Momma's Man Director Is Daddy's Boy

The Jacobs’ apartment — which Azazel describes as “sometimes hard to breathe [in] and hard to leave” — provides an enormous array of visual points of contact, cluttered with boxes, books, film equipment and an oddball assortment of props and toys, from baby-doll heads to wind-up red robots. (“What props? It’s my life,” Ken responds.) The Jacobs’ loft, in fact, gives Momma’s Man its enduring paralysis metaphor: the home that is both claustrophobic and comforting.

While Momma’s Man isn’t directly autobiographical (Ken and Azazel talk more than the father and son depicted in the film), Azazel was, ironically, struck with Bell’s palsy during postproduction. “In terms of parallels with the film, it’s freaky,” he admits. The paralyzing disease gripped him right after he informed his girlfriend (The GoodTimesKid’s Sara Diaz) that he planned to stay in New York to edit the film: “The next thing I know, I’m waking up and half my face is frozen.” He went to an acupuncturist three days a week, but the palsy lasted four months. It wasn’t until the film neared completion that it finally lifted and Azazel was able to return to L.A.

The conjugal bed

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More About

• Flo Jacobs
• Ken Jacobs
• Azazel Jacobs
• Mike Kuchar
• State University of New York at Purchase

After leaving Yuen Yuen, father and son walk down Bayard Street back toward the Jacobs’ loft. Ken stops to buy a bag of lychee fruit, and the two reminisce about the city’s transformations over the years, from Ken’s early memories of “horses delivering milk on the cobblestones” to the time Azazel was caught in the middle of an Asian gang fight at the Chinese Ice Cream Factory. (Azazel’s currently writing a gangster flick.)

“Nothing is sacred in this city; everything changes, and I know our place won’t be mine to go to,” Azazel says, referring to his parents’ apartment, which is a rental. “In an odd way, I wanted the film to disconnect me from it: to allow us to own it without buying it, to be a way of letting it go, to remind myself that it’s not the physical location, it’s not the square feet — it’s only what was done with it.”