Hello Octoberones!

That’s a word, right? Pronounced like the fancy chocolate you buy at duty free when you’ve forgotten to get your significant other some more meaningful trinket from your business trip? I’m not saying that’s something I once did at the Berlin airport at 6 in the morning, but some of you might have. 

If you hate “Octoberones”—and you really ought to—do you think there should be another name for the Premiere Party community, a way for me to more regularly address you all? Like how Mariah Carey has her Lambily, and Susan Sarandon has her SaranFans (that’s real), and of course there’s Roma Maffia’s Mafia (I’m assuming that has to exist, because otherwise who am I paying membership dues to??). If that’s something people who read this glorious newsletter want for themselves, please send in your ideas: [email protected]. I would never presume to name the community myself, because that’s like giving yourself a nickname. It just won’t fly. But if you, dear readers, wanted to send me your ideas, I can run them by the group. Please, though, I beg of you: don’t propose “Richard Lawson’s Soldiers of God,” because that part of my life is firmly over and I strongly disavow anything done in my name in or around Kissimmee, Florida during that period of time. 

Anyway, hello. We find ourselves in October, don’t we? Cider stores the nation over are bustling, everyone’s getting ready for the harvest dance where Jimmy is going to propose to Darla before he ships out to the Pacific, and the New York Film Festival is in full swing. Oh boy is that thing swinging, if Wednesday night’s big movie was any indication. 

The film that evening was Nathan Fielder and Lance “Primetime” Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, a documentary-cum–something else that blew everyone’s socks off, including my own. I went into the movie warily. I really don’t enjoy Fielder’s shtick most of the time. Nathan For You is largely an exercise in embarrassing unwitting regular people, and that is not a genre I can get behind. I am told that season two of The Rehearsal is something I would enjoy, but my Fielder ick is hard to overcome. So, I sat down for You Can See Everything with a smug, “prove me wrong” sort of attitude. (Earlier in the evening I had set up a folding table with a sign reading “Prove Me Wrong” outside of Juilliard, in order to honor a fallen hero.) 

At first, it seemed like my fears were warranted: there are portions in the early stretch of Fielder and Oppenheim’s three-hour film when it seems that Fielder is just there to get amusing footage of his subject, now imprisoned Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, while he gives withering reaction shots to the camera. But even then, it’s hard to be annoyed by Fielder’s antics because his access to Holmes and her husband as the family prepares for Holmes’s long prison term is boggling. And then midway through the film, You Can See Everything takes on fascinating new shape, in ways I won’t spoil here.

I’m going to write about the movie more thoroughly once it’s out and people have had a chance to see it. What I’ll do now is urge you to see it when you can: it is a gripping, bizarre, singular movie, one that provokes infinite questions and left me reeling as I wandered out of the theater. I know that sounds awfully grandiose, and I don’t want to overhype the movie, but I was really astonished by it. 

Luckily, the film is out in just a couple of weeks, so your wait to see it won’t be long. In the meantime, want some other recommendations? Well, here you go.