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.

The Phoenix and the Vortex - Part 2

On the mean streets of Flushing, Queens I had become the easy scapegoat prey of immigrant junior Aryans, struttin' home boyz, and San Juan-ites who were anxious to deflect the non-stop assault on their peoples and re-focus it on the skinny, big-eared, funny looking, crew cut Jap kid who skulked Parsons Boulevard like he "f-ckin' owned the motherf-cker!" More like I was perpetually lost, the criss-cross of streets, traffic lights, and cookie cutter apartment buildings all coagulating into a grand gestalt of confusion and endless wandering.

I would cross a concrete playground of swings and monkey bars on route to the grocery store for a carton of milk and, like the ghost shadows of Kowloon, suddenly be surrounded by a circling pack of sneering, tongue-wagging dingo pups, all chanting racist obscenities at me in 360 degree LucasFilm Surround-Sound, words I did not understand, like Tojo and slant and ones I knew all too well: dirty Jap. Then, like a swarm of buzzing locusts, they would descend upon me, pummeling their clenched fists into my gut, kicking, and grabbing and ripping my clothes as I swooned to the asphalt screaming, "Stop! Stop it! What'd I do? STOP!" As fast as they mysteriously materialized, these pre-pubescent cub scout KKK hooligans would vanish down shadowy alleyways and disperse to the wind like dandelion pollen.

I would crawl back to my building, up the elevator to my parents' threadbare two bedroom abode and collapse into my mother's open arms blathering like some compromised Pollyana, wetting the sofa and her skirt, her tears staining my brown corduroy pants as she stroked my hair and hugged me. When my dad came home he would order me to fight back, and I would gush like a Galveston jackrup rig puncturing the motherlode.

So disappointed in his son's distinct lack of Bushido warrior instincts, and fearing that his boys weren't quite masculine enough for his liking, some years later Dad enrolled both my brother and I in a judo class at the New York Buddhist Church on the upper westside of Manhattan, a Japanese-American Jodo Shinshu sect enclave and community center. Kevin and I wore pathetic white belts and uniforms as we were intoned with military extortations by the judo sensei to "Flip! Fall! Roll! Counter! Stand up!"

It must've been obvious to all casual observers that Kevin and I had far much less than our hearts invested in this endeavor, for we dreaded going Saturday mornings, preferring to watch Hanna Barbera cartoons to being treated like Marine Corp bootcamp maggots by a short oriental drill instructor with throbbing veins on his nearly-absent neck. As a last ditch desperate effort to preserve these two paying students and not lose face, sensei promoted us to yellow belts after four tortuous sessions. I could care less if he plucked gold bullion coins from his arse. This was not for me.

By 1965 my father was growing war weary of his 4 year commute into NYC each day, marching like some ancient Roman peasant through subterranean catacombs in the belly of the beast with their abrasive urine odor and passed-out derelicts scattered to and fro. He was hustling for work like a junk-addicted hooker scours johns with a spare Jackson on Manhattan's far westside, and his rent and overhead was devouring his profits faster than he could say, "antidisestablishmentarianism."

So my father did what every other smallville Royal Oakie in the Big City does when he's married, has two brats to fertilize on a daily basis, and a yearning for fauna, flora, grass (non-smoking kind), and an escape from bus exhaust, surly deli weiner-meisters, and Sihk taxi honkers: move his ass to the burbs pronto. Which is exactly what he did in 1965. He moved all our sh-t just across the George Washington Bridge to the NYC commuter town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, where silent era cinema gods like Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Tommy Edison, and D.W. Griffith ("D.W." to his friends) shot quickie 35mm one-reelers for celluloid-ravenous and adoring legions worldwide at the turn of the 20th century. In an unusual move, the old man rented two apartments in the newly erected, monolithic steel and concrete Horizon House (sounds eeriliy like a rehab center to me), Building Number Three, one to live in, the other for his burgeoning design office.

The daily beatings ceased. I would continue my elementary indocrination sans blood-thirsty gang rivalries and territorial gambits. The mini-me Adolfs, Jesuses, and Jermaines would be stunned by the absence of their favorite asian whipping boy and once again have to rip each other a new one, just like old times. I would enjoy some suburban respite, free to doodle Marvel-style to my thumper's content, unafraid to venture alone to the 7-11 for milk, candy, and comic books (the bonafide Dickensian serials of my era), and act for once like a normal kid doing mostly normal things normally. I was safe in suburb heaven once again. Until the next tsunami of sh-t hit the fan, natch.

The Phoenix and the Vortex - Part 1

The week before I was to register for my junior fall term at NYU Film my father, Toshihiko, sat me down and told me the bad news: he was having a bad year and couldn't afford to pay my tuition. This wasn't entirely a surprise and wasn't the complete mind-bending soul-searching catastrophe that would push me into a massive, coagulating funk and escalating ever downward spiral. It was more like: hey, I can take some time off to sew some cowboy seeds, bum around like Kerouac and Kesey, earn some cold hard large, take some girls on some non-Dutch dates, pray I get lucky, and finally focus on screenwriting.

My father had been a minority small business owner since he moved our family from Detroit to Queens and a year later took over a small Manhattan industrial design firm whose owner, fallen on hard times with waning health who wanted out of all the pressures and hassle of running a business rat race, literally handed it over to him, hook, line, and ball and chain in 1961. He took over the lease and kept all the furniture and equipment and it was like: adios! Hasta la vista, maricone. It was the start of an entrepreneurial run that would keep my father struggling, nail-biting, and sleep-deprived for the next 34 years.

As anyone whose family is engaged in a small business enterprise would certainly and instantly suss up to -- even scream aloud if given the correct amount of water, air, and sunlight --surviving is no small Jobian task; in fact, it is a 24/7/365 test of mettle, persistence against aneurism-inducing odds, ingenuity, fast-talking snake-oil salesmanship, and an absolute disregard for normalcy, sanity, and 9 to 5 safety in a "regular job" with benefits and a clear exit strategy (retirement, old age, disease, taxes, and death).

When I imagine my father as a 20-something, working as a house boy in Detroit for two men in an "open relationship" and ridiculed for being a catamite, so he could save every penny to buy art supplies: brushes, pencils, paints, and art board. As a Japanese-American just released from an Arizona World War II desert internment camp and relocated 1,500 miles from his father's missionary career at a Buddhist Church in California, he was absolutely clueless about what these vicious taunts meant and, once cognizant, turned redder than a radish dipped in pig blood. He was a neurotic homophobic ever since.

Dad attended Cass Tech in Detroit, a high school that embraced the visual and performing arts. Amongst his classmates was Edna Galoolie, a starving and stunning theater ingenue who would later change her name to Ellen Burstyn and win an Oscar for her portrayal of a working class single-mom waitress in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, directed by Marty Scorcese (a bizarre twist of fate and lost opportunity that haunts me like a wraithe to this day). He kept in touch with her over the years, telling me how loose she was an ambitious working-her-way-up actress.

In high school he was left back a couple years because his English was less than Shakespearean, but I understand he was very popular and fancied himself a crooner in the style of Sinatra and Crosby, often singing ba-ba-ba-boo drivel at high school sock hops and soda jerk joints with jukeboxes. I have already noted he was a be-bop Bird and Miles and Ella junkie, saving up pennies to nab the latest vinyl from those hep cats in downtown Motown, playing them till the grooves filled with dust and static and those jitterbug scat lines and mellifluous sax riffs burned into his brain stem.

He was driven as an artist enamored with American cars and sketched and painted them feverishly in dusk-till-dawn marathons, with a youthful joie de vivre and spark that must have shone bright as the twin suns of some Heinleinian solar system quintillions of light years yonder. I dare say he must have been talented because, right after graduating Cass Tech, he landed a job at Chrysler Automotive in their fabled styling department. My father got the job of his teen wet dreams and hobnobbed with the Caucasian auto design royalty of America. By golly, he was made.

I'm not sure why, but my Dad must have tired of toiling his young life away in the ghetto of big three automotive haute couture for minimal remuneration and even less creative satisfaction. Maybe the big wheels weren't ready to let some greasy, slant-eyed Jap kid from a country we just atom bombed to submission get the one-up and raise his people's creative profile and aspirations. As I understand it, he soon took another job at an industrial design firm in Detroit, Sundberg-Ferar, and must have grown tired there too of white authoritarianism and humdrum dead-end assignments designing furniture knobs and utilitarian kitchen appliances.

In a heartbeat, Dad hopped a plane and traveled to New York City with a job offer to work for a toy manufacturer, Deluxe Reading Company, on a humongous 24" plastic and vinyl doll that was the rage of its day, Suzy Smart. He stayed in Queens with his Philippino Chrysler-alumni best bud Rey Isip's family while mom packed and rented our tiny home in suburban Royal Oak, Michigan. I took my first propeller plane ride from Detroit to New York at age 5 and distinctly recall seeing an Oz-like cityscape of tall, sparkling, majestic skyscrapers on a crisp autumn day from a bird's eye view 2,000 feet up. I had no idea my life was to be forever transmogrified from a tree-lined small town hamlet to a brick and asphalt purgatory of hunters and the hunted.

With ambition big as a baleen whale frolicking in the arctic circle, after a year he said, "Sayonara, ku-ichi!" to the toy biz and joined an industrial design company on West 37th Street but, after arriving, realized he had stepped into a fecal quagmire of partners (called "associates") bickering over money, clients, bills, credit, cash flow -- all the mundane business matters that need attending to that people who wanted to be artists contemptuously avoided like oozing punjab lepers on their front stoop. The owner asked Dad to simply take over the reigns as he'd decided to ditch the merry-go-round and take safe harbor as a salary man in another firm.

Pop must either have had some incredibly mentalist foresight and sensed limitless opportunity, or otherwise he was more doomed than a mentally challenged quadrapalegic in a relay race during the special olympics. My mother would swear to the latter (and does to this day, her mantra being, "Your father had no business being in business."). I think he was young, naive, filled with ambition, with a gambler's penchant for quick fortune and blue sky optimism, for he seized the moment and took over the company, changing its name to the improbable and impossible to pronounce Toshihiko Sakow Associates, Inc.

I can't say the acorn fell far from the big-ass oak tree. Like flies drawn to the flame and feces, I would drop deep into the bottomless tar pit of over-ambition many a time in the years to come. It's like alcoholism or dwarfism or sickle cell anemia: it's all in the chromosomes, dude (and Dan would turn to me suddenly with a straight poker face and proclaim with one twisted mouth corner in his best Newark boyz-in-the-hood parlance, "How you know you got chrome-zomes, boy?" Chunks would just blow out my nostrils and I would get the full-on acid reflux cackle till-my-ribs-almost-burst laugh spasms every time).

My old man hustled his ass off over the next decade and made a go of it. He traveled all the time, flying to conventions in Chicago and other far off and mythical (to me) cities like Boston, Vegas, San Fran, and Dallas, wining and dining potential clients at the better HoJo's and Steak and Brews, kissing babies (some well over 20), and squeezing out odd-job product design assignments for companies like Mattel (Barbie catamarans!), Panasonic (easier for white ghost gaijin to pronounce than Matsushita Electronics), Royal Typewriter (relics from the age of coelacanthes and trilobytes -- not to be confused with kilobytes), plastic hamster tube cages, and consumer electronics ad-nauseum (radios, cassette recorders, LED clocks, stereo components, you-name-it-he-done-'em).

I know. You're shaking and scratching your head (perhaps even noodling your gonads), wondering aloud if I have lost my mother-lovin' rose-colored marbles, and muttering what-the-f--k is the point of this incessant, non-stop, flow-of-conscious bullsh-t off-topic rambling?

Be kind and nice to me (it's so damn mentally exhausting finding just the right verbiage) and hear me out. Pretty please with maraschino cherries?

My father is my personal hero, the nemesis of unspeakable (and hard to pronounce) evil in the free world, a cathedral of light and hymns in the scorched ravages of Chernobyl, the guru who taught me so many life lessons and priceless blood-stained and hard-fought truths and self-realizations. I will never, ever, ever be able to repay his mountainous, boundless kindness and unconditional love. Although I tried my damndest before he passed in 2000. Guess I didn't try hard enough.

He was a 5'3" (same Napoleonic size as me) artist and entrepreneur, with the gift of gab who made friends as easily as George W pissed-off liberals and middle eastern theocracies, who people felt instantly drawn to for his easy, good natured self-deprecating humor, twinkling brown eyes, modesty, and utterly arresting used car sales skills. He was smoother than a newborn's butt cheeks, and could be hilarious and kidding around one moment and serious as nails the next. The eldest son of a Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist Japanese missionary who was left behind In his hometown of Fukui because his parents thought they would return home in less than 5 years, but got trapped in America by WWII and never left. He was talented. Driven. He fought each day like Muhammed Ali against George Foreman, Moses against Pharoah, and General Patton against Rommel in the dusty Sahara, until he utterly and completely gave up in 1996 and slowly broke my heart.

I loved and admired my father beyond all words, as much as any child could love their parent for giving them life then teaching them how to live it. His presence beats in my heart every living moment of my life and I am so sad he left me alone to battle on.

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: 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...

Storytelling: A Lost Art

One of my earliest memories is riding a bus on the way to 3rd grade in Flushing, Queens New York with 3 boys surrounding me and, right on the spot, making up a story that kept them jaw-dropped and absolutely on the edge of their naugahyde padded seats. I don't recall what the stories were about, but I had this gift of telling an engaging yarn at an early age.

This talent was a definite ego boost for a skinny, short, different-looking Japanese-American kid who wasn't good at sports and who got bullied and beaten on a regular basis by the Puerto Rican and German immigrant neighborhood kids. So I retreated into books, fantasy, TV, and drawing.

My father was a gifted artist and industrial designer who's own fetish was cars, be-bop jazz, and science fiction (pouring through novels by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Silverberg, Bradbury, and countless others like comic books). He worked for Chrysler in Detroit when I was born designing interior dashboards and rear ends, those fifties curvy, chrome-laden, sparkling doo-dads cars the era was famous for.

The first story I can recollect was concocted during summer camp when I was 7-8 at a YMCA sleepaway camp that had spider-webbed, beetle infested latrines with no plumbing that just reeked so bad I didn't go to the bathroom for the 2 weeks I was imprisoned there. No way, Jose.

These were the carefree summer days of bug juice (so watered down and spiked with sugar the taste was nearly imperceptible), bug-hunting, sports (ugh), swinging by a rope into fetid lake water with your feet stepping on unspeakable slime, camp wars (catch the flag against a neighboring camp to break up the growing monotony and keep the kiddies from outright cannibalism), and those overnight camping trips, complete with marshmallow roasting (why was mine always burnt?), half-cooked hot dogs, gassy beans cooked in the can, campfires, and -- you guessed it -- teenage counselors trying to scare the piss out of us young-uns by telling ghost stories.

This was, by a landslide, my favorite camp activity. In an earlier post I already recounted my childhood obsession with horror movies. Well, sitting under the stars with the dark, foreboding woods all around, hellish creatures howling and chiggering in the not-so-distant distance, stroboscopic bats (winged rodents, fa-chrissakes!) flitting in the trees, all this was enough to make any red-blooded pre-pubescent city kid quake with anxiety and bone-chilling willies.

I was enraptured by these ghost stories. They spoke to me like the Lord whispered to Moses on the Mount. Like Shoeless Joe intoned Kevin Costner. I cannot express how exciting, how breathless these verbal, real-time, your-mouth-to-my-ear exchanges seemed to me.

Against the flickering, yellow light of the cracking wood fire, the long, dancing shadows against the trees, the perceived isolation of the deep forest, what happened those nights played out entirely in the mind's eye, each detail exaggerated one-hundredfold, each person projecting themselves as the protagonist, emotions and adrenaline redlining.

I took in how the storyteller would slow down or quicken their description, how their volume would cascade to a pin-drop whisper, only to be followed by a shouted word that made everyone scream and jump out of their skin, grabbing one another for dear life. It was like a horror movie taking place inside your head, with you seeing each close-up, every shot and cut. It was a primal, epiphanous experience pour moi.

After the stories concluded and the teen counselors went off to smoke pot, chug Old Milwaukees, and engage in sloppy, drippy condom-less sex, we campers were herded into our pup tents like pathetic yard dawgs. But we were too wired on marshmallows and bug juice and fear to even contemplate sleep. We lay in our sleeping bags listening to the satanic night creatures rustling around us, and tossed and turned helplessly, feeling as if our heads would explode.

I tried to read my Mad Magazine by flashlight inside my sleeping bag and, once finished, fidgeted like a jitterbug on crystal meth. I sat up and found my other two tentmates wide awake, too young to engage in any felonious mischief or have any concept thereof. One of them, I can't remember their name (shame on me yet again), asked me if I knew any stories. I guess they were used to having their mommies read them a Grimm's Fairy Tale at night. I shurgged, said, "Sure."

Right there on the spot, my mind filled with residual horrific images, I concocted this open-ended twisted tale of a pack of three boys who got lost in the woods, unable to retrace their footsteps or lock on to anything familiar.

As I spoke I could feel my storytelling powers at work, luring these two young minds like trout to fisherman flies, like moths to the flame. Their eyes widened and their hearts raced as I embellished every point: the young hikers' desperation, their wanting to go home, their tearing, swollen eyes and wavering voices.

The three froze in their tracks as one boy noticed blood drops on the ground. "Must'a been a coyote killed a bird or somethin'," the brave one said to the others reassuringly. Then the nervous Nelly asked, "But where are the feathers? What about the bones?" The brave one shucked him off, "You sissy freak. Coyotes eat birds in one gulp, like big snakes."

The three trudged on until they spotted a house through the thicket of trees. They ran, racing against each other, for the shelter. The brave one pounded on the rotting front door, screaming for help, noticing the crumbling decay of this shack literally in the middle of nowhere. When no one answered, they slammed all their weight against the door until it crashed open.

It was dark inside. Slits of light through boarded-up shattered windows. And the first thing that assaulted their senses like a screaming banshee was the smell. A stultifying stench of rotting flesh. They instinctively covered their noses. The Nelly vomited all over the pocked, slimy floorboards.

Then they all spotted it. A pool of blood in one corner of the bare room. The drooping ceiling above had one big, crimson stain, a maddening drip-drip-drip, and the sound of a beating heart beneath the floorboards.

The door suddenly slammed closed -- and they were thrust into blackness. Something grabbed their legs from below.

My two tentmates screamed so loud, counselors came rushing in, demanding, "What the hell happened? You okay?"

As the two others caught their breath and steadied their trembling, I sat smiling like the cat who ate the canary. In that instant I realized my destiny was sewn. I would tell stories. It's what I was meant to do.

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).

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.

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.

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.