Last week, on the virtual pages of The Local, a battle was raging over the direction of our district 13 schools. It's clear that everyone in the debate wants what's best for their kids. Some people are fighting for an expansion of "progressive" schools. Others are arguing for supporting the schools that we have like PS 11 and PS 20,...
About a decade ago I had an idea for a script called New Well Being. The film was very similar in some ways to the new Mark Romanek film based on the novel by Kazuo Ishaguro, Never Let Me Go. My friend Alana just blogged about it and the trailer is INTENSE. In my story two football stars- one the quarterback...
About 15 years ago, when I was in a band driving around the country for long stretches, I would often think of grand art projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t always have the means or connections to really pull them off. Some of them I completed in part, and others have recently started to float back into my consciousness. In many cases...
In 2010 it is time for us, as a society, to take a hard look at the role of the news media in our political and financial systems. After 7 years of following the Atlantic Yards development project I am troubled by both the print and TV media's inability or unwillingness to engage in any level of real reporting on...
We are trying to finish our film "Battle of Brooklyn", and since my wife is the editor it has fallen to me to watch the brood. It's always a bit of a struggle to get my older daughter to leave the house. She's had some anxiety issues for a couple of years. Things had improved last spring when we unfortunately...
When I was working on the Transitions book with my father he referenced Erikson's 8 stages of life in his version of the introduction. We struggled with the tone of the tome, and I feared that his reliance on long standing studies and references to phsychologic fact would take away from the directness that I sought. It wasn't that I...
Last week I posted a couple of hundred old photos of the early 90's NYC music scene on our facebook fan page. A lot of the photos had been seen before, and many of them were from my book, "Scraps", but only a handful of people had gotten a chance to really look through them as a group. The response...
This has been a very intense, but positive, week on a number of fronts. For the past couple of years we have been struggling with our direction as filmmakers. We've spent a lot of energy developing TV projects, not out of a love for TV, but instead because it is nearly impossible to raise funds for the kind of films that...
The revolving door between government and industry doesn't just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, "Battle for Brooklyn" (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism. It's difficult to find a way...
There's a pretty amazing Gil Scott-Heron article in this weeks New Yorker. It's a rare piece of writing that reads like a well edited documentary film. So much of the time, even in good articles, the writing is almost as much about the writer as it is about the subject. It's kind of understandable that this would be the case, because...
As we get closer to having a finished film, we've started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title "Battle of Brooklyn." However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with...
We were down by the river, the family and I, walking around in our river shoes like the summer people that we are. A shy looking boy with a fishing pole approached just as the wife and older girl were heading off to find a bathroom. The little girl and I stuck around to watch the fishing. The shy boy turned...