Concessions

There was a flickering moment, in the dim, packed back room of
Vermillion gallery on Sunday night, when it seemed that Grant
Cogswell might fall down. Faint. Or walk out. Or start crying, or
yelling, or just stand there and not say anything, forever. It
was a nervous-making few seconds. Cogswell—standing in front of
friends and family and colleagues and well-wishers and maybe just the
morbidly curious—was delivering a fundraising pitch for his
upcoming film project, Sebastopol (his first, with director Dan
Gildark, since 2007’s semidisastrous Cthulhu). Cogswell got a
few words in, then paused for a long time, head down. (“It’s been a
long time since I talked in front of a crowd,” he told me later. “I
felt the floor opening up beneath me.”) He pushed through. There was no
collapse. All were relieved.

It’s hard not to root for Cogswell, because dude is super-duper
charming—and interesting, in a mad-scientist sort of way, and
engagingly bare, in a just-mad sort of way. It’s easy to understand how
he gets people on board. You just like him. And
Sebastopol (“a dark romantic comedy about a Boeing engineer who
detours from a friend’s wedding to rendezvous in Ukraine with a woman
he has met on the internet”) sounds like a fittingly odd and ambitious
project (though not too ambitious—no fish monsters this time).

Set to film in Ukraine, with an impressive local crew (Ben Kasulke
shooting, Etta Lilienthal designing), Sebastopol is adapted from
the first-person account of a Seattle writer and filmmaker (“a friend
of mine, who is not me,” Cogswell insists) who went to Ukraine
to find a wife and discovered that things are shitty in the “white
third world.” Cogswell, describing his initial conversation with this
Ukrainian-bride-marrying friend, relayed a bunch of dubious shit, such
as: “These people have nothing but their beautiful daughters,” and that
fine old chestnut about how courtship rituals + marriages + divorces
= paying for sex, and dating is just like prostitution and
all ladies are for sale anyway so arranged marriages for everyone
because these women want to get rescued and so it’s okay!
Please.

I asked Cogswell to unpack those ideas a bit—where does he
personally come down on the love-is-a-transaction
spectrum?—and received the best speech ever: “I don’t come down
on it,” he said. “I don’t know where I stand. Listen. I have a bisexual
past that will probably never be repeated and a heterosexual future
that will probably never happen. I do know that male physical
attraction is caused by the ability to produce a healthy child in a
woman. And female attraction is based on whether that male is going to
protect and provide for that child. And all the complexities and the
romance between there and where we are in the West are a mystery.”
Sebastopol is about that.