The Flashback Interview: Sarah Kernochan
My first exposure to my newest interview subject, Sarah Kernochan, came when my mom allowed me to rent the movie 9 1/2 Weeks, which Sarah helped write, on New Years’ Eve in 2001. Although my mom wasn’t aware of most 80s pop culture, she had heard of that film, and was reluctant to let me see it, but she eventually let me, and I liked what I saw. A few months later, I watched the 74th Academy Awards and saw Sarah Kernochan onstage accepting an Oscar for Best Documentary Short for Thoth. Years later, I looked up Sarah Kernochan’s official website, and was impressed by the depths of her talents. She’s been a screenwriter, a director and a musician. I knew I’d want to interview her someday, and that day came on June 17th, 2019. I hope you all enjoy getting to know her.
Say hello to Sarah Kernochan!
Johnny: One of your earliest jobs was working as a ghostwriter at The Village Voice. What was it like to be working for that paper during the turbulent times of the late 1960s?
Sarah: Well, it was certainly turbulent politically, but culturally, it was really a gas. I mean, not everything was built around the Vietnam War. There was a sexual revolution going on. The hippies were in full swing, and there were be-ins, everybody taking their clothes off (laughing), and drugs and having a lot of sex. Mainly, there was an upsurge in what had been fringe art in the mainstream. The column I ghostwrote was called Scenes, and that’s what we did every week. We would feature short bits depicting all the latest stuff that was happening around the city, or we were bringing their attention to something to read or see, or interesting people who were coming up. That part was really kind of euphoric. Of course, otherwise at the Voice there was a lot of resistance going on, and some of the most important counterculture voices were prominent in the Voice because they started the tradition of Subjective Journalism, where the author is part of the story. They were more emotional pieces than straight journalism.
Johnny: I see. As the Village Voice has shut down about a year or two back, do you have your pieces for The Village Voice backed up? Do you have an archive of them saved up?
Sarah: Yes. In a way, I think the Voice is still open with a skeleton crew. There’s definitely an archive. There’s a Facebook page for people who are exchanging their old articles. I think there’s an archive online and that someone runs that, but I couldn’t be sure. It’s been so long since I had anything to do with them. My tenure was very brief.
Johnny: Alright. You developed an interest in documentary film-making, leading you and your fellow Village Voice writer, the late Howard Smith, to create the 1972 documentary Marjoe. What was the impetus behind choosing Marjoe Gortner as your subject, and what was the most surprising thing that happened during filming of the documentary?
Sarah: Well, we had no interest in making a documentary (laughing). What happened was that I had quit the Voice in order to turn to screenwriting, because I thought I might be able to get some traction there. Howard kind of perked up at that because he had a lot of connections through the column in the film business, and he said we should do a movie together. You know, “You write and I’ll direct”, or whatever. We had it in our minds. Marjoe had just come to New York to be an actor. He had quit the preaching business again, as he did periodically when his conscience was stricken or he got bored. He had come to New York as a complete unknown, and he was using his scrapbook about his being a miracle child preacher to kind of get attention so that he could get press, and thereby help his career as an actor. Otherwise, he was just a complete unknown in a sea of unknowns, and he was used to being the center of attention (laughing). Howard had a radio show on WABC FM, which became WPLJ, and he would interview celebrities or interesting people. He spoke with Marjoe, and he brought all this stuff back home with him. We lived together, and he said, “Should we call the Maysles Brothers? This looks like a good subject”. I said, “No. Let us do it”, not really thinking about whether it would be something we would be good at, or whether we could even get the money to do it. It actually came together kind of miraculously, very, very fast, and so off we went, kind of pretending to be born-again Christians in order to keep Marjoe’s secret that he was a preacher in name only. He didn’t believe in anything he was doing, but he knew how to whip up a crowd, so we were filming that deception, and in the course of it, had to also deceive as to whether we were friendly to the Evangelicals or not. We were mostly agnostic. What was the most notable thing that happened? Let’s see. We didn’t get outed. They never caught on, and we had releases from everyone who walked into the tent, so we were pretty well covered. I guess the most notable thing that happened was we witnessed kind of a bona fide miracle. Marjoe said it happened now and then, simply because someone believed so hard that they were going to get healed that they actually got better. We were in a tent in about 100 degree heat in the afternoon, and the only ones to show up were kind of hardcore old people. One of them had a shoulder issue where she could not lift her arm much above her chest. He led them in a Fellini-like parade all around the perimeter of the tent, which was a lot of exercise for these people, and I think that the heat and the exhaustion led a lot of people to speak in tongues and fall on the floor. They basically went into ecstacies, and this woman raised her arm very high. It wasn’t a shill, because plenty of preachers, you know, use shills. They would know who they were, but Marjoe never bothered to do that. He was shocked (laughing) that he had actually done something good for somebody, so that’s what I remember.
Johnny: Alright. Not only were you and Howard nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar for Marjoe, but you won the award. How nervous were you that night, and how did it feel when you won?
Sarah: I was mainly nervous about throwing up on the stage because I knew we were going to win, simply because we were that rare documentary that was actually successful, and we received publicity in just about every publication there was, even Playboy. I mean, people didn’t know anything about the born again movement. It was like discovering a lost tribe (laughing). It played in the big cities in the North. The picture did not play in the South, where the Bible Belt would cause much of a stir. They just loved going to this movie and seeing this sort of exotic culture, and watching the antics of Marjoe pulling the wool over their eyes. It was quite successful, and we really kind of knew we were going to win, so it was really about getting the right dose of Valium before I went up so I wouldn’t barf.
Johnny: We’ll return to the big screen in a few questions, but I’d like to ask a few questions about your music, starting with this: Who were your biggest influences as a musician?
Sarah: Randy Newman, probably, because he had a classical underpinning and I also had a classical education. I could play the piano about as well as him, which means I could play very well. The Looney Tunes composer, Carl Stalling, I also really loved his music, and he did a lot of classical music quoting as well. I just wasn’t satisfied with the usual pop, 4 chords and that’s it. I tried to go much further with it than that. I kind of came in at the end of the singer-songwriter movement. Probably if I had come in earlier, I would’ve been more successful, but I was lucky enough to get two albums out of it. I really resented being compared to Joni Mitchell, whom I resembled.
Johnny: Well, I thought “House Of Pain” was a very interesting song. What was the story behind it?
Sarah: Island Of Lost Souls was one of my favorite movies. It was hilarious. I just really liked that refrain of “Please don’t take us to the House Of Pain”. It was about a mad Dr. Moreau who was using his operating table to graft men onto animals, creating these hybrids and not using any anesthetic at all. They were always moaning, “Please don’t take me to the House Of Pain”, and it stuck with me. I thought it would be great to build a love song around it, and I made a video before there were music videos. I used clips from the movie…
Johnny: Yeah. I thought that video was very creative. Some elements of it reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s animation for Monty Python’s Flying Circus…
Sarah: I was looking for that and didn’t have the money to do it. That’s exactly what I wanted it to be like, but I didn’t get very far with it. I spent my entire record advance on it, and I thought the record company, RCA, could actually use it. They had just come out with home video cassettes. They were in Beta form at that point, and I said, “Why don’t you just test out your equipment, and what it could do for you in terms of promotion, by running this little film that I conceived in the record stores to sell my album?”, and they didn’t do it (laughing). I thought it was crazy, and then, of course, video became popular, but it was far too late for me. I’m really sick of being ahead of my time.
Johnny: Well, I definitely think it was a fantastic piece of film-making, and honestly, if it had played in theaters, I definitely think it could’ve been nominated for a Best Live Action Short Oscar.
Sarah: Oh, I doubt it. I think it was too weird for the Academy.
Johnny: Alright. Well, another one of the many interesting songs on the album House Of Pain was Tonto’s Song. It came across as a rather dark deconstruction of The Lone Ranger. Was that the idea behind the song, or as Native American politics were frequently discussed in the 70s, did they play a part in that, too?
Sarah: I was very interested in Indian politics at the time, but I don’t actually think I thought about that when I was writing that. I was really addressing Tonto as a TV figure, as a legend that was coming to a close, but I don’t think I thought of it politically. I don’t tend to write political songs, unless you’re talking about sexual politics, and then I wrote quite a few (laughing).
Johnny: That actually leads to my next question. Your album Beat Around The Bush had some rather delightfully provocative song titles like “Can I Get On Top This Time?” and “It’s Alright, It Won’t Bite”. In your songwriting experience, do you think subtlety or bluntness is the better approach to writing about topics like love and sex?
Sarah: Well, I tried both. Obviously, you couldn’t get very far if you were blunt. In fact, RCA was extremely uncomfortable with my writing about sex, although I wasn’t graphic or anything. That was sort of fun to push the envelope. I had wanted to call the album Box Lunch, and they wouldn’t let me, so I came up with Beat Around The Bush, which was really just as bad. Yeah, (laughing) in another way I was ahead of my time because now nobody would blink at that stuff, but once my recording contract was up, I actually became much freer with that. I did a song cycle which I performed, which was about 20 minutes of fairly obscene stuff, certainly nothing you would expect to come out of a girl’s mouth. I was very influenced by Henry Miller, whom I discovered when I was 12. I discovered some hidden pages that my brothers had ripped out of a copy of Sexus. It didn’t turn me on, but the language fascinated me because it just seemed so taboo, and it just felt like these were words to get used to and see what happened.
Johnny: Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. I think everybody goes through a phase when they’re teenagers where they’re aspiring towards adulthood, and they try to figure their way to it in any way they can. I certainly went through it myself because when I was a teenager, I thought that one of the things about being an adult was you got to curse whenever you wanted, and so I’d be using profanity in school and the teachers would get upset.
Sarah: (Laughing) Yeah, I don’t think I would’ve done that with my teachers, but when I did come around to publishing my first novel, that also was extremely graphic.
Johnny: Alright. Speaking of writing along those lines, your first screenwriting credit came with 9 1/2 Weeks, where you collaborated with Patrica Knop and the late Zalman King. If you read the novel before you wrote the script, did you think it would be difficult to adapt into a mainstream movie?
Sarah: I didn’t read the book at all, and I didn’t collaborate with them. They were fired and I replaced them due to the director. The script, I think, was 2/3rd them, and you don’t get a screen credit unless you’ve written 1/3rd of the adapted material, and I had done that, but most of the words were Zalman and Patricia. They had already plumbed the book, and I came on the project late in the process. I was told to cut-and-paste and make things work that didn’t, and I never went to the book. I just was addressing fixing the script itself. It didn’t seem relevant, I didn’t have time to read the book. I never thought of it, and I didn’t really read it until after the script was locked.
Johnny: Alright. Well, I think you did a good job in helping to put it together. While 9 1/2 Weeks is one of my favorite 80s movies, I was unnerved to see some of what went into production of the movie, namely the different treatments between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. If you had directed the movie, what would you have done differently?
Sarah: Well, I met Kim, of course, and found her very vulnerable, but you could work with that. She didn’t have a lot of confidence in what she could do, and I was writing pages for her, and I wanted to have them real and based on her own story, if possible, to help her with the acting. Getting past her defenses took a little soft-shoe, but it was worth it. I really liked her. Obviously, Adrian and Mickey took a different, very sadistic approach, and it upset me on her behalf. They claimed it was absolutely necessary because she couldn’t act, but when it came right down to it, I think it was Adrian, the director, that had to figure that out.
Johnny: I see.
Sarah: I think she suffered for nothing.
Johnny: Yeah. Looking at the trivia on IMDB, I can see that. It kind of makes me feel a little guilty about watching the movie. If you’ve seen it in the years since, what are your feelings on it?
Sarah: I never really liked it. I mean, I thought it was a bunch of wonderful set pieces, and was very erotic. I thought it achieved that aim, but I didn’t think, as a story, that it was strong. Also, Adrian didn’t shoot a lot of it. Half the time he wasn’t shooting the script. It was actually quite a crazy time. He spent the first week shooting water towers. I mean, the producers were tearing their hair out. The ending that had been written kind of didn’t get done, and the scene with the pills came in quite late. I think it’s very weak. There was an earlier version that had him trying to get them both killed as if that were the ultimate orgasm, and she would stop the boat from crashing at the last minute. I guess the pills were a good substitute, but you know, I’m a writer. A lot of us…If our script is not followed (laughing), we don’t like the movie. I wrote a great line for her at the end when she gets help. I have no idea why it was cut. That was the first time it happened to me, but it was much better than what they had. As a feminist also, I didn’t love it. It was quite demeaning, but on the other hand, I like that it was exploring this side of women who seem like they’ve got it altogether, but they have a side that wants to be dominated, and the book was very frank about that. I admired it, but it wasn’t a movie that I liked in particular.
Johnny: Alright. To go to my next question: What was the story behind the screenplay for your next film, Dancers?
Sarah: Oh, boy. I had just married James Lapine, and through Stephen Sondheim, there was six degrees of Herbert Ross, who was the director. My agent sent me to go up for that film. It was very hard to get jobs because they tend to pigeonhole you on the basis of your last film, and because my film was an erotic one, nobody was making erotic movies. Anyway, Herbert liked me in a different way. He didn’t associate me with 9 1/2 Weeks. He associated me with my husband. He said, “What do you think of ballet?”. I said, “When I was a kid, I liked it very much”. He said, “Well, I’ve got a theater in Italy booked. The American Ballet Theater has set a month aside in their schedules to make this movie, and we shoot in three months”. That’s how that came about. He didn’t really have time to see a lot of writers (laughing), and I could do it very quickly because whatever you think of the movie, and it was very weak, I only wrote half a script. Half of the movie was ballet dancing, and Herbert wouldn’t let me write anything layered or complicated because he said dancers can’t remember lines, particularly Misha. I wrote him one scene, and it took him 11 takes.
Johnny: Okay. Dancers was a Cannon Films release. I’ve interviewed quite a few people who have worked for Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and those opinions have been mixed to negative on the duo, so what did you think of them?
Sarah: Never met them, thank god, but back when I was with Howard Smith, he knew them. He knew the original owners of Cannon. We were aware of Cannon Films in the early 70s, and then it was taken over by Golan and Globus. We knew people connected with Cannon, and we knew how they were, but when it came around to Herbert Ross, he was the one to deal with them, and I never saw them. Herbert was not used to working on a budget of 7 million dollars. To film an entire ballet on that, plus ancillary scenes, and his wife was dying of cancer at the same time…It was a really fraught shoot, and I felt sorry for him. She died during the editing, so it was a very unhappy time, and it kind of reflected in the downbeat and dour tone of the film, but the dancing was wonderful, and a great record of Baryshnikov performing his signature role before, very shortly afterwards, he wasn’t able to. It only recently came out digitally. It was out of print for a very long time, but somebody bought that catalog and brought it out. It is a historical record of a great dancer, so it has some value, but it’s not a movie that anybody (laughing) except for dancers had seen.
Johnny: Alright. Going into the 90s, you collaborated with your husband as screenwriter for his movie Impromptu. With the movie’s artistic themes and cast of theater veterans, had you considered making Impromptu a play before a movie?
Sarah: That’s an interesting question because they actually did adapt the movie into a play in French Canada. It was translated. We have talked about it now and then, but no, never in my mind. I don’t want to write a play. I don’t believe I’d be any good at writing plays. It’s not a form that I think I have any natural ability with, and I find it limited and very frustrating after the freedom and imagination of film. I wrote it while the Writer’s Guild was on strike. I’d always wanted to write it, but I’d been so busy with assignments that I didn’t get around to it. I’d had the idea for quite some time, so when the Writer’s Guild went on strike, I decided to do it. I wrote it relatively fast, and then I gave it to my husband. He had never made a film before, but he was kind of hot at the time, and like Marjoe, it came together very quickly. You would have never thought it would, but that was a break. Being the crack caster that he was with actors, Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson, I don’t think he discovered them, but he did give them their first big roles.
Johnny: Alright. To go to my next question: You wrote the screenplay for Sommersby with Nicholas Meyer. When the idea to Americanize the French film The Return Of Martin Guerre came across to you, what did you think of that concept?
Sarah: Well, Meyer wrote it first before I ever came on the scene, and as happened with 9 1/2 Weeks, when the director, Jon Amiel, came on, and everybody. the head of the studio included, wanted changes, and Jodie Foster wanted changes to her part, I came on and replaced him. I did not work with him, and I think he resented my coming in (laughing) because he tried to grab full credit on it. I really, really admired his idea of setting it in the Civil War. It was the perfect thing to do, and for the most part, I admired the way he adapted the story to that time, but we really changed the third act a lot, even the basic point of whether Richard Gere was guilty or not. He had it the other way. He had him be guilty, and we had him be innocent, so quite a lot was changed over the course of the rewrites, and also, because he hadn’t done his research, there was quite a lot of stuff that was not true to the war. You know, he had people eating big meals and, really, Southerners were impoverished. They had nothing. He had them eating string beans, and there were no string beans. There were no seeds. They didn’t know how to garden. They were starving. It was stuff like that that we changed.
Johnny: Alright. To move to my next question: You wrote and directed the movie Strike!, also known as All I Wanna Do. A movie about the combination of an all girls school and an all boy school, how did your own school days influence the film?
Sarah: Well, I had originally said to my best friends, and they were my best friends from the boarding school I attended in the 60s, “I’m going to write a movie about us for our daughters”. My daughter, at the time, was about 4. It was, to a huge extent, based on my schooling. It was a homage to a wonderful time with rich friendships, and a single sex situation really made me who I am. It was a real watershed for me, so yes, it was very much inspired by that. The story of the film involves an all girls school, and a small group of girls that find out the school is going co-ed, so they band together to try and stop it. It’s a comedy. My school, Rosemary Hall, did not go co-ed until some time after I graduated, so that wasn’t an experience I went through. The subject never even came up. The school wasn’t entirely broke at the time. It eventually went co-ed with Choate, as Choate-Rosemary Hall. That was a new part of the story that I came at without any personal experience or personal opinion about whether or not it was a good idea.
Johnny: Alright. Strike!/All I Wanna Do was a Miramax release. Knowing what we know now about Harvey Weinstein, how did you deal with his thuggish behavior?
Sarah: I tried my best to play along because he was such a loose cannon. He scared the shit out of me, but what was even scarier was his constantly trying to recut the movie for young males, and that’s not who I made the movie for. I made it for girls, and for some reason, he decided there was no such thing as marketing for girls. You have to get the boys in there instead of girls. I had no idea why not, but at a certain point, a producer tried to protect me by saying, “We’re not going to make any more changes”. That happened after he took out a crucial scene that I miss to this day. That was very frightening, but I went through it and we finished the film, and then he refused to release it. It was to open in Canada, where it was filmed, several months prior to when it was supposed to open in New York. Obviously, young girls could be marketed to, and the Canadians showed the way, but Harvey just plopped another film in my slot and took my theaters. They were so anxious to get rid of it, and that was that. Everybody begged him, including Nora Ephron, one of the producers, to at least release it in New York and L.A so it wouldn’t go straight to video, and he said, “Well, sure. Who’s paying for it?”. I paid for one week in one theater in New York, and that’s all I could afford, so that’s what it got. It got its’ reviews, getting a few blurbs for the video cassette, but that was all Harvey’s fine work. I am among the legions of filmmakers whose work he had destroyed. In my case, he destroyed my directing career. It was impossible after that because women only got one chance. The rare time a woman did get to direct a film, she had one shot. If it wasn’t a success, there wasn’t going to be another one.
Johnny: I’m so sorry you had to deal with that. I really feel sympathy for anybody who had to deal with Harvey Weinstein, because even before his sexual abuse came out, I would be reading movie magazines as a teenager and a young adult, and I read about how he was always mistreating filmmakers, placing priority on one over another, slicing up movies, and even haunting creators on their deathbeds like he did with Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella. I mean, that’s despicable behavior, and then you put the sexual stuff on top of it, and I really hope he gets punished for it.
Sarah: I don’t think he’ll go to jail, but you know what? He’ll never get back to where he was. He’ll never get that back.
Johnny: Alright. Well, on a lighter and happier note, in 2002, you took home your second Oscar, this one for the Best Documentary Short, Thoth. How had your approach to documentary film-making changed in the years between Marjoe and Thoth?
Sarah: Well, since I hadn’t made one in thirty years (laughing), I was pretty much working the same path I did on Marjoe. I mean, I was the one to come up with what we were going to shoot, and also how the movie would be cut. I pretty much did the same thing with Thoth, which was you winnow out your best footage and your biggest surprises, so when the audience is saying, “Next. I get the point”, you throw in another one, so there’s an energy there, and also kind of a three act structure. I pretty much did the same thing because it worked the first time, and the material lends itself to that. The big change was that my subject was also working a spiritual theme like Marjoe, except Marjoe was a liar and Thoth was trying to tell the truth, the truth of his being. I admired him very much, and he’s still one of my friends. He’s still doing what he’s doing. To me, a portrait of the outsider is what we all feel. People’s attention waxes and wanes. Why do we do this? What is the moment of inspiration like? It’s everything about my experience as a writer, and I thought others as artists could relate to it.
Johnny: Alright. In addition to your screenplays, you’ve also written several books, one of which stood out as Jane Was Here, which deals with the concept of reincarnation, so this leads me to ask: Do you think that dreams one has about the past are actually visits into either previous lives or future lives?
Sarah: It depends on the dream, you know, if they’re fully formed, and you’re kind of not there, but there, and the details are very specific to a certain time. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a dream like that, but I have had flashes of a previous life. I remember going to the Viking Museum in Oslo, and feeling like, “Oh my god, I’ve been here before. I recognize this ship”. It was such a strong feeling. I do believe in it, to answer your question. People, when they’re going through something bad, they go, “Why me?”. Reincarnation explains why. It means you’re compensating or balancing out something to do with the life you had before. You’re back again because you’re working on something. Someone may be a baby who dies tragically because that person caused the death of a baby in a former life.
Johnny: Getting philosophical, if you undergo drastic changes in your temperament, your approach to the world, or your life in general, would you say it’s possible to live multiple lives in one? In other words, reincarnate but still be alive?
Sarah: Well, that’s quantum physics, and I became overjoyed (laughing) when that became a household word because that is about parallel existences, and time is concentric instead of linear. I do think, in a way, we’re living our lives in different eras happening simaltaneously in an oscillating way. It’s very difficult to describe, but the irony is: You bring up Jane Was Here, and I have a pilot for a TV series based on it that’s making the rounds right now and getting reactions. Hopefully, we’ll get a deal on that. It would make a great series.
Johnny: Alright. To my next question: You write, direct and sing, so what talent do you have that you haven’t been able to showcase yet, but still hope to do so someday?
Sarah: I used to think I could act, but I don’t think that way anymore. I think I’ve done about everything. I get restless. That’s what I am. When I feel I’ve taken one art form to the point where I’m kind of burned out on it, then I’ll go to something else I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ll study that for a while. I have abandoned film numerous times. They’re not my favorite writing form, but opportunity keeps knocking, and that’s what I’ve done the most. Actually, I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, and that it is a world where I’ve never seemed to be able to get any traction. My first book was quite successful, but one thing after another happened. That career fizzled almost overnight, and I just couldn’t seem to get back in again, but the opportunity to do movies was still there, so that’s the direction I went. Jane Was Here happened during a fallow time in film. I couldn’t get a job, so I finished the book, and immediately afterwards I got a film offer. That’s the kind of thing that tends to happen.
Johnny: Alright. I now come to my final question. I apologize if this sounds like a ghoulish one, but I’ve asked this of several other Oscar winners I’ve interviewed, so if you’re included in the Oscars In Memoriam when you pass away, which film that you were involved in would you most like to have them use a clip from when they mention you?
Sarah: I don’t know that they would, they would probably just run my picture, but my favorite film is Impromptu, by far. That was me at my freest and most uninhibited. I had the most fun of all writing that one, and the script was shot as written, which you can rarely say in the movie business. That experience was a joy from start to finish. It gave me a great deal of confidence, and I loved writing those characters and pushing them around so much that I even went and wrote a sequel to it about the end of the affair between Fredric Chopin and George Sand. At one point, it had Julianne Moore attached, and we still couldn’t get the financing because they couldn’t find someone to play the man, and the actor didn’t want to play it because it was a woman’s movie. Lately we’ve been talking about making that into a play.
Johnny: Well, I do hope you’ll be remembered by the Oscars because, in the years that I’ve watched the In Memoriams, they tend to exclude a lot of Oscar winners, like, for example, Howard Smith, who won the Oscar for Marjoe with you. He wasn’t included in the In Memoriam when he passed away, and that kind of pissed me off.
Sarah: Oh, I don’t know. He only made one other documentary. I don’t think he was on their radar at all. They don’t only put Oscar winners in the In Memoriam, you know. There are a lot of people on that list who never won an Oscar, including some of our most famous actors. If Glenn Close were to die tomorrow, she never won an Oscar, but she’d be up there. I know I will be up there. I’m sure to get in there because I have a long list of screen credits, and by the way, I won’t get pissed off if I’m not included because I’ll be dead.
Johnny: Well, that about does it for my questions. I thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to do this. It was an honor to interview you.
Sarah: Oh, thank you. How did you even come across me? I’m hardly very well-known.
Johnny: Well, it was actually because of 9 1/2 Weeks, and that led me to your IMDB filmography. I took a look at your credits, and then I paid a visit to your website. I thought, “Gee, she’d make for a fascinating interview subject”, and you certainly were fascinating.
Sarah: Oh, thank you.
Johnny: Well, that’s about it from me. I’ll definitely be in touch again soon, and I hope you have a good afternoon.
Sarah: Thank you. You, too, Johnny.
Johnny: See you later.
Sarah: Bye.
Johnny: Bye.
I would like to thank Sarah Kernochan for taking the time out of her schedule to speak to me. For more information on her life and work, you can visit her official website, where most of the pictures in this interview came from.