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.