born 1 January 1970

Anita Rinaldi, Budapest, Hungary, porn star/director

Ben O’Brien, Durham, North Carolina, extra/grandson of Van Heflin

Bob Recon, Palo Alto, California, composer/short filmmaker

Caroline St. Onge, birthplace unspecified, Québécois TV actress

Cenk Ertan, birthplace unspecified, Turkish TV actor

Fiona Dolman, Findhorn, Scotland, TV actress

Gabriel Jarret, Los Angeles, California, actor

Gustavo Cabaña, Buenos Aires, Argentina, writer/director/editor

Hans Somers, birthplace unspecified, Dutch TV actor/director

Jenny Scott, Windsor, England, TV news correspondent

Johnny Thrust, birthplace unspecified, porn star

Jossie Thacker, Brooklyn, New York, actress/Fly Girl

Kimberly Page, Chicago, Illinois, professional wrestler/actress

Lori Gillis, Paris, France, set decorator

Mark Sharrock, Tavistock, England, producer/location manager

Niels Hein, Hamburg, Germany, production manager/dolly grip

Nursel Köse, birthplace unspecified, German actress

Ridley Tsui, Hong Kong, stuntman/martial arts choreographer

Rodney Leinhardt, Greenwich, Connecticut, professional wrestler

Svetlana Novikova, Moscow, USSR, short filmmaker

Todd Hanson, Minneapolis, Minnesota, actor

Tomasz Bielawiec, Bialystock, Poland, extra

At one time (and to this day, in outdated links) it was widely reported that 1 January 1970 was the day Paul Thomas Anderson was born. In time, Anderson became a famous writer and director, to the point where some actual fact-checking took place, and a date in June was permanently enshrined as legitimate and correct, in internet terms anyway.

This is worth mentioning because the nature of my project compels me not to fact-check, but to take the list of names and dates that I’m going to work from as a kind of gospel truth. Not that I won’t point out a case or two where other sources offer conflicting information. The point is I don’t all that much care when or where these people were actually born; some unfixable percentage of them are bound to be straight-up cold lying about their origins. Show business at every level entails the inexorable commingling of shit and Shinola. But it goes well beyond that, for me. Who among us can say we were fully present for the occasion of our own birth? All of us and none of us, that’s who. Every person’s origin is a tale told to her or to him by a parent, a family, a hospital, a church, a government. And how could it ever be otherwise? Well, nowadays, with cameras and smartphones from earliest childhood, everyone (in some countries, above a certain income level, at least) is to some degree time-stamped. But not so in 1970. For the year in question, by and large, I’m just going to take everybody’s word for it.

My goal is to recognize, and to celebrate, every person, born the same year as I, whose achievements have landed them a slot on the Internet Movie Database. Partly this has to do with my own trepidation at the threshold of a fifth decade. Everybody who approaches this milestone feels that a little. But, I hope more amusingly and universally, I intend this to be an inquiry into what moving pictures consist of at this moment in time. Who are the people who make them? What roles do they play? How do they do it? Who has a voice? What trends are apparent?

I’m also intrigued by the notion of what I’ll call “hidden constituencies”. What, if anything, do these folks have in common? What deeper forces are at work on people who were born minutes apart at opposite ends of the same continent, or the same world, or the same borough? I want to acknowledge the stars, the also-rans, and the virtual non-entities on the same plane for a second or two.

Take this initial batch of names. You have two professional wrestlers, one female, one male. Do they know each other? In general, do the male and the female professional wrestlers socialize? (Yes, as it turns out: Kimberly Page was married to “Diamond” Dallas Page.) You have two short filmmakers, one male, one female. Now, it’s easy for the internet to tell me something about one of the two, Bob Recon. Like me, his father was an academic. Unlike me, his Tahitian mother was a Black Panther, and he composes ultra-high-frequency symphonies for dogs and cats. But what is there to know about the other, Svetlana Novikova? Is she the same Moscow-born Svetlana Novikova who now lives in Austin and makes iridescent oil paintings of dogs and catsstallions, and Johnny Depp)? (and Maybe, but I kind of doubt it.

You have two porn stars, one female, one male. ( I am in awe of the output – of effort, of fluids, of dignity – attributed to the man who goes by the name of Johnny Thrust. 75 credits in 2005 alone, often under an alias, “Bad Bob”. When your name is Johnny Thrust, do you really require a yet-down-and-dirtier alter ego? It’s not for me to say. I won’t be sampling his work for this project. It is worth a scroll through his oeuvre; a multitude of evocative titles awaits the non-faint-hearted non-prude. All those sequels: Tough Love 13! Chocolate Gazongas 4! Anal Full Nelson 5! Barely 18 19! ) And so forth.

Please join me as I contemplate the mysteries of this, my inscrutable cohort. I’ll try to post a brief essay for each day of the year, noting consiliences where they may exist, inventing others where they clearly don’t, and just wildly free associating: that’s what the internet is all about, is it not? Also, for each day and month, I’ll declare a “winner”. Yes, of course, we’re all winners here. But some people have done a better job of distinguishing themselves from every other baby that showed up on the earth that day. And on this day, that person is clearly Gabriel Jarret.

There is so much to love about Real Genius, from 1985. It’s best remembered as the film that made Val Kilmer a star. Never again would Kilmer put it all together so winningly. Handsome, funny, charming, serious, soulful, slapsticky: the total package. But the reason why the film remains so beloved and so watchable today has less to do with Kilmer and more to do with the supporting cast. In no other geek film of the 1980s (a venerable genre unto itself) are the geeks so lavishly and recognizably geeky. The giraffe-necked gamine, the mean preppy suckup, the beatific longhaired mathematician: all note-perfect archetypes. And at the center of the action, Mitch, the homesick wide-eyed innocent with the too skinny arms and Brillo-y bar mitzvah pompadour.

The actor has kept a respectably steady profile in movies and TV since then. But it’s his showing as the barely pubescent telemetry whiz from a quarter-century ago that makes Gabriel Jarret Today’s Winner. Happy 40th birthday Gabriel.