77. The Camera Opens Doors

One of us pulled over to photograph an old pickup and a beat-up basketball hoop, and 30 seconds later the owner was walking him through his garage. The man, in his 80s, has a '69 Camaro under a cover and a drawer of hot rod t-shirts he's never worn. He turned down a portrait, but gave his address and said to come back any time. None of it would have happened without the camera, and neither would the portraits one of us took of a woman who cried as she sold him the Nirvana shirt she'd bought as a teenager. A topic card about quitting sends us two ways. One of us thinks of the line in Mad Men about Don Draper only liking the beginning of things, and wonders if that's why he left acting and screenwriting. The other hears it as advice to deal with nagging chores at once and keep a room like David Mamet's, with a typewriter and a bed. The one who left screenwriting once wrote five pages a day for years in LA, and a spec script went out to every studio and didn't sell. Facing two or three more years to get that close again, he felt like a 37-year-old still in single-A ball, and stopped. It ends in a sauna with two strangers who talked about their plans like Tarantino characters. Mentioned in this episode: Mad Men, David Mamet, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Casey Neistat, Stephen King, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, the Nikon F5. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com