Fear and kvetching in New Haven

By Jessica Winter

DuShey wrote and directed this 40-minute opus about a nebbishy, bespectacled freshman--a kid from Brooklyn named, yes, Allen Konigs-berg--with a crush on a girl in his entryway. Allen (Brian Johnson, CC '00) lusts, pines, and kvetches. He even solicits advice from his impossibly buff roommate Keith (Trevor Hawkins, DC '99), who informs him early in the school year that if the Animal House poster on their bedroom door is upside down, the bunk is a-rockin' so Allen shouldn't come a-knockin'. (Allen worries: "But what if I need something, like a book, or my retainer?") Needless to say, Bluto remains on his head for the better part of a semester, and the stream of nubile lasses pouring in and out of Keith's Den of Sin only intensifies our Allen's lovelorn despair. He only has four eyes for Lindsey (Jenny Bottomly, BK '99), who is, of course, pretty, smart, sweet, and yet somehow inscrutable. Complications derive not just from Allen's own insecurities but also via Keith's roving eye.

Producer Beau Bauman, SM '99, calls Across the Hall "an anti-romantic comedy," and the mix of intellectual humor and slapstick, the rabbi jokes, the anecdotes about Aunt Selma's passover seder, and even the vague misogyny (one of Allen's best quips compares the pickings at the average Yale party to "the bar scene in Star Wars") all pay tribute to Woody Allen.

But just as Woody's films are often composed as love letters to New York City, Across the Hall is as much an homage to Yale as it is to a past master of filmmaking. "I see the movie as two things," DuShey said. "It's over and around being influenced by Woody Allen--it's more of a joke about being influenced by Woody Allen. But I also see it as a Yale movie, a way to aestheticize the Yale experience." Allen--encouraged by Lindsey, who admires his quick wit--tries out for the Exit Players and performs stand-up at Six Feet Under. Yalies party down at the Silliman Beach Club, and DuShey's camera pulls back demurely as Allen and Lindsey share a first kiss in front of Sterling. For a Romeo and Juliet dream sequence, DuShey was this close to securing a cameo by Professor Harold Bloom, who was to appear from the wings and explain to the audience why Allen's anxiety of influence has caused him to forget Romeo's lines (parodying a scene from Annie Hall). Alack the day, a scheduling conflict prevented the good professor's appearance.

The spark for Across the Hall lit up the environs of yet another Yale institution one day last spring. "I was sitting in Naples in the middle of the day, and I just thought up the basic idea for a movie: two guys after the same girl," DuShey recalled. He fired off the script over a week and a half's time the following autumn, while Bauman procured both equipment from UPIX and Yale Audio-Visual, and full Sudler funding. "I have only great things to say about the filmmaking scene here," DuShey said. "It's very supportive in terms of people and funding. But there's no one scene, so there's a lot of space to do your own thing." What DuShey has done may be pilfered from a certain Manhattanite, but he loots a cinematic legacy with such style and self-awareness, while infusing it with so much wistful affection for both young love and Old Blue, that he succeeds in making it his own thing after all.

Photo of Trevor Hawkins, DC '99, and Brian Johnson, CC '00, courtesy of Beau Bauman, SM '99.

Back to A&E...