As I was about to start middle school, my family made plans to move into another suburban housing development, this time in Long Beach, California. It was only a short five miles from our previous house, but it was an immense disruption in my life. I had to leave all the good friends I had grown up with and was forced to enroll in a new middle school where I knew absolutely nobody. In retrospect, this relocation may be one of the key reasons why I became a filmmaker.
We were the first family to move into this new development on the north side of what was to become known as Bixby Hill. Construction on the south side of the hill wasn’t planned for a few more years, so it was pretty much wilderness over there. Having moved away from my friends, I was a lonely kid, and after school I would wander around the construction zone and goof around by myself. One-by-one neighbors started to slowly move into the development and I quickly met a group of kids who would go on to become my partners-in-crime in some amazing adventures on Bixby Hill. Bruce “Bruno” Malasky was a brilliant mind, extremely curious with an early love of computer programming and photography. Craig Mitchell was the strong silent type—a solid football player with a creative streak that belied his quiet nature. Then there were the Frankenfeld boys. Three brothers, Eric, Paul, and Phil, who were eager, creative, and smart. We started running as a pack, playing street football together and getting into all kinds of trouble.
These kids were my loyal cohorts as we teamed up on a series of ever more ambitious “projects” using the immense resources at hand. First up was an audacious attempt to build a large wooden boat. We “requisitioned” lumber from the construction zone, and dragged it into Craig’s family garage. Inside, we built ourselves a fourteen-foot, flat-bottom boat utilizing all of Craig’s father’s “off-limits” power tools. This craft turned out amazingly well, and we had grand plans to take our boat down to the ocean and use it for fishing. But there was one technical flaw. We hadn’t figured out how to seal the gaps between the planks of wood. One night I had a genius breakthrough and came up with a brilliant plan in which we would jam paper into the gaps and then fill them over with white Elmer’s glue. This process seemed to solve the problem nicely and our boat really looked shipshape!
For our maiden voyage, we slid the boat into a neighborhood swimming pool. This would be our “shakedown cruise.” Whoops! Elmer’s glue turned out to be completely water-soluble and within minutes the gaps between the planks were melting and water was streaming into the boat. The youngest Frankenfeld brother had to bail out overboard as our boat went straight to the bottom. It took a couple of hours but we finally managed to drag the waterlogged craft out of the pool and across the street, where we unceremoniously dumped it in the empty field. For the next few days our beached boat sat there as a jarring testament to the folly of our grand plans. A couple of days later, our abandoned boat suddenly disappeared. We never saw it again and we never found out who took it, or for what purpose. For months afterward we were fixated on wild speculations of whether the boat-nappers were using it to smuggle contraband from offshore freighters or how they just might have drowned at sea during their first voyage in it.
We continued our path toward ever-larger and more elaborate projects, including some serious experimentation with model rockets, kites, and hot air balloons. Our rockets were genuinely dangerous, de facto pipe bombs actually, stuffed with every red-blooded American boy’s rocket fuel of choice, paper match heads. We’d tear them out of packs of matches by the hundreds and stuff them into pipes purloined from the construction zone. A kid we knew, using the same materials, accidentally blew up his garage with one of these devices, which finally motivated us to migrate to a different recipe.
Bruno was the scientific mind of our bunch and had read an article about military rocket engines and patiently explained to us that if we could get our hands on some potassium nitrate, then we could mix it with sugar and have a genuine rocket fuel. Leave it to Bruno to know that potassium nitrate’s common name was saltpeter and that pharmacies sold it by the can for various geriatric medicinal uses. What followed was a tag team process where our crew would split up and then enter the same drugstore alone and “innocently” buy canisters of saltpeter with the excuse our grandparents needed it for unknown reasons. This explanation always seemed to shut down any questions by the druggist. Our obsession with saltpeter came to a spectacular and terrifying end one day. Upon ignition, the body tube of one of our rockets cracked apart and a burning mass of our “rocket fuel” landed right on the arch of my shoe. I managed to kick the flaming shoe off my foot before this chemical inferno could scorch my skin, but our rocket fuel burned right through my jettisoned shoe from arch to sole and pretty much put an end to not only a nice pair of Converse sneakers but also our experimentation with such unstable stuff.
I had always liked photography and, with my friends’ help, constructed a darkroom in my parents’ garage from requisitioned lumber. (Again, courtesy of Phase Two of Bixby Hill’s development.) I did a lot of experimentation with black and white negative film, although since I couldn’t afford a photographic enlarger, I was forced to substitute a slide projector in its place. The resulting imagery from this contraption was pretty bizarre, although some untrained eyes called it “artistic.”
My mom and dad had always been avid shutterbugs and used to torture my sister and me every Christmas morning with their 8 mm camera rig with its four blinding spotlights. One day I borrowed my parents’ camera and showed it to my gang. Without a second thought we decided then and there to make a movie. Production began immediately on Ways of the West, a ridiculously ambitious Western epic. It was probably not the best subject for a first film, but we had lots of kids to star, our beloved field for the backdrop, and even a working archery kit with bow and arrow.
Again, we relied on Bruno to teach us the technology. Bruno had actually read a book about moviemaking techniques and taught us some important concepts about cinematic flow of action. It was a lightbulb moment that day when Bruno explained that for the action in a film to make sense filmically, if a character exited frame camera left, then on the very next cut the character must enter frame from camera right. When we cut this stuff together and watched the action flow it was just like the movies we watched in theaters! This was the beginning of our experimentation with the language of film. In later projects we would investigate techniques used by our favorite filmmakers such as cross-cutting, flashbacks, and that most powerful tool of all—the close-up.
Ways of the West was not a good movie. In fact, we never did finish it. But it had the most awesome stunt by a local kid named Nathan Heit, who took an arrow to the chest and then performed a radical tumble to the bottom of a steep hill. We would rewatch Nate’s spectacular stunt over and over and it began to dawn on us that the possibility of us making a thrilling movie might just be within our grasp. You were a stud, Nate!
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When I was in ninth grade I badgered my parents to drive me up to Hollywood Boulevard to see a science fiction film I had been eagerly anticipating. Director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing at the Hollywood Pacific Theater in 70 mm Cinerama and it literally blew my young mind. It was the first moment I perceived that film could be art and the first film I had ever seen that left the audience with more questions than answers. I left the theater dazzled and puzzled. I liked that feeling.
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One day I came up with a brilliant idea, which would turn out to be one of the best academic moves of my entire middle school tenure. I asked one of our teachers if we could submit a short documentary movie as a substitute for the ten-page written report required for our English class. Surprisingly, our teacher was thrilled with the idea. Right there was an important lesson. I learned that everybody, even a stodgy middle school teacher, is dazzled with the glamour of movies. I guess she was enchanted with the idea of being elevated from an ignored middle school teacher right up to the status of an “Executive Producer”—truly heady stuff! And so started our epic, The Fish Movie.
A slight detour first … at that time in my life I actually believed that I was destined to devote my life to science and to pursue a career in marine biology and oceanography. Growing up on the eastern border of Long Beach, adjoining nearby Seal Beach, I developed a strong love of the ocean and all things aquatic. A short distance away was Alamitos Bay, where I first learned to sail at the municipal Leeway Junior Sailing Club. I was an avid swimmer and sailor and a huge fan of the great oceanic adventurer of the day, filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Maybe the true highlight of my high school life was the day Craig’s father wrangled us a tour of the Calypso, Cousteau’s research vessel, which happened to be docked for a few days in the port of Long Beach. In fact, the day we were on board, who should saunter by us but the dashing Captain Cousteau himself! We breathlessly introduced ourselves and the Captain was kind enough to indulge us with a photo.
Craig and I were both also avid scuba divers, a passion that transferred to an obsession with aquariums. Together we had hand-built several of them. So, when it came time to find a subject for our documentary short project, it was a no-brainer to make a movie about something we loved. Fish.
The Fish Movie was a five-minute overview of aquariums with some nice shots of colorful fish and a terrific stop-motion animated title sequence created by Bruno. The first time we screened it, our teacher flipped out. She loved it! She liked it so much she would pull all three of us out of our other classes and have us screen The Fish Movie for every one of her other classes. Obviously we were onto something here, and pretty soon we were not only doing our own school movies every semester, we were also helping friends to produce their own projects. And no matter how bad the movies turned out, we always received a grade of A on them!