It's Me. Hi. I'm The Substack, It's Me.

I don't even mention my cat ONCE, are you proud?

Dec 03, 2022

In elementary school, I was the editor in chief and publisher of The Second Grade Newspaper, which went to print twice and included such topics as “lost and found” and “recycling.” I made it on KidPix. Great program, KidPix.

In high school, I jumped on the newsletter wagon early, adding a dozen of my friends to a listserv called “eye candy eaters.” I would periodically — usually on Sunday night — send out a bunch of pictures of hot actors, to break up the monotony of the school week. I ran a very special edition when Heath Ledger passed.

And now I’m doing this. Why? Go watch the scene in Julie (RIP) & Julia where Amy Adams is like “I could have a blog!!!!” There is a certain kind of woman who has to have a whatever the other girls have, and it’s me! hi! I am a writer, by trade and by nature, and I figured this would be a really good way to put off the writing I’m actually supposed to be doing.

I’ll launch properly in 2023, but this is a preview edition to offer you, my nearest and dearest, the opportunity to either forward my brilliance to your friends and co-workers so they can get in on the ground level…or unsubscribe. Because, OK, some of you did not sign up for this. Substack lets you just add people, which feels…illegal? Certainly tacky and pushy in a way I don’t enjoy, but I did it anyway. Feel free to delete yourself; I’d rather you pull the plug now than resent me every time this shows up in your inbox.

If you’re still on board, here’s what you can expect going forward: a semi-organized dump of stuff on my desktop, Twitter drafts, rejected articles, and if anyone wants to shoot an advice question my way, I will do my best to answer!

AN INCOMPLETE CATEGORIZATION OF NEPOTISM BABIES

Talented and seemingly chill enough that I give them a pass

-Dakota Johnson

-Margaret Qualley

-Jessie Ennis

-Riley Keough

-Beanie Feldstein

-Lucas Hedges

-O’Shea Jackson Jr

-Billie Lourd

-Ang Lee’s son, probably

-Domhnall Gleeson

-Brendan Fraser’s model sons, probably

-Bill Skarsgard

-Colin Hanks

-Elizabeth Olsen

-Dan Levy

-Maggie Gyllenhaal

-Tracee Ellis Ross

Charmless but harmless

-Lily Collins

-Scott Eastwood

-Maude Apatow

-Zoey Deutch

-Maya Hawke

-Zoe Kravitz

-Sosie Bacon

-Pauline Chalamet

-Kathryn Gallagher

-The Gummer Girls

-Alexander Skarsgard

-Gracie Abrams

-John David Washington

-Phoebe Dynevor

-Willow Smith

-Jake Gyllenhaal

No, sorry, no, I’m not interested in hearing about you

-Cazzie David

-Lily-Rose Depp

-Ansel Elgort

-Lori Harvey

-Ben Platt

-Molly Gordon

-Cazzie David, again

-Nicola Peltz

-Brooklyn Beckham

-Jaden Smith

-Emma Roberts

In a tier above everyone else because she’s reinventing the art of being a nepo baby: Francesca Scorsese, who ropes her dad into making TikTok videos and had a good attitude about being cut out of Bones and All. I love her and I want the world for her.

(((((((((I wrote over a thousand words about Kanye that I decided actually don’t need to show up in anyone’s inbox unannounced, but if you want for some diabolical reason to read them, I will send))))))))

IMAGES THAT ARE BRINGING ME PEACE

MOVIES THAT ARE MOVIES

(I’m starting to get why people write those long introductions before recipes.)

I didn’t go to film school, I went to TV writing school, which is better and also dumber, because now I’m good at writing scripts, but so is everyone else, and I don’t know how to use a camera. Before I went to TV writing school, I took a 6-week screenwriting intensive at USC, because that’s what really cool 17-year-olds do. Not sex or drugs, oh no. We go to screenwriting camp! It ended up being, actually, a very useful course, and not just because one of my friends was a Scientologist.

From what I’ve gleaned, much of film school is spent making short films, the idea being that you learn to communicate succinctly while you practice the skills you’d need for a feature. Which is the case. But it’s also the case that nobody grows up on shorts (except for maybe the wordless shorts they play before Pixar movies? Do they still do that? No, right? Because streaming?). By the time you’re 20, you’ve seen, what, a thousand movies? And probably…six of them were shorts? We have no attachment to shorts, no taste in shorts, no sense of what’s a good one. I’ve always had trouble evaluating shorts and I’ve definitely never been like “wow, that was a great short.” (Including All Too Well, though the song itself is a masterpiece.) Yet this is the foundational project of learning to make movies. Strange!

But beyond filming your own, if you’re just trying to get a handle on what constitutes a “good movie” — whether because you want to make one or watch one or become a critic or just a well-informed fan — you probably look up The Lists. 99 Movies Every Snob Should See; The 100 Greatest Bummers Ever Made; 101 Flicks Where The Director Was Banging The Technically Underage Star But Oh, The Score! Who but a masochist makes it through those lists? Life’s too short to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or, for that matter, The Island of Dr. Moreau. If it’s a Something of Dr. Someone, I’m out!

Take the “Sight and Sound” list that just dropped and has the Internet momentarily distracted from mortality. I’m sure all the titles on it are really super good, but I had barely heard of most of them (does that make me stupid/America-centric or speak to their limited cultural impact? A debate for another day), and the list doesn’t work, in my opinion, as an educational tool (not its stated purpose, but this is my newsletter and I make the rules).

I think most of us pedestrian movie lovers are more like the bit in 30 Rock where Liz Lemon explains she’s trying to watch all the AFI 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made, but she only has Tootsie and Star Wars, so she just watches those over and over again.

There’s a middle ground. Movies that demonstrate what Hollywood does well. Undeniable screenplays that adhere to the traditional structure, that could conceivably sell without IP attached and would make at least a little money, where a man completes a task, there are set-ups and pay-offs, a little humor, a little action, a little romance. Movies for when you’re looking for something better than Marvel but you’re not up for Requiem For A Dream, or want to remind yourself how this whole Hero’s Journey thing looks when it’s less theoretical and more fun. (Later, Lemon says Tootsie is an example in all the screenplay books, and I for one believe her.) With all that in mind, here’s MY list of 10 Perfect Traditional Movies For Your Educational And Entertainment Purposes: