Lights

I watched cartoons constantly.  It's a cliche for one to say that he was raised by television, and I don't think that's fair to say about myself, but it's hard to remember a moment in childhood that wasn't driven by cartoons in one way or another.  If I wasn't watching them, I was reading comic books based upon them, and if I wasn't reading I was playing with my countless action figures representing their characters.  I didn't have many friends, at least not the sort who were human beings, but the Ninja Turtles, the Ghostbusters, the Muppet Babies, Captain Planet, the Toxic Crusaders, GI Joe and, much more than any of them, The Batman was my nearest and dearest.

The day hit me like a knife.  Something was going on in the news.  I can't remember what it was, because I had no idea what it was.  All I knew it that I was four year old almost violently addicted to cartoons, it was Saturday morning and my cartoons were not on the television, because of something happening in stupid Grownup World.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they said on Schoolhouse Rock.  And I had many action figures.  Almost all the characters I had been expecting to see were represented.  So I simply told my own story.  A massive crossover, before I fully understood what that was, was created.  And from that moment on, I wanted to direct movies.  It was clear I didn't even need friends to do it.

It was pointed out to me, frequently, and by a wide variety of adults that, much like walking into Mordor, one does not simply become a filmmaker.  Acting, or writing, is required first.  The example presented to me was Opie.  Little Ronny Howard.  In the black and white images of the Andy Griffith Show, Opie looked to be about my age.  I was told he was now a successful director.  This made sense.

I started acting, or doing something sort of like it shortly after.  Munchins, flying monkies, Tiny Tim, I was short and I was goddamn adorable.  But I had little patience at the time for this standing onstage bullshit.  I wanted to create things that lasted forever.  I wanted to make the moving pictures.

My first real step, ignoring this performing nonsense for a moment, was to memorize every line and every frame of every movie I watched.  And I did just that.  At the time, the Disney Channel did not show the teen sitcoms for which it has become known, but rather classic Disney films, and films that most people think are made by Disney but really aren't, like Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Due to the fact that these were on television quite often, I was able to watch them on something of a loop.  To learn them.

Not long after, my love of comic books and my love of memorizing movies intersected.  The Batman animated series released a true masterpiece of a feature film, Mask Of The Phantasm.  Around the same time, a little known Dark Horse comic called The Mask was adapted into a feature film starring the white guy from In Living Color, who at that moment was quickly, somewhat sneakily, becoming a movie star.  In a few years, he would become The Riddler and my universe would truly collapse upon itself.

But for the moment I had video tapes of these two masks, one of the Phantasm, the other not, and I would watch these films more times in a day that actually seemed possible.  I also began reading more and more comics about these characters.  I actually remember where I was when Bane broke Batman.  It's a distant memory, if remembered at all, by most now, as the moment has been collected in so many trade paperbacks and adapted into a very uneven film, but that moment occurred at the end of an issue.  "Broken…and done," said Bane as he walked away from Batman's lifeless, seemingly dead body.  It's a common punchline now that comic book constantly die and return to life, but at the time…I cried each time it seemed that Batman, Superman…they died.  Multiple times, yes, and often in misleading ways that were not truly deaths at all, but to me, small bits of my soul died as those issues ended.  Hell, they still do, when it happens in comics even to this day.

I read The Mask comics quite a bit as well.  Of course, having seen the movie more times than I had seen any textbook at that point, I was accustomed to Stanley Ipkiss, Milo the dog and Dorian Tyrell wearing The Mask, all with greatly different results.  But these comics books…SO MANY people put on The Mask.  The Mask lived in us all!  I even started to get into Norse mythology, somewhat, because of the scene in the film that finds Ben Stein telling Jim Carrey that Loki may be possessing him.  It's been stated too many times in too many places that comic books open doors for people to learn other things.  So I won't say it.

I guess I'm never happy doing anything.  I was a theater kid through most of high school, but I avoided, to the best of my ability, the stereotypes that go along with it.  Rather than brood and memorize Shakespeare, I ran around manically and performed "Weird Al" Yankovic songs in every variety show or what have you given by the drama department.  Or just in class.  Holding still was impossible.  It still is.  Holding still and not crying when a superhero seems to die.  These activities are impossible for me.

Then the day came when the opportunity was presented, still in high school, to major in an artistic field.  I chose cinema.  That was the dream.  But the dream puzzled many of those in charge, because I had been in so very much theater, both in school and out in various groups and so forth.  But I knew film was what counted.  Film was creating something that lasted forever, not just for a few months at most.  I continued making movies til I graduated, at which time I was rejected from two film schools, submitting films that were strange and weirdly shot and writing an essay about why I wanted to be John Waters and Kevin Smith.  I did, however, find a school that allowed film as a major without the whole business of submitting a film and writing an essay.  It was simply a major.  You could just start.

It was soon after just starting, however, that I realized I wasn't a filmmaker.  I was a writer.  I was a strangely gifted editor.  But I was not a director.  I would write a script and get to the location and basically say "Fuck it, do what you want, actors."  This worked well, I guess, for having a lot of footage that I could turn into something later, which is what I did, but being a director with any kind of vision or goal…this was not part of who I was.

I did befriend folks, though, for whom that was a pretty big deal.  So it was nice to write for them, to help edit, to be…whatever I was.  Someone at the beginning and the end of whatever rainbow there was, I guess.

All through this, other than in my own and occasionally my friends' movies, I had completely abandoned acting.  I didn't particularly miss the process of putting on a play, but I will confess to missing the live reactions of a crowd.