Writer, social commentator and all-around grump Fran Lebowitz is coming to Park City to be interviewed, answer questions and explain why she doesn’t need you to show her things on the Internet.
Fran Lebowitz is 72, and her biting social commentary on American life has long been filtered through a Manhattan lens. How she’ll translate that to a local audience Saturday night is anyone’s guess.
Lebowitz said making her Netflix series “Pretend It’s a City” with her good friend Martin Scorsese brought a whole new audience of people in their 20s to her work. And while the 2021 series was a critical success, she was hesitant, at first, to embark on the project for reasons that are surprising.
“With ‘Pretend It’s a City’ what the disconcerting thing was that at the beginning, especially, Marty kept saying, ‘I don't know how to do this. I've never done this. I don't know how to do this.’ So you know, it's like the greatest living American director tells you that they don’t know how to do something, it's not confidence-inspiring,” Lebowitz said. “But you know, I said, ‘Marty, I don't know how, don’t ask me.’ You know, I said, ‘I don't know, just make a movie and cut it into seven pieces,’ which of course, is not what he did. And it turned out. Yes, of course, he knows how to do it.”
The title of the series came from her daily walks through the streets of Manhattan and her growing frustrations with people not paying attention to their surroundings.
“And especially with tourists because they will stop, and especially after the phones, once there were the phones, everyone was looking down, no one was moving. And so I used to yell at people in the street. I, in fact, I say 'used to,' it's really not accurate. I still do. But you know, 'move! Pretend it’s a city!'"
Lebowitz is famously anti-technology. She doesn’t own a cell phone and said she has no intention of ever getting one.
“People say, ‘You don't have a phone?’ I have a phone. It's now called a landline. It's in my apartment,” she said. “But they mean I don't have an iPhone. And that seems to really annoy people. ‘I can't reach you.’ And I always say, 'So what? Who am I?' You know? 'What am I the head of, you know, trauma brain surgery in New York Hospital?' Believe me, if you have an emergency, don't call me, I have no skills.”
Leibowitz said she’s made a career out of observing the world around her. And sometimes what she sees is worthy of a cantankerous complaint.
“I know that everyone thinks I complain all the time, I understand that. I mean, to me, a lot of what people call complaining is simply observing," she said. "OK, now, it's not that I expect things to be perfect, you know, or even bearable. But there are certainly many, many things, for instance, I fly all the time. All right, I am on a plane, at least half the days of the year, maybe more. And no one who has to fly all the time can possibly think that there's nothing to complain about.”
Is her speaking tour a form of writerly procrastination? Lebowitz, once known for her writing, has hit writer’s block that’s lasted decades.
“And writing is hard for me,” Lebowitz said. “I have done much more talking. I mean, that I used to always say the only job that seems harder to me is coal mining. So, you know, or any kind of mining that is really hard. I always feel sorry for miners, but writing is very hard. I know. I mean, one thing that really does surprise me about technology is how the entire world seems all at once to have agreed to spend all day long writing for free. That would not be me.”
Lebowitz said she enjoys spending time with a good book on her sofa more than anything else. That’s her idea of happiness.
An Evening with Fran Lebowitz is Saturday, April 8 at the Park City Eccles Center located at 1750 Kearns Blvd.
The show starts at 7:30 p.m.
