Making A Live Cinema Musical (Part 1): A Letter, a Brother, and the Street as Stage

How a trip to Belarus, and Francis Ford Coppola, led to an improvised one-shot musical in the streets of San Francisco.

A lot of people have been asking how Francis Ford Coppola ended up connected to my micro-budget musical, so I’m sharing the story here. This is Part 1 of a series about the making of a radically personal film, Brother Verses Brother.

The first big “uh-oh are we really going to do this?” Composer/actor Ethan Gold and me in the stripes, at Specs Museum and Cafe.

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My new movie didn’t start with a script. It started with a four-page letter to my twin brother, beginning:

Imagine you’re playing your music in Kerouac Alley, and no one’s paying attention.

I was proposing something insane: that we make a quasi-musical, live, in the streets of San Francisco, playing versions of ourselves — and that our 99-year-old father should act in it with us.

I didn’t know then how much real life was about to flood into the story — or how Francis Ford Coppola, godfather of the neighborhood, would end up involved.

As anyone with siblings knows, even when you hate them, you still support them to the death. My brother Ethan thought I was being manic. I’d just premiered a no-budget short film in the company of a Belarusian director friend, Nikita Lavretski, and watched his improvised one-shot feature “A Date in Minsk.” I became convinced I must do a one-shot movie about my musical relationship with Ethan my brother, right away - before we gave up on our musical collaboration, and to catch our Dad while he was still alive.

Though caught up in his own music, Ethan agreed to try. Ethan had been writing stunning songs that the world didn’t seem to notice. I was struggling to find money for a big-budget dream-movie, Fogtown. We had nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, our father Herbert Gold - who’d published 25 novels and battled Kerouac - had somehow survived all his friends and was living alone in his rent controlled apartment.

There was something tragic here that might speak to people. Something funny too.

The idea grew bigger and more urgent.

I told Ethan (deliriously, I soon discovered) that an improvised ninety-minute film would only take ninety minutes to make, and would allow us to capture the comedy and pathos of our existence. And by filming in real-time, we could punk an audience that was increasingly too distracted to watch anything longer than twelve seconds.

We could also live out the particular symbiotic glue of twins. This would be a no-cuts movie about codependent brothers trying to “cut,” by reconnecting with a father who’s preparing to die.

I’d already spent a year putting together a book of poetry and art with them called Father Verses Sons, which was a poetic correspondence about love, loss, aging, death, sex, puns, and tomatoes. Why not a movie counterpart?

I was planning to launch the book at the historic City Lights bookshop on our dad's 100th birthday in a few months. I decided Brother Verses Brother would commence on that same streetcorner.

Some ideas cannot wait.

Given courage by the concept of Live Cinema— a mad, brilliant filmmaking approach championed by Francis Ford Coppola—I set out to create a vision of Bohemian culture and American manhood on the edge of collapse. I would invite a single camera into a safari across a troubled but great city. Maybe we could make something beautiful. Or it would break us trying.

I wanted Brother Verses Brother to be a tale of men grappling for meaning - in songs, in art, in women, and in pigeon shit. What I didn’t know was how deeply reality would crash in, and how love would become necessary in order to survive.

NEXT:

Live Cinema Demands Telepathy.