It’s been almost half a year since I last posted. When I was younger I’d probably be upset about not keeping up with a blog, but I think maybe I don’t have as strict self-imposed rules as I’ve gotten older.
Nothing really interesting has gone on other than watching a ton of movies and work. I usually just try to post on here when there’s an interesting event happening. I think at the half point is usually when it starts to ramp up anyway.
A few weeks back I was able to go to Zurich to see some friends I made at the Zurich Film Festival. Jean de Meuron has become a good friend of mine since we were on the Hamilton Panel together that I hosted. I’ll be working the ZFF in September with Elena (ZFF’s social manager) and their social team, so that should be a great experience.
Zurich is a beautiful city, it made me forget about being online and social media work even though it was because of it that led me there.
You open the app and people you know are at the premiere, sharing their work, everyone got the credential, everyone is six feet from someone you grew up watching on screen. It's easy to feel like you missed a turn. Like there's a list and my name quietly fell off it sometime around 2019.
I do the math on other people's lives sometimes, which is the dumbest thing a person can do, and yet here I am, an adult, doing it. The math is always wrong. I'm comparing my random Tuesday to someone's best ten seconds of the month and somehow feel perpetual melencholy.
For a while I told myself the answer was making your own luck. And maybe that's part of it. But I think the bigger thing is just being a real friend. So much of this industry, at least the LA version I've seen, runs on what you can do for someone. Ask to hang out and you get ghosted, because there's no upside. People are warm right up until you stop being useful.
ZFF has been the opposite. Everyone there has been so kind and so genuine that it almost threw me off at first. Jean is the perfect example. We talked about hanging out in Zurich and then we actually did it. No agenda, just two people walking around a beautiful city talking about movies for hours. We're looking forward to working together now, but that came second. The friendship came first, and that almost never happens to me anymore.
So maybe it was never about making your own luck. Maybe you just find your people and hold onto them. Turns out that's worth more than any red carpet photo, although red carpets are still pretty cool.
