‘The Glorias’: Film Review
In “The Glorias,” Julie Taymor’s pinpoint timely yet rousingly old-fashioned biopic about the life and times of Gloria Steinem, the legendary feminist leader is portrayed by four different actresses at four different stages of her life. Alicia Vikander plays her as a young woman wearing a sari as she travels through India, planting her flag as a writer in the insanely male-centric world of 1960s New York journalism, and in her formative days as an organizer and rising star of the women’s liberation movement. Julianne Moore plays her in her activist and celebrity-spokeswoman-of-the-movement 1970s heyday and beyond. Nine-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays her as a girl growing up in 1940s Ohio, and Lulu Wilson plays her as a teenager.
Every so often, a couple of the Glorias will converse or give each other a shoulder to lean on during a Greyhound bus ride, usually shot in black-and-white (the fact that Steinem is perpetually on the road is one of the film’s themes), and there’s a funny moment when two of them face each other on a talk show. The movie also jumps around in time a lot. And since Taymor, as a director of film and theater, has an established pedigree of playfully adventurous storytelling, you may suspect, early on, that in “The Glorias” she’s crafting some clever postmodern game of how to stage a big-screen biography, the way Todd Haynes did with Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There.”
But “The Glorias,” it turns out, isn’t some heady deconstruction of Gloria Steinem’s image or mythology. Despite the teasing title, it’s not about several competing Glorias; it’s about how all the women Gloria Steinem met or knew, and whose pain and perception she absorbed, were Glorias. “The Glorias,” at heart, is an almost startlingly conventional movie, told with the sprawl — and, at times, the paint-by-numbers psychology — of a sidewinding cradle-to-grave biopic. The film is acted with great flair and emotional precision, and it’s been staged by Taymor with vividly detailed historical flavor, yet it tells Steinem’s story in a way that’s more wide than deep. We come away moved by her journey, and with an enhanced appreciation for what she did, how she did it, and what it took. But the richer question a biographical drama can ask — apart from the accomplishments and the public image, who is this person? what’s the inner mystery that makes her tick? — never gets fully answered in “The Glorias.” The movie is as much a biography of second-wave feminism as it is of Steinem, and so its effect is to touch and inspire us in a solid but slightly neutral way.
That said, the traditional approach taken by Taymor, who co-wrote the script with Sarah Ruhl (it’s based on Steinem’s 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road”), works fine and dandy on its own middlebrow terms, because the spirit of radical invention is right there in Gloria Steinem’s story — in how she became a crusader by deciding, in each encounter, to stand up against a culture so dominated by the male perspective that the movement couldn’t just be about changing the rules. It needed to be about revealing to men that, having ruled the world for so long, they literally didn’t know what they didn’t know.
“The Glorias” is two hours and 19 minutes long, and a little too much of that running time gets taken up by the story of Steinem’s youth. Yet the relationship between young Gloria and her warm, rumpled, irresponsible dreamer of an antique-salesman father, played with subliminal heartbreak by Timothy Hutton, is touching and vital to the narrative; it gives her a foundation of kinship with men, even as she’s going to spend her life fighting them. The Steinem home might be described as a lovingly managed disaster. Gloria and her older sister are taken care of, but their mother, Ruth (Enid Graham), suffers from depression, feeling trapped and bedraggled in a home with no stability. When Gloria learns that Ruth once wrote for newspapers, but had to do it under a pen name, only to quit, it’s as empowering a scene as the publishing-office encounters in “Little Women.”
Gloria isn’t presented as any sort of rebel (as a teenager, the most adventurous thing she does is to tap dance with a black friend in her father’s barbershop), and the roots of her feminism are diverse. They’re there in the saddened empathy she has for Ruth, and in the tales of rape and oppression she hears during her two-year student fellowship to India during the ’50s. All that forms the soil in which her consciousness will flower once she leaps into the world of New York journalism, which turns out to be a giant man cave.
She’s an intuitive and funny enough writer to land a job with The New York Times, but her editor keeps insisting that she stay on the ladies’ beat. He then invites her to join him in a hotel room; she quits on the spot. But at Show magazine, she gets traction by going undercover as a Playboy Bunny and writing what became a very famous story about it. Taymor stages these scenes with a socially acute “Mad Men” verve.
The liveliness of the film’s tone comes from the way that Gloria, as enraged as she is at the sexist mountain she has to climb, doesn’t have an ax-grinding bone in her body. Vikander, a terrific actress, marvelously mimics Steinem’s brainy sensuality and slightly clenched epigrammatic wit. With her long straight now-blonde hair parted in the middle, set off by what would become her signature tinted aviator frames (saleswoman in the glasses store: “Those are too big! They hide your beautiful face!” Gloria: “They’re perfect!”), she has the look that, as so many have noted, made her the perfect “presentable” media face of the modern feminist movement.
Yet what also makes the Steinem we see a star spokeswoman is that she’s such a wittily rational person. She simply can’t fathom why she’d be the one in the office who has to make a pot of coffee, or why her editor at New York magazine goes apoplectic when she pitches the notion of covering the Civil Rights march on Washington. Through her calm close-to-the-vest nature, she’s pioneering a kind of I don’t get it! feminism. As in: I don’t get why the world works this way, so why wouldn’t we change it?
But if that’s the right attitude, it doesn’t mean that evolving past age-old sex roles requires anything less than heavy artillery. Gloria starts to speak at engagements, and bonds with a number of the other leaders of the feminist movement, all clasping hands across lines of race and class — notably Dorothy Pittman Hughes (Janelle Monáe), who teaches her how to speak in public, and the great intrepid Florynce Kennedy (brilliantly played by Lorraine Toussaint), the lawyer and activist whose renegade-cowgirl wardrobe and shoot-from-the-hip oratory become a benchmark of the movement. Bette Midler plays Bella Abzug (of course!), and does it with full Abzugian yenta-from-hell life force. Gloria absorbs the lessons of these women, which isn’t just one of style. It’s the lesson that women’s rights, Civil Rights, and economic rights are indivisible crusades.
“The Glorias” gets into the nitty-gritty of the backroom politics of the feminist movement, and on that level it’s a richly gratifying movie. We see the strategizing on abortion and the ERA, and the founding (and running) of Ms., a magazine that was daring and finely executed enough to prove that the revolution may not be televised, but it will be put between perfect-bound covers.
And Taymor, one is glad to see, does find a bit of space to play around. She stages a fantastic surreal satirical sequence of Gloria on a talk show, being asked by the smug leering host about her “sex object” looks and — the inevitable question — why she isn’t married. Yet because that theme is such a delicate one, you may feel that Taymor, as a filmmaker, is also shying away from it. She doesn’t dramatize one minute from any of Steinem’s relationships with men, and lest in making that complaint I sound just like that talk-show host, I cling to the idea that a biopic is exactly where you want to see that, where you want to soak up the flavor of how a figure like Steinem, as she was fighting male culture, negotiated male culture in her private life. The movie lacks that dimension.
Julianne Moore, make no mistake, could have taken that dimension and run with it. Her performance is etched with a twinkle of hard-won knowingness, especially when she’s delivering vintage Steinem-isms like “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” And she expresses what may be the ultimate truth of Gloria Steinem, which is that she decided to devote her life to fighting a war — but it was a special war, because it was waged almost entirely out of love. Love for her sisters, love for America, even love for the men she was fighting. That’s why she’d do whatever it took to wake them up.
Inside the making of Netflix's Aaron Hernandez doc series, from new revelations to jailhouse tapes
Netflix
Netflix's latest documentary sensation is the three-part "Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez" (now available on the site), which is a gripping look at the former NFL star who, while being a fan favorite playing tight end for the New England Patriots, was also linked to three murders.
Directed by Geno McDermott, "Killer Inside" uses archival footage, security camera surveillance, courtroom proceedings, interviews with people who knew Hernandez, as well as jailhouse phone calls made by Hernandez, to piece together the life of the gifted athlete and what led to his downward spiral.
After the Patriots drafted Hernandez in the fourth round of the NFL Draft in 2010, he rose to prominence in the Patriots' Tom Brady-led offense, which included a trip to Super Bowl XLVI in 2012 (in which Hernandez scored a touchdown in a loss to the New York Giants). Hernandez was thought to be another diamond in the rough found by coach Bill Belichick, as he was awarded a 5-year, nearly $40 million contract with the team in 2012.
But Hernandez's life imploded the following year when he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder of Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of his fiancée's sister. Hernandez was later charged with the murder of two men in a 2012 Boston drive-by shooting.
Hernandez became front-page news coast to coast. Could an NFL star also be living a double-life as a murderer?
In just over three hours, "Killer Inside" maps out what police found and what they believe to be Hernandez's involvement. But that's hardly it. McDermott weaves in Hernandez's youth in Bristol, Connecticut, which included watching his mother be physically assaulted by his father (a star high-school football player), and Hernandez being molested by an older child, according to his brother, Jonathan. McDermott also tracked down Hernandez's high-school teammate, Dennis SanSoucie, who said he and Hernandez had a sexual relationship, adding to the tabloid speculation that Hernandez was gay (SanSoucie also recounted their relationship to The Boston Globe's Spotlight team and Hernandez came out to his mother in prison, according to Jonathan Hernandez's book). Then there's the theory that Hernandez's behavior was triggered by CTE, brain trauma caused by a lifetime of playing football.
The public will likely never get a complete account of Hernandez's story and motives, as he committed suicide two days after getting a not guilty verdict in the 2012 drive-by murder case (he had previously been found guilty of the murder of Lloyd). He was 27 years old.
Business Insider spoke to McDermott about how an 87-minute documentary on Hernandez he showed at a film festival led to Netflix turning it into a doc series, the interview he wish he landed, and why he's not convinced Hernandez was the gunman for all the murders he was accused of.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jason Guerrasio: It sounds like you got involved in 2017, which is around the time the second trial was starting. Aaron was already found guilty in the Odin Lloyd case.
Geno McDermott: Yes. I had started this company called Blackfin and I was 28 years old at the time. Just bootstrapped it and selling projects here and there. So my agents at WME said I should come to meet these two writers who had been doing a book on Aaron Hernandez. But they couldn't sell it, for whatever reason. So in January of 2017, I met with Dan Wetzel and Kevin Armstrong (who are both interviewed for the series), and they had been following Aaron Hernandez all the way back to high school covering his football career. They also reported the first trial. We decided to partner.
What was interesting about the second trial was that it seemed everyone had forgotten about Aaron. He was already a convicted murderer so the thought was he's a thug, he's got a bunch of tattoos, it's par for the course, we're over it he's going to be convicted again and spend his life in prison. So I was fascinated by that. I couldn't believe that everyone had dropped the story and these guys couldn't sell a book on him.
Elsa/Getty ImagesGuerrasio: So you have no distribution lined up at this point, you're just making it.
McDermott: Right. I was just so passionate about the story I decided to self-finance it. So we started getting interviews. We also were able to tap into the courtroom feed of the second trial. Our goal was to eventually interview Aaron Hernandez.
Guerrasio: From the start, are you building a strategy on how to get him on camera?
McDermott: There was no way we were going to get him on camera before trial and while he's on trial, so we were going to wait for the trial to end and then approach him. So in the meantime, let's go out and get as many interviews as we can get. We start calling everyone we could in Aaron's life. Whoever was willing to give us an interview, on a moment's notice we flew to interview them.
Guerrasio: Who were the early people you got?
McDermott: Stephen Ziogas [a childhood friend of Hernandez]. Mike Massey, Odin Lloyd's best friend. Carol Bailey, who was the neighbor in the flop house. We just started chipping away. Getting whoever we could get. And I think being in that courtroom and having the footage from the feed, that gave us another big amount of material.
Guerrasio: But then Aaron commits suicide.
McDermott: Well, before that, Jose Baez did a great job and Aaron was deemed not guilty. That was the first big bomb. Everyone's minds were blown. Then him committing suicide days later, that was the mega bomb.
Guerrasio: Did you even get off the starting blocks of trying to get him for an interview in that time from the trial ending to him committing suicide?
McDermott: There were so many press requests happening, we stepped back. Maybe a month later or two months later we would have started our outreach.
Guerrasio: So you weren't even close to the ask when he died.
McDermott: No, I don't believe so.
NetflixGuerrasio: But you have this treasure trove of stuff from the court footage to the interviews, which culminates into you doing an 87-minute documentary titled, "My Perfect World: The Aaron Hernandez Story," which you submit to film festivals.
McDermott: Yes. I submitted it to 12 different festivals and we got denied to every single one except for Doc NYC. I had thought that the film was just going to die on the vine.
Guerrasio: Netflix has someone at the fest tracking it?
McDermott: Yeah. My goal in making it, my dream was to make something that was good enough to be on Netflix. I was always going to go with them. They saw it there. And the thing with festivals is they really want stuff to be under 90 minutes, so that's why it was 87 minutes long. There were a lot of text cards to explain things. But there was a lot more to explore.
Guerrasio: So "My Perfect World" didn't have Aaron's calls from jail and other things?
McDermott: Didn't have the jail phone calls, Dennis SanSoucie, a lot of stuff.
Guerrasio: Your pitch to Netflix is basically, "This movie is just the tip of the iceberg."
McDermott: Yeah. So talking to Netflix we agreed it should be a doc series.
Guerrasio: Now with Netflix backing you, do you go back and try to get Aaron's fiancée on camera, and his mom, and others?
McDermott: Yeah. We reached out both during the making of the film and the series to everyone two or three times. Every family member. Every friend. Anyone we could find in our research.
Guerrasio: Even Alexander Bradley, the person in the car with Hernandez for the drive-by shooting, that Jose Baez suggested in the trial was the actual shooter?
McDermott: We may have. But we had footage of him on the stand.
NetflixGuerrasio: He's a fascinating part of the movie because you flip things with him to make the viewer wonder, did he kill the two people in the car? Did Aaron really shoot him in the face? Having done this ultimate deep dive do you believe Aaron was the trigger man in all these instances?
McDermott: Honestly, I still don't know. It's our job not to make those types of decisions in the series. Our job is to present all the facts and present all their perspectives and for the viewer to decide. We wanted to get as many people's perspectives as possible.
Guerrasio: Having said that, did it frustrate you that you never answer the "why" question in this? You build all this up but there's never a clear answer of why Aaron did all this.
McDermott: I think the "why" is what fascinates me and fascinates America about this topic. Most true-crime stories have a definitive ending: "This is the motive." But with the Hernandez true-crime story, it can be one of many things, and every time you put your finger on something, then something else pops up. It seems the story is still unfolding. There are still details. I wasn't frustrated by that, it was more I was fascinated by that.
Guerrasio: How late in the game did the Hernandez jail calls come into your possession? Did you have a cut where there were no Aaron calls?
McDermott: After we put the movie in festivals is when we started getting access to the phone calls. So when we went from scratch with Netflix we had them. But you had to be persistent. With the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, they are frustrating because with your request letter you have to write it in a perfect way otherwise they reject it.
Guerrasio: Doing some digging, I found in the calls Aaron made from jail that he talked about wanting to go back to the NFL, being angry about the gay accusations, being mad that Belichick didn't have his back, why did stuff like that not make the cut?
McDermott: I feel like with a story like this you could go on forever with those 900 calls. We felt we could tell the story in around three hours, so that was the guideline we put ourselves under. A lot of these true-crime series get accused of being too long, so you're trying to find the happy medium.
Steven Senne/APGuerrasio: You felt there was a sweet spot in telling this story.
McDermott: Exactly. We could have spent entire episodes on those court cases. They went on forever. You had to truncate them and present what you feel the viewer needs the most to know the story.
Guerrasio: Looking back, is there a person you wished you got to interview?
McDermott: We really wanted to interview Jonathan Hernandez, Aaron's brother. Obviously, everyone in the Hernandez family and his world has been reached out to a thousand times, so we were trying to be respectful of that and doing it the right way. But it would have been great to have his perspective in there.
Guerrasio: Did he stonewall you?
McDermott: No. He was very respectful and said, "Thanks for your interest, I just won't participate at this time." He was super nice and professional.
Guerrasio: You say that it seems this is a story that won't go away. Something new always comes up. Do you feel you can tell more or is this the definitive story?
McDermott: I think there's always more story to tell. I fell this is the definitive doc series on the topic, but it's hard to predict the future. But we're really happy where we landed and the response has been insane.
Guerrasio: So if Netflix called tomorrow and asked, "What else you got on this?" You're not hanging up the phone.
McDermott: [Laughs.] I don't think any filmmaker would hang up the phone on that call.
‘The 40-Year-Old Version’s Radha Blank Is No Flash In The Pan: Sundance Q&A
Radha Blank joins a long line of filmmakers making their feature film debut at Sundance with The 40-Year-Old Version, a black and white comedy she not only helmed, but wrote, produced and stars in as well. I can’t remember many who’ve waited as she has for the big moment that happens this afternoon. Here, the New Yorker playwright/rapper/teacher of screenwriters/writer of episodes of shows that include She’s Gotta Have It and Empire, explains how she got here. Her film premieres this afternoon and as you will see, she is no overnight success.
DEADLINE: Are you more nervous about this premiere than the opening night of one of your plays?
BLANK: [Pauses]. Mmmmm, yes. I think so. As a playwright, sometimes things don’t go right, and you can look at the director and say, hey, what happened? In this case, that doesn’t work, because I had the bright idea to write, direct and star in the damn thing. It is on me, but honestly, I am very proud of the movie. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfectly me. I wanted to create this love letter to New York and these cultural institutions that impacted me. I feel like it does that. I hope people think it’s as funny as I think it is, but no matter what, I can at least say I got my first film into Sundance. And, I”m officially a film director.
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DEADLINE: The sly humor worked for me, including the very first moment where your character wakes up, and puts her ear to the wall when she hears the sound of her neighbors having sex. And that gives way to someone crying.
BLANK: Yes, that changes the mood very quickly. New York living, and everybody living right on top of each other, you hear conversations, you hear sex, you hear fights. I wanted it to be authentic without overstating, this is what it’s like to live in New York.
DEADLINE: You’ve made this transition after writing plays and TV shows. How does this happen, where you come out of nowhere to become a movie star, at age 40?
BLANK: I’m 40 plus, and I don’t know if I would use the word star, yet. I feel honestly that all of my experience has culminated in this moment. I was raise by cinephiles, so movies are so important to me. I was raised on them and movies are more important to me than most people. My friends don’t like to go with me because I want to talk, and break it down two hours later. Maybe this was inevitable; I was going to be working in films in some capacity because I was so invested in story. You mention some plays. I’ve written a lot of plays but I haven’t had many of them produced. Part of that adversity lent itself to the storytelling in the film, but the plays became my writing samples for TV work and are how I got on Empire, and Get Down and She’s Gotta Have It. The money is good, which is why I think people put up with the dysfunctional TV writing rooms. The money is very good and it supplemented my play writing income. You are in a room six months, every single day, as part of this super brain working in service of the creator’s vision. I always felt, I have a vision of my own. I don’t know there’s another TV writer who worked with Baz Luhrmann, Lee Daniels and Spike Lee. I worked for three auteurs putting their voices into this TV mode. I saw them have victories and challenges working in TV but they also walked away and did their film work. I thought, this is a viable career path for me.
The plays got me in the writing room and the writing rooms got my screenplay read. Found myself at Sundance and I consider myself a Sundance baby, having come through numerous labs, two screenwriting and a director’s lab. Sunance made a huge investment in the development of my voice, and a lot of the people there my age, they were very invested in me winning. There were a lot of young artist who come through there, but what I heard was, your voice is so crystal clear because I had all these years to get clear about what it was I wanted to say. I was the senior member of my class in ’17, but most of us have gone on to make features, and two fellows who are in development, or in production. It was one of those key, pivotal life changing moments, getting the Sundance stamp of approval, and advisors like Octavia Spencer being invested in me finding the right financiers and producers. The lab gave me a chance to learn what the film was and what it wasn’t. There was one scene I shot and it was very funny, but it wasn’t my movie and I thought what a gift I have been given, to get to explore and experiment with story. It made me more confident. A lot of people said, don’t shoot black and white, don’t shoot on film. Make it easier on yourself.
But Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, all the people who inspired me, they didn’t have another format to fall back on. I wanted to make a film in the spirit of those filmmakers who not only had to work in film, but who had tremendous respect and trust in their actors. I feel like I hit the jackpot here, and found people who just made my job easier. They’re either from New York, or are the starving, downtrodden artists themselves. I got really lucky with the cast. Over the three or four years it took to get this made, everyone said they really loved the script and that’s what they invested in. I had never directed a feature in my life; or acted, really. I was on a show called Timeless, where I played Bessie Smith. That doesn’t mean people are going to believe me, or that the other actor in the scene won’t demolish me because the performance is bad. I think that the film, if it works, is because I play a heightened version of myself and I’m relying on a documentary style of filmmaking where the shot might not be perfect, but the audience is kind of peeking in on a conversation as it’s happening. It’s raw and feels in my mind the way New York flows.
DEADLINE: You said you’re a cinephile. What’s your favorite movie?
BLANK: Probably Dog Day Afternoon, and I use that film a lot when I teach screenwriting. Mind you, I’m a person who decided to write, direct, star in and produce my own film, but what I love about that movie is, a lot of people look at that film and gave Lumet all the credit in the world. If you look at the script by Frank Pierson, you remember that scene where Sonny leads the manager down the basement to check on the air conditioning when the bank teller is going to pass out. And he hears the scratching at the window and you realize he’s like, the cops are about to infiltrate us. And the gunshot comes and people scatter. It is masterful, and it is all on the page. I feel like that one moment; there’s a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing, which I use in my class. That book has a section on characters plotting their way and to me, Sonny is that character who, based on certain actions he takes, gives you a sense of who he is. It is part of why the movie moves and happens as he does. If Sonny wasn’t the kind of bank robber who had empathy for the bank teller, they probably would all have gotten shot. His character strength was his character flaw. I just felt like that was a film that was a beautiful marriage where a director elevated the words of a writer.
People ask me, why black and white. When I was a kid, my mom would be watching Night of the Hunter, The Lose Weekend, The Apartment –okay that’s my second favorite film — but when you shoot in black and white, you can’t hide behind color. It boils down to the words people are saying and the performances of the actors. Someone coming from New York and from the hip hop culture, I wanted to give it mature, vulnerable sophisticated treatment. Hip hop these days is so over-saturated, over-sexualized and loud. The black and white gives it a certain level of vulnerability I feel the culture deserves at this moment in time.
It was fun to play with influences. I don’t know if a lot of people are going to catch them. There’s a scene where Radha’s student and their friends are taunting Radha after her debacle at the hip hop club. That’s a reference from Purple Rain, the scene where The Kid [Prince]’s father shot himself, and Morris Day and the Time peek in the door and say, ‘How’s the family?’ This movie gave me a chance to celebrate what I loved about some of my favorite films. I’m fine that a lot of people don’t catch it, but some die hard Prince fans did. As hard as it was…the film damn near killed me and I’m still recovering, things like that made my job fun.
DEADLINE: How close to your life is the core story of the film?
BLANK: Some of it is. I have heard some off color stories about theater producers. I did lose my mom, and I was very close with her, like the character who loses her confidence after. My mother planted those storytelling seeds in me. I was a teaching artist for 20 years and the kids in the movie are amalgamations of the students I’ve taught over the years. I was a playwright who felt I might die an obscure one. Black actors in New York, certain literary agents and people who came to see the work would tell me, your work is amazing. I had done this play in 2011 and everybody knew it was going to break. And it just didn’t happen. I, like my character, was dealing with bitterness. Other characters signified what pushed me in different directions. Tiny Furniture is a film that inspired me. When I saw that, and saw her mother and sister were in it, they were not the greatest actors, but they were perfect for that. You knew [Lena Dunham] had invited you into her world and they shot in her mother’s apartment and a lot of her real friends were in it. I did the same thing. That’s my brother with me when we’re evaluating her mother’s art.
DEADLINE: What will make this a perfect Sundance?
BLANK: It’s a cocktail of things. I hope they love the movie, and fall in love with it. I hope we meet our buyers here and there’s someone who gets it, immediately and wants to support the film and bring it to a greater audience. I don’t know who that is. It may be streaming, or theatrical. I know at some point I want people sitting in a theater, with their popcorn, watching the movie. The Film Forum showed Manhattan last year and it was on one of those tinier screens. That’s a film that when you see it on a screen, that opening number with the Gershwin tunes, I cry every time; it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I hope that is a part of the journey of this film. People in the dark, and you hear cackling, two older women saying, shut up. That real New York cinema moment, I want it to be part of this film’s story.
DEADLINE: People in Hollywood always say to newcomers, so what else you got? What’s your answer?
BLANK: This is a moment where all my other scripts burst in the door and go, yeah, uh huh, you better tell them about us! I have an arsenal of plays, screenplays, and plays that could be screenplays. TV pilots I’ve been cooking, slow baking and marinating over 20 years. I have a father daughter road trip film inspired by a road trip I took with my dad when I was 19 years old. Sun Ra is considered the father of Afro Fusionism and he was a jazz musician who turned his life around and created a whole new form of jazz. That film, that story I’m hoping to do next. It’s so different from The 40-Year-Old Version, but what’s not different is I am once again using my family as the resource. When people call me a late bloomer, an overnight success, those scripts walk in the door and they have something to say, that’s not true at all. I am now just waiting to figure out what my next 20 years will bring. I want to be a serious filmmaker and I think this film can help establish that.
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