On a Quest for Student Gold

Assigned to write a script for a 12-minute movie soon after arriving at NYU’s film school, Ari Gold first came up with a story about a bar. He read it and tossed it. Then he tried a more personal subject: his mother’s death.

He churned out 18 pages in one evening in that fall of 1997. He called it “Helicopter,” after the craft that crashed near San Francisco in 1991, killing his mom and her famous companion, rock promoter Bill Graham.

Later he would sum up his project as “one night of writing and 2 1/2 years of execution.”

Maybe “Helicopter” was too personal. Maybe he made it too complicated by envisioning the use of toys in scenes--miniature plastic cars and houses and people--to capture how bizarre it felt to ride in a stretch limo to the memorial concert that drew a crowd of 300,000, how he was overwhelmed by “the unreal nature of loss when you’re in the middle of a public event.”

Whatever the reason, “Helicopter” wasn’t done on time. Not close. Gold faced the prospect of having nothing to submit as his class project, or to the film festivals, or to the Student Academy Awards, a showcase for ambitious film students across the country.

So he made a quickie movie.

“Culture” was one minute long. It showed him standing against a white backdrop, looking like a Gen-X renegade in his long coat, tangled hair and reddish stubble. For one wordless minute, he crouched and gyrated and used his fingers as weapons while simulating the sound of gunfire--until a blood pack exploded on his back and he collapsed.

The end product was a bit of a goof, but an entertaining goof. Gold got his 60-second film into a slew of festivals, including Sundance. He promoted it with T-shirts, fliers and his own “Dogma 99,” making fun of the Dogma 95 campaign led by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who was fighting the artificiality of Hollywood films.

Gold’s 10 rules--in addition to dubbing himself “Ari von Gold”--mandated that every film “must be exactly one minute” and “must be shot in one take, with no rehearsals.” Rule No. 3? “The number 3 must not be mentioned.”

His credo came to the attention of a Serbian filmmaker in war-torn Belgrade, who promptly made his own movie based on it, turning on a camera for 60 seconds in a darkened room during an air raid alarm, showing four men eating, drinking beer, playing a harmonica and singing. “Point is, everything is real,” filmmaker Aleksandar Gubas explained, “just a micro-part of war life.”

But Gold’s run with his one-minute movie basically ended at the 1999 student Oscars, staged by the same Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that hands out the gold statuettes each March. Though “Culture” made the Eastern finals, it was not sent on for the national judging in Beverly Hills.

“My film was snubbed,” he quipped afterward, “just like ‘Titanic.’ Or, wait a minute, maybe ‘Titanic’ wasn’t snubbed. OK, ‘Culture 2’ will be three hours long.”

He knew better, of course, than to launch a sequel. When the deadline hit for his next student film, and the 2000 Student Academy Awards, he’d have to be ready with the film that was a little less of a goof and a lot closer to his heart.

*

It wasn’t long ago that New York University and USC seemed like novelties with their film schools. Today, 600 colleges and universities have some kind of film program, according to the motion picture academy. In their 27th year, its student awards draw entries from Dartmouth and Berkeley and Scottsdale Community College, not to mention the Ringling (as in circus) School of Art and Design.

Many of the students with cameras are driven by ambition, to be sure, if not fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to emulate how John Singleton sprang out of USC, at 22, ready to write and direct “Boyz N the Hood”? Who didn’t know of those five friends from the University of Central Florida who couldn’t pay their water bill, then came up with “The Blair Witch Project”?

But the opportunity to make a personal statement cannot be overlooked, either, as a motive for student filmmakers. Top contenders in this spring’s academy contest included a Stanford student’s documentary inspired by her anorexia, a Columbia student’s dramatic film inspired by her family’s fight to survive the Holocaust and an NYU student’s exploration of her father’s death.

“For some of the students, these shorts are the best thing they’ll ever do. They dig deep,” says David Irving, chairman of NYU’s undergraduate film program.

For the true hotshots--the “comets”--this may be the last time there’s no pressure from some studio, Irving notes. And for others not quite so talented, there probably won’t be a chance to write or direct anything professionally. “They may be running a cable station on the reservation in Montana.”

Gold, now 29, grew up in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, one of three children of Melissa and Herb Gold, who split when he and a twin brother were 3. Herb Gold is one of America’s most prolific authors, but their mother was plenty creative in her own right, even if restlessly so: A Radcliffe grad, she served for a stretch as chief script editor for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, worked as a freelance book editor, taught English to Russian immigrants, helped organize a Bay Area visit by Nelson Mandela. She also competed against twentysomethings in 100-mile bicycle races.

She seemed to be chasing something in her personal life as well, going through three marriages and a 20-year flirtation with Graham. Lore had it that he half-jokingly proposed to her at one point, later she to him. They stopped joking in 1991, when she became the daily companion of the tempestuous promoter who had presided over the ‘60s psychedelic scene at the Fillmore Auditorium and over tours by everyone from the Grateful Dead to Bruce Springsteen.

The couple and a pilot were returning from a Huey Lewis and the News concert in rain and winds on Oct. 25, 1991, when their helicopter struck a 200-foot-tall electrical tower. Melissa Gold was 47.

Ari was a literature major at Columbia then. His father called him. “You see in movies people say, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes,’ but I wasn’t. I just sort of collapsed on the floor.”

He flew back for the funeral and the Laughter, Love and Music concert that drew a massive tie-dyed crowd to Golden Gate Park. Though billed as a memorial to all three victims, it essentially was a tribute to Graham, the local icon. Some news reports described Melissa Gold as his “gal pal.”

Twin brother Ethan recalls that Ari “sort of took a hard turn into a ditch after the whole event.”

After Columbia, he gave Los Angeles a try, getting his father’s permission to write--and peddle--a script called “A Girl of Forty,” based on one of Herb Gold’s books.

A Times reporter, doing a story on people who lived in Hollywood, ran into the 22-year-old three months after he hit town. He’d rented a semi-decrepit apartment where he could write “to the archetypal Hollywood sound of a palm tree scraping against his window.”

Gold insisted that he loved Hollywood, but the reporter found him amazed by the “concentration of dream-seekers, the number of people waiting on tables who truly believe they are on the verge of becoming stars.”

He realizes now how he was one of them. By the time he applied to NYU, three years later, he was looking for “a life raft,” he says. “In a way, going to film school was based not so much on ‘I want to do it,’ but on ‘I have to get out of L.A.’ I was lost.”

He hadn’t sold the script and found writing lonely. “I wanted to actually interact with people,” he says.

He began thinking that directing, or even acting, might be more for him. So he made a short film on his own and enrolled in a class to try performing--Shakespeare of all things--before joining the new class of graduate students at NYU, he and 37 other wannabe Scorseses.

*

One evening last spring, Gold pedaled his bike from his East Village apartment up to the Museum of Modern Art to support several schoolmates whose “narrative” films were among six still in contention in the New York regional finals of the 1999 Student Academy Awards. His own quirky “Culture” was in the “alternative” category, to be judged the next day.

Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax studio head, was eating dinner in a corner of the museum’s restaurant, waiting to announce the final vote by academy members who screened the student films. Weinstein had an aide watch them, also. His question: Any worth a look?

No wonder the students were nervous. Milling about a cocktail reception with friends and families, they waited and fretted--and eyed one another.

Film professors often remind them that movie-making is collaborative, so they should be too. But it’s hard for there not to be some competitive edge in the air--or sometimes a lot of it--as young filmmakers stand on the brink of discovering whether their dreams are just dreams. A few had earned the right to strut, at least for the moment. But even they didn’t know if it was really going to happen for them.

“Projects, I have plenty--paying jobs I don’t,” Columbia student Julia Solomonoff said at the museum reception, deadly serious--she was struggling to pay her rent. She had invested a lot in her thesis film, “Fiesta,” about the meeting of a street urchin and an older man in her native Argentina. But she feared her work was too subtle--in a classic “foreign film” manner--to match the Hollywood punch of another entry, from NYU.

“I’m worried about that ‘Fish Belly White,’ ” she confided.

That was the film of Michael Burke, who already had won an award at Sundance for his tale of a teenage farm boy who struggles with his sexual identity and bites the head off his pet rooster. Standing across the room in a circle of well-wishers, including Gold, Burke had the attitude: Dressed in black, with thin cool-dude shades, he was explaining how he planned to be picky in selecting an agent who could get him what he wanted. “I’m looking to get behind the camera as soon as I can,” he said. He wanted to direct, in other words.

It was hard to believe that Burke, 34, not long ago was a special-education teacher in Vermont or that he maxed out his credit cards to finance his $34,000 film.

“He’s definitely getting some hype,” Gold said.

No one was surprised when Weinstein announced that “Fish Belly White” was one of the three narrative films going to New York. The Columbia student’s effort did not make the cut.

The next day, Gold’s “Culture” was out too.

“I wasn’t entirely surprised,” he said. “It was a one-minute film.”

*

His first directing professor told him “Helicopter” wouldn’t fly, that “it wasn’t a real movie.”

One thing led to another, and Gold stormed out. He never opened his grades at NYU after that. But he found a mentor, Carol Dysinger, who had won a student Oscar back in 1977, for her own NYU film.

To pay for “Helicopter,” which grew to 21 minutes, Gold used money he got from his mother’s insurance. “I wasn’t comfortable having it,” he said. “I wanted to use up this money. This seemed an appropriate way.”

He also wanted the film to be a family affair. He hoped to play himself and get his brother and sister to play themselves. Nina Gold, an actress and yoga teacher in San Francisco, agreed. But his brother, a musician in L.A., would only do the score, not act. “I’d been through my own processes of mourning and healing,” Ethan said. “I didn’t want to revisit it.”

So he only used his sister’s voice, recording their mother’s singsong “Ari, it’s Mom” phone messages to him, matching his to hers, as they struggled to reach each other those last months. “You’re the one who’s never home,” says the woman who now would never be there for him as he groped, much like her, to find his place in life.

He got two friends and an acting student to play the three siblings taking the limo to the memorial concert. He got the real footage of the crowd chanting, “Yo, Bill!”

A ‘60s type jumps in the limo, looking to hitch a ride, and gushes, “It’s like the old days, man! Did you know Bill Graham?”

Ari’s character says, “My mom was in the helicopter.” And the older fellow says, “The Helicopter? Yeah, that was a great band.”

External shots show the limo and a police escort as toys. There’s animation too, sketched outlines of a helicopter, and rain and a tower.

It’s all mixed together, until the end--simply images of his mother, from death back to girlhood.

“When you do something experimental, there’s a lot more risk,” he said. “You’re trying something that might be a colossal failure.”

That occurred to him when he sent “Helicopter” to the film festivals that had embraced “Culture.” Sundance turned it down. Others too.

When he sent it this spring to the Student Academy Awards, he assumed he would at least make the New York finals again--if only because there aren’t that many entries in the “alternative” category, only nine in New York this year. On this he was right. He was summoned to attend the local finals, on April 22 at the American Museum of the Moving Image.

For the second year in a row, when they announced the entries being sent West, his was not included. In fact, the judges had given only two of New York’s alternative films the necessary 7 on a 10-point scale.

Gold said, “No one’s going to see my film.”

David Schwartz had the same thought.

Chief curator of the Moving Image museum, Schwartz attended all the New York judging. With the first panel, which whittled down the entries, “Ari’s film got unanimously top scores,” he said. But a second panel had a “mixed response”--some hated it. Those judges preferred the other “death” film, by the NYU student who lost her father.

Schwartz figured, “Let the academy decide.” New York was entitled to send three alternative films. Why not send three?

The accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers wasn’t counting these ballots. Schwartz called the national director of the student awards and the local judges to get their OK.

Then he called Gold. “I felt him bracing for more bad news,” the contest official recalled. “Like we lost his film.” But the news was, “You’re in.”

Weeks later, Schwartz was not the least bit surprised when word came from Los Angeles about which one of New York’s three alternative filmmakers would be flown out for five days of schmoozing--and final judging--starting June 7.

*

They were put up at the Century Plaza Hotel. “I’m overlooking a parking lot,” Gold quipped. “I’m definitely back in L.A.”

The academy threw them a welcoming dinner at Yamashiro, the restaurant with a spectacular view above Hollywood. The next day there were round-tables at the Director’s Guild, then sessions to meet top cinematographers, and an afternoon to view all their films.

Gold was struck by how much he liked the competition in his category, an engaged couple from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Michael Mullen, 22, and Jessica Lakis, 24. They prided themselves on making “by far the cheapest movie here,” having spent only $3,000 on “Dear Sir, Letters to a Union Soldier,” about a man who discovers a name matching his own on a gravestone at Gettysburg, then has a dialogue with the dead soldier through letters. “If they win, I’m happy for them,” Gold said.

If he didn’t sound his usual hip self . . . well, it only got worse at a dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was downright gushy there, making some “we’re just glad to be here” comments when it was his turn to address the academy hosts. “You know,” another student filmmaker teased him, “they’ve already voted.”

He wore “the suit” to the final ceremony, June 11, at the academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. It looked like an old zoot suit with its thick pinstripes on blue cloth, but it was a 1983 Pierre Cardin, he insisted, that he picked up in Bozeman, Mont., after driving someone’s car there for a fee. He saw advertisements for a “Sweet Pea Ball” and knew he had to go. “I grabbed a girl off the wall, and we swing-danced and we won $50,” he said.

His brother was with him--not in Bozeman but at the academy--in a gray suit and cowboy boots.

A USC student, Kennedy Wheatley, had the most unusual delegation--of ironworkers, including some of the women who were the subject of her documentary “Iron Ladies.” She asked them to join her on stage when she won her category.

The animation winners were all local, with first place--and $2,000--going to a student from CalArts, and second and third to UCLA films.

The narrative category was swept by New York. Second and third places went to NYU films and the gold to a 25-minute World War II drama, set in Hungary, directed by Columbia’s Joan L. Stein, the student whose parents fled the Holocaust. Stein was the only one of the filmmakers not able to attend--she was “expecting her first child imminently,” her school said.

Gold’s category was the last announced. He slumped down in his seat, next to his brother, his hands clutched under his chin. But he knew where he’d landed the instant the second-place film was announced--the Pennsylvania couple’s Gettysburg tale.

He began his speech, “I’d like to thank my teacher who told me not to make this movie. . . .”

*

He hung around L.A. after the ceremony, staying with his brother, networking and going to a premiere for “Groove,” a low-budget indie about the rave party scene. He’s in it, playing a pretty large supporting role--he never forgot the urge that led him to take that Shakespeare course some years back. In fact, he spent much of his time trying to line up performing roles, using a five-minute demo tape containing, among other things, all of “Culture.”

Not that he’s given up on writing. He’s close to a deal, he thinks, on that old script based on his father’s book. He also could direct some, perhaps music videos.

“It’s strange,” he said. “Something was hanging over me. Telling this story has in a sense freed me up.”

He realized what makes him happiest in this pressure-cooker business. And it’s not the line you usually hear from these film school hotshots. “I think,” Ari Gold said. “I really want to act.” *