ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 12.7.23

I thought I’d break a little from my typical essay material, and discuss just such an opportunity I had a few years ago, in what I consider to be not just my only real contribution of any substance to Jewish pop culture, but a creative high-point in my career.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 11.23.23

1994.

It’s winter break, my freshman year of college. We’re in Phoenix visiting my grandparents, and Quentin Tarantino - my obsession of the past year - is on Charlie Rose, in a blue blazer and green tie emblazoned with Astroboy, every inch the enfant terrible grudgingly dressing for church or Olive Garden.

Charlie is giving his typically chummy interview, showing how with-it he is by “getting down” with the current it-boy (we were decades away from knowing the extent of Charlie Rose’s “chumminess”), and at some point gets to a question about Tarantino’s influences

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10.4.23

Creativity is a tricky, distracting, lonely, distancing, isolating thing to live with - a pull, an obsession, a constant, background hum - and in past relationships, I’d found my partners less supportive than I needed of the attention I felt compelled to give to ideas I was trying to bring to fruition. I was beyond lucky to marry a woman who understood and encouraged this behavior, and suddenly, making things and sharing my life didn’t feel like either/or.

Of course, that’s by the standards of 20-odd years ago, where my creativity had really only one longform output - screenwriting. Now, my creativity tends to be more fragmented, splintered, an itch that can be scratched a thousand times a day crafting a tweet, an essay, a pic, a video - not to mention that I write and produce video content for a living, so there’s that - so while the individual distraction is briefer, it’s more prevalent.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9.20.23

Friends, I’m positively grappling with the long-read I’d planned for this week, so while I plan to return to more serious fare next week, for now …

In his 1930 comedy of manners, Private Lives, Noël Coward cannily wrote that “It’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” While unearthing this universal truth that can be applied nearly end-to-end across the century of indispensable pop music since then, Coward can’t have known his big-tent summation would also include a season two episode of The Love Boat, but I was as surprised as you to find it applied.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9.12.23

This was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes. The work covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors currently striking for improved working conditions and fair pay.

::

I’m old enough to know two inextricable facts:

• Starting new things is hard

• Starting new things, already hard to do, is even harder to do without a mentor

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9.6.23

I. You Know (His) Name

In 2005, for the third time in my life, I witnessed the media blitz around the announcement of a new James Bond.

As I recall, the announcement was met with incredible skepticism, which to my interpretation could stem from two possible sources:

1. We were exhausted being a few years into an unwinnable forever-war with a draft-dodging fake cowboy running things with all the statesmanship of Slim Pickens astride an h-bomb.

2. The new James Bond had blond hair and blue eyes.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 8.29.23

When I was five, my sister had her tonsils out. Mom stayed overnight at the hospital with her, which left Dad to figure out what we were going to do with our evening together.

We found ourselves at dinner at the Roy Rogers on Reisterstown Road - a treat for me, an easy solve for Dad (no shade - as a father to a ten year old myself, I know that job one is filling the hours) - when Dad glanced across the street to the twin cinema at the Plaza with a “… Huh,” and asked if, after dinner, I might want to go over to the mall to see The Empire Strikes Back, in its 1982 rerelease.

(Yep, drop what you’re doing, Internet, a white guy in his 40s is gonna talk at you about Star Wars)

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 7.6.23

This may wind up being my first written-to-completion post, so I feel like I’m still introducing myself to you, the hypothetical reader.

Probably one of the first things you should know - or could easily guess - about me is I’m movie people.

This isn’t badge of honor or an attempt to gatekeep - though in the past I’ve certainly used it as both and done a lot of work to, y’know, stop that - but a statement of fact. It just means that the most prominent form of commercial art for the past century is the art form that got its claws into me first, foremost, and which renews its hold on me daily.

In my dating life, if we can count back that far, my being movie people wasn’t a problem exactly, but it didn’t really help - they could like a movie just fine, but then there I was, taking in what should have been an evening’s diversion with deathly serious obsessiveness. Every movie I loved was a bend in the river of my destiny, every movie I disliked (which was most movies) a harbinger of bad things to come in an ever-worsening culture. Forgetting for a moment that a single movie probably isn’t either of these extremes, it made me not a lot of fun to be around.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 8.28.23

I was chatting with my sister last week, who mentioned she’d just watched Witness for the Prosecution for the first time - a movie I haven’t seen, but I’m sure I’ll get to it - and she mentioned that it was somewhat belabored by today’s standards in terms of how its twist unfurls.

It got me thinking about how, as movies have evolved, and moviegoers’ understanding of them has (mostly) evolved with them, getting a character on board with their overall situation is usually a much quicker process.

Take, for instance, George Bailey’s refusal to engage with the test Clarence has put him through; George doesn’t deny that he’s witnessing Bedford Falls without his influence so much as he fails to understand that that’s what he’s witnessing, despite Clarence’s repeated patient explanations of the premise.

This goes beyond Joseph Campbell’s “call refused” - this is “call rejected, call repeated, call rejected, call sent to voicemail.”