I was watching Jodie Foster play a game in a Variety video called Does Jodie Foster Know Her Lines?  The gist was her holding some oversized black index cards (Note: With the Variety logo facing camera front in case we forgot who thought up this game),  reading a line she’s said in one of the 50 plus films she’s made in the last half-century, and then guessing which movie it was from and which character said it.

Needless to say, Jodie scored 100%, not because she’s always perfect but due to the fact that she seems to have been smart and present in her life.  And has always been a storyteller.

The latter really got to me as I begin to plunge back into writing a new, very extended story project of my own that I honestly have some trepidation about.  It’s not that I don’t want to tell this story but more that I have some fears about telling it right; and doing it justice.

As if that isn’t the way it always is. Or that there is ever a right or a just way to tell a story.  

Because all stories have some lies in them.  The question to always ask yourself is if you are telling some basic truth.

At least as you see it. 

But more importantly, as you know it.

Unvarnished.

And honestly.

Like she did in such classic movies as Taxi Driver, The Accused, Silence of the Lambs and, more recently, Nyad.

You don’t have to be a teenage prostitute to play one in Taxi Driver but you do have be confident and a bit no-nonsense, or at least able to project it.  That’s the reason Martin Scorcese cast her in the film in the first place.  When he first worked with her at the age of 11 years old (Note: In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) he said he’d seldom seen anyone be so professionally direct and confident while working on a movie set.

Not in an obnoxious, braggadocio way.  Just in a direct and honest way.

It makes me wonder whether my reservations have not so much to do with justice and rightness but in the ability to be unvarnished and real to some very personal situations, as I know them, when I write about them.

It seems to me that if you have a modicum of skill in any type of artistic endeavor,  allowing that essential truth to “come out” is the most essential element. 

How you get there, well, that’s another story.  It involves who you are and the type of storyteller you want to be.   Or, truly, ARE.

Being present helps because you can draw on what you recall, what you saw and, most importantly, how you felt. Memories and visuals are all well and good but they can be deceptive and elusive and precious.  But how those make you feel, well, that’s something else.

Being smart is also valuable since it helps you perceive stuff below the surface.  Though that too can get in your way if you become too intellectual about a situation because it leads you to believe that life, and the people who inhabit it, are always logical.

It is not and we all definitely will not be all, most, or even some of the time. 

Depending on who we are, the lives we’ve had, the genes we’ve inherited and the behaviors we’ve learned.

I think that’s the artistry Jodie (Note: Sorry, can’t help calling her by her first name in print, even though I’ve only met her twice for about 30 seconds in total) brings to everything she does professionally, as well as how she’s navigated her personally, very private life.

She may not have always been the “out” celebrity everyone wanted to have but, at the same time, none of us have lived her very private life.  And before counter-arguing consider what it must have been like to be both an Oscar nominee and the very public inspiration behind a very internationally public, attempted presidential assassination at the very beginning and very end of your teenage years.

I barely got through mine with acne and the death of Janis Joplin.

As I venture into new artistic territory at the start of Pride Month I find it interesting to be instinctually drawn back to the expression of truthful storytelling and the films, and life, of Jodie Foster. 

And marvel at how the organizers of the annual West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade could have EVER thought naming MAGA adjacent Real Housewife Kathy Hilton its grand marshal brought any justice, rightness and collective truths to our stores…

At least if they’d asked Jodie, she would have given them an honest answer.

”My Name Is Tallulah” – Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone