ONE

THANK YOU, MRS. MAXWELL

The middle of three children, I was raised in a neighborhood of Irish, Italian, and Jewish families in Valley Stream, Long Island. My dad, Edward J. Burns, was a sergeant with the NYPD. Later, he became the department’s media spokesman. My mom, Molly, worked for the FAA and has to get the credit for turning me on to Woody Allen.

Soon after we got our first VCR, sometime in the early eighties, she brought home a VHS copy of Take the Money and Run, which, needless to say, I loved. That was soon followed by Bananas and Sleeper. A few years later, it was Annie Hall and Manhattan.

But at this point, I had never given any thought to how movies got made or who wrote them, and I certainly had no dreams of becoming a writer myself. Not yet. But my father did.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a poem that won first prize in the Catholic Daughters of the Americas Long Island poetry contest. It impressed my dad, and from then on he always encouraged me to write and tried to turn me on to writers and novels he thought I might enjoy. One day he came home with two books, a collection of Eugene O’Neill plays and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I never looked at the O’Neill plays, but I immediately fell in love with Salinger’s classic coming-of-age story. It was after taking the journey with Holden Caulfield that I first thought about the possibilities of telling stories of my own.

I was always a pretty good storyteller. You had to be in my house if you wanted to get airtime at the dinner table. I also never had any problem sitting down for a few hours to tackle a creative writing assignment at school. That was not true of my science fair projects, and I usually received good grades and encouragement from my English teachers over the years. My senior year of high school, I wrote a short story that my English teacher, Mrs. Maxwell, thought was terrific. But much to my dismay, she wanted to include it in the school’s literary magazine. I was at first absolutely against this. I thought the story was too sensitive, and I knew my friends would rag on me endlessly. I did not need that abuse going into my last summer before college. However, after sleeping on it, I said okay—but with one condition. I asked her not to put my name on it. I would get the satisfaction of seeing my work in print and I wouldn’t have to worry about my reputation.

Thankfully, Mrs. Maxwell ignored my request. She published the story with my byline, and while there was a fair bit of ball-breaking from my friends, some were impressed, and the girls . . . well, long story short, when I went away to college, I thought maybe I would become a writer. I was a pretty good student and a pretty good athlete. If I wasn’t playing ball, I was watching it on TV or reading about it in the sports pages. So I figured maybe I’d be a sportswriter.

I started my college career at SUNY Oneonta in Upstate New York while being wait-listed at SUNY Albany. After one semester at Oneonta, I was accepted to Albany, where I soon declared myself an English major. During my sophomore year, I started to entertain the idea of becoming a novelist. The picture I had in my head of a novelist’s life appealed to my nineteen-year-old’s sensibilities. I’d write during the day and go out at night. I was getting good feedback on a handful of short stories I had written and decided it was time to start my first novel. I got about fifteen pages into it and realized I was not going to be a novelist. The major issue being that I was enjoying too many nights out and not enough time in front of the typewriter and in the classroom.

I was put on academic probation, and it turned out to be a blessing. My advisor issued a blunt warning but also offered a stay-in-school-and-don’t-get-your-ass-kicked-by-your-father strategy.

“Look, if you don’t get your grades up, you’re going to get kicked out of school,” he said. “But as an English major, you can become a Film Studies minor, where you watch a bunch of old movies, write a paper, and you’re pretty much guaranteed an A. You’ll get a couple of A’s, get your GPA up, and we won’t have to kick you out of school. What do you say?”

The next semester, I took my first film appreciation class. It was called Four Directors, and it focused on Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder. I was enamored from day one. These men were the heart of the lineup of post–World War II filmmakers, and I tried to watch every film they made.

On the first day, we watched Wilder’s Academy Award–winning classic The Apartment, which I immediately flipped for because it reminded me of the Woody Allen films I loved. It was a New York comedy, small and intimate, and it felt honest. After seeing it, I went up to the professor and asked, “All right, who is this guy Wilder? Tell me everything. Fill me in.”

A Jew from Austria, Wilder fled Hitler and Nazi Germany, where he had worked as a journalist in Paris and then Hollywood. In 1939, he cowrote Ninotchka, which earned his first Academy Award nomination and heralded the arrival of an unparalleled talent.

The real pleasure of learning about Wilder, though, was watching Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. His range was astounding, and he wrote and directed like Woody Allen—my reference point in any discussion of film at the time. Now I had another master to revere.

I spent that semester devouring film. I was constantly searching for new discoveries. I watched everything: Hollywood classics, French New Wave, Film Noir, Westerns, Italian Neorealism, and of course the great American films of the late sixties and early seventies.

One such film from that era was the Peter Bogdanovich coming-of-age movie The Last Picture Show starring Cybill Shepherd and Timothy Bottoms as high schoolers in West Texas, and watching it was a life-changing experience, as good art is. You’re one person before, then different after. Here was an honest look at friends and families in small-town America. Although Valley Stream, Long Island, is a long way from Texas, I felt like I knew those people. After seeing that film, I knew those were the kinds of stories I’ve always responded to and those would be the kinds of stories I would like to tell. But the dream of becoming a screenwriter still wasn’t born.

My eyes opened wider after seeing François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. I had never seen a film like this. Again, I found myself relating to the story and falling in love with the honest approach to the storytelling. That put me on a Truffaut kick. The Man Who Loved Women, Stolen Kisses, The Woman Next Door, and Day for Night all reminded me of what I loved about Woody, the delicate balance in tone between drama and comedy. After immersing myself in these films, something else happened. I was no longer thinking about writing novels or short stories. I was thinking about writing films. I was thinking about becoming a screenwriter.

So I called my dad and told him that I wanted to write movies. We talked it out. I told him about the movies and filmmakers that were turning me on and that I really felt like I had to make movies. A few days later, he sent me the book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. That was my dad; if we wanted to do something, he supported the effort.

So I found myself with this book, and the next step was up to me. I had no idea then, but this Syd Field how-to is the bible for every aspiring screenwriter, and for good reason. It tells you exactly how to do it. It delivers on the promise of the title.

I had never even seen a screenplay before, but the format I saw in the book excited me; it seemed within my grasp. It was all dialogue. I loved writing dialogue. I would finish a chapter, process the information I’d read, and say to myself, “Okay, I can do this.”

FILM SCHOOL

That summer, I went to the video store every day and rented movies. I watched with a new attention to detail and determination to learn. Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese’s first full-length film, and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, another breakout first feature, spoke to me. All had a similar sensibility. They were scrappy, intimate films. They were indies before anyone coined the term indies.

I returned to Albany for my junior year and signed up for every film class the school offered. Before the end of the semester, I wrote my first screenplay, a semiautobiographical story about my high school basketball team. I thought it could really get made into a movie. Maybe everyone thinks that about their scripts. Why else write them?

However, my belief in this script was so strong and passionate that I didn’t see any way I could hand my script off to some guy in Hollywood and let him massacre my masterpiece. (I have since reread said script, entitled Apple Pie, and it is no masterpiece.) He wouldn’t know me. Nor could he understand my experiences. This was a passion project. I was going to have to pull a Spike Lee and learn how to make movies myself. So I began looking into film schools.

At the time, my dad, who had gone back to school and gotten his master’s while still a cop, was an adjunct professor at NYU. He taught one class each semester in communications and mass media. I thought that provided me with an inside track to getting in, and I told him I wanted to transfer to NYU, like Marty and Spike, the following year and study filmmaking.

I expected him to say he’d make a few calls and see what he could do. He seemed to know everyone. Plus, he was a great dad. He was present and involved in our lives. If my brother, sister, or I had a dream, he was there to help us get closer to them. My mom was the same.

But as soon as I mentioned NYU, he said, “Look at your grades and look at my salary. And then let’s rethink NYU.”

After researching film programs at other city and state schools, I enrolled for my senior year at Hunter College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Tuition was about $600 a semester. My first class was Film Directing 101, and on the first day, the professor, Everett Aison, stood in front of the class and asked which of us wanted to direct films. Everyone of course raised his or her hand.

Then he asked how many of us had any acting experience. This time no hands went up.

“How do you expect to work with actors if you have no idea what you are going to be asking of them?”

We were silent.

He had a good point.

“What we’re going to do this semester is divide into groups of four and you’ll create and perform a three- to four-minute play. One of you will be the director, one will be the writer, and the other two will act.” The first time, I was picked as one of the actors. A classmate wrote a short five-minute piece about a young Eurotrash couple living on the Upper East Side of New York. I played Jean Paul, and the woman opposite me was Gabrielle. We rehearsed once before class, and we were pretty terrible, which is understandable since I hadn’t acted since third grade. And just as I would be years later on day one of Saving Private Ryan, I was scared shitless. But when it was time to put the play up on its feet, something happened that will forever be a turning point to remember. About halfway through the play, I forgot I was in a classroom. I forgot about my nervousness. I forgot about everything except what I was supposed to be saying, thinking, and reacting to in that moment. In other words, I lost myself to the role and became that other person, and it was fun. I now had the acting bug.

Afterward, my classmates were generous with their praise. A few of them said I should think about doing more acting. And I did. I put myself in the first film I made, The Shadow, a five-minute black-and-white silent movie about a guy who leaves his Upper West Side apartment one night and is followed by a shadow that eventually kills him. Not much acting was required in that one, but I loved the process and knew I was headed in the right direction.

THIS IS WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING

I didn’t do any writing until the second semester, when I finally took my first screenwriting class, and this was the next important moment for me. The professor assigned each of us to write a ten-minute film about an isolated incident. I wrote a comedic scene about a high school couple losing their virginity.

The next time the class met, the professor announced he was going to read our pieces in front of the class. It was the first time anything I’d written would be read aloud in front of people, and I was terrified. What if my script fell flat? What if no one laughed? What if it turned out I couldn’t write?

All those thoughts ran through my head as I sat in the classroom waiting for the professor to read my pages. Mine was second or third in line. Hearing the title read, followed by my name, I steadied myself. The professor was a good reader; he got the voices and the rhythm. I turned my head slightly to look around and saw people paying attention. Then came the first laugh. I exhaled, feeling relief. More laughter followed. People were into the piece. I could tell they were caught up and anticipating what was going to happen next. It was one of the greatest feelings of my life, both relief and exhilaration.

To this day I can remember exactly where I was sitting in that classroom and can hear myself say, “I can do this. This is what I should be doing.”