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Myles Berkowitz, Walkter Salles
Doc-style comedy has been a success, but best perk was falling
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Screenwriter/actor Myles Berkowitz was at wit's end after a decade of frustration in Hollywood. He had paid for his education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business by acting in commercials for Coke, McDonald's, and the US. Army, and subsequently starred in several offBroadway plays before moving to Los Angeles. He got work writing for television with producers at Universal, Paramount, and Columbia, and wrote several episodes of HBO's "Tales From The Crypt," and even won a including the Cable ACE award. But all his successes, including a Cable ACE nomination of his own for producing a short-lived Family Channel series called "The Beef," proved fleeting, as he still couldn't get his feature-length scripts produced. To make matters worse, his dating life was a mess.
So Berkowitz, now 36, took one last shot. He secured $60,000 in financing to videotape himself on 20 dates. The plan was to produce a dark, documentary-style comedy about the harsh realities of singledom, hoping to find an hour and a half of humor within a mountain of footage. 20 Dates has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Berkowitz fell in love with interior designer Elisabeth Wagner, and caught their courtship on camera. He nurtured this new love while he was contractually obligated, for the film, to date other women, an ordeal Wagner described as "intimidating and emotionally draining. I wasn't intimidated by any one woman," explained Wagner, "but by all the women." The charming courtship turned his "mean, vicious" comedy into a romantic one.
The film's other saving grace was financier Elie Samaha, a virtual cliche of the over-the-top B-movie producer. Screaming for obligatory T&A shots and threatening to mail Berkowitzs body parts to family members, Samaha provided Berkowitz with both an antagonist and some wildly comic moments. Wagner and Samaha gave essential story points and structure to 20 Dates, and cemented the film's success. After winning the audience award at the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival, Fox Searchlight picked up 20 Dates for distribution. 20 Dates shows Berkowitz and DP/cameraman Adam Biggs running around Los Angeles eluding harassment by the police, since the shooting was done without a permit. "We'd set up our cameras and then see cops coming, and either try to act like we weren't really there with a camera, or take the stuff and disappear into an alley" recalls Berkowitz. He originally made the filming obvious to his dates, but soon found that influencing the evenings, so he went the Candid Camera route instead. This strategy proved dangerous.Two girls sued after being informed of the filming, and one reacted violently, stabbing Berkowitz in the hand with a fork. The injured filmmaker required stitches, and eventually reached settlements with the girls involved that allowed their scenes to be included in the film.
Berkowitz shot 120 hours of video for the 88 minute movie, a ratio more akin to documentary filmmaking than the traditional 5:1 or 10:1 of an independent, low-budget comedy. But the film's manipulated nature led Berkowitz to consider it more comedy than documentary. "On any one date, we would have three or four hours of footage, and had to choose a couple of minutes that would serve our story," explains Berkowitz. "When you're only using two minutes of footage, I don't care if you're trying to make a documentary, there's going to be debate about whether it's reality or not. But we didn't care about that.We were going for the laughs:"
Berkowitz endured a grueling one-year editing process, intentionally choosing a male and female editor, Michael Elliot and Lisa Cheek, for different gender perspectives. Elliot, a top commercial editor who has worked with directors such as Tony Kaye, Barry Sonnenfeld and Spike Lee, was excited about getting involved, according to Berkowitz, but also made him promise not to cop out. "I asked him what he meant by that," said Berkowitz, "and he said `well, you know, you're a bit of a jerk (in the movie). But that's ultimately why the movie will work." I had another way of saying it, which is "If it's funny, it's in." Elliot and Cheek had, according to Berkowitz, "much more power in the editing room than editors usually have," since he felt that as the film's subject he would be the worst judge of what was funny or interesting. In essentially writing the film in the editing room, Berkowitz took a page from Charlie Chaplin. "Chaplin wrote his movies from different takes," he explains. "He would film a few scenes at a time and then close down production. Then he would work out the scenes and story with his writing partner, who was the big fat guy who always beat on him in the movies. So instead of sitting down with a piece of paper, writing a script and then shooting it, he wrote in the editing room and kept going out to shoot more. That's basically what we did:"
Besides hostile dates, guerrilla filming tactics and an excruciating editing process, Berkowitzs other primary obstacle was Samaha. In 20 Dates, Berkowitz shows several long shots of the outside of Samaha's once, while the audience hears their conversations. It seems mysterious while watching it that Berkowitz would secretly tape conversatioru with his own producer, but he taped because of his real life fear that Samaha might make good on certain threats. "When he started seeing footage of me on dates, he started to go nuts and get angry. He thought I was trying to steal his money" says Berkowitz. "With all the movies that come out of Hollywood about relationships and dating, I had to bring something more to the table, which was reality. That was the point. That was why I kept saying to Elie, `You think you can sell this movie if you throw in pretty actresses, sex, T&A, but you're not going to be able to sell that movie. The only way you're going to be able to sell this is to keep it real.' He didn't understand that."
Berkowitz and Wagner are to be married in October.
Professionally, however, he feels his future depends on how well 20
Dates fares at the box office. "If we bomb, that's fine, because
I'll have given it my best shot-and I'll be able to move on in
my life because I got the girl." MM
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This story was published in the April/May 1999 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Myles Berkowitz Scores with 20 Dates / Doc-style comedy has been a success, but best perk was falling
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