Brian was working for a few weeks on the Paramount lot, and with a bit of smooth talking was able to "borrow" an unused conference room for a night. We had spent a week or so putting together a budget, some conceptual art, and a game plan on how it was all going to be produced. We had our producer and Director of Photography join us, and we phoned in the names of the band and their management to the front gate. It was all very impressive and professional looking, and we were nervous about the pitch, but everything rolled forward like a ball of unstoppable kinetic energy, at the mercy of gravity alone.

We dressed up, we shook hands, we smiled. You do what you have to do. There were three songs, and we had a different concept for each of them. One was a simple band-in-the studio set of images, one was a black and white, documentary-style collage of homeless people and their plight, and the last was, boldly, a western. Brian and I took turns going over the ideas, with our DP and Producer backing us up when there was a technical question. We moved through the stories easily, passionately, and we pandered to the band. We were confident and self-assured, and everyone had felt like they had just gotten off the bus in Tinsel-town. 

When the meeting was over, everyone was in in full support of the project. We laughed, we told stories, we admired the film artifacts in the lobby. They asked what our timeframe was, and we said we'd be ready to shoot in a month. We'd have to move fast, but we needed to line up the equipment and a crew, get some location permits and things like that, but we claimed it was possible. We were going to start with the homeless-themed project, and this seemed the easiest of the three to shoot. We were going to shoot it with an Arriflex 16mm, and go over film stocks with the DP later. The next few weeks would be location scouting and shot lists. We'll be in touch, babe!

Brian and I were riding high that night. It was a fun wave for a few hours, until it hit us that we sill had no idea where the money was coming from -or if it would come at all- but that was going to be cleared up in the coming days, when we had to make the same pitch to the guy who was financing the whole operation.

So the next Friday we had to do it again, only without the Paramount Studios overhead to prop us up. Brian had moved onto a different production, so now we had to hold the meetings elsewhere. Their people talked to our people, and it was decided that The Financier would have us over to his expensive home in the Valley. Great! But we were nervous. "Just tell it like you told us," the band's manager said, which was a fine sentiment, but everyone likes to know who is signing the checks. We had no idea who this angelic investor was, and we braced ourselves for the worst. In fact, the origins of the guy seemed lost on the band too, as one of them mentioned at the time, "I have no idea what the guy does, but I wish I had his money." I think I heard he was the bass player's uncle. Or something.

The week before, as we were exiting the Paramount offices, the manager was stopped by a large, jovial mustachioed man accompanied by two thin, scantily-clad women. "Ron!" our new acquaintance exclaimed, and their was some hugging, and a hey-old-friend type of exchange. We were all then introduced to Ron Jeremy, the "Charlie Chaplin of Porn" as he was known. Details of the exploits that garnered that monicker will not be relayed here, but Brian and the guys in the band all knew of him, and felt like they were meeting a star. Jeremy, his own greatest publicist, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a few autographed 8x10s of himself with more scantily clad women. It all embarrassed me.

Mostly because I was a long time, diligent student of film, and here I had never heard of the "Charlie Chaplin of Porn" or any of his, ahem, accomplishments. He seemed nice enough, no doubt, and he offered to help out with our production. He told me about his warehouse full of camera gear, and how most of it went unused since they'd switched over to video. He said I could check it out. Borrow what I wanted. Let's get together! Give me your number!

I gave him my number, and he called it. I wasn't home and he left a message, "Sean! It's Ron! Ron Jeremy! Just wanted to set a time to hook up, show you my equipment! Like I said, you guys are welcome to use any of it! Give me a call..." This was all very awkward. When Brian and I discussed the opportunity to save some of the budget with our producer, she had some reservations. "I mean," she put it gently,"can you imagine what's gone through those lenses?"

Ron Jeremy called a few more times. I never called him back. All record of him having tried to reach me was erased, since I was living at home with my parents and younger brothers and sisters at the time. I can only imagine what my mother thought when Ron Jeremy called, looking for me, asking me when he could "show me his equipment."

So the big meeting came, and we were nervous. The budget amounted to nearly $250,000, with the bulk of that money going to the western style video. The band had been pretty excited when we'd pitched that idea to them, and showed them some of the costumes and locations we had in mind, so we added some money to the budget to really make the concepts sparkle.

When this was all pitched that fateful night to the financier, the manager interrupted with "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" like we had never been clear on the specific costs. We started in on defending the numbers, and brought out the production budget to explain, but it was The Man who calmed us all. "Actually, $250,000 sounds reasonable the way you have it laid out here..." And everyone shut up. We said we had plans to begin production in a couple weeks, and our producer would like to know about the timeframe for the funding, so that we could put our deposits down on equipment rental, insurance, etc. He just nodded, smiled, and said that he could have the partial budget money for video #1 wired to our account in a week. Upwards to 50 grand. "Great!" we said. And then he asked about "Road Trip Productions".

"How'd you come up with the name?"

I shrugged. "We like road trips." And this seemed to please him. Later, one of the band mates told us that he had several nice cars. Several.

That night, Brian and I were driving eastbound on the 134. It was a hot summer night, and we'd put out our cigars and bid the talent goodbye, and we were racing down the freeway with the windows rolled down, screaming at the top of our lungs. This was it! The moment we'd always longed for! We were going to be BIG, and nothing was going to stop us! I was punch drunk and wanted to kiss everyone on the mouth, which I think I did. At home in bed that night, I couldn't sleep from the excitement. I was just laying there, laughing to myself, thanking profusely the Good Lord Above, and any tangental, if only partially-involved, celestial beings. I had no real idea what was going to happen next, or how it was all going to unfold, but I knew one thing. Disney was going to get my two-week notice first thing Monday morning.

While I was at USC and before I was at Disney, I had the good fortune to get in as a production assistant on a couple music videos and commercials for a bit of weekend work. My old friend Brian, with whom I grew up making weekly videos for our church youth group, was several years older than me and was working nearly full time in the film industry as a production coordinator and second A.D., so he would call me to see if I was interested in a couple days work. I always was, of course, and found myself working on a few live film sets -and getting paid for it- over the summer. This helped pad my resume for the eventual job at Disney, and it also gave me some fun on-set time with my buddy. 

We had a great time, felt important at the bottom of the ladder, and learned a lot about the business. At the end of a job, we would dine on leftover craft services and chat about the Big Time, and just how we were going to go about making it. We knew that, eventually, we were just going to have to go out on a limb and make something, anything, so we could shop ourselves around. So we set about a plan. But first, a road trip. Something Brian and I had always been prone to.

Hawaii, 1991. Brian and I join his mom out to the islands and bring the video camera. We make a movie, which we edit in-camera, meaning, we shot the film in scenic order, making it ready to watch back at the hotel. We head out one night with no concepts in mind, but come across a sugar cane refinery with an unlocked gate. We drove the rental car, our recently muddied Isuzu Trooper, through the open fence and came across an eerily lit industrial complex, steeped in shadows and steam, and begging for a bit of creative energy. A few hours later we'd finished another masterpiece, this one entitled, "The Cane Killer" about, what else? A murderous thug in a chinaman hat who haunts the sugar cane and attacks unsuspecting tourists. I think there were five characters in all, with just the two of us to do the performance. Considering one of us had to hold the camera, it posed something of a creative challenge. But we had fun making it, and when we got home we dubbed the Batman soundtrack to it, and it was an instant home movie classic.

A few nights later, we were walking a Maui beach talking of the future. I told him the story of George Lucas, who had been so consumed by the production of Star Wars that he was convinced it was going to be a failure upon its release, and so he escaped to Maui when production wrapped, and it was there that he walked the beach with his buddy Steven Spielberg and pitched a little idea for a film he had. Something about the

ten commandments and an adventurous archeologist name "Indiana Smith". A couple years later, a slight character name change, and history was made. Brian and I sat there on the sand, in the dark, waves crashing at our feet. If we were going to make movies, we'd best be getting started...

So when I was at Disney, I started to take it seriously. One late day, after everyone had gone home, I stopped in on the producer's office and bent his ear a bit. I asked him what I should do to get started making films. Where was it I should be spending my energy. And he said, "Are you writing?"

Which caught me off guard a bit, and not just because the answer was "no" but because I'd always been obsessed with the images -their composition and juxtaposition, and the emotional power that was wrought in camera placement. His name was Don Hahn, and he was a tall, mild-mannered, friendly, and all the while clever and thoughtful man. He had just finished up as an associate producer on Roger Rabbit, and this was his first big production. He was hired on at Disney 15 years before, the same week as my friend Steve (hence, how I got the job) and started out as a Production Assistant, like me. So I think he had a bit of empathy for my lowly, but ambitious position. He took ten minutes and reminded me of the simple things -you've gotta have a good story, you've gotta be able to tell a good story, and if you don't have that, if you can't do that, the millions of dollars of camera gear aren't gonna make a damn bit of difference. All this from the guy who, a couple years later, would be the name that came up, announced at the Academy Awards ceremony, when Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture.

Don was right, of course. And then he didn't hesitate to add what would be the salient, resounding thing of our little talk: you don't have millions of dollars. So every moment that you're not behind the camera, you should be behind the pen. Cameras are costly. Pencils are cheap.

He was right. I was seeing and learning about the importance of story right there, on the Beauty pre-production staff. I needed to get writing, but how? I was a terrible English student. I didn't think I could do it. It scared me. I'd tried some screenwriting in the past, but it had always fallen so flat that my passion never got anchored in it. But, Don mentioned a few books that might help, told me to just tell a story as naturally as it came, and that it didn't hurt to get a computer. The computer was the easy part. A few weeks later I got my first Mac, very excitedly, and I stopped in to tell him, but it didn't seem to move him much. Don said, "Oh good."

So I struggled with the writing, on and off, but still chatted regularly with Brian about our plans to produce something. It so happened that we had a few mutual friends from summer camp who were starting out in a band, and had had some industry attention directed their way. We approached them about doing a few music videos, and they were excited about the prospect. Brian also had a friend in the recording business, and had helped them get a high quality demo tape made at one of the finest recording houses in Hollywood, so we had impressed upon them that we were a serious, highly connected, professional outfit. They trusted us, and wanted us along for the ride. They thought they

were going gold. "Fine with us!" we figured.

Brian and I got together fairly regularly to listen to the songs and bounce ideas around for the videos. We chatted about it with a friend who was a professional cinematographer and he like the concepts, so he was in! Then we mentioned the concepts to a friend who was a producer and got her input on budgeting. She was supportive, so SHE WAS IN! And we chatted with a few other film friends who all said they'd be happy to come around to crew for us and THEY WERE ALL IN! All we needed was a green light and a blank check, and then we'd all be in. But we also needed a company name. One day at a gas station it came to us: Road Trip Productions. We thought it was perfect.

Friends from USC would call and I would just tell them: I quit school and got a job at Disney, and they were stunned. My parents never voiced any opinions about this change of mine. I was always an independent guy, and here I was doing the same old, independent things. And perhaps it sounded like a good job to them. Anyway, I was elated.

I was hired onto the pre-production unit of Beauty and the Beast. There were about 12 people working on the film. The producer, his assistant, a production coordinator, six or seven story people, and two guys who were ostensibly the directors, though the corporate execs hadn’t exactly given them their full blessing. And then me, the grunt. I would make copies, answer phones, deliver this and pick up that, hang this and take down that. The only thing I couldn’t do was buy beer and cigars for the team on Friday afternoons, which was met with some dismay after the first week I was there. 

I had no grasp of it at, but I had come on to Disney at the perfect time. The studio was just coming off the release of The Little Mermaid, which was a massive hit for an animated film. They were willing to throw a lot into their next film, so it was a big budget affair, with all the talent that could be mustered. Our staff was small enough that we

were harbored on the original studio lot in the old special effects building, and I remember having to work around these abandoned multi-plane animation cameras and editing tables that were relics from the days when Walt Disney himself walked the halls and barked out directions.

On lunch breaks I would wander the studio lot and its park-like setting with its manicured landscape and art deco buildings. It actually felt like working at Disneyland every day, but instead of parades and a carnivals, it was professionals hard at work, and I spent every spare moment peering into sound stages to see what was being worked on, to watch real films get made. With my badge, I could go virtually anywhere, as long as I didn’t bug anyone, and it became a challenge for me to get my real work done, as there was always something to do and see. And as an employee I was able to see all kinds of films, pre-release, which was a treat, and probably saved me a lot of money, since I was in the habit of seeing every movie that came out. Working on the Disney lot was everything I’d imagined, and more. Movie stars would walk past me in the halls, every day or so, as I went to Michael Eisner’s office to drop off or pick up whatever was demanded of me.

My film was in pre-production, which meant that we were putting together the story, bit by bit. In animation, every little thing is planned out before production, so every joke, every line of dialogue, every music cue, and virtually every movement is decided ahead of time, so no drawings are wasted, as that is the most expensive part. So here I got to watch the locations imagined, the characters develop, the plot unfold, and the jokes being written every day. It was just a few people with white 5x7 pads and pencils, and they would basically draw out the movie in comic book form. I’d help them pin up the drawings on big 4’x8’ boards, and every few days they’d walk through their scenes with a pointer, making their own sound effects and telling jokes all the way. Then everyone would sit back and discuss it. What’s funnier, this or that? If this happens, then what’s going to happen to that character when he gets to your scene? And so on. It was an amazingly collaborative effort, and it’s the way animated films had always been made. I had no idea.

But Disney was in a time of change, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the executive in charge of production, demanded that a script be written and it seemed to confound everyone on the team. I wasn’t in on it, but I was on Katzenberg’s side -a script made perfect sense! Why, it’s the blueprint for the film! But animated films had historically never had a “Written by” credit. All those big boards with the hundreds of hand-drawn cartoons on them, that was the script.

Katzenberg was a control freak, and couldn’t handle not being able to line out and edit a screenplay, so a screenwriter was hired. For the story artists on staff, some of whom had been on since Disney himself was there, this was anathema to the timeless method that had been around since Mickey first climbed on screen. But a writer showed up and handed them a script, and it was their job to draw it all out -essentially robbing them of so much of their creative expertise. 

Additionally, the film was to be a musical (in the end, only a few minutes would not have song) and the songwriting team of Ashman and Menken, the geniuses behind The Little Mermaid, were true believers in the structural capacity of the song lyrics -the songs must always propel the film’s action- and so I got to stand idly by and watch this battle unfold, as these creative minds would try to outdo one another on a daily basis.

In the end, the screenwriter was clearly reduced to coming in to the story meetings and copying down what she saw on the boards, and then taking the song lyrics and doing the mundane task of disambiguating it all into the proper industry screenplay format. You could see she had been beaten down, eventually, and, in my estimation, outmatched. But upon the film’s release, with that screenplay credit up there on the screen, she reaped all the accolades. That’s Hollywood.

I hiss when I see that credit come up, when my kids watch the movie, because I remember ten or fifteen of the most intelligent, funny, and creative people I have ever known working together, thinking together, and joking together, to make what would be considered one of the finest animated films ever made, and the first to be nominated for “Best Picture” by the Motion Picture Academy. I had never known what a “story artist” was before I worked at Disney, but after my time there I was convinced that every film needed one. And here, I now wanted to be one, but I couldn’t draw.

There was a hero in all of this, and I will never forget the day I met him. I had come back a bit late from lunch (everyone took hour and a half lunches) and I was told that I better get back there and stand by in case I was needed. So I headed to the back of the old effects building where my office was, adjacent to the big workrooms the artists were using for their story crafting, and I saw a bit of a commotion. Everyone was standing around, talking and laughing, and moving from area to area to admire the work. I entered, and few folks stepped aside and standing there in the middle of it, smiling, looking at drawings, a smoking a cigar, was Walt Disney himself -ghost-like, alive, but an apparition, and still a seeming fixture of the palace, with a sage-like quality that had everyone around him in full, admiring attention. Then he looked right at me, smiled, extended his hand, and I was introduced to the man.

It was not Walt Disney, but Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew. Roy was known in the Hollywood circle as the savior of The Disney Studios and the champion of traditional animation. As a board member and one of the largest shareholders, he held a lot of power at the place, but he was the one man who knew the origins of the company, and held steadfast to what Disney really stood for. And with his uncanny resemblance to  the guy who started it all, one couldn’t help but shut up and appreciate him.

Feature Animation was Roy Disney’s baby, and when he showed up to see what was going on down there with the artists, everyone would stop what they were doing and get up from their desks. The man was a king, but he loved his subjects, and in turn he was greatly admired. If there is one man who orchestrated a renaissance of animation, it was no keyboard-bound screenwriter, no formula-minded corporate head, no digital effects programmer or marketing machine. It was Roy Disney.

I worked in story meetings with all these folks, including, on some days, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy Disney, and few other inside Hollywood luminaries. I would hustle the boards back and forth as the artists pitched their scenes. Everyone wanted their work to be liked, but Katzenberg always wanted something altered, deleted, or improved upon, as if to put his own “magical” imprint on the work. The truth was, and we all knew it, he would disagree with himself all the time. And, though he had an adept mind for the movies, it was clear he couldn’t work the guns at the battlefront. (But he could pound Diet Cokes like a morphine addict, and it was my job to keep up an endless supply.) The guy would drone on and on about what made a successful story, and everyone would appear to be taking diligent notes, but as soon as the higher-ups would leave, notes would be compared and exchanged -the guys had been drawing comic portraits of each other. And these were some seriously impressive sketches. I still have a few of me.

This is the way it happened with that great film, and I know because I was there, a part of history. I saw it all come together firsthand, but I’ll never forget that the best, most productive story meetings were the ones with the regular old workers -the artists, the directors, and the producer, and the stewards like me. Everyone would throw jokes at the boards until something stuck, and we knew when it was sticking because we’d all be laughing. Other meetings, we’d all sit together quietly, staring at the drawings, not saying a word. A few times the producer would turn to me, the lowly production assistant in the back of the room, and ask, “What do you think?” and all heads would turn, waiting for my answer. And I would say nothing. For I loved it all.

Eventually, I would help photograph all the storyboard drawings and hand the footage to the newly-hired editor, who would take the recorded dialogue, songs, and soundtrack and paste it all together into a viewable product. I remember watching the movie for the first time, shot after shot, drawing after drawing, with no movement at all -save for a 5 second bit of animation- and thinking how strange it all was, this finished but motionless picture, that garnered applause at its close. The film went into full production after that, and all the animators were brought in to give some real life to the thing. As each bit of movement was finished and then painted, the editor would cut it into the assemblage. The film would be shown every few weeks, and you could see it come to life -from the original static, chalky sketches to a vibrant pastiche of color, hue, and energy.

And I became suddenly bored with it all. This wondrous golem that I’d been a part of since its inception was now a buzzing production workhorse, a papered assembly line. We’d moved off the dreamy studio lot and out to a grey, low-rise warehouse in Burbank, with a secured entrance and a labyrinth of cubicles. There were hundreds of artists, all demanding copies and errands. I couldn’t connect with more than a few of them, and the creative guys I’d worked with had moved on to other projects. Once the jokes were down on paper, everything was handed to the people who could really draw; illustrators, background artists, animators. This was animation. Though interesting in and of itself, it was a long, slow, boring process. The movie was coming to life, but my passion for being there was all but depleted when the story was down. The other assistants I had trained into the crew (there were several of us now) all seemed to resent the fact that I was 20 years old and a college dropout, where some of them had put their due time in at film school (and few at USC, no less!)

I found myself utterly bored at a dream job. 20 years old, and ready to retire from Disney. Lost, again.

I was having a hard time with the college scene. While everyone was getting into the swing of dorm parties and late night studying, making friends and rushing fraternities, I was spending my time in the Cinema School library watching old movies on VHS, and reading screenplays. I will never forget watching the David Lean classic Brief Encounter on a little TV in a brown melamine cubicle, sitting in a metal chair a few feet from the screen, while wearing a plastic set of crappy headphones, and being utterly moved by the beauty and brilliance of the film, with its deep black and white photographic tones and its dramatic Rachmaninoff score. It was a rhapsodic experience for me, and I was a crying mess right there in the library, taking off the headset and rewinding the tape. I did this nearly every day. 

And they had a fantastic library of screenplays -some with multiple drafts! They wouldn’t let me leave the library with them, as I wasn’t officially in the film school, so I’d just sit in there all day and try and decipher, say, the original draft of Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, for example. I wanted to know how the story had evolved from the original conception, and why the producers had made the changes that they did. This was in the days before DVD extras and Director Commentaries, so I was stuck coming to my own conclusions. At nights I’d stand outside some of the 400 level classes that I knew had famous filmmakers and celebrities speaking, and I’d try to get in. I just wanted to learn, fulfill my obsession, and obligate my passion. Sometimes I got in, sometimes I snuck in, and sometimes they closed the door in my face. I was not one of their elite.

At one point, shyness be damned, I went to the Cinema School Dean’s office to accost the dean. There were a number of screenplays in the library that they wouldn’t let me read, see, or even touch because I hadn’t yet been accepted into the film school. They asked for my film school I.D. (yes, they had their own I.D.) and when I began to complain, the kid behind the counter said go see the Dean, if it upsets you so much.

So I marched right up there. I was fuming. I wanted to know why I was paying $40,000 a year, as a legitimate USC student and I couldn’t use the damn library! I wanted to know why they wanted to keep me from learning! I wanted to know what the big point of these constricting school policies was! But most of all, I wanted to meet this Dean and see what kind of person he was. 

He was out. The Big Shot was out. His secretary asked me what it was regarding, and I mumbled something about how I wanted to use the library. She told me I didn’t have full access to the library because I wasn’t a film student. And that hurt. Because if I wasn’t a film student, then what was I?

Back then, everything at the USC School of Cinema revolved around the 480, which was a 20 minute 16mm sound film, made entirely by students. The school produced about five 480 narrative fiction films a year, and considering the hundreds of students

enrolled in the school, it was obviously extremely competitive. Only the best of the best were selected to direct one of these films, and all the rest of you scrubs had to build sets and wipe lenses if you wanted your degree. It never made sense to me: all these films students, at the finest film school in all the land -the oldest in the nation- and none of them making films. What were we doing here? I was feeling more and more disillusioned every day.

Mid way through my third semester I found myself on Academic Probation. This had no effect on me, but it disturbed the Financial Aid office, and they recommended that I see a College Advisor, to protect their investment. Fine, I thought. No, really, I thought that was fine! I could use a little advising. So I made an appointment, went in and sat down. She was nice. Friendly. She pulled up my transcript and looked it over for a minute, and then made a something’s-burning-in-the-kitchen face.

“Sean,” she said, “you seem to have an interest in an eclectic range of subjects.” It was true. I had refused to sign up for any mundane 100 person general ed basics. For example, instead of “History” I took “History of Ancient and Medieval Science”. Instead of “Anthropology” I had taken “Exploring Cultural Ethnography Through Film” and for a science I took “Earthquake Geology”. I was all over the map, and I was pulling down C’s, D’s, and I’s and W’s (“incomplete” and “withdrawal”.) They were mostly 300 and 400 level courses.

On the other hand, I was taking all the film classes they would let me into without me being an official student. Evidently, it takes some students a few years to get accepted into the program -and by then they wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the requirements- so a lot of classes were open to average Joes like me. I took “Editing 101”, “On-Screen Direction of Actors”, “Film Business and Law”, and several others. And, aside from Introduction to Cinema, I got A’s in all of them. One class, I forget the exact name of it, took a current film in release and studied it from pre-production to release, inviting once a week someone who worked on that particular movie. I loved the class so much, that when the teacher thought my paper on Steven Spielberg “was good, but read too much like a magazine article” (which I took as a compliment) I wrote a completely new paper on the Sony takeover of Universal. I got an A. A high-on-himself senior film student in the class was infuriated by this, and the prof defended me: “But he wrote two papers!”

The class was held on a Wednesday night, right after my editing class. I would go to both classes, and then head to the student editing bay around 10:00, and stay there all night working on my pieces. And I mean I was there all night. Strangely, in the bureaucratic mess of rules that was the USC School of Cinema, I was given access to the 16mm and video editing equipment, since I was in the editing class (I was given a “special” I.D., of all things.) I would grab snacks out of the vending machines and chat with some of the 480 crews about their films, and then hang in the editing bays and work on my class projects: old raw 16mm footage of Gunsmoke episodes and video of bad documentaries. We were allowed to choose which footage we wanted to edit, and I chose them all. And the Gunsmoke episode I editing a few different ways. And then, when I ran out of projects, I got my old 8mm movies from high school, had them

transferred to video in the developing department and re-edited them with a soundtrack, just for posterity.

But the semester was coming to an end, and, my advisor warned, if I didn’t fulfill my general education requirements and polish all my grades, USC Film School, as an option, was seriously dead in the water. (And the D in Introduction to Cinema did not help. I would have to take it again.) She said I was clearly a bright student, and asked why I couldn’t apply myself in the other classes for the greater goal. I didn’t say much, because I knew I just didn’t want to.

And then she told me exactly the thing I needed to hear, exactly the thing I wanted to hear, exactly the right advice -advice I would heed, and run with.

She told me to take a year off school, and perhaps go get a job in Hollywood.

Of course! I thought. And I was stunned, because here was my college advisor, advising me not to go to college at all! She said a lot of people do it -take a year off to work- and then they come back refreshed and renewed, and with a greater interest in their education, and it all sounded swell to me.

And I went and got a hold of the one guy who I knew who worked in the film business, told him about my plight, asked him to where to apply, and went for it. A month later, after a few friendly calls on my behalf, Steve and I were lunching at the Disney Studios commissary, and I was the youngest employee of Walt Disney Feature Animation.

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.”

For a long time it was all about the hat. The Perfect Hat. I wore a lot of hats in high school, mostly because I didn’t know what to do with my hair, but I had a friend who was on an endless quest for the perfect hat, and the concept interested me. As far as I know, he never found it, but I eventually found one I thought was perfect and I dropped a hundred dollars on it. My friend did not agree that it was the perfect hat, but it was a classic, wide-brimmed wool fedora that looked like it fell out of a noir film and I went for it, for better or for worse.

But, for me, it was really about the leather jacket. I asked my dad at my high school graduation what he was going to get me for a “grad gift” and he just sort of snorted, What do you want? and I said I’d like a leather jacket. He laughed and said something about them being too damn expensive, but -I had him- I said, well, didn’t you have a leather jacket in high school? and he thought I was joking, but I, wisely, waited for the answer, which, of course, was yes. He grew up in the fifties, after all. They all had leather jackets.

I think I ended up paying for the jacket myself, somehow, but it was no matter -I really wanted one. I was going to keep it forever, and wear it around the world. I pictured myself riding a motorcycle across the desert, climbing the pyramids, and sitting in cafes surrounded by luminous strangers in colorful dress and speaking foreign languages, I in my jacket. It was going to be my Adventure Jacket. And, of course, it was going to be just like the one Indiana Jones had, or some acceptable facsimile, and it would register the stories of my lifetime, and I’d be wearing it when I finally uncapped the fabled box of treasures, and the mysteries of the universe came flowing out.

I finally found a jacket that felt right, in a dopey leather goods store in a local mall. It was a couple hundred dollars, was the right color and weight, had all the necessary pockets in all the proper places, and it had a silky interior lining with some kind of cartographic map design on it. I immediately envisioned myself lost in Kashmir or Tajikistan or somewhere in India and I was taking off the jacket, turning it inside-out, and spreading it out on the saddle on the back of an elephant and I was trying to find my way back to the border, or the bar, or wherever they served beer in English.

Most importantly, the jacket was warm without being hot. This meant that I could wear it with the zipper down and feel comfortable nearly everywhere. I thought I looked good! I would put on a dress shirt and tie and go to church in it, and sometimes I would even throw it on when I walked out of the ocean, no shirt at all. I was an idiot, but I had The Jacket, and I was sure I would have it the rest of my life.

I wore it across the country a few times, both directions. I wore it to the South Pacific and to Mexico and to Europe. I wore it to friends’ weddings and funerals, and I wore it around the house. And for a time I wore it with the wide-brimmed fedora, which I thought

looked super-cool. I was in St. Louis, Missouri, standing beneath the famous Arch wearing the fedora and the jacket when an older man approached me. He looked like some lonely old businessman, killing time at a tourist spot between flights. I had noticed him eyeing me earlier, in the visitor center. He walked up, said hello, stood there uneasily for a few moments, and then said, tellingly, “I like your outfit.” I quickly excused myself and drove to Chicago. Somewhere on the highway it dawned on me: don’t wear the fedora with the leather jacket.

Anyway, it was a good jacket, but I wore it in a lot more coffee shops than countries, and I spilled a lotta latte on it over the years. I tore it, one night, climbing over a fence, and it ripped just below the armpit in a soft spot in the leather. As the hole grew over the years, I had it safety-pinned together, and it seemed to hold. But soon, the collar started to fray, and the backside got stiff and cracked from all those times I wore it in the rain. And then the lining got dingy, and the maps became unreadable and scented with all my sweaty badness, and those maps on the lining would lead you to nowhere but the conclusion that the guy wearing this nasty old coat had nothing going for him.

At its low point, the brown leather Adventure Jacket was thrown-up on by its owner, and it hardly deserved the undignified event. That was me, leaning up against a dumpster behind some bar in Hermosa Beach, my leather jacket shielding me from my vomit. Sure, I cleaned myself up after that, but the jacket never regained the luster that my other, more illustrious exploits had burnished it with, and it was eventually closeted and retired on some uneventful day.

I kept it, and still have it, though I haven’t worn it in ten years. It’s hardly wearable, but it does lend some sort of timeworn, book-jacket feel to the wearer, and it has a lot of memories. I keep it around for the sentimental value, though I can’t seem to expunge from my memory that time that I barfed on it. Since then, there’s been other, more utility-oriented jackets. It took me years, but I finally learned that it was never the costume that knew or told the story, as much as we’d like to think these things are filled with meaning. They are only so if I am there, explaining it. And when I am gone, it will be little more than an old, smelly jacket, and all who gaze at it will not gaze in wonder, but will only wonder why I had held on to an old, beat-up, smelly jacket.

Indiana Jones, I later surmised, must have had a whole bunch of jackets. And they must have been made of Burmese dragon skin, or some damn thing, since he was dragging under trucks in them with nary a blemish, whereas I ripped mine hopping over a little fence. I suppose he could have gotten by with the single favorite hat, since he was a cautious fellow. Anyway, Indiana Jones made the fedora/leather jacket thing work, but he made it work in a time when straight men wore fedoras.

It was January, 1990. After a year and a half at USC, where I felt stuck, lonely, uninspired, bored to tears, and with my marrow steeped in misery, I dropped out when I got the dream job everyone I knew (okay, no one) at film school envied: I was hired on, full-time, with a film crew at Disney Studios. Full benefits, including screen credit, and donuts on Fridays. Before nine months was up, I’d be in a conference room at Paramount Studios, standing at the end of a long glass table, pitching ideas to talented, impressionable, well-connected men sitting in high-backed leather chairs. Later, we would all turn cigars in our fingers, laughing like old buddies, though we were hardly acquainted. I knew then: all my childhood dreams were well on their way to coming true. And I knew it. I just knew it. It was an unforgettable warm, summer night in Southern California. A hot wind was blowing off the desert, up and over the San Gabriel mountains, and then down, dreamlike, sending old crumpled call sheets spiraling up in the air between the Hollywood sound stages.

A month later I would be penniless, broken down on some highway, a thousand miles from home. A thousand miles from everyone and everything. The Internet was a decade off, and I had no minutes on my ATT charge card. It was a severe lonesomeness. Any dreams I had in film were no more lively than the abandoned drive-in theater in Oklahoma that I had stopped at a few days earlier, to get some shots with my Olympus 35mm SLR. Still photography. It’s all I had: a few rolls of unexposed film and the dream of one day being able to afford to develop it. That and my brown leather jacket -the only thing keeping me warm in that beat-up old Honda. The nights had gone cold, and they’d done it fast. I’d wake some mornings and the windshield would be iced over -on the inside. The fog from my breath all night would condense on the glass and then freeze up by daybreak. I’d have to scrape the ice off with that useless ATT card, and then scoop it off the dash.

That was twenty years ago. Today, the weather is warm, clear, and nearly always so. I live in the suburbs outside of San Diego. I have a pretty wife, a nice house, a couple of reliable vehicles, and even a few cute kids. I run a little construction business where I build patio covers made out of aluminum pressed with a nice, dimly-satisfying wood-grain finish. All the technology of the future has arrived, and I now have all the workings of a Hollywood movie studio on my phone! -so I can do all that, when I get around to it. I’m a little busy now, with life, barbecuing hot wings and drinking a beer at sunset. I’m cooking 28 perfectly slathered and sauced wings. That’s 14 for each of us, me and my wife. We had some left over from the kid’s second birthday party last weekend, you see. So, too many hot wings. I can’t complain.

Looking back, I can tell my passions were like a tiger or a lion, or some beastly chimera that had me down and bleeding, and was just dragging me from kill site to kill site in play or jest, or to brag to the other carnivores, Look what sorry prey I fell this morning! And it was so easy! And so weak, so infirm! ‘Tis nothing to brag about, but ‘tis pretty to watch it bleed...