Quotes of the Day
At Joseph Gordon-Levitt's site hitRECord.org, earnest, talented young people post their work — short films, photography, illustrations — and then other people are allowed to mess with it: editing it, putting it to music, adding animation, whatever they want. After I talked to Gordon-Levitt for a profile in TIME, he posted an hour of audio from our interview to hitRECord, and people used it to write their own profiles of him.
More than 70 people submitted something. Most wrote about themselves. Some wrote about cute animals. One recorded a half-hour rant about what a dick I am. But much of it was great. I took some of the stuff I liked, stitched it together, worked in some of my reporting that my editor cut from the print version, and added some sentences to sew it all up.
The result is below. And at hitRECord.org, where I hope someone has added animation and a score that includes the guy who thinks I'm a dick. — Joel Stein
A Cup Of Regular Joe
By Members of hitRECord (and Joel Stein)
This is a story about a guy named Jeff.
"I would be happy if people said, 'This is a story about a guy named Jeff and it's loosely based on this conversation I had with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.' That's not what they say. They say, 'This guy is this. He said this,'" says Gordon-Levitt about past articles that were full of errors.
It seems like a stupid thing to do, calling Joseph Gordon-Levitt "Jeff." But we live in a world where people call themselves "T-Pain" and website commenters go by "RedHeadMonster" and where Joseph Gordon-Levitt himself goes by "JGL" on fan-sites, "Joe" in person and "Regular Joe" on his own. And, besides, he invited me in his house and drank a beer with me, and there's a good chance this article will have at least one error, so sure, if he thinks this "Jeff" gambit will make him feel better, than, sure, yeah, "Jeff" it is.
Jeff has had to deal with fame nearly his whole life. As a kid, he played an alien in the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, a gig he's tried to distance himself from, first as a gay hustler in Mysterious Skin (2004) and as a teen murder investigator in Brick (2005). Since then, he's become an indie heartthrob due to his Golden Globe–nominated role in the not-so-romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer (2009). There's a lightness he brings to his roles, including this month's 50/50, in which he stars as 27-year-old Adam, who is diagnosed with cancer. Whilst the premise of the film (based on screenwriter Will Reiser's own experience with cancer) screams "tragedy," 50/50 has been dubbed a "comedy-drama." In one scene, Kyle (Seth Rogen) encourages Adam to shave his head with Kyle's pubic-hair trimmers, and to examine his chances of survival in a positive light: "If you were a casino game, you'd have the best odds!"
Sitting in the recording studio of his large Los Angeles home, barefoot in black jeans, Jeff, 30, looks like an indie actor. But he's now doing some very un-indie films: in 2010 Jeff replaced James Franco in Christopher Nolan's Inception (due to scheduling conflicts). Next year he's in The Dark Knight Rises, Steven Spielberg's film about Abraham Lincoln and a time-travel cop movie with Bruce Willis.
The black jeans are traditional Levi 501s: "There are certain classics you don't want to f--- with," Jeff says. Which may be surprising, since his website, hitRECord.org, is completely dedicated to f---ing with the classics. He started the site in 2005 with his brother, "Burning Dan," a professional fire dancer (their parents were L.A. hippies). At first it was just a way for Jeff to post videos and get feedback. But then they got the idea to link creative people together by starting an open collaborative project. HitRECord (as in pushing a circular red button) is a production company where an online community comes together to submit "hit records" (as in, an artistic work that becomes popular) not only for review, but as an invitation to "remix" the record.
"Rather than just exhibiting and admiring each other's work as isolated individuals, we gather here to work on projects together," he says. Then members can take each other's work and remix it — adding music, animation or just creating something new based on the idea. "Having someone take creative liberty with what I've done, it's just fascinating. It's like, 'Wow they really got it.' Or they didn't get it. You can really tell, based on the art that they make. Much more than what the box office was." And when he thinks something might be commercially viable, he tries to sell it to media companies, splitting the profits with the artists. Last year, Joe sent out $50,000 worth of checks to contributors.
Jeff started hitRECord shortly after dropping out of Columbia College "about halfway" through a bachelor's degree. He blames Final Cut Pro. "When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'"
If YouTube is the web's wild west, then hitRECord is a kindly shelter for frontiersmen and fanciful passersby. If YouTube is a vast, heartless terrain that distinguishes good from evil through assaults and triumphs, hitRECord is a makeshift hearth for the resourceful but wary, sustained by little more than boundless encouragement and the regularity of its own motley collaborations. And its members are passionate — they're mostly people who have never showed anyone their art before and have found a supportive group that encourages them to (for instance) make more tiny, cute drawings of pretend animals. "More than a company, it's like a family, and more than a family I daresay it's like the mafia of art," says hitRECord user DeeAsHerself. "You join, you learn how it works, you start RECording, and when you're done, you can't leave." Ess, a short-story writer whose profile photo has her mouth covered by a sweatshirt, says, "The most valuable thing that you get on the site is honest feedback. You can skip the fees for that writer's workshop and avoid the sweaty palms and embarrassment at open mic night at that dive bar."
Once a month or so, Jeff puts on live shows promoting hitRECord, opening them with an anti-anti-piracy call to arms: "Please turn all recording devices on." People take the stage to perform their work, and Jeff sings Nirvana and Lady Gaga songs, plays guitar, gets behind a drum kit, reads poetry and sometimes talks in French. Girls tend to like this. He's educated, multi-talented, self-expressive and risk-taking. He's like James Franco, if James Franco wasn't so weird.
It's that nice-guy eager earnestness that, as much as his acting skills, is getting him so much work. When James McAvoy dropped out of 50/50 a few days into filming due to a family emergency, the producers called Jeff the same day. He flew up that night to meet the director, producers and the scriptwriter, Will Reiser, who was in remission from the cancer he wrote about. They all shared some beers and smoked some pot on the roof of the hotel, and Jeff said yes the next morning. "At the time I was like, 'Hopefully he'll like it.' But knowing him now and how many roles he gets offered and how deliberate he is in choosing his career path, I'm shocked," says director Jonathan Levine.
Rogen points out that even though Reiser's neurotic, repressed character is totally different from Jeff, somehow the nice-guy stuff comes through. "My family is from Vancouver, where we were shooting, so almost as a joke I said, 'If you don't have a Passover Seder to go to, my family's having one.' And he came," Rogen says. "He's the kind of guy who will talk to my insane family and have a great time doing it. He's the kind of guy who comes to your parents' Passover seder."
Ben Karlin, a producer on 50/50, says Jeff plays comedy very real and small, which is surprising since he spent so many years on a multi-camera sitcom. More importantly, his niceness makes him one of the few young American actors who can play a leading man. "Even in a movie like Inception, which didn't have a lot of character depth, you still got the sense his character was a solid standup guy and you didn't know anything about that guy. That's really rare," Karlin says.
To take advantage of publicity for 50/50, Jeff is releasing hitRECord's first major product, RECollection Vol. 1, which contains a DVD of 36 short films, a 64-page book, and a 17-track CD comprised of the work of 471 people. The entire hitRECord project, in fact, is both fueled by the celebrity mystique that surrounds Jeff and his derisive attitude toward it. (For an example of this, see Jeff's first short film, Pictures of Assholes, in which he confronts two paparazzi.)
Maybe this article will wind up on RECollection Vol. 2. Even if not, chances are, in time, these words will be remixed by Joe and the hitRECorders into something fortuitous, using the underscore of a reader recording a vocal, to a collaborative success you will indubitably view on hitRECord soon.
- Joel Stein