“Other times I film him but I play a song on my stereo, mostly musicals or opera. He stalks a moth or nothing really and we hear a song from Carmen. He likes songs from South Pacific too.” I took a big gulp of Tab. “I call it Denton’s Diaries.”
“You are very funny,” Meadow said, like being funny was a diagnosis. “How many of these diaries exist?”
“Probably twenty? I watch them and that’s about it.”
“No editing and one shot, huh?”
I shrugged. “I just film it, stop if I need to switch angles. It’s just for a goof.”
“It isn’t really making a film until you edit. Otherwise it is like filming a skit.”
“Funny you should say that. I also used to make fake commercials.”
“With the video camera?”
“Yeah. I made a bunch of these. Directed by and starring me. With occasional guest turns from Denton. At first I tried to do takeoffs, like puns or Cracked magazine stuff. But then I realized that just exactly redoing the commercials with my found props and my pets was funnier. The more precisely I imitated and recited the words as they were, the funnier the videos turned out.”
“Interesting. I have to think about why that might be. It is odd what is funny, right?”
“Yeah, it really is.”
“So you like making things,” she said.
“Do you want me to show you sometime?” I said, swallowing my third perfect ball of mozzarella wrapped in red pepper.
“I don’t even need to see them. I know they are great,” she said and barked out a loud laugh.
We continued to eat in the kitchen, by ourselves, Meadow’s parents nowhere in sight. They had apparently gone out to dinner. I suppose that as different as we were, we shared an affinity for solitude, for making private worlds within the real world. All I know is that I was very comfortable with her and in her house. My mother picked me up shortly after, and on the ride home, I could not stop talking about Meadow.
When the developed film came back from the lab a week later, we watched our “raw” footage on Meadow’s projector. First my prat flip, then Meadow’s deadfall.
“It is funnier when you do it,” I said.
“Why do you think so?” she asked, looking puzzled.
“Because no one expects the glamorous skinny chick to do something goofy. But the chubby girl has to do something funny. I mean, why else are we looking at her, you know? If you are expecting it, not as funny.”
“I don’t know if that is true. You tell someone something is a comedy so they know it is okay to laugh. They expect it to be funny, and it is,” she said. I thought about that. Nodded.
“But yours is still funnier,” I said.
“You mean yours. I was only the actor; it was your film.” She was right, it was my film — the idea, the phrase, hadn’t ever occurred to me before. She taught me how to edit my film.
Our life together had begun.
* * *
Most days we hung out after school, almost entirely at Meadow’s house. Sometimes we made films, but more often we watched films. Meadow was already movie obsessed: we went to the revival art house theater, the Nuart, and watched whatever films they were showing. We went to Westwood Village and spent entire Saturdays seeing movies, going from one movie theater to another, watching everything that came out: blockbusters, teen films, war films, comedies. And as Hosney’s class opened a world of great older films to us, we also began to watch more obscure movies on video at Meadow’s house. Foreign films, black-and-white American films, silent films, documentaries, everything. And we watched what we loved over and over. What we discovered was that the more you saw of something good, the better it became. Being comprehensive also was important. When Meadow was on a James Cagney kick, we watched The Roaring Twenties, The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, White Heat. Dialogue memorized, scenes recalled: we became our own insular world of reference and repetition. If you didn’t know the films, you didn’t know us.
We were best friends the way girls can sometimes be at that age. We wrote notes to each other. After we went to our respective homes, we would call each other on the phone and do our homework together. We made occasional movies as well, with Meadow’s Super 8 camera and then her 16 mm camera and with my video camera. We made epics and shorts and parodies. Then, at last, came Meadow’s sixteenth birthday, and her parents gave her a car. We were free to do as we pleased: drive to the beach, drive to the movies, and sometimes just drive.
We were different, even then. Meadow was very serious about seeing what she wanted to see, and she was always more obsessive than I was. I remember a Saturday in junior year. I wanted to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Again. (We had seen it the previous weekend.) She wanted to see something at the Nuart. My Little Loves by Jean Eustache.
“It is only playing one night,” she said. It mattered, in those days. Sometimes you had only one chance to see a film. A lot of films were not available on video yet. The night before, she had taken me to another film by the same director, The Mother and the Whore. In French with subtitles. Full of dialogue and long static shots in low-light black and white, which made it feel like a documentary, like a cinema verité film. Three and a half hours of Jean-Pierre Léaud chain-smoking with manic desperation. It felt very cool to me to see a French film about sexual despair when I had yet to have had any sex at all. In the end, I was glad I had seen it, but I was not eager for more.
Meadow was determined, and tonight was a chance to see Eustache’s only other film “on the big screen,” which was like the final verdict.
“Oh my god, but it is Saturday,” I said. She shrugged. “Can’t we be dumb tonight? I think Jean Eustache is a genius, but do we have to see genius films all the time?”
“Not all the time,” she said. “Just tonight.”
“I just want to get stoned and see something,” I said. “Something with jokes.”
We went to My Little Loves, which was, as it turned out, great. And it was in color and shorter than his other film. Then we got stoned, blowing smoke out the window of her room, and watched Monty Python. That was our compromise. Usually I did what Meadow liked and I was better for it, I think. She wanted to challenge the very idea of what films were or could be. She was always questioning everything. She wanted to challenge herself and the audience. But I was different, kind of lazy maybe. Flabby in every way. It only emerged slowly, and in contrast to Meadow, what I wanted from movies. I didn’t want to change everything. I didn’t want to challenge in dramatic formal ways. I watched a bad sitcom, and I thought, what would make this good? What would make this really funny? I saw a comedy that I liked, and I imagined what my version of that would be. A silly teenage comedy with girls as the main characters instead of boys. From a girl’s point of view, but just as raunchy and silly. That seemed radical to me. That’s what I wanted to make. I wanted seduction, not challenge. Or maybe I wanted to smuggle the challenge in a little, not subvert the whole form. Meadow and I were very different, but it was Meadow who made me see that I could — and should — make films. She did it, so I did it. And if we disagreed, had different ideas about the kinds of films worth making, it made us both all the better. I wouldn’t have become a filmmaker, I think, if it wasn’t for Hosney’s class and Meadow’s friendship. If it wasn’t for them, I would have become a Tarzana housewife who cracks a lot of silly jokes after a few glasses of white wine on girls’ night out. Nothing wrong with that, really, that’s my audience, my people. But now they have something to watch at the movies. Meadow put me in that direction, there is no doubt about it, and that brought me to the Tisch School and all that followed. I still think about what Meadow would think of every film I make and it pulls me to take more risks, find the edge of my jokes. It is part of how I view the world, no matter what.