I can't remember exactly when I first met him. The AFM, probably, or one of those LA things I was always reluctant to attend. I was his secret shiksa. He was my North Star.
Yale wrote Bad Timing for Nic Roeg. I would later produce New Town Killers in Edinburgh for Nic's son Luc — directed by Richard Jobson, singer of the Skids, one of the great punk bands. The worlds were always the same world.
He invented the camp Batman. The New York Times called him a discovery. He kept journals on everyone he met — their behaviour, their attitudes, the things they said when they thought nobody was listening. He was, as someone once put it, the Allen Dulles of the literary world. He watched. He listened. He wrote it down.
He loved the bones of me. I never understood why.
Yale believed the container mattered as much as what was inside. His home proved it — not the LA kind, not minimalism and statement art, but the home of a man who had spent a lifetime collecting things that interested him and refusing to throw any of them away. Every surface told a story. Every meal came with three more.
His envelopes were the same. Covered in stamps — more than any letter needed. Stickers. The unmistakable kind intelligence of Yale Udoff. And a red Spitfire drawn on almost all of them. Biro, felt tip, the same hand reaching across years.
When Fly Me to Dunoon — my film, my production — was coming together — Rod Steiger, Eddie Izzard, Noah Wyle, £525,000 from Scottish Screen, announced at Cannes from a yacht with Nick Lom, son of Herbert Lom — Yale was excited. He always saw what things could be.
He was kindness and intelligence incarnate. Those two things together, in one person, without pretension. That's rare anywhere. In Los Angeles, it's practically extinct.
When I heard he'd died, I cried my eyes out.
In February 2026 I found myself sitting with his envelopes again. I wrote to his agents at Gersh — Bob and Dan — to complete the dialogue Yale and I had started all those years ago. I told them about the work. The slate. I told them I couldn't imagine how they must miss his sparkles.
They didn't reply.
It is what it is.
This page, this site, this body of work — it's the delivery on his faith. He saw the bones before the body existed. The body exists now.
He would have liked the library. He would have understood the envelopes.
The red Spitfire still flies.
— Kate Dain, April 2026
