Bummed About Bennifer’s Break Up
It’s really none of my business, let’s just start with that.
I mean, of course, it’s not my concern about the details that aren’t in the public domain like the meta styled movie I didn’t see that J Lo self financed to chronicle the renewal of their relationship. Nobody knows exactly why the marriage ended with the two principals walking off the proverbial stage, heart in hand and stage left. The only players the wiser for the real and reel reasoning for the demise of Bennifer 2.0 would probably be their exes, their children, and Lupe Lopez. I don’t really have a pressing need to know any salacious details and I can’t quite understand why I am disappointed for them (my incurable condition as a hopeless romantic might be the motivating factor). But, there was something incredibly inspiring about love lost and found decades later and in Hollywood.
I don’t know either of them personally, but I have enough of a six degree of separation stance to know things about their persons. I came of age in Hollywood around the same time, albeit my career wasn’t catapulted into stratospheric success the way theirs were.
When Ben Affleck created his film initiative with Matt Damon called Project Greenlight, I remember taking some meetings with their company. I don’t remember what the objective of that company actually was. Discovering unsung heroes of writing and directing? Circumventing the studio system to produce movies that they were interested in? I’m not sure anymore, it’s been awhile. The only details I do remember? There was a guy who worked for them with somewhere between beet and carrot red curls. Armed with a Harvard degree, his name was Jeff Bayliss and I remember taking enough meetings with him that we went to Santa Monica to see Amelie together. Those outings weren’t actually dates. Young executives in Hollywood suggested a list of movies they needed to see “for work” over the weekends and often invited me to tag along. That’s how I saw My Dog Skip, which I would never have chosen for myself had Patrick Baker not needed to see it when he was working for Barry Levinson, although the need for the viewing of that particular movie also escapes me. Maybe it one of the first movies the head of FedEx produced…I either wasn’t paying attention then or I am a little long in the tooth to recount…My other major connection to Affleck? I am forever in his debt for what he made happen for “The Kid”.
That’s how I affectionately referred to my assistant at the time. Before 2007, I relied solely on my momager slash guardian angel of a parent, my darling mother, Mariam, to shepherd my career and to listen when I had to strategize both script and the after effects of the general meeting. I am a very visual person and, admittedly, a super co-dependent one, too. Probably explains why I was so hard hit watching my mother in the prime of her life emaciated and destroyed by the cruelest of cancers over a short six month stint. When she died, I was quite certain the sky would be rolled up and the sun would never dare to show its bright countenance again. Evidently, I was quite mistaken as only my world went dark. My immature thought process, the same one that had helped me create worlds and memorable characters, needed somebody I trusted to help me drag myself from the depths of depression to create art for art sake and also for a paycheck. I found my angel at the now defunct Palisades Video, the last of the brick and mortar Blockbuster style video rental joints. Much like Quentin Tarantino and others who cut their teeth on creating a Hollywood career by making movie suggestions, The Kid aka Reza also had high hopes of becoming an actor and player in the reel world. He was funny and personable. I thought he had a lot of moxie when as a 21 year old he asked me out as I was old enough to be his babysitter at 15 years his senior. Nothing romantic transpired (I set him up with my cousin instead) but I hired him as my assistant as a result of our serendipitous meeting over returning DVDs 15 years ago when people still did that. Our connection was two fold. As much as I wanted to go back to work, I wanted to help insure he got what he wanted as well, just as my mother had paved the way for me. With him at the helm of my company, I sold a pitch in the room and was hired for a television pilot, a passion project for the successful and gregarious, Tommy Lynch. Reza’s parents wanted him to go a far safer, traditional route for his career, insisting that he give up the acting dream and concentrate on something that could secure a brighter financial future. They insisted he pursue a graduate degree and he acquiesced. But, not before one final and incredible opportunity. Before the dream died, Ben Affleck gave Reza an impromptu opportunity to star as airport guard 4 (maybe it was 3, who knows) in the pivotal scene of his Oscar award winning film, Argo. So last minute was this dream non speaking shot at the brass ring part, if you look closely at that tense scene towards the end of the movie, you can see Reza is still wearing his own blue turtleneck under an assumedly borrowed Persian inspired (movie set in Iran) camouflage jacket!
My connection to J Lo is a lot closer. I have always admired her chutzpah. Case in point? Mark Morgan is a producer and somebody, for a long time, I considered a friend. He was the first producer post UCLA film school to option an original script I wrote called Paying Lip Serivce. He was also the producer of J Lo’s movie, The Wedding Planner, and I always admired how she tied one of her songs that had nothing to do with the plot to the release of that movie. Both hit the tops of the box office and the charts and those were still early days for her. Years later, when I was working for Predawn Production, my boss, Ron Bass, was employed to do a polish on Maid In Manhattan and he also had a script that J Lo found herself attached to. Many a Benny Medina meeting followed, none of which I attended. Ron also had a long working relationship with a producer named Elaine Goldsmith Thomas. I liked her instantly when I met her during in their creative interactions. Elaine didn’t mince words, seemed tough and honest in her approach, and, to me, was a bad ass I could both admire and, one day, hope to emulate. Years passed, and with Reza’s help, I found myself taking meetings again, one fortuitous one was with Elaine’s production company. Her VP at the time, Jared Mass, enjoyed my pitch so much that he insisted I pitch it to Elaine in the room when she was next in from New York. He thought we might be the perfect partnering. The day of the meeting, I was shaking in my scuffed boots! When the meeting finally happened, Elaine said she needed to attend an unexpected meeting with the studio and that I had 15 minutes. One of my party tricks is speaking really fast yet coherently, so the task was completed in under 9 minutes. She asked who I had been to so far with my pitch and I shared that I was in talks with another Hollywood female powerhouse, Debra Martin Chase. She encouraged me to continue down that path and I was temporarily crestfallen until she said she wanted to pitch me a passion project to see if I could flesh it out and we could partner up! I missed my mother so acutely in the moment as my hand slipped into hers in an agreement to work together. My mother would have been so proud. Probably too soon for me to reach for the brass ring as I choked as I was still emotionally wrought. I didn’t present my pitch confidently or as if I knew what I was doing. Alas…opportunity lost. Anyway, Elaine and J Lo continue to be best friends and producing partners to this day.
Coming back to the divorce…Honestly, I don’t know why I care. I think it has a lot to do with how publicly this played out and for how it inspired so many people to think there was a chance to rekindle emotional fires that had been reduced to embers blown away in the wind. Irrespective, I wanted for their real happiness as they are both real and reel people who deserve a connection to soulmate as much as the next guy. Also, I suspect my disappointment has something to do with my commitment to happy endings. All always ends well in my scripts. My characters always kiss and make up and then kiss some more. But, maybe there is something joyous that will come out of this for them, too. It’s in the phrase. Happy. Ending. We all want to be satiated when something comes to an end and maybe they got the closure and the mutual affection that they needed to continue to create artistically. We have all enjoyed their work to some degree, so I hope as artists and human beings they are both edified in a way that we as viewers can continue to benefit from their artistry.