All my friends are in Paris, and I'm almost jealous. Almost. I'm in New York, spending my summer weekends chasing the enigmatic Roll-O Dairy Bar around the tri-state area—not on assignment, just out of genuine obsession. I love its cheeky rules, its studied mix of high and low. It feels spiritually adjacent to Superiority Burger (the two are even collaborating on a few events this summer). There are worse ways to spend July.
The first great movie of the season is Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s delirious parody of the direct-to-television “issue of the week” videos they’d make us watch in health class. Maddie (John Early) is a dishwasher at a content-creation company—essentially BA Test Kitchen in disguise—who rises to on-camera talent and relapses into an eating disorder under the pressurized circumstances. Kate Berlant plays his too-supportive lesbian best friend. Claudia O’Doherty is their nemesis, the imperious Alison Roman-esque culinary doyenne, and Connor O’Malley is their preposterously exploitative boss who wears a large peacoat in Los Angeles for no reason other than to show authority.
The movie is an endless stream of jokes (giggle too long and you'll miss the next one), but you might also pause to consider whether you’re meant to laugh, cringe, or feel bad. That thin membrane between mockery and empathy, particularly as it concerns the millennial lifestyle, runs through Early's comedy work and is just as pronounced in his feature debut.
You can read more about the movie in my TIFF dispatch from last year, and this newer essay for Caper—less a review than an exploration of influencers, and appetite, and how food has started to look sinister.
Maddie’s Secret opens today in L.A. and is already in theaters in NYC. John Early was kind enough to answer a few questions about it, as well as what he likes to watch and eat.
I have no choice! I’m a total slave to my algorithm, so I still just watch the shit all the time. On its surface, the movie is about food influencers, but to me, it works on a more symbolic level. I didn’t really immerse myself to the point of no return in that culture; I hastily assembled some ephemera and details from that world to serve a deeper emotional purpose. But Maddie’s sincerity about food and the content she makes has made me less cynical about it all, honestly. It’s almost like it’s rubbed off on me.
Marijuana was huge. I went to school for acting, and it was an incredibly exhausting program. The teachers were excellent; Kristen Johnson, who plays my mother in the film, was one of them. But it really beats you down. You have to recover, and I escaped to the movies. I just went on a little tear in my early 20s when I lived with a straight guy who was a filmmaker. We were best friends. We just smoked dank herb and watched a lot of movies. To bring food into it, you know, you get the munchies. I was doing crazy shit with stuff from Trader Joe’s.
When I graduated from college, there’d long been a childhood desire to make sketch comedy where I played women, and as I got older, I pulled towards something a little more mysterious, something more cinematic. Some of the pivotal influences for this movie are the movies that made me want to be a filmmaker in general. When I first moved to New York, I saw a 10-year anniversary screening of Showgirls (1995) with the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas in person. I had never seen anything like that. I had never even seen a movie by a male auteur that had that kind of verve. That really rocked me.
Polyester (1981) made me want to make movies because I had always had this murky desire to play the lead woman in a melodrama, and that’s exactly what was happening in it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—how visually beautiful and how strangely emotional it was. I don’t know if John Waters thinks of it that way, but I found it very moving, this gift he’s giving to Divine and to his Baltimore friends by bringing them into more and more expensive movies and including them.
What’s the last movie that made you laugh? Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Glenn Close was cracking my ass up, as she always does.
Your favorite New York movie? Vanya On 42nd Street (1994). I just worked with Wally [Shawn] and Andre Gregory for two years on this play, and that’s a very New York movie to me.
The film you’ve seen the most times? Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
A movie that devastates you? One of the movies that really first upset me was Dancer in the Dark (2000). I’ve never been able to watch it again, but it’s imprinted on me. I was way too young to watch it, and it felt so unfair. It felt like I had been, against my will, ripped from childhood. It’s over. There’s no turning back. I’ve seen too much. That was brutal.
What do you watch when you’re not trying to have an opinion about it? I have to say, not to be a snob, but I don’t do that with movies. I am a little, maybe oppressively, ceremonial about movies. It’s genuinely annoying to my friends.
I want the most John Early possible evening. What are we watching and where are we eating? Muriel’s Wedding (1994). As I say this, I don’t quite know what Australian food is, but we’re working off a tiki theme. Something tropical, big, and tacky, with a pineapple as table dressing.
What’s your diner order? A chicken salad club with bacon on toasted bread. I mean, I guess that’s what a club is, but yes, toasted white bread. And fries and a chocolate milkshake.
What’s the worst vegetable? I already feel the haters coming for me, but if you’re my age and lived in Brooklyn in the 2010s, you were roasting butternut squash. There was this boom of the sheet pan and the roasting of autumnal vegetables, and I cannot go back. I hate seeing cubes of butternut squash. Something about it reminds me of a seedy time in my life, of Edison bulbs and Mason jars in Brooklyn restaurants. That was an ugly time aesthetically across the board. The pop music was bad. Everything was bad.
Your parents are in town; where do you take them? Musso and Frank.
Your friends are in town, where do you take them? Biryani Kabob House.
What’s your preferred treat/pick-me-up? Butterfingers are so genius. The texture of it. I’m drawn to delicate toffee, butter pecan, and caramel. That’s my profile. So many popular candy bars are bland to me; the chocolate isn’t hitting, the nougat is flavorless. But a Butterfinger is such a punch of flavor.
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