L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

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  Like Jackie O, if you’ll allow a minor comparison to Little Edie’s cousin, Barrymore has also been part of the public firmament for so long she seems a permanent part of the culture. Think about it: twenty-eight years ago, she played the adorable Gertie in her godfather’s, Steven Speilberg’s, ET: The Extraterrestrial. She was seven then. We’ve watched her grow up and go through well-documented trials and triumphs along the way. (And I’d certainly count her table-dance and boob-flash birthday gift to David Letterman back in 1995—a spontaneous eruption of the goofy, everywoman sexiness that is one of her trademarks—as one of her triumphs.)

  She is the girl next door, who became a preteen megastar and substance abuser, who was institutionalized and went to rehab when most girls were just getting their periods. She emancipated herself at fifteen and before she could legally drink, she’d already gained the sort of perspective that would set her on the path to being a role model for female empowerment. Yes, I really said that. On the one hand, I’m talking about how Barrymore started her own production company, Flower Films, with partner Nancy Juvonen when she was just twenty because she knew by then that she wanted to be in Hollywood but not of it.

  “I loved all aspects of filmmaking. I studied it so much that I just kind of clicked and I was, like, producing, producing, producing, hmm. So, I decided to start a company and on a guttural instinct I asked this woman to start it with me,” she explains. “She’s very organized, and I’m very disorganized, but we had the same creative tastes and intentions and approach to life. I had all this background and experience, but we both said let’s create like a college for how you [get to] be a producer. And we’re definitely not going to read any books written on it because that’s all going to come from, like, Hollywood people, and we definitely don’t want to party with Tinseltown and wine and dine—we want to go to school for how we would make movies. And that’s what we did.”

  So they logged years—really years—watching documentaries, studying film, reading scripts, meeting with agents, making lists of writers and directors they wanted to work with. After starring in and unofficially helping hits such as Scream and Ever After get made, Barrymore’s Flower Films debuted as a full-blown production company with the modest back-to-high-school hit, Never Been Kissed. A year later, Barrymore also starred in the company’s monster Charlie’s Angels.

  On the other hand, though, I’m talking about an underlying message discernible in most Barrymore films, going back to the Cinderella redux, Ever After, which says, basically, girls don’t have to take shit.

  “What excited me most about that movie was that [it showed] the way I feel about life,” says Barrymore. “Don’t wait to be rescued, rescue yourself. I was so excited to do that movie. I was, like, yeah, man.’”

  I confess that I still get verklempt at all the girl-power shit in the Charlie’s Angels films.

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” she says, delighted. “That’s all I wanted to come across. I love people who love each other and have a lack of competitiveness, but when they band together, there’s no stopping them. Oh, and P.S., if you can’t laugh at yourself, yeck, vomit.”

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  If her entirely human, preternaturally approachable persona is a put-on, it’ll take a keener eye than mine to discern how. For example, when I succumb to exhaustion and go prone on her leather couch seconds after introductions are made, the first laughing words out of her mouth are, “Please, make yourself comfortable.” When I bolt upright, she insists that I stay down. Then, her ancient golden retriever, Flossie, who once rescued her from a house fire, ambles over and starts licking my hands.

  I take that as a sign and from my back ask her about this movie Whip It, which she directed and is working mightily to finish up for a fall release.

  “In a nutshell (and I can make a good story sound bad whereas my partner, Nan, can make a bad story sound good), it’s about a girl, played by Ellen Page, who lives in a small town and is battling her world—her family has a sort of a set of ideas of what your life is supposed to be—and she finds this Austin roller derby team. The movie is really about finding your tribe out in the world. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about being yourself and being okay.”

  When I tell her my grandmother, like the characters in Whip It, was a roller derby girl, she says, “Get the fuck out, that’s awesome!”

  Barrymore plays derby demon Smashley Simpson, and the story fits with a credo she’s pursued in both her films and her life.

  “It’s a little bit of be your own superhero. I was a girl who never believed that girls couldn’t do what boys can do. And I don’t believe in being repressed, or ‘no,’ or that your dreams have limitations. And whatever people told me or society or anything that got in the way, or was tearing away at that idea, I just never let it. I think that’s very, very true to derby. It’s, like, this is who I am. I don’t care if it has to come out in another form and an alter ego, but I want to go out there and kick ass and have fun and be theatrical and capable while I’m fucking doing it and have a good time and party. It’s this whole culture, and the metaphor of it is so beautiful and interesting, and I dig it and agree with it.

  “That’s just the derby part of the film,” she says. “It’s also got a lot of comedy and a lot of drama because if you’re not laughing through life, you’re fucked, and if you don’t explore the heartaches of falling in love and getting your heart broken or the struggles you go through with your family in order to try and make it work. There’s drama in life and there’s bad-ass action and I just love all those things and I wanted to incorporate them all into one film.”

  In case you haven’t noticed, with Barrymore, words come in waves and it’s a testament to her charm that you want to put them in your pocket and take them home with you, like seashells after a day at the beach.

  Meanwhile, the film playing now on HBO is a bit of a revelation. Barrymore’s performance in Grey Gardens delivers on the depth and maturity she hinted at in her brief turn as the empathetic teacher, Karen Pomeroy in Donnie Darko. One of that film’s most gripping scenes is when Pomeroy leaves her class to go outside to have a private moment with God during which all she can do is scream, “Yes, fuck.”

  “Richard actually took that from a moment I had after we met with a studio, because I was so fucking disgusted by what they said and what their vision of the movie was. I was just like FUUUUUCK. So, we finally got to make it with people who let us make it the way we wanted to, and God bless them for it.”

  I tell her that scene changed my perception of her as an actor. She gets it.

  “I think for as much as I’m so supposedly accessible, people don’t really know me. I think it’s funny, and I’m kind of glad, because then I go and have my own private life, even though I don’t really get to have one, and the Donnie Darko of it all, that’s a huge part of who I really am.”

  Despite that, Barrymore had to do everything but stalk Grey Gardens director Michael Sucsy to get the part.

  “I’ve beat down the door for every opportunity I’ve gotten, or I created it for myself. I love a good fight because I don’t believe in things that are just handed to you. It doesn’t feel right to me. Nothing’s happened like that,” she says. “This was that thing where I was, like, beyond crossing a line where I might, like, get arrested. I didn’t want to personally upset this person too much, but I was, like, I have to do this. I hounded. I finally got a meeting with [Sucsy]—he didn’t even want to take a meeting with me. I came with a binder this thick, annotated, highlighted, researched, on her, her life. I knew her school curriculum. I knew her class schedule at Miss Porter’s. And I was, like, I’ve got an overriding theme of what she is and who she is and that is a walking contradiction. Everything in the next moment will totally oppose what she just did or said.”

  To prepare for the role, Barrymore took diction lessons for a year and h
alf, transforming the ways she speaks from her natural mien (“…like Moon Zappa. If you want to cast me as Spicoli’s girlfriend, I’m your guy.”) to Edie Beale’s more formal, Yankee diction. She also cut herself off from friends, family, and technology for months.

  “I told Michael, I’ll give up my life for this, and I’ll do what’s right for her, which is I’ll shut out the world, because she decided to shut out the world. And I’m very outgoing. I love my friends, I’m totally social, and I want to live like her, so I understand what it really feels like.”

  To keep herself company, of sorts, she composed letters to herself on an old typewriter.

  “I wrote manifestos about how I’m a fraud and I’m naked in a snowstorm and everybody’s laughing at me because they see the fucking joke. I’m a joke,” she says, laughing at herself. “I had nothing to do at night. I was going crazy.”

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  If you haven’t seen the film yet, I daresay you will also be taken aback by Ms. Barrymore. It’s a powerful, transformative performance. One in which she busts through what you might think you know about her and what she’s capable of.

  When you think about it, Barrymore’s lived a lot in her thirty-four years, and if you can imagine it, she just seems to be coming into her own. The Hollywood girl who put the girlie in girl power, who grew up in the public eye, turned into woman when we weren’t looking.

  “My struggles were the best thing that ever happened to me, just because they made me so humble and grateful, and I think that everybody should have it all taken away at some point so that they never forget it,” she says. “When I was, like, thirteen and got locked up in an institution because my mother stuck me in it and all this bad shit happened and I went off the deep end and blah, blah, blah, that was my important lifetime revelation—that one must always conduct oneself with humility, grace, and gratitude.”

  Some would say that runs contrary to the prevailing Hollywood attitude.

  “Well, fuck that,” she laughs

  Monster Out Of The Box

  A Sandow Birk Omnibus

  Originally published in The Surfer’s Journal, August, 2009.

  Author’s note: Sandow Birk was in the middle of a major, global blasphemy when Scott Hulet, one of the West Coast’s great cultural anthropologists, commissioned this piece. Birk’s American Qur’an made a lot of people nervous when his gallerist, Eleana Del Rio, started showing the first of the suras he’d meticulously transcribed and then adorned with richly illustrated scenes from contemporary Americana. The Koran proscribes illustrations of its texts. Some wondered why do it? Why show it? American Qur’an has since traveled the world and been hailed as a masterpiece. Back then, Birk was hitting his stride as an artist of consequence. Now, he fits comfortably in the long tradition of major West Coast artists who follow their muse and damn the torpedoes.

  The guest of honor is dressed in slacks, sensible shoes, and a button-down shirt that was possibly ironed. Handsome in a retro, California beach-boy way, with hair neater than a dry gin martini, he looks more like someone who stepped out of a Jan and Dean song than a heretic stoking the flames of fatwa. Still, the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair, turquoise jewelry, and the pack of American Spirit cigarettes in her overcoat pocket is palpably agitated. She’s pretty much taken over the question-and-answer session.

  She is one of a couple dozen Otis Art Institute alumni gathered on a comfortable autumn evening at the Koplin Del Rio gallery in Culver City. They’re there to both celebrate their unlikely star graduate and, as it turns out, to confront his most recent project. The woman with salt-and-pepper hair wants to know some things about the guest of honor and this project, a third of which is hanging from the gallery walls. She wants to know how it came to be, what the hell he was thinking, and was he aware of the potential ramifications.

  The guest of honor, the artist Sandow Birk, patiently and politely tells the story: His travels to Muslim countries—surf trips to places like Indonesia and Morocco—made him curious. This curiosity led to a personal exploration of a document that’s played almost no historic role in our cultural and political landscape until fairly recently. Now it’s damned near center stage. Birk simply wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

  As for what he was thinking, Birk admits to having thought more about the consequences of this project than perhaps any other in his increasingly ambitious oeuvre. And yes, he’s aware that some might find what he’s doing here provocative. And yes, he knows that in many Muslim countries the consequences would be grave indeed.

  “But,” he starts to say, and something changes in the laid-back, unassumingly polite man. He straightens up a little—you notice he’s tall, solidly built, and his eyes have some steel in them—and he continues, “I don’t live in those countries. I live in America.”

  The throng of Otis Art Institute alumni falls silent while the weight of what he has just said hits the back of their throats like a shot of whisky. There is a short instant of recognition, then ingestion, and finally comprehension. Suddenly, this little celebratory event has turned into a referendum on the separation of church and state here in Los Angeles, here in California, here in the United States. Or, to put it another way, if R. Crumb can render the Book of Genesis as a comic book, can’t Sandow Birk transcribe and illustrate the Holy Koran?

  The short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, but...

  Begun nearly five years ago, Birk’s American Qur’an is, in some ways, highly reverent. It endeavors to render each of the Koran’s 114 suras, or chapters, in accordance with the traditional specifications for colors, margins, formatting, page illuminations, and adornment.

  Trickier for some, especially the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair, is how Birk extends the source material with personal touches. The traditional calligraphy translating what Muslims believe is the word of God told through the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad is done in a uniquely American idiom: cholo graffiti. More to the point, Birk illuminates the underlying context of each chapter—sometimes literally, sometimes interpretively—with scenes from life in contemporary America.

  For instance, a stock-car race—that most American of indulgences—illustrates sura hundred, “Chargers,” a Koranic verse about horses snorting into battle and god knowing the violent love for worldly goods that resides in men’s hearts, etc. Sura sixty-five, “Divorce,” provides fairly explicit (and relatively compassionate) instructions for the disposition of a divorce. Birk illustrates this chapter with a man leaning against his pick-up truck, a cooler at his feet, beer in hand, staring across the gulf of their front yard at his wife who has a toddler at her feet and a bun in the oven. A forsaken Big Wheel sits in the grass between them.

  Thus, Birk’s Koran is both personal and American. And herein lies the blasphemy, if it is such, where it was bound to be—in the art. The Koran, one could argue, isn’t supposed to be personalized, editorialized, illuminated, or contextualized—unless, of course, one could argue back, one lives in America.

  Either way, much controversy greeted the opening of Birk’s American Qur’an. The New York Times and The Associated Press speculated on potential blowback from the Muslim community.

  “Our families and people who know the gallery were scared,” Koplin Del Rio owner Eleana Del Rio said. “Who knew what the outcome would be?” Still, she said, there was never any question about exhibiting the work. “We were one-hundred percent supportive.”

  For his part, Birk thinks all the Sturm und Drang is just a little off target.

  “So far, it’s been about how it relates to Islam—what are they going to think? But that’s really kind of missing the point. The audience is Americans. That’s whom I’m thinking this is for,” he says. “It’s saying look at yourself. It’s saying this is how we live, this is the message from God, and how do those things fit together—sort of taking it at face value. Whether you’re talking about the B
ible or the Koran, when the guy tells you a flood’s going to come or you’re going to burn in hell, how is that supposed to affect you when you’re just going to the grocery store today? It’s the whole conundrum of religion, I think.”

  Birk pauses and laughs before finishing the thought. “That sort of putting two things together—the divine message and the really mundane of America.”

  Back at the Koplin Del Rio gallery, with the question-and-answer session waiting for some resolution in the wake of Birk’s declaration, the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair finally breaks the silence. “I think you’re a very, very brave man,” she says.

  At the reception that follows, the woman says her name is Diane and explains that aside from being an artist and an Otis alumni, she’s a South African Jew. “I think I shouldn’t tell him what I know about jihad and world history,” she confides in a near-whisper.

  Soon enough, though, it’s something other than jihad and the modern Crusades and the banality of American culture or whatever else one might read into the subtext of Birk’s American Qur’an that has caught her imagination.

  “I can’t believe through surfing he traveled the world and became fascinated with the Koran and this is what happened,” says Diane, shaking her head, as mystified now with the impetus for Birk’s intellectual journey as with the journey itself.

  She’s got a point. With Birk, you can’t blame it all on surfing, but you can blame a lot.