Do You Remember Laurie Zimmer? (2003) - full transcript

From day to day

a film by charlotte szlovak

with laura fanning

Twenty-five years ago,
I shot my first film in Los Angeles

with a young American actress,
Laurie Zimmer.

When I met her,

she'd decided to change her name
to Laura Fanning.

She thought it sounded better
for a career in Hollywood.

Laurie Zimmer or Laura Fanning,
it didn't matter to me.

I had ho doubt
that she would make her way to the stars.

I thought I would start my cinema career
with this movie.



It never came out.

I ended up leaving it in a box
for all those years,

and I even forgot my actress.

At the time,

I lived in New York
with my husband and my children,

my head full of film projects and illusions.

I had my whole life ahead of me.

One day, I ended up in Los Angeles,
world capital of filmmaking.

I discovered this town

that never appeared in films
aside from studio settings,

as though it deprived itself
of its own representation.

This mythic location, that's really
nothing but suburbs, fascinated me.

I wanted to describe Los Angeles,

this town without centre or limits,



and depict a woman
who either searched for herself there,

or lost herself.

I had imagined a character

representing both a Hollywood icon

and any unemployed woman in the city.

I looked for a face that could embody
this LA woman I had in mind,

but all the actresses I met
were nothing but flawed copies.

She embodied my character.

She had her grace, her femininity,

and a very particular melancholy
that radiated from her.

She was also my ideal duplicate.

A mirrored image, inverted, perfect,

in which I could project myself
without anyone recognising me.

I don't quite know...

I don't quite remember what year it was,

either '73 or '75.

It was in Los Angeles.

The French consulate had thrown
a party for French cinema.

The old school greats were there.

I knew Samuel Fuller,
who introduced me to Fritz Lang,

and Mamoulian, that I had met
at the Moscow Festival.

And suddenly,
a stunning young woman appeared.

Marvellous, in a sheath dress.

Her shoulders, her cleavage, her freckles...

She had sparkling, vivid blue eyes.

She was clever and ravishing,

with a slightly raspy voice.

And she seemed, I don't know, already...

She seemed familiar
in that way that some people do.

So, we spent the night at her place.

The phone rings in the middle of the night.

I pick up automatically.

"Hello?" And I hear a voice saying,
"Hello? Laurie?"

I recognise that voice.
It belongs to Jean Eustache.

So I say, "Jean? Is that you?"

He tells me, "Pascal? What are you doing..."

All of a sudden, Laurie rushes towards me
and takes the phone.

And I realise something.

Laurie had been in France
shooting Jean Eustache's film,

Une sale histoire,

a few months before I'd met her.

I find a trace of her
in one of Eustache's notebooks...

PEINE PERDUE
pieces of an abandoned script

In it, he says that he'd lost
his American addresses,

and that he'd arrived in Los Angeles
and looked for Laurie.

I find her again, very different,

in those pictures that Jean's son, Boris,
lent me.

I discover Laurie on set,

a little frozen, a stranger to this story.

Then, another Laurie, in more intimate roles.

I learnt that Eustache called up Laurie
before he died.

All right.

What's left'?

There's one left in Alameda.

There, I have old...

I am a true custodian.

I keep address books,

travel journals, datebooks, etc.

I keep them for years. This one is very old.

I think it's even older than...

Yes, Newsreel, that was in the '60s.

It's in alphabetical order, so...

Z. There we go.

Laurie Zimmer.
I even corrected it to Laura Fanning.

She lived at 2130, Vista del Mar.

This is where I met her.

In Hollywood.

Then, later, she had a silly address,

336 and a half, South Wilton Place,
in Los Angeles.

That's it for trails like these.

I also have two old photographs

where we see us together,
very poorly pictured,

in some cafe somewhere over there.

She was wearing her French beret.

This is the official picture.

That's it.

The past didn't exist in Hollywood.

Failure is carefully locked away
in the cupboard, along with the ghosts.

There is only a sparkling present
under the sun or the spotlight,

and an eternal, immediate
and promising future.

Time takes you away but leads you nowhere.

I come back to Los Angeles
to look for Laurie,

perhaps to start up something
with her again,

to fix the failure of my first film.

My only clues are the addresses

kept by Pascal Aubier
in his old red notebook,

the ones kept by the actors' union,
who wouldn't tell me anything else.

I visit her old homes again.

Then, I go back in time
and visit 2130 Vista del Mar,

where a ghost has been waiting for 25 years.

So many people have gone through here.

The city sends me signs
that I try to interpret.

Coincidentally, the car from the movie

that awaited me in front of her house
was nothing but a wreck.

I try to find my character's home.

But I find no trace of it in Laurie's real life
or in her character's life.

I don't know where I am.

I wander down the street,
down the neighbourhood where I filmed,

and everything is gone.

My memories and the movie's aesthetics
are no longer anchored in reality.

In Hollywood, this abyss of dreams,

I knew there was no place for me.

But I asked cinema to make me exist.

I wanted to follow my desire.

I thought I could translate it via film.

I had the prettiest actress in the world.
The town belonged to me.

We lacked money,
but we shared the same elation.

Now, how will I get on without her'?

I've hit a wall.

The town is a smooth surface,
foreign, unattainable.

Everywhere I look, I see nothing
but arrogance, money, success and power.

If I don't want to be swallowed
by this illusion of a town,

I have to hold onto a thread,
to a link in the tangle.

I find a lead in another note,
another Laurie, Laurie Frank,

scriptwriter and gallery owner in Hollywood.

She started naming people
and summoning images.

Barbet Schroeder,
Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson.

When I think about the movie
Assault on Precinct 13, I think about her.

She's the most original element
in the movie.

But I don't know how much comes from her

and how much comes from the direction.

John Carpenter is a huge fan
of Howard Hawks.

And Assault on Precinct 13
is a remake of Rio Bravo.

He turned her into the most Hawks-like
woman of all his movies.

He directed each gaze,

each line,

each expression

to turn her into the spitting image
of Lauren Bacall or Angie Dickinson,

who was in Rio Bravo.

Unfortunately, John Carpenter
was an independent filmmaker.

At the time, he didn't work for the studios.

I even wonder

why he didn't cast Laurie Zimmer
in Halloween.

She would have been big
with this movie, I think.

On the web, Laurie's career narrows down
to that one Carpenter movie, Assault,

her first movie in '76.

Every search made me hope
for something new,

to no avail.

Up until now, Laurie had two names.

There we are.

Now, she had a third one.

The detective had told us
her last known address,

in a neighbourhood north of LA,
almost out of the map.

I was going to find her at any moment.

The house had two entrances.

One of them looked abandoned or sealed off.

The young woman thought she remembered

that Laurie and her family had gone
to live in Ohio.

They'd bought the house in '94.

They gave me the name of the person
in charge of the transaction,

Carol Luttrell.

But the trail ended there again.

The woman was dead,

and the sales contract had no address.

I was back where I'd started.

We're all detectives here, in a way,

and I went with the name you gave me,
Laurie Steele.

I found out that a certain Laurie Steele

had her son Oliver baptised

in a San Francisco synagogue,
two years ago.

The father's name was Frederick Steele.

I did some research on Dr Frederick Steele,

and I found one

in a Bette Davis movie.

It's the doctor who tells Bette Davis
that she has a brain tumour

in Dark Victory and who marries her
at the end of the movie.

It's Frederick Steele.

Did Laurie have a child, then invent a father

by borrowing the name
from Dark Victory to fool the rabbi?

I don't know,
but it's an interesting coincidence.

All I had left
were the messages I'd launched,

like bottles in the ocean.

While I wait for a sign, I decode
on the walls the depths of the past,

but wherever I go,
I meet nothing but ghosts on my path.

Stone ghosts on Broadway,

vestiges of the showy cinema
from the '20s or the '30s,

the Roxie, the Orpheum,
the Los Angeles Theatre,

of Egyptian-Aztec style,

turned into preaching rooms
for religious brotherhoods,

or simply left to decay.

Perhaps she simply didn't want to

be an actress like every other.

I persist in searching for her,

I question the people who've known her

and who have no idea what she's become.

I don't even know if she's still alive.

All I know is that she is dead
when it comes to cinema.

I'm scared.

For the first time in a longtime,
a few people believed in my desire.

I'm in Los Angeles with a film crew

and I chase after an illusion,
an illusion, a bygone era,

an ex-actress without a career,
disappeared into anonymity.

I'm lost.

Three or four years ago,
I had a fiancee in Berkeley.

We drove towards Big Sur,
on the coast road.

On the way back, she told me,

"There's a beautiful beach over there,
I want to show it to you."

She walked about 15 feet ahead of me.

Then, she turned back to me.

And her movement

brought back to mind, precisely,

Laurie Zimmer,

in the exact same spot.

It wasn't in Big Sur,
but it was the same woman.

A Californian woman, Jewish,

with hair darker than Laurie's,
blue eyes, freckles,

and she was both very smart
and bloody annoying.

You stammer, you can't help it...

Filmmakers always make the same movies,

and men always like the same women.

It's her.

How surprising, right'?

You know what to write about us.

It changed me completely.

Not at all.

I told you everything at the same time.

About the present and the past,
about the film I'd started working on,

about my long path towards you.

We found each other at the last minute.

I was going back to Paris the next day.

I was going to come back
to finish the film with you.

We were going to write each other.

-Funny. Really funny!
there we are.

You're going to start another career, now.

-Okay'?
- We 'II see.

Right'? We'll see.
-We'll see.

-Okay.
-It'll be like Rashémon.

Rashémon, yeah'?

From Laura Fanning a Charlotte Szlovak.

"Hello, children.

"My dear Charlotte, first,
I must ask you to forgive my French.

"It's been a while, at least 20 years,

"that I haven't written in French.

"I'm no longer an actress, thank God.

"I'm a mother, a wife

"and a teacher for more or less at risk teens.

"I live on a small island
in the San Francisco Bay.

"| have two adorable sons, one 17,
the other 15, and a lovely husband.

"| have beautiful memories of you."

From Laura Fanning to Charlotte Szlovak.

"One spins, the other doesn't."

"My dear Charlotte,

"funny, isn't it, that thanks to technology,

"we can have a discussion
despite time and space.

"| try to convince my high school students,

"who read at a primary school level,

"that writing is an encounter
that surpasses limitations.

"They don't care at all. Too bad.

"Anyway, I think about it,
my dear Charlotte, I do."

From Laura Fanning to Charlotte Szlovak.

April 1st, 2002.

"Your film, regrets."

I hoped that your image would, magically,

unwind the fates that seemed
to plague us for 25 years.

I hoped to find you in a film.

I wanted to rescind time,

pick up history where we'd left it.

I wanted you to be Sleeping Beauty,

the one I would return to cinema
with a wave of my magic wand.

I wanted to go to you
and knock on your door.

But you didn't show,
you didn't open the door.

You were scared.

I made this film without you.

With your absence and my desire.

I found my desire to film again,

and I'd come looking for that, too.