ON WINGS OF DESIRE, A NEW CAREER TOOK FLIGHT

by James Hebert, Arts Writer
San Diego Union-Tribune
January 14, 2007

DAN MARGULES' PUPPY LOVE FOR JAZZ, WRITING HELPED HIM RIFF HIS WAY TO FILMMAKING

It's your typical boy-meets-girl tale. Except for the part about how the boy was, until recently, a dog. With a weakness for bagels. And a deep friendship with the guy who used to play Eddie Haskell on "Leave It to Beaver."

Actually, there's not much typical at all about Begleiter, a short film that might count as the world's most literal shaggy-dog story if it didn't star a nonshaggy Rhodesian ridgeback.

Even the movie's source of inspiration is an eyebrow-raiser: Wim Wenders' lyrical 1987 film Wings of Desire, about an angel who yearns to be human, and finally gets his wish.

But then, not much about Dan Margules' filmmaking career has been typical, either. You might even compare his transformation - software engineer turns screenwriter and director - to the journey made by that angel and that dog. Except in some ways, Margules seems to have planned for this leap all his life.

(In other words: That metaphor don't hunt.)

Now that Begleiter is getting noticed, Margules doesn't sound as if he's planning to leap back, either. The film, shot at locations around San Diego, is based on a short story Margules wrote years ago and then tossed in a drawer. It follows a dog who is adopted by an affectionate owner, then left homeless by her boorish boyfriend. A mystical author played by Ken Osmond (the onetime Eddie Haskell) helps the pair reunite, this time as two humans.

"I'd always had an interest in writing, from first grade on," says the native of Chicago. "But I made a detour in college. I studied computer science at UCSD, because that's where the money was."

Even so, he kept writing on the side. He was a jazz critic for years, first locally for the now-defunct Jazz Link and then for L.A.-area publications as well as his own online newsletter.

Margules also dabbled in screenwriting, attending seminars and reading up on the craft, keeping his hand in just enough to remind himself of that nagging passion.

"Little by little, things kept telling me: This is what you want to do," he says.

Bored with the software racket, he engineered a layoff that came with a nice severance package (enough to finance Begleiter); he also left with sufficient stock options to keep him afloat while he launched his film career.

Inspired by a meeting he had with the director Stuart Gordon, Margules dug out his old "Happy the Dog" story, read it for the first time in seven years and ... decided it was "terrible."

But the DVD version of Wings of Desire had just come out, and it got Margules thinking.

"I'd always wanted to do something like Big with a dog," he says, name-dropping the Tom Hanks movie in which a boy suddenly finds himself inhabiting a man's body.

"I thought: 'Well, what about a dog turning into a man?' "

Once the ideas started flowing, Margules wrote the script in about a week. Osmond came to the film by chance; he shares an agent with Hayley Mills, whom Margules wanted to cast (she was unavailable).

Margules also used his jazz connections to land Alphonse Mouzon, a onetime member of Weather Report, as composer.

While Margules gets the word out to festivals about Begleiter and works on getting a feature project called West of 5 produced (it has attracted a producer and the interest of a couple of name actresses), he's also helping local film people link up through San Diego Filmmakers. The year-old group's monthly meetings welcome everyone from actors to composers to makeup artists.

One of the most satisfying aspects of his new life, Margules says, is when people respond to his film the way they used to respond to some of his writing on jazz. When, as he puts it, "people connect to it and say: 'I get what you're saying.' "

photos by Nelvin C. Cepeda / Union-Tribune

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