Barry Sonnenfeld - Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother

Copyright 2020 by Sonnenfeld Productions, Inc.

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First Edition: March 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sonnenfeld, Barry, author.

Title: Barry Sonnenfeld, call your mother : memoirs of a neurotic filmmaker / Barry Sonnenfeld.

Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034038 | ISBN 9780316415613 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316415637 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sonnenfeld, Barry. | Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. | CinematographersUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.S616 A3 2020 | DDC 791.4302/33092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034038

ISBNs: 978-0-316-41561-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-41563-7 (ebook)

E3-20200213-JV-NF-ORI

For Sweetie.

REGRET THE PAST

FEAR THE PRESENT

DREAD THE FUTURE

I n 2011, I directed Men in Black 3, the third and final film in my MIB trilogy. It was a profoundly painful experience. Someday I might write about it.

Etan Cohennot to be confused with Ethan Coen, Joel Coens brother, who uses the same letters of the alphabet but puts the h in his first name, unlike Etan, who saves it for his lastwrote the screenplay. I co-wrote a pivotal sequence in which a character named Griffin the Archanan explains the concept of quantum mechanics to Will Smith and Josh BrolinAgents J and K.

Griffin, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is the last surviving member of the Archanan race and, as such, has the unique ability to see infinite potential outcomes of any action. I called him a Quantum Mechanic. He is loosely based on me.

In the scene, set at Shea Stadium in the summer of 1969, Griffin offers Agents J and K a device to save Earth. He also provides them with proof of his quantum timeviewing ability by showing them the final game of the 1969 World Series, which wont happen for another three months.

The truth he reveals is that life is a series of accidents, and only the most optimistic of all possible outcomes would have resulted in me, Barry Sonnenfeld, making it to this point in life.

Wait.

Thats not what Griffin says.

What he says is this:

There are so many futures and theyre all real. You just dont know which ones will coalesce. Until then, theyre all happening. Like this one: Its my favorite moment in human history. All the things that had to converge for the Mets to win the World Series. They were in last place every season until they won it all.

That baseball, for instance, thrown for the last out in Game 5, manufactured in 1962 by the Spalding factory of Chicopee, Massachusetts. It was aerodynamically flawed due to the horsehide being improperly tanned because Sheila, the tanners wife, left him for a Puerto Rican golf pro that Sunday.

When that ball is pitched to Davey Johnson, who only became a baseball player because his father couldnt find a football to give him for his 8th birthday, it hits his bat two micrometers too high, causing him to pop up to Cleon Jones, who would have been born Clara, a statistical typist, if his parents didnt have an extra glass of wine that night before going to bed.

A miracle is what seems impossible but happens anyway.

That summarizes the story of my life.

Directing Griffin the Archanan. Men in Black 3.

I was at Shea that day when the Miracle Mets won the World Series, cheering on the home team with Judy Dakin, a zaftig Jewish girl I was in love with. We played hooky from Music & Art High School and took the 7 train out to Shea. At twenty bucks for the pair, Judy and I bought a couple of scalped tickets to history.

Its been a slow process, but over the past several decades, Ive started to embrace another theory of quantum mechanics. I wonder if I have died multiple times and managed in each incident to move to a different multiverseone where, instead of dying, I miraculously live on in a world exactly like the one I previously lived in, except:

My father managed to swerve the Caddy back into our lane and avoid a head-on collision with a tractor trailer.

I wasnt killed by muggers on 14th Street and Fifth Avenue.

I didnt die when my plane crashed at Van Nuys Airport.

And most recently, the elk I hit doing 70 miles an hour on I-80 forty miles east of North Platte, Nebraska, didnt kill me.

6:40 a.m., I-80 West, North Platte, Nebraska. HDR 9 exposures.

Or maybe there are no multiple universes and Im just very lucky.

Of course, luck can be a subjective thing. Theres the story of a Japanese man who was visiting Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on that city. He survived the nuclear explosion. Over the next three days, he managed to walk, bike, and hitchhike the four hundred kilometers back to his hometown of Nagasaki, whereupon the United States dropped an atomic bomb on