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John Krokidas and Austin Bunn Discuss ‘Kill Your Darlings’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

WRITER’S NOTE: This interview took place back in 2013.

John Krokidas makes his feature film directorial debut with “Kill Your Darlings” which stars Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan and Michael C. Hall. The movie is about a murder that occurred in 1944 which brought three poets of the beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs) together for the first time. Radcliffe portrays Ginsberg as a 17-year-old who is about to start college at Columbia University, and he ends up falling under the extroverted spell of fellow classmate Lucien Carr (DeHaan) who introduces him to the poets who would later bring a new vision to writers everywhere. It is when Carr murders his love David Kammerer (Hall) that their relationship starts to become unglued.

Krokidas co-wrote the script for “Kill Your Darlings” with his Yale University roommate Austin Bunn. A former magazine journalist, fiction writer and reporter, Bunn graduated from Yale and went on to get his master’s degree at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As for Krokidas, he later attended New York University’s Graduate Film Program where he made the short films “Shame No More” and “Slo-Mo.”

I got to hear how Krokidas and Bunn made the film under challenging circumstances when they appeared at the “Kill Your Darlings” press conference held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Question: What was the division of creative responsibility between you two like?

Austin Bunn: Probably like a lot of people in this room, I discovered the beats in college. I used to go to the campus bookstore and just track down the poetry collection, find Allen’s books and read them like they were some secret transmissions from the future version of myself. I was a closeted, young creative writer from New Jersey so Allen Ginsberg’s work meant the world to me. So, I had this really strong connection with Allen and of beat biographies and the history. I read a lot of the back catalog and I had come to John with the idea. So, in terms of the division of responsibility, I would write the first draft and then John would come in. The thing about John, as you will soon learn, he wanted to raise the emotional decibel level in every scene. John is one of the most riveting and vital and least hagiographic version of this story. We didn’t want to take the beats’ greatness as a given, so John sort of demanded that we write a really emotional roller coaster. Then we just went back and forth. John talks about it as the Postal Service, like the band version of producing a script. We were living in different cities at the time; I was at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a graduate student and John was in New York finishing film school.

John Krokidas: Austin wanted to do this as a play first. He was a playwright and a short story writer of some renown, and we were college roommates and we shared ideas with each other as college roommates and good friends do. But I, of course, started seeing the movie version in the back of my head and I had just gotten out of NYU film school and started convincing him that the play would be really flat and undramatic, but as a movie…

Austin Bunn: The Jedi mind trick!

John Krokidas: This would be amazing. But I would say I’m the structure guy I think, coming from NYU’s film program. I’m very traditionalist in terms of Sidney Lumet’s “find your spine,” and Austin is really wonderful with character and dialogue. If anything, he’s on a religious crusade against expository dialogue, and I would write these three paragraph monologues for each character expressing their emotion like that scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh finally turns to Allen to give him advice. I had a two-page monologue version and Austin crossed it all out (Austin laughs) and wrote the one line that’s in the movie, “The most important thing your father ever did was fail me,” which said everything.

Question: The movie is also very visual too because of the beats’ energy and such. How did you go about creating the look with cinematographer Reed Morano?

John Krokidas: I’m so proud of what we brought to this film. The movie is set in 1944 and it’s a murder story. Even in the writing process, I looked up and saw that “Double Indemnity” won Best Picture that year, and it was the year of “Laura” and “Gilda” and all these great American Film noirs. So, I said, “Why don’t we incorporate this even in just the fabric of the movie and start with the jail scene in a place of heightened tension flashback to more innocent times, and then build again to see whether or not these characters can escape or not escape their fate?” So, I started looking at noir style at first, but I thought an academic recreation of Film noir, who wants to see that? Going back to spine and theme, I thought what this piece was really about was young people finding their voice. So, what about going from conformity, the row houses of New Jersey and the pillars of Columbia, to nonconformity? And of course, where film noir went in the hands of the French was the New Wave. So I thought, “Okay well let’s start off with these controlled, composed, expressionistic-lit shots, and then as the boys go down the rabbit hole together, let’s take the camera off the tripod. Let’s get some jazzier free-form style.” So, I made this book of the 1940s. I had learned that Ang Lee, for “The Ice Storm,” did a 50 page book on the 1970s with colors, fonts and important historical events, you name it. So, I did that with the 1940s and then gave it to Reed. The great thing that I have learned on this is you can do all the academic treatises you want, but then you hire great people. She saw the goal post of what I wanted and then she showed me Jean-Pierre Melville’s films. She showed me films that meant a lot to her and then let kind of what I wanted filter through her own imagination. What I am amazed by specifically in her work is we did this movie in 24 days. Each scene was done in two hours or less, and she has the instincts to be like a documentary camera person and is able to light like that at the same time. We wanted to make sure this film felt relevant and contemporary as opposed to just being a traditional biopic.

Austin Bunn: (We didn’t want it to be) the greatest hits version of their lives.

John Krokidas: It was looking at Ryan McGinley photographs and contemporary, counterculture, young images of today and then finding what connected them to the 1940s. What was resonant in counterculture then and today at the same time.

Question: What was the direction that you were giving your actors? We were told that sometimes you would pull them aside for a more dramatic scene, but was there a consciousness you went into to direct the film and the actors? Were they any kind of specific kind of notes you gave them?

John Krokidas: Here’s the embarrassing story; Austin and I actually met freshman year because we were both acting in a production at Yale of “The Lion in Winter.”

Austin Bunn: Yes.

John Krokidas: Neither of us were the greatest actors in the world which is, I think, why we went into writing and directing. But I trained as an actor as an undergraduate and what you learn is that each actor has their own method and way. It’s whatever it takes for them to get the emotions to the surface. So, when I met with each actor that I cast, I would just simply ask them, “Have you trained? How do you like to work and what don’t you like?” Michael C. Hall gave me one of the greatest lessons in directing in which he said, “If what I am doing is not making you happy, don’t tell me that because that will make me self-conscious and it will make me think about what I’m doing. Just tell me to add whatever you want to what I’m doing.” That’s just a great lesson for life. Dan and I, when we were working together, we spent time before production (he was so generous and hard working on this) and he wanted to approach this like it was his first film which was very poignant to me. I said, “Would you like to try learning a new method and approach acting in a different style?” He said, “Absolutely!” So, with Dan, he’s so bright and in his head, and for the intellectuals Meisner works really well in focusing your action on what you are trying to do in the scene. Dane had trained extensively, and what he does is create a Bible for the character and does tons of research before production. Then he burns it and starts really becoming the character on set. Ben Foster (who plays William Burroughs) has something I’ve never seen another actor do which is, once we’ve basically got the scene up on its feet, he goes and he does the blocking of the scene by himself in the location several times. He calls it “the dance” because once he’s memorized the dance and knows the physicality (“I need to pick up the fork here, I need to put it down there”), he doesn’t have to think about it anymore and that’s completely freeing to him. So it’s like cooking this huge seven course meal where you have to get everything done at exactly the right time, but every plate needs a little bit of love in a different way. To me the greatest thing was being able to get this dream cast and then just to work with them to find how they like to work and what got the best out of them.

Austin Bunn: John had a really intuitive idea which was to keep the actors from reading past this point in the biographies, so none of the actors came in burdened by the mythology of who these guys would become. They were just 19-year-old kids. So, I think that was really smart and it released the actors from having to play the later decisions in their lives and the kinds of writers they would become. They just got to be young people, and that was a great relief I think for them.

John Krokidas: Yeah, and for us too as writers. I had a talk with Jack Huston once when he and I shared the same room and I’m saying, “Oh my god, I’m directing you as Jack Kerouac.” But we were like, “No. You are Jack who is a college student on a football scholarship who hates the other jocks, who just wrote a book which he thinks might be completely trite and he just wants to get out of college and have some real-life experience and join the war so he could begin to have real material to write his next book. That’s who you are.” That just liberated all of us.

Question: When writing the script, how much are you tied to the truth and how much are you allowed to take creative license?

John Krokidas: We did so much research for this. We felt we had to, and I think part of it’s our academic background because there’s so much in the biographies. There are so many biographies of them out there, but then also we would find different accounts online for example from David Kammerer’s friends. They said that that relationship between him and Lucien was never portrayed accurately and that Lucien actually kept coming back to David and David was asking him to end the relationship. And then we may have broken into Jack Kerouac’s college apartment together. We did the trick of pressing all the buzzers and then somebody let us in. But what’s interesting is Columbia students were living there and they had no idea that they were in Jack Kerouac’s apartment. So, we physically went to all of the locations in which this movie took place, and that just helped inform our writing process as well; getting to be able to visualize the actual spaces. Add to that, we went to Stanford University to the Allen Ginsberg archives. It wasn’t about the lack of material out there. If anything, it was about making sure that we really just focused on who they were up until the point which the movie takes place.

Austin Bunn: Just to add to that, the people that I know that have seen the film have been really surprised at how much is actually totally accurate. The day after the murder, Allen Ginsberg went to the West End Bar, “You Always Hurt the One You Love” was playing on the jukebox and he wrote the poem that ends the film. It ends with “I am a poet;” that is a line from August 20, 1944 so we worked really hard to weave it in. But like John was saying before, we didn’t want to do the dutiful, stuffy, every box checked kind of biopic that has been around for a while. We wanted to do something that felt more in line with the spirit of the beats that was more specific and honest and transgressive, and I hope we got there.

Question: Did you two have a specific goal of what you wanted to portray and what you wanted the audience to leave with either of the time or of the characters themselves?

John Krokidas: What I want the audience to leave with is that feeling of when we were 18 and 19 years old just like these guys were in the movie; when everything seemed possible and you knew that you had something important to say about with your life. That you wanted to do something different and unique and not just what your parents taught you, not just what school taught you, but you wanted to really leave your mark on the world. The fact that after the movie these guys actually did it and created the greatest counterculture movement of the twentieth century is amazing. I have had plenty of people come up to me after seeing the movie and said, “This movie made me want to be a better writer” or “this movie made me want to go back and start playing music again.” That to me means everything. That’s ultimately, deep in my heart, why I wanted to make this movie.

Austin Bunn: The pivot point was this murder. I loved Allen Ginsberg for his openness and his honesty, and to think that at one point in his life he was called upon to defend his best friend in an honor slaying of a known homosexual, the very thing that Ginsberg went on in his life to defy and radically create change about the idea of being in the closet and the shame around that issue, that contradiction was really exciting to us dramatically.

John Krokidas: You know this movie took, from the time that we started talking about this until the time that we are getting the chance to be with you all today, over 10 years to make. When I really think about it, the thing that kept me going and kept me wanting to tell this story is that there needs to be something that pisses me off at night. The fact that in 1944 you could literally get away with murder by portraying your victim as a homosexual, that pissed me off to no end. This isn’t a political movie and it’s one scene and it’s obviously what informed how Lucien Carr got away with murder, but for me that was the thing that kept me up all night that said, “No, I have to tell the story.”

Question: The movie has different kinds of music playing throughout it like jazz and contemporary music. Did you envision using different musical styles when it came to making this movie?

John Krokidas: I originally wanted a bebop jazz score similar to Miles Davis’ score for Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” because the transition from swing to bebop at this time was exactly what these guys wanted to do with words; to go from rhythms to exploding them into something beautiful. My music supervisor, Randal Poster, said to me, “John put down your academic treatise, put down your paper. Go make your movie. Your child’s going to start becoming the person that he or she wants to be.” So I went and I made my movie, and then I put jazz music on the film and it didn’t work at all. And then I went and did only period accurate music and it felt like Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” which is a great movie but it’s not the young rebellious movie about being 19 and wanting to change the world that we wanted to make. So, I actually went back to the playlists that Austin and I used a while writing this movie and I used Sigur Rós and stuff that was timeless but contemporary, and it brought the movie to life. Then I realized that the composer Nico Muhly had arranged all of those albums and worked with Grizzly Bear and Björk and other people that we were using as temp track. So, we got the movie to Nico and just thankfully he loved it. Now that I knew that I had contemporary music in a period film, then we get to that heist sequence. I had heist period music on it, it was so corny. The sequence didn’t work, it didn’t have any stakes to it, and I can academically tell you when the beats come on, they led to the hippies which led to the punks, and the punks led to Kurt Cobain and the 90s, etc. But the truth is that while I can intellectualize it, you go with what’s visceral and what feels honest and true to you. For me, the biggest lesson in making my first film is to do all of your homework, do all your research, know what you’re doing, but then don’t be afraid to get out of the way if your movie starts to tell you what you should be doing.

Question: How did you decide on what literary quotes to put in, and how did you work with the actors in establishing the cadence and the elocution on those?

Austin Bunn: What a great question! If you know any of the beat history, this new vision was real for them and they have written volumes about it, none of which makes any sense. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

John Krokidas: Do you all remember your journals when you were 20 years old or those conversations you had at three in the morning with other college students? We got to read their version of it, and there’s a reason that we hide all of our journals and don’t let them see the light of day.

Austin Bunn: It was challenging. With the uninhibited, uncensored expression of the soul, that’s actually a credible quote directly from the Ginsberg new vision manifesto. So in some ways we knew we had to distill some of that material from the Ginsberg journals to help make the argument for how valuable this manifesto was and the irony honestly of what transpires in the plot which is the very thing that Allen’s called to do which is to create this censored version of history. But in terms of the poetry itself, it was really challenging because as we all know there are movies about poets and writers where recitations happen and they are really flat and they can be corny and there’s a time where you tune out of the movie when you’re waiting for the poetry to end. Specifically, I think of Allen’s first poem that happens on the boat. We were really challenged to find a poem that would speak to audiences but was genuinely an Allen Ginsberg poem written in his voice. So what we had to do was really channel Allen. His early work is quite rough and burdened by trying to impress his dad and his professors. John had the concept of this isn’t a poem that he’s just reading to impress people, it’s a poem he’s reading to Lucien Carr. The audience knows that, you know that and Lucien finds it out on the boat at that moment. That really gave me permission to kind of rethink what the poem was going to do and how we would make it, so we came upon Allen’s method which was kind of magpie; stealing from the American vernacular and going out and finding common speech and repurposing it, creating this Whitman-esque inclusion. So you hear in the poem things that you’ve already heard in the film just like Ginsberg did himself. Things like Allen in wonderland is reworked in the poem, unbloomed stalwart is the very thing that David said to him at the party. So we’re kind of hopefully paying off not just a poem that is emotionally powerful, but also something of the method that Ginsberg would use for the rest of his life.

John Krokidas: Radcliffe was such a hard worker. While he was on Broadway doing a musical, we would meet once a week for two months before even preproduction and rehearsals began to work on the accent and to work together. I have him on my iPhone reading “Howl.” We didn’t look at the later recordings, we looked at the earliest vocal recordings possible of Allen Ginsberg to make sure that we weren’t capturing the voice of who he became, but his voice at that time and what his reading voice was like. To be honest, it’s just really telling the actor, “You’re not performing a poem. You are letting Lucien know that he is loved with this poem and that you love him and that you can see inside him.” It’s playing the emotion underneath the poem which was the direction.

Question: What does it do for you when all the main characters are gay? Normally you got the female characters who can be a love interest but they are not going to be a rival. Usually, even now in films and in life, there is a separate role where as if you are all the same gender, you can all be anything to each other.

John Krokidas: I think this is a movie with every character is discovering what their sexuality is (gay, straight, bi or all over the place), and more importantly whether or not they are worthy of being loved. I personally don’t know if Lucien Carr was straight or gay, and to me it’s irrelevant because I have seen this relationship play out amongst gay people I have known so many times where an older man who is gay and a younger man of questionable sexuality develops such a close bond. The stereotype I think would be is that the young man had an absent father figure or finds the older man’s confidence and just the care and nurturing qualities of them very attractive. What happens though is that those two get so intimate that ultimately there’s nowhere else to take the relationship but sexual, and when that happens then the power position in that relationship twists and the younger man suddenly realizes that he holds the power because he’s the sexually desired one. That’s where a lot of conflict ensues. Whatever you read about that relationship between Lucien and David, everyone knew that they were codependent. Everyone knew it was toxic and going to end badly. Nobody knew it was going to end in murder.

Austin Bunn: I think a lot of the biopics we see are kind of denatured of their sexual qualities and the edginess of the relationships in them. So, I think we were trying to do something that restored some of that ambiguity, lust, desire and confusion that is genuinely in the beats’ history. We were not making that up.

“Kill Your Darlings” is available to own and rent on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital.

Charlie Hunnam on Acting in ‘Deadfall’ and Portraying a Former Boxer

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

WRITER’S NOTE: This article was written back in 2012.

Best known for his roles in the film “Green Street Hooligans” and on the television series “Sons of Anarchy,” actor Charlie Hunnam gets to do a variation on his tough guy image in “Deadfall.” Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, he portrays Jay, an ex-boxer who has just been released from prison. He is contemplating going back home to have Thanksgiving dinner with his parents, but things go awry for him after he seriously injures, albeit accidentally, his former coach who had betrayed him. Fearing he will be sent back to jail, Jay flees the scene and goes on the run.

While talking with Christina Radish of Collider, Hunnam said there was “real poetry” to Zach Dean’s script when he first read it and that he related to Jay’s frustration and anger over how his life felt completely out of his control. When actors study and prepare to play a role, they are always expected to go over the similarities they share with their characters as well as how they are different from them. Hunnam found that his life as an actor was similar to Jay’s career as a boxer.

“I thought that was really interesting and I could relate to it, in a way, living in Hollywood,” Hunnam told Radish. “I’m very disciplined and I have a very clear idea of how I want to be spending my time, but I’m at the mercy of everybody else who decides how I get to spend my time and whether I get to work or not. In classic storytelling terms, with the classic hero’s journey and contemporary male narrative, a man being released from prison is a dynamic that I was predisposed to be interested in and like.”

The other interesting thing Hunnam brought up in his interview with Radish was how Jay was a successful athlete. Now in crime dramas like “Deadfall,” we typically expect boxers like Jay to have failed in their profession in one way or another, be it through drugs or some sort of gambling controversy. But here, Jay proves to be a victim of circumstance which has rendered his past achievements non-existent.

“This guy seemed like a guy who had dedicated his entire life to this goal of becoming a world class athlete and actually achieved it,” Hunnam said of Jay. “We just all inherently understand the dedication and sacrifice that is needed to achieve that because we’ve all grown up watching professional athletes on TV, so I understood that. He seemed like a guy where it was day one of the rest of his life. He had ruined the prior 30 years and he was coming out completely with nothing, at all.”

One of the best things about “Deadfall” is how beautiful the snowy landscapes look and how brutally cold they appear. I got to attend the movie’s press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, and it was surprising to hear Hunnam say how he looked forward to working in the freezing cold. Many actors would give anything not to work in such frigid temperatures, but for Hunnam it offered a change of pace. Still, he did find the snow to be a challenging environment to work in.

“I had actually been really excited about a period in the cold weather because we shoot ‘Sons of Anarchy’ in LA through the course of the summer, and I’m a skinny guy who wants to look as big as possible so I wear several layers of clothing; it gets really old being that hot,” Hunnam said. “But I must say that a couple of days in, I was craving the sunshine. You know when you’re really hot you get miserable and a little bit grumpy, but the cold is really debilitating.”

Hunnam did take the time to train as a boxer which helped him better understand his character. It also turned out he had a unique way of getting into Jay’s psyche which he accomplished by working out a lot and then suddenly stopping. Anyone who has exercised a lot at the gym and then stopped for a period can clearly understand how difficult it is to start all over again.

“I’ve also always been interested in boxing so I put myself through an intense boxing academy where I got up and ran five miles every morning and then went and had breakfast and boxed a couple of hours and then came home and watched fights all day long and then went and swam, and I did this seven days a week for five weeks before filming this movie. Then when I got to Montreal (where the film was shot) I wanted to stop completely and feel the absence, and I knew that was going to have a very negative effect on my psychology. It’s kind of a shortcut, rather than intellectually empathizing, to actually feeling the emotion. I got into a very dark and happy place during shooting because of that preparation,” Hunnam said.

Charlie Hunnam still has “Sons of Anarchy” to work on, and many are excited at what the show’s upcoming season finale has to offer. Up next for him is Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” in which he will be playing Raleigh Antrobus, a washed-up former pilot who has to defend the world by piloting a giant robot and fighting monsters who are rising out of the depths of the ocean. Thar one looks to be Hunnam’s biggest movie yet.

SOURCES:

Christina Radish, “Charlie Hunnam Talks DEADFALL, SONS OF ANARCHY Season 5, PACIFIC RIM, and Writing a Movie About a Drug Lord for WB and Legendary,” Collider, December 5, 2012.

Ben Kenber, “Interview with the Cast and Director of Deadfall,” We Got This Covered, December 7, 2012.

Rachel Nichols Talks About the Making of ‘Alex Cross’

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RACHEL NICHOLS stars in ALEX CROSS

WRITER’S NOTE: This article was originally written back in 2012.

She has had memorable roles in movies like “P2,” “Star Trek” and “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” but it’s going to be hard to forget about Rachel Nichols after watching her in “Alex Cross.” As Detective Monica Ashe, partner to Cross and lover to Detective Tommy Kane (Ed Burns), Nichols is a strong and alluring presence as she holds her own with a very talented cast which includes Tyler Perry. While the movie is not exactly a critics’ darling according to Rotten Tomatoes, Nichols registers as one of its best assets to where you wish her character was in it a little longer.

While at the “Alex Cross” press conference which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Nichols said she was familiar with James Patterson’s books and the Alex Cross character, but what drew her to this project was the script.

Rachel Nichols: I read the script and I just thought to myself this is going to be sort of an interesting combination of the drama aspects and also a lot of action. I knew that Rob (Cohen) was attached and obviously everyone is familiar with his work, and I knew that he’d put a really exciting and very different spin on it and I wanted to be part of that.

As I said earlier, I really wish Nichols was in the movie longer. Her character ends up, shall we say, disappearing from it rather early on, and Nichols commented that she has a sad history of getting the “not” part in several movies. She also said her parents wish she would do a romantic comedy next where she survives and ends up happy in the end. Regardless, Nichols had a lot of fun during the filming of “Alex Cross.”

Rachel Nichols: I honestly felt that I was there for the entire film. When I watched it the first time I didn’t actually know where in the course of things that I would no longer be in the film. I like the element of surprise that comes along here. That and what happens to Cross’ wife supports the vigilante aspect of it and makes everyone get on Cross’ side.

Like her co-star Burns, Nichols has played her fair share of law enforcement officers on screen. When asked if this has helped her develop a talent for figuring out the mystery or solving the case in each movie she’s in, Nichols replied she certainly tries to.

Rachel Nichols: I don’t think I’m terribly successful at it. There is that element of trying to figure things out which is fun, but I certainly don’t think that I’ve accrued any new skills to do that.

But although she has played cops in the past, Nichols made clear that she still had to relearn the techniques of sweeping a room and proper weapons procedure while working with the Detroit Police Department in preparation for her role.

Rachel Nichols: You’d think it would be like getting back on a bicycle but it’s not.

In talking about working with Burns, she said the first thing they shot together was their love scene. It happened a month after they first met at the casting sessions, and she recalled that they looked at one another and said, “Hey, how are you? Let’s get naked!” Looking back, Nichols said this was totally the way to do it.

Rachel Nichols: I love that scene because two people sitting on a bed is not as dynamic as that scene was. We did the roundabout and it was moving and constantly emotional and he (Burns) is out the door. But thanks to Cohen, it felt very easy for us to do and we had a great day on set.

I am very serious when I say Rachel Nichols is really good in “Alex Cross,” and I think the roles she gets offered from here on out will be much bigger than what she’s received so far. Hearing her talk about her role as Monica Ashe shows us an actress who has done her research and never just walks through any part given to her. I look forward to seeing what she does next.

‘Skyfall’ Cast and Crew on Cinematographer Roger Deakins

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WRITER’S NOTE: This article was originally written back in 2012.

“Skyfall” has earned the respect of both critics and audiences around the world as they rightfully hail it as one of the best James Bond movies ever made. But while Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes have received tremendous praise for their terrific work, there is another man working behind the scenes who is equally deserving: Roger Deakins. Thanks to him, “Skyfall” features such unforgettably beautiful images like the assassination scene in Shanghai and the cold and barren landscape of Scotland. None of this is lost on the cast and crew as they spoke highly of Deakins’ work at the film’s press conference in Beverly Hills.

Deakins is best known for his work on many of the Coen Brothers’ movies such as “True Grit” and “No Country for Old Men.” He had previously worked with Mendes on “Revolutionary Road” and “Jarhead,” and the director attributes the look of “Skyfall” solely to Deakins.

Sam Mendes: He contributes what a great cinematographer contributes which is an unbelievable eye, an extraordinary skill in lighting, and for doing an immense amount of work in prep. (He showed) huge care and dedication from day minus 100 to the last day of timing which was only a few weeks ago. He’s a very shy man and he expresses himself through his work, and you just put a camera in front of Roger’s eye and point him in the direction of something interesting and he’s a very happy man. He’s one of the greats and it’s a privilege to have him on the movie.

Daniel Craig: There is an incredibly consistency in his work. He has a surety and you feel like it’s a Sam Mendes movie but it’s also a Roger Deakins movie as well. He has put his stamp on it, it’s not intrusive and it’s very magical.

Bérénice Marlohe, who plays the mysterious Bond girl Sévérine in “Skyfall,” spoke lovingly of Deakins and his work on this film.

Bérénice Marlohe: I have this concept that I’ve always believed in that hugely talented people are hugely humble. When I was on that set, I saw that with Sam, Daniel and him. He’s such a pure, beautiful man and just very focused on his work, and then when I got to see the movie, I would never expect that. The first thing that struck me was that mix of reality, a real story with real human beings, and with each picture it felt like you were having a journey in a dream. It was all so surprising and beautiful.

Naomie Harris, who portrays Eve, also described Deakins as being shy, humble and also added that he was quite “self-effacing.” This made him much different compared to the cinematographers she has worked with in the past.

Naomie Harris: It was a very different experience for me than working with most DPs because they can be very strong characters who really make their presence known on sets, and he’s the complete opposite. He’s really quiet and doesn’t interfere with your process at all, and he’s very respectful of actors’ spaces. For me it was an amazing pleasure to work with him.

To hear all this said about Roger Deakins makes him seem highly unique among the cinematographers of the world. I couldn’t agree more with everyone’s individual assessments of his work as the look of “Skyfall” is indeed gorgeous especially for an action movie. The greatest directors of photography have a look which is all their own and the kind you can notice right away, and Deakins has earned his place among them. Hopefully the Academy Awards will recognize his work here with an Oscar nomination when the time comes around.

Naomie Harris on Portraying a Bond Woman in ‘Skyfall’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

WRITER’S NOTE: This article was written in 2012.

She thrilled us as a hardened survivor in “28 Days Later” and wowed us with mystical powers in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, so it was only a matter of time before English actress Naomie Harris got the chance to play a Bond girl. She finally gets the opportunity in the 007 adventure “Skyfall” where she plays Eve, an MI6 field agent who works hard at being Bond’s equal. She shares a sizzling chemistry with actor Daniel Craig in certain scenes, and it’s the kind of chemistry you want to see last for more than one Bond film.

Harris appeared at the “Skyfall” press conference held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, California where she talked about her role as Eve. Being a Bond girl carries with it a weight of expectations, and some still consider a character like this to be sexist in its design. Harris was asked what being a Bond girl meant to her and she said it meant being alluring and beautiful, and she initially found it to be constraining as a result.

Naomie Harris: I usually don’t play roles like that. In fact, I don’t know if I have ever played a role like that before, so I felt confined by all those set ideals. But then a friend of mine gave me a great piece of advice which was, just forget about all of that and imagine you are a part of a low budget movie where you can do whatever you want with this role and just make it your own. And that ultimately is how I come to see Bond girls. In terms of Bond girl terminology, I think we’re just women in Bond movies and women now in Bond movies can be anything so you’re totally free to create. That’s what makes it an interesting role.

Now Bond has a reputation of loving women and leaving them, and this has made being a Bond girl seem less appealing to many people. For Harris, however, playing Eve in “Skyfall” represented an opportunity to portray a new generation of them, and it’s just as well as the Bond franchise is now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Naomie Harris: They certainly said that to me when I auditioned. They said, we want you to create a modern woman that women can respect and admire and look up to, and this is something we’re creating that’s new and different. That was one of the reasons why I was so excited about taking on the challenge of this role.

When asked if people should say Bond girl or Bond woman, Harris replied we can call it whatever we want.

Harris was asked to audition for the role of Eve after director Sam Mendes and casting director Debbie McWilliams saw her in a production of “Frankenstein” directed by Danny Boyle. She had no idea they were in the audience, and her agent later told Harris they wanted to meet with her about being in “Skyfall.”

Naomie Harris: I had two auditions and I didn’t really take it seriously because I never ever saw myself as a Bond girl. I wasn’t really very nervous at all because I know they auditioned hundreds of girls all around the world, and I thought this is right at the beginning of their casting process so they’re not going to cast me. It wasn’t until the third audition when Sam said, “It’s down between you and just two others” that I realized this is actually serious and could actually really happen. That was the first time I got really nervous. Thankfully I got the role and largely because of Boyle because Mendes called him and asked what I was like to work with, and he gave me a glowing report.

Doing “Skyfall” gave Harris a great respect for action heroes because before this she had no idea of the amount of training which goes into getting prepared for a film like this one. Harris even said Craig would do a 15-hour day and then train for 2 hours afterwards, and she doesn’t know of anybody else who works as hard or has that dedication to a particular role.

Naomie Harris: Movies like these are emotionally and hugely physically demanding. For someone like me who’s incredibly lazy and doesn’t exercise at all, it was a big change for me to be exercising for two months before doing the movie. I was out five days a week with a personal trainer, I was on the gun range three days a week, and I was even doing stunt driving and developing all these other skills that I didn’t have before. I really got in touch with my body in a way that I never had before.

When it came to talking about working with Craig, Harris couldn’t have spoken of him more highly.

Naomie Harris: Daniel definitely remembers what it was like coming into this franchise and how intimidating and overwhelming it was for him. It’s amazing that in his third Bond movie he remembers that and he really goes out of his way to make sure that you don’t feel that weight of pressure and that it is shared. He kind of holds your hand and says ‘we’ll get through this together’ throughout the whole thing, and he is an incredibly generous man.

Talking about Craig also let Harris to tell one of the most memorable stories from that press conference.

Naomie Harris: For me the story that sums up Daniel was the first time that I met him. He was having a costume fitting and I was being walked down the hallway and I was asked whether I wanted to meet him. I was very intimidated and I thought I don’t want to bother him while he’s having a costume fitting as that wouldn’t be a great first time to meet him. So, I kept on walking down the hall and he saw me walk past, and as he ran out of his costume fitting, he hit me over the head and said, “Where are you going stupid?” And then he gave me this massive hug and said, “Welcome aboard,” and that for me really sums up Daniel because he’s incredibly down to earth and incredibly warm and also quite silly as well.

In closing, Harris leaves an everlasting impression as Eve in “Skyfall,” and this will become clearer to audiences around the world once they have seen this 007 movie. She is not your average Bond girl who pales in comparison to him, but instead one who can say she’s in many ways his equal.

Naomie Harris: Eve is very capable in the field. She is a very competent field agent but she’s working on this mission with the ultimate field agent who is Bond. She’s never going to be able to live up to him, and no man and no woman can. That’s why he is Bond and so it’s understandable that she needs a bit of help, but I was not happy about having to shoot him. I thought I really wanted to be a better shot than that.

Ronald Krauss and Kathy DiFiore on the Making of ‘Gimme Shelter’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

WRITER’S NOTE: This interview took place in 2014.

“Gimme Shelter” gives audiences one of the most intimate looks at life inside a shelter for those in need they could ever hope to see. It stars Vanessa Hudgens who turns in an astonishing performance as Apple Bailey, the child of an abusive and drug addicted mother. At the film’s beginning, Apple runs away from home and seeks out her biological father, a Wall Street banker named Tom Fitzpatrick (played by Brendan Fraser) who does what he can to help her out, but she ends up running away upon discovering she’s pregnant, and because Tom isn’t excited about her wanting to keep the baby. After a couple of nights on the streets and a nasty car accident, Apple finds her way to a shelter for young pregnant women run which is run by a spiritual woman, and it is there that she begins to feel a sense of hope for the first time in her life.

“Gimme Shelter” was written and directed by Ronald Krauss who actually spent some time in an actual women’s shelter run by Kathy DiFiore, a once homeless woman who eventually turned her life around and founded Several Sources Shelters which is dedicated to helping women in need. Krauss’ original plan was to make a documentary out of all the interviews he did with residents of the shelter, but in an attempt to show the world of the importance of the work DiFiore has done and to keep her legacy going, he decided to make a feature length movie instead.

I got to meet with Krauss and DiFiore during a roundtable interview at the “Gimme Shelter’s” press day held at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. It was especially nice to see DiFiore there as she does not do a lot of publicity. DiFiore talked about why she decided to let Krauss make this movie which was inspired by her work. Krauss went into detail about his experiences at the shelter, and he also explained how he came to cast Hudgens in the lead role.

Question: How are you?

Kathy DiFiore: Good but a little tired. I’ve never been to so many interviews (everyone laughs).

Question: Welcome to our world. So, what did you think when this guy (Ronald Krauss) shows up on your doorstep? I guess you’re used to having people show up on your doorstep, but this guy…

Kathy DiFiore: Usually they’re pregnant women (laughs).

Question: Yeah right. This guy shows up and I doubt it went like, “Uh, can I stay here because I’m doing research for a movie.” But how did you feel when he proposes the idea of doing a movie based on your thing?

Kathy DiFiore: Well, it didn’t happen that way. It happened more like he was visiting his brother who happens to live a mile and a half from the shelter, and he had heard about my work through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, and he volunteered. It was Christmas time and I let people come in to volunteer all the time, especially someone that has the talents he has. He eventually said, “Maybe I could film some of what you’re doing” which I wasn’t fond of because of the $10,000 fine. I didn’t want any publicity. I thought, let me just go quietly. No public relations. Over the course of time, and it took several months as he was doing the work speaking with the young mothers and they got to know him, they would come to me and tell me how much they respected him and how much he respected them. He felt they were giving him private information, but he was treating them with such dignity. You don’t hear those types of words coming out of the women that come to me. They’ve been abused and abandoned and are really confused by so many, particularly men, in their lives. And then I heard a little voice inside my head, I’m a very prayerful woman and I was asking God for guidance, and I heard, “Trust him.” And when I heard “trust him,” it kept going on. Trust him, trust him, trust him. I thought, okay holy spirit, okay, and then he and I talked about some of the things he looked at.

Ronald Krauss: I didn’t really have any sort of agenda when I met Kathy. I wasn’t really setting out to make a film. It just so happened that her shelter was a mile from my brother’s house and it was at Christmas time. Usually during the holidays I’m, like a lot of people, at food banks or something or shelters just reaching out to people who are less fortunate. I remember the first time I was there visiting Kathy and walked into that shelter for the first time and saw mothers and children walking around and it was really fascinating. It’s exactly what you see in the film because we shot the film at the real place. I had learned that Kathy had not done any publicity in her work. For the last 30 years she remained anonymous other than when she started with the $10,000 fine, and that was news of a woman who was homeless and was trying to give back to society by turning her own home into a shelter. The state came down on her, and that’s a whole other story. She reached out to Mother Teresa, and Mother Teresa came by her side and together they changed the laws in the state of New Jersey, and she was honored in the White House with Ronald Reagan. I learned all of this which was fascinating and I was sort of intrigued by her, but I was more intrigued by… the young women that struggled and were finding their way in life and the woman that was sort of selflessly helping them with her work in this shelter and five shelters she has now; some just for homeless women and some for teenagers and different things. My first thing was to sort of really help her organize so that her legacy and her work would continue. I didn’t realize that I was planting the seeds for a film that I was really trying to say that people need to learn about your work. I was thinking at first that I was going to document her work just for her own purpose so people could find out later. With any device that I found there, and I actually borrowed her camera, I started to interview the girls and record the girls and go through her boxes and look at all her old videotapes. It was a lot of stuff. I started filming one girl after the next, one after the next, interview and asking where they were from, how they ended up here, where’s their parents, where’s all these things and the tapes started piling up. I would put them in Kathy’s office in the back, and before I know it there was a whole stack of tapes of these girls and their stories and they were all very similar. They were all stories of abuse and neglect and abandonment. It was both something like a bad mother, bad father, nobody cared and the thing they had in common is that they didn’t pick this life. They didn’t pick these parents. They didn’t pick up parent who was a drug addict or an alcoholic, it just happened. And what do people do when these things happen? They just get abused and they struggle in life, and they think there’s no hope. A lot of times the will of the parents and the people who are bad, it gets thrown onto the kids and they become angry and bitter and they fight and rebel and they run away and become homeless, and so it’s a vicious cycle. I think the turning point of the whole thing for me was I kept going back and back and weeks were passing and peoples’ lives were passing through my life, and they were touching me but I was sort of a little bit removed in a sense. Then one day I showed up at the shelter at about 7 o’clock at night and there was a young girl standing there in front of the shelter; an African American girl about 18 years old. It was about 15 degrees out, she had no jacket on and she was just standing there and I said, “Can I help you? Why don’t you come inside? What are you doing out here?” I thought she lived in the shelter but she didn’t and she thought I worked there and I didn’t obviously work there, so we were kind of misleading each other. Then Kathy shows up and I’m standing in the living room with this girl and Kathy says, “Who’s this girl?” And I said, “I don’t know. She was in front of the shelter.” And she comes over and says, “Never let anybody in the shelter. These are the rules here.” She kind of dug into me a little bit, you know? And I was like, “Okay but this girl, she didn’t have a place to go. She’s by herself, she doesn’t have a jacket, she has nothing.” And she says, “Let me talk to her.” Kathy’s very seasoned obviously and knows what to look for in these people because they could be deceiving, and she interviewed her and she came back to me and said, “It just so happens that we have one bed left in the shelter. Why don’t you tell this girl that she could stay here.” And so I went up to her, her name was Darlecia, and I said, “Hey Darlecia, they have an extra bed here for you to stay. You can stay here” and this girl… I’m sorry (Ronald started to get teary eyed) … Anyway, this girl, she hugged me so hard that she almost knocked me over.

Question: Is she the one that you based Vanessa Hudgens’ character on?

Ronald Krauss: Yeah. It was a jolt into my heart about that there were many young girls like this out there and that could use help. That’s what inspired me and made me think if I was to make a film it could create awareness for other people. I asked Kathy about it and she said absolutely not, of course. And then time went on and she came to me and said, “You know the girls really respect you and trust you in terms of the care of what you’ve been doing, and perhaps you’re right. Maybe some sort of film could really help to spread the word that shelters like this exist and that other people can be kind, and maybe someone will open a shelter if they see a film like this.” But no one ever anticipated it would be a film like this.

Question: What made you choose Vanessa Hudgens for the role of Apple Bailey and what was it like to work with her?

Ronald Krauss: I never thought that a Hollywood actress could really play the role like this after living there for like a year. I lived there for a year writing this script. And there are a lot of famous actors that wanted to do it and had auditioned and some of them were really well known, and then someone mentioned Vanessa Hudgens and I didn’t really know who she was. I met with her and she was very passionate to play this role. She believed in herself that she could really do it. There was something inside of her. She turned in a great audition, she was persistent, and the turning point was that I had taken all the auditions, there was about seven or eight that I liked, and I sent them to the shelter. I didn’t tell them who I was thinking about. And when they saw the link of the girls, they unanimously picked Vanessa. They said this is the girl who should play this part, and that was the confirmation. She dove into this thing, she lived in the shelter, cut her hair off, she gained 15 pounds and besides the physical transformation, she transformed inside and she bonded with Kathy and the girls and they trusted her and they opened up to her.

Question: Kathy, what did you think of the final film?

Kathy DiFiore: (It’s) perfect. It still makes me cry when I watch it. There are women who have left Several Sources that want to come and see it and I can’t wait for that. It’s a legacy for us.

“Gimme Shelter” is now available to own and rent on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital.

Flicks For Fans Screens Friday The 13th For Its 40th Anniversary

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Thanks to the Coronavirus (COVID-19), many movies including “No Time to Die” and “Fast & Furious 9” have had their releases delayed from seven months to a full year. As for the movie theaters, they are virtually empty or have developed a “social distancing” designed to keep audience members separated from one another (as if social media has not accomplished this already). Truth is, we would be better off staying at home and watching “Dolemite is My Name” or “The Irishman” on Netflix.

This epidemic, however, did not stop Flicks For Fans from screening “Friday the 13th” in honor of its 40th anniversary. That’s right folks, the horror classic which eventually gave birth to the hockey mask wearing icon known as Jason Voorhees has now reached its fourth decade and continues to thrill one generation of horror fans after another. The screening was held at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills, California, and it played as a double feature with another slasher film, “Sleepaway Camp,” which has a twist ending M. Night Shyamalan would never have come up with on his own.

Hosting this momentous screening was James “Jimmy O” Oster, writer for JoBlo and Arrow in the Head, and he was shameless in admitting just how much he loves the “Friday the 13th” and its far bloodier sequels, and he thanked those of us who braved the pandemic to come here even as we are, as he put it, “facing Armageddon.” Those who did show up were careful to keep their distance from one another, but we were relieved to see the theater had an ample supply of Purell and toilet paper on hand.

In addition, James and the Flick For Fans founder, Jason Coleman, took the time to make this cinematic experience all the more immersive. Fans got a chance to participate in the Kevin Bacon “Kill Cabin” photo op where you could get a picture taken while having a knife stick out of your throat. Both James and Jason did an excellent job of recreating the setting of Kevin’s infamous death scene to where it looked pretty much spot on. I did see, however, that they included a copy of Kitty Kelley’s “biography” on Nancy Reagan, and I am fairly certain this book was not featured in the 1980 film.

But the real “immersive experience” of this screening came as guests were brought to the back of the Fine Arts Theatre where actress Natasha Needles portrays a Crystal Lake camp counselor who takes audience members on an orientation for new counselors while trying to ease any concerns about the rumors we may have heard about “Camp Blood.” This orientation allows us to meet certain prophets of doom as well as a crazed parent who is a bit upset about her son drowning accidentally. There is also a wheelchair-bound man who has a machete painfully inserted into a certain part of his body. Judging from this man’s reaction to this unexpected injury, medical science has certainly come a long way since the 1980’s.

Special consideration should be given to Brittany Fontaine, a graduate of Tom Savini’s Special Make-Up Effects Program, for doing the special effects and make-up effects for the immersive experience.

“Friday the 13th” was preceded by a number of vintage trailers of 1980’s slasher flicks: “Don’t Go in the Woods,” “Madman” and “Just Before Dawn.” These are movies which feature young adults venturing into nature against their better judgment, making out with one another at the worst possible moment, and inviting death in ways which truly have them asking to be, at the very least, decapitated. And yes, they each have a prophet of doom warning others of a legend which must be taken seriously, but like scientists in the average disaster movie, their warnings are thoughtlessly ignored.

Also preceding the movie were some retro commercials featured as well. Suffice to say, laxative advertisements must have been far more lucrative 40 years ago.

But more importantly, this “Friday the 13th” screening was preceded by a video message from director Sean S. Cunningham which he made just for Flicks For Fans and this audience. In it, he thanked those in the audience for “braving the L.A. traffic” to be here (clearly this was made before Coronavirus became a global pandemic), and he paid tribute to all the actors who have played Jason over the years, among them Kane Hodder.

A big thank you to both James Oster and Jason Coleman and Flicks For Fans for putting this anniversary screening together and for making it all the more immersive. Furthermore, they deserve medals of honor for keeping it going even as we suffer through a global disease which will still be with us for some time. For some, it offered an opportunity to see “Friday the 13th” on the silver screen for the very first time, and the sound was jacked up to make all the screams more infinitely ear-piercing than ever before. A big thanks also goes out the employees of the Fine Art Theatre for all the Purell and toilet paper. It’s nice to know there was some place in Los Angeles which still had them.

Finishing the 2019 Los Angeles Marathon in One Piece

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

2019 LA Marathon half runners

So, the time had come again. The day of the Los Angeles Marathon had arrived, an event which brings the city of angels together in a way which is beautiful. Strangers cheer you on no matter who you are, and volunteers of all kinds are on hand to give you all the water, Gatorade, oranges, bananas and, yes, beer you could ever possibly want as you pound the pavement for 26.2 miles. We’ve trained for this endurance event for months, and now all we can do is hope it pays off as we pound the pavement for what those who do not run openly think is an insane distance to travel on foot. Of course, many of those same people keep telling me they cannot even run a mile, so their bewilderment at such an event is understandable.

This is the ninth year in a row I have participated in the LA Marathon, but things were different this time around. After running the full 26.2 miles for the past eight years, I decided the time had come to run the half marathon instead as it was harder to find time to train, and I was unable to complete certain runs either because my knees were hurting more than usual, or because I stupidly lost my cell phone and had to go searching for it. Seriously, hell hath no fury like a human being who has lost their cell phone.

2019 LA Marathon Ben running gear

In a time where I find myself oversleeping for far too often, I actually woke up about a half hour or so before the alarm on my cell phone was set to go off (4:45 a.m. to be exact). Since I was running the half marathon, I didn’t need to be in Santa Monica until about 6:00 a.m., so I took it easy as I got my running gear on and made sure to apply generous amounts of Body Glide and suntan lotion to my far too pale body. As I drove out to Santa Monica, I played music from the “American Flyers” soundtrack to pump myself up. I usually go with that or Queen’s extended version of “One Vision” as the key is to get myself all psyched up for a day in which I travel all parts of Los Angeles while saving gas money in the process. And, as I always like to tell people, I have to get back to my car somehow, and taking an Uber or a Lyft is out of the question. It’s not like any of the drivers can deal with all those road closures in a sane fashion anyway.

I drove over expecting traffic to be backed up to a crawl but I was astonished to see things weren’t that bad as getting into Santa Monica proved to be a piece of cake. Since the full marathoners had long since arrived, parked and made their way via bus to Dodger Stadium, the half marathoners were the only ones left. I parked in a lot off of Ocean Avenue, the cheap seats of LA Marathon parking, and made my way over to where the buses were waiting. Of course, unlike when parking at the Civic Center off of Main Street, the path to the buses was not a straight line like it once was. I realized this when I found myself approaching the Santa Monica Pier and began wondering where the hell I was.

As I made my way up, people were already gathering around as the last touches were being put on the finish line, and I was already getting congratulations from strangers for participating. I was in a hurry so I didn’t have time to tell anyone I had not actually started the marathon yet. Still, no one questioned why a guy like me who is carrying a little more luggage on his belly than he cared to admit could have finished running the LA Marathon so quickly. As much as I would like to believe I am faster than speeding bullet, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest otherwise.

My biggest fear was of getting on the wrong bus and ending up at Dodger Stadium. I was told there would be buses which would take us to Beverly Hills where the half-marathon starting point was, and that they would be leaving between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m. I had to double check with the traffic cop on duty to make sure I wasn’t about to make the dumbest mistake possible. It would have been catastrophic had I gone on one heading to Dodger Stadium as I could easily see myself going into full on self-flagellation mode. Heaven forbid I take it easy on myself, huh?

2019 LA Marathon full runners

Anyway, I did get on the right bus which led me to the corner of Fairfax and Orange Grove. As I arrived, I had the good fortune to run into several of my fellow Pablove runners who were all set to run 13.1 miles from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica. To my surprise, there were more Pablove runners taking on the half-marathon than I originally realized. Like me, they decided to do the half as they were unable to devote the time they needed to training. But on the upside, we got to avoid running up those steep hills in Downtown Los Angeles as well as having to endure all those religious people who keep yelling into their bullhorns about how we have to give ourselves to Jesus. Methinks those people take the word of the Bible far too literally.

The day turned out to be warmer than I expected. This was a surprise after experiencing the coldest winter Southern California has had in lord only knows how long. For a while, I figured we might be greeted by cold weather this marathon hasn’t seen since 2012. But no, it was warmer than many would have preferred. Still, it wasn’t a scorcher like it was a few years ago.

At Dodger Stadium, the runners have to count the number of times Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” is played before they cross the starting line. From where we were, we were not subjected to that undying anthem. Instead, we got a school band performing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for us which we proudly stood for. But yeah, in retrospect I should have kneeled.

We had to wait a bit to start as the elite marathon runners, those who are Kenyan or anyone else determined to finish it in 2 or 3 hours, passed by. Once they came and went, we were led out in waves onto Sunset Boulevard. I decided to run this marathon at a 2:2 pace which means I ran for two minutes and then walked for another two. It didn’t take long for me to lose my fellow Pablove runners as they took off with no signs of stopping for any walk break, and once again I was “all by myself.” But was I? After all, thousands upon thousands of people were participating in this event, so I had little reason to ever feel lonely.

It is an exhilarating thing to run this particular marathon as it brings the citizens of Los Angeles together in a way I want them to be brought together on a daily basis. I don’t know the religions of everyone who volunteered, but they were definitely on display whether or not it called for its most loyal followers to wear a turban . I have to tell you, the endless supply of bananas came in handy as they gave me the extra burst of energy I desperately needed. In retrospect, however, I should have taken more of those orange slices as the juice was much needed on a day where Southern California returned to its unseasonably warm temperatures after going through one of its coldest winters ever.

Another joy I have in running this particular marathon is in seeing the signs spectators feel free to put on display. Among them was one which stated how we run better than the government, but then again, who doesn’t these days. One of my favorites came from someone eager to address the current controversy involving celebrities helping their kids cheat their way into top-rated universities.

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Not once did I ever feel the need to take one or two extra strength Tylenol caplets. If I ran 26.2 miles, I would have taken at least one by the time I reached mile 13. My feet can only get abused so much before they start to complain as if to say, “why have you forsaken us?” Trust me, I have run this marathon before without taking any pain relievers, and I came out of it wondering why I could be so cruel to myself.

The sun did shine a lot brighter than I thought it would, but there was a cool breeze blowing in our direction as we approached Ocean Avenue. Of course, we had to suffer through San Vicente Boulevard before we got there, and this street feels never ending. It’s like a dolly zoom in a movie in that you are making progress, but the visual ahead suddenly looks a lot further away than you thought. Remember the moment in “Jaws” where Chief Brody slowly realizes that kid on the yellow raft is being attacked by a shark? That’s what I’m talking about.

I came into this year’s LA Marathon a bit depressed as I fell backwards in terms of training and ended up realizing I would be better off running the half. I had to accept the fact that my body is not the well-oiled machine it once was, and this involved acknowledging to myself of how I am not as young as I look. Regardless, this day was still a triumphant one, and I felt a sense of pride as I crossed the finish line while holding nine fingers up in the air to indicate how many times I have participated in this particular endurance event.

We still had to keep walking upon crossing the finish line as to suddenly stop would not be in our best interest. We were greeted with medals, and the LA Marathon always has the best ones, as well as servings of bananas, bagels (no cream cheese, damn it), water and Muscle Milk (which was not cold enough). Coach Kerry, who ran the half marathon with us, said he tried to wait for us, but security kept moving the runners along so they could make room for all the runners who had yet to finish.

So I walked slowly back to my car, put on deodorant, changed my shirt, got in and drove home. Although I only ran 13.1 miles, I was still wiped out and discovered a significant of sunburn on my back. I did put suntan lotion on, but my arms can only reach so far to cover everything.

As I walked home after parking my car, strangers noticed what was around my neck and were quick to say congratulations. Like I said, this event is the kind of thing which brings the citizens of this crazy city together in a beautiful way.

There are certain visuals from this marathon I will keep with me always. Among them is watching a physically disabled man slowly making his way to the finish line with a walker while still being in a lot of time. I also saw a young female runner being loaded onto a medical vehicle even as she screamed over the pain from her leg. I hope she’s doing better now.

I want to thank Coaches Kerry, Joaquin and Lourdes for all their help this past season and to congratulate my fellow Pablove runners for crossing the finish line. It has been an honor running in support of The Pablove Foundation which continues its fight against childhood cancer. These group of runners succeeded in raising over $50,000 for the organization, $1,000 of which was raised by me. Last I checked, my fundraising page is still up and running, so please feel free to make a tax-deductible donation to a great non-profit.

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN MAKE A DONATION TO THE PABLOVE FOUNDATION.

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