Frank Whaley is most recognized from his starring role with Kevin Spacey in the independent cult favorite Swimming With Sharks and films like Pulp Fiction and Vacancy, as well as television shows including The Dead Zone, CSI, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and House M.D. But this time, Frank is behind the camera - as director and writer of the independent film, New York City Serenade starring Freddie Prinze Jr, Chris Klein and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, which recently opened theatrically in New York. And who better to tell us about the film than Frank himself - so check out his blog below written just for Amazon to celebrate the film, which is now available on DVD. - Lisanne
I began writing the screenplay for NEW YORK CITY SERENADE one early November morning in 1994. The night before, my best friend at the time and I were sitting in a pre-Starbucks coffee shop on the west side of Manhattan trying to figure out what to do with our Saturday night. We bumped into an acquaintance who was on his way to a party up at Columbia University where his lady friend was a student. We decided to tag along, despite his sheepish warning “It might be by invitation only.” We assured him it would be fine. Like most things in those days it was on a lark, an impulse conducted with little or no thought. This particular Saturday evening, this crashed party, and it’s aftermath, became the basis for the script.
We took the subway uptown and found the party. It was in a beautiful old townhouse which was now home to a Columbia fraternity. My friend immediately engaged himself in a close conversation with an exotic looking blonde art student. Left to my own devices, I began making mindless conversation with various coeds. One of these conversations turned into a spirited game of truth or dare between myself and a couple of philosophy majors in an upstairs study and ended when one of the young lady’s boyfriend and a few of his frat brothers burst in. I accepted their invitation to fight but only one at a time before scurrying out of the room like a squirrel. Hearing the commotion my friend removed himself from the back room where he and the art student had moved their conversation and the two of us hauled ass out of there, escaping a small angry mob of drunk frat boys.
The next night I was packing up my drums in the dive bar where my band had played a set earlier in the evening, (For many years I played the drums in a NYC band called the Niagaras). The place was called Mondo Cane, a fire trap situated above an Italian restaurant in the West Village with space to occupy thirty people but whose owner frequently allowed in five times that many for a ten dollar cover charge. My friend came in and sunk into a corner table looking forlorn. Evidently the art student was a friend of a co-worker of his girlfriend. Word had traveled and his girlfriend found out he had been getting busy with her at the party the night before. She broke up with him at dinner earlier in the evening but not before throwing a full glass of ginger ale in his face.
The good news was she was no longer his girlfriend and therefore no longer going to the film festival in Houston, Texas where a short film he had made was going to be playing. It took a little bit of convincing but I was the recipient of the extra plane ticket and moreover a free trip to Houston.
This relatively pointless series of events became the script and eventually the movie. What I set out to do was capture an otherwise forgotten moment. I was in my mid thirties and at a real turning point in my life, which had become a nightly booze fueled whirlpool of adolescence and I was becoming way to old and tired for the whole thing. I think writing the script helped me come to terms with a lot of things at that time.
I also wanted to write a story about New York, the New York that I experienced in my younger days.
Mostly I wanted to tell a story about friendship and the strange way people have of moving in and out of each other’s lives like ghosts. All the people that I wrote about and characterized in the movie are no longer a part of my life, at least not in any significant way. It’s as though I lived another life, remote from me now and completely forgotten about. Somewhere tucked away in the nooks and crannies of memory there are vague pictures.
In the movie Owen and Ray are like brothers, of the same mind, two sides of the same coin. Inseparable. In the end they have no choice but go their separate ways.
After I wrote the first draft I put the script away for a long time. I wrote and directed my second film THE JIMMY SHOW, got married and started a family. In 2001 I came back to it, I did a couple of revised drafts, changed the title from THE WINTER SPRING RISE AND FALL OF RAY and set out to try and get it financed. I sent it to my agent and she said “No one wants to see a movie about these two awful people.”
A little over four years later I somehow managed to raise the money to make it. In the summer of 2006 Freddie Prinze Jr., Chris Klein, Jamie Lynn Sigler, Heather Bucha and Wallace Shawn among others along with my faithful producer Rachel Peters and a very good and hard working crew began twenty-two and a half blistering, drama filled and very difficult days and nights filming NEW YORK CITY SERENADE in and around the city of Manhattan.
Nearly three years later the film has finally found a theatrical release, an extremely limited release (one theater) , but a release none the less. More importantly it will find an extremely beautiful DVD release courtesy of ANCHOR BAY ENTERTAINMENT.
It’s been quite a journey from that early November morning in 1994. I’m glad I was able to tell this story. I hope people enjoy the movie. - Frank Whaley
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