Dreams Are Made Of

Text and image by Mabel Pickering.

He prints T-shirts for his friends from London using the 1960s BBC logo and the slogan “British Babe Collective.”  

He’s scared of his apartment buzzer and calls the bathroom the “micturition station,” which is often accompanied by an explanation for those not in the know.

He hosts his director, photographer, poet, model and actor friends for martini and tartlet nights. Everyone in the room is the all-time greatest person, according to him.

He prints satirical posters asking for a job and a mentor, and he employs Martin the Flyer Man to pedal around Manhattan and paste them up. He reads Joyce, cooks a Guinness Stew on a Saturday, enjoys a snifter of whisky like me, and loves both Leo DiCaprio and his curly blonde, lipstick-wearing girlfriend, ‘Syd the Kid’ (she is an adult woman).

I met Samuel Kitterman on the Long Island Rail Road. He was going to a producer friend’s soiree in West Islip. He told me he has a Chinese guru master called Hillman, is attracted to fire signs, and misses his bald business partner, who was on the run in Mexico.

By the time he reached his stop, it was clear that Sam wasn’t just enjoying life, or lifting the people around him with his optimism, intelligence and charm.

He was showing people how to live life.

Meet Sam: the ad tech professional, film producer, porno writer, web designer, impresario and arts leader.

We’re doing this interview because I think you’re a leader in the arts. Am I right or wrong? 

I’d have to say you’re wrong on that one. I’m a leader of one – myself – at best.  

Ok. What community would you want to lead?  

Well, I’m currently leading myself into bankruptcy. 

What about the viewers of SamSite, your website? Although under refurbishment, it has a map of Samhattan, fake advertisements, person of the month, lists of your favorite things, Samsara.

Run me through your thought process behind this. 

I would love to be leading people, and especially prospective employers, to SamSite. What happened is I kept getting prompted to provide a personal website or some sort of online portfolio, so I decided it was time I set one up.

In truth, I have no professional design experience, so I’d really have to strain myself to come up with something that looks chic and modern. But, as luck would have it, I have very little interest in that sort of thing.

More than ever, I feel that people are trying to accomplish a specific look as some sort of social signifier rather than best materializing what’s true and unique to themselves (see: the truly absurd resurgence of disposable cameras). So, I wanted the website itself, not just the content therein, to be a reflection of who I am.

You went to Cornell, you studied information science, you worked in ad tech. Now you’ve produced a film called The Beijing Rodeo about Chinatown’s fictitious underworld of duels, dances and degenerates. And you’re writing a soft porno. Two questions: Why the change of gear? And are softies coming back?

While I’d love to be in a position where my artistic pursuits pay for my life, the truth is that it’s a very small slice of the creative populace for whom that’s the case. And that’s something I’ve always known to be the reality of the situation, even in my most starry-eyed moments. I pursue the entertainment stuff for fun.

Some fellow desk workers are going to spend their excess money on vacations, some on toys. I spend mine on what I find fun or exciting, which is these little creative projects, because that’s where I personally get my kicks.

As per the softie, which is in fact the pilot episode for an anthology series called For a Good Time Call 1-800-BRADY, which I hope to make with the help of some of my favorite young writers, not just me, I’m not sure I believe it heralds any sort of soft-core revival.

Much the opposite. I think the American people’s relationship with eroticism is so shot – for good reason – that it might just be beyond saving. But, if there is an escape hatch, I suppose it to be through the re-contextualization of desire away from rote, bestial satisfaction towards something more nuanced.

Basically, I believe that instantaneous access to vulgar materials has desensitized people to the simmering sensation of venereal yearning that can serve as a stepping stone to revelations about themselves and their place in the universe. It’s my hope that 1-800-BRADY can reintroduce the viewer to this special pleasure and nudge them towards reassessing their relationship with their body and what those of others make them feel.

Your production company, New Metropolitan Pictures, blends narrative filmmaking with immersive, live viewing experience. You designed Beijing Rodeo to be viewed by a standing audience and accompanied with live music. Why?

Here it must be specified that my brilliant accomplice and New Metro co-founder, Kenny Geiler, came up with the idea of The Beijing Rodeo.

As per why I supported it, and why I think what he has labeled a “movie concert experience” is a good idea, that’s really two reasons. For one, somewhere the filmgoing experience stopped feeling like an affair. That’s something I’d love to have come back. Perhaps it’s just getting older and jaded, but I remember the pomp and circumstance – I guess some might call it an inconvenience – of going to a movie back in the day. Finding the showtimes in the newspaper, going to buy the tickets early if it was a big movie, etc. The excitement of seeing it on the big screen, knowing that it would be months before you got to do so at home.

I’m not exactly breaking any new ground with this analysis, but these days, the ease of replicating a theater experience at home has really drained going out to a movie of its social heft.

Whereas a concert is a concert—everyone knows you can’t have the same experience on your couch.

So, infusing a little bit of that experience into the traditional theatergoing experience seemed like a smart idea to me. 

Finally, I think a huge reason film has lost its cultural relevance is because of how staid it’s become as a medium. While people are creating all sorts of varied types of films, I don’t see many out there tackling what a film could be in particularly diverse or provocative ways.

People used to interact with moviegoing in more motley ways in the past, whether it be through drive-ins, spook shows in the 1950s, or weird arty films that were presented in a peculiar fashion, like those of Sjūji Terayama and Seijun Suzuki – the later stuff – in Japan. Or Andy Warhol’s films here in the US.

They were making films that were designed to be delivered and interacted with in particular ways, before that just meant putting it on YouTube. 

Do you think you were born with an eye for the arts? Or is this something you have grown over time? Your father collects wine. Is that art? What about your mother? Was she artistic?

I would say anything related to orchestrating sensation is inherently artistic. So, yes, that would include food and wine.

My mother was a collage artist and, frankly, was the one that got me started on my creative interests. She gifted me a DVD of Sunset Boulevard when I was a young child, and my love for storytelling from all eras really started there. Because of the types of movies and music I was introduced to at a young age, I never had the understandable yet unfortunate antipathy towards black and white film, subtitles, etc that a lot of my peers had to endure when defining their tastes. 

You have two mezzanines in your Upper West Side apartment, both accessed by ladders. One is your bedroom. The other is storage. If you could turn the latter space into anything else, what would it be?

Well, my original plan was to make a raised living room / conversation plane reminiscent of the sunken living room / conversation pits of yesteryear. But I quickly realized that I didn’t really want to invite my houseguests to crawl around on all fours just to have a nice sit and chat.

So, my next idea was to make an indoor zen garden specifically for when I ordered sushi for dinners. But actually getting a nice meal set in a place that required slinking on hands and knees proved an insurmountable obstacle.

So, as of now the plan is to turn it into a guest bedroom. 

What’s next for Sam?

First and foremost, I am helping get The Beijing Rodeo launched this spring. Then, I’m finishing up the screenplays for the first three episodes of 1-800-BRADY, and working to get that project off the ground.

Finally, I am going to keep plugging away at the video game I am designing called Passion Quest: Love is a Game.

Oh, and I’ll keep looking for gainful employment.