“I feel like I have a bachelor’s degree just by proxy,” NYU doorman Julian Pimiento said of his post at 14 Washington Place.
Since 1995, Pimiento has been at his post at the NYU faculty residential building. He’s spent time in conversation with film and writing professors, piecing together odds and ends of their passing advice.
Pimiento, 39, was born in Colombia but moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his mother and father when he was 18 months old.
After graduating from St. Francis Preparatory School, Pimiento briefly attended Hunter College before dropping out and joining the property services workers union, Local 32BJ.
The switch didn’t curtail his desire to continue learning. He signed up for almost every trade course available from his union, eventually finding a creative writing class. He had kept journals in his adolescence and early adulthood but had never thought seriously about writing as a career path.
“When you grow up in a blue-collar environment, it’s not always conducive to creative writing or acting,” Pimiento said. “It’s more the manual type of creativity.”
Pimiento enrolled in the course, and after the first class he knew he wanted to pursue the subject.
“In the past, I had always wanted to get out of there when a class was over,” he said. “But when this class ended, I didn’t want to leave.”
The class and his efforts in it paid off. “Grace,” a short story he wrote, was published and also given a coffeehouse reading.
The story was inspired by a real-life incident involving Pimiento’s mother in the late 1970s, when there was an immigration raid in the factory where she worked. Until 1996, Pimiento and his family were among the millions of undocumented workers in the U.S.
“I read it, and people really liked it,” Pimiento said. “It wasn’t just personal anymore because other people were identifying with it so I thought, what can I do with this?”
Pimiento found the answer to that question in 2008, when he and his friend Alrick Brown, a Tisch graduate, entered the film in Campus MovieFest. CMF is a student film festival that gives aspiring student filmmakers the equipment they need to make a short film in one week.
The crew filmed the eight-minute short in Pimiento’s union building in just one day. Pimiento played an immigration officer in the film.
“One of the great things I share with my fellow union workers is that we have a story to tell and one that people want to hear,” Pimiento said.
Pimiento and Brown didn’t end up submitting their work to CMF after learning the festival would own all the rights to the film, but they did submit it to various local and international festivals, such as the Bronx International Film Festival and the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival, where it was met with much praise.
Pimiento went on to write and direct a second short titled “Recurrence,” which explores how a police officer copes with the consequences of a police shooting, not unlike the 1999 shooting of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo.
“The film doesn’t judge the police officer but rather shows what it would feel like to live with that,” Pimiento said.
He continues to write, while maintaining his full-time post as an NYU doorman and raising his two children.
“I put the kids to bed, then stay up and write,” Pimiento said. “In the mornings, I have dark circles under my eyes. I’m always writing though — on the subway, in the park on my lunch break. I’m always walking around with a pad of paper.”
“High Rise,” Pimiento’s newest project with Brown, will portray the lives of iron workers as iconic images of ordinary men thrown into extraordinary situations, he said.
“It’s going to be a cross between the action of ‘Die Hard’ and the drama of ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ ” he said.
Pimiento may spend his days opening the door for those who come and go from 14 Washington Place, but he’s breaking barriers as he enters the film industry.
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