Raconteurs, Chain-Smokers, and Dramaturgy at NYU - Part 2

The spring semester of my second year at NYU, I signed on for the Advanced Screenwriting Seminar with screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur. I was somehow admitted even though this class was meant for seniors. Once again film chair Haig Manoogian just waved me through as though I had a Speed Pass at Six Flags. Ever since I made the 5 minute color sound short MORNING, I was suddenly a "chosen one", a member of the inner circle who had the backing of the powers that be. This had happened to Scorcese, Amy Heckerling, and Marty Brest when they made their career-breaking shorts while undergrads. It was, pinch-pinch, happening to me and undeniably felt good.

There was nothing typical about this class. It had only a handful of students (around 6-8, I think), including an NYU film production teacher, Barry Sherman, shocking unto itself. When I saw Barry I knew this would be a worthwhile class. The other students were serious about screenwriting, as serious as I'd become, sort of a late-to-the-game born-again speaker of tongues whose new parlance was FADE IN.

The classroom was more like a closet, with hardly enough room for a round table and chairs. Not your typical Economics 101 auditorium, complete with podium and stadium seats for slumbering students with cassette tape recorders (I fell asleep in every economics class while taping it to listen to and jot down notes later).
Robert Alan Aurthur's claim to fame was writing Grand Prix with Steve McQueen and directed by John Frankenheimer. He was one of the pioneer television writers who worked on STUDIO ONE in 1948 and the Philco Television Playhouse in the 50's. While he taught this class he co-wrote and co-produced his last movie with director Bob Fosse, ALL THAT JAZZ, starring Roy Scheider. He died a few years later, but I'll always remember Bob Aurthur.

ALL THAT JAZZ was a great movie, filled with visual and visceral spectacle, panache, bravura, and very much dedicated to the Broadway theater where Fosse is a legend. Scheider was Fosse's doppelganger, broadly playing a famous broadway musical director caught up in a whirlwind, chaotic production that he pours his heart, soul, and every waking minute into, played out against the backdrop of his personal life and the trials and tribulations of a life in show biz. Despite the desperation and the breathless on-the-edge-of-a-razor portrayal of this lifestyle, there was a sense of the all-or-nothing, this-show-will-be-your-last (and was, in Aurthur's case) attitude involved in every artistic creation. If you haven't seen it, flawed as it may be, I urge you to catch it.

Fosse brought to the screen an amazing multi-Oscar winning musical starring Lisa Minelli, CABARET, a stunning, groundbreaking translation of the hit Broadway production set in Hitler's Germany in the 1940's. It captured the seedy underbelly of a society decaying into fascism set against the bright colored lights and leave-your-troubles-behind escapism of entertainment.

Kind of sounds like the George W years, huh?

As a teacher Bob Aurthur was no-nonsense, I don't give a flying f--k about your feelings, seat-of-his-pants, acerbic, jaded, vitriolic Hollywood-despising victim of countless ruthless, nasty, egomaniacal, stab-you-in-the-back Hollywood producers, the ones who smile in your face as they twist the flat blade in your gut while smoking a Havana.

Bob was grizzled, war-worn, with deep wrinkles on his face, haunched posture, sagging droopy fat deposits beneath his weary middle-aged eyes, horribly out of shape and about 50 pounds overweight, with tousled, salted brown hair and fingers and lips stained yellow with nicotine. He coughed a dry, hacking cackle often during class. This did not bode well for long term wellness.

During each 2 hour marathon that commenced with Nazi train schedule precision at 7pm, Bob chained-smoked filterless Camels during class, and I sat transfixed and disgusted as a huge empty gray metal ashtray in the center of the table was filled to the brim with stinking ashes, sputum, and butts. Even worse, all my hapless, nicotine-addicted classmates took this as their cue and permission to light up and help fill that goddamn bowl. It was enough to make any semi-normal person hurl their half-digested chow mein and Dr. Pepper.

From day one, Bob lit up a Camel and declared non-chalantly that he was going to conduct this class as though he were a movie producer. He wasn't interested in telling us what was good about our scripts, he definitely wanted to let you and everyone in the room (perhaps all mankind) know what sucked, what mistakes you made, why your piece of sh-t script would never be produced, and why you should think long and hard about your assured non-career as a screenwriter and very seriously consider accounting, working the fryer, or becoming a sous chef at HoJo's. Plus, he wasn't going to be the only one blowing acidic wind. He wanted every last person to chime in with a deafening chorus of ego-crushing, emasculating, seemingly non-stop castigation and humiliation.

Not fun.

His class was a self-declared smoke-filled war zone of vicious attacks, like wolves circling wounded, bleeding stags beneath the dark forest canopy, snipping and growling, snapping for slimy pieces of rotting, fetid flesh.

One student named Jonathan (good thing I can't remember his last name), was reduced to a sniveling, bawling, tear-stained bundle of shredded nerve endings by the end of his 30 minute "feedback" session. His voice quavered, hands trembling like some pathetic Parkinson's patient. He became apoplectic and reduced to stuttering Turretts after that class, like some shell shocked Vietnam hellhole prison camp vet who sits and stares at the shadows on the walls, mumbling incoherently.

I sat during these sessions in utter and absolute shock, speechless, gripped with fear at what I would endure as I watched student after student take hits like the nose tackle guard of the New York Giants during a blitz. I hardly participated in these verbal lashings while others relished the opportunity to publicly castrate and verbally annihilate a fellow student, only to be attacked even more viciously by their previous victim in another session.

This was madness. It was beyond brutal. This was a sadistic bloodletting. I was witnessing a breakdown of society into cannibalism and anarchy right before my bloodshot eyes. Was Hollywood truly this ruthless and insane? Or was Bob Aurthur exorcizing his own demons and inner torment by orchestrating this neo-nazi butchery with clueless students? I couldn't tell and, to tell you the truth, I was scared crapless.

During the semester I worked on an autobiographical comedy about growing up absurd in New Jersey on COPLEY AVENUE, which became the script's title. I sweated every line of dialogue, trying to capture the parlance and rhythm of my friends' argot who populated this sophomoric teen stagger down memory lane. I was so nervous about being put through the meat grinder of Bob's ascerbicism and my fellow classmates' venting, that I didn't hand it in until the very end of the semester.

I was flabbergasted beyond words when Bob said, "Bruce's script has the best dialogue that's been written all semester." I pinched myself over and over again, trying to wake up from some kind of hypnotic stupor. I just couldn't believe that praise was being emitted from Bob's bloody shark jaws. I was dumbfounded, confounded, silently ecstatic, and quite willing to take the master's gospel as some sign from the Universe that maybe, just perhaps, yes, it could even be remotely possible that I had a shot at this vicious ego crapshoot.

Yoda had spoken. The floodgates sprung a leak in the mighty dike. Rays of rainbow light shone down to illuminate the deep, dark abyss of my sad-ass existence. At least for a few glorious nano-seconds.

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.