Codependent twin musicians Ari and Ethan Gold have one night to find three things: love, a song, and their father - a 99-year-old Beat Generation poet, the last of his kind. Their search plays out in 90 minutes of “Live Cinema,” according to the precepts of Executive Producer Francis Ford Coppola, delivering an unbroken journey through San Francisco's North Beach, toward one final performance, captured just weeks before their father’s death.

READ THE SUBSTACK ABOUT THE FILM HERE.

My new screenplay was just a four-page letter I sent to my identical twin brother. It began: “Imagine you’re playing your music in Kerouac Alley, and no one’s paying attention.” The letter outlined an alarmingly personal musical film that I was proposing we make in the streets of San Francisco - playing versions of ourselves. To top it off, I wanted our 99-year-old father to act in it with us.

As anyone with siblings knows, even when you hate them, you still support them to the death. My brother thought I was nuts, but agreed we had nothing to lose: Ethan was writing stunning songs that the world didn’t seem to notice. I was struggling to find money for a big-budget dream-movie. Meanwhile, our father Herbert Gold - who’d published 25 novels and battled Kerouac - had somehow survived all his friends and was living alone in his rent controlled apartment. There was something tragic here that might speak to people. Something funny too.

Inspired by a Belarusian director friend, Nikita Lavretski, I told Ethan - deliriously - that an improvised ninety-minute film would only take ninety minutes to make, and would allow us to capture the true weirdness, comedy & pathos of our own existence. And by creating an experience of real-life-in-real-time, we could punk an audience that was too distracted to watch anything longer than twelve seconds. Simultaneously, we could live out the particular symbiotic glue of twins, who live life without cuts. This would be a tale of codependent brothers trying to separate, by connecting with their father who’s about to die.

I’d already prepared a book of poetry with them called Father Verses Sons, and we planned to launch it at the historic City Lights bookshop on our dad's 100th birthday. Brother Verses Brother would be the musical version of a book of poems, starting on that same streetcorner. Given courage by Coppola’s concept of Live Cinema, we set out to create our own vision of Bohemian culture & American manhood, & invite our audience into a safari across a great & troubled city. 

Brother Verses Brother is a story of men searching for meaning - in songs, in women, and in pigeon shit. A movie whose story blends with reality, to create a new dream. Nearing the exit may make us all (even you!) into poets. - Ari Gold

Diagnosis & Verdict - by Herbert Gold
Even well into my eighties
I thought I was a young man.
I knew I would die someday
But the diagnosis would have to be
He died of the complications of young age.