Doug and I had a great benefactor for our production The Last Captain (which you can see for free on Youtube). He gave us a lot of money to make our film and stood out of the way while we did.

We finished the Last Captain in 2017 and sent in our application to various festivals. The only thing left to do now was wait while the festivals determined if they wanted to show our film or not. 

My question was what to do while we waited. 

Now, there was some money left over in the budget of The Last Captain. Not enough to make another film, but certainly enough to get us started. We figured we would figure out how to raise the rest of the money while the time came.

We asked our benevolent benefactor if we could use the leftover money for another project. Being benevolent, he agreed.

But what would be the subject. Since Doug and I were an adjunct to the West Coast Fencing Archive, we would have to do another fencing film.  I figured we could do one about Aldo Nadi. He had West Coast roots and we even had someone, John McDougall, who had taken lessons from Nadi.

Doug opted for his college coach Michael D’Asaro. I had known of D’Asaro through my friends Gene Ching and Cole Harkness. They had regaled me with horror stories of his coaching methods back in the 1980s. Coincidentally, he was my coach when I took private lessons from him at the Westside Fencing Center back in the 1990s.

It would be a lot easier for us to do a film about D’Asaro. Doug had already done a ton of research about his former coach. He had compiled most of it into a book about D’Asaro’s life. Best of all, Doug already had a large collection of photos on the subject.

We would need more, of course. Plus, we would need to track down people who knew him during the various phases of his life. Doug had contact with most of the people who knew when he was a championship coach, but we needed to track down people him from his younger days when he was a world renowned fencer.

Some of the stories I had heard from my friends talk about his competitive days and even growing up on the rough streets of Brooklyn. The key would be to get first hand witnesses from those days.