Hell Is Other Parents by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Author:Deborah Copaken Kogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books

One afternoon, just as we were sitting down to lunch in the craft services tent, a PA came to fetch us. “Can we borrow Jacob for a minute?” he said. “J.J. needs him.” J.J. is the director of Star Trek.

Jacob, who’d spent the whole morning fighting fake battles and getting bruised, eyed his uneaten food hungrily. “Can I eat my chicken first?”

“No,” said the PA. “J.J. needs you now.”

Jacob put down his fork and stood up. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

J.J. is also cocreator of the TV show Lost. J.J.’s casting director, April, had once called, several months earlier, to ask if Jacob wanted to play a minor role on that show, but it would have conflicted with a family plan, so I’d said no.

Jacob had been upset with me when he’d realized the role I’d turned down on his behalf—the chance to play Ben’s younger self, omg, in Hawaii!—so when J.J.’s casting director called again, asking him to play Adolescent Spock, he happily accepted, not because of any innate love for Star Trek, which he’d never seen, but for the chance to work with his generation’s Gene Roddenberry. Meaning, not much can keep my son from a savory chicken lunch, but the chance to quiz J.J. himself on the future plotlines of his favorite show could.

The PA accompanied us to the parking lot, where J.J. was walking in and around the perimeters of two giant circles marked with tape on the ground, his eye flush up against his viewfinder, while a group of his colleagues stood by. J.J. shares the same black-framed, cool-nerd taste in eyewear as his costume designer, but he wears them unironically: one senses in the man the dutiful bar mitzvah boy he must have once been. His smile, as much a part of his signature look as his eyewear, is genuine, inviting, and he addresses everyone on set with an intoxicating insouciance, as if we were all just hanging out backstage at the high school theater instead of congregating on multimillion-dollar sets.

“Oh, good, Jacob,” he said, when he spotted my son, “glad you’re here. Did you know the second J in my name stands for Jacob? Jeffrey Jacob. Isn’t that cool?” He held the viewfinder up to his eye and directed my son to stand between the two circles on the ground. “Yup,” he said to the large coterie around him, “I knew it. The shot’s not going to work. I need a third bowl.”

An architect holding his rendering, in three-dimensional miniature, of the two giant “bowls” marked on the macadam, nodded his head and stared down at his model, turning it this way and that. The bowls—around eight to ten feet in diameter, if I had to guess—were to be constructed on the Paramount lot and used in a scene that would be shot a month hence, when Jacob would return to LA with my father for another eleven days of combat training and shooting.

The man standing next to the architect, presumably the producer, said, “We can’t do it, J.

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