"It was after we shot the scene with the girls that my editor and I realized it didn't work in the movie. While we were shooting, we didn't know if anything was going to work," Director Dan Cohen told me by telephone. We were talking about his wonderful film Diamond Men released last year. The scene, entitled "Romance," one of three delete scenes available on the DVD, features several working girls sitting around chatting in a brothel called the Altoona Riding Club.

"It looked like you were toying with the idea of introducing more characters," I said. "It was supposed to be a fun scene in the middle of the movie and it looked okay on paper, but when I shot it and looked at the rest of the film it just didn't go." Cohen said.

As EI readers know, one of the great things about DVD is that it gives us extras that we would never have had the opportunity to see otherwise.

"Robert Forster, the man is really coming into his own again in one respect and is going onto another phase in his career in another. How did you get him involved?" I asked.

"Robert was with the movie from the beginning, but it took him a year to find the time. We were waiting and talking, bargaining etc, trying to get him and his manager to go with me, an unproven director. Obviously, this wasn't a big money role for him, but the payoff is, well, people like Stanley Kauffmann [The New Republic film critic] and Roger Ebert have called it his best work."

Veteran actor Robert Forster gives a very even measured performance in Diamond Men. Forster plays Eddie Miller an aging traveling diamond/jewelry salesman who is about to be phased out after a heart attack makes him uninsurable.

"It was shot on 35mm," Dan Cohen told me.

"The film looks really like it was made in the 1970s, especially, the credit sequence." I said.

"Diamond Men is consciously modeled after 70s movies I love; films like The Last Detail and Five Easy Pieces, so many of them starring the one and only Nicholson." Said Cohen.

With Cohen, I share a great appreciation for Five Easy Pieces, possibly my favorite film, and The Last Detail is an amazing little movie. Those EI readers that haven't seen them both should make a party of it and watch them back to back. Start with Detail and end with Five.

"John Huneck, the Cinematographer, shot 30 million feet of film. And we talked for a year as he worked on other projects. He has made quite a few other features and a couple with Robert Forster. Of course, we wanted the up close and personal when it was necessary but the idea was to, in the beginning, make it look very gritty and you will notice that the color is muted. But then as the picture goes on and, of course, at the end we made it richer, and gave it more vitality."

"How did you achieve that?"

"It's about lighting, and we moved to exteriors with more color and more camera movement. When we were in the brothel, there's bright red, for example, and things that are not in the rest of the film." Cohen's reference to the brothel, called the Altoona Riding Club, is an old house in the woods where much of the action goes down.

"I appreciated your stripped down credit sequence."

"Well, that was really economic necessity. I wanted it to be generic and simple and to the point. Because the idea was that as the movie goes on, it changes in tone and what happens to these guys. For example, in the beginning, when Donnie [Wahlberg] has sex with that waitress, there was originally a little bit of nudity. But I thought, let the surprise come later when they get to the brothel because no one is expecting that to happen. It's a comic movie much of the time, and the idea is if you had nudity early on then the audience would have been ready for anything. As it is, they are really surprised when that happens."

"Yes, and the eye in the middle of the chest of the masseuse. That was freakin' hilarious." I observed and Cohen chuckled. In one very funny scene, Robert Forster is accosted, not serviced, by a young lady with a very special tattoo.

"Ah, yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I was in Cancun at Club Med and some woman with really white skin and, well, really flat chested comes walking down the beach. She had that really white skin and bleachy white hair and a load of tattoos. And she had this huge tattoo of a screaming eyeball in the middle of her chest. It was hilarious and also freaky and I thought, somehow, I will use this in my life."

"Did you do research on the origin of it? I mean, you know, these days you can just go to your local Barnes & Noble and there are magazines about tattoos with pictures and everything." I said.

"I did that but I also went to a lot of tattoo shops in Hollywood looking for this tattoo, and I couldn't find it. It was weird, the best way to describe it is that the eye looked like a fried egg that was screaming. But I toned it down for the movie because it would have looked ridiculous." Cohen is right, I thought. Sometimes life is pretty ridiculous, especially, when it comes to tattoos these days.

"Yeah, it looks almost Egyptian in the movie." I said.

"And, by the way, it was all digitized. The actress never saw it. I have a new respect for special effects even in dramas these days." Cohen responded.

"Man, I thought that it was a real tattoo. Was the intent that it be a real tattoo or in the mind of Robert Forster's character."

"Well, the tattoo itself in the film is supposed to be real, but the blinking of the eye was in his mind. It was a joke, I know it's a little out of context and...."

"No, it's not." I interrupted. "Here are two men and they are going to talk man talk. And when they talk about the eye, it is so funny and it transcends the comedic elements because it's natural and real."

"In a way, it sets you up for what is to come in the end that is humorous, ironic, and little sad."

Later, Donnie Wahlberg's character, Bobby Walker, even asks the brothel's madam played by Jasmin Guy to set him up with the girl with the eye tattoo. I'll bet that would really happen. Cohen's fun and insightful screenplay contains very natural dialogue.

"Donnie Wahlberg is clearly talented." I said. Wahlberg's Bobby is Robert Forster's trainee on the road. He has little education and gets by mainly on his charm.

"Donnie is very talented. He came to the film very prepared." Said Cohen.

"And he is certainly a ladykiller in the film." I observed. Wahlberg has a way with women in the film landing one in every town the two frequent.

"You know, it's not the guys who look like a million bucks that can kill the ladies. It's the guys who have personality and style and Donnie's got it. He comes alive as soon as he gets on the set and he is immensely appealling."

"And the waitress, she is really familiar, she had a real 1970s thing going on." I was referring to one of the girls Bobby hooks up with early in the film.

"Do you know who she is? That waitress is Nikki Fritz. She is the star of about 100 soft core sex movies, and she is really quite a good actress. And I shot some nudity with her but didn't want to use it because she was so good."

Fritz has acted in a load of movies and is a Fred Olen Ray film regular (think Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold and countless others). Fritz in Diamond Men actually reminded me of Valerie Perrine who was so good in the 1970s with memorable supporting roles in great films like Lenny, and Slaughterhouse Five. Perhaps, we will see more (or less as the case might be) of Fritz in the future.

"The movie was shot in 18 days. Most of it was shot on the road in Pennsylvania, and the rest we shot in Los Angeles with people I could get to work there. I was thrilled that it looked as good as it did. Then we had all that Mexico stuff that was shot in Malibu. It was a pretty ambitious undertaking." Cohen talked humbly about his film with youthful exuberance.

"Small budgets make a filmmaker go with small stories, right?" I asked.

"Well, I was very much aware of that because I'm a script-writer. And I wanted something about the characters with a plot that would be enough to drive it without anything big. I knew the story would be strong enough to move on its own."

So true, I thought, it is so important not to be over-ambitious. When Stephen Wong and I were at Slamdance and Sundance we saw so many films that replaced big budgets with little stories dealing with fragility of the human condition. Lack of money makes a filmmaker dig deep and rely on creativity and imagination to make a successful film.

"Is there an Altoona Riding Club in your past?" I asked, referring to the brothel from Diamond Men. Cohen exploded into laughter.

"Well, let me put it this way, Altoona is a real town smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania. And my father was on the road for some time and he took me on the road and taught me a lot about the road. There were a lot of stories we told each other, and I'll leave it at that. While I would not exlcude the possibility of an Altoona Riding Club, I made it up for the film. You know, my friends and I joked about the idea of opening up a series of bars and restaurants called the Altoona Riding Club. On the walls, we would have 1880s pictures or oils of beautiful women that were on all the walls of the saloons of the old West."

"I would definently frequent such a joint," I joked.

"I would too," Said Cohen.

Diamond Men, a great little film, is available on DVD from Lion's Gate Home Entertainment.

Jonathan W. Hickman