Casting the Losers Movie

I got asked by the folks at the My Book, The Movie blog to draw up a dream cast for my book Losers. Since casting movies with 14-year-olds is sort of an impossible feat anyway, I decided to throw all the rules out the window. Half my cast is dead. The other half are way far away from being fourteen years old. Here's a snip (or read it from the start):

Hollywood would probably want Jupiter to look like Christian Slater in Heathers. I'm going to go with Ewan McGregor, though -- five years before Trainspotting, with his hair a little shaggier and his eyes a little more feral. His best friend, Vadim, in my head was always an Igor type. (Except, of course, that in Russia "Igor" is a name that real people actually have, and one of my best friends is named Igor, so I need to watch the references around him.) He's cool in his own way, but we'd probably have to prettify him up, so instead of, like, a 14-year-old Kyle MacLachlan who isn't quite ready to star in Blue Velvet, we'll probably have to go with what can only be described as a Wesley Crusher-type.

Read on ----->

Oh, and I talk a little about the process of making the movie 1/20, from the writer's point of view anyway, which usually doesn't mean much, since they try and keep the writers far, far away from the production -- except that I snuck my way onto the set running for coffee and stuff. Fun. Illicit fun.

Me: It's great to see you here. But why did you move to Crown Heights?

Ari: To show the people of Gotham that their city doesn't belong to the criminals and the corrupt.

(I promise, this wasn't a setup. It just popped up in the middle of a conversation.)

A Day at the Movies

Today was the first NYC screening of 1/20, the movie I wrote! My whole family was there -- my kids, my parents, the generation in between (uh, my wife and me). It was wonderful. I was more uncomfortable than ever. It's so hard to see something you wrote and not be able to stop and change the lines before you recite them. When I read live, I'm always rearranging the words on the page so they sound better coming out of my mouth. Watching a movie you wrote, you're like rubbernecking at your own accident. (Not that i was reciting them in the first place.)

(And honestly, I think the movie turned out amazing. Such good actors. The director makes everything look beautiful, even electric toys with their guts hanging out. Not to mention the city of Washington DC. But I keep hearing my lines, and thinking, did I really write that? No. Once the music's left your head, it's already compromised.)

I think i'm a lot more successful at being a father than being a writer. Not that I'm that good at either one, but being a father, you just screw up and you have to keep going. Being a writer, you're never sure if what you're doing is good enough, so you just keep redoing it, until someone rips the pages out of your hand and gives them to a publisher.

And I should say, thanks to Rew Starr and her posse for making the showing so successful. And for making me feel at home at a theater with that many animal heads hanging on the walls.

Hasidim on Halloween

So yesterday was Halloween, a holiday that causes me no end of consternation.

You know how the Official Jewish Community is always talking about being Jewish on Christmas, and feeling peer pressure, and not knowing how to deal with it? Well, Christmas is easy to ignore -- all my non-Jewish friends are non-Christian anticapitalist anarchists of the Occupy Wall Street variety, anyway -- but Halloween is not. Creepy music! Costumes! The macabre! Back before I was religious, it was a religious holiday.

Yesterday, the Kveller staff asked me for any Jewish-related Halloween memories. I started writing something. Then I changed my mind and drew it as a cartoon instead. You can read the whole thing over at their blog, if you want. Can I recommend that you do? I'm pretty proud of it.

Caught Rapping on Video

Aaaaaah. I hate the way I look on video. But I do rap, and that's something of a consolation, right?

Yesterday the amazing Sawyer Novack and I got interviewed about 1/20, the movie I wrote and he costarred in. We were promoting the first New York City screening of the film -- which is happening on Sunday, November 6 (see below). He was a really good sport. And we saw each other for the first time since filming, and (now I'm going to sound like a grandparent or something) he's at least twice as tall as he was when we shot it, and he's been up to all this other stuff. For instance:
New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

That's right. SAWYER IS ON ONION.TV. (And it is totally offensive, and hilarious. Sawyer comes in at 1:55 if you're squeamish.)

And, yes, we're going to be screening the movie live! It's at the Branded Saloon in Brooklyn. It's a "brunch screening" at noon, whatever that means. Come and figure it out with me. (Oh, and here's Part 1 of yesterday's interview, which I'm putting on the bottom because I fidget a lot at the beginning. I know. Diva.)

Dressing the Part

So a few weeks ago I stumbled across this weird video. It's a fashion show from the '80s, a Jean-Paul Gaultier collection featuring hot bored-looking chicks dressed up as Hasidic Jewish men.

Of course.

I was basically compelled to feature it in a Jewniverse, which I did (it's out next week--subscribe right now to get it!). Then I wrote it. Then I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't.

Today I'm wearing a white button-down shirt. It's a far cry from the punk-rock t-shirts of my choice, the vaguely hip blazers of my wife's selection, but it's what I've been wearing more often lately. Like Gaultier, I might be going through a phase of my own -- albeit, less fashionably. And, uh, less revealingly.

I have to say, I kind of like it. I feel more serious -- about work, about myself, and about little things. (My posture is improving dramatically.) It's a little more distinguished. And when I walk down the streets of my own relatively ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn, I get this whole stare of respect and/or identification with a group of people whose respect or comradeship I never thought I'd be after. Which is to say, the old guys. I always wondered why the bulk of retired people didn't just wear t-shirts and Bermuda shorts. Now I think I know.

Anyway. A few weeks ago, the online show Rew and Who did a feature on 1/20, the movie I wrote. It's filmed in the East Village, in a studio in the back of a bar called Otto's Shrunken Head, and it's every bit as punk and alterna-something as you think it is. I was invited in for an interview along with one of the stars. Heading out of the office, I shed my starched and Jewish shirt and changed into a more-suitable Mumm-Ra t-shirt (which you might think is related to Mamre, where Abraham pitched his famous tent, but is actually the bad guy on ThunderCats) and ran downtown.

So that was how I filmed the first interview:  

We got invited back today -- we're appearing with Alan Merill, who wrote "I Love Rock 'n Roll." And again, I'm wearing a white shirt. This time, I'm not taking it off. After all, there's nothing more punk than not looking very punk in the first place. This might not be all of who I am, but it's a part of who I am.

Even if they mistake me for Jean-Paul Gaultier.