Listen up, thirtysomething lonelyhearts. Myles Berkowitz has some advice for you: Date as often as you can.
"Dating is something you can't get good at unless you do it a lot," Berkowitz said during a telephone interview from Denver. "I certainly wasn't any good at it. But I got better at it through continual practice, and I got results."If I can do this, anyone can. I'm not the most likable guy, and I did."
And though the filmmaker may sound like he's blowing smoke, the evidence suggests he knows what he's talking about.
Berkowitz went out nearly two dozen times over the course of a couple of months -- both for the sake of his personal life and for the purpose of making a movie, the comedic documentary "20 Dates." (The film opened Friday exclusively at the Loews Cineplex Broadway Centre Cinemas.)
Of course, Berkowitz also had valuable, long-term relationship experience, a four-year marriage . . . although it ended in divorce. Once Berkowitz became single again, he fell into the expected routine -- namely, dating once every four or six months at the most.
"That's definitely not the way to do it," he said. "If you're dating that infrequently, you're going to get anxious and build it up into the most important three or four hours of your life. It's supposed to be fun, not something you dread."
Berkowitz says shy singles need to get over their fear of rejection and suggested that everyday locations -- such as coffeehouses and grocery stores -- are perfect for meeting other singles.
"Look for places where you can act like yourself and dress normally," he said. "You don't need to put on a show to ask someone out. By that same token, you should at least look decent. Unshaven, smelly and in sweats isn't the first impression you want to give someone."
He also admitted that he was extremely nervous about re-entering the dating arena. "By the time I was driving to pick up my date, I was already a mess. I would spend two weeks planning out my wardrobe and rehearsing all my great lines, only to have it all fall apart over the course of three hours."
In desperation -- both careerwise and relationshipwise -- he struck on his dating theory: Quantity leads to quality.
"It's like being in a play or a movie," he said. "Both take months of rehearsing day and night for actors to get their lines and performances right. At that point, it starts to get routine. Dating was the exact same thing for me. By about the ninth date, the nervousness got knocked out of my head and I could start being myself."
As for the idea of recording the dates on film, Berkowitz said that as a frustrated filmmaker, he needed a "fresh and cheap" concept.
"I'll admit that I was looking for a way to make a movie on a shoestring budget," he said. "But it was also something that I hadn't seen done before, and it was also a way for me to get my face on the screen. What could be better than that?"
The results speak for themselves: "20 Dates" is currently enjoying a run in theaters nationwide, and Berkowitz is engaged to one of the 20 women, Elisabeth Wagner. "It blows my mind that the strategy worked, and I couldn't be happier. However, I still have to question her taste if she wants to spend the rest of her life with me."
Unfortunately, there were some major problems between the two while Berkowitz was making the film. Though Berkowitz and Wagner had already fallen for each other midway through the filming, he decided to continue going out with other women for the sake of his movie.
"I couldn't just abandon it at that point, and the producers weren't really interested in having the movie end without delivering on the name," he explained. "But she wasn't buying my excuse. Thankfully, I'm a persuasive guy, and there were no real sparks with any of the other women."
Aside from dating, there is another area in which Berkowitz said he can give useful advice: movie promotions.
An early version of "20 Dates" was shown at the 1997 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, and to ensure that his film would be one of the festival's most-talked-about-hits, Berkowitz actually bought up all the tickets to the premiere showing and gave them away to friends and strangers alike.
"We had a packed house, and all these media types were wondering why they couldn't get a ticket to see it," he said. "Needless to say, I started getting a lot of phone calls from interested distributors."
Slamdance Executive Director Peter Baxter recalled Berkowitz's antics and said it may have led to one of his festival's most unusual success stories.
"It was pretty ingenious, I'll admit," Baxter said in a separate telephone interview. "But it's something we certainly wouldn't recommend to all of our filmmakers. It would probably be too expensive for them."
Maybe, but Berkowitz said that the studio suitors that eventually won the bidding war for the film, Fox Searchlight Pictures, reimbursed him for the tickets. He was also signed to a first-look development deal. (He recently finished writing the script for a "buddy comedy," which is in development at the studio.)
"This is as happy an ending to the film as I could have ever imagined," he said. "I got the girl and finished the movie."