TREES LOUNGE + 1990s NYC

I’ve been busy finishing the new novel, so essays have been lacking of late. But last Saturday night I went to see the newly restored 4K of TREES LOUNGE at the Paris Theater and it’s left me pondering that time in my life. 

It was probably summerish 1995. 

I met Rina over at Eisenberg’s. The cafe was right across the street from the production company’s main offices on Fifth Avenue, and she could only slip away for a few minutes. 

She handed me a piece of paper and told me, “That’s your resumé. Memorize it and then come over,” and then she split almost immediately after.

Rina was a production coordinator, and we’d been working together on commercials and industrials for a year or so by this point. She’d just been hired to coordinate an indie feature, and she wanted me to be her assistant on it. I knew how she liked things related to production – paperwork, petty cash receipts, etc. She didn’t want to train someone new, and since I was deeply in-between gigs, I was hopeful it could work out.

The only problem was the simple fact that I didn’t have any feature production work on my resumé. 

This piece of paper I was memorizing at Eisenberg’s took care of that. It was full of gigs Rina had worked on that weren’t on her CV. She was fairly positive no one interviewing me was affiliated with any of these productions. But she wasn’t entirely sure.

I don’t remember much of the actual interview except that it was over pretty quickly and there were thankfully no real questions about my very fake resumé. 

The gig didn’t pay much, but it did pay.

The last indie feature I’d interviewed for before this one told me they expected me to file for unemployment WHILE I was working for them. They said my “wages” were 300 a week, but they would only actually be giving me 50 bucks in cash weekly. I was supposed to make up the difference by filing for unemployment while I worked for them under the table. This was pretty common with indie film production in the ‘90s in NYC. It sucked.

But this gig wasn’t that. This was legit. Low paying, but legit. 

Plus, it was with Steve Buscemi. I’d obviously seen and loved RESEVOIR DOGS, but it was IN THE SOUP and LIVING IN OBLIVION that I truly adored. Inside baseball narrative films about indie filmmaking in NYC were always my sweet spot. To this day, I feel like nothing quite captured the spirit of 1990s NYC indie filmmaking like the representation of the craft service table in LIVING IN OBLIVION: 

A few bananas. A styrofoam bowl full of peanut M+M’s. Some Entenmann’s. Cold coffee. A carton of turned milk. 

The spread was factually, tonally and spiritually correct.

I was hired to be the APOC (Assistant Production Office Coordinator) and mostly had to be told what my responsibilities were by Rina. I knew purchase orders, I knew petty cash, I knew how to put together pick up and return lists for the production assistants, but there were some feature film things I had never dealt with before on commercials or industrials.

The feature world and the commercial world in NYC were sort of alike and sort of different at the same time. They were both fruit, but they were different types of fruit.

One of the responsibilities I had on TREES that I had never had on commercials involved the script. In preproduction I would have to keep track of all the last-minute script changes, and once shooting started, I’d be responsible for putting the sides together. Those were the tiny, ¼ page xeroxed copies of the scenes they’d be shooting each day that everyone on set had in their back pockets.

Since Steve was also the writer, he’d have to sit with me and go over his changes. As a 25-year-old wanna be filmmaker, this was pure joy for me.

Steve would come into the office with dialogue and scene changes written on cocktail napkins, not because he was out all night in bars, but because the central location of TREES was the Trees Lounge bar. They’d be scouting and rehearsing, and he’d get ideas and scribble them down on the napkins from the set.

Steve was (and still is, I imagine) as wonderful as you’ve heard. 

I had been on some ugly sets, and later in my production life I would be on some even uglier ones. Manic shoots complete with crying crew members, narcissistic and abusive directors, and screaming producers. Years later, when I moved on to producing and EPing, I once had to get a director to agree that I would only bail him out if we were ACTIVELY in production. At all other times, (including pre and post) please call your lawyer. He makes more than me, anyway.

But Steve Buscemi and my TREES experience were not that. 

I don’t know if it came from his working crew or his being a fireman or just his being a decent human being, but he always respected and was thankful for the effort that his crew put into the production. Later in my life, as a producer and eventually as a director, I tried to emulate that as best as I could. 

I’m sure lots of other folks in production that have crossed paths with him throughout the years have done the same.

Film production – and especially indie film production – can be an excruciatingly tough gig. But it can also be such a fucking blast. 

Crews are trained to sacrifice. We are taught that the shoot, the shot, the film – all that is the more important than us as individuals, certainly more important than our health, physical, mental or otherwise. It’s hard to be on set day after day and not believe that. And when you do believe it and you get the shot, or you make the day, or production pulls a miracle out of its ass, the dopamine rush becomes something you will chase and chase from gig to gig.

So, when you’re lucky enough to work with a director that’s also a decent human being, it becomes a very special experience.

The hours were long in general, but in the week just before shooting they were even more so. I was burnt. I was tired. I kept forgetting to order lunch. I’d normally always get a turkey club from the Limelight Diner which was just a few blocks away. One fateful day, I ordered it late, like 3PM, and when it showed up, I ate not just the sandwich, but also the coleslaw. 

I imagine that coleslaw had been sitting out for most of the day at this point. Probably made at dawn, scooped into a tiny paper cup and stuck on an orange plastic tray in the kitchen to sit for hours and hours. Bacteria brewing and looking for an intestine.

It found mine.

I became violently ill almost immediately. Everybody in the office knew it, but what could they do about it? It was just a few days before shooting was set to start and we were against the wall. I would slip away to use the bathroom every thirty minutes. People tried not to make eye contact with me. I was a dead man walking, and if they looked into my eyes, they would have to acknowledge my sickness. They might feel responsible if I died. I dunno. I think everyone was ignoring my illness mostly because no one had the time for me to be sick.

Until Steve came in.

He was speaking with the producers and then saw me out of the corner of his eye. He gave me a nod and then turned back to his conversation, but I could tell he looked concerned. Finally, he excused himself and stepped over to me.

He asked me how I was. 

“Unwell” was the only appropriate answer. He told me I should go home and take care of myself. One (or both, I can’t remember) of the producers jumped in. 

“No,” they said. “He’s fine. We can’t let anyone go. We need everyone here.”

Steve looked back at them incredulously and said, “His face is green. He’s going home.”

They relented. Steve asked me where I lived. When I told him Sunnyside in Queens, he gave me a twenty. “Take a cab.”

I’m sure my not being in the production office fucked something up. I have no idea. I didn’t get back to the office until 2-3 days later (and probably fifteen pounds lighter).

But my absence being a burden on production didn’t factor into anything in Steve’s head. He saw that I needed help, and he helped me.

It was as simple as that.

A few more quick TREES memories… 

I used to have to call the actors for various reasons; call times, paperwork, whatever. Calling Seymour Cassell was always a joy. I don’t think he ever answered his phone any of the times I called, which was fine by me. I wasn’t calling to chat; I was calling to get his voicemail. After a few rings, his message would start. 

You’d hear about 20 seconds of jazz and then Seymour’s voice would come on and say something to the effect of, “You hear that? That’s jazz, baby. And me? I’m Seymour. Leave a message.” I’m pretty sure he changed the song each week. I loved it.

TREES was Chloe Sevigny’s first feature after KIDS. At some point there was some paperwork production needed her to sign, something about insurance, I think? I can’t remember. But we needed it by a deadline, and I couldn’t get a hold of her, so I started sending interns over to her apartment to get her to sign it. At the time she lived with Harmony Corine over on St. Marks. Every single intern I sent over there would come back to the production office debilitatingly high and with no signed papers. Chloe was never home, but Harmony was and he was either incredibly generous with his weed, or he just really liked getting my interns high. I have no idea how or when we got the paper signed, but I assumed we did.

The wrap party was at Coney Island High (RIP) on St. Marks Place. It was easily one of the top ten drunkest nights of my life. When I left the production office to head over to the venue, I had 3-4K in cash in my pocket to pay the owners of the club. The next morning, I woke up on my couch with no idea of how I got home and panicked message after panicked message being left on my answering machine. “Where the fuck was the money?” was asked repeatedly by a few different people.

I had gotten violently shitfaced with four thousand dollars in cash in my front pocket and I had forgotten to pay the venue. 

I took a deep breath and slid my hand into my jeans. The cash was still there. An Uncle Billy fucks up and closes the Savings and Loan level moment was graciously avoided. 

And finally, a few years after working on TREES, I was standing with a girlfriend on West Broadway and Houston waiting to cross, when she pointed out that Steve Buscemi was on the other side of the street about to cross toward us.

She elbowed me. “That’s that actor you said you knew.” 

I got a little sweaty. “I said I worked with him, not that I knew him.”

“Are you gonna say hi?” she asked. 

The light changed and we started crossing. I didn’t want to say hello to him, but mostly because I didn’t want to bug him, I didn’t want to find out that he didn’t remember me, I didn’t wanna seem weird.

As we passed him and I said nothing, I could feel the disappointment pouring off my girlfriend.  

And then after a few more steps, I heard a very distinctive voice say, “Alex? How you doing?”

We chatted for a few minutes and then we were off on our respective ways.

The new 4K restoration of TREES LOUNGE is playing around. See it in a theater, if you can.

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Copyright @ 2026 by Alex R. Johnson

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