This Is How We Love: The Foto-Novel

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My latest book is called This Is How We Love: The Foto-Novel. It’s the story behind the worst movie to have ever won the Academy Award. Have you not heard of this movie?

Let me tell you about it.

But where to begin? Should we begin with the fabled “curse” that afflicted nearly everyone associated with this notorious film, including the gaffers and all three lighting technicians, not to mention the poor thespian pooch, Charlie Boy, the first of two canines to play “Bones the Blind Dog”?

Or should we begin with the planned three-week shooting schedule that ballooned into a sixteenth-month odyssey after myriad issues, including sickness (dengue fever from mosquitoes that hitched a ride in a spray bottle specially imported from Venezuela by the lead stylist), a category 4 hurricane (the first believed to have occurred in California since the previous one tore through mastodons 2.5 million years ago), an unplanned explosion inside a porta-potty (as opposed to all of those planned explosions inside porta-potties), multiple babies conceived (and then delivered) on set, and, yes, a helicopter crash that took out an ammo depot (instantly detonating $186 million in Tomahawk cruise missiles, not counting the five that inadvertently launched and had to be shot down before penetrating Canadian airspace)?

Or how about the strange fact that even though This Is How We Love amazingly, astonishingly, incredibly managed to (reportedly) win a Best Picture Academy Award, no legal copies of the film are now available, minus a few VHS bootleg editions one can purchase only after diving deep into the moist, dark bowels of eBay?

The movie’s backstory is undoubtedly already infamous among a specific type of fandom, the type to have memorized every line in the disastrous Howard the Duck or the type to have obtained the ultra-rare outtakes of Back to the Future starring Eric Stoltz before they surfaced on YouTube and were quickly removed.

But for those with an actual life, which I’m assuming and hoping you are currently living, allow me to provide some nonessential cinematic history.

It’s 1990, and a small-time television writer with a murky past, Matthew Michaud, 46, is looking to branch out from the lesser realm of TV scribe and into the loftier principalities of the silver screen. With eight episodes of The Rockford Files under his double-pronged, leather belt—as well as a made-for-TV movie starring Christopher Knight of Brady Bunch fame (1984’s Rocks Along the Horizon, CBS)—Michaud’s dream was to bring his somewhat limited skill set to theaters, a dream he had nurtured since piloting his 1971 V-8 Buick Electra from Cleveland, Ohio, straight to Hollywood in the fuggy summer of 1975.

Michaud, if nothing else, was a believer in his god-given right to an audience, in his entitlement as a natural-born American citizen to elevate the ideas he scribbled down on his legal pad at a Sunset Boulevard Denny’s onto the big screen and to then have them transmitted across the world. But this didn’t hold true only for writing. Michaud was most keen to direct, to become a true auteur, much like his cinematic heroes, the writers-directors Éric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman, and John Huston.

One of Michaud’s most treasured script ideas was for an epic, hours-long drama, to take place in the current day (then the mid-1990s), featuring at least twenty disparate characters, with endlessly intertwining plotlines striated throughout the film like the fatty veins in a high-end rib-eye.

Which isn’t to say that the movie’s numerous plots were in any way simple. If you’re prone to motion sickness, now might be the time to grab a rail or even a bucket. Either way, here we go:

It’s 1993, and former astronaut Bizz Adams, 54, lives in a “just your average” five-thousand-square-foot mansion, within a compound, within Everytown, USA—Brentwood, Los Angeles. Haunted by a mishap in space that he fears he could have been responsible for (lighting a celebratory cigar in an oxygen-rich environment), Bizz remains preoccupied with a past that he can’t control and a future with, seemingly, very little excitement or possibility.

His middle-aged wife, Azure Adams—longing for all the advantages and perks once associated with her proximity to fame—has pickled her lethargy in gin and tonics, and her sexual release in the backyard shed with the compound’s Mexican American gardener, Ray Ray.

Bizz, the Former Astronaut, and Azure, the Cheating Alcoholic, have two adult children: Bobby (a former NASCAR driver with a burned face) and Melissa (a troubled Gen Xer). Making matters even more complicated (remember, this was the nineties) is the fact that Melissa is, gulp, a “lesbian” who volunteers at a suicide hotline a few evenings a week, and yet her biggest dream is to teach disadvantaged inner-city middle-schoolers advanced algebra.

Still with me?

The wife of Bobby, the Former NASCAR Driver, Rachey, works as an escort to help her husband afford the cosmetic surgery for his scarred face so that he might one day work as a dashing, exclusive real estate agent in the Brentwood, Los Angeles, area. But there remains a void in Bobby and Rachey’s marriage, one they attempt to fill by taking the unusual step of adopting a fully-grown Native American with an intellectual disability. The man’s name is Pecker, short for “Peckerwood.” His parents, we come to learn, have died in a forest fire due to the unhinged greed of a consortium of white, wealthy real estate developers. Tragic. All of it—

I’ll stop there. It’s all bullshit, of course, all just the entirely fictional premise for my latest book, This Is How We Love: The Foto-Novel, out this week, and brought to you with the help of a select group of comedians and actors, including Patton Oswalt, Chris Meloni, Michael Ian Black, Jon Hamm, Laraine Newman, Amy Sedaris, Scott Rogowsky, Paul Feig, Amber Tamblyn, David Cross, and—in his last-ever role—the great and very-much-missed Paul Reubens. (Paul spent an afternoon at Jon Hamm’s house in LA, posing for various photos. He was dying of cancer, and he knew it, and yet he still took time out of his day to do this. An incredible mensch.)

What follows are just a few more of the 221 “film stills” within the book that tell a very convoluted plot indeed, with many clichés and supremely dated tropes from a movie that never existed, but which (with the great assistance from photographer Seth Olenick and designer Danielle Deschenes) are brought fully to life. Think American Beauty meets Mr. Holland’s Opus meets The Day the Clown Cried meets just about any two-star movie on Starz on a Tuesday afternoon at 2:35.

It’s a very bad movie, and the entire history, if you’re up for it, is available here.

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