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.
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