The Academy Accepts This Award on Monday Movies’s Behalf

Last night, an old friend of mine walked up on the Oscar stage. Seth Gordon produced the movie “Undefeated”, about a coach who takes on the challenge of a poor, neglected North Memphis high school’s football team. I didn’t even know that the movie existed, much less that he’d had a hand in it. I was so surprised that I assumed it was someone else named Seth Gordon. (Why, there’s even another one involved in high school sports!) But there he was, a head taller than the rest of the directors and producers. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person in my wide circle of friends who had a connection to them. A few of their names turned up in tagged congratulations in my Facebook status feed.

I remain outrageously fond of the first movie by Seth I ever saw. I’m not talking about his first commercial feature, Four Christmases, which contains two hilarious sequences — the Rube Goldberg destruction of the family home via rooftop antenna, and the destruction of  Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon’s senses of superiority via a game of Taboo against Vaughn’s bonehead stepbrother (Jon Favreau). Nor am I talking about the from-nowhere documentary that jump-started his career, The King of Kong, in which the documentarian’s monastic patience paid off in the form of Billy Mitchell, a fermenting anti-hero who seemed to have been lying in wait for his close-up. Nor his first theatrical release, New York Doll, which he produced and edited, a sad and beautiful walk in the evening with a Dionysiac androgyne aged into cronehood.

The first movie I saw by Seth, he made when I was sleeping and showed me the next morning. We were at a retreat for our college improv group in the woods in New Hampshire. We’d been taking turns noodling with his video camera all night–I’m sure there were some action-movie somersaults on the tape, shots of us hurtling over the floral-patterned vacation-home couch making guns with our fingers the cool way. After everyone had gone to bed–or possibly just when no one was looking–Seth staged a ballet on the dining room table. With the camera resting on the table and his hands out of view, he shot salt and pepper shakers and Coke cans and red-and-yellow plastic squeeze bottles past one another and right up to the camera. It was very, very funny, and it wasn’t clear why, because it was also very original.

This is maybe a you-had-to-be-there story. But I was there. And I remember it, because I wanted to watch it a couple of times over and over, like children and their shows. I do not claim that I saw it and thought, “wow, this guy is going places!” But I did think about the movie now and then, and talked about it plenty of times when the hook of the story wasn’t “I knew him when” but just “I know this guy.”