Warren Cuccurullo
Venice Beach, California, 2013
The invite came while I was licking my wounds in our shared studio in Lynchburg, Virginia, the day after a deer jumped in front of my motorcycle and sent me skidding down the road like an upside-down turtle, fraying my backpack to ribbons and scattering its contents along the way.
Although alcohol was not involved in the accident per se, drinking had been my primary mode of self-medication, social lubrication, and dissociation for the better part of a decade.
Matty’s invitation for me to handle BTS photo and video as DuckDuck Collective’s “super PA” for two weeks came with an experimental suggestion: What if I took advantage of California’s penchant for clean eating and fun-under-the-sun excitement to see what it felt like to take a fortnight’s break from booze? We’d be neck deep in casting, wardrobe, location scouting, and production and he wanted as much of my creative capacity as I could summon for our 14- to 17-hour shoot days.
And despite the infamously party-prone nature of the production industry, he had been learning that creativity and sobriety were better bedfellows.
I met W. C. when Matty, my dear friend and photo/film mentor, invited me to work on the Robert Mondavi “For Real” campaign.
When we met Warren — famed guitar virtuoso of Frank Zappa, Missing Persons, Duran Duran, TV Mania, and more — he was 57 years old and in better shape than any of my 20-to 30-something-year-old climber friends. We asked him his secret to creative success and physical fitness, he explained that he hadn't touched alcohol in many years. I was more than convinced, and my two-week experiment persists to this day.
Many of his friends from the past few decades, he said, have died from hard drugs and drinking problems, yet here Warren remains — still honing his craft, pursuing creative projects, and (until spring 2026) running his popular Santa Monica restaurant, Via Veneto.
During our week-long stay in Los Angeles, we spent a good deal of time with Warren in which we exchanged music via YouTube videos projected onto the ceiling of his flat (like our friend Gull), talked about the state of modern music (the man is has a razor-sharp brain), took photos, and, on our last day in town, shared a gluten-free pancake and fresh juice breakfast.
I’ve only worked in L.A. one other time since, but I look forward to cutting it up with cuccurullo again as soon as I can make it happen. Feel free to invite me out anytime.
Less than 48 hours later, I was waking up — early — in a Santa Monica hotel room with an ocean view. My mind, body, and spirit operating on forgotten levels of clarity and acuity. We’d ride rented beach cruisers down the shoreline past the litany of drum circles and roller skaters to muscle beach where we’d work our way inland to the ground producer’s office.
The chance encounter took place on the grounds of that office, which was situated below the flat where Warren was living at the time. He asked what we were up to. We told him. Matty asked if we could come take pictures of him later, and he told us to come back when we had wrapped for the day.
I had yet to learn the particulars of properly exposing my shots — Matty pulled me in having noticed in my first attempts at video “the sort of innate eye that can’t be taught. So I was there to gain the teachable aspects of camera work.
he gave me a quick-and-dirty rundown on shutter speed, aperture, and ISO after knocking on Warren’s door while we waited to be let inside. It felt like suddenly getting pushed into the deep end of the big kid pool with a camera in my hand and pretty much no idea what I was doing.
