My love for film, and what Meryl Streep’s speech at the 2017 Golden Globes meant to me as a foreign filmmaker in Hollywood
First of all, I wanted to say that the speech Meryl Streep gave yesterday at the Golden Globes when receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award is exactly the kind of speech I, (and I hope the whole artist community,) have been waiting for for some time now. This is exactly the kind of behavior I have been needing to see in artists of that stature, using their social influence and platforms like the Golden Globes to get the message across that we do not want a fascist America.
(What I’m really hoping for personally is a return to a John Lennon and Yoko Ono level of activism during the Nixon administration, and a combination of art and activism reflected both in public appearances as well as in filmmaking, and also music. And with documentary films seeing a popularity like never before, it is moving somewhat in the right direction. Besides broken hearts, political unrest usually makes for great art, and all governments have always known this and are extremely challenged by it. The first direction towards total dictatorship has always been a shutting down of artists and free thinkers, and that is exactly why we have to step up hard, fast and fearlessly in the face of cowardice and corruption.)
I am so thankful that it came from Meryl Streep, out of all people, someone who has been in the public eye for so long and has had so many awards and nominations that even she got tired of all the attention.
Both Meryl Streep and Viola Davis, in an endearing and highly emotional introduction speech, rose to the occasion to highlight the true role of the artist in society, and we were all overdue for some real integrity. Patricia Arquette’s speech at the 2015 Oscars was of course an example of this type of integrity, and surely gave Meryl Streep a boost of energy, judging from her reaction back then.
Meryl Streep of course has a long history of playing both powerful and vulnerable women in film, and surely has done much behind the scenes to help others, but this very public speech at the start of 2017 was much needed and truly some light in the darkness that has been pretty much all of 2016 and specifically the hideous Trump election.
I was personally getting more exhilarated by the minute, or by the second rather, and felt particularly spoken to as a foreigner, from the Netherlands, and a filmmaker living in Hollywood, still struggling after 25 years here, to finalize my paperwork to be able to stay here permanently and get on with my professional and personal life. In one charged speech she validated my whole existence and reason for being and struggling in Hollywood for 25 years.
I had only caught a tiny glimpse of Viola Davis getting her star on Hollywood Boulevard a couple of days earlier, (first star of the year,) with Meryl Streep in attendance, (that was the reason she had lost her voice, speaking to loud fans on a rainy day,) when I happened to be on my way to Starbucks. I’d heard some commotion in the distance and had seen a big helicopter hanging right over my office for a while but I had no idea it was for Viola Davis, and Meryl Streep, or else I would have rushed over there. I’m still kicking myself over that one. (I’m so used to commotion and helicopters in Hollywood I often don’t pay close attention anymore. There are always helicopters circling around and often times for negative things or big movie shoots but I’m pretty sure by the way it was just hanging there in one spot it had to do with the event directly.)
Meryl Streep was a real regular on Dutch television in the 80s when I was growing up, (Dutch TV was flooded with American fare in general,) and both my parents and myself were big fans of her and huge film fans in general. Film had always played a very important role in our lives, and that’s what ultimately caused me to move to the US by myself in 1992, at age 19, to study film in Los Angeles.
Film was my parents’ way to refuse to grow up in a sense, and it was the glue that held us together as a family. I grew up an only child in a small and rather boring, mostly working class kind of town but my mother grew up in nearby The Hague, which brimmed with movie theaters and clubs and restaurants and my parents were always going to the movies, long before I was born, and then dragging me along because they couldn’t afford a babysitter. So I actually got to attend classics like The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon upon their original releases in the early 70s, before I could even understand anything, and I have no idea how they were able to keep me from crying in the theater. And the obsessive movie watching tradition just never really stopped.
Before the internet days, before DVDs and VOD streaming, before cable TV, and before we had our first VCR, saved up for and bought by me in 1989, (and I even remember renting VCR’s along with films in a big plastic case from Blockbuster-like videostores,) we’d either go to the theater or watch movies playing on TV, my parents luckily both having great taste and skipping the big blockbusters for what are now considered classics of American cinema. You didn’t have a gazillion channels on TV in those days neither, especially in the Netherlands, (12 channels total from what I can remember, 2 channels each from several countries,) and Saturday evening was movie night. It was hyped up that way on TV, and we bought into it, my mother often buying a cake to go with the coffee when we knew something really good was going to go on.
We’d draw the curtains closed, dimmed the lights in the living room, (one TV in our household, like most families in those days,) pulled up our chairs, and with coffee and cake, (and my father smoking one cigarette after the other right there in the room,) watched films like The Deer Hunter, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood (featuring one of the first lesbian sub-stories I can personally remember, as a mostly closeted lesbian myself back then,) and Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Serpico, The Pawnbroker, On the Waterfront, Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, East of Eden, A Place in the Sun, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Once Upon a Time in America, etc. There was no rating system in the Netherlands neither and I got exposed to just about everything, the Dutch being heavy on sex and Americans heavy on violence, and it’s kind of a miracle I turned out reasonably sane. (After midnight the Dutch channels just turned to static for a while and then some soft-porn channel would come on, and my parents would switch over to the BBC, which would run for a couple of hours longer.
And speaking of the Dutch and their fondness of sex, it was really nice to see Dutch director Paul Verhoeven win the Best Foreign Film category at the Golden Globes yesterday with the French Entry of Elle, and using his whole time on stage to praise the wonderful French actress, and lead of Elle, Isabelle Huppert, to a somewhat awkward response from the audience in general.)
Those movie watching days will always be some of my fondest childhood memories, and even the Oscars were a huge deal, always televised live and in its’ entirety, and we’d be glued to the TV for the whole show, rooting for our personal favorites, despite having absolutely no personal investment in any of it. The neighbors in our apartment building were more down to earth and just thought we were crazy. In the 80s the Oscars also happen to take place in March, on the same day as my birthday, and so my birthday in my youth always overshadowed but celebrated somehow by watching the Oscars with coffee and cake instead.
Later on, after I moved to Los Angeles legally on a 5-year Student Visa and studied film at LACC, with intention of transferring to UCLA, which never happened due to me falling “Out-of-Status,” (because of my first US Citizen husband’s marriage and divorce, while I was a lesbian, and then the Defense Of Marriage Act of 1996 doing me in, while all my European, heterosexual film school contemporaries were getting married and receiving their Green Cards,) I ended up working for almost a decade at the art house movie theater chain, The Laemmle Theatres, (owned by Robert Laemmle and later joined by his son Gregory, related to Carl Laemmle, who had founded Universal Studios in 1917.)
I worked at primarily their Santa Monica theater, (6 evenings a week for 9 years straight, sometimes covering shifts at their other locations,) then called the Monica 4-Plex, (now Laemmle’s Monica Film Center,) throughout the 90s in what would later be known as a sort of revival decade of independent cinema, (after the more commercial 80s,) seeing some of the biggest names around now getting their first start there, pacing around nervously in the theater lobby, their fame often rising per screening.
The Laemmle Theatres, specializing in independent and foreign films, were a real celebrity hotspot in general throughout the 90s, and didn’t have the competition of the Pacific Theaters just yet, and of course no Netflix existed, and so they drew massive crowds on an almost nightly basis. They also specialized in red carpet premieres, four-walling (theater rentals,) and film festivals, and every organization from the AFI and AFM to the IDA, OutFest and Film Independent (then IFP/West) held screening events there, with the Santa Monica location also conveniently located just one block from the ocean.
I got to see more films than I could handle, all for free, as almost a required part of the job, and even got free tickets to all other movie theaters in Los Angeles. A whole decade of free films at every single movie theater in LA. (My personal favorite hangout was the New Beverly Cinema, then owned and run by film buff Sherman Torgan, who passed away in 2007, leaving the day to day business to his son Michael, while the actual business and programming got taken over by Quentin Tarantino.)
I got to appropriately end my 9-year Box Office job at The Laemmle Theatres by producing a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective, my personal film hero, at my request. I chose the line-up, including the only film not directed by Cassavetes himself, Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, wrote, designed and distributed the flyers at every college, coffeehouse and film organization in town, (with the help of my second husband-to-be,) and helped track the original film prints down for the theater’s booking agent. We booked the cast and crew and moderated the Q&A’s, and helped get some press for it, (Gary Oldman was instrumental in drawing attention to the event by interviewing Gena Rowlands for Venice Magazine, and Film Independent featured it in their then monthly printed event calendar,) and despite it running throughout the Fall of 2001, (3 months total,) right in the aftermath of 9/11, it was hugely successful. People generally felt very vulnerable and John’s films were the perfect remedy.
In the theater lobby we sold copies of a newly published biography, Ray’s Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes, like hotcakes, and the unplanned addition of a brand-new documentary on John Cassavetes, Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge, (for an upcoming Criterion Collection Cassavetes 5 films DVD set,) finished the run. My timing couldn’t have been better in that regard, as there was a surge of renewed interest in John Cassavetes in 2001. My co-workers and lower management, mainly guys, had gotten increasingly bothered by me and the retrospective’s success though and as a result The Laemmle Theatres let me go, (without ever giving me an official reason,) in November of 2001, about the worst time in recent US history, so soon after 9/11, to lose a job but it made a great addition to my modest resume.
It helped me secure future internships at film production companies like IFC’s then west coast division Next Wave Films, Samuel Goldwyn Films, and Miramax, as well as one’s of the original sponsors of the retrospective film organization Film Independent. Besides interning at their office in 2002 they also let me volunteer for their 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival and Independent Spirit Awards, (as a celebrity escort, for the awesome Diego Luna in 2002, and “queen of indie film” and personal 90s favorite Lili Taylor in 2003.)
So it all worked out for the most part. The part that didn’t work out however was that I didn’t get paid for any of this work, and moreover couldn’t wholeheartedly pursue paid positions at any of these places, because I had lost my legal status in this country, and even though I technically had documents to get employment and pay income taxes, (which I always have done,) that is real state identification and a real Social Security number, I was getting increasingly self-conscious about my status in a post 9/11 US.
I had gotten hired legally at The Laemmle Theatres on a temporary work permit, after my first husband started my adjustment-of-status in late 1992 but never finished it, and I had already gotten my Social Security number immediately upon arrival in the US in the summer of 1992 on a valid international 5-year Student Visa, (after completing all the paperwork, English tests, medical exams, and paying some $15000 total in fees, including required full-time, out-of-state tuition for the first two semesters, international health insurance, and proof of covered expenses for room and board,) since I was allowed to work for pay on school campus, (as well as do unpaid internships in my field of study.)
Of course I wasn’t eligle for unemployment benefits neither, despite having been hired legally and always paying my income taxes, and like I said the Laemmle’s themselves never gave me a reason for letting me go neither, yet showed interest in my film project and wanted me to screen it at their theater as well. They shook my hand on my way out of the home office and wished me good luck on my creative endeavors, which is somewhat odd behavior after you’ve just been told that they don’t want you to work for them anymore. (They also didn’t do the actual firing but let an assistant manager, without firing authority, ban me from working and entering the theater, so no one actually used the word fired. The Laemmle’s themselves remained very friendly with me when I would run into them at film festivals in subsequent years. The assistant manager who banned me got fired shortly after my film retrospective himself, I heard from a coworker I happened to run into. All very strange.)
With the exception of a couple of legal trips back to the Netherlands during my first 5 years here, and my parents visiting me twice in Los Angeles after that, in 1998 and 2003, I haven’t had a normal, continuous relationship with them in 25 years.
We have continued our relationship over the phone during those years, and the conversation, regarding the subject of film in particular, shifted increasingly towards my own writings and film projects, as well as my reasons for being here, and having gotten stuck in a broken immigration system, which federally discriminated against LGBTQ immigrants by excluding us from family immigration law through DOMA, from 1996 to 2015, (in an even way longer history of LGBTQ immigration exclusion policies, which I’m covering along with my own personal story in an upcoming Feature Documentary called The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented,) but also the passing away of more or less contemporaries of my parents mainly, from Marlon Brando to Karen Black, in my parents’ increasing awareness of own their mortalities.
And I’m not even including the string of unfortunate deaths in 2016, because my father passed away of a heart attack himself in late 2015, (incidentally hospitalized a couple a weeks before next to Dutch director of the film Speed Jan De Bont’s brother, cinematographer Peter De Bont, of Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and Blood, with whom he was discussing film from his hospital bed, and showing off his pride at me struggling to make it in Hollywood. Peter De Bont passed away himself several months later, in July of 2016.)
So, to finish it off with the Golden Globes of 2017. Meryl Streep’s both heartfelt and political speech meant the world to me in an otherwise mostly uneven awards show.
Highlights of the evening, besides Streep’s Lifetime Achievement Award and speech, were Viola Davis’ win for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama) in Fences, and her own two speeches, full of both humility and defiance as only Viola Davis can bring it on, (including a wonderful Emile Zola quote about the purpose of an artist being living life loud,) and Moonlight for Best Drama, which I’ve admittedly not seen yet, despite rave reviews, just because I have been turning every penny lately to finish up my own documentary on LGBTQ immigration rights, but I am anxiously awaiting my voting screeners from Film Independent for the 2017 Independent Spirit Awards, which includes a copy of Moonlight.
As I mentioned before, I rather appreciated Paul Verhoeven’s win and speech for Best Foreign Film Elle, (although foreign seemed to have primarily translated into European,) and was okay with witnessing Atlanta take it for Best TV Series (Comedy) over my personal favorite Transparent, which has gotten quite a bit of attention and won top awards at the two previous Globes shows. And I could also appreciate Diego Luna’s insistence on speaking Spanish, in light of Donald Trump’s horribly racist threats to mainly Mexican immigrants, even though the audience fell completely quiet during his segment, instead of picking up on what he was doing and giving him some encouragement.
I personally rather appreciated Evan Rachel Woods, Octavia Spencer and Kathryn Hahn’s tuxedo choices, especially since I’ve been sort of lobbying for women to wear tuxedos to award shows, not as gender identity statements but as symbolic gesture to bring attention to the very real problem of misogyny in the film industry in general and the gender wage gap specifically.
As far as La La Land being the big winner, Ryan Gosling is likable enough as usual and his own speech felt sincere, but the story of two struggling, white artists feels very tired and contrite.
Low points in general, besides Mel Gibson’s and Vince Vaughn’s angry faces, were the entire rushing through of all things truly artful, (like the film clips themselves, in horrible montages,) and political alike, (with the exception of Streep’s well deserved stage time,) in favor of the usual entertainment shallowness and the predictably male, white agenda. The worst of it were the embarrassingly skipping of mentions of Moonlight and its’ director Barry Jenkins, and a parade of burly beards on white, heterosexual men.
If anyone questions why big beards on white men are inappropriate, it is in fact a throwback to “American heritage,” (white heritage that is of course,) and a blatant display of white privilege, for it wasn’t too long ago that plenty of men of color sporting such bushy beards were nabbed by the FBI and thrown in prison at Guantanamo Bay, suspected of terrorism without ever being charged, and they are still very subject to racial profiling in today’s political climate.
Besides this it is a blatant symbol of hyper-masculinity in a time when we are anticipating a sexual harasser for a president, and in a generally misogynist atmosphere known amongst the more aware ones of us as “rape culture.” (Other than that I have nothing against facial hair in particular.)
And the single lowest point of the evening was Casey Affleck Best Actor win, in light of several sexual harassment claims against him by female industry professionals, and whose accounts of his behavior I don’t doubt for a minute.
And I’ll end my Golden Globes rant with the poignant Carrie Fisher (RIP) quote, and best advice ever: “Take your broken heart, turn it into art.”
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If you enjoyed this article, please recommend it by pushing the little heart button at the bottom of the page, or share in your social media, or both.
And please check out my other articles at medium.com/@gabriellabregman, on mainly LGBTQ and immigration issues and the state of women in film.
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBT Immigrants (2014)
The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries (2016)
Gender-Binary System notes (2016)
My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (2015)
Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise (2015)
The 2016 Valentine’s Day Filmmakers Manifesto (2016)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
Click for Complete List of Articles (2016)
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based writer, filmmaker, producer, currently in post-production of a feature documentary called ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company ‘Queer Women Filmmakers Center, Los Angeles.’
You can find me mostly on Facebook for right now, (facebook.com/gabriellabregman,) where I also maintain a Facebook Group called ‘Queer Women Filmmakers Center, Los Angeles’
