Facebook X Email Print Save Story In May, I joined the director Todd Solondz for lunch at Union Square Café, the swank Manhattan bistro. The restaurant opened in 1985, the same year that Solondz dropped out of the master’s program in film at N.Y.
U.’s Tisch School of the Arts, a short walk downtown. His last student project was “Schatt’s Last Shot,” a short starring a scrawny Solondz at twenty-five—hair fluffy and jet black, mouth stuffed with braces—as a high schooler named Ezra, trying and failing to pass gym class, get into M.
I.T., and go steady with a barely interested cheerleader named Bunny.
After Ezra bombs on the basketball court, he listens to Bunny narrate his state of affairs in a locker room. “It’s, like, everything you ever worked for, everything you ever dreamed of, your whole future, just—down the drain,” she tells him. A lot has changed.
The restaurant has moved a few blocks north, for one, and Solondz’s hair is now gray and Seussian in light wisps, his large features ornamented by bright-blue circular glasses. Since “Schatt’s Last Shot,” which earned Solondz a three-picture deal with Scott Rudin, at Twentieth Century Fox, he has made eight features that have disturbed and enthralled audiences with their perverse, often brutal looks at upper-middle-class American suburbia. (Depending on the critic, he’s the patron saint of “pessimism,” “the new theater of cruelty,” or “schlubs and schlemiels.
”) He is best known for .