Book Review: Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother

I’m a film fan who has always been drawn to bizarre stories about misunderstood outcasts. So the familiar scrawl of long, skinny handwriting forming the credits before an Addams Family or Men in Black movie meant that my entertainment was in the hands of someone who understood me. When I heard the director of those movies, Barry Sonnenfeld, plugging his first book, a memoir, on a podcast, I knew I’d have to order a copy. Within its 350 pages I learned about his angst-filled childhood, his unorthodox entry into the movie business, and a few juicy Hollywood stories told in the author’s dry, sarcastic humor and quick, pessimistic wit in his book, Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker.

Barry Sonnenfeld,  Call Your Mother plot synopsis

Hollywood director Barry Sonnenfeld’s memoir chronicles his early life through the peak of his filmmaking career. The first half of the book centers around his eccentric parents. It then shifts focus to some juicy on-set stories. The way he handles challenges in his career is clearly informed by his upbringing once you get to know his parents.

Sonnenfeld was born to a dramatic, pathologically lying mother and a neglectful, cheating father. They’re not the worst parents you’ll ever read about. But from their son’s point of view, they’re comically awful on one hand and completely unforgivable on the other. To the outside world, though, they’re generous and inspiring. This forces their son to play the part of ungrateful spawn. But now, Sonnenfeld takes up a significant amount of space in his book to explain what went on behind closed doors.

Growing up in New York City, Sonnenfeld also recounts his rough neighborhood as well as alienation from his peers, chilling interactions with his child molester and part-time live-in cousin, and the subsequent smothering and verbally abusive parenting that he suffered through. After several attempts to escape his home life, he finally succeeds. He starts out as a film before graduating to camera man. Eventually, he ends up in cinematography before being asked to direct his first film. It’s a profession  that he ultimately fell into rather than pursued.

Eventually, he met and, many years later, married the love of his life Susan “Sweetie” Ringo. This union gave him the safe and stable home life that he craved throughout his childhood. It also came on the heels of his successful directing career.

The book’s title

The story behind the book’s title is one of the first told. It stems from an experience as a teenager. One night, he was paged over in the intercom at Madison Square Garden in front of a packed house attending the Winter Festival for Peace concert protesting the Vietnam War. Thinking his father was dead, Sonnenfeld called home. Instead, he learned that his mother had fallen into hysterics over the fact that he wasn’t home 20 minutes past the scheduled end of the concert.

We all grow up taking our parents’ threats too seriously. Eventually, you get to a point where you begin to call their bluff. In Sonnenfeld’s case, calling out his parents manifested in an insulting, mean-spirited humor towards them. Unfortunately, they continued to take the upper hand for the rest of their lives.

Despite his animosity towards his parents, this book isn’t a tell-all about how his parents ruined his life. While they did leave their share of emotional scars, he takes full credit for his successes and failures.

Instead, Sonnenfeld lives by the philosophy that every choice that we make throughout our lives plunges us into a new reality. Each reality leads us to a different outcome. He credits this philosophy as the choices that led him to meet his wife, break into the movie business, and avoid being killed in an airplane crash among other things. However, he’s adamant that a plane crash will eventually kill him.

Coping mechanisms

Sonnenfeld’s years of emotional torture primed him for a Hollywood career. He was able to endure the hot-headed temper of egomaniacal studio executives, the audacious egos of big Hollywood stars, and the tedious and time-sensitive pressures of filmmaking.

Humor is one of Sonnenfeld’s biggest coping mechanisms. While sometimes over-the-top in terms of meanness, throwing jokes at his and his enemy’s expense gives him a bit of control in an otherwise powerless situation. He’s not afraid to humiliate his nemesis and take a punch for it. Several muggings built up his tolerance to be able to take a punch, physically and emotionally.

Another is common sense. When faced with a situation where someone in power is telling him to pull off the impossible, he outlines in detail the reasons why it cannot be done. Then, he moves onto the hoops that not only he, but also the person barking out the commands, will have to jump through in order to achieve it. Finally, he notes the dollar amount needed to accomplish the task. This is eventually the tipping point that allows practicality to win the day.

Sonnenfeld’s ultimate superpower, though, is as he states,  “…when events get scary, I get calm.” As someone who is good in a crisis, I can relate to this sentiment. When you spend your days waiting for the plane to crash, there’s a sense of relief when it happens, and you realize that you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Gross out factor

This memoir likes to get detailed, giving the reader an immersive, sensory experience. Often, these details tend to be overwhelmingly gross. This includes Sonnenfeld’s mother’s kitchen rules and absent-minded attempts at cooking. He chronicles  burnt food, gooey substances splattering the walls, and undercooked TV dinners that sustained him throughout his childhood.

Later, he recounts his first gigs in the movie industry as a camera man for several porn films. What starts as a long, drawn out, boring gig results in a wide array of bodily fluids that end up protruding from both cast and crew. He utilizes nearly all five senses in order to put the reader in the moment with him. So if you have a weak stomach, you’ll want to skip that chapter.

Inside jokes

Because he’s so candid, Sonnenfeld lets the reader in on his inside jokes and vernacular, referring back to them in later chapters once he establishes them in his early life. Readers will learn new terms such as the “silent schmuck,” who CM the CM is, and the definition of the word “decimation” as it relates to Kelly Sonnenfeld’s hurt feelings.

In this way, you’re reliving the experience with him. I would have liked to have read more about the making of his famous films from his distinct voice rather than some of the less flashy moments. But his picking and choosing which stories to include or to gloss over speaks to the moments that truly affected his memory and their importance in his life’s history.

My recommendation

Any film buff, especially one who has a soft spot for indies of the 80’s or blockbusters of the 90’s should definitely add this to their TBR list. However, if you’re strictly in it for the films, there is a lot of back story to get through first.

And once you do get there, a lot of his stories revolve around the pre-production process of his hit movies rather than on-set anecdotes. Plenty of behind-the-scenes photographs supplement the text but do not always go along with the story he is currently telling.

Primarily, this book is framed around how the parent-child relationship never completely ends. It informs your entire life, no matter how much of a big shot you become. And if your parents are needy and experts on guilt tripping, like Sonnenfeld, you’ll always be child first, filmmaker second. Yet he jumped through a million different realities to end up in this one, and because of this, he got to write all about it.

Buy it!

Buy a copy of Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.

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