Skip Tracer screened in LA

Is there no end to this man’s need for attention? Apparently not.

Last night the recently released and renovated Skip Tracer screened at a tiny boutique venue in Los Angeles and I was invited to introduce my movie and do a Q&A following the screening. What incredible fun. It could so easily have been a flagellation of my ego, but it wasn’t. People who weren’t even alive when my first feature was made enjoyed it, and expressed their enjoyment in hyperbolic terms. I was amazed.

It started, as so many things do these days, with an email:

Dear Zale,

Hi! My name is Robert Dayton. I am a former Vancouverite performer/artist/actor/writer/etc. Bret gave me your email.

I’ve been doing a fun screening series in LA called “Uh Oh Canadia!” at a microcinema called Whammy! It’s small, like only 30 seats but it’s my way of trying to turn LA on to amazing Canadian media.

I would absolutely love to screen Skip Tracer. It’s been my favourite Canadian movie for some time now.

What would it take to make that happen?

Warm regards,Robert

I let Robert know that all it would take to make that happen would be to purchase the newly released Blu-Ray disc from Gold Ninja Video and get it organized. And soon enough, that all happened.

Here’s Robert’s report on the screening:

Zale,
Thanks again for being so generous with your time and the screening. It was great to see everyone get into the movie. I already loved Skip Tracer but seeing the new transfer made me love it more. It’s just a perfect movie. The Conversation is my favorite Coppola but I prefer Skip Tracer, it speaks to me.  I loved people’s questions and your answers, it was hard to end it!

This is my response: My pleasure, Robert. The venue, Whammy, is, as Robert described it, a small music store at 2514 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles. My kind of place. Small. Intimate. Obviously developing a loyal fan base. The reference to Coppola’s The Conversation came from my answer to an attendee’s question about my inspiration for Skip Tracer. I mentioned The Conversation, which came out just a couple of years before I got to make my movie and was a major influence on me stylistically. “The Conversation is my favorite movies,” she shot back. That should give you some idea of the audience the screening had attracted. I was in my element.

Passion was added to that Blu-Ray disc just because the was space for it. Now I’m hoping that Robert can arrange a similar screening of that movie at Whammy. Sooner or later I’m going to find some eyeballs for that movie and I don’t mind starting with a 30 seat venue. The campaign continues.

Nostalgia Ain’t What it Use to Be

I have always disliked nostalgia. Going back into the past has seldom been pleasant for me, because it was always accompanied by a feeling of loss, of time that can’t be recaptured. But recently I had a completely different experience of nostalgia.

I couldn’t sleep. Three in the morning and I was lying in bed wide awake, wondering if I should get up and make a coffee and maybe do something. Then the memories started coming. They were short, vivid, detailed, and totally random. They ranged from fishing in the little creek when I was six years old, carrying the little trout home in my pockets, cleaning them and watching my mother fry them up for my breakfast to taking a standing ovation in Alice Tulley Hall after the screening of “Skip Tracer” at the New York Film Festival. Sometimes they connected into a chain – meeting my first wife, greeting her in Toronto after her nightmare drive across the country with her mother and sisters, having to convince her to marry me after she’d had three days of her mother trying to convince her not to, honeymoon in Niagara Falls with the bed that wouldn’t stop vibrating, driving back to Maple Ridge after we were married, and harvesting a grouse for dinner on the way with my sling shot., meeting her grandmother in Saskatchewan and going to the farm to buy Sally Squink, our wiener piglet, Sally in the motel room after breaking out of her crate, her tiny hooves clicking on the tile floor, Sally weaning herself on yellow plumbs, grown up Sally plowing a furrow through my aunt’s lawn. Flip to running across the street in London to the Japanese restaurant to get a cup of hot saki because it was so bitterly cold. Flip to being parked and knocked off the road by an oncoming truck while leaning over the front seat to get my sound gear together on the back seat, resulting in bending the steering wheel with my back while my wife got a concussion, followed by the ambulance ride. Flip to scenes from China, from Guangzhou, from Vietnam, from Thailand, from Australia, classrooms and students, tours of ancient villages. And back to teen years again at university. Playing chess at the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt, exploring the castle in Koenigstein, feeding the gophers while hitching to Toronto, the long lonely drive to L.A. on my hunt for work…. It just went on and on. For hours.

But this time the nostalgia wasn’t painful. It was more like watching a corny old feel good movie with lots of plot turns and high drama. It was like flipping through pages of my life. It was comforting. What an incredible ride it has been. I’m still sad that it’s over, but there’s nothing in there that I regret. Not even the moments of emotional pain that, at the time, made suicide seem an attractive alternative.

I thought about writing it all down. Writing my autobiography. And then I thought why? Who would want to read it? Why would I want them to read it?

Fuck off. This was my life. You can’t have it.