High School Film Daze - Part 2

In 9th grade I decided to graduate early. I was totally bored in high school, easily got straight-A's, and kind of went berserk.

In my new persona at Teaneck High, I played rhythm guitar in 2 rock bands: one was the Rosenberry Blues Band with drummer Billy "the Rat" Rosenfeld, lead guitarist Danny Warmflash, bassist Neil Jordan, and I can't for the life of me remember the singer's name (shame on me), except to say he was kind of a chubby Al Franken ringer, mostly off-key crooner.

I was in several bands with my BFF Dan; they were actually the same band with a different name every time we played out. It was just a goof to us. The nucleus was me, Dan, and Sal Mummiani on guitars and bass, Tom Castronovo on drums, sometimes keyboardist Bob Papazian, singer Gina Scala (we all sang different songs but Gina was the best), sometimes Frank Perrone would play sax on some songs. Our band names included Megaton, Jimmy Durango and the Polka Pirates, Hot Ice -- there were so many, I can't remember them all (shame on me again).

I went to summer school 3 summers in a row to accumulate the credits needed to graduate early. After all, I knew what I want to study: filmmaking. Mark Ulano went to the School of Visual Arts in NYC when I was junior, and I ended up on independent study in almost every class, going 2 days a week to NYC to attend SVA classes with Mark. I met a whole bunch of folks at SVA: Reeves Lehmann, future Chair of the SVA Film Department, Richie Siegel, Steve Fritz, Frank Isaacs, Tony Ceglio (who would become the NY Giants football team cameraman), Bill Tasgal, the list goes on and on.


I made my own independent study film in 11th grade, primarily to fulfill credit for my German class (along with English, Art, and others I can't recall), but the only thing German about the film was the title, "Tagen im Leben" ("Days in the Life") and a snippet of Dvorak's New World Symphony that played triumphantly when my German teacher appeared on-camera. It starred classmate Jimmy Krieger and the narrative, admittedly very thin, just followed our protagonist around during a typical high school day. Not exactly Raging Bull, but somewhat biographical and reflective of the ennui of my life at the time, which was huge. It rang in around 20 minutes with non-stop music which, once again, was married beautifully to the images.

Going for the higher ground (not that SVA wasn't an excellent school -- it just didn't have the cache of NYU which, I would later learn, along with a dollar, could buy me a subway token in 1978), I applied to NYU Film School at a time when popular myth said it was harder to get into film school than medical school. There was that much stiff competition for limited openings. But armed with "1+1=3" and my own solo effort, "Tagen im Leben", NYU Film Chair, and legend in his own right, Haig Manoogian, must have seen some flicker of light within me, for he gushed over certain technically difficult shots (following Mr. Reilly out of a dark car interior into bright sunlight while racking the F-Stop) and admitted me at 16 years old, not as a freshman, but as a sophomore, skipping freshman super-8 film production and editing altogether

A babe in the woods, a fish thrown into the frying pan of NYU Film, soon-to-be-discovered as a dog-eat-dog, competitive microcosm of the "real world" -- whatever that was.

High School Film Daze

Mark Ulano and I became inseparable filmmaking cohorts in high school. Mark's father was a famous jazz drummer and teacher, Sam Ulano, who taught my brother Kevin drums. Our art teacher was Bill Reilly, perhaps the coolest, hippest teacher you could ever happen upon if you were so lucky, for Mr. Reilly believed in turning young artists loose upon the world and letting them run wild. Which is what he did for Mark and me. He gave us Super-8 Kodak cameras and turned our art period into a free period where we could literally run amok and shoot B&W rolls of film until the cows came home.


Mark's parents were so bohemian cool that they allowed Mark's girlfriend Julia, who came from a strict orthodox Jewish family, to sleep over in the basement. Permitted pre-marital high school sex. It blew my middle class gaskets right off the ticker.

Mark had the cash for the absolute Rolls Royce of Super-8 cameras, the Beaulieu, with a 6-60mm wide angle lens, backwind for in-camera dissolves, fade outs, the whole nine. It was a budding filmmakers' wet dream camera and we used it all the time. To this day, Mark is cutting edge as an Academy-Award winning sound recordist (more on that in later blogs).

Mark and I went blind editing Super-8 footage with our Eumig reel-to-reel editing rigs and splicers. The frames were so small you had to squint to see what was in them, but we struggled with what we had and made those little movies that would become the basis for our careers.

Meanwhile, I was pouring my guts out into my journal which, from 1971 to maybe 1985 would become thousands of pages long. I would later throw out the entire opus when I cleaned out a house, deciding quite hastily I would never read any of it. I hadn't even peeked at those pages for maybe 15 years when I trashed them. Oh well.

Point is: I never wrote a script in high school. Filmmaking was all about doing it, not writing about it or premeditating the process. Closest I came to screenwriting was maybe an outline and storyboard of shots. Once out in the wild, they would hardly even be considered for I just winged it, shooting literally from the hip, forgetting tripods and proper framing. It was almost experimental filmmaking because all the rules, which we were ignorant of, were never followed. It was from the guts.

I remember Mr. Reilly saying how my shots were always strange: obtuse angles, off center and never balanced with horizon or converging perspective. I didn't give a damn.

My favorite director was Kurosawa whose Seven Samurai was shown as part of a Sunday afternoon after-church double-feature with subtitles at the New York Buddhist Church. The movie stunned me with its humanism, breathtaking action sequences, and deep characterizations.

The director that Mark and I idolized was Kubrick. A ClockWork Orange blew our minds, and the book was one Dan and I quoted Russky slang from, "Viddy this, me droogs. Bit of the ol' horrorshow ultra-violence are we up to now?" Brilliant. Another vision of the future, so utterly different from 2001.

Who the hell is Bruce Sakow and why's he blogging about screenwriting?

Good question.

I've been a screenwriter since 1976 -- over 30 hard fought, battle scarred years -- and I've been there, done that, tuned in, tuned out, and still haven't dropped dead or out of sight. No, I'm still alive and, while not exactly 100%, "every now and then I know it's kind of hard to tell, but I'm still alive and well" (to quote Edgar Winter), which is to say, I'm still in the game.

Over the course of this life of screenwriting, I've written 21 feature-length scripts. At about 100 pages per script plus 2-3 drafts for each (give or take), I've written over 5,000 pages, not including all the non-fiction I've churned out over the years as a corporate communications writer. Believe me, I'm not trying to brag or overstate my case, for I know there are writers out there who've written a hundred times my output and made a hell of a lot more cash doing it (Stephen King, the richest writer alive and one of my idols, comes almost instantly to mind).

I guess I have some explaining to do.

When I was in 7th grade, I got bit by the moviemaking bug bad. It was somewhere around the time that "2001: A Space Odyssey" was released (1968) and I remember not understanding it (I went to see it with my father, an avid sci-fi fan, who walked out of the theater just as puzzled and mumbled, "Arthur C. Clarke is weird..."). But it was, by far, the most imaginative vision of the future I'd ever witnessed, and I wanted to use this amazing canvas of light and sound to express my ideas, my yet-to-emerge vision about the world.


Just goes to show how truly clueless I was...

Growing up, I was absolutely scared to death by horror films, especially the ones they showed on Chiller Theater with Zachary as the host on Saturday nights in the NYC area. The opening credit montage of black and white horror flick clips produced endless nightmares. The B-movies I obsessed over would not even make me so much as flinch today, but I'll never forget them: "Them", "The Man with X-Ray Eyes", "The Attack of the 50 Foot Man" (and Woman), "The Incredible Shrinking Man", "The Fly", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "The Mummy" -- the list goes on and on. I also was scared crapless by a Superman episode (loved that show) that featured Mole Men.


Some years earlier, I think I was 10, my father purchased a regular 8mm movie camera that you wound up (I believe it was a Bolex, but I'm not sure) and I made my first movie: stripping a 12" G.I. Joe of its green fatigues and setting it on fire on camera while waving it in my hand. So much for the emerging Spielberg. No plot, no dialogue, it made no sense whatsoever. Just on screen carnage. Maybe I was on to something...

I started making super-8 mm movies in junior high with a Canon 1014. Just mess-around flicks made with friends. I tried a stop-motion film, inspired by an award winning short at the time of guys on invisible motorcyles, that featured my pal Joe Imperato in leather jacket and cool Raybans, riding -- you guessed it -- an invisible motorcyle. Another project I started and never finished.

My best friend Dan Luciano and I, self-proclaimed intelligentsia of the seventh grade (along with Joe and an annoying freak geek named John Borchek who Dan once referred to as a "pimp". Once he looked it up, Johnny was not a happy camper. He got kind of violent which was good for a huge chuckle, as he had as much physical prowess as a moth on steroids), both hyper-focused on our futures as psychiatrists, created psychological profiles of our classmates for fun. Oh, he's neurotic with an Oedipus complex; she's an extrovert with psychosexual penis envy. We thought this was hilarious.


In any event, our cinematic opus was PARANOID, portrait of a paranoid-schizophrenic young man (played by Dan), who was locked up in an attic, straight-jacketed and pathetic as can be. We got as far as one black and white photo of Dan siting on the floor wearing a T-shirt, head in his hands, looking as crazed as a 12 year old can possibly muster. It's actually a haunting image, even decades later.

Fortunately, we didn't stop there. I made a mess-around super-8 movie with Dan dressed up in green soldier fatigues, complete with a helmet, BB rifle, cap gun, water canteen, and fake grenade on an Army surplus belt. We used to play army in a dump yard near his dad's house off Elm Street in Teaneck, so I filmed him walking around a desolate backdrop of dirt hills, dust blown by the wind, fall foilage. It became a post-nuclear statement of a coming apocalypse and ended with Dan in tears, the last man on Earth.

I had the film sound-striped and added music, Ten Years After, and the music elevated the visuals, proving its power to add synergistic energy to pictures. Dan's mom Arlene loved this little movie I titled The Patriot the most; after all, Danny boy, her only child, was the star. Years later she bought it from me for $25 which had me flabbergasted -- my first moviemaker swag.

When my family moved to Teaneck, NJ the summer before my sophomore year in high school, I grew my hair down to my shoulder blades and practiced every waking hour playing guitar till my fingers bled on the rusting steel strings of a $30 Sears Harmony folk guitar. I had been so uncool/square/boring my whole life, I saw this move as my one and only opportunity for a total makeover, from bookworm geek jap to long-haired rocker jap. I read Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and grokked on genetic messiahs and Jimi Hendrix's cosmic riffs on Voodoo Chile.

Sometime in junior high I started writing a journal of my most personal and inner demons spilled on the page with black blood. It was psychotherapy to me, helping me work through difficult periods of self examination and questioning. My journal literally kept me sane through very insane times and events, lighting the fire of the word within me, the power of language and thoughts and verbal expression.

Where's this going, you ask? Very well, let's get back on the rails.

In 10th grade I met my filmmaking cohort and newest best friend, Mark Ulano, a 12th grader who was already far gone on the movie bug. Together we made 2 super-8 masterpieces, one a documentary of our art teacher, Bill Reilly, titled "1+1=3" that won an honorable mention in the Kodak Teenage Filmmaking Awards, and another black and white opus, THE DREAMER, starring Kenny Einhorn (Mark's alter ego) and Mark's girlfriend and high school sweetheart, Julia Rudich.


Somehow, Mark commandeered a hospital room for a couple of hours, and we filmed Kenny in a hospital bed and gown with Julia in a nurse's uniform taking his temperature as he awoke from a coma. A little vaseline around the perimeter of the lens gave the whole white-on-white sequence a dream-like aura.

I was hooked on the filmmaking bug for good. No turning back. No further thoughts of becoming a shrink. It was all or nothing, much to my parents' regret.