unravelling an ed ruscha easter egg in sofia coppola’s somewhere

with a surprising cameo from hugh hefner

I found myself watching Somewhere (2010) last week, one of my favourite Sofia Coppola films. (Yes, another Sofia Coppola-adjacent newsletter. Blame the guy who commented on the last one saying that she hasn’t made any good movies <3).

Somewhere is a quiet, meandering film about loneliness, ennui, ageing, about fame and innocence, and perhaps most of all, about Los Angeles. The director said she wanted to show the life of an actor between the shots: Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, the lonely A-lister (👀) at the film’s heart. He spends his days driving his Ferrari in circles, worrying about his hairline, sleeping with a nameless cast of women, and bumming around the Chateau Marmont, famed den of celebrity and iniquity. (You can check out any time you like…) At least until his pre-teen daughter, played by Elle Fanning, shows up for a bit.

This plot is perhaps why Somewhere doesn’t get the same amount of love as The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation or Marie Antoinette. The main criticism levelled at the movie is the most boring one that anyone can make of a film: that nothing really happens. This comment is, I think, the cinematic equivalent of what John Waters says about going home with someone and realising they don’t own any books.

But I’m getting sidetracked. There is one thing in particular that caught my eye in Somewhere this time around. Tucked in the corner of Johnny’s hotel suite is a painting, immediately recognisable as the work of Ed Ruscha – the American artist known for his use of text and found phrases, a cinematic fascination with the American West, with California, gas stations and mountains. (It’s pronounced “rew-shay”, btw, per the business cards he used to pass out.)

Ed Ruscha’s COLD BEER BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, in Johnny Marco’s Chateau Marmont suite

He was, like seemingly every commercially successful male artist of the latter half of the 20th century (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning… etc), repped by Leo Castelli, and became a kind of poster boy for Californian cool – with JG Ballard once saying that he has “the coolest gaze in American art” – both meanings of the word surely implied. He was also a total babe, who bagged a series of other total babes (Eve Babitz!! Lauren Hutton!!!), before remarrying his ex-wife in the same Vegas chapel they originally wed in, a couple of decades later. Talk about lore!

I’m a sucker for typography and of course, America in all of its banal, roadside beauty, so I have always liked Ruscha’s work – particularly for its impersonality, its succinct way of capturing American mythology, its abstracted absences. If John Giorno walks right up and offers you a blowjob, Ed Ruscha makes eyes across the bar and then leaves. He cracks jokes his viewer isn’t always in on, he plays with his food – literally.

Ruscha is the perfect fit for Somewhere, a film which is a portrait of Los Angeles as much as it is a character study. Starting in 1967, the artist began to draw, print, and paint the Hollywood sign, then visible from his studio. He showed it against red sunsets, from the front, from the back, in black and white, up close and from further away – an icon disappearing into the horizon lines, a word that means everything and nothing at all.

Ed Ruscha’s Back of Hollywood, 1977

And there were other portraits of the city: like Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the book he published in 1996 which serves as a photographic study of the famous street, captured by a camera mounted on his pick-up truck. The book, which today will set you back a couple of gs, unfolds accordion-like, stretching around 25 feet. Ruscha returned many times to photograph the strip – in the digital archive 12 Sunsets, a collection of over 65,000 images spanning from the 1960s to 2007 – the Chateau stands like a megalith as the street changes around it, including of billboards advertising the latest blockbusters.

Ed Ruscha's drive-by pictures of the famed castle on Sunset

In Somewhere, the Ruscha work that finds its way on screen is one of his word paintings featuring a font of his own design, Boy Scout Utility Modern – which he’s been using since 1982. Overlaid over a cloudy sky, it features words which may as well be the byline of Johnny’s life: COLD BEER BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. For what feels like at least half of the film, Johnny’s nursing a cold one. And as for the girls…

Cold Beer Beautiful Girls (1993) via Sothebys

In one particularly brilliant scene, the actor watches a pair of twins pole dance in his bedroom to My Hero by the Foo Fighters. It’s almost entirely devoid of eroticism: more palpable is the awkward squeaking of skin on metal, the wan enthusiasm of the actor as he struggles to keep his eyes open. The twins, by the way, were residents of Los Angeles’s second most mythologised chateau… the Playboy Mansion. They are played by the Shannon twins, 20-year-old girlfriends of Hugh Hefner and stars of one of my The Girls Next Door, on which Coppola herself made a cameo to meet them and Hef. Yes, really.

The painting, it turns it out, was borrowed by Coppola for the movie. She liked it so much she bought it, and in 2013 included it in a portrait and list of her favourite things, as featured in the Wall Street Journal. In Johnny’s room, it’s a symbol of the shallowness of his own life, as well as his transience – it’s wrapped in plastic, the concierge delivery sticker still attached.

In an interview, fashion designer Humberto Leon asked Coppola about the title of the film. She revealed that it itself was a Ruscha tribute. “I love Ed Ruscha’s work, so was trying to think of something in that spirit, and the idea is that the main character needs to go somewhere else, but doesn’t know exactly where,” she said. “It’s the vague idea of somewhere other than where he is right now.”

That gets to what I love about this film, what I love about Ruscha, and what I love about America – the idea of the place, rather than simply the place itself. Whether in the intimacy of Coppola’s gaze, the ghosts that haunt Chateau’s scuffed hallways, or the gas stations and words that tease from Ruscha’s canvasses – they all exist in the in-between. Or in other words… somewhere.

Coppola’s favourite things – including her Ed Ruscha. Photograph Martyn Thompson