Paddle To The Metal
Marty Supreme, Abel Ferrara and locking in.
Don’t let the Letterboxd fool you, I very much enjoyed Marty Supreme.
If its months-long jacket promo campaign somehow escaped your attention, the film is a period epic (dare I say fuccboi Godfather) covering eight months in the life of an inveterate scammer / screw-up / ping-pong prodigy, unstoppable in his single-minded pursuit of “greatness.”
Hijinks ensue!
Like Eddington before it (script PDF here), Marty is as deftly crafted and metatextually dense as it is uninterested in easy pleasure or “likeability.”
I didn’t exactly leave the Kips Bay AMC on a high, but I also can’t shake this flick several weeks later. Guess we’re frictionmaxxing…
Sam Bodrojan’s LA Review Of Books piece is a zoomed-out summary that does a much better job than I will in exploring Marty’s quirks, charms and sociopolitical context. On the BTS tip, these talks with costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, composer Daniel Lopatin and cinematographer (and legit GOAT) Darius Khondji are all great, as are GQ and The Guardian’s deep dives with writer / director Josh Safdie.
(Haven’t listened to his Affleck-moderated DGA pod or found the definitive non-hoops convo with WBOTY Timothée C, but hey, there’s a whole year ahead of us.)
All of this to say: as much as Marty Supreme chronicles the quixotic odyssey of a fictional table tennis hustler, I think Safdie’s asshole v. world adventure is really a movie about everything it takes to make a movie.
In that respect, King Of New York and Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara’s wildly engaging, refreshingly loose autobiography is Marty’s most fitting companion piece, even if he wasn’t already a prominent player in the film’s “non actor” cast.
Scene — what a title! — is a profane, poetic memoir from the notorious New York auteur (and stylish cat) told entirely in snapshots and side quests — a shuffle-mode chronology of damaged muses, shady financiers and Willem Dafoes.
It’s a life of schemes and sacrifices; fumbling the bag (in the paycheck / partner / eightball senses of the word) is a far-too recurring theme. Abel is self-aware enough to make amends for the roughest of these antics, yet the animating principle of his life remains a compulsion to create, by any means necessary.
On the making of his first non-XXX film, The Driller Killer:
Now it’s the dead of winter and I’m staring at my reflection on the editing table screen, trying to cut together a trailer we can use to sell the movie, freezing, broke, and questioning everything. They say you make plans and God laughs, but God also gives you the spring, and the first hint of it in NYC, the good energy rolling out of the buildings with the people who have been cooped up all winter was a savior. I had been showing the cut scenes around, and as usual it was 99 percent rejection. But in this business you only need one…
These tales hit different on my own cinematic journey.
Right before the holidays, Packages got its first official (albeit gentle and personally delivered) “no” from a festival, which I can appreciate from a thick-skin-building perspective but… still not the best feeling in the world lol.
A friend found her own movie in the same boat, which helps. Solidarity, etc etc. We all just gotta keep pushing our respective rocks up the hill.
There’s no formula. People ask me how to get on all the time, which translates to “how can you put me on, without all the work it took you to get there.” It’s the wrong question either way, and my response has simply become:
How bad do you want it?
Marty’s mythology and Abel’s real life are in many ways cautionary tales, but you can’t deny that our boys are locked in. Disappointment is inevitable, but “no” doesn’t exist in their worlds. Delusional or not, that is the boulder fuel needed to stay in motion, nonbelievers be damned.
If you stop, it’s gonna roll you right back over.
But if you want it bad enough, you’ll figure it out.
Unidentified Flying Playlist 2025 — I started my playlist as a promo companion for the UFO album, and have continued to add ten new DJ-friendly tracks every week. Since starting this Substack I’ve done the same for band tunes too, and every January I archive ‘em (here’s the 2023 + 2024 UFPs and the ‘24 Guitarish) as a diary of what I dug throughout that past year. I stand by my selections, but weekly favs ≠ canonical “best;” there are three Cash Cobain songs in my 2025 picks and it’s truly insane none of them were “Trippin On A Yacht.”
Stove God Cooks, “El Pueblo” (Brycon on the beat)
The Natural Yogurt Band, Red Sky At Night (zooted, sample-y funk)
A.G. Cook, “Dread” + Stone Island Sound playlist
Matt Dillon Cuban vinyl set (EVR 4EVA)
Eyedress guitar pick hair clips — retro merch achievement unlocked.
Screen Slate convo with Tom Schiller (filmmaker + SNL OG)
How A Baywatch Spinoff Turned David Hasselhoff Into A Monster Fighter
Playlists updated!