Michael Maren on Telling Stories within Stories about Storytellers
By Kerri Arsenault
Multi-colored wires, gleaming wrenches, and sections of pipe sloshed around the backseat of electrician Morris Kopelman’s car. Morris’s grandson, Michael Maren, would drown himself in those tools as would a modern-day kid in a ball pit, coming up only for air.
Michael was the kind of kid who stuck his fingers in light sockets or fiddled with 220V outlets to see what happened. He unscrewed every screw he encountered. Once, after watching Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on NBC, after the adults left the room, he disemboweled the back of the TV set in order to understand the machinations of a TV program in full color. He was six. Michael’s curiosity occasionally electrocuted him, but those bits in the backseat of his grandfather’s car were dots to connect. Michael wanted to know how things worked.
Curiosity was the perfect conduit for becoming a storyteller, the career path Michael took, which started after college when he went to India and lived a sensory-overloaded maelstrom amid a broken heart. He joined the Peace Corps, then began a journalism career which began adventures galore: canoeing across Lake Victoria; tailed by secret police in Ethiopia; jailed in Sudan for practicing journalism on a tourist visa. Michael thrived. It makes sense; to be a great storyteller, you must be obsessed with mechanism, process, the innards and underbellies of things, and organizing chaos into something whole.
After a near fatal encounter in Somalia, he met Dani Shapiro at a Halloween party and that’s when his journalism enterprise began to lose its shine. They married, and Michael and Dani’s creative partnership has held steady ever since. “There’s no question I would have gone back to Africa or some other war zone had we not met,” he says.
Michael’s CV also includes father to a son studying film, writing instructor, author, and now, director and screenwriter for his forthcoming movie Shriver, which has been momentarily on hold; when the pandemic hit, the film was eight days from finishing.
Shriver includes Kate Hudson, Michael Shannon (as Shriver), Don Johnson, and Zach Braff, among others. The characters and actors all reflect Michael’s comedic tone: quirky, intelligent, and slightly dark.
“My father had an ability to say the most insulting things and everyone thought he was adorable and funny. He wasn’t kidding…but he wasn’t wrong,” Michael says with the deadpan of a heat-seeking missile. Then he laughs.
Shriver, like his first feature film, A Short History of Decay, is also about storytelling itself, and features a man struggling to tell or understand his own story; Shriver is a handyman mistaken for a famous reclusive writer, which is another narrator in the plot, too.
“We tell ourselves a story to remember,” Michael says about the craft itself. And for Shriver, people continuously tell him his story because he can’t remember or is confused about his own. This idea of forgetting and remembering repeats in A Short History of Decay, when a flailing Brooklyn writer visits his parents in Florida and finds his father recovering from a stroke and his mother deepening into Alzheimer’s anxious grip even while she knew she had the disease. And it’s also a storyline in Michael’s life: his mother suffered from Alzheimer’s but was an expert at covering it up.
“We are our stories,” he says. “Stories are how we organize our life.” I think about the tangle of wires he played with as a child, the need to circumvent his father’s tyranny, his mother’s memory. For Michael, there’s hardly a separation between storyteller and story, disorder and order, humor and darkness, forgetting and remembering… and hovering on that precipice is what makes stories and their tellers, great.
