heatherferreira

New feature in production in New York

2012-02-13T09:37:00.001-08:00

Heather Ferreira has begun production on a new feature film set in New York City. The gritty, intense picture will be shot entirely on 35mm film using Panavision movie camera equipment. Production is funded and scheduled to begin in mid-April. Ferreira wrote the screenplay and will direct.

BREAKING - God used Ektachrome on His last film: Kodak granted last-minute rescue

2012-01-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

Kodak Allowed to Borrow $650 Million While Planning Patent Sales

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Eastman Kodak Co., the photography pioneer that filed for court protection, won a bankruptcy judge’s approval to borrow as much as $650 million to support operations as it pursues a sale of patents.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper in Manhattan approved Kodak’s request for preliminary borrowing at a court hearing yesterday. The company has a $950 million financing agreement from Citigroup Inc. and will return to court for permission to borrow the full amount.

More after the jump.

Kodak files for bankruptcy

2012-01-19T06:59:00.000-08:00

Well, it's happened.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Eastman Kodak Co., running short of cash and unable to sell 1,100 digital imaging parents that could have rescued it, filed Thursday for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

More after the jump.

Kodak WTF?

2012-01-05T05:03:00.000-08:00

Heather Ferreira asks, "Is anyone else out there watching the changes over at Kodak with growing worry and apprehension?"

This is nothing but bad news.

Kodak loses third board member in 2 weeks

Published: December 31, 2011 1:43 PM
By The Associated Press

QUICK READUniversity of California academic Laura Tyson resigns from Kodak's board of directors

(AP) -- Eastman Kodak Co. says another member of its board of directors has resigned -- the third director to exit the struggling company in the past two weeks.

The latest director to relinquish the post is Laura D. Tyson, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. Kodak didn't say why Tyson resigned.

Tyson is a professor of global management...

http://www.newsday.com/news/kodak-loses-third-board-member-in-2-weeks-1.3420595

Accelerating Palladium exposure: TiO2 and imagination

2011-12-08T18:57:00.001-08:00

"The most overt problem in making Palladium accessible to motion picture film making," said Heather Ferreira today in a conversation with silver colloidal processing expert photochemist Denise Ross, "is that Palladium by nature needs a slow, slow exposure. The trick we're going to need to succeed at is speeding that exposure time up, so that when a motion picture camera's shutter opens and closes on a single frame, that frame has been exposed to all the normal spectrum and ultraviolet light it needs to bring out the detail we all recognize a Palladium print for."

Ferreira noted afterward to her team that "Titanium has some possibilities. Titanium dioxide is a well-known photocatalyst, which means accelerating the exposure reaction time of a film's chemical emulsion is what it does. I am not a chemist and am not sure if titanium dioxide is compatible with Palladium and, even if it is, if it will yield any kind of results we look for. Still, we can't throw anything out. While talking with Denise, I found titanium very much on my mind, and my initial research points to that element being maybe very useful, very useful, in speeding up the emulsion reaction time for a range of film stocks, and a Palladium-sensitive one might be lurking on that list and untested yet.

"It's not likely going to be the grail that brings the Eureka, but our failures using it would be useful in pointing us to the chemicals that will work. We can then look at Titanium and go, 'Okay, that doesn't work.' That will be settled. With that settled, we can then ask, 'Okay, what does?' The idea, the thing, is to test out every hypothesis, no matter how nuts it sounds. I know a chemical compound exists or can be hit upon that will speed up Sodium Tetrachloropalladate. It's simple: we have an automobile. It only goes 15 miles an hour. Well, it's time to invent the catalytic converter and other things that will take us from zero to 70 in 4.9 seconds. The necessity is there. The invention follows. We're going to do it. By 2013, we'll have made the premiere motion picture version of this beautiful film."

An Elias Howe Moment

2011-12-07T12:57:00.001-08:00

This is Heather posting. I had the most amazing dream this morning of what you are looking at in the accompanying picture. The steamboat came up out of the water, and I noticed its paddle wheel churning the water. That reminded me of something that could rotate sending film through lab chemistry. There was also a ferris wheel attached to the steamship, but in the front of it, which looked really strange as you can see. I'm not sure what the dream means, but I do know I don't have dreams like this of mechanical things. I passed it on to one of my photography chemistry professors and she was very excited. Another photochemist I've spoken to was excited too! She actually wonders if what I was seeing was apparatus to expose the film and not process it.

The fact we twenty-first century women are talking together about this tells me how far we've come. Imagine discussing an Elias Howe/Kerkule-like invention dream and scientists becoming excited by it, not just tossing it aside. What an exciting time to be alive. What if a team of women actually invents Palladium process motion picture film, like we're thinking? Time to bring some fellows into this... first on the list awaits in Santa Fe...

Stay tuned!

Hot on the trail of Palladium motion picture film

2011-12-06T20:32:00.001-08:00

One of the questions Heather Ferreira is out to solve in 2012-2013 is whether motion picture film can be custom-manufactured using a palladium-based, instead of silver-based emulsion technique. Many obstacles lie in the path of it, says Ferreira. "One thing I've learned from experts, such as Anthony Accardi at Green Rhino in Brooklyn, and Melody Bostick and her colleagues, is that any motion picture version of Palladium faces two substantial, but crossable obstacles: one, Palladium by its nature is a slow exposure process. You're expected to keep the aperture of your camera wide open on the subject for several minutes while it does not move. How this gets in the way of achieving a motion picture shot is pretty obvious, ain't it? The challenge I'm giving our German and American labs is make the film with a faster emulsion that doesn't lose the graytones. In other words, a Palladium film that catches an image faster than Palladium film does.

"What's great is, most of the custom film makers, as in people who actually manufacture film for a hobby and a living, are not telling me what I want is impossible. They're coming back with great suggestions, such as mixing platinum with silver. Or silver with Palladium. Chemical compounds which to me is exciting. Melody and I are even talking about the uses of silane, a bonder that fuses emulsion to glass, and how it might be used to fasten film emulsion to plastic. There's other chemicals too that bond emulsion to surfaces, and in Germany and at Tisch we'll be looking closely at those. So, that's the first big problem: Palladium by nature is made for still photography -- the way we imagine it now. I'm out to re-imagine it as a motion picture process. I think that it's possible. I believe we'll have a new motion picture camera ready to assist with that by 2013.

"The second major obstacle I foresee in manufacturing a Palladium film has to do with what happens to the blacktones in the answer prints. Black is just going to thin away. It can't handle it. The black range will be lost the way we're doing it now. But I'm curious, and intend to research, and work out, by hand if necessary, if some chemical compound or manipulation, some specific recipe we haven't tweaked out quite yet, will lock the blacktones down tightly while allowing the typical Palladium "blooming open" of all those classic graytones to still occur. Never say never to me. I'm on the trail of this film and we're going to exhibit a prototype of it by mid-2012."

Asked what got her into photochemistry, Ferreira answered, "A wonderful class lecture at the Met with Nora Kennedy in the Photographic Restoration Department. She's a knowledgeable source. The place was full of scientists in lab coats and white gloves, preserving still photographs. I began to wonder if motion picture film could be preserved and restored like the original exhibit prints, you know the Stieglitzes and Langes at the Met, and that brought me to chemicals, and then I thought of my grandfather.

"My granddad was an inventor and toy maker who could make anything with his hands. He was also an avid photographer. He passed his Polaroid camera, a 1960's Polaroid Land Camera 250, to my mother when I was a child. I took way more pictures on it than she did. I remember loving to swab the developer on the exposed photos after taking them. The smell, the stickiness. There's nothing like it. I fell in love with photography right then, but you know... life gets in the way. I guess I'm coming back around full circle to it from my work making little films, you know, motion picture films, movies. I'm absolutely certain vintage and custom movie film can be possible in the future. Melody informed me today there's entire little communities of these people, these enthusiasts, these geeks, who feel the same way I do.

"Because I'm a geek. A photochemistry geek. I want to manufacture my own movie film right in my kitchen, and Melody tells me today she knows a lady who does that. We're going to get together and start testing this out. I see Palladium motion picture film sitting at, like, the end of this big tunnel. I am going to reach the end of this tunnel. I'm inventing that film. Anyone who says it isn't possible, I say so wasn't 3-D."

The astonishing detail of Palladium photography

2011-12-06T20:30:00.001-08:00

From Jackson Fine Art, a Palladium rendering of two roses. As the viewer can see, Palladium is not ordinary black-and-white film processing. It yields a gorgeous and very long gray range with immensely subtle black tones, with crisp detail and evocative subtlety.

Photo by artist Kenzo Iru, courtesy Jackson Fine Art Atlanta.

Girl from the Port of Kallis: Self-Portrait Two

2011-12-06T14:19:00.001-08:00

Self-portrait using an Olympus D-460 in muted tungsten light.

Madonna Ektakromika: Self-Portrait One

2011-12-06T14:13:00.001-08:00

Self-portrait using an Olympus D-460 in muted tungsten light.

The future of feature film: customer service chemistry

2011-12-06T06:37:00.001-08:00

Indie filmmaker and photochemistry enthusiast Heather Ferreira is in talks with two European film laboratories about a research project previously seen as impossible: to apply today's technology revolution not only to digital equipment, software and production, but to analog film chemistry and its improvement and expansion. Ferreira reported to The Historic Photography Department at New York University's Tisch School of The Arts, that to preserve its legacy and not only survive but outperform sales and awareness expectations this century, film, particularly motion picture film, simply needs to be re-imagined the way Steve Jobs re-imagined the personal computer. Ferreira predicts "a future where movie directors and still photographers remain devoted to film not as a hobby or personal quirk but an academic discipline, and a fiery customer base, not unlike Apple and Linux." She continued at Tisch, "What my team is after is the discovery of a Baskin-Robbinslike offering of new flavors and textures for filmmakers to use. I foresee photographers and filmmakers selecting excitedly from palettes of as-yet-undiscovered, as-yet-unmanufactured film stocks with deeper colors, stranger and more interesting graytones, blacks that expand what we think of as the color 'black' on an image, and all manner of detail that's never been seen before. I remain committed to the concept that film is not dead. It's going through transformation like a phoenix, and it's going to return from the ashes offering more flavors than before. The path to that is simple, and is chemistry."

The 1977 Star Wars Budget Challenge

2011-11-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

Sellino Films is out to set a new record: Movies today have runaway budgets -- $250MM has become typical for the average major motion picture.

Sellino believes it's still possible to make a high-quality movie -- and even science fiction including top-notch visual effects -- for $11MM, the budget George Lucas used to make the 1977 Star Wars. We call it The 1977 Star Wars Budget Challenge: can Sellino Films actually shoot to completion and finish post on a major motion picture studio science-fiction movie for $11MM? We say yes -- and have pitched the challenge and its social media publicity concepts to an exec at a major Los Angeles studio. If this adventuresome female executive greenlights the $11MM, the picture is go and the challenge is on!

Watch Sellino Films prove -- or disprove -- that Hollywood can make a picture for a price more reflective of today's renewed common sense values... the 1977 Star Wars Budget challenge is on!

Ferreira wins Production Hub New York's contest

2011-10-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

It's not every day an independent film director just walks in off the street and wins enough publicity to change his career -- but that's exactly what Heather Ferreira just did tonight, attending the glittering launch party for Showbiz Software: the go-to method for budgeting and crewing your film straight off your Mac or PC.

Heather was one of the invitees to the evening gala, which took place at swanky Manhattan club Taj on W. 21st and was standing room only wall to wall with producers, investors, actors, writers and directors; like all other guests, she was assigned a raffle ticket as she walked in. "I didn't expect to win anything," she confesses post-beer tonight in Queens. "The last time I ever won something was high school." However, tonight, our filmmaker won the grand prize, hearing her name called out in front of the entire audience of industry types, who applauded warmly for her. (An insider tattles to us that upon winning, Ferreira put both fists in the air and crowed, "I'm the queen of the world!")

The grand prize is a feature profile on New York City's Production Hub website, industry and crew 411 for the entire Tri-State region. "I'm looking forward to the publicity, although some of the films on my company's slate are shown there as targeting - the movies we plan to make. The others, however, are in active development. The future will make clear which are which, if all goes well. I'm still completely amazed by winning this," says Ferreira, "and deeply grateful to my publicist, Josh Mitchell, and to the Production Hub team, as well as to all the other great sponsors of this amazing event. I'm humbled!"

Work on the feature profile, worth more than $500, is said to begin Monday, October 10, 2011. Not bad for a director who claims she never wins anything. (Photo courtesy of Leimomi)

Ferreira dances it up at NYC's The Libertine

2011-09-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Miss Ferreira attended Friday night's gala at New York City's most top-secret pub cum dance bar, The Libertine, and in a floating, glimmering concoction of heliotrope chiffon and satin no less. Her report? "I danced like a fiend in the blood-red lights. Such 1978 decor! So many sexy beasts! Honest to God, The Libertine is the 21st century's last chance at Studio 54. I loved it. I was totally there."

Hair and jewelled gun sparkling, the platinum-blonde director diva canoodled with strangers and pranced stairways with friends, and "everybody was begging for my picture. The dress went over gangbusters: I think the Mad Men thing has gone viral -- three different guys literally walked up and thanked me for wearing a full-length cocktail gown to a dance club," recalls Ferreira. "And there I was among all those bustiers and slut stockings feeling like the ugly duckling. Till then. I think demure has won out over slutty. I know I consciously won't be wearing cone bras and garters onstage when I perform. Bustiers either. The underwear as outerwear thing has totally played itself out. Madonna not only can't direct -- there's a fucking surprise -- (but) that whole look she brought in is over. Class and sophistication win the day, and the night."

Highlights of the night, according to Ferreira:

1. "The three drunk cute girls at Essex Station all clinging to each other, and gazing longingly at me together, then one of them crooning, 'Oh my God, you are soooo beauuuuutiful.' You were too, girls. Thank you."

2. "The sweet gay guy in the green and white sports shirt who stalked me for blocks until he finally caught up and said, 'I like your dress.' Thank you, darling dear. Why don't I have a gay son yet? I want one. Dammit."

3. "The black gay guy who squealed with delight the second he saw me and that dress and blonde hair walk into that club. As for me, darling sweetest, I adored your sexy braids. And what presence! Thank you!"

4. "The entire borough of Manhattan stopping cold as though frozen in amber simply to gaze at a black woman with bright blonde real hair walking by. Really: is it that rare? But thank you."

5. "The two Asian guys who insisted they take my picture out on William Street. Thank you, sugar boys. I'll pose for you two anytime."

And finally, she applauds:

"The way my picture came out under those red lights. It was like a scene out of Mean Streets: the bar thing with DeNiro coming in slow motion with 'Heather Weintraub' while The Stones are playing. Kent Wakeford had to work hard for that lighting and there it was for free at The Libertine. My features look so Portuguese in that picture. My eyebrows, my beak of a Luso nose, my brow -- I'm so coarse and Mediterranean, I look so jolie laide here and I love that. That may be my favorite picture of me. Put it by this article."

How could we refuse?

Cory's gonna get a movie role!

2011-09-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Filmmaker and pop singer Heather Ferreira will be attending the beautiful international model Cory Kennedy's invitation-only all-star Post Fashion Week party tonight. "I'm going to write a movie role for her," smiles Ferreira. "She's so fabulous. She has that entire Studio 54 thing. She's a sexy beast." But more the point, what will Heather wear to Cory's gala? "If the tailor's done in time, the color of twilight. Gorgeous and too big for me. He's fixing it. That's all I'm going to say. Come see it."

Her publicist Josh Mitchell will be in full court at the center of things, making it all happen. "Shoutout to Josh!" Ferreira crows with a giggle. "That's my punkin. I love him."

"I wanted to be a scientist," claims Ferreira

2011-09-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Heather Ferreira revealed in an interview this morning that as a kid she wanted to be a scientist. "This has been an exciting week for science," the blonde gushed over coffee to a reporter across from Manhattan's famous Bryant Park. "The guys at CERN disproved Einstein's theory of light speed, and these guys out at Berkeley just got one step closer to being able to record dreams and the movies you see in your mind. Both are equally exciting to me for different reasons." When asked where this sudden interest in science came from, Ferreira became angry. "It's not sudden," she responds. "I've always been into science. As a kid I was really into Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, and wanted to be an astronomer. I was planning to attend Cornell for that purpose. I loved the TV series Cosmos, and kids made fun of me for that stuff. I wore glasses and worked at the library. I was considered a nerd."

She continues, "It's been a banner week for science. Soon we won't even need Hollywood. They'll be able to record dreams and sell them straight to DVD. I dream entire movies and whole dolly and special effects sequences, so I'm looking quite forward to cutting out the middle men and selling the public stuff straight out of my head. I think any director would. We're on the cutting edge forefront of what Cameron saw when he wrote Strange Days. Plus the idea of neutrinos racing faster than light. Einstein's not the final word. There's more to learn out there. I find that sexy."

Sellino moves in on "Serling-esque" novel

2011-09-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

Sellino Films announces the beginning bids to obtain the feature film rights to the British science-fiction novel, by Charles Eric Maine, He Owned The World. Heather Ferreira was "chilled to the bone by this amazing book" she claims "reads like James Cameron meets Rod Serling". She envisions the production as "either a feature film, or a miniseries. I'd prefer miniseries so all the nuances of the book make it in there, but I'm not the biggest fan of television. I prefer features, so we'll see how it turns out in the end."

"The Courtney Love of Cinema"

2011-09-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

We have to ask Heather Ferreira: are you sure you want that title?

Blonde, and Having More Fun

2011-09-14T01:12:00.000-07:00

Heather Ferreira hit NV Magazine's Movers and Shakers bash last night, and sparked as a blonde for the event. "I've always felt natural blonde. It's me," she says. "Not many black girls can pull it off, but for some reason stylists think I can." Having her tresses bleached "costs a fortune and does irreparable damage to black hair," explains Ferreira, "but for me it's worth it. The minute the stylist saw it and started combing it when it was finished, she started saying 'this so works for you. I can't believe it. It's not supposed to, but blonde works for you.' I agree." And so do we!

NV Magazine's gala celebrated top entrepreneurs of color in New York City, and Ferreira was invited. A red-carpet cordon complete with doorman guard ushered guests into the Empire State Building to nosh free drinks and exquisite canapes. Every eye was on the black blonde, and mouths were whispering. Do blondes have more fun? Heather will have to fill us in...

Ferreira hits Jagger gala, proclaims "too safe"

2011-09-09T22:51:00.001-07:00

Film director-pop singer Heather Ferreira indeed was seen at last night's Jagger gala at Electric on The Bowery in Manhattan. Her take on the party? "You know how when someone is dead or has moved away, and you visit their house, and saudade (miss) them? [The gala] was like that. Looking around at how safe everybody was dressed and was being, I missed cocaine. The party was cute, but I needed a bump. Everybody there did."

Ferreira due to grace NYC Jagger event

2011-09-01T13:40:00.001-07:00

Next week, Heather Ferreira will be attending the New York City launch party for author Marc Spitz's awaited and exciting new book Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue. Top names are expected to be there, and Sellino Films' resident Cinepunk and Pop Princess of Hollywood will be premiering her new look, as well as a few possible upcoming singles. Photos from the event will be posted here on Heather's blog - stay tuned for them! "Marc and I have almost exactly the same birthday," cheers Ferreira. "This event will most definitely be a sizzler."

The Sex Pistols made the below quote in 1976

2011-08-31T13:55:00.001-07:00

Never has the state of cinema been so torpid. Never has the motion picture industry been as stale. Nothing is moving. Ideas are sluggish and wither on the page. No film seems new. Nothing in the movie houses excites me. Normally this would make me depressed. Instead, it invigorates me because change is in the air. Typically, it is a dead creative era like the one movies are in that immediately precedes the first crack of revolutionary lightning. Negative ions are swirling; the evening sky has that ominous magic hour fragrance that comes just before a storm, and the limbs and the leaves of trees are swaying torridly in a thunderhead tango. Something's about to happen in film -- change is about to come.

Yolandi Visser: Lady Gaga's Worst Nightmare

2011-08-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Yolandi Visser, seen here, is the pop frontwoman whose gold-gilt snarl on Die Antwoord's hit "Rich Bitch" has poised her to take the throne from Lady Gaga once and for all. Those of you who already know who Visser is, good. Those who don't, take a look upstairs at the video to "Rich Bitch" to see why if Die Antwoord ever decide to get serious and assume a sensible English band name, and bring Yolandi Visser stateside -- although in truthfulness what really needs to happen is for Yolandi to dump her backing band, go solo and be managed by Freddy DeMann -- Lady Gaga's through. The reasons are many:

SHE'S THINNER

Visser is thinner, leaner and more photogenic than Gaga. Lady Gaga herself infamously once said, "A pop star shouldn't eat", yet without her makeup looks like she belongs to the "do as I say, not as I do" school of thought. In contrast, Yolandi Visser's body is like that of an android: one gets the sense this young South African has never eaten in her life.

SHE ACTUALLY EMBODIES EIGHTIES SPIRIT

While Lady Gaga pretends to understand the Eighties, and thoroughly does her best to approximate them (and arguably in a soulless, "however, I was never there" manner recalling Japanese Suzuki violinists failing to capture the heart and soul of Brahms while hitting every note with digital accuracy), you look at Yolandi Visser and are immediately reminded spiritually of Annabella Lwin, frontwoman of Malcolm McLaren's 1980 concept band Bow Wow Wow. She reminds me of Nina Hagen and has a touch of Adam Ant.

You get a sense of real danger from Visser, whereas Gaga to me seems calculated. Would Lady Gaga take a public dump in a toilet live onstage? Never; but Visser would -- and so would have her Eighties peers. The Eighties were the transition from punk to new wave -- both highly confrontational, aggressive music genres based in political outrage. There was nothing calculated or safe about them. Were The Clash safe? The Sex Pistols? The Smiths? Gaga appears to have gotten her cuddly opinion of the Eighties from old copies of Smash Hits. Visser, however, is palpably the real deal. Besides, as a former UWS private school student, Germanotti would have been rightly dismissed by every waver boy and girl then as that most dreaded of terms -- a poseur -- and likely gotten headbutted off the stage as early as her first live stage show. I might have in fact done it for her.

It seems we knew how to call out a spade better then than we do now.

HER SONGS ARE HOOKIER THAN GAGA'S

None of Gaga's songs became earworms for me. Many people love them, and I won't fault them for that; it's their choice and I applaud it. However, within 32 bars of "Rich Bitch", I was singing along against my will. The power of a sticky, relentless hook cannot be underestimated. Lady Gaga knows this and tends to overload singles with three hooks per song. It's kind of the pop arranger version of melisma. But if your song is that great, why does it need three different choruses, all competing against each other without counterpoint? "Louie Louie" needed just one; so do most great pop singles. More than one hook is overkill and reeks of desperation. Visser needed just one -- two words -- "reech beech". Hit was born.

SHE'S MORE OUTRAGEOUS THAN GAGA

The evidence: Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, and about 30,000 more exhibits too many to list in one blog related to filmmaking. Google's your friend.

SHE'S SEXIER THAN GAGA, AND A BLONDE FOR REAL

Below is what Yolandi Visser's body looks like. You know how the media is. Seriously: Rolling Stone so much as puts Visser on their cover one time -- and it's over. I'm weary of Gaga's Blatant Plagiarism anyway, and not only look back piningly at Britney Spears wishing she'd return, I want Madonna to return! At least Brit and Madonna were original... But Gaga plays her fans as outright fools who completely missed the Eighties and need her as their tour guide to explain to them what they were. Forget this. Give us Yolandi: I'm throwing in the bet she's going to be Madonna to Gaga's Cyndi Lauper -- and you know? That's "Eighties", and it's just about time.

Ten Good Things About Attending New York University

2011-08-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

Yep, I've been mighty ticked off at the bureaucracy round here lately, so tonight I decided to try a deliberate change of heart, and to challenge myself to list ten good things about being a student at prestigious New York University. Here goes: Ten Good Things About Attending NYU...

10. You may not get hired faster, but if they see NYU on your resume, employers do call you back faster. That's a fact. I just sent out resumes last night, and two very cool jobs contacted me with interest this morning. Yes, despite the fact I'm signed to direct two feature films shortly, I'm still working, folks. In this economy you'd have to have your brain parked sideways not to do so.

9. Yes, the absence of any real campus can be isolating and demoralizing, but once you do make friends here, they tend to stick around as friends. Ryan, Dee, and Lily, I'm lookin' at you! Solidarity at NYU is hard to come by, but once it's formed it tends to be rock solid.

8. Being able to drink beer in the open in certain squares and plazas without Public Safety being aware/caring about it, so long as the container conceals the contents. Try that at UGA.

7. Probably the most dedicated team of student advisers on the face of the earth. They're so dedicated they have not yet risen like the mob at La Bastille and slain everyone in administrative for shoehorning them into the worst location ~~off~~ on campus. I sometimes think my own student adviser would shoot assailants in the night to make sure I get the right classes on time. Jennifer's one of these academic cowboy sheriffs, and is awesome. Tali is another. Now that I think about it, so's Chris.

6. A very good, committed health services team, including the Wellness Center. Their hands are pretty much tied when it comes to resolving any bureaucratic issues that are deteriorating your health, but they do care, and they do try to resolve them. I give them that, totally.

5. 500 free pages of printing and copying per semester. You just ain't gonna beat that anywhere. You kinda feel like saying, "Thanks, Mom!" Because it's just that damned comforting.

4. Far more books about every conceivable subject on earth inside the library at Bobst than you will ever get around to reading in twelve of your lifetime. Just the awareness that they're there. And the number of journals NYU subscribes to, just so your naughty, entitled little self can maybe read ten pages of one for the final exam of a class you cannot even stand, requires space math to even pronounce.

3. Violet really is a nice color. And it goes well with gray.

2. I have not yet once encountered either Olsen Twin.

And finally, the number one good thing about attending New York University:

1. Admit it, fellow students: the slack-jawed, brief expression of fleeting amazement and envy, and wondering if you must be rich, that immediately crosses people's faces when they ask you what college you attend, and you reply, "Oh, NYU." You all know you've spotted it, and you all know you like it. So there they are, the top ten good things about being here.

The great thing about being here, however, is that it truly does fill your brain up with a pretty strong education. You sit in most classes here and can actually feel and smell your cerebrum grinding metal and smoking with resistance every few moments. It's a good feeling.

Dr. Roberts, I'm looking at you.

Yes, I Felt It

2011-08-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I was sitting downtown in New York at the computer when the entire office started to sway gently and shake. I gave a strange look across at other folks in the room, but nobody noticed. Editor's note here: I lived in LA for over a decade. I know an earthquake when I feel one. So, while the rest of the room appeared to ignore this occurrence, I immediately browsed over to the seismology sites to see if a quake was underway. Sure enough: a pretty big thick waveform was appearing on the screen. I smirked and went about my day as the aftershocks faded, and put it out of mind. But that's one good thing an LA upbringing gives you: instant discernment between what is not an earthquake happening around you, and what definitely the fuck is -- and this was.

A moment ago my mother calls and asks if I'm okay. Why, I wonder? "Because your brother tried to reach you today and all the lines were down. Did you not hear about the earthquake? We even felt it down here (in the Deep South)..."

And now everyone in the office, overhearing that phone call, is chiming in, "Oh yeah I felt that!" "I felt it as soon as it happened!" "In fact, I..."

Then why were you not gripped by the brutal talons of panic, horror and hysteria like I was when it was actually underway? Your calm faces were a mockery unto me. I swooned in terror certain it was the end. Buildings were toppling. Sheep and rabbits were screaming. Kittens were...

My most-loved item of the month: Foam Earplugs

2011-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

This may become part of a series: the item, food or find I adore most of a particular month. For August 2011, that would have to be foam earplugs - the kind you can get at the corner drugstore. Frustrated with ongoing noise where I am living, I finally gave in yesterday and plunked down four bucks and some change for a package of noise-reducing foam earplugs. Oddly enough, at the store I went to, the strongest ones - those that reduce the most decibels - were actually the cheapest.

I chose the strongest: reducing environmental noise by 33 decibels. I opened the package immediately, right in the store. I took two pink foam plugs, twisted them as instructed, and carefully inserted them into my ears. Then I exited the store.

Such bliss!

I cannot adequately describe how much softer and gentler my world has become by taking the sound level of New York City and turning it down by 33 decibels. Screaming police sirens glide by like nuns playing in thick white socks. Nearby howling brats can be barely heard. Homeless people panhandling for change become a murmur. Subway musicians who interrupt your train of thought with their particular choice of cultural noise without asking you, then demand to be paid for having shattered whatever you were trying to think of - a bane of mine I personally despise - sink to a whisper, lower than "one" on a radio dial. Smartalecks sitting next to you on the 7 who feel you should play audience to whatever might be on their mind that particular moment, you can cheerfully ignore, because unless they touch you, you're no longer even aware they are there! Snoring from upstairs? Gone. Neighbor's morning alarm clock? Vanished. Passing buses, shrieking train brakes, jackhammers pounding - all sweet silence.

This is an item no director or writer should be without. You can actually complete a thought or a mental sentence in these. Rush and get yourself a pair now; you won't regret it...

August production notes

2011-08-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

What a wild ride August has been! Justin and Heather will be meeting soon to discuss promo film segments we need to develop first for the Young Scorsese/Young Coppola feature project. The title of this project is now Back To One. The rap music angle may be dropped in order to orient the film more towards a drama than a comedy, as the script's second draft brought in very compelling emotional components. Make no mistake, Back To One still has all the laughs we promised, but it's now a very different and far more serious story than the brazen yuks of The Great American Movie Movie - which will make a lighthearted sequel, if Back To One performs well at the box office.

Heather had a great opening conversation by email with one of the most lauded cinematographers in Hollywood history yesterday, and he has invited her to continue a dialogue with him. This is a huge honor, and we're not daring say who he is online...

Admission of Heresy: Stanley Kubrick

2011-07-22T16:04:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, impassioned by the lusty red movie that is Phantom of The Paradise, directed by Brian DePalma, I felt cocky enough to break away from 35 years of having considered Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey my favorite film to announce the Bronx auteur had been de-throned, and that Phantom was my official new favorite.

What a fool I was.

Nothing in particular inspired this, but I am publicly changing my mind and recanting that dreadful opinion statement. 2001: A Space Odyssey is once again, was always before, and I suspect will always be the number one motion picture, in my opinion, ever made.

From babyhood, and, according to my mother, even before my own birth, I lay in awe of this picture (Mom once stated she went to see the movie in 1968 while pregnant with me, and that I kicked as though struck with convulsions the moment the MGM logo heralded the start of the film); as a young girl I became Positively Obsessed To An Autism Degree with the animated segments based upon the movie that appeared from time to time, terrifyingly, on the 1970s PBS kids' show The Electric Company, during that same period I lay scared to death in my room unable to rise out of bed from fear because the wall opposite my bedroom door looked identical to a white monolith -- and then as a young woman I worked steadily to at last obtain the entire compendium of the cartoons that inspired my childhood fascination and terror.

My father owned this copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the Richard Strauss tone poem Kubrick set his opening titles and scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey to -- you know the one: that eerie fanfare of faraway trumpets that starts as the sun rises in perfect apogee over earth and moon, and then those particular little font letters quietly announce what film, by whom, and from what studio, only to then blow you out of a stadium with, arguably, the most well-known and powerful classical piece composed in human history -- and as a little girl I sat and stared at it, read all the liner notes (and still remember them), and became Also Obsessed with the rare and now defunct except in Japan Columbia logo on the record.

It was a superby dire-looking, ominously designed vinyl record cover.

The label was a dark, sinister gray. There was no color to be found on it anywhere. Its font was clinical, precise. Black, and white. No bullshit.

Kubrick, like me, would have loved it.

Everything and anything Kubrick continued to Obsess both me and my younger sister during our growing-up years. We found sad commiseration in scenes from The Shining, because one of its main characters reminded us a bit too much of a deranged and in fact violently psychotic member of family who, like that character, chased us with an axe and tore through a door with it to try to reach his intended victims. That was August 1980; I still remember it.

Full Metal Jacket reminded me even further of this same family member, because when "Gomer Pyle" is shown finally suffering a full psychotic break at the end, he happens to be seated in exact replica of the underwear this family member always sat round our childhood house in, playing with and loading ammunition with a creepy understare exactly as Pyle is shown doing. It made us wonder two things:

Did Stanley Kubrick quietly observe our family house during the 1970s and 1980s?

And the darker, sadder,

Did Kubrick grow up in an abusive home with a dangerous father? From the films he's made and the scenes he nearly always defaults into, I consider it no doubt. Count me as another director who grew up with a deadly parent. I recognize his tribal markings. They're same as mine and, in judging from a certain belt freeze-frame scene he tucked in Goodfellas, Scorsese's. You can't fake a domestic abuse scene on camera. When filmmakers who never have experienced one personally try to lens one, we who have really experienced it Know. The timing, the sick randomness of the violent home, the nuance, the very cell level quiddity of it, is never right on screen.

But when a director who has really walked it then talks it, it is.

I suspect Martin Scorsese witnessed violence between his parents. In one online video, he faintly alludes to it. But I can't be sure, and that gives me pause.

Kubrick witnessing and also experiencing it first-hand, however, I know for sure. If The Shining doesn't howl to you that he was there, you weren't either.

On a lighter note, my sister and I to this day still describe certain things, especially locations, as "very Kubrick". This is beginning to appear as an adjective online. She and I were using it in the Seventies. "Suspiciously Kubrick-looking" locations, to us, include:

Hospital corridors, especially if unusually symmetrical

Deserted hotel hallways

Poorly lit and symmetrical public restrooms, if empty of people

Any public restroom with strongly green fluorescent lighting, especially if one of the light panels is weak and flickering while you are standing there, and the room is otherwise deserted

Art gallery / museum interiors, especially if there is a central cutout doorway leading onward to further empty showrooms and immaculate salons, and if the walls on either side of the doorway are perfectly symmetrical to the door, and directly facing the viewer's eye

Basically, anything that is very symmetrical in front of the eye, immaculate to the point of near-gleaming, museum-like, and airless, as though the location has been kept under a bell jar under absolute hermetic biostasis for decades and never disturbed by man, and with a distinct look suggesting oxygen itself neither is manufactured nor has moved there.

All the above locations, by the way, must be empty of humans -- and completely silent.

That, to us, is "very Kubrick". Those locations exist. I am looking for one now for a short film.

But the point is, nobody is going to get closer as a director to the precise palette of neuroses that fuel me as a creative individual than Stanley Kubrick. Talk all you like about "Wow, Ferreira directs like a man. Why, she directs kind of like Scorsese. That violence and male pathology thing." Whatever. These are window dressing.

Late at night, when all is quiet, and the world is dark; when it's night, I am trapped in my room, and no soul is around, or it definitely seems so; and when the clock strikes 3 am and every terror in the black struts grandly out into open like Robert Plant in my room, naked but leather pants and gold paint and a grin, and then dares me to do something about them, the director who has been there and knows me, and the director I want to someday be, is the master Stanley Kubrick, and the greatest film I can think of, in fact, without argument the finest motion picture made of all time, is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

With a vague shrug at DePalma and deep apologies to Mr. Kubrick himself, there it is.

The gauntlet: We hereby challenge Spielberg

2011-07-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Briefly: it's time for someone to make some films the way Steven Spielberg did during his chocolate bar-sneaking, gate-crashing salad days at Universal. Remember the wonder, the exotic Central Asian locations, the skystorms, the map travel sequences, and the imagination? Steven's given up his game lately, and it's time for someone, somewhere, to recapture it for today's audiences. It can't be judged this early, but the latest script coming behind Apocalypse, as yet untitled, takes us to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in modern Pakistan, where if you know your counterculture myths and UFO stories, you know something rather... strange... happened in about 2500 B.C. ... and where the construction of a modern dam leads not only to what remains there, but the unlikely and extremely dangerous cause of the event, about to be reawakened. As a filmmaker, I'll never forget two things Spielberg placed in the moviegoing consciousness forever -- the SS Cotopaxi lying dumped like a toy boat in the desert, and a thousand Indian fingers, when asked "where the music and lights came from" when "the stars sang to you", pointing chillingly -- straight up.

Steven, either you come back to us with more of this stuff, or somebody else will. You get points, however, for casting director Truffaut as an actor in Close Encounters of The Third Kind, one of the three greatest American films ever made, period.

War of The Worlds was dark, A.I. was simply void of your genius, and everything you've made since Schindler's List has been lightless; devoid of wonder, and cynical.

The Holocaust was indeed the worst moment for mankind. Your imagination, however, Steven, was one of the best. Can you come back home and bring us the light back? And remind us again of reason to believe...?

Sellino's Apocalypse Meow: It's on -- the film war between cats and dogs begins

2011-07-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Murderopolis and Apocalypse Meow are at completed script phase. Murderopolis is the sequel to Naked City. Reuben Conovy dies. Apocalypse Meow, not to be confused with t his one, is a top-tier typical Hollywood computer animated cartoon starring A-list names as political world dogs and cats fighting to prevent the ultimate canine vs. feline world war. The wish-list is George Clooney as Trophy, the White House dog, Tina Fey as his CIA (Canine Intelligence Agency) sidekick and love interest, and Jeremy Irons as the voice of X. Bolivar Gupstone, a vicious coelacanth dictator bent on world domination. (Of course. What are cinema super-villains always bent on?)

Anyway, both screenplays are finished and in final draft stage. I wish the script to Meow were a little shorter: it homes in at 129 pages, a brevity record for yours truly. (The way I write, this means the movie itself will come in at just under two hours - probably 98 minutes.) However, it's funny and smart -- smart being the aspect that worries me in a studio era where Dumb and Appeals To Middle America Audiences Who Can't Spell and Needed Scorsese's Upcoming Film's Title Subtracted Four Words Down to "Hugo" seem to be the norm -- but in a world also where Tina Fey has a career and George Clooney actually gets scripts to work from, there may be hope.

Murderopolis goes on the shelf for 2013 while Naked City continues preproduction, and Sellino now launches Apocalypse Meow into active development. We'd be crazy not to.

Hey, look! A religion for Hollywood

2011-06-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in life ya just gotta take a comedy break. HuffPo has this hilarious new article entitled, "Create Your Own Religion". (Go there and submit your own right now. But I need to warn you going in: mine's going to win.) The rules are simple, you describe your religion, what its beliefs are, its major holidays, and so on, and you name the religion. Then send it. I did all these things, and had a big larf. Here's what I made: Hollywood Atlantean - The Religion That Will Defeat Scientology.

What is the name of your religion? *

Hollywood Atlantean: We Shall Defeat Scientology

What are your main beliefs? *

Past lives and reincarnation are real. It's why you can meet someone and love or hate them instantly without having met them before; the two of you were friends or enemies in a former life, and your soul, not your mind, remembers. Earth is a school.

The meaning of life is to be born in subsequent lives of either ease or difficulty, and learn compassion, courage, and ethics - then return after death to the other side, where a council of more experienced souls reviews your performance in life. You are then given pointers on how you could do better next, and you select a new body, your next parents, your upcoming soulmate and the next list of challenges.

Atlantis did exist. The behaviors and events that destroyed it are almost identical to the challenges we face now, today, as a species. If we do not avoid the excesses and mistakes of Atlantis, our societies will vanish like Atlantis.

New agers are the closest living embodiment of the great ones of Atlantis. After a long period of separatism, selfishness and opportunism, it is time for these great ascended ones to join as a culture and recognized religion, and bring the Great Epoch of White Light to mankind openly, out of the closet, and with no apology.

Hollywood contains more of us than any other industry.

While Scientology is for actors and musicians, Hollywood Atlantean is for producers, directors, studio executives and writers. Our work is the manipulation of White Light to impart energy, belief systems and emotion to the human audience. Come on, what's more new age than that?

Our number one tenet is that we are the official end of Scientology, because the reason Scientology attracts so many actors is it appeals to their egos: tell an actor he is of a chosen tribe and has magical powers and is destined to lead the world, and you can make him do anything.

Hollywood Atlantean tells him he is of a chosen tribe, has magic powers, and is destined to lead the world, and pays him residuals. We also control AMPTP, the DGA, and SAG.

We win.

What are your most important rituals? *

Meditation, yoga, visualization, and affirmations.

Daily sending of White Light and Well Wishes to random strangers, be they in subway trains, stuck with us traffic jams, or on the street.

Visualizing that their fondest wish come true. Loving others, even when they hate, despise and scorn us. Except actors and agents.

Preparation and consumption of organic food, which is the new age version of kosher.

Worship of the sun, Great Bringer of White Light unto the industry and unto the people. We dare you to prove the sun isn't awesome, because it is.

What are your major holidays? *

Atlantis Day (October 1) - you will notice magic hour is the strongest on this day. Just the sun's friendly way of saying Hollywood is better, and behind the camera people in it are its chosen people.

Remembrance Day (December 21) - day of observing the major religions' destruction of pagan holidays, and a somber time of reverence for those who kept them alive.

Hollywood Day (Whenever Oscars are) - hedonism. Blind, wild hedonism. As long as the cocaine is organic.

Oprah Winfrey's Birthday (January 29) - Because The Great She brought down the Sacred Tablets from The Holy Mountain. Observed by drinking copious amounts of red wine, the consumption of chocolate, revealing painful emotional stories, and then weeping into tissues.

Martin Scorsese's Birthday (November 17) - Because he is Aloof Quarry, and we will get him. He will join us because we know the secrets of the Kundun. (The Dalai Lama is one of us. Haven't you noticed how much time he spends watching movies and hanging out with us? Has he hung out with Scientologists yet? Huh? Huh? Has he?) Soon he will be unto us as Ben Kenobi is unto the Jedi. All bow down, drive a taxi, and call somebody in New York a f---ing f---.

And then send them White Light.

We do not need Anonymous. You do not defeat Scientology with haXXing. You defeat them with sex, power and money. Hollywood controls all three, and there is not one single Scientologist studio exec - but they all watch Oprah. We win. We have cool clothes. Join us.

Put your cash in the basket, drone!

This is NOT cgi

2011-06-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

Here's something I just discovered: veteran skyman Captain César Brito, no less than the last Chief Pilot of Air Portugal's (TAP's) Airbus A310 fleet banking extreme left in a hairpin demonstration of absolute flight control at an air show in Evora. The jet's an Airbus CS-TEI: that qualifies it as a jumbo jet, or "heavy". That's the exact size and qualification of aircraft that in September of 2001... well, in New York, let's not go into that. "This Portuguese machismo stuff gives me the willies," whimpered another seasoned pilot, witnessing the turn. The 2-year-old video will definitely raise the hairs on the back of your neck; it's like a scene from a nightmare. That left turn - and you'll know it when you see it - is the epitome of breathtaking.

Now this is the kind of balls we world-exploring Lusos are known for, and it makes me feel all the more encouraged about telling stories of our courage on film. Bem feito, Captain Brito!

Okay, Italy: top that. ;)

Can I just say I love Bob Mackie?

2011-06-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

He has a website, and he's on Facebook. J'adore that man!

Wait: I can't stop myself. Bob Mackie: this man is The Art of Fabulous personified. Martin Scorsese loves Armani.

When my film comes out, I will wear Mackie!

If you live in New York, you know who this is

2011-06-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

I don't know who she is. I can't figure out what she wants. There's no way to guess where she lives, what she does for a living or where she comes from: but I heart, heart, heart a mysterious individual known only as Moustache, who lurks certain MTA subway stations here in New York City decorating the lips of actors, advertisement models -- even dogs -- with her glorious, curly sobriquet. A wag and a wit extraordinaire, this female -- and I am absolutely sure she is female -- is more than mere graffitist. She's resoundingly clever and probably genius.

WNYC has already noticed her work; so has The Laughing Squid. I'm lame and late to the game. New York's already on top of her. Yet no one knows who she is. If she would cover her face with a mask, and preserve her identity for the ages, I'd interview her and post the video. All I know is I first developed an artistic crush on this person and her work years ago when I first noticed it. It took one final, swirling smartaleckism, however, from her, for me to fall helplessly in love.

Platinum Hit, a reality show about "songwriters" (and yes, in a world of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Freddie Perren those quotation marks are intentional), is advertised in the subways with a host of enormous wall posters where the lanky, photogenic wannabees slump in numerous variations of slouch and perform duckface, while scrawled bits of Warholipsic self-absorption narrate above their heads, explaining their existence. "I write to express myself," one aspiring scribe sighs. "I write for money," a second one says.

Writes Moustache, above the one with no narration, "I write moustache."

I love this woman and everything about her. A commenter at CBS Television, studying her art, compares her to Magritte and muses, "This one’s probably a professional illustrator judging by the way “moustache” curls around the upper lip... [whoever it is] certainly knows his/her stuff."

She sure does, and she never fails to entertain. I burst out loud laughing at the Platinum Hit one. Who says all graffiti is lame? Miss Moustache, God bless you, whoever you are.

You're what makes New York New York.

You've come a long way, baby

2011-06-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

Not to be a prude, but: does anyone else notice anything in common between most ads these days?

Again, not a criticism, just an observation.

"What's Naked City About?"

2011-06-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine after reading the script asked me, "So what's Naked City (my upcoming feature) about, exactly?" I felt bad hearing this because to me it meant the screenplay must have poor structure. I thought the story was obvious: a Portuguese hit man learns a bunch of wasteoids murdered the daughter he never knew he had, and gets revenge. When I said as much, the friend surprised me.

"No," he said, "I can see it's about that. But there's so much more here. To me there's a lot more different stories there, and they all unfold upon the other."

I didn't know what he means. Last night, in bed during a storm here in New York, it became a little clearer to me. I realized a few important (I guess) things:

One, the story is disturbingly autobiographical, and points to an aspect of myself I dislike sharing in the open: my and my family's mixed ethnic background, and how the fact we are mixed created a painful disconnect for me growing up. I looked like one group of people but was another. If I tried to socialize with them, they bullied me. They could tell from my awkward lack of body grace, absence of rhythm and inability to speak the cool way they did that I wasn't one of them, was an Oreo, a pretender: they were black geese; I was a brown duck.

Worse, the white swans did not notice I was a duck, and categorized me as one of the geese. In the American South, this meant racism. Because to their eyes there is no difference between brown ducks and black geese -- anything not a swan is "geese" -- I didn't get to swim in the lake with them, either. If I tried, they would laugh, or just discriminate: silly duck; good jobs are for swans; nice books are for swans; better futures are for swans; and certainly, those long-legged boys with butter-colored hair and blue eyes are for swan girls, only. I learned my lesson well and, today, when long-legged blonde blue-eyed men approach me, I must admit I close up like a nocturnal flower, avert my eyes and run the other way. The memories of being ridiculed, called a "spear chukker" and a "she-boon" by boys I liked in school sting decades later still.

As I grew up, I kind of instinctively knew there was more to us, my family, than our skin color and fuzzy hair. Some of us didn't even have fuzzy hair. We not only never spoke in the bouncy cadence of the geese around us, my siblings and I soon learned we couldn't. We just didn't have whatever it is that gives black folks the gift to talk with a drum beat like that. Our noses, lips, cheekbones and eyes didn't match the stylish, endlessly cool geese, either. I'd lie in bed praying, God, please tell me who I am. I fit in nowhere. The black kids don't like me and the white kids hate me too. I feel most comfortable around the Chinese, Korean and Jewish kids. This doesn't make sense to me. Please teach me why.

I was rewarded with curious dreams. At night, I would see myself inside exotic foreign houses of worship, being either enticed towards something or welcomed by it. The earliest dream showed me inside a large circular stone temple with a high, curved cupola. Inside it, pulsating green light vibrated. As I inched towards it, suddenly the whole ceiling lit up, and a gigantic, magnificent Hindu goddess -- now, at age 42, having read, I think it was Saraswati -- appeared above me, smiling gently upon me like a mother and opening her arms to me. She was dressed in radiant silks of every color imaginable and dripping jewels; yet the atmosphere around her was absent of any lucre or materialism. All I felt was Amma, Amma. Mother.

She wrapped her caramel-colored arms around me and her midnight black locks tumbled like heavy velvet on my cheek and shoulder. I woke from the dream feeling very loved.

The journey began.

I visited a large Hindu temple in Atlanta and felt very welcomed. I began investigating my family's origins. Before anyone else, I saw strands that pointed, you guessed it, to India. This explained the persistent dark circles under my, my mother's, and my Aunt Constance's, eyes. My mother and aunt loathed these deep brown swoops and slathed on all manner of Ambi and other skin bleaches to get rid of them. They still have them. Lulz. As a teenager, I liked them.

The Indians of Georgia made me part of their family, and I began performing pujas, attending temple regularly, and becoming familiar with the Hindu religious calendar. I read the glorious Bhagavad Gita. For awhile, I was content.

Then the Jewish dreams began.

As if another, perhaps envious ancestor, surveying all this and nodding to herself, had seen enough and wanted her genetic contribution to be known, I had less dreams of being in Hindu temples and suddenly was visited by a spectacular dream I fully intend to put in a film one day:

It is outdoors, daylight, in a European city, perhaps Prague. I am on the run, being hunted by a team of soldiers in long dark woolen coats and uniforms. Bells are ringing in the sharp, cold air, and it is dead of winter. I reach the front doorstep of a squat rectangular building with menorahs carved in its columns. The windows are veiled, dark, of stained glass. You can see nothing inside. Tracking shot alongside me running breathlessly to this doorstep and suddenly feeling safe. I drop to my knees and pry up the flat threshold stone with my fingers. This dirties my fingernails with black earth. I dig beneath. My fingertips find something hard. Prying, digging up, I find gleaming pieces of golden treasure my grandparents have hidden there.

I investigated older, dying family members and asked them penetrating questions, pretending to be on their side about it. I'm just making sure. Surely we're not Jewish. Look at us: we look sort of black, sort of Indian. To most people, we look Hispanic. Everyone knows Jews don't look the way we do. Jews are all white. Right? They're certainly not niggers -- what a white guy in a red car called me at the gas station in Covington, Georgia, in 2000, after almost running me off the road.

But certain family members, when asked, "Okay, this is going to sound strange, okay: but, are we Jewish?" actually nodded calmly, as if reporting me the weather, and said, "Yes, so-and-so-person was a Jew, he didn't go do what the white Jews did, though, he didn't worship with them, cause you didn't do that... he didn't do much of nothin, now that I think of it... all he did was work... I don't know where them people worship, wherever it was, he never told us." The stories were becoming weirdly similar and I became acquainted with a slender thread of people in my mother's back family who identified as JEWS: but over time, bowing to who knows what pressure from whom and where, slowly converting to Methodist Christianity, joining churches in order to marry this or that lady or that man, then assuming suspiciously distant positions to those churches, simply registering with them, and then working very hard to blend in.

Me, after these meetings or phone calls, I was just racistly astounded people in my family I had long assumed black even knew who Jews were and knew what the word Jewish meant.

I'd quiz them: did these people go to temple?

"Yeah, he called it 'temple', or something else... school or something... all them folks just hung together, they didn't associate much with the rest of the family... mainly they just worked, kept quiet... stayed to themselves..."

Did they celebrate Passover? Hanukah?

"I don't know nothin' about that stuff. They worshipped somethin, round near the holidays; it was different from us, though, and we weren't never invited, so we just left them to themselves and when we saw em at family reunions or out at so-and-so's house somewhere... we just said alright, we'd greet em, say hello, just smile at each other... I remember so-and-so used to hang out at your granddaddy's house and drink his wine... he was cousin so-and-so's second cousin" and then I'd be listed an entire roster of Idelles, Tressies, Veaseys and other antiquated black southern names.

So what you're saying is so-and-so, my great-so-and-so's second cousin, was Jewish?

Old family member scowls at me like I think he or she is stupid: (loudly) "YEAH so-and-so was Jewish[, dummy]. S/he was a Jew."

I would then say: So We're Jewish.

Response: silence.

The dreams increased in visual repetition and intensity. Again and again, like an endless play loop, I saw myself approaching the feet of the same European shul, digging the dirt under its entrance doorstep, and discovering treasure. Later, awake, I investigated real shuls and, while my experiences there were not as universally welcoming as my sojourns among the Hindus had been, I came away aware I had ancestors who were Jews. This explained a lot about me and my siblings -- the quest for excellence, the attention to books and study that had weirdly turned so many black kids in school against us. It made me sad, however, because I now knew I had a lot going on inside me nobody was going to understand. The mixed product of everything, I belonged, fully, to nothing. I did not feel welcome in most shuls, most black people shrank back from, disliked and ridiculed me, and American whites miscategorized me as simply black, and dropped me in a slot titled Stereotype.

Naked City's lead character, Reuben Sebastiao Conovy, is a Portuguese Jew who may have Cape Verdean ancestry. Cape Verde is an African former Portuguese colony, the source of many slaves. It is also easy shorthand for how a black person like myself can trace her ancestry to Portugal, as an enterprising older family member, in 2004, finally did. Portugal in the 19th century was home to not only white Portuguese but black former colonists and former slaves, as well as Jews of Indian ancestry who emigrated there from the Portuguese colony of Goa. This may be how I, standing here black in America, have Portuguese, Indian and Sephardic ancestors.

It also may not be.

But reading over the script to Naked City, I recognize the howling pain that drives Conovy as my own. He laments to his girlfriend, a full-blooded Portuguese Catholic who looks Italian, as many white Portuguese do, that he fits nowhere: as a Jew he is shut out from being truly Portuguese, as a black he is shut out from being a Jew, and as a Portuguese he is shut out from everybody. Insiders view him as outsider, but outsiders view him as outsider, too; though by heritage, by blood and by DNA he belongs to all three minorities, none accepts him, and all three view him with deep racism and suspicion.

This has been my racial experience exactly. To read my own secret confessions spooling out as dialogue from my favorite movie character thus far was sobering, and it made me feel embarrassed. Nobody is going to believe or understand this, I warned myself.

I can't accept myself as Jewish. There are Jews and non-Jews alike who will never accept me as Jewish. Oddly enough, the Nazi regime would have. Had I grown up in the Germany of 1936, and my ancestry been discovered and reported by a meddling neighbor, I would have gone to camp.

And never returned.

Yet I know better than to rally behind or claim it. After all, everyone in the family who truly was Jewish is long dead, and took their secret to the grave. My maternal grandmother, the last of the generation who knew, died taking a secret, too. I cared long for her during her last days, sparing nothing to be with her. We understood and loved each other. In return, as she died, she left me with the inheritance of what she considered the revelation of an enormous secret.

Lying in bed, barely able to whisper, her mouth crusted and dried from administrative neglect until I discovered her and gave her cold water to drink, she knew she was dying. Gazing at me, helpless, pitiful, this once powerful, defiant lady who had intimidated many and raised so many strong children, and had once been taller than most men, noticed dangling at my throat a small gold Star of David. I'd stopped by shul that morning and forgotten to take it off. She saw it and began to look very, very sad. After a moment, she asked me to lean close to her.

"I'm leaving," she whispered. "Will you get me a rabbi?"

My. Methodist. African-American. Portuguese. Grandmother.

Who served in a church all the days of her life, attending endless ladies' days and deaconess' meetings, taking down minutes, keeping records, tithing money, posing as wife of my handsome and wonderful not exactly Christian and decidedly Japanese-looking grandfather, Julian, and whom I had considered Of Course Christian Because How Could She Or Anyone Else In My Close Family, Especially My Christian Mother, Be Something Else, and who was in her eighties, had grown up in a rural town and had never said so much as gefilte her whole life around me...

Was asking me, the family outcast but the granddaughter she adored and trusted, to go find her a rabbi for her final moments.

I blinked. "A rabbi?"

Grandmother Othella nodded yes and closed her eyes with a sigh, and a tear ran from her eye. I felt the world crashing in all over me as I went to do it.

When the rabbi arrived, a square-shoulder, compact white guy with a dark brown beard, and in a quiet black suit and tie, he looked a little bit puzzled, my grandmother looked sadly relieved, and I left them in the room together, alone. I am willing to support this story with a polygraph test. It happened.

When Reuben Conovy bemoans his mixed-race status and the loss of exact identity with which it wounded him, I feel that pain. I realize reading the script I know what it feels like to be the outsider even among outsiders, to enter a private world of a people unfairly rejected by the mainstream and be asked to leave, because to them, you're more of a reject than they are, and to keep grasp of the slim thread of American acceptance they've fought for, they need someone lower to step on, and guess who that is. I know the precise wounding it is to walk into a club where Latinos new to America are, and be called a nigger by them. "Yes, we are less, to whites; but don't you get it? You're black in America so you are less than us. Blacks are at the bottom. Female is beneath male. So 'black female' is double bottom. Do you get it?"

And then to approach the black females, get stopped in your tracks by a stare so cold it could kill, and watch them look you up and down, notice you're different, laugh like hyenas at your diction and be told by them, "You some kinda fool, bitch? You ain't one of us, neither."

Who are you when that happens? Where do you turn?

Reuben Conovy is a killing machine because in America the gun is the great equalizer: it doesn't see race, it just takes you down. All men, black, white, Jewish, gentile, gay, straight, Latino or Asian -- facing the barrel of a gun, you're same to the man behind it. With a piece in his hand, the color of a man is Power.

Faced with a world where he is ethnically Portuguese but Portuguese who look white treat him with disrespect because of his dark skin, where his father may have been part-black, but blacks see him as white or Latino and therefore withhold secrets and any brotherhood from him, and where his mother was Jewish, but because she was Sephardic and non-observing what little Hebrew he learned was slanted by Ladino which is spoken pretty much nowhere, whatever rituals he observed and gleaned from her he now performs incorrectly, and the Askhenazi shuls he reaches to see him as a colored outsider, Reuben fits nowhere; "I'm like the wind," he tells his girlfriend, Sonia. Then he maligns and punishes her for still wanting to marry him.

This may have been wise, because in a pivotal scene where Reuben angers her, Sonia lets fly a bitter demonstration of anti-Semitism and reveals what she really thinks of Jews in the first place. Too hurt to reply, Reuben turns and exits. Later, when his own stepbrother, whose mother was gentile and Catholic, erupts into possibly the single most virulent blasphemous and anti-Semitic cinematic diatribe in recorded history, the heartless hit man finally sobs aloud.

Again, all this was autobiographical: it is amazing what The People In Your Neighborhood will say to you when they see your skin color and presume there is no way you could be Jewish. Anti-Semitism is everywhere. It ain't "lurkin'". Haters swarm beneath the respectable surface of Everyplace, only a light scratch from being seen: just look "non-Jewish" and let ordinary people relax in your presence enough to trust you, and then the things they say, so casually, will take your fucking breath away.

On the 4 train, not two weeks ago, a bent and nasty old man was ranting and passing out fliers. The Jews, he said, owned all the banking and media institutions in America and danced on top of buildings as the World Trade Center came down. Jews are evil, Jews are this, Jews are that; on and on it went. Trapped on the train I felt myself dying inside. Any more seconds on this train and I am going to kill this man. I decided, let's get off this train now at the next stop. I'll lose 15, maybe even 30 minutes on my schedule because of this. But it doesn't matter. We're getting off.

And get off I did, very next stop; but not before leaning into his hoary ear and telling him what I was and what I felt about what he said.

Other passengers, overhearing, stared at me stunned. Moments before, there they were: whites, blacks, even a Mexican, nodding and cheering this guy on -- yeah, the Jews, they're all evil, they're the cause of everything, kill them -- but now here they were confronted by a girl with brown skin, black hair and full lips, looking them in the eye and saying I am Jewish. That's not nice. And walking off the train. New York City. 4 train. 2011.

The hideous things anti-Semites have said to me, assuming that because to them I look Harmless Nigger, I could not possibly be Jewish, have simply got to heard and seen. The time of assumed safety and innocence is over, folks.

I added them juicily into the script, and made them pop right out of the mouths of people audiences would never expect, people up till then they were starting to trust, because that's the way it is in real life. You're getting to know Bob [false name], that great guy, union carpenter [false job], his wife's with the PTA [false organization], he works around Jews all the time, their kids are great. Such cool people.

Then, sitting over dinner, he relates or you both overhear on the nearby television some story having to do with September 11th, or finances, or God knows what... then puts his own take on it, looks helplessly at you, and says something anti-Semitic and waits expecting agreement.

"I mean you know how they are. Jews own everything. Cmaan, you know. Jews."

Sonia Betencourt, Reuben's girlfriend, seemed like such a great person till up to then. I liked her and I felt sorry for her when Reuben mistreated her. I was unsure how her story would end and hoped they'd marry. Then out of her mouth it comes: anti-Semitism.

Other characters similarly hurt and surprised me, like real people I'd met in life, folks who still probably think back on that quiet intelligent black girl they had for dinner and wonder why she never talked to them again. Celando Reis, the Godfather of the Portuguese mob, delivers a hateful anti-Jewish comment to his top hit man, and considers it a backhanded compliment: "Yeah, when I found out you were Jewish, Reuben, at first I was concerned, because I figured you'd try to steal all my money. But you never did that, so that's how I know you're true blue."

Really.

People say these things. They come from the same file as "You're more articulate than most of the black people I know", "Your entire family went to college? That's unusual in a black family", and "Normally I can't stand black people but you, Heather -- you're different..."

I'm an artist, I consider film art, and to make good art, you have to tell the truth. The mask must come off these statements and behaviors. Jews everywhere need to know, these are the vile things people are saying about you when your back is turned. Some of these people act like your friends in front of you. They then turn to me, when you leave the room, and say this, freely, because to them I look black, and Blacks Are Not Jews, therefore they think they are safe.

Yeah, maybe they are safe. But it means the rest of us aren't. I plan to reveal the hatred. Hatred must be exposed. Where better, than in a feature film?

So, what's Naked City about?

Logline: In the summer of 1977, a Portuguese-American hit man learns about the death of the daughter he never knew he had, and wreaks vengeance.

Also about: How things in America, and in New York, began to change for the worse at the end of the Seventies. How the Seventies were not the easy-going, simple decade VH1 likes to present them as, but a complicated, turbulent time with a lot of dark events hidden behind a shag rug sheen and the scent of Love's Baby Soft perfume. Pornography, profiteering, crime and suffering capped with a blonde Ultrabright Mormon smile.

But also about: Being one race but being thought of as another. Looking one thing but being completely a different thing.

It's about people seeing you, instantly judging you and misidentifying you, and the world presuming based on their misidentification of your appearance that you are one of a race of people who in fact actually despise you on contact.

It could be about being young, gifted and black in America, with that preamble.

More likely it's about the cross-religious, cross-racial love affairs, marriages and encounters of centuries past that ultimately resulted in me, my siblings and a great many gypsy people out there who hope one day to define, once and for all, who they are, without needing to exist in the often cruel shadow of other people's often gross and mistaken assumptions of the same. I hope Reuben Conovy finds peace someday.

As a person of color in this world, I rather doubt I ever will.

If I were M. Night Shyamalan:

2011-06-10T12:34:00.001-07:00

Slate this week has offered a lip-smacking article on one of the more nightmarish inventions to hit the blogosphere since IMDB's rather evil Star Meter: the Hollywood Career-O-Matic, perpendicular, unlikely brainchild of Rotten Tomatoes, and posted by one Alex Tabarrok, a respected economics blogger at Marginal Revolution.

According to the article, what this fiendish algorithm does is use a director's or actor's reviews and box office as a sort of divining rod -- or is it crucible? -- to calculate the heat left, if any, in the above's career. This is fine. Until someone uses your name to test it publicly. This was the fate of an extremely unlucky M. Night Shyamalan, who for what loathing rakshasa's private reasons we shall never know was deemed the living litmus test subject for the one question directors never hope to face down, and pray their investors never see, namely: "What have you done for me lately?"

Shyamalan fared particularly unwell and this week I walk past him like a car wreck while making a nervous sign of the cross and intoning under my breath, very low, "There, but for the grace of God, go I", because the algorithmic results of his career thus far, according to Rotten Tomatoes and their wicked Film Critic Orgasmatron, were particularly dire. This is the kind of invention that must be smashed at once, hopefully by sledgehammers in the grip of Thor, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the rest of the Robin and The Seven Hoods cast, as soon as possible, in fact exterminated here in larvae stage like the baby in It's Alive -- before it gets in the hands and Blackberries of studio execs on Lankershim, and in a convulsive bloodbath, simply The World Ends. Because then, before even taking a meeting, executives will Tomato Test you. And if you score low, you ain't getting in. As you can see, so inherently Satanic is this invention, say goodbye to the career of even Scorsese.

Which brings me to the ten things I would do, right now, in light of this unholy progeny of digit and daemon, were I one unfathomably unlucky former NYU film student named M. Night Shyamalan:

10. Refuse to read this article, or the one it's based on.

9. In fact, swear off the web forever and have Lynn Hirschberg refer to it as my "luddite proclivity" from now on. No one can make a neurosis hot in print like Lynn Hirschberg.

8. Call up Brian De Palma and spend some weekends with him, because he and I are now firmly in the same unfair boat, and Brian knows how to steer it. He's been trapped on it in its own Sargasso Sea for years.

7. Call up John Milius, join him on a housetop and take rifle shots at little furry animals until he, I, and Brian slowly feel better.

6. Try not to hate Scorsese when he avoids us at parties with that winced, polite smile thing he does. And you know the exact one we're talking about. Oh, you don't? Then ask Brian.

5. Move Things Officially Along from this PR disaster the way Weiner should: aggressively launching and announcing The Next Big Campaign I'm Into, Folks. For Weiner, a new economic policy for the Dems that will actually work. For Shyamalan, the next movie.

4. Spend quality time with that woman in the doorway and the two small things beside her. Oh, those are my kids? (I forgot I had those...)

3. Read Julia Phillips's hilarious You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.

2. Re-read it. Feel kind of familiar and sad at most of the stories. If so inclined, turn it into a drinking game, and pop a Quaalude every time Julia makes a cock reference. See you in the grave.

1. Grow a beard, hole up with some Hitchcock, and come back again swinging hard this time. A good filmmaker never dies. As Julia says, "If you can't be first, be best. If you can't be best, be first." And when you're both, as M. Night was for a minute, and then lose it... try never to end up the litmus test of an evil new Online Hollywood Public Relations Nightmare Generator ever again. (In fact, that's the cause of all of this: Shyamalan hasn't grown a beard.)

Let us not be smug, fellow filmmakers. It could have been any of us. There needs to be one of these career destroyer machines for the lives of journalists, and there isn't one. Hmm.

Hey Brian.

Part of a series: "If I were Martin Scorsese"

2011-06-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

This weekend I intend to start more "If I were" articles. Today, the subject of our essay is His Royal Majesty, The Gangster Priest of Cinema. Thus, here you have it from an amateur filmmaker: the top ten things I would do, if I were Martin Scorsese:

10. Distance myself from the Burton/Taylor film publicly, but retain the book rights. You never know when they might come in useful someday.

Today is not that day.

9. Immediately cease all public announcements of what films I'm going to direct. As any writer knows, and Paul Schrader ought to tell him, the minute you open your mouth about a creative project you're doing, your interest in that project mysteriously declines, and strangely, it often never gets made. Which brings us to:

8. Sit down officially with Tina Sinatra and ask for a white paper of parameters of what, "in a perfect world", can and cannot be depicted in a biography feature about her father. Then sorta kinda adhere to it.

And when asked if I promise to adhere to it... wink.

7. Commission the Tina-approved, sanitary studio script from Akiva Goldsman.

6. Commission the real script from Oliver Stone.

5. Sell my house in Los Angeles and never return there again.

4. Move into The Dakota. Alone.

3. Grow the beard back.

2. Put a black rinse in my hair, ditch the glasses, and commit to a $2 million picture shot in New York about something. Anything. As long as it makes Rick Yorn go very, very pale upon hearing what it is.

1. Cast Daniel Craig as Sinatra and be done with it.

These are the things I would do, alas, so would I do, if only, unto God only, I had been born in a Flushing hospital about 69 years ago with the name Martin Charles Scorsese.

Show Biz Kids: Steely Dan, Hollywood Playas?

2011-06-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

An entire blog could be constructed from Steely Dan songs that reference Hollywood. Since I'm at Tisch eating Funyuns, drinking a Red Bull, and looking at a long day ahead of me, and therefore do not have time to give the subject its proper dues, I'm putting this short article here as a reminder to return and address it later, fully. Note to self: jazz songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen habitually make Hollywood references in their songs. What's important, though, here, is they make them correctly -- as if they spent time doing blow with Julia Phillips, not Tommy Mottola. When they riff on the industry, they generally know what they're talking about. Some quick instances, then I'm out of here. Let's grab the most obvious ones first:

1. Show Biz Kids: "Show biz kids making movies / Of themselves you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else". (Gee: you just figured this out.) You learn this within six months' arrival in Los Angeles, and everybody knows it. I'm still trying to figure out if I have to become this way in order to get my next picture done. The Dan figured it out then. I wonder who burned them and inspired this cruel dawn of enlightenment? I sure remember who mine were.

2. Haitian Divorce: "When she smiled, she said it all / The band was hot, so they danced the famous Merengue / Now we dolly back... / Now we fade to black..." My personal favorite, because Fagen and Becker not only use Hollywood shoot terminology correctly (dolly back, fade to black) and get away with it in a pop song, they know what a dolly out shot is used for: in this song, it occurs as a man's Caucasian wife begins slow-dancing with a large black man in an all-night club on the islands, after a fight with her soon-to-be-estranged husband. It's a mockery of the slow outdollies seen in a thousand black-and-white romance movies, and the fade to black usually punctuating them, as an implication of sex to follow. In Haitian Divorce, sex indeed is exactly what happens, and the wife tearfully reconciles with her explosive husband stateside, only to present him with a half-black toddler. Fagen and Becker, as I note below, often play the part of disgruntled screenwriters in their lyrics; half their songs could be movies and ninety percent of them follow the three-act plot point rule. One of their films of course infamously became a movie, without their consent, this being You, Me, and Dupree; it was basically a screenplay set to jazz rock, as are most classic era Dan songs -- as I'll note in far greater detail, later.

Extra points to Walt and Don for the double entendre, too, of ending this interracial love scene with the phrase "fade to black". Hardee har. Joke got, fellas. Why not dolly in on it to make it even more obvious?

3. Don't Take Me Alive: This is a movie, not a pop song. Really. Listen to the lyrics and notice the plot points. You can almost see Jan De Bont cinematography accompanying this song.

4. Glamour Profession: perhaps the most cynical of Steely Dan movie business songs, this one boasts a fast-talking LA coke dealer who, looking calmly across his domain (and probably the Hollywood sign, from somewhere around the 8000 block of Sunset), muses to himself, "Hollywood, I know your middle name / Who inspires your fabled fools? That's my claim to fame..."

Well, the names of about six of those "fabled fools" spring to mind instantly as I read that, and one is one of the best filmmakers alive; several others are still kind of alive out there, and one, bless her heart, is now dead. But blow was a whole system, an entire religion, back then -- again, the Seventies, because Glamour Profession was recorded not in 1980, but '79 -- and a religion I would not mind seeing return despite its darker rites, because not only the recording but the movie industry were arguably better and more creative when snow was falling. Watching it "while they danced", Walt Becker and Donald Fagen were not mere ringside viewers to all this hedonism. They were in the ring where all the blood is, and dancing, too.

More on the idea of Steely Dan: Show Biz Kids, later.

World's first dolly shot?

2011-06-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

Call me a Hitchcock groupie, but hey. I won't argue that; it's true. I finished watching Blackmail (directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1929) and Number Seventeen (1932) last night, and my article on each will appear shortly. Both are powerful early works by The Master and both show his promise. Blackmail is the more straight-forward of the two narratives; Number Seventeen suffers from a meandering and at times unclear first act, but makes up for it with enormous force by act three (the third act climax, involving a speeding locomotive, a hurtling country bus, and a soon-to-depart ferry, must be fully seen to be believed -- if your heart survives it). Starring a charming Anny Ondra as a faithless damsel in peril whose mistreatment of her detective boyfriend brings punishment she soon regrets, Blackmail is a taut thriller from start to finish, with many of Hitchcock's later visual trademarks already at the fore. You'll warmly recognize a certain staircase shot and a climactic chase high on a national monument. But what brings me to blog tonight is what I am certain is the world's first dolly shot, executed by Jack Cox, at the direction of Alfred Hitchcock.

Jack Cox, as all Hitchcock fans know, is that surly cinematographer who gave Hitchcock's hand an early virtual slap when the latter attempted to peer through a camera on set in front of him. "I'll see to that, you see to what you do," or something like it, came out of Cox's mouth, and the young Hitchcock never forgot it. Today DPs are fired for this kind of wisecrackery; but in the swaddling days of film, a cinematographer held equal power to that of a director, and our portly Master, beginning his career at Ealing Studios, held his tongue and left Jack to his work.

We'll never know which man hatched the idea: but either he or Hitchcock executed something we can only accept as an attempted dolly shot, and it arrives at the end of act one of Blackmail. Poor Alice White, that fickle girl, ditches her lumpen cop boyfriend for a glamorous male artist at the cafe, but things go wrong at the artist's studio, and defending herself, she gets hold of a knife. Bladed, events turn worse, and the spurned detective, realizing what's occurred and who is behind it, turns as his fellow policemen unveil the body sprawled across the four-poster bed. When the detective, played by popular hero type John Longden, recognizes whose corpse it is, the camera hurtles towards it with a primitive, rumbling motion that looks borne on a wagon with very bad, rotting wheels. It's a rough, ungainly, and clumsily-executed shot, but its use and position in the narrative betray it as what it is: a dolly shot, meant to underline the horror of the detective's immediate recognition of the victim, whom he saw alive mere hours ago on the arm of his beloved.

With the exception of one shot in history: a Martin Scorsese choice I admit I will never truly comprehend -- Vicky turning from losing the putt-putt miniature golf ball to shake her head slowly at Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull -- that's what the dolly shot is for: underlining a critical moment with an emotional beat, as if to say to the audience, Now, do you see this carefully? Are you quite sure you get this?

Dollying in tells us, The moment you are seeing is important; you already knew that, but we're just underlining it here to sink it in. Hitchcock, with Jack E. Cox, knows that, and underlines the shocking instant of corpse recognition with that one rumbling, violent camera motion. I jumped out of my chair and danced around the room chanting, "Dolly shot! Dolly shot! In 1929! Alfred Hitchcock invented the dolly shot! It figures!"

Well, a little calmer now in retrospect, I can't say for certain he did. But if any director could or would have been capable of inventing the dolly shot, Alfred Hitchcock was that fellow. It should also be noted Hitchcock makes his first cameo appearance in Blackmail, as a chubby gent being molested on a train by an absolute demon of a child. Wikipedia does not corroborate the story, but I also strongly believe The Master makes a second cameo at the end, carrying a certain nasty painting away down a corridor.

Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie and other usual suspects are great viewing for any cinema fan any night of the year; but the real treat is getting hold of and watching Alfred Hitchcock's beginning work, especially on a cool, breezy spring evening. I holed up like a fiend treating myself to these fuzzy old delicious black-and-whites, and was spellbound. It cheers me as a young director to see one of the Truly Greats in his own youth, trammeled by technological blunders and executing less than seamless shots. I will never be on the level of Hitchcock, but seeing his early work, a girl director can dream. I recommend the earliest films of Alfred Hitchcock to any cineaste. They're good watchin'.

In fact I dare you not once to look behind you while watching the first 15 minutes of Number Seventeen at night on Halloween.

And I dare you not to go, "Ahaaa: dolly shot!" at plot point one during Blackmail.

An Interview with Director Heather Ferreira Pt 4

2011-05-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

Q. So after 20 + years in the business, you've gone back to film school. How valuable do you find that?

A. There's two schools of thought. There's a big argument online about whether film schools are even necessary now "in the digital age", where any movie under the sun is available for you from Netflix or via p2p for you to study, in your own home, when you want to. My feeling is it's necessary. I feel film school brings you your working peers, your colleagues. Your future family. Coppola has Lucas and Spielberg. They went to USC together. Marty has tons of peers too, most of them NYU alums. You find your peers, your soul family, at film school. Ultimately they're your tribe. You make films together, eventually form studios together.

Q. Who are your NYU film peers right now?

A. Mainly faculty, but a couple of really wonderful producers I met in Techniques & Technologies class. We kept in touch because we were nuts about film, and we ended up making a film together. That film will soon be at festivals, and then they'll have credits on IMDB. But that's not why we did it. We all did it because we genuinely like each other and all wanted to make a film. One was like, "Let me know when you're directing something, I want to be there and learn by watching." I was like, "Forget that, next time I'm directing I'll put you to work." And I did, he came to the set, he was amazing, and ended up co-exec producing it. He had lots of questions about how to handle crew, et cetera... I hope to assist him on his film. That's what it's about.

Another great thing about attending film school is all the perks you get. I get to go into certain cinema houses for free, others at extremely cut-rate cost, and get to see all the movies I want to see, and take care of my addiction. Other things, it's outrageous all the cool freebies students can get. Plus, when you go to NYU, that's a tremendous tiger you get to walk with. The entire city respects you; it's preassumed you're rich, so you can get away with a lot. I love being an NYU student. I'm very proud of the violet. I also found out I did pass that Environmental Sustainability [biosciences] exam. Not only did I pass, I got an A. I got an A in the whole class, and that brings me up to a 3.9 GPA. Why wouldn't one go to film school? College is awesome.

Q. What feature films are you planning now?

A. I find the hardest thing is the planning. I'm the type who writes a script that she loves, and launches it into development, and then a week later writes an even better script and then falls in love with that one. It takes every ounce of strength I've got to pull the brakes and keep from throwing away existing preproduction to go chasing after that subsequent script. But it's a thing I must do in order to get any picture done.

Right now, my company, Sellino Films, is about to launch. We should have our website up and be a legitimate LLC next week. I'm hiring an assistant, finally, and we have five feature films planned. It's funny, but once you commit to your choices and set your [production] slate, you're often surprised by what kinds of movies you're actually going to make.

Naked City is the first one we're going to make. That's about the Portuguese mob in Newark and New York. It's set in 1977.

Q. Does the Portuguese have a mob?

A. There is absolutely a Portuguese-American mob in this country. The one over in Lisbon, the native Portuguese one, is even bigger. Every immigrant ethnicity has a Mafia. That's so funny about the Italians: cinematically, you'd think there's only one, and it's theirs. The Israelis have one, the Irish had one and in one particular city still kind of have one. Yes, there is a Portuguese Mafia. You won't find it in Newark, though, much anymore.

Q. But they kill people.

A. Only when necessary.

Q. Is it necessary sometimes, to kill people?

A. I never would.

Q. Have you avenged your honor on anybody we should know about?

A. It's occurred a few places to a few people. It was satisfying. They know who they are. Let's move on to the next question. I'm a nice person.

Q. What are the other four movies Sellino is doing? Is that right? "Sellino"?

A. It means "bustle" in Italian. The significance is personal to me.

Another film is Anwesenheit, which is German for feeling like when you're being followed. The Germans actually coined a word for that! It's a Hitchcock-style piece set in 1960 about a famous Manhattan psychiatrist, Italian-American, named William Fregosi, who's married to a prime time TV star, one of those singy-dancy TV girls like Leslie Uggams or Doris Day, with her own nighttime variety show. She's black as an added bonus. So here is this interracial couple in the New York of 1960...

Q. Which in itself is a movie.

A. I know! I could have made a dozen movies about that relationship alone. I loved those two characters. I hated to see the script end. But anyway, it's about those two as a couple, coming back from their honeymoon, when Kate, that's the wife, decides she wants William to pull the car over and see the sharks in this seaside aquatic museum. That's only the beginning of things. The stopover ends up leading to mayhem, and like I said, it's very Hitchcock. It's all very chaste: him kissing her hand, which is in a glove; them embracing, as she gasps demurely, "Oh, Will"; the two of them even share separate beds. I made a point of that in the script. It's a Hays Code era film: everything implied, nothing seen. Even the violence is pared back. It's very demure.

Q. What happens to them? In the movie?

A. Oh, they get scared to death. It's like that 1970's horror thing Let's Scare Jessica To Death, except Let's Scare William and Kate Fregosi To Death Instead. Shadows close in, things go bump in the night, a blonde swandives off a rooftop in Manhattan. Great stuff. Insane asylums, a midnight speedboat kidnapping. Great stuff. Really it's an allegory about the paranoia of being a mixed couple in America during the early 1960s. But nobody but other mixed couple viewers are going to care about that. Mostly it's my homage to Alfred Hitchcock.

Q. You seem to really love Alfred Hitchcock.

A. I'd marry him if he were alive and single. I worship everything he did.

Q. So there is Anwesenheit, Naked City, and what else?

A. There's The Golden Needle, which is even more overtly Hitchcock: it depends very heavily on a famous classical piece, and the climactic scene takes place while that piece is being performed by an orchestra at Carnegie Hall, live. [Do] you remember The Man Who Knew Too Much? It's kind of in the vein of that. But it's about a gorgeous ballerina, whom we want Anne Hathaway to play, and her bachelor playboy friend, George Clooney, and what exactly's going on between the two of them the night a rival ballet dancer dies onstage. This is nuts but I want Marty Scorsese to play the nuisance fan who keeps pestering Anne Hathaway. Marty's brilliant. He's almost a finer actor than a director, and he's about pretty much the greatest director alive -- so that tells you something about how well he can act. But this guy is autistic, and notices every little dot and nuance about this woman because he loves her. That gift for noticing detail will come in handy.

Q. Does he become a detective?

A. I envisioned Marty initially as kind of Columbo, as Peter Falk -- you must know, Columbo was just about one of my favorite TV shows growing up, I didn't miss an episode -- just following this lady around, asking deeper and deeper, more nuisancing questions as kind of a pest. Just then, the night before writing the script, I had a dream of Alfred Hitchcock standing in my room, and he bent down to my ear, and whispered, "Scorsese's character is autistic."

That second, boom, I woke up, and the whole script fell straight together, easier. At first, the Columbo angle wasn't exciting me. The idea of Scorsese playing the lead wasn't even sending me. I couldn't get excited; I wasn't "seeing" it -- and every script writer in the world knows exactly what I mean. Suddenly when Alfred Hitchcock said that: the whole movie formed right in my head like straight from Minerva and I was excited by it. The autism angle was what did it: seeing Marty as this little autistic man, toddling back and forth, repeating phrases over and over again -- who can't imagine Martin Scorsese doing that? -- I saw a mentally challenged man becoming in essence the guy who solves a mystery. Don't forget Clooney though. I see him as the bachelor playboy in the midst of it. And John Turturro as the bad guy. Soviet. A Communist. Evil.

Q. You braincast Scorsese a lot. You have a connection to him.

A. Everyone says they have a connection to Scorsese. Few do. I'll put it this way: Sellino Films is close to someone who knows Martin Scorsese extremely well, for real. That person wants to work with me, and can get Marty on the phone by pushing a speed dial number. I've seen it. I'm fortunate to have that connection. Do I know Scorsese personally? No. Do I want to work with him? Yes, but not with him as director. I want to cast Scorsese, as Irwin Winkler did. I see the man as a ferocious actor, and as another director, I want to see the depth of his range. I want to get inside his head as an actor and move around some furniture.

Q. Do any of your other films intend Scorsese as an actor?

A. I want him to play Will Fregosi in Anwesenheit. But don't think he's special. I want Brian DePalma to play the bad guy in it, James Vuhrman. Brian DePalma can act his butt off too, and I've been dying to cast him in something since before Scorsese. Seeing DePalma and Scorsese face off against each other, these two legendary directors, as actors versus each other -- I'd go see whatever movie that was like with the fist of an angry god. That's the ultimate cage match of modern cinema.

Q. What about the gangster film? Gangsterland?

A. Gangsterland is in active development. There's another associate of ours who knows Martin Scorsese, who's co-producing that. It's a three-picture deal, he has a role in the first one and is the lead in the second one. DeNiro is said to be an active contender for villain in film one. Our co-producer, Harvey Keitel, requires no introduction. He's the villain of the second film. We all want Samuel L. Jackson in film three. And Martin is said to be the lead in all three, as kind of a heroin addict Mafia lieutenant who ascends to power. It's a piece about what the mob will be doing in New York half a century from now. Marty took us back to the cradle of the New York mob in Gangs of New York. This takes that in the opposite direction: where the mob will be in 2060.

Q. How did you get Harvey Keitel interested in a movie of yours?

A. I asked him to read the script, and he read it. I must add, I have Daphna to thank. Daphna Kastner-Keitel, his quite beautiful wife. She's an actor herself. I'm dying to cast her, but not sure if she's still actively treading the boards. She has quite an exotic look and she'd be great as Sonia in Naked City. She'd really get a fierce hold of that role and tear it up. I need someone to play Sonia who will fearlessly drive it to the wall. Daphna could.

Q. Well, I've really enjoyed talking to you. You have a lot of great energy and I have a feeling you're going to make it!

A. I do hope so.

Q. Is there anything you want me to add?

A. Sellino Films will be a full functioning LLC next week, and our website should be fully up and running by then. We're young, and we're small and new, but we pay attention to story, we exist for the actors, and we revere the director. The mix of that usually produces good films. I hope so. We'll do what we can do make it happen. There's a pretty huge mountain in front of us since we're just starting out, but one step at a time. And mark these rash words: I am going to cast James Cameron in something.

(UPDATE: since this interview, Sellino Films associate producer Vasilis Bliumis met with Robert DeNiro at Cannes to discuss him starring in Gangsterland. DeNiro is said to be interested and has requested a white paper on the film immediately.)

An Interview with Director Heather Ferreira Pt 3

2011-05-24T09:49:00.001-07:00

Continuation of the rainy day interview with Maurecia Valli at Starbucks.

Q. We haven't talked much about your directing style. What would you call that and how do you like to work?

A. I write my own movies for one thing. I really wouldn't see myself as an interpreter of other writers' work. This may be radical, but my feeling is if a movie idea comes to a person and they write it, they're the best director for the piece. If they don't know how to direct, they need to learn. Not every good screenwriter is born to be a director, but those who are generally seem to know they are. And if you know, then you should learn. This divides me from every single other director out there probably, and definitely sets me at odds against the studio system because I respect the writer.

I began in this business as a screenwriter with delusions of grandeur, and I remain a screenwriter with delusions of grandeur.

I don't understand those writers like Laeta Kalogridis who can put their heart, soul and life into a 120-page screenplay and then turn it over to somebody else and let them direct it. She's a fine writer, but I don't understand it. I'm more like Joe Eszterhas: I saw it, I wrote it, either shoot it my way or shut up. I mean, that sounds confrontational, but I believe screenwriters need to be bitchier, stronger. There needs to be that moment of "Writers' Cut", where writers stand up to directors and can say, "Hold on, that's not how I saw that scene."

Now, directors across the board will have me tarred and feathered for saying that, but writers are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to story interpretation -- and writers are the ones who came up with the story! We accept that in this business, but isn't that extraordinary? But the thing is, directors used to be treated kind of like screenwriters in that everyone else around and beneath them had more power than directors did over what made it to the final screen. It took Elliot Silverstein to change that, and I'm glad he did. But that was 1964 and it's time for screenwriters to fight and march for, and raise hell for, and finally get -- a thing called Writers' Prerogative, or Writers' Cut. Many directors and certainly producers would not agree with me on that, but it would absolutely raise the quality standards of what you're seeing out there on screens in movie theaters.

Q. What do you mean about Elliot Silverstein? Who is that?

A. He was a big TV director who was working on Twilight Zone, and he noticed the episode he was shooting was controlled visually by everybody except himself. He stood up for directors and it turned into a battle. Eventually it became the power of final cut. We expect filmmakers to have the rights to final cut on their picture but it wasn't always like that. It wasn't like that at all until 1964. The Directors' Guild publishes a fantastic magazine that I go get every month up on W. 57th, and they did a story on this. DGA Magazine is actually awesome. Every director, shop or not, should subscribe to that magazine. The stories in it are just intense, especially their historical articles like how final cut became a right. They ran a fabulous story on this last month. Silverstein went to the wall, he nailed them, and he got us that say-so. Someone, I think Eszterhas, needs to do that for writers. It's the 21st century. It's time for Writers' Cut.

Q. Would you give up the final cut to a writer?

A. If I was the kind of director who relied on writers' work to make my movies. Luckily I'm not and I can write. But if I was... I mean if my entire career depended on how well the screenplays were written I made into movies... you better believe I would. The screenwriter is the first person who saw those characters, overheard their dialogue, created the scene. How dare I say my vision of this or that scene supersedes the vision of the person who invented it? I mean excuse my language, but exactly how dare I? Concede to the writer. The writer knows what astrological sign that character is; do I?

The systemwide refusal to respect the writer is nothing but arrogance. But it's survival arrogance -- studios and many directors realize they'll have to start recycling, being honest, and living sustainably if they even once acknowledge the writer is the one who deserves creative privilege. To acknowledge the writer would bring the whole system down. Somebody has to be Boxer [Orwell reference]. Somebody has to be lowest caste and carry the burden, otherwise -- shudder -- the system will change. Studios tried to enslave the directors and directors unionized and shrugged the bigotry down to writers, to stay in power. We sacrificed them. I refuse to do it. I may pay later for saying this, but if I ever direct a picture based on some writer's work, other than myself, that writer will be invited to the set, and I will be open to their advice. I mean, they invented the story and the characters and the story is king -- why wouldn't I?

Interestingly, no union has yet sided with the Writers' Guild of America on this issue. Unions just love talking leftist philosophy and "working together" and "the power of many" when it's one of the big shiny three -- DGA, SAG and IATSE -- against the evil studios, but then they turn remarkably selfish and evil themselves when it comes to inviting writers to the table. Writers are always left out. They'll march with them if they see SAG might get in trouble; you know, if the fire is coming up the street. But when it's a writers' march for writers' rights, you can hear crickets in the room. Writers are the niggers of Hollywood: relevant only when votes are needed. If you're a screenwriter hearing this, you know it's true and your blood needs to be boiling.

Q. What was your experience as a screenwriter in Hollywood?

A. I was Marilyn Monroe. Courted by everyone, but a candle in the wind when the rains came in. Every studio wanted in my pants. Oliver Stone's company invited me to their office... what was that, IXTLAN I think. DeLaurentis. Several lot clubhouses at Warner. Warner was a big one. They were the nicest to me. I think I was at that commissary eating lunch every day. Icon over there, Revelations Entertainment, a bunch of guys. Universal, I lived across from them near Lankershim and I was there every day. I was considered Miss Hot Screenwriter, and ICM and CAA both wanted me.

All this came to an end when I signed with Lee Daniels as a client of his. Suddenly the courtship ended and it was nothing but working for Lee to develop projects as his, as he ascended from talent manager inexplicably to director. I'm not bitter about it. I'm just one of a faceless horde people like that devour on the way to the top. But times were good before his involvement. I got a lot of work and met a lot of names.

Q. Is it true Michael Biehn owes you $5000?

A. Yes, and he knows why. But he's dealing with enough. What a good actor. You look at some of the things such talented people do, and just shake your head. Michael, if you're reading this, [she says this in little girl voice like Carol Anne in Poltergeist] come home.

You know exactly what we mean when we say that.

Q. Did you really date Quentin Tarantino?

A. It's almost a question of who didn't date Tarantino.

Q. What do you think of him?

A. Talented kid.

Q. Nothing more to add?

A. Nothing more to add.

Q. What's the dating scene like for a female movie director?

A. [Laughs] You should be asking Kathryn Bigelow! She's a lot better-looking than me! Seriously, though... I don't date. I haven't dated since Quentin. There's no time. I also have a limited attention span for boring people. I'd rather stay home and write, or come up with movies and scenes, than sit over lasagna listening to some dingbat wax poetic about their widget business and malevolent exes. I figure if it's meant to happen, it will.

I find myself often falling in love with machines and gadgets. I'm kind of a tech that way. I consider my computer my daughter actually. Seeing my computer mistreated almost makes me violent. If she's missing or in storage I can hear her crying for me. Weird huh? It gets better: I would actually plan my own wedding and get the dress, cake and everything if I could marry a Panavision Platinum camera next week. I'd stage the wedding photos in Vanity Fair. Me and the love of my life... a motion picture camera. Kind of says it all.

Q. Okay, Panavision or Arriflex?

A. [Laughter] Bolex! No, seriously... although I have shot a very nice film on a Bolex. Arriflex bayonet cameras are sexy, they're kind of the Bic pen of movie cameras... an NYU film professor who shall remain nameless was reportedly stunned one time when I loaded a bayonet in front of him with my eyes closed. But who's he kidding? I'm a director. Not all directors know how but we should all know how to load and unload our film into a camera.

Q. Does Scorsese?

A. No. But he's Scorsese. He's earned the privilege not to know how to load film into a camera.

Q. Back to cameras.

A. Okay: Panavision wins, because I think all directors, especially we new breed, we "relative youngsters as it were", when we're sitting as kids imagining being on a location in a baseball cap, squinting behind a camera and pointing at something off-screen to our DP in some kind of photograph [laughter] -- and it's always the same photograph -- the camera we all see ourselves behind is a Panavision. And a Platinum: the standard. I love Arriflex and wouldn't turn one down, but Panavision, that's my heart. The grail as a kid is to direct from behind a Panavision.

Q. Did you see yourself in the baseball hat?

A. Oh yes, and I visualized that for years. When it finally happened and I directed my first film, it was raining and miserable out on location and I picked up a cap and went to do it. There were production photos taken and I looked back at them after wrap. It was a Panavision baseball cap I'd picked up. So there I was, the big director, wearing her baseball cap just like everybody else.

Q. Why do directors always wear those caps?

A. For me it's a baby sucker, a pacifier, a security blanket. I don't feel like a director without one on my head, it's like I have no business being on the set. But I'm addicted to hats as it is. I seldom go out without some type of hat on, and I don't consider a gentleman fully dressed unless he's wearing a fedora. What is this thing of men walking around in baseball caps at bars and on the street? Those and short pants, and sneakers. Dockers. They look just like toddlers! How women manage to sexually desire a person who's six feet tall but dressed like a toddler on a play date -- that's beyond me. Take me back instead to those thrilling days of yesteryear when a man dressed like a man, and a woman like a woman.

I don't feel at all dressed without a lid on. I like big hats. Large hats. I'll probably end up wearing them in the director chair and launching a style. Alfred Hitchcock wore a full suit to the set, God bless him. If I were male, so would I. I like that John Landis does it. He looks great on every set. Me, I'll wear Armani and a big sloppy Mediterranean hat, and treat [the set] like it's a yacht.

Cavalcanti's "Went The Day Well?"

2011-05-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

Cinema expert Vincent LoBrutto and I attended Film Forum's showing of the Ealing wartime movie "Went The Day Well?" yesterday. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, this black-and-white actioner kept us on edge of seat the whole two hours, and never lifted the pressure from our suspense. The tale of a small English village, Bramley End, quietly taken hostage by Nazi soldiers disguised as local tommies -- and then fighting back -- it's a pulse-pounder from start to finish, and reminds me of the kind of film John Milius tried to remake in 1984 as Red Dawn, and John McTiernan or Steven Spielberg today would remake very well as something else; but I hope no one ever does.

Although oddly absent of closeup shots -- and this may have been a choice of Cavalcanti's to keep us from identifying too closely with any one character in the film, and instead watching both sides from a certain documentary-style detachment -- Went The Day Well catches you by the throat within 10 minutes of picture start, and does not let up until the last gunshot. Too, I liked the way Cavalcanti depicted violence: quickly, perfunctorily, and without the lingering, panting lust of how we shoot violence cinematically today. Knife stabs are implied, swift, and over, with no blood shown -- and this was effective. Likewise, shotgun and pistol shots were muffled, nearly quiet, and absent the sweetening and sexying up we take for granted in action films today. None of this detracted at all from the power of the film or willing suspension of disbelief. The audience, a mixed crowd of all ages, gasped and groaned at all the right places.

I don't hear too many gasps and groans of suspense in movie theaters today. What I notice instead is a certain coldly amused cynicism: the audience has seen it all, and to me this is clear notice we filmmakers need to scale it back and deliver more -- by showing less.

Leslie Banks is delectable in his role as a British traitor, the kind of character who would be played by Alan Rickman now; stuffy, twiddling, perpetually soothing, he murmurs and caresses his fellow villagers straight into a trap then continues to twist the screw once he's got them there. He's the kind of person you love to hate and Americans now get criticized for because in our country we demand that this type of character die in act three. He does, and in 1942, in a British film; so the next time a foreign cineaste accuses me and other Americans of culturally deifying the death penalty on the big screen, I'll direct them to this film as evidence the Continent was baying for blood first. Banks's character, Oliver Wilsford, pays the ultimate price in the very best way, just when you expect it to happen. The difference is Cavalcanti serves it up quickly, without the gloating, malingering slow motion shots John McTiernan in Die Hard and many other US directors have made us hungry for. I felt a little let down at how simply it happened. But then, in real life, that's often how simply it happens.

Ealing Studios also breaks many modern American production rules by showing sympathetic characters hurt or even killed unexpectedly -- the way death intrudes in real life. I can't count how many times this Manhattan audience gasped then mourned quietly in their seats when the lives of well-liked characters in this film came to an abrupt, and often startlingly realistic, end. (To avoid spoilers, I won't say whose, how or when.) Watching, I was reminded of other great UK films like the nuclear fantasies When The Wind Blows, and the quietly terrifying Threads. The British show death a la carte, straight/no chaser, as is. So does the rest of the world. America alone continues to glamorize killing and death onscreen, and my suspicion is because we have not yet experienced military landfall and invasion on our native shores. Once we have seen war and death how they really are, will we finally strip the camp and the sequins from screen violence? And I ask this as a director very, very fond of slow motion beauty shots of death, and Michael Bay multicamera perspectives on very violent scenes.

Criticisms: only one, and that is treacherous Oliver Wilsford being clearly illustrated in the film as a gay man.

I'm new to Alberto Cavalcanti, and I'm impressed. Went The Day Well is a powerful tale with all the right pieces just where they need to be, and confidently presented. Watching it, you can see beginning blueprints of modern action cinema -- much the way you can hear modern Hollywood score writing in Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Prokofiev long before Erich Korngold got there -- and this was in 1942. It's comical to think that Martin Scorsese was in his mommy's tummy when this picture was flickering in the faces of London movie audiences. It just goes to show you the eternal art that cinema is, and how long, if we keep to traditional methods, it's likely to be so.

(End note: as for the "7" accompanying this article, if you've seen the film, it requires no explanation. If you have not seen the film, and you need the 7 explained to you, see the film.)

Whom would I cast as a young Sinatra?

2011-05-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Justin Timberlake. Period.

An Interview with Director Heather Ferreira Pt. 2

2011-05-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

Continuation of Maurecia Valli's interview with me at the Starbucks in front of Bobst Library, New York University, where it has been raining without cease for nights and days.

Q. You seem very obsessed with the music you use in your films and you were like that on the television shows you directed. What's music to you?

A. I was very musical as a child. I'm not sure if that has to do with it. But, I know how to play a few instruments and I take music very seriously, in my personal life. I have symphony tickets. I know how to attend the symphony. I take it seriously, I dress up. Full gown. Gloves. Jewelry. It's weird, too, because part of me thinks classical music should be accessible by everyone, but another part of me really enjoys the "dress up" aspect of it, that sense of it being special.

My father had a wonderful record collection, and a turntable: a Panasonic, made in 1970, that had the most deep, rich woofers and subwoofers. He was really into music and his taste was eclectic: he had everything Blue Note ever signed, along with Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones, everything Motown, a whole lot of Tamla, Peter Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan, Jerry Butler, Joan Baez, you name it. If it got airplay between 1960 and 1975, he owned it. He could have easily operated an FM radio station with that collection. And me, I got to sit in front of it and listen to it. He'd listen to it while smashed out of his mind, and walk around singing with a glass of Bacardi.

I would sit as a kid listening to everything, and stare at the record labels going round. I don't know if I'm mildly autistic, but I could get very lost just sitting and staring at a record label logo go round and round on a record turntable. I'm not sure where I went, doing that. It wasn't even soothing; it's like I tranced to it. Even today, I see a vinyl-era label logo and chills go down my spine. Like the Columbia walking eye. I see that and get chills, it's like an orgasm.

But I really got into music and responded to it as a child. Growing up, I became musical. I sang. I played instruments in band. I formed a rock band. I thought I was going to become a pop singer, kind of a black Madonna. For a minute that nearly happened. I got a brief deal on Capitol and walked off it because they remixed one of my songs R&B, and at the time that bothered me. I live and breathe music. I understand theory.

To me, if I want to write a screenplay, all I have to do is select a certain group of songs... or they select me... and I listen to them in headphones and start to see characters, and scenes. Every time I write a movie, the music to each scene was right there lined up and ready, and kind of gave me dictation. Even today, I log each song on a soundtrack list so I'll know what tune I was listening to when I wrote whichever scene. That helps me in editing. I edit to music. Music and film, to me, they're just parallel.

I was asked the other day by someone: if you were told you were to be sent to an island, and you could either have movies to watch, or music to listen to, but you could never have both, which would you pick -- movies or music? And I laughed and said, here is where I'm completely the opposite of Martin Scorsese: he'd choose films. I'd wave goodbye to film and I'd cry. I'd feel very sad. But I'd choose music without even thinking about it. To me, movies I could live without; and that'd be a very sad life. But without music I would die.

Q. What do you like to write and direct films about? What subject matter?

A. I find I like making films about people I would never let anywhere near me in real life. There was this character walking down the street the other day, down in the Village. Italian and Puerto Rican, a mixed fellow. Long shaggy black hair, wearing a brown 70's leatherette jacket and jeans, walking up the street -- and talking agitatedly to himself.

Further into the Village, a black guy and his girlfriend get into it, a fight right out on the street corner. Her yelling, doing almost masculine body language, getting right up in his face, with four or five people grabbing her and the guy, holding them both back from each other. I walk past this stuff and I think, marvelous... storylines... but in real life I wouldn't be caught dead near those people. Crazy people, people who yell, fight, act out in public... mental cases, criminals...

I also love to explore pathology. I mean for God's sake my last characters were hit men and pornographers! Child pornographers! I used to make educational kids' shows. I loathe such people. But on paper, on film... they're fascinating to watch, like a petri dish of moving filth. Really: who's going to sit through a film of peaceful goody goodies meditating, singing Kumbaya? [Laughter] You know it. What you pay 20 bucks to see is the pathology.

I also find I write a lot of films about conservatives, political conservatives. Now that's not my cup of tea privately, those philosophies. I'm a liberal. However, I like exploring beliefs that are different from mine, and I think it's important to present those views and the people who hold them with integrity. One film I wrote shows a neoconservative TV producer keeping his liberal production crew alive in a category five hurricane. I didn't find it hard to write that guy at all. I have beer with conservatives. We don't agree, but we agree cordially to disagree.

Q. What was the worst shoot of your life?

A. Sunshine Again, without doubt. That terrible, awful kids' show. Make no doubt about it, I loved the idea, I loved the concept. But the actual production was literally cursed and I nearly died producing it. I would never go near that show again.

Q. What happened on it?

A. Oh, every damned thing imaginable. Crooked location owner, crooked set designer, and both ganged up on me together at the same time without even knowing each other. They smelled money and decided to graft some extra cash out of me and the production, both of them. When I fought back, they went out-and-out deception and lied together to try to cause harm. I managed to minimize and humiliate them both, but they're still out there somewhere, stealing from other productions. I'd out them, but they're sociopaths and don't exercise proper self-control, and they'd fight back, and then I'd fight dirty and it'd become a bloodbath. Better to pick your battles.

Q. What are your issues?

A. I have phobias.

Q. Phobias... you mean... like --

A. Actual psychiatric phobias that break me out in a cold sweat and give me nightmares.

Q. Oh wow: what are your phobias?

A. Weird: hearing the sound of a woman's high heels behind me on a sidewalk, night or day that makes me berserk. That'll just send me into convulsions. The other one is being inside a church. I have nightmares about being inside a church and feeling pressure closing in on me from all sides. Claustrophobia kind of stuff where I can't breathe. It's hard for me to go into a church. Especially those gothic, elaborate Mediterranean-looking ones with all the ornate stuff on the inside of them and it's all dark and cool and you see candles burning within? [I'm] scared to death of that, man. That and high heels make me crazy. I'll fight, I'll scream.

Q. What are some of your pet peeves?

A. People who waste your time. I think time-waster people should be dragged in the street and shot dead. The kind of person who invites you over to see their office space because you were looking for one on Craigslist, and tells you their life story, and bores you to death, then says they want your company as a tenant, and asks you for the deposit, and you start to move your stuff in, and then next day they send you an email third-person saying they changed their mind... and then drag out giving your back your deposit for like nine or ten days or something. There's a lot of that in New York. It makes me lethal. People who waste my time. In this business, time is money. Time is everything.

Q. What do you love?

A. Hats. Ridiculous hats of deviant size. I'll spend my last money on a good hat. It has to be braid -- not straw. Huge, decadent, Halston-style 1970s cocaine hats. The kind you wear on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Oh. And flowers. Fresh flowers. I love the colors and scents of fresh flowers the way some women like ice cream. I also adore shoes and purses, and vintage clothing. But yeah, give me a fresh hat and some fresh roses, and a glass of red wine, and I'll fall in love with you.

PART 3 COMING SOON

An interview with Director Heather Ferreira Pt. 1

2011-05-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

Here's notes from an interview I did last night with a friend of mine, Maurecia [Sorry for misspelling it!]. I'm not important enough for this to go in a magazine, but she asked some great questions, and maybe one day it should. This portion is Part 1, and she says there's about 6 parts.

Q. Okay, so you're a black female movie director. Why no movie projects done yet or coming up about what it's like to be black, female and a movie director? Or not one?

A. I never understood "the black female experience". I wasn't a part of that. As a kid, I wasn't raised "black". We were very Kennedy: education, affluence, 'be conscious of class, watch what you say, privacy is number one'. There was a huge emphasis on books and learning. This is not to say your average black kid in the Seventies wasn't into books and learning, but as a northerner black kid transplanted to the rural South in America back then, the average black kids I witnessed there were definitely not into either. You ran a risk of getting beat up if you wore glasses, spoke well, studied, were good at something not involving sports or music in some way. All three of us [her siblings] got bullied as kids, and the bullies were always other black kids, especially girls. Each of these bullies let us know by telling us they had a problem with us specifically being smart and reading books. I'd be told, "You supposed to be smart. Hmph. Spell so and so." Then beat you up. Or, "You talk proper, you trying to sound white. You trying to act white." Then beat you up. I learned not to associate with such people. And such people, to me, were "the black female experience." So, I wouldn't know what "the black female experience" is. I don't care to know. I know what THIS black female's experience is, and those are the films I care about.

Q. What's your favorite film of all time?

A. Brian DePalma's Phantom of The Paradise. Hands down, no question. Not just because it's technically good, which it is -- the silent film sequence at the beginning is by itself reason to see and own this movie -- but because for me, it touches all my favorite subjects: there's a rock music angle, which once having recorded rock music I simply love; there's over-the-top camp and horror, which I also love, being a Seventies kid; plus Paul Williams is in it, and acts very well in it, I might add. So there's stunt casting. I like to cast directors as actors: of course I love stunt casting. Casting Paul Williams was daring. I love Brian DePalma for that. But Brian likes to "go there", and what I mean by that is he makes choices other directors would blush at. He seems fearless, down for anything. I mean look at Redacted. All true, but look what it cost him. Phantom is sheer Seventies fantasy: it's the best 1970's movie ever made for sheer colossal ballsiness. It also clearly inspired George Lucas's idea for Darth Vader, but that's a whole other rant.

Q. What other films influenced you growing up?

A. Star Wars without question. The Omen by Richard Donner was first: I started really noticing motion picture making because of The Omen. Billy Goldenberg's soundtracks first got me hooked as far as movie soundtrack, but it was Jerry Goldsmith in this one who led me to really sitting to watch and notice the images going on [while his music was playing]. The Omen was my favorite movie forever. Then I saw Star Wars and remember seeing Vader walk on the screen, and I remember consciously saying to myself, "I don't know what the business is that makes what I am seeing possible, but that's what I'm going to do with my life, right there." Other films I kind of worshiped were Prophecy by John Frankenheimer, Aliens by James Cameron, and of course Die Hard, the first one, John McTiernan did. I love a lot of McTiernan: Predator, Die Hard, Last Action Hero. McTiernan's the Scorsese of action movies. His work is immaculate and his shot sequences are the best in the film business. I mean Die Hard, those storyboards are like watching a ballet. Just stunning. He beat Kubrick's in that one.

Q. How has the business treated you as a black woman behind the camera?

A. I've encountered more sexism than racism, to tell you the truth. [You] tell people, "I want to shoot an actioner" and some guy with a beard in a baseball cap, who lights sets for a living, chuckles. I'm like, "I'm sorry; do I need a penis to support a C-stand? I had no idea." I wasn't aware to direct an action movie I needed testosterone. That kind of dismissiveness, that nasty exchange of looks. People see I'm young, cute and apple-cheeked and think they can walk all over me. I'm also soft-spoken. I don't yell action, I say it a single time: quietly. I'd like to think that suggests confidence but a lot of people in this business, men particularly, seem to take it as indication I'm a weakling or a target. I had a DP on my last shoot who assumed because I was quiet and patient judging a shot I needed his tutorial on how to direct -- which he recited to me in front of my crew -- and who shouted action ahead of me. Talented kid but he'll never work with me again and I bet he wonders why. There it is. As far as racism... no, just sexism. A black man will get a gig before I do. There are two black male directors I can think of instantly who have no business behind a movie camera. But they'll get the call before I do.

Q. Who are your idols, as far as directors?

A. Alfred Hitchcock. Brian DePalma. Stanley Kubrick. Martin Scorsese.

Q. There's no women on that list..!

A. True, but because I'm tough on women directors as I would be men directors, and I have yet to find a female director with as strong a visual style as the male directors I enjoy. I like a very strong, quite pronounced visual identity in directors. I have one. My last picture, people tell me they can't believe a woman directed -- because the visual expression is so individual and that strong. It's the voice of an auteur. They're not used to that. Women directors on the whole, the ones I see, tend to favor -- I don't know why -- a certain flat, TV commercial-like lighting, a lot of twoshots with people talking to each other, and very cookie-cutter shot composition. I on the other hand shot my last film to look like I socked you in the eye before you got to see it. I wanted a bloody color palette, intense grain, and a very precise Seventies visual atmosphere. I see few female directors that anal and specific. I'll fight a cameraman to get a precise shot the way I put it on the storyboard. I'm strongly visual. I don't see any women directors whose style I can identify from a still. I can look at a still and tell whether it's Scorsese or DePalma. Certainly Kubrick. Few women directors, in fact none, at least to me, seem that unique.

Q. What is your visual style?

A. Ha ha, I have noticed yeah I have one. I like nostalgic lighting. I like a picture to look like it was made anytime before 1979. I loathe the cinematography of most pictures made after that. There are exceptions, I think I named Die Hard. [McTiernan's] directing is unparalleled. His DP on that was Jan De Bont. De Bont's a genius, I'd kill to make him my DP on everything I shoot the rest of my life. But um... let's see, my visual "style", my identity... I like overhead lights passing over dark car surfaces, like in tunnels. I love putting a camera behind the front passenger wheel of a car and getting low angle drive shots that way, I love how those look. I'm big into dollies. I love what a dolly shot communicates, how and why. I don't think I could shoot a picture without a dolly. I love jib shots. Not big majestic boom shots, no, mind you: but small discreet dramatic jibs that come up from midway a character, medium closeup, to their face. I absolutely love those shots. I like stories about the Seventies, the times, the morals there. They seemed an idyllic time and I adore making movies that say, "Oh no they were not." Because it was a dark decade. There was optimism but it was like piped-in music or aromatherapy from the media then, and the Nixon Administration. Out on the streets, and in my parents' home, as I remember, there was deep paranoia: left and right loathed each other, crime was rising, you could see freaks -- live freaks: guys with fuzz, fur and dope -- right on the street, and that bothered a lot of people on the right like my parents. I loved it. I was very into Underground Comics, I was a Freak Brothers fan. Frank Zappa. To me it was an exciting time; but to look back with saudade and say it was all The Brady Bunch -- no way. That's simplistic and deceptive. As a decade it was much much more.

PART 2 COMING SOON

And then Von Trier says something Uncool

2011-05-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

And adds more. And says more. Then adds more and more and more.

Oh well. We'll always have Paris.

This would be the right moment for Leslie Dart to phone call Scorsese and say, "Brief public announcement, bow out."

Von Trier tries something cool: Scorsese fans die

2011-05-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

From The Guardian UK, a story so timely and fun forget this is May, it must be my October birthday:

"Lars von Trier is to return to one of his most famous creations, the film-making documentary The Five Obstructions, but this time with Martin Scorsese in the hotseat.

Von Trier's 2003 film saw him challenging his mentor, fellow Danish film-maker Jørgen Leth, to remake his own short film The Perfect Human five times, with a different caveat in place on each occasion designed to make life difficult for the director to complete his task. These included remaking the film entirely with shots lasting no longer than 12 frames, and shooting it in the "worst location on Earth" (apparently Mumbai's red light district), without revealing that location in the final cut.

Scorsese will be handed a similar challenge, though it's not clear which film he will be asked to remake. The film-makers plan to shoot next year."

Online rumor suggested the film to be re-sizzled and served in the pan is Taxi Driver. Fan reaction to the idea dimmed upon contact. "This is a bad idea," observed one. "No" [with a lot more O's] typed another. Greek choruses of howls, hisses and shrieks filled the amphitheater. The cries still continue, and the outrage may become viral. The announcement of the film from Cannes really is the shot heard round the world.

As for me, I cannot contain my excitement at Martin Scorsese re-shooting one his own prior films in a different key. (What did I just say below about him constantly re-visiting and re-editing his earlier work?) I'll go on the record and predict a) This is unfortunately wishful talk, like the Sinatra biopic we're all waiting for, and whose potential casting is indeed an Oh Noe, and after a few coffees, schedule congestion and Marty's sighting of the next project, the whole irresistible souffle will fall apart against the oven door of reality, or b) If it does somehow stick together against the odds, the film both men choose won't be something to cross one's legs and giggle subversively about. I hope however it's c) They actually do it, and it is.

Von Trier is a champion god-blessed troublemaker, a gutsy genius, the kind of man I'd adore to have as a director son (and any son of mine had better very well become a director, or die); trust it to be him to pull Scorsese aside from his comfortable VIP booth and champagne at Cannes and hit him with a genuine challenge. I'd certainly see this film. I'd watch it with the fist of an angry god.

If it is Taxi Driver, I can think of no obstructions. But if it turns out instead to be Mean Streets, which'd be a lot more fun, here's some hurdles and subversion:

1. Make the entire cast older, which will make Johnny Boy's contempt for taking responsibility chronic and far more pathological;

2. Appoint Keitel to play Johnny Boy and cast DeNiro as Charlie Cappa; that would slap my head spinning round and hook my attention right there;

3. For God's sake get that boring woman-and-relationship angle out of this movie at last so it can breathe; make Teresa a gay man, Charlie's lover, have Scorsese portray him; and while you're at it, erase the epilepsy;

4. Make the long-hair scene in the bathroom what it clearly originally was: a gay encounter gone suddenly wrong, consistent with all Scorsese's other historic holiday-gone-wrong etudes; and

5. Suppose Jimmy Shorts is interrupted shooting at Johnny Boy by Charlie Cappa, armed with a gun we didn't know about, shooting right back? Just where would that scene lead?

Mean Streets is Scorsese's best film bar none and cannot be improved upon. However, it can be perverted. Taking an existing film down a different alley is like taking another way home; your entire night, and even your life, can completely change as result. A lot of my screenplays are about exactly that: how one minor decision, made differently, by a character, can alter the fates of every person in a film. What would have happened if, as one fan asked, the Passenger Watching Silhouette had been black making deranged racial comments about a white gentleman making love to his wife? For that matter, if Travis Bickle had been black? The thing is, we'll never know -- but Lars Von Trier is asking filmmakers to help us know. It's movies as jazz: directing as bebop. Basically, it's a Von Trier/Scorsese mashup. For that, I simply love this guy. It's a directorial jam session: who knows where this could lead?

I don't care how it turns out. I shrug at what film it is. I admire both men for daring this. It makes filmmaking fun; it's the most exuberant, what-the-hell-let's-do-it in ages. I smell fresh air stirring round the studios at last. Imagination just murmured, Wow, I can breathe.

"I just don't see a point to this," remarks one Scorsese Fan on a site. Well, let me help you with that.

Whatever it turns out as, it just might be art.

The "Brian DePalma Shot"

2011-05-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

What is The DePalma Shot? To me, describing it's a little bit like major key might sound in the words of a person who doesn't know theory: you don't know how to describe it, but you know what it is when it's playing. Major key sounds happy, and minor key angry or sad, and that's the limit of what some people know. For me, Brian DePalma's work is kind of a minor seventh: pleasurable stuff but not without a certain tension, like something's about to happen and you had better watch carefully. Notably there is no such thing I can identify as a Scorsese shot (Just what is that?), but you bet your bippy I believe there's a DePalma one, my ex has spent most of his questionable career ripping it off, and here are a few examples of what it looks like:

I couldn't tell you what it is if you had a gun to my head (which, as I imagine that situation, I notice is composed as a DePalma shot). My closest guess would be Brian likes closeups, he likes hands, he can get more dramatic tension out of a single human hand occupying a frame alone than most of his peers can wrench from an entire feature, he likes slight dutch angles, he likes bright, broad and almost theatre-stage melodramatic lighting. Well, and good.

But what about these things, together or not, make something "a Brian DePalma Shot"?

I wish I could tell you in words. All I know is I love it. It's stuff like his, Scorsese's and Fellini's that make me wish I were Italian.

Plus, Brian DePalma lives with his eyes open, he's not afraid to open his mouth, and his politics are courageous and spot on. There's quite a lovely blog about him here.

Scorsese in his youth

2011-05-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

Portrait of the artist as a young man. Several photographs of director Martin Scorsese through different points of his life and career. Note the one up above of him as a toddler (!) in Native American gear! All photos copyright their respective owners. Anyone who has photos of young Alfred Hitchcock or Brian DePalma, please contact me!

And yes: this is him.

Can Scorsese Act?

2011-05-13T10:36:00.001-07:00

And now on to the most pressing question of our age. Martin Scorsese is well-renowned as possibly the greatest motion picture director currently alive and walking the earth. The American Film Institute adores him; several members have deemed him second-greatest director in history, behind only my favorite, Alfred Hitchcock, who remains firmly and deservedly enthroned at number one. If you came to this blog by Googling Scorsese's name, it's likely you know who he is and agree with the AFI assessment. There is no arguing Marty's grasp of the craft: he literally ecstatically lives and breathes the art of film, and superb motion pictures seem to sprout in his remember-now,-he-was-almost-a-priest wake like damp, lush red roses in a Tuscan labyrinth.

However: ... can he act?

In a clear case of he inherits it from his mama, Marty Scorsese's got the acting bug. And for a director, he's got it bad. His onscreen appearances number only behind those of Hitchcock, who had a particular and mischievous fondness for skulking onto set and in front of cameras. But where The Master poked fun with his appearances, The Heir Apparent is dead serious; Alfred Hitchcock loathed seeing his generous frame on the screen and limited himself to often comic cameos... Scorsese entered the film business as an aspiring actor, taking acting classes here at New York University, and has been enamored seeing his sharp profile, magnificent black caterpillar eyebrows and compact, ethereal frame on celluloid ever since.

What's worth a closer look is that while most of us can spot a director cameo pretty much instantly -- "That's the director," I've heard audience members whisper in darkened movie theaters, and cringed, wondering My God, is it that obvious? (And perhaps it is: sometimes I think a visible self-consciousness on many screens gives it away.) -- Scorsese as an actor is so subtle, so skilled, it takes a second look to be sure what we're seeing is really him.

I can't count the times I've had to correct a person, "No, I promise you, that was Scorsese," and the other gasps, "What?" -- And then goes, "Wait a minute, roll that back, let me see that again." The viewer then crouches, rapt, staring at the little screen without speaking or, at times, even breathing. When the clip ends, he or she then sits back, eyebrows raised, with a droll smile and an impressed expression; and the verdict is always, "... Damn, he can act."

But can he?

The first film clip submitted for your approval is probably the most (in)famous: Martin Scorsese starring himself as Passenger Watching Silhouette in Taxi Driver, which he directed.

Chilling to the last, here our auteur-turned-actor presents his on-screen co-star Robert DeNiro such a disturbing, authentic portrait of a misogynist, plainly dangerous Midtown Manhattan type who climbs into Travis Bickle's soiled cab, you can actually observe DeNiro lose his compass in front of it. He forgets he is acting and becomes visibly absorbed by Scorsese's acting, fascinated by it. Watch his eyes and his energy. Directors reading this will recognize the moment where DeNiro temporarily gets distracted and begins pointing his attention behind him upon Scorsese instead of his role. See if you can spot it.

Two urban legends persist about this segment: one, that the sole reason Martin Scorsese opted to play the role of the Passenger (one rather oddly closely suited to him and his then psychology, as he admits later in a Playboy Interview) was that the actor booked to do so instead failed to show up for call time and Marty was rolling against the clock. The other is that DeNiro himself directed Scorsese in the scene; instructing Scorsese that he would not lower the cab flag until Marty made him do it, he provoked Scorsese into portraying the role full-throttle, which resulted in that dark, epic performance, arguably the finest in the film. I disbelieve both theories. For one, missing actors are simply too easy to replace in New York City. Instantly. An assistant's 30-second phone call to any casting agent in the city would have solved the missing actor problem toute de suite. Plus Marion Dougherty was his casting director. Please.

My vote is he wanted the role on contact the second he saw it in Paul Schrader's screenplay. Additionally, this was a SAG film and a studio (Warner) picture. Way too easy to recast. Too, why has this mysterious Pete Best of actors never surfaced with his side of the story?

Second, judging by his energy seated in front of Scorsese, watching him, DeNiro did not direct anything in the segment. He's far too absorbed watching Marty's energy to keep total control of even his own, much less focus any energy upon directing, which takes some. Less a director does he look in the scene than actor playing opposite what he is witnessing, and so subtly awestruck his attention drifts out of character and to Scorsese's in a way the cameras could actually see.

In the above scene, Marty is miles ahead from his freshman and sophomore turns on-screen, as a troublemaker in Who's That Knocking At My Door? and goonily grinning, heartless assassin Jimmy Shorts (below) in Mean Streets.

Seated behind Robert DeNiro as the one nut in New York more dangerous than Travis Bickle, he shows poise and maturity many experienced actors might envy. He's confident and in the driver's seat; and when he bellows to DeNiro to put the fucking flag down, DeNiro does it. His acting makes very clear: death will ensue if Bickle doesn't.

The next segment I consider technically weaker. In the clip below, Scorsese does another acting turn, this time for veteran directing legend Akira Kurosawa, and as Vincent Van Gogh at brush and easel in the fields of Provence in the "Crows" segment, feature film Dreams.

So what's wrong? I'm likely nit-picking, but having directed people on film myself, if Scorsese turned in this kind of performance for me, I'd politely have "notes". And I'd make him do it again, take after take, until two things were corrected:

One -- and this is a persistent weakness of Martin Scorsese's -- when acting, he fails to modulate his speaking voice to fit the character. Every man he plays, whether Van Gogh, or Geritol exec Martin Rittenour in Quiz Show (which rent and see), or the garrulous agent Goodley in the brilliant, acutely-rendered Round Midnight, shares Scorsese's exact verbal intonation: which is far too specific, too recognizable, and too precise. Van Gogh begins in a dreamy, breathless tone absent of accent and geography -- which was a bullseye, and one I wish Marty had continued in -- but either because he was too wrapped up in self-consciousness, due to working with one of his idols, Kurosawa, or owing to Kurosawa exhibiting (dare I say it?) directorial weakness due to working with one of his idols, Martin Scorsese, soon after he chasses delicately out in the open giving the artist such elegant voicing... back he goes quickly into rapid-fire post-caffeine modern 20th century Martin Scorsese. I would have called cut and made him retake the scene.

Secondly, his hand motions and squints towards the horizon are textbook moves. Far too untrained and obvious; this is Scorsese playing himself playing an actor playing Van Gogh. I would have asked him to please restrict his hand to the brushes and palette, and motion out to the horizon with his attention and energy, not his physical body. There is a fine moment where he faces his young Japanese art student visitor, and their eyes meet. Unfortunately, the apprentice, played I believe by Akita Terao, is palpably so awestruck standing in the presence of Scorsese he becomes ungenerous with his attention, and Marty has no energetic canvas against which to structure the emotion behind that stare. The scene quickly puddles and their briefly-connected energy dissipates. I'll say it here: anyone who wants to put Martin Scorsese to work as an actor should dispense with all "awe" reserved towards him. This is destructive to the final results, and gives Marty nothing to work with as an actor; therefore if you love him so much, why even cast him? If you do love him, discard the worship and direct the man.

This performance, therefore, shows a few technical weaknesses. But do not all actors, good and bad, have them?

Next, let's look what happens when a director who fears and worships Scorsese less, Robert Redford, handles the helm eliciting a performance from him as Geritol executive Martin Rittenour.

My first commentary here is applause for Redford's lighting choices. He, along with Anthony Minghella (dec.), is one of few modern directors who can light a film the way film used to be lit: you would almost swear he flashed the negative. The movie looks as though it were shot on Ektachrome; and having shot Ektachrome, I will share that that's hard to do.

But my second notes are that Scorsese here begins status quo, with that rat-a-tat-tat, bangbang delivery he's known for... but then cools it down dramatically, and very nicely. Perhaps Redford pressed him, because here Scorsese tones it down: when he looks across to Dick Goodwin, then dismisses his yes-men in the scene, for a rare moment you get a chimerical, impossibly sweet taste of his character talking. "Would you excuse us...? For a moment please?" asks a disturbed, threatened Martin Rittenour -- not a Heh Heh I'm On Camera Martin Scorsese. Marty is even using a lower key than his own voice! And at normal speaking velocity.

It's character. It's heavenly.

But as soon as he says, "Young man," it's back again: you feel less you are in a Fifties boardroom at NBC talking to the head of a pharmaceutical corporation and more a backroom at modern-day Sikelia about to have your pitch passed on.

Someone must direct Scorsese to stop sounding like himself.

It's all his modulation. Next, energy. When I watch you acting, I don't want to see the actor in front of me. I want the character. Redford could have said cut and brought this to a stop. Was he intimidated? I would have stopped scene, leaned down into Marty's left ear, and quietly said, out of earshot of cast and crew, "I need you to talk slower. Imagine a record. Your voice is at 45. I want it at 33. Try it again." Then I'd start tweaking his energy; "You're a pill exec. It's the Fifties. This kid is an upstart. Who does he think he is? Patronize him more. See if you can get away with insulting him. You hire kids like this for your mailroom. Get him again. Good, Marty. Now zap him again. Good, he winced. Hit him again."

I'll skip deeper analysis of the Rittenour and some of Scorsese's other performances until later, in order to finally showcase here online what's been for many of us a very difficult segment to locate, Scorsese's acting performance as Communist feature director Joe Lesser in Irwin Winkler's at times bland but mostly effective Guilty By Suspicion. Here Scorsese and DeNiro are together on-screen again; and once again, you will see DeNiro struggle to keep focused his attention while watching his frequent director and good friend literally tear the scenery to shreds in what I personally consider to be the finest acting performance of Martin Scorsese's career.

As Lesser, yes, Marty is in familiar territory: he is playing a Hollywood director, "how much of a stretch is that?" Yes, fans. But he tries hard not to portray himself, and this deserves merit. Joe Lesser does have that familiar clipped, overcaffeinated cadence, but Scorsese takes detectable pains this occasion to reign it in; was this Irwin Winkler, that rare other director in town willing to tell him cut if it's necessary, knowing better and keeping the pressure on him? Irwin Winkler's too busy to say, but my suspicion is no; instead I believe Scorsese himself, that perfectionist always re-editing and re-polishing already made films in his mind, also probably revisits and micromanages his performances. The director's typical self-consciousness on-screen is here torqued into a tool. I think it's Scorsese, having sat and watched Scorsese, and having cringed at Scorsese, and having told himself, "Never again."

Lesser is a film director, and one who obviously likes fine clothes, like Scorsese does; but there the parallels end, and we get to witness the counterfeit confidence of an artist secretly terrified inside at the events and whispers forcing him to abandon a mid-edit film, and leave the country. He shrugs it off affably to Robert DeNiro and Allen Rich, informing them, "This (America) isn't my country," and relegates final cut of a feature film he has directed instead to DeNiro, who is clearly playing a kind of fictional "Joe Mankiewicz de la West Coast", minimizing his panic at this necessity to the playful warning "as long as he doesn't mess it up."

No director alive is going to just walk off his or her own feature, hand away final cut and their DGA credit, and move entire household to London forever "in five hours" without needing a good hard drink not just before and during but afterward. As a veteran director Scorsese the actor would know this; and in spite of any friendship with Irwin Winkler, he would likely have called Winkler on it had Winkler himself not known. Winkler is a director and also knew. Yet Lesser is shown smug and exhibiting a superb effort not to show it. "I'm a Communist," he admits to colleagues in the edit room. "I was a Communist then and I'm a Communist now." His editors cut nervous sidelong glances, state flatly neither one of them is hearing this, and quickly exit. This is a topsy-turvy edit session in a nightmare Hollywood, yet Joe Lesser seems more concerned where his cup of coffee is when he walks into it. But it's deceptive.

Look closer, and you can feel Joe Lesser's palpable terror flickering at the edge of all that expensive dark wool, black silk and congeniality. Lesser is scared to death and facing personal annihilation; Martin Scorsese's portrayal of that compressed but livid terror -- ensubtled, so repressed you know a self-inflicted gunshot is on the way within days of his touching down at Heathrow -- is understated, delirious, and fine as a French dusting powder. Therefore:

Can Martin Scorsese act? That's a fair question. My personal assessment is,

With a weak director, no.

Under a strong director, yes and extremely well.

But after having put together this article and watched his acting again, my real question is not whether Marty can act, but when he plans to do it again.

Because my opinion is, he should.

"Cintage"?

2011-05-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Cintage: (SIN-tij) n., the art of producing and directing movies in the 21st century that sound, look and feel credibly as though they were made during the years 1940-1979.

In fact, that's a good new name for my studio.

The Golden Needle: script finished

2011-05-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

And I thought you were going to be The Gunnist. :)

Never predict what your baby is going to look like. Don't even choose blue or pink for the nursery. Because as any filmmaker knows, that kid is going to pop out and surprise you.

The Gunnist was an idea for a screenplay about a veteran hit man teaching his apprentice. Try as I might, that script would not form. I struggled, it punched and slapped me, we rolled around the floor and we had our time wasted. Eventually, finally, we retreated to our respective corners of the ring and slopped rinse around our bleeding mouths.

Then out pops The Golden Needle.

THE GOLDEN NEEDLE (U.S., 2012, Thriller)

Set in New York City, 1955, The Golden Needle is the story of an autistic ballet fan in his fifties who becomes enamored of a mysterious and beautiful French-American prima ballerina who conceals a desperate secret. Directed by Heather Ferreira, the film garnered strong comparisons to the mid-career works of Alfred Hitchcock, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx, who played autistic savant Murray Peisner, won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

(Well, a girl can dream, can't she?)

This screenplay is complete. I'm happy with it.

In The Manner of Hitchcock

2011-05-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

When I decide to write a screenplay (or, I should probably say, when a movie comes along and decides it would like to be written by me), the way it often happens is I look around and find myself really wanting to go see a great film at the theater, but nothing's out on screens I care to see. This past week was a good example: I couldn't see myself paying $15 to see Tyler Perry's latest, or to watch colorful bouncing pixels attempt to convince me that I am looking at a parrot and laughing at Rio. Where are the really good movies nowadays?

When I get this way, with a strong "wanna see a movie but nothing's out there" jones, to soothe it, I nearly always sit down and write the type of picture I want to see. In this case it was something along the lines of Hitchcock.

I'd love to see movies return to the way they looked and sounded during the age of Hitchcock. This is because I want Hollywood to return to its golden age of storytelling. I also want us to return to the Joe Breen Era days of the Hays Code. Joe Breen was the guy in charge of the PCA during the Fifties. A brief summary of him could be presented as, "Made a lot of writers mad." But damned -- oops, darned -- if the guy didn't make Hollywood movies interesting. Interesting in that we discovered not being freely able to Say Or Show That Thing made tracking down sneaky methods to Say or Show That Thing Anyway Behind His Back one heck of a duck hunt. Breen arguably is behind why Fifties movies are so sexy. This isn't to say the Hays Code was a good thing to do, or that we should retrograde back to the days where we can't say anything or show anything without a board of censors breathing down our backs. What I do hope I'm saying is I've learned you can say and show a lot more when there are fine cords subtly restricting that expression. Case in point my latest screenplay, The Golden Needle.

I'll cover The Golden Needle in more detail upstairs, but my initial observations of this screenplay are that I think I did accurately capture the pace and atmosphere of its setting, New York City in 1955, and that I also captured accurately the feel, restraint and decorum of Fifties Hollywood moviemaking. There were scenes where I wanted to say something and realized the films of the 1950s did not permit saying it the way that at first felt most natural to me. I had to tone language down dramatically. I had to back depictions of violence off firmly. Most fascinatingly, sex had to be pushed far back, to the realms of implication and innuendo.

This made several scenes surprisingly scorching hot, which I find amusing!

Overall the script was taut, suspenseful, and good at touching all the nerves we're used to feeling quiver when watching a Hitchcock film. There was an ambiguous, icy-cold lead actress goddess, untouchable and unstable. There was a secondary actress bringing further danger into it. The male lead was flawed, endangered, and resolutely heroic to the point of self-destruction. Police officers were suitably bigoted and frightening (Hitchcock had a childhood loathing of policemen, better detailed on this fine blog). A classical symphony was central to the plot, and a pivotal scene depended for its suspense entirely on the musical structure of the symphony in question. Soviet spies, Cuban mischief, and an exotic village far on the outskirts of Mexico tempted and thrilled. Most pleasingly, there was a MacGuffin. I've watched a great many Hitchcock films and enjoy them all -- even the flawed, delicious Vertigo. Challenging myself to write a script to a film in the style of Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most fun and exciting things I can think of to do. I recommend it to all screenwriters and to any director. It's fun to see how close you can get.

But back on the Hays Code restriction, placing myself on a Joe Breen diet was illuminating and rewarding for me as a writer and a director. When you can't say "fuck", and you can't show fucking, and you can't depict a bunch of thugs fucking your character up, you get forced into very interesting maze paths of imagination. Some of those really charged me.

In one scene in The Golden Needle, the lead character, an autistic man named Murray Peisner, unwraps his coat to see he has accidentally confiscated the mink stole of the woman he adores, glamorous ballerina Antoinette Chenault, from her penthouse. Enamored of her, but unable to fully articulate it, he subsumes his whole face in the rich glistening black fur of the mink, and he inhales deeply. When he lifts up his face, it is flushed and perspirous.

I clicked "save" on that and chuckled, and immediately printed it as a .pdf to proofread and read back. It has become one of the most explicit depictions of sex, and of oral sex in particular, I think I have ever written for a screenplay.

My point is, if this were a film set in modern times, with no Hays Code restrictions, and Murray and Antoinette could be shown romping gleefully naked into bed and humping each other madly, the naughty subtlety of the mink scene would have been lost!

Later on in the movie, Murray observes Antoinette's hair when she is standing before him in her dance studio. It is damp and he notices it. But what he does is confess what he did to her mink stole, describing in simplest terms what he did, and adding, "It was soft... nice... I liked it." A brief moment later, gazing at her hair -- and seeing its similarity to the black fur of the mink (and making a clear sexual parallel) -- he says aloud, "Your hair is black." Antoinette nervously nods, "Yes, it is," and exits the building post-haste.

The scene is intended to illustrate that autistic people have sexual desires as much as "normal" folk do, and that Murray's desire for Antoinette is growing, powerful and specific. After burying his face in her mink in a visual shibboleth of performing cunnilingus (or what the French call "faire minette") upon this woman he worships and adores, he notices the hair on her head and the fur of that mink are the same color. It is almost a simple algebraic formula: captivated by the radiant sparkling black hair upon her scalp, he is imagining the rich sparkling damp black hair someplace else.

Who says Hays Code movies can't be sexy?

And Alfred Hitchcock's movies were riotous with implied sex and heated sexuality. This essay by one wonderful blogger I've mentioned before covers the subject better than I ever could. The Master had quite a droll eye for both the sexy and the hilarious, and any good Hitchcock film often has generous doses of both. Just the same, any modern movie that purports to be written in the manner of Hitchcock had better have equal spoonfuls of both and served just as well.

Anyway, this was one of those weekends where I longed to be in a vast dark movie theater, with Coke and popcorn, being swept away by a Saul Bass intro, click-clacking Bernard Hermann music, and Kim Novak or Tippy Hedren making me nervous with their glacial paranoia and sultry dislikability. And a good MacGuffin or two.

Since modern movie-going is loud and arguably crass, and affords me no such pleasures, like any cinematic onanist I had to please myself. I did so, I think, with the creepy Carnegie Hall nuance of The Golden Needle -- the first feature film I have ever written a lead role for George Clooney for. If luck holds out, the modern Cary Grant will play me a Soviet toxicologist for whom time is running out... and I'll find a splendid Murray Peisner and Antoinette Chenault whose unlikely romance and startlingly sexy shared chemistry will dampen a few feminine movie seats and cross a few nervous masculine legs in defiance of my hopefully, briefly revived Hays Code.

Bringing back Hitchcock? Well, someone's got to do it!

And sadly, that director appears demoralizingly not to be M. Night Shyamalan.

Little Portugal

2011-05-04T07:04:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I took the train out to Jersey to check out Newark and its famed Little Portugal neighborhoods. I had never been there. I admit being Portuguese-American in New York can make you feel a bit orphaned, something I've addressed on film and in numerous screenplays; there aren't many "out and declared" Lusos in New York, and going to Long Island City to visit Little Brazil just makes you mad: for God's sake, they're The Colony and they're better at establishing neighborhoods than we are! (And then there's those annoying bossas, everything in sixth chords, even at funerals, and people pronouncing Ds as Js, but that's a comic rant for another time. Ahh, Brasilieros...) Lots of Portuguese friends have encouraged me to see Little Portugal, but I was prepared for disappointment. I'm glad that expectation itself was disappointed.

It does something for your heart to see market and neighborhood signs in your own language. No anthropologist can tell me what that feeling is. I'm not sure there's a name for it. All I know is, for a few brief moments, strolling around Elm, Ferry, LaFayette and Market, I felt a surge of joy in my heart and I felt like I belonged and existed. My back wasn't to the wall anymore as "the one individual in the room with the weird name nobody can spell and whose food no one here has ever eaten". A towering seawave of Spanish was knocked flat by a single street sign that spells Rodrigues the way you see it in this sentence -- with an S. (No offense, Spanish-speaking friends; it's just your language insists there is only one way to spell Gomes, Fernandes and Rodrigues, and I and other Portuguese beg permission to differ!)

In the shops, the olive oils were all Portuguese brands. The sardines were offered with tomato sauce. That's how grandmother always cooked and presented fish. Sweet foods were spelled doces, not "dulces", for once. Red ceramic roosters I hadn't seen since my grandmother's dining room table during childhood were all over shopfront window displays. Pale blue tiles unseen since my mother's first house, and busted up broken in the basement of her last one, gazed softly, adorned with saints, from house-fronts. Portuguese flags beamed proudly from literally every street-facing window in those traditional Christmas-and-Futbol colors.

I found myself speaking my native tongue again instead of English -- instinctively. Walking by animated street-corner conversations, I understood exactly what was being said, down to the nuance -- though this is the result of second-hand study. My grandmother and mother were not taught Portuguese. Upon learning seven years ago from two wonderfully nosy aunts' research for a family reunion, that Portugal was our heritage, I committed myself to studying Portuguese.

It made my chest puff up with pride walking the sidewalks of Little Portugal. My fondest two moments were stopping by the Fatima church to curtsy in front of Mother Mary's statue, and strolling past the Sports Club. What manner of man talk goes on in that great building, I wonder? And in Portuguese -- every word of it! What mischief gets planned, what empires get imagined? I bought a tart orange soda pop at Ritz, which has been there since the Seventies (and delightfully still looks it; going in there's like stepping through a time machine back into 1971), spying on passing conversations and smirking happily at all the Cunhas, Reises and Gonsaleses names on all the tidy, well-kept, virtually bank vault-silent houses lined in neat little rows along the backstreets. I kept my thoughts to myself and smiled inwardly at the new script ideas growing in me like daisies. Most of all I kept my mouth shut, knew my place, and went about my business working very hard not to be seen or noticed.

And as any Portuguese reading this blog essay knows... that's so Portuguese.

Disco Noir

2011-05-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Disco Noir: [ dis-koh nwar] noun, adjective - film genre invented and popularized by American director Heather Ferreira; bleak, often raw, post-millennial cinema treating "the dark side of the Seventies", frequently depicting the lives and violent deaths of pornographers, discotheque owners, prostitutes, television variety show stars and producers, and criminals during the years 1970-1979 in large American urban centers such as Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles. Pivotal films of the genre: Naked City, The Gunnist, The Righteous & The Wicked.

A few years from now I hope to be able to read a definition like that in a big thick film studies book at Barnes and Noble.

Mission Accomplished For Real, Suckaz

2011-05-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Gunnist moves to script phase

2011-04-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Gunnist is back on track with new casting and a fresh new storyline. (Won't discuss here, because when writers talk, script dissolves.) All I can say is there is nothing like a very good new actor to rejuvenate you. I've found that in one hell of a Canadian: he's powerful, he's dangerous, and he is the next Robert DeNiro. One look at his reel and wow. You'll learn who he is soon...

Me at Staten Island

2011-04-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Heather Ferreira at a friend's place on Staten Island, after some very good Italian down the street.

Farewell Mr. Lumet

2011-04-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sidney Lumet passed today at 86. Unbelievable director behind Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, and a lot of other films I loved. Network alone assures him a spotlighted chair above. Farewell, auteur Lumet, farewell.

Well, that's the end of a good day right there. The rest of this weekend will now suck voraciously.

Portugal: The Dead Canary

2011-04-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

As a Portuguese-American, I look on with sadness at the collapse of Portugal into the debtor mire in which Ireland and Greece sink desperately waving their arms. I also look to my own country and kind of do a Fokkers DeNiro point at my eyes then at America: "I'm watching you." Europe and North America appear to be in considerable economic danger, and saying so seems both an example of "Johnny Speak Lately" and an understatement.

What disturbs me more is 20th century history clearly shows what happens when European economies are nearing collapse, their men cannot find work, and their children go hungry. Often a world war is declared. If we give in and declare one this time, with the weapons we have now, it's hardly hyperbole to predict we're finished.

Conovy star wins recurring role on Boardwalk Empire

2011-03-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

Devin Harjes, who played Xandy Barbeau in Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy, phoned me yesterday with great news - he's won the role of Jack Dempsey in HBO's series Boardwalk Empire! Huge congratulations to Devin!

Naked City - screenplay ready

2011-03-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

Naked City is complete. The second draft hauls in at 2 hours 15 minutes and I'm not cutting a thing until the editing room once it's shot - that's really the only way to know. The characters are vibrant and unedited, the dialogue is unapologetic, and the situations are real. I do feel this script will make a powerful film. But there is no way any studio is going to back this picture. I look forward to strictly independent backing for this one, with a little distributor who believes in it, and some good critical reviews and word of mouth until it snowballs into a filmstorm.

This is my Mean Streets, and I am the Portuguese Scorsese. This is the screenplay that leaves no doubt.

Naked City: Production stills from Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy

2011-03-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

It's official: I've started writing the feature version of Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy, and it's well underway, proceeding nicely. The working title of the film is Naked City (a title so good I am sure it has been used before in some other film), and it is a prequel to events seen in Surprise Surprise. If it all comes together the way I hope, production on Naked City will start before Gangsterland and then I can direct Saturday Night using Gangsterland's cast. I'd like to bring Devin and Fernando in on that film.

Production photography from the shoot of Conovy is ready; Amanda's provided some gorgeous behind-the-scenes pics for all to see. In the following photos you'll glimpse moments from the production of this now completed film and see cast and crew on one of the best little shoots of my life.

I love this first picture most: it's my actors Fernando Gamarra (l.) and Devin Harjes (r.) after completing the dolly shot fight sequence for Scene 20. It really is a great photograph, and Fernando eerily reminds me of a young Dustin Hoffman. I admit it -- I love the cinematography and photography of the 1970s, and this photo, it cannot be denied, has a certain iconic "Seventies-ness". That feel absolutely authenticated my entire picture. Thanks, gentlemen, for a fantastic shoot -- and here's to Naked City!

Capturing the scene

2011-03-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

Between takes on Conovy

2011-03-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Fernando Gamarra and Heather Ferreira

2011-03-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

The shooting of Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy

2011-03-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

On location: actors Fernando Gamarra (hit man Reuben Sebastao Conovy) and Devin Harjes (amateur pornographer Xandy Barbeau), right, prepare for scene 20 together. Center frame, David Ladd prepares his dolly move while DP Ryan De Franco sizes up his landmark shot. Director Heather Ferreira and sound recordist Filipe Chagas can be seen at left. Trivia: both Ferreira and Chagas are Portuguese, and Gamarra's assassin character, Conovy, is Portuguese. Filipe being a Portuguese citizen was an unexpected surprise, and he and Ferreira often joked with each other in Portuguese on set.

Actor Fernando Gamarra concluding a scene

2011-03-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

The hit man and the pornographer

2011-03-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

The visceral end of dolly shot Scene 20

2011-03-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

Heather Ferreira directing actors Fernando Gamarra and Devin Harjes in a scene from Conovy

2011-03-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Sound recordist Filipe Chagas shows Executive Producer David Ladd how to position boom

2011-03-21T09:27:00.001-07:00

Ferreira daubs blood off actor Devin Harjes

2011-03-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

Ferreira fixing a prop

2011-03-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

Ferreira on set

2011-03-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Cinematographer Ryan De Franco

2011-03-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

De Franco with Ferreira, shooting a scene

2011-03-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

De Franco on the floor capturing Xandy's kick POVs

2011-03-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

Sound recordist Filipe Chagas poses for a shot

2011-03-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

Filipe Chagas recording ambiance

2011-03-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Chagas recording a scene

2011-03-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Ferreira and De Franco check shot

2011-03-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

DP Ryan De Franco captures The Punishment Scene

2011-03-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Notes during rehearsal

2011-03-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

Conovy prepares to punish Xandy for his own guilt

2011-03-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

Surprise Surprise Mr. Conovy director Heather Ferreira admires FX blood on her hand

2011-03-21T09:13:00.001-07:00

DP De Franco's ominous shot composition of the gun scene

2011-03-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

Executive Producer David Ladd observes a take

2011-03-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ferreira directing the rhythm of the fight scene, Pt 1

2011-03-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

Ferreira directing the rhythm of the fight scene, pt. 2

2011-03-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

Executive Producer Amanda Bleakney marks slate before a scene

2011-03-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

Director Heather Ferreira adds more FX blood to actor Devin Harjes as actor Fernando Gamarra looks on

2011-03-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

Actor Fernando Gamarra centers himself before a take

2011-03-21T09:05:00.001-07:00

Fight scene from Conovy

2011-03-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ferreira's storyboards used in the film

2011-03-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

Production stills from Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy

2011-03-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

Executive Producer Amanda Bleakney, my classmate at NYU, did slate and took fabulous pictures of the entire production of Conovy. We met up and she's provided me the photography. Above are numerous moments from the production of the film. I desaturated and raised the contrast of them using Photoshop, two effects I like for the "timeless" quality they lend an image. They make the stills look as though we might have made this film in 1973 or something! The first photo, however, and a few selected ones, I'll post in original color. Thank you so much, Amanda, for taking such great stills!

What would have been $300 in 1960

2011-03-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

Now here's a priceless tool for moviemakers and screenwriters everywhere: ever need to know how much a hot dog was in 1959 or what the cost of a car today would have gotten you in 1943? Need your characters to make sense when they discuss (as in my script's case) how much they, as Portuguese Mafia, need to blackmail an Azorean earthquake refugee out of to let him stay in Fall River in the winter of 1960? Look no further: The American Institute for Economic Research, or AIER, which "conducts independent, scientific, economic research to educate individuals", offers a free online Cost Of Living Calculator that not only will tell you what $5 in 1950 would be now, it also works the other way around. Which is fabulous. Visit AIER by clicking here. And for those who are interested, the answer to the question is 40 dollars and 33 cents.

Yo Screenwriter, I'mma let you finish, but Director and Producer have one of the best movie-interrupting suggestions of all time

2011-03-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've encountered blockage in my screenwriting since directing Conovy. I want to write a feature version of the film but keep finding myself banging my head into a wall, unable to get past page one in a way that I like. This is unusual for me: I'm the type who can usually blast straight past writer's block by hearing the right tune and drinking an ice cold Heineken. But not this time. It's as though having directed a film has officially terminated my previous identity as a screenwriter. The cops are at the door, it's 3 am, and they're holding their caps in their hands: "Ma'am... we have terrible news."

Specifically, the problem seems to be that the minute the writer in me starts typing a scene, the producer in me walks in the room, judges the locations or time period, and interrupts, saying, "That's expensive", or the director walks in, looks at the scene, and says, "That'll be tough to shoot..." Which leaves the screenwriter cutting his eyes murderously across at them both kind of the way Paul Schrader would.

The solution is obvious, of course: kick the producer and director out the room so the damn screenwriter can do his job.

That, or a six pack of something. Or taking it DePalma.

Billy Goldenberg is still composing

2011-03-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

The inestimable Billy Goldenberg, who unwittingly provided the score to my film Surprise, Surprise, Mr. Conovy, has a long and admirable history in Hollywood: drawn there from New York by the vibrant experimental cinema of the 1970s (an era I too admire), he worked tirelessly providing the soundtracks to so many films I loved growing up, his filmography is very nearly a "Heather's Best" list that would tell you a lot about me: he composed the scores to Duel, Lizzie Borden, and Helter Skelter, first of all -- three specific movies that as a little girl I was not allowed to watch, so I remember those nights and those films a little more vividly. While my parents watched the images of those movies, I lay curled in bed in total darkness across the hall and listened closely to the music -- thus that music made a deeper impression upon me!

I remember the queasy wails of malleted percussion in Duel punctuated by that 18-wheeler horn, signaling Dennis Weaver was not rid of that demon trucker yet, and that that scary movie was still not over. Duel's soundtrack scared me to death; because I could not see what was going on (but knew what the plot was), I lay awake imagining in my head this dreadful black rig thundering down the freeway chasing a vulnerable man to depths of hell. Every sighting of a freight truck afterward in the Seventies both terrified and thrilled me and my older brother -- who got to stay up and watch.

Lizzie Borden, in my young mind growing up, had a soundtrack only infinitesimally less fear-inducing than The Omen's (rendered by Mr. Goldenberg's scare-scoring twin in many ways, the late Jerry Goldsmith). This was yet another film I was prohibited by age from seeing as a child, but being a keen reader, I knew the story: a (possibly) crazed woman butchers her family (you know the rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an axe / gave her husband 30 whacks / and when she saw what she had done / gave her children 31"), essentially becoming the first known female serial killer of the Victorian Era. Goldenberg wound together an eerie, spinetingling potboiler of a score -- and to this day, 35 years later, I still remember all those chilling female voices together chanting "[indistinct] Liz-zieeee Bor-dennnnnnn..."

I sang this to Mr. Goldenberg on the phone last night, and he chuckled.

I remember Helter Skelter more viscerally than sonically: and I remember being scared to death by it. Lying in bed, I heard swirling strings and human screams and imagined the worst. I find it interesting all three of these films were veiled visually from me as a child. I believe nothing is coincidence and that providence may have made my parents prevent me from seeing them because I was to instead listen to them -- and let their sonic identity sink deep in my very psyche as if meant to be remembered very specifically. And for what reason?

Well, probably, to make me remember to track down their composer to score my own films later on (well, at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

When Jerry Goldsmith died, I was devastated: here was a soundtrack composer I idolized -- on strength of The Omen alone -- and I never met or worked with him. I felt like such a failure that day; I had just arranged something with his assistant to interview him for a documentary I was planning, and she said time was short. I figured I could defy fate and things like cancer and meet him anyway; all would work out, right? It always does, right? And then came the email saying he had passed away. I sat for a long time, a week or two really, and thought, There will never be his like again. What composer today could match or excel a Jerry Goldsmith? And in my mind, immediately there was the response, Billy Goldenberg. But I admit with embarrassment I told myself right then, Forget it; that guy's dead probably; and if he's alive, God bless him, he probably doesn't score movies anymore. I'll probably never meet him in time, either.

Hopefully, Mr. Goldenberg, whom I have now learned has visited and read my blog, will laugh at those comments over coffee next week.

A friend here at NYU watched some of Surprise, Surprise, Mr. Conovy and, noticing the music, commented that the entire film reminded him for some reason of -- and he said this specifically -- Columbo. That's another thing that might make Mr. Goldenberg smile, because he is the composer who scored all the best episodes of Columbo we remember: those dark, epic contrabasses, those swirling violas and cellos, all the menacing brasstones and meaty woodwinds we think of and hear in our minds when we sit back and recall Just How Good That Damned TV Series Was. To me, and I've called it this in some of my Score Rants (my brother will tell you what those are), it is the sound of the 1970 to 1974 Universal Pictures Studio Orchestra -- whether those men played it or not -- and when I watch great Seventies programs from Universal, such as Night Gallery or Columbo, that's the music that takes me back. It makes me smile. That stuff is real music.

And Billy Goldenberg is the architect behind a lot of it.

Believe me when I tell you Mr. Goldenberg is the guy who made the good shows and movies of the Seventies sound like they did, because he is: his resume reads like a hit list of the best of the decade (and I'm throwing in some late Sixties so you fully get it): Hullabaloo, Ironside, Columbo, The Sixth Sense, Alias Smith & Jones, Circle of Fear, Don't Call The Police (remember that one? I do! Scary as hell), Harry O, Delvecchio (Jesus Christ, Delvecchio... I loved that show and its cues), Kojak (we should bow down to him for this one alone), The Lazarus Syndrome (also scary as hell), Rhoda, McCloud, Don't Be Afraid of The Dark, Queen of The Stardust Ballroom, Gemini Man, Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night (another one my parents wouldn't let me watch!), and it goes on, and on, and on. He's still composing.

I hope he will compose for my films. Spielberg for some peculiar reason shifted aside to John Williams during the Seventies, but I intend to take up the slack. Check out the pride here: As far as scoring movies, Goldenberg's my choice. Billy Goldenberg makes the sound my film style was born for: dark, intense, and authentic.

Boy oh boy, am I glad he's still writing...