Seven years ago, a pair of creative people in relatively uncreative jobs started an Instagram account. Wally and Amanda Koval called the account Accidentally Wes Anderson, and to it they posted photos that somehow seemed to channel the filmmaker’s unique imagination: an abandoned hotel in Switzerland right out of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a row of midcentury pastel cottages, a payphone centered on an orange-tiled wall. You only have to see an image or two to be swept into the whimsical world of a Wes Anderson film.
Not surprisingly, the account soon enjoyed a massive following and contributions from all over the world, which led to one coffee table book and now a second, both with forewords written by Anderson himself, as well as a puzzle and postcards. The project is now a full-time job (and then some) for the Kovals, generating so many submissions that the biggest challenge, even for their second book, has been paring down the options (for Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures, which debuted this week, they went from 100,000 options to the 200 that made the final cut).
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The Accidentally Wes Anderson books have never featured St. Louis. But that could change, because the married co-authors are spending five days here beginning this Saturday. They see it as part of their quest for images redolent of the master auteur’s eye.
Yet Wally Koval stresses that the Accidentally Wes Anderson universe is not about what they see, but what you see. This is their inaugural book tour (the first book dropped in 2020, when the ongoing pandemic made travel ill-advised), and they’ve chosen its stops largely on enthusiasm from indie bookstores and their patrons. They know they’re dropping into communities where they already have fans, or at least book buyers. Now they want to turn them into contributors.
“My hope is that it’s not necessarily going to be scouting, but more so drumming up the excitement to submit the photos,” he says. “We’re coming to places where people are really interested in it, but maybe they don’t know that our submissions are always open, which is what we always say. Or maybe they think that the majority of the photos come from us, when for this book, we worked with 168 photographers from 38 different countries. It’s a wild kind of community project all in all, where the more, the merrier.” As Koval notes, a small percentage of the book’s photos came from professional photographers, and the vast majority were shot on smartphones. You need the right eye, not the right equipment.
So what should that eye be looking for? Even the project’s co-founder resorts to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s famous description of pornography: You know it when you see it. But he’ll drill down a bit: “If you ask me, ‘What is Accidentally Wes Anderson,’ I say, ‘Well, it’s a moment of delight,’ right? It’s an intersection of unique design and an unexpected narrative. It’s a location down the street that you walk by every day, but you never knew it had a super interesting story.” Then, of course, you find the story.
Indeed, the stories are a huge part of the book’s appeal, to the point that—unusually for a coffee table book—there’s an audio version, narrated by Jeff Goldblum no less. The Kovals don’t just give us the photos; they give us the story behind what we’re seeing. That inevitably leads to a host of Anderson-esque characters, from the Alpine enthusiast Sir Hugh Munro, for whom a series of summits in the Scottish Highlands are named, to Korea’s King Sunjong, who covered a Buddhist temple in pure gold. One can imagine some of our local eccentrics fitting right in.
Luckily enough, other than their Saturday night event at Hi-Pointe Theatre (tickets required), the Kovals have a wide-open itinerary. Says Wally, “I like when we have more down time in a location.” They’ll map out a few destinations, but his favorite stops are often the ones they stumble into in between them.
The Kovals are interested in your suggestions on where to go. Says Wally, “I’m excited to see what interesting places we uncover, and what members of the community we get to high five, and what other bookstores we get to swing by. And little free libraries! We’ve been leaving a bunch of fun items in little free libraries along the way.”
But from Wally’s perspective, your big takeaway should be that you don’t have to wait for them to find Wes Anderson’s vision. Wes Anderson’s vision, after all, is inside each of us.
He says, “I love when people are like, ‘There’s this awesome place in St. Louis that would be perfect for your feed.’ And what I always say is, ‘I can’t wait for you to take a photo.’” After all, submissions are always open.
