At the moment I’m looking at an old menu from a restaurant called the Brown Derby. On its cover is an imaginary map of Los Angeles with Hollywood at its center. It’s scattered with cartoon depictions of movie cameras,

At the onset of our thirties we, the former nannies, while ascending the career ladder, found our personal lives lagging. Polly found her male peers juvenile – emotionally immature and adolescent in their delight at attaining useless things.

Unlike Mr. Booker, Bob Brown was not a man who, he liked to say, “Waded through god damn minutia,” especially the finer points of male versus female behavior. Bob Brown tended to set goals and chart practical points to achieve them.

There is a kind of courtship that goes on between producer and director, a kind of wooing. The producer holds the means of movie making (money) and the director, if they’re any good, provides the vision. There’s a honeymoon period,

There are definitely seasons in California, whatever anyone says to the contrary. In the winter the smog lifts. The daytime skies are a blue that delights my New England soul. At night the lights that sprawl from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea gl...

“You know my mom and dad came out to visit me when I was on that first movie. I took them to set, Grauman’s Chinese, Max Factor’s. We looked at every little bitty star on Hollywood Boulevard and had hot fudge sundaes at C.C. Brown’s. The day they came to…

  Shooting began. Patsy Morris, checking in one afternoon as the crew broke for lunch cautioned me. “Remember, movies are like high school with a paycheck. The same juvenile behavior and more cliques than you can keep track of.”

We were in pre-production for months, which is otherwise known as “development.” It’s mostly an accounting trick, cinema semantics as some impressive dollar deals are tied to certain points in the film schedule,

Some people apply battle strategy to film making. Many directors are able to extemporize on Sun Tzu’s thirteen principals of war. I wasn’t very familiar with eastern philosophy, even though Cooper Daniels had sent me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melr...

I scanned the editing room to see if there was a physical tell for an epiphany moment. Two young men in their early twenties, my classmates, were hunched down in a darkened cubicle, stubble across their chins, staring at the projection screen.