I first took note of the name of Ric Menello in early 2009, when I saw him listed in credits of James Gray’s “Two Lovers,” which he co-wrote and which I’d rank among the best films of the last decade. I met Ric a year later, at a screening at 92Y Tribeca of Douglas Sirk’s “There’s Always Tomorrow,” and ran into him periodically at the movies. I last saw him in December, at a première of the new restoration of John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.” I knew that Ric had also co-written Gray’s forthcoming film, “Lowlife,” and we spoke hopefully about its release (no date has been set yet). When I saw him that evening, I thought that he didn’t look well. Though always, in the brief time of my acquaintance with him, a hefty man, he seemed to have gained much weight, his ankles appeared swollen, and his breathing sounded somewhat labored. He died, on March 1st, at the age of sixty.
A few days ago, I spoke with James Gray about his friend and collaborator. He offered a deeply moving, extravagantly detailed, profoundly insightful portrait of a remarkable person. Along the way, he also provided an illuminating, poignant view of the genesis of “Two Lovers.” There are other realms of Ric’s life and work that Gray didn’t discuss—a glance at IMDb reveals that Ric co-wrote the Run D.M.C. movie, “Tougher Than Leather,” which Rick Rubin directed; co-wrote several movies directed by Adam Dubin, who is better known for his music videos; and himself directed several memorable music videos. Certainly, Rubin, Dubin, and others whom Gray mentioned, and who have worked with or befriended Ric, could add significantly to the portrait. There would, I think, be a great, tragicomic oral history of him to be gathered and composed. He seems to have been something of a Zelig of the modern cinema—not one with Zelig’s ailment of chameleon-like adaptation but, rather, something of an anti-Zelig, who endured other ailments but whose character and temperament remained unshakably, obstinately his own.
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GRAY: I got a phone call—this is about 1996, I think, late ’96, somewhere around there—from Rick Rubin, who, along with Russell Simmons, started Def Jam Records. And Rick said [deepening his voice in impersonation], “I have somebody on the phone I want you to talk to.” You know, he had made a three-way call.
I said, “Hello?”
[Adopts a nasal voice] “Hello?” “Who’s this?”
[Shrill voice] “Who’s this?”
“This is James Gray.”
“Did you direct ‘Little Odessa’?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, that wasn’t too good.”
“Who is this?”
“This is Ric Menello.”
[In the deep voice of Rick Rubin] “This is my friend Ric Menello. He knows much more about movies than you do.”
And all of a sudden I started talking to the guy. And, of course, I immediately liked him because he disparaged my work. And I realized that Rick Rubin was absolutely correct: he knew everything. He was working at the desk of the dorm—Weinstein dorm at N.Y.U.—when Rubin met him. And he would hold court talking about movies, and they quickly recognized him as kind of a savant, and they befriended him.
He was, I found out only when he died, significantly older than we were. I mean, he’s older than Rick, and Rick is older than I am. He’s about twenty years older than I am, so I always just assumed he was a contemporary of Rick’s. But apparently he’d been sitting behind that desk for quite a while. And he lived with his mother in a retirement community in New Jersey called Cheesequake Village, which has been sort of immortalized—if you can use that word—by Philip Roth, I think in “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
In any event, he would—you’d call him up, and you could call him at 3 A.M. and he would immediately pick up the phone.
[Adopts Menello’s voice] “Hello?”
[In his own voice] “Menello.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s this movie where blah blah blah?” and you would ask him a question and he would know the answer.
And I immediately knew he was astonishing because, after this phone call with Rubin and with Menello, where I spent, I don’t know, three hours talking to the guy, I realized that he was an unbelievable resource, as well as, by the way, a very good person—I mean, a very sweet person. And one time, I remember, I was watching some black-and-white movie from the forties with John Hodiak. And I kept pushing the satellite-dish button for info and it kept saying “T.B.A.” I didn’t know what it was. So I would call Menello. I would say, “Menello, I’m watching this black-and-white movie, starring John Hodiak,” and we wind up, of course, having a whole conversation about John Hodiak, which involved every detail you ever wanted to know about the man.
And so I’m talking to him, and I say, “Menello, I’m watching this movie and I don’t know what it is, but it looks really good and I don’t know what it is.”
He says, [Menello’s voice], “Put the telephone to the speaker, my brother.”
So I take the phone, I put it to the speaker, about twenty seconds later: [in a soft voice] “H-h-h-hello?”
“Hello?”
“The film is called ‘A Bell for Adano,’ directed by Henry King, with Gene Tierney and, you’re quite right, my boy John Hodiak.”
And then he sort of gave me this capsule review. [in Menello’s voice] “Darryl Zanuck decided it was too long in the end.…” I don’t remember if it was Darryl Zanuck—I can’t remember—but he gave me the whole capsule review of this movie, and I found that so astonishing after twenty seconds of audio. And so every time I had a movie question I would call him. And either I introduced him to Wes or Rick Rubin introduced him to Wes Anderson—I can’t remember who—but, you know, Wes started to use him as a resource. Darren Aronofsky did. And, you know, Jim Jarmusch we put him on the phone with, and all these people who wound up knowing him even though he never essentially left the retirement community of Cheesequake Village. And you would talk to him and he would say, [in Menello’s voice] “Otto Preminger decided—hold on. Maaa! No! Don’t do it! Because it’s shiny and it’s broken. Hello?” And then he’d come back and you’d think to yourself, what’s shiny and broken? What does that even mean? So, he was really quite the character.
How did you come to collaborate with him?
Well, what happened was… It’s sort of a sad story, actually. What happened was, he was very reliant on his mother. And she died. And I would talk to him and he would say things like, [in Menello’s voice] “I have macular degeneration. I’m going blind.” I said, “Menello, you’re going blind?” “Yes, I look at the Amsler Grid on the Internet.” I was like, “What are you talking about? The Amsler Grid? What is that?” “I looked at it and I’m going blind!” So I would say, “Menello, you know, you’re not going blind.” I had a car come get him and take him to the ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist called me and said, “Mr. Gray, his eyes are completely fine.” He obviously was having a kind of mental breakdown, and then it became sort of official that he had this mental breakdown after his mother’s death, and he was institutionalized for a while.
And then, Rick Rubin and, I believe, Owen Wilson, and I sort of split three ways his rent for a year—and this guy, Adam Dubin, who was also very helpful, from N.Y.U. We split his rent and moved him into an apartment in Brooklyn after he was released from the hospital. And I felt that I needed to do something to help him. So when I started doing “Two Lovers,” I found myself calling him and just reading him scenes. And he would make suggestions, and sometimes I didn’t like them but sometimes I did, and then I would say, “Well, what movie is this like?” and he would say, “I saw this once in a movie.” Or, better yet, if he’d say “I’ve never seen it in a movie,” you knew you were doing really well.
And I thought, at the end of the process, Well, if I put this guy on as the co-writer, he gets half the money and he gets into the W.G.A. and he gets health benefits, which would really help him, because he was in bad shape. So I did that, and he got half the money, and the benefits, and the residuals, and all that stuff. So when the new movie that I did, “Lowlife,” came around, for me it was a no-brainer to split the credit and to keep the health benefits rolling, and he was very helpful. I’d read him stuff over the phone and he would comment, and, again, direct me to other movies I should look at and works of art that I should know about.
He was also very, very knowledgeable about literature. He wasn’t just a movie savant; you could talk to him about Homer or you could talk to him about Shakespeare—you could talk to him about all that stuff. I would have lengthy conversations with him about “Henry IV” or Virgil, the Aeneid. He would know—he would know all about it and I could talk—I remember, I was looking through Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” and he knew everything about that stuff. And you just thought to yourself, “How do you know about this?” I had a conversation with him once about “Middlemarch” and I’m like, “Is there anything you don’t know about?” He was one of those kinds of people. And opera, too—I remember discussing an opera called “Fedora,” which is a very obscure opera by Umberto Giordano, and he said, “Oh, you know, I’m related to Giordano—my cousin Vinnie Giordano is his relative, but…” and all of a sudden he goes on a disquisition about Giordano and “Fedora,” which is, like I said, not exactly Puccini or Verdi.
So he was a very educated person, whether he was an autodidact or not. He did go to N.Y.U. but he never finished. Quite tellingly, he finished, I think, one class short of getting his master’s. So he was not fully capable, and he was totally resistant to change. He used to watch his movies on this black-and-white nineteen-inch television, and he would look at some Minnelli movie and I would say, “Well, how can you tell about that? Because you’re watching it in black-and-white.” He would say, “I can tell. I look at the backlight, that’s how I know how the color looks.” So I said, “Well, Menello, it’s your birthday,” so for his birthday I bought him—at the time, it’s the best you could get, which was a thirty-two-inch, flat-screen Sony television, and I had it sent to him. And I’ll never forget, the phone call was from P. C. Richard: a guy calls up and says, [deep voice] “Hello, Mr. Gary?” I said, “Mr. Gray.” “Yes, Mr. Gary. You know, the customer that is receiving the television, the Sony 550-P?” I’m like, “Yes?” “The customer has refused delivery.” So I’m like, “What?” “The customer Ric Meneelo?” “Menello.” “Yeah, he refused delivery of the television.” So I call him up, I think it’s gonna be some pride thing, you know, he’s gonna be sitting there and saying, “I can’t take it, this is too generous.” No, it’s the opposite: he says, “I can’t, I won’t accept this television, because I like the aerial on mine, and my mother gets to watch her shows, and I don’t want this TV.” Weirdly sort of ungrateful in the most charming way, and I finally said, “O.K., Menello, don’t worry, we’ll get you a satellite-dish setup, we’ll do it.” He was like crazy and yet, at the same time, fantastic.
And I found out about his death in the most—not that there’s ever a good way—but the most heartbreaking way. What happened was, I was calling him to kibitz about movies, which I do every day, I spoke to him every day—and [odd accent] “Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Who’s this?”
“Who’s this?”
“Are you—who are you trying to call?”
“I’m trying to call Ric Menello?”
“Is that whose phone this is?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“James Gray.”
“Are you a family member?”
“No. Who am I talking to?”
“This is an orderly from Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. He collapsed, your friend, in the subway. He’s in critical condition; he’s not doing very well at all. We think it’s cardiac arrest.”
And then, four hours later, he was dead, and the conversation I had with the guy is like you and I would be talking about a head of lettuce or something. It was horrible.
_When I saw Ric recently, he didn’t look well._The thing is, too, he was utterly resistant to any medical care at all. He had terrible breath. I said to him, “It’s like you have trench mouth. You have to go to the dentist.”
“No, I won’t go.”
I said, “Well, Menello, why don’t we do this? If you don’t go to the dentist, I can’t see you.” Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would say, “All right, I’ll go to the dentist.” He said, “Well, if that’s the way you feel”—like he was being forced. I broke my vow but I saw him anyway. I remember saying to him, have you gotten your colonoscopy, have you gotten a checkup on your heart, and he was…
[Gray put me on hold—he had to take a call about “Lowlife,”—and then got back on the phone with me.]
…I just finished it last Thursday. In fact—it’s weird: I had some kind of instinct that I should show it to Menello a little bit early, which is usually not what I do. I showed him an almost-finished—maybe with the exception of one music cue, I showed him the movie a month ago, and he left me a very touching but disturbing voice mail, which was all about how, if this was the movie on his tombstone, he’d be glad with that, because of how proud he was, and all that—and I’m thinking, “Tombstone?” So he must have been feeling very unwell. But maybe he had some kind of death wish. Apparently the apartment he lived in—he had a very good friend, his next-door neighbor, whose name is Mel, they went in and cleaned it out. And Adam Dubin—apparently there was garbage everywhere, bedbugs, an unimaginable space. He couldn’t quite function.
Did your discussions seem to spark ambition in him? Did he get the desire to write something, to write something about the movies he knew about, to write a movie on his own?
Oh, absolutely, which, interestingly, he never would send to me. What happened with him was that he went into this period of hibernation and he didn’t do anything, and when we started to engage on stories and stuff, he became much more active about sending material. The thing is, he was the world’s most aggravating e-mailer, because you would send him an e-mail and say, “Menello, what’s a movie like this?” or “What’s your feeling on this?” and he would send you thirty-paragraph e-mails, lengthy, lengthy e-mails, and there would be thirty of them in your in-box, with all kinds of facts and factoids. And I think he was sort of encouraged to work again, yes, because he had written, I think, either two or three scripts since we worked on “Two Lovers,” and he never would send them to me. I’d say, “You don’t want me to read them?” “I’ll send you them some time.” But he never did. Other people got them; other people read them. He was apparently working on some Roselli biography. I don’t know the details. I’m ignorant this way. I don’t know what his life was on that side.
Gray mentioned that his wife found a blog post about Ric’s life in Ditmas Park that depicts him as a sort of “local hero,” in which he, Gray, learned that…
In a way, he was a kind of a very popular person. It was very weird.
So he wasn’t a hermit, he talked to people in cafés.
Apparently he did, very much so. I had presumed he was. When he was living in Cheesequake Village with his mother, he led a very hermetic existence, because he didn’t have a car. He didn’t drive, and Cheesequake Village, where he lived—because I went to visit him—it was so inaccessible, he was so in the middle of nowhere. And that was part of the reason we all felt it was imperative that he get out—that, once he got out of the hospital, that he would go somewhere else. Brooklyn was really the right idea, because there he could engage with his friend Mel, who was living up the block, and that he would be able to go eat at cafés. And it is true, I would call him up in the middle of the night—for him, 1 A.M. his time—and you’d hear, like “Yow!” “Brrr, br-br-br, br-br-br,” [girl’s voice] “Hi, Ric,”—you know, the girls saying, “Hi, Ric!”—it was unbelievable. I remember the happiness I felt hearing that in the background when I spoke to him because I felt, my God, he’s been reintegrated in this great way, although apparently, when he died, not completely.
He took care of himself, got his own food?
Apparently he never threw anything out, including, like, rotting cartons.… I didn’t go to the apartment, obviously, because I’m in L.A., but apparently he didn’t know of things like laundry and throwing things out and so forth. A very peculiar—and I don’t mean a Collyer brothers’ thing where he had to collect every newspaper, but personal hygiene was not his strong point.
Did he spend a lot of time in movie theatres, haunting the repertory houses?
He did, but he also—he used to say, “I used to watch ’em all on television. You know, I don’t really talk about TV that much, but ‘Million Dollar Movie,’ ‘Chiller Theatre,’ all these movies, I saw them all—first time I ever saw ‘Rocco and His Brothers’—on television.” I said, “ ‘Rocco and His Brothers,’ you saw that on TV? That movie never plays on commercial television. ABC is going to show ‘Rocco and His Brothers’? When did you see that?” “Don’t worry about it.” That was a big one with him: “Don’t worry about it.” … For all of his craziness and homelessness qualities, he was fantastic. He was also a very sweet person. He always asked about my children, about my wife, which is more than I can say for most people, to be honest. I kept thinking, how does this guy have the time? How does he know about Umberto Giordano’s operas and can, at the same time, talk to me about some obscure movie by Alfred Werker?
How would you put such a character into a movie? How would you tell a story about someone who lived that way?
You know, in some ways, without me knowing it consciously—because I did the first draft of “Two Lovers” on my own—“Two Lovers” is sort of about him. When I went into his apartment—I’ll never forget this—in Cheesequake Village, there was a photograph of a very handsome man in a tuxedo, and I said, “Oh, who’s that?” and he said, “Me.” And it was a picture, I guess, from the early to mid-seventies, and Menello had a bit of a dashing quality. And I remember thinking, “Oh, Menello had this relationship with this woman and he was supposed to marry…” and there was this other woman, and he was, at one point, sort of dashing, but at the same time he had these problems, where he was living with his mother, he wouldn’t leave the apartment. And then, all of a sudden, the next thing I know I’m writing a whole script about it. And in some ways, that’s his story. He wasn’t a handsome guy like Joaquin Phoenix, but the truth of the matter is that, in his day, he was. And he was attractive to the ladies; it’s so weird to contemplate that, but… God, it breaks my heart actually, it’s kind of difficult for me. Yesterday, I picked up the phone. I was going to call him about something, and all of a sudden you realize you can’t do that.
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Wes Anderson sent word, via e-mail, in memory of Ric:
In particular, Anderson adds,
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P.S. The blog post that Gray refers to may be this one, or it may be this one, of deeper cinematic and personal significance, by my friend Glenn Kenny. It’s an interview with Ric’s friend Mel Neuhaus, who fills in lots of crucial aspects of Ric’s work, including his plans for movie projects of his own. And here’s Ric in action, together with his friend, in an episode of “That Menello Show,” on YouTube.
Richard Brody continues to remember Ric Menello in a conversation with Rick Rubin, the music producer and co-founder of Def Jam Records who brought Ric on board to direct music videos in the eighties, and also introduced him to Gray.
This article originally stated that Ric Menello died on March 4, 2013. It has been updated with correct the date of his death, March 1st.
Illustration by Jashar Awan.
