Eight Duck Salads with Gus Van Sant
A New Yorker Cartoonists' Lunch with one Hollywood's finest directors.
June 26, 2018
Theatre District, NY
I once pitched a caption so bad that I made New Yorker history.
Not the good kind of history. There’s no plaque. But somewhere in the record of that week’s Talk of the Town, there’s a line about a table of cartoonists greeting a pitched gag with “groans”. I am, as far as I can tell, the only cartoonist ever immortalised in the magazine for bombing at lunch. It feels right, somehow. A man should be remembered for something.
Let me back up.
The reason there was a journalist at lunch in the first place was that we had a guest. Gus Van Sant. That Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting, Milk, and Drugstore Cowboy, and who had a film out that week about the cartoonist John Callahan, called Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. So this was not a normal Tuesday.
The lunch itself, though, was the usual ritual. After the Tuesday pitch meeting at the New Yorker, a batch of us would shuffle up to Pergola des Artistes in the Theatre District and talk shop over duck salad and cheap red wine. Eight of us that day. The duck salad arrived piled on the plate like it had fallen out of a ziplock bag. It always did. That was part of the charm, or at least that’s what we told ourselves.
In attendance, in no particular order, were Sid Harris, Sofia Warren, Felipe “Fego” Galindo, Farley Katz, Sam Gross, Jason Adam Katzenstein and Cartoon Editor, Emma Allen.
Sam Gross held court. Sam usually did. He pulled out a stack of cartoons and told stories about Callahan and about every other cartoonist he’d known across half a century of this strange trade. Gossip, scandal, kvetching: the whole nine. The rest of us pecked away at our duck and listened like apprentices, which is exactly what we were.
At some point, Sam slid the cartoons across and invited captions. And I, God help me, pitched one…
