Last Thursday night there was a special screening at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York commemorating the 25^th anniversary of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” This film has always been dear to my heart, because it was the first film I ever did publicity on from before it started shooting all the way through release. Being on the set every day and going to dailies, was exciting, fun, and ultimately, life-changing. I liked the experience so much that shortly afterwards, I closed my first PR company, Reid Rosefelt Publicity, and became a unit publicist, working on movie sets around the world for the next seven years. But like any first love, “Desperately Seeking Susan” was always special. I’ll write about working on the film someday, but this post is about another film.

During the Q&A that followed the screening, screenwriter Leora Barish spoke about how she was inspired to write it by seeing Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” This was news to me, because before that night I had never spoken or laid eyes on Leora Barish. At that point, after ten years of doing publicity, I had never interviewed a writer who wasn’t also the director. And as she never visited the set while I was there, I was focused on all the wonderful things that were happening in front of me. So many people got their film careers launched on “Desperately Seeking Susan”: in addition to Seidelman, who fought to bring in Madonna and gave the film an incredible sense of style and dynamism, there were producers Midge Sanford, Sarah Pillsbury and Michael Peyser, cinematographer Ed Lachman, casting directors Billy Hopkins and Risa Bramon (and Todd Thaler), composer Thomas Newman, and not incidentally, Madonna, Aidan Quinn, Laurie Metcalf, and John Turturro. The film was also driven by the veteran talents of Rosanna Arquette and production designer/costume designer Santo Loquasto, and Bramon and Hopkins found many talented actors like Mark Blum (who would later appear in one of my short films), Anna Levine Thomson, Robert Joy, Will Patton, and Peter Maloney, and gave cameos to an unbelievable list of downtown types, cult actors and up-and-comers, including: John Lurie, Richard Edson, Steven Wright, Richard Hell, Shirley Stoler, Ann Magnuson, Anne Carlisle, Rockets Redglare, Annie Golden, Airto Lindsay, Carol Leifer, Michael Badalucco, Giancarlo Esposito, and Adele Bertei and Tom DiCillo. And what I didn’t know then is that the New York City of 1984 was going to disappear and this film would both helped invent the fantasy of that moment plus serve as a time capsule.

Anyway, soon after Barish mentioned “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” I was struck by something. It was very possible that Leora Barish wouldn’t have seen “Celine and Julie” if it weren’t for me. And therefore… no me, maybe no “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and maybe no movie, no launching point for a lot of these careers. Of course, many, if not all, of these people were on their way with or without the film, but still… the fact was that I played a crucial role in bringing “Celine and Julie Go Boating” to the US, where it inspired her script.

Jacques Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” had its US premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1974, while I was still a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, so of course I didn’t see it. But when I got to New York a few years later, I got a job at Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films. In those days there weren’t many distributors that brought out foreign films, and even fewer handled the kind of films with extremely limited commercial potential that New Yorker did. This gave Talbot enormous power, because if he didn’t like something, it probably wouldn’t get seen in this country. But his taste was exquisite, and he was an engine behind the US careers of such talents as Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Godard,Herzog, Alain Tanner, Claude Lanzman, and… Jacques Rivette. But “Celine and Julie” played the New York Film Festival and Dan didn’t buy it.

New Yorker Films was a very small company and I wore a lot of hats there: I was the publicist for all the smaller films; I designed and laid out the catalogs and all the mailing pieces; I sent materials to the theatres; and I watched movies that Dan was considering acquiring. Dan was a father figure to me. Not only was he teaching me the film business, he was giving me a crash course in world cinema. For the first years I kept my mouth shut and watched, but after a while I started to speak up about marketing issues and what films he should buy. As in, speak up very loudly. As in shouting matches. As I said, he was a father figure, and this kind of thing commonly goes on in families. Some people there thought I was way off base, but Dan never fired me, and crazy as I was, we are friends to this day. During all my tenure at New Yorker films I never got angrier with Dan than about “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” I flat out demanded he buy it. He refused again and again. Finally I screeched, “If you don’t buy this film, then you should shut this company down today.” He knew I wouldn’t stop, so he gave in. Still, he released the movie in New York with no time for advance screenings and it was pulled from the theatre before the rave review in the Village Voice appeared. That was a crushing disappointment, but the important thing for me was that “Celine and Julie Go Boating” was now in the catalog, where it would get a limited 35mm theatrical release and could be rented in 16mm for countless non-theatrical showings in years to come.

So it’s possible that Leora Barish caught the film at a film festival in 1974, but it’s more likely she did at one of the hundreds of US showings that came between the time New Yorker Films bought the film in 1978 and when she wrote “Desperately Seeking Susan” in the early 1980s

Of course a film as great as “Celine and Julie” would have come out one way or another in the US. A company like Rialto would have bought it at some point and it would have made its way to video. But at that point in time there was only one door, which was shut tight until I kicked it open.

I often wonder why I write this blog, but this week I believe that I’m telling an instructive story, regardless of when or how Leora Barish saw “Celine and Julie.” If you work in the film business and you are facing a situation where you can fight for what you think is right—or choose not to fight—let me guarantee that you will end up more successful and wealthy if you don’t fight. If you are seen as uncompromising, you will be judged “difficult” and a pain in the ass, and you will pay a heavy price. On the other hand, you will never find out what the impact might have been if you did stand up.

Last Sunday was the first time that I didn’t post since I started this blog. No matter how busy I was I always was able to make it work, but last week I was working on Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” at the Toronto Film Festival and the schedule was pretty relentless. Unfortunately, this blog was one of the few that was to be anchored to a particular date, in this case the anniversary of 9/11.

My idea was to tell an anecdote from my life that brought up a more innocent memory of the World Trade Towers, before it became an icon of horror and death, and more recently an opportunity for some to stir up ignorance, hysteria, and prejudice.

Here’s my story:

When I first moved to New York as a movie-mad Midwesterner, I’d never been on a Hollywood movie set. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to find out that scenes from Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong remake were going to shot in New York. I sure couldn’t miss that! So the night of the filming, my friends and I headed down to the World Trade Center, not having any idea whether we’d get close enough to see anything.

Arriving on the scene confirmed our doubts – there was no place where we could find even the most distant vantage point. We were about to leave when my friend Gary suggested that we go around to the other side of the Towers. Maybe we’d be able to go inside, head through through the lobby and get really close. This was such a stupid idea that I thought it might work. In any case, we had come this far and we had nothing better to do.

Coming around the bend we discovered a line. So we went to the end and got on it. It turned out to be the line for “King Kong” extras. Once we got inside, we filled out the forms to be SAG Waivers. Not only were we going to get close—we were going to be paid $30! We were pros! Soon were outside staring up at the dizzying spectacle of Carlo Rambaldi’s 40 foot tall “mechanical” King Kong lying on his back, totally in scale with the Twin Towers looming above us. Unlike the original King Kong, which was a puppet, or the Peter Jackson’s CGI King Kong, both of which were highly animated, this Kong didn’t groan, grimace, exhibit convulsive death spasms, or really do anything at all --he just lied there like a ginormous slug. To paraphrase John Cleese, this particular Kong was CONVINCINGLY BEREFT OF LIFE and was giving an Academy Award worthy performance as an EX-GORILLA!

But can you imagine the wonderment for a kid making his first visit to a movie set? A forty-foot gorilla! What magic!

I was soon introduced to another astonishing marvel--the craft service table. You could fill your stomach with all the candy and junk food you wanted, totally free. Ho-Hos! Bagels! Coffee! Root Beer! And guess who came by for a nosh? Jeff Bridges, that’s who. I told him about my admiration for his performance in “The Last Picture Show,” and particularly “The Last American Hero” (which I had shown at my college film club) and that I totally agreed about what Pauline Kael said about him possibly being “the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived.” After a while I asked him if I was making him uncomfortable with all my exuberant praise, and he hugged me and said, “No man! I love it!”

I was soon introduced to the torpor of a movie set. You wait around for hours and hours and hours waiting for something to happen. Soon it is the middle of the night and absolutely nothing has happened. The only thing that was fun was the guy who went on top of Kong and spilled buckets of blood on him to the cheers of the crowd. Joel Siegel also climbed up on Kong’s chest and did his evening news report.

The director, John Guillermin (“The Towering Inferno”) seemed kind of puny amidst the huge crowd and ape, but from a distance I watched him work with the actors. (Years later I proudly told the late Claude Chabrol that I watched John Guillermin direct, and he said, “You watched him do what?”) I asked people who the pretty blonde was, and they said she was “some model,” and I said I thought she was pretty good. Which was a fair assessment since she was Jessica Lange making her screen debut. Still, most of what Lange did that night was run through the crowd towards Bridges shouting “Jack! Jack!” and getting all worked up. Over and over “Jack! Jack! Jack!”

I was determined to work my way into the shot, so I slowly pushed my way to the front. And when it came time for the final crane shot, I was pretty close to the action. My 22-year-old profile can clearly be identified in the lower right  by my Proto-Bieber 70s haircut and big shnoz, identical to photos of me from the time.

I’ve appeared in many films since then, but I think this is my best performance to date. I was supposed to playing a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla, and I look exactly like a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla, because of course I was a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla.  If you compare my work here to all the actors delivering their lines to light stands today, you’ll know that this is the real deal.  But I was a contract player then, part of the studio system.   Those were the golden days of the movies and sadly, they’ll never be back.

I usually write about my past with this blog, but this week I’m heading off to the Toronto Film Festival for the first time in many years, setting up interviews for Errol Morris for his new movie “Tabloid.”     So I’m about to have a real experience, not a remembered one.  I sure as hell won’t write about that!    What I’m going to do instead is write something about the World Trade Towers (not 9/11) that will appear when I’m at the Toronto Festival, just as I was on September 11th. 2001.