The Brothers Lofaro

By Catherine Valeriote

(l-r) Future DGA Members Steve and Tom Lofaro at age 2.

You expect identical twins to look alike. But the voice! The mannerisms!

"It's uncanny, it's scary!" These same words inevitably pop out when people describe their first meeting with Tom and Steve Lofaro. The DGA brothers with the duplicate DNA share a lot: the same professional field, a twin bond and a lifetime of identity-swapping pranks.

But they're not matching bookends, and Steve's beard isn't the only distinguishing feature. Steve's an assistant director, Tom's been a production manager and studio executive. Tom is politically active in the Directors Guild, Steve's not. Tom lives in the city, Steve's a "country mouse." How did identical boys from the Bronx end up in different places at midlife?

Growing up in New York, the young Lofaro brothers delighted in exploiting their identical looks. "They fooled a couple of nuns in school," their brother Gene, a DGA director, recalls, "and at least in the early stages they fooled a couple of girls they were dating. They were mischievous!"

In elementary school, oldest brother Ray inspired their fascination with film. "Ray gave me a box camera in the eighth grade," says Tom. Ray Lofaro, a prominent commercial producer in New York, taught them darkroom techniques, and gave them access to his soundstage and studios. The twins took pictures and developed them together, and joined the camera club at Cardinal Hayes High School. "We were close and competitive," Tom recalls.

The Lofaros entered separate campuses of Fordham University. Then the death of their brother Marcy (Marcello), had a terrible, but unifying impact. "After we had the tragedy of my brother dying in Vietnam in '68," Steve recalls, "I was motivated to get out of the School of Education and pursue my dream to go into film. I just thought, if my brother's going to get shot in the head at 19 years of age, I better try to get what it is I want out of life." Steve transferred to the film school at New York University, six months later Tom followed. Both were profoundly affected by Marcy's death. "I think the film we made in school was a testament to that," Steve says. "It was a very dark film because it was such a dark time for us."

Marcy's death, and Ray's death years later were just two of the times that the twins came to each other's support. "There's a very empathic relationship when you're that close to somebody," says Steve. "It's a very special relationship, it really is. And we can speak in a certain shorthand and understand at a very deep level where the other guy's at. It's like having an extra soul to fortify yourself."

After college, Steve worked in commercials in New York as a freelance production assistant. Tom entered New York's DGA training program. "I worked primarily in features, with a lot of really terrific directors," says Tom. "I had the opportunity as a trainee and a 2nd AD to work with Billy Friedkin, Bob Fosse, Karel Reisz and Sidney Lumet." Tom moved to Northern California, where he worked on The Streets of San Francisco, among other things. In the minimum number of days, he moved up to 1st AD.

Steve, meanwhile, applied to the training program, but in a depressed market, the DGA didn't accept trainees that year in New York. So Steve produced commercials until he encountered an intriguing opportunity. "Erhard Seminars Training. It was called 'est!'" Steve says. "I had been through the 'training' in New York, and they had job openings." The controversial self-help guru Werner Erhard made an impression on him. "I thought this guy had a very, very powerful message. He was like the precursor to the Nike advertisements. " Est needed a head of production, in California, and Steve wanted to move west. So he took a cut in pay to join est (and Tom) in San Francisco.

Steve Lofaro was in charge of recording Werner Erhard's lectures for enhanced replay in seminar venues. "I was learning a lot. I was running production in seven cities, from Hawaii to Boston." But Erhard's penchant for helping people change their lives meant Steve had some pretty amateur support personnel. "I had firemen running logistics for me! All kinds of things." The low salary and poor help began to wear thin. Within six months the Directors Guild discovered that est's non-Guild operation was employing DGA directors. A jurisdictional dispute followed, and Werner Erhard refused to sign with the Guild. As per usual practice, the DGA decided to "withhold the services of qualified personnel." In this case, they lured Steve away with a Guild card, based on his six years of production experience in New York. It was 1976, and both brothers were now DGA members.

It wasn't long before the Lofaros got a chance to work together. Tom was firsting for director Gil Cates on a feature called The Promise, and asked Steve to be his second AD. Steve hadn't seconded a feature before, but he says he had no worries about working for his brother. "I always could trust, that if I had a question or I screwed up, that Tom would not think it was a question of my ability, just a question of my knowledge. I know that he had implicit trust in my ability, because we're just two dynamos."

The Lofaros did three movies together, two of them with Cates. "I love them both," Cates enthuses. "When they were together it was a lot of fun. They worked together like a hand in a glove. But I never knew who I was talking to because they sound alike."

"You have the same voice going over the radio," Steve concurs, "and everybody's on their toes all the time. They don't know if it's Tom or Steve."

Tom grew in demand among other directors, especially first-timers and actor-directors such as Rob Reiner, Danny DeVito and Alan Arkin. He wasn't available when Cates called, so Cates started using Steve as his first. "Ike left," as Steve puts it, "and Gil took Mike! Gil and I established a relationship that's lasted until today. I've done some 19 or 20 pictures with Gil."

In 1983 Steve was working with Cates on Hobson's Choice in New Orleans. Tom flew in to visit, and joined them for a dinner-break re­union. "The three of us cavorted," as Steve puts it, and hatched a plot to trick the crew. Pretending to be Steve, Tom went out and called everyone back to the set. Even without a beard, "the crew couldn't tell," Steve chuckles, "until I walked out on the set. I forget who the biggest joke was played on, maybe the cameraman, he was doing double-takes!"

Tom Lofaro at Indian Dunes.

It was Tom's reputation for nurturing first-time directors that brought him together with James Burrows. "He had a deal to do a feature called Partners," Tom remembers. "They said, 'Oh you got to get Lofaro, he's the guy who can handle these first-time feature directors.'" Burrows disliked the hours doing features, but loved Tom, whom he nicknamed "Mo." He persuaded Tom to come "in from the streets" to do Cheers. They were together for seven years in the '80s on Cheers, and for numerous pilots after that. "He's far and away the best AD I've ever had," Burrows asserts. He says that Tom always took the initiative, and "never took any bullshit." Tom directed five episodes of Cheers, and had one talent rare among ADs. "Lofaro could read any part in the run-through and get laughs," Burrows recalls. "He'd stand in, just be reading the part because the actor was absent. He would be hysterical. When Tommy left and (the next AD) tried it, everybody said, 'He's no Lofaro!'"

Tom left Cheers to move up to production manager and co-producer on Dear John. Over the years he rose in the ranks, and became a production executive and vice president of production at Paramount. He made himself a reputation as a "king of multi-camera comedy" at the studio, and recently moved from his office below Paramount's water tower (that's where our interview took place) to Ren-Mar Studios.

In 1993, however, came the sobering impetus for Tom's Guild work. He was working as an AD on a film and the director fired him. "I had never been fired before in my life, and never since!" he still fumes. When word got out, Tom started getting calls from DGA Council members, telling him that capricious discharge was a rampant problem, and he was the guy who could do something about it. So, "I got up one evening and I gave this impassioned speech at the Council," he says.

Katy Garretson, former Chair of the AD/UPM Council, heard that speech. "And it moved me," Garretson says. "I credit Tom with getting me more active on the Council." She and Tom became Co-chairs of the then newly formed Working Conditions Committee. After serving on the 1995-1996 Proposals Committee, the groundwork was laid for getting the first-ever clause addressing capricious discharge.

The Working Conditions Committee eventually succeeded in getting the capricious discharge clause into the Basic Agreement. Tom says it's a "watered-down version," but the fact that it's in there at all is "huge." The clause states that ADs must get 48 hours' notice before being fired as a chance to improve their work. If the person is fired without that notice, they get an added one week and two days' pay. "It's minimal and symbolic," he concedes. "But the symbolism was enough to represent to the directors that 'Look, you have to be human. If something isn't working, you have to have the courage to communicate it to the individual.'"

The Working Conditions Com­mittee also produced The Creative Way, the comprehensive reference manual for DGA members. The section in the book near and dear to Tom's heart is the three-page "Pro­fes­sional Stan­dards" section. Those pages emphasize teamwork within the director's team, and warn that members hurt themselves and each other when they compromise the Basic Agreement.

He also served on the 1998 and 1999 Negotiations Committee and feels that one of accomplishments he's most proud of is the multi-camera qualifications list. "With the multi-camera QL, which passed in the '99 negotiations, we opened up the Guild to tape producers to come in as UPMs so that the studios could hire the tape producers that they had been using which was eroding the UPM jurisdiction. They wanted to be able to hire them in film. We knew that was going on and we wanted it to stop, but we also wanted to satisfy studio executives and give them the people they wanted. So we made it win-win. We said, 'Hey, listen, you've got to bring these people in to the Guild.'"

Tom Lofaro worked on half a dozen committees and the Western AD/UPM Council during the '90s. He is currently a Co-chair on the AD/UPM PAC committee. Katy Garretson remembers that she and Tom often butted heads, but "we had a great deal of respect for each other in terms of our passion and our commitment to the cause."

Tom speaks of all his volunteered time in openly idealistic terms. "I'll tell you what it is for me: It's being connected to a higher purpose and knowing that it needs to be done." He views the struggle for better working conditions as a way of keeping "humanity" in the entertainment business. "Economics drives this business, and if we allow it to drive this business there'll be no humanity left. They'll kill it. The only people who are going to keep humanity in the business are the humans, right?"

Tom lives in a townhouse in Santa Monica. Steve's home is way out in the hills of Simi Valley, which he says explains his lack of Guild involvement. "I'm just too far away," he says. "That was one of the things I had to relinquish when I decided to move out of town and come here."

The decision to live in the country is part of Steve's over-arching belief system. "My wife (of 18 years, Pat) did not want to live in the city. She's concerned about air pollution and things like that, and rightly so. One of the choices that you make in life, is a family value versus a professional value. I made the choice that my main focus was going to be my family. I didn't have this rocket-propelled career that I was going to pursue. As opportunities presented themselves, I would take them." (Those opportunities included ten feature films, nine or ten TV series, 35 or 40 movies for television, and hundreds of commercials.)

The backyard of Steve's house, where we talked, boasts a first-class kitchen garden, full of ripening corn, tomatoes, eggplant and basil. "I have a philosophy of life that includes taking care of things from the bottom up. We compost, we have solar energy systems here, we grow a little bit of our own food. For awhile we had a couple of sheep to help involve our sons."

One family-versus-job decision Steve had to make involved working on the Nash Bridges show in San Francisco the last two seasons. He and his family finally decided Northern California was closer than a lot of work available, and they'd make the most of bonding on the weekends and hiatus. But ultimately, Steve says, "My humanity is here with my family, and my larger family, and the country." On Christmas and Easter, both brothers traditionally get together at Steve's house with their families.

Steve and Tom Lofaro today.

Steve's back on Nash Bridges this fall as 1st AD. He's done UPM work but doesn't pursue it. "I like to be on the set," he explains. In the future, he's interested in directing.

This season, Tom has stepped away from the corporate scene at Paramount to be line producer/UPM on a new series, State of Grace. "It's nice to be working on a show again - a show is a lot more fun!"

After 30 years in the same business, the brothers have a sense of professional responsibility to each other. "Because anything I do," Tom explains, "is a reflection on him, and anything he does is a reflection on me. And he knows that and I know that. So we have to maintain a certain standard - I think Steve and I have lived what the DGA tries to represent: professionalism, high standards, and good work."

There's an inevitable temptation to compare and contrast twins. Even brother Gene labels Tom the "thoughtful" brother, Steve the "spontaneous" one. But with the Lofaros, director Gil Cates insists, "The better question is, 'how are they the same?' They're both energetic, bright, hard workers, and love to make movies."

So next time you bump into one of the Lofaro twins, and you're not sure which one it is, just ask. And if you think he's pulling your leg, do what others have done before you: demand to see a driver's license! Because I'm still having some doubts whether I really talked to both of them, or just the same one twice.

Catherine Valeriote is a freelance writer who has written for educational CD-ROMs, the Los Angeles Times and Cosmopolitan.

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