Origins

When I was a wee lad of maybe 6 or 7, I remember a friend of my big brother's talking about "the wolfman movie" or "werewolf movie". I didn't know what the hell a werewolf was at the time and didn't see the movie. Pretty soon thereafter, we got a call from this friend saying that "the wolfman movie" was on channel 27 so we tuned in and behold! Henry Hull changing into the WEREWOLF OF LONDON. My first movie monster and I was hooked from that moment forward. A few years later, I saw it again and was able to positively identify which werewolf movie it was, because I'd since seen THE WOLF MAN and was a tad perplexed that it didn't seem to be the same film. The wolf man was always my favorite monster. Loved him and was sympathetic towards Lon Chaney Jr.'s Lawrence Talbot character. So tragic and sad, yet cool as hell when the full moon rose.. Another family friend introduced me to the popular magazine, "Famous Monsters of Filmland" around this same time.

Sure, the photos of the movie monsters were neat-o but what became even more fascinating were the behind-the-scenes features. Images like that of Boris Karloff sitting in what looked like a barber's chair being made-up by Jack Pierce immediately exposed the magic trick. Famous Monsters' incidentally taught the fundamental language of cinema to it's young readers. The featured titles were frequently, almost exclusively from the Universal horror movies of the '30s and '40s which luckily would show every weekend on my local channel 27's "Nightmare Theater" complete with it's own horror host, "Dr. Dead." Those wonderful old black & white movies would re-run and naturally, I'd re-watch them every time, studying their special effects tricks and more importantly, the narrative filmic structure. Horror movies inherently lend themselves to the most inventive cinematic techniques. These were so much more fun and fascinating than the usual dull talking-head stage plays that "normal" movies presented. At one point, my brother and this friend, if I remember correctly his name was David Conway, decided that it would be fun to make our own movie! We discussed the story, which would've been a rip-off of the Universal films featuring as many monsters as we could squeeze in. My imagination went wild with this spark of inventive fancy! But like many doomed projects throughout my life, it never was allowed to advance beyond the imagination stage for the usual childhood limitations reasons. David visited my family about 10 years later and mentioned "remember Famous Monsters?" I proudly announced that I'd graduated to Fangoria magazine by then and had even made some short films! He seemed a little dismayed that my childhood fantasy was still extant. Maybe it was envy.. I was lucky that I had friends and a great art teacher who fostered the dream. Maybe David didn't, unfortunately.

Fifth grade, circa 1974. Our new art teacher, Linda Harvy came from the big city of Springfield, Missouri to our little town of Stockton, bringing a wonderful contemporary sensibility to her students. One big class project was super-8 filmmaking. Finally! A chance to start realizing those childhood visions! Linda supplied the camera, film and projector; equipment that was out of my reach during those frustrating childhood years. The class was divided into groups to make 4 or 5 separate little short films. It was inevitable that the first movie I made with best friend at the time, Todd Wingert, was "The Werewolf" as our part of this class assignment. Well, Linda was really the director of everything, but I couldn't help but jump in and seize control. Todd and I were so eager to make our movie that we were first and got ours done before anyone else. It was so much fun that afterward, I barged in on another group who hadn't shot their movie yet. I wonder if Linda still has those old films..? The film stock itself was rather expensive and in short supply so we had to be very careful and precise during shooting. Back then, there was a filmmaking shortcut called "editing in the camera" where you tried to chronologically compose each shot to the next, timed perfectly with the action of the previous shot, minding where the following shot would begin and so on. It rarely worked very well but it taught me to be even more disciplined and cognizant of the craft. Later, in high school, Linda moved up to teaching advanced art techniques at that higher level so she remained as a teacher, mentor and wonderful friend who let me work on my personal film projects during class while everyone else was painting or spinning clay. This kind of supportive encouragement would probably get a teacher fired in today's regimented indoctrination system. ..but I'll refrain from a useless rant on that subject. As I aged, my passion for movies grew seemingly parallel with the sophistication of cinematic techniques that were happening in the '70s. Todd Wingert's family moved away after 7th grade. I was sad to see him go but he was replaced by another Todd almost immediately. 8th grade, Todd Reynolds moved to Stockton from Kansas City and we became life-long best friends and filmmaking partners. Actually, I think he was there in 7th grade but we didn't bond until after my first Todd moved away. His mother is a writer, so that creative instinct and drive was always encouraged and nurtured. We naturally gravitated to each other and our dreams and imaginations thrived while we wrote scripts and assembled the tools to make our own movies. That'll be the story of "TRRS Films" in the next chapter of this blog / memoir..