If anyone had told me that my very different young adult twins would BOTH venture out of our nest into the movie business, I’d have said: “Impossible!”
Matt and Samantha are NOT your garden variety fraternal twins, separated only by gender. My daughter’s early childhood diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder caused my twins to grow up in vastly different worlds. While Samantha struggled academically and socially in special schools, Matt enrolled in a gifted program and made friends easily. Samantha was endlessly jealous of her brother; Matt was forever embarrassed by his sister. Still, they always loved each other, but mostly from a distance—the greater, the better—to maintain family peace.
Flash forward to age 22, when Samantha was cast as the female lead in a film, Keep the Change, and“discovered” at the JCC’s Adaptations Program for young adults with disabilities. At the same time, Matt graduated from Vassar as a film major and began working seriously on a screenplay with a friend he met in rehab –after both of them became sober. He had joked about his twin sister getting the first screen credit, but he was truly proud of her success (and perhaps even the tiniest bit jealous?)
However, the pendulum swung back when Samantha graduated from Pace and was unable to find any job, internship or volunteer position for an entire year. The script Matt and his friend’s had written about rehab was presented and rejected by every television network. End of story, right?
Hardly! Matt and his friend, Nick, spent a year rewriting their television script into a feature film called Being Charlie, which was sold to Castle Rock Entertainment. They labored over revisions while waiting and hoping for financing. Finally, in February 2015, their dream came true when the financing fell into place and Rob Reiner signed on as director; it seemed almost too good to be true, like winning the lottery twice, but hey, sometimes “you gotta believe.”
As Matt’s mom, I clearly can’t be objective about the movie. What I can say is that Being Charlie contains all of the ingredients I believe make a film great: a well-crafted story of redemption where the main characters grow in addition to sharp dialogue that inspired a balance of laughter and tears. The audience at its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival gave it a standing ovation. (Never mind that the critics were less complimentary. As a writer, I know how much easier—and more fun—it is to criticize others’ art than create your own!)
My husband Howard and I were floating on clouds—from watching our son up on stage during the Q and A session with Nick, Rob Reiner and the entire cast—to mingling with them at the cast party. Someone asked for Matt’s autograph! A teacher from the mid-west told him and Nick she thought the film should be shown in every high school.
Now that I’m back to my ordinary life, it’s hard to believe that my twins—so completely different from each other—would both be in movies, one as a writer and the other as co-star—at the same time. Of course, Matt has moved to LA while Samantha continues to live in New York, so my twins are as far apart from each other as possible while still living in the continental US. I can’t help but feel sad that our family is separated, and my twins continue to have a distant (but oddly parallel) relationship.
Still, I’m hoping one day they’ll find a way to connect more deeply. Before Matt left for his premiere, he visited Samantha while she was shooting and then ate dinner with her and her friends on the spectrum. My daughter was delighted.
Could it be that sharing the magical experience of movie-making will bring my twins together one day? A mother can only hope. After all, from my perspective, I see two beautiful and distinct shooting stars, crossing overhead in the same vast sky.
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Originally Published on The Never-Empty Nest
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