Right now I’m starting a film studio called TEXARKANA. I have a group of films I’ve been developing for the last few years that I’m ready to make, and I’m also ready to work for other directors as an actor.
TEXARKANA is a studio, but it’s also a proposal for how I want to spend the rest of my life. Making feature films. Making plays. Working with people for a long time. Rehearsing. Developing performances. Making things inside recognizable forms and genres but trying to make something actually new inside them.
I’ve had a lot of jobs.
For the last five years I’ve been studying acting very seriously. I started because I realized that even though I had spent my life around cameras, performers, fashion, documentary, advertising and filmmaking, I didn’t actually understand what actors did. I wanted to understand performance from inside the body.
That changed the way I direct and changed the way I think about films.
Before that I had finished a film called SHAKEDOWN, which I had been making, in one form or another, for more than a decade. I first went to Shakedown when I came back to Los Angeles after college. I met Ronnie that night and asked if I could take pictures. Eventually I asked if I could videotape the shows.
I started filming every night.
I would shoot the performances and then edit the footage and bring it back. I wasn’t really selling it. I would give people their birthday parties, performances, dances. I was learning how to edit by showing people themselves.
At some point that stopped feeling like a job and became a life.
Years later I finished the film and showed it at the Whitney Biennial. Then I traveled with it. Then my mother died. Then COVID happened. The movie went online.
Somewhere in there I got an agent and started trying to develop larger narrative films.
Before all of that I had another life.
I was one of the founders of Hood By Air.
I had gone to graduate school at Bard because I thought I was going to become an artist. I got kicked out. When I came back to New York I could barely figure out how to make money. I tried assisting a stylist. She barely paid me. I was helping my girlfriend with a party and making little videos and trying to understand how anyone survived here.
Then I connected with Shayne.
I had become suspicious of the way the art world worked. I felt like people with structures and money could witness our lives, take from them, turn them into culture, and somehow we still wouldn’t have any money.
I became obsessed with the idea that maybe the most radical thing we could do was build something that made money.
Hood By Air became that thing.
We built it from almost nothing. It grew very quickly. Eventually we had to formalize the company because other people wanted to invest and participate in it, and I became CEO. Shayne and I were partners and co-founders in what the company became.
We did that until the company went on hiatus in 2017.
The funny thing is that before Hood By Air, most of my working life had been some version of being an assistant.
I worked for stylists.
I worked on commercials.
I worked for photographers.
For a short period I worked as a paparazzo with some Brazilian guys. I hated it. Paparazzi is mostly waiting.
For years I worked with Tony Kaye.
I met Tony when I was working at Maxfield in Los Angeles. I was a runner there. It was a strange job, almost like extremely high-end servant work. I spent a lot of my time hiding in their antiquarian book collection.
Michael Jackson would shop there. J.Lo would come in and try on Gucci underwear. Famous people were constantly moving through the store.
Tony started coming in and talking to me. Then he started calling the store just to talk.
At the time I thought I wanted to go to Jewish theological seminary. He was interested in that. We became friends.
One day he used something from one of our conversations in an interview, and I called him and basically said: I can do this for you. Please get me out of here.
He sent a black car to pick me up.
I thought I was being prostituted.
I told him never to send a car like that for me again.
Eventually I started working for him as a researcher and then as a director’s assistant. I worked on Lake of Fire. I went to Pensacola, Florida, and did my first documentary interview sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Tony was making some of the biggest commercials in the world at that time. I drove him around in a huge black Cadillac with the license plate JEWISH. He didn’t like talking on the phone, so I made his calls. I went to meetings. I styled commercials. I learned how directors behaved in rooms.
He became my mentor and, in many ways, my benefactor. He helped me pay for school.
At Antioch I studied media and social change. I also worked for Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, mostly as an assistant editor on A Lion in the House. Between them and Tony I started to understand what documentary filmmaking could be.
Before Maxfield I worked at Fred Segal in Brentwood.
My uncle got me the job.
I worked in the men’s department. Rich dads would come in and I would help them button their shirts.
Before that I had one of the strangest jobs of my life.
I had moved back to Los Angeles and was looking for telemarketing work. I found a place in Hollywood, near Hollywood and La Brea, behind a strip mall underneath a huge billboard.
It was run by Russian guys.
We cold-called convenience stores across America and sold them things from a catalog: lighters, little products, whatever they could put near the register.
We also sold porn on VHS.
Eventually I realized that the reason they had hired me was that I was a young woman with a nice voice and they wanted me to call men in convenience stores and read them the titles of porn tapes.
I remember thinking: Is this phone sex?
There was a Russian guy who worked there who wore very short white shorts and fed a white pigeon.
I quit.
Before Los Angeles I was in Seattle.
I had left my parents’ house and eventually my parents took me to court so I could become emancipated.
I worked at a bakery called the Urban Bakery. I would get up incredibly early — which to me probably meant ten in the morning — bake, and then go to high school.
I volunteered at Chicken Soup Brigade doing home care for people who were dying of AIDS.
Then I worked doing fundraising calls for the Northwest AIDS Foundation.
I loved telemarketing.
I was really good at talking to strangers. I liked figuring out how somebody who wanted to donate but didn’t have much money could divide the payment into a way that worked.
Before Seattle I was in boarding school in Israel.
I had wanted very badly to get away from my family.
At some point my parents stopped sending me money. On weekends we had to leave the boarding school, and the school found me a family to stay with near Netanya. The father was a doctor and was abusive. I stayed there maybe twice. I remember mostly locking myself in the bathroom.
Then I just stopped going.
So I needed money.
There was a group of Sephardic guys in town who everybody understood to be involved in money changing or money laundering. All the Americans went to them to exchange dollars because they loved American dollars.
They also owned a schnitzel shop.
I asked them for a job.
So my first real job may have been making schnitzel sandwiches for the mob in Israel.
The guy I worked for was named Sharon.
Sometimes I paid myself in beer or stole shekels from the register.
They were also connected to clubs in Tel Aviv, which meant I started going to nightclubs.
I think nightclubs became one of the places where I first understood the world.
Before all of this, there was my father.
My father was a pediatrician, but he never really had a normal medical practice. He was more like a pediatrician entrepreneur.
He did home visits to foster homes all over Los Angeles. My mother worked in his office. Eventually the office was in our house.
I worked there too.
He was interested in holistic medicine before that was really fashionable. I would help make pills out of echinacea and goldenseal. I filed things. I organized things. I think this may be where my love of office supplies comes from.
I remember my father teaching me how to count time using quarters. I no longer understand what that means, but I remember it.
The story of how my parents met changes depending on who tells it.
What I know is that they both already had sons.
My father had a son named Simeon Star Weinraub. My mother had a son named Ronald Shavon Marquise Johnson.
Ronald had asthma. One day my mother took him to Martin Luther King Hospital during an asthma attack.
My father was working there as an emergency room doctor.
According to a story I heard at my mother’s funeral, my father stole either my mother’s chart or my brother’s chart, found her address, and showed up at the house.
My mother was living with my grandmother and great-grandmother somewhere around 51st and Western.
My father pulled up in a huge white vintage Jaguar. This was 1978, and I think the Jaguar was already old then. I remember being told it had a bubble top. Maybe white interior. Maybe black.
He knocked.
My grandmother answered.
She called my mother and basically pushed her out the door, apparently saying something like, She can’t cook.
Their first date, as the story was told at my mother’s funeral, was my parents, my brother, and about five of my cousins going to a drive-in movie.
There were children inside the Jaguar and children sitting on top of it.
My father spent the entire movie going back and forth buying popcorn.
I was born December 23, 1979, at 11:20 in the morning.
I was born at home in Country Club Park in Los Angeles.
My father delivered me with a midwife. My grandmother and great-grandmother were there. My brother Simeon filmed my birth on 16mm. My mom was 23.
I still haven’t seen the film.
Country Club Park was a Black middle-class neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers. Lou Rawls lived across the street. Someone next door drove an incredible two-seater Mercedes. There were a few other mixed-race couples on the street. One of the husbands, according to my memory, was a Catholic priest who was married, which seems much stranger to me now than it did then.
My neighborhood nickname was Little Miss Fast Time.
My friends Jennifer and Martin lived on the corner. Their parents owned the 31 Flavors on Larchmont.
There was a house at the top of the hill that we thought was haunted, and I would run past it.
My mother described the room where I was born as candlelit. I think there may have been a Coptic guitarist there.
I don’t know if that part is true.
A lot of the beginning of my life exists for me that way: somebody tells me a story, somebody else tells me a slightly different version, and somewhere there may be a 16mm film that would prove at least some of it happened.
Maybe that’s also why I became a filmmaker.