It’s 3 p.m. at the Sunset Tower Hotel, the purgatory hour between lunch and dinner at one of Hollywood’s favorite places to hammer out deals and gaze at stars. Jordan Firstman decides it’s late enough in the day for his first Aperol spritz, which leads to some reminiscing. It was a decade ago that über-producer Greg Berlanti invited the then-25-year-old Firstman to the Tower Bar to discuss the trajectory of his career.
Berlanti, who became the showrunner of “Dawson’s Creek” at age 27, has served as a coach for more than one young queer creator, and Firstman had just sold a series to the cable channel Sundance TV, based on his romantic intergenerational short film “Call Your Father.” He was getting pushback from the network about casting a 50-year-old out gay actor in the lead. It would languish there for years, and then disappear altogether in that company’s revolving door of mergers and executive changes. Firstman, 35, does not resemble the typical filmmaker whose career launched into the stratosphere out of the Cannes Film Festival.
His baggy jeans, chest-hugging polo and Oakley raver sunglasses lend themselves better to the hipster neighborhood of Silver Lake. (Not coincidentally, that’s the setting of Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy “I Love L.A.,” on which he co-stars as a stylist and BFF to Sennott’s aspiring talent manager, Maia.) Impishness is Firstman’s trademark — he’s all easy crooked smiles and bouncing brown curls. That quality is what’s made his “Internet Gay” persona travel so readily — as evidenced by his more than 1 million followers on Instagram and TikTok. Yet in May, Firstman took the French Riviera by storm with “Club Kid” — his feature debut as a writer-director and first turn as a leading man on the big screen — where the project inspired a heated bidding war.
Indie giant A24 beat out Focus Features, Searchlight, Netflix and Mubi for a global rights deal worth $17 million, instantly solidifying Firstman as a force to be reckoned with. Depression and low self-esteem hover over Peter like buzzing drones, swatted away by late nights and early mornings and Uber Eats and laptop porn. That cycle is disrupted when 10-year-old Arlo (newcomer Reggie Absolom) shows up at the door of Peter’s SoHo apartment announcing he is his son.
Both father and child are saved and tested in equal parts, as we learn that truly happy endings never come home with us from the club. The magic trick of “Club Kid” is Firstman’s ability to sell a broad, humorous story about the kind of love that fundamentally changes us — all while being firmly rooted in the digital, unapologetically gay culture that formed his artistic sensibilities. Firstman is the creative love child of Judd Apatow and Nicole Holofcener, delivered unto a Gen Z cohort who’ve become obsessed with watching movies in theaters.
Then we took it to the New York Film Festival, which I was very nervous to do, and showed it to the 35-year-olds who do drugs. I built the story to work on levels, with the top being a layer of warmth that feels like a hug. I explore some of my more transgressive ideas beneath the surface.
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