Chasing The Dream: Saginaw to Hollywood - My True Story

When I was 10 years old, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to make movies. I know, I know... this sounds like bullshit but it's the truth. One night I snuck into the living room, way after my bed time, and hid behind the couch as my parents watched this movie called, "Duel". It was a film about this guy being chased down by a big ass semi tractor trailer across the California desert. After the film, there was a "behind the scenes" show where you got to see how the film was shot... that was it. I was hooked.

Shortly afterward, I convinced my mother to let me watch movies with her on television. Little did I know, she was into watching Westerns. So I faked to enjoy Westerns too... anything to get more TV time. Let's just say, I fell asleep a lot while watching TV with mom. My mom started taking me to the local cineplex when she could afford it. My fire was stoked... a movie called Jaws did me in. There was no escaping the "jaws" of movie making at this point. As I grew a little older, and my parents divorced, my mother was going through some of my dads old military stuff and she found an old reel to reel sound recorder, a microphone, a camera light and a Kodak 8mm film camera. She asked me if I wanted the stuff (I was sure she'd rather have tossed it in the trash). Not having the slightest clue as to how any of this stuff worked, I took it any way. I quickly found out how the light worked when I burned a hole in my bedroom carpet by sitting it face down on the floor for two seconds. If that was any indication as to my future filmmaking skills... I was in trouble.

I figured out how to work the camera, lights and the reel to reel recorder. I found my first actors, too... my little brother and sister. I was a selfish big brother... I forced them to wear bed sheets and halloween costumes for the skits I'd shoot with them. We even used my mom's wigs when she was sleeping. My filmmaking got real advanced when I recruited the entire neighborhood to be in my mini-productions. It all came to a crashing halt when my mother couldn't afford to buy me the Kodak film cartridges from our local drugstore anymore. Besides that, I had shot a lot of stuff but never had anyway of getting the film processed or editing it together. And frankly, everyone was sick of taking orders from me, specially not having seen anything that we ever shot...

I was determined... driven to see what I had shot edited together and also to shoot more. I started collecting soda (pop) cans, which in Michigan you can recycle for 10 cents each. It took a lot of bicycling around the neighborhood and digging in ditches and trash bins to find 100 cans just to buy a cartridge of 8mm film that only lasted for 3 minutes of shooting time. It took weeks but I was determined (I also recruited a few of the neighborhood kids to help). In exchange for a neighborhood screening of our little movies, I talked a few parents into donating their weekly soda cans to fund our "shoots". We didn't call it filmmaking... we just calling it "shooting or shoots". Getting this financing, changed everything...

More to come!
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Me... 10 years old.

Thanks for reading. Love to hear your comments.

DT