There is a kind of courtship that goes on between producer and director, a kind of wooing. The producer holds the means of movie making (money) and the director, if they’re any good, provides the vision. There’s a honeymoon period, and often an inevitable falling out. It was a form…
Category: Entertainment
There are definitely seasons in California, whatever anyone says to the contrary. In the winter the smog lifts. The daytime skies are a blue that delights my New England soul. At night the lights that sprawl from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea glow against a heavenly dome of…
Instead of brocade and a ruff she favored cardigan twin sets and a short strand of pearls. She was bird-boned and regal. She powdered her face Elizabeth 1 white. She had no eyebrows to speak of, and above her high forehead her tight-permed curls were red. As you can…
“You know my mom and dad came out to visit me when I was on that first movie. I took them to set, Grauman’s Chinese, Max Factor’s. We looked at every little bitty star on Hollywood Boulevard and had hot fudge sundaes at C.C. Brown’s. The day they came to…
Shooting began. Patsy Morris, checking in one afternoon as the crew broke for lunch cautioned me. “Remember, movies are like high school with a paycheck. The same juvenile behavior and more cliques than you can keep track of.” Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We were in pre-production for months, which is otherwise known as “development.” It’s mostly an accounting trick, cinema semantics as some impressive dollar deals are tied to certain points in the film schedule, like the huge fees that are handed out the first day of principal photography. Podcast: Play in…
Some people apply battle strategy to film making. Many directors are able to extemporize on Sun Tzu’s thirteen principals of war. I wasn’t very familiar with eastern philosophy, even though Cooper Daniels had sent me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose for a stack of treatises in vogue with…
I scanned the editing room to see if there was a physical tell for an epiphany moment. Two young men in their early twenties, my classmates, were hunched down in a darkened cubicle, stubble across their chins, staring at the projection screen. The only thing on their horizon was their…
I called my mom. Mother Lydia was the antithesis of everyone I knew in Hollywood. If I couldn’t get absolution I knew calling her would result in a strong dose of disapproval, an advised course correction, and a grudging glimmer of hope. First of all, as a school superintendent, she…