You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory

I had the most incredible spring semester interning at Sikelia Productions, and I am so excited to continue working there over the summer for my lifetime hero, Martin Scorsese - not to mention his legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and the rest of the gracious and wonderful people at the office. After heading back to Austin for a few days in late May, I am now back in New York City and currently jumping into pre-production on my next film, which I am planning to shoot in late July.

Here's a quick wrap-up of my spring semester, leading into my plans for an exciting and productive summer. In mid-April, my roommate Bobb Barito and I signed a lease on our first-ever apartment in New York City, along with our friend Adam Boese. We are now the proud occupants of an excellent three-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side - I have included a few pictures of my room throughout this post. Over the summer, in addition to working three days a week as an intern at Sikelia Productions, I will also continue working as a Technical Assistant at Tisch's Post-Production Center.

This past Spring Break, I was lucky enough to have two of my best friends from Austin High School - Cora Walters, who is currently attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and Bolton Eckert, who just recently started studying at the Art Institute of Los Angeles - visit me in New York City. It was excellent having them both as guests. Bolton, Bobb and I celebrated Saint Patrick's Day at Shades of Green Pub & Restaurant, where we somehow became fast friends with a very friendly Irish family, as well as members of the Irish rock band The Saw Doctors, who were just returning from a concert. It was great fun.

There are two movies that I've seen this year that I believe deserve extraordinary praise. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom – the director’s first film since the should-have-been-Oscar-winning animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) – is the movie event of the summer. This is a poignant and hilarious picture, and on a personal level, I haven’t been so deeply affected by one of Anderson’s films since The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), one of the last films I saw with my father before he passed away. In a New England community in the 1960s, twelve year-old outcasts Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) run away from home together, convinced beyond any doubt that they are in love (once on the adventure, they are aided by Sam’s considerable skills as a Khaki Scout). Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel are among the adults and parents leading a search-and-rescue mission to find Sam and Suzy. Willis and Norton, in particular, do some of their best work in years.

In this film, Anderson beautifully expresses both the joy and melancholy of first love. Even though Moonrise Kingdom does end on a positive note, there’s still a hint of a dissatisfied adulthood waiting for our protagonists by the end of their adventure. Whether Suzy and Sam end up together in the long run is irrelevant – their love will never feel as real and as powerful as it does in their memory. Their utopian ‘moonrise kingdom’ is something the adults have long since abandoned, and soon enough, it will exist only in Suzy and Sam’s memories. Moonrise Kingdom is the only movie I’ve seen this year where a packed audience erupted in applause when the film ended. I would have joined them, but I was busy wiping tears from my eyes. After seeing the film, I got a little wild at Regal Union Square's Rock of Ages booth - here's a link to a truly astonishing video.

On Saturday, April 28th, I saw Bernie, the new film from Austin's own Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset), at the Angelika Film Center. In this endlessly funny and sometimes achingly sad true story of small-town murder, actual locals from Carthage, Texas recount the tale of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), a beloved small-town mortician on trial for murdering a disliked elderly woman (Shirley MacLaine). East Texas is an area that hasn't received much cinematic attention (and an area that I hold close to my heart, having spent quite a bit of my childhood in Hallsville and Longview), and it comes to vivid life as a loving and warped environment in Linklater’s film.

After the screening, Linklater held a Q&A with the audience. I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Linklater both during the Q&A and after the screening, and he remains the quintessential Texas filmmaker. We talked briefly about East Texas, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, and when I first met him back in 2004 at the Criterion DVD signing of his film Slacker (1991) at Austin's Waterloo Video (see the comparison picture to the right, of Linklater and me through the years). He is such a nice person, and one of the best filmmakers out there. Bernie, which also features career-best performances from Black and Matthew McConaughey, is a testament to Linklater’s enduring genius.

Earlier in April, I served as Assistant Director for my friend Jordan Fein's Intermediate Narrative film White Carpet. It was one of the most ambitious film sets on which I've had the privilege of working - after four days of shooting in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the entire crew was exhausted, but we were proud to have worked so hard on a large-scale student film. In early May, I also served as Assistant Director for a music video directed by my friend Ben Dewey.

The Tisch Dean's Scholars program once again provided me with some extraordinary opportunities this semester. In addition to seeing the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (which I wrote about in my last blog entry), we toured the outstanding Harlem School of the Arts in late March, and for our final event of the semester, we went bowling at Bowlmor Lanes on University Place. As always, I was surrounded by incredible students and the most supportive professors and administrators at Tisch.

On Friday, June 1st, I was lucky enough to see Once on Broadway, the new musical based on the 2007 film. Once is nominated for eleven Tony Awards, and I'd say it deserves just about every one of them. The play manages to capture both the intimacy of the film (which is essentially a two-person movie) while effortlessly transitioning into rousing musical numbers by a talented ensemble of musicians-actors-dancers.

As far as classes are concerned, it was quite a whirlwind to finish everything by mid-May. For my last Developing the Screenplay class, I read the first fifty pages of my feature screenplay in class, and I wrote two final essays for my History of Modern Ireland and Introduction to Performance Studies courses. Finally, for my Intermediate Editing Workshop class, I finished editing my friend Ben Dewey's Intermediate Narrative film Quitting. Now, whether I like it or not, I have to start referring to myself as a senior.

I am very sad to report that the Tisch School of the Arts' Steenbeck Lab, where for decades film students have edited their 16MM Sight and Sound: Film projects by hand, has been dismantled, to be replaced by a computer lab for digital editing in the fall. As far as I know, Intermediate and Advanced Production students will still have access to film equipment for their projects, but all future sophomore classes will not have the opportunity to shoot on black-and-white 16MM film and then edit their pictures by hand, as students have done for over forty years. NYU was one of the last film schools to actively use Steenbecks, and it was only a matter of time before the powers-that-be decided that the machines be discontinued. Despite the fact that most of my larger projects have been shot digitally (mainly for cost reasons), I am a firm believer in the power and importance of film, and my heart sinks when I now pass that eerily empty Steenbeck room. Learning how to use that machine and edit five of my own black-and-white Sight and Sound: Film projects on the Steenbeck was one of the most valuable things I've learned in film school, and I feel fortunate to have been a part of the second-to-last class to take this extraordinary course in its purest form. In honor of the Steenbeck machines, here's my favorite of the five films I made in Sight and Sound: Film, Heart of Gold - shot on 16MM and edited by hand on a Steenbeck.


Heart of Gold from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

Although Moonrise Kingdom and Bernie stand above the rest of this year's theatrical releases, there have been a few other excellent pictures. Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea has the sad power of a fading memory, with a rich, melancholic atmosphere and an extraordinary performance from Rachel Weisz. Mark and Jay Duplass' Jeff, Who Lives at Home doesn't have a cynical bone in its body - the performances are so engaging, the actors so likable and the writing so good, that it's hard to imagine the film not winning someone over. Joss Whedon's The Avengers is a summer superhero thrill-ride with outstanding performances from two of the best working actors, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. (there was a certain satisfaction in seeing a mini-reunion between the two actors, after their memorable pairing in David Fincher's masterpiece Zodiac). Nicholas Stoller's The Five-Year Engagement is a very honest and heartfelt romantic comedy, and another home-run for Stoller, Jason Segel and Judd Apatow (I particularly enjoyed the steady stream of Van Morrison tunes).

In addition, I saw the restoration of Jean Renoir's masterpiece Grand Illusion (1937) at Film Forum this week, and it was an absolutely astonishing print of the picture (as I was heading out of Film Forum, John Turturro and his family were heading in to see Django). And a recent viewing of Elia Kazan's devastatingly powerful and hauntingly beautiful East of Eden (1955) confirmed that, much like John Steinbeck's novel of the same name, the film is a kind of reflection of my values and beliefs as a person.

I Sighed A Million Sighs, I Told A Million Lies To Myself...To Myself

My Spring Semester at NYU has been the best, most productive period of my life. From acting in my friends' Sight and Sound: Studio and Film projects to meeting and receiving advice from writer/director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), it's been an incredible ride. The most rewarding part of my semester - writing, directing and starring in a personal project outside of class titled With Love, Marty - has just officially wrapped, and I am happy to say that the shoot was extremely successful, thanks to the hard work and help from my friends and collaborators (particularly my extraordinary cinematographer, Ben Dewey; my producer and assistant director, Erica Rose; my sound mixer and sound editor, Bobb Barito; and my art director, Madeline Wall). But before I discuss Marty, I want to write about some noteworthy moments from the semester.

On April 22nd, I directed my final Sight and Sound: Studio project – a scene from Martin McDonagh’s great play The Pillowman. I adapted the scene and first presented it to my class in mid-March, and after I returned from Spring Break, I held auditions at NYU’s Todman Center, and cast three very talented actors in the roles of Katurian, Tupolski and Ariel. I rehearsed diligently with the three actors for a few weeks before the shoot, and then, finally, on April 22nd, we shot the scene in a three-camera television studio on the 12th floor of the Tisch School of the Arts (the television studio more or less became home for all of the students this semester). My three actors - Hunter Rodgers, Danny Pudelek and Armen Armazza - gave wonderful performances during our two-hour shoot, where I managed to get three takes of the scene (which is pretty good, considering that set construction, lighting, and camera rehearsals take a significant amount of time). Here is my final project:

The Sight and Sound: Studio class was one of the most rewarding and fascinating classes I’ve taken at Tisch – it is every bit the compliment to my Sight and Sound: Film course. My professor, Alex Sichel, was a wonderful teacher, and she really prepared me as a director with my first three Studio exercises, which were entertaining but ultimately uneven. With her guidance and great criticism, I was prepared for a more ambitious, ultimately successful final project. My peers in the class were some of the finest people I have had the chance to work with, and everyone in the class formed a lasting bond together. I will miss them, but I look forward to working professionally with them in the years to come.

On April 11th, my friend Lucas Loredo stayed with me for a week in New York City before he traveled overseas for a semester abroad at Oxford University in England (Lucas is about to finish his third year at Stanford University). The trip marked Lucas’ first time in New York City, and I wanted to show him the best possible time while he was visiting. Among many other adventures, I got us tickets for live tapings of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It was fascinating to watch the behind-the-scenes production of these great shows, particularly as the television studios were not entirely different from the studios we use for our Sight and Sound: Studio production class. Before the taping, both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert greeted the audience and answered questions from the small crowd. Lucas, always one to rise to the occasion, conversed directly with Mr. Stewart and asked him some fascinating questions.

As Lucas and I reminisced about our glory days as Red Dragon Players at Austin High School (by my count, we were in six plays together under the direction of Mr. Billy Dragoo), I wanted to show him the best theatre that Broadway had to offer. We lucked into some fantastic seats for the infamous Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, which proved to be an enormously entertaining - if not entirely coherent - night of theatre. But the show that really floored us was Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherf**ker With The Hat, starring Bobby Cannavale, Chris Rock and Annabella Sciorra. Lucas and I landed front-row tickets to this extraordinary play, which recently received six Tony Award nominations, including Best Play, Best Director (Anna D. Shapiro) and Best Actor for the devastating performance from Cannavale (who I last saw in the Off-Broadway production of Trust last fall).

During his stay, we also had a chance to walk through Central Park, visit Rockefeller Center and NBC Studios, enjoy ourselves at Lincoln Square, explore Greenwich Village and the NYU area, and make our way through Times Square more than a few times. We saw an NYU student production of No Exit, a French play by Jean-Paul Sartre, which was directed by my good friend and fellow film student Erica Rose (she most recently served as Producer and Assistant Director for my new film, With Love, Marty). She's an incredible talent, and her play was impeccably directed, staged and acted. Lucas also had a chance to be an extra in my friend Morgan Ingari's final Sight and Sound: Studio project, which was a great chance for Lucas to see some of Tisch's great facilities.

The weekend before Lucas arrived, I had the honor of working as Assistant Director for my friend and roommate Bobb Barito's film Lead Me To The Clouds. For the film - a student production outside of class (very similar to my own film that I shot in late April) - Bobb assembled an incredible crew of Tisch students, and we successfully shot his movie over a three-day period at a variety of locations all over the city. Bobb is currently in the post-production stage with the film, simultaneously sound editing both his project and my movie (I am incredibly lucky to work - and live - with somebody who is so brilliant regarding the art of sound mixing and sound editing).

On March 23rd, the Dean’s Scholars were invited to see Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway, a brilliant new play by Rajiv Joseph, starring Robin Williams and directed by Moises Kaufman. After the play ended and the audience cleared the theatre, the Dean's Scholars were invited to come to the front of the stage and meet privately with Mr. Williams, who has been a huge supporter of the Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Williams could not have been more gracious and kind to our small group of scholars, particularly after giving such an arresting and exhaustive performance. The show itself is one of the finest shows I've seen on Broadway yet - a truly incredible piece that unfortunately did not pick up as many Tony nominations as I would have expected. Pictured above is my good friend and fellow Dean's Scholar, Nicole Cobb, and me with Mr. Williams after the show.

The Dean's Scholars program has led to amazing opportunities throughout the semester, and it's resulted in a great sense of community among the students. Professor Chris Chan Roberson and Anita Gupta, the leaders of the program, organized the first ever Dean's Scholars Collaborative Projects in March, where two scholars from different Tisch departments worked together on creative collaborations. This project was largely, to quote Roberson, "designed to capitalize on the interdepartmental tours and scholars meetings" that we have participated in during the school year. Kiah Victoria, a freshman in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and I collaborated on a short music video for her song Find Me. Kiah wrote and performed the song, and I filmed the movie, shooting footage of Kiah in Washington Square Park and incorporating one of my silent Sight and Sound: Film projects from last semester into the film. I have posted a link below to our video:

On Thursday, April 28th, I was invited as part of the Dean’s Scholars program to attend the Alec Baldwin Luncheon, where eleven Tisch scholars had an hour-and-a-half lunch with actor and Tisch alum Alec Baldwin in the office of Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell on the 12th Floor of the Tisch Building. Although every student prepared questions for Mr. Baldwin, he was very interested in talking to us about our backgrounds and our passions. Mr. Baldwin has always been a huge supporter of the Tisch School of the Arts, and his incredible career advice was so valuable. Although I asked him a serious question about his career, I also had to tell him that he absolutely owned Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) with only ten minutes of screen time. Mr. Baldwin, of course, modestly replied that nobody should ever try to 'own' a movie, but it's very true - his brilliant supporting roles in films such as Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006) are every bit as memorable as his leading roles (I will admit that I took particular pleasure in hearing Mr. Baldwin impersonate Scorsese, and also talking about his experience working with Robert De Niro on various projects, including 2006's The Good Shepherd). Overall, it was an absolutely wonderful experience to sit and have lunch with one of the most respected actors in the film business. Pictured above are the eleven scholars and Mr. Baldwin.

This semester, I produced the Tisch New Theatre mainstage show Last Exit No Toll with my friend and fellow Tisch New Theatre Executive Board Officer Alex Fofonoff. The play, written and directed by sophomore Rachel Music (who previously directed me in her short play Consciousness, for which I received my first Off-Broadway credit), premiered at the historic Kraine Theatre on Wednesday, April 27th and ran for five performances. We were able to use the Kraine Theatre before the nightly performances of the incredibly talented New York Neo-Futurists, who regularly perform their brilliant show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in the Kraine at 10:00 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. The company of Last Exit No Toll was thrilled to share a performance space with some of New York's most talented artists.

The rehearsal process began in early January, and it was an incredible experience to assist the director and performers with rehearsal space, assemble a technical crew and manage the concerns of the company as a whole as the play slowly came to life. I have to thank my friend and professional partner Alex Fofonoff, who helped me enormously as a first-time producer. In the end, our fundraising efforts (we raised over $1200 for the show with a Kickstarter campaign, from very generous donations from our supporters) and our successful production of the play made us both very proud. Working with the very talented cast and crew was an honor and a privilege. Here is a link to an article the Washington Square News wrote about the production of the play.

This semester has been incredibly productive - I've never felt more at home and surrounded by brilliant, amazing people. I have much more to report, and so I will continue my thoughts and anecdotes in another post in the very near future. In the meantime, I need to continue editing and fine-tuning my new film With Love, Marty - the production that will be the focus of my next entry.

Blame It On A Simple Twist Of Fate

Note: In between the posts below, I have posted a link to each of my five Sight and Sound film projects from last semester - the films have just been transferred digitally at the Post-Production Center at Tisch.

It's hard to believe that the second semester of sophomore year is already half-way over. In early February, I worked on a short film titled "The Hanged Man" for The Tisch 48-Hour Film Festival. For this competition, Tisch students have to write, direct, produce and edit an original film in forty-eight hours. Teams were given a prop, a character and a line of dialogue at the start of the competition that had to be included in the movie - in this case, the prop was cards, the character was a drop-out, and the line of dialogue was "I'm still learning." I was lucky enough to work with a fantastic group of people, including Benjamin Dewey, Nicole Cobb, Bobb Barito, Zeshawn Ali and Celine Comolet, on this particular project.

This semester, I have an incredible variety of classes. My major production class is Sight and Sound: Studio, a television-production class that consists of shooting short scenes in a television studio environment. Shooting the scenes live with your actors and operating with a three-camera set-up is extremely exciting, and the class provides invaluable directing experience, as heavy emphasis is placed on the rehearsal process between the director and the actors (there is a separate class that accompanies Studio, called Rehearsal Techniques, that serves as an acting class for directors).

I am also taking Writing the Short Screenplay with the great professor Nick Tanis; an Italian Cinema course with writer, director, film critic, professor and cultural icon Antonio Monda (who appears in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as the Festival Director who asks Bill Murray about the scientific purpose of killing the shark); Pre-Production Colloquium with filmmaker Pete Chatmon, preparing screenplays for next semester's intermediate production classes; and The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, a fascinating history course taught by the brilliant professor David Engel. For Monda's course Hollywood Auteurs, he brought in screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader as a guest to speak about his film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). I had the pleasure of sitting in on the class and meeting Mr. Schrader, who is my all-time favorite screenwriter (among many other works, he wrote Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out The Dead). In short, it was the highlight of my week.

I am currently co-producing Tisch New Theatre's Spring Mainstage Show, Last Exit No Toll, written by sophomore Rachel Lewis, with my good friend and fellow TNT Officer Alex Fofonoff. The show is scheduled to open in late April at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, and I am incredibly excited to be a part of the production team for this great student work.

The 83rd annual Academy Awards were something of a disappointment, if only because the year's best film, David Fincher's The Social Network, did not walk away with the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars it so richly deserved. Perhaps I have been spoiled by the Oscars during the last four years, when daring and brilliant movies such as Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006), Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) all won the Best Picture Oscar - I figured the Academy would continue its relatively new tradition of actually awarding the best film. At any rate, The Social Network joins the list of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Pulp Fiction (1994), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Taxi Driver (1976), Citizen Kane (1941), L.A. Confidential (1997), Fargo (1996) and The Aviator (2004) as one of the many masterpieces to have lost Best Picture to a lesser movie.

But there were some very deserving winners at the Oscars, including Christian Bale, who won Best Supporting Actor for his tour-de-force performance in David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Natalie Portman, who won Best Actress for her great work in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. The winner for Best Live Action Short, God of Love, was a particularly exciting win, as writer/director/star Luke Matheny was a graduate student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts last year, and God of Love was his graduate thesis film at NYU. I was also very happy to see Melissa Leo, Aaron Sorkin, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Wally Pfister, Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs walk away with Academy Awards.

Admittedly, I haven't had the time to see an overabundance of films theatrically this semester, but there are a few titles I can recommend. Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids is a disarmingly sweet and funny comedy, with great performances from John C. Reilly, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Ed Helms. Patrick Lussier's Drive Angry: Shot in 3D is every bit as ridiculous and joyously entertaining as it sounds, starring Nicolas Cage at the height of his campy powers. And although I seem to be in the minority, I enjoyed Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet. To be completely honest, most of the movies worth seeing in theaters are late award-season contenders from 2010 (including Mike Leigh's Another Year, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biuitful, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, George Hickenlooper's Casino Jack, Richard J. Lewis' Barney's Version and John Wells' The Company Men).

There is one new release, however, that stands above the rest. Rango is one of the funniest, most original and extraordinarily strange animated films I’ve seen in years. Gore Verbinski, the director of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, is responsible for the first great movie of 2011. After all, it’s not every animated film that features a villain largely inspired by John Huston’s corrupt character from Chinatown (1974), a trippy dream sequence with Clint Eastwood’s character from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), an action sequence paying homage to the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now (1979) and a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson. As Roger Ebert notes in his review of the film, “The more movies you’ve seen, the more you may like it."

But more than sending up and paying homage to the western genre (which it does brilliantly), Rango is simply more fun than any children's movie in recently memory. The energy is fueled by Johnny Depp's hilarious performance as Rango, a chameleon who dabbles in performance and playwriting. Rango is unexpectedly forced to protect an Old West town from a water shortage, and through his methods of improvisation, he convinces the town that he's a gunslinger from the West. The performance represents Depp's best work in years - he's genuinely lovable and wonderfully aloof. The supporting characters are incredibly detailed (not to mention very funny), and the animation rivals the aesthetic beauty of the best-looking animated films of all time. Rango is a family film that takes chances and isn't afraid to embrace the bizarre, and the result is incredibly rewarding.

I Just Had Coffee With McCauley...Half An Hour Ago!

Before the new year begins and I finish compiling my Top Ten list of 2010’s best films, I almost certainly have to document the final few weeks of my extraordinary first semester of sophomore year at New York University. I must start by saying that I had the incredible honor of meeting one of my lifelong heroes in life and in art on December 2^nd, 2010 – Mr. Al Pacino. Let me preface this experience by saying that, when I first started my film criticism website when I was thirteen years old, I wrote a dedication on the front page that, to this day, reads as follows: “This website is dedicated to Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Al Pacino, my heroes, and the men who are responsible for my love of cinema, acting, filmmaking and writing.” This dedication will always remain true. When I was eleven years old and I started watching the visceral, forceful, brilliant performances by De Niro and Pacino and the passionate, emotionally devastating pictures by Scorsese, I knew that I wanted to be an actor, and I knew that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

Film after film, Pacino’s searing performances redefined my notion of what acting could be. There was a disturbing rawness, a pain, a wild, uncontrollable force in his performances that shook me to my very core. By the time I was twelve, his work as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Frank Serpico in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), Sonny in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Richard Roma in James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Lowell Bergman in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), Vincent Hanna in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and countless other movies was embedded in my brain, like a piece of personal history. When I wasn’t obsessively re-watching every Pacino, De Niro and Scorsese movie at home on VHS, I was seeking out their current work in theaters. My mom took me to see Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) when it was first released, and there I was, yet again, gaping in awe at the power and the intensity that Mr. Pacino brought to every role, every performance.

So when I say that I am a “fan” of Mr. Pacino’s work, I do not use the term “fan” lightly. He, along with De Niro and Scorsese, is responsible for my entire career as an artist. How choices have I made onstage as an actor that I simply borrowed from the endless library of Mr. Pacino’s brilliant performances that I more or less store away in the back of my mind? To come face-to-face with the man who I have been watching and idolizing for years in the dark of the cinema, is something I cannot really describe. It was not unlike first seeing Martin Scorsese speak last year at the Director’s Guild Theater – the man and his work are such an integral part of my very psychology and personal history, that it is surreal to see him, at last, in person.

Pacino is currently starring in the Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice at the Broadhurst Theatre, and I was very lucky to attend the play in early December (and, afterwards, I was able to meet Pacino at the stage door). It was a magnificent production, with Pacino giving a powerhouse performance as Shylock, and featured an excellent supporting cast, including Jesse L. Martin and Lily Rabe. That same weekend, I also had the pleasure of attending the Broadway revival of Driving Miss Daisy at the Golden Theatre, starring James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave and Boyd Gaines, which was a fantastic production, as well.

On Monday, December 6^th, I attended the 2010 Tisch School of the Arts Gala, also known as "The Face of Tisch" Gala, at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Lincoln Center as one of the Tisch Dean’s Scholars. The Gala, which is held every year and celebrates an outstanding alumnus of Tisch, this year honored actor/director Billy Crystal, Class of 1970 (BFA, Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television). At the Gala, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with NYU President John Sexton, and for the ceremony, the Dean's Scholars received front-row seats in the auditorium as Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Shaffer, Marcia Gay Harden, Jesse L. Martin, Sean Curran and many others came onstage to honor Mr. Crystal, who sat in the audience with his family. It was an one-of-a-kind experience, from laughing consistently at Mr. Williams' jokes to watching a spectacular dance number by students from the Tisch Dance department to hearing Mr. Crystal describe his NYU film classes in the late 1960s when a young Martin Scorsese was his demanding professor. After the ceremony, there was an incredible dinner for the guests where the Dean's Scholars received their own table. You can click on this link to view official pictures from the event, where you'll find a group picture of the Dean's Scholars (as well as great pictures of Mr. Crystal, Mr. Williams and many others). I am truly grateful for having been able to attend this ceremony.

The end of the semester meant saying goodbye to Sight and Sound: Film, my favorite class that I have ever taken, taught by the great professor Laszlo Santha. For my final Sight and Sound film, I had the honor of working with three great actors – fellow film student and actor Grant Rosenmeyer, who, among many other roles, played Ari Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); my friend Lizzie Logan from Columbia University, who was in my third Sight and Sound movie; and a very talented actor named Angelo Niakas, who also starred in several of my classmates’ films. All three actors did extraordinary work in my film, which was titled But When We Get To The End, He Wants To Start All Over Again, and my crew members Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff and Ben Dewey were so incredibly hard-working and dedicated.

I also had the great opportunity of acting in thirteen of my classmates’ movies over the course of the semester, and I hope to post some of those movies online once they are transferred digitally (because everything is shot on 16MM film, a proper digital transfer usually takes a little while). In the meantime, I have uploaded a rough recording of my first four films for Sight and Sound: Film. The video is a digital recording of the four films as they were screened on a 16MM projector in the Tisch Steenbeck lab, and so the quality is understandably murky. But until the films are transferred properly next semester, here are the first four films I wrote, directed and edited this semester.

I also crewed on a Tisch junior's Color Sync film in New Jersey during the weekend before finals began, which was great fun. The day after I returned to Austin for the holiday season, I saw one of my high school theatre directors, Mrs. Annie Dragoo, perform in The City Theatre's production of Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling. Mrs. Dragoo was fantastic in the production, and it was a great way to jump into the Austin arts scene for my winter break.

As for movies, I will post my Top Ten list of 2010's best films in the coming days. For now, I will simply say that 2010 was the best year for film, in my opinion, since 2007, when we saw the likes of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, David Fincher's Zodiac, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all seven of which remained among my favorite films of the 2000s decade.

Awake Again, I Can't Pretend, And I Know I'm Alone... And Close To The End

On Friday, October 22nd, I had the opportunity to perform in the Off-Broadway production of my friend Rachel Lewis' play Consciousness at Theatre 80 at Saint Marks Place in New York City. The production was presented by The People's Theatre LAB as part of an all-night show called The People's Fest. In Rachel's play, I played two different characters - Dr. O'Hanlan and Reverend Jonas Haversham, both meaty roles, and I had the chance to perform alongside some incredibly talented actors, many of whom train at the Stella Adler Studio at New York University. As an actor, I was honored and thrilled to perform in this production, particularly considering that the play counted as an Off-Broadway credit. As an added bonus, I also appeared on the poster for The People's Fest, which I have posted to the right (granted, the picture on the poster is from four years ago, when I played Edward Teller in The Red Dragon Players' 2006 production of The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer).

In October, I was also elected to join Tisch New Theatre's Executive Board as an officer. It is an incredible honor to join the officers on this board, including my good friend Alexander Fofonoff. I have been involved with this incredible organization since last year, when Tisch New Theatre produced and performed my original one-act play The Certifiable for their Fall 2009 Staged Reading, and last spring when I first performed in Rachel Lewis' Consciousness for their Spring 2010 Staged Reading. Since on the Executive Board, I have helped organize the Fall 2010 Staged Reading, as well as helped plan a TNT Master Class with musical director Will Van Dyke, the current keyboardist for The Addams Family on Broadway. Shortly after being elected to the Executive Board, my fellow officers and I went to see The New York Neo-Futurists perform Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind at The Kraine Theater, a fascinating piece of performance art that, to quote Backstage, is "like the glory days of Saturday Night Live, only funnier and slightly surreal."

My roommate and good friend Bobb Barito recently had his short film The Pit, which he filmed this past summer, selected for the 7th Annual NYC Downtown Short Film Festival Audience Choice Screenings. He and I attended one of the Audience Choice screenings on Saturday, October 23rd at the Duo Theater on East 4th Street. We were astounded to find that this theater, which features beautiful paintings and artwork, was used by Francis Ford Coppola for the astounding operetta scene from The Godfather Part II (1974), where Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) first sees Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin). Bobb's film was received very well, and I very much hope The Pit is selected as an audience favorite for the festival.

In other news, my Sight and Sound: Film class, taught by the incredible professor Laszlo Santha, is quite simply the best class I've ever taken in my life, college or otherwise. Santha told our class at the beginning of the semester that this was the greatest class of all time, and I should have taken him at his word. After all, in what other class can you write, direct and shoot five of your own movies on 16mm film and crew on at least fifteen other films in one semester? So far this semester, I have written and directed four projects - The Hand Job, a short comedy thriller about a man searching for his severed hand; Relapse, a drama about a recovering alcoholic who falls back into old habits at a birthday party; Proper Behavior For Your Date, a Woody Allen-esque piece on an awkward man's struggle to find love and behave appropriately on dates; and Heart of Gold, a solemn drama about a Midwestern boy who follows a lost love to New York City. Several of my friends have acted in these films, including Bobb Barito, Mike Cheslik, Alex Casper, Jeremy Keller and Lizzie Logan, who I first met two years ago at the University of Southern California's Summer Screenwriting program (she is now a freshman at Columbia University). I'm enormously proud of all four films - particularly the latter two, as they are both rather personal projects.

In addition to working on these films, I have also starred in nine movies in my Sight and Sound class, ranging from slapstick comedy films to serious dramas. This has been an incredible opportunity to work with talented Sight and Sound crews other than my own and also a great opportunity to practice the difficult art of acting for film, which is an entirely different beast than acting for stage. I hope to post many of these movies once the semester has ended and we have turned in our 16mm films to be digitized by the Post-Production Center (although the movies will, quite simply, never look as good or as beautiful as they do when projected on a 16mm projector).

In the past month, there have been some astounding movies released in cinemas, including works from Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, two of my favorite filmmakers. Eastwood's Hereafter is a solemn, heartfelt meditation on the existence of a spiritual life after death. The movie, masterfully written by Peter Morgan, is full of the thoughtfulness that has come to be associated with Eastwood's incredible work as a director. The performances are superb, particularly from Matt Damon, as a retired psychic haunted by his gift, and from newcomers George and Frankie McLaren, as two young brothers in London who are faced with an unspeakable tragedy. Audiences should be so lucky that a master filmmaker like Eastwood is willing to maturely explore this material.

Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the filmmaker's best work since Match Point (2005), also reckons with death, albeit in a very different way. The picture is funny, yes, but it becomes increasingly devastating as we watch Allen's characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side. The movie hit me very powerfully, as the best Woody Allen films always have, and its middling critical reception is really bewildering to me. The ensemble cast is so uniformly excellent that it's hard to know where to start (although Anthony Hopkins in particular stands out).

But the best film I've seen since The Social Network is inarguably Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours, which is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. I have no doubt that 127 Hours will stand as one of my favorite films of the year - it is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

There are many other incredible movies that I've seen in the past month, including Doug Liman's Fair Game, an important movie for American audiences to see in order to relive the outrage regarding the Bush administration's handling of ousted CIA agent Valerie Plame, with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as fantastic and compulsively watchable as they've ever been; John Curran's Stone, with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton giving brilliant performances in a daring character-driven drama with no easy answers and no easy resolutions; Charles Ferguson's infuriating and fascinating documentary Inside Job, which relentlessly pursues the cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis; Matt Reeves' Let Me In, the film that Stephen King correctly named the best American horror film of the past twenty years; Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, a beautiful and disturbing drama starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley; and Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here, the 'documentary' about Joaquin Phoenix's descent into madness (the fact that this film is apparently a hoax does not diminish the power and the sadness of Phoenix's performance and downfall in the film).

I am extremely excited to announce that I will be attending The Face of Tisch Gala 2010 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center on Monday, December 6th. This annual Tisch Gala is an event that I have always wanted to attend, and this year the Tisch Dean's Scholars have been invited to attend the ceremony for free, where guests will include Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, James Franco, Whoopi Goldberg and Honorary Chair Martin Scorsese. I am incredibly honored to attend this event with my fellow Dean's Scholars, where I will hopefully meet many of these incredible talents.

On Tuesday, November 2nd, my wonderful and supportive screenwriting professor Selma Thompson hosted a screening of the great documentary Winnebago Man in Third North's Mini Theatre, and following the screening there was a Q&A with the film's producer, Joel Heller. Mr. Heller, Professor Thompson's former student at NYU, now lives and works primarily in Austin, and so it was fascinating to hear him speak about the film and the Austin filmmakers who made the movie. On Friday, November 5th, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Professor Thompson, Mr. Heller and a group of other students in the East Village, where I was able to ask him all about his filmmaking career. The next weekend, I served as Producer and Assistant Director on my friend Aaron Kodz's short film Moneyrollers, which we shot in Coral Tower with a very talented cast and crew (I will also work as a Co-Editor with Aaron on the movie, which is now in post-production).

Until my next post, I'll leave you with the above recently released image from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), one of my ten favorite films of all time.

And The Leaves That Are Green Turn To Brown

It's hard to believe that it's been an entire month since I moved back to New York City - it really does seem just like yesterday when my mother, grandmother and I arrived in the city and I moved into my new room at NYU's Coral Tower. Labor Day weekend, the weekend before classes officially started, my family and I saw the Off-Broadway production of Paul Weitz's new play, Trust, starring Zach Braff, Sutton Foster, Bobby Cannavale and Ari Graynor, and the Barrow Street Theatre's revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Both productions were outstanding - Weitz's play was an actor's showcase for Braff and his costars, and Wilder's play was as devastating as ever in David Cromer's brilliantly minimalist production.

Labor Day weekend was also a chance to reunite with my friends from NYU. Luckily, I have been spending just as much time this year with these great people as I did last year. My buddy Bobb Barito and I share a room together at Coral Tower - and we've already played host to screenings of Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), among others - and my friend Morgan Block lives just a few minutes away near Union Square. I spend an extraordinary amount of time with my pals Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff and Ben Dewey, as we operate in a rotating crew for my Sight and Sound: Film class, which meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:50 P.M. For this production class, taught by the incredible instructor Laszlo Santha, our crew shoots a total of twenty short movies on 16MM black-and-white reversal film with an Arriflex 16S camera during the semester. Every student writes and directs five films, works as a crew member on all other projects, and edits their own films by hand in the Steenbeck lab at the Tisch School of the Arts. In other words, this course is the opportunity of a lifetime. Up until this year, my filmmaking experience has only been with digital cameras - thankfully, NYU still grants students the opportunity to work with actual film and shoot some very 'old-school-style' projects.

The process of shooting on actual film is relentlessly stressful, but it's also extremely rewarding. There is a beauty to the black-and-white reversal film that simply cannot be captured with a digital camera. My crew and I finished shooting my first project yesterday on Ninth Avenue and Ganesvoort Street, and this next week I will spend most of my time in the Steenbeck lab at Tisch, editing and splicing my film and preparing the final cut for the class screening next week. My assignment was to shoot a chase sequence, and, with the help of my friends and talented actors Bobb Barito and Mike Cheslik, shoot a chase sequence we certainly did.

Two weekends ago, I took a day trip with some friends to Port Washington, New York, a town on the North Shore of Long Island where my friend Morgan Block calls home. Morgan invited my friends and me to have lunch at her house (her mother made some delicious Challach French Toast for lunch) and celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Interestingly enough, Port Washington is the town where Daisy Buchanan lives in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - in fact, there is even a house in Port Washington that likely served as Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy's East Egg home.

In the past few weeks, there have also been a number of very exciting events I have attended on the NYU campus. On September 21st, my friend Jeremy Keller invited me to the Season Premiere of HBO's comedy series Bored to Death at NYU's Skirball Center. At the premiere, guests included series stars Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Oliver Platt, as well as series creator/ producer Jonathan Ames. After an introduction from Ames, Skirball screened the first two episodes of the new season - and although I had admittedly never watched the series before, I must admit that Bored to Death offers a great deal of laughs. On September 29th, Morgan and I attended the Global Poverty Project's 1.4 Billion Reasons presentation at the Skirball Center, hosted by actor Hugh Jackman. During the two-hour event, Jackman and Global Poverty Project founder Hugh Evans discussed numerous ways that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the globe. It was a fascinating presentation, and Jackman's presence drew the attention of a large crowd to this very important issue.

On September 22nd, I went on a tour of the Lower East Side Community Gardens with the Tisch Dean's Scholars group. Our tour guide, Mr. Howard Brandstein, gave us a fascinating history of the Community Gardens and joined us afterwards for some coffee and dessert. The Tisch Dean's Scholar group, led by the great Professor Chris Chan Roberson, has organized many fascinating events for the semester, and I am honored to spend time with my fellow scholars and the great professors who sponsor the activities. This Wednesday, the group is going on a tour of The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and I am very much looking forward to that experience.

The fall movie season has started off quite nicely with a series of outstanding features, both mainstream and independent, playing in theaters right now. Anton Corbijn's The American is a thriller so uniquely quiet, thoughtful and European that I am almost in disbelief that it is a mainstream Hollywood release. I have a feeling most American audiences simply don't know how to react to this picture, and it's a pity. In the 1970s, this sort of expertly crafted art thriller would have been the norm. Corbijn and star George Clooney deserve high praise for daring to even make The American - it's one of the riskier films I've seen this year, and one of the best. On the other side of the cinematic spectrum is Robert Rodriguez's explosively entertaining Machete, starring Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez and, my hero, Robert De Niro. I've been looking forward to seeing this radical, hilarious and unabashedly violent exploitation picture ever since my friend Steve White worked as the Location Manager on the film, and I'm happy to report that it's tremendous fun.

On September 18th, I caught a screening of Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton in a dual role as identical twins, one a college philosophy professor and the other a stoner criminal. Norton is better than ever, and Nelson has more on his mind - regarding philosophy, intellectualism and marijuana - than is initially apparent. Leaves of Grass is a funny and insightful piece of cinema that deserves more publicity and a much larger audience. After the screening at the Village East Cinema, both Norton and Nelson came out into the audience for a post-film Q&A. It was fascinating to hear Norton, one of the best actors of his generation, and Nelson, a fantastic actor - Minority Report (2002), Syriana (2005), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) - and filmmaker - The Grey Zone (2001) - discuss this independent project that was very close to both of their hearts.

The fall movie season officially exploded with the release of Ben Affleck's superb crime drama The Town. The writing, the direction and the performances - particularly from Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper and Affleck - are simply outstanding. On September 24th, one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Oliver Stone, released his latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I've heard various complaints about this picture (particularly regarding the ending), but perhaps I'm too biased in my favoritism for Stone to really agree with any of the criticism. There's something so unapologetically sincere, ambitious and absolutely nuts about Stone's filmmaking style that I can't help but admire each and every project he tackles, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is his finest work in the past ten years. It's relentlessly entertaining and surprisingly sentimental, and Manhattan has never looked better - or more corrupt - than in Stone's latest vision. Frank Langella, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and, of course, Michael Douglas stand out among the very talented ensemble.

The cinematic elephant in the room is David Fincher's The Social Network, which stands alongside Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island as the best film I've seen this year. Although the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate who created the website Facebook and subsequently became the youngest billionaire in the world doesn't sound like material worthy of comparison to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the comparison is more than justified. Fincher's astounding direction, Aaron Sorkin's brilliant and dense screenplay and the performances - particularly from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg - are all first-rate.

On that note, I will depart for the evening. If you haven't yet checked out The American, Machete, Leaves of Grass, The Town, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and especially The Social Network, then I recommend you do so. Until next time, I'll leave you with a list of highly recommended movies I caught in cinemas over the summer in Austin. Here they are: Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, David Michod's Animal Kingdom, Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man, Aaron Schneider's Get Low, Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, Jay Duplass' Cyrus, Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, Raymond De Felitta's City Island, Christian Carion's Farewell, Ricki Stern's Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child, Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, Adam McKay's The Other Guys and Daniel Barber's Harry Brown.