An Animated Lunch With Larry

Interviewing Larry Guterman is like trying to yank wisdom teeth. It's hard enough to get him simply to talk about himself. It's virtually impossible to extract anything serious from his mouth.

But the parallel seems to end there. Wisdom teeth are not funny. Guterman is. With a wry, self-deprecating wit, he attempted to explain what it's like to be a physics major-computer science jock-animator-filmmaker-artist-Harvard student. "Harvard is a sunny day, a leisurely stroll through the Harvard Yard."

Lowell House roommate Roy Sinai '87 describes Guterman's casual demeanor. "Larry," says Sinai, "takes his work and his play very seriously, but he's never serious. his whole attitude is very relaxed. Even in the most horrible of nightmare situations he won't get too worked up about anything. And I can always relax in his company, just sit on his bed and talk." To this, Guterman pipes in, "We like to play nude nerf basketball in front of the Lowell courtyard at night."

A lunch with Larry and his former roommate Jeffrey R. Chapman '86 ("my collaborator," insists Guterman)--demonstrates more of the same. Sitting in the new Cambridge War Memorial Park, the pair face the requisite, serious kind of interview questions. The two, who co-wrote and co-directed Larry's latest film, politely respond with the requisite, serious kind of interview answers. Except that it was all in mocking tones. Chapman, asked to describe Guterman, replies: "Once in an atomic age a true genius passes through Harvard's gates. Larry encompasses the diversity of Harvard within itself."

A few facts did surface, however. Guterman spent his childhood moving around with his family from Maryland to Montreal to Calgary, finally settling in Toronto in 1976 and attending the Hebrew Day School there. He matriculated at MIT for his freshman year, but subsequently transfered to Harvard. Chapman explains his friend's reasons for abandoning East Cambridge. "Larry was under the impression that [MIT] was a good training school for the visual arts."

When Byerly Hall gave him the go-ahead, Guterman decided to defer the offer for a year instead and travel to Israel and Egypt. Then, once at Harvard, he decided to comp the Lampoon art board and learn Arabic, both of which he did with great aplomb. Sinai explains, "Larry is extremely broad-minded politically, and he's always conscious of political issues--that's an important part of him. It's hard to find someone so willing to listen to anybody else."

Although a declared physics major, Guterman has also managed to squeeze in four computer science classes for fun. And, for the past three summers, he has attended Sheridan College in Toronto, earning the equivalent of a junior college degree for his work in classical animation. Of these summers, he says, "First I was gonna work in a lab, a bio-chem lab. But then I thought that would be kind of a drag."

The dialogue between Guterman and Chapman continues. "Larry's always been torn between his technical and creative drives."

"I did work at a lab in MIT."

"What kind of a lab was that, Larry?" asks his friend.

"Just, um, it was, the stuff we were doing was..."

"Yes, Larry?" Chapman prods.

"Oh, okay, the intention of the project I worked on was to ascertain the effect of a Vitamin A-deficient diet on rats infected with the herpes simplex-one virus."

"Is that the 'herpes' herpes virus?" asks the naive interviewer.

With a stern and concerned deadpan look, Larry replies, "No, that would be the simplex-two."

A friend of Guterman's stops by the park bench to say hello. "People constantly recognize him in Harvard Square," explains Chapman.

Guterman's summers of animated bliss led him to take animation here at Harvard. Then, he embarked upon the wonderful world of Harvard filmmaking. Rally (pronounced rah-lee), his aforementioned endeavor with "collaborator" Chapman, became the focus of Guterman's attentions during his final semester as a senior. "It's a macabre, black-comedy, murder-thriller kind of thing," Chapman says of the film.

Rally, whose title derives from a nickname Larry's roommates have given him (a nickname Sinai contends "makes no sense and is for the critics to figure out") is actually the collaboration of Guterman and most of his close friends and roommates. In the film, Guterman--who deftly plays himself with a Woody Allen flair--speaks to the audience of his suspicions concerning Sinai's plot to kill him.

Daniel Vilmure '87, one of Guterman's film drones, contends, "The one thing about Larry that convinced me he was going to be a good filmmaker was when he was working on Rally he had this glaze in his eyes, and he walked around sort of like in a trance, and he only considered people in terms of his film. He would ask, 'Are you gonna help me carry this equipment?,' 'Are you gonna be an extra?' He was obsessed. That's sign of a true artist. So I gave him the nickname 'Sergei.' You know, like Sergei Eisenstein."

Guterman and Chapman continue their dialogue. "It was really an in-house production with everyone's skills complementing one another's," says Guterman, half-seriously. "Jeff and I had a vision. We had the same vision, and because we had complementary skills and abilities we were able to synthesize them into one unified strategy. We had an idea about the film, and it came out just the way we planned it."

Says Chapman, "We had the technical and creative tools to make our vision a reality."

"We spent a lot of time just bouncing ideas off one another. Setting up a story board."

"It was sort of an open forum of ideas."

Guterman says he and Chapman had tried to collaborate on a number of projects before Rally, "but we could never get our act together."

"The reason we couldn't get our act together is because we weren't concurrently awake for more than two hours out of any 24. Larry sleeps during the day. I sleep at night. I'd get up in the morning and Larry's light would still be on. He'd be totally asleep, with all his clothes on. I'd come back from class in the afternoon and the room would be dark and Larry would still be asleep. Except this time his books would be on the floor."

Does Guterman do most of his creative work at night?"

"Yeah," he replies, adding a mighty display of dialogue. "I wanna talk about Jon Lederman, musical boy wonder." Lederman, Class of '87, is Guterman's other roommate, who composed the musical score for Rally. "Of course, we had a bit of a row at one point. At first I didn't think the music was appropriate for the film. When I realized he was right and I was wrong, it was getting really close to the mix date, and he had to compose and record a lot of stuff. The day before the mix I was putting an incredible amount of pressure on him, and he came five hours late with the tape. But not before tripping over cords which caused $2000 worth of musical equipment to plummet into Lowell's unforgiving steel-reinforced floors.

"So Jon came running like a bulldog into Severwith the tape. I said to him, 'Do you want me topay for the damage?' and he said, 'No.' Then Isaid, 'You're not blaming me for this, are you?'He said, 'No. But if it wasn't for you this neverwould have happened.'"

Next year Guterman has offers either to work forcomputer animation companies in California or totry his hand at film production work in New York.Again, this information did not come easily.

Then he mumbled something about his cloggedears and, returning to practical concerns,mentioned something about needing a date for theLast Dance