow not perceived as an urgent medical issue, and some of the “advice” she got from doctors (“Have a glass of wine before sex”) is outrageous, albeit sadly common. After finally receiving a diagnosis, Gross underwent a vestibulectomy, where tissue is removed from the “vestibule”, a procedure which required her to basically step out of the flow of her own life to recover. She moved back in with her parents for the duration of her healing process. Vulvodynia, vaginismus, and other pelvic floor conditions, are not present in public consciousness: people who suffer often suffer in silence and alone. Bonnie Gross, an award-winning comedy writer, knew her story was important. Lady Parts is her first full-length script.

While all of this sounds very serious - and it is - the miracle of Gross’ Lady Parts script is its overall tone of hilarity, its healthy sense of the absurd, its flow between sentiment (not sentimentality) and comedy. Gross sacrifices nothing: she doesn’t sacrifice the message for the medium, or vice versa. She makes her points about vaginal health care, but she doesn’t allow the mood to dip, or the tone to tilt into self-seriousness. The film is about trauma, but the overall tone is light. This is a very difficult feat - almost no one manages it, and it is a tribute to Gross that she pulls it off. Lady Parts shines light on a condition rarely discussed (one woman started her question at the QA with, “I had no idea this was even a thing.”), and this is valid and valuable, but it imparts its message hilariously, with three very memorable central characters: Paige (the incredible Valentina Tammaro), Paige’s mother Linda (Amy Lyndon), and father Steve (Peter Larney). Gross allows these characters room to breathe, speak their mind, be flawed, change. Lady Parts is clearly personal. The humor in the film is earned, it comes from an experiential place.

The Florida Film Festival was Lady Parts’ world premiere. Other festivals will follow, I am sure, and hopefully the film will find distribution. It deserves to be seen by a large audience. We were blown away by it.

I’ll be writing a general roundup of the festival, but in the meantime, it was a pleasure to “sit down” over Zoom and discuss all things Lady Parts with screenwriter Bonnie Gross.

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Lady Parts is based on your experience. What was it like to have to let it go, to have people act it out, interpret it? It’s not a diary entry any more. It’s this other thing now.

It was difficult. There were a couple phases. The first phase was realizing this isn’t just a personal diary entry, like you said. My vaginal trauma is now everyone’s to know. It’s out there on social media. anyone can look it up. So I can’t pick and choose who knows about it anymore. That was hard to come to terms with. And then there were times when I was on set, when I really felt it. The scene that really got me was when the mom was shaving Paige’s legs, because that’s something that really did happen. And I remember crying and I had to leave the room after the second take because it was bringing up so much emotion. Paige was going through her healing process, and I was going through my own healing process on set. It’s like constantly re-living trauma, which is a great thing.

That’s art!

I think that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to direct it. I was there on set, and I worked with Valentina and Nancy, answering questions like, “How do you sit in a Sitz Bath? How were you walking?” But with some of the other stuff, I felt like I still had too much PTSD revolving around it. There were times when I’d step out for a 30-minute therapy session just to make sure I was in a good head space to come to set.

It’s interesting because the script is by you but ultimately it isn’t about you.

I tell people Paige is based on me in some respects but there are some aspects of her that aren’t like me at all.

You come from a comedy writing background. Is this your first full-length script?

Yes.

The script is so good. The tone is central to why the whole thing works. I mean, you’re handling a lot of challenges with this script, even beyond the subject matter. It’s a story about traumatic vagina problems and yet it’s also very funny. It’s deep but it’s also light. How did you know this was going to be your first full-length, and also how did you think about how you wanted to tell this story? Finding the right tone?

It sounds corny to be like “This is the story I have to tell” but I really did feel that way. This situation consumed my entire 20s. From learning about it, going to multiple doctors, getting gaslit, moving back home with my parents, getting the surgery… It was everything. Lady Parts started as a blog post I’d written after surgery and it was the first time I got a lot of feedback. People responded, saying “This is really cool that you’re writing about this” or “This is something I’m struggling with” or “I know somebody who has this, can they reach out to you?” And I thought, “Oh wow, this is not just me!” For the longest time, I thought this was just happening to me. I was so scared to tell anybody about the surgery, about anything that was going on with me. And now obviously I am telling the world. Through every stage of this process, it became more and more obvious to me that this film needed to be made. We’ve had so many people reach out saying “This is exactly my journey” or “I showed this trailer to my parents to explain what was happening to me”.

And about finding the right tone for the script. I didn’t want it to come across as me info-dumping on someone with: “Here’s why you should care about vaginal health care, and vulvovaginal and pelvic pain disorders.” What better way to tell a story than with a story? At the end of the day, Lady Parts is about Paige getting autonomy over her body, and self-confidence in her writing. There’s also her relationship with her parents. So that’s the real story under the vulvovaginal-pelvic pain. This is real life. You’re dealing with a chronic illness while you’re also dealing with life in general. That was my journey too: moving to LA, sleeping on an air mattress, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Through all of it, humor binds us together. I am an AP English nerd, and you can’t have comedy without tragedy and you can’t have tragedy without comedy. I feel like humor was really important for the script, especially if we wanted it to sit with people who maybe don’t have a vaginal pain issue. It needed to resonate on a human connection level.

There’s the scene in the movie where she drinks too much prune juice and poops herself basically. That actually happened. And I remember me and my mom, at some point we just started cracking up about it. There are so many moments where in the same conversation we were crying and laughing. I just wanted people to see it and feel like, even if I don’t have pelvic floor dysfunction, I see myself in one of these characters. I’ve moved home with my parents, I’ve gone through a life change, I’ve found humor in a dark scenario.

I loved how the script showed that trauma isn’t just physical. Paige has had the surgery but her associations are still traumatic. You addressed this with the character of Cody, the dude who comes into the coffee shop and asks her on a date. I love that character, and I love that actor, Lars Midthun. Cody and the parents show another thing the script does really well: Paige isn’t the only one who gets to be complex.

I am very lucky. Those parents are based on my parents. They did show up to my doctor appointment. They were very supportive. My mom did have cervical cancer. That part was true. I am lucky that my parents were open with me and willing to be emotional and tell me about things. I’m very close to my dad. Every Saturday we’d go to the chiropractor together because we both have messed-up backs and bodies. I could have a conversation with him about my relationships, about everything that was going on, and it was never a weird thing. I got a lot of feedback like, “I can’t believe your dad was so supportive!” His response was always, “Okay, well, my daughter’s in pain, it doesn’t matter where the pain is, she’s in pain. I care.” I’m so used to the trope of parents in films being like “Oh no!” if something sexual comes up – “It’s forbidden, we don’t want to talk about it.” Very rarely do we get to see in media parents – especially fathers – and boyfriends, any male figures, really – being supportive, and I wanted to highlight that as well. We’ve seen so many movie dads who are aloof goofy guys who can’t deal. Paige’s dad can be goofy but he doesn’t need to be dumb.

He’s there for his daughter. If he doesn’t know what to say, then he’s silent on the phone, but you feel him. Betsey Brown, one of the other jurors, also appreciated the positive portrayal of the parent-daughter relationship.

The scene where the dad ties the belt around Paige’s thighs… that actually did happen. I wanted to show that even though the dad might not know how to help, he wants to help. He gets so excited about the belt idea and when he sees that it’s working, he’s happy he’s doing something positive and productive. Then there’s the scene where he opens up to her, and I thought that was really important. I think you realize one day that your parents are just people who had no idea what they were doing and still don’t. You hit that weird age where you’re like, “Oh wait, this was the age you had me, and you don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

When it came to Cody, what I wanted to show was that vulvodynia or any vulvovaginal-pelvic issue doesn’t have to be the end of a relationship. The relationship ends because of long distance or other things. Who knows if they get back together?

I hold out hope.

We’re all holding out hope! I think it’s important for males to see that you can be supportive. Even if you don’t necessarily know what’s going on, there’s still ways to care and be a supportive partner.

Yes, it’s this really cool line you walk here. You are educating but you are also entertaining. Your film made me think of how people throughout history have suffered through this without ever speaking about it or saying a word to anyone, and that’s just tragic to me. The vagina is a body part, that’s all. If it has problems, then they need to be addressed.

The best way I can describe it is, if this problem was on my shoulder, I could get it fixed and go back to work and tell everyone, “Oh yeah I had a nerve ending problem on my shoulder” and everyone would be like “Oh wow, interesting.” And just because of the location on my body, suddenly it’s a taboo, I can’t talk about it, there’s no research, you’re gaslit, you’re told it’s not a big deal.

Or insurance didn’t want to cover it because they considered it “cosmetic”. Did that really happen?

Yes. And all the doctors appointments leading up to the surgery, not covered at all by health insurance. The doctor I went to in New York was a Dr. Goldstein. In the script I made him Dr. Silverstein, for a fun little Easter egg. Funnily enough, the guy that got it right, the guy who treated me with kindness, the guy who did my surgery, was an old white male.

Good for Dr. Goldstein!

He was able to diagnose me in about five minutes. The amount of gaslighting I experienced before that… I think I went to 15 doctors over the course of 3 years in 3 different cities and states.

How did you connect with the director, Nancy Boyd?

I work at Light Iron with Meghan Griesbeck, who came on as another producer for Lady Parts. Meghan and Nancy are childhood best friends. Nancy was finishing up her Master’s at USC for directing, and Meghan suggested her: “You know, Nancy also has vaginal issues, you two should meet!” I had told Meghan I was looking for a director but it was hard to find someone who was going to be able to understand this and take it in the way it needed to go. I gave Nancy the script and she read the first scene, the tampon scene, and she said, “Oh my God, this is my story.” The director needed to understand the intricacies of this condition. There’s the nerve-ending problem, but on top of it you have the pelvic floor problems, the vaginismus – which is where suddenly your muscles contract involuntarily because it’s so used to pain at the entryway. So Nancy and I connected. I was like, “You’ve got dilators too? You understand this weird world?” It was perfect.

What was the casting like and how did you find the amazing Valentina?

I adore her and I hope more people see this and realize how incredible she is and keep casting her. Valentina was in a short Nancy directed before Lady Parts and so that’s how we came to Valentina and asked her to audition for Paige. Honestly, we did most of the casting through Backstage. We found pretty much everybody there. It was during Covid, 2021, when we were casting. I was in my tiny studio, on Zoom for 7 hours a day. We never met anyone in person until we got to set, which is crazy. Luckily, Val and Lars had so much chemistry and the parents were amazing together. Everyone melded so well together and it really showed.

The film moves from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to New York – it feels quite expansive – but really, all of the action is in the parents’ house. It’s perfect for a low-budget film! Did you film in an Airbnb?

Yes. We filmed in the Airbnb where everyone also was staying. It was the most indie thing we could have done. Our main actress slept in Paige’s childhood room set, on that twin bed. I was staying at a family friend’s who had a she-shed with a twin bed in the back. Threshold LA, the dungeon, is where we shot the doctor scenes because they have a gynecology room with stirrups and an exam table. We thought, “This is perfect, this is exactly where the Lady Parts team needs to be.”

Have you collaborated with companies or health care groups selling dilators and things like that?

Yes! We partnered with Intimate Rose, who donated dilators to our set. They’ve been super helpful, sharing our stuff on social media, they even made a Lady Parts discount code to buy stuff on their site. I partnered with HelloGina, which offers digital therapy, so you can do dilator therapy in the comfort of your home, where it’s more accessible and affordable if you can’t go to a doctor. I also have a discount code with them. We partnered with the Pelvic People, and they’re the ones who donated the Kiwis we raffled off at the screening, toys made to help people with pelvic floor dysfunction.

Tell me about audience response.

The Florida Film Festival was our world premiere, our first festival, first screening. We were nervous. The only people who had seen it were people who worked on it. How will it go for people who don’t know me? It was incredible. There was somebody in the audience who was a pelvic floor therapist. That was super exciting!

Oh that’s right. She said, “I’m right down the street!”

Yes! There are a bunch of Facebook support groups for vulvodynia awareness and I posted it in there saying we were having a screening if anyone was in the Orlando area. A woman came up to me after the screening and said, “Hey I saw your post and I decided to come and I brought my daughter with me.” She said she didn’t feel comfortable talking to her daughter about it at first, but there they were, watching this film together and laughing about it. How beautiful. The film did its job. We had some dads come up to us too. One said, “I have a nine year old daughter and I’ll be ready to talk to her about this if …”

I can’t.

I started crying. It was so impactful.

Being able to have – if you want it – a non-painful sex life, is a valid health issue. It is not this frivolous thing, you know?

Right. Like in the doctor gaslighting montage, one of the doctors says, “It’s not life or death, I wouldn’t worry about it.” With a lot of health issues, they say, “It’s not fatal.” Right, but I’m living with chronic pain. Even besides the sex thing, I can’t put in a tampon, I can’t sit on a bike, I can’t wear certain clothes. I had multiple doctors tell me to drink a glass of wine before sex.

That is disgusting.

And I know I’m not the only one. I recently joined an advocacy group called Tight Lipped, they’re a grassroots organization for vulvovaginal pelvic pain disorder patients and we’re trying to work on education and awareness. We all have the same stories and it’s really sad. We all experienced someone telling us to drink. We all experienced someone telling us it’s not life or death and we should just live with it.

It’s excellent to have doctors like your doctor – and now your film – to just say, “Hey, this is actually a thing. You can research it.”

It is a health condition involving nerves and muscles, and it needs to be researched and included in insurance models. It needs to be accessible and affordable. I think the statistic is 1 in 4 people will experience vulvar pain at some point in their lives. It can happen from menopause, puberty, or you go through a traumatic event. People just don’t talk about it. You can have vagnismus from religious trauma, sexual trauma, or back problems, or if your pelvis is misaligned. It shouldn’t be taboo.

Back to the Cody thing we were talking about: during the scene at his place, it really showed “Your life isn’t over. If you want to be a sexual person, then there are ways you can do it.” A man can get on board with it. Cody involving himself in it was radical in a quiet funny way, even though he had no idea what was happening but took the very smart attitude of: I want both of us to have fun tonight, whatever we do. It was such a hopeful scene.

We can have fun no matter what. To your point, I think a lot of times, because of the society we’re in, we associate sex with PIV, penis in vagina, and that is what we mean by sex, and you’re a virgin until it happens. All of that is just myth.

It’s also damaging for people who aren’t participating in it, or who can’t.

Yes. I thought my life was over when I was first diagnosed. I am never going to have sex. Nobody is ever going to love me. It was so sad. And that’s where Paige is at: “I’m not even going to talk to men because why would I, it’s not even worth it if I can’t do PIV sex.” There are so many ways to define pleasure, and if your partner doesn’t want to try, then it’s not worth it. You don’t need to do PIV to have a booming sex life or pleasure in your life.

By that point, I was happy for her that she could see another way. Whether or not it was with him, she could see new possibilities. She can give him as much information as she feels comfortable doing, but of course he already knows everything because he read the blog post …

Yes, that’s out of the way! It’s so funny. I went on a Hinge date recently and I had something in my profile about Lady Parts so he looked it up and he was like “I already know everything!” So I didn’t have to go through the whole “See, it’s a nerve ending problem …” thing.

What is next for Lady Parts?

We want to go to more festivals. I hope we can find distribution for it. I think it would mean a lot to people to be able to see it.

It’s interesting, and this is occurring to me just now as we are speaking. The way you conceptualized the parents, and those two beautiful actors’ performances – it shows that Paige being stuck in her life has affected them. And so her becoming un-stuck lets THEM become un-stuck. They’re worried about her – and rightly so. I love how you watch them all transform. As she gets better, the family system gets healthier.

Ironically, as she’s loosening up her body, her mind is loosening up, and all the characters around her are loosening up too. If one person can open up, it makes space for someone else to open up, which is the whole point of sharing this story to begin with.

Lady Parts film

Lady Parts instagram

“I’m just making fun of things.”

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2023 was a year of anniversaries. In 2013, after a prolonged crackup in the fall/winter of 2012, plus a hallucinatory (and great) solo trip to Memphis, I finally got diagnosed bipolar. I say finally because “they” think I “had it” since I was 12, an annus horribilis if ever there was one. Nothing would have been possible without the diagnosis. Things weren’t just bad. They were scary. Mania was productive: I wrote 30,000-40,000 words on Elvis in 2011-2012 alone. But I couldn’t have gone on for much longer. In 2013, I also started writing for Rogerebert.com, making 2023 the ten-year anniversary for two major life events.

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At the start of 2023, I made the conscious decision to commemorate these anniversaries. In January, I took another solo trip to Memphis, staying in the same hotel I stayed in 2013. It was amazing. It poured rain for a couple of days, and there was a crazy snow storm, so I spent a couple of days in the hotel, emerging only for short walks and food. It was luxuriously empty and quiet. I just walked around. I went to Graceland, mainly to visit Elvis’ cars. On a rainy afternoon, I went to Beale Street - which was sparsely populated - holed up in a blues club to stay out of the rain, listened to music, had a beer, and read a novel by Chester Himes.

I went back to all the spots I visited in 2012. I allowed myself to feel how far I have come. I miss my mania sometimes but I don’t miss the other.

I also went to Ebertfest. Covid interrupted my participation with Ebertfest, so it’s been a couple of years since I attended the festival. This, too, was a ten-year anniversary. I went to Ebertfest in 2013, right after I got the diagnosis. 2013 was a year filled with jagged fears and radical change, my moods wildly buckling up and down for months, so much so it took an entire care team to help me stabilize. I was still buckling up and down when I went to Ebertfest, which took place just a month after Roger died. Mum came with me. I felt I couldn’t face all these new experiences alone. At first I was stressed out, since I had some responsibilities at the festival: participating in panels, meeting new colleagues, etc. I was stressed out about leaving Mum in a place where she knew absolutely no one. At one point, in the crowded theatre lobby, I lost Mum, and looked around wildly. I didn’t want her to be lost by herself in a sea of strangers. Then I caught sight of her, standing by the concession counter, chatting with Haskell Wexler. Yeah. She was fine.

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This year, Mitchell came with me to Ebertfest. I realized how much I had missed seeing all the Ebertfest people once a year: patrons, staff, fellow critics. It was beautiful re-joining that community, having breakfast with editors Brian, Nick and Matt, Mitchell fitting right in. Again, Ebertfest had multiple layers of symbolic resonance for me: noticing the passage of time, and really feeling what time can do. In 2013, I was a nervous wreck. In 2023, going to Ebertfest was like coming home. Getting diagnosed made having an actual life possible.

In 2023, I also started this Substack. I’ve been feeling stagnant in my writing, in general. I want to do more. I want to write long-form pieces on subjects that interest me. I want to stretch and grow and go out on a limb. But then I look at all I’ve written this year and I realize “Wow, okay, I did a lot this year”, even though it feels like pure chaos when I’m in the thick of it. I think of Doris Lessing’s comment: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

I’ll share some of the more off-the-beaten-path things I’ve written, on my site and others, as well as some more high-profile things.

Kay Francis

When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can’t wait to be forgotten.
— from Kay Francis’s private diaries, c. 1938

I wrote about this intriguing actress on my site.

Dubravka Ugrešić

I feel like I am smuggling neglected Central and East European literary values into World literature.
— Dubravka Ugrešić

Ugrešić died this year and it is a great loss. I’ve read her novels and essays, soaking up her unique dissident writer-in-exile perspective. I wrote about her when she died.

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Janis Martin

I wrote ‘Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll’ in about 10 minutes.
— Janis Martin

I had so much fun digging into the forgotten career of rockabilly singer Janis Martin, whose short career derailed when she got pregnant. Billed as “the female Elvis”, somewhat unfairly (although an understandable marketing ploy), Martin was no gimmick. Her first single - which she wrote - sold 750,000 copies. That’s almost Elvis-level numbers. She should be remembered. So I did my best.

Ten Years

My 2012 crackup detailed. Commemorating the ten year anniversary.

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Kenneth Anger

Well, this was a mixed legacy. I wrote about it.

Tina Turner

I wrote about how lucky I feel to have come of age in a moment where a 45-50 year-old woman was the biggest star in the world.

Alan Arkin

Alan Arkin’s passing led me down a memory lane to when I had an insanely strong reaction to him at age 11, 12, after catching The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming on television. Sometimes an actor dies, and a career retrospective is not what I feel like writing. The distance isn’t there. Instead, I want to imagine my way back to childhood, when my personality and tastes were being formed. Arkin was almost a tomboy avatar to me, which is a little difficult to explain but … I tried.

Sinéad O’Connor

As long as the house of The Holy Spirit remains a haven for criminals the reputation of the church will remain in ruins.” —
— Sinéad O’Connor

I couldn’t really speak when she passed - I still can’t really speak of it - but I did my best.

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Dariush Mehrjui

The murder of this cinematic master and his wife is a travesty. I wrote about my journey with his films, while still in a state of shock and outrage.

Ebert Reviews

Just a smattering of review I wrote in 2023:

Review of Saint Omer
Review of The Quiet Girl
Review of Eight Mountains
Review of It Ain’t Over
Review of Enys Men
Review of birth/rebirth
Interview with Dan Callahan on his new book, Bing and Billie and Frank and Ella and Judy and Barbra
Review of Wingwomen
Review of Eileen
For Ebert’s 10 Best Films of 2023, I wrote about Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
For Ebert’s The Great Performances of 2023, I wrote about Rosy McEwen in Blue Jean

Criterion Collection

I had a blast writing the booklet essay for Criterion’s release of After Hours, which led to a 45-minute phone conversation with Martin Scorsese, an experience I will never forget.

Writing about Elvis in Hollywood for Criterion felt like a blissful culmination of all the work I’ve done breaking down this man’s career and accomplishments.

Podcasts

I appeared as a guest on a couple of excellent podcasts, where the conversations were focused and free-range, talking with interesting people about interesting things. I appeared on Jen Johans’ fabulous podcast Watch With Jen, where we discussed 5 Elvis movies (not the usual suspects). I had so much fun appearing on Jason Bailey and Mike Hull’s podcast A Very Good Year, where we discussed movies in 1953! I was a guest on Ryan Czerwonko' and David Garelik’s podcast Adult Film, where we talked about acting, process, the Actors Studio, Gena Rowlands, Bette Davis … we could have gone all night.

I’ll close this out with a poem by the great Louise Glück, who died in October 2023. It’s a masterpiece.

Hawk’s Shadow

Embracing in the road
for some reason I no longer remember
and then drawing apart, seeing
a shape ahead–-how close was it?
We looked up to where the hawk
hovered with its kill; I watched them
veering toward West Hill, casting
their one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
shape of the predator–
Then they disappeared. And I thought,
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me.