Huskies
in Hollywood
Stars Behind the Screen
By Bill Kirtz
Fade in. Wide shot of a
Hollywood mogul's office. The great man's feet rest on his enormous mahogany
desk. He puffs his $25 El Clintino as a humble gofer slinks in.
Gofer: "Sir? I hate to bother you, but-"
Mogul: "Then don't."
Gofer: "But I've got a great movie idea. It's about Northeastern-not
Northwestern-a Boston school without industry ties or a film major, but
people who have gone there include a two-time Oscar winner, Sling Blade's
producer, a high-concept deal maker targeting the international market,
and the LA Independent Film Festival's founder. They all started at the
bottom, with no contacts. Think Rocky meets Babes in Arms! I see Sly as
the dean, Meryl as the provost, Glenn as a struggling sophomore, Demi as
Woody. If we work fast and cheap, we can bring it in for under $200 million."
Mogul: "Isn't Demi Moore too old to play Woody Allen? Anyway, hustle
me up a double decaf latte, kid, and lemme think about it."
Fade out.
When you do think about it, Huskies have parlayed a smattering of courses,
a cinema studies minor, and a lot of moxie into celluloid success.
Barbara Kopple's eight-millimeter film of a lobotomy patient irked her
N.U. psychology professor three decades ago but started her on the road
to two Academy Awards, a fly-on-the-wall look at "Wild Man" Woody
Allen, and a reputation as America's premier documentarian.
David Bushell, a 1992 speech communication grad, remembers art professor
Sam Bishop's encouragement long before Sling Blade justified his Hollywood
floor sweeping and mail cart pushing.
Paul Boghosian adapted the lessons of some inspirational N.U. history
teachers to a varied media career capped by three feature productions-with
ever-bigger plans in the making.
Robert Faust found his 1989 marketing degree the right ticket to a television
stint with Robert Mitchum and Juliette Lewis. Now, he's anxious to have
an N.U. co-op student help him launch others' film careers.
Not to mention 1989 grad Sasha Berman, who progressed from Filene's
Basement co-oping to a top marketing job at New Yorker Films, the prestigious
international distributor. Or 1971 grad Peter Lance, a novelist (see "H.U.
Sky, Private Eye," May 1988) who helped write John Woo's Blackjack
and whose first screenplay, Angels of Death, has been bought by Columbia
Pictures for Michael Douglas's production company. Or Byron Hurt, a former
N.U. quarterback and 1993 journalism graduate now editing his documentary
on black masculinity for a possible public television release.
Scene One
Something about Barbara
Two Academy Awards. A shooting schedule crammed with TV series and feature
films. And with Wild Man Blues, a rare nonfiction breakthrough into box
office black ink.
Still, Barbara Kopple doesn't "see myself as really successful.
I've got a long way to go."
The way started at Northeastern in 1967, when the product of Scarsdale,
New York, affluence fell into filmmaking with a look at Medfield (Massachusetts)
State Hospital lobotomy patients. Anxious to "do something entirely
different from my previous experience," she'd first enrolled at West
Virginia's University of Charleston. Drawn to Boston by the Vietnam protest
movement, Kopple came here to study social organizations and social welfare.
In late 1968, she moved on to New York's New School. After she took
only a couple of classes in cinema verité-the cinema of truth-the
masters of that genre, Albert and David Maysles, hired her as a general
assistant. She helped light and shoot their exploration of door-to-door
Bible sellers' bleak lives (Salesman) and riveting account-including an
on-camera killing-of the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour, Gimme Shelter.
Kopple has credited the Maysles brothers with teaching her everything
about filmmaking, from the ground up. But at some point, she says, every
filmmaker must develop his or her own skills. Hers are an anthropological
approach and what Woody Allen has termed the knack for being unobtrusive.
She doesn't scorn academic training, however. She has taught at New
York University's well-regarded film school, and thinks such programs are
useful because students "have people rooting for you and pushing you."
To make her breakthrough film, the gritty, violent Harlan County, U.S.A.
(produced for a piddling $350,000), Kopple immersed herself in a Kentucky
coal-mining community. It earned her a VW van trip to Los Angeles and a
1976 Oscar she accepted in a borrowed dress.
Her second Academy Award, in 1990, came for American Dream. She earned
it by spending five years detailing a bitter strike at a Minnesota meatpacking
plant. She shot during sixty-degree-below-zero windchill days, talked her
way into previously closed union negotiations, formed friendships with
scabs and strikers' wives. Financing came no easier than filmmaking. Rock
icon Bruce Springsteen rescued the project with $25,000 just before her
original backers pulled the plug. Money problems delayed commercial release
for a year, and she's figured she's taken a six-figure bath on the whole
thing.
Kopple's more recent work has been better financed but no less rough-edged,
including a South African television study of Nelson Mandela's Robben Island
prison, a Lifetime cable TV indictment (Defending Our Daughters) of crimes
against women throughout the world, and a nuanced NBC profile of boxer
Mike Tyson.
And then came Woody.
Crumb director Terry Zwigoff was first hired to document Allen's 1996
European tour with his Dixieland band. Zwigoff left the project-some say
because Allen was uncomfortable with his attempts to probe his psyche,
some because Zwigoff wasn't promised final cut, the absolute right to decide
what to include. Then Allen's longtime friend and producer Jean Doumanian
asked Kopple to film the twenty-three-day jaunt.
Glad of the chance to finally work without budget constraints, Kopple
accepted Doumanian as her producer, but insisted on total artistic control
and complete access to Allen and future wife Soon-Yi Previn.
Wild Man Blues has been a rare documentary commercial success and earned
generally favorable reviews. Still, a few dismiss it as a soft feature-as
Allen's carefully orchestrated route to rehabilitation after his much-condemned
wooing of the young adopted daughter of his former companion, Mia Farrow.
Whatever Allen's intent, the film shows him as twitchy and self-absorbed
off-screen as on, alternately dominating and dominated by Previn, eternally
dismissed by his nonagenarian parents. A press release it isn't. Kopple
catches Allen telling bystanders Previn grew up eating out of Korean garbage
cans and dismissing his infinitely more talented musical colleagues. And
the final scene in his parents' Brooklyn apartment, where they tell him
he should have been a pharmacist already, shows something about Woody that
his own mock-autobiographical movies haven't.
Kopple, whose four-person crew shot 50 hours of film during their 16
to 18 hours of daily access to Allen and Previn, shrugs at the carpers.
She says, "The hard thing is to beg critics to just lie back and look
at the film for entertainment: 'Is it done well? Do you forget the camera
is there?' "
In any event, she's had little time to brood, plunging into three episodes
of the NBC drama Homicide. "The Homicides were really fun," she
says. "The cast and crew were great. It was very quick and very real.
It's much easier than nonfiction. It has a script, and you can do as many
takes as you want. Real life doesn't repeat itself."
For the fifty-two-year-old Kopple, real life has sometimes meant altering
reality. For a long time, she claimed an N.U. psychology degree and shaved
six years off her age. Still, as she's said, she's no journalist and never
claimed objectivity.
Objectivity won't be necessary for her next two projects, both feature
films. The first, Joe Glory, is a politics-based love story in which she
plans to cast Natalie (Beautiful Girls) Portman. The second is the screen
version of David Rabe's play about the rape of a go-go dancer, In the Boom
Boom Room, with Patricia Arquette.
Then, Kopple says she'll return to the financially challenged world
of nonfiction filmmaking. At the top of her wish list is finishing Woodstock
Two, which will compare the 1994 festival with the famous original. She
began what she calls this "passionate and important project"
five years ago, but money problems have delayed completion.
Difficulty getting backers, who almost certainly won't recoup their
investment, is a common headache for even the most celebrated documentarians.
Take Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, the 1988 stunner that freed an
innocent drifter from death row and drew more attention for not winning
an Oscar than most documentary winners receive for getting one. It's grossed
only $1.2 million, less than Marlon Brando's daily fee and about the cost
of Kopple's American Dream.
Kopple seems resigned to it all. "Financial problems are always
really difficult. No matter who you are and what you've done, it's never
easy. But I don't measure success by money but by what you're able to give
people. Documentaries are much more important than any fiction film. They'll
continue to live on."
Scene Two
The Players
What's wrong with this picture? David Bushell is a legitimate film industry
player driving the LA Freeway to El Segundo in a . . . Ford Explorer?
No 350L Mercedes? No metallic gray Range Rover complete with elephant
guards and fax machine?
Nope. Bushell is car-phoning from his midrange rental as he heads to
The Minus Man set. There, he's overseeing Blade Runner scriptwriter Hampton
Fancher's offbeat drama starring Janeane Garofalo and Sheryl Crow. Later,
he'll return to his New York City home turf to supervise Once in a Life,
an urban drama directed by Laurence Fishburne.
Quite a distance from his "kind of frustrating days" at Northeastern,
when he took any film elective he could but found Sam Bishop "the
only teacher who gave me anything. He listened to every suggestion."
After graduation in 1992, Bushell drove cross-country with two college
pals-their U-Haul trailer as big as their Honda Accord-and spent six months
on such menial jobs as sweeping studios, carrying coffee around McDonald's
commercial sets, and driving a studio truck.
The Tinseltown peonage convinced him a film career was what he wanted.
"I got a head start. It gave me confidence. My parents thought I was
crazy to be pushing a mail cart for $400 to $500 a week-maxing out credit
cards, crashing on couches, living on macaroni and cheese. But I was learning."
Eventually, he became a production assistant on the low-budget 1994
hit Handgun. Then, he produced Drop Dead Rock, panned as subsophomoric,
and was executive producer of the crime drama Illtown, starring Lili Taylor.
After producing "a bad film I won't name" for $300,000 in
eighteen days on Long Island, Bushell was lounging by a Lake Worth, Florida,
swimming pool when he picked up Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade script.
"I was blown away," he recalls. He packed
up another U-Haul, drove to Arkansas, and started supervising the surprise
hit about a tenderhearted killer that won a 1997 Oscar for best screenplay
adaptation.
Bushell, whose most recently completed effort is Niagara, Niagara, a
1997 portrait of misfit lovers on a crime spree, stresses there's no set
way to become a producer. "It's sitting back and listening. It's a
lot of hard work."
His advice to wide-screen wannabes: "Don't be shortsighted. Don't
think about making money. Keep your head up. Don't look backward. I want
to say I was lucky, but I wasn't a rich kid. I had no contacts. I paid
my dues."
Bushell believes a stand-alone N.U. film major would help youngsters
pay those dues more easily. "It's all about experience," he says.
Courses can teach everything "from preproduction to editing, including
budgets. I'm a product of N.U. and started from scratch. Northeastern should
get quality [film] internships in New York and Boston. I'll take kids on."
Paul Boghosian won't-not unless they have a solid grounding in the liberal
arts.
The 1965 political science and economics grad produces movies with business
savvy and moxie he picked up selling shoes on co-op. Film school? Not for
him and the people he hires for his Boston and Washington, D.C., HarborSide
Films production offices.
"I enjoyed reading and the emphasis on writing, with top-notch
history teachers like Norman Rosenblatt and Ray Robinson," he says
of his N.U. days. "I've had terrible luck with communications interns.
I'm looking for people who can analyze storytelling, who've majored in
English, history, psychology, sociology. You can hire people who know where
the camera and lights go. I'm looking for people who feel comfortable with
words."
His own way with words, which Northeastern readers noticed with his
eloquent 1991 N.U. News eulogy to Rosenblatt, helped him connect at Columbia
Business School with Columbia Journalism School prof and noted film critic
Judith Crist. His ambition led her to dub him "Citizen Boghosian"
and to hire him to help arrange her famous Long Island seminars with such
directing notables as Francis Ford Coppola and William (The French Connection)
Friedkin. Later, he steered screen legends Joan Fontaine and Ginger Rogers
onto the celebrity lecture circuit.
And now, after decades of television production, Boghosian's moving
onto the large screen. In an innovative and complicated arrangement, Puerto
Rican backers got tax credits for matching the $1.25 million Boghosian
raised in Hollywood to make Undercurrent, a steamy film noir he's modestly
dubbed a combination of Body Heat and Indecent Proposal. The slick, muddled
Lorenzo (Falcon Crest) Lamas vehicle had brief runs at Boston's Museum
of Fine Arts and Brookline's Coolidge Corner Theatre before heading into
premium cable land in the U.S. and theaters abroad.
That's not chopped liver. To properly market an American theatrical
release, Boghosian would have had to spend more than what the film cost
to make. "I look at this as a business," he says. "With
no major stars or major budget, you go to premium cable. This enhances
sales in Europe and in Asia, where forty percent of world revenues come
from."
Boghosian has greater expectations for his next two features. He describes
Primal Rage as "Jaws in the jungle." It's a $4$5 million
project set in the Colombian rain forest. Next comes Marta, which he sees
as a 195979 Cuban panorama blending Casablanca with Gilda. In his
words, the $10$15 million venture is a "musical, romance, melodrama,
political thriller."
Boghosian mentions Andy Garcia and Jennifer Lopez as potential Marta
costars, while conceding that casting and budget are up in the air on both
pictures. No matter-he's pitching.
Chutzpah? Hey, in the movie business you gotta have it-and Boghosian
learned it at Thom McAn during his Huntington Avenue days. "If you
can sell shoes to old ladies with smelly feet, you can do a lot in life,"
he grins.
For Robert Faust, "Northeastern was a good experience in terms
of learning what I didn't want to do. Co-op was great. It's what attracted
me in the first place."
After a co-op job in the IBM marketing department, Faust spent part
of his senior year at MTV in New York. He then landed a Columbia Television
development job in Los Angeles, working on the eleven-episode flop A Family
for Joe, with Robert Mitchum and Juliette Lewis. Next came two years as
a consultant and producer for the Samuel Goldwyn Company.
In 1994, he had an inspiration. Los Angeles, the traditional center
of the movie universe, had no permanent venue for boosting independent
productions. So Faust started the Los Angeles Film Festival, combining
his marketing, programming, and fund-raising expertise to showcase upcoming
talents. It lets innovative young filmmakers meet studio and distribution
heavyweights and sponsors workshops on how to develop their projects. "We're
helping launch careers," Faust says. He hopes the five-year-old festival
will join Sundance and Toronto as top independent film sites.
Though he "had no intention of becoming a filmmaker" during
his Huntington Avenue days, his marketing degree has nevertheless been
eminently useful in the film industry. "This is a business. Making
movies is all business," he says. "The director is the only one
who shouldn't have to think of it that way."
Faust's N.U. marketing classmate, Sasha Berman, has found her cinema
studies minor a perfect vehicle for climbing the film distribution ladder.
After graduation, the Kiev, Ukraine, native spent three years at the
Harvard Film Archive, where she crossed paths with such outstanding documentarians
as Ross McElwee (Sherman's March). Berman then worked as a production assistant
in Toronto, helped a San Francisco distributor screen such offbeat hits
as Red Rock West and Kurt and Courtney, and became distribution manager
for the New York Citybased Women Make Movies.
Next came two years as managing director of the esteemed but perennially
broke Coolidge Corner Theatre, where she did everything from fund-raising
to programming to hiring and firing.
Now, she's director of marketing and publicity at distributor New Yorker
Films, handling American showings of Shohei Imamura's latest, The Eel,
a Japanese drama of madness and domesticity that won 1997's Cannes Film
Festival Palme d'Or award.
Berman "loved the film program" at Northeastern. Director
Inez Hedges "was the major force. She was wonderful-very inspiring."
Scene Three
Not-So-Nutty Professors
To carve and protect a niche in academia, you have to depend on the
not-always-automatic kindness of strangers in other departments. Inez Hedges's
persistence in gaining interdepartmental cooperation has helped Husky film
people survive their shoestring academic budget.
A Harvard undergraduate Greek and German major, Hedges learned Japanese
to write her doctoral dissertation, on director Yasujiro Ozu. After arriving
at N.U.'s modern languages department, she started Northeastern's film
program in 1982, and drew international recognition the next year with
a conference on film's philosophical dimensions. In 1984, she got film
studies approved as a minor.
The film program has grown-surviving even an eighty percent budget cut
over time-because "the spirit of collaboration" has made it easy
to offer courses taught by faculty in other departments, Hedges says. Thirty
students now are working on dual majors in cinema studies and other subjects
in the College of Arts and Sciences. Many others are completing the eight-course
requirement for a minor or pursuing a five-course graduate certificate.
The program's most popular class, the team-taught "Exploring the
Humanities through Films," draws more than 100 undergrads each fall.
Hedges insists it's more than popcorn-munching for credit. "It's a
killer course" with five papers and a four-part final exam, she says.
Other intriguing interdisciplinary offerings include
"The Spanish Civil War on Film," taught by modern languages professor
Constance Rose; "Film and Psychology," led by adjunct professor
of psychology Emily Fox Kales; and modern languages department chairman
Harlow Robinson's "European Modernism."
With Hedges on sabbatical writing a book titled Faustian Bargains, a
look at how characters sell their souls in twentieth-century film, literature,
and art, Robinson is the film program's acting director.
"I'm impressed by the strong links between language and cinema"
at N.U., says Robinson, who's working on a book about Russian émigrés
in Hollywood. He's proud his department will be offering new courses in
Chinese and Japanese cinema in the spring quarter to complement his own
Soviet cinema class.
Chinese. Japanese. Soviet. Although Northeastern's film program can
hardly be called a blockbuster, it's still quite a change from the 1970s,
when Sam Bishop was a one-person film program. The art professor, now in
his thirty-first and final year here, at one time taught production, animation,
and film history. And that wasn't his only cinematic duty. He had to reassure
then President Asa Knowles that critic John Simon's 1977 trashing of Northeastern
and Kopple (over a typographical error in Harlan County's credits) was
unwarranted.
Bishop thinks the interdisciplinary nature of cinema studies at Northeastern
has strengthened the program. "Technical skills will get you only
so far," he says. "You need a sensibility, to analyze a lot of
good film, to expand your vocabulary. Lots of students are enamored of
equipment, but they don't have much to say. They're so focused and specialized,
when they should have strong exposure to literature and have a range of
experience they can apply to film later on. You can acquire technical skills
very quickly, but people who get those early sometimes never transcend
them."
Communications assistant professor Kevin Howley thinks N.U.'s "strength
is the context of a liberal arts education. It's an advantage. Professional
schools tend to focus on technique."
Howley and others applaud the cinema program's ties with the Boston
Film and Video Foundation, which offers several production courses. They
also note that New England Cable Network (NECN), where many N.U.-ers have
parlayed internships into full-time jobs, lets students learn nearly every
phase of the craft-from lighting to editing, from preproduction to merging
pictures and words.
Proliferating cable channels like NECN have created more demand for
"product," and therefore more job opportunities for graduates.
Still, Hedges can't give a firm "yes" or "no" to the
perennial student question: Can you make a living making films? "Who
knows? I'm not an economist," she says.
Journalism professor Alan Schroeder has an answer: "It's realistic
that Northeastern graduates can be in the documentary profession. It's
unrealistic to think you can make money in it. Video opens more doors-there's
room for more documentaries and there are more of them than ever before,
but the reality still is that they play to small audiences. You spend as
much time fund-raising as you do filmmaking," says the Emmy-winning
studio producer, who has made documentaries for national and regional public
television. "Errol Morris, Fred Wiseman [the acclaimed director of
High School and Law and Order], and Kopple herself are out there with tin
cups, begging and applying for grants."
Scene Four
Tin Cup
Byron Hurt knows the hard realities of the film biz. But that hasn't
stopped him from working and dreaming.
On campus, Hurt produced Northeastern's first video yearbook and a hour-long
documentary, My Memories, about being black at a predominantly white university.
When he graduated in 1993, armed with a student filmmaking grant and $300
from the journalism department, Hurt roamed the country to make I Am a
Man. After four years of what he calls on-the-job learning, he edited more
than 100 hours of interviews about black masculinity into a two-hour version
for high school and college screenings.
Now, he's trimming it to fifty-six minutes, with hopes for a public
broadcasting showing.
Hurt enjoyed his courses here but would have liked stronger broadcasting
and more documentary instruction. Although he'd love to be a full-time
filmmaker, he knows "it's very tough to make a living. You have to
be able to support yourself as you do it-to keep your eyes and ears open
to the field."
He's supported himself at N.U., first at the Center for the Study of
Sport in Society and now in the Office of Public Relations. "I'd like
to make another documentary, but I'm taking a break," he says. "It
takes a lot of work and perseverance to make this happen."
But Hurt's script ends on an upbeat. "I'm still learning, still
growing," he says. "I hope I can leave a legacy that will outlive
myself."
Finale
Fade in on movie mogul who, flicking an intercom with his cigar-free
hand, summons an assistant minion.
Minion: "Sir?"
Mogul: "Know that kid who was just in here? The one who always
wears a cap with 'N.U.' on it?"
Minion: "Sure. A real go-getter."
Mogul: "Yeah. I know. Move him up to associate gofer. And then
get me Sly Stallone on the phone."
Bill Kirtz, an associate professor of journalism, regularly writes
the "Talk of the Gown" column.
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