The 2023 Hamptons Film Festival & Dan Rattiner's Underappreciated Movie Career

If you look through the thick program previewing this week’s Hamptons International Film Festival, you will discover nearly a hundred films available to be seen at our local theaters. You will also discover events and lectures to go to. But among those invited to speak about their careers, I am once again not included.

It is not well known that I have a substantial film career. Most know me as the founder of Dan’s Papers or as the cartoonist whose excellent drawings have appeared in national magazines. (See one here.) But read on. Or go online and look me up on IMDb. I’m there. But, once again, I’m a nobody at the film festival.

My considerable career as a film actor includes four films, and my fame has only increased with each one.

The first film I was in was Alan Alda’s Sweet Liberty, a comedy that included a scene in which redcoats and rebels conducted a battle reenactment on the vast lawn of the Cormaria Retreat Center in Sag Harbor. I did not participate in the smoke and cannon fire of that re-enactment. I was too new on the scene for that. Instead, I applied for and got selected to be an extra in that film. I would be paid $50 and have access to the food table full of snacks and sodas off to one side for the duration of the scene.

This scene took place with Alan Alda and Michael Caine, the two stars, walking drunkenly down the white line in the center of Sag Harbor’s Main Street at 3 o’clock in the morning. My role, along with about 10 others, was to walk slowly along the sidewalk not noticing the two stars talking animatedly to one another. To create the scene, the filmmakers had rented the entire length of Main Street, installed floodlights, banned automobiles and put some shiny liquid substance to make Main Street glisten as if it was just after a midnight rain.

I strolled along over and over in front of The American Hotel for two hours as the scene was shot again and again. Unfortunately, my efforts did not appear in the finished product. They’d been cut, as they used to say, onto the cutting-room floor.

My next film was the movie Masquerade, where once again I appeared as an extra, this time at a small table for two in an oceanfront restaurant at a resort in Westhampton Beach. Our role, and my wife had joined me, was to sit at the table pretending to eat salad. Rob Lowe, the star of this movie, enters in a bathing suit from the beach, talking loudly with another actor who is with him as they wend their way through the dining room to the lobby of the establishment. Again I was paid $50. And again I had access to the snacks and soda offstage. Also once again, the scene was run over and over, each time, for the three hours, under orders to not eat the salad. The salad had to look exactly the same for each shoot. Instead, I stared at a big moth that had flown into it and died. The things you do to make a movie.

Also, in the end, I was not in the movie. As Lowe strolled through, our table was blocked by a large structural column that held up the patio’s roof. I’d have been in the scene if not for that. Frankly, I was thrilled. This was a step up.

A few years later, my career took a brief nosedive. I’d auditioned at the Amagansett firehouse and been selected as an extra in the Steven Spielberg movie Deep Impact. The scene would have us stand on the beach at Atlantic Avenue looking out to sea in horror as the camera, located on the dune at the back of the beach, pretended to film a huge tidal wave coming horribly toward us (brought in by computer-generated imagery) because the incoming comet had crashed into the sea way offshore.

Unfortunately, that scene got scrubbed, so we were never out there. It did happen in the movie, though, all done by CGI. So no hard feelings.

The pinnacle of my film career came nine years later with a speaking part in the Roger Corman movie Cyclops. Corman was then and still is the master of B-grade horror movies. (His best was Little Shop of Horrors.)

Certainly Cyclops was a low-budget film. And the scene I was in was filmed in Bulgaria, where things are cheap. The movie set for the film was a 1 ⁄ 4-scale Roman Colosseum originally built for the movie Spartacus, now sitting unused atop a hill above the city of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. In that colosseum, the cyclops, in chains, was to face off against some captured slaves, with the resulting slaughter witnessed by a group of Roman spectators in the stands. Also watching was the star, Eric Roberts, who played the smug and corrupt emperor.

My role in this came about because my wife’s son, Scoop Wasserstein, fresh out of college, had gotten a job as the personal assistant to Corman, at Corman’s office in Hollywood. Corman had sent Scoop to Bulgaria to oversee the expense budget. It needed to be kept under control.

In the course of things, the director of Cyclops had decided, amusingly, to give Scoop a part in the film — a slave who, friendly but frightened, in the end gets killed by Roberts, just for sport. But that was after our scene.

Bulgarian extras were hired to fill the colosseum to noisily watch the slaughter, but because none spoke good English, the director decided to hire a few Americans. Scoop volunteered his brother and sister, his mom, and me, his stepfather, to do that job. We were thus flown in for the assignment.

I was dressed as a Roman senator, my wife a lady-in-waiting, and the others as plebeians. And up we went into the stands.

Out onto the upcoming killing grounds, a master of ceremonies droned on and on about what we were about to see.

And I, disgusted, stood up, pointed down to him, and shouted, “Get on With it!” That was my line. As a result, the crowd booed, and the man fled.

Thus I am now listed with a speaking part as an actor on the IMDb website.

I rest my case.