Not long after Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester was released, I was discussing the director with my friend Brendan, at a rooftop party in Brooklyn. (I included that last detail so you’d know that I am — or at least have been — or at least think I may have been — cool.)
With Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester under his directorial belt, we envisioned Van Sant’s next film…. We suggested it be an autobiographical bio-pic in which a brilliant young filmmaker overcomes adversity to find his own voice (with the help of a mentor character who doesn’t quite follow the rules). The experienced and uninspired Van Sant, as mentor, must confront the commercialization of his recent films and the accompanying loss of passion for his work… together, mentor and student, they learn to reject the Hollywood system and find their own way.
The name of the film: Running Out of Gerunds.
Now, no one ever thinks this is nearly as brilliant and funny as we did. (And I realize now that “finding” in this instance is probably not actually a gerund, but a present tense verb. The hubris of youth!) Nevertheless, I love the joke dearly.
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To be fair, it is certainly notable that Van Sant took the clout he earned with the success of Good Will Hunting and went ahead and made a big fat failed experiment of a movie that is probably only successful as commentary on the intersection of the low-budget-and-scrappy and the movie-star-laden-and-over-marketed.
Only because of Good Will Hunting did anyone let Van Sant make Psycho.
A few years later he returns to commercial filmmaking. In a way Finding Forrester is simply a sequel to Good Will Hunting, and as Van Sant explains in an interview with The Believer, “The most interesting films that studios want to be making are sequels. They would rather make sequels than make the originals, which is always a kind of a funny Catch-22.”
[Running Out of Gerunds artwork by Alex W. Meriwether]
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