Michael Corrente Photo courtesy of Iridium Entertainment.

I’m in the waiting room at The Post Factory in Manhattan, a huge space hosting editing rooms galore and young people sitting at  their desks or walking around with an intense bustle of a small Pentagon. I am waiting for Michael Corrente, a fellow Rhode Islander and the Director of “FEDERAL HILL”, “AMERICAN BUFFALO” and “OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE” and I’m clearing my head of any preconceptions or hearsay about him (we native Rhode Islanders tend to pick up gossip and scuttlebutt as if it were lint on black velvet) just as he walks out from the editing room wearing a casual shirt and a 7 o’clock shadow. 

“Come in, come in,” he waves.

Arranging the table for a guest who drops in for coffee, he’s casual, but the loose shirt has a laser on top of it, I can tell. “So-and-so says hello and he says, “Great guy, and he’s doing so much for the State. But why the hell are they busting his balls! Jesus. I can’t believe it. What is it with Rhode Island?”

“I know,” I say, but I save what I want to say for later.

“I’d like to show you some of my latest film. It’s coming out in the fall…”

Frozen on a broad monitor screen, an image waits to be released from limbo. The lights go down. The image comes to life.

Luminous, horizonlike… scenes…a Catholic mass…three young boys in a pew… a close shot on bleeding Jesus…a coin thrown into the air…vastness of a beach … a gangland shooting…

A pause in the movie. The lights go on.

“Powerful,” I say.

“I’m doing a private screening in Rhode Island in a couple of weeks,” he says. “We have to raise another million for the film, but let’s find a place where we can talk. The investors are coming into the screening room in a few minutes.”

Corrente is still an “independent” film maker who still has to struggle to make his films. I’ve already heard (the lint factor, remember?) that he is masterful as a producer and at raising money. I’ve even heard one guy in the business say, “I wish I had Michael producing for me. He can get anything.” Corrente has come far since his first film, FEDERAL HILL, which he did by raising money on his own from friends, family and the community, for eighty thousand dollars. The budget for his upcoming film is five million.

We walk around the space and peek in room after room looking for a place to talk.

“This one,” he says, and he sticks his head in.

The Post Factory in Manhattan. It's where the Boss (Michael Corrente) works. Photos by Vin Fraioli.

“Can we come in?”

A man hidden behind a computer stands up looking as neat as a science teacher from the 1960’s.

“I’m planning to make eleven horror films! Eleven!  I’d like to shoot them all in Rhode Island in one location. For ten million dollars. Hey, what better place. There are some of the best actors in the country. From Trinity Rep!”

From behind the computer, the pair of 1960’s glasses begins to recite running tickertape of information about this project as Corrente sits back and nods, then adds, “The Sci-Fi Channel was bought for 1.5 million dollars ten years ago, and now it’s worth…what?”

“…3.1 billion dollars” comes the voice behind the monitor.

Corrente gets excited. “Horror films. It’s a cash cow business. It’s a license to print money!”

I have the distinct feeling that Corrente the entrepreneur, the strategist, the director walks the tightrope between making art and money. It’s an impression which will become stronger as we talk and I, of all people, should know. I have been an entrepreneur myself, having learned that Art, like Crime, doesn’t pay, so I went into Real Estate.

I ask him. Point blank.

“If you could make a film without having to worry about money, producers, commercial return, what would you do? What would be your subject?”

I sit back and wait for the report to my rocket. Something biographical, I expect. Something esoteric. Some historical event, imbedded in the imagination?

He looks at me.

“I can tell you right now what it would be.

He does (and I will not print what he tells me as it would weaken the surprise).

But I will tell you, he is beside himself with passion for the project.

“It opens up like this, BANG!”

Corrente jumps off the chair. He moves to the center of the room and now Corrente, the actor, takes over, the one who got his start at Trinity Repertory playing in roles like “Betrayal” and “Inherit the wind”.

“Picture this!” Corrente smacks his palms together.

Miming, grimacing, pulling, Corrente shows us the movie he wants to make. There is something Neapolitan about him, for those of you who know about Naples and the Commedia dell’arte. Not tall, not stocky, young looking and physical, he talks with his body.

“This film will be the culmination of my entire career,” he says. “I was born to make it. Not to say, that it will be a great movie, but no one else was meant to direct this film. All of the pieces of the puzzle in my career are coming together which began with FEDERAL HILL. That film started as a one-act play then became a screenplay. I shopped it around to director after director, but nobody wanted to do it, so I did it myself. Richard Crudo was my DP and still is and now, he’s the president of the ASC. All these years, it seems, as Adrian Hall, the Founding Director of Trinity Rep used to say, I’ve been filling up my creative well getting ready to do this and now I’m ready. But we have to get out of here. Somebody needs the room.”

Once more, we become nomads and search the studio for a quiet spot to talk. We find it. A coffee table. A few chairs. Now, the subject comes around to growing up in Rhode Island

“Tell me, where did you grow up?”

I learn where he was born, where he moved, what he did, and, like a therapy session, we talk about the inevitable father, manifested and conjured by the artist.

“I was the youngest of six,” Corrente says, “so the sun rose and set on me. My father came from the old country. He was in construction and couldn’t read or write and made a living renovating but the guy would do whatever he could for me. He encouraged me, telling me ‘Hey, if this guy could make a movie, so can you’. He had a love for the movies since he was a boy and I’ll tell you why. He grew up without a father and when he was a boy, between the ages of four and eleven, his mother couldn’t afford a babysitter when she went to work, so she dropped him off at the local movie theater and he would spend the entire day watching films. Can you picture this little kid, his eyes wide open in front of the screen? He got to know every actor, every movie, every line. And he memorized them. You are so lucky, I told him.”

Corrente himself learned construction and when he came to New York City twenty years ago and rather than donning a waiter’s jacket like so many other actors, he went into the renovation business swinging a hammer. He worked on apartments, homes, making more money than most directors did. I hear between the lines, watching the choreography of his hands that he was not the type to settle for the poverty of the struggling artist. Within a short time, he had reserved two apartments for himself in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons. “Hey, my father said, ‘If they put the Popsicle in front of you, it strengthens the will.’”

Movies, for him, I see, are a piece of business. To make money. That practical side of the artist who cares about how they live and how to translate work into not merely an artistic journey, but a concrete living. And I know about this, all too well. I’ve just visited a friend of mine, who declares himself an “artist” and refuses to get a “real” job, as he waits for his big chance to direct a major film. Guys like him are like clams without a shell, expecting the world to protect him and to pay his ticket. Corrente, however, would jump out of that chair right now to grab a hammer and two-by-four if he had to make a living and now there’s that lint again I carried on my black velvet jacket, of how aggressive he can be when it comes to raising money for his projects.

“Listen,” he says. “I tell young people who want to get into this business, at school, they should spend one semester on craft and technique and the other three and a half years teaching you how to raise money, because this business is all about raising money.”

Now, I succumb to a cliché, as an interviewer to interviewee and I ask him, “Forget about money, budgets, producers, investors, etcetera, which movie would you make if you had none of those concerns?”

“What, do you mean my dream movie?”

He considers. He dips into his well of being and looks straight at me.

“I told you. It’s a film which will be the culmination of my entire life. It’s where I come from. It’s happening sooner than I expected, but hey…”

There is that silence now, an almost palpable mist, which floats between words and sentences.

“Well, I have to get back into the editing room,” he says. “I don’t want to be rude to the investors.”

He shakes my hand and sees me out.

What a nice guy, I say to myself.

Later, on my way home, I think about Corrente’s father. I remember something a friend told me years ago. That friend, now a surgeon, used to help his father who like Corrente’s, was a contractor. “One time,” he said, “I was working with my father. I hit my finger with the hammer so hard, I started to yell. My finger started to bleed and my father came over to me and said, “Good. Now this profession can get into your blood, straight into your bloodstream.”

I want to tell this story to Corrente, who as contractor, artist, actor, fundraiser, must have whacked his finger mighty hard, on more than one occasion.

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Vin Fraioli, born in Providence, is an author of numerous articles and the book “change of View.” He still lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two kids when he’s not traveling around the world giving lectures and concerts as a classical guitarist. He is also a sometimes actor, now working on his own movie script.