Photo: ichard Harbaugh/Getty Images
No one wants to hear that two of our best living directors — Wes Anderson and James L. Brooks — got stuck in an elevator together, but they did. On Monday, June 6, the two of them, along with frequent Anderson collaborator Luke Wilson and others, got trapped in an elevator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures after a 30th-anniversary screening of Anderson’s film Bottle Rocket. According to TMZ, they were in there for less than an hour, which is still kind of a long time to be trapped in an elevator, potentially due to a weight-related issue, according to one of the L.A. Fire Department crew members who freed them.
Teams for the Academy Museum, Anderson, and Brooks didn’t reply to requests for comment, but now that we can basically see everyone is safe and sound and has had a whole day to recover from the trauma of what might have turned out to be the plot of the movie Devil, can we admit that this would have been an awesome thing to sit in on? Listen to? Maybe even watch? Can we admit to ourselves that so long as both these guys are totally fine, this is perhaps an exploitable content form that we could reap benefits from for years to come?
We’ve endured years of “Actors on Actors” and roundtables of directors, but this would provide a new angle: directors together for no set amount of time with no journalists to feed them questions to ask each other. There’s a kind of appealing mundanity to the types of conversations these directors could have in a walled-off setting. We wouldn’t have to trap them for real — we could put the directors in an elevator, say “Stay put,” and then at some point stage a rescue. Everyone will know what’s going on except for when they’ll get out of the elevator. As any director knows, some vérité is always good. They might ask each other questions about their filmography, sure, but they also might ask each other stuff like, “How long do you think we’ll be in here?” or “What do you have going on later tonight?” Maybe: “Has this ever happened to you before?” There are endless opportunities, if only because they’d be in there for a seemingly endless amount of time. What are some other directors who might be fun in an elevator together? Jon M. Chu and Emerald Fennell? Nancy Meyers and Guy Ritchie? Steven Spielberg and, uh, Kane Parsons? The possibilities are limitless, and elevators are everywhere.
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