Source: The Reeler blog (URL)
While enduring a walk through SoHo last week, I spotted a few photocopied posters taped to lampposts along Prince Street. They queried in blockish, hand-drawn letters: DEAR MR. WES ANDERSON, WHERE ARE YOU? SARAH, accompanied by an illustration of what I assumed was the artist guided by some hipster-auteur radar gadget in hand. “If you are Wes Anderson, know him or know how I can get in touch with him, please e-mail wesandersonsearch [at] hotmail.com,” the poster entreatied.
All-points bulletin: Sarah Law’s flier, near Prince and Mulberry streets (Photo: STV)
Not quite believing (or even being able to rationalize) what I was seeing, I sent along an inquiry to learn more. “Wes Anderson is just one of my all-time favorite directors,” said Sarah Law, a friendly, candid 20-year-old Hong Kong native who began her quest late in 2005. “I’m an art student at Parsons, and I’ve always wanted to meet him, but I’ve never been able to figure out how I could get his contact (information). So I just started putting up these posters. I put them up downtown, in SoHo, East Village, West Village, kind of all over the place. I’ve been getting a lot of contact from people, but so far I haven’t really gotten in touch with him.”
And after she meets him? “I’d really like to work with him in some capacity,” she said. “I’m very interested in all kinds of art, and I mean, it could be a very naïve, student-type thing to do, but just to be in these kind of creatvie situations and projects, that what I want to do. It started as a project to find him, and whatever comes out of it–even if it’s nothing–I still had fun doing it.”
Law puts the response tally at about 40 so far, adding that most people contacted her out of the same curiosity that guided me to write. On the whole, feedback has been supportive if not productive. She said one woman got in touch saying her son once worked with Anderson; her note compiled the names and contact information for the companies they had in common. Law said she passed along letters to each just a few days ago.
Only a handful of replies have been negative, including a few customary Wes Anderson haters and one man who wrote to complain about “litter” after removing Law’s handiwork from his neighborhood. Among the positive contacts, Law stays in touch with a few seeking to stay apprised of her progress. The latest development has her heading off for a year of studying in Paris–coincidentally or not, the city in which Anderson is rumored to be taking up semi-permanent residence.
As hinted at above, Law frequently refers to her search as a “project”–as in, her family and most of her New York friends support her project, but several of her old boarding school friends “just thought it was one of the most wack projects.” Naturally, the “S” word has crept into more than one such exchange. “They thought I was stalking him and stuff like that,” she said. “I definitely understand that, but I don’t know. That’s just not how I see it. If I met him, I wouldn’t be really crazy or anything. I don’t see it as stalking him; I like his work, but I’m not in love with him. I’m interested in working with him.”
Law paused. “But like I said,” she continued, “if I never meet him, being able to do this has been a lot of fun, too.”