Innocents and Others (20 page)

“Yeah?” she said.

“I'm really into retro-slut,” I said, and barked out a dumb laugh. She rolled her eyes, but I could see she was laughing.

“You are, huh?” Meadow looked me over in my oversized man shirt and my jeans so tight that when I bent my legs at the knee, skin pinched into the folds of the fabric. “What look are you going for?”

“Fat and poor,” I said. She gave out a guffaw at that, a sound that betrayed her surface cool. We had that in common: loud, awkward, unladylike laughs. She smiled broadly and her wide mouth softened her hard edge. She was—and is—a seductive person.

That day, when class was over, she invited me to her place after school. Of course I said yes, what would I miss? My TV and my Slim Fast? But first she suggested we ditch last period. We walked to Lucy's, the cheap taco stand behind the alley, and ate greasy quesadillas wrapped in foil. We decided to walk over to the Santa Monica Pier to get coffees, and then I watched her roll and smoke a cigarette. I remember watching her smoke and knowing somehow that my adult life was beginning and she would be the key to it. I truly could not have been more impressed.

We ate ice creams to get rid of the cigarette breath and made it back to campus in time for her mother to pick us up in her big green Mercedes. The car had a burled wood and tan interior with a creamy leather smell: so different from my mother's old Honda Civic's reek of french fries and stale candy corn.

Her house in Bel-Air was extremely lavish compared to our little rented house in Santa Monica, but I was used to that. Everyone at Wake School had money except for me and a few other scholarship kids. Her wealth was merely typical in that world. But what did strike me was her collection of books and records. She was, it
turned out, brilliant on top of stylish and beautiful. I have to admit that I thought for a second that it wasn't quite fair. Meadow had everything. But I stopped myself and just thought,
She wants to be friends with me
, which felt very good. We sat on the floor of her room and listened to
Talking Heads: 77
, which I also owned. We all bought that record. In those days, whether it was jeans or records, the whole class acted in unison: the same records in every collection with a few variations. But here is where Meadow began to change me. Instead of watching TV, she suggested we make a movie. She had a Super 8 camera and actual black-and-white film, which was rare. She wanted us to film each other in the canyon behind the house. And we did, first Meadow directing me as I walked through the shrub and rocks.

“You have lost something,” she said. “Something important.”

I walked, looking. I imagined I was lost in the canyon, looking for a way out.

“Move over to your left, where that stream of light is.” I moved. “Beautiful! Wow,” she said. “Just walk slowly, and think of the saddest thing you can.” I now imagined my dog, Sylvester, who had died the year before. Thinking of him could bring me to tears in seconds. “Great,” Meadow whispered, and then I felt it. When things get intense, it always happened. I felt the genuine tears flood my eyes, and then I turned my body into a giant wet noodle, and did a huge forward pratfall, flipping over and letting the weight of my ass send me over again, exaggerating my tumble until I heard Meadow laughing. I heard the laugh and continued to tumble, adding cartoony sound effects as I rolled painfully over the rocks. I would do anything to get people to laugh at me. And tripping, falling, at pretty much any moment, never failed.

Then it was my turn and I was at a bit of a loss. I thought about
what I wanted to see. I told her to nonchalantly walk up to the edge of the pool and drop in, fully clothed and with no expression on her face.

“Really?” she said.

“That's what I got,” I said. “Falls. Unexpected falls. That's pretty much it.” Meadow laughed, but then she did the slowest and most serious deadpan walk to the edge of the pool. I filmed her, and she stood there in her white clothes, feet together on the lip of the pool. She was very still and expressionless. Then she began to sway. Gently at first, and then more widely but still expressionless until she keeled over like a felled tree into the water. I think I loved Meadow from that moment on.

After we had filmed for a couple of hours, Meadow promised to get the film developed so we could edit it the next week. “I don't know how to edit,” I said.

“I will show you,” she said. “And you will show me what you know.” I had never worked with someone before. It was a revelation: I could share my peculiar view of the world with other people.

“I have made some videos,” I told her.

“Yeah?” she said, and put a stuffed olive in her mouth. We had unloaded from the refrigerator a bounty of fancy appetizers in plastic catering containers.

“My dad bought me a video camera for Christmas last year,” I said. “Yeah. So I made this goofy series of videos.”

“Like what?” Meadow said, really looking interested.

I started giggling.

“What?”

“It is very silly. I film my cat, Denton, doing his Denton stuff like chasing a string, looking out the window, walking—and I narrate his interior monologue.” This was how I spent my lonely weekends, aside from watching TV. I made these silly videos and I watched them.

“Really?” she said.

“It started like that. But then it got more elaborate. I put the camera on a tripod, point it at him, and then I read Sartre and Camus while he looks meaningfully out the window.” Meadow made an “ahh” sound and tilted her head. “It works even better if I read it in French. Denton speaks perfect French.”

“Of course he does.”

“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.

Now I suppose it is time for some revelations about Meadow Mori, which I think should be obvious to everyone, and not revelations at all. Meadow's “affair” with Orson Welles: she loves his movies and loves him. Did she live with him for a year or even meet him? No, she did not. If you read her essay carefully, the clues are all there, at least for Welles nerds. (Wrong house, wrong date of death,
Stagecoach
not
City Lights
, etc.) Meadow was creating what she called a fabule, a wish-story about herself, half dream and half fact. I know Meadow, and I alone seem able to read her perfectly. Meadow is playful, and she tells her own truth in her own way—you just have to yield to her version of the world to see how it all fits together, surrender to her possibilities. In a sense, she is the lover of Welles. Welles the great confidence artist, the prevaricator, the big fake who tells you he is manipulating you and that makes the magic all the more magical. Sleight of hand, she is all of that. She would say film is an art form built on an illusion. Static images shown quickly create the illusion of movement. All of it is a magic trick to Meadow, and that is part of what makes it so miraculous and beautiful: it isn't real life. She didn't ever meet Welles, but she loved him, the idea of him, completely. When she graduated from high school, she moved to New York to go to college just like I did. She deferred a year, rented a huge studio in a discarded and unused factory in Gloversville to make movies on her own, and when she finally tried to attend the next fall she didn't last long in the program—she wanted to invent her own way. She—and we—created a kind of film camp in the summer of my freshman year. She got the idea from Nicholas Ray's film commune in Binghamton, New York. [
Ed's note: Nicholas Ray made a documentary with his students called
We Can't Go Home Again,
which you can find
here
and streaming on Netflix.
] That was our only collaboration after high school.