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.

High School Film Daze

Mark Ulano and I became inseparable filmmaking cohorts in high school. Mark's father was a famous jazz drummer and teacher, Sam Ulano, who taught my brother Kevin drums. Our art teacher was Bill Reilly, perhaps the coolest, hippest teacher you could ever happen upon if you were so lucky, for Mr. Reilly believed in turning young artists loose upon the world and letting them run wild. Which is what he did for Mark and me. He gave us Super-8 Kodak cameras and turned our art period into a free period where we could literally run amok and shoot B&W rolls of film until the cows came home.


Mark's parents were so bohemian cool that they allowed Mark's girlfriend Julia, who came from a strict orthodox Jewish family, to sleep over in the basement. Permitted pre-marital high school sex. It blew my middle class gaskets right off the ticker.

Mark had the cash for the absolute Rolls Royce of Super-8 cameras, the Beaulieu, with a 6-60mm wide angle lens, backwind for in-camera dissolves, fade outs, the whole nine. It was a budding filmmakers' wet dream camera and we used it all the time. To this day, Mark is cutting edge as an Academy-Award winning sound recordist (more on that in later blogs).

Mark and I went blind editing Super-8 footage with our Eumig reel-to-reel editing rigs and splicers. The frames were so small you had to squint to see what was in them, but we struggled with what we had and made those little movies that would become the basis for our careers.

Meanwhile, I was pouring my guts out into my journal which, from 1971 to maybe 1985 would become thousands of pages long. I would later throw out the entire opus when I cleaned out a house, deciding quite hastily I would never read any of it. I hadn't even peeked at those pages for maybe 15 years when I trashed them. Oh well.

Point is: I never wrote a script in high school. Filmmaking was all about doing it, not writing about it or premeditating the process. Closest I came to screenwriting was maybe an outline and storyboard of shots. Once out in the wild, they would hardly even be considered for I just winged it, shooting literally from the hip, forgetting tripods and proper framing. It was almost experimental filmmaking because all the rules, which we were ignorant of, were never followed. It was from the guts.

I remember Mr. Reilly saying how my shots were always strange: obtuse angles, off center and never balanced with horizon or converging perspective. I didn't give a damn.

My favorite director was Kurosawa whose Seven Samurai was shown as part of a Sunday afternoon after-church double-feature with subtitles at the New York Buddhist Church. The movie stunned me with its humanism, breathtaking action sequences, and deep characterizations.

The director that Mark and I idolized was Kubrick. A ClockWork Orange blew our minds, and the book was one Dan and I quoted Russky slang from, "Viddy this, me droogs. Bit of the ol' horrorshow ultra-violence are we up to now?" Brilliant. Another vision of the future, so utterly different from 2001.