In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kevin Smokler is one of our most astute pop culture critics. His book Break the Frame shares career-spanning interviews with 24 celebrated and rising female filmmakers.
Saul Austerlitz wrote of the book:
“A captivating collection of interviews with a bevy of women filmmakers…Smokler… is intent on not asking obvious questions about sexism and discrimination, and instead foregrounding his own sense of wonder: ‘How did you pull this off?'”
In his own words, here is Kevin Smokler’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Break the Frame:
When you get to interview two dozen incredible women filmmakers, you get to watch at least 5 times that many incredible movies that offer up music , scoring a few memorable moments. The math behind this bounty is practically incalculable, so I’ve tried to narrow it down to movie you’ve heard of but might be missing and the songs from them that will bring them right back to you.
10 songs
“Kids in America” by the Muffs
“So ok, you’re probably going, is this like a Noxema commercial or what?”
It’s 30 seconds into Clueless (1995) exactly where we are, a movie about privileged teenagers that thinks it’s funny we’re watching a movie about privileged teenagers. Because its characters have no doubt seen a lot of these movies too.
The genius of director Amy Heckerling comes in many shapes and sizes. My favorite is how her movies effectively remove a song on their soundtrack in any other context. Heckerling had already done this once (as well as direct the previous decade’s defining teen movie) in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where “Moving in Stereo” by the Cars now and forever means “there’s a stunningly beautiful woman.” Here this cover of Kim Wilde’s 1981 hit “Kids in America” by the southern California pop punk quartet The Muffs will always mean “Clueless is starting!” perhaps the most quotable (Heckerling did the screenplay too), and beloved teen movie of the last three decades.
I had the honor of interviewing Amy Heckerling three times. During our last conversation, I praised Ms. Heckerling for writing perhaps the most quotable movie of all time. “I think that honor should go to Casablanca but thank you” she said.
“Love Drought” by Beyonce
Just as it’s impossible to divorce Beyonce’s modern classic of a sixth album Lemonade (2016) from its companion film, we also can’t separate that film from its chief inspiration, 1991’s Daughters of the Dust, written and directed by Julie Dash. The story of a black family moving to the American mainland from an island off the South Carolina coast in the early 20th century, Dash’s only feature film has been inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, to be preserved as an American cultural treasure for all time.
“Love Drought” is the most Dashian of the short films of the songs on Lemonade. The white lace dresses, achingly beautiful natural light and swampy baptismal waters are straight out of Daughters (Beyonce has stated as much). The movie (which is like watching a great painting come to life) is narrated in pensive voice over that doesn’t quite match what we are seeing onscreen, precisely how “Love Draught” opens too.
I nearly had a heart attack when offered the opportunity to speak to a national treasure like Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust being her only film is a crime against our interests as movie lovers. But fear not, Dash has been working steadily since then, making television, music videos (“Gimme One Reason” by Tracy Chapman? Dash) and art installations as magisterial as few directors can.
“Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall
Another case of a song now being inseparable from the movie. Scottish singer KT Tunstall’s first single was already a hit when it showed up as the opening title music to The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Tunstall was inspired to write it by her musical hero Patti Smith and the moment she realized, looking at the cover of Smith’s 1975 debut album Horses, that she too wanted to spend her life as a musician.
Fitting then a) The Devil Wears Prada opens with a montage of women preparing to meet the day and a celebration of the glory of female power and b) Aline Brosh McKenna, who has made a glorious career of these celebrations, wrote the screenplay (adopted from the novel by Lauren Weisberger) and won a BAFTA award for it.
I spoke to Brosh McKenna shortly after the release of her directorial debut Your Place or Mine (2023, Netflix) , a romantic comedy about childhood best friends (Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher) who swap houses for a week. But you probably also know her from the screenplay for 27 Dresses (which I love and we discussed at length) and as co-creator/show runner of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (same).
“Here comes the change” by Kesha
I love telling people that 2018’s One the Basis of Sex, about the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a pioneering lawyer for women’s rights long before she ascended to the Supreme Court, was directed by the same person who made George Clooney a movie star. Mimi Leder had been a go-to-director in network television for much of the 80s and 90s (the use of steadicams in ER and The West Wing and therefore the inventor of the “walk and talk” scene) when Steven Spielberg asked her to head up 1996’s The Peacemaker, Clooney’s first starring role on the big screen. No Mimi Leder, no Oceans whathaveyous. Just saying.
The Peacemaker ain’t as good as One the Basis.. (which kills it at a hard movie genre to get right, the biopic). Basis concludes with this soaring ballad by Kesha, which I also love, because, as if it isn’t obvious yet, I am fond of an artist doing what we do not expect of them.
“Happy” by Pharrell Williams
The brightest moment of Good Trouble, the 2020 documentary on Civil Rights Legend John Lewis, isn’t the young Lewis marching over the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, Alabama or a middle-aged Lewis being elected to Congress. It’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree dancing with his staff to this Pharrell Williams’s #1 single. For his own listening, Congressman Lewis leaned toward blues, gospel and soul, each of which is present in Pharrell’s Motown descendant.
Good Trouble is the sixth documentary in the filmography of Dawn Porter, who does for the reckoning of American history what the late E.L Doctorow did in novels. Her body of work seems to stretch out faster than we can watch it, with great movies about The Supreme Court, The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Lady Bird Johnson and Luther Vandross coming in only the 5 years following Good Trouble.
“Juicy” by The Notorious B.I.G
It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine
Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin’ pictures on my wall
I’m sure “Juicy” The Notorious B.I.G debut single in August of 1994 wasn’t the first hip-hop song to open with nostalgia for the genre’s history. But it’s the first one that comes to mind, when remembering that, when Christopher Wallace began rapping on corners of his native Brooklyn, hip-hop was already a national phenomenon, its earliest stars adults in their 30s and 40s.
Dream Hampton was an all-star of music criticism and reporting during the rise of hip-hip but filmed everything during her years writing as always wanted to direct movies. It was all a Dream (2024) is her feature-length documentary about the early years of that great American music genre she witnessed and interpreted.
“Bamba” by Yousouu N’Door
Elizabeth Chai Vasheryli was a half dozen documentaries into her directing career when she and her husband Jimmy Chin won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2018 for Free Solo. Her 2008 project Youssou N’Dour: I Bring what I Love changed everything for the 30 year old filmmaker. Her movie, far from a conventional biography, came to the life of Africa’s most famous musician since Fela Kuti, at precisely the moment everything changed for him.
The Sengelase N’Dour’s plans to release his album Eygpt, in praise of his devotion to Islam, ran smack into the terrorist attack of Sept 11, 2001 and the Anti-Muslim fury and bigotry that followed. “Bamba”, on a later N’Dour record testifies again to N’DOUR’s faith (“Bamba” in West Africa means “resiliant”) and gives the trailer to Vasherlyi’s documentary, a remarkable beginning to a remarkable career, its weight, its joy, its wings.
“I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday
Writer/Directors Shari Springer Berman and David Pulcini got the juice to make 2003’s American Splendor (and receive an Oscar Nomination for the screenplay) thanks to their first film, a documentary called Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (1997). By coincidence, the two recent film school graduates had been in Los Angeles trying to get their career started when they heard about the closing of Chasen’s, a legendary Beverly Hills restaurant that had served movie stars, presidents and visiting royalty for 59 years. The two sensed a story, borrowed some equipment from a West Coast film school they did not attend and got to work.
Chasen’s did not allow filming in the restaurant during business hours. The directors got lucky when the staff, at their final pre-service meeting suddenly burst into a rendition of the American songbook classic “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a sad piano ballad about growing older and missing what once was, made famous contemporaneously by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and my favorite version, Billie Holiday.
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way
I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you
“Breeze’s” by Meshell Ndegeocello
The underrated romantic drama Really, Love (2020) opens with this song by an underrated musical genius, Washington DC’s own Meshell Ndegeocello. Of course we know her voice and bass talents on John Mellacamp’s remake of Van Morrision’s “Wild Night.” We should know way way more about her 14 studio albums, her 3 Grammys, that she is the first woman featured on the cover of Bass Player Magazine or that her debut record, “Plantation Lullabies” is universally considered one of the great first albums in modern music history.
Felisha Pride (currently showrunner of the upcoming “Different World” sequel on Netflix), co-write and produced Really, Love and told me she and director Angel Kristi Williams’s chief inspirations were black romantic dramas of the 1990s like Love Jones, Jason’s Lyric and Waiting to Exhale and of course, their unforgettable soundtracks. These movies, Pride told me, luxuriated in confidence, serenity and the still beauty of blackness. So does the music and person of Meshell Ndegeocello, whose music always seems to be conjuring noble spirits just after the falling of night.
Comment te dire adieu – Franciose Hardy
In adopting Darcy Bell’s novel A Simple Favor for the movies, Screenwriter Jessica Sharzer changed the focus from a thriller about disappearance and betrayal to a thrilling human drama about the dynamics of a new friendship between working mothers.
“it’s a conversation I have with my female friends all the time,” Sharzer told me, “Where the stay at home moms are self conscious about not having careers and not making money. And the working moms feel guilty about not spending enough time with their kids and not being hands on enough… And I hadn’t really seen that in a movie, or at least not in a genre movie.”
This song comes in at the very beginning of this mating dance. Stephanie (Ann Kendrick) dances her way around the palace where Emily (Blake Lively) lives. It’s French, 1960s (a theme of the movie) sexy and kinda dangerous, like a snake giving you a smile. For a movie where main characters go missing, it’s pretty great that the song’s name means “How to Say Goodbye to You!”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Kevin Smokler’s playlist for his book Brat Pack America
Kevin Smokler’s playlist for his book Practical Classics
Kevin Smokler is the author of Brat Pack America and Practical Classics, and the co-director of the award winning 2022 documentary film Vinyl Nation. His essays and criticism have appeared in Salon, Vulture, Buzzfeed, and NPR.org. Onstage, he has interviewed comedians, actors, architects, filmmakers, and musicians at venues throughout North America.