I’ve always loved road movies because they make something enormous feel incredibly personal. You can travel thousands of miles, cross half the country, see places you’ve never seen before, and somehow the most important thing happening is still a conversation between two people sitting a few feet apart.
That is what I want California, Baby to feel like.
The film follows Baby, a twenty-year-old from Tennessee who leaves just before Christmas with very little money and a stubborn certainty that she is going to become an actress in Los Angeles. When her trip falls apart almost immediately, she ends up hitching a ride with Whit, a twenty-one-year-old Vanderbilt student driving home to his family in Beverly Hills for Christmas.
On paper, they could not be more different.
Baby has spent years learning that if she wants something, she has to figure it out herself. Whit has spent his life surrounded by people willing to help him, but that help has become its own kind of limitation. His family loves him deeply, but they rarely trust him to handle things on his own. Baby desperately wants independence because she has never had security. Whit desperately wants independence despite having almost nothing but security.
That contradiction is the heart of the movie for me.
I don’t want California, Baby to be a story where one character teaches the other how to live. Baby and Whit are both right about some things and spectacularly wrong about others. They judge each other, disappoint each other, make each other laugh, and slowly begin trusting each other in ways neither expected. Somewhere between Tennessee and California, they become important to each other almost accidentally.
I want the film to feel intimate, imperfect, and alive. Long stretches of highway, cheap motels, truck stops, wind turbines, bad fast food, Christmas lights, music played too loudly in the car, and the strange conversations that only seem possible when you have hundreds of miles left to go. The road trip gives the movie its scale, but Baby and Whit give it its reason for existing.
I’m also making this movie at a point in my own life when the questions these characters are asking feel very real. What happens when the structure you’ve grown up with starts disappearing? How much of adulthood is actually knowing what you’re doing, and how much of it is simply deciding to keep moving? How do you learn to trust yourself? And how do you become independent without convincing yourself that independence means being alone?
By the time Baby and Whit reach California, neither of them has figured out their life. That is important to me. They have simply become a little more willing to face what comes next, and a little more willing to let somebody else be there when they do.
Making an independent feature at this scale requires an enormous amount of trust. Trust from our cast and crew, trust from the people allowing us into their communities along the road, and trust from everyone who chooses to support this campaign.
If you help us make California, Baby, you are helping us put this Jeep on the road and tell this story for real.
I hope you’ll come with us.
—Barrett