Over the weekend, Hal Ackerman was on the East Coast, traveling from bookstore to bookstore, promoting his new book,”Stein, Stoned.”
Come Monday, the UCLA lecturer was back in Rolfe Hall, teaching his eight graduate students in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
“Pick a card, any card,” Ackerman said with a slight smile, spreading a deck of playing cards on the table before his students. Graduate student Justin Hillian drew the two of hearts and slid it back into the pile.
Ackerman took the deck and carefully reshuffled and divided the cards, each face down, into several piles.
Then he stopped, trying to remember how the trick proceeds.
“This wouldn’t happen to be your card, would it?” he finally asked Hillian, pointing to a card. Ackerman flipped the ace of spades. The class began to laugh. Ackerman was clearly disappointed.
“I know you wanted it to work,” he said as the students began to quiet down. “But what’s fun is that you thought it was possible. That’s what movies are kind of about, writing something believable.”
With this in mind, Ackerman released his first novel “Stein, Stoned” this summer, placing believable characters in unlikely situations. The novel tells the story of an aging former marijuana activist suddenly called to fight crime.
Ackerman originally became inspired to write after he saw the musical “Camelot” as a junior at Queens College in New York. This inspiration led him to write a musical adaptation of “Robin Hood,” which was eventually performed on stage.
Ackerman was overwhelmed by the audience’s reception and decided that he would pursue a career in writing.
“The applause and laughter of 500 people about things that I thought in my head were funny made me think, if I can’t have love in my life, this would be a good substitute,” he said.
Ackerman worked as a playwright in 1970s New York City before moving to California and entering the screenwriting business. Largely self-taught, he joined faculty at the UCLA Department of Film and Television, where he has been for the past 22 years.
Audience feedback is important to Ackerman, and he imagined writing a novel as a new way to receive audience appreciation. He wanted to write a book that he could see people enjoying in a cafe or on a train.
Ackerman wanted to write an interesting story with colorful characters ““ the main reason for writing “Stein, Stoned,” he said.
“What inspires a writer is characters in a situation,” he said.
For Ackerman, this manifested in the character Stein, who in many ways is an exaggeration of himself.
He uses Stein to embark on an adventure, solving crime while at the same time touching upon deeper philosophical themes.
Despite his active writing career on the side, Ackerman has still demanded the utmost from his students.
According to Nicholas Griffin, who took Ackerman’s screenwriting workshops in the ’80s and went on to co-write the 2003 movie “Matchstick Men,” it was Ackerman’s enthusiasm for writing and sense of accountability that made him such an effective teacher.
“You were always writing,” Griffin said.
Former student- Scott Kosar, who went on to write the 2003 remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” as well as the 2004 film “The Machinist,” echoed Griffin.
“He was the best teacher I ever had,” Kosar said.
In Ackerman’s current class, the students agreed that “always engaged” is a suitable way to describe the class.
Hillian added, “It’s like riding a lightning bolt with a harness. Actually, no harness.”