Ragtime Revisited

“Just make sure Landovsky doesn’t destroy the place.”

The words were Milos Forman’s. It was August, 1980, in the driveway behind a large 1877 Victorian house on Captain Merritt’s Hill in Mt. Kisco, New York, about 40 miles north of New York City. During the months of June and July, it had been transformed into the Family House location of the feature film Ragtime, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel. Forman was speaking to 29-year-old fellow Czech Josef Lustig, but his eyes were also on me. Lustig had recently arrived from California after working as director Ivan Passer’s assistant on Cutter’s Way, the last great American film of the 1970s. On Ragtime, however, he was, like me, a Production Assistant (PA), the lowest figure on the totem pole that comprises a commercial film production in the U.S. Sometime earlier that day, Josef had pointed out a man seated nearby next to an attractive woman.

“Do you know who that is? That’s the Jack Nicholson of Czechoslovakia, Pavel Landovsky.”

It turned out Landovsky and his female companion were staying at Forman’s house in the small bucolic town of Warren, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive north of Mt. Kisco. Due to my rather unique position that summer, I was the only PA in the crew who had the use of a film company rental car for both business and personal use. For Lustig to visit Landovsky at Forman’s that evening, he would need me to drive him. With Forman’s permission, I proceeded to do just that.

Upon our arrival, we discovered that Landovsky had broken the remote for Forman’s large television set. There followed a night of conversation in Czech, some of which Josef would translate for me into English, including my first exposure to the peculiarly Czech brand of black humor that I would later encounter in the novels of Jaroslav Hasek, Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera. Josef explained that under the Communist regime, consumer goods like the ones we take for granted in the U.S. were scarce and as a result, stealing was ubiquitous. One joke then making the rounds involved a worker at a nuclear power plant who stole a pair of radioactive pliers. The proud new owner brought the pliers home and as a result killed his entire family.

The next morning the Jack Nicholson of Czechoslovakia made us breakfast and Josef and I drove back to Westchester County.

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I had been hired at age 18 to work on Ragtime by Michael Hausman, one of the film’s Executive Producers. The previous owner of what became the Family House location was a woman who specialized in buying old houses and restoring them in accordance with their appropriate historic period. One of my mother’s friends knew her and she passed along a letter I had written to the Location Manager seeking a job on the film after an article in the local Patent Trader newspaper mentioned the upcoming film. That all the work she had put into the effort would shortly be negated by the film’s Production Designer and Art Director was but one of the ironies that would mark the production of Ragtime.

The previous two summers I had been employed as a dishwasher at a small restaurant on Eastern Long Island. This year, I was about to receive a promotion to busboy. But in late May, I received a phone call at my parents’s home in Westchester while on summer break from my freshman year at college from Richard Brick, Ragtime’s Location Manager. He said he was in possession of my “remarkable” letter and asked me to come into the production office in Manhattan for an interview. It was my personal introduction to commercial filmmaking and a form of euphemistic Hollywood hyperbole I would infrequently but unmistakably encounter at a couple of other times in my life.

I arrived at Ragtime Productions L.T.D. in West 57th Street on Columbus Circle in New York City and met with Brick in his office. To say that I experienced this as the culmination of my youthful love of movies and filmmaking (I had been shooting film with a Super 8 camera and editing the results since I was 15) would be an understatement. For soon I would be working for one of the directors, Milos Forman, whose interview appeared in my often-consulted paperback copy of Joseph Gelmis’s The Film Director as Superstar along with others like Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

Brick then walked me over to meet Hausman.

“The only reason you’re getting this job is because you go to Cornell and I went to Cornell,” Hausman intoned. “This is the film business. . .”

I don’t recall what else he said, but he had made his point.

I was instructed to move into and live in the recently vacated house near the town where I was raised since I was six years old. My duties were to include acting as the production company’s representative and community liaison and ‘supervising’ the extraordinarily talented union crew of set dressers, carpenters and scenic artists who prepared the set for the filming scheduled for the month of August. There were the two Herbs, for example, Herb Mulligan and Herb Darrell. Mulligan, a congenial Irishman who planted and tended the garden where the discovery of Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s infant son takes place, had previously decorated Robert De Niro’s apartment in Taxi Driver, dressed the sets of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, and seen to it that an open box of Bayer aspirin is visible on Walter Mauthau’s desk in The Taking of Pelham 123. Darrell, a Black man with a barbed sense of humor who, like New Yorkers Stokely Carmichael and Shirley Chisholm, had roots in the West Indies, was universally acclaimed by his fellow carpenters, set dressers and electricians as the most talented carpenter they had ever known.

Perhaps I should say three Herbs: Mulligan also included some marijuana plants in the garden he was cultivating that were ready for harvest and distribution among select members of the crew by the time the shooting began in August.

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James Baldwin spoke of the effect of growing up in the movie theaters of America rooting for Gary Cooper to kill the Indians and then realizing he was the Indians. The obverse is growing up in post-World War II suburban America venerating Hollywood movies like Martin Ritt’s Hud, with its widescreen black and white cinematography by James Wong Howe and career-defining performances by Paul Newman, Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, and then realizing the film depicts a Texas ethnically cleansed of its indigenous, Mexican and Black populations.

By 1980, the writer Philip Roth was a neighbor of Milos Forman in Warren, Connecticut. Seven years earlier, Roth published an essay in The New York Times entitled “My Baseball Years.” In it, Roth, who was born in 1933 and came of age during the U.S. involvement in World War II, describes his as “surely . . . the most patriotic generation of American schoolchildren in our history (and the most willingly and successfully propagandized).” My father, a French Canadian born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1930, was the son of a textile mill factory worker. My mother, born in 1935 in New York City, was the daughter of an immigrant German building superintendent in the Bronx. As members of Roth’s generation, they absorbed the U.S. wartime culture as Roth did, largely through the two major organs of mass media at the time, radio and the movies. Together, they brought their shared love of movies with them when they moved our family from the Bronx to suburban Westchester County in February, 1968 (only my father still listened to the radio on a regular basis). Like many Americans who were uplifted by the postwar tide of unprecedented economic prosperity, they both had transcended their working-class origins, my father by becoming a psychology professor and my mother by becoming a New York City public school teacher. And now they were, if somewhat belatedly, joining the flight of white Americans from the urban upheavals of 1960s American cities to the suburbs.

A year later, my father introduced the first color television set into our home, which became an easily accessible way to watch the films presented by the three major TV networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, as well as the local New York City stations on Channels 5, 9 and 11. Particularly enthralling – and terrifying – for a pre-teenager were the Saturday night horror movies on Channel 5’s Creature Features and Channel 11’s Thriller programs, of which I was at first only permitted to view the first half hour. I had to rely on my lucky classmates in elementary school who had watched these movies to their conclusions to fill me in on how Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London, for example, met his fate (“Thanks for the bullet. . .”).

More exciting, however, were drives to the local movie theaters, all of which maintained their single-screen auditoriums until 1977. It has become something akin to one of Gustave Flaubert’s Received Ideas that the 1970s constituted the last Golden Age of Hollywood movies. The Godfather, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Sting, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All the President’s Men, Network – it is a long and formidable list. I saw many of these movies upon their initial release or, if my parents deemed them unsuitable for someone my age, later in the decade as part of double-features or the result of train rides into Manhattan to view them in the many repertory or art house theaters then in operation. Among these masterpieces, the director with the most impressive body of work was indisputably Robert Altman, who began the decade with MAS*H and then proceeded to turn out Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and Nashville before it was even half over.

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Altman was the director producer Dino De Laurentiis originally hired to direct Ragtime. He would work from a screenplay by E. L. Doctorow adapted from Doctorow’s novel, which had been justly celebrated as a great literary achievement. While Gore Vidal questioned the wisdom of Doctorow’s mixing of fictional and historic figures in his novel for an already diminished reading public in a country notorious for its historical amnesia (“Walt Whitman meets Henry Ford on the Titanic,” Vidal quipped), elsewhere he acknowledged Doctorow’s genius. Doctorow’s script was over 300 pages long (a typical Hollywood screenplay is 120 pages) and Altman told him he would film every page of it.

Doctorow said problems between De Laurentiis and Altman began developing during the De Laurentiis-produced and Altman-directed Paul Newman film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson – in which Altman cast Doctorow in a small role as an adviser to President Grover Cleveland – and that Altman’s intent to film what would amount to a feature film and a TV miniseries contributed to De Laurentiis’s decision to fire Altman even before the disappointing box office results of Buffalo Bill. That De Laurentiis then turned to a director who had recently scored a smash critical and box office success with an adaptation of another best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has a certain Hollywood logic. But talented and brilliant a filmmaker as Forman was (and he had made three great films – Black Peter, Loves of a Blond and The Fireman’s Ball – in the politically and culturally liberalized Czechoslovakia of the 1960s), he did not come of age, either as a film artist or a human being, in Ragtime’s milieu, which is the United States Ollywood screenplay is 120 pagesHOAs Forman himself put it in his memoir, Turnaround (but not in the context of Ragtime), “I see now that when I came to New York in 1967 with the ambition of making a film in America, I didn’t successfully respect the difficulties of working in another language, in a different film tradition, and in a world whose messy life I didn’t know even superficially, much less intimately.”

Forman had been trained at the Prague Film Academy in Czechoslovakia as a screenwriter at a time – the late 1950s – and under a regime – a Stalinist dictatorship -- where screenwriting students never saw, let along laid a hand on, a film camera. When one’s screenwriting professors included a young Milan Kundera, one’s mind may understandably not have been on cameras or film technology anyway. “With Ragtime,” Forman recalled, “E. L. Doctorow simply rewrote his novel into a different format. The sprawling script crawled with characters and gave off a monotone buzz of unaccentuated emotion because Doctorow failed to make any of the hard focusing choices necessary for a good adaptation. He produced a huge libretto of some three hundred pages, a prettily penned brick that I wouldn’t have known how to begin to shoot.” To give Forman his due, it is instructive in this regard that Kundera himself participated in the adaptation of his own great novel, The Joke, into an excellent film directed by Jaromil Jires in part by eliminating the novel’s central love story. “When in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted to my works,” Kundera recalled, “someone called [the novel] The Joke ‘a major indictment of Stalinism,’ I was quick to interject, ‘Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love story!’”

“The one narrative strand of the novel [Ragtime] that gripped me immediately,” Forman said, “was the story of a piano player. Coalhouse Walker Jr. is gifted and black, and he drives a gleaming Model T until an envious group of white firemen defile it. They shit on its backseat, so the pianist can either humiliate himself by cleaning their shit with his own hands, or he can stand up to them and risk getting badly hurt in the process.” According to Forman, “I had a great knowledge of Walker’s dilemma from the old country: in the everyday life of Communist Czechoslovakia, you constantly found yourself before ignorant, powerful people who didn’t mind casually humiliating you, and you risked your livelihood and maybe your life by defying them. Squeezed between Hitler and Stalin in Central Europe, the Czechs had to laugh a lot to keep their sanity, so theirs is an ironic, nothing-is-sacred sense of self-preservational humor.”

Again the former screenwriting professor Kundera, in the context of the humor in Josef Skvorecky’s novel The Cowards, the film adaptation of which Forman was preparing prior to his emigration to the U.S. when Russian tanks ended the Prague Spring by invading Czechoslovakia in August, 1968 and forever preempted a Forman/Skvorecky film of The Cowards: “Which makes me think that people laugh at different things in every part of the world. How would anyone dispute Bertolt Brecht’s sense of humor? Well, his theater adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik shows that he didn’t understand a thing about Hasek’s comical sense.”

The one American film where Forman arguably was able to successfully apply both the reality of and insights gleaned from life under a Stalinist dictatorship to life in the U.S. was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The shared element was the power and pervasiveness of monstrous modern bureaucracies, be they corporate or state, whose tyranny is aptly represented by Louise Fletcher’s soft-spoken performance as Nurse Rached, as fitting an emblem there is in popular culture of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But Forman’s chosen subject for Ragtime involved the history of racism in the U.S., a nation founded on the genocidal dispossession of its native inhabitants and the enslavement of disparate ethnicities of Africans. What Forman thought he was selectively gleaning from Doctorow’s novel in fact infuses its every page in the rhythms and syncopations of its Joplin-like prose. The novel, after all, is titled after one of the great contributions of Africans to American culture.

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My role at the Ragtime Family House location was from the outset a contentious one. Now living and sleeping on a cot in the house in a small second story bedroom with a paperback Penguin edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to keep me company, each morning members of the crew would arrive to engage in the day’s work. Hausman had come up with the idea that, rather than pay the standard union tool fee that meant any tool required for the work to be done be provided by the union workers themselves, he would save money on this and future productions by having me purchase the tools as the need arose. This made me a very popular figure that summer with the owner and staff of Mt. Kisco Paint & Hardware, as each day I would appear and haul away a cache of whatever the day’s work called for. It had the opposite effect on Ragtime’s union crew.

The set dresser assigned to supervise the work on location was a tough, no-nonsense Irishman, Bob Riley. Riley’s assessment of Chris Newman, the sound mixer on Ragtime who had previously won an Oscar for The Exorcist, was “the guy can hear a bird pee on a leaf.” One day, I received instructions from the production office that I was to mow the lawn prior to a screen test to be conducted in the front yard involving actress Elizabeth McGovern. Having purchased a lawn mower and returned to the property, I had not even pulled the cord to start it when an irate Riley appeared.

“That’s a violation of union contract,” he said.

I immediately deferred to Riley and went inside the house to call the production office to inform them.

Sometime later, the production office called back. The property’s new owners, a couple with children from New Jersy, had agreed to defer moving in until filming was completed. I was told that I would be mowing the lawn as an employee of the new owners, who would pay me themselves, in addition to my $150 weekly paycheck from Ragtime Productions L.T.D. As this and the tools gamesmanship continued, Riley eventually quit the production in protest. Later that summer I learned from another set dresser that the dispute had gone all the way up to the President of the film workers union, IATSE.

Riley’s more conciliatory replacement was the inimitable Walter Pluff. Missing a significant number of prominent teeth, one of Pluff’s first orders of business was to have me purchase for him each morning a case of 8 oz. bottles of Budweiser and stash it in the house’s basement so that on the rare occasions when other members of the production staff showed up from New York City, it would not be noticed. In part due to Pluff’s largesse, but mostly because the set dressers, carpenters, scenic artists, teamsters, and electricians I interacted with on a daily basis came to see and accept me as the naïve but helpful and considerate 18-year-old that I was, I began spending more time with them after work at local bars and learned something of what it meant to be a unionized worker in New York’s film business. And I had the added bonus of being the only PA present to observe Forman when he showed up to rehearse Howard E. Rollins Jr., James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Brad Dourif and other members of the cast prior to the actual filming.

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Once the filming began, my responsibilities expanded to include driving carpenter Herb Darrell from the parking lot in downtown Mt. Kisco where crew members left their cars up the steep hill to the set. Herb, who commuted from his house in North White Plains, had served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. A ship he sailed on had been sunk in the North Atlantic, where he and other crew members had been rescued. At one point he rolled up his trouser leg to show me the scars from the wound he had received that made walking up steep hills painful and difficult.

“Don’t give me that ‘women and children first,’” he said, “I’m going to be the first one in the lifeboat.”

Earlier, the carriage house/servants’s quarters behind the main Ragtime house had served as a much under-utilized production office for staff from New York City. The screen door lacked a doorknob, so with an eye to who would be opening the door, Herb crafted one out of wood in the shape of a large erect phallus.

“Oh Herbie, it’s so real!,” was his imagined response from those who would make use of it to enter the building.

Herb told me he had previously worked on The Wiz at the Astoria Studios in the borough of Queens in New York City where his duties included laboriously constructing an enormous wooden door. The Wiz’s director was the famously on-time and under-budget Sidney Lumet, who had got his start in Yiddish Theater and live network television. Once he and his crew of carpenters had completed the task, Herb demonstrated to me what ensued:

“Sidney Lumet came in like Groucho Marx,” Herb said and began imitating Groucho’s duck walk with a camera on one shoulder.

After pacing back and forth two or three times, Herb stopped. Lumet was done filming the wooden door.

The next day it was taken apart with chain saws.

Prior to the start of filming in August, one day Herb’s wife joined him at the location. He gave her a tour of his and the others’ handiwork, which included a gazebo he had constructed in the garden where the other two Herbs had also spent their time.

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E.L. Doctorow arrived one evening in the Iowa City of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Yates in 1989 to deliver a lecture in Shambaugh Auditorium in the basement of the University of Iowa’s Main Library. I have two distinct memories of the event. Based on photographs of Doctorow on the jacket covers of his books, I had assumed he would come across as a prototypically urbane New York City intellectual. Instead, his demeanor was that of a genial proprietor of a neighborhood deli or Kosher butcher shop. One thing he said particularly resonated with me: “When I want to make it rain, I can make it a fine mist, a slight drizzle or a heavy downpour. Milos Forman has to hire a $50,000 rain machine.”

I took me eight years from my experience on Ragtime to recover something of my childhood love of movies and filmmaking. I had largely abandoned any thoughts of making a career in the film industry, in part because I realized from my experience on Ragtime that I lacked the facility with ersatz sincerity that is the coin of the Hollywood realm. Unable to afford to live in Manhattan, I decided to follow the path a number of my friends had taken and enroll in graduate school.

I had learned from a professor at Yale that the only graduate film program in the U.S. that allowed students to engage in both film production and what at the time was referred to as film studies was at the University of Iowa, located off Interstate 80 about halfway between the George Washington Bridge in New York and the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Like its geographically balanced position in the middle of the country, I thought I could hedge my bets by straddling these two areas of film. If I could not cut it with my first love of filmmaking, then I could fall back on becoming a professor of film history.

When I applied to Iowa’s film program in 1987, I went to Columbia University, where my former employers on Ragtime ran the film production program, to obtain a written letter of recommendation. Most of the other PAs on Ragtime had been graduate film students at Columbia where they conveniently served as another source of cheap – and uncredited (none of us received a credit on the finished film) – labor. I waited outside the film department offices until the elevator opened and Richard Brick, now the Chair of the department, emerged followed by an entourage of students. After the last one had left his office, I entered and re-introduced myself.

Brick professed that he did not know who I was. I mentioned the instance when I had telephoned him about the gypsy moth caterpillars that were poised to devour the leaves on the large oak trees on the front lawn of the Family House. At the time, Brick had thanked me profusely and instructed me to hire an insect exterminator, as the cost of furnishing the leaves of denuded trees with plastic replacements would run to $10,000.

I left him my name and address. Not long after, I received a letter of recommendation with an attached note that stated, “After a few moments of further reflection, it all came back to me after the almost 7 years since Ragtime.”

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During my years at Iowa, I did not realize at the time that my innate abilities as an organizer and the practical side of my personality were well-suited to the collaborative effort that constitutes most filmmaking. Unless you were a Stan Brakhage making personal experimental films or a Harry Smith hand painting onto strips of celluloid – and even they had to rely on the manufacturers who built the camera or made the celluloid – you had to organize a disparate crew of people to realize your filmic ideas. But I also knew that the kind of narrative films I aspired to make – the kind I had grown up watching in theaters and on TV – involved large amounts of money and an industry that was making fewer and fewer of that kind of motion picture.

After I had transitioned from the M.A. to the Ph.D. program at Iowa and thereby committed myself to an academic rather than a filmmaking career, my interest in movies again began to wane and I realized I would never write a dissertation. I was teaching undergraduate classes in both the Rhetoric and Communications Studies Departments (the latter then hosted the film program). In part based on comparing how graduate Teaching Assistants were treated in the two departments, and in part based on reports that graduate Teaching and Research Assistants at the University of California were unionized and either preparing to go or already on strike, in 1993 I initiated a unionization campaign among the approximately 2,600 graduate workers at the University of Iowa. After a summer interviewing representatives of established unions, in the Fall of 1993 a vote was taken by Iowa graduate students between the two finalists: Service Employees Internation Union (SEIU) Local 150 (a large local of workers in different industries based in Milwaukee) and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), which was headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and offered us our own local.

Perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of SEIU was the fact that Iowa was an anti-union, right-to-work state where relatively few workers belonged to unions. At its founding, the State of Iowa also bore the distinction of having outlawed the settlement of African Americans within its borders. A graduate student whose grandfather had been active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters pointed out that since SEIU was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), it thereby brought with it added political influence. SEIU was also distinguishing itself by organizing janitors in Los Angeles as part of its Justice for Janitors campaign. UE, by contrast, had been expelled by the CIO along with unions like Harry Bridges’s ILWU in 1949 for refusing to sign the loyalty oaths typical of the post-World War II anti-Communist witch hunt in the U.S. But this also pointed to perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of UE – they were a militant union committed to democratic governance by the rank-and-file whose Constitution limited the salary of the UE President to that of the highest paid member of any of its bargaining units. Regardless, SEIU Local 150 won the fairly evenly divided affiliation vote and after a concerted anti-union campaign from the University administration, we narrowly lost our election in April 1994.

The loss was personally devasting to me, who had spent a year organizing the campaign. After teaching one more semester of classes in Fall 1994, I packed my possessions into my 1974 Dodge Dart – “the Joads,” remarked one of my graduate film student colleagues as he observed the result – and moved to San Francisco to heal my wounds. For the graduate students at the University of Iowa who remained, however, it was a blessing in disguise: two years later, they handily won their union election as the first UE-affiliated graduate worker union in the U.S. As of 2025, UE-affiliated graduate worker unions include those at MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota and many other campuses, including my undergraduate alma mater, Cornell.

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I did make one black & white 16mm film at Iowa of which I was proud, a parody of the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film, Battleship Potemkin: Eisenstein’s Mother Doing the Dishes. Its title also parodically alluded to the straightforward, declaratory titles of early silent cinema – the Lumiere Brothers’s Workers Leaving a Factory, for example, or Thomas Alva Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (I also considered making Electrocuting Edison, but lacked the budget for special effects). It was selected by the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest festival of independent and experimental film in the U.S., and shown at the prime 7:00 p.m. slot on a Saturday night in the venerable Michigan Theater in 1992.

I was attending a cousin’s wedding in Milwaukee that weekend and missed the screening.

(Note: Eisenstein’s ‘Mother Doing the Dishes’ is available on Vimeo along with a feature-length documentary film I made after moving to the West Coast, ‘Bad Reception: The Wireless Revolution in San Francisco.’)