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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, July 24th, 2006 - 3 Comments »
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Where's Anderson? One New Yorker's Quest For Wes

While enduring a walk through SoHo last week, I spotted a few photocopied posters taped to lampposts along Prince Street. They queried in blockish, hand-drawn letters: DEAR MR. WES ANDERSON, WHERE ARE YOU? SARAH, accompanied by an illustration of what I assumed was the artist guided by some hipster-auteur radar gadget in hand. “If you are Wes Anderson, know him or know how I can get in touch with him, please e-mail wesandersonsearch [at] hotmail.com,” the poster entreatied.

All-points bulletin: Sarah Law’s flier, near Prince and Mulberry streets (Photo: STV)
Not quite believing (or even being able to rationalize) what I was seeing, I sent along an inquiry to learn more. “Wes Anderson is just one of my all-time favorite directors,” said Sarah Law, a friendly, candid 20-year-old Hong Kong native who began her quest late in 2005. “I’m an art student at Parsons, and I’ve always wanted to meet him, but I’ve never been able to figure out how I could get his contact (information). So I just started putting up these posters. I put them up downtown, in SoHo, East Village, West Village, kind of all over the place. I’ve been getting a lot of contact from people, but so far I haven’t really gotten in touch with him.”
And after she meets him? “I’d really like to work with him in some capacity,” she said. “I’m very interested in all kinds of art, and I mean, it could be a very naïve, student-type thing to do, but just to be in these kind of creatvie situations and projects, that what I want to do. It started as a project to find him, and whatever comes out of it–even if it’s nothing–I still had fun doing it.”
Law puts the response tally at about 40 so far, adding that most people contacted her out of the same curiosity that guided me to write. On the whole, feedback has been supportive if not productive. She said one woman got in touch saying her son once worked with Anderson; her note compiled the names and contact information for the companies they had in common. Law said she passed along letters to each just a few days ago.
Only a handful of replies have been negative, including a few customary Wes Anderson haters and one man who wrote to complain about “litter” after removing Law’s handiwork from his neighborhood. Among the positive contacts, Law stays in touch with a few seeking to stay apprised of her progress. The latest development has her heading off for a year of studying in Paris–coincidentally or not, the city in which Anderson is rumored to be taking up semi-permanent residence.
As hinted at above, Law frequently refers to her search as a “project”–as in, her family and most of her New York friends support her project, but several of her old boarding school friends “just thought it was one of the most wack projects.” Naturally, the “S” word has crept into more than one such exchange. “They thought I was stalking him and stuff like that,” she said. “I definitely understand that, but I don’t know. That’s just not how I see it. If I met him, I wouldn’t be really crazy or anything. I don’t see it as stalking him; I like his work, but I’m not in love with him. I’m interested in working with him.”
Law paused. “But like I said,” she continued, “if I never meet him, being able to do this has been a lot of fun, too.”

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3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Where's Anderson? One New Yorker's Quest For Wes”

  1. Joe Cool says:
    July 24, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    His production company is American Empirical. That’s a good place to start.

  2. Rushmore says:
    August 20, 2006 at 7:45 pm

    I see him all the time in my neighborhood. You’re going about it the wrong way. If you were resourceful, you would have found a better way.

  3. Otrera says:
    September 5, 2006 at 8:54 am

    If it was easy to find him, she would be in his neighborhood. Maybe, Rushmore, she doesn’t know where your neighborhood is? He is in France, is that where you are.
    And, IMDB, and a whole list of Google sites don’t have the address for American Empirical…

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon