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.