Literary Los Angeles: The After-Movie Q&A

One of my favorite Los Angeles institutions is the after-movie Q&A.   Of course, question-and-answer periods following new releases and small screenings are not exclusive to Los Angeles but I’d hazard that in no other city do they feature so prominently in the cultural landscape (the after-movie Q&A also figures prominently in the screenplay I’m working on these days).   In other cities, I’ve found, Q&A sessions are usually reserved for either film festival up-and-comers or famous, established directors (the types of people one might reasonably be interested in hearing describe their process and methods).   As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I heard Woody Allen, one of my childhood heroes, shrug and mumble his way through a quick session; later I listened to Christopher Nolan give a thoroughly entertaining disquisition on the joys of low-budget filmmaking.

What marks these people — not just Woody Allen and Christopher Nolan, but also the newly minted auteurs at small festivals around the country — is that they are passionate about their work, even when they are less than passionate about the contentious, fawning, inane, self-promoting, or just plain nonsensical questions put to them later.   And you are probably passionate about their work, too, or you wouldn’t be there.

In Los Angeles, though, a high concentration of both film geeks and below-the-line old-timers has led to a situation where nearly every Grindhouse festival or Jim Kelly revival ends in a Q&A with the director, the producer, the screenwriter, the lead actors, and often enough all of them together.

I used to feel more than a little embarrassed sitting through these after-movie sessions (though more embarrassed yet to get up and leave).   These men (it’s usually men) are old, gruff, and often of uncertain memory and temperament.   They all look a bit down on their luck.   What’s worse, the audience has usually gathered at least in part to make fun of the very work these people are now publically representing.   (The shifting sands of irony and genuine enjoyment are too complicated to sift here: suffice it to say that one tends to watch “Birdemic” with a slightly different mindset than “Ran.”)   It’s hard for me to titter at the over-the-top innuendo-laden dialogue of a teen slasher movie when I know the screenwriter who wrote it is sitting two rows ahead of me.

What I learned, though, is that these gruff old men in their straining short-sleeved button-downs are not precious about their work.   They are not sitting up there to share their vision; they’d rather reminisce about the fun they had shooting on a Manhattan street without a permit, or a few good recipes for cheap fake blood, or how drunk the key grip got every night on location in Mexico.   (At a recent Q&A I attended, the producer, screenwriter, and composer spent much of the talk comparing notes on how much they all hated the director, who had wisely absented himself from the screening.)

Invariably a super-film-geek will raise his hand and ask some incredibly specific question, something like, “Why did you decide to end the final confrontation scene with a dissolve?” And the director will cock his head and say something like, “You know, I made eight movies that year.   I don’t really remember.   I hardly even remember their names.”

The point is not that these guys don’t love what they do, that they don’t take pride in it, or that they’re hacks (though some are, and most of those would say so proudly).   The point is, it’s work, it’s their job, and their job is to make movies and not to sit around pontificating about them.   They’ve lived long lives supporting themselves doing the things they love, even if those things won’t ever earn them an Academy Award.   They know the point of the work is to work, and you don’t need to be too precious about it.   They don’t take themselves too seriously, and they don’t care if you laugh at some of the lines.