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.

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...

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.

High School Film Daze - Part 2

In 9th grade I decided to graduate early. I was totally bored in high school, easily got straight-A's, and kind of went berserk.

In my new persona at Teaneck High, I played rhythm guitar in 2 rock bands: one was the Rosenberry Blues Band with drummer Billy "the Rat" Rosenfeld, lead guitarist Danny Warmflash, bassist Neil Jordan, and I can't for the life of me remember the singer's name (shame on me), except to say he was kind of a chubby Al Franken ringer, mostly off-key crooner.

I was in several bands with my BFF Dan; they were actually the same band with a different name every time we played out. It was just a goof to us. The nucleus was me, Dan, and Sal Mummiani on guitars and bass, Tom Castronovo on drums, sometimes keyboardist Bob Papazian, singer Gina Scala (we all sang different songs but Gina was the best), sometimes Frank Perrone would play sax on some songs. Our band names included Megaton, Jimmy Durango and the Polka Pirates, Hot Ice -- there were so many, I can't remember them all (shame on me again).

I went to summer school 3 summers in a row to accumulate the credits needed to graduate early. After all, I knew what I want to study: filmmaking. Mark Ulano went to the School of Visual Arts in NYC when I was junior, and I ended up on independent study in almost every class, going 2 days a week to NYC to attend SVA classes with Mark. I met a whole bunch of folks at SVA: Reeves Lehmann, future Chair of the SVA Film Department, Richie Siegel, Steve Fritz, Frank Isaacs, Tony Ceglio (who would become the NY Giants football team cameraman), Bill Tasgal, the list goes on and on.


I made my own independent study film in 11th grade, primarily to fulfill credit for my German class (along with English, Art, and others I can't recall), but the only thing German about the film was the title, "Tagen im Leben" ("Days in the Life") and a snippet of Dvorak's New World Symphony that played triumphantly when my German teacher appeared on-camera. It starred classmate Jimmy Krieger and the narrative, admittedly very thin, just followed our protagonist around during a typical high school day. Not exactly Raging Bull, but somewhat biographical and reflective of the ennui of my life at the time, which was huge. It rang in around 20 minutes with non-stop music which, once again, was married beautifully to the images.

Going for the higher ground (not that SVA wasn't an excellent school -- it just didn't have the cache of NYU which, I would later learn, along with a dollar, could buy me a subway token in 1978), I applied to NYU Film School at a time when popular myth said it was harder to get into film school than medical school. There was that much stiff competition for limited openings. But armed with "1+1=3" and my own solo effort, "Tagen im Leben", NYU Film Chair, and legend in his own right, Haig Manoogian, must have seen some flicker of light within me, for he gushed over certain technically difficult shots (following Mr. Reilly out of a dark car interior into bright sunlight while racking the F-Stop) and admitted me at 16 years old, not as a freshman, but as a sophomore, skipping freshman super-8 film production and editing altogether

A babe in the woods, a fish thrown into the frying pan of NYU Film, soon-to-be-discovered as a dog-eat-dog, competitive microcosm of the "real world" -- whatever that was.