Milton Moses Ginsberg - a filmmaking hero, mentor and dear friend - passed away on May 23. I’ll miss reveling in Milton’s insights on movies, literature and life, which he shared with me during our all-too-rare meetings in the course of a 40-year friendship. And I’ll always cherish the look on his face when I surprised him by showing up at a 2012 screening of his chef d’oeuvre, Coming Apart, at Manhattan’s Film Forum.
The first time I saw the film, at Cine Malibu in 1969, I was stunned. That same year my high school English teacher took our class to see Fellini Satyricon. I’m sure the well-meaning pedagogue didn’t know that his adolescent charges would see a naked hermaphrodite, an amputation, gluttony, flatulence, orgies and more in the Italian maestro’s film. On the contrary, he must have thought, “What could go wrong with an Oscar-winning international auteur’s adaptation of Petronius?” Today, of course, his intentions wouldn’t matter; he’d simply face a firing squad.
In that zeitgeist, though - and this is why Milton became an idol to me - shocking audiences was among the highest aesthetic values. 1969's best-selling novel was Portnoy’s Complaint. The Living Theatre performed Paradise Now in the nude at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music, and the troupe was arrested for such performances in other cities). Also featuring naked actors, Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Lab Theatre and Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in ’69 wowed New York audiences. John Schlesinger’s X-rated Midnight Cowboy, Dennis Hopper’s drug-drenched Easy Rider and Constantin Costa-Gavras’ anti-imperialist Z were considered mainstream movie fare. I tried to partake in all such spectacle.
But, as I said, Coming Apart stunned me, perhaps even more than Fellini’s picture, and as much or more than emerging experimental theatre. Thunderbolts from Hollywood paled by comparison. Milton’s story’s contemporary New York setting was literally closer to home than the other movies’ milieus. And its dark premise was more deeply disturbing than the overt excesses of plays, novels and cinema I imbibed at the time.
Coming Apart is a black and white faux documentary, shot through a one-way mirror in a single cramped location, about a psychiatrist named Joe Glazer, who’s coming undone; he’s played to a turn by Rip Torn. Yes, Rip Torn. Glazer has erotic encounters with his patients and films them covertly; the footage thus obtained is what we watch. The shrink’s cases share the depths of their despair and depravity with him, he offers his rage in return. In the working-class home of my teen years psychotherapy was taboo - something for crazy people, other people - so I lived vicariously through the characters' sharing and offering.
Co-starring Sally Kirkland and Viveca Lindfors, Milton’s directorial debut is hardly a barrel of laughs. But its terrifying take on obsessive sex was right up my alley. I was a confused (and no doubt sexually obsessed) adolescent who was beginning to think of cinema as both boundless art form and refuge. As an escape that could be both comforting and challenging. Coming Apart became one of the movies - along with certain Swedish, Italian, Japanese and French delights, Marx Brothers madness, Warhol experiments, documentaries and transgressive Hollywood offerings - that lured me off the path to a law career. It took me four full years of college to know for sure that I wanted to make movies. But Milton had planted the seed while I was still in high school.
And then, shortly after I started working my way up from intern and production assistant, without planning it or knowing it would happen, I met the badass behind the film.
It was 1977 or 1978 and an aspiring editor named Sonya Polonsky, who I’d met during an internship, arranged a job interview with Milton Moses Ginsberg. Before and after directing his debut feature and 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington, Milton had made his living as an editor. Our meeting went well and he hired me to sync dailies, help organize material and “pull selected takes” on an episode of a medical documentary series about a pediatric neurosurgeon. Milton found and exponentially enhanced the drama in the footage; the series received two Emmy awards. He was a demanding boss, but generously shared his thoughts and methods with me. His brilliance was intoxicating.
Even more thrilling, though, was getting to know Milton outside of work. We both lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and occasionally met for dinner at one of the neighborhood’s many affordable restaurants. (Yes, there were actually good inexpensive restaurants in desirable residential areas of the city back then.) During those repasts I learned that the director of one of the grimmest movies I'd ever seen had a fantastic sense of humor and that he was a superb raconteur.
I remember one evening in particular, at a short-lived spot with outdoor seating on West 78th Street, Milton regaled me with tales of growing up in the Bronx - borough of my beloved New York Yankees. Of W.E.B. Dubois. Of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Of James Baldwin, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo. He talked about being in the army, at a base in Texas in the early 1960’s, with a buddy who was also from the Bronx. The friend was excited to show Milton a Life magazine article about someone from their neighborhood. “Look,” the soldier exclaimed, “Barbara Kubrick’s brother is making a movie!”
Such moments shone a light on careers that might never have occurred to the likes of us children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. And now, Milton could not only discuss fellow-Bronxite Stanley Kubrick’s films with breathtaking insight, he’d made a couple of motion pictures of his own.
The air on West 78th Street seemed particularly charged that night, simply because of who lived in the neighborhood – our neighborhood. A block south was Miles Davis’ brownstone. Across the street to the north was the Apthorp, a large apartment building where Joseph Heller, Nora Ephron, Gelsey Kirkland and Al Pacino lived. Jules Feiffer, Mick Jagger, Philip Roth and the aforementioned James Baldwin all resided short distances from our dining spot. And we felt that this was exactly where we belonged.
Milton also began to share his writing. A story about a bicycle messenger – an important fixture in the pre-internet New York filmmaking community – trapped on the roof of the Screen Services building during a holiday weekend. And Lady Dick – a female detective yarn pre-dating series like Mare of Easttown and Deadwind by decades… but with humor.
Milton, over the years, grew out of the youthful pessimism that led him to make Coming Apart until he finally bade cynicism a permanent farewell. At age 42, he wed his soulmate, painter Nina Posnansky. Neither had been married before; they remained together and in love until Milton’s death.
But shedding misanthropy didn’t make my friend and mentor any less of a contrarian, albeit a hilarious one. When I started teaching he asked me what kinds of things my students were surprised to learn about editing. I said that many of them would never have guessed how frequently we delete great scenes in order to improve the film as whole. “Or,” Milton responded, “how often we delete the film as a whole in order to preserve a great scene!”
When I got married, Nina and Milton gave me a painting of Nina’s they knew I adored. It’s a still life of two place settings on a table with a vase full of flowers, a basket of fruit and two candles. Warm. Welcoming. Serene. A scene of Milton and Nina’s domestic tranquility that I get to look at and thereby remember Milton every day.
If the above musings seem desultory I’m glad. Shiva - the Jewish ritual of sitting at home for a full week as friends and relatives visit bearing food to recall the deceased - is desultory. A sad story followed by one that’s sidesplitting. Followed by corned beef or cheesecake or schnapps. Milton was too secular for Nina even to have considered “sitting shiva.” But I’m glad I got to reflect and to share.
I don’t know who first purveyed the notion that it’s perilous to meet those you most admire, but I do know they were wrong. Rest in peace, Milton Moses Ginsberg.
