Newsletter 85: Knowing THEM Back THEN

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from December 2017, about moving to Los Angeles and becoming casual friends with a young student wanna-be filmmaker named Rian Johnson. The trailer for his new film Knives Out looks awesome.

When I moved out to Los Angeles mere days after I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1997, I didn’t know a single soul out there other than Tim Grierson. I’ve written about Grierson’s and my high school friendship before, and obviously we’re still the same Mattoon dorks, as you can tell from the weekly podcast, but it was still a leap to move out there. I went out there for a job at U: The National College Magazine, and my primary objective was to look for apartments for me and my fiancee (who planned on moving out there in two months). Turned out, she quickly became my ex-fiancee, and suddenly I was adrift, sad and in a strange new city in which I only knew one guy, a guy with his own set of new friends.

Because Grierson is a good person, he immediately welcomed me into his circle of pals, all of whom, like him, had just graduated from film school at the University of Southern California. This was terribly exciting for me. USC was the school that had produced George Lucas, and Robert Zemeckis, and Ron Howard, and…