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strong, and even though I felt nervous around him, his love of the history of cinema inspired me. I made a few student films that weren’t very good (Marty confirmed that). Though I loved learning the principles of directing, I needed to be onstage. I had done summer stock and was also the house manager for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a musical that ran in the East Village. I tore tickets, directed people to their seats in the tiny theater, sold drinks and souvenirs at intermission, and knew everyone’s parts. I could have gone on for any actor in the musical, including Lucy.
    I was barely earning enough to share a tiny eighty-dollar-a-month apartment in the East Village with David Sherman, one of my oldest and dearest friends, dating back to junior high. He’s now a doctor and we live near each other in Los Angeles. Back then, he was in medical school and I was in film school, and we would switch and do each other’s homework. This meant he would go see a movie, and I would illegally dispense drugs to his patients.
    We lived at 325 East Fifth Street, next door to the police station that would later be the home of Kojak. There was a red-haired detective at the precinct—I’ll call him Sergeant Dinkus—and he was always busting music great Miles Davis. Oftentimes, Davis’s red Ferrari would be towed and sitting in front of the precinct, and Sergeant Dinkus would be lecturing the pissed-off jazz man. “Don’t come down here looking for trouble!” he’d say. Miles would say, “I wasn’t looking for trouble—I’m just looking to buy some heroin.”
    “Down here” meant the East Village, the center of the sixties’ cultural revolution. Plenty of today’s balding boomers were then long-haired, peace-loving hippies who believed that we shouldn’t be the world’s police dog—including me, with my bushy “Jew ’fro.” It was the perfect time to be young and angry. We hated LBJ, and then we really hated Richard Nixon. We despised the war, because it meant we could be drafted right away to fight for something we didn’t believe in. The disaster of Vietnam fell on the heels of the violence of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations. National Guard units patrolled college campuses, students were killed at Kent State, and the Democratic convention in Chicago was chaotic. The country was divided between a mass of angry, idealistic people who felt that the government was blowing it and those who didn’t. Other than that, it was a fun time.
    The Lower East Side of New York had an electric energy. Head shops and restaurants were everywhere, and the Fillmore East was around the corner. It was the best music venue in the city, home to Hendrix, Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Dylan. It had also originally been a theater, and I’d seen my first movie there, Shane , when I was five. Next to the theater was the Central Plaza, a catering hall for weddings and big events and, for fifteen years, the place where my dad had produced jazz concerts. We grew up going there, and it was now an NYU building housing dance and theater studios. One of the studios was in the very ballroom Dad had used for his weekly jazz events. Alongside the Plaza was Ratner’s restaurant, which had been a well-known spot in New York for years, but the young people that now packed the streets had given it a new life. When you’re as stoned as everyone was in that neighborhood, a dairy restaurant with great whipped cream desserts is an oasis. David and I went there a lot. David had a heavy beard that he could grow as fast as Nixon. One day after a few hits on a joint, he shaved one side of his face, dividing it right down the middle. A little high, we sat down in Ratner’s, and the waiter came over and asked David what he would like. The clean-shaven side, which was facing the waiter, ordered something, and then David turned his head and the bearded side ordered something else. David then got