Steven Martini

Steven Martini played cadet Alex Stone in Major Payne, and thirty years on he writes, directs, edits and scores his own films.

Martini came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast in 2026 to talk about Bittersweet, which had just been released in Brazil as it started its run through the foreign markets. Brad knew him the way most people do, from a movie that came out in the mid nineties, and said so before handing him the floor. Martini took it back to that period, a business he says now feels like a different planet, and worked forward from there.

He wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored Bittersweet, and acted in it. His wife produced it, the capital P producer, as he puts it, the one who organized things and made sure everybody got paid. Every professional he knew told him not to work with his wife. He did it anyway, because he did not think the film would get made any other way, and he says it made them stronger. Directing, for him, is a defensive job. Hand a script to somebody else in Hollywood and by the time it is being shot it has been through a million iterations, so he directs to protect the script. He wrote the music himself because there was no money for a composer. Acting is still the part he wants most.

Early on he was cast as the rookie on Prince Street, an NBC series about undercover cops in New York, sold to him as a ten o'clock Thursday slot. It was recast, partly reshot, and a year went by. Then Warner Brothers and NBC went to war over the syndication rights to Friends and Seinfeld, and the Thursday slot became a chip in an argument he had no part in. The show moved to Friday, then Saturday, then it was cancelled. He had been paid for episodes that never aired, so he wrote a script and made a film for fifty thousand dollars with his brother and his high school friends. The thing that became Bittersweet cost him more. Something he calls innocuous put him and his girlfriend into the court system, and he sat through the social workers and the group sessions and heard from families whose cases were far worse than his.

Martini's family is on the East Coast and he still asks himself why they let him move to California. His own kids are ten and eleven, and they were there while he made the film. He has written a script that brings Alex Stone back thirty years later, a soldier retired from the military who finds his old leather jacket in the garage. Doing it properly means going through Universal, which owns the character. If Universal passes, he says he will make the movie anyway and change the names.