Rainbow's Edge - Part 1

After dad announced in no uncertain terms he couldn't cough up the large for NYU fall semester in 1974, I met with undergrad film chair Haig Manoogian and delivered the bad news like an Al Qaeda chieftain after 48 hours of Mossad interrogation.

Haig was visibly rattled as he shook his head, waving his cigarette about, "This is not good, Bruce. Not good at all."

He asked about financial aid and, like the naive dope I am, I told him my dad owned a company and our family probably didn't qualify. My foot still throbs from where the bullet hit -- fired straight from my lips.

Haig took another drag and looked me right in the corneas, "That's too bad, Bruce. We're gonna miss you this semester. What are your plans?"

"Get a job, I guess."

"Well, let me know if I can do anything for you. Don't be a stranger, okay?"

I thanked him for his support and told him I'd be, "Back in the spring, makin' pictures like Capra (his favorite)."

Haig smiled ear to ear like the Armenian elf he was, shook my hand as vigorously as a Saint Bernard wags its tail anticipating a blood-dripping slab of porterhouse, and I was the out the door.

Never to return.

Well, not exactly. But I'd never take another class at NYU. I'll get around to why later. I promise.

Thus began a period of hustling for money and foregoing my screenwriter fantasies for as long as I could stand it.

I hastily took a part-time dead end job at E.J. Korvettes in Paramus, NJ selling cameras, a position boldly advertised in jobs section of the Bergen Record. My boss, a disenfranchised and sardonic 30-something wiseacre whose name I will never recall, pushed me like a slaveship rowmaster to hawk an inferior 35mm snapshot camera hastily slapped together by some Japanese no-name sweatshop Nikon wannabee (the equivalent manufacturer today is some money worshipping Chinese back alley basement fly-by-night with a name like Gold Sky Camera) so I could make an aneurism inducing extra $0.65 per sale.

"That's your commish, above and beyond your hourly swag. The sh-t adds up, lemme tell ya," my boss implored, gold upper incisor momentarily blinding me in the bright overhead fluorescent glare.

I watched with utter nausea as he seduced sucker after sucker who wandered up to the counter to buy this piece of crap that, "It's like our special this week, I ain't lyin'. Better than a Kodak Instamatic. I swear on me mutter. Look at this craftsmanship. Can't beat that with a pogo stick." I did everything humanly possible not to hurl on the spot.

I collected my first paycheck, around $38 after taxes for the fifteen hours I groveled, and was gone like the Great Plains Buffalo, calling in sick for the rest of eternity. I should have learned my lesson. Sales was not my cup o' Joe.

My next humiliating gig was as a waiter at a pseudo Japanese hibachi restaurant, Ichiban, that I referred to as "itchy bum" to my friends. It was run by a whiter than Wonder Bread middle aged restauranteur named Ted, tall (compared to the midget help), with droopy war-worn eyelids, a long wrinkled sullen face that rarely cracked a smile, always sporting an open collar button down dry-cleaned cotton shirt, to whom owning a Japanese eatery was little distinguished from a Popeye's franchise. He was into making money and not overly obsessed with haute cuisine.

Ted played the role of bartender to keep an eagle eye on the hired asians who performed all his drudgery: Japanese sushi chefs who were little more than Key West buskers who juggled knives instead of multicolored rubber balls, sexy Korean, Japanese, and Chinese waitresses who knew how to smile coyly to run up big alcohol tabs (the more drunk you were, the less you cared about the lousy undercooked dog scraps masquerading for cuisine), and an occasional male waiter (moi) when he couldn't find any women to work the tables like geishas in a Kyoto tea house. The only other white person was some local high school senior who bussed tables at the snap of a snap-on nailed finger and who disappeared like a comet in a Nevada night sky, silently and in a wink, at closing bell.

Ted was of the opinion that, "Orientals all look the same. Black hair and slant eyes with funny accents. What's the big deal? Who gives a goddamn?"

Apparently no one because no asians ever ate here. At least during my "I spent a lifetime there one month" tenure. That should have been indicative enough of how excellent the Japanese food was, but I was clueless and, like I keep admitting, a dope.

Only loud, beer and mixed drink swilling middle class caucasians indistinguishable to me from Ted and his ilk ate at Ichiban. People who couldn't even pronounce the name. The oily businessman clientele got wasted every afternoon and pinched oriental asian butt while the women would blush, cover their mouths, and giggle. I did everything humanly possible not to hurl on the spot.

I did my time, got paroled, and walked a free young fool, still not quite disappointed in humanity, with a pep in my snappy step, whistling a Zep tune, playing air guitar, insouciant and non-plussed as can possibly be. Yet I was 18 years old, broke, desperate as a woodchuck in the Siberian tundra, living with ma and pa, possessing no job skills or prospects, existing on fumes and the kindness of high school cohorts and neighborhood rabble. I was as pathetic and downtrodden as an Indian leper.

The next turn of events was unthinkable and from out of the azure.

My father asked me to work for him. I started the next day as vice president of Toshihiko Sakow Associates, Inc.

That same day I started working feverishly on my first feature length screenplay, a sci-fi epic loosely based on Frank Herbert's inspiring masterwork, Dune, titled "STARCHILD". This was ambitious and outright audacious and would teach me some serious lessons right out of the box.

Thank the heavens for nepotism. How else would the kids of the captains of industry and sordid trust fund brats without an ivy sheepskin possibly eke out a spoiled, privileged existence (like I was one of them -- NOT)? I was about to find out in a full-on, totally gnarly way.

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).