Work Doesn’t Wait. Todd Strauss Schulson, NY

Todd Strauss-Schulson has directed the movies A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas. The Final Girls. Isn’t It Romantic. The kind that sneak up on you, horror movies that make you cry, raunchy comedies that make you feel cozy, rom-coms that ask if the love stories we tell ourselves make us feel more hopeful or more alone. They’re the kind of movies that used to be the middle class of American cinema. Twenty-Thirty million dollar budgets.... a real theatrical release, time to find an audience.

That world doesn’t exist anymore.

So, what do you do?

The Wind and the Work

He has a friend from high school. Not a creative. A business guy. They’re having drinks somewhere, years ago, and Todd is commiserating. Movies are impossible. Harder than ever. Nobody wants to take a risk.

The friend listens. Then he says:

When I was in college, I took a sailing class. You know what they teach you? You have to know where the wind is going to be. Then you point your boat toward where the wind is going to be.

So where’s the wind, Todd?

He thought about it. Marvel movies? Low-budget horror? Podcasts? He didn’t know. He thought maybe there was no wind left at all.

The tree

He rents a place in Frogtown, a sleepy oasis on the eastside of Los Angeles. There’s a tangerine tree in the backyard. More tangerines than one person can eat. So, he starts messing around. Gets obsessed with turning the bounty of tangerines into soda. Fails. Tries again. Fails better. Documents the whole thing on Instagram. Not as marketing. Not as a brand. Just : here’s this stupid thing I’m doing. Watch me screw it up. People wonder if he’s losing his mind? He’s not sure that he isn’t. It is simultaneously a joke, performance art, but also a real thing he’s sincerely trying to do well and working very hard at.

People watch.

They don’t just watch. They write back. You’re carbonating it wrong. He says, okay, show me how to do it. They say, what if you added rosemary to the simple syrup? He says, ok and how do you make simple syrup?

People start introducing him around at parties as the tangerine guy… hey, meet my friend, he lives near you and does claymation. The animator sees the posts and says, I want to make you a claymated TIZZ video. Creative friends, composers. Production designers. Writers, Actors. All of them saying the same thing:

I want to help.

The letters

When he was fourteen years old, Todd wrote a letter to Dick Smith. The godfather of modern makeup effects. He worked from the 1940s to the 1990s. Did The Exorcist. Taxi Driver. A legend.

Todd wrote him a letter. Said, I got liquid latex all over my mother’s shower curtain and she wants me to pay for it and I don’t have any money. How do I get it off?

Dick Smith wrote back. Told him exactly how to do it.

He didn’t have to. Could have ignored the letter. Could have been too busy, too important.

He wasn’t.

Todd never forgot that. The openness. The generosity. Some people like to be mysterious. They like to hold on to their secrets. They like to be oblique. But Dick Smith shared his secrets widely and with everyone. His recipe for fake blood. His tricks for making wigs look real.

And that became his true legacy. Not just his award winning work, but how many makeup effects people began their careers because of what he taught and inspired in them.

He thinks about that a lot now. When he’s posting stories. How he prefers to create in public. A generosity of creative spirit. And how that can inspire other people. When the claymation guy offers to make a commercial for nothing. When the whole stupid soda project becomes something real and suddenly he’s at the center of a storm of idea’s other people are throwing at him : that’s the joy of living. The way you approach the world is how the world approaches you. If you’re rigid and cold that’s the world you get. And you’ve gotta dig to find the joy. But, if you’re warm and open and enthusiastic, that’s what comes knocking at your door. He prefers that.

The hematoma and the buffer

We did this interview in January. He had just gotten back to New York. Five days earlier. Still in the buffer between the holidays and real life. He’d gone on a silent meditation retreat, moving slowly, no talking, no cell phones. Then he got back to New York, immediately went sledding in Central Park during a blizzard, slammed his leg into a metal pole and gave himself a hematoma the size of a grapefruit. Three days later he flew to Iceland. Walked on it. Soaked it in mineral hot springs for far too long. Did everything wrong.

He’s still limping.

I ask him why he does the retreats. He’s done maybe fifteen in the last twelve years. Anywhere from Three days to fifteen days. Silence. No reading. Just sitting.

People think the not-talking is the hard part, he says. It’s not. The not-talking is a sweet relief. You don’t have to be your personality all day. You don’t have to perform. Over time you can really just… be… it’s like, your personality can relax so your soul can take over.

The hard part is the sitting. Wrangling your attention, like a cat sitting at a mouse hole waiting for the next thought to pop out. Seeing clearly that you are not your thoughts. That everything you think isn’t true.

That’s a hard thing to remember in a business where everyone is selling their personality. Their hot takes. Their “refined aesthetic”. Turning their entire being into a brand.

The retreats remind him of what is most true. They feel like scrubbing his brain with a Brillo pad. They leave him raw and tender and human. They are where the soul can recharge. Then he comes back to New York and the traffic sounds louder and the phone feels poisonous and he has three days before he habituates back into the noise.

Where the wind is

I ask him if he ever thinks about the road not taken. The bigger movie he could have made after Harold and Kumar. The safer choice. The more strategic career.

He says No. Not really.

He tells me, his dad died 3 months before he booked his first movie and he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease in that same window of time. It was a rupture that catapulted him into his 30’s. The second everything clicked into gear, life punched him in the gut.

You can’t plan around that. You can’t control the world no matter how hard you try. You can only adjust your sails.

He thinks about the sailing lesson a lot now. Not because he knows where the wind is. He doesn’t. Nobody does.

But he knows you have to keep the boat moving. You have to make something. Anything. Every day if you can. Even if it’s just a story about a tangerine tree. Even if it’s just a stupid (and delicious) tangerine soda. Even if nobody watches.

Because eventually, someone does.

*This conversation appears in Issue 006 of NAFF Magazine. The full transcript runs long - the way good conversations do. But this is the part I kept thinking about afterward. The part about wind. The part about work. The part about a fourteen-year-old kid writing a letter to a legend and getting an answer.*

Todd Strauss-Schulson is a filmmaker. But more than that, he’s someone who figured out that you don’t wait for permission. You just start. And you keep starting.

His Instagram is @straussschulson. His movies are wherever you find movies. His soda is called TIZZ. Try it. Or don’t. He’ll probably make something else tomorrow anyway.

The full feature appears in Issue 006 of NAFF Magazine.

For those who prefer to hear cadence as well as read it, the recorded conversation sits alongside the printed piece — another way to spend time inside the story.

If you’re here, it’s because I wanted you to be. This list is small — mostly people I trust to see what I see. If someone else should be here, let me know.

adrianmesko@naffmagazine.com

NAFF is a fully self-funded project — made with friends, time, and persistence. The podcast goes deeper into each story, and every listen or share helps keep it alive.

Issues 001–004 are available online, and through selected stockists.

— Adrian Mesko