I met with the production manager and told him I was on my way out. He wasn’t particularly sad to see me go. I could never brag that I was the most reliable worker, and little more than the least successful brown-noser, a position that seemed over-staffed in the Feature Animation department. I always felt at odds with most of the middle-management, but since we’d gone into full production, my employment at Disney seemed merely tolerated because of the little bit of seniority I had (having been there the longest) and my friendly relationships with the artists. A few were sad to see me go, and that was nice, but the now hectic pace of the film saw me lost in the shuffle of a quickly growing crew. Many never knew I was gone until some time later, when I was (literally) thousands of miles away.

My last week at Disney, I was preoccupied with the music videos we were getting ready to produce at RTP (Road Trip Productions.) I only mentioned it to one other co-worker who was unimpressed and, I think, glad I was leaving. An NYU production graduate himself, he offered me this sagely advice: “Synchronize the editing to the music.” I bit

my lip and humbly thanked him, and then watched as he went back to answering phones, setting appointments, and stocking the supply cabinet. It’s the way I have always remembered him, a tragic and pathetic symbol of the death of a passion, and a fate that I intended to avoid until the end of my days. But fate has many guises, and will throw itself headlong into one’s path at any given time -and the more unexpected, the more inevitable. 

A couple days before I said goodbye to Disney, I was delivering an old dictation machine in Glendale. I was driving down Glenoaks Boulevard at the end of the day. I was going to do the typical run and head on home, but instead of the usual mundane tasks falling over themselves to distract me from more pressing matters, -like the detailed shot list for the two shoot days of the upcoming music video- an old man crossed the street in front of my beat-up old Honda Civic, and I plowed headlong into him.

It was one of those things. I saw him in the lane. I slowed. He stopped. He waved me on. I waved him on. He waved me on again. Then we both hesitated, and went. Before I knew what was happening, he was up on the hood, crushing in my windshield. I jumped out of the car just as he was rolling off, and several helpful pedestrians approached, one was a nurse. The paramedics came. Police cars. Kids on bikes, stalled in the grassy median, leaning over their handlebars. I will never forget it. I gave the police a full description of the event. They measured the skid marks, interviewed bystanders, and then, in what seemed like a quickly receding tide, were gone. The old man had been wheeled off on a gurney, moaning as if the world had come to and end, and I was left in the middle of an intersection, a crossroads, standing next to a car with a broken-in windshield.

I was in shock. But who would care about me? I was the driver. I remember driving straight home that evening, speeding down the freeway, leaning out the driver’s side window so I could see around the caved in windshield. And I would remember the dictation machine, covered in some glass, and how it had fallen on the floor of the car from the impact. I never delivered it.

The next morning I phoned that I would be late for work. I was in an accident, I told them, and had to get my windshield repaired. I had one of those mobile-repair places come out and take care of it and, still feeling in shock, I went to work late in the morning.

I mentioned it to a few people, who laughed a bit and made a few jokes about it to make me feel better (“He was old? Well, he probably had one leg in the grave anyway!” etc.) It was their way, and I didn’t take offense. I told my boss and didn’t think much about the accident itself, though I felt dread at not knowing the fate of the victim. The next day at work was my last one, and it was uneventful. Everyone was busy, and there were a few “good luck”s, but I celebrated when I got home by calling the police station and getting a copy of the police report.

It found that I was not at fault, which was something of a relief. It had been determined that I’d been driving under the speed limit and that the pedestrian was not crossing in a marked crosswalk. But later I noticed on my car a new dent in the roof, just near the upper corner of the windshield. When I drove, I could put my hand up a bit past the door, and run my fingers over the small dent, which was a slight concave depression the width and breadth a man’s head would make if it struck the hollow steel at 30 mph.

The shoot days were scheduled for the weekend, a week away. Brian and I were getting pretty stressed about it, since we had been working on the project without hearing anything from the investor. The manager strung us along for a few days and then we began to have some serious doubts that a check would come through at all. We had gone ahead and called the rental houses and reserved the equipment. And we had a camera truck in mind, and were going to move surreptitiously through the inner city of Los Angeles -the original Skid Row- and get some footage of real life on the streets, as well as some candid shots of the band in the locations and interacting with people down on their luck.

The song was a moody and poignant one, any proceeds of which were going to help certain inner city campaigns, as I understood it. Our video was well-intentioned and some of the images I had in mind were moving and sympathetic, and I was really looking forward to getting into the thick of the shoot, having scouted out the dismal locations with Brian on more than a few occasions. But that Tuesday we got a call from the band’s manager. Something was awry.

“Everything’s on hold,” was the word, without saying why. We felt that the band had little clue how much we had put into this endeavor, and calls weren’t returned until Thursday, after we had gotten message to them that all our equipment reservations had to be cancelled, and the crew notified to not show on their call times until further notice.

Interestingly, though I had quit Disney the week before, I found myself back on the Paramount lot working on one of the smaller sound stages on a commercial. Not wanting to turn down a production job, Brian had booked worked for himself and offered me a position as a P.A. (Production Assistant) for a few days. It seemed like a good idea to me -make a few extra bucks and get to spend time with Brian on the lot, and hammer out some last minute ideas on the upcoming weekend shoot.

I went to work on Thursday with a sickly, heavy heart. An old woman had called me late the previous night asking “WHAT ARE YOU GOIN TO DO?” about the accident, and then mysteriously adding “HE CAN’T SPEAK!” She sounded crazy, and I never got any specifics, but evidently she was some girlfriend of the old man I had hit, and she was upset about the whole accident. And who could blame her? I had no idea how to respond, was totally surprised by the call, and never found out how she had got my number. The next day I relayed the information to Brian, who was very supportive, though we were both fairly depressed when we got the message later that night that no money would be coming in to finance RTP any time soon.

As is typical Hollywood fashion, there was a disagreement between a few parties, egos were involved, and financing was pulled indefinitely and all creative projects came to a halt. I tried not to freak out about it. I was still working in the industry, and I was sure I could find more work. Brian was a reliable friend.

That Friday night after we wrapped, I walked out of the sound stage and took the long route to my car. Though it had been a cloudy day, it was a nice night and I stood there in the quieting alley between the big, non de-script buildings where dreams were made. Brian was saying goodbye and good night, and we were both feeling like we’d been had by the whole affair with the band. Then he stared away for a moment and said, without enthusiasm, “Look. It’s a Klingon on a bike.”

Sure enough, riding past us down the lane and around the corner was a Klingon. A real Klingon, and he just rode on by, not thinking twice about it, his Fu Manchu mustache blowing in the breeze. He was surely an extra from Star Trek: The Next Generation, shooting on a soundstage a few buildings over, and we just laughed about it all right there. Hey, you know? It’s Hollywood. Nothing is real. Look, there’s a Klingon on a bike!

And we were working on a commercial for the most ignominious of products: Kitty Litter. For several days, my job as a production was to examine various bags of kitty litter, and pick the least attractive one. It would be an overhead shot. Two cats would walk onto two separate kitty litter boxes. One cat would find one box appealing, -yes, that’s our product!- and the other cat would find the adjacent box to be too abhorrent to even relieve itself upon. I worked several days, long hours, sifting through various brands of kitty litter and choosing the worst ones, and, when it wasn’t ugly enough, making the kitty litter even more unappealing through various forms of gritty, sharp clumpiness, and employing unattractive colors from dirty, graying spray paint and other unworthy elements like ground glass and, well, whatever was handy.

The week before I’d been crewing on a major-league blockbuster, and then I’d been producing my own artsy independent works, and now I was working long hours to photograph something that a housecat would, or would not, take a shit in. I remember seriously thinking about my future in the film industry at that point. Was this where I wanted to be? Was this how God intended my life to be spent? Was it all so inevitable and ignoble, without me even seeing it coming?