In 1971, I returned home from studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts, London, and found that my parents had put our house at 35 City Boulevard, West Brighton, Staten Island, up for sale. This was the only house I knew, and soon it would be gone.
I’d been in London for a year studying fencing and mime, sipping Typhoo tea for breakfast, Watneys Cider for dinner, and yet, suddenly, feeling homesick and isolated. I remember getting inebriated at the famous Cockney watering hole, the Crabtree Pub (within the sound of the bells of St. Mary le Bow), then walking back to the train station late Christmas Eve, standing on the platform as it began snowing. Across the tracks, a group of more inebriated revelers were singing off-key,
“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus, Happy Birthday to You!”
When I finally got back to my side flat in East Putney, I put two shillings into the gas-metered water heater over the tub, drew a nice bath, then nearly drowned when the pilot light blew out on the water heater, and I fainted from gas inhalation. Luckily, when I passed out, I hit my head against the wall that adjoined the next apartment, which was filled with young women. One of them had investigated the thud against the wall and found me floating unconscious in the tub and saved my life. I awoke in a National Health hospital and, after drinking some tea, offered to me by a young nurse, fell back on my hospital bed and thought about a world in turmoil: Vietnam, the long-term effects of “Turn on-Tune in, and Drop-out,” the rebirth of the feminist movement, and the Kent State killings; it felt like I was living through a movie.
On weekends when I was living in East Putney, across the Thames, and going to school in South Kensington, I’d take the Underground to the Bijou and watch foreign films, mostly Truffaut, Bertolucci, and anything featuring Oskar Werner, who, at the time, was my favorite actor. The honesty in these films fired my imagination and instilled in me a desire to learn filmmaking. Thus, when I returned to the States, after the shock of hearing that our house was for sale, I took a detour from my acting career and applied to the NYU Film School, which, at the time, was one of the best schools in the world for learning how to tell a story using the visual medium of motion pictures.
The NYU Institute of Film and Television, as it is officially called, was located on the 8th Floor of one of the NYU buildings on Greene Street, just off West 4th. The place was dismal, rundown, and smelled of tarnished brass, film stock, and floor wax. The first-year class goal was to familiarize students with every aspect of filmmaking, except the most important one- how to tell a story. You learned to load a vintage wind-up World War II Filmo camera, the kind that captured newsreel reports of the Battle of the Bulge; you learned how to use a guillotine film splicer with adhesive film tape that had sprockets for editing, how to attach film leader, the use of China marking pencils, and the technique of editing audio tape. When you actually had a film to work on, you edited on a lovely dinosaur called a Movieola, which resembled a Singer sewing machine that ate a movie projector; this later evolved into a flatbed editor called a Steenbeck. All these things are now completely obsolete in the digital age, but back then, during my first year as a film student at NYU, these were the tools of the trade.
There was a great diversity of the students in my class; a mix of poor kids, middle-class kids, and the ultrawealthy. While NYU fell short of its focus on teaching students how to tell a story, it succeeded somewhat in creating an atmosphere of collaboration. Projects were randomly assigned to a group of students, each member of the group having a job to learn and execute in order for the group to make a short film. Someone would be assigned to direct, someone to edit, someone to shoot, etc. My diverse group of NYU film students included Delfina Rattazzi, heir to Fiat Motors, Jackie Astor, whose great-grandfather, John Jacob Astor, perished aboard the Titanic, Gary Cookson, whose gorgeous and gifted mother, Beatrice Straight, would soon win an Academy Award for “Network,” and my illustrious friend, playwright and screenwriter, Joe Gilford, the son of the legendary actor and activist, Jack Gilford.
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