The Coen brothers –one writes screenplays and the other directs those movies, have crafted some of the best movies post-second 1970s golden age Hollywood. The world loves “Fargo”, I’ll go with “Miller’s Crossing” and the soundtrack for “The Big Lebowski” has its own personal cult.
So the news that their 2013 release will be about the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, the same one that brought us the young Bon Dylan among others, and starring Justin Timberlake, is really and at least interesting.
Michael Ciepley of the New York Times begins his interview with Joel this way: “What if a folk singer got beat up outside a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1961?” The quest Joel asked himself and thus began the vision that would end up being “Inside Llewyn Davis”. A story of New York City including covers of the popular folk songs of the day by performers filmed live.
Sounds like fun but it isn’t what interests me today.
What interests me is the way an idea mentioned in the first sentence became fleshed out to such an extreme. It is nearly always that way when I start, though usually not an idea for me, usually an image.
In 1985, I dated for a very short while this blonde haired Swedish girl and one October afternoon I was standing outside a building waiting for her to show up for lunch. The building was on 59th street and Madison Avenue and the streets were busy and then it started to rain and everybody’s umbrella went up. So the girl was late and I was standing there kinda trying to peer under the umbrellas to find her and the image caught my imagination. “What,” I asked myself “if the girl didn’t show?”
Maybe ten years later I got around to writing the story, “Ooh La La”. And it begins just there, a man is looking at the umbrellas going by and waiting for a girl to show up and waiting and waiting. And he remembers his life with the girl. The story occurs in a Dystopia where a very addictive drug which gives people extreme self-confidence, is destroying the Island. The anti-drug laws are Draconian in an attempt to control the epidemic. The man is released from prison after serving three years for possession. He starts up to taking and dealing the drug almost immediately and falls in with a hooker junkie, they fall in love and she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, he falls for another woman, a woman from a different social strata…
It goes nowhere very pleasant.
Anyway, the trigger was that image of the umbrellas.
Meanwhile, the Coen Bros movie looks terrific…