Memories, Dreams, Reflections 3: The Embryonic Auteur

 

Most people have heard of the cliché that most boys want to be firemen or astronauts when they grew up, but when I was in grade school, my greatest desire was to be a moviemaker. My heroes in that regard were George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (hey, what do you expect, it was the Eighties). The first movie I ever saw in theaters was the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, in 1983, during its initial theatrical release. I must have been around 3 or 4 years of age at that point, and my memory of going to the movies that evening are very hazy. I almost certainly had no idea what was going on, but I do remember the scenes of the Ewoks celebrating in the forests of Endor at the end (I would just like to say that I loved the Ewoks back then and that I still do now; I’ve never understood the hatred they generate amongst some members of the Star Wars fan base. Of course, my favorite character in the original trilogy was the alien informally known as Hammerhead who appeared in the cantina scene in the first Star Wars film; years later I found out that his real name was Momaw Nadon. I also had a soft spot for the Rancor monster. I even had the original Rancor action figure, and it had a lever built into its spine that you could use to make its jaw move up and down: during the 9^th grade I went through a spell where I decided to take up ventriloquism and I would employ this old Rancor action figure as my ventriloquist’s dummy… for some inscrutable reason, my nickname for it was “Stanley”). 

But enough about Rancor Ventriloquism. Aside from the Star Wars franchise, some other films I liked from that era that were associated with Lucas and Spielberg included the Indiana Jones films and also The Dark Crystal. Words cannot really describe just how obsessed I was as a kid with The Dark Crystal. The Skeksis utterly fascinated me, and the ending of the film, in which the Mystics and the Skeksis elide into a new race, left me spellbound. This was my introduction to the concept of the Union of Opposites, and perhaps was what inspired me to begin studying Alchemy during my adult years. I should say I had other favorite films not associated with either Lucas or Spielberg. I also adored the Ghostbuster films, and also had a great fetish for black and white Japanese monster movies, with the Godzilla films in particular being favorites (of which I'll speak more about later).

However, this dream of becoming a filmmaker was a somewhat nebulous one, and I only had a very slight grasp on just how films were made, or even specific ideas for what my films would be. But I knew that I wanted to direct both big budget monster movies and also epic sci-fi space operas, with storylines that mixed up scenes of space battles with themes of cosmic mysticism. When I was in the 3^rd grade (during the years 1988-1989), I wrote out the following for a school assignment (apologies ahead of time for the poor spelling):

“When I Grow Up”

When I grow up I want to be a movie maker.

I would make the best movies ever made.

Thell be so relistic they would hit the jackpot!

I would win 10000 dollars.

The character’s in the movie that’ll hit the box office!

Yay!

Not to mention the books!

Ill be famos!

Yes, that’s what I want to be.

Stapled beneath this declaration is another piece of paper, on which I drew an illustration of a screening room of a movie theater, done in crayons. On the lower right-hand side of this illustration there is a man manipulating a film projector, while on the screen itself a crudely drawn green dinosaur (obviously modeled after Godzilla: I even wrote out the word ‘Godzilla’ in erratic green letters above his head) is destroying a city and breathing out red flames. Seated before this screen there is an audience of equally crudely drawn stick figure people, including an orange-headed man wearing a top hat (from the top of which protrudes a flower) and holding a cane, and this nattily dressed theatergoer is exclaiming “it’s scary!” This type of illustration was quite common for me back in the day, for in my grade school era I would often draw scenes in which giant monsters were going about eating people and destroying cities. I can only wonder what my art teachers made of that… I imagine it's the sort of thing one could get in trouble for these days. 

On a related note, I can recall my siblings and I playing a Commodore 64 game called Film Maker back in the mid-1980’s. Actually, calling it a “game” was a bit of a stretch. It was more like an electronic animation tool, put out in 1985 by Spinnaker Software, that let you create your own “movies.” First you selected a scene, which were more like scenic backdrops, and there were 13 of these: some of the options included a city, the sea, a forest, the moon, a living room, a castle, and a gas station. Next, you populated this scene with a variety of objects, such as men and women, robots, aliens, dogs, cats, automobiles, random shapes, and so on (these objects could be manipulated as well, with one being able to adjust their size and color: you could only have 8 objects per scene, though). Next one individually moved each object around the screen, tracing the route they would take for the finished film. Then one selected a song to accompany the film: there were 5 songs to choose from, somewhat twee electronic renditions of music from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker: “March,” “Russian Dance,” “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” and “Dance of the Reed Pipes” (the one exception was the fifth song, “Peter & the Wolf”). Also, text could be added to the bottom of the screen to give context to the action unfolding above. Finally, one could watch the scene they had created, and even save it to floppy disk afterwards. I made a number of 45-second “movies” using this program, mostly variations on giant robots/aliens/monsters attacking population centers, no doubt in a crude attempt to emulate the creature features I so enjoyed watching in those days. One of my favorite creations for this program was a film called “The Blob.” The backdrop used was that of a castle built on the side of a river, and I had taken the circle shaped object, made it gigantic, colored it green, and animated it bouncing around the city, crashing down atop miniature cars and people (and even a dog), while “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” played incongruously in the background (for the curious, the text at the bottom of the screen for this film read as follows: “READ ALL ABOUT IT! HUGE BLOB INVADES CASTLE”). This one I even posted onto YouTube in 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rddzc1RIcPE

By the time I got to the 6^th grade and middle school I had begun losing interest in making films, and by  high school I had exchanged that dream for another: the dream of being a bigshot bestselling novelist. Yet in the 12^th grade, my senior year at high school, I suddenly found myself briefly bit by the filmmaking bug again. At that time I had become very interested in the films of Quentin Tarantino (the first film of his I saw, Pulp Fiction, had been in November of 1997, though I had read the screenplay for the film back in June of that same year), and also 90’s indie films in general (for truly the 90’s were the golden years for indie films). For a short period of time I decided I would be an indie filmmaker. Deciding I should be a bit more professional about it, I began reading books on how to write screenplays, how to finance indie films, and so on. In the spring of 1998, a few months before I graduated high school, I even began work on a screenplay, though I never completed it (I began writing it in a big blue spiral-bound notebook on April 6^th, 1998 and quit writing it sometime around April 12^th: in that span of time I completed around 55 pages). Inspired by the crime films of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the name of this screenplay was Nurse Sharks, and it was essentially a rip-off of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, in that it was a non-linear tale about a bank robbery gone wrong. The only twist I brought to this formula was that the bank robbers were all women. I can hardly hold this failed screenplay up as an example of good writing: there’s one particularly cliché scene where an older cop mentions how this will be his last sting, and how he’s looking forward to retirement and spending time with his family (which obviously is the kiss of death for such a character).

One thing I came to realize about filmmaking is that it can be a long, complicated process, one that involves working with many different people, and that one usually needs to have good social skills to succeed at such an affair. Being an incurable introvert, obviously such a career path would not be for me. However, anyone who has read any of my books can certainly see hints of this thwarted childhood ambition. In some ways being a fiction writer is a lot like being not only a film director, but also a scriptwriter, costume designer, set designer, even a soundman/composer. One gets to do it all, without the annoying hassle of working with other (ugh) people.