Her, it turns out, is more than just a film about a man who falls in love with an operating system on a hand-held device. The new Spike Jonze movie starring Joaquin Phoenix has a special connection to Santa Cruz, says Ike Jablon, marketing director for Nickelodeon Theaters.
That’s because the first phone picture ever was taken here in Santa Cruz County. Inventor Philippe Kahn took the picture at Sutter Maternity Center in 1997 of his newborn daughter Sophie. (Even more amazingly, he didn’t use The Flight of the Concords method of duct-taping a film camera to a cell phone.)
“It was a magical moment: ‘point, shoot and share instantly,’” Kahn wrote us via e-mail. (We assume he couldn’t talk on the phone because he’s still busy taking pictures with it.) “We have friends and family all over the world and this was 1997 in Santa Cruz. Magical!”
The camera phone changed the way people interact with technology, and Jablon says Her, which opens at the Del Mar this Friday, takes a closer look at that bond. A Daytime-Emmy-nominated producer, Jablon moved back to his native Santa Cruz in 2012. In his new job, he’s filling the big, Irish-accented shoes of Maurice Peel, the much-loved Nick fixture (stretching back to the Sash Mill days) whose departure last year for a life of leisure in Aptos left all of us in Santa Cruz maddeningly unable to determine what movies are playing on that mystical day of the week known only to our Celtic brethren, “Tursday.”
“The film explores our relationship with technology and where it can go,” Jablon says.
Kahn, a “cinema fan” who loves indie flicks, says the difference between the camera phone and Her’s device is a leap, but he sees the connection:
“Without the camera-phone, that device in “Her” would have no eyes and ears. And without eyes and ears, I’m not sure that that there would be a movie. The camera-phone is ‘eyes and ears for instantly sharing.’”
