I Oughta Be in Pictures

Continuing the great job of porting over content, from MySpace on 10/21. That film project I mention here now has a final script, a great crew, and a tight shooting schedule that commences next week. And besides being a co-writer, I also have a small non-speaking role. Yaaay!

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When I was ten years old I wanted to make movies.

My friend Steven and I wrote scripts, loose leaf on ruled paper, which I bound together with those little bendable brass thumbtack things that you fit through the holes in the margins. My efforts were pretty derivative- I didn't see a problem with repeating the plot of Jaws verbatim (albeit condensed to ten pages) nor did the fact that George Lucas had already done a spaceship navigating an asteroid field prevent me from thinking that it was a nifty idea for a scene.

Nevertheless, we had heart. We even went so far as to paint backdrops, figure out which of our toys and models could serve as props, and sign up our friends as actors. Our efforts really fell apart over the lack of a camera to shoot anything with. This was pre-digital video days, so we would have been talking a Super-Eight at a minimum, and nobody's parents were interested in springing for that. Small death of a small dream.

Flash forward ten or so years. A college sophomore, I was having one of those "what will I do when I grow up" crises. I now recognize that any twenty year old who is worried about choosing a life path already should be slapped silly and sent out to play, but at the time it seemed quite serious. I took out a sheet of paper (loose leaf again, no thumbtack bindies this time) and went through the Berkeley catalog, listing out all the majors that interested me besides the one I was actually pursuing. The one that most interested me was Film Theory. But no, that was all so impractical, back to Political Science for me.

Jump cut another ten plus years, to 2005. In the pit of misery at a ten hour a day, 6.5 days a week finance job with a dotcom I asked myself, "If I could do anything in the world right now, what would it be?" The first answer to flash through my mind was that I would go to film school. I actually ended up using my post-IPO proceeds from that job to take six months off and finish the novel I'd been working on for the last few years. Not by any means a bad investment of time or money, but I did notice that the desire to make movies had kept itself alive over a twenty-five year period.

And fade in now, two years later. Call me a slow learner, or, I think more accurately, a slow believer. A few weeks ago I went to the orientation for the latest round of Scary Cow, a local filmmaking collective. Last week I went to the pitch session for the projects in this round and met the various team leaders. And today I met in a diner (itself a very cinematic setting) with members of one of the teams and went over ideas for the script and the production schedule.

Roughly twenty-seven years from conception to production, but over the next few months I will finally be involved in making movies. Yaay!