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.