This is a collection of my Beatles memorabilia. I fell in love with the Beatles as a 13 year-old kid in a boarding school in England in 1963 - before anyone really heard about the Beatles here in the US. This is their first (mono) album, the single She Loves You and their first EP Twist & Shout. In that year I collected every clipping that mentioned the Beatles in 2 school exercise books that are now 60 years old. scotch tape has long since disintegrated, by the clippings remain.
This brass tankard is actually a souvenir my parents took from their service in Egypt in WW2 and is made from an artillery shell casing. The medal is from George VI and the newspaper is the front page from the Egypt Times on VJ Day.
This is my trusty director's viewfinder that hung around my neck for all my decades of filming commercials. I also recovered literally thousands of one-hour-photo packets from my film shoots over the years. Finally this is my first Cannes Lion - a bronze for a National Heart Foundation commercial I filmed in Australia when I was 22. All my life when asked what I did, I always put down "Director" This was my craft that I plied for 50 years.
I directed Schmitts Gay, the SNL spot with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler in 1991. The piece ran on their season opener and we were there for the live show. This spot has run numerous times. They turned it into a trading card and I still have one of the bottles we made for the shoot!
In June 1995 I was awarded the Crystal Apple for services to the New York City film industry by then mayor Rudy Giuliani. The award was presented at a ceremony at Gracie Mansion. Alongside me were the other recipients: the actor Ron Silver, director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) and MTV CEO Tom Freston, The NYC film commissioner at the time was Patricia Reed Scott (George C Scott's ex-wife). Bruce Willis was in NY working on Die Hard With a Vengeance. This was one of the more memorable days of my career! It took a number of attempts to shoot the photograph especially the spherical glass award. I finally settled on a single tungsten fresnel and let the reflections and refractions define the sphere.
This handcrafted Tansu Japanese cabinet from the 20's has been in our family for as long as I can remember. The piece traveled from South Africa to England to Australia before I finally brought it here to the US.
We grew up with this clock - now 65 years old - that remained on our mantlepiece all our lives. In the following images, I include the first family photo taken in 1958 the year after we emigrated from South Africa to England. The clock was a gift to my Dad as we left South Africa by boat on the Union Castle line.
The inside of the clock shows the original wind-up key and the chime mechanism
This is my Nagra III. First invented in the late 50's by the Kudelski Company in Switzerland. This machine, which cost over $1,000 (about $10,000 today) pioneered the recording of on location sound. The Nagra III is still used to this today. At the age of 20, I was made head-of-audio at the ad agency that I joined at age 19 after dropping out of university.
When I was 21, I listened to a US radio serial broadcast on Australian radio called "ChickenMan" - 3-minute comedy episodes. Locally, 2 geniuses Fysh Rutherford and Greg McAlpine, whose amazing illustrations are seen here, developed a groundbreaking satirical Sunday newspaper comic strip called "Iron Outlaw and Steel Sheila" (Sheila being Australian slang for a woman). I managed to get in touch and persuaded them that we could create a radio comic based on their strip.
Amazingly they agreed!
They wrote the brilliant scripts and I produced (and paid for) the five 3-minute episodes. I even started my first company RADIO COMICS. My brother, who was working at the local recording studio recorded and mixed the show and I sent a dozen or so tapes to radio stations all over the country.
However.... I had not actually researched what a station would actually pay and the offers from one or two stations were so low (I remember $2/episode), that I sadly ended my first business a few months later.
This is the first Polaroid camera developed by Edwin Land in 1948. A gift from my brother-in-law
This leather mask was a souvenir from Venice Italy that we bought when we took our kids there 20 years ago.
A local piece of pottery
