Popcorn Man in the Sky with Diamonds
I think Carlos is now 21.
His father, Gil Ferrer, has two very successful hair salons on Madison Avenue and Bridgehampton. I've known Gil for years and he is an artist. Whenever I do a film or television show, I make sure that he gets a pass at me before the movie set hair and makeup people do. In 1998 Cornelia Bregman, wife of producer Martin Bregman, had Gil make me look like a Billionaire for the film "Bone Collector." His paintings and art work are always in view around his shop and the black cape over my shoulders feels like satin as I sip the latte'.
Gil and I talk as he sculpts around me. In 1998 he told me about his 14 year old son, Carlos, who had been tinkering with film editing, computers and cameras since he could crawl. Gil painted a word picture of his son lying on the floor with lenses, computer chips and a dream. Everyone brags about their children whether it's true or not, but there was a tone in Gil's voice that made this different, that his kid was really making films since he was a child.
Sometime after that first cut, I got a call from a young woman, Alexandra Buckley. She called in the summer of 1999 because she had a lead in a film, "Scallop Pond" and knew nothing about acting. The director was 14 years old. Her easy nature belied her anxiety. She was born in our era but F. Scott Fitzgerald dreamed up her flaxen hair, brown eyes and a shape that can only be fully realized after she steps up on the porch in a summer dress with the sunlight behind her. She was smart, gentle, self effacing, and gifted with a Master's degree. She studied with me for five years after that, until she got her second masters in education. She's in Harlem teaching inner city kids now and using her acting skills in the process.
Alexandra stayed at my house in Montauk and we worked and prepared for two weeks before the shoot. By the time she started on the shoot of Carlos Ferrer's first full feature film, she felt confident and ready. Gil screened the film in NYC to the astonishment of the packed audience. Alexandra showed star quality. But Carlos was fifteen years old at his first premier. The film was a bit bumpy and overly mysterious but it was as good as some of the dreck I've seen while flipping the channels. It had some vigor or life. But... It was directed by a FOURTEEN soon-to-be FIFTEEN YEAR OLD BOY.
I visited that set a few times in Southampton. Carlos faced challenges, as most directors do. I watched Carlos, a tiny gentleman, talk to a DP at midnight. The DP, in a condescending way was trying to take over the film and begin to dictate the shots. Carlos explained what he wanted but the DP was moving ahead without him. At the stroke of midnight the young boy turned into a full fledged director/man and fired that DP.
Carlos, now in his second year of college, has made another film: "Popcorn Man." When he called, I told him that I had a student whom I felt had the potential for a long career as an actor. Ron Haxton sounded right for the part Carlos was casting.
It's 1:00 am and I just finished viewing "Popcorn Man" starring my student Ron
Haxton. It's 24 minutes long.
Ron came to study with me a few years ago. We worked privately, then he attended my classes and last year he spent the summer with me and The Montauk Group working on scenes and exercises. He is an athlete who engenders a warmth and self deprecating humor that makes anyone who meets him feel at ease. At one point in "Popcorn Man", in order to capture the attention of his son up in his room, locked away by his ex wife, Ron puts his hands up in the air and makes a strange ape like movement that only he and his son could understand, binding them with a bond of friendship, love and loss; a private understanding that could only come from a cultivated sense of fun that had to have existed between them in the past. Ron took that from an exercise that I had him do in class; a magnificent psychological gesture of love to his young son and a moment of great acting.
When I watched Ron's work in this film I felt unadulterated pride that I had something - even in a distant way -- to do with the ease, poise and elegance of his work. When I realized that Carlos had an Ingmar Bergman like maturity as a film maker, I felt hope lives in the passion of our young people. This simple, unassuming film shows rhythm, life beyond a natural understanding of film, but a rare sense of the auteur that the European film makers like Fellini, Malle, Herzog had in their ability to capture the inner thoughts and moods of all of us.
Hollywood films are made for hundreds of millions of dollars; money that could be going to Darfur, or could bring back music lessons to public schools instead of wasting it on the horrid vanity that we pay to sit through.
"Popcorn Man" is just another garage film shot on a beer budget along familiar locations, moving across the mind and spirit of all small towns where average people sit in movie theaters, and as depicted in the film itself, dreaming and waiting for things to happen.
I raise my glass to that dream, but it's not beer in my flute. It's Dom...
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