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.