Raconteurs, Chain-Smokers, and Dramaturgy at NYU - Part 1

Okay, I made the decision to focus on screenwriting by winter of my second year at NYU, this due to a series of lugubrious mishaps, misfortunes, and miscalculations, but certainly hammering those mercilessly learned life-lessons we are ever-so-reluctantly forced to endure at the most inopportune of times.

Sh-t happens, what can I say?

I was too young and too assinine to admit defeat. It was all about making a plan (the best laid plans of mice and men) and sticking to the strategy, even if the end result was about as lucid as an Indonesian tsunami in winter.

Fortunately for me, NYU had some excellent screenwriting instructors who inspired, entertained, and injected our impressionable young neurons with short-circuiting knowledge, epilepsy-inducing tales from the Hollywood crypt and, yes, even shiny, platinum pearls of wisdom, like so many glowing ornaments on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. This was, after all, show business.

This was an era of ideas (Dune, Slaughterhouse Five, Stranger in a Strange Land), radicalism (Easy Rider, Woodstock, Blow-Up), sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll with Jagger, Daltry, Stewart, and scores of other music royalty struttin' their stuff. It was anything goes vs. the status quo in a time of the Vietnam war, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Ku Klux Klan, and William F. Buckley, a neo-conservative so self-deluded and snobbish, he caused acid reflux in many a longhair, myself included.

(I just spent some time with my friend Lisa who actually worked on FIRING LINE and got to observe Bill Buckley the person. I stand corrected in my misinformed statement above. Lisa, whose opinion I value dearly, told me that the behind-the-scenes Bill Buckley was a warm, caring, generous human being who actually lived his values.)

This was the cultural backdrop, the melieu, and context of my creative awakening, the bursting of my middle class bubble, the breaking of my neorealist cherry.

In my second year I enrolled in a screenwriting class taught by veteran Hollywood screenwriter Ian McClellan Hunter, writer of The Adventures of Robin Hood, winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Roman Holiday, and many others. Ian was the real deal and we were all excited to pick his wired brain and get some of those literary chops to rub off on us by osmosis.

One of the perks of the class was going to Ian's fabulous six room, three bath upper westside Broadway apartment within spitball distanace of John and Yoko's famous Dakota residence. During class Ian's lovely and dutiful wife would hand out dainty and very tasty watercress sandwiches on engraved silver trays to munch on, often accompanied by a bottle or two of Chardonny or Perrier, foie gras, baguettes, and thin, crispy crackers. This was an absolute gastronomic delight for those students who imbibed massive quantities of tetrahydrocannibinol minutes before their arrival to Ian's Manhattan sanctuary.

To be very honest, Ian didn't teach us much about screenwriting. He had a tendency to drink a few glasses of vintage vino or shots of Irish whiskey and spin off into detailed madcap recollections of meetings and infamous arguments between producers, directors, actors, with writers caught in the middle of ego chest-thumping reminescent of what's seen daily in the baboon cage at the Bronx Zoo: a show of male testosterone, peacock tail flaring, with thunderous howling precipitating nasty halitosis and pack leader dominance.

Thus, we'd all get tipsy as Ian, always the charming and roguish Algonquin raconteur, would embellish his stories with stars like Cary Grant, or Irene Dunn, or Jimmy Stewart, or Hitch, each appearing for cameos alongside slimy studio moguls, rapacious ten percenters, and the lowly, disrespected sub-species of wordsmiths who crawled on all fours amongst the Hollywood elite who always stood upright, walking tall, flicking their ashes on the wordsmith's bodies.

Ian was an entertainer, a wiry, tallish man in his 60's, given to smoking a pipe and wearing turtleneck sweaters (or were they dickies?), with curly brown locks and twinkling Irish eyes that wink-wink-nod-nod expressed a boyish irreverance and tendency towards iconoclastic pranks and good humor. He loved to hear himself talk, and we loved to listen to him, young minds soaking up the lurid lore of bygone golden days.

Ian survived the notorious 1950's blacklisting of his contemporaries Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Lillian Hellman, amongst many others, by the devil incarnate, Joe "Ken Starr" McCarthy, whose witchhunting and unfair demonic probing brought the Hollywood establishment into shame and disarray, crushed by public outcry and misguided accusations in a cold war mass-induced atmosphere of paranoia and atomic bomb fear.

Kinda sounds like 9/11, huh?

Everybody got an "A" in Ian's class with minimal feedback and criticism and, if he took a shine to you as a true bud, you would be covertly inducted into attending one of his weekly poker games, where folks like Sidney Lumet, Robert Alan Aurthur, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, and other New York tinseltown mafia, would congregate to exchange war stories, commiserate, drink themselves sloppy, regurgitate in Ian's marble commode and, yes, actually play a few hands of five card stud, deuces wild.

All things must pass, and the class was soon over after Thanksgiving with not a whole lot to show, except maybe some splendid memories and the collective sharing of a man's fabled past, like living history unfolding before your ears. No regrets here. Ian was my first exposure to the hidden world of the New York movie establishment, existing much like the invisible lower eastside garment sweatshops, the predatory champions of capitalism on Wall Street, the shooting galleries of the lower eastside, Chinatown's after hours gambling clubs, or the cockfights in the basements of Spanish Harlem, the hidden worlds that one cannot fathom or easily enter. New York City is full of such hidden worlds, and at times they beckon and a previously locked door creaks open, revealing a microcosm of humanity that engulfs you like a giant toad swallowing a fly.

NYU Film: Fork in the Road

I took screenwriting my first year at NYU, taught by Jackie Parks, who was enthusiastic and encouraging but hardly inspiring (nothing against Jackie; she's a great lady who I love). The book we studied was Aristotle's Poetics, which was as lofty and intellectual a tome as I'd ever encountered. Filled with concepts like protagonist, antagonist, conflict, the "chorus" who commented and narrated the performed theatrical event, this was like reducing drama to some alien abstract science.

I viewed Poetics as intellectual sludge. It did not resonate inside me. It was dry and studied and about as alive and contemporary as its author. I was not particularly moved.

I recall we wrote these artsy-craftsy short scripts and exercises. Our final was a short narrative script and the class was an easy "A". As I was very much caught up in the proactive and time-consuming production process, this course was a necessary evil I endured, like the inane NYU first year required "Expository Writing" class that my niece had to take 30 years after I was forced to slag through it. I guess English majors need jobs, for this course kept plenty employed over the years and the tens of thousands of students NYU grinds through like so much hamburger.

My second year at NYU, I took 16mm film production with film chairman Haig Manoogian. During the first couple of weeks anyone who wanted to direct a film had to submit a short script that would be voted on by the class. Only 5 scripts would be selected and the class would break up into production crews and start production.

Obviously, most people wanted to direct, for NYU's rep was a director's school with Scorcese as its prototypical example. I don't remember how many, but my best guess is over 15 scripts were submitted for review.

The previous summer I wrote a short genre script titled Seppuku, which is Japanese for ritual suicide or hara kiri. After a decade of watching all those Japanese samurai movies, I cooked up a story about a NYC Buddhist priest who is a sword master and teacher (much like at the NY Buddhist Church, where I wanted to shoot). The priest is assaulted by criminals and gets so enraged he goes after them with his sword. After he exacts his revenge he realizes the great sin of killing he has committed and commits suicide. Not the happiest ending, but this was the 70's era of the anti-hero with movies like Easy Rider, Death Wish, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, and scores of B-movies that would no doubt be direct-to-video releases today. Luckily in the 70's the video revolution had not yet occurred, so theaters were the primary distribution method.

I turned my script in, considering it some masterpiece, and was once again deflated when it barely made 5th place. This whole process was political with friends voting for friends (what the hell did I expect? I was just so damn naive and egotistical) and alliances formed way before scripts were turned in. But my script made it by the hairs on my ass (and there aren't many). I was going to make a damn movie!

The other scripts that were voted in were pretty masturbatory pseudo-artistic suffering artist type flicks - but I remember at least one was an ambitious comedy written by classmate Henry Park, Out to Lunch, which depicted the outrageous antics of three loser Brooklyn buddies during their 30 minute lunch break from a fast food purgatorium. It read funny and fast; on-screen it was marred by second-rate amateur performances, sub-par sound (a common student film problem as it's the job no one wants) and poorly lit, disturbingly grainy black and white cinematography.

Mike Negrin, son of IATSE NY cameraman Sol Negrin, was the only person I remember who complimented my script. He said it was "commercial" and was "what the industry wanted to see." I took this as a supreme compliment, for Mike was one of the few chosen ones who were pretty much guaranteed a career path after graduation. Another almuni, John Vorisek, son of famous movie soundtrack mixer Dick Vorisek, was another anointed one, as was famed Exorcist make-up artist Dick Smith's son David (who made a great documentary about his dad at NYU). These guys had a gold ticket, the free pass, the industry nod. The rest of us would have to claw our way into part-time film biz employment, dog-eat-dog NYU style. There was a method to the madness.

Seppuku was doomed from the start. As the Lotsofs and I scouted locations, broke down the script, made equipment lists, and got wrapped in the all-consuming throes of pre-production, I didn'[t realize how hard this story would be to cast. First of all, there aren't that many Asian actors in NYC to play principal parts, and the lead needed to be both a good actor and a competent swordsman. After weeks of looking I finally found an actual from-Japan sword instructor who was a convincing actor. A few days before production commenced, he got cold feet and dropped out.

I was left with a ton of equipment that would not be used, short thousands of dollars in savings (I projected a final cost of $10K for the production -- and it's a little known fact that film students have to bear production costs in addition to tuition and living expenses which can amount to big bucks fast), and a very hard lesson: movie production was incredibly risky and expensive. I was extremely bummed. I came this close. The funk would last at least 6 months. Some rethinking was in order here.

My 5 minute color sync film, Morning, cost me $800 - which seems like a pittance today, but at the time I was astounded by how much a 5 minute movie cost me. I paid nothing for the equipment or editing (actually, it was paid by tuition), so this additional cost was film stock, processing, food, transportation, communication, the whole nine. I had begged, borrowed, and prostituted myself big time to come up with a $10K bankroll, only to spend over $2K with nothing to show. Just bitterness and agita.

I could'a been a contender. I could'a been somebody, instead of a bum.

It suddenly hit me like an ice pick through my ear hole: I could not afford to make another film. I was going to concentrate on putting my stories down on paper, directing movies in my mind, sitting on a chair using a Selectric. I would become a screenwriter.

Little did I know...

Storytelling: A Lost Art

One of my earliest memories is riding a bus on the way to 3rd grade in Flushing, Queens New York with 3 boys surrounding me and, right on the spot, making up a story that kept them jaw-dropped and absolutely on the edge of their naugahyde padded seats. I don't recall what the stories were about, but I had this gift of telling an engaging yarn at an early age.

This talent was a definite ego boost for a skinny, short, different-looking Japanese-American kid who wasn't good at sports and who got bullied and beaten on a regular basis by the Puerto Rican and German immigrant neighborhood kids. So I retreated into books, fantasy, TV, and drawing.

My father was a gifted artist and industrial designer who's own fetish was cars, be-bop jazz, and science fiction (pouring through novels by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Silverberg, Bradbury, and countless others like comic books). He worked for Chrysler in Detroit when I was born designing interior dashboards and rear ends, those fifties curvy, chrome-laden, sparkling doo-dads cars the era was famous for.

The first story I can recollect was concocted during summer camp when I was 7-8 at a YMCA sleepaway camp that had spider-webbed, beetle infested latrines with no plumbing that just reeked so bad I didn't go to the bathroom for the 2 weeks I was imprisoned there. No way, Jose.

These were the carefree summer days of bug juice (so watered down and spiked with sugar the taste was nearly imperceptible), bug-hunting, sports (ugh), swinging by a rope into fetid lake water with your feet stepping on unspeakable slime, camp wars (catch the flag against a neighboring camp to break up the growing monotony and keep the kiddies from outright cannibalism), and those overnight camping trips, complete with marshmallow roasting (why was mine always burnt?), half-cooked hot dogs, gassy beans cooked in the can, campfires, and -- you guessed it -- teenage counselors trying to scare the piss out of us young-uns by telling ghost stories.

This was, by a landslide, my favorite camp activity. In an earlier post I already recounted my childhood obsession with horror movies. Well, sitting under the stars with the dark, foreboding woods all around, hellish creatures howling and chiggering in the not-so-distant distance, stroboscopic bats (winged rodents, fa-chrissakes!) flitting in the trees, all this was enough to make any red-blooded pre-pubescent city kid quake with anxiety and bone-chilling willies.

I was enraptured by these ghost stories. They spoke to me like the Lord whispered to Moses on the Mount. Like Shoeless Joe intoned Kevin Costner. I cannot express how exciting, how breathless these verbal, real-time, your-mouth-to-my-ear exchanges seemed to me.

Against the flickering, yellow light of the cracking wood fire, the long, dancing shadows against the trees, the perceived isolation of the deep forest, what happened those nights played out entirely in the mind's eye, each detail exaggerated one-hundredfold, each person projecting themselves as the protagonist, emotions and adrenaline redlining.

I took in how the storyteller would slow down or quicken their description, how their volume would cascade to a pin-drop whisper, only to be followed by a shouted word that made everyone scream and jump out of their skin, grabbing one another for dear life. It was like a horror movie taking place inside your head, with you seeing each close-up, every shot and cut. It was a primal, epiphanous experience pour moi.

After the stories concluded and the teen counselors went off to smoke pot, chug Old Milwaukees, and engage in sloppy, drippy condom-less sex, we campers were herded into our pup tents like pathetic yard dawgs. But we were too wired on marshmallows and bug juice and fear to even contemplate sleep. We lay in our sleeping bags listening to the satanic night creatures rustling around us, and tossed and turned helplessly, feeling as if our heads would explode.

I tried to read my Mad Magazine by flashlight inside my sleeping bag and, once finished, fidgeted like a jitterbug on crystal meth. I sat up and found my other two tentmates wide awake, too young to engage in any felonious mischief or have any concept thereof. One of them, I can't remember their name (shame on me yet again), asked me if I knew any stories. I guess they were used to having their mommies read them a Grimm's Fairy Tale at night. I shurgged, said, "Sure."

Right there on the spot, my mind filled with residual horrific images, I concocted this open-ended twisted tale of a pack of three boys who got lost in the woods, unable to retrace their footsteps or lock on to anything familiar.

As I spoke I could feel my storytelling powers at work, luring these two young minds like trout to fisherman flies, like moths to the flame. Their eyes widened and their hearts raced as I embellished every point: the young hikers' desperation, their wanting to go home, their tearing, swollen eyes and wavering voices.

The three froze in their tracks as one boy noticed blood drops on the ground. "Must'a been a coyote killed a bird or somethin'," the brave one said to the others reassuringly. Then the nervous Nelly asked, "But where are the feathers? What about the bones?" The brave one shucked him off, "You sissy freak. Coyotes eat birds in one gulp, like big snakes."

The three trudged on until they spotted a house through the thicket of trees. They ran, racing against each other, for the shelter. The brave one pounded on the rotting front door, screaming for help, noticing the crumbling decay of this shack literally in the middle of nowhere. When no one answered, they slammed all their weight against the door until it crashed open.

It was dark inside. Slits of light through boarded-up shattered windows. And the first thing that assaulted their senses like a screaming banshee was the smell. A stultifying stench of rotting flesh. They instinctively covered their noses. The Nelly vomited all over the pocked, slimy floorboards.

Then they all spotted it. A pool of blood in one corner of the bare room. The drooping ceiling above had one big, crimson stain, a maddening drip-drip-drip, and the sound of a beating heart beneath the floorboards.

The door suddenly slammed closed -- and they were thrust into blackness. Something grabbed their legs from below.

My two tentmates screamed so loud, counselors came rushing in, demanding, "What the hell happened? You okay?"

As the two others caught their breath and steadied their trembling, I sat smiling like the cat who ate the canary. In that instant I realized my destiny was sewn. I would tell stories. It's what I was meant to do.

NYU Film: Bucking the System

Making silent B&W 16mm shorts at NYU was fine -- for a while. I'd been doing this since high school, adding dramatic music to reinforce the power of the moving image. But eventually all filmmakers (circa the 1970s) wanted to work with sync sound. Of course, once the video camcorder was invented, this was no longer an issue, and young filmmakers today take for granted sync sound with dialogue automatically married to picture.

Back in the day (gawd that sounds awful) and even today, if you shoot film (vs. the hi-def video filmmaking revolution I will discuss in detail in future blog installments - I've wholeheartedly embraced this movement), you recorded sound separately from picture in what's referred to as "double system" sound recording. So, while the film camera is cranking film, a reel-to-reel (today it's all digital using computers) sound recorder recorded sound simultaneously, in "crystal" sync which used signals precisely pulsed from quartz crystals to synchronize sound and film frames. Today, sync is maintained using a standard called SMPTE which is time-code based, marrying film frames to precise instances of time.

Geez, film sounds pretty technical, huh? Perfect for geeks like me. Just a reminder: I was a film geek 10 years before IBM invented the Personal Computer. That was a whole 'nother technology to embrace (you bet I would!), but the times, they were a changin' and, for a while, film was my opiate. Hell, it still is.

I did make some super-8 sound movies which recorded sound on super-8 film that had a magnetic stripe running down one edge. It was a breakthrough technology at the time and the marriage of sound and picture was blissful. In the 70's I made a sound-sync documentary of my New Jersey pals titled SUBURBAN PYGMIS, but it's the only one I did. The cost was prohibitive.

Silent super-8 films could also be sent out to a lab to have a magnetic stripe added so you could later record sound via a sound projector. Mark Ulano and I did this. It became our modus operandi for years.

I should mention that during this period I'd become a connoiseur of foreign films. In those days you couldn't get them on video, but there were maybe a dozen movie theaters in NYC that showed foreign and revival (read: old) films. I guess I'd gotten in the habit watching all those classic Japanese samurai flicks at the NY Buddhist Church over the years. Plus, I took the required film history courses at college and was hooked.

The Paris in NY specialized in contemporary French fare, others in classics, still others in recent foreign releases. In the 1970's there was an explosion of films from directors like Bunuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), Fellini (his biographical masterpiece Amarcord blew me and Dan Luciano away), Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris - the first x-rated Brando flick), Wertmuller (Seven Beauties), Truffaut (Day for Night), and I distinctly remember being transmogrified by Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. It was artsy cubed: powerful images and performances, enigmatic, non-linear, adult, it pierced your heart and stripped you bare.

In the second semester of Sight and Sound, while my classmates were still scrambling to make silent short films with interlocked music, I got antsy to do a sound sync short. Call me ballsy, pretentious, capricious, a snob, full of sh-t, I was determined to make a movie where when people's lips moved, you heard them speak. No narration (a trick every NYU student abuses and anathema in the industry in most cases - unless your name is Scorcese), no clumsy dubbing (which even the master got away with in "It's Not Just You, Murray"), the real deal.

Problem was, I could not procure the necessary tools at NYU to make this movie. I was not authorized under the auspices of the school to be lent sync cameras and sound recorders by the equipment office, where future power-brokers cut deals with the favored few and screwed us mere mortals. That would not happen until next year. So, rather than shelling out big bucks (to me, anyway) for an Arri-16 and Nagra, I pulled favors with my old pal Mark Ulano and my friends at SVA, including Steve Fritz, a serious director of photography, plus my NYU cohorts for acting and other production schlepping, and set off to make a 5 minute short titled MORNING. We shot on location at the Klaveness' fabulous Park Avenue digs.

For the first time I actually wrote a script (!), because dialog and acting demanded real lines to read. I mentioned all these foreign movies because this short was heavily influenced by the match-cutting, use of color backgrounds, and minimalism so powerful in Cries and Whispers. I had no agenda for making this sound movie other than this is what my zeitgeist whispered in my artiste ear.

After decades of being boxed in an attic, I had the 16mm optical sound print transferred to video by a company that uses the Rank Cinetel frame scanning technology employed by Hollywood studios. I hadn't seen the film in years and it now strikes me as pretentious, precocious (I was 17 when I made it in 1974), pushing the envelope of non-linear storytelling and, interestingly enough, very much focused on these three characters, their emotions, and inter-relationships. It was a delicately woven tapestry, with obvious European influences.

Steve Fritz did a professional, first rate job as cinematographer, and we shot color negative. My pal Mark Ulano was associate director, co-editor, and sound recordist. My cast were all NYU classmates: Liv Klaveness, the tall Nordic blonde, Gail Showalter, the short, moody brunette, and cast as the rogue in a love triangle, Steve Kostant was approriately chauvanistic.

When I screened the film in Sight and Sound (spliced and sound interlocked, before an answer print was made with title opticals, etc.) in Charlie Milne's class, the class sat mostly speechless. The only one who was truly enthusiastic was Haig Manoogian, film chair who got wind of the effort by Charlie. I guess after years of seeing essentially the same student films, 90% black and white, clumsily shot and edited, with bad acting, unintentional humor, focused on sophomoric themes, MORNING was something truly unexpected and, at least in Haig's view, welcome.

When Charlie asked the class for reactions, one smug, skinny, Tom Petty-blonde midwestern dude with pointy cowboy boots raised his hand and proclaimed, "That was a film, not a movie." This was a huge slap in my face and arrow in my tender ego. A heated discussion ensued where Charlie and the class argued about what constituted a film vs. a movie; it was a gut-twisting, perverse, dialectic, intellectual back room side show of masturbation at the height of auteur snobbism. NYU Film was famous for this elitist doo-doo. I just sat there, jaw agape, wondering what the f--k was going on, my heart oozing.

I thank my lucky stars that Haig saw through the politics, rivalry, and pettiness. He would become my champion from that time forward, granting me whatever production tools and favors I needed, and taking me under his wing as he had done for Scorceses, Amy Heckerling, Marty Brest, and others.

You be the judge of my first sound sync, color film, MORNING.

Dog-Eat-Dog: NYU Film School - Part 2

Along with film production, NYU film students were required to take screenwriting, and my teacher for a semester was Mardik Martin, co-screenwriter of Mean Streets, directed by our most famous graduate, enfant terrible Martin Scorcese.

If you go to UCLA, you're well aware of the Hollywood legends of Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. At USC, George Lucas has left his imprint by donating tons of money for entire buildings to be erected in his name. In the universe of film schools, UCLA, USC, and NYU are the creme de la creme. I'm not knocking other programs, like the American Film Institute (I was a Screenwriting Fellow there, too), SVA, Columbia, and scores of others. These 3 have the name recognition and their grads have made inroads in the cinema.

I didn't go to the California schools, so I can't attest to the lionizing of these aforementioned luminaries, but NYU in the 70's was a kind of shrine to Scorcese or, as everyone called him, Marty. Marty was our urban legend, a validator to the industry success possible to achieve by laying out significant mountains of gold to go to NYU Film.

Sight and Sound instructor (and future NYU Film Chair) Charlie Milne screened Marty's NYU short, "It's Not Just You, Murray" religiously each semester and we watched in silent awe at the master's work. If we behaved, we even saw the first feature Haig Manoogian produced with Marty as director, another Harvey Keitel indie must-see, "Who's That Knocking at my Door" - a precursor to Mean Streets in every stylistic sense.

For the brief period of time I spent in his class, Mardik Martin was a humble, brilliant, soft spoken, and very real person, a consummate New Yorker and Hollywood outsider whom we could all easily identify with. The semi-autobiographical neo-realist homage to DeSica and Casavettes, Mean Streets, had just been released and Mardik announced to the class that he was moving out to Los Angeles to work with Scorcese on a new project.

Mardik sat at the front of the room and intoned solemnly, "Look around you. These are the people you will be making movies with for the rest of your life. The friendships you make here will be intense, and the alliances you form will be your ticket someday."

We all gazed at the ragtag, semi-bohemian, blue-jeaned, mostly unkempt (the guys, I mean) assembly of misfits and artsy-craftsy long hairs and knew, deep down, Mardik was coming from a place of truth. We nodded slowly, taking in the gravity of his prophetic words. When class ended, we all bolted to the closest theater to catch Marty's and Mardik's breakthrough opus.

I can't tell you how exciting this seemed to me and how energized we felt as a class. I saw Mean Streets, and despite its rambling, almost flow-of-consciousness narrative structure, this was, without an iota of doubt, a love letter to New York, a slice of life from lower Manhattan, the culmination of Marty's sickly childhood staring out his window at the great panorama of Grand Street in the bosom of Little Italy. He captured the sights, sounds, smells, and people who populated this world so realistically, you could taste it.

Harvey Keitel, and especially Robert DeNiro in his breakthrough role as the dim-witted Johnny Boy, gave luminescent performances so nuanced and naturalistic, they kicked you right in the cajones. Coppola's brilliant but definitely Hollywood Godfather was no comparison for the realism and grit of Marty's downtown world of hustlers and desperate wannabees. What this picture lacked in polish it made up for a hundred times over with heart and soul, the filmic blood of a tour-de-force talent to be reckoned with.

So two of NYU's proteges had made it big time, and the era of amazing pictures they would work on would absolutely blow me away: Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Color of Money, my God, the list is endless.

I proclaim: one Scorcese picture has more talent, passion, and luminosity than a dozen crass Hollywood assembly line confections.

I rest my case (for now).

Dog-Eat-Dog: NYU Film School

At 16 years old, I entered NYU Film directly into sophomore classes because I'd fulfilled my freshman requirements making Super-8 films in high school. It was, to say the least, uncomfortable to be amongst students who were 19-20 years old, and I'm sure they viewed me as weird (to put it mildly). I was no fashionista, was not hip in any sense of the word (anti-hip comes to mind), wore thick aviator eyeglasses, had incredible reserves of nervous teen energy and, shall I say, bravura (as in cock-sure egotism that masks underlying insecurity and self-doubt).


I had limited sexual chops acquired through a couple of brief high school flings, and the bevy of young, buxom artsy college gals who strolled the hallowed 8th floor Green Street halls were most evidently repelled by this geeky kid who drove a sh-t brown Caddy Coupe Deville from Jersey every day.

Back in the day, a 2nd year film requirement was "The Language of Sight and Sound", a black and white 16MM production course, and Charley Milne was our teacher. During the first class each student stood up and introduced themselves before the class was divvied up into 4 person crews.

I don't recall what my spiel was, but I was surprised when 26 year old Liv Klavenness, a 5'11" scandanavian blonde amazon fashion-model married to a Norwegian shipping magnate multi-millionaire, walked right up to me and nonchalantly declared, "You sound like you know what you're talking about. I want to be in your group." I was taken aback. This woman was so out of my league, it was astounding.

Equally shocking was another 19 year old young lady, Gail Showalter, wan, winsome, dark-haired dancer-type, also wanted to join my group along with Harold Apter, a Jersey transfer student who would become a lifelong friend and fellow man of letters (Emmy Award winner to boot!). So the high school dweeb finds himself in a film crew with 2, count 'em 2 looker ladies making silent 16MM short films, sometimes accompanied by music on full 16 mag and interlocked during projection.

Each week we shot one 100' roll of B&W film on 16MM wind-up Bolexes (Arriflexes if we were lucky), edited on reel-to-reel Filmos, and the following week screened our shorts in class. The assignments were touchy-feely, like make a 3 minute movie on "loneliness". But, as a Super-8 veteran, they were right up my alley.

Every year, if you should by happenstance stroll through Washington Square Park from September through December, you will see NYU film crews with cameras on tripods (probably video camcorders these days) making their little short films on a rigorous and sleep-deprived schedule, with short tempers and egos flexing like peacocks on steroids.

I doubt the routine has changed much since the 70's, for competition rules the roost and the person with the biggest ego, vision, cajones, and stamina always emerges the victor in these dog-eat-dog training grounds, where the microcosm of film school is crafted to mirror the "real world" of vultures, backstabbing, greedy, double-talking hustlers, cinema pimps, and mogul wannabees.

I think I know what I'm talking about. Producer Joel Silver attended NYU when I was there, as did Marty Brest, Amy Heckerling, Joe Gilford (Jack's son), and a slew of other soon-to-be Tinseltown luminaries.

Gee. Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh. Sounding a bit jaded. But, go ahead, I challenge you to walk up to an NYU Film school grad and ask them for their absolutely honest assessment of their film school experience. I ain't making this up, I swear.