No Small Affair

Listeners of the very early episodes of the Brattle Film Podcast will know that this mostly forgotten teen romcom, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this weekend, was a foundational film for me, though I didn't realize it at the time. The story of a young guy obsessed with film (still photography, not cinema) who falls in love with an older singer may have a few surface similarities to my own life, but that's not really why this movie looms so large in my psychological makeup. It was my first encounter with the kind of movie that would go on to become my favorite type of film story&mdash, the Brief Encounter Picture. These are films about people who meet for a short period of time but form a connection that affects them profoundly. Though the characters in these films rarely, if ever, see each other again, their lives are forever changed because of this chance meeting. Often, their differing backgrounds make them an unexpected or unlikely pair, but that's part of what makes their connection special, as is the fleeting nature of the time they spend together. After seeing many films of this ilk, I came away with the belief that just because nothing lasts forever, that doesn't mean we should not invest time, energy, and passion into whatever relationships and projects we feel drawn to. This lesson has served me well, though, interestingly, I've lived a fairly consistent life.

Some of the best examples of these brief encounter pictures are my all-time favorite film, Roman Holiday, and the David Lean/Noel Coward picture, Brief Encounter, which I named this sub-genre after. There are also George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, Clint Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and John Carney's Once. Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise was a classic brief encounter until the story of its characters continued in later films. Brief Encounter pictures are usually about two people in a romantic context, but not always. I would argue that John Hughes's The Breakfast Club belongs to this group. They often center on young people—though Tom McCarthy's The Visitor is a wonderful example where the protagonist is a man in his 60s. They are most often small-scale, low-budget pictures, though you can't find a bigger production than James Cameron's Titanic, which is a quintessential brief encounter picture. Casablanca is the story of two brief encounters: one in Paris where Rick and Ilsa fall in love only to be separated by the German occupation, and the second when they meet up again in Casablanca and are able to get their relationship back to a place where they'll, "always have Paris."

But the movie-going experience itself is fundamentally a brief encounter. When we watch a film, we spend just a couple of hours with the characters and events depicted on the screen. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we take our brief glimpses into these worlds and move on, but every now and then, we see a film that presents us with truth or stirs in us an emotion that irrevocably alters our perspectives. We carry these films around with us forever like touchstones. We may revisit them occasionally, and we may feel differently about them as the decades pass, but the initial experience will stay with us forever, even though it only represents about two hours of our lives. Indeed, when I first saw No Small Affair—not in the theater but on HBO a year or so later at my cousins' house—it didn't hit me as something profound that I would be writing about 40 years later. But as the decades passed and I examined my life at key junctures, I couldn't help thinking about how significantly films have shaped my life choices, and this one—far more than any of the classic teen movies I loved and watched over and over when I was young—was always there in the mix.

No Small Affair stars Jon Cryer as Charles Cummings, a high school student with a passion for still photography of buildings and landscapes who one day accidentally snaps a picture of the beautiful Laura Victor (Demi Moore) when she stumbles into the frame of his perfectly composed shot of a fishing pier. After developing the photo, he falls in love with her image and tries to track her down without any luck. That is until his older brother (Peter Frechette) and soon-to-be sister-in-law (EG Daily) take him to a bar where she happens to be singing. He convinces her to let him do a series of proper photos of her, which she can use for publicity. This leads to some very '80s montage sequences set to some very '80s pop songs, including a terrific title track that underscores the day they spend running around San Francisco taking pictures. The movie is full of fun tunes and plenty of '80s-era conflicts, obstacles, and shenanigans. Charles's mother (Ann Wedgeworth) and her latest paramour (Jeffrey Tambor) have concerns about how Charles' obsession has switched from photography to this older woman, and most contemporary audiences will share these concerns. This is one of those movies that would not play well in our current culture, as Demi Moore's character would be considered a straight-up pedophile groomer today for the ways in which she deals with Charles’ feelings for her. I could never read this picture in that way, as I've always felt the choices made by the characters in this film come from a place of kindness, vulnerability, and affect that has always felt honest and correct to me. Everything leads up to a final scene that's about as perfect an ending for the film as the final scenes of Roman Holiday, Lost in Translation, The Bridges of Madison County, or any of the other brief encounters I listed above (OK, maybe not as good as Casablanca).

The film apparently started production in 1981 with 19-year-old Matthew Broderick starring opposite 35-year-old Sally Field. While that pairing would have technically been more legal, it would have played a whole lot weirder, especially since Field was such an established, Oscar-winning adult star by this point. I don't know how the story played out as originally written by screenwriter Craig Bolotin since the production shut down due to director Martin Ritt's health issues. A lot of rewrites occurred before the project was restarted a couple of years later with director Jerry Schatzberg (The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow, The Seduction of Joe Tynan). It had by then been re-cast with the unknown Jon Cryer and the up-and-coming Ellen Barkin. Barkin might have been terrific in the role, but Schatzberg opted for the virtually unknown Moore, whose limited credits included the soap opera General Hospital and the ultra-low-budget 3D sci-fi horror film Parasite. With these two as the leads, the film lands just as it should since both actors were coming to the picture with almost zero name recognition, yet Moore was already exuding the confidence and worldliness of a movie star.

I love No Small Affair so much that I read both Cryer's and Moore's autobiographies, mainly to learn if they actually became a couple while shooting the film. Their accounts are largely the same. Both claim they hooked up for the duration of the production, and both talk about the hard-partying Moore's wildness and how much the nebbishy Cryer was concerned about her cocaine use. Both differ slightly as to whether or not Cryer lost his virginity to Moore—she claims that he did, while he claims that he wasn't technically a virgin when they first got together but that he was so bad at sex that she probably assumed he was. Regardless, their real-life relationship dynamics seemed to enhance the roles they played in this key early film in both of their careers.

It should come as no surprise that gifted still photographer Schatzberg would hire the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heaven's Gate, Blow Out, The River) to shoot his lightweight teen comedy. This movie looks like a million bucks, as well as it should, considering it's about someone obsessed with photography. There are shots of San Francisco in this movie, like the ones of Cryer climbing out his bedroom window onto the fire escape with all his camera gear, that are some of the most beautiful renderings of this oft-used cinematic city. Schatzberg's career follows an interesting trajectory, with this film being the only plucky little teen comedy made by a director who typically helmed gritty dramas and character studies. I have no idea what he thinks of this movie, and I still kick myself for not telling him how profoundly I feel this picture affected the positive course of my life when he came to the Harvard Film Archive back when I was working there. I'm not a starfucker and don't like to bother celebrities when I'm in their midst, but on this occasion, I think I could have said something that probably no one else has ever said to man, and I regret not doing so.