We always worked hard on our preparation for interviews, aiming to ask questions most other interviewers never posed. Dan also joined me for interviews with Francesco Rosi, Jack Lemmon, Paul Schrader (as ex-Detroiters, we had a few bones to pick with him on Blue Collar), and Spike Lee, among many others. Dan also collaborated with me on organizing special supplements and critical symposia on films we regarded as major events, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, among others. Throughout subsequent decades, Dan contributed scores of articles, reviews, and interviews, and co-edited two anthologies of The Cineaste Interviews. He was also a good friend and the encounters with him were a real pleasure.”
In subsequent years, Dan and I interviewed Costa numerous times, and became good friends with the filmmaker, who wrote about Dan’s passing in a recent email to me: “I had admiration for his work, his personal history. That positive experience encouraged me to invite Dan to join the Cineaste editorial board, and his name first appeared on the masthead in our Summer 1970 issue. Since I knew Dan had been in Greece in 1962–63 on a Fulbright Scholarship, and so had been there during the Lambrakis Affair and had definite views of the right-wing machinations behind that political assassination, I invited him to join me to interview Costa-Gavras during the filmmaker’s visit to New York for the premiere of Z (1969). Indeed, throughout our decades-long friendship and collaboration, I always looked up to Dan as a sort of wiser, older, more experienced brother. Our discussions made it clear that we saw eye to eye on many issues related to film and politics, although I was also aware of his expertise in so many other areas. We discovered that we both had grown up in working-class families in Detroit, but had never met there, although it’s possible we both saw films at Wayne State University’s Monteith Film Society or attended sessions at the downtown Artists’ Workshop. He was nearly a decade older than me, and more widely read and educated than myself at the time. I met Dan in New York City in 1969, just two years after I founded Cineaste, while I was a film student at New York University.
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