Starstruck: My Unlikely Road to Hollywood

Introduction: Take One

I met my first movie star when I was 13 years old. Actually, he was more than a star: he was one of my heroes, Buster Keaton. My best friend and I read that he was making a film in downtown Manhattan and managed to track him down. It was an experience we will never forget.

Good timing and luck have defined my life from that day to this. How else can I explain getting my first book published when I was 18 years old or being hired to work on a hit television show when I never dreamt of a career in broadcasting? Even my academic career, teaching at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, came about by chance: the man who was hired to take over a popular, long-running course was having personal problems and they needed a replacement fast.

I chalk it up to serendipity, which the songwriting Sherman Brothers once defined as the art of happy accidents.

Over the years I’ve met many people I grew up admiring as well as today’s leading lights, but one thing has never changed: I remain an unabashed fan.

This seems to hold me in good stead with the people I encounter. I didn’t understand why at first. Then I learned that the interviewers stars face on press junkets aren’t always fans or buffs. Sometimes they haven’t even bothered to watch the movies they’re supposed to be asking about!

Actors and other luminaries respond to genuine enthusiasm. They’ll tell stories they don’t often share if they believe I’m truly interested in hearing them. Morgan Freeman explained how he got his first job in movies, as a background extra in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964). Lumet needed people to walk down a street on the upper West Side of Manhattan while the film’s star, Rod Steiger, stared through a chain link fence at a playground. With each take, Lumet used fewer people; he didn’t want a crowd, just a sampling of passers-by. In the end he used only one person. It was Freeman, who did what no one else in the crowd had thought to do: he paused in his walk and lit a cigarette before continuing on. This completely natural moment caught the director’s eye.

Years later, as a star, Freeman accosted an extra on one of his sets and asked him where he was going. Nervously, the fellow said he was headed from point A to point B. But where are you going and why are you going there? Freeman persisted. The flustered man said the assistant director had told him to cross from one spot to another. He didn’t understand Freeman’s point: a believable extra should know who he’s supposed to be and where he’s heading. I hope someday he figured it out.

I’ve had many odd, funny, and unusual experiences from the time, at age 14, that I was allowed entry into the underground world of old-movie buffs in Manhattan to attending my first Cinecon convention the following year (in Baraboo, Wisconsin); from my stumbling attempts to make 8mm silent movies with my friends (long before the invention of video) to several years of traipsing around the country giving college lectures. Once I appeared in a Midwestern campus ballroom that seated several thousand, but there were only 11 people in attendance. The promoters told me I drew the best turnout they’d had all week. When I asked students at another school how they had happened to book me, they explained that they had a certain amount left in their annual speaker budget so I was whom they could afford. I now think of these as character-building experiences.

I never kept a journal, but every now and then after a special day I’ve been smart enough to jot down my thoughts. I’m awfully glad I did; it’s one reason I can recreate so many incidents in detail. For the rest, I’ve trusted my memory, with a little help from my family. So, step into the Wayback Machine with me as we travel through one lucky guy’s life experience.

Circulation: 3

As a boy I never considered myself unusual. Yet, instead of delivering newspapers, I had a TV Guide route. My father read two newspapers a day, but I never got into that habit, preferring to devour his weekly edition of Variety. I couldn’t hit or throw a baseball, but I devised my own comic strip. At 12 I received rejection slips for my gag cartoons from The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. I guess I wasn’t usual after all.

The first movie image I clearly remember is the last scene of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was reissued to theaters in 1955 when I was four. Movies were shown on a continuous basis in those days, so the minute a throng of parents dragged their kids out of the theater, my mother took me by the hand and led me inside before the current showing was over. That’s why the first image burned in my brain is the final shot of Walt Disney’s film, with Prince Charming leading Snow White toward a gleaming golden sun.

I’m pretty sure that took place at the Guild Theatre, the art deco movie house that stood—as a seeming afterthought—behind Radio City Music Hall on 50th Street in Manhattan. Several years later my parents took me back to the Guild to see Robert Youngson’s 1958 compilation feature The Golden Age of Comedy. There was a life-sized standee of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy with Jean Harlow outside the theater, and it made a vivid impression on me, almost as vivid as the hilarious silent-comedy excerpts I got to see on the big screen. I was hooked, to put it mildly. (Years later, I got to know Bob Youngson and had the opportunity to thank him for making such a difference in my life.)

I became obsessed with silent comedy, which even turned up as kiddie-show fodder on television in those days. In 1959 Charlie Chaplin reissued his feature-length films, and I got to see Modern Times on a theater screen. It was a time of great discovery for me.

I also acquired my first home-movie projector as a birthday present. It cost $9.99 and was advertised in a mail order catalog as being battery operated. In fact, only its tiny bulb used a battery: to make the pictures move you had to turn a metal crank, which made a terrible racket. This proved to be an early lesson in false advertising. Eventually, I got permission to use my parents’ Bell & Howell projector, which they had acquired to screen our family home movies. From that point on I saved my money to purchase 8mm editions of vintage films with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and other giants of the silent era. I needed no persuasion to show them on any and all occasions. (They also spurred me to try making my own silent shorts with a group of friends when we were in junior high school. This taught me an important lesson about how hard it is to create comedy, even if you have a supply of cream pies on hand.)

I was born in Manhattan; that gives me a lifelong right to call myself a native New Yorker. The hospital where I was born is now a condo apartment building on West 49th Street. We left the city when I was four, but I clearly remember living in our apartment house on West 77th Street just off Amsterdam Avenue. There was a friendly neighborhood fruit vendor named Dominic, whose apples came in fancy tissue paper. I also recall that one of the grocery stores we frequented on Broadway was a former movie theater, which I found confusing because it retained its marquee out front. I always hoped we were going to the movies when, as often as not, we were just going shopping for dinner.

Our first, boxy console television set had slots on both sides of the wooden cabinet to allow sound to emerge from its cloth-covered speakers. It reminded me of a piggy bank, and I would drop coins into the slots from time to time, occasionally causing minor havoc with the set. One of my earliest memories is of an Indian-head test pattern, which I later learned was the only thing available to watch on TV until Howdy Doody signed on every weekday afternoon. I never sat in that show’s famed Peanut Gallery, but I did get to visit backstage with a local New York TV personality, The Merry Mailman, who was portrayed by genial Ray Heatherton. It turns out that Ray was my father’s first client when he started practicing law, so that gave us an in. (Ray’s daughter Joey later made a splash as a sex-kittenish musical performer.)

When my brother was born, we moved to a two-story house in Teaneck, New Jersey, a nice place to grow up in the 1950s and’60s. It was a bedroom community, just five miles from the George Washington Bridge, though many of my friends never crossed the Hudson River to spend time in the greatest city on earth. We visited often, especially when my grandmother lived on the Upper West Side. I remember staying overnight at her apartment so we could walk to Central Park West and see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (I even have a dim recollection of seeing Hopalong Cassidy in the parade, shaking hands along the way.) When I started driving, I could be in midtown in 20 minutes flat.

My father was a special hearings officer for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it was known in those days. He came home at the exact same time every day and never brought his work with him, although he was a soft touch and often took phone calls (even at dinnertime) from people who needed help with immigration problems. Toward the end of his 30-year hitch with Uncle Sam, one of his cohorts successfully petitioned to have him and his colleagues officially called judges.

My mother had been a nightclub performer when she was in her teens, singing and playing an accordion. She joined the chorus of the original Broadway production of Carousel in 1946 and stayed with the show nearly a year. She always spoke about how thrilling it was to stand in the wings and watch John Raitt sing Soliloquy every night. She also appeared on the popular radio show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, and we had a transcription disc of the broadcast. Apparently, fellow contestant Vic Damone was slated to win, but the producers were forced to call it a tie because she got as much applause as he did. After marrying my dad, she gave up her career but still took occasional club dates and sang at local charity and community events.

People often ask me if my parents inspired my interest in movies. The answer is no, but I did grow up in a house where there was a keen awareness of show business. My Uncle Bernie was a professional pianist and songwriter. He died when I was a year and a half old, and my father inherited the copyrights for many songs he wrote. About once a year, Captain Kangaroo would play an old 78 rpm record of a novelty song called Professor Spoons, and Lawrence Welk would perform another of his numbers on his popular network TV show. Those were big days in our household because, my father explained, it meant his ASCAP rating would go up that quarter and so would his royalties.

Most important for me was the fact that my dad subscribed to Variety, known in those days as the show business Bible. It arrived in the mail every Thursday. For years my hands were smeared with ink from its pages as I pored over movie news, nightclub reviews, and the comings and goings of stars in columns labeled NY to LA, NY to London, etc. (Having read the nightclub reviews by Jose, which evoked so much glamor in my eyes, it was a shock some years later to meet their author, the very unglamorous Joe Cohen, although when embracing an attractive publicist he did use a line I’ve never forgotten: Quelle broad!)

We lived on a pleasant, tree-lined street called Grayson Place. I had to walk four blocks to my elementary school. The public library was just another block away, and that’s where I spent a great deal of time. The librarians in the children’s room were friendly and encouraging, and I devoured entire series of books like Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle, Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price, and Jay Williams’ Danny Dunn adventures. I also learned how to use the Dewey Decimal system to find what few film-related books and biographies were available in the adult division.

The first book I remember taking home was Mack Sennett’s 1956 autobiography, King of Comedy. It transported me to the rough-and-ready days of silent moviemaking, and I loved it. (I later came to learn that many of his stories were inaccurate, or at best apocryphal, but they captured the spirit of that freewheeling period and that’s what appealed to me most.) I would check it out again and again, as I did other books that came along like John McCabe’s Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, published when I was 10 years old. Another book I read and reread was Bob Thomas’ The Art of Animation, which taught me about the workings of the Walt Disney Studio at the time Sleeping Beauty was in production.

I was devoted to my daily installment of The Mickey Mouse Club and to the weekly hour-long show, Disneyland (later called Walt Disney Presents and then Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color). I felt such a strong connection to Disney that in an illustrated book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales I owned, I added words in crayon at the end of a story: A Walt Disney Production. I was Disney’s ideal target audience. When he promoted an upcoming movie, it whet my appetite to see it, and I don’t think I missed a single one.

I felt the same keen sense of anticipation for each new Jerry Lewis movie. While spending our summer at Bradley Beach, New Jersey, I saw that kid on the screen for the first time in his first film without Dean Martin, The Delicate Delinquent. I was sold.

In those days, before multiplexes and 3,000-screen opening weekends, movies followed a predictable trail. They usually opened in Manhattan and then gradually expanded to the suburbs. I came to know the personalities of every theater in my area, which included Hackensack, Englewood, Ridgefield Park, and Fort Lee as well as Teaneck. The Oritani in Hackensack tended to show Warner Bros. cartoons, so that was good reason to favor it. The Fox and the Teaneck would show Terrytoons or those awful, repetitious Casper the Friendly Ghost shorts. Ugh. The Fox in Hackensack also ran newsreels, which at that time held absolutely no interest for me.

Saturday matinee kiddie shows were a big part of my adolescence. Around midweek I would call local theaters to see what they planned to show. It took me time to realize that theater managers gave little thought to the content of these programs; they were comprised of whatever prints happened to be sitting in the local film exchange. That’s how I saw all the Francis the Talking Mule and Ma and Pa Kettle comedies, along with cheesy science fiction movies and even Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.

One time, a local Thom McAn shoe store on Cedar Lane sponsored a free kiddie show at the Teaneck Theater that promised 25 cartoons. Needless to say, I arrived early. The flyer advertising the show featured head shots of various characters, including Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, but all we got were Tom and Jerry cartoons—including some that reused footage from shorts we’d just seen minutes earlier. Even worse, there weren’t 25 shorts, only 18. I knew because I’d been counting. (Didn’t everyone?) Filled with righteous indignation, I lingered in the lobby afterwards to register my annoyance with the manager, but he never showed his face. He would have had to contend with a furious 12-year-old.

So many aspects of moviegoing have changed since I was a kid. When I went to the movies with my family, no one ever bothered to call ahead or check a timetable in the newspaper. We simply marched into the theater and sat down right in the middle of a film. We’d see it through to the end, followed by a cartoon, a travelogue, and some coming attractions, take in the second feature and then the first feature. At a given moment my mom or dad would say, This is where we came in, and we’d leave. It’s utterly unthinkable today but it was commonplace back then. Peter Bogdanovich has written about this phenomenon, and I even traded memories with Martin Scorsese, who laughed in recognition of the same experience he had growing up.

The first price I paid for a Saturday matinee was 35 cents. It soon went up to 50 cents, then 75 cents, and then a dollar. If you went to Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan before noon, it cost only 99 cents! My memories of the Music Hall are mixed, because we often stood in line for the Christmas show in freezing weather, shivering for well over an hour on 50th or 51st Street as the crowd occasionally inched forward. My mother would take me by the hand as we entered the palatial auditorium to see movies like The Music Man or a new Disney release. I remember the Rockettes, of course, and the theater organist, who emerged from a curtained alcove on one side of the screen.

When I wasn’t busy at the movies, I spent my time reading comic books—mostly the funny kind, although I also liked Superman—and watching TV. I was so addicted to television that I could barely bring myself to turn it off from the moment I got home from school. There were great local kiddie shows, a constant parade of cartoons, and of course The Mickey Mouse Club. That was all before dinner and prime-time programming. On Monday night, CBS had a strong comedy lineup, and while I didn’t care for The Danny Thomas Show, it didn’t pay to turn the set off for a measly half hour while waiting for The Andy Griffith Show. What could you possibly accomplish in 30 minutes’ time when you had to check your watch every couple of minutes?

Television was also my portal to the past. In those days, TV was a living museum of movies, with vintage cartoons and comedy shorts comprising the bulk of children’s programming. I watched Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals every day of my life for years and years. No wonder I committed so many of their shorts to memory. I got to sample cartoons from every studio: Warner Bros., Max Fleischer, Terrytoons, Van Buren, Ub Iwerks, you name it. Like kids of the video generation, I didn’t mind watching them over and over. Familiarity did not breed contempt.

In my adolescence, when my interests broadened, local television enabled me to see countless movies from the 1930s and ’40s that didn’t ever turn up at the Museum of Modern Art, The New Yorker Theater, or other revival houses I haunted in New York. More than once I went to bed early and set my alarm for 2:30 a.m. in order to see a rarity like Twentieth Century or A Message to Garcia, then try to fall back to sleep so I could function in school the next day.

It’s amazing to me how much I remember from my years of constant TV viewing: moments on game shows, talk shows, kiddie shows, and variety programs. A little while back I met the wonderful singer Marilyn Maye and told her that I remembered when The Mike Douglas Show surprised her by flying in her 12-year-old daughter to perform a song from the show Sweet Charity. Marilyn was amazed that I retained that memory and informed me that her daughter was then 60!

The events of November 22, 1963, are still crystal-clear in my mind. I was in eighth grade typing class when our principal spoke to us on the public address system about President Kennedy having been shot. While many have written and spoken about the events of that day and its aftermath, no one talks about a media phenomenon I’ve never experienced since: every television show was canceled for the next four days. The networks played somber classical music and resumed broadcasting only when there was news to be updated. I was watching live that Sunday morning when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and frantically called my parents into the room. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen—and there was no such thing as instant replay.

What motivated me to publish my own magazine? I really don’t know; I hadn’t seen Citizen Kane at the age of 9. I guess I needed to express myself. When I was in the fifth grade my best friend Barry Ahrendt and I created a journal called The Bergen Bulletin, a newspaper-ish moniker indicating our location in Bergen County, New Jersey, and my lifelong fondness for alliteration. Our first issue had a circulation of three: one original and two carbon copies. (If you don’t remember carbon paper, I’m sorry.)

To be honest, Barry and I weren’t all that interested in reporting news. My passion at that time was drawing cartoons, and The Bulletin (as it was soon renamed) gave me a place to display my work. Barry liked to write. We passed around our three copies to classmates, and the feedback we got fueled our determination to publish on a regular basis.

It was at this crucial point that we invested $3.95—no small sum for a couple of fifth graders—in a quaint device called a hectograph. It was a 9x12 vat of hardened gelatin in a tin casing about a quarter of an inch deep. When we wrote or drew on a ditto stencil—the kind our teachers used at school with ditto machines, the precursor to photocopiers—and rubbed the slick ditto paper facedown on the hectograph, it left an impression in the gelatin. By gently sponging down the surface and placing one sheet of coated ditto paper on top, then peeling it off, we could make exact copies. (If someone had told us about a future world in which personal computers could enable any child to create graphics, photos, and type fonts, we would have called it science fiction.)

The gelatin vat was called a hectograph because the prefix hecto means hundred in Latin. We renamed it the 35-o-graph because our copies started getting blurry once we reached that number of reproductions. Still, we were happy to have 35 copies to circulate around our school.

Barry, who was a straight-A student, wrote some news-related articles, and his older brother contributed a few erudite essays about world affairs. As my interest in show business grew, I started writing profiles of some of my favorite entertainers. We produced a new issue every other week throughout our fifth- and sixth-grade years. Then we retired the publication, figuring that when we entered junior high school that fall, we would join its newspaper staff.

We received a rude awakening when we learned that as seventh-grade freshmen, we didn’t rate a place on the paper. Barry lost interest, but another friend, Barry Gottlieb, joined me in launching a new magazine-format publication called Profile. My father’s cousin, who was in the printing business, gave me a used mimeograph machine. All that was missing was a feeding mechanism to load blank paper into the printing drum, so we had to find a way to do that by hand. (Using the edge of a typewriter eraser—another relic of days gone by—made it easier.) The mimeo machine, a staple of schools and civic organizations, was an evil contraption that had to be hand-inked, which guaranteed black stains under our fingernails, but it could make an infinite number of copies from one stencil. We ran off a whopping 100. Typing on the stencil was fairly simple, but drawing on it required a stylus and a delicate touch.

Barry’s father was associated with a local advertising agency and its friendly co-owner, Ernie Vigdor, allowed us to mess around in his office. One of his staff artists even custom-designed a logo for Profile. I will never forget watching in fascination as he took stock lettering and painted out some of the thickness of the letter P in order to create a unique typeface.

In league with that, we decided to produce a professionally printed wraparound cover for our humble magazine. With photographs on the front, back, and inside covers, we felt we’d made a giant leap toward legitimacy. Barry’s hobby was magic, so he contributed articles about famous magicians while I embarked on writing about film history. My surveys of the careers of Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and other silent stars were workmanlike rehashes of facts one could find in books. I did my best to personalize them where I could. When I found a London mailing address for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in my go-to resource, the library publication Current Biography, I wrote to him to ask if Pickford ever gave him any advice about his own career. Being the gentleman he was, he answered my query. I’ll never forget the special air-mail envelope in which it arrived. As it turns out, he had little to do with his stepmother while growing up but said nice things about her. I didn’t gain much material for my article, but it certainly was exciting to get that letter.

When I wrote articles about the Superman TV series and Warner Bros. cartoons, I drew on my own youthful observations, with facts gleaned from obsessive TV watching rather than library research. There were virtually no sources where I could learn about such pop culture topics, and it was exciting to try to piece the puzzles together for myself.

I also got a crash course in magic, working as Barry’s assistant at some kids birthday parties. It was fun to go to Louis Tannen’s famous emporium in Manhattan on Saturday mornings, where salesmen demonstrated tricks for customers, even kids like us. I especially enjoyed a memorable interview Barry conducted with the renowned magician Milbourne Christopher, who was exceedingly kind to us. He welcomed us into his apartment on Central Park West, which was filled with wonderful memorabilia, and ended our conversation by producing a burst of fire using flash paper. He even presented both of us with signed copies of his book on the history of magic.

I started writing fan letters to people I admired around this time and got some promising replies. Cartoonist and caricaturist Al Kilgore invited us to visit him at his home in Queens Village. I had first seen his work in Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, which featured Al’s beautiful renderings of Stan and Ollie. It turned out that Al was an avid movie buff and collector, so we had much to talk about. His day job was writing and drawing a daily syndicated Bullwinkle comic strip. Following a long and lively conversation, he sat at his drawing table in a tiny basement workroom and drew a souvenir portrait of Bullwinkle reading a copy of Profile. When he finished, he signed it for Barry and Leonard. Knowing that there was no way for us to share this treasure, I sheepishly asked if he would do another drawing for me. This time he drew the villainous Boris Badenov tearing up a copy of Profile (a whimsical touch typical of Al’s imagination) and signed it for Leonard and Barry. I kept the original Boris and settled for a photostat of Bullwinkle, while my friend did the opposite. (That began a deep and lasting friendship with Al, one of the dearest people I’ve ever met. In the years to come he would contribute cover art for several issues of my magazine Film Fan Monthly, and he devoted as much time to these freebies as he did to any paying gigs. Al died, much too young, in the early 1980s and I spoke at his memorial service.)

I still didn’t think in terms of a career; that was far off in the future. I never consciously planned anything that happened during these exciting years. Publishing a magazine, going to Manhattan at every opportunity, and seeking out interesting people just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

Looking back, I realize how fortunate I was to meet so many generous, gracious individuals. There were only a few rotten apples, like a couple of movie studio publicists who couldn’t be bothered with my amateur efforts. When I wrote a letter requesting still photos from Charlie Chaplin’s upcoming film A Countess from Hong Kong, an executive at Universal Pictures took the time to compose a formal response saying that the company didn’t find my magazine a suitable outlet for their publicity campaign. However, he concluded condescendingly, so your letter shouldn’t be a total loss, here are several stills. If he was going to send the photos anyway, what did he gain by being so unkind? I’ll never understand people like that, especially in the field of publicity.

I learned another valuable lesson early on: if there was any way to dodge publicists and reach the person directly, my chances of success were infinitely better. In 1969 I learned that the esteemed director George Stevens was coming to New York City to appear at the opening of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. They would be showing such classic films as Gunga Din, A Place in the Sun, and Shane. At age 18 I hadn’t yet made solid connections at MoMA, so I called several leading midtown Manhattan hotels and asked for Mr. Stevens. I scored on the second try, as I recall, and left a message that I wanted to interview him.

Imagine my astonishment when during dinner a day later the telephone rang. It was George Stevens returning my call. I