A Serenade from Frank Whaley
March 17, 2009

Actor/filmmaker Frank Whaley went the filmmaker route for his most recent project to come to DVD. The film, which Whaley wrote and directed, is New York City Serenade (Anchor Bay, Street: March 24), which concerns a pair of down-on-their-luck childhood friends—one a rock drummer (Chris Klein), the other an aspiring actor (Freddie Prinze, Jr.)—who, in the grand tradition of indie films about buddies in their late 20s, are trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Though the leading men portray New Yorkers and New York is in the title, a good deal of the film was shot outside of the city (there’s an extended sequence in the second half where the two travel to a low-end film festival in Kansas). Whaley, who lives in Manhattan, told me in an

“There’s a certain vibe to people who write and direct films in New York,” he said. “New York City Serenade is honest, authentic and human, while also being pretty stark and unsentimental. That’s a New York film!”

As an actor, Whaley has been directed by such filmmakers as John Woo (Broken Arrow), Andrew Bergman (The Freshman), Danny DeVito (Hoffa), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and John Hughes (Career Opportunities) and has obviously picked up a bit about the art of moviemaking tips from all of them. But it’s director Oliver Stone—with whom Whaley has worked five times—that he says he learned the most from.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 17, 2009 | Comments (0)