So if your last name ends with a vowel* -
No, he took Kathy Kodak, he was into alliteration, Tommy Tucker, Tommy Tuttle. He took Tony Buba, because he said he wanted to know what a Buba looked like.
He wanted people that were older. They were all about thirty, or thirty-one. What he wanted to do was throw a bunch of different people with different backgrounds into one area and see what happens. That was his idea of a graduate program.
That’s awesome.
It was! If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have gotten into graduate school! I only had a 2.5 - 2.6 as an undergrad.
Compared to now when it’s all weighted and political and ridiculous - and you have to write these papers and all this ... It really doesn’t matter in the long term, it’s all bullshit, its all gatekeeping ... Yeah you had these people from all over the place coming to there ...
I was never around artsy people. My brother was because he went to CMU. He was a music major. Back then they would come into Braddock to go to the working class bar. I used to hate all of them. They’d come down there, and, ‘Oh, this is real.’
Cause you know, life is elsewehere.
That used to drive me crazy in college. When I used to teach I’d never say, “When you get into the real world.” Cause its real at the moment when you’re in school. If you can function in school, you can function when you leave school.
I didn’t realize how sensitive people were to different jokes. This one friend of mine at the time, his wife was having a baby. The primal scream and all this. I had never heard any of this. And I was living with this one woman at the time. She moved to Athens with me, and she couldn’t find any work, and she got depressed and she ended up moving out, and back up to Erie.
And so I was depressed. I started coming home, and started making the films of Braddock.
It was what was there. I had to get the projects done for these different things. It was like, well I was gone for 6 years 7 years of school and you come back, and it was different --
How had it changed?
It was always in a decline. My generation was really starting to see the decline. You just noticed it more. It was the analogy of not seeing your parents or your grandparents for years and, Man, they got old.
What changed in you during that time that you were away that you were able to see it more when you came back?
When your family comes from Italy you’re always sortof on the outside - you’re never part of both worlds anyway so I’ve always been sort of cynical, and on the outside looking in type of thing that would sort of fit documentary work.
What really changed was when I took this one class, it was supposed to be the history of cinema. The teacher that taught us was George Sempsel. He taught it as the history of home movies.
Everybody would bring in their home movies.He would go over them, when people would shoot ‘em, what time, what they would do, if different things would take place during the home movie.
It gave me a focus. It was eye-opening. It never entered my mind that all these people you knew all your life told these stories to you actually could be films. Everybody else was too used to them.
And people, if something’s too familiar, they don’t give it any value.
Exactly.
* - "last name ends in a vowel" = you are Polish, or Italian, in the 40's-60's. Vince Lombardi ended up coaching at Green Bay because the Giant's owner refused to hire a head coach whose last name ended in a vowel. ~ Jessica Fenlon
