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| My childhood hero: Harrison Ford |
It's been a busy few weeks since I posted the last chapter of my book,
The Film School of Life, but I've finally written down the second chapter. As I was starting on this second chapter, I realized that the last five or six paragraphs of the first chapter should actually be in the second chapter, so I edited the original
Chapter 1 and have added that part to Chapter 2 at the beginning. I am going to try and not do this kind of thing too much in writing this book, but this book is a bit of a work in progress, so I may edit and proof things from time-to-time. With that said, Chapter 2 picks up right where Chapter 1 left off, dealing with my childhood dreams of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I hope you enjoy this latest chapter in this experiment.
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Chapter 2
“What Do I Want to Be
When I Grow Up?”
Having
been born in 1990, I was not alive when the original Star
Wars trilogy hit theaters, nor
when the first three Indiana Jones movies
were released, however I quickly discovered Harrison Ford through
home video.
You
never forget the first time you remember a movie star's name, or at
least I haven't. I was three when my Mom's best friend, Ms. Rachel,
bought us what was purely called the Star Wars trilogy
at the time (because there was no inclination of the prequels then).
We watched all three of the movies, and I wish I could honestly say
the movies themselves blew my mind, but that wasn't the case. Sure,
I loved Star Wars, I
got as many of the toys as I could, and I would often pretend I was
Han Solo or Luke Skywalker when playing, but the most indelible
impression those three movies made on me was that Harrison Ford was
the coolest thing since sliced bread.
From
watching these movies, I remembered Harrison Ford's name. Maybe I
asked my Mom who he was, or I actually read it in the credits, I
don't know and I don't care, because I was hooked, I wanted to see
every Harrison Ford movie.
Soon
after, we got all three Indiana Jones
movies that had been made at that time, and I was even more
fascinated by Mr. Ford. However, unlike Star Wars,
with Indiana Jones, I had discovered a character who would go on to
be bigger than the actor playing him. While I was still mad about
Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones was the first time a movie character
really leapt off the screen for me and became my go to person of
choice to play make believe as.
Using
my older brother's bag for his Sega Gamegear as Indy's satchel, and
my Granddad's old brown fedora, I ran around the house as Indiana
Jones. I would climb the stairs, imagining they were a cliff with
pillows as falling rocks. I would swing from the top bunk of our
bunk bed to the bottom bunk, like Indy would going down to the lower
level of an ancient temple. I would even crawl across the couch,
pretending that there was a ceiling caving in right above me and I
had to wriggle my way through before I was crushed.
For
a three-to-five year old kid, this was serious stuff. Sure, did I
get away with seeing a good many movies that I shouldn't have seen at
that age because I secretly watched them with my older brothers
(Batman Returns and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,
I'm looking at you)? You bet, but if it weren't for those secret
movie sessions, would I have said at my Kindergarden graduation that
I wanted to be Harrison Ford?
You
know, in my five-year-old mind's logic, when I was asked before
graduation what I wanted to be when I grew up, well I thought the
answer was simple, I wanted to be Harrison Ford. Okay, so I now know
how stupid it is to want to be another person, because that is
impossible, but at five it seemed reasonable. He was my two favorite
movie characters of all-time. If one person could be both Han Solo
and Indiana Jones, then isn't he a person worth wanting to be? At
least, that's what I thought anyways.
So then
came the time for me to get my actual diploma. Decked out in my
white cap and gown, with my front tooth chipped and blackened from an
incident falling face first in the church gym, I went down the aisle
as my name was called and climbed the steps to the stage, receiving
my diploma. As I took hold of that tiny rolled up piece of paper,
they announced that I wanted to be Harrison Ford when I grew up,
exactly what I had told them earlier. Safe to say, I felt completely
unstoppable. While I look back on this moment now and kind of just
hang my head, wondering how I could have been that gullible, I think
it also goes to just show how much movies influenced my earliest
years.
Over
the next few years, my ambitions changed, but I still loved Harrison
Ford, and I still loved movies, I just no longer wanted to be
Harrison Ford.
As far
as most of the usual occupations that children want to be when they
get older, I never really had a desire for the norm. I never wanted
to be a doctor, an astronaut, or a fireman. Those sort of jobs
seemed boring to me.
You've
got to understand, I was the kid in elementary school who spent my
days writing stories and drawing whatever I imagined instead of
actually doing my school work. Even when we got out of the classroom
and onto the playground, rather than playing sports or whatnot, I
spent almost all of my time on the swingset pretending I was piloting
an X-wing starfighter into battle.
On top
of that, from about first to fifth grade, I was often a compulsive
liar, making up stories about myself and my family in order to make
others believe that I had this crazy, awesome life. I can vividly
recall making up stories about my family spending vacations in Japan
at the height of the Pokemon craze, or even touting that my
Dad worked on the crew of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom
Menace, creating the special effect when Darth Maul was chopped
in half by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sure, I look back upon my propensity to
lie at those times with regret now, but I also have come to
appreciate the imagination that I had to concoct such wild and random
stories. Without imagination, I really don't know where I would be.
For as
long as I can remember, I have just had a desire to create things. I
have been fortunate enough so far to be able to see things vividly in
my mind's eye that do not exist. While this has led to its fair
share of disappointment over the years -- realizing that things can
never be as I imagined them in my mind -- it also gives me something
to aspire toward.
The
things I used to draw and write in school were highly imaginative for
a kid of my age. They were riffs on all of the things I loved,
mainly Star Wars. I wrote and drew stories about space
cowboys and penned epic fantasy sagas that ripped off a lot of my
favorite video games during those years. Perhaps one of my personal
favorite stories I ever wrote was simply titled, “The Avenger.”
It was the tale of a teenaged secret agent who fought evil in a sky
blue windbreaker, with matching pants. While there wasn't a lot to
these stories or their characters, they were some of the very first
story ideas I ever remember coming up with. As a matter of fact, in
a bid to be more like my older brother, Jonathan, who made a
cherished home movie classic called Catzilla, I often busted
out the home video camera to make home movies myself.
I made
a sequel to Catzilla, and even used the same cat to star in a
movie I made with my babysitter, called Kung Fu Kitty. In
that, I played Kung Fu Boy, a boy who could talk with a magical cat
that knew kung fu and fought crime. I even did opening credits for
Kung Fu Kitty by writing them out onto a sheet of paper and
scrolling past them while singing a song that had only three words,
“Kung Fu Kitty,” in a style reminiscent of Danny Elfman's theme
for Batman. I know, original. Right?
Another
movie I made, or attempted to make, was a film version of, “The
Avenger.” I cast myself as the titular hero, and my next door
neighbor as the evil villain with a cybernetic claw for an arm
(bought at Toy's-R-Us, of course). For the film, I changed the
costume for the hero from a windbreaker to a black sweatsuit,
probably because that's what I actually owned as opposed to the other
costume. Of course, before I go too much further into the tale of
this adaptation, I must point out that I never wrote a script and
that I only ever shot one scene for the film because we were called
for dinner before I could shoot anymore.
Like a
lot of kids, writing a script seemed too time consuming. I knew
where I wanted the story to go, so what was the point? The story was
going to start with the Avenger infiltrating his archnemesis's lair,
discovering that he had a super laser death ray built in a space
station orbiting the Earth that he was going to use to destroy the
world. Why destroy the world? Because that's what I thought all bad
guys wanted to do at the time. Suffice to say, the film would wind
up on the space station, where the Avenger and his nemesis duked it
out as the clock was ticking down, me and my neighbor even rehearsed
a bit of this climactic fight scene on the trampoline in the
backyard, but it never went on camera.
You
see, I had no desires to be a moviemaker yet, I was just making a
movie because it was a spur of the moment impulse that an eight or
nine-year-old child has from time to time. My older brother, that
was my personal hero at the time, had made home movies with his
friends, so I thought I should do the same. The fact is, I
half-baked the whole idea. I had this crazy idea that we didn't need
sets or even extras, my Dad would be able to add all of that in with
CGI, which was just starting to really be a common staple in major
Hollywood movies back then.
On the
evening when we shot the only scene that was ever shot, my brother
and sister operated the camera as I ran through our backyard,
fighting invisible bad guys that were not there (the ones that would
be added digitally later). I charged from our dog's pen in the very
far corner of the yard, all the way to the fort, storming up the
steps and kicking a non-existent bad guy down the slide before
sliding down the slide myself. I called cut, and I thought it was
brilliant. Why would a suburban backyard with a child's play fort be
the hideout for an evil mastermind? You've got me, but the movie
didn't go any further than that, because my Mom called us and said
that dinner was ready, and my next door neighbor had to go back home,
so that was that. The impulse to make this movie dissipated by the
next day when something else popped up to preoccupy my time. As I
said, I did not want to make movies at that time, I just saw it as
something I should do. If I am being entirely truthful, the very
first thing I remember actually wanting to be when I grew up was a
cartoonist.
Around
second grade, I had become fascinated with those books that you could
buy at school book fairs that collected the works of say a year's
worth of newspaper comic strips into one book. I remember getting
Garfield at Large at a school book fair, and I was hooked. I
mean, I already loved Garfield from his brief stint on Saturday
morning television, but I think what really appealed to me about this
collection of comic strips, was that they were fun, funny, and they
seemed like something I could do.
You
see, my very favorite thing to do when I was little was to draw.
More so than writing stories or even playing make believe or watching
movies, drawing was sort of my first real love, and so for years I
told everyone that I wanted to be a comic strip cartoonist when I
grew up. This desire was only bolstered by the school career day
when one of my classmate's grandfather, who was a comic strip
cartoonist, came and talked to the class. I just thought it was the
coolest job in the world, so like everything I said that I wanted to
do, my Aunt Jane went out and bought me a lot of the stuff for it. I
got tons of sketchbooks, how-to-draw cartoons manuals, and art
supplies.
Eventually
my artistic ambitions went from comic strips to comic books and
manga. For the rest of elementary school, and most of middle school,
my ambition was simple, I wanted to write and draw stories. It just
wasn't possible for me to simply write without seeing the story
visually. When I wrote and drew stories, I saw how everything was
supposed to look. The setting, the costumes, the characters, the
colors of everything, and the angle upon which we were watching the
events unfold, I just could see it in my mind's eye. I was certainly
on the right track to achieving my dream, there was only one catch, I
couldn't draw.
No
matter how much I drew and wanted to be a good artist, I just simply
didn't have the gift. My best work was amateurish at best, and I
think deep down I knew that. Even when I was challenged to a draw
off in fifth grade between a popular kid and myself, where fellow
popular kids chose the winner, I knew I wasn't going to win (sure,
the deck was stacked against me, but he was also just a better artist
than me). However, I kept trucking on thinking that if I just
continued to draw, that I would be the next great comic book artist.
My
middle schools years was when I really first discovered comic books.
I was buying collections of old comic books at Books-a-Million,
buying old comics off ebay, and purchasing the new issues on
newstands. I had become obsessed with Stan Lee and wanted to be the
next great, just like him (it doesn't hurt that the first Spider-Man
movie hit theaters around this time to bolster my interests). During
this time, I tried to create my own catalogue of characters, just
like Stan Lee did at Marvel in the Sixties. Suffice to say, all of
my creations were basically knock offs of Stan Lee's best characters,
but hey, some of them were actually passable for a twelve-year-old
kid.
I
remember creating the Blue Scarab, a Batman rip-off who had no super
powers, protected the grimy, eternally dark city known as Sobian
City, and used a utility belt and his blue cape and cowl (shaped like
a scarab beetle's head) to fight crime. Then there was the Jumper, a
superhero who's only sole power was that he could jump really high,
and kick, that was it. Of course, my favorite hero I had created
during this period was the Phantom.
The
Phantom was essentially Spider-Man, just with ghost abilities. He
was a high school geek who was involved in an accidental chemical
spill on the streets of New York City, granting him the ability to
turn invisible, walk through walls, and be super strong and
acrobatic. He was the hero I cared the most for, and was the one I
did the most work on. I even made half of a full issue once, I was
so jazzed about him, but I think the thing I loved the most about the
Phantom was that I could see all of his villains so clearly.
There
was his archnemesis, Rocket, a man in a Boba Fett-styled suit with
jetpack and gauntlets that fired rockets. Then there was the
Juggler, a disgraced baseball pitcher who masqueraded as a circus
juggler committing crimes. However, my two personal favorites were
Mirage and the Absorber. Mirage was a man who could create false
images in the minds of his enemies, while the Absorber had the
ability to absorb any element, such as water, fire, and rock, to
strengthen his own body. With all of these villains and a
crackerjack hero, I thought I had come up with my Spider-Man, alas it
wasn't meant to be.
Toward
the end of my eighth grade year, I was home watching TV one night,
and on came a preview for a new cartoon that was about to premiere on
Nickelodeon called Danny Phantom. I was completely
gobsmacked. The premise was so similar to the one of my own comic
book Phantom, that I was heartbroken and furious at the same time.
In the mind of a thirteen-year-old kid, I felt as if my idea had been
stolen, which in fact I learned quickly thereafter that it was more
that the Phantom I had created wasn't really that original of an idea
to begin with. After this whole fiasco, and the continual
realization that I just wasn't as good of an artist as so many other
people in my school, my dreams of being a comic book writer/artist
just dissipated. I didn't want to just be the writer and not draw my
own stories, so I was in limbo, with no real dream to pursue.
During
this time, I toyed with a great many ideas of what I wanted to do
instead of writing and drawing comic books. I thought of being a
video game creator or being an actor, since I had just really gotten
into theatre at school. While I loved both of those things, neither
of them were truly me, and that was when a school assignment changed
my life.
It was
my Freshman year of high school and I was tasked by my history
teacher to do an oral report on a modern historical figure. We went
to the library to look through the biography section to find our
subjects. I personally had no clue who I wanted to do my report on.
Most everybody was either doing athletes or politicians, but neither
of those kinds of people interested me. That is when I saw it, the
biography of George Lucas on the bookshelf.
Throughout
the fourteen years of my life up to that point, there was only one
constant, it was that I loved movies, and more particularly, loved
Star Wars. See, I was the one in my family who obsessively
tracked movies online and knew the release dates of all the major
blockbusters. If you wanted to know when a movie was coming out, I
was the one to ask.
So here
I was in the school library, checking out the bio of George Lucas. I
had found my modern historical figure and had gotten him approved by
my history teacher, so now all I had to do was read the book and give the report.
Over
the next few days, I started reading the book whenever I get some
downtime in classes (cause who is going to read at home). As I got
further and further into the story of George Lucas, the more I
realized that me and George had a lot in common. We were both small
for our age, we were both introverts with very few friends who
favored TV and movies above playing outside, and we both wore
glasses. I saw so much of myself in his story, and I just sort of
got lost in his biography. When I started to get to the part where
he went to film school and learned to make movies, and read about the
process of how he made all of these classic movies like the original
Star Wars, I was fascinated.
Now,
while the process of video and moviemaking was not new to me – with
my Dad having been a videographer and producer for my entire life –
this was the first time I took an active interest in it. All of a
sudden, it was like someone flipped a switch inside my brain. I
wanted to make movies. I already knew how to run and operate a
camera, having professionally operated a camera for my Dad since I
was twelve, and I already had a myriad of stories in my mind and how
I visually wanted them to look, so it was a no-brainer. I was going
to be a moviemaker.
When I
nervously gave my oral report, I got an A, and more importantly, I
had finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Now,
while I wasn't without the usual teenage act of changing my mind from
time-to-time, wanting to be a playwright or be a musical theatre
actor yet again, I always came back to movies. The movies were very
much my first obsession, and I just never could let them go.
