Getting a Gig

I read about Tamara Jenkins, the director behind Beverly Hills Slums. The interview in the book seems to be well chosen. I’ve read many interviews involving first-time directors, and Tamara Jenkins seems to have hit all the right notes in her interview. She covered her personal story, her development, and then her claim to fame, dropping names like Coppola and Peter Bogdonovich along the way. She also made sure to add those tips that every budding filmmaker want to hear, as if she was secretly conducting some lecture at NYU.

When I took some film classes in San Francisco, the technical aspects were or course dry, but film was in general a rather dry subject. It’s essentially chemistry, which may be exciting when you’re looking at a finished product, like a picture of a sunset or that moment in time when a raindrop enters a puddle, but in general it’s all just numbers, curves, and conventions. The real beauty with filmmaking is in the finished product. Sometimes the beauty shines through in the script, but it’s the collaboration among all the moving parts of that machine that is Hollywood which may come across as something beautiful, perhaps elegant.

Tamara Jenkin’s story really exposes the pitfalls of collaboration, or rather, the awkward mixture of private funding and artistic endeavor. She described her first feature film experience as having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” To her, making the film was like making spaghetti with chocolate sauce—a novel idea that sours when you share it.

“It might be a crazy idea. To put chocolate in pasta sauce. And you know, it might be like the most amazing pasta sauce or it might suck. But at least you tried this wild thing. Like it was your obsession.”

“But then people are like, ‘Well, you know what, how about just a little chocolate? We don’t want to make it too crazy.’ And you’re like, “No, no, I’m telling you, we need two pounds of chocolate!” So they’re like, “How about a quarter pound of chocolate?’ Da, da, da.”

“So that little chipping away of how much chocolate you’re supposed to put in dilute the original intention of having this crazy chocolate pasta sauce.”

Tamara’s chocolate-spaghetti metaphor is apt for the idea of collaboration. It was the same idea that made me weary of film business. In film theory, there’s an idea of the auteur. An auteur is like the captain of a ship, only for a film. Film directors have the hardest job in filmmaking, and it’s why they garner all the respect. They’re the CEOs, the people who have to deal with the responsibility of getting a movie done. A finished feature is their vision, but unlike Jenkins, it isn’t always their idea. It’s their ability to collaborate that really sets them apart, and what makes Jenkins worthy of King Coppola to invite her to court.