Remembering Ric Menello: A conversation with Mel Neuhaus

Marisa Berenson and Ric Menello, February 2013. Photograph by Mel Neuhaus.

I nev­er had the priv­ilege of
meet­ing the cinephile and cine­aste Ric Menello, who died on March 1 at age 60. (His MTV.com obit­u­ary is here; a more heart­felt remin­is­cence from his Brooklyn neigh­bor­hood, with links to some per­tin­ent videos,  is here.) But dur­ing the mid-to-late 1980s, I felt like I almost knew
him, thanks to a couple of mutu­al friends, people who had stud­ied and hung out
with Ric in the film stud­ies pro­gram at NYU. I heard stor­ies of movie-mad
stu­dents fes­toon­ing their sneak­ers with the names of their favor­ite directors,
of Ric’s auteur cat­ech­ism (“What is Budd Boetticher?” “Budd Boetticher is an
auteur.” “Why is Budd Boetticher an auteur?” “Because his films have Mise-en-scène.”) and of some unhygien­ic pay­back shenanigans involving the
hair­brush of a cer­tain stuck-up desk mon­it­or at Weinstein Hall who subsequently
went on to her own music-video-related fame. As for Ric, his rela­tion­ship with
one-time Weinstein Hall res­id­ent Rick Rubin led to his dir­ect­ing a few music
videos for the likes of the Beastie Boys and L.L. Cool J. And then…not much,
that people out­side of the busi­ness would have heard of, until a reemergence
that was bear­ing more and more good fruit at the time of Menello’s passing.

Mel
Neuhaus was one of Ric’s old­est friends and cer­tainly his closest. I became
acquain­ted with Mel when he was one of the co-owners of a mail-order laser-disc
out­fit called Laser Island. Mel really knew his stuff and had the chops to get
super-obscure items, and I was a pretty good cus­tom­er if I may say so myself.
(Well I recall pre-ordering the eight-disc  Godzilla “Toho Death Battle Chronicles” box set
with a couple of music video com­pil­a­tions on the side [New Order among them];
the day the ordered arrived at Mel’s place, I got shit­canned from my job at
Stereo Review. He very kindly offered to let me back out, but I stuck to the
plan and shelled out the five hun­dred bucks. Boy, was my live-in girlfriend
unhappy when she came upon that receipt.) In any event, after chat­ting over
what new good­ies I was likely to buy, Mel would clue me in on stuff he was up
to, for instance, col­lab­or­at­ing with Ric on a script for a haunted-house comedy
star­ring the Beastie Boys.

A
little after the laser disc mar­ket, such as it was, dried up, Mel and I lost
touch. I thought of him when I learned of Menello’s death, and dropped him a
note. As it happened, he and Menello had become neigh­bors again over the years.
It was good to make con­tact with Mel, although I wish I’d been spurred to
do so by a hap­pi­er occa­sion. I was glad to learn that Mel, whose dry and
mord­ant wit was always an out­stand­ing fea­ture of our talks in the past, has
writ­ten a nov­el, Gray Matter, that’s on sale as an e‑book at Amazon, which I
bought pretty much imme­di­ately and look for­ward to read­ing. After we both
bitched and moaned a bit about how poorly the world is treat­ing aging male
cinephiles such as ourselves, we got on the sub­ject of the late, great Menello,
and I’ve repro­duced much of the con­ver­sa­tion, with some edits and shifts and
com­pres­sions I deemed necessary/desirable, below.

Glenn Kenny:  I remem­ber being at Cannes in 2008 and
see­ing James Gray’s Two Lovers and
see­ing Ric’s name come up as the co-screenwriter.  And think­ing how great that was, because I had not heard
much of or about him since the excel­lent com­ment­ary he did for the DVD of Chabrol’s
Cry of the Owl in 2002. And I was
so glad to learn he’d been work­ing more with James Gray. Because I remembered a
lot of the things about him that I’d heard from you, about not just what a
great cinephile he was but how funny and gen­er­ous he was.  How did you and Ric meet?  Were you guys boy­hood friends or
col­lege friends?

Mel
Neuhaos:  We met first year at
NYU.  And I remem­ber we were at
some screen­ing, back when the school would show you movies at the Bleecker
Street Cinema.  That was
essen­tially like one of their classroom present­a­tions.  And I was just sit­ting there, I don’t
even remem­ber what the movie was. 
He was in front of me sit­ting with some strik­ing brunette—that’s what I
remem­ber.  And some­thing came up on
the movie, and I made some snarky com­ment, and he turned around and at first I
thought he was going to tell me to be quiet, but he just kind of appended
it.  And I star­ted laugh­ing.  And I said, “Oh, that was kind of fun.”
And a little bit later I ran into him and we just star­ted talk­ing and found out
we were sort of on the same page. 
We star­ted going to grind­houses see­ing spa­ghetti west­erns and Italian Dirty
Harry ripoffs, which were all over the
place back then.  And just talking
about  movies that we loved.
Frequently he said “Nobody I know has ever heard of this movie except you. “
And I said, well, yeah, man. He
would come over to the apart­ment up in Washington Heights and we’d watch 16 mm
prints, which was the only way you could col­lect movies in those days.

GK: I remem­ber com­ing to one of your
16mm screen­ings in Brooklyn.

MN:  Yeah, I moved to Sheepshead Bay. And
screened every week.  And even if
he wasn’t around for that, one day a week it was just Menello day, and he would
come over.  Then, after that, laser
discs and then DVDs, and then Blu-Rays. It was a con­stant. The one time that we
were out of touch for a bit, because he was out on the Coast and everything, we
both dis­covered obscure Japanese cinema at the same time. And it was bizarre,
‘cause we had­n’t talked in a few months. 
And you know, we were the kind of guys who got kind of pissed off about
shar­ing movies with people who had nev­er seen them before; we’d get mad that
they were see­ing this for the first time. And we had this kind of  “We’ve seen them all” atti­tude.  But we were so stu­pid, because there’s
so much stuff out there.  And I
said to Menello, ”I saw some movies recently that have opened up a whole new
world for me.” And Menello said, “Me too.”  And I said, “I’m now into Japanese cinema, but not just
Kurosawa and Ozu.  It’s beyond
that.”  He goes, “Me too.” And I
said, “Like what?”  And he’s going,
“Well dir­ect­ors like…”–and he star­ted to go, “Shhhh”–and I said
“Shinoda!”  And he goes,
“Yes.”  And I said, “Goh…” and he’d
fin­ish, “Gosha.”  I said, “Yes.”  It was just crazy.  He said, this is amaz­ing.  And we just were talk­ing about that for
hours and hours. 

And even­tu­ally he came back to New
York we both ended up in Ditmas Park, and Ric was only two blocks away from
us.  So we saw him all the time,
and he became kind of a neigh­bor­hood fix­ture.  The thing about this area is it’s crammed full of
artists.  I mean not just writers
but would-be film­makers, musi­cians, paint­ers, pho­to­graph­ers.  And we would all con­greg­ate at this
place called Vox Pop.  And Ric sort
of became the king of this place. 
And you’d walk down the street, every­one would come run­ning out of
stores to say, “Hey, Ric!” My wife called him the Burgomaster of Brooklyn. And
when all this stuff star­ted to come into play for him the whole neighborhood
was just so happy for him. The
year that Two Lovers was eligible,
every­one came to Vox Pop that morn­ing, with Ric, to watch the live feed and see
if Ric would get a nomination. 
This is sev­en in the morn­ing. And Menello is there shak­ing his head, no,
I’m not going to get nom­in­ated, I’m not going to get nom­in­ated.  And he did­n’t.  But every­body in the neigh­bor­hood was
there to com­mis­er­ate with him. Not
that he really seemed to mind that much, but that was just a typ­ic­al dis­play of
how the neigh­bor­hood felt about him. 
And at Vox Pop we had a Menello night when we showed a lot of his
shorts, some of the things he and I made togeth­er. There was a promo Menello
and I made in the early 80’s to try to raise money to do a low budget
movie.  And we played it as Siskel
and Ebert.  We showed that and that
got a lot of laughs.  And then we
showed this movie I helped out on with Ric and Adam Dubin called Sidesplitters which has sort of become a cult item.  Lewis Black and Jim Norton are in it,
play­ing sort of the Antichrist Abbott and Costello. And then we did a Q and
A.  So it was a really nice
night.  And I don’t know, I mean
I’ve got 41 years of stor­ies and anec­dotes and just hil­ari­ous stuff.

GK:  I recall you guys were work­ing on a script for a picture
that nev­er got made where the Beastie Boys were in a haunted house scen­ario. It
was called Scared Stupid, riff­ing on
Martin and Lewis…

MN:  More Abbott and Costello, again, actu­ally, as it turns out. 

The funny thing about that is Ric
was work­ing for Def Jam at the time and Rick Rubin said, “I want to do a movie
with The Beasties in the fla­vor of the Abbott and Costello movies.”  And Menello and I par­tic­u­larly loved The
Abbott and Costello Show on television,
because it was—we think it’s sort of sur­real.  Because here they were, kind of this broken-down aging
com­edy team…they were Abbott and Costello and they were liv­ing in this dumpy room­ing house in Paterson, New
Jersey run by a psycho-landlord, Mr. Fields.  And except for Mike the cop, all the oth­er ten­ants were either
thugs or hook­ers.  And Menello and
I thought that was just the greatest concept ever.  And what Menello and I would often do when we would talk
about movies or shows we liked, or were work­ing on a thing, we would always
fig­ure out what happened to these char­ac­ters after­wards, or cre­ate entirely
dif­fer­ent movie scen­ari­os involving them. 
And we said, you know, if Bud and Lou had only las­ted as long as Gunsmoke, and that show had gone into the early 70’s, we had
this whole scen­ario planned.  Lou
basic­ally stayed the same but Bud embraced the drug cul­ture.  And he kind of—you know the way older
guys used to wear the pais­ley shirts and those long side­burns and the
comb-overs to try to get chicks? Bud became that.  And he star­ted becom­ing a pot­head ‘cause he was still living
with Lou and he was just drag­ging on weed all the time, 24/7.  And he changed his name from Bud Abbott
to Bad Abbott.

GK:  Nice.

MN:  [imit­ates Lou Costello] “Bud, stop
smoking that stuff.”  We would just
go on with that for hours.  And so
Menello came over one day and he said, “Let’s come up with an idea for the
Beastie Boys movie.” I said, “Well, if you’re talk­ing Abbott and Costello,
we’ve got a little selec­tion here and it’s pretty much com­part­ment­al­ized.  You either got the ser­vice com­edy, the
west­ern com­edy, the who­dunit or the haunted house thing.”  And Menello said, “Well, it’s got to be
the haunted house.” I said, “You’re right.”  So he said, “I’m going to tell Rubin that’s what we’re going
to do.” 

And then we were talk­ing on the
phone about it dur­ing the week and I said, “I have this bizarre idea.”  “What is it?”  “What if you come over on Friday and instead of watching
movies like we always do on the week­ends or some­thing, we just spent the entire
week­end doing this script? By that I mean, what if we do the entire script in
one week­end?” “You think we can do that?”   “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”  So he came over on Friday after­noon and
we had already the basic out­line for the plot.  And we broke it down scene by scene.  And then we went out to the El Greco
Diner where we would always go and pigged out, and then came back and went over
everything we had done.  And I
said, “We’ve got the entire movie broken down.” Says Ric, “All we got to do now
is write it.”  And then: “I’ll be
here tomor­row at 7:30 in the morn­ing,” which I thought was amaz­ing for Menello
to say.  But he showed up with
reams of loose-leaf paper and pens. 
And the way we would do it is we always put dif­fer­ent act­ors or
act­resses in parts, wheth­er or not they were liv­ing or dead.  This is the way we ima­gined who would
be who.  And Menello would be
lay­ing down on the couch with a pad and pen and I would be pacing the floor.  And we’d become the char­ac­ters.  And it got to the point where we
star­ted yelling at each oth­er in dif­fer­ent voices.  It was kind of very Norman Bates‑y.  But it would­n’t be Mel and Ric yelling
at each oth­er, it would be Oliver Reed and George Sanders hav­ing an argument.
At one point we had the slimy law­yer that the Beastie Boys hired and for some
reas­on we decided it was Jose Ferrer. 
And we just star­ted in, and it was real vul­gar, which was great.  That was the thing.  Saying “Listen, you mother­fuck­ers” in a
Jose Ferrer voice, that kind of stuff. 
We would just be break­ing up laugh­ing.  And with the read­ing of the will… At one point Menello had
got­ten got a call from Rubin who told him one of the Beasties was dat­ing Molly
Ringwald, and that she wanted to be in it.  So I said, all right, sure.  So she kind of became the Joan Davis char­ac­ter.  And we spent the entire day doing
this.  And then we said, all right,
let’s take a break.  And we had
got­ten through about 80 to 90 per­cent of the script.  And we were shocked. 
I said, “This is working.” 
He goes, “Let’s get some­thing to eat.”  So we went out and we got some­thing to eat.  And we came back and kind of went
through everything to see if it even made sense.  And he says, “It kind of works.” And we fin­ished up the next
day.  If you saw it, we had reams
and reams of loose-leaf paper. 
Most of it had Menello’s doodles of car­toon char­ac­ters, and there’d be
some­times only line on a page. If
you stacked up the script pages they would prob­ably go from the floor to your
knee­cap.  I said, “Oh, God, pity
who­ever has to type this up.” And
Menello goes, “It’s not going to be me.” 
I said, well, “It’s not going to be me either.” He goes, “Rubin’s going
to take care of it.  The thing is,
we got it.” 

And I was so shocked when  a couple of weeks later he came over
with a typed up script.  I remember
he men­tioned the woman who was Rubin’s assist­ant who had taken care of it and I
said, “Jeez, she deserves a medal.” 
And it was actu­ally read­ing funny. 
And I remem­ber at the time, and it’s funny that you men­tioned Martin and
Lewis. Because Paramount had wind of the pro­ject, and called up threatening
Rubin because they said it soun­ded too much like Scared Stiff.  And
Rubin said, “What are you talk­ing about?” 
And they said, “We don’t want people to get the two movies
con­fused.”  And so Rubin started
going, “What, you’re re-uniting Martin and Lewis?” He goes, “You’re talking
about a movie that was made 35 years ago? 
What do you mean, people are going to get con­fused?”  And I swear to God, the guy from the
leg­al depart­ment at Paramount said, “We’ve got high hopes for that movie yet.” 

The hor­rible thing about that was
the Beastie Boys split from Def Jam and fell out with Rubin.  And they wanted to take the script with
them and Rubin said, “It’s mine.” Like Daffy Duck in the Warner Brothers cartoon–it’s
mine, it’s mine!  And Menello said,
“I guess it’s nev­er going to get made cause there’s no way—believe me, I can’t
get into it, but there’s no way they’re ever going to get back togeth­er again.”  And I said, damn.  But one of the Beastie Boys at that
time was get­ting laser disks from me. 
And he had talked to Ric and the idea was, “Well maybe Mel would
con­sider work­ing with us on some pro­ject.” There was a lot of bad blood at the
time and Rubin didn’t like that idea, and noth­ing ever became of it any­way. I
heard that that script was named one of the most wanted never-to-be-made cult
movies ever.  And some­body, I
guess, had got­ten a copy of one of the drafts or whatever, how it ended up, and
was selling them on eBay for I don’t know how much. 

GK:  Eventually the Beastie Boys had their
rap­proche­ment with Rick Rubin. 
They were in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent place as per­formers by that point.

MN:  Yeah.  I must
have a copy of the script some­where.  I
remem­ber some funny stuff in there.

GK: I men­tioned before, Ric’s
com­ment­ary on the DVD of Cry of the Owl
is really something.

MN:
Well for as long as I knew him Ric would say of Chabrol, “He’s my favorite
liv­ing dir­ect­or.” And Ric wrote him a fan let­ter, and Chabrol wrote him back
and Menello would sit there trans­lat­ing, with a French-English dic­tion­ary what
he said. And he would cor­res­pond with Chabrol and Chabrol—I don’t remem­ber what
movie it was, it might have been Story of Women or Madame Bovary, one of
those pic­tures from around that period—Chabrol sent Ric his script with all his
annota­tions in it.  And Menello was
over the moon about it.  He says,
“I can­’t believe this.”  And they
kind of…things happened, they lost touch. 

When James Gray was at Cannes with Two
Lovers he was sit­ting next to Chabrol at an
event. And Chabrol loved James Gray. 
He goes, “You’re the only American dir­ect­or I like.”  And James thanks him.  And Chabrol goes, “I was shocked when I
saw the name Ric Menello and I was won­der­ing, could it be the same Ric Menello
who used to write to me in the 80’s?” 
And James says, “Yes, Ric told me about that.”  And Chabrol says, “Why did he stop writ­ing?”  James
replied, “I don’t know, I guess he did­n’t want to both­er you.  That’s the way Ric is. “ And Chabrol
says, “No, no, no.”  He gave him
his con­tact inform­a­tion.  “You must
tell him to get in touch with me.” 
So Ric was  thrilled.  And I said, “Why did­n’t you go to
Cannes?”  And he goes, “Well, a
couple of reas­ons.”  I said, “Well
what’s one?”  “I don’t have a
pass­port.” “That’s a good reason.” 

I had been shoot­ing foot­age for a
doc­u­ment­ary Adam Dubin was pro­du­cing about Ric, and after I heard this story, I
said to Dubin, “If we go take this movie to the extreme, this is the only thing
I want to go and manufacture. 
Everything else just happens. 
But I want this to be  planned. I want to con­tact Chabrol and tell him about it,
because I’m sure he’ll agree, and I want to fly Menello over to France to
just–under the pre­tense of get­ting some kind of award or some­thing like that.  We’ll actu­ally film him going to the
pass­port office to get his pass­port. Which will be hil­ari­ous in and of
itself.  And he meets Chabrol.  And I want an over­head shot of the two
of them walk­ing off togeth­er, like the end of Casablanca.  And
that’s the only thing I want to plan.” 
And Dubin said, “That’s great.” 
Of course in the inter­im Chabrol passed away.  And then the pro­ject went on the back burn­er for a while.
But I’m glad that Adam wants to do some­thing with it now. 

The only con­sol­a­tion with respect
to his passing is that the last three months were the hap­pi­est I’ve ever seen
Menello.  ‘Cause everything was
start­ing to really open up for him. 
He has a new movie he wrote with James Gray, Lowlife, com­ing out in a couple of weeks.  And Thanksgiving we always get together
at a mutu­al friend’s house and she does this huge lay­out.  And he had just seen the movie and he
said, “First of all it was no digit­al crap, it was an actu­al 35 mm print,” so
he was all excited about that. And
he said, “Do you remem­ber when I first saw Two Lovers and I said I thought it came out way bet­ter than I
thought, I really was proud of it?” 
I said, “Yeah.”  And he
said, “This grinds it into the dust. 
If I ever get remembered for one thing, I’d be happy if it was
this.  It was great.  It looks like an epic, it moves, everything
works. I’m so happy about it.” I said, “Well, that’s great, Ric.”  And then we were exchan­ging notes cause
we were going to start anoth­er script at the end of this month.  He had also been con­trac­ted to do a
screen­play for a biop­ic on Jimmy Roselli, which he was work­ing on.  And the final draft went through with
the pro­du­cers and they green­lit it. 
And he was so excited about that too.  He was sup­posed to pick up his check on Monday. And on top
of that, we went to some industry Christmas party where we met a man who,
unbe­knownst to us, turned out to be some enorm­ously suc­cess­ful pro­du­cer.  He kind of passed him­self off as “Well,
I’ve made a couple documentaries.” 
He did a lot more than that. And we met with him a few weeks ago and he
was inter­ested in hav­ing us devel­op a crime series for TV with him. And we’re
com­ing back after­wards and he turned to me and he said, you know, “You’re the
most pess­im­ist­ic bas­tard I know after me.” And he put his hand on my arm and he
said, “For the first time in my life, I’m cau­tiously optim­ist­ic.”  And it’s just–it’s such a fucking
shame. 

I took him to some media events I
was cov­er­ing freel­ance, and they said you could bring a guest.  We had a blast.  And one of them was for the 40^th
anniversary of Cabaret and it was kind
of one of those things—you know, ”You want to go?”  And he said, “Yeah, what the hell, why not?” Then he said,
“You think Marisa Berenson will be there?”  I said, “It’s pos­sible.  They said all the prin­cipals will be there.”  And Menello goes, “But not Bob
Fosse.”  I said, “Well, if he is,
I’m going to run like hell.” So we went. 
It was at the Trump Tower. 
You walk in and you look at the bottled water and they had Trump
Water.  It had his pic­ture on it.
We star­ted laugh­ing about that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of
those things, but it’s in a suite, they set you, 2 or 3 journ­al­ists, at each
table and it’s like speed dating. 

GK:  Yeah, I did that with Leon Vitali and
Malcolm MacDowell for the Kubrick Blu-ray releases…

MN:  Yeah, yeah, so you know how that works.
So it’s Michael York and Joel Grey and we were talk­ing to them, and they were
really nice and it was great, ‘cause you could get really intim­ate with these
people and it was fun.  And then
after everything was said and done, we were really ask­ing ques­tions we wanted
to ask them.  Menello and I brought
up Accident to Michael York, and he just
lit up: “God bless you both.”  He
just star­ted talk­ing to us about Losey and Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker and
it was just great.  And then we
were ask­ing him about, we said, 
“We’re very fond of a movie you did called Zeppelin.”  And
he says,” I actu­ally like that too. 
I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of one crit­ic’s review who said, ‘It’s a
gas.’” 

And I was talk­ing to Joel Grey
about this movie, Man on a Swing that I
kind of thought was quirky.  He
kind of was sur­prised that any­body knew about it.  Then he talked to Menello at anoth­er table and Menello
brings it up and Grey goes, “Somebody else just asked me that.”  And Menello goes, “That’s my best
friend.  I’m his guest here
today.”  So we’re sit­ting there,
and then t I look over and I jab Menello in the side and I said, “I think
Marisa Berenson’s com­ing in.” Menello goes, “What?”  She came in, and she looked gor­geous.  And she’s sit­ting down.  And Menello’s like, “Please let her be
smart.” We’re talk­ing to her. And
she was great. And she was very intu­it­ive about the dif­fer­ences of work­ing with
Kubrick as opposed to Visconti. 
All this great stuff that she was talk­ing about.  We were just thrilled.  And Menello was star­ted ask­ing her some
ques­tions and he stopped and he says, “I just have to say this.  You’re so beau­ti­ful. I can­’t stop
think­ing how gor­geous you are. I
just wanted to say it.”  And she
said “Oh, well thank you.”  And she
said, “And who are you with again?” 
And Menello goes, “Well actu­ally I’m not even sup­posed to be here.” And
he poin­ted to me and says “This is my best friend Mel and he’s writ­ing for this
Examiner online or whatever, and I’m his guest.  But we’ve writ­ten a lot of stuff togeth­er and I’ve
actually…well, I wrote a movie a couple of years ago with James Gray. “ And she
says, “Oh yes?  What movie was
that?”  “It was this movie called Two
Lovers.”  And Marisa Berenson gasps, and she says, “I love that
movie!”  And Menello was in
heav­en.  And he just was like,
“Really?”  Yeah.  And after­wards he came over, he was
like in a trance.  And I said,
“Ric, this is crazy.  Go up to her
and let me get a pic­ture of you guys.” And so he goes up to her: “Would it be
all right if Mel took a picture?” 
She goes, are you kidding? 
And she grabbed Menello and he was just fly­ing.  And then after­wards, he said, “I don’t
want you to think me being out of line or any­thing like this, but when the new
movie comes out in the spring, James has indic­ated to me that he might arrange
for me to do a mod­estly budget movie that I could write and dir­ect.” Ric goes
on,  “I have no idea what it would
be yet, but it’s up there and I just wanted to know, would it be all right to
get in touch with you….because I mean again, I don’t know what it’s going to be
but I would love to have you involved in it if you wanted to.”  And she just said, “Of course, of
course.” She gave him her e‑mail address and he was just…you know…he just said,
“I did­n’t think any­thing could top the event we went to last night”—which was
like the 90^th anniversary of Warner Brothers thing, which was fun—“but this
topped it.”  And he goes, “This is
like, everything’s going. 
Everything’s going for me. 
Everything. “ And I said, “Yeah. 
Good stuff. “