Joe Dipasquale Back from Hollywood By Glenn Gramigna DiPasquale has begun laying plans to produce a trilogy of three feature films devoted to the Italian-American experience, with the second to be shot in Buffalo. Hollywood had been the undis-puted Land of Dreams for Lockport’s Joe DiPasquale as long as he could remember. As soon as he was eighteen, he hightailed it for the hills of Beverly where he brashly pitched his story ideas to studio big shots face to face. During his college years, he pretty much majored in the movie biz at Syracuse. After graduation, he headed for the Left Coast again where he produced two hit network TV movies. Where does a young man go to find a third great cinematic challenge after scaling such heights before the age of thirty-three? Cannes? Aspen? Perhaps the bright lights of Broadway or the tax free peaks of Switzerland? No. Instead of swimming with the sharks, DiPasquale decided to come home to seek his next great project right here, amongst his family and earliest friends in WNY. He’s also teaching screenwriting and film producing classes at SUNY’s University at Buffalo. How would you like to learn the movie business in a WNY classroom from someone with a decade-long successful track record in Hollywood? University of Buffalo student Julia Mordaunt has been getting exactly that opportunity along with dozens of her peers for the past two years. “It’s just a great thing to be able to learn about moviemaking from someone who has really been there himself,” says Mordaunt, 21. “He’s helped students get internships with NBC and the NYS Film Office and he’s been available to help me with this screenplay whenever I’ve called him day or night.” “The chance to do things like working with the students at UB is the reason I came back,” DiPasquale says. “I missed the honesty I find in people here, the authenticity with which they live their lives, the sense of belonging. The willingness to reveal themselves that you get here, not in LA where everything is based on how people look rather than who they are.” DiPasquale sees Western New York as “a living movie set,” filled with “beautiful architecture, fantastic neighborhoods, and interesting people,” the kind of place that would serve as an ideal backdrop in which to make the kind of feature films he’s always wanted to make. DiPasquale’s had an internship at Paramount during college, and then worked in TV movie development at Fox and ABC, before earning major kudos for his contributions to 1992’s Doing Time on Maple Drive, a ground breaking portrait of a dysfunctional family starring Jim Carrey. Finally in the late nineties, DiPasquale got his chance to executive produce two T.V. movies: the 1997 Lifetime presentation, Any Mother’s Son, which told the true story of a gay sailor who had been murdered in Japan; and 1998’s CBS A Father for Brittany, about the struggles of former Cheektowaga resident Keith Lussier to keep custody of his adopted daughter after his wife died. DiPasquale then elected to continue his cinematic career amidst the promise and problems of a much chillier land. “I remember that after we finished shooting Brittany in Toronto, I went to Niagara Falls, Ont. to help my maternal grandmother cover her fig trees for the winter and I thought to myself as I was helping her, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to get back to my roots. To the person I really am and want to be.’ Right after that I decided to move back.” Since moving his Bright Street Pictures offices from Los Angeles to Lexington Ave., DePasquale has begun laying plans to produce a trilogy of three feature films devoted to the Italian-American experience, with the second to be shot in Buffalo. Meanwhile, besides volunteering for non-creative yeoman’s duty at both Shea’s and Studio, he has ceaselessly buttonholed city and county officials about setting up a Buffalo Film Office (Did you know Rochester’s has brought in $40 million in 10 years?); helped those working successfully to get the Erie Canal Terminus included in the Inner Harbor Project; and even manned shovel and spade on community clean-up days at the historic Buffalo Central Terminal. “I came back here looking for inspiration and I found it,” DiPasquale states. “I feel like my best work is yet to come.” Glenn Gramigna writes for many Western New York and nationally-based publications. COOL PEOPLE CONTINUED SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top