The Hollywood Interview

FAREWELL TO DIANE KEATON, OUR 2003 INTERVIEW POSTED BELOW

2025-10-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

FAREWELL TO DIANE KEATON, OUR 2003 INTERVIEW REPOSTED BELOW
by Terry Keefe
This article originally appeared in the Dec/Jan 2003 issue of Venice Magazine.

Diane Keaton's new movie Something's Gotta Give reminds us of why we fell in love with her in the first place. And if you're a younger moviegoer who is new to her work, you'll understand immediately why she became a star some three decades ago. The film provides Keaton with her best starring role in recent memory, but it's more than that, as this particular part fits the actor so well that it's a little magical. Writer/director Nancy Meyers created the role of Erica Barry with Keaton in mind, and it shows. The role is a virtual playground for the acting pleasures of Keaton, who is at once hilarious, charming, neurotic, and touching as a successful, divorced playwright who finds her true love at middle-age with the eternal roving bachelor Harry Sanborn, played to perfection by Jack Nicholson. Erica has essentially given up on the prospect of love at this point in her life, and when her young daughter Marin (Amanda Peet) brings the womanizing Harry to Erica's house in the Hamptons, she certainly doesn't anticipate that her life is about to change. But Nicholson's Harry isn't as nimble in the bedroom as he used to be, and he has a heart attack prior to a romp with Peet, requiring him to stay with Erica until he is able to travel. The sparks fly as Erica and Harry, who never in a million years thought that they could want each other, find themselves drawn together.

The film is being marketed with a poster of Keaton and Nicholson accompanied by the title "Jack & Diane." Without having seen the film, this might just look like a clever promotion, tying in the names of the cast to a famous rock song. But the "Jack & Diane" who are being marketed here have such chemistry together that their sum is even greater than their already great parts, and selling them as a pair is thus very apt. Not only is this the hottest middle-aged romance ever put on screen, but it's one of the hottest romances in romantic comedy history, period. The sparks escalating between Keaton and Nicholson are so tangible that they transcend the already strong dialogue and story to create something far more profound than you usually get from a movie. Specifically, Something's Gotta Give takes you on a journey that reminds you very much what it is like to fall in love in the real world, outside of the three-act structure of Hollywood. Keaton and Nicholson build their relationship to a high boil very slowly. They blunder about, occasionally flirting, occasionally arguing, and then, boom! Before either one of them realizes it, they're there.

If Something's Gotta Give had a spiritual godfather, it would have to be the great writer/director Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels). Like the best Sturges films, Something's Gotta Give is a comedy where everyone sounds like people you know, only a lot wittier and smarter. At the same time, beneath the gags is a tenderness and humanity that most comedies never even bother to reach for. A prime example of where these paths cross is the first bedroom scene between Keaton and Nicholson, in which Nicholson's Harry starts to have heart palpitations and Keaton makes him check his blood pressure. This all goes down in the middle of a romantic moment which manages to not only stay romantic, but build to an even sexier level after the gags are over.

Like Nicholson, Keaton is now in the enviable position of doing some of the best work of her career many years into it, and will quite probably, and deservedly, receive an Oscar nomination for her performance. There is a whole younger generation of moviegoers who are going to be introduced to her via Something's Gotta Give, so now might be a good time to recap her career before launching into the interview proper.

Keaton was born in Los Angeles and moved to New York to study at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. She would appear on Broadway in "Hair" and then be cast opposite future collaborator Woody Allen in his show, "Play it Again, Sam," a role that she would reprise in the film version in 1972. That would also be the year in which her Kaye Adams met Al Pacino's Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Kaye was introduced to "the family" very much at the same pace the audience was, starting at the wedding party and ending with the dark scene in which Michael lies boldfacedly to Kaye about his role in the murders of the heads of the Five Families. The last shot of The Godfather is of Kaye's face as Michael closes the door on her, and at that concluding moment it becomes very much her story. She would once again play Kaye in The Godfather: Part II in 1974, and by then her character, like the audience, is devoid of any illusions that her husband can be redeemed.

Woody Allen would cast her as his comedic foil and romantic interest in a string of wacky comedies— Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), but it would be with Annie Hall in 1977 that their partnership would bear its most intoxicating fruit. The film followed the roller coaster relationship between Allen's famed New York comedian Alvy Singer and Keaton's Annie, who comes to Manhattan as sort of a country bumpkin but quickly develops big city neuroses as varied as those of Allen's character. It was one of the first American romantic comedies where the characters almost lived happily ever after together, but not quite. The film also broke the mold in terms of its fractured narrative and skillful interweaving of different types of comedy. Keaton won a Best Actress Academy Award for her work as Annie. She then appeared in a far darker look at modern romance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), and would close out the decade with two more Woody Allen classics, Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979).
A lengthy shoot followed on the epic Reds (1981), where she played writer Louise Bryant opposite director/star Warren Beatty, as well as future co-star Jack Nicholson, who appeared in a supporting role. The film garnered her a second Academy Award nomination, as well as a Golden Globe nomination. More Golden Globe nominations followed in Shoot the Moon (1982), Mrs. Soffel (1984), the Nancy Meyers-scripted and produced Baby Boom (1987), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and the television film "Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight" (1994). Amongst her many other films are The Little Drummer Girl (1984), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Radio Days (1987), and The Godfather: Part III (1990). She appeared in a string of commercial successes in the early to mid-nineties with Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride: Part II (1995), and The First Wives Club (1996). She earned a third Academy Award nomination for Marvin's Room in 1996. Keaton has also had success as a director, most notably with the theatrical features Unstrung Heroes (1995) and Hanging Up (2000), which she also starred in opposite Lisa Kudrow and Meg Ryan. In addition to her filmmaking endeavors, she's very involved with the Los Angeles Conservancy, a group which fights to preserve many of the historical buildings in town.

Did you speak frequently with Nancy Meyers as she was writing the script for Something's Gotta Give?

Diane Keaton: Not really. When she was sort of finished with an outline, she talked to me about it, and then again when she had a first draft, she spoke to me about it. She told me the idea and asked me what I thought. What could I think but that it was a golden opportunity for me? My only question was, would it really realize itself? That was all. Otherwise, what? Of course, I wanted to do it. And I know Nancy and I know what her work is like. She always wanted to do it with Jack, and the opportunity to work with Jack again was thrilling. Besides the fact that I was terrified, I was thrilled. [laughs]

You were terrified to work with Jack again?

Yeah, I mean I hadn't seen Jack, besides passing him like twice in 25 years. [laughs] So I didn't know what he would be like. Because in that span of time, you know, Jack became larger than legendary. He became a national treasure, which has not exactly happened to me. You know, I would see him on television peripherally at a Lakers game or read about him on the cover of Time Magazine or see him at an awards show. I didn't know who he was.

Has his style of working changed much since you did Reds?

Yes, I do think so. When I worked with him in Reds, he was kind of Warren's friend. Warren had this huge burden, which was the making of Reds, which was really very difficult for him. He was so invested in that movie. It was the passion of his life. He had a lot of difficulties with it, because it was such a massive undertaking. So Jack came in, as his best friend, and gave him a tremendous amount of support, and relief, and added humor on the set. Jack was like a hero— he was a hero to all of us, in a way. I only had a few scenes with him, but they were some of the most enjoyable scenes I did on Reds, because they were free of the burden of the responsibility of this movie, something that was being carried about on Warren's back. So Jack was really Warren's hero and my hero. He was sort of the relief that came in, that just lifted up the day for us. So in that regard, he wasn't carrying the burden of the leading role in this movie. He would come in and be fabulous, like he is, and help everybody and leave. And I felt at the time that he was the most generous actor I'd ever been with on-screen, by far. He was always right there with you and he was always helpful and he would never let you down. Because of the technique that I come from, which is the Sandy Meisner technique, you're only as good as the person you're acting with. And it's really kind of a more reactive type of acting. Like I take from what you give me and that colors my performance. As opposed to going it on my own and forging my path to create a wonderful performance without the help of anyone. I always need the help of everyone! [laughs] He changed in that time, because we all change in 25 years. And because in this movie, he carries it. So it was a more real relationship. Sort of like in the movie, it's how you get to know somebody in all their complexities and their great aspects and their stubbornness, or their curiosity. Because the thing about Jack is that he lives with questions. And I don't like to question things on the set, you know? I just like to go there and do my work. But Jack is just filled with ideas and questions and details and specifics. And you're thinking that this guy can wear you out because that energy which he has to explore and be curious is singular, and it never stops. You're always being challenged when you're with Jack, that's the way I see it. And that's also a very enlivening thing when you're acting. So I'd have to say that it was a very profound experience for me, this one.

The film is obviously tightly scripted, because the comedy hits its marks constantly. At the same time, it felt very loose, almost as if it were improvised.

And yet every single one of those words is Nancy's. I never had a shot at improvising or junking up a sentence. I don't consider myself a great improviser, but I do like to junk up sentences and sort of like change the rhythm and just add a little here and... [laughs] ...make it all awful. And in a certain sense, to someone like Nancy, who's sort of a purist with words, it must be a living hell to listen to me destroy a sentence. If you notice, I don't have a lot of jokes. But Nancy knows I talk fast and she's just on you, she's watching you like a hawk and making sure that you're really delivering the message that you want to say. At the same time, she loves that loose look and loose feel of it. I think that's just about trusting the other actors and being appreciated by the director, and Nancy's really one of the best listeners that I've ever been around. And I like the fact that she pays so much attention to me, because I can frequently just get away with it. No director's going to come up and say that much to me anymore, and I don't think they even have that much interest. But Nancy really cares, because, basically, I'm playing Nancy in a way.

You and Jack did some really great long takes, particularly that one on the beach, where the acting just flowed and it was never cut away from.

That was fabulous. I love a two-shot. I'll always love that. Woody did that a lot as well. And as a director I appreciate that also. I just like a long walk and talk, with no cuts.

Do you find that a lot of actors can do those types of shots or is it rare?

I think a lot of actors can do it. I think it's just a question of what is the genre that you're working in? With romantic comedy, I think it's essential that you can be able to do that. I think it's part of the craft of doing a romantic comedy that you have to be able to handle a two-shot that goes on and on.

Another thing that really worked perfectly about the film was that all of the lead actors were very much on the same page, tonally and comedy-wise. You, Jack, Keanu Reeves, Amanda Peet, and Frances McDormand all blended so well.

And they all have very different styles. I don't know how that happens. Jack has a very different style than I have and Keanu has a totally different style from Amanda, and of course, Frances is also totally different.

How was that tonal balance found? In rehearsal?

We didn't have any rehearsal, really. I think we had a couple of days before we started. I liked that; I don't like to rehearse.

Is that because rehearsal can mean doing the material to death?

Yeah, to me it's the death. The death of my performance. [laughs] I don't like having some sort of marker in the back of my head telling me, "You should do it like this. You were supposed " It's so delicate for me anyway. If I feel an audience is going to give me something, I'll repeat it instead of going on my own journey. So I don't like that.

One of the best scenes is the first bedroom scene between you and Jack. It had so many great comedic moments. But it was also a very sexy, hot scene.

In between takes, we were continually worried about how many kisses were we actually going to have to perform in front of everyone. [laughs] But it was heaven to perform. Once the camera goes, you can just let those inhibitions go and you just enjoy it. I had a fabulous time. He was wonderful, but it was hard to get there, that's all. Sometimes it's kind of difficult when you're doing these intimate scenes, as you can imagine. Think about it. You stay focused on that script and this beautiful actor. It's all about "action" and "cut." In between is when it's really the best, but after and before, it's so humiliating. [laughs]

And in this particular scene, you not only had to be sexy, you also had to be very funny! Did you and Jack try different ways of doing your scenes?

Oh, we had a lot of takes and we tried different ways all the time. Jack wouldn't like to do a lot of takes. But I always like to do many, many takes, because I always feel like my performance is more dependent on riding an impulse that I can't really be sure where it's going to take me. I'm sort of flailing about. But he's more grounded and rooted in the idea of what he wants to do with the scene. I'm like a moving target. I like to move all the time. [moves back and forth] And I feel as though this is saving me in some regard. I believe that some people would think of that as "mannerisms." That I'm guilty of many mannerisms. [laughs] And I think that both Jack and Nancy helped me on that particular front with this movie. He would sometimes say, "Look me in the eye here, and slow down." [laughs] And Nancy, who was my total support system, would just do it over and over, until she felt that I actually sort of landed. But she wouldn't inhibit my impulses, for which I have to say, "Hats off to you." Because it's so easy to inhibit an actor's impulses, but she didn't. She accepted the fact that I would get it if we did it enough.

Had you always planned on doing the nude scene the way it appears in the film?

Uh-huh. Don't I have to do it? This woman becomes lost in the love affair of her life and she's this age, might as well as show it and say this is still here and it's great to be this woman in love. At any age. It's fun, it's a dream come true. Falling in love is rare. To have to play this for the first time, when you're age 55 is like, "Wow! That's a lot." Can I go back there and revisit the exquisite beauty of falling in love with somebody and getting lost in their face? Getting lost in their being. God, that's heaven. That is the human experience and that's why this is such a great role, the idea of playing someone in love.

Let's go back a bit. Your first major role was on Broadway in "Hair." What was that experience like?

I was just in the chorus. I was the understudy to Lynn Kellogg, and then I took the part over when she left. I didn't even know what that show was until after I saw it. Can you believe that? I was in that show for quite a while. I never saw it. I thought it was an excellent show. And I had had no real respect for the show at all. I was just doing my job, I didn't know what the hell it was. I liked the music, I thought the music was really good. But I didn't have a concept of what that show was. It was fantastic! See, this is why it's really good to see what you're doing sometimes. [laughs] To go away from yourself, your own little stupid, selfish thoughts, and see it as a whole. It was just like a revelation! It was an excellent show.

And then you played opposite Woody Allen in "Play it Again, Sam." How was he to act with on stage?

Hilarious. You know what I think I am? I'm a good audience. I really am. I'll go the distance for somebody who is that funny. I really loved Woody because he was so incredible to be around and so funny. It was like a great big treat.

Was the shooting atmosphere on the two wacky comedies you and Woody did together, Sleeper and Love and Death, as loose as the comedy would have you believe, or was it more formal than that?

It was loose, and I didn't understand it. He has never been a formal filmmaker. He's just like [quickly], "Okay, here we are, we're going, let's go." It just threw me off in the beginning. I didn't know what the hell was going on, at all. It just didn't seem like this was what my idea of making a movie was. Because I had done The Godfather, which was more formal. Woody was just going so fast. I just didn't understand his technique at that point.

Did you just sort of follow his lead then?

He'd just throw you in there. Some people spend time in preparation, but Woody has no respect for the actor's dilemma. [laughs] He just goes! "It's fine, don't worry about it, let's go!" He's always been that way.

Had his working method changed when you shot Manhattan Murder Mystery with him years later?

No. [laughs] He has no patience. None. And if you do more than like six takes, he's just bored out of his mind and has to rewrite the scene. And he's a genius editor on the set. He just gets rid of anything he hates right there. He thinks on his feet. He watches it, hates it, tears it apart, makes cuts, and then we shoot it again.

I know he always incorporates a lot of re-shooting into his production process.

Yeah, but even on the day itself, when he's not re-shooting, he did that. Especially on Manhattan Murder Mystery, because we had these four-page scenes, and that was his hand-held period. We had a four-page scene, all dialogue, and he'd just run around with that camera. We were just sitting there endlessly talking, no cuts. Then he'd take a look at it, slash that thing in half, get rid of it, boom! A whole new scene and we'd shoot that, all the way through. It was the most fun I'd ever had. C'mon, talk about giving me a chance to really move! [laughs] I was happy! No one was telling me to slow down. Give me a hand-held camera any day, as an actor. I love it. Instead of stepping into a static close-up. That's the hardest thing for me to do.

And I imagine that The Godfather must have been very much like that. A lot of static shots, right?

It was so formal. They [the three Godfather films] were all formal. [Director of Photography] Gordon Willis had a real approach to filmmaking that dominated the film visually. The first time Woody Allen worked with Gordon, he was consumed with anxiety over whether he should hire him or not, because he had heard that he was tough, and he didn't know if he could work with that, didn't know if he wanted to work with it. Because he's never looking for a real emotional connection on any of these movies, with anybody. It was the best decision he ever made because he learned more from Gordon Willis than he ever learned from anybody.

What was your first experience on The Godfather shoot?

We started with the party scene, and I didn't understand at all what was going on. People were really drinking. They were out of their minds. And I just didn't get any of it. We'd be sitting there for days, without doing anything. Al Pacino and I were just sitting off to the corner, because we were the outcasts. Finally they came around and shot us. Really, I was in another zone. I didn't experience The Godfather. Not once. It was too overwhelming to me. I was so scared. I was just 23 and I was an unself-possessed 23.

What was the most difficult scene that you and Al Pacino had to shoot over the course of the three Godfather films?

The most difficult and my favorite was in the hotel room [in The Godfather: Part II], the abortion scene [where Kaye tells Michael she has aborted his baby]. We had to stop. We didn't even shoot for a whole day because we had to rewrite the scene. It was so intense and so hard, because nobody knew where they were going. And, finally, it got set and then it was a really good scene. We rehearsed it a lot. There was a lot of tension though. I'd never done that before, when you just stop and don't work all that day. Except for with Jack and Nancy. [laughs] They like to talk.

How did it feel to step back into those roles again many years later for The Godfather: Part III?

Strange. Very strange. We started with a party again, right? But the party was so dour. It was the scariest party in Part III. There was no life to that party. And I thought, "Okay, either this is the masterwork of all time, because he has captured the essence of what happens to a person when they become a Mafioso boss, or it's really boring." One or the other, because the life had been sucked out of the party. I thought that was very interesting, because I didn't know whether it was going to work or not. So the movie felt very different. But still very formal, by the way. That same goddamn approach [laughs] where he's in a bed like 45 feet away, and I'm here having an intimate scene, talking with him. That's so hard for me to make that work, because I want to move. I want to touch him.

Did you know that the final shot of The Godfather would be on your face?

Not for a second.

When you read Annie Hall for the first time, were you aware of how very unique it was?

Yeah, I knew that it was fantastic. I couldn't wait to do it. Woody had a lot of worries about it. He thought it was going to be a "Mary Tyler Moore" episode. He was just consumed with worry about the situational aspects of it. He didn't trust it. It was a real leap for him. It was a big moment for Woody and he had to be scared. It makes sense. But I wasn't. I was an actress. I saw the part, I got it. Sometimes your instincts, you just know. It was like Nancy's movie, I just knew that this was a good one for me.

Annie transforms quite a bit over the course of that story. Was your performance based on anyone you knew?

Oh, I just knew that part. I owned that part. Because I got everything about it. It was easy. It was the easiest part for me to play. Maybe with the exception of the singing. That was the hardest part of the movie for me. Because Woody just refuses to make a big deal out of anything. [laughs] You just sing. I felt like I needed more time. He was like, "No, three takes. It's fine. Moving on." That was the one part in the film that I was really worried about. Because I wanted to be good. I had already had such a lifelong ambition to be a singer.

Really? I wasn't aware of that.

Oh yeah, I had a nightclub act, going around singing. At Reno Sweeny's, this place in New York. But in my fantasy, I did not compute what that life was actually like. The nightclub circuit.

I watched Annie Hall again last night. I had forgotten how many filmmaking concepts he pioneered with that film.

He had so many beautiful ideas in that. It was just the beginning of his ability to try all these different storytelling techniques. His imagination is just astonishing.

Was directing something you always wanted to do?

No, it wasn't. But I was interested in photography and I did a couple of books. And I thought from there that I would do a music video. I did a documentary about my sister. Then I did an "After School Special." It just really came out of a need to express myself in a visual way, where I was telling the story and I was responsible for what we were looking at. Because I was intrigued by that. I've always been intrigued by that, and it was a way also out of constantly "me and my performing and my career." It was just a great relief, and a way of looking out, as opposed to looking in. It really is an actor's dilemma. It's always going to be a problem for all actors, that you're just going to sit with yourself too much. So this was a great opportunity to expand. And I was really only too happy to do it in a very gradual way.

Unstrung Heroes is a great film. Did you search for the right script for a long time, to make your theatrical feature debut with?

No, not at all. The producers came to me and I auditioned. I just told them what I wanted to do, and what I thought the point of view should be, and they hired me.

Such a great cast. Michael Richards, Andie MacDowell, John Turturro, Maury Chakin.

[The casting] was a very difficult part of Unstrung Heroes, because we were never going to make that movie unless we got somebody really famous. And Michael Richards' name came up. I had an experience with him earlier, because I was supposed to do a film called Pet People for Steven Spielberg, which fell apart. We were after him, offering him everything, and he would not commit to Pet People. So they said, "Okay, you've got to give this part to Michael Richards." And I was like, 'He's not going to do it. He can't make a decision.' But he made the decision like that. [snaps her fingers] He wanted that part so badly. He was the kind of guy on the set who was very emotionally involved in that part. He's very serious and very intent on creating this world for himself as a character. He made that movie happen. Without Michael Richards, there would be no Unstrung Heroes. So go figure, right?

How was working with Walter Matthau when you directed and acted in Hanging Up?

My favorite. My absolute favorite. I loved him so much. Walter is really the original authentic man. The only really authentic man who is a superstar... and Jack, too. Jack reminds me of Walter, not in their acting styles, but as people. Because they are so unique. They are so authentic. And they've earned that authenticity the hard way. They go their own way. They don't follow. They make their own rules. I love Walter, I wish he were still here. I can't bear that he is not here.

Are you preparing to direct anything now?

I'm working on a couple of projects and a couple of books that I own. I want to do something darker as a director. I feel comfortable with that.

I wanted to close by talking a little bit about your work with the Los Angeles Conservancy.

I'm a member of the board. We're fighting to save the Ambassador Hotel from demolition. It's owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and we really feel that the history of this building is too important to disappear from the landscape of Los Angeles. We're planning outreach programs to educate all of the citizens of Los Angeles to somehow take more pride in our incredible cultural history. We want to involve the film community with saving its own past, in the form of those picture palaces on Broadway (in downtown Los Angeles). We have this hopeful idea that each studio will adopt a theater on Broadway. And this is something we're going to try and approach some of these very powerful men and women with, and see if we can really engage them in servicing their own legacy, and the legacy of the 20th Century, in honor of the great art form that emerged in the 20th Century. I believe that the more people know, the more they'll take pride. We want to make Broadway as incredible and exciting as it once was, even comparing to a place like Soho in New York. Downtown L.A. is incredible, and now with the addition of the Disney Hall, right near MOCA, right near City Hall. This is an opportunity for all of us to seize the moment and really protect our treasures, our historic treasures in the form of these irreplaceable buildings which make L.A. this enriched place that it really is.

THE CAMEO: (Attempting) to cast the legendary Lawrence Tierney in My Low-Budget Feature

2025-04-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

In 1994, I confronted my fears of cold-calling by attempting to book one of the great wild men in the history of Hollywood, actor Lawrence Tierney, to appear in our low-budget feature film.

Terry Keefe

Aug 15, 2024

(Actor Lawrence Tierney, above, in RESERVOIR DOGS.)

We had to get a celebrity cameo in our movie. Everything depended on it, our cinematic manhood, everything that we ever were, or ever would be, or ever could be… or so we had convinced ourselves.

The year was 1994, and Mike Wechsler and I had just shot our first feature film, Slaves of Hollywood, which we wrote together and then co-directed. The satire followed a group of young Hollywood assistants to producers, agents, and studio executives. The tone was based in reality, but with touches of real wackiness. In moments of fancy, and ego, we called the style “hyper-reality.”

Our budget was a little over $100,000, financed by a combination of personal savings, generous relatives, crazy/daring/wonderful friends, and credit cards. Very low-cost for the time, but today, you could do far more with the adjusted- for-inflation equivalent amount due to the cost effectiveness of shooting and posting on digital, as opposed to the 16 mm film which we shot and edited on.

As we moved into the post-production phase of film and audio editing, an enormous “flatbed” Moviola editing deck, which was used to splice picture and audio tracks together manually, took over my tiny apartment living room in West L.A. for two years. That flatbed was the opposite of what your typical young & single 90s guy wanted in his bachelor pad. One friend always jokingly referred to it as the “chick magnet,” but I was essentially dating our film anyway and no magnets were needed.

Mike and myself (he’s got the baseball hat) working on our 16 mm film editing deck in my long-suffering apartment. The pieces of film hanging from a rack of metal behind us are part of what was known as a “trim bin.” Our filmmaker friend Yuri Biersach is giving us notes on a cut. These stills were from a news story from the local ABC station, which was actually about Yuri and not us, but we’d take any good publicity. Or any publicity at all, really. Mike and I would eventually get better at giving enthusiastic facial expressions for reverse shots. I vowed not to look like I was catching flies with my mouth in any such future PR opportunities.

Making any feature films outside the studio system back then was still fairly unusual, partially because they had to be shot on actual film to be taken seriously. There was still a stigma associated with video, in that you weren’t a “real” feature film if that was your format of choice. 35 mm film was preferable, but 16 mm was still ok for festival screenings, with the caveat that you would have to “blow up” the 16 negative to a 35 negative for theatrical distribution.

Trying to look like an expert with our 16 mm Arriflex film camera during the main shoot of SLAVES OF HOLLYWOOD.

Celebrating our locked picture and sound cut by throwing the trim bin into the air. I would still find pieces of 16 mm workprint in that apartment for years to come. We once joked that this pic would have been a good ad for AVID, which was emerging as the industry leader in nonlinear editing systems in the early 90s.

Although we had what was regarded as a “real” feature, it was far from a done deal that anyone would ever see a second of it. Unlike today, if you didn’t get a theatrical distribution deal back then, or at the very least a home video deal that got you into Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video, it was like your movie didn’t exist. There was no YouTube, Tik Tok, Insta, Facebook, et al. Social media was in its infancy, and the closed platform of America Online was what a handful of my friends and myself were using to dip our toes into the internet. But you couldn't screen your feature film on AOL. Still photos alone could take an hour to download from the AOL portal and were just as likely to freeze your screen, knocking you off the dial-up connection and forcing a reboot. Your mom calling at an inopportune time to ask when you were finally going to make it in Hollywood would have the same effect.

One way to break out of the indie muck was to get some type of press mention for your film, in the two main trade papers of Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, or in a major film journal or magazine, such as Film Comment. A few years earlier, both the Hollywood and mainstream press seemed to love stories of do-it-yourself micro-budget filmmakers who had financed feature-length work on credit cards and friends/family/whoever donations. In 1987, Robert Townsend regaled journalists with tales of how he finished his landmark feature Hollywood Shuffle using his credit cards. Robert Rodriguez upped the backstory a notch when he explained that he had obtained some of the reported $7000 budget of his 1992 debut, El Mariachi, by donating his body for pharmaceutical product testing at an Austin, Texas-based company, where you could go stay for a week or two, and take home cash after having “doctors” test pills or skin creams on you.

That body experimentation fundraising tale was hard to top, but some filmmakers then put a new spin on the “scrappy indie filmmaker makes good” story by getting actual stars to appear in their little 16 mm epics, for a few minutes at least. In 1993, filmmaker-actors Donal Lardner Ward and Eric Schaeffer had shown what mileage they could get out of cameo scenes featuring themselves and Phoebe Cates, Martha Plimpton, Casey Siemaszko, and indie filmmaking icon John Sayles, in their very funny and charming low-budget feature My Life’s In Turnaround. The plot was even partially about the two lead characters trying to get names to appear in a film they wanted to make. None of those names were huge stars, but they were recognizable talents and that helped garner press attention.

A one sheet for MY LIFE’S IN TURNAROUND, above, with Phoebe Cates and Martha Plimpton prominently featured for their cameos.

Similarly, Repo Man producer Peter McCarthy directed a film called Floundering in 1994, that featured short cameo scenes with Ethan Hawke, Steve Buscemi, and John Cusack. Those scenes garnered that film a mention in Premiere Magazine, a huge coup for an indie at the time. Premiere was a monthly Hollywood Bible, read by everyone in town, but it primarily covered the studio films and major stars. For an indie to even get a few lines in Premiere put you on the map. Words were not as cheap and disposable as they currently are. Your film could be written about on 1000 blogs today and not get the amount of actual useful publicity, as in quantifiable career benefits, from that one tiny paragraph in Premiere in 1994. By the time Floundering screened at Sundance in January of 94, it had a buzz you could practically hear all the way in my dingy L.A. apartment with my sexy roommate, the Moviola flatbed. This was a brief moment in time when it felt like celebrity cameos could make the difference between your little film ever being watched by someone other than your friends and relatives, and the larger world.

James Legros starring, and Steve Buscemi cameo-ing, in FLOUNDERING.

Misguided or not, we saw the “Cameo” as the ticket we needed to get our film noticed above the rest.

One potential hurdle to the Cameo for us was that we had already filmed most of Slaves of Hollywood, but we still had a few scenes to shoot, or more specifically, reshoot. One scene that we needed to redo featured a freakish music video producer character, named Roger Peabody, interviewing his potential new, wide-eyed assistant Fisher Lovelace, played by a twentysomething Hill Harper. The scene, which took place at a wild party Roger was throwing, was chocked with enough verbal and visual sexual innuendo to offend Benny Hill. If John Waters directed the Andy Warhol party scene in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, that might be the tone, or so we hoped.

We needed to reshoot the scene partially because the actor who we originally cast as Roger Peabody just wasn’t… quite right. That was our fault entirely in the casting, as the actor gave it his all. He was funny but a little too buffoonish, rather than funny with a dangerous edge, which was what was needed. I can’t even blame his performance entirely, though, not even close, as there were several other reasons why the scene didn’t work as shot. For one, our Co-Producer, Alan, had kindly offered up his apartment for free to film in, but it had white walls and bland rectangular windows facing out to a street of even more generic, bland L.A. apartments. Roger Peabody needed a sinister, techo-lair of sorts, a real set, and what we had looked like a 1970s West L.A. duplex, no matter what we tried to do to dress it up.

On top of that, even the casting of the minor players in the scene seemed cursed. A character, who was named simply “Sexy Dominatrix” in the script, figured as a part of Roger’s inner entourage. Swathed in a leather catsuit, she was to occasionally crack a whip in Fisher’s general direction, as Roger interviewed him, to create increasing tension. If you’ve seen the Alfred Molina scene in Boogie Nights, with Cosmo the fire-cracker thrower, that is along the lines of what we were trying for. Sexy Dominatrix created tension on the set that day alright, but not in the manner we had hoped. In what seemed like convenient casting, some of our casting agents had met a real-life dominatrix, who also was a professional extra, on another film shoot, and we hired her on their word, without ever speaking to her. It seemed like perfect stunt casting, but the reality… this was not good. Sexy Dominatrix was beautiful, but also was, to put it delicately, acting oddly. Her eyes constantly darted in different directions, and she spoke in a monotone to any questions. This was all before 9 am. I’m not sure exactly what she thought she was being hired for, but her behavior screamed that she may have believed it was a real S&M party, and we were all just play-acting that we were making a movie as the “scene.” The concepts of “action” and “cut” seemed to escape her. She was constantly throwing her whip around, in a pretty dangerous fashion, and freaking everyone out, including Mike, who got whipped in the side of his head while playing an extra for us that day (half of the party extras didn’t show, probably because the pay was so low), and could have lost an eye.

Blocking-wise, Sexy Dominatrix sat on the couch next to Roger in the scene, so she was in most of the wider shots, and we couldn’t “cut around” her performance easily in the editing, with “coverage,” as in reaction shots and close-ups, of the other actors. She would often look directly at the lens, or just stare blankly off-camera, ruining all the wide shots. Did I mention that she also had a few lines to speak?

Trooper that he always was, Hill Harper gamely fought his way through all of these obstacles and still gave a good performance as the freaked-out assistant Fisher, but about halfway-through screening the miserable dailies at Foto-Kem Lab in Burbank the next night, we just asked the projectionist for a mercy killing and he turned the projector off. On the somber ride home, we discussed dates for a reshoot.

A silver lining lay here though. Since we had to shoot the scene again anyway, we decided to recast Roger with somebody famous and finally get our Cameo. During the bulk of the shoot, Michael and I would alternate “directing days.” For efficiency reasons, we never co-directed the same scene, and one of us was always the sole director, calling the shots, with the other effectively acting as a sounding board for creative ideas. We agreed Mike could take a crack at directing the “Roger Scene” this time. I had certainly had enough of it.

Another factor that drove our desire to go big in casting the Cameo was that we had landed an amazing location for the reshoot. A few wealthy young friends of our production company partner Matt, who was also a young law firm associate now, had pooled their considerable resources and opened a restaurant and nightclub on the then-very happening Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, called Savoy. This place had everything you would want for Roger Scene 2.0, a huge dance floor with disco lights and a DJ booth, along with a plush, and a little sleazy-looking, lounge area upstairs, decked out with beaded curtains and brightly-colored felt couches. The kicker, and most important part: they were letting us shoot there for free. A location that was both great and gratis was a huge deal for our formerly low-budget, now basically no budget left, film.

There was also a deadline now. The Savoy Night Club was available for one Sunday, in 30 days.

We had a month to find a star to do the Cameo.

Our first, and most obvious, problem: we didn’t know anyone famous, not on a personal level, at least. We started pulling at every celebrity straw in our lives that might yield gold. If you lived in L.A., you were only a few steps removed from every major celebrity, but those were big steps. Case in point: at Orion Pictures, I had worked for two years directly across the hall from the Meadowbrook Productions office of Alec Baldwin, then a very popular leading man. While Alec Baldwin wouldn’t have been right for Roger Peabody, as written, we would have sure as hell rewritten the role to make it right. He even vaguely seemed to remember my name and shook my hand from time to time. However, Alec’s assistant, who I was otherwise friendly with, would have laughed in my face if I had asked this favor. The alternative was waiting in the Orion parking lot to ambush Alec with the ask, which may have gotten me tasered by security. No, in general, a current big star was not worth pursuing unless we knew them well.

We strategized. Maybe what we needed was a name from the past, someone who hadn’t worked that much in recent years, but who was undeniably still a star.

Which is how we ended up discussing the casting of the one-time Bernard Schwartz. You may know him better as Tony Curtis.

A friend of a friend, who knew someone at a major talent agency, that being ICM, said that Tony Curtis, then about 69 years old and a long way from his heyday headlining studio films, maybe needed money, and wanted to put the word out that he was willing to do independent features. There were a lot of “maybes” in this whole scenario. Tony Curtis could have been flush with cash and just needed something to do with his days. In fact, when he died at age 85, in 2010, his estate was reportedly valued at 60 million, so perhaps Tony was just momentarily cash-poor in 1994, or, more likely, our intel was all wrong. To boot, Tony and his agent were probably talking about 7–8 million dollar indies when they “put the word out,” not stuff like our little no-budget. None of this stopped us from dreaming of adding “And featuring Tony Curtis as Roger Peabody” to the credits.

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. Curtis is simply dynamite as the young press agent Sidney Falco. Oh, what could have been.

I quickly made the sort of mistake of casually mentioning the Curtis Cameo Hypothetical to my Grandmother on Long Island, who had given me some of the money to make Slaves in the first place. I never knew she was a Tony Curtis fan, and suspect she had only ever really seen Some Like It Hot. I do remember she definitely declined to take 9-year old me to The Bad News Bears 3, the one where they go to Japan and Tony Curtis is their manager, so she couldn’t be that big a fan. Nonetheless, my grandmother suddenly offered to put together the money to get Tony Curtis in the movie. She even started writing potential dialogue for Tony and sent it to me in handwritten form. Her suggestion was that Tony could be the narrator of the film, and start out with him in “his mansion in Malibu” (did he even live in Malibu?), reminiscing about his youth in the business and leading us into this story about Hollywood assistants. Creative discussions about literally anything with my Grandmother would often detour immediately into an argument, going back to the high school talent show skits that I would write, direct, and star in, and which she always had creative notes on. So, I just told her “that sounded good, let’s think about it.” Hollywood had provided me with valuable lessons in handling creative disputes, including giving the high-hat to my own grandmother.

While I worked on the financing, Mike volunteered to call Tony Curtis’ agent at ICM, who, somewhat surprisingly, picked the phone right up. (Note: The agent may have been the late Jack Gilardi, famous in his own right for representing movie stars, but our memories on this are not positive.) I was standing by when Mike made the call, and it was a quick one, as he pitched the film and the project succinctly. Mike was good at cold-calling, and seemed to enjoy the wild-card thrills of it. Conversely, cold-calling made me miserable with anxiety, and I was thrilled Mike liked taking on this task for us.

The ICM Agent replied, “$50,000. We’ll give you one day for $50,000.”

Mike: “Okay…”

ICM Agent: “But we have to do it soon. Get back to me.”

The ICM Agent hung up. But Jesus, we could have Tony Frigging Curtis as our cameo. Sidney Falco, the Cookie Full of Arsenic, the Boy with the Ice Cream Face, as Burt Lancaster dubbed him in Sweet Smell of Success. He was practically booked, Dan-O. Tony could definitely play a sleazy music video producer. He excelled at playing cads and near-creeps. But would he? I mean, the ICM Agent didn’t even ask to see the material, but maybe the material didn’t matter so much to them? We would always rewrite it if needed anyway.

I casually told my grandmother about the price. She didn’t flinch, but also didn’t have $50,000, or she did, but wasn’t going to commit to the whole thing. My grandmother could be as cagey as any agent at ICM.

“I think we talk to Uncle Barry about this,” said my Grandmother, in reference to my grandfather’s brother, who was the wealthiest man in the family by a long shot, after a lengthy career near the head of a major tobacco company. “He probably liked Tony Curtis,” she added. “He smoked a lot in his movies.”

Pangs of conscience hit. There was no way I could ask anyone in my family to cough up 50 grand for Tony Curtis, even if one of them, the retired cigarette mogul, likely could spare it. I told my grandmother that we’d have to check on Tony’s availability and get back to her. I instinctively knew that I couldn’t take any more money from family for this project. They had given so much already on blind faith in me. What would happen if we lost all of it? The whole family might starve.

Pooling every dollar we had, Mike and I came to the conclusion that the most we could afford to pay an actor for the Cameo was $500. That definitely would narrow the herd, maybe to none. We were back where we started and the clock was ticking. What sort of name actor could we get for $500?!

“Paul says he has a connection to Lawrence Tierney. Apparently, he’s willing to work pretty cheap right now,” relayed Mike, after a phone call with our producer Paul.

“Who’s Lawrence Tierney again?” said I, who really should have known this, USC Film School degree and all.

“The old bald guy in Reservoir Dogs.”

Oh, this could work. We had reaped creative dividends in Slaves already by “casting against type” in other roles, which could surprise the audience. Lawrence Tierney isn’t what you would immediately think of as the top music video producer in Hollywood, but that’s exactly why it could be memorable. Casting against type could also obviously be a complete disaster. You didn’t cast Wallace Shawn as Maverick in Top Gun, although I would love to see that.

The truth is that, although we considered ourselves cinephiles, we really knew little about Lawrence Tierney. We had heard of Dillinger, but neither of us had seen that 1945 film which had made Tierney a star, nor were we really aware of any of the later Tierney noir classics, at most by title only.

Anyway, what was important to us was how Tierney looked and acted now, not 38 years prior, so Mike and I went out to the Brentwood Blockbuster immediately and rented their one copy of Reservoir Dogs. I hadn’t actually watched Dogs when it was released in the Fall of 1992, but I had seen publicity stills in the trade papers and knew what Lawrence Tierney generally looked like. Although it seems in retrospect that Tarantino just exploded into full being the moment Dogs first screened, the build of his soon-to-be comet of a career was a little slower than that. My screenwriter roommate Alex had raved about Dogs, which he saw at a special press screening, and the film had taken Sundance by storm in January of ‘92. But Tarantino was never even mentioned when we were putting together potential Director Lists for our studio projects at the Orion Pictures production company I worked at in 1992. There was just less crossover between the indie world and the studio film world in the early 90s. Pulp Fiction, with Miramax and Jersey Films behind it, had garnered ink in the trades with each casting announcement, but also a few snickers with the news that John Travolta, his headlining career then deader-than-disco, was a lead. When Mike and I popped in that VHS of Dogs, the rapturous reception of Pulp at Cannes in May of 94 still loomed a few months out in the future. As the “Dogs” argued about tipping in the diner prior to the big heist, my first real introduction to Lawrence Tierney began.

The Man with the Plan: Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot in RESERVOIR DOGS.

As the big boss Joe Cabot, Tierney simmered, an old gangster filled with barely-suppressed rage that felt ready to explode outwards at any moment. A senior citizen-version of the Hulk, and whose craggy features also looked like the Hulk’s main Marvel Comics rival, the Thing, a fact directly referenced by Tim Roth’s character in the film. Tierney felt more than the physical and mental equal of the far younger group of actors, who played the jewel thieves that crime boss Cabot puts together for a job that goes wayyyy awry. Even real-life ex-con and bank robber Eddie Bunker, who played Mr. Blue, felt like a relative kid, and a sweetheart, compared to Tierney. When trying to compare Tierney to any modern actors, maybe Dogs co-star Michael Madsen came close. Not necessarily someone you wanted to see do Shakespeare, but who had a malevolent screen presence that felt totally authentic.

Behind the scenes: Tierney in the middle amongst the other Dogs. Tim Roth reportedly didn’t like Tierney much, and so the fact that much heftier Tierney is using him as a resting spot here probably went over poorly.

Mike was always the go-to one of us who could knock out some quick scene pages, to see if they would work. The same endeavor might take me a week. Mike ran off to Java Joe, our favorite coffee house around the corner on Santa Monica Blvd., and wrote a quick draft of the potential scene with Tierney. He brought it back a few hours later, and I read it on the early model Apple Powerbook, which we shared ownership of. I loved the bare-bones of the freshly-scripted scene.

“I imagine Tierney in a bright red smoking jacket, and smoking a cigar. We’ll backlight him and his head. I want him to look like the devil,” explained Mike.

Hill Harper in our film, playing Fisher, the bright-eyed assistant to the decadent music video mogul, Roger Peabody.

Okay, we had to do this. Hill Harper as the young assistant, and the terrorizing Tierney, as his boss, were going to be a great pair. Tierney was perfect for us!

Just as important, he might even need us. Lawrence Tierney had been a rising star in the 40s and 50s, before a major career downturn. While Reservoir Dogs should have made him in high demand again, it somehow hadn’t, the reasons of which we should have looked a little more closely into. He had definitely done a few projects after Dogs that were on the very low-budget side, such as the recent 35-minute short film Red, which will figure a bit later in this tale.

Our measly $500 might actually land him then, having heard that “Larry always could use money” from our tenuous connection to Tierney: Joey, a performance artist and writer who published a physical zine every month, or maybe every few months, which covered cutting-edge art of different stripes in Los Angeles. Joey was a close friend of producer Paul, whose Brentwood apartment had become the go-to place for meetings related to the film. Joey was frequently there as well, just hanging out, and on this night, having pizza with us. How Joey was friends with Tierney was also tenuous, but Joey knew lots of show business characters, seemingly through his zine.

Still, Joey was adamant that, “You can use my name to speak with him, but it’s your deal after that. If it goes south, don’t drag me into it.”

“No problem,” I told Joey. “What’s going to go south?”

Joey shrugged, “Just sayin’.”

“So you’ll tell him that I’m calling?”

“I already did. He said to give him a ring. Not too early, he’s not a morning dude.”

Wow. Joey had already laid the groundwork. This was exciting. Joey reached into his upper pocket, checked a pocket notebook, scribbled on one sheet, ripped the page out, and handed me Tierney’s 213 area code phone number.

“Remember, keep me out of this now,” asserted Joey, before going back to his pizza.

The general standoffish manner in which the usually gregarious Joey offered me the set-up for our big cameo should have been a warning.

Mike called his Uncle Morty that night and told him we were likely to land Lawrence Tierney for our reshoots. Morty was an entertainment lawyer now, but he had once been Co-President of one of the major studios in the late 60s and early 70s. He was our unofficial advisor on the film and wanted to be kept abreast of any and all developments.

Morty also relished in playing the Devil’s Advocate to the pair of bright-eyed dreamer neophytes that his nephew and I definitely were. No matter what news we’d bring him about the film, including things like this that we were excited about, he would always manage to spin it around into something that created doubt as to whether we had any idea what we were doing in show business.

“I thought he was dead,” said Morty, not as a reference to Snake Plissken, because Morty didn’t do pop culture references, but in all seriousness.

While Reservoir Dogs had been released, the stories about Lawrence Tierney from the set of that film had not trickled down to me, or really anywhere else of note. We asked Morty what he knew about Tierney.

“Only that I heard he was nuts,” replied Morty, and added, “I remember something about the LAPD driving him to the Arizona state line in the 50s and telling him not to come back.”

This is one of the many Lawrence Tierney legends that abounded, and I eventually heard this tale a lot, although Morty was the first to bring it up. To this day, I don’t know if the Arizona state line story was true. It seems like a hell of a drive for the cops to deal with one actor.

Morty also added, “You think that maybe his cameo might HURT your film?”

So many questions to consider. But the answer to that one was no, but also maybe? I don’t know. What were these wild stories Morty was referring to? And what difference, now that Lawrence Tierney was in his 70s?

Regardless, the next morning, I volunteered to be the one who called Tierney, even though this would have normally been a better job for Mike. I wanted to prove I could do it, and I knew that cold-calling was something I had to get better at. Negotiating too. About a year prior, I had mentioned the latter to another friend of the same age, and he gifted me with something that he said had helped him with the same problem: a set of cassette tapes on negotiating by Herb Cohen, the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Negotiator,” who wrote the book You Can Negotiate Anything, and who had this go-to catchphrase when things went rough in a negotiation: “Whoa, wait just a minute!” I’m not sure I learned anything from those tapes, but we were about to find out.

In addition to the books-on-tape method, there was a jumping-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool strategy to the way my twentysomething self conquered various fears. Nervous about talking to girls at parties? I’d make myself talk to five that night. Now maybe I would get great at cold-calling and negotiation from this one conversation with Lawrence Tierney. At the least, I would get better. I honestly couldn’t get much worse.

I’d have to finish actually dialing the numbers first though, which was always the biggest hurdle for me when making a stressful phone call. I’d stop and start quite a bit. This was not a new problem. In high school and college, I had a tendency to even hang up on the call recipient once when making a stressful phone call, before then making a second call and actually following through. These were in the days before Caller ID. Hanging up on someone seemed to be a pervasive societal dysfunctional impulse of the day, as I had the reverse happen to me all the time. The phone would ring, I’d answer, and then the caller would quickly click off. A few minutes later, it would ring again but the caller would stay on this time. It might be somebody you had called about business, or were thinking about dating, or just about anything. You knew they had been the one who hung up, but weren’t sure why, and no one usually pointed it out.

Regardless, I was determined not to hang up on Tierney even once. Larry’s area code was 213, which covered much of Hollywood and Downtown L.A., and I dialed parts of that 213 numerous times, then hung up and started again, before pushing the last button and finally letting it actually ring.

A gruff male voice answered.

“Hello?”

A television set was blaring in the background with what sounded like a war movie, one that I didn’t recognize and so it was likely older. Explosions and gunfire and soldiers shouting.

It was definitely him. Nobody else alive sounded like this. I wasn’t sure how to start. I didn’t feel like just saying “Hi, Larry?” was going to be appropriate. Little did I know how little my own version of being “appropriate” was going to matter in this relationship.

“Hi, I’m trying to reach Lawrence Tierney.”

“Speaking!!!”

As I would quickly learn, Larry would frequently yell in conversation, and I’m not sure whether it was because his hearing was bad, or the television was just so loud. I’m positive he wasn’t always as contentious as he sounded. He just couldn’t hear, for reasons physical, mechanical, or both, so every conversation eventually became like having a screaming match with Joe Cabot. With the television always going, both you and he were struggling to hear, and be heard, over what felt like a constant stream of old war movies, which always seemed to be on during battle scenes. Now there was cannon fire.

“Hi, my name’s Terry Keefe. Our mutual friend Joe Poplowski talked to you about the feature film we wanted to, um, offer you a role in?”

“I don’t know any Popalowski. Polish? Don’t know him.”

“Poplowski.” I corrected.

“Uh-huh,” grunted Larry.

Long silence. Joey had to know Larry. This was his phone number he had given me. Also, the last thing I attributed to wacky Joey’s identity was that he was Polish, but this seemed to matter to Larry.

I was ready to throw in the towel here when Larry rescued the call.

“Keefe…Irish?”

“I am!” I exclaimed, grasping for any common ground here.

“Yeah, so am I.”

I never knew what to say when anyone who was proudly Irish-American, but who inevitably called themselves just plain Irish, tried to bond with me over it. Despite being Irish myself, I was brought up by Russian-Poles who barely knew when St. Pat’s Day was. Larry was of a New York generation where your ethnic and/or religious self-identity was very important, though, and I was happily Irish now.

“Cool, that’s awesome!” I replied, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. It sounded convincing on my end. I wasn’t going to sing “Molly Malone” to win him over. Well, I probably would have at this point.

Explosions from the war movie. Long silence from Larry. Well, not totally, because he was breathing heavy. He cleared his throat loudly a few times.

“What kind of picture are you making?!” Larry finally blurted out.

“It’s called Slaves of Hollywood.”

“Porno?”

We had heard this so many times, from so many people, that we should have known we had a serious marketing problem with that title. We hadn’t actually borrowed the title from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz, which is something we were also frequently asked. The original name of the film was, in fact, KNAVES of Hollywood. A friend suggested SLAVES of Hollywood and it just rolled off the tongue better, but somehow adding “Hollywood” provided a porno vibe not quite there in Slaves of New York.

It didn’t appear that Larry was necessarily turned off by the prospect of being in a porno. He was still on the line.

“No, no, it’s not a porno, Larry. It’s an indie comedy about working in the film business. We have to reshoot a scene and wanted to cast you. It’s a day of shooting. We’ve written the part just for you.”

“Ah-hah. It’s a pick-up.”

“Right, a pick-up!”

“And we wrote it just for you!”

More silence from Tierney. Bomber planes on the television.

“How much you offering?”

“Ah, $500?”

“That’s….that’s the best you can do, eh?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, but cash. We’ll pay you in cash.”

“Of course I want it in cash!”

Another long silence, but maybe we were getting somewhere. In this scenario, we were at least exchanging money somewhere, sometime, in exchange for his acting services. Felt like casting to me!

“I’ll do it for $600,” Tierney suddenly grunted.

That extra $100 might mean we didn’t eat that week back in those days. That is how broke we were, but who needs food when you can have the CAMEO?

More silence from Larry, who then burst out, loudly, “$600 then. We have a deal for your picture.”

This may have been the easiest negotiation I ever had. Despite his gruffness, Larry spoke in the sophisticated-sounding parlance of many older Hollywood players, when he referred to movies and films as “pictures.” We were making pictures! So much more elegant than just movies.

He asked for my phone number, which he repeated to himself as he scribbled it down.

“Okay, I’m gonna keep that number by my phone. Give me a call tomorrow and we can figure out a time to get me those script pages. I’m going out to Arizona in a few days to look at some land, so let’s talk before then.”

We seemed to be all set! Maybe it wasn’t that difficult to get a celebrity to do a cameo in your picture. Or maybe it was because I was That. Damn. Good.

I told my grandmother the great news. Crickets on the line in Greenport, Long Island. She vaguely remembered Tierney from her younger moviegoing days and that he was a “tough guy actor.”

She added, “I thought he was dead.”

Fans of the Tim Burton film Ed Wood may remember this as a frequent reaction when Ed would boast about having Bela Lugosi in his upcoming projects. That I was heading into Edward D. Wood territory myself in my general career and filmmaking approach was sort of lost on me at the time. I had gone from being a rising development guy at a major film studio to whatever the hell I was doing now. All in two years. Oh, the places you’ll go.

“Tony Curtis would still be better,” concluded my grandmother, who had attended the famous Girls’ High in Brooklyn, and was only two years younger than Larry, who had attended the related Boys’ High. They were practically neighbors in the same era and could have potentially met at an ice cream social between the schools. Larry was surely one of the most famous people to come out of the neighborhood in that time period, along with Norman Mailer, who also attended Boys’ High, albeit a few years after Larry. One might think my grandmother would have more knowledge of a famous actor she grew up near, but she barely knew who he was these many decades later. Maybe this wasn’t such a great cameo with the general audience then, but my grandmother wouldn’t have made it through five minutes of Reservoir Dogs either.

Regardless, that evening, Mike and I celebrated. Well, we got coffee at Java Joe and then watched Larry’s recent film Red, the low-budget short that Chris Gore (billed in the credits as Christian Gore), founder and editor of the seminal magazine Film Threat, had directed, sometime shortly after Reservoir Dogs. Gore’s magazine was a vital, and influential, part of the independent film scene in the 90s. Film Threat had a punk rock edge to it, and whereas other indie film mags would be covering the latest Sundance discovery, Film Threat might write about directors and projects that virtually no one else was even giving a word of ink to.

In the film, Tierney plays the titular “Red,” the real-life Jersey bartender (Louis “Red” Deutsch) who was the victim of phone pranksters at the Tube Bar in Jersey City. The ‘Tube Bar Tapes”, in the pre-internet days, went the analog version of “viral,” via cassette tape trading, and featured a pair of prank callers, later revealed to be named John Elmo and Jim Davidson, who recorded a series of calls to the Tube Bar. Red the Bartender would pick up the phone, be duped initially, but then become increasingly verbally violent as the callers provoking him. The Tube Bar Pranksters were sort of spiritual grandfathers to the Jerky Boys.

(Tierney on the cover of the VHS of Red, above.)

Sample dialogue:

Prank Caller: Is Al there?

Red: Al who?!

Prank Caller: Al Coholic.

Red: (shouts to the bar) Is Alcoholic here?

The bar erupts into laughter and Red realizes that he’s been had.

Red: (back into phone) “Why you ***king son of a bitch! I’ll kill ya!!”

Rinse and repeat. A few hours later, the caller dials the bar again and gets Red.

Prank Caller: “Is Ben there?”

Red: “Ben who?”

Prank Caller: “Ben Dover.”

Red (shouts to bar): “Is Bendover here?”

Laughs from the bar patrons, as Red realizes he has been taken yet again, and turns back to the call with absolute fury, shouting,“You’ll remember me for the rest of your life!! You sunovabitch, I’m gonna -” Red then unleashes a torrent of descriptions of what he will do to the Caller’s mother, rectum, testicles, and the same of all his family members, mixed with every manner of swear word and insult.

The Red of Gore’s Red eventually is driven insane by the incessant calls and starts actually killing his tormentors, who have unwisely shown up at the Tube Bar and identified themselves to him. The beleaguered bartender finally pulls a shotgun from behind the deck and blows them away in a bloody massacre.

We had now seen the modern-day version of Tierney in two films, and what was dawning on us was that he was maybe more of a great presence than a great actor, per se, but a great presence was plenty for us.

The next day, Mike and I relayed the Tierney Casting Good News to attorney friend Matt, who wisely made the point that we had better get our new star under some type of contract. If we didn’t have this deal in writing, we could easily get the rest of the cast and crew together at Savoy …and Tierney might decide not to show. There was no arguing the logic of this, but it felt like a potential road bump. Another hurdle to make this fantasy cameo come true. Because while my negotiating skills were still developing, I did know that getting somebody to sign an actual contract potentially could be a lot harder than getting them to verbally agree to a deal.

Matt put it sympathetically, but bluntly, “T, there isn’t really a deal with this guy unless we have him inked.” Matt would generally call me “T” when he was telling me something he knew I needed to hear, but didn’t really want to.

I told Matt I’d let Tierney know about the contract, and about an hour later, after several false starts but no actual hang-ups, I called Tierney again. He picked up right away, but there was no television blaring this time. If it weren’t for his unmistakable rasp, he would have seemed like a different person. His voice was calmer, and more measured.

I reintroduced myself, explaining we had just spoken last night and had negotiated a shooting deal, and that I was hoping to memorialize our deal in writing. For our picture. That last part I said as quickly as I could, hoping to just get him to a “no problem” right away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Silence on the other end, and I had to ask if he was still there, which he was.

I had no idea what to do here. I tried explaining again who I was, in case he needed reminding.

“Yeah, I don’t think I can help you out with this picture,” he said, flat and emotionless as can be. I couldn’t tell if he just didn’t remember our big negotiation from last night, or if he was now saying “No” to me, after sleeping on it. Was it because I mentioned a contract? The voice of Herb Cohen echoed in my head, but before I could even blurt out, “Whoa! Wait just a minute,” Larry concluded the call himself.

“I’ve gotta go, sorry” and he hung up.

My Cameo dreams were dissolving before my eyes. This time I didn’t need my pre-call ritual of false starts. I re-dialed Tierney straight through immediately. Like a boss. Okay, I would tell him that we would forget about the contract for now, maybe for good. If I had the money, he was going to show up, right? He surely needed it for that Arizona Land Deal. Wasn’t that what they were selling in Glengarry Glen Ross? Always. Be. Closing. We didn’t need a contract. And if people saw him take the money from me, and he did the shoot, hell, there should be no problem making a case in court that he agreed for his image to be used.

But, the phone rang and rang. He had no answering machine, which was unusual for an actor at the time, yet this was no ordinary actor either.

I tried again an hour later. He was definitely avoiding me. Caller ID didn’t exist, so he was willing to not pick up that phone, and potentially lose other more important calls, just not to take my call. That boded poorly.

Mike wasn’t thrilled when I told him what happened, but he also wasn’t that surprised. Maybe he had little confidence in my nascent dealmaking abilities, or maybe he was a bit relieved. He confided, “Look, it might have been the Shoot From Hell. It sounds like he’s a little off, or maybe way off. If things went wrong somehow, like he just ditched us, we’d lose our shirts on this shoot.”

I dozed off that evening around 10 pm.

The phone rang around midnight. This usually meant somebody died back home.

I stumbled to get the phone, knocking it off its base. This was before Caller ID, so there was no way to know who on the other line.

Loud television dialogue greeted me as I mumbled a hello.

“Keefe?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Larry Tierney! When are we shooting the picture?”

The images of Larry from Red, angrily shouting into the phone, invaded my mind.

“Larry? I thought you didn’t want to do the picture… or something?”

“What are you talking about?! I told you I would keep your number by my phone. We’re supposed to be making a picture together! 700 bucks!”

“600.”

“Okay, fine. Can you do the 7? See if you can do the 7.”

“Okay, I think we could do that, but that’s all,” I replied, trying to be stern but also wanting to keep my deal together. I was now up to 700 bucks, but still worth it for the Cameo.

It was only later that I realized Larry had negotiated another $100 out of me. Was this the method to his madness? Herb Cohen would have hit me with his book.

“I’m heading out to Arizona for a few days to look at some property there. Land. Let’s get this all locked before then,” Larry said. Arizona and that land deal again. This reminded me that I wanted to ask him if he had ever actually been driven to the Arizona state line and dropped off by the L.A. cops, but I resisted. Maybe that story really happened and he had developed a whole separate life in Arizona since then, with a wife, kids, grandkids. He might need the land to build an extra house for his expanding family. I did get the impression that our 600, now 700, bucks was maybe key to this real estate purchase he hinted at.

The sounds of movie dialogue from his television echoed.

“Have you ever seen this picture I’m watching?”

I started to reply that I’d have to know what it was first, but he cut me off.

“Breaker Morant. Such a great picture.”

I agreed, although I hadn’t yet seen the 1980 film. Based on Larry’s recommendation here, I did see it later that year, and he was right, it was a great picture, but it wasn’t MY picture.

“Larry, I’m glad we’re doing this. There was still that thing with getting a contract -”

He cut me off again. “Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow, and we’ll arrange a time for you to come by and give me those script pages, and I’ll sign whatever you need.”

All sounded okay, although I was a little nervous about how he ended the call quickly when the contract came up. We said goodbye, hung up, and I went to sleep like an auteur baby, pretty confident in the future of this shoot and my career.

The next morning, I decided to give Larry until 11 am or so before I called. He likely had been up late watching the rest of Breaker Morant. I didn’t want to wake him. Larry was an older guy, after all.

Larry picked up after a few rings, his tone somber.

“I don’t think I can do the picture.”

I was shocked and fumbled for an unprepared answer to this. I didn’t think a little indignation was out of line, so I added some to my tone.

“Larry, I thought we had a deal!”

“No.”

“I’ll pay you cash.”

“Of course you’ll pay me cash -”

That sounded hopeful again.

“- but no. Can’t do the picture.”

“Larry, is there anything I can do to get you to change your mind?”

“No.” A pause. “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

Larry hung up. Even Herb Cohen would have been exasperated by now.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Mike a second time that Tierney had dropped out. Just as well because later that day, as in much much later, circumstances changed once more. I had gone out for a bit, and when I returned home after midnight, there was a message on my answering machine which took up the entire side of the cassette tape. An hour in length. What the hell was this?

Larry had called. His television was blaring what an announcer kept name-checking as “Racing from Santa Anita.” Horns to start a horse race followed by the frenzied announcer doing play-by-play of the horses galloping around the track. Larry shouted into the phone over the din of this racket.

“Keefe, it’s Tierney! I still haven’t gotten those script pages!! Drop them off to me here at the Hollywood Tower Apartments…”

A loud rustling sound, then louder clumping and slamming noises, and the phone seemed to hit the ground. I listened for Larry to pick up the phone, but that never happened. My cassette answering machine was sound-activated, and as long as there was any audio whatsoever on the line, it just kept recording, until the tape ran out and abruptly cut off. An hour later.

Did Larry gamble on the horses and suddenly decide he needed our shoot to cover a bad bet? I kept listening…for the next hour, as “Racing From Santa Anita” ended and an episode of “Dr. Who” started, likely the Tom Baker-starring version, from the theme song that I knew from childhood. I liked “Dr. Who” at least. Finally, the tape just cut off. Did Larry die? Should I be calling 911? I probably should have, but I didn’t. Somehow I knew that Larry had just passed out, or fallen asleep.

Plus, he had given me his address, or at least the name of where he lived. I could find the rest. This day had been good to me after all.

The next morning, I decided I wasn’t going to call Day Larry. My plan was to just drop the pages off at the Hollywood Tower Apartments and leave them there for Larry. Day Larry would probably pick them up, but odds were it was Late-Night Larry who would read them and hopefully love them. I would thus avoid direct contact with Day Larry, who seemed to not know who I was.

Late-Night Larry was a different story, and I had the impression that Larry would maybe have a few drinks, see my number on the little scrap of paper he kept by the phone, remembered about the project, and gave me a call. Day Larry had no memory of this whatsoever, or maybe just a fading memory, like a conversation you had after five cocktails. Larry was certainly an alcoholic, and had actually been very open about his participation in Alcoholics Anonymous during his mid-century heyday, but, to be clear, I have no way of knowing if he was still drinking during these later years of his life. Friends in the terrific 2022 biography of Larry, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, by Burt Kearns, speculated that Larry may have been manic depressive and that was a possibility here also. Regardless of the cause, I was negotiating with two Larrys, effectively. Hey, my method was dive into the deep end of the pool, right? Even if there might not be any water in it.

I cruised out to the Hollywood Tower Apartments, which was several stories tall, somewhere near Highland Blvd., and which looked like it could collapse during the next earthquake, hell, the next aftershock. Larry could probably even knock it over by punching the wall during a tough negotiating call with me. A lot of people lived in this place, and somewhere, in one of these apartments, Larry and I had been hammering out our deal over the phone. I wondered what his neighbors thought of his television volume, and I felt sympathy for whoever they were.

(Note: The Hollywood Tower Apartments is what I remember the apartment building being called. A current search of Google reveals a very different-looking building of that name, than I remember, far more expensive-appearance and more like a boutique hotel, so it is possible Larry’s building was called something else. The old building he lived in may also just be gone, or the version seen on Google was a renovation.)

A good-looking Young Actor Type sat behind a desk. Not exactly a doorman, but his job seemed to be to watch the lobby.

I approached, “Hi, I needed to leave something for Lawrence Tierney.”

That name needed no introduction. “Oh, yes!” he nodded, quickly taking the papers from me. I thanked him and headed off. Over my shoulder, I saw the Young Actor Type pick up the phone, presumably calling Larry. He then flipped through the script pages himself with interest. I took off before Day Larry made an appearance in the lobby.

On the way home, I spontaneously decided to make a stop at the Beverly Hills Public Library, where Mike and I had done a lot of fruitful research for Slaves of Hollywood, as they had a huge microfilm library of magazines and newspapers, going back many decades. Long before things were digitized.

It was time to learn everything I could about Lawrence Tierney. I was so excited about us working together that I wanted to read up on his early films and learn more about the guy we were going to shoot this scene with. These were the days when the library was the best place for most types of broad research. I was going to regret this stop, though.

Over the remainder of that afternoon, I pulled newspaper articles and gossip columns going back to the 1940s, and I learned pretty quickly why Larry had had his career end several times, although I was not quite sure why he was able to come back several times as well with new projects. Bluntly, Larry might as well have been the person the phrase “raging alcoholic” was invented for. In his legend-making days of the 40s and 50s, he was arrested at least twenty times for fights in bars, nightclubs, and with cops. Not just in L.A., but in New York as well, and several states in between. This Hulk-like cross-country ramage continued well into the next decades.

One of Larry’s many headlines for brawling and getting arrested. this one in New Jersey in 1949. “Fists flew and the cops came.” It would not be the last time.

If there was a Day Larry and a Night Larry, Drunk Larry could be added as a third persona, and it was the Larry you really didn’t want to meet. Drunk Larry seemingly would just punch other bar patrons, unprovoked. The Los Angeles cops beat him with night sticks on more than one occasion, for resisting arrest, and maybe just because they were so sick of him. Enough to drop him to Arizona? Maybe, but probably not. The legendary gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons loved writing about Larry, and often led with his most recent antics in their regular show biz columns. During the 40s and 50s, Larry tried to choke a cab driver, hit a waiter over the head with a sugar bowl for refusing to sell him more drinks, was put in jail for 90 days for breaking a college student’s jaw, and also placed in a mental institution after being found “disheveled in a church.” These were just some of the highlights.

Just another night in Hollywood: Lawrence Tierney and the LAPD.

The articles revealed that Larry managed to end, and subsequently jumpstart his career more times than virtually anyone in Hollywood history. He had been on the career skids after losing his RKO contract, when he got a significant role as one of the main villains in The Greatest Show on Earth, which won Best Picture in 1953. His co-stars included Jimmy Stewart and Charlton Heston. Legendary director Cecil B. DeMille apparently loved Larry, promising him a multi-picture deal. Which Larry managed to scuttle when he made the papers again for getting in fights and being arrested for the umpteenth time.

In good company. Jimmy Stewart in clown-face, Charlton Heston, and Lawrence Tierney in THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Larry was reportedly the favorite of equally legendary director Elia Kazan, to play the role of Charley, the brother of Marlon Brando, in On the Waterfront. For reasons unknown, Larry demanded too much money and the role went to Rod Steiger, who received an Academy Award Nomination for the film. Steiger’s career skyrocketed afterwards. Years later, producers apparently wanted Larry for the lead in the John Avildsen film Joe in 1970, but the role went to Peter Boyle after Larry reportedly urinated on someone during the wardrobe fitting, and, for good measure, was also arrested for assaulting a bartender that week.

As Larry’s career continued to death-rattle and then somehow resurrect itself again, his younger brother Gerard Tierney, who had sort of followed him out to Hollywood, gradually built a very successful career in movies and television, in a pretty stable and consistent fashion. He worked under the name of Scott Brady, which turned out to be helpful in separating him PR-wise from Larry’s antics. In terms of his acting style, Scott Brady was warmer on screen, sort of a more accessible version of his brother, who he definitely resembled. While his onscreen persona didn’t burn with the pure malice of his brother, whose did? Brady had a lot more luck than Larry did in being cast in hero roles, though. Between 1959 and 1961, Brady would star in his own western television series “Shotgun Slade,” about a traveling private detective/gunslinger, and went on to be a regular guest star on numerous television series, sometimes as a babyface, sometimes as a heel. Towards the end of his career, he landed co-starring roles in numerous studio films such as The China Syndrome and Gremlins.

Larry’s younger brother, Scott Brady, as “Shotgun Slade,” above.

By the 70s, Larry himself was driving a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park for tourists, and was also reported to be occasionally homeless. He continued to work as an actor, albeit much more sporadically, and was cast in Andy Warhol’s Bad in 1976, and in John Cassavetes’ Gloria in 1980. I would have paid to be a fly on the wall to watch a conversation between Warhol and Larry, which could have easily degenerated into a prequel for I Shot Andy Warhol.

But then business began to pick up again. Another legendary director, John Huston, helped spur on yet another comeback cycle when he cast Larry in a supporting role in Prizzi’s Honor in 1985, alongside Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner. Then, Larry landed a larger role in Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, followed by a very prominent part as Ryan O’Neal’s father, in 1987's Tough Guys Don’t Dance, written and directed by fellow Boys’ High alumni, Norman Mailer. He had a recurring role as Sgt. Jenkins on “Hill Street Blues,” where he even was given the last line of the series, picking up the phone and simply saying, “Hill Street” in his gruff voice.

Tierney as the desk sergeant in “Hill Street Blues.”

Violence always followed in the footsteps of success with Larry, though. Another clipping recounted an incident in 1991, just three years prior to our then-current journey with him, where a drunk Larry fired a .357 magnum in his apartment, which blasted through the wall into the adjoining apartment. He apparently was shooting near, or at, his nephew. The nephew was Michael Tierney, the son of Edward Tierney, youngest brother of Larry and Scott Brady/Gerard Tierney. Edward also had an acting career, first introduced to the public playing the long-suffering younger brother to a recently released convict played by Larry, in The Hoodlum, in 1951, and then later in B-pictures such as Liane, Jungle Goddess. No one was hurt in the recent shooting, but Larry had been arrested.

This is who Mike and I had been dying to get onto our film. We had a cast and crew to worry about, and the date we could have the night club Savoy, for shooting, was locked. If we had to stop shooting because of some on-set problem, it would likely be months before Savoy would be open for us again, if ever.

In the late afternoon, Mike and I met at my 16 mm workprint-infested apartment on Saltair Ave., where we read through the press clippings I had printed out from microfilm. Our partner and attorney Matt joined us, as Mike also had some Larry research of his own that he had done. A mutual friend named Melanie had recently worked closely with one of the investors in Pulp Fiction, which hadn’t been released yet but which anticipation for was very high, and Melaine had some Tierney stories that her boss relayed, about the shoot of Reservoir Dogs in 1991. We called Melanie via speakerphone, which we gathered around eagerly.

(Tierney, Harvey Keitel, and Michael Madsen on the RESERVOIR DOGS set. Keitel is joking around with his fist, but I’ve got a feeling something prompted this. Nonplussed, Larry prepares to eat Keitel’s fist.)

“Lawrence Tierney and Quentin Tarantino nearly killed each other!”Melanie recounted. Apparently, Tarantino and Tierney got into a near fistfight/shoving match after Tierney kept forgetting his lines, and Tarantino fired Tierney, who stormed off the set and down the street to a bar, where he proceeded to get loaded. Later that day, a drunk and enraged Tierney fired his Magnum in his apartment, either at his nephew Michael Tierney, or in his general direction. A large hole was blown in the wall. I had just read the story about shooting the gun in the apartment in the library research, of course, but hadn’t realized the incident was a direct result of a very bad day on the Reservoir Dogs set.

“And he pulled a knife on Jerry Seinfeld!!!” exclaimed Melanie, as a segue way to her final Tierney tale. Now, the real details of that “Seinfeld” story only became quite well known years later, but at the time, all Melanie could relay was that Larry managed to ruin for himself what would have been a lucrative recurring role as Elaine’s father, Alton Benes, on “Seinfeld,” in 1990, when he tried to steal a large knife from the kitchen set in Jerry’s apartment. Jerry Seinfeld himself confronted Larry about it, and Larry tried to make a joke of the situation, saying he took the knife in case he had to stab Seinfeld in the head with it, and mimicking that stabbing with the blade. He was quickly fired, although the one episode Larry did appear on, “The Jacket,” is considered a classic of the series. He showed his comedic chops in the episode, skills which he was seldom cast to use.

Jason Alexander, Jerry Seinfeld, and Tierney in the “Seinfeld” episode “The Jacket.” His one and only appearance on the series as Elaine’s father, Alton.

First-time director Tarantino reportedly had grand visions of including Larry in his later works, which could have seen Larry even cast in Pulp Fiction in some supporting role. Early drafts of Reservoir Dogs had contained a dedication of the script to Lawrence Tierney, but Larry had subsequently managed to incinerate this career bridge as well by his behavior on-set, turning uber-fan Tarantino into an adversary.

Most of the crazy Larry-related Reservoir Dog stories, as recounted by not just Tarantino, but also co-stars Chris Penn, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth, weren’t really reported in the press until years later, largely when Tarantino and the cast started doing interviews reminiscing about the making of the film for landmarks like the DVD release. Tarantino would recount in an interview with The Guardian, “Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time — he just needed to be sedated. We had decided to shoot his scenes first, so my first week of directing was talking with this ***king lunatic. He was personally challenging to every aspect of filmmaking.”

It was pretty obvious that we had to drop the Tierney cameo. Sexy Dominatrix hurling her whip around willy-nilly had nearly cost Mike an eye. Imagine if Larry attacked one of us, or one of the crew, or even Hill.

If I didn’t call Tierney, he might never call me again. However, formal termination of the relationship was probably advisable, according to attorney Matt, who was concerned I had already made a verbal contract with Tierney. Meaning that Tierney could now come after us for the promised $700 whether we shot with him or not.

This had been a long day already. Mike and I decided we’d just tell Tierney in the morning that the shoot was off for money reasons, not actually fire him, and hopefully that would end things and he’d forget about us.

As that evening’s work/entertainment, I had already picked up three more of Tierney’s most famous early films at the Santa Monica-based speciality video store Vidiots: 1945’s Dillinger, as well as Born to Kill, and, of course, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, both released in 1947. It seemed pointless to watch them now, but we popped Dillinger in anyway, with the intention of watching just for a few minutes. We couldn’t turn it off.

Dillinger was Tierney’s first starring feature role, and the film that made him a star after RKO loaned him out to the low-budget “Poverty Row” producers at King Brothers and Monogram Pictures. Directed by Max Nosseck, Dillinger was reportedly made for some $65,000, and was done on such a shoestring that it included a “smoke bomb” bank robbery scene that was edited in from the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once. Even with his lack of leading role experience, which sometimes is evident in his occasionally flat line delivery here, Tierney radiates a magnetic screen presence. You really can’t take your eyes off him. The film went on to be a huge box office success, grossing at least 2 million on that small budget, and some reports had it as much as 4 million, in 1940s dollars. Tierney became an overnight star.

Tierney and Anne Jeffreys in DILLINGER.

There were two more noir classics to go and the night was still young. While Tierney showed great promise in Dillinger, the two RKO films we watched next, The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Born to Kill, showed him really come into his own, on films with larger budgets. In the case of Born to Kill, the film also benefited from the directing skills of one Robert Wise. Like Dillinger, the RKO productions were also filled with terrific supporting actors, who were great foils, of a variety of stripes, against Tierney’s slow-boiling presence.

Tierney and the great Elisha Cook Jr. in BORN TO KILL.

The 1940s were a time in Hollywood of great faces in the undercard, and Born, in particular, has strong supporting work from the likes of Elisha Cook Jr., as Tierney’s miscreant best friend, in a nice visual continuation of their criminal partnership seen first in Dillinger, where he played one of Dillinger’s gang. Larry was at his best when he had a good foil to play off of, and Cook Jr., nervous and much smaller physically than Larry, completed a great onscreen pairing.

Tierney gets ready to ruin the life of nice-guy Ted North in THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE.

This trio of films quickly schooled us that Tierney was more than just the photogenic character guy from Reservoir Dogs. He was a legit great actor. This is why he had so many chances at comebacks. He was the definition of acting lightning in a bottle. Not always easy to control, to be sure, but when he delivered, he delivered huge. Tierney radiated malice onscreen in a way that few performers ever have, before or since. In both Born and Devil, he never appears to be acting. It’s more like the real-life actual version of his degenerate criminal characters was dropped into the film. In a time when special effects were in shorter supply in films, Tierney was a special effect via his unique and riveting screen presence. At the time of the RKO films, he was frequently compared to Robert Mitchum, who was also in trouble with the law often, although not as much as Tierney was. Mitchum obviously also shined in his portrayals of criminals, but there was an occasional warmth that peaked through with Mitchum, a humanity… that Tierney seemed to lack, onscreen at least. When Tierney did crack a joke, or attempt a twinkle, it only made him scarier to the audience, even if it briefly fooled or charmed his hapless victims in the actual film. Mitchum could play a hard-boiled hero and have the audience root for him. Tierney, maybe not. If Tierney had portrayed the villain in The Night of the Hunter instead of Mitchum, that already haunting film about an evil preacher chasing two children may have been so terrifying as to be difficult to watch.

After Born to Kill unspooled to its bleak ending, which was the opposite of life-affirming, followed by the famous RKO logo, Mike and I had come to the same conclusion. One of us just had to say it.

“You know, it’s worth trying. This could be great. This guy has more great performances in him,” said Mike.

“Tarantino had to squeeze what he got out of him,” I cautioned. “You can see him cutting around Tierney sometimes, when there were longer dialogue passages.”

“But he had a lot more scenes with Tarantino,” Mike correctly noted.
“We only have this one to get through.”

“And we’re going to give him a chance to show those comedic skills, that Jerry Seinfeld lost out on,” I added. “We’re going to have to warn the cast and crew before we shoot, though. Let us handle him.”

“If one of us gets killed, just dedicate the movie to me,” Mike said.

“You’re directing, so it probably will be you he gets first,” I half-joked.

So, after being ready to cut and run from the possible madman just hours earlier, we had now decided we had to do this. There were maybe still levels of greatness in Tierney that had never been tapped. We would be the tappers.

Filmmaking folly, thy name is youth.

Because nothing good ever comes easy, the next morning a new player entered the game. The call was from Michael Tierney, the same nephew who had been shot at, or near, in 1991. He seemed affable, but also businesslike. He wasn’t ringing to be my new pal.

“Larry has a lot of young filmmaker friends, and he likes to help them out. I just try to look out for my uncle and help in his management,” said Michael.

I agreed that it was important for a family member to be watching out for Larry, and it was, but now I knew we had somebody else in here who could gum up the works. Up until now, I had only been dealing with Day Larry or Night Larry, but now I had Nephew Larry in the mix. Getting to a contact might have just gotten much harder, or maybe it was going to be easier, if his nephew could handle the Day/Night Larry side of things. We were about to find out.

“Maybe we’ll get Day for Night Larry,” Mike joked, making a reference to the 1973 Francois Truffaut film. Cinephile humor. Actually, Day for Night Larry sounded like just what we wanted. Calm with moments of fire, hopefully all for the camera.

Michael Tierney suggested we all meet the next day, so Larry could get to know us a bit, and in Michael Tierney’s words, “Go over the script pages you sent and some concerns he had.” The whole thing now seemed like it was tenuous all over again. I restrained myself from blurting, “Whoa! Wait just a minute.” Larry maybe didn’t like the script pages, which was sort of fine, because we could rewrite them, but we were running out of time. The shoot at Savoy was in two weeks.

I again called Joey, our original liaison to Larry, who Larry didn’t seem to actually remember, for advice. Joey said that he knew Michael and that I shouldn’t be worried about dealing with him in a high-tension negotiation.

“Michael’s a ***king actor,” Joey added with a shrug. Only in L.A. could that sentence be understood to speak volumes, but also possibly mean little at the same time. “A ***king actor” could mean a performer who takes his craft very seriously. It could mean a flaky actor who sleeps on friend’s couches and never gets work. Or it could mean a giant pain to our negotiation. We were going to find out shortly.

The next afternoon, which was a Sunday, Mike and I set out to meet the Tierney’s at the venerable Hollywood Athletic Club, a cavernous bar and pool hall that had found new popularity with hipsters in recent years, and which Larry himself picked for our meeting. The Athletic Club had originally started as an actual health club in the 1920s, and its membership included a veritable who’s who of the motion picture industry of the time, such as Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Jean Harlow, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Larry had once lived above the place sometime during his 40s and 50s heydays. If Larry had been banned from the place back then, as he was from so many Hollywood hotspots during his hard-drinking prime, the current owners weren’t likely aware.

The venerable Hollywood Athletic Club in modern times, above, at 6525 Sunset Blvd.

Drizzling cold rain greeted us at the valet. Typical March weather in Los Angeles. A decent crowd inside for drinks and lunch on a Sunday afternoon, with a few people playing pool as well. A top production designer couldn’t have stage-managed a better location for our big sit-down with Lawrence Tierney. The shadowy lighting, the classic art deco design, it all screamed noir. There was no point in living in L.A. if you couldn’t occasionally imagine your life as part of a classic movie, even with the knowledge that supporting characters like us had a high mortality rate in Lawrence Tierney pictures.

Michael Tierney had already arrived, standing by the bar when Mike and I entered. He was a few years older than us, with slightly longish hair, and a bowling-style shirt. Michael greeted us with handshakes, saying that his uncle was walking down the street to join us, and that he was sometimes late, so we should get a table.

The three of us sat down in the rear of the dining area, and made some small talk. The crowd was mostly younger types in the 20s, our general age range. Which made Larry’s entrance stand out all the more. Standing 6'1'’, wearing a dark trench raincoat, he first appeared at the far end of the bar, his bald dome looming above most of the other patrons. By far the oldest person in the place. As he made his way to our table, a number of heads turned. Some stopped playing pool for a moment. Maybe they knew him from Reservoir Dogs, or the one “Seinfeld” episode, or there were a few cinephiles who knew his cinematic history, or they were all staring just because he was a unique and imposing presence.

After how many crazy phone calls and conversations and debates amongst us, I couldn’t believe we were actually here together. My heart raced.

Larry smiled a small amount when we were introduced, but he didn’t waste much time dashing our hopes of ever making this work.

“Fellas, I have some bad news about this picture.”

He just let that sit there.

Michael Tierney chimed in, rescuing the moment to a degree, “Larry found out this morning that he has an offer for at least a week on the new Ivan Reitman movie. $10,000 a day. He has to leave next Thursday.”

That would put him already out of town by the time we had to shoot at Savoy. Hoping that it was maybe just the proverbial Hollywood “creative differences” here, I injected, “Larry, was it the script? We can work on that. We wrote it for you, so we can change it…”

“Naw, not the script. The script is fine. I mean, you have some stuff in there that I don’t know… I tell the guy to take his clothes off…,” he laughed. Mike and I all joined in the laughter, still hoping to save this.

Michael Tierney added, “Look, Larry’s willing to do your movie if you can still do it when he gets back. We just don’t know when that is going to be yet.”

Larry said, “$10,000 a day is not something I can screw with. You know, I’m looking at land in Arizona right now.”

I still blame the great state of Arizona in part for this, but that was that. Larry wasn’t saying no to us, but it wasn’t likely something we could wait any longer for. After all of the sturm and drang, this had simply ended with a polite “no thank-you.”

Larry added, “I know you guys worked hard on this picture, so I wanted to tell you in person.”

What could we say to that, other than a thank you in return? It didn’t hit me back then, because I was an egotistical young artist, and thought that of course Larry should do our scene. We needed him, but we were also doing him a favor. We were going to be huge in this business. I mean, what else was Larry doing anyway? Working with frigging Ivan Reitman? Larry was a guy who had gone the distance in show business, not once, but several times. He also managed to epic-ly dynamite his career several times, but nonetheless, this couldn’t be looked at in any other way than that he was doing us the favor in even considering the film.

The Larry Tierney we met that day was the one I read about later in parts of Burt Kearns’ book, in some recollections. Charming and funny, there was nothing violent or explosive about the guy in front of us. He was encouraging to two young filmmakers who he likely didn’t have to have this meeting with. But, based on the myriad experiences of others, the occasional madman of legend was likely to also make an appearance, with or without alcohol, if you spent enough time with him. He was one complicated character.

Quentin Tarantino would add the following about working with Larry years after Reservoir Dogs, which is quoted in the Burt Kearns book, “If you’ve ever seen The Devil Thumbs a Ride, that could be called ‘The Lawrence Tierney Story,’ because it’s about some nice guy who’s driving down the street and Lawrence Tierney’s hitchhiking on the side of the road. And you stop to pick him up. You’re having a good day and you’re a nice guy, but because you bumped into Lawrence Tierney, he’s gonna ruin your life. From that moment on, your day’s gonna be **cked and your life is going to be ruined while he’s in your presence.”

Based on that analogy, perhaps it is best that things ended when they did and my last memory of Larry was a fond one that I cherish. He gave Mike and I each a very firm handshake in the light rain outside the Hollywood Athletic Club and said, “Fellas, best of luck with your picture.” Then, he walked down the street with his much younger nephew, who he had once fired a gun at, or in the general direction of, and he was gone.

Although Michael Tierney’s injecting himself into the proceedings really annoyed me at the time, because I felt like he was going to get in the way of his uncle shooting with us, I also believe in retrospect that he was keeping an eye on his uncle and making sure that no one took advantage of him. These were the acts of a loving family member, and I’ve had to do the same for my own family, and their own business interests, as years have progressed. The Tierneys were an acting family. Different than the Baldwins or the Barrymores, to be sure, but then, every family was different.

Lawrence Tierney died on February 26, 2002, of pneumonia, which had been preceded by a series of strokes, one of which was sometime in 1995, only a year or so after our meeting. He was 82. Larry had outlasted by decades both of his younger brothers, who, by all accounts, did not live anywhere as hard as he did. That was a very high bar, granted.

After Larry’s death, literally dozens of stories came out, largely in tribute to him, from other young filmmakers and writers, similar to ourselves in career stature (as in not much career stature at the time) and who Larry had befriended, and vice-versa. Some of them, like Chris Gore, ended up actually shooting projects with Larry. Others developed friendships. The old Hollywood had abandoned Larry long ago, for the most part, but the younger upstarts viewed him as a legend and a star. Some of their stories would become the stuff of indie filmmaker legend. Larry crashing on their couch for a night, and then not leaving for a month. Phone calls in the middle of the night to pick him up at the Formosa and other classic Hollywood bars he still haunted in his 70s. Randomly throwing punches at people. Bouts of kleptomania, and public urination, including one occasion in the back of the Egyptian Theater at an American Cinematheque screening of Born to Kill, in 1999, as recounted in an epic blog post by Eddie Muller.

The Ivan Reitman movie, which the Tierneys didn’t identify by name, was Junior, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a man who gets pregnant, and also starred Danny Devito and Emma Thompson. Larry played a moving man with a line or two in Junior. Not a memorable role, but at $10,000 a day, I couldn’t blame him for forgoing our production for this one. In retrospect, I wonder if Larry had any of his “moments” with Arnold around. Even at his advanced age, I would not have bet against Larry in a fist fight with 40-something Schwarzenegger.

JUNIOR, the movie we lost Tierney for.

Junior also maybe put Larry back on the map with the studio casting directors for one last ride in the biggest film of 1998, Armageddon. Larry shot a noteworthy scene for the Touchstone Pictures smash hit, where he played Eddie “Gramp” Stamper, the elderly father of the Bruce Willis character, who goes to visit him before the likely suicide mission against the asteroid. The scene was cut from the theatrical version, but it was included in the Director’s Cut DVD and is easily found on YouTube. Directed by Michael Bay, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Armageddon was the top-grossing worldwide feature film hit of the year. Despite the scene being cut, Larry was playing in the biggest leagues of his career for his final act. He also kept working in small indies, and with family, right until the end. His last actual recorded role was in a low-budget movie called Evicted, in 1999, which co-starred and was directed by his nephew Michael.

Michael Tierney later went on to become one of the most successful male porn stars in the world, under the stage name “Joe Blow,” but has apparently since retired from porn. He starred in over 350 exotic pictures and was nominated for two Adult Video Awards, the porn equivalent of the Oscars.

Michael Tierney, as “Joe Blow,” above.

The weight of Larry’s legend seemed to be felt by Michael, long after the older Tierney’s passing. While promoting a documentary about his life called The Last Days of Joe Blow, Michael explained in an interview with Australian blogBeat, “Growing up in somebody like Lawrence Tierney’s shadow is a little intimidating because you wanna be an actor and you can’t be who he was, because there’s only one Lawrence Tierney. Going into porn was kind of my, ‘F you,” to the whole being somebody’s nephew. I’m gonna be Joe Blow and start with a new name and let’s see how I do on my own without any training wheels in a completely foreign territory.”

In the end, we never got “the Cameo” in our film, and wound up shooting the scene at Savoy with a basically unknown, but gifted, actor named Scott Murphy as Roger, and who did a terrific job.

Scott Murphy as Roger Peabody, below, in the scene we finally shot at Savoy.

The Tierney Cameo would have made little difference commercially by the time our theatrical release four years later, in 1998, actually happened. By the end of the decade, there were star cameos everywhere in small films, but sometimes the stars were at the top of the credits as well. “Indie” had become an entertainment buzzword of the 90s, and celebrities were directing, producing, and sometimes starring in indie films for the “indie cred,” also a buzzword of the time that lingers today like cheap aftershave. Stars descended upon every Sundance in droves, and there was now only a fine line between Hollywood and what had become known, somewhat derisively, as “Indiewood.” With all that, we were maybe more original by not having a cameo by the time our film hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles. That marketing hook had been played. At any rate, Slaves was released to some truly great reviews, and some truly awful ones. Critics either took the ride or they didn’t. In a bit of symmetry with our Tierney journey, Film Threat would give Slaves its first good review, and its only 4-star notice.

By the time our film was actually released in theaters, Hill Harper himself had become such a successful actor that he was a major selling point of the marketing. Hill had just come off a big role as part of the ensemble in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus and was subsequently was the lead in a number of indie features that received theatrical distribution, such as Hav Plenty and Loving Jezebel. In the end, we had an actual indie star as one of the leads and just didn’t know it in 1994. No need for a cameo but a few years had to pass, as they did because it took us forever to find distribution. Hill was literally the other guy in the Roger Peabody scene, no less.

Our week-long theatrical booking at the Laemmle Monica 4 in Santa Monica, CA, in good company with THE LIMEY.

(Our VHS cover, above. No cameos on the cover, but it still sold ok.)

Hill Harper, above, was all the star power our little film ever really needed.

As Mike put it after we said goodbye to Larry, “Look, we got to meet a legend.”

That much was true.

“You’ll remember me for the rest of your life!” Red vowed on the “Tube Bar Tapes.” That much was also true about Larry.

I was also never afraid to call anyone in Hollywood again.

SOURCES:

Much of the research for this piece was done from my own actual life experiences with Lawrence Tierney, in addition to the help of Wikipedia and IMDB, along with the following notable sources:

Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy by Burt Kearns contains so much detail, having been researched so thoroughly, that you will feel you have lived the life of Lawrence Tierney, with everything that entails, by the end. You may even feel a bit hungover and battered. Required reading for any Tierney fans. Available on Amazon.

This very entertaining article from Eddie Muller recounts the night Larry showed up uninvited to the American Cinematheque’s screening of Born to Kill in 1999.

The Big Leak: An Uneasy Evening with the Noir Legend Lawrence Tierney
Eddie Muller's uneasy evening with noir legend Lawrence Tierneywww.eddiemuller.com

Beat Magazine in Australia did this interview with Michael Tierney, aka Joe Blow.

The Last Days of Joe Blow
"I knew it was a crazy thing to go into, I knew it was reckless, I knew it was somewhat dangerous - I think it's more…beat.com.au

That Night COLORS Screened at USC Film School

2025-04-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

In 1988, a young USC screenwriting student named John Singleton, who was already scripting his 1991 feature BOYZ N THE HOOD, had a few things to say at a Question and Answer session for the ages.

Terry Keefe

Apr 17, 2025

(COLORS was released theatrically in the United States 37 years ago this week, in April 1988.)

(A one-sheet for the 1991 release of Boyz n the Hood, above.)

“Your movie gets it all wrong!” shouted a male voice from the audience.

Our little group of Freshman Film Students, the average age being 18, sitting together at Norris Theater at the University of Southern California, all looked at each other with surprise and a little nervous laughter. Did somebody really just say that? Did a crazy person wander in off the street? There was no shortage of them in our university neighborhood.

“Your movie gets it all wrong!” was just not the typical response heard from students at the class known as 466 at the University of Southern California’s Film School, then more formerly called the USC School of Cinema-Television, and today dubbed the USC School of Cinematic Arts. 466 was held weekly on Thursday evenings at Norris Theater, and featured a screening of a soon-to-be-released theatrical feature, followed by a Q&A with a luminary from the film. During the past two semesters, the collected grad and undergrad and faculty of USC Film School had held court with the likes of Leonard Nimoy, William Friedkin, Ridley Scott, Edward James Olmos, and Martin Sheen, all of whom answered our very reverent queries.

A particular highlight of the prior Fall semester was when director Phil Joanou brought his debut feature Three O’Clock High, a “High Noon in a high school” comedy, to 466. Joanou had graduated from USC just two years before and progressed right to directing two episodes of the NBC series “Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories,” after Spielberg had seen a VHS of Joanou’s student thesis film, known at the school as a “480,” in reference to the class with the same number. The 480 thesis film was entitled “Last Chance Dance.” For his second feature, Joanou was directing what was known then only as “the U2 Movie,” and which would be released theatrically about a year later as the documentary “Rattle and Hum.” 1987 was the year of The Joshua Tree album, and no one was cooler than U2 amongst, well, a lot of us at USC, although the band had its share of haters even then. Joanou was even sporting a long hairstyle very reminiscent of Bono at the time, making him look a bit like a fifth member of the group.

(USC alum Phil Joanou, right, directs the Edge in Rattle and Hum. Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures.)

Joanou had been part of the undergraduate production program, like my friends and I, which was considerably smaller than the similar graduate sequence. At the time, undergrads were rarely given the opportunity to direct one of the coveted 480 films in the first place, as more resources were allocated for the graduate students back then. However, Joanou had not only directed a 480, he had also catapulted into the “industry” to great success on the back of that 480. Just a few years older than us, Joanou was someone we could aspire to be. Even cooler than the association with U2 was that Joanou had received the tap on the shoulder from none other than Spielberg, whose legend, along with that of George Lucas, loomed over USC Film School like dual colossuses. Steven Spielberg, had famously been rejected from USC Film School, and attended Long Beach State, but he had joined with actual alumnus Lucas in donating buildings to the newly renovated Film School in 1984. Their respective names stared at us as we headed to class each day. (To be clear, there were plenty of my fellow film students who were also inspired to become filmmakers by so many other directors. Names like Friedkin, Scorsese, Lynch, Truffaut, Hitchcock, to name just a few. That being said, the legends of Spielberg and Lucas were inescapable around the Film School.)

Joanou’s seemingly overnight success had been the focus of short articles and blurbs in the mainstream movie publication Premiere, an article in New York Magazine, and one in the Los Angeles Times, amongst many others. In a stall of the men’s bathroom at Norris, someone had scrawled on the wall, with a pen, “Phil Joanou shat here.” When you’re the subject of a scatalogical-graffiti tribute at your film school alma mater, you have definitely arrived.

Some members of our undergrad class, totaling about 15, swarmed Joanou after the Q&A. The returning hero was happy to answer any of our questions, very warmly, even giving us each his business card, from the office he now kept at Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin Entertainment. The card featured a silhouette of E.T. and Elliot flying through the air on the bicycle. The reverent manner in which some of the starstruck gang, including myself, held those business cards after receiving them, you would have thought they were Willie Wonka’s Golden Tickets.

Many of the bigger name guests would be ushered out a back door shortly after the Q&A ended, but Joanou stayed to speak to as many students as wanted to speak with him. When the faculty indicated that they needed to close the theater, the conversations with Joanou continued outside Norris. By around 10 PM, Joanou intimated that he needed to be getting home, but that we could keep talking on the way to his car, which was parked a few blocks away on campus. We then followed Joanou in a film student parade of sorts, until he got into his vintage Porsche, but not before graciously wishing us each good luck on our own 480s. I never got selected to direct a 480 myself, a few years later, when I was an eligible senior, but it was a nice sentiment from him. Getting the director slot on one of those 480s could be a real-life Golden Ticket at USC Film School, as it had been for Joanou.

Joanou’s vintage Porsche made a noticeable clunking sound as it pulled away, and one of our group remarked, in reference to the car that didn’t sound like it might even make it to the nearby 10 Freeway, “He probably just hasn’t gotten the residuals from Three O’Clock High yet.” We regularly threw around words like “residuals” as if we knew of what we spoke. A few of us even subscribed to Daily Variety. I myself would keep that Amblin card in my wallet for the next six months, dragging it out at college parties in ridiculous fashion to tell the story of my “friend Phil” who worked for Steven Spielberg. What I should have done was try actually calling him to see if he needed an intern, but I had placed him on a pedestal in my mind and was intimidated to make that call.

The 466 Guests were mythical figures, of different stripes, that descended upon our campus each week. Some, like Joanou, were close enough to us in age that we could imagine ourselves being them. Others were titans, such as Nimoy, who we had grown up with on the small and big screen, and just being in the same room with them was a thrill.

We never thought someone from the school would ever challenge one of the 466 guests, but that was on the menu this particular Thursday. Colors was released theatrically on April 15, 1988, so the date of this 466 class would have likely been one of two Thursdays before the official release, that being either April 7, or April 14, 1988.

The guest at 466 was sometimes the star, sometimes the director, sometimes the writer(s), and on a slower night, we’d get the producer.

The evening Colors screened at 466 was supposed to be a slower night.

Colors starred Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, and was directed by Dennis Hopper, but none of them would be in attendance. The primary producer, Robert H. Solo from Orion Pictures, would be doing the Q&A.

Orion likely saw Colors as their typical mid-level spring/early summer release, the type they had mastered: a medium studio film budget (in this case, somewhere between 6–10 million), with stars who were nonetheless not too big to afford, and a familiar genre structure, in this case a buddy cop story, which Orion was known for putting some unique twists on.

The unique twist in Colors was that its more familiar story of two cops learning to get along and survive had been set against a backdrop of the street gangs of Los Angeles, a subject that had relatively recently put the wars between the Bloods and the Crips on the national radar via various media and news outlets. A recent example was the March 28, 1988 cover of Newsweek, with the headline “The Drug Gangs” and a photo of an African-American gang member being arrested in Los Angeles. The 80s were a period of American life when being featured on the cover of either Newsweek or Time meant that story was amongst the big news of the week, seen at every supermarket check-out counter. Recaps of the big cover stories were also often on every national and local news station. A nationwide fascination had sprung up over the concept of rival gangs who each wore a distinctive color, red in the case of the Bloods, and blue for the Crips. Also catching media and public interest was the concept of “drive-by shootings” between the adversaries, which felt like a uniquely California car culture spin on gang warfare.

(The March 28, 1988 cover of NEWSWEEK. The upcoming release of COLORS is mentioned inside. Credits: NEWSWEEK)

Before opening the doors at Norris Theater for a 466 screening, students would gather outside, sometimes over an hour before showtime. On the evening of the Colors screening, there was a bigger crowd waiting than I had yet seen at 466. There was no way everyone was going to get a seat.

Publicity of all kinds was trailing Colors before its imminent opening, which helped to make this campus showing such an event. Orion had recently screened the film to a few sets of young audiences in Los Angeles, and in one instance, some Los Angeles gang members got into a fist fight, but not much more detail was reported in the news than that. The Guardian Angels, who had recently increased their presence in L.A., predicted that there would be gang violence in theaters when Colors was released, and the NAACP denounced Colors in advance for glorifying gang violence. This was before most people could have ever seen the film, which we were all about to in Norris Theater.

(The exterior of Norris Theater in more recent times. Students would line up outside in the 80s, prior to 466. Credits: USC School of Cinematic Arts)

While any USC students were allowed to attend 466 screenings, actual Film School majors got first crack at the seats in Norris Theater. For those nights, we were the envy of the students who lined up in the “other” queue, hoping to get into a few of the empty seats held for non-film students. During a period of time when the “geek with a camera” was a ubiquitous, but not very heroic, character in 80s movies, 466 was a nice perk for we geeks with cameras.

Each of us even had a special 466 card, with the USC Cinema-Television logo emblazoned on it, which you would hand in upon entering Norris. There was a color-coded system used with the cards, with a red dot on the card being for full film majors, and a blue dot being for minors. After the screening and Q&A was over, a teaching assistant would call off the names of everyone to come pick up their cards one-by-one. Every time, during the years of 1987 and 1988, mild chuckles would erupt when the name of a student, “Steve Spielberg,” who was a tall jock type, was called. This particular Spielberg, who I think was a cinema minor and presumably was unrelated to the famed filmmaker, seemed annoyed by the laughs every time. In comparison, there was always a grad student, whose name I never knew, at most of the 466 screenings who had clearly styled his look after late 80s Spielberg, with the shaggy hair parted the same, similar beard, and even the same circular glasses often worn by the director back then. He stood off to the side when Phil Joanou was speaking to all of the rest of us post-Three O’Clock High screening, and just sort of stared at him, as if he were waiting for Joanou to acknowledge that he was cosplaying his mentor. That guy would have loved to have a 466 card with “Steve Spielberg” on it.

(My Freshman Year 466 Card. This got you to the front of the line at Norris Theater, VIP-style. Credit: Terry Keefe)

Colors was even attracting students you never saw anywhere near the Film School, unless they were lost. Such as a large group of enormous USC Football Players, who were banging on the doors, having arrived late, and pushing to get into the sold-out screening after everyone had already been seated. Football Players were kings on the USC campus in that era. I had recently experienced the entitlement of one gridiron star who kept dropping a “cheat sheet” over his shoulder, onto my desk, asking for the answers to specific questions, during an Earth Science 101 final. I barely knew this guy and there was no way in hell I was doing that for him. It didn’t matter, because the sorority girl next to him was willing to help the poor lad pass and scribbled a few granite/quartz-related answers back to him. Versions of that incident played out all over campus on a daily basis. So, it gave me some pleasure when the 466 teaching assistant explained to the gang of Players that the screening was totally sold-out. Some of them couldn’t believe it and acted like they had never been turned down for anything on the USC campus before. I heard one of them actually say the position he played, as if that mattered much at the film school. Get in line, jock-o.

There had been rumors that Dennis Hopper would make a surprise appearance that night at 466 also — “They’re hoping he can come,” said a teaching assistant in the know earlier that day — but it wasn’t to be. Hopper was something of an unexpected choice as director for Colors, only his fourth feature at the helm since Easy Rider put him on the map as a filmmaker in 1969, a map which he was nearly removed from with his financially and critically disastrous second directorial effort, The Last Movie, in 1971. Hopper hadn’t directed a feature since his little-seen 1980 film Out of the Blue, but he was currently in the middle of an acting renaissance, and surge of popularity, with his role as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Feck in River’s Edge, and as Shooter Fletch in the commercial hit Hoosiers, all released two years prior in 1986.

When the lights came up in Norris, after Colors had screened, the applause from the assembled film students was more polite than enthusiastic. Colors is set in the LAPD’s then-real life, and now defunct, C.R.A.S.H. Unit (which stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) in which the brash young rookie McGavin (Penn) learns how to police the gang neighborhoods under the wiser tutelage of C.R.A.S.H. veteran Hodges (Duvall). The plot is driven by a search for a shipment of drugs and money that threatens to trigger a larger gang war. I shared what seemed to be the audience’s very middle of the road reaction and felt that Colors was a solid cop film, but there was something missing that I couldn’t articulate. My movie analysis skills were still pretty nascent at that point, although I also had to admit the film cast a grim spell that had left me feeling gut-punched.

(COLORS producer Robert H. Solo, above, during an interview promoting the film. Credits: Bobby Wygant)

As the curtains closed and two chairs were put out on stage for the Q&A to come, the Moderator for the evening introduced producer Robert H. Solo, who took one of the seats. The Moderator was either Charles Champlin, revered Los Angeles Times film critic, or Rick Jewell, a professor in the USC Critical Studies Department, as one of the two of them handled almost all of the 466 Q&A’s that year. However, my own memory fails as to which one handled that night, and none of the half-dozen former classmates I’ve asked seem to recall either.

Whether it was Champlin or Jewell, the Moderator would soon have their hands full.

In his late 50s, Solo was dressed in a sports coat and slacks. After beginning his career as a studio executive, Solo had previously produced the legendary Ken Russell’s The Devils in 1971, and later, the terrific 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as well as 1983’s Bad Boys, no relation to the 1995 Will Smith-Martin Lawrence film of the same name, but a teens-in-prison flick starring a young Sean Penn, Esai Morales, Ally Sheedy, and Clancy Brown. Directed by Rick Rosenthal, Bad Boys was a ubiquitous presence in video stores large and small at the beginning of the video rental boom. The early drafts for Colors were set in Chicago, where Bad Boys had been filmed, and Solo mentioned in later interviews that Bad Boys was a catalyst for his interest in the world of gangs.

Presumably, Bad Boys was also the beginning of Solo’s working relationship with Sean Penn, who developed the Colorsscript with Solo, through a series of drafts with screenwriters Michael Schiffer, and Richard Di Lello, who share story credit, with Schiffer receiving screenplay credit. Most 1980s studio producers weren’t as prolific as the likes of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, with a film or two coming out every year. Many spent years developing numerous projects, with the hope of getting one of them to a theatrical feature release. The studio producer was often the one who even came up with the general idea of a script in the first place, then hired a writer to “take a crack at it.” Feature film projects could then germinate for years at the major studios, until an attachment of a star actor or director helped launch a script off a shelf and into production. Even with a coveted studio “First Look Deal,” as Solo had at Orion Pictures, a feature film release was a rare occasion that came around once every few years, if the producer was lucky. In other words, this was a very big week for Robert H. Solo.

The Moderator pointed to an up-stretched hand in the audience for the first question.

“What was the above the line and below the line budget for the film?”

Light groans from the audience, as this exact question was asked without fail every 466 Q&A, and was usually posed by a student in the Peter Stark Producing Program, a graduate sequence which trained students in the business side of Hollywood and, specifically, in producing. Classes were often taught by top Hollywood producers, studio executives, and talent agents. Known as “Starkies” within the film school, many of the Peter Stark students wore suits to class, and some also carried briefcases. For we “young artists” in the undergrad production and writing programs, these Suits-in-Training were exactly what we had majored in film to not become. Little did we know that some of these same people are who we would be pitching for funds in a few years, but that was still far from our willfully naive minds. “Never selling out” was a big mantra of our generation of artists in general, although many of us would be absolutely dying to sell out not long after graduation when we actually had to make a living of some sort.

Solo answered the above the line/below the line query with very specific figures, which got a bit of a laugh because really only the producer would usually have that information down to a dollar, based on past guest responses to the question at least. Sometimes the director wouldn’t even know the breakdown of the budget, an actor usually not, and a writer almost definitely not, although they would often reply with something like “Well, I can tell you what I was paid.” But a Starkie still asked the question every time, no matter who the guest was, and likely, the query was an outgrowth of a production budgeting class some of them were taking.

The next question wasn’t really a query at all, but more of a definitive statement.

“Your movie gets it all wrong!!”

A Young African-American Man of approximately 19 was standing up and gesturing at Solo from about three rows back. He was thin, wore glasses, and had been sitting with a group of male and female friends, who were watching him intently. All of the rest of us were now watching him intently as well, as in basically the entire assembled Film School.

We had never heard anyone tell one of the 466 guests that they didn’t like their film, much less whatever the hell was happening here.

“I grew up in South Central! My mother kept me out of gangs, this isn’t what it’s like at all! This movie gets it all wrong!”

The Young Man went on to attack Colors for being marketed as a “realistic” portrayal of Los Angeles gangs, but which was told from the perspective of two white cops. He then specifically went after scenes he thought were unrealistic. First, a scene in which an African-American couple are naked and energetically having sex, when the LAPD bursts in and shoots the man dead, as he was reaching for his pants. The Young Man argued that the police would have let him get his pants on. He next pointed out another scene, in which the police raid a drug house and bring out a woman handcuffed, and totally nude. The Young Man pointed out that the police would have let her get dressed first. I had to agree that the graphic nudity in both of those scenes felt straight out of an exploitation film and these criticisms were spot-on.

A hush in the audience. Nervous laughter, and a few coughs. Then, the most uncomfortable silence for what felt like half a minute or more. Finally, Robert Solo responded.

“We hired members of the C.R.A.S.H. unit as consultants. We had actual gang members as some of the actors,” said Solo, and added, “Ice-T wrote the theme song.”

“Well, Ice-T didn’t write the script!” the Young Man shouted back, which got a round of laughs from the audience. The Young Man then sat down. A murmur in the crowd slowly settled.

“Thank you for your comments,” the Moderator said to the Young Man, then turned back to Solo, “So, how did you start working with Dennis Hopper?”

“Dennis came in for the meeting wearing all these crazy clothes…” started Solo.

This got a laugh from an audience that needed to put the tension somewhere. Crazy Dennis Hopper stories are always a crowd pleaser anyway, and Solo then dived into how Dennis went about casting.

The rest of the Q&A was pretty much status quo, with questions about script development and financing. But, when my friends and I returned to what was known as “The Cinema Floor” at the dorms of Birnkrant Hall, as most of the residents were film students of some sort on the 4th Floor, we only had one question: Who was the Young Man?!

A friend who was in the screenwriting program, known formally then as the Filmic Writing Program, told us that the Young Man was named John Singleton, and that he was also in the Filmic Writing Program, but a year ahead of us. Other than perhaps large lectures, I wouldn’t have had any classes with Singleton up until that point.

“That guy’s never gonna make it in Hollywood!” declared one of our group. Obviously, this particular statement deserves a gold trophy for Worst USC Film School Career Prediction Ever, to be shared with whatever hapless administrator rejected Steven Spielberg’s application in the 1960s. However, we all did agree that getting up and shouting at a 466 guest just felt like a recipe for career destruction. It also needs to be stated that the undergraduate film programs at USC at the time were composed overwhelmingly of white students. The group of friends I’m referring to in this piece were all also white, and male. While I can’t imagine any us reacting to Colors with the public anger that Singleton did, our life experiences up until that point were also likely very different than his.

Something else was new to me, though, in watching and hearing what Singleton said that night: he was more passionate in how he felt about a film, negatively in the case of Colors, than I had ever been about any piece of art that I had seen up until then. And man, the pure guts he had at that age. He was the first film student I had ever seen stand up publicly and say a film made by the major studios simply didn’t work, directly to a representative of one of those major studios. There was something daring and freeing in how he expressed this that I had not encountered before. You could tell the powers that be of Hollywood when their films were terrible.

In his comments at 466, Singleton also nailed on the head what was bothering me about Colors but which I couldn’t put into critical words at 18. Specifically, that Colors makes only a minor effort to develop most of the gang members, effectively the bad guys in this story, as characters. One notable exception is a somewhat older Latino gang member named Frog, played by the late Trinidad Silva, who anchors a few key scenes that contain explanations as to why some young men are attracted to join gangs. (Silva, tragically, would pass away just a few months after the release of Colors, in July of 1988.) While boasting notable supporting talent like a young Don Cheadle as the effective main villain, a drug-dealing gang member named Rocket, most of the gang members are there essentially as blank foils to the police characters, playing their part as antagonists to the cops in car chases, shootings, and interrogations, but little beyond that.

Within a few weeks, Colors became both a box office success, grossing 46 million, and a major source of controversy. Violence between gangs in Los Angeles did break out at movie theaters showing Colors, and there was also one gang-related shooting outside of a theater in Stockton, California that was screening the film. Across the country, many theaters opted not to book the movie at all, in fear of more potential bloodshed.

The real-life LAPD and Colors were also blending together in April 1988, as the actual C.R.A.S.H. unit of the LAPD was involved in something called Operation Hammer, where numerous gang members were arrested, that same month. The arrests of Operation Hammer peaked approximately one week before the release of Colors when, according to Wikipedia, “1,453 people were arrested by one thousand police officers in a single weekend.” However, this huge sweep of arrests only resulted in 32 charges being actually filed, making it look far more like a PR stunt for the LAPD in retrospect. Many news pieces about Operation Hammer also found a way to mention Colors in the spring of 1988, perpetually intertwining the film and the topic of L.A. gangs.

In writing this remembrance, it was helpful to examine how Colors has been viewed over the subsequent decades, just as much as how it was perceived at the time of release. Said film writer Santino J. Rivera on Poco.com in a 2013 article entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Colors, but Were Afraid to Ask,” “Say what you want, but it’s an important film and one that displays a change in attitude in Hollywood towards people of color. It wasn’t too long before Colors came out that Hollywood was portraying us as break dancers and pesky neighborhood kids. Dennis Hopper changed all of that and things have never been the same.”

Dennis Hopper was quoted as saying, in defense of Colors on NBC’s “Today,” “I know that Abraham Lincoln was shot in a theater, but I don’t think it’s because of the play he was seeing. I’m merely pointing my finger at a problem and saying there’s a major problem in Los Angeles. It’s a crack problem, and it’s a problem that kids are killing each other. And it’s not a movie problem. The movie can only say, ‘Look, this is happening.’”

Producer Solo added in an interview with Bobby Wygant, “Colors is not a message picture. It’s a portrait. It’s letting the public know, who had blinders on, what is going on in our cities. What are we going to do about it?”

(A mass arrest in COLORS, above. Credit: Orion Pictures)

Hopper and Solo were correct in that the film did help shed light on the gang problem in L.A., which many in other parts of the country and the world would have not known about otherwise. A buddy cop film structure also helped provide something familiar to hang onto for an audience that might not have interest in seeing a film set just within the gangs themselves, or so the conventional wisdom likely went at the time. Without what Orion perceived as commercial hooks, i.e. two white movie star leads, it was also very possible that a film about the gangs of Los Angeles was never touched by a major studio at all in 1988. Although, that perspective was about to change.

(Robert Duvall’s Hodges and Sean Penn’s McGavin make an arrest in COLORS, above. Credits: Orion Pictures)

If Colors didn’t satisfy everyone as the ideal film on Los Angeles gangs at the time it was released, another, very different, film set amongst the gangs of Los Angeles was right on the horizon. Word spread quickly on campus in spring of 1990 that a USC student had just made a major deal with Columbia Pictures to write and direct a feature film. A specific name wasn’t attached to the verbal telegraph that got the news around the school, but soon, it would be.

The USC filmmaker’s name was John Singleton.

The upcoming film, entitled Boyz n the Hood, and reportedly about a group of three friends growing up in South Central, was scheduled to go into production in the fall of 1990. A friend recalled that Singleton stated in a later interview that he had been inspired to write Boyz after the 466 Colors screening, but I have never been able to actually find that interview. It also doesn’t jibe with a number of things that Singleton said in interviews about the creation of the screenplay, which he has said really started germinating back when he was a kid sitting on his family’s porch and watching things that went on in the neighborhood. He also explained that he had submitted a synopsis of what would become the Boyz script with his freshman admission application, along with a few other ideas.

Singleton would later recollect in interviews that he wrote much of Boyz in the USC Computer Lab, because he didn’t have a computer of his own. The late 80s were a time when maybe 1 out of every 8 or so USC students owned a computer. To meet the demand, the Computer Lab, located in what was a large windowless room, was filled with Macs that any student could use, was often open very late, and was packed with students during exam time, when term papers were often also due. Singleton would also recall that he wrote Boyz at the Lab using Microsoft Word, as screenwriting computer programs had not come into fashion yet. He would submit a finished draft of Boyz as his senior thesis, and he graduated from USC in May 1990, effectively already a studio director. While many of the rest of us at the Film School were clamoring to get picked to direct a 480 project, and then hope it turned out good enough to get industry attention, so we could maybe get hired to direct, or have a lunch meeting with a development executive at least… John Singleton had barreled through all of that and kicked down enough doors to get right to the major studios.

(Above, the only college picture I’ve been able to find of John Singleton was in the 1988 USC official yearbook, EL RODEO, which featured Singleton as part of the group picture for the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. He is first on the left, second row. Credits: EL RODEO Yearbook)

In May 1991, Boyz n the Hood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, to rapturous audiences and great reviews. Released theatrically a few months later in July, Boyz became a box office hit globally, sweeping like wildfire around the world, and heralding the arrival of an exciting new filmmaking voice.

As the two major studio films centering around Los Angeles gangs produced up until that point, Boyz n the Hood and Colors would quickly be compared by critics and audiences. While there were numerous obvious similarities between the two films due to subject matter and setting, the differences in tone and POV are stark from the opening title cards.

Colors begins with an ominous scroll which reads:

“The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department each has a gang crime division. The Police Department’s division is called C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) and the Sheriff’s division is called O.S.S. (Operation Safe Streets). The combined anti-gang task force numbers 250 men and women. In the Greater Los Angeles area, there are over 600 street gangs with almost 70,000 members. Last year there were over 387 gang-related killings”

Whereas Boyz begins with a single title card with this message:

Boyz: “One out of every twenty-one black Americans will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another black male.”

Boyz star Ice Cube directly referenced Colors, in an interview in 2011 for the documentary The Enduring Significance of Boyz n the Hood, “Colors is one thing, this ain’t it. This isn’t a movie telling you how bad it is to be a cop. This is a movie telling you how bad it is to be in the hood.”

Ice Cube’s seminal group N.W.A. was formed in 1987 in Compton, not far from the USC neighborhood, and their legendary album Straight Outta Compton was released in January 1989, likely recorded around the same time as the release of Colors. “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” which Singleton borrowed his film’s title from, was the album’s first single. Singleton later told a story that he had first met Ice Cube while Singleton was college interning on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and then again at a concert in 1990, after the Boyz script had sold. Singleton pitched Ice Cube on starring in the upcoming film that night, but then also had to ask Cube for a ride back to his dorm at USC.

John Singleton, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Ice Cube, and Morris Chestnut during production of Boyz N The Hood.

The sounds of a Colors-like shootout, with gunfire, helicopters, and sirens, play out behind the opening title cards of Boyz, but the sound design isn’t used to introduce us to the neighborhood in the middle of a police action. Instead, it helps set up the world that the three adolescent versions of our main characters — named Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky — live in every day. We meet the kids as characters, and, specifically, our lead characters, in a marked difference to Colors, where the first residents of South Central that we meet are nameless gangsters wielding guns and being chased by police. The film then cuts ahead to introduce us to the 17–18 years old Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube), and Ricky (Morris Chesnut), who have since grown to near-adulthood in South Central, and are each on very potentially different life paths.

Something that distinguished Boyz for me immediately, not just from Colors but from most mainstream entertainment of the time, was that it was the first studio film that felt like it had been made from someone in my generation, as there were references and statements about cultural norms which had rarely appeared onscreen until now. The young characters mention AIDS, which might as well have not existed in Movieland, for as many times as studio features even acknowledged the illness, but it was what my generation seemed to spend half its time time thinking and talking about. They also discuss the related use of condoms, a similar conversation to which my friends and I may have had countless times back then, but which rarely was echoed in films. Larry Fishburne’s character of “Furious” Styles, Tre’s father, refers to the SAT test as “culturally biased,” something that many were arguing to be true in the real world, but a statement which would also not likely pop up in the movies of the day. When the younger versions of the three friends find a dead body in an alleyway, they pass a bullet-ridden election poster for Reagan-Bush, a bit of negative commentary on the Reagan Years, a sentiment which also most definitely wasn’t seen often in mainstream Hollywood productions, but which was unavoidable in youth culture and on college campuses.

Boyz showcases strong acting performances throughout, including turns from Angela Bassett and Tyra Ferrell as the mothers of the lead boys, and Nia Long as Brandi. Fishburne as “Furious” Styles continues to dazzle on a recent rewatch decades later. Continuing the pattern of introducing ideas and concepts rarely seen in Hollywood films up until that point, Fishburne performs what is essentially a monologue about the dangers of gentrification, while visiting another part of South Central, with his son and friends, that is prophetic, and powerfully written and performed, with passages like, “It’s called gentrification. It’s what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. When they bring the property value down, they can buy the land at a lower price. Then, they move all the people out, raise the property value, and sell it at a profit. What we need to do, is we need to keep everything in our neighborhood, everything, black-owned, with black money.”

In comparison to the end of Colors, where Sean Penn’s McGavin has learned to control himself a bit and is trying to educate his own new hot-headed young partner, the tag at the very end of the credits in Boyz is simply “Increase the Peace.” Boyz has a very different point than Colors, the latter of which seems to be a truly hopeless one: that there is no way out of the cycle of violence of the gangs. Ice-T essentially voiced the film’s conclusion himself on the soundtrack: “The gangs in L.A. will never die — just multiply.”

Despite the emotional devastation left by the shooting of a main character at the end of Boyz, there is hope for the future as the film draws to a close, but certainly, no easy answers are provided. Tre looks to have a good chance at a better tomorrow, but it also involves him leaving South Central to go to college far away at Morehouse.

Similar to events that happened upon the release of Colors, there was also gang-related violence at theaters showing Boyz n the Hood. Singleton defended his own film against accusations that it caused violence. Similar to what Hopper said three years prior, Singleton asserted, “I didn’t create the circumstances under which people shoot each other.”

Singleton, who was 23 at the time of the release of Boyz, would become the youngest filmmaker ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for Boyz, at 24, and the first African-American to ever compete in the category. He would also receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

When asked about his experiences at USC in a 1994 interview on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” Singleton explained some of the challenges he encountered as a person of color in an overwhelmingly white film program at the time, saying, “I got in the film program. And you know, I was one of like 14 African-Americans in a program that had like 2000 students. Since my success, they’ve admitted, like, you know, more than that. But I mean, when I was there, dudes used to look at me and be like, ‘Oh, well, you should just give it up, you know. Cause you’re black and you’ll never make it.’ After a while I was like, you know, I was trying to be cool with people. But I was like, ‘You know what? You know, kill this, you know?’ So I just stepped to everybody after that. And I was, like, listen, ‘I’m gonna make movies. You are not going to make movies. You have nothing to talk about, you know? I have life, you know, I have a life? You know, what do you have to talk about? You gonna talk about growing up in Encino?’”

Although Singleton was harsh in his recollection of some of his USC Film School interactions early in his career, he would eventually become an advisor to the school, appearing at numerous fundraising events, and speaking at the 2006 Commencement. Recalled USC School of Cinematic Arts Dean Elizabeth Daley in 2019, “John frequently showed up just to watch films with students, and would stick around long after the official end time of any program to speak with them about their projects. Importantly, he always brought students into the professional fold, hiring them on his films and television projects.” Daley, in should be noted, as instrumental in allowing more undergrads to direct the vital 480 projects, when she took over as Dean in 1991.

John Singleton speaks at the USC School of Cinema-Television commencement ceremonies in 2006. Credits: USC School of Cinematic Arts

A screenwriter friend, who was also in attendance at the 466 screening as a student that night, encouraged me to give Colors a re-watch these many decades later, saying it was better than I remembered. He was right, and I found much more to respect on director Hopper’s part than I initially had, although I can’t say I enjoyed the film much more than I did as a college freshman. Colors remained a bleak ride for me, over three decades later, and, at times, an odd blend of tones and styles. Shot by legendary DP Haskell Wexler with the often verite feel he was famous for, the camerawork is loose and sometimes handheld, creating an atmosphere of constant danger, where it feels like something, or someone, is ready to explode at any moment, and often does. This is when Colors is at its best. But mixed with the verite style are big studio action set pieces, such as a wild car chase through the streets of Venice, accompanied by an action-driving Herbie Hancock score that could have appeared in numerous other cop films of the day. Cars explode, a shoot-out takes place in a fancy restaurant in which a gang member named High Top crashes through a plate glass restaurant window on a motorcycle, then takes a well-dressed white woman hostage. Yet another car chase through South Central ends in a car crash and explosion into the famous Watts Towers, with Penn and Duvall stuck upside down in their flipped squad car, exchanging buddy banter, which sets up the next scene in which Penn has dinner with Duvall and his wife.

One can feel director Hopper really straining against the conventional buddy structure, trying to expand the world of the film in the edges wherever he can, which results in a picture built around familiar tropes but also mixed with lengthy scenes completely apart from the cop characters, such as when a group of Latino gang members, led by Trinidad Silva’s Frog, initiate a younger member, through a beating and then a welcoming into their ranks. The scene serves as an examination of what draws young men into gangs, but it also feels somewhat shoehorned into the existing story structure, a sort of detour, although one that is welcome in that it is one of just a few scenes in Colors which tells things from the point of view of the gang members.

Colors also proved prophetic, in ways the filmmakers likely never intended. While ostensibly the hero of Colors, as he is the one of the two leads with a real character arc, Sean Penn’s McGavin can best be described as a bad cop. He spray-paints an adolescent graffiti tagger in the face. He punches a suspect, unprovoked. His attitude towards the gang members is pretty well summed up with his line, “I didn’t volunteer for C.R.A.S.H. to be nice and to play games with these assholes.” McGavin seems to become a slightly more restrained cop by the end, but he could just as easily be one of the cops caught on the videotape beating Rodney King a few years later as well. The same bad cops whose criminal trial acquittals in 1992 sparked the L.A. Riots, where parts of the neighborhood surrounding USC were looted and/or burned. I also couldn’t help but constantly be reminded of Detective Mark Fuhrman while watching Penn as McGavin, partially by his thug-like policing style, and also because of the manner in which he could rationalize it as a necessary part of the job. By 1994–95, Fuhrman would become the most famous LAPD officer in the world, because of his pivotal role in the O.J. Simpson Trial, in which the defense painted him as a racist due to audio recordings he made with an aspiring screenwriter, who was doing research about the police. Recordings in which Fuhrman used racial slurs repeatedly, and discussed graphic acts of LAPD brutality, including beating witnesses. The real-life C.R.A.S.H. unit, dramatized in Colors, would become the focus of the Rampart Scandal in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which numerous LAPD officers were implicated in every manner of crime and corruption, including bank robbery.

(Sean Penn’s Officer McGavin spray-paints the face of a teen suspect, in COLORS. Credit: Orion Pictures)

(John Singleton, above, during production of BOYZ N THE HOOD. Credits: Columbia Pictures)

When I worked at Orion Pictures after graduation, as first as a producer’s assistant, and then as a low-level development exec, I would see Colors producer Robert H. Solo, who everyone just called “Bob,” on an almost daily basis, as my office was directly down the hall from his production company. We were always friendly, but one day, I did make the social mistake of bringing up the 466 Screening. He had no idea that student was John Singleton, and he didn’t seem to find it interesting or amusing that the kid who was yelling at him had grown up in just a few years to be one of the biggest directors in town. I never discussed it with him again. Bob was proud of Colors and had a big poster of the film on display inside his office, along with a prop crowbar with “May I Come in?” written on the side, which is used by cops in the film to bust open the door of a house where gang members were hiding, specifically in the scene where the girl is arrested naked. I wonder if Bob and Singleton ever met again years later and how that went. Bob was a no-nonsense producer, who was well-respected by the studios for keeping projects moving ahead and bringing them in on budget. I suspect he and Singleton might have worked together well, had they initially met under different circumstances.

In a lesson that perspective is everything in Hollywood, Phil Joanou would direct his third feature, State of Grace, at Orion. While the Irish mob film, which starred Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Robin Wright, and Gary Oldman, has since grown in reputation and has a devoted fan base, State of Grace was only modestly received by both audiences and critics at the time of its release in 1990. I was in charge of putting together “Directors Lists” for various screenplays that Orion owned, to try to “package” them with a director, and I would include Joanou on them as often as I could. However, particularly after his 1992 feature Final Analysis, which starred Richard Gere and Kim Basinger, also was not as big hit as hoped (although its box office was better than its reviews), Joanou had “cooled,” and I was soon told by my higher-ups that he didn’t need to be on our current lists.

From the perspective of 2025, Phil Joanou did not become the next Spielberg for a new generation of filmmakers, very accomplished though his career has been. I was, and remain, a fan, but the wide influence of his work, nearly four decades out now from his breakthroughs, simply isn’t on the level of a seminal filmmaker. Singleton, however, was arguably the first of the Gen X filmmakers to become an icon, and certainly the first from what could be called my sequence at USC Film School. In his 1994 interview with Conan O’Brien, Singleton referenced the Spielberg and Lucas obsession at our era of USC, remembering, “Everybody there was trying to be like, George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, everybody. They would grow beards that look like Spielberg. And look like Lucas. And they wear the right kind of glasses and stuff. And I was like, you know, people will say, ‘Oh, you’re trying to be like Spike Lee…’ I was trying to be like John Singleton. I was trying to define my own identity, you know, as a person. And then maybe I’d find it if I got a chance to make a movie.” It is worth noting that Singleton also credited Spielberg as a major inspiration for wanting to be a director, after he saw a behind-the-scenes piece on the news show “20/20” about the making of Close Encounters, as a child. The two directors would eventually become friends.

John Singleton and Steven Spielberg at a Time-Warner event. Credits: USC School of Cinema-Television

While the twin towers of Spielberg and Lucas cast, both decades ago and today, a large shadow at USC Film School — each filmmaker donated a huge new building in 2009, basically knocking their “old” 1984 models down to make way — John Singleton would also become a reason innumerable new filmmakers picked up the proverbial camera in the first place. Not just at USC, but across the globe.

Singleton with a group of USC students at a bar gathering. Credits: USC School of Cinematic Arts

On the topic of John Singleton’s legacy, Todd “Stereo” Williams wrote for Andscape in 2019, the year when Singleton left this earth way too early, “The success of Singleton’s creative voice was a game changer; it was a generational and cultural push into both Hollywood’s mainstream and black cinema’s more rarefied corners. He made movies for a generation that understood the ideals of the civil rights generation but didn’t always feel beholden to them. His movies could be as brash, and as hopeful, as a great rap album. He demanded accountability in the industry and commanded your attention in his storytelling. With news of Singleton’s passing, we’re losing a huge part of contemporary Hollywood’s soul and black Hollywood’s legacy. But his success forged a path that the Ryan Cooglers and Ava DuVernays now walk — Cali kids who broke through telling stories their way. For almost three decades, Singleton gave us a map to follow.”

None of the principal figures of the 466 screening are with us any longer:

Dennis Hopper passed away from prostate cancer on May 29, 2010, at the age of 74.

Robert H. Solo passed away on August 27, 2018, at the age of 85.

John Singleton passed away on April 28, 2019, of a stroke, at the age of 51.

The weekly 466 screening series continues to this day at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

(466 in more modern days, still at Norris Theater, as Leonard Maltin interviews USC alum Kevin Feige and THOR screenwriter, the late Don Payne, in 2011 . Credits: LOS ANGELES TIMES)

SOURCES:

Thanks to the numerous fellow USC School of Cinema-Television alumni who answered my emails about what they themselves recalled from that 466 Colors screening. Unfortunately, no video tape existed of the event, which was confirmed for me by the school itself.

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This interview was for a print article for Venice Magazine and the Hollywood Interview, with director Fernando Meirelles for CITY OF GOD in 2003, a film which blew my mind in the cinemas. It took place in an apartment in Marina Del Rey that the film studio was renting for Meirelles and his family during the promotions of the film.

Halle Berry MONSTER'S BALL In-Depth Audio Interview 2002

2023-08-10T06:36:00.003-07:00

I did this interview with Halle Berry during the Oscar campaign for MONSTER'S BALL in 2002. She called from London, in the morning my time in Los Angeles. It was for print, not radio. We also speak about her upcoming X-MEN and JAMES BOND films. This was done on a speakerphone with a microcasette recorder with no intention of it every being listened to by the public, so please excuse the audio quality.