Welllll hellooooo!!! EVERYTHING IS TERRIFYING AND SAD! Here is an update about my indie film!
me continuing to work for a progressive future
The movie is deep in the post process! We’re in the middle of coloring, just did an ADR session and have submitted to Sundance, South By Southwest and, uhhhhh…I can’t remember which other ones. We’re also hopefully locking in a composer/music supervisor!! WOW!!!!
Losing a parent introduced me to a version of my dad I never met and then re-introduced me to a dad I had forgotten.
It inspired all of my following years artistically and emotionally. It changed all of my pre-existing relationships I had with my surviving family and those that died before I was born.
My sister and I went to clean out his storage unit after he died. I found so many photos and bits and bobs and photos, excavating our relationship. Death bore so much for me I never thought it could, and I know it has more to create.
What are we reshooting? What are reshoots?!?? Hey, hey!! Deep breaths!
When you shoot a feature-length movie for as little money as we did and shoot for as few days as we did, well, you miss some things! You get cocky and say, “We can just get this super artistic, risky type of shot, we don’t need coverage of every actor in their own single shot!” And sometimes… you’re wrong! You should’ve gotten that coverage. Or, completely theoretically, let’s say a certain someone’s grandma went to a particularly *fun* dinner and took a *tumble* on the mean streets of Brentwood, scraping up half of her entire face a few days before your last day of principal photography, making it so you could only shoot her from one very weird-looking angle during the climactic fight scene at the end of the movie…IF THAT HAPPENED—it would be nice to reshoot!! So we did! ALREADY!
Well, it’s been a week since we launched this campaign and I feel like a robot learning emotions. I am so inspired and grateful. Unnerving to hear from a writer but: words simply fail. We had plans to beg and plead to get to our initial goal of $75,000 and in under a week we hit our absolute-blue-sky-probably-couldn’t-happen-right? goal of $180,000!?!??!?!
We reached that goal and then some at our fundraiser show this past Saturday at Dynasty Typewriter was a massive success! Over 2,500 people watched online. I personally loved the show because I put all of my favorite, funniest performers in it and just got to watch them be insane. I continue to be outrageously proud and embarrassed by my riches in friends and donations to independent film.
this is a horse stripper I think
In addition to titillating equestrian interactions, Paraloubis played their first show, Sam Reich and Zac Oyama sent beautiful, heartfelt and deeply personal congratulatory videos and my friends dubbed over scenes of my parents acting from the 80s. Oh, and Brennan and Jenson kissed on the mouth while we shot off confetti canons. For cinema!!!!!
Today’s newsletter, in which Laser (our campaign manager and smartest-most-talented-person-alive) asks Izzy way-too-meaningful questions to get her to cry about this whole thing:
I’m almost positive everyone who becomes a filmmaker does so because they feel an overpowering urge to recreate the specific feeling they experienced when they first watched their favorite movie. I don’t need proof or evidence for that if I feel it in my heart, which is what’s most important. But I genuinely can’t guess another reason why someone would want to make movies!
the “loves dinosaurs” to “makes movies” pipeline
I classify what makes my “Favorite Movies” list as one that, no matter how many times I’ve seen It, makes me relive that about-to-go-down-the-drop-on-the-Jurassic-Park-ride feeling in my tummy. Speaking of, Jurassic Park meets that criteria. It’s one of my all time favorite movies. Also, and because I know every micro-second by heart, Die Hard does too. Others include Into the Spider-verse (every single time I write a feature, I have to rewatch this movie because it gets the story out so well), Casablanca, My Neighbor Totoro, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Spy, almost every episode of Bluey and season 4 of The Wire.
My grandma, JoAnne Astrow, likes to tell a story that her grandmother, Ottolie, apparently left her family in present-day Austria to become a circus entertainer. I have absolutely no idea if that is true because this woman also lied to my face about having slept with Sydney Poitier for 10 years. JoAnne has been an actress in commercials and plays, did improv shows in New York City in the 70s and was a touring standup comedian. She met my grandfather, Mark Lonow, at an acting studio in NYC. He was the stage manager for the first production of Hair, I think, before doing some acting roles and then ended up as co-owner of The Improv. My mom, Claudia Lonow, was Diana Fairgate on the show Knots Landing, was a touring standup, and then became was a showrunner multiple times over.
I lived with all of these people in a house until I went to college. With such eccentric characters around all the time, my mom’s work, and subsequently mine, became quite autobiographical. We had a lot of good material! My mom created show after show based on our life and came home and filmed me doing bits in the bathroom (always the bathroom for some reason) such as a completely improvised song as Moses’ mom from The Prince of Egypt sending her baby (a tupperware) down the river. I don’t know why I thought there needed to be a different song of that, that character already has a song doing that?!
After college, my mom and I tried and failed at several plots to team up and combine our talents: two podcasts we didn’t feel like seeing through; a couple of unpaid development deals; I was her assistant at one point until we both fired me because I didn’t want her to tell me what to do and neither did she; and a non-failed improv show called Mom-prov we’ve done at UCB a bunch of times where we improvise for as long as we can with my grandma. One time my grandma pulled her pants down in front of the audience. Another time (we think) she sort of forgot to wear pants entirely.
HELLO! If you’re still here, thank you for reading these. I’m flummoxed by the number of “this many people opened your email” stats and it’s turning me into a megalomaniac so look forward to seeing me in a cyber truck and launching a really bad skincare line. Where we left off, we had scored a great actor to play dead daddy dearest and things were looking super real.
Soon enough, it was time to shoot. What? For real? We have location permits? There’s a schedule? Oh GOD!!!! I gathered all of my pumping supplies (to milk myself like a cow) and got my ass to work! Except for the first day, I wasn’t called that day. My perfect angel friend, who maybe to their own detriment is incapable of saying no to people who need their help or want to benefit from their talent, Vic Michaelis, did me the gargantuan service of playing my sister.
sibling party
TIME JUMP: I had asked Vic to consider the part a week before we started shooting as was the production’s vibe at that point. They said yes before I explained what the project was at all, because they’re a lunatic. I gave them many outs, saying, “Please don’t feel like you have to say yes to this because you are my friend,” to which I think they told me to shut up or something like that. I sent them the script and they maintained they were enthusiastic and available. They also asked what my inspiration for this sister relationship was and I responded Fleabag, the most perfect sister relationship ever written. They told me that they had read our relationship in the script as exactly that. I was honored and excited beyond acceptable reason.
Last newsletter, I told you abouthow I (along with so many talented friends) wrote a script for a movie about my dead dad (or D(e)ad) during lock-down. Next we had to decide… could we actually make it?
My mom has a lot of fortune as a network show-runner for 25 years. She has made a lot of groundbreaking television as a writer and executive producer with shows like Rude Awakening, Accidentally On Purpose, and How To Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)to name a few. Though my mom is lucky to have had this success and even as prolific as she is, this work has always been at the behest of studio and network heads with the shows ending well before really getting started. As all good mama’s girls, I too have been attempting to live off of a career as a writer/actor/comedian since I graduated college. In 10 years of auditioning and pitching for other people, the only place I’ve been able to really make what I want has been personal with no chance of ever seeing the outside world.
You may remember, there was a lot of time over the various periods of lock down to do a lot of different things. Here’s what I decided to do: find out I’m severely allergic to mold by buying a humidifier, start taking anti-psychotics (cool/normal), write, feel AMAZING about what I’m writing, HATE everything I’ve written, and then finally write again after stealing a movie idea from my mom that I make about me.
During this period of complete mental and physical stability, I also read “Rebel Without A Crew” by Robert Rodriguez, who tells the story of his filmmaking journey by using anything at his disposal to make movies. After churning out a 110-page action-comedy that involved a helicopter flying into a building, I thought—maybe I should take his advice and make something a little more practical.
So, I committed myself to adapting an idea from my mom about seeing my recently-deceased dad in mirrors after he died, and making it possible to film. My mom was in the middle of working on pitches (a horrible experience) to television executives (somehow worse) and said I could take her idea. I took events from my dad’s actual passing and turned it into a surreal ghost story with a lot of stupid jokes and then a few years, after getting married, getting pregnant and having a baby…the movie was written!
