ABOUT
When I was a kid my Mom would take my brother and me to see just about any Disney film that played in Macon, Georgia. I remember how much the movie theaters sucked back then with their low-backed chairs, sticky floors and tinny sound systems but it was magic to me. We’d stop at the K-Mart across the street from the theater and get big bags of popcorn that my mom would smuggle into the theater in a big K-Mart bag. I didn’t realize it at the time but I don’t think she really had the money to splurge on these little adventures. My Dad was pretty strict with the wallet so she had to be a little bit subversive to make it work. I think she did it because she loved us and because she loved movies herself.
I remember having to convince her that Star Wars wasn’t going to have any profanity in it. I had read the novelization before the movie made it to our town but she was still skeptical. She eventually relented and took us to see it but I don’t think she watched it with us. I think she just dropped us off for that one. And oh what a movie it was.
I grew up on Star Trek. I blame that little fact on my own determination to do the right thing. I think my own personal morality has more to do with Trek than with the Methodist church we were made to attend. Trek was pretty cool but it was never all that exciting. It couldn’t afford to be. I dreamt of a show with real robots and speeding spaceships and in the summer of 1977 those dreams came true.
I’ve seen a lot of movies since Star Wars but none of them have clicked into place for me so easily. It truly was the movie I’d always wished for. It made me aware of the fact that people could actually manufacture worlds that didn’t exist. I saved up all my money for every book on the making of the movie that I could get my hands on. I had the Star Wars Sketchbook. I had the Star Wars Album (a weird little book that was probably just a cash-in). I had the Famous Monsters Star Wars magazine. I had to know how it was done. How had these people plucked my dreams from between my ears and shown them to me on the big screen?
That was back in the day when the warts of any production were still kept secret. Hollywood still maintained some sense of its own mystery so I never learned how George Lucas was hospitalized due to stress and fatigue during the production or about the tryst between Harrison and Carrie. I just soaked up all the “we’re gonna put on a show” goodness that the press was filled with in the wake of this new kind of box office juggernaut and I immediately wanted to make movies.
My senior year in high school I put together a rudimentary (read: BAD) special effects reel using my Dad’s 8mm film camera and presented it as a science project. I’m not sure how I got my teacher to agree to it but the science fair judges weren’t fooled. One asked, “So you just executed some of the existing movie effects? Nothing new?” I beamed, “Nope!” while surrounded with my cardboard starship models and they moved on to the next kid. I didn’t win anything but I was proud of my crappy stop-motion techniques. Next stop, Star Wars.
Well, it never really came to that. When I was considering colleges I was corralled into a school that I could go to for free since my Mom worked there…and they didn’t have a film program. My Mom actually recruited people to come and tell me what a terrible career filmmaking would be anyway. She discouraged my dreams and I let her do it out of my own fear. I had terrible self-esteem so I was easily discouraged. I eventually found my way into the university’s theatre department and was quite happy with theatre for a long time, but my true love was always movies. It just took me a while to get back to them.
In 2001, I packed up my late night theatre series (freakengine) in Memphis and moved to LA. I didn’t have a plan but I knew that I’d need to live somewhere other than the southeast if I was going to work in the film industry at all. I eventually landed a job on the Disney backlot and while it was interesting to get some firsthand knowledge of the way things worked on set, it was ultimately boring. The eighth-grader in me was not all that impressed.
I’m still here in LA and I’m still not impressed with the Hollywood machine but I’m still dreaming. In 2009 I wrote and directed a year-long, sci-fi web series called Jupiter’s Ghost. It hasn’t gotten much attention but I learned a lot making it and I hope to do even more. In the meantime I’m going to use this site to share my love of movies with you. Hopefully you have some dreams left too.
-Tom
