When I say it was all about the hat, what I mean is that it was all about the movies. It was always all about the movies. The first movie I ever saw was The Snowball Express,

one of those dismal Dean Jones, family flicks Disney made in the 70s that reached cinematic heights along with Candleshoe, The Apple Dumpling Gang, and The Cat from Outer Space. I don’t remember the movie, but I remember the experience. I remember the local Montrose Theater, and the dark hall and the smell of stale concessions. I remember my sisters taking me, and my falling asleep at one point. I must’ve been 3 years old, and not understood a thing. But I remember them asking me if I liked it, and I remember saying “yes,” but not really knowing what I was talking about. Not much of a stretch from film school, really.

But it was Star Wars, 4 or 5 years later, that had me at hello. Space ships, aliens, heroes, villains and mentors, a battle between good and evil, and the notion that somewhere, deep down inside all of us, was a magic power that would make the world obey, if only you would “trust your feelings” and “let go,” as Obi-Wan implored.

This all sounded very good to me, as a kid. I was the quiet one, and painfully shy. I could hide in a theater and feel safe. It was the reliable escape from a world that would never obey, and I would trust it more than any friend or parent, pastor or preacher -but I volunteered to make videos for my church youth group, so I could use the church video camera. And when I was bored in class, I would scribble out elaborate sets of storyboards for little movies that I couldn’t get out of my head. And I borrowed a Super-8 camera and made a little Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof for a film festival with my friends, and we got an Honorable Mention. So it only followed that when high school ended, I would go to USC for the film school. After all, it’s where George Lucas went.

My college advisor in high school was not encouraging. She seemed to be getting commission from the local city college for every student she succeeded in sending there, and when I told her of my plans, she just scoffed, and held up my grades, which were not impressive. This had no effect on me, and later, when I was accepted to the university, she was surprised to hear it, and gave me that look like my family had some sort of wealthy connections, or something.

But there were no connections, no back-room dealings or exchanges with alumni -although I did mention in my application that my older sister was a student, and that seemed to have been enough. I applied nowhere else, was interested in nowhere else, and needed no back up plans. It was about the movies, and this was all part of the Grand Plan of my life. Clearly, The Force was work.

I think it made my dad happy. He made sure I filled out all the financial aid forms, and then he drew up a budget for me on a yellow notepad. Five simple lines: Tuition, Books, Room, Food, and Living Expenses. I think I totally dismissed it. “Sounds fine, Dad,” I might’ve said. I was going to be a filmmaker!

Once in USC, you still had to be accepted into the inner circle of the film school in order to get the degree. Oh sure you could take most of the classes -and they were happy to take your money- but if you weren’t accepted into the school itself you would find

yourself adrift in the world with some faceless bachelors degree to keep you afloat. But what did I care? I was there to learn!

In my first semester I took Cinema 190, Introduction to Cinema, and the professor was a guy named Drew Casper, the most passionate man I had ever encountered. It was funny at first. We’d watch a movie and then he’d get up and yell and scream and leap around the class trying to convey how great it all was. There were hundreds of us in the class, which was a theater -one of the nicest I’d ever been in- and the class was so popular that even the cinema students who had it as a requirement had a hard time getting into it. It met once a week, with a smaller discussion period on a Thursday, led by a teaching assistant who was quite the opposite of Casper. I would sit in the discussion period and my eyes would glaze over with boredom, as the guy would wax on about the homoerotic subtext of Casablanca, or some such thing.

I’ll never forget him asking the class about the Hitchcock classic, The Birds. Now, I love HItchcock, and had seen most every one of his movies. (North By Northwest, to this day, remains on my top ten list.) And the question was, “Why do the birds attack?” I  heard this and immediately thought, why does this matter? I mean, who cares? They attack! The question is, what are we going to do about it! I sat there and said nothing. And, if I remember correctly, everyone else in the class did the same thing. The teacher went on, droning, and I cared less and less. A week later, in another “discussion”, he asked the question again. Why do the birds attack? and I was ready.

I had made friends with a grad student named Ed when I worked for the USC media services department, (we drove little electric carts around campus, delivering TVs and VCRs to whoever needed them.) Ed was as cynical about the whole place as anyone I had met there, and he had a hell of a sense of humor. He had a BA in production and was always telling me not to waste my time, but here he was getting a masters in Film Theory at USC, all the while claiming Star Wars was a great script and a near perfect film -so I took to him right away.

I told Ed about the problem of The Birds and asked him the question of why they attack. He thought this was hilarious, and shook his head, telling me about how USC film students “lived for this shit.” Then he gave me his theory about Hitchcock and The Birds: “There’s no meaning to it. None. Alfred Hitchcock was a genius, and this was one of his later films. He was well aware by this time that the critics were dissecting his work and ascribing all sorts of meaning that was never there in the first place. The birds attack! It sucks, and people get hurt, and we all run for our lives. It’s like life. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do about any of it.”

I was 18. I’d seen a million films. And here was a guy, just a few years older than me, giving me the most profound thought on art I’d ever heard. That sometimes a fun horror movie is just a fun horror movie. That sometimes, there’s no there there. That sometimes a bird is just a bird, and a rock is just a rock, and a gun is just a gun, and sometimes the gun goes off and shoots someone, making it ll very interesting to watch.

But then he said something else. “You know, these grad students are all full of shit.” (He was one, and I never asked him about that, but it did give him some authority.) “I think Hitchcock had the best sense of humor of us all, and if you look closely at the movie, you’ll notice that always just before the birds go crazy, in nearly every scene, someone is either smoking or drinking alcohol.” I thought about it for a second, and it seemed true. One scene didn’t seem to fit, however. Early in the movie, a pet bird escapes from a cage, for what seems like no reason. I mentioned this.

Ed snickered and said, “Remember how the lead character catches the bird and gets him back in the cage?” I thought about it, for a second. And, yes, there it was: the guy catches the bird with an upside down ashtray. Ed said, “Hitchcock wants you to think that the birds attack us for our sins and indiscretions in life.”

“Really,” I asked.

“No. I think Hitchcock did it because this is just the sort of thing that sets off liberal film critics. Mention it in class next time and you’ll get a big reaction.” And sure, enough, I did. I went through the scenes, one by one, and the rest of the class went oh, yeah! and when we got to the scene where the bird is caught in the ashtray, the teacher just rejected it outright. “No. Sorry. That’s just too much of a stretch,” and then he went on with something like, “The bird attacks are a metaphor for loneliness and fear of abandonment. Each attack is actually preceded by someone speaking of the fear of being left alone, or how they were abandoned as a child, or how they lost their family. The film works on a very symbolic level, so the bird attacks, are the exteriorization of how the characters feel about themselves...”

And I went back to being a classroom zombie, with the rest of them, and I got a D in Drew Casper’s famed 190 - Introduction to Cinema. And then I knew I would never get accepted into the film school.

I told Ed about it all the next day. We were delivering an amp and a microphone to an auditorium, and when I mentioned what happened, he laughed so hard he drove the electric cart off the sidewalk and nearly felt out onto the pavement. “Ha! That’s so goddam funny, Sean! I told you! I TOLD YOU!”

He was just about the smartest guy in the entire film school. He was unattractive, nerdy,  with pasty white skin like the rest of us from being in a darkened theater al the time, and  he just plain loved the movies. When I told him I didn’t think I’d ever be able to muster the straight A’s I needed to get into the school (it was that competitive of an arena) he just patted me on the back and asked me, “You want to make movies, go make movies. You’re gonna go into debt hundreds of thousands of dollars going to school here. Don’t you think you’re better off using that money as the budget on your first film? You’ll learn by doing.” It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Give yourself five or ten years to do it, and you’ll come out ahead of all of these geeks in the end. Including me, by the way.”