Oy Oy! Round and Round the Garden, Tisch Gala, The Wheels and Rebecca Miller

On Thursday, April 5th, I had an absolutely extraordinary day. Only a few days prior, I was named the recipient of the Sony Electronics Scholarship by the Tisch School of the Arts. I accepted this award - which included a Sony technology package with an amazing amount of Sony products - at the 2012 Wasserman/ King Awards at the Cantor Film Center on Thursday (the Wasserman/King Awards are a ceremony where the top prizes from the 2012 First Run Festival are also announced - essentially, it's NYU film school's Academy Awards). Thursday, however, was also the opening night of Tisch New Theatre's Mainstage production of Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden, in which I was performing as Reg. I arrived at Cantor at 5:45 PM, and luckily, the recipients of the Sony Electronics Scholarship were awarded near the beginning of the ceremony. I went onstage and accepted the award from our wonderful Dean Mary Schmidt Cambell, and then I hail-tailed it to the Kraine Theater on East 4th Street for our first performance of Round and Round the Garden at 7:30 PM. You can click here to view pictures from the 2012 Wasserman/King Awards.

I am so lucky to have been a part of Round and Round the Garden - the play easily ranks among the finest productions in which I've had the good fortune to perform. I'm as proud of this production as any film work I've done while at Tisch, and it was enormously rewarding returning to this particular play after five years (I played Norman in Austin High School's 2007 UIL One-Act production of Round and Round the Garden). The other five actors in the cast - Daniel Richardson (Norman), Taylor Myers (Tom), Kira Kull (Ruth), Flora Greeson (Annie) and Elise Kibler (Sarah) - are extremely talented artists, and after spending so much time with them onstage and offstage, I consider them among my closest friends. Our director, Daniel Hasse (who starred in my film The Wheels) and producer, Bethany McHugh (who serves on the Tisch New Theatre Executive Board with me) are the two oustanding leaders who made the play possible. There's something about this endlessly hilarious and unexpectedly moving play that brings out the love among its cast members - this was true in 2007, and it is still true in 2012. Flipping heck!

After our first performance, I went to celebrate with some of my friends and family who had come to see the production, including Bobb Barito, Ben Dewey, Mike Cheslik, Ani Tomasic, Tom Corbisiero (who played the father in my film The Wheels), Karen McFarlane (who played Lucille in my film With Love, Marty) and, of course, my mother Gretchen and our family friend Leslie Eckert, both of whom flew in from Austin to see the performance. We went to the B Bar & Grill, just down the street from the Kraine Theater, and it was wonderful to be surrounded by my friends.

Like most shows, our Round and Round the Garden company kept getting better with each performance. Luckily, our closing night was filmed by the director himself, and we were never better than during our final performance. After that performance, the cast and crew celebrated at U2 Karaoke Lounge and Suites on Saint Marks. I'll admit to performing a few rousing numbers, among them "Sloop John B" by The Beach Boys and "What's Up?" by 4 Non-Blondes.

From having our incredible poster proudly framed and displayed in the Tisch lobby for many weeks to attracting large and enthusiastic audiences for every performance, my second (and hopefully not final) Round and Round the Garden experience was nothing short of amazing, and another wonderful collaboration with Tisch New Theatre, one of the finest of all Tisch organizations. More than anything, it was exhilarating to get back onstage again. Here is a link to both a feature on Round and Round the Garden on the Tisch School of the Arts website, as well as an article from NYU Local about our production. Congratulations to my fellow cast and members and the crew, and thank you to my friends and family for coming to see the show!

On Thursday, April 19th, I attended the 2012 Tisch Gala After Party at the New York Marriot Marquis. Only a week earlier, the Dean's Scholars had been offered tickets to the After Party, as well as the opportunity to record a special video tribute for Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, who was being honored for her twentieth year as Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at this year's Gala. I immediately recorded a video thanking Dean Campbell, explaining that, as a Tisch Dean's Scholar, there is no way I could attend this extraordinary school and pursue my dreams if it were not for her support and wonderful leadership. As usual, this year's Tisch Gala was star-studded, with Martin Scorsese, Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee, Tony Kushner, Bill Paxton and Clive Davis among those in attendance and speaking at the event. You can click on this link to see some of the photographs from the Gala.

However, I had no idea that my tribute video would play - in its entirety - for the whole audience at the 2012 Tisch Gala at the Marriot Marquis. As I arrived at the After Party, a few of my professors who were leaving the Gala said that not only was my entire video played, but that I was the only current student featured among the tribute videos honoring Dean Campbell from Tisch graduates (including Ang Lee. This was such an incredible honor, and I was nearly beside myself to learn that Scorsese, Baldwin, Lee and, of course, Dean Campbell - among many others - watched my video (I can assure you that, the next morning while working at Mr. Scorsese's office, I waited for him to recognize me from the video - alas, this did not happen).

The 2012 Tisch Gala After Party was an extraordinary time to spend with friends and celebrate the end of the semester. If you want to view some of the official After Party photographs from the Photo Booth, you can find those here at this website. Here are more official photographs from the event, including the stage and screen where my video played for the crowd.

Earlier on that same Thursday, I had tickets to a Tribeca Talks Director's Series panel called 100 Years of Universal (one of many special events hosted by the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival), during which Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Judd Apatow were slated to speak about their films with Universal Pictures. I was enormously excited for this event, as it marked the first time I was able to see De Niro - my lifelong hero (along with Scorsese) and the finest actor in the history of cinema - in person. Ben, Mike and Nicole joined me for this event at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and although Mrs. Streep was unfortunately unable to attend at the last minute, I was overjoyed to hear De Niro speak for an hour about the Tribeca Film Festival, his upcoming projects, his preparation as an actor, and a few memories about the many films he has made at Universal (The Deer Hunter, Casino, Midnight Run, The Good Shepherd). Thank you so much to my godmother, Kay Lee Werlin, for treating my friends and me to this wonderful event!

In other news, the feedback on my film The Wheels has been wonderful around Tisch. The film has received some very high praise from the professors, and I am especially proud of this particular movie. Tisch Professor Geoff Erb invited me to screen The Wheels for his Freshman Colloquium class, as part of a presentation of complex student films that were successfully produced. Professor Erb and his colleagues were very kind in their praise for the film, and on Tuesday, April 24th, I screened the film for his class (essentially half of the entire freshman class) on a large screen at Cantor. After the screening, Ben, Bobb and I came onstage and participated in a Q&A with Professor Erb and the freshman class, detailing the intricate pre-production process of The Wheels and explaining how we successfully worked with the NYU production supervisors and the great people at Deno's Wonder Wheel to shoot a seemingly "un-filmable" student project. It was such an honor presenting and screening my film for the class, and the fact that The Wheels is being used as an example of a successful student film is humbling, to say the least.

In the midst of mailing out DVDs of the film to my IndieGoGo contributers and showing the project to my friends (in addition to an upcoming joint-screening of The Wheels and my producer Erica Rose's film And I Love Her at Tisch), I have slowly but surely been attempting to thank everyone who gave so much support to the film. Please click here to check out The Wheels on IMDB.

Before performing in Round and Round the Garden, I was able to join the Tisch Dean's Scholars to see the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, directed by the legendary Mike Nichols and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield. I was anticipating this production more than any Broadway performance in recent memory, as Miller's work has such a profound influence on me, and the teaming of Hoffman and Nichols was almost too good to be true. I do not exaggerate when I say that Death of a Salesman was the best piece of live theatre I have ever seen - as the curtain went down on the performance, tears were streaming down my face. I have never been so moved by any theatrical performance in my life. I cannot thank the Tisch Dean's Scholars program enough for the tickets to this extraordinary revival, which is now nominated for several Tony Awards.

After the performance, Nicole and I waited outside the Stage Door as many famous faces emerged from backstage, including Mike Nichols, Andrew Garfield, Liza Minneli and Alan Alda. But what was truly amazing about the experience was being able to talk about the performance with my directing professor Rebecca Miller (Arthur Miller's daughter). She has taught me so much about directing actors this semester, whether through coaching me as I directed my final scene from Michael Mann's The Insider (1999) in class, or giving insight into her own films, such as The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009). She is an extraordinary professor, and her directorial wisdom has made an indelible impression on me - I am so honored to have had such a remarkable person as my professor. Luckily, I have had the opportunity to tell her how much of an impact her films - particularly The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), starring her husband, Daniel-Day Lewis - have made on me. Here is a link to a fascinating article on the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman that opens with extraordinary praise from Professor Miller.

Speaking of Broadway, while my mother and Mrs. Eckert were visiting New York City, I had the pleasure of joining them to see Gore Vidal's The Best Man on Broadway at the Schoenfeld Theater, directed by Michael Wilson and starring James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury, Candice Bergen, John Larroquette, Eric McCormack and Michael McKean. Filled to the brim with incredibly talented actors and impeccably directed by Mr. Wilson, The Best Man was an outstanding production. After the play ended, I had the good opportunity to see Mrs. Lansbury exit the Stage Door and greet her many fans. At eighty-six years old, she is still astounding audiences with her performances.

There are many other experiences from this semester that I will report in my next blog post. The end of this semester - with Round and Round the Garden performances, the Wasserman/ King Awards, working extra days at my internship, apartment-hunting for the summer, Assistant-Directing a most ambitious Intermediate Narrative film, submitting The Wheels to films festivals and mailing out DVDs of the movie, preparing for a summer film project, writing my feature screenplay for Developing the Screenplay, directing my final scene for Rebecca Miller's class, editing Ben Dewey's Intermediate Narrative film Quitting and keeping up with my classes - has been exhausting. I will close by expressing my deep sadness regarding the death of Levon Helm, one of the finest musicians of all time. I encourage everyone to watch Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) to witness Helm's breathtaking musical performance, or listen to Helm's wonderful songs (both with The Band and his solo work) in his remembrance. His voice, his music and his power will never fade away.

Lastly, Sunday, April 29th marked the ten-year anniversary of the death of my father, John Kyser. If you knew him, hold on to his memory. He was a wonderful father and a great man, and I miss him every day.

That Her Face, At First Just Ghostly, Turned A Whiter Shade of Pale

Although I still have many things to report from my fall semester and winter break, I want to write a little bit about my spring semester thus far. Starting in January, I have been interning at Martin Scorsese's office, Sikelia Productions, which is nothing short of a dream come true for me. If you know me, then you know that Mr. Scorsese has been my hero since I was eleven years old. In my review of Hugo, I wrote: "I await a new Scorsese movie the same way some anticipate a sort of religious experience. His work is such a fundamentally important part of my life that there are times when I don't know how much I originally found similarities between my personal demons and Scorsese's work, and how much Scorsese's work ultimately influenced my behavior." In short, it has been the honor of a lifetime to work at his office this semester. Here's a link to a recent CBS News look inside Mr. Scorsese's office.

In February, I auditioned for and was subsequently cast in Tisch New Theatre's Spring Mainstage production of Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden. I have written in many previous posts about my enormous love for this play, as I starred in Austin High School's 2007 UIL One-Act Play production of Round and Round the Garden as Norman, and the other cast members in that production became some of my best friends to this day (including Lucas Loredo and Cora Walters). That production of Round and Round the Garden advanced to the Texas State Championship (the first Austin High production to do so in eighteen years), and along the way, I was named Best Actor at the Zone, District and Area competitions, and won All-Star Cast awards at the Regional and State competitions. Out of the twenty-three plays in which I performed at Austin High, Round and Round the Garden will always remain closest to my heart.

I am incredibly excited for this new production, in which I am playing Reg. The other five cast members are brilliant performers, and our director, Daniel Hasse, is doing a fantastic job. The performance dates for Round and Round the Garden are April 5th, 6th and 7th at 7:30 PM at the historic Kraine Theatre in the East Village (last year, my friend Alexander Fofonoff and I produced Tisch New Theatre's Spring Mainstage production of Last Exit No Toll at the Kraine, and so it is nice to return to a familiar stage). Last semester, Daniel starred in my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels; now the tables have turned, and he is directing me.

Tisch New Theatre recently put up our IndieGoGo fundraising page for Round and Round the Garden, and I highly encourage you to contribute to this fantastic production if you can! Here is the link to the IndieGoGo page, as well as our promotional video:

Finally, after one final ADR session last Friday, my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels is completely finished. I sent the following update to my wonderful IndieGoGo contributors just a few weeks ago regarding the current status of the film:

Dear Contributors,

It’s been about three months since my crew and I finished shooting The Wheels, and now, the final film is nearly complete. I wanted to update all of you regarding its production status as my team and I head into the final leg of post-production.

About two weeks ago, my cinematographer Benjamin Dewey began color-correcting the film in a finishing suite at Tisch. After fine-tuning the colors over the course of several evenings, Ben succeeded in giving the picture a haunting, faded look, similar to that of an old photograph or a distant memory. I sat in on the process and watched as Ben worked his magic, and I feel so lucky to have him and so many talented others working on this project.

After the color-correction process, Ben helped design the closing titles to the film. We are meeting for a final time tomorrow evening to tweak some small picture details in After Effects. Ben recently posted his new Cinematography Reel for Fall 2011, and it includes some color-corrected footage from The Wheels. If you have a chance, make sure to watch his reel below, which features clips from many outstanding projects that he shot last semester (including The Wheels). Here is Ben's reel:

Ben is also currently working on the poster for The Wheels (he created a beautiful poster for my last film, With Love, Marty). As soon as the poster for The Wheels is completed, I will send the image out to all of you.

My roommate, good friend and sound designer extraordinaire Bobb Barito is currently putting the finishing touches on the sound design, and his work is extraordinary. Once that is completed, The Wheels will be entirely finished. Once again, thank you all so much for your support of this project – it means the world to me, and my wonderful crew and I would not have had the opportunity to make this movie if it were not for your generosity. I very much look forward to showing you the final film.

Sincerely,

Jack Kyser

My classes this semester are absolutely amazing. My favorite class is Directing the Actor, as my professor is Rebecca Miller, the acclaimed writer and director of The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, and daughter of Arthur Miller. I was hoping more than anything to have Mrs. Miller as my directing professor, and she is an outstanding teacher. Two weeks ago, I directed a scene from Michael Mann's The Insider in front of Mrs. Miller and my Directing the Actor class, which was a thrilling experience. Her comments and criticism of my direction were invaluable, and the two actors I cast in the scene were enormously talented.

I am also taking Developing the Screenplay, a wonderful screenwriting class taught by the great writer Ken Dancyger. He's a brilliant professor, and, after pitching my feature screenplay in front of the class and meeting with him privately, I feel motivated and energized to continue writing my feature script. My other classes include Intermediate Editing, where I am editing Ben Dewey's Intermediate Narrative film Quitting (I was also the Assistant Director on that film last semester) on AVID; Introduction to Performance Studies; and History of Modern Ireland, a class at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House.

I have served as Assistant Director on two projects so far this semester. Most recently, I was the Assistant Director for my friend Nicole Cobb's Intermediate Experimental film Athanasia's Waltz, one of the best projects I've had the privilege to work on. After weeks of location scouting in Red Hook and across Brooklyn, as well as sitting in on rehearsals with Nicole and her two very talented actors, the picture was shot last weekend in Brooklyn with an incredibly supportive crew. As soon as I receive the production stills from the set, I will post them on this blog. In the meantime, here is a link to the page for Athanasia's Waltz on Nicole's website.

I also worked as Assistant Director for Ben's Intermediate Short Commercial Form project Don't Try This At Home in late February, with a small crew that included Ben, Bobb and Jon Annunziata. On the last day of February, I presented my Dean's Scholars Collaborative Project to the Tisch Dean's Scholars, where I collaborated on a small project with another film major and a photography student. That incredible program, to which I devoted an entire post earlier this year, has some amazing events lined up for this semester that I will share in the coming weeks.

With regard to this year's Academy Awards - first of all, I was ecstatic on the morning of the Oscar nominations, as Hugo led with eleven nominations, and both The Tree of Life and Terrence Malick were nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, respectively. Yes, there were many omissions (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Margaret, Take Shelter, Shame and Young Adult were completely ignored), but the triumph for Hugo lifted my spirits - at least until the Oscar ceremony.

My heart was a little broken this time last year, when David Fincher and The Social Network lost their Oscars to a less deserving picture. But this year was much worse. I hadn't been this close to the Oscar race since 2007, when Scorsese won his first Best Director Oscar for The Departed. There is no question that Scorsese deserved this year's Oscar - not simply because he has a long history of losing to inferior films, but because he made the best film of the year, Hugo. Although I was very happy to see Hugo win richly-deserved Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects, nothing stings as badly as watching the most deserving film lose the top awards - particularly when it loses them to a charming and inoffensive silent picture that appeals mainly to people who haven't seen many silent films. Oh, well - history will be the judge. The Artist joins Dances with Wolves, Ordinary People, Chicago and Rocky. Hugo, meanwhile, joins Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York and The Aviator.

Additionally, for the second year in a row, many performers who deserved to win the Best Actor Oscar (Leonardo DiCaprio for J. Edgar, Michael Shannon for Take Shelter, Michael Fassbender for Shame) were not even nominated. Meanwhile, the extraordinary performances that were nominated (Brad Pitt for Moneyball, Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, George Clooney for The Descendants) failed to win the Oscar. On a positive note, I was very happy that Christopher Plummer, Woody Allen and Alexander Payne all received Academy Awards.

I have seen several films since I returned to New York City, including two outstanding holdovers from 2011 - Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus, a brilliant and brutal Shakespeare adaptation with incredible performances from Fiennes, Jessica Chastain and Vanessa Redgrave, who unquestionably should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. New 2012 releases that I have admired include Paul Weitz's Being Flynn, with an unforgettable performance from our finest living actor, Robert De Niro (a performance that will hopefully result in an Oscar nomination for De Niro, after his astounding recent work in Stone and Everybody's Fine went overlooked); David Wain's ferociously funny Wanderlust, delightfully full of that unmistakable Wain humor (the best bit, besides an outrageously funny mirror-monologue from Paul Rudd, is a morning news show with Wain, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black doing their thing); and Tony Kaye's Detachment, an immensely powerful film with an excellent lead performance from Adrien Brody. Note: Michael Showalter is a professor at the Tisch Schools of the Arts, and when I see him at Tisch, it's hard not to express my enthusiasm for his work, from the brilliant Wet Hot American Summer to his appearance in Wanderlust - so, instead, I'll express my love here. Mr. Showalter, you are a comic genius.

Finally, here's a comedy short for which I served as Assistant Director last semester - Surprise! - from the new sketch comedy group Unlikely Allies. My friend Mike Cheslik directed the short, and Bobb did the sound - take a look!

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.

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.