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| Risking his neck: Bruce Davison gets
prison punishment for pedophiles in Short Eyes. |
“I got the job when the cast, mostly junkies, told the original
director if he came back, he’d be killed,” filmmaker
Robert M. Young says of Short Eyes, his 1977 adaptation of
the play by late poet, Lower East Sider, and heroin addict Miguel
Piñero, which is reopening this week at the Quad. “I
then spent a week feeding Miguel cherry brandy so he wouldn’t
get a fix. Together we restructured the movie.” Piñero
had written and starred in Short Eyes—about a mostly
black and Puerto Rican cell block’s reaction to a white pedophile—as
an inmate in Sing Sing, and when it became a Tony-nominated hit,
Hollywood took notice. Still, it was a struggle to get the film
made. “The studio wanted Pacino or some Hollywood star, but
Miguel said the lead had to be Puerto Rican,” the Bronx-born
Young, now 78, recalls. “He wouldn’t let it lose its
integrity.” During the six-week shoot, the director became
awed by Piñero (played by Benjamin Bratt in the eponymous 2001
biopic). Once, when Young altered the script, Jose Perez, the actor
Piñero had fought for, simply quit. “Halfway through
the movie, my main character walks!” says Young. “Miguel
just says, ‘Write the son of a bitch out!’ That’s
who he was—the American Jean Genet, willing to throw it all
away.” Perez returned, and the film Pauline Kael called “the
most frightening movie about American prisons ever made” was
released. “It was a non-union film, so I got suspended from
the Director’s Guild and was never paid,” Young says.
“I even got fined $1,500—but I’d give my eyeteeth
to do it again.” —BEN KAPLAN
Opens March 7
Quad Cinema
34 W. 13th Street
www.quadcinema.com
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