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.

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: 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.

Who the hell is Bruce Sakow and why's he blogging about screenwriting?

Good question.

I've been a screenwriter since 1976 -- over 30 hard fought, battle scarred years -- and I've been there, done that, tuned in, tuned out, and still haven't dropped dead or out of sight. No, I'm still alive and, while not exactly 100%, "every now and then I know it's kind of hard to tell, but I'm still alive and well" (to quote Edgar Winter), which is to say, I'm still in the game.

Over the course of this life of screenwriting, I've written 21 feature-length scripts. At about 100 pages per script plus 2-3 drafts for each (give or take), I've written over 5,000 pages, not including all the non-fiction I've churned out over the years as a corporate communications writer. Believe me, I'm not trying to brag or overstate my case, for I know there are writers out there who've written a hundred times my output and made a hell of a lot more cash doing it (Stephen King, the richest writer alive and one of my idols, comes almost instantly to mind).

I guess I have some explaining to do.

When I was in 7th grade, I got bit by the moviemaking bug bad. It was somewhere around the time that "2001: A Space Odyssey" was released (1968) and I remember not understanding it (I went to see it with my father, an avid sci-fi fan, who walked out of the theater just as puzzled and mumbled, "Arthur C. Clarke is weird..."). But it was, by far, the most imaginative vision of the future I'd ever witnessed, and I wanted to use this amazing canvas of light and sound to express my ideas, my yet-to-emerge vision about the world.


Just goes to show how truly clueless I was...

Growing up, I was absolutely scared to death by horror films, especially the ones they showed on Chiller Theater with Zachary as the host on Saturday nights in the NYC area. The opening credit montage of black and white horror flick clips produced endless nightmares. The B-movies I obsessed over would not even make me so much as flinch today, but I'll never forget them: "Them", "The Man with X-Ray Eyes", "The Attack of the 50 Foot Man" (and Woman), "The Incredible Shrinking Man", "The Fly", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "The Mummy" -- the list goes on and on. I also was scared crapless by a Superman episode (loved that show) that featured Mole Men.


Some years earlier, I think I was 10, my father purchased a regular 8mm movie camera that you wound up (I believe it was a Bolex, but I'm not sure) and I made my first movie: stripping a 12" G.I. Joe of its green fatigues and setting it on fire on camera while waving it in my hand. So much for the emerging Spielberg. No plot, no dialogue, it made no sense whatsoever. Just on screen carnage. Maybe I was on to something...

I started making super-8 mm movies in junior high with a Canon 1014. Just mess-around flicks made with friends. I tried a stop-motion film, inspired by an award winning short at the time of guys on invisible motorcyles, that featured my pal Joe Imperato in leather jacket and cool Raybans, riding -- you guessed it -- an invisible motorcyle. Another project I started and never finished.

My best friend Dan Luciano and I, self-proclaimed intelligentsia of the seventh grade (along with Joe and an annoying freak geek named John Borchek who Dan once referred to as a "pimp". Once he looked it up, Johnny was not a happy camper. He got kind of violent which was good for a huge chuckle, as he had as much physical prowess as a moth on steroids), both hyper-focused on our futures as psychiatrists, created psychological profiles of our classmates for fun. Oh, he's neurotic with an Oedipus complex; she's an extrovert with psychosexual penis envy. We thought this was hilarious.


In any event, our cinematic opus was PARANOID, portrait of a paranoid-schizophrenic young man (played by Dan), who was locked up in an attic, straight-jacketed and pathetic as can be. We got as far as one black and white photo of Dan siting on the floor wearing a T-shirt, head in his hands, looking as crazed as a 12 year old can possibly muster. It's actually a haunting image, even decades later.

Fortunately, we didn't stop there. I made a mess-around super-8 movie with Dan dressed up in green soldier fatigues, complete with a helmet, BB rifle, cap gun, water canteen, and fake grenade on an Army surplus belt. We used to play army in a dump yard near his dad's house off Elm Street in Teaneck, so I filmed him walking around a desolate backdrop of dirt hills, dust blown by the wind, fall foilage. It became a post-nuclear statement of a coming apocalypse and ended with Dan in tears, the last man on Earth.

I had the film sound-striped and added music, Ten Years After, and the music elevated the visuals, proving its power to add synergistic energy to pictures. Dan's mom Arlene loved this little movie I titled The Patriot the most; after all, Danny boy, her only child, was the star. Years later she bought it from me for $25 which had me flabbergasted -- my first moviemaker swag.

When my family moved to Teaneck, NJ the summer before my sophomore year in high school, I grew my hair down to my shoulder blades and practiced every waking hour playing guitar till my fingers bled on the rusting steel strings of a $30 Sears Harmony folk guitar. I had been so uncool/square/boring my whole life, I saw this move as my one and only opportunity for a total makeover, from bookworm geek jap to long-haired rocker jap. I read Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and grokked on genetic messiahs and Jimi Hendrix's cosmic riffs on Voodoo Chile.

Sometime in junior high I started writing a journal of my most personal and inner demons spilled on the page with black blood. It was psychotherapy to me, helping me work through difficult periods of self examination and questioning. My journal literally kept me sane through very insane times and events, lighting the fire of the word within me, the power of language and thoughts and verbal expression.

Where's this going, you ask? Very well, let's get back on the rails.

In 10th grade I met my filmmaking cohort and newest best friend, Mark Ulano, a 12th grader who was already far gone on the movie bug. Together we made 2 super-8 masterpieces, one a documentary of our art teacher, Bill Reilly, titled "1+1=3" that won an honorable mention in the Kodak Teenage Filmmaking Awards, and another black and white opus, THE DREAMER, starring Kenny Einhorn (Mark's alter ego) and Mark's girlfriend and high school sweetheart, Julia Rudich.


Somehow, Mark commandeered a hospital room for a couple of hours, and we filmed Kenny in a hospital bed and gown with Julia in a nurse's uniform taking his temperature as he awoke from a coma. A little vaseline around the perimeter of the lens gave the whole white-on-white sequence a dream-like aura.

I was hooked on the filmmaking bug for good. No turning back. No further thoughts of becoming a shrink. It was all or nothing, much to my parents' regret.