Before Ned Vizzini ended his short, erratically brilliant life Thursday – leaping to his death in Brooklyn – he was in Hollywood. There, last spring, he did something rare in that selfish little town: He helped someone. He helped my son.
Sam had just arrived there on a film internship. He was 21, with stars in his eyes and half a dozen unpublished screenplays under his belt. I emailed Ned to let him know, and soon enough, he was meeting Sam for brunch.
Ned and I met 9 years before, when he was the Park Slope prodigy: Barely 23 – a young-looking 20-something at that – he’d just published his first novel, “Be More Chill,” whose nerdy hero hasn’t a clue how to land the girl of his dream until he swallows a supercomputer in pill form, a “squip,” that tells him what to do.
Bold, funny and heartbreaking, “Be More Chill” was a delight, probably the first book since “Catcher in the Rye” to really capture what it’s like to be young and restless. Then again, it seemed Ned had been writing it for years: By 15, he was a columnist for the New York Press, writing confessional columns set in the corridors of Stuyvesant HS, columns later compiled in a book.
“There was lots of fallout,” Vizzini told me when I interviewed him that day in his dusty apartment, not far from where he’d grown up. In khaki cargo shorts and black socks, he had a lopsided smile and played with a Slinky on his coffee table as he talked. Some of his Stuyvesant peers spat on him when they saw their exploits and names in print, he told me, but that was OK: “Whatever else has happened in my life since I turned 18, I was never bored. I hate being bored.”
Two years later, we all had a better sense of that fallout: He came out with “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” based on the five days he spent in the psychiatric ward of a Brooklyn hospital the year of our interview – before it or after, I don’t know. It became a pretty big film, and when I congratulated him he promptly sent a nice note back.
By the time we spoke again, last year – for The Post’s In My Library column – Ned was in LA. “What the hell are you doing out there?” I asked. Turned out, it was kind of a funny story: After that book came out, he ran into a former inmate at the psychiatric place he’d been in briefly. “You wrote a book about being in the hospital”? the guy asked. “So what are you still doing in BROOKLYN for?”
And so, Ned said, a year later, he moved to California. “I’m married, too,” he told me, shyly. “And yes, I’d be happy to meet Sam.”
They met for brunch and Ned took home one of Sam’s screenplays to read and critique. Then he emailed me to say that he was impressed by Sam, and that he was going to do well in LA – that he was smart and ambitious, traits, he promised, that would do Sam well.
Ned had those traits in spades, but it wasn’t enough. We’ll never know what drove him to leave his wife and young son and take his life at 32.
Sam was shocked and heartsick at the news. He was about to email Ned and arrange to meet him early next year, at Ned’s suggestion. He says the notes Ned had given him had greatly improved his screenplay.
And then he told me about the day they’d met.
“He was fairly intense,” Sam recalls. “I was three minutes late and he rebuked me … he reminded me that you can never be too early, and I’ve been prompt with everything since.”
Ned, you left us way too early. Thank you for the good work – and all the angst and wit wrapped up in it. Thank you for your kindness, and may you finally find peace.