Meeting Famous Hollywood Celebrities

ON THE PURPOSE AND MEANING OF MEETING FAMOUS PEOPLE,
including The Time I Didn't Have Sex with Salma Hayek and The Time Spike Lee (metaphorically) Punched Me in the Gut

by christopher funderburg

Look, I don't blame him. I'm not trying to criticize anybody here and as much as I can come across as deeply judgmental, I'm not trying to start off things by rendering a petty judgment against a friend of mine. But recently, Pinnland Empire impresario and retired sideburns enthusiast Marcus Pinn (who I swear to God is the nicest dude with whom I'm currently friends) posted a couple photos to Facebook taken from his seat in the audience at a preview screening of Only God Forgives as Nicolas Wending Refn and Ryan Gosling came out for a Q&A.

He was thrilled to be there in the room with them, looking at 'em up close - and the photos got way more comments and "likes" than the majority of his (uniformly excellent) Pinnland Empire posts get noticed and commented upon. I'm not sure if I need to elaborate why meaningless photos of two men whom we have all seen photographed countless times getting more response than thoughtful and entertaining criticism is depressing, but I might need to point out that I just don't understand why he even took the photos or wanted to be in the room with those dudes to begin with.

Who cares?

The vast majority of these preview Q&A screenings are done on a press junket where the subjects have canned answers that they give over and over again to a variety of audiences and interviewing publications - you're supremely unlikely to get any new info or special insight during one of these talks. When I was an active programmer for the Jacob Burns Film Center, I attended dozens and dozens of Q&A sessions; our business model was built around making our theatrical experience more essential by combining as many live elements as possible: prize giveaways, professorial lectures, intros by notable fans and, more than anything else, questions and answer sessions.

Because of the "press junket" factor, the overwhelming majority of Q&A's are tedious to the point of irritation. If you get a particularly engaging or lively guest (like, say, Bobcat Goldthwait after a screening of God Bless America) they can be fun...but only if you haven't heard or read anything else about the film in advance. The average Q&A features canned jokes, practiced (and frequently coached) responses to controversies and a lot of bland back-patting - if you've already read an interview, any interview, on the film in question, you're going to get only a tiny percent of new material during the live event. If you're a big enough fan to be really excited to be there in the room, there's almost no way (or reason) to have engaged in a pre-screening media blackout. By and large, live Q&A's are repetitive and shallow excises for even mildly engaged fans.

Perhaps the most frustrating variation on the junket-style Q&A is the one where a not-altogether powerful figure spends the discussion dancing around on-set insanity because they can't afford to step on anyone's toes. But they have no way of responding to questions on the spot even somewhat truthfully without the weirdness being felt just below the surface of their answers. They give pointed yet unobjectionable non-answers that painfully belie their bitterness.

I have no idea what happened during the production of Knight and Day because director James Mangold was a total pro who didn't say a bad word about anyone or anything involved with production of the film. But, Jesus Christ man, you could feel something was up - studio interference? Diva demands? General Tom Cruise-ry? Who knows, I could only speculate because Mangold said nothing of interest. But I was there, man, five feet from him and I'm sure there's some (baffling) James Mangold superfan out that would would have swooned at the opportunity.

Very early in my career, I was disabused of any romantic notions of what it might mean to meet these Important Hollywood Types. One of the first events I attended was Salma Hayek's Q&A after a screening of her directorial debut, The Maldonado Miracle. Now, I'm not saying my girlfriend and I had any kind of "list" where we were in agreement that the other could sleep with the people on their list, but it goes without saying I would have liked to have sex with Salma Hayek and would have pursued even the slightest opportunity to do so. Seriously, she's a effulgent seraphim beyond rebuke. And leading up to the event, I got nervous to meet her. She's gorgeous. Gorge-ous. I had reenacted the diving board scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien on more than one occasion.

The night of the big event came and...nothing. Obviously. She did her Q&A, I hung around pretending like I had a legitimate work-related reason to be in her vicinity and my big moment came when I was charged with giving her some posters to sign. I handed her the posters (ooooh). And then a felt-tip pen (ahhhhh). I had a couple back-up pens in my hand, just in case (hole. e. shit.) And then she touched my elbow, pulling me down daintily to whisper in my ear: "Can you spell 'Jacob Burns Film Center' for me? I don't want to misspell it." I can still feel her breath on my lobe. Very romantic. I'll let your imagination do the rest.

Seriously, though, it was immediately apparent she was there to do her job and I was there to do my silly little job and it was just about as sexy as a trip to Showbiz Pizza.* At some point, someone asked if I wanted to get a photo with her. It seemed about as logical as being asked if you want to take a photo with the cashier at Dunkin Donuts. But geez, do they want it. The throngs want it. They want to crowd in there and get a photo taken standing next to the Noted Hollywood Fellow. The two of them just standing there. Smilin'.

And you wouldn't believe what a source of tsuris the machinations of finagling a photo-op can be. From that deflating beginning with Ms. Hayek, I had almost no interest in jockeying for position; that might seem like a reasonable and uncontroversial position, but you would be shocked by just how much importance is placed on interviewers and programmers and executives and donors getting their photo taken with a famous person at one of these events. There are actual heated arguments and petty feuds based on who then gets their photo with said Artiste of Note published in the little "Live at the ___!" pages in the back of Film Comment or in the JBFC's print calendar.

I'll ask again: who could possibly care?

Seeing Pinn's Facebook photos made me think, "What's actually going on here? Why does it bug me? What is the source of my bugitude?" On an uncomplicated level, I think there's a basic, even animal, excitement to being in the physical proximity of really gorgeous human beings. The only time I jettisoned my informal "no photos" rule was so I could stand directly next to Isabella Rosselini and just absorb...it. Her beauty had an overwhelming, electric quality - she just sets off a neutron bomb of grace and loveliness when she enters the room. It's tough to explain until you experience it in person, but it I got the ol' proverbial knee weakness just spending a matter of seconds in her orbit.

Most actresses have this magnetism (to a lesser extent than Rossellini, of course, who is truly sui generis), even ones you might not expect like Parker Posey and Patricia Clarkson. It makes sense: on a significant level, they have "charming" as a professional requirement. They know what they're doing - and again, you're meeting them in a professional capacity, a transactional situation where you deliver them live adoration and in exchange receive a small taste of their calculated allure.

Of course, some of them are so worn out by the adoration that they have their shields up at all times and exude hostility and condescension towards their fans just to have any hope of warding them off. I guess I don't want to slag anybody by name, but a much-lusted after ingenue was truly one of the most unpleasant human beings I've encountered in my life - she turned away in silence from requests for photos while complaining about having to be in Venice the next day in between taking long drags from her cigarette and then sat in the limo while he co-star shook hands with fans and signed dvd's and posters.

But on a certain level, how could you blame her? The majority of her interaction with the public is probably leeringly unsettling, uncomfortably sexualized and oppressively over-reactive. On a regular basis I'm sure she hears, "Oh my God, I love you, come to my prom with me!" from panting fans whom unwittingly cross the line into creepiness. Imagine if on a regular basis people shrieked and bugged out their eyes when they saw you.

That might be a part of why I don't care about meeting famous people: because I know how fans come off to them. You're not their friend, they probably wouldn't like you if you knew them even in a non-forced and awkward circumstance. I brought a girlfriend and her best friend to a Q&A with Tim Burton after Big Fish - the best friend was a huge fan of Hollywood's pre-eminent pale dude with very tall hair. In discussing the event beforehand, she jokingly threw out a fantasy scenario in which should could befriend him and then they could have some whimsical adventures together. (Presumably black-and-white-stripe-intensive adventures.)

She had good-natured self-awareness about the absurdity of it, but that notion of meeting a friend who doesn't know you yet, of making a reality out of an imagined friendship, can be strangely powerful. Tim Burton "the real guy sitting in our lobby with sunglasses on at 10:00 pm surrounding by an entourage of snotty personal assistants" is of course nothing like Tim Burton "the imagined friend and creator of worlds of whimsy." And a lot of people understand that meeting their imaginary friends will mainly be a disappointment - they won't become friends or even make a mild connection - so I can't figure why (like the young lady in question) they go ahead and make the effort to get in the room with them.

I can acknowledge, in reality, that almost all of these encounters are pretty low stakes and the fans don't have any expectation beyond getting a gander up close at someone for whom they feel enthusiasm. Marcus Pinn, for example, probably had next to nothing at stake in his Gosling/Refn viewing party. But I do think there's something going on in the live interaction that has to do with crossing the boundary between the "real" and the real. Slavoj Zizek and Bertolt Brecht could have a field day with it, but I can at least say that there is something powerful that causes us to want to bridge the gap between cinematic fantasy and the real emotions; between the unreality and the fears, lusts and ideas those engineered fantasies inspire in us.

When you watch a movie, you are seeing something unreal** that nevertheless engenders real thoughts and feelings. There's a psychological inclination to bridge that cognitive gap. Standing next to Colin Firth and having a photo taken of you together can be the result of indulging that inclination. That's what's going on with the woman who wanted to be friends with Tim Burton - she was already friends with his films and had some nagging drive to work out the disconnect between her real emotions and the cinematic fantasy. Loving a movie is an authentic relationship to a construct - somehow developing a relationship with the author of said construct would bridge the gap and make the real relationship (our feelings for a movie) now connected to a real thing (the author).

That's the generous analysis. On the other end of the spectrum is the undeniable fact that being in the room with a famous person frequently serves as an assertion of socio-economic importance. What I mean is, it's a prime opportunity for acting like a goddamned big shot. When I met Steven Spielberg in the real live flesh, nearly no one at the gala was reconciling their disconnect between fantasy and reality. Maybe that one seventeen year-old kid who was there.

What a lot of those gala-teers were doing (and I wouldn't be so obnoxious as to say the majority) were confirming that they were more than fucking important enough to be eating dinner with Steven Spielberg. For plenty of folks, being in the room with an important person is an affirmation of their own importance - hence the heated arguments and petty feuds over photo-ops and their publication. These people don't care about Steven Spielberg (not in any meaningful sense), but they care very much about the appearance of a connection to him and his world.

My revulsion at pretending to be a big shot led me to start all but hiding from guests and publicists at these events - which is not difficult because they are swarmed with interested parties all night. As I've been writing this, I've been trying to disentangle my own feelings on everything. It boils down to detesting the fake connection and not wanting to delude myself that there's any meaning to just seein' some guy. That might seem reasonable, but I have a tendency to foolishly play the great man and there's an amount of fear involved: I don't enjoy being constantly reminded that I'm a nobody.

I can sit in the audience and listen to a Q&A, but I don't want anyone to laugh at me for thinking I'm cool or interesting just because I was in the vicinity of cool and/or interesting folks. And, oh man, that reminds me: any definitions of "cool" and/or "interesting" go right out the window when you start talking about "being in the room" - I can't tell you how many people seemed awed that I was around when people like Tom Cruise or Steve Guttenberg came to the JBFC.

Who cares?

Well, I got to thinking about my most notable experiences in this capacity and what made them remarkable. Getting to know Jonathan Demme immediately leapt to mind - he's on the board at the JBFC and hosts a monthly Film Club. I've gotten to know him fairly well and he seems to like me (he seems to like a lot of stuff, though - he's a very personable, enthusiastic guy), but after thinking about, I realized I know him in a professional capacity: I hunt down prints for his series, discuss titles and then very occasionally join him for the Q&A's. I have a few photos on Facebook of me with Demme but he's basically in them incidentally - they're photos that I like of me at work and it's really cool he's in there, but they're actually photos of me, not him.

That did remind me of the time we did a Q&A with Jason Segel with Demme as the interviewer. After the screening, Demme called me over and introduced me to Segel, just the three of us having a little conversation. I had no idea what to say to the guy. That's another reason I avoid getting embroiled in these situations - I don't know what to fucking say. I briefly thought about mentioning his "Andre the Giant orders ice cream" sketch on Saturday Night Live and then reconsidered. Instead, I just gave him a heartfelt if boilerplate spiel about how he should come back to the JBFC and screen Being There, a film he had discussed with a huge amount of enthusiasm during the talk. He was super nice and (because it applies to actors as much as actresses) extremely charming but clearly a little baffled as to why Demme had singled me out. They then discussed going to see a Neil Young concert together. I briefly thought it would be funny to invite myself along.

Sadly, the Demme/Segel situation is probably the best case scenario for this sort of thing. I actually had a bona fide, Oscar-feted "in" to meet an (extremely tall) charming famous person whose work I enjoy. And it was nice, it was cool and it did appeal to my psychological inclination to make an imaginary relationship (I laughs at his mooovies) into something real (talkin' JBFC business with my boy big Jay). It also did indeed make me feel like a big shot. Demme called me out of the crowded theater and ushered me behind the velvet ropes for a little private chit-chat. But I feel gross and weird for relating this tale (and like I'm somehow betraying Demme) and would have felt like a schnook if I then asked for a quick photos of me and my boy J., pallin' it up backstage at the 'BFC.

I have two more brief tales and then I'm put this to rest. One is the most satisfying Q&A interaction I've ever had and the other the most valuable (maybe the only valuable one I've ever had). The most satisfying: after a screening of Vera Drake, I was introduced to Mike Leigh by NY Times critic and JBFC board president Janet Maslin, who had conducted the interview. She had been told by our colleague Brian Ackerman that I was a huge fan and I ended up with a few moments alone with Leigh.

He's one of my absolute favorite filmmakers and I was delighted to find him personable and funny - especially considering his notoriously curmudgeonly and combative Q&A's, one of which he was just finished delivering. His best response to a question from the audience: "Well, if you had paid attention to the film, you would know the answer to that question." It was followed by a blunt silence.

We discussed fish botulism, specifically the then-current incidence of American fish that ended up in the U.K. with the affliction. He couldn't believe the total lack of coverage in the U.S. press and I briefly discussed my limited understanding of the "chicken libel" laws that cause the U.S. media to shy away from any discussion of meat-industry impropriety. I believe the words "Yeah, Oprah got sued because of those laws" came out of my mouth. He assured me I wasn't crazy for eschewing beef out of fear of mad cow disease. I loved the dude. And I'm not going to lie, I thought to myself "Man, I should be friends with Mike Leigh." It's the one and only time I regret not getting a photo. Imagine that: me and Mike smilin', discussing food-sourced degenerative brain diseases.

The only Q&A affected me in any meaningful way wasn't at the JBFC, but at Tulane University when I was taking classes there in 1999-2000. Spike Lee came and spoke almost extemporaneously (I believe showed clips from his films, but I genuinely can't recall) before taking a series of questions from the faculty and then finally opening things up to the audience. I didn't ask him anything during the audience-based portion of the Q&A because it immediately devolved in a procession of folks hawking their scripts, R&B demos, head-shots and whatever other self-promotional materials you can imagine. At one point, a man claiming to be Master P.'s brother (this was in New Orleans, after all) caused Lee*** to spend several minutes laughing at his own impression of the "Unnnh"'s we all know and love from "Make Em Say Uhh."

Now, I'm a huge Spike Lee fan, probably past the point of good sense. I even defend unbeloved non-classics like Miracle at St Anna. Go ahead, you can look it up on this very site. My ballot for our Favorite Films of the 90's compilation included Clockers and Crooklyn and I feel stupid for taking Malcolm X off my ballot even though I know I did so only because I didn't want any one filmmaker to dominate my list. But it should have been on there - and was, up into one of my final revisions.

That is to say: I really love Spike Lee's films. I even like when he does things that don't necessarily work but are weird and original - he's the most experimental Hollywood filmmaker of the past few decades in the sense of trying countless different styles and ideas and aesthetic gestures rather than just repeating himself. He's great. Case closed.

So, when I managed to catch up with him after the event, 20-year-old me was shocked and even hurt by our interaction. I said, "Mr. Lee, you spent the whole evening talking about and to the black community, to the black perspective, but as a young white man who cares about the issues raised by your films, what can I do?" "Mind your own damn business." He said it with the signature Spike Lee sleepy-lidded smirk and went on his way (still seperating himself from the bustling crowd). I was left stunned, just standing there with my jaw open.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about his answer. Not as much as I've spent thinking about his films, but still a good amount. I grew up white and upper-middle-class in the South (Nashville, Louisiana, Virginia) and farm country (just outside of Amish Lancaster in rural Pennsylvania). Before that moment I spoke to Lee, I had almost zero experience with black people. I had no black friends, I had almost no black classmates, I rarely encountered anyone who wasn't white in any social capacity. I didn't have any concept of paternalism or even a solid grasp on the history of race in NYC in the 70's and 80's that gave birth to his an important side of his work.****

I wasn't able to see how a slackerly white kid sauntering up to him and saying, "Yes, yes, enough about the black angle, let's focus on white meeeeeeeee!" might have irked him. I needed to have my bubble burst - it might have been the first moment I really understood the tension between well-meaning suburban liberal condescension and a black perspective tired of being co-opted and forced into a subordinate role.

After his answer, I thought about how during his talk he discussed Sidney Poitier leaving a quarter on the table after he uses the phone in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner because for so many years black progress had been driven by the concept that black people had to meet the highest possible standards of uprightness and decency for the suffering of their community to be taken seriously. Lee talked about how he was tired of the idea that for blacks to be respected, they had to be so perfect as to not even mooch the cost of a single phone call.

I think, on a certain level, that idea of "fuck you, I'm not going to chase white standards any longer" drives his irascible, contrarian streak - I definitely think it's what caused him so much pleasure in blowing me off and leaving me dumbfounded. And he was more than right if he wanted to put me in my place. I needed to be put in my place - and still do as much as anybody does.

With his dismissal of my concerns, he was saying both "stop telling black people they're incapable of handling their own communities and lives" as well as "think about other perspectives before making the situation about yourself." But I've also struggled with his response - if you peer at it too hard, it sounds a suspicious amount like advocating for segregation. More than anything, if made me feel like I should stop talking and start listening - really listening to his work, for example.

I can't say I always think he's 100% right or even totally coherent (for example, I agree with almost everything in Terrence Rafferty's admiring, but ultimately negative review of Do the Right Thing) but the point of hearing him out isn't to reach total agreement - he shouldn't have to be perfect to be taken seriously, he shouldn't have to be a flawless philosopher, politician, aesthete and moralist to be respected. That's not the idea; the idea is to be affected and changed by his art. And his movies are so good that as a cinephile, their excellence makes them my damn business.

I can't say I thought we would be pals or that I should have made him pose for a photo, though. That would have just been silly.

* Please note: your trip to Showbiz Pizza should not in any way, shape or form be sexy.

** Even with a documentary there is a artistic mediation standing between you and the reality - the "realness" of documentary images is obviously one of their more abused and insidious qualities. With documentary footage, as an audience member, you personally haven't witnessed an incident, only the chemical reaction of silver and light on celluloid that imitates certain elements of the reality. Or more recently, a digital analysis of light that results in an electronic configuration that can be processed be certain machines to then produce an image. You don't see the reality, only the mediated results of a chemical/mechanical response to it. It's a big distinction that for some reason gets treated as though it doesn't matter.

*** Hey, "Lee" and "Leigh!" Hunh. I guess I should have made an effort to meet Lee Marvin before he died when I was 8. I'm open to hearing opinions on if Jennifer Jason Leigh or Rachel Leigh Cook seems like a better "Leigh" to complete the trifecta.

**** Spike Lee's films aren't only about race, by the way. They're frequently even more emphatically about sex. (And not to be goofily reductive: they're about a huge amount of things - too many ideas is one of his most consistent issues.)

!!!!!!! Look, I have nowhere to mention it, but when Ron Eldard came to the JBFC with House of Sand and Fog, he brought cookies for the entire audience.

home about contact us featured writings years in review film productions