Author Bio

So, what do you call it? Fate? Kismet? If my mother would not have run into Barbara’s mother on the Plaza in Kansas City and if Barbara was not leaving her job in Beverly Hills with the renowned motion picture agent, Jack Gilardi, to marry an unknown chubby hilarious new comedian named Don Rickles and if my mother hadn’t insisted I go get Barbara’s job…see? People in the wings setting you up…you walk through another door and sit at a desk in a sheath and high heels answering the phone, “Good Morning, Jack Gilardi’s office,” until one noisy afternoon when John Cassavetes saunters down the carpeted hallway and lands sitting on the corner of your desk and offers you a job. And another door opens and you’re learning the picture business. How to make a movie from the ground up. Holy Macaroni. Magic. Fade out. Fade In on all my years with Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. John, circling the room in his Wallabees and me writing down every word he said in shorthand. Typing it. And reading the scene out loud to whoever he’d lassoed into the office. The UPS guy, the Sparkletts guy. “Hey, you got a minute?” he would ask, grinning. And they were hooked to listen because, after all, besides being a writer and a director, John was a movie star.

Was I lucky? You bet. Am I grateful? Oh, man.

“We’re gonna shoot on March 23th,” John would say with his eyes all lit up. What? How? But if John said we were gonna make the picture, we made the picture. If he said you could do the job, you did it. I learned how to work a Nagra, lift a boom mike, hold an Arriflex which weighed nearly as much as me, and shoot. “Shoot the scene, kid,” Cassavetes said, handing me the camera and walking out of the room. We were shooting in a practical – a real house, not on a set. Where we cooked the food for the scene and called everyone in town to buy short ends to shoot the next day. Kind of like left-overs. That’s what you do when you don’t have money. I learned how to be a script girl – I would rather wait tables. I learned how to cut 35mm on a Moviola, which I assume are all gone. Maybe there’s one at the Academy or in the basement at Eastman Kodak. If there’s still an Eastman Kodak. I learned how to time a print at Deluxe with a guy named Otto Paoloni. “Not too sepia,” he said, frowning as I moved the dials. “That a girl,” he said, as I eased off the yellow and opened up the red. I learned how to find a good quote out of a bad review to use in an ad. Not an easy trick. Skipping across a sentence cutting out words. Kind of like dead-heading geraniums. And I learned to write. Watching him, listening to endless readings of the script. I didn’t know I was learning to write but I guess that’s what happened. I think so. I hope so.

And in between I got to watch Gena work. Close up. On the set, in their house, in the kitchen making spaghetti, in the driveway sitting in her convertible with the top down, doing lines. Oh baby. Caught up in her impeccable timing, so close to her that I smelled like her perfume. The greatest acting class a person could get.

And somewhere in there I got married, I had a baby, and I woke up one morning with a story in my head. And for five and a half years I sat at my red Selectric typewriter that I rolled in and out of the breakfast room and I wrote THE GIRLS in between driving car pool, lugging kids to school and McDonalds and being a wife to a successful working husband and taking improv class and folding laundry and making more spaghetti and marching for women’s rights. And the book got published! And somewhere after that I wrote four more books and got a divorce and wrote some magazine pieces and some short stories and acted in a few small parts in a few great big movies and landed a lot of guest star parts on a lot of super television shows and found myself writing a book of short stories with a novella about all of it – thinly disguised, if you will, or possibly, I hope, capturing THE PICTURE BUSINESS. And there you have it. Years packed into sentences. A grateful woman touched by Fate. Kismet. Whatever you call it. I say luck and moxie. I say blessed.

Elaine Kagan

A member in good standing of SAG-AFTRA and the Writer’s Guild of America.