How did "The Film Club" come about?
My son was sent to me in ninth grade—he was a tall, strapping young man whose mother couldn’t control him. There was a massive lassitude in him, some unbelievable disengagement. I was a university graduate—I couldn’t countenance it—so I started doing his assignments for him, thinking I couldn’t let him fail and couldn’t let the school system fail him. Then, to my horror, grade 10 was the same thing. After 18 months, one night, as I did Jesse’s Latin homework with him, you could feel his disinterest like a physical entity in the room. So I gave him the choice—drop school and watch films with me.
How long did it last?
We did it for three years, and during that time, I published a novel, but I didn’t know what to write next. At first I was going to write about getting over a sexual addiction, and Jesse’s face fell: “Oh, Dad, that’s a really terrible idea,” he said. “Write about us watching movies. Call it The Goodbye Club, like I was saying goodbye.” So I called my agent and he said, ‘Don’t call it that. Call it 'The Film Club.’"
So you had to reconstruct everything that happened during those years?
I was writing not so much an exact account but storytelling. You don’t make things up—one of those scenes with Jesse’s loutish friends did happen, just a month before where it happens in the book. I allowed myself the artistic freedom as long as nothing was ever a lie—the thing I wrote about had to have happened or have been said. The dialogue in the book is the result of knowing Jesse’s voice really well.
What stories did you leave out?
I didn’t leave out anything revelatory of Jesse or my relationship with him. I also didn’t want to pull focus—I’d gone from being a nationally known TV film critic to someone who couldn’t get work. Simultaneously, Random House read my latest novel and dumped me. Talk about screwed! I was 50 years old and the most important activity of my life—writing—Random House said kiss off. I left that out.
If you hadn’t been out of work, you might not have had the time for the film club.
It was like something out of the Bible: “This is going to seem like misfortune, but this is a gift from God,” you know? I’ve thought about this many times. For half the film club, I thought it was proof positive that I’d mismanaged my life, including how I raised my son.
Were there things about Jesse you omitted as well?
When I was done with the book, I gave it to Jesse, who said, “Dad, you’ve got to cut a whole bunch of stuff.” The thing was, it was stuff you and I would never have thought about in a million years—not like when I write about him chewing with his mouth open in a restaurant. Then he showed the book to those loutish friends who grab their balls, pretending they’re all South Central L.A., and they told Jesse there was nothing they didn’t already know. So Jesse said, “OK, let it go.”
Where’s Jesse now?
In Vietnam. You know the opening frames of "Apocalypse Now"? I think it got to him because after he finished a year at the University of Toronto, he said he wanted to go to film school in Prague. He has to submit a fully-written screenplay by May 30 and he said he wanted to write it there. I think maybe he’s seeing himself like Martin Sheen, sweating, a Vietnamese hooker on his lap, being an artist. He’s back for the U.S. tour of the book.
Your family was shocked that you let Jesse leave school, but in retrospect it seems like a wise move. Where does wisdom like that come from?
Probably from my belief that most wisdom you try to visit on young people is wasted. The only real advice I ever gave Jesse is to try not doing anything that will kill you, because everything you do in your 20s is pretty much a mess and won’t lead anywhere important. If you can just survive it, if you make it to the finish line of 30, it’ll pay off. I believe North American males really are children until 30. I know I was. I think back to my own adolescence—I inherited not one, but two estates, so my maturity was really immaturity lubricated by money. I guess my concern about Jesse is that I lived recklessly for many years, straightened myself out when I was about 35 or 40, and turned out, for the moment, ok. It worries me that Jesse thinks that his dad broke every possible rule and everything turned out ok. I worry that I can’t get it through him that it doesn’t always go that way.
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