Class Notes - October 6, 1999
Class notes features
Filmmaker Debra Kent '77 directs her own life
My career path is so odd," admits Debra Kent '77, who over the
past 20 years in the entertainment business has been an assistant director
for filmmakers as diverse as Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, and Ron Shelton,
and has worked on TV programs ranging from CBS's Lonesome Dove to HBO's
Sex and the City. She was production manager for The 24-Hour Woman, an independent
film starring Rosie Perez, and most recently for John Turturro's Illuminata,
which opened last month.
Kent majored in architecture at Princeton, and, after she graduated, went to work for her father's architecture firm. "We were not a good match," she says. "He fired me a lot, and I quit a lot, and ultimately I realized it wasn't for me. And I always loved movies." She moved to Los Angeles and became a staff writer and eventually editor of "this crazy magazine" published in Beverly Hills called The Gold Book, a leather-bound, yearly periodical that cost $40 and was printed in five languages, including Japanese and Farsi. After a few years writing profiles like "Men and Their Toys" and "The Ladies Who Lunch With Ivana Trump," Kent decided to try the movies.
While working at Lorimar Productions, she was accepted by the Director's Guild training program. The first film she was assigned to was in New York. "It was for Woody Allen," she says. "Two days later I left my apartment, my job-everything-and I went to New York and started working for Woody."
Although most movies are in production for 10 or 12 weeks, Allen's film, September, took 12 months. "It was one of Woody's bad experiences," Kent explains. "He shot the movie three times." After Allen wrapped the film, Kent returned to L.A., only to get called back for more shooting. "I told them I couldn't come back for just a couple of weeks of reshoots," she recalls, "but then they said, 'no-it's not just a couple of scenes. It's the entire movie.' I was on the movie forever, but it was great. The best thing about it was that Woody keeps good hours: You start at seven, you wrap at seven, and you have some semblance of a life. And in the film business, that's pretty good."
Once again in L.A. after working on Allen's next film, Alice, Kent worked on bigger-budgeted studio movies while writing and producing; during this time she optioned a book and set up the project at United Artists. Since then she has moved to New York, where she's been turning down larger assignments in favor of work that turns over faster, such as commercials and title sequences for TV and films. "I've done a lot of big-budget films and I prefer working on indies," she says. "I get calls to do features, but they just take all your time-six months. You can't do anything else. The smaller things only take six weeks." Now with the freedom to work on her own projects and screenplays, Kent can afford to keep her life as eclectic as she wants.
-Stephen Garrett '92
Columbia basketball coach Armond Hill '85 heads into a new season
In 1971, Armond Hill was a hotshot point guard for Bishop Ford High
in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a two-time All-America with
scholarship offers rolling in from all the big-time athletic powers, from
Maryland, Notre Dame, Louisville. Hill turned them all down. He wanted to
go to Princeton. "I wanted more than anything to play, to get better,"
says Hill. "But I knew that basketball was going to end-that the ball
could be taken out of my hands at any moment-and I wanted to balance my
life."
He did just that. After spending a postgraduate year at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey to raise his grades sufficiently for admission to Princeton, Hill forged one of the finest careers in the history of Tiger hoops, leading his team to the 1975 National Invitational Tournament championship and pulling down the 1975-76 Ivy League Player of the Year award. Drafted in the first round by the Atlanta Hawks, he played eight seasons in the NBA before hanging up his sneakers and returning to Princeton in 1983 to complete his degree in psychology. From there Hill moved into coaching, first at Lawrenceville and later as an assistant to Pete Carril at Princeton. Along the way, he continued to cultivate a lifelong interest in art-drawing and painting, serving on the board of the Atlanta Ballet, working as a researcher at the High Museum in Atlanta, and later as curator of the Lawrenceville art museum.
Now 46 and beginning his fourth season as head coach at Columbia, Hill finds himself trying to persuade some of today's young players to make the choice he made 28 years ago, to pass up the free ride and come to an Ivy League school where there are no athletic scholarships and where basketball is only part of the package. In this show-me-the-money era, balance is not an easy sell. "Today everyone wants that instant success," says Hill, taking a few moments on an early August afternoon to talk by phone from his office, the grind of a month of recruiting travel reflected in his voice. "They want the NCAA tournament, ESPN coverage, and every sneaker in the book. And they all want to be pros."
Hill urges prospective players not so much to lower their sights as to broaden them. Even then, he knows, the odds are against him. According to Hill, Columbia's academic standards effectively preclude him from going after 95 percent of the kids he sees. In addition, he admits, Columbia's lack of recent on-court success-the Lions haven't had a winning season since 1993-puts him at a recruiting disadvantage against perennial Ivy powerhouses Princeton and Penn. "The kid I'm going after is different from the one Penn or Princeton is talking to in terms of talent," says Hill. "But we're all looking for the same thing in terms of heart and character. We're all looking for the kid who loves to play. The kid who wants to get better." The kid with a sense of balance.
On this August afternoon, though, Hill clearly is ready to set aside the search and to start working with the players he already has. "I'm looking forward to getting back to basketball," he says. "It's time to go to work."
What about that concept of balance? Hill gives a weary laugh. "Well, I still try to get to an art opening now and then, just to go and look at something a little different"
In a way that's just what he has been doing all his life.
Whitney Darrow, Jr. '31, longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker, died of respiratory failure August 10. He was 89. Darrow was born in Princeton, where his father, Whitney Darrow 1903, was instrumental in the creation of the Princeton University Press, which was founded in order to publish Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Darrow grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at Princeton, he cut his comic teeth at The Daily Princetonian, where he wrote a humor column, and at The Princeton Tiger, where he was art editor.
But it was over the course of 50 years, beginning in 1933, that he flowered as one of The New Yorker's master draftsmen, drawing images of suburban couples, sexy young women, and children. All in all, Darrow created more than 1,500 cartoons, for which, contrary to custom, he wrote his own captions.
His drawing at the left was published in a history of the Press written by his father.
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