Queens Tribune

As long as Fresh Meadows-born independent film director Seth Landau has his “New York sensibility” with him then he knows his film career in Los Angeles can’t go too bad.
“Being a New Yorker has given me a sensibility that I’ve been able to take with me and that will affect the movies I’m going to make,” said the 29-year-old writer, director and actor. “There will always be a character that is from New York or that has that New York influence.”

Landau put his New York sensibility to use in his directorial debut “Take Out,” an indie comedy that centers on a fictional newspaper called The Arizona Tribune and its corrupt editors and surrounding business landscape. One of the paper’s reporters, Zack Turk, who also happens to be the grandson of a fast food CEO, is reassigned to the restaurant beat and decides to make a big change, by eliminating chain restaurant after chain restaurant.

“The role of the grandfather was heavily influenced by my grandfather, who was a blue-collar worker and moved his way up to an executive,” he said. Landau absorbed a bit of the New York sensibility as he spent a lot of his adolescence around his father’s parents in Whitestone, after the family moved to Long Island. A majority of the time was particularly spent at Shea Stadium watching his favorite team.

Landau’s real interest in film didn’t begin until his mother moved the family to Arizona in 1988 after his parents’ divorce.

“I had always grown up watching the movies, plus growing up a Jewish kid with a strong New York accent living in the middle of the country’s second largest Moron population I wasn’t really that popular, so I pretty much had a lot of time to myself at home,” he said. “And this was right around the time HBO was getting big in the 80s.” Landau grew up under the influence of a heavy dose of 80s comedy via the television screen, something he calls a quasi catharsis.

“I guess my introduction to film wasn’t as romantic as some of those other guys that talk about the curtain rising and the flicker of the projectors, but it’s still the same, I was introduced to movies.”

It wasn’t until after college when he was living in Houston doing a reporter stint for the New Times in 2000 that he had the epiphany to be a director and writer. On a whim Landau moved to Los Angeles.

“I took jobs as anything from production assistants to administrative jobs,” he said. “I worked on the sets of movies to being in the offices learning about the ins and outs, I was essentially working for money but I learned a ton throughout those jobs.”

From movie watcher to reporter to production assistant his New York sensibility told him that his experiences were well worth a feature film. For the sake of comedy, he took the more outrageous aspects of the media and corporate America and turned them into “Take Out,” which just wrapped filming in August.

“Tex Whitmire, the editor, is the total rah-rah big business, advertisers before everyone else, blood and gore on the front-page type of guy,” Landau said, of the Texas cartoony character that represents a heightened lack of morals.

“And Zach’s grandfather is all that is wrong with corporate America, on the greed aspect, he epitomizes those who don’t care about the consumer’s well being just about profit,” he added.

The director, who has had good and bad experiences during his time working in the media, is in the process of submitting the film to 15 of the major independent film festivals, a few which are in the New York area.

“Hopefully, we will be able to get the film programmed and then it will eventually be distributed,” Landau said. Depending on that sensibility again he added.

“I have no doubt that in the near future it will happen.”