Ethan Webb
Peer Review
From Auteur to Author
“I’m not a cool person”, Kendall Olsen assured me as we, facing each other across a dusty, graphitized, scratched table, sat with unwavering eye contact in an abandoned room hidden amidst the maze of the Iwasaki Library in Emerson College.
Initially I didn’t know what to think; what makes someone “cool”!? As me and Kendall got to know each other, and long after her boyfriend Gian DiCostanzo insisted that she’s “very fun”, I became aware that she had held herself in very low esteem with such an answer as, “I’m not a cool person”.
I became aware that in high school Kendall Olsen would have said, had she been asked, that she actually had some big life-dreams; that she planned to lead a very “cool and fun” life and become a very “cool person”. She’d say, eagerly, that when she goes off to college she’d be on her way to living out her dream; she’d be en-route to becoming an acclaimed director after attending a top film school. Up until two years ago Kendall would say she’s well on her way to achieving this dream, as a freshman at Emerson College, currently pursuing a degree in Visual Media Arts.
From the small town of Naperville, in Illinois – right outside of Chicago – Kendall defines herself as somebody who doesn’t like cities. Two years ago, when Kendall came to Boston in order to attend Emerson College she wasn’t fond about the prospect of “city life”. What she was fond of, however, was the art of filmmaking: it was what she came to the city of Boston for; she was attending Emerson College so that she could follow through on her dream of graduating from a top Film School to become a successful director, “I came to Emerson knowing exactly what I wanted to do. As a VMA I was so sure. I wanted to do everything, which isn’t a option… So I wanted to be a director”. In her high school only 2 film classes were offered to students but she took them both up, with great interest, and began to find enjoyment in making her own movies.
As Kendall talked to me in our little enclave, I discerned that she isn’t too proud of the fact that her ambitions have since changed: 20-year-old Kendall Olsen, a Junior at Emerson College, has adopted different plans (that she purportedly doesn’t think are as “cool”). Rather than wielding a megaphone and perching atop a tall red folding chair labeled “Director” somewhere in a Hollywood studio, Kendall’s new dream is to buy herself an especially small house on the outskirts of a city and pursue a career in Writing for Television.
Once she began school at Emerson, Kendall rather quickly began to second-guess her dream of becoming a director: she felt intimidated by the competitive Emerson film culture. The hustle and bustle of city life was a hard enough transition for this small-town girl out of Illinois but to mix this sudden change of pace with a dose of fierce Emerson film savants proved to be quite an overwhelming combination for her. Kendall had been discouraged by a notoriously over-zealous crowd of peers: she had gone from an eager film student who wanted to do everything in film to a person who just knew she didn’t want to compete so intensely against classmates. My friend Zac Warren, who is pursuing a VMA major at Emerson in order to become a director, talks of the Film Culture that Kendall was set off by, “It can be very competitive since a lot of film students picture themselves going all the way to the Grammys and most want to be a director. As a freshman I was surprised at how seriously some kids took it”. Since she came to Emerson, Kendall has sought to transfer out a few times. She will not be defeated, though: in the words of her boyfriend, Gian, she is “very strong”. She revealed to me one of her many tattoos, located on her wrist, which propounds these words of his: the tattoo read, “Warrior”, written in the handwriting of a dear friend. She refused to explain the tattoo, though, because of “personal reasons”. Despite an initial setback and a slight change of plans, Kendall’s passion for filmmaking has remained ever ardent throughout college and her internal strength has endured resolutely; Kendall has decided to stay in the business of filmmaking, after switching into WLP, by pursuing the career of Writing for Television rather than directing. Kendall told me that if it wasn’t for her comedy troupe or A Cappella group then she’d be a lot more fed up with school.
In her spare time Kendall refines her expertise either by watching T.V, practicing with her comedy troupe, or singing with her A Cappella group. Her boyfriend Gian is an actor himself and so he shares her love of performance art, but he and Kendall share more than a common love for performing; they also both love cleaning.
Maybe it is this love of cleaning that is to blame for Kendall’s future mortgage payments as she plans to move into an especially small house (not just a small sized house: a miniature conveniently sized house, basically the size of one room for any other house). While she may not really know why she wants to live like this, I think I do: there’d be less to clean! One day Kendall will be living in a small, modest, sanitary abode, making big bucks by writing for her favorite T.V show, Broad City, all the while rehearsing A Cappella performances with Gian and the critters of the forest, far away from city life.