A FEATURE FILM BEFORE WE’RE TWENTY?

While editing was underway on And You Shall Be a Man, My Son, Craig had been drafted by Ms. Townley to assist classmate Kathy Miller on an animated project she was making entitled The Egg. Since Craig and I had shot And You Shall Be a Man, My Son on 16 mm film, Ms. Townley figured Craig would have the expertise to assist Kathy with her 16 mm film. Kathy was a very artistic teen illustrator and her movie was intended as a cute little stop-motion animation of a chick pecking its way out of an eggshell. I’m probably not properly conveying Kathy’s talent or the charm of her movie very well, but there’s a reason.

Craig spent over a month helping Kathy film each of the animation cells she drew. Around the same time a letter arrived in the mail. It was a solicitation to enter And You Shall Be a Man, My Son in the largest high school film festival in California. Without a second thought we mailed off a print of our movie with our entrance fee. We were both thrilled to promptly receive a response informing us that the judges had accepted our film and that the awards ceremony would be a month hence up in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. It turned out that Kathy’s film, The Egg, had been accepted also but her parents were not too keen on her taking an overnight trip with us, by plane without a chaperone, so she would not be attending. At sixteen years old we were completely stoked to be traveling on our own, by jet, as genuine filmmakers invited to a real film festival.

Upon landing, Craig and I took a taxi from SFO to Mill Valley and arrived at our dumpy little motel. We planned to get to the festival early, convinced we would win and that this night would be the crowning glory of our young filmmaking careers. In fact, we did arrive an hour early at the high school that was hosting the event. We paid the cabbie and he drove away as we climbed the stairs to the auditorium. The door was locked. There was no one around. It was Saturday night and we were in front of an empty high school. WTF?! We ran down the street to a gas station and managed to figure out that we had misread the instructions and the event was actually being held at another high school, all the way across town, eight full miles away. So Craig and I did the only thing we could, we started to run. With visions of an emcee calling out our names as winners and no one there to accept our awards, we huffed and puffed and ran. It was a long freakin’ distance.

Drenched in sweat, we staggered into the theater and plopped in our seats just as the first award was being announced. It was quickly clear that we were up against some formidable competition. Some nearby filmmakers had made a Super 8 mm parody of the kid’s show Sesame Street, which featured singing, dancing, and puppetry. As the night went on and this Sesame Street kept racking up more wins, Craig and I were genuinely worried. Did we travel four hundred miles by jet, all the way to Northern California, and then run eight miles for nothing? Then, as the host was preparing to announce the grand prize winner, I noticed it. Behind us, up in the window of the projection booth, I could see the projectionist threading up the 16 mm projector. I elbowed Craig and whispered, “Looks like somebody who shot their film on sixteen is taking the prize.” Both of us were positively beaming with big goofy grins on our faces. All of the films in the competition were shot on Super 8 mm, even their beloved Sesame Street, except for our movie! Were they saving the best for last? The host coolly sauntered back to the stage. “And now the Grand Prize Winner of this year’s festival is…” He opened the envelope. “… from Long Beach, California…” For Craig and me, time came to a stop as we realized we had this one in the bag, and then the host continued, “The Egg by animator Kathy Miller.” The audience burst into applause and the projectionist rolled Kathy’s 16 mm award-winning cartoon.

To save money, Craig and I walked all the way back to the motel. It was about midnight and a cold Bay Area wind was howling around us as we trudged the eight miles in silence, lugging Kathy’s grand prize trophy. We didn’t feel our legs. We didn’t feel the cold. The trophy got heavier and heavier. As we crossed a bridge I was tempted to chuck the damn thing down into the water. Instead, we just continued walking, grumbling and cursing at our piss-poor luck all the way. Suddenly, I stopped in my tracks. There’s something about raw and utter disappointment that can sometimes galvanize a young person to action, trigger a fire in the belly. A raw notion, something we had once idly talked about, somehow popped into my brain and I just blurted it out. At that moment it made singular, total sense—it would certainly change my life and career path forever.

“We’ll show ’em.” “Yeah?” Craig responded. “Yeah. We’ll make a feature film before we’re twenty years old.” Craig thought it over for a moment and then, without a beat, responded simply and profoundly. “Fuckin’ A.”