A well-deserved N.Y. Times piece about Little Miss Sunshine directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who are very married, very talented and who finish each other’s sentences.
There’s just this one tiny odd note in Franz Lidz‘s piece that I’m sure Dayton is regretting to some extent already. It comes when Dayton refers to a former roommate named Frank H. Sprague, “a perpetual 30 year-old college student [whose] extended academic career had spanned 22 years…[and] was one of those people who really did what you’re supposed to do in life but never reaped any of the benefits,” inside whom “there was a whole universe hidden.” Sprague ended up dead a few years ago “in a derelict Hollywood studio apartment,” Lidz reports. And then right after this sentence he quotes Dayton as saying Sprague “died in his underwear clutching a Hershey bar.”
Whoa. No matter how much of a loser or a dilletante Sprague might have been, it’s disrespectful to dismiss him that way. The use of the words “clutching a Hershey bar” doesn’t feel right.