Nonfiction BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker By Barry Sonnenfeld What kind of filmmaker does it take to imagine the universe of an intergalactic immigration service that helps to process surreptitious space aliens stopping by our planet, or the household of a macabre couple so madly in love they might actually kill each other? It takes someone like Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of quintessential 1990s-era blockbusters like “Men in Black” and “The Addams Family,” and before that the director of photography on essential 1980s films like “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona” and “When Harry Met Sally … . ” Though he never quite became a brand name unto himself like, say, Tim Burton in his prime, Sonnenfeld, at least for a while, was just as effective at making likable and highly commercial movies about weirdos, eccentrics and outsiders. And, as he sometimes goes to great lengths to illustrate in a new book, “Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker,” there’s a reason — many reasons — he gravitates to these kinds of characters.
As Sonnenfeld would be the first to admit, his moment at the top of Hollywood’s food chain was short-lived. “There was a period in my life when I thought I was rich and was going to be rich forever,” he writes, and his moments of self-effacement — combined with the fact that he no longer needs to stroke anyone’s ego — make him an ideal tour guide through the vagaries and hypocrisies of the entertainment industry. But this is also a book about how Sonnenfeld became the artist that he is and the people he blames — namely, his parents — for how he turned out. He catalogs his own anxieties at length, sometimes to exorcise them and sometimes to fetishize them.
These stories can be humorous, but they can also call to mind Orson Welles’s deathless put-down of Woody Allen: “That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge. ” Sonnenfeld grew up a baby boomer in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, raised by his father, Sonny, a philandering World War II veteran and lighting salesman, and his mother, Kelly, an overbearing schoolteacher. In the anecdote that provides the book with its title, Sonnenfeld claims that Kelly had a Jimi Hendrix performance at Madison Square Garden interrupted so that an announcer could get on the public-address system and instruct the author to phone his mom. (She was allegedly worried that he hadn’t returned home by 2 a.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
m. as promised. ) The scars of these stresses manifest themselves throughout Sonnenfeld’s life; as a junior-high student, he gets out of gym class with a magical doctor’s note that says he is too underweight to risk losing any more weight, and he has spent his life afflicted by sciatica, kidney stones and bouts of vomiting. (He claims to have thrown up 18 times during the making of “Blood Simple.
”) Sonnenfeld has nonetheless retained some nostalgia for his youth, and he writes splendidly when he lets this spirit guide him; he describes a spring afternoon as being “the kind of day you tie your denim jacket around your waist on the way home. ” His parents, who sound like real pieces of work, do not receive such cordial treatment. (Either that or I am missing the affection in the passage where he says, “Until he died, my mother could have been Vincent Gardenia’s photo double. ”) There’s a crudeness, too, in how Sonnenfeld writes about sexual matters when he comes of age, as he vacillates between portraying himself as a hopeless nebbish and a closet Lothario.
I definitely didn’t need to know the pet names that he and his wife have for their genitals, and while your mileage may vary, the excessively detailed chapter in which Sonnenfeld recounts his brief time as a cameraman on porn films had me wishing my memory could be wiped by one of those neuralyzer devices from “Men in Black. ” It’s when Sonnenfeld turns to his career in legitimate cinema that the book really comes alive. As he perceptively observes, the same hang-ups that have inhibited him elsewhere in life are likely what drove him to become a great director of photography.
““I never could be an actor,” he writes, “but I found a way, only child of Jewish parents that I am, to make the audience pay attention to me, the camera.”
” It is thrilling to ride shotgun as Sonnenfeld encounters the striving sibling filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who hire him basically because he owns a 16-millimeter camera, and they gather in the Coens’ basement-level apartment on Riverside Drive to plot out “Blood Simple,” their breakthrough 1984 thriller. Having no funds, they film and edit a preliminary trailer to help them try to raise $750,000 from potential investors, including at least one chain-smoking dentist. Watching the Coens at work, Sonnenfeld compares them to a group of fish or birds that instinctively know when to lead and when to follow as they whip and pivot — “Joel would follow Ethan. They would turn on their mark.
Now Ethan is following Joel” — and it is as hypnotic to read as it probably was for the author to observe. And when his memoir reaches his professional zenith, Sonnenfeld’s compunction for oversharing pays off. He delves into his collection of insider vocabulary (“giving someone a cake” is his code for firing someone) and explains why he prefers to start filming a new project on a Thursday or Friday (so that any incompetent staffers can be weeded out and given their cakes before the weekend). He describes Penny Marshall’s daily breakfast on “Big” as consisting of “a dozen White Castle hamburgers and a carton of Marlboros,” and he notes the producer Scott Rudin’s peculiar habit of leaving messages for people he has no interest in actually talking to.
As Sonnenfeld writes, “Scott just wanted to remind you he was out there. After trading calls for a week, you’d realize if Rudin really wanted to speak to you, he’d find a way. ” Sonnenfeld doesn’t mind letting you see him with egg on his face, either, as when he chases Warren Beatty for the lead role in the crime caper “Get Shorty,” only to have the actor tell him: “I look like Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty wouldn’t be a numbers runner.
” Still, it’s surprising that, for all his candor, Sonnenfeld doesn’t have a chapter about the making of “Men in Black,” an enormous hit that yielded a multi-film franchise, nor does he reckon with the failure of his notorious 1999 flop, “Wild Wild West. ” There is one aspect of the book I haven’t addressed yet. At the start of his memoir, Sonnenfeld writes of a family member he calls Cousin Mike the Child Molester, who slept on his living room couch and preyed upon children Sonnenfeld knew, as well as the author himself. When, as an adult, Sonnenfeld confronted his father about Cousin Mike’s abominable misconduct, his father was unapologetic, replying that “child molestation didn’t have the same stigma back then that it has now” before his rationalization somehow turned even more repulsive.
Near the end of the book, Sonnenfeld returns to the story of Cousin Mike, describing in more detail how he was abused and disclosing that, according to Kelly, Cousin Mike eventually died of AIDS. These are sad, sickening acts; it is devastating to learn that Sonnenfeld was subjected to them and heartening to know that he has survived them. It takes him, I think, a couple of attempts to set his account down on the page — the earlier section on Cousin Mike is written with some of the same ironic detachment that Sonnenfeld uses throughout the book, and it feels off, but the later section is sober and harrowing. If these passages feel jarringly out of sync with the rest of the memoir, I suppose that is unavoidable and almost by design.
They are moments where Sonnenfeld has truly put himself out there, as is and unguarded, without concern for an audience’s judgment or approval.
Books of The Times It’s been 20 years since Anthony Bourdain published his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” with its solemn warning: Never order fish...
August flew back to Michigan for Thanksgiving. It was his first time on an airplane, and even though he tried to be nonchalant about it, he held his breath duri...
