A friend of Guterman's stops by the park bench to say hello. "People constantly recognize him in Harvard Square," explains Chapman.

Guterman's summers of animated bliss led him to take animation here at Harvard. Then, he embarked upon the wonderful world of Harvard filmmaking. Rally (pronounced rah-lee), his aforementioned endeavor with "collaborator" Chapman, became the focus of Guterman's attentions during his final semester as a senior. "It's a macabre, black-comedy, murder-thriller kind of thing," Chapman says of the film.

Rally, whose title derives from a nickname Larry's roommates have given him (a nickname Sinai contends "makes no sense and is for the critics to figure out") is actually the collaboration of Guterman and most of his close friends and roommates. In the film, Guterman--who deftly plays himself with a Woody Allen flair--speaks to the audience of his suspicions concerning Sinai's plot to kill him.

Daniel Vilmure '87, one of Guterman's film drones, contends, "The one thing about Larry that convinced me he was going to be a good filmmaker was when he was working on Rally he had this glaze in his eyes, and he walked around sort of like in a trance, and he only considered people in terms of his film. He would ask, 'Are you gonna help me carry this equipment?,' 'Are you gonna be an extra?' He was obsessed. That's sign of a true artist. So I gave him the nickname 'Sergei.' You know, like Sergei Eisenstein."

Guterman and Chapman continue their dialogue. "It was really an in-house production with everyone's skills complementing one another's," says Guterman, half-seriously. "Jeff and I had a vision. We had the same vision, and because we had complementary skills and abilities we were able to synthesize them into one unified strategy. We had an idea about the film, and it came out just the way we planned it."

Says Chapman, "We had the technical and creative tools to make our vision a reality."

"We spent a lot of time just bouncing ideas off one another. Setting up a story board."

"It was sort of an open forum of ideas."

Guterman says he and Chapman had tried to collaborate on a number of projects before Rally, "but we could never get our act together."

"The reason we couldn't get our act together is because we weren't concurrently awake for more than two hours out of any 24. Larry sleeps during the day. I sleep at night. I'd get up in the morning and Larry's light would still be on. He'd be totally asleep, with all his clothes on. I'd come back from class in the afternoon and the room would be dark and Larry would still be asleep. Except this time his books would be on the floor."

Does Guterman do most of his creative work at night?"

"Yeah," he replies, adding a mighty display of dialogue. "I wanna talk about Jon Lederman, musical boy wonder." Lederman, Class of '87, is Guterman's other roommate, who composed the musical score for Rally. "Of course, we had a bit of a row at one point. At first I didn't think the music was appropriate for the film. When I realized he was right and I was wrong, it was getting really close to the mix date, and he had to compose and record a lot of stuff. The day before the mix I was putting an incredible amount of pressure on him, and he came five hours late with the tape. But not before tripping over cords which caused $2000 worth of musical equipment to plummet into Lowell's unforgiving steel-reinforced floors.

"So Jon came running like a bulldog into Severwith the tape. I said to him, 'Do you want me topay for the damage?' and he said, 'No.' Then Isaid, 'You're not blaming me for this, are you?'He said, 'No. But if it wasn't for you this neverwould have happened.'"

Next year Guterman has offers either to work forcomputer animation companies in California or totry his hand at film production work in New York.Again, this information did not come easily.

Then he mumbled something about his cloggedears and, returning to practical concerns,mentioned something about needing a date for theLast Dance