AutoBio for AFI

For a while there a few years ago, I was noodling the idea of a graduate fellowship in cinematography at the American Film Institute. Never figured out how to do two years of full-time school and still support the family, so I let it float away, down that lazy river that carries away the sweet dreams that are not to be...

Introduction

A child of what is arguably the first modern age of media, I am both a longtime participant in the creation of media and an avid consumer of the same. Ours is an age where media is finding exponential expansion, where the clichéd koan that asks whether life imitates art or vice versa finds renewed acuity. It would seem that I, like so many Americans, have come to embody that koan. Do we embrace those arts that strike us near and dear as reflections of our own identity, or is the notion of self that we carry near and dear little more than an agglomeration of a lifetime of media consumption?

For my part, the question’s would-be solution is less compelling than the symptoms that frame its query. We influence, and are influenced by the vast media hydra – such becomes the veritable stars by which contemporary wayfarers would sight in charting their course over a chaotic cultural and socio-psychological sea. As such, the composition and production of constructive media is among the most important tasks to which we might pledge our faculties. Just as it’s been suggested that the Gutenberg Press was the most important advance of the last millennium, influencing the creation of nearly every other great innovation, so does media now wax supreme in support or influence of all the other strata of our lives. Politics? Electoral outcomes are a foregone conclusion of effective media. Religion? Televangelists have influenced more parishioners than any cleric in the history of the world. Romance and sex? Our intimate lives owe far more to the exploits of Pamela Anderson than the efforts of Emily Post. Industry and commerce? These institutions might well collapse in the absence of the media that sells, spins, and supports their endeavors. Whether it’s true that our lifestyles imitate our art or the converse, I believe both can be traced in a devolutionary spiral that begs the intervention of sustained voices of reason and intelligence.

Thus have I sketched the crossroads from which I now compose: I have invested the lion’s share of my adult blood, sweat, tears, hopes and dreams to the creation of media – especially to the industry of narrative film production – and will invest the remainder to greater degree. Yet while such premature exclamation would tarry with tomorrow, such is perhaps best tempered by the context only to be had in a brief appraisal of days gone by.

Biography

As the circumstances of my conception, birth and infancy required only my peripheral participation we’ll overlook them entirely, instead introducing our young protagonist in blissfully ignorant childhood in the Las Vegas of the 1960’s. I was the spawn of a show business household; my stepfather a stagehand in a long line of Las Vegas production extravaganzas, my bread and board was from my earliest days a dispensation from the entertainment deities. In my middle-school years (back then we called it junior high) I routinely arrived home from school in time to accompany my stepfather to work, to sit in the light booth for the matinee show of whichever production he then found his employ. I first stood in the presence of an unclothed woman at one such production (a burlesque review called Bottoms Up on which a curtain rises in Las Vegas theaters to this day), only dimly aware of the $5 casino chip pressed into my hand by the show’s producer as I goggled at the showgirls’ casual nudity.

Thus did childhood pass into adolescence, and primary education eventually give way to the university. I was a gifted student whose aptitude was exceeded only by my diminished focus, and did not deserve my matriculation at such a prestigious institution as Santa Clara University. Still, they had enrolled my father and three older brothers, and so were hard-pressed to disdain my own application. Woefully immature and unprepared for the freedom of that world, it is sufficient to say that I did not wield the advantages that such an education might provide, but rather dissipated such along with the time spent in that institution. While I was thereby enriched – intellectually, spiritually and culturally, such was the limit of my advantage. Now possessing the acuity of retrospect, I would gladly do it over again, with vastly different result (thus this narrative).

So did the years pass from adolescence into adulthood, but let’s not touch down again until 1986, when my romance with a young would-be actress brought me to Los Angeles, and, before long, into the film industry. My ability to drive a five-ton truck landed me the post of art department leadman on a series of non-profit short films; in that post I found a natural aptitude for set decoration, an aptitude that led to five years of commercials and rock videos and eventually a union card (local 44) and the better part of another decade in features and episodic television.

While I thrived in the art department, loving the creative expression, freedom of movement and limitless variety of media and locations in which we were expected to perform, I divined before long that such would not ultimately provide a satisfying career path – neither as dresser, decorator, art director (all of which I tried), nor even as production designer. Thus did I again commence my so-called higher education, aspiring to levitate by sheer will alone above the line to a more satisfying and expressive creative endeavor. I applied myself to screenwriting in 1991, a tempestuous romance with the Word that endures to this day, through six feature properties and at least two shorts (while the first feature project, a blackly comedic misadventure entitled Two For the Road, was all but dreadful, the second was less so – and since the writing was enjoyable and the results steadily progressed through lessening degrees of unworthiness, I persevered. My current work, entitled The Bean King, comprises one facet of this application). Concurrent to my exploits with the pen I began a course in independent study, building and digesting a library of texts on production management, direction, staging and previsualization, acting, producing, production finance, and more. When my contacts with prospective agents proved discouraging I learned to write a business plan with the intent of raising funds for independent production (a pursuit that has borne fruit, in my ability to realize income from writing business plans).

But just as a resume fails utterly to capture the true ability and value of the would-be employee, so does this biography, in its examination of blood, bone and viscera overlook the artist’s heart and soul. For that focus we must turn instead to…

Philosophy and Other Slippery Slopes

The artist’s path began in earnest for me when, at the threshold of my thirties (and not incidentally, marriage) I was given my first real camera. I had, like any American, dallied with Polaroids and point and shoots, yet with this instrument something in me shifted – a switch was thrown. I found a strong affinity (and again enjoyed a natural aptitude) with the viewfinder and shutter that is paralleled in my life only by my affinity for words – and that dynamic duo has informed everything I’ve done since, both in film and out.

Words and pictures; I know of only one industry in which such gifts might prove most apt in expression.

With my camera on my arm I found visual advantages that few photographers are afforded, given my post as a union set dresser. I shot sunrises on the empty tarmac of LAX; I shot forest fires raging over Malibu; I shot terrible explosions; I shot tender portraits – of my children, of grips, gaffers, medics and movie stars. On the set of My So-Called Life I began anonymously posting stills on the corkboard above the crafts service table, and once unmasked became an ersatz celebrity with cast and crew.

I had learned from my mentor in art direction (whose own mentor was the late Jordan Cronenweth) that availing light to the set, and ultimately the lens, was the art director’s primary mandate. Once I began to frame life within 35mm parameters, I understood light with a new eye. With that eye to the viewfinder I found an avenue for expression that my words had never approached – I found something of the satisfaction that a composer must feel when his score is brought to symphonic life. I found the essence of that culture that my university studies in sociology so emphasized. A small sample of my portfolio comprises a second facet of this application, but twenty images do reduced justice to my romance with images living, latent and still.

In my zeal for such imagery my horizons have continued to expand. Digital video has afforded me the ability to push my craft into motion, and back to my singular ambition. As with screenwriting, business planning, producing, directing and the other crafts necessary to my maturation as a filmmaker, I have taught myself the rudiments of editing (thanks to Apple and their Final Cut Pro), again with vastly satisfying results.

Cinematography is, in my view, the apogee of the cinematic challenge, a technological and artistic alchemy that requires deft control of art, science, and leadership. The latter is perhaps the most overlooked challenge of the effective cinematographer, for the director of photography’s leadership challenge eclipses any other in the cinematic pantheon. The director is a leader, to be sure – yet his interactions are primarily with cast and department heads. Department heads face leadership challenges with their own rank and file, but these responsibilities approach neither the sway nor the gravity of the DP’s, who must inspire and oversee the best effort of his or her camera team (the slightest misstep of whom can render the best efforts of cast and crew moot), the gaffer and her team of riggers and juicers, and the key grip and his team of hammers. It is beyond dispute that cinema can exist in the absence of any craft but the cinematographer’s: in the absence of the manipulation of light and shadow, cinema is dead.

I’ve had the privilege to witness the craft as it’s practiced by the masters – by the late Jordan Cronenweth, by Allen Daviau, John Toll, Vittorio Storaro, Tak Fujimoto, Andrzej Bartkowiak, John Schwartzman and others. I have been thereby inspired to take up some measure of their passion, in greater or lesser degree. While I am this day a filmmaker in many aspects, and will continue to be so and grow and mature in those arts, I believe that mastery of the camera is mastery of cinema in its essence.

I Corinthians exhorts: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known. (I Corinthians 13:12). Such ably characterizes the ambition to which I have pledged: to see life in all its sweep, scope, and drama and to capture such through precision glass; to share that vision, reflected through that rarefied prism that exists somewhere between the eye and the soul, for the edification of an audience limited by neither time nor space; to inspire some fraction of that audience to reach just a bit beyond their grasp, in imitation of the art they have divined as a reflection of their lives, or in recognition of their lives as a potentiality that they might one day fulfill.