How I Broke into Hollywood by Fenjves Pablo F. & Lang Rocky

Author:Fenjves, Pablo F. & Lang, Rocky [Lang, Rocky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-13T07:00:00+00:00

I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and my parents moved to Los Angeles when I was three or four months old. My father, Marshall Landis, was an interior decorator, and he came west to start a new business, but he died a few years later, when I was five. My mother, Shirley, was left to raise me and my two older sisters, Jean and Joan. She got a job at a bank in Beverly Hills, where she worked for the next thirty-five years.

We lived in Westwood, about a mile and a half from UCLA. The Veterans Cemetery was just beyond our backyard, and in those days it was a marvelous place: a lot of open ground, eucalyptus trees everywhere, plenty of space for my friends and me to play and ride our skateboards (two-by-fours with skates nailed to the bottom). Now the trees are gone and there are only graves there, including those of my stepfather and father-in-law.

The Veterans Home itself is on the other side of the freeway from the cemetery. In the old days, in good weather, you’d see all of these old guys sitting around or going for short strolls. Some of them had served in World War I, and I remember one guy from the Spanish-American War. When they died, we would ride our skateboards down to the cemetery to go to their funerals. Three veterans would line up and do a twenty-one gun salute, each of them firing his carbine seven times. Then they would give us the big, brass shells. I must have been to fifty or sixty funerals as a kid, just waiting for the gunfire so I could collect the shells.

When I was about seven, my mother remarried a man named Walter Levine and I gained a stepsister, Mimi, and a new half-brother, Mark.

I went to Bellagio Road Elementary School, in Bel Air, and then I went to Emerson Junior High, right behind the Mormon Temple.

My interest in film goes so far back that it’s a little obnoxious. In 1958, at the age of eight, I went to the Crest Theater, on Westwood Boulevard, and saw a movie called The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. It was directed by Nathan Juran and is perhaps better known for featuring the work of Ray Harryhausen, the great stop-motion animator. It was a magical experience for me. I had the complete filmgoer’s suspension of disbelief: That was me on the beach, fighting the Cyclops. I remember I came home and said to my mom, “Who makes the movie?” And she said, “The director,” which in retrospect I realize was surprisingly sophisticated. So, from the time I was eight years old, whenever people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d say, “a director.” And because I grew up in Los Angeles, I could take advantage of my proximity to the movie business and learn as much as possible about making movies.

I think that was a big advantage, knowing what I wanted to do with my life at such an early age.

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