The Canyon

I grew up listening to the folklore of Coldwater Canyon from my dad about hot LA summer days, close encounters with Hollywood stars, and the lifelong friendship those formative years forged. So, curiously, the summer after graduating from film school, I rounded up the gang, the self-proclaimed Coldwater Cowboys, at their parents’ houses in the hills above Beverly Hills for one more birthday celebration. What I thought would be an inquiry became an odyssey. Through unearthing these stories, I realized the extremeness of my dad and his friends' tales as well as their cultural significance. Yet, I also found that this close-knit community’s stories echo universal themes of friendship, competition, nostalgia, and aging—all topics I related to while I was flipping my own chapter from childhood to adulthood. Once the friends reunited around the old kitchen table, time stood still; it was as if the last fifty years hadn’t passed. Comparing the young and now-aging faces of these friends from the Canyon made me think of my own friends and wonder how different, and similar, we will be when we fast-forward a few decades ourselves. Many spectacular things brewed in the Canyon during my dad’s youth—chart-topping records, generation-defining performances, and front-page scandals—yet, in my opinion, the most spectacular was the simple, idyllic lives of the families who called the Canyon home.