loving the film

"Film has brought me to some of the most surreal moments of my life," I said to my neighbor from under the brim of my 30's-era newsboy hat.

He, the student writer and director of a film about a Orthodox Jewish vampire who drinks menstrual blood, nodded. "It kind of makes you do things you would never do otherwise."

Our other neighbor, who had scaled a snowy wall earlier that morning before donning his checked fedora, practiced his snarl.

The director yelled action, and the three of us pretended to snap photos as, in the boxing ring, a baby-faced sophomore punched a 110-pound girl to the ground.


I am a film major at one of the most prestigious film programs in the country, and I spent much of the fall of 2005 applying fake blood. Sometimes it was spit out of mouths, as with the 110-pound boxer. Sometimes it was applied to body parts--fortunately not for the film about menstrual blood. In one memorable incident, it was sprayed out of a high-pressure deck sprayer at 4 a.m. in a basement where we did not have legal access. I wore my running shoes to that shoot, just in case.

I was never one of those huge film geeks who make digital videos on weekends, so I'm not sure if students enter film school with high-minded notions of yelling "Cut!' or if they understand the cheap, cold, exhausted reality that awaits them. For the general public, however, I imagine behind-the-scenes documentaries on Hollywood DVDs have given a skewed impression of what filmmaking is like for most of us. Let me put it this way: Steven Spielberg probably never gets pushed up a hill in a grocery cart so he can get a tracking shot.

Needless to say, my personal forays into filmmaking have not met with great success. I took one film production class my junior year, and my final project was a combination ELO music video and iPod commercial that included the aforementioned tracking shot. Turns out, when I got that shot the film wasn't properly exposed, so I didn't wind up using it. My boyfriend at the time, who was pushing me in the cart, had sprained his ankle for naught. With earlier films I made that semester, every disaster that could happen did, from the film loading incorrectly to the lens being out of focus. The very word "reshoot" began to make my blood curdle.

When it came to senior year and time to make a thesis, I thought for a while that I would make my own film. I had visions of dance numbers and fantasy sequences and snappy dialogue, and figured I would pull it together when the time came. Then I came to my senses and remembered how I felt when I found out I had been shooting for an hour and a half in slow motion. I decided to crew other peoples' films instead.

So getting back to this "things you wouldn't do normally" thing. In the course of working on student films, I have inserted a plastic plant into the ass of a man I had only met a few days earlier. I have broken into a basement by actually shattering a window. I have worked for 12 hours and then driven across state lines to work for another four. I have lied to innocent townspeople and pretended to interview them about Osama bin Laden. I have convinced a 19-year old boy to climb an unstable ladder onto a roof coated in ice. Perhaps most dangerously, I've almost put milk into the non-dairy sink at the house of Orthodox Jews. That was a close one.

When all the thesis shoots were over last fall, I thought my surreal life was finished. Being a film student isn't nearly as dramatic as being a student filmmaker, even though the head of the department, one of the most respected names in film scholarship, insists we wear costumes for class presentations. When my presentation date came, I was getting into my French chef costume and heading to the film department kitchen, where we were warming up the lentils and potatoes au gratin we had prepared for the class. Business as usual.

I had never been to the kitchen before, and it was a little jarring to walk from the big, hyper-modern film department atrium into the cozy kitchen that was like any standard 1960's-era kitchen, wallpaper and all. Then I noticed the framed painting, which was actually a map of the U.S. Senate floor signed by the cast and crew of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and given to Frank Capra as a gift.

I stirred my lentils and stared at James Stewart's signature, intended as a memento for Frank Capra from one of the most successful and best-loved films of his career. Instead it was there for me, a 21-year old college student who had failed in her filmmaking attempts and was relegated to applying fake blood to extras. They say the Hollywood produces the American dream, and there it was, keeping me company in the film department's kitchen.

the doppelgang

My ex-boyfriend has a doppelganger who has already stolen both of our careers.

His name is Joel Stein, and I can't decide if I hate him or, in some way that is probably psychological and fucked-up, want to jump his bones. He's had columns for Time, Entertainment Weekly and Time Out New York, all of which I have read at one point or another with some interest. He really caught my eye, though, when I saw him on a vh1 clip show so generic I can't even remember what it was about. And this is what really earns my ire-- he's a fundit.

I'm relatively certain my friend Justin invented the word "fundit," though it seems too appropos and brilliant not to be in common usage. Fundits are the people who are not Paul Begala, Bill O'Reilly, or anyone else with marginally meaningful commentary; these are the people who explain to you how much Nicole Richie spent on her most recent handbag, and make you feel like you should care. Their primary domain is the Vh1 clip show, where they could be commenting on anything from celebrity mansions to Hurricane Katrina; don't worry, their commentary on the hurricane is probably along the lines of Mardi Gras and jazz rather than America's inherent racial tensions. Fundits in no way pose any danger to making you think too much, and that's why I like them.

The thing about Joel Stein is he kind of manages to do both. He has a column for Time, which gives him at least some measure of respect, but also knows the ins and outs of on-set celebrity hookups. He's some kind of postmodern Renaissance man, and could most definitely kick my ass at Trivial Pursuit.

My ex-boyfriend has a more legitimate claim to hating and/or worshipping Joel Stein, as they look exactly alike and both of them write humor columns for their various publications. As I took a different tack and now edit every word in my publication, I write here instead and pretend people read it. It almost works as well.

What Joel Stein managed that both of us want, however, is becoming famous for essentially being himself. He writes about whatever is going on in his life-- going on hotornot.com, visiting a high school, whatever-- and turns it into part of the public record. Years from now, some college student trapped in a microfilm room will use one of Joel Stein's columns as a piece of research in some ill-planned research paper, and maybe even get an A. For right now, the best I can do is maybe write one of my news editors a recommendation, and she hasn't even asked me yet.

Ideally my career will not take me in a direction that will earn me fundit status; when it comes down to it I'd probably prefer a Pulitzer to a 5-second spot on Vh1. But what if Joel Stein does both? The first-ever Pulitzer-winning fundit? Frank Rich might have already done this, but I haven't seen him on Vh1 yet so the jury is officially still out. I don't know who it says more about-- American culture, my generation, or just myself-- but pseudo-celebrity is almost more valuable than actual accomplishment these days. I'm not sure which, if either, I'll actually manage to obtain, but I know one thing-- if my ex-boyfriend does in fact become the next Joel Stein, as he's well on his way to doing, I am riding those coattails all the way to "I Love the 00's." Or, if I'm lucky, "The Fabulous Life Of..."

the new fatigue?

I've grown out of liberal rage, for now, but I think I've grown into liberal schadenfreude.

I've always had this weird journalistic desire for things to keep getting worse. Watching a hurricane barrel toward the coast, for example, I actually want it to smash into land and destroy everything, just to see what happens, how everyone reacts. On 9/11 I was secretly thrilled that I had to rework the high school newspaper to cover it, even as I staggered around trying to wrap my mind around it all.

Only in the last few years, though, has this harmless, dirty little secret become so ruthless. Like so many of my political allies I want everything in the Bush administration to fall apart. More than once in the last two years someone has admitted to me that, as much as they hate the war in Iraq, they want it all to self-destruct so Bush will have to take the blame. During the Hurricane Katrina debacle I skipped over the stages of disbelief into anger right into partisan bloodlust-- a phase I'm sure Elisabeth Kubler-Ross would have incorporated into the five steps of grieving had she been addressing national tragedies.

These days with the Bush administration it's like a schadenfreude free-for-all-- every day something else seems to just crash around the Republican party's feet. At some point I will probably start feeling bad about this, but right now I'm enjoying the ride, greeting news stories with combined glee ("Tom Delay indicted again?!?") and condescending bafflement ("Bush decided to alienate his based by nominating Harriet Miers why now?") I've got the liberal media on my side, and the rest of my college campus, so before the Democrats execute another graceless belly-flop off the political high dive, lets just take a moment to imagine what it might be like, one day, to be on top again.

the voice of god

West 66th Street at Columbus Avenue is kind of the rainbow row of ABC news-- 47 West, 77 West, 147 Columbus, the center of all national news on the network. The intersection is also home to a stop for the M66 crosstown bus. The entire time I have worked at ABC this stop has had two identical ads for World News Tonight on either of its glass side. A large-than-life Peter Jennings gazes serenely onto the street with the tagline "When the world doesn't make sense, he does."

Early this morning the memorials had already cropped up, taped, of all places, to the ad at the bus stop. I guess it's the nearest public place to ABC headquarters with Jennings' photo. On one side of the stop you having a living, impromptu memorial, a testament to the impact Jennings had. On the other side of the stop, where an identical ad used to be, it is blank. The ad has already been removed.

I knew ABC would be ambivalent about letting Jennings go, seeing as they still haven't named his replacement, but I had no idea they'd be so naked about it. On one side he lives on as a legend; on the other, out of necessity, we're already moving on.

As was much-discussed during Dan Rather's resignation and Tom Brokaw's retirement, we are reaching the end of the Big Three, the so-called "voice of God" anchors. For over 20 years-- my entire life-- Jennings, Brokaw and Rather were the last word, the single source for whatever information the day had to offer. Their voices, with the impossibly deep and soothing baritone and bass tones, rang out in houses all over the country when 7 o'clock rolled around. Back then, and maybe this is just because I was younger, the news could wait until 7.

I can't claim to have been a Jennings watcher-- during the 9/11 period I refused to watch anyone but Tom Brokaw-- but, especially working at ABC, his passing strikes me hard. The bus poster had it right-- he really could make the world make sense. All of them could, those men who can no longer really be called the Big Three. Of course we live in an age where fewer and fewer people get their news from the nightly broadcast, and most people I like and respect would trust Jon Stewart sooner than any talking head on NBC. It's easy here to romanticize "a more innocent time," when "things were simpler," but in the case of television news it's resoundingly true. Peter Jennings was never a screaming pundit, nor did he invite them on his show, and for that I respect him more than even his most tenacious journalism.

I don't think it's a bad thing that we are moving on from single "voice of God" news sources-- almost everything deserves further analysis than the nightly news can give-- but it's worth it to note its passing. With the last of the three gone, to be replaced by yet another unkown and unremarkable white man, it's a free-for-all for the next top dog status. I'd love it if Bill O'Reilly and Wolf Blitzer left the scene before they even get a chance, but sadly, I don't think it will end that way. Next time something happens on the scale of 9/11, the ABC anchor can report from the roof all he wants, but nobody may even pay attention. They'll have their own sources and their own way to interpret, and I can only hope that even one of them can be as reliable as Peter Jennings.

who is michael kelly?

At the documentary production office that has hired me as an unpaid summer intern, we get a lot of unwanted books. Things people picked up for past shows, random promotional copies, even roadmaps. I picked through some of them earlier last week, bypassing the small library we collected on Poland, picking up a paperback copy of "Reagan: A Life in Letters", but my heart about stopped when I found "Michael Kelly: Things Worth Fighting For."

In April 2003, Michael Kelly was the editor-at-large for the Atlantic Monthly; I was a freshman at a New England college that put the "liberal" in "liberal arts," the kind of place where I wasn't the only 18-year old with a subscription to the Atlantic. The thick, texty issues usually piled up unread in a corner in my dorm; I was busy. I managed to pick up the May 2003 issue on time, though, when it arrived in early April.

In April 2003, we had been at war for about two weeks. I read the Atlantic as I half-listened to my friend Jesse's coffeehouse guitar performance, where he sang "American Pie" and "This Land is Your Land," including the pessimistic second and third verses as an act of protest against our brand-new skirmish in the desert. With acoustic guitar behind me, I read a piece called "Letter from Kuwait" by Michael Kelly. An embedded reporter about to head out to Iraq, Kelly wrote about what he called "phony peace," the period before the current Iraq war and the one before it when, though everyone from Jacques Chirac to dirty college students was calling for peace, we all knew we were going to war. He described "human shields" who traveled to Iraq intending to stand in the way of the first bombs; of course, as it became apparent that the bombs were actually coming, they split. Yup, the war was really happening; even the idealists have left town.

Kelly wrote in early March, before Bush had delivered his ultimatum to Saddam; not two weeks before that, I had attended my first protest, an enormous anti-war march in New York that attracted upwards of 200,000, including 400 from my school alone. Kelly wasn't exactly criticizing all this hot-air protesting, my sign-waving and hollering, but the result was the same. Not even two months after testing out my activist waters, this random writer was making me question its entire phony peace purpose. Our parents had fought to actually end a war and had, in a way succeeded; not one person I met at the giant protest expected their actions to change anything.

I couldn't get this man and his clear-eyed writing out of my head. I listened to Jesse play and thought about Woody Guthrie, my parents, human shields, Jesse and me, all protestors with wildly varying goals. I couldn't figure out what we had to do with each other, and that made me crazy. All I could do was think in metaphor.

The next morning, April 4, in those early days of a war we all figured would be over soon, I checked the news online and saw that a journalist had been killed in Iraq. It was Michael Kelly.

That was the catalyst I needed. I sat down and wrote about war and peace, protest ballads, and what it meant to be an idealistic college student during a war that couldn't find any reasons for happening, but took down a few brilliant journalists in the meantime.

In short, Michael Kelly moved me. And finding his book, over two years later, I am moved again. This summer in my work as a television intern I have realized that I want to write instead, be a print journalist. What I really want, though, is to write like Michael Kelly.

I could never hope, of course, to match the man's wit or effortless grace with words. The more I read in "Things Worth Fighting For," the more I despairingly realize I'm just dancing around the feet of a giant. I've got other idols I'm dying to emulate too-- Frank Rich, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Sridhar Pappu-- but Michael Kelly started it all, so this little adventure will bear his name. Hopefully by taking this leap, writing no longer just for myself but actually making it publicly available, that I can improve, go beyond flushed ramblings to something readable and worthwhile.

I'm worried that it's presumptuous to start a blog that no one will probably read, to name it something as obscure as "The Michael Kelly Chase," or just to be a college student claiming she's going to write like a journalistic giant, a dead one at that. But this is where those worries end; I'll never keep it up if I don't just put myself out there for once. Goodbye insecurity, goodbye presumptuous, and let's begin.