FADE In
The road I’m now started because of a World War II documentary I watched when I was fourteen. I forget the name, but it was about Japan’s ambitions in the pacific. It didn’t paint the Japanese in a good light.
Now sometime during my middle school years, TV’s were installed classrooms. So after the school’s announcements, we’d watch Channel One News. Of course, they would do feature stories to fill the time.
And they did a piece on the Japan and said something that the doc I watched contradicted. I must’ve muttered something, because the next thing I know, my English teacher, Mrs. Urgate, told me to explain what I meant to the class.
So I did. I stood in front of the class, basically giving my classmates a report on the doc I’d seen. Of course, they didn’t care. Mrs. Ugarte, thanked me, and I thought nothing of it.
A few months later, we had to sign up for our freshman classes when we got to high school. I remember taking my class sheet up to Mrs. Ugarte to make sure I’d done it right.
She looked it over and saw my elective classes and said, “nope,” erased one class and switched it out to speech.
Of course, I objected, but she said, “no, Andrew, you going to learn public speaking. You got a gift.”
Little did I know at the time that Mrs. Ugarte had set me on the road to college.
It was through that speech class I leaned, via Mr. Rex Wiesnthhal, May he Rest In Peace, about debate and poetry interpretation. It was also through speech that I discovered acting.
When I cashed out on sports my sophomore year, I fell
back into the fine arts.
I wasn’t bad at acting. In fact, I won a slew of awards for it my senior year and for a scholarship to small university in the Panhandle of Texas.
It was there that I met Jerry who was more into films and screenwriting. Jerry wanted to be a director.
In time, so did I, but more as a writer/director. I wasn’t technically savvy, so I focused primarily on the writing and directing. (This was a mistake.)
Plus, I feel in love with the screenplay format.
So I started coming up with ideas and screenplays.
The goal was always to make an independent film, get it screened and sold at Sundance, and date Scarlet Johansson. Maybe with a little luck, even marry her.
Of course, none of that happened.
I did end up making a film, but it’s on a hard drive.
All this to say is that now I understand where my mistake was in making films.
Photography was always a means to improve my eye to make better pictures. Making videos was way to hone my ability to finally make a better movie.
So technically, I’ve been at thud since college.
Telling stories visually is something that has always gnawed at me.
It’s an itch I’ve never been able to scratch.
Now the world has changed.
Making a film and getting it seen at Sundance isn’t the only way to go or share your art.
The internet is the most Democratic means of distributing your work.
But I don’t have a lot to show for my twenty years of chasing the white whale.
That’s something I’d like to change.