An interview over milk shakes at a Westwood diner with film director David Lynch. Watching Tim Robbins’ latest theater production on the UCLA campus. Spray-painting the Daily Bruin office.

Life has certainly been full of colorful experiences for former Daily Bruin Arts & Entertainment editor Mickey Birnbaum, who graduated from UCLA in 1981.

Birnbaum has transformed his various interests in the arts world into successful careers in arts journalism, screenwriting and, most recently, playwriting. Birnbaum returns to his roots with the Los Angeles openings of his two recent plays, “Big Death and Little Death” on Friday and “Bleed Rail,” which opened on Saturday.

Although he majored in English, Birnbaum, who was known as Michael Auerbach during his college years, developed an interest in film and theater while attending UCLA theater productions involving students who would soon emerge as some of Hollywood’s most prominent figures.

“When I was here, Tim Robbins was here in the theater department and the Actors’ Gang was just starting up,” he said. “I got to hang out with them and see them do their first work.”

Birnbaum’s interest in both theater and film soon drew him to the Arts & Entertainment section of the Daily Bruin. The staff initially just ignored him, but his persistence in hanging around the office soon paid off.

“I started to come to the office during the day when nobody was there, and I would just start cleaning up and organizing things for them,” Birnbaum said. “Finally they said, ‘I guess you better let him write something.’”

Having finally secured a position at the paper, Birnbaum encountered no difficulty advancing through the ranks, first as a staff member and then rising to A&E editor during his last two years at UCLA.

Being a writer and editor at The Bruin allowed Birnbaum to sample a variety of different arts-related fields in addition to theater and film.

“I wrote everything: I did movie reviews, I did theater reviews, I covered books, music ... whether I was qualified for it or not,” he said.

While the subjects he covered haven’t changed, college journalism has grown up quite a bit since he left campus. Pre-dating technological advancements, newspaper production during Birnbaum’s time involved physically pasting headlines and stories to a page rather than using a computer program.

“Everything had to be pasted up by hand, so we were there usually until three in the morning working out headlines and slugs to meet our deadlines,” he said.

Birnbaum describes the A&E staff of his time as an assemblage of “loose cannons” who often bewildered advisers with their writing.

“We wrote all these impenetrable articles about semiotics and postmodernist theory, as if anybody in the readership of (The) Bruin would care,” he said.

When they weren’t writing, Birnbaum and the A&E staff might have been found pulling pranks on the rest of the staff. Birnbaum recalled a particularly memorable incident in which the A&E section protested a new remodeling of the newspaper offices.

“We spray-painted the entire office – all of our cubicles – with little protest slogans and things. ... We were so obnoxious,” he said.

Pranks aside, Birnbaum did gain invaluable experience from his time at UCLA and the Daily Bruin – expertise that propelled him toward an initial career in arts journalism. After graduating, Birnbaum went on to work for such publications as LA Weekly, Us Weekly, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

Before long, however, Birnbaum’s interest turned to film. He began his screenwriting career in 1984 writing action movies, but soon wished for greater creative license. His first script produced into a feature film was “The Tie That Binds,” a suspense thriller that came out in 1995.

Birnbaum began another project around 1999 called “Used Guys,” a comedy that recruited a stellar cast including Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller. After eight years in development, however, the film fell through right before production due to disagreement on its budget.

Rather than being disappointed, Birnbaum saw the failure as an opportunity to return back to his other love – theater.

“It’s very difficult to get a movie made, and that’s one of the reasons that I segued back into theater,” he said. “I just wanted to see some work done and have some autonomy over it.”

Birnbaum enrolled in writing workshops for playwrights, seeking guidance from the large Los Angeles theater community he had kept in contact with since college. Success soon greeted him again with his play “Big Death and Little Death.”

“(The play) is about a couple of teenagers trying to grow up in really difficult circumstances, and one of the things that really sustains them is death metal. ... It’s a complicated play to stage; cars fly through the air, (and) it includes the end of the universe,” he said.

Events like these initially appeared too complex and elaborate to incorporate into a full-scale play, but the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., took on the production; “Big Death and Little Death” premiered there in 2005. The fourth production opens on Friday in North Hollywood at the Lankershim Arts Center.

Birnbaum’s second play, “Bleed Rail,” which is about two friends – one of whom works in a slaughterhouse, the other in a fast-food restaurant – premiered May 12 at Boston Court in Pasadena.

Birnbaum credits his success at rising in both the film and theater worlds with remaining authentic rather than attempting to follow a particular mold.

“There are a million people out there who are trying to write ‘Superman 4’ or something that is commercial and recognizable,” he said. “But the way that I broke into the business was writing something really odd and original.”