When I graduated from Oberlin, a year later, I decided that the best use of my limited income from babysitting would be to rent a hundred-and-fifty-square-foot “studio” a story below the Safdies. Sara—my gamine friend who had accompanied me to Slamdance, a budding film editrix—took the desk next to mine. Now I wasn’t just an interloper; I was a part of the fabric of the place. Another friend of the group’s also joined our floor, an actress and writer named Greta Gerwig, who was already famous to me because she’d starred in some of the premier mumblecore films of the mid- to late aughts, which had beckoned from the shelves of Campus Video and convinced me that a career in movies was within my reach.
Sara and I were diligently shooting and editing episodes of a web series, “Delusional Downtown Divas,” that was meant to skewer the art world. “D.D.D.,” as we called it, averaged about three hundred views an episode, but it was a way to create work at a breakneck pace. We’d often shoot at actual art openings, live music events, and other settings that made our lack of a production budget look less glaring. The series starred three of my closest friends, Isabel, Joana, and Audrey, whom I’d met when I was one, three, and thirteen, respectively. At night, we partied prodigiously, in echoey lofts rented by boys who dressed like James Dean and had somehow been paid well for indie albums that didn’t chart; at the Jane Hotel, where the Olsen twins could be spotted on a Tuesday night; or in our childhood homes when our parents were away for the weekend. During the week, I sped from a job selling couture-influenced baby attire to my little office, where I edited on a desktop computer that I’d put on my first credit card and was paying off ten dollars at a time. Greta, meanwhile, used our space to film audition tapes, and occasionally I would act as her reader, running lines from scripts with code names like “Flight of the Pterodactyls” (which turned out to be one of the many “Jurassic Park” reboots). We were all in awe when Greta booked her first studio film, Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” and headed off to California. When she came home, three months later, we threw her a huge party in Chinatown. I asked her how Hollywood was, and she shrugged. “Everyone hikes,” she said.
Looking back, it was a very innocent time. Yes, there was drama. A boy who knew a boy built us a storage loft and a ladder, into which he wood-burned the Springsteen lyrics “I love you for your pink Cadillac,” and so naturally I slept with him, then road-tripped with him to a wedding in Kentucky. By the end of the weekend we weren’t speaking, except when he demanded that I drive on the highway in Baltimore so that he could get some shut-eye, even though I had no license. Sara and I got into a fight when I found out that she and an older paramour had been sleeping on the floor of the office at night, which seemed to me like an abuse of privileges (although it’s impossible, now, to imagine caring about that). One time, a jilted boyfriend of Audrey’s stomped into my office with a thrifted lamp that she had forgotten at his place, smashed it, and screamed, “Make sure to tell her about this!”
We weren’t making money. If anything, we were losing it, and we were living with our parents in order to be able to afford our odd little utopia. Ariel (or Rel, as we called him) once spent hours constructing a phone system between our floors out of tin cans and twine, just so that we could tell dirty jokes followed by “over and out.” To this day, I feel a pang every time I watch a documentary about artists and they describe the moment when they first became part of a creative community, when nobody was doing it for the cash yet, nobody had betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout. At the time, it all seemed tentative and terrifying, impossible and inevitable. In total, this period lasted only a year or so, but it felt much longer, or maybe wider, because it was when I really fell in love with movies. It was also the first time that I felt like someone worth knowing.