A Student’s Life on the Development Trail

Ari Taub is 22 and on a very fast track.

Barely three months out of NYU, he already knows his way around Hollywood’s movie development circuit. Virtually all the major studios interviewed him after his junior film was shown at an industry screening.

The 10-minute movie, which cost him $10,000 to make, was about a bicycle messenger who bent over backwards to deliver a package on time--only to have it explode violently seconds after the drop-off.

On his first Los Angeles trip, Taub discovered that development executives at Warner Bros., Columbia, Tri-Star and other studios all asked the same question: Do you have a full-length, feature script?

He didn’t. “I hate to write,” explains Taub, who wants to direct.

When he gets to California with his new film in a few months, however, the student will be better prepared. He plans to have one script completed and two more in progress--and he’s told all his friends they would be wise to do the same.

“Within a two-week period, you’re a hot item,” says New York-born Taub, a doctor’s son. “If you don’t sell a script within that period, you cool down. You’ve been seen by everybody, and they say, ‘OK, who’s next?’ ”

Taub estimates that between 30% and 40% of his freshman friends left film school within three years, because of the high cost, loss of interest or competitive pressures. Of the remaining “die-hards,” he reckons, about 90% will graduate into low-paying film jobs.

The worst such work, Taub says, is as a “parking PA”--a production assistant who spends all night on the streets of New York, putting up barricades as cars pull out in order to clear the way for a film crew in the morning.

According to Taub, the biggest cultural clash at NYU’s film school is between hot young undergraduates and their older contemporaries in the graduate program. “We think of them as kind of a joke,” Taub says of the 25- or 30-year-old grad students, many of whom have abandoned careers as lawyers or doctors to take up film making. “They don’t seem to know what they’re doing in life.”

The “die-hards,” by Taub’s account, know exactly what they want: to make commercial movies.

His next project?

A World War II comedy, set on a submarine. “Sort of like ‘Kelly’s Heroes,’ ” he says.