Alexa Fraser-Herron is a film producer, manager of indie film incubator Scary Cow, and very tall.
Mark Montgomery French: How tall are you?
Alexa Fraser-Herron: I am 5′9″ and a half.
You seem taller.
I think it’s my gravitas (laughter), and my taste in shoes.
Where are you from?
I’m from Los Angeles. I was born in a natural birth clinic in Azusa, California. My parents were living in Hollywood, in an apartment down the street from Hollywood High, but for whatever reason they wanted to have me there. So when my Mom went into labor they drove an hour out to Azusa. I was born in the “Oasis Room”. There’s a photo of the doctor that birthed me, holding me, and he’s wearing jeans. And it looks like we’re just in some cool hippie bedroom.
Is your family tall?
On my mother’s side a lot of us are Scottish, and us Scots are pretty tall. She’s taller than me, maybe about 6′. My father, on the other hand, is about my height and his mother is this teeny tiny Austrian woman. So I’m a mix in terms of background.
How old were you when you ended up reaching 5′9″?
I was about twelve.
WHOA!
I’ve been this height for a really long time.
How, how, how was that change?
That was…fucked. I was in seventh grade, I was this height, I had glasses, I had crooked teeth and I felt super awkward, not attractive and definitely not athletic. Every other person and a lot of adults would share their opinion of what I could do with my marvelous height, and it never failed to either be modeling or basketball. I was like, “awesome”. Even though I was a kid, I knew enough to know that if I went out for modeling jobs I would probably get fully roasted for not being thin. And the basketball thing was a joke because I was not athletic at all. And then if there was any interest in your pre-pubescent love life, it was “Oh you should be with that guy. He’s tall like you.”
I remember sitting in the front row of my high school geometry class with terrible vision—I was wearing glasses but they must not have been the correct prescription—and my teacher Miss Berger was trying to pressure me into sitting in the back of the class. I said “I can’t see the board” and she said “What are you talking about? You’re so tall”.
Because height and distance are totally the same. Well, she wasn’t the physics teacher…
No, not at all.
Your mom is tall, so I guess her reaction to you being tall and shorter than her was probably not a big deal.
She was very protective of me. For school photo day—where they get all the kids together to take a group shot—I was always, always relegated to the back row. And she’d always say “That’s so fucking stupid”.
When I was 12 years old we went to New Orleans for the first time. We took the Amtrak train and my mom got a little cabin for us since it was a three day trip, and I used to take off around the train by myself. Part of being that height at such a young age is that a lot of men just assume you’re older (or maybe they don’t because there are plenty of grown men that are gross that like younger girls anyway).
I remember seeing this guy around the train that was kind of cute, and I was too young to understand how old he was. He would like kind of, you know, notice me and watch me and I kinda got this feeling like that we liked each other. And then when we got into New Orleans, I saw him out in the crowds of people looking for their bags. I was separated from my parents for like a second and he swooped in to make his move. And his line was—in 1992—“hey, were you ever at a party in Florida in 1981?” It was the most random assemblage of facts as he was trying to figure out if we’d ever met before. All of a sudden my mom was right there, and she said “She was a year old in 1981 so no, that wasn’t her.”
Creepy.
A little bit.
Do you still get people coming up to you in public about your height?
Oh, totally. It’s mostly men that I think are interested in me and maybe use it as a way to kind of get in and pick me up, or make an idiot of themselves. I don’t know. One of the most recent memorable examples was when a guy sidled up to me while I was waiting across the street and said “You’re my height! How tall are you?”
Wow. He really thought that one through. Did you actually end up playing basketball or modeling?
Of course not. If I’ve modeled anything it would’ve been in the early days of Etsy when I made stuff, but definitely nothing professional.
Did your height change how your friends related to you?
Growing up I bounced around a lot in terms of friend groups. Sometimes I had friends that were bigger and more Amazonal than me. I often was the tallest in the group, and like the funny fat girl trope I do think that when you’re not conventionally attractive or “normal” it does make you work harder to get accepted. I’ve been a crack-up funny person for as long as I can remember so that might have been a part of it. I never had trouble making friends or keeping them necessarily because I was fairly fun to be around. But every now and then there’d be the whole “Ooh, Alexa, go for that guy. He’s tall too!”
Because that’s how it works. (laughter)
During my time in art school I sat through so many inane critiques and I saw when people really aren’t that engaged—I don’t want to say when they’re not intelligent because I think there’s more to it than that—they just hone in on the most obvious thing. “You’re tall. What’s that like? Oh, your hair is red.” Mm-hmm…
Since your height has helped you be a crack-up, how do you think it’s helped you as a filmmaker?
Oh wow. That’s kind of a deep dive. (mimes plugging her nose and jumping in the water) I love film. I watched tons and tons of TV and movies from a very young age. I was an only child until I was ten and to my parents I was the guinea pig baby where they maybe did all kinds of stuff wrong and they’re were too young to know. One of those things was that the TV would come on as soon as I got up and no one told me to shut it off. And once I got home from school it came right back on again and stayed on typically until after I fell asleep. I fell asleep watching television all the time and I’ve watched sooooooo much stuff: all different kinds of genres, highbrow, lowbrow, what have you.
I feel like a lot of that informed my point of view as a filmmaker. Being tall—obviously I don’t think that’s all there was to it—but my height and always feeling different when I was growing up, maybe worked in tandem with the kinds of music and film and TV shows I ended up being attracted to and identifying with. And once I started to actually make movies, I definitely became drawn to stories that are a little bit different with characters that you don’t often see.
I got teased a lot for my appearance, my height hyping part of that. Growing up in L.A. in the eighties and nineties, I feel very fortunate that instead of me being “Oh, I’m ugly and useless so I’ll just go hide until I go to college”, I leaned into stuff and was like, well, “fuck you”, and embraced certain aspects of myself. You start picking aspects of pop culture and film and music that builds you up and protects you, right?
What were you watching that made you say “THAT is something I’m going to take and inspire me to make something else”?
It’s funny now revisiting stuff that I remember watching growing up, not realizing it back then that it totally was contributing to my identity as a storyteller. One of the big ones was Jonathan Demme films. Silence of the Lambs came out when I was twelve and I was like, “Oh my gosh, the Something Wild/Married to the Mob guy made this like really slick movie with Jodie Foster.”
If you remember, Married to the Mob and Something Wild all had these really kooky, weird characters with really rad clothes. A lot of it was counterculture-y and different. And there was Sister Carol, who’s like the Jamaican woman that was always a peripheral character in his stories, and if you watch Rachel Getting Married she sings in the wedding. I always love that, not necessarily inside jokes, but if you like a certain filmmaker and you watch their work you’re sort of rewarded with those in-jokes and those Easter eggs and those themes that keep coming up, like “Goodbye Horses”. He made that song famous with the Buffalo Bill stripping scene in Silence of the Lambs, but he actually used that song in several of his films before he made that.
What other music were you listening to at the time?
I really liked The Crow soundtrack that came out when I was in junior high and kids were discovering bands just by listening to this.
Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots…
Jesus and Mary Chain, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. But more important for me was the touchstone that it provided. I got the James O’Barr graphic novel that The Crow was based on and there are Joy Division lyrics all over it. And the song that Nine Inch Nails does on that soundtrack is “Dead Souls”, which is a cover of Joy Division. Joy Division was a big band to me—I remember there was one kid in my high school that wore a Joy Division t-shirt, I think it might have been the statue of the woman that’s lying back with her hand over her eyes.
Back then if you wanted to listen to music you’d have to go buy it, you’d have to commit, and I didn’t have a lot of money. So I remember asking him “Do you listen to Joy Division? Are they any good?” And he’s like, “they’re awesome”. I bought Substance and I still think it’s a near-perfect album.
What do you think regular-sized people are surprised about that’s normal to you because of your height?
How much it’s a topic of conversation, but I think that if you’re below a certain height it’s a topic of conversation for you too. “You’re so small and blah, blah, blah.”
The effect is that you’re not actually a human being, you’re a thing for them to comment and gawk at. “You’re adorable! It’s so wonderful that your tiny hands can turn the wheel!”
My thing that surprises regular-sized people is how much effort it takes to actually transport myself anywhere. If I fly it has to be a first-class seat.
Oh my God.
First-class isn’t even comfortable, it’s just doable. My knees are up against the seat in front of me but I’m just able to walk upright after three and half hours in the air.
I’ve been flying a lot in the past year and I usually end up in the cheap seats. I guess it’s my hips or something but I really prefer to have my legs crossed, and trying to cross my legs back there is just…(laughter)…my knee comes up to my ear and hopefully I’m not kicking the person next to me.
I just helped one of my oldest friends move out of L.A. where she’d been living for 17 years.
And by oldest, you mean she’s 95.
Yeah, she’s 95, super old…(laughter) She mentioned she was driving to Oregon with her cat, and I said “Do you want me to come with you”? I thought it’d be a really good bonding thing and I could also be there to support her. Then it dawned on me that she has a fucking Fiat, and I said I would help her drive! I’m glad I did it, but ho-ly shit. I’m 55 percent legs by the way. I did the math. (laughter) That should be a question for your interviews. You should start bringing measuring tapes.
“Pardon me, what percentage of you is leg?”
I do remember when I worked retail that a friend of my boss came in one day and he was incredibly tall. He had to have been 6′7″, 6′8″. And because I’m tall too, and I’ve had people falling over my height, I just blurted out—as a comrade—“Oh you are magnificently tall. That is so wonderful”.
That’s nice.
Instead of saying “Ya FREAK! How tall are you? Is there the opposite of lifts you can wear for your shoes?” (laughter)
Dips!
It just carves out the floor wherever you go.
This interview has been condensed and edited.