In Search of a Midnight Kiss: Hollywood Ending

“I remember being stuck there in that shower in Brian’s place, and we’re under rent control, so he never wants to call the landlord because they want him out, because he’s paying way too low of a rent, and so the bathroom is clogged and he was afraid to call,” recalls Holdridge, who converses in run-on sentences and who has a thick heaping of blond hair on top of his pale face. “I remember standing in this pool of water, other people’s bath water, and I’m like, what the hell happened to my life?”

At the same time, Holdridge knew that all aspiring filmmakers, or artists, struggle on their way to the top. “Part of me was like, well, you’re here, you’re dealing with it, you’re really giving it everything you have,” he says “It’s easy to be safe and seclude yourself in a smaller place where you feel like people will reward you emotionally a little more.”

That safer, smaller place Holdridge thought of as the grungy bath water swirled around his ankles was most likely Austin, Texas. That’s where Holdridge and many of the friends (including McGuire) who comprise the cast and crew of his new film, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, first came together and started winning the accolades and validation that send dream-filled young men and women West.

Back then, Holdridge, who attended the University of Texas, was deep into the mix of art-house, coffee-culture and independent filmmaking that defined Austin in the ’90s, high on the good vibrations of locals Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and Wes Anderson.

“Robert Rodriguez had just made his movie [El Mariachi] and Slacker had just come out and Dazed and Confused was just doing its thing,” remembers Holdridge, who still carries himself with the endearing awkwardness of a recent grad. “It was, like, a really good time to be 18 or 19, going to watch indie films and being, like, oh man, we can do it ourselves. We can tell our own stories.”

So he did. Holdridge’s first indie feature, Wrong Numbers, won the audience award at the 2001 Austin Film Festival. In 2003, his follow-up, Sexless, became the first film to win both the audience and competition awards at South By Southwest. Hollywood came calling, and, as it has for so many young men and women who leave the safe confines of home for the bright lights of the big city, the shit hit the fan.

I am sitting with Holdridge and his two Midnight Kiss leads, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds, at Café Audrey in Hollywood, a strangely cheerless place that disappoints as both a coffee shop and an homage to Audrey Hepburn. The three have the easy manner of old friends about them, which they are, having worked together on Holdridge’s Austin indies and having spent much of the past 18 months on the road, as their latest collaboration wound its way through festivals around the world, winning fans and distribution deals wherever it went. They also carry the newfound joie de vivre of having survived their Hollywood horror stories, which they can now relate with something like good humor.

“When I moved here, I was on Mansfield and Fountain, and there were gunshots every night. I was in a one-bedroom apartment with three girls. It was so bad,” says Simmonds, who is from Houston. In this group dynamic, she plays the role of the younger sister to older brothers Holdridge and McNairy, who tease her in her absence when a call from her ex shows up on her phone while she’s in the bathroom.

For his part, McNairy remembers being isolated and lonely during his early days in L.A. “I’d just leave the house and go walk around town, for probably like a year, not knowing anybody,” says the actor, who wears a shirt and tie in a slightly disheveled way and speaks with the unhurried ease of an Everyman who knows he’s funny but doesn’t overdo it.

Simmonds and McNairy agree, though, that their own travails are no match for their director’s. Like McNairy’s character in Midnight Kiss, Holdridge crashed his car on the way here from Austin (the photos of a flipped and wrecked car on the side of the road seen early in the film are actually his). His girlfriend dumped him. A bicyclist stole his laptop from a stroller while he was out for a walk with his sister and nephew. Bad enough, but in this case, the laptop contained the script over which Hollywood beckoned him — a remake of Wrong Numbers. By the time Holdridge rewrote from scratch Wrong Numbers, a movie with a similar premise had recently been released. Meanwhile, he was confined to the living room of his friend’s apartment while the stoner roommate who was supposed to move out instead stayed stoned. As for work, the only gig Holdridge could get was a $7-an-hour job at a video store. “Like, all these actors are good-looking and they take all the table-waiting jobs,” he laughs. “I mean, I could do it, but I’m not quite good-looking enough to oust an actor.”