Life Between Shows: It’s Not All About Me?

Life between shows can be challenging to someone like me.  As I may have mentioned before, I am a mostly self-absorbed person for perhaps eighteen to twenty-six hours a day.  I don’t even have to be conscious; even my dreams are all about me, me, and me.  It’s hard to look out and see the bigger world, the one that doesn’t revolve around me.  It doesn’t help that because I’m so concerned about my own wellbeing and comfort, I’m one of those people who don’t watch the news if they can possibly avoid it.  It’s full of depressing and horrible things, and it’s not about me.

Now I’m sorry for that tendency—not because I’ve missed the latest bizarre and hideous crime spree, but because I’ve missed several of President Obama’s more important talks.  I don’t say “speeches”, because with Obama these come out as more like specific advice for the troubled, like: “Dear ‘Single Mother Out of Work’”, or “Dear ‘Lost My Career in Auto Assembly’”.  He gives good, solid, effective advice, too.  How, you may ask, does all this relate to Renee or her career: the great business of Show Business?  I will explain.

Recently, while between shows, I’ve received several interesting communiqués.   The first was from an old college friend who I’ll call Dr. Smith.  We hadn’t been in touch for many years, and I was surprised to find that he had become a game designer.  He was also surprised that I had not become a dolphin scientist.  But we still had some important old and now new things in common.  He’s designing a role playing game involving cetaceans and incorporating some of the hallowed tenets of my favorite television series (and now film) Star Trek.  He looked me up in part because he wanted to find out how dolphins’ minds might be different from out own.  Coincidentally, I had been thinking about him often over the past few months myself, wondering what he’d done with his life, because he was such a creative and passionate person.

Actually, when we reminisced the other day he called himself ‘angry’ and said I was also angry back then, which is true.  When we were seventeen, we both wanted to change the world, and we didn’t have the power (or the wisdom, being so young and inexperienced at life) to effect change.  Instead, as the years passed, we struggled to make a living and still be creative, getting buffeted by events beyond our control, getting more angry, going through deep crises and self-examination, confronting our core values, seeking some sort of balance for the sake of our sanity, and we both came out the other side being Taoists philosophically, being less angry and more powerful, at least in our own lives.

I also received an interesting email yesterday from Ted, “an artist, sculptor and designer” with the subject line: “Dolphins, Sea World, Production Design”.  Ted had found my website, http://www.reneeprince.net/ and discovered some interesting common threads.  He, like me (and Dr. Smith, and probably most of you out there reading this who are over thirty), had “lived a number of different lives in order to keep the ball rolling”.  He eventually ended up with a career in exhibit design and fabrication.  He’d written because, as he put it: “I think it’s not a terrible idea for people with common interests, talents to connect with each other and offer fresh perspective”.

The third communiqué that ties into this was from Sy Montgomery, the author I mentioned in my last blog.  She has written extensively on the natural world, and my favorite book of hers is Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest.  I had emailed her belatedly with the news that I had quoted her in my blog, and she wrote back the next day saying, among other things, that she has always wanted to collaborate with someone on a film about the pink dolphins. “If you ever want to try to do such a thing”, she said, she would like to work with me.

I would love to do such a thing, but I immediately thought to myself, “What could I, as a standby painter or even a production designer, possibly be able to contribute to such a film?”

Enter President Obama.  This morning, while searching out information for a short magazine article on the environment, I stumbled across a May 8^th, 2009 talk where Obama was promoting a new way of thinking about unemployment.  He said we should use that time to go back to college, to learn new skills to better ourselves for a new economy, where knowledge is the most valuable thing we will have to offer on the job market.

He also said, “We’re moving forward because now is not the time for small plans.  It’s not a time to pause or to be passive or to wait around for our problems to somehow fix themselves.”  He wants to change the unemployment benefits rules to allow for educational grants and even has a website devoted to this.  If any of you out there are between shows, take a look.  Who knows what your future might hold? Check out Opportunity.gov.

So, integrating all these messages to me (because it’s really all about me, most of my waking and sleeping life), I’ve undergone a shift in my thinking.  I’m not as angry anymore; I’m not as inexperienced and powerless as I was when I was younger.  I just sold my first flip house and managed to make a profit even in this shipwrecked economy.  Sure, it’s all going to pay off the usurers—I mean the credit card companies—I’m in debt to, but if I can make a profit once, I can do it again.

Eventually I’ll have enough money to buy a Red camera or something equivalent and perhaps I’ll start my own small business with the camera equipment.  I’ll add exponentially to my knowledge of filmmaking.  I could help make that movie about pink dolphins as a camera person.  Or perhaps I’ll have enough capital to invest in the movie, or help produce it.

It’s all about changing perspective, about making the kinds of plans that bring out all your potential.  It’s about cultivating hope, instead of settling for where you are now, feeling victimized by the world’s woes, or inadequate in the face of accelerating change.

And why do I want to make movies about dolphins?  Because, as I tend to forget when I’m the center of my own little world, always afraid of failure and going broke, and losing what relatively little I have, it’s really not all about me.  I love, without conditions, all dolphins and whales for good, well-researched and scientifically validated reasons as well as other, more personal ones, and I want to change the world so that they have a higher, more exalted place in it—so they can survive and thrive.  I also love the ocean like I love cetaceans—an unconditional love that feels like a necessary part of my soul.

I want to be a part of both of them, a helper—a player, not a hater. If I can make films or write, or whatever I can do with the knowledge and power I’ve managed (and will manage) to build within myself, I’m going to continue to live the dream, and I’m going to make this the best dream I can.  But this dream won’t be all about me—at least not all the time.

 

Movies About Animals: Not Just for Kids

Every year a handful of movies get made about animals’ relationships with humans.  I like to see these kinds of movies.  But why is it that the humans involved in the story are always children?  Why does every animal movie have to be considered a children’s story, made for a family (read: children brought in by an adult or two) audience?  The only exceptions that come to mind are Day of the Dolphin (made many decades ago, and only adult because it was based on an adult bestselling thriller), Dragonheart (possibly because the dragon is mythically associated with grownup knights and maidens?), and A Boy and His Dog (because it was based on the adult post-apocalyptic Harlan Ellison short story).  I’m not counting the true stories, such as Gorillas in the Mist, Never Cry Wolf, and Marley and Me.  They’re true, by the way, because adults lived them, not precocious children.

With stories about animal-human relationships, we as a society have regarded this subject as childish or child-centered, it seems.  What a sad loss—to alienate our grown up lives and feelings from the animals who share our lives—at least when it comes to the glory and richness of cinematic storytelling.  I think this has come about because we’re taught that as mature adults we’re not supposed to love animals as much as people.

But why not?  Is it such a radical idea to suggest that animals deserve our devotion and love, just as much as we deserve (possibly, if we behave ourselves) their devotion and love?

I’ve never wanted children for as long as I can remember.  I wouldn’t play with dolls, but loved to play with stuffed animals.  And when I grew up, real animals took their place as my playmates.  I have “owned” (or possibly they have owned me) lizards, dogs, a horse, a pigeon, various wild birds, a parrot, and one of my best friends, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is a wild red tailed hawk named Tennerin, who has spent the past eleven winters with me.  At one point in my life, two Pacific white sided dolphins were my closest friends.  I would love to see a grownup film of a story starring any of the above species (or others).

I often get inspired by movies—an absolutely real motivating, life-energizing inspiration (as with Star Trek), and movies can be a source of knowledge and inspiration to shift one’s attitude in a good, earth-changing way.  Gorillas in the Mist is a great example.  Before the film, the general public had little knowledge of gorillas’ gentleness and intelligence, and their loyalty to family and friends.  They had no knowledge that gorillas are critically endangered by poaching and habitat loss.  It is different now, and the gorillas’ lives have been much changed for the better as a result of the dissemination of that knowledge, along with the determination to help their plight that the movie inspired in many future researchers and conservationists.

A few years ago I was a speaker at a self-help group.  I could have talked about almost anything, but I brought up the story of my friendship with those two white-sided dolphins and then the relationship I have with Tennerin.  The room was rapt with attention.  I called for questions and instead received enchanting, heartfelt answers. An old man raised his hand and told of his special, secret friendship with a crow who shared his breakfast each morning on his apartment balcony.  He had tears in his eyes by the time he had finished his story.  More people spoke up, telling about their dogs or their cats, or their awe-inspiring encounters with wild creatures.

As the stories came, the power of the feelings in that room swept through all of us.  It shifted from a simple speech into a cathartic event. None of the adults had been able to tell these stories before, for fear they might be thought of as childish or foolish.  They were afraid, in many cases, that they would be told their pet was psychologically merely a substitute for a human child.

This last judgment is particularly vexing to me.  I have to agree with one of my favorite authors, the nature writer Sy Montgomery, who said in her book, The Good, Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood: (which would make a fine movie, by the way)

“These psychologists have identified a group of physical traits, such as the flat face and big eyes of pug dogs, that they call “baby releasers” and claim the sight of these activate a torrent of misplaced maternal feelings toward animals.  This suggests that any friendship between a human and an animal is really just some kind of wiring mistake, a person’s thwarted yearning for a human infant—a simple-minded view, that in my opinion, insults mothers, diminishes animals, and underestimates the complexity of love.”

Love is a mysterious, multi-dimensional emotion, as ephemeral as a chimera, as strong as an ocean.  No one, old or young, human or animal, is untouched by it. Whatever love is, it has power over any story.  I hope that we will evolve in our views on the importance of our relationships with the animals we love, realizing that no matter what our age, they are amazing, inspiring and worthy of more cinematic expression for mature humans of every age.

The Other Side of the Dream

Joking or only half so, we often like to say we are “living the dream” in the film business. Dreaming is more than a metaphor in the Business, however, and the dream has at least two sides.

When I work as a standby painter or a scenic artist, by the time they call “Wrap!” on the first day of shooting, the majority of work on the “other side” has already been done months or even years earlier.  The first part of the film’s creation has already occurred: that of bringing an idea into being through inspiration and passion.  I’m not saying that we on the production/shooting side of a film have no passion.  It’s just that our passion is going into predetermined channels, the channels opened during the inspiration part of the process on the other side.

When I production design a film, I get an invitation to join the other side, and I love the experience.  It is, in one sense, even more like living a dream than the rest of filmmaking work—in the sense that a dream has little to do with reality.

On the other side, when filmmaking begins, the script, even if it is completed, is still a running conversation of sorts shared between a small group of people; it is not yet an official blueprint for plot and dialogue and character. The film to come is more of a force than a plan, simply because everything with a solid reality has yet to be formed.  The production office may or may not have opened, and the shooting locations only exist in theory; like subatomic particles in superposition—they are probabilities only, as yet to collapse their waveforms into reality.  The actors may be only partly cast, the leads still out there somewhere, as yet unknown, even to themselves; and the director may be hoping for his own team but still isn’t sure he has one yet, because that team can only be formed through the work of making things happen out of nothing.

On the other side, more than any other time in the process of filmmaking is it so obvious that we are creating something out of nothing—nothing but ideas.  If that isn’t magic, what can magic be?

More fantastic still is when the ideas and force behind the inspiration have a source that’s… I’m searching for the right word here, folks, because I don’t want to sound like a namby-pamby, new age, hippy fluff-head—but it may be unavoidable.  Let me put it this way: sometimes I work on films that have a spiritual origin, and the sense of passion that creates them is not driven so much by creativity for its own sake, but by the need to express the really Big Questions.  Where do we come from? Why are we here?  Is there something out there bigger than ourselves and if so, what is the nature of that something and how do we fit in?

I’m not talking about religion, or even spirituality as we commonly box and package it.  By example, I refer to a book on film written by Stephen Simon, a producer and director I love to work with.  In The Force is with You: Mystical Movie Messages that Inspire Our Lives he coined the term “spiritual cinema” and his list of spiritual movies included such diverse titles as Star Wars; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Dr. Strangelove; The China Syndrome; The Matrix; and Forrest Gump.

Their common thread for me was that I had loved every one of them, and had put them into a special class of favorite film: they touched some deep chord in my psyche that other surely great films did not.  I loved Goodfellas and Fargo too, but they weren’t part of the same class.  After working with Stephen I realized what that class was: spiritual cinema.

When I work as a production designer it is usually on these kinds of films, which are often labors of love much more than they are commercially oriented.  There’s not much money, and they’re definitely in some backwater eddy rather than part of the mainstream filmmaking current. Part of that is the way Hollywood has been structured, which is another story for another blog.  But another part of it is the vision of the director and the writer: they have specific things to say and questions to ask, and a series of producer-driven rewrites would never happen.  They also do not want to explore any common denominators if it means dumbing things down in order to bring in a bigger audience.

So these movies I design are done on their own, but usually done by film professionals, who might be working for very little money, but working on principle and out of passion for the project.  Well-known actors, too, take on these projects because of the spiritual focus. 

It is incredibly informative to look at the other side of these kinds of films, especially since they’re a do-it-yourself form of filmmaking.  But the other side is usually a secret world, like dreams, I suppose; only a few of the people involved from the beginning can know how it is done and what happens at each step in the process of creating a film from scratch.  However, with digital media and the power inherent in the internet, you can get a good, long look at the other side should you be curious.

One of the most interesting independents I’ve designed and so had the opportunity to work on from the other side is called Dreams Awake, a sort of family road trip film that evolves into a mystical adventure set in California’s iconic, visually stunning Mt. Shasta (magnificent! I hiked up there every day off I had).

Jerry Alden Deal, the writer and director of Dreams Awake has kept up a great blog about his experience of making this film from the beginning, and his narrative probably, if put into a book form, would provide an excellent detailed course on almost every aspect of filmmaking, production, editing, and post-production.  A first-time director, he has had to learn countless new things about making a film as he has worked through the entire creation process involved on the other side. His blog can be found at

http://www.indiefilmblog.com/ 

Now that Jerry is getting close to finishing his film, he has done some interesting things to get it noticed on the internet, and his choices are also instructive.  Check out the following links to see what he’s come up with:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dreams-Awake/126279460223

http://twitter.com/DreamsAwakeFilm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcFmZ_Ufcg

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053835/

Aspiring filmmakers will find some useful ideas and pointers from Jerry’s experience, but of course the experience on other side is different for every film creation—as different as we all are.  I love the living the dream while on set and shooting, but I also love the first, more mysterious land of the dream as it begins to take form on the other side. 

  

To Seek Out New Life

Long ago, in this galaxy, on our own planet earth, a television show changed, shaped and inspired my tiny life during my “formative years”.  As a young brain forming new connections between feelings, thoughts, and judgments, searching for ethics and for something beyond my own society’s troubled multiple standards of “morality” and even the sense of what should be sacred,  this hour-long nightly play about humanity in the distant future was just the ticket.

It was my ticket out of one place and time and into many others, far out into the reaches of the unknown, experiencing, along with the crew of the Enterprise the greatest adventures of all—understanding the diversity and endless intelligences of the universe.

It’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t or hasn’t been a Star Trek fan what this constellation of feelings about life in general and your own life in particular can be.  It can be magical, a source of a strange, deep sense of hope—that we are better than the wars we seem to be constantly waging here and now; that we will rise above our petty, planet-bound prejudices in order to take a wider, truer view of all that the universe has to show us.  The certainty that our acquisitive nature can be swept away before our curiosity, and we will make discoveries not for the hope of conquering or purchasing, but for the simple wonder of learning about those different from ourselves.

In escaping the venalities of human nature, we expanded our capacity for higher intelligence, created a more spiritual equation when determining the meaning of our lives.  All this happened aboard the Enterprise, and though her crew changed over her incarnations and over the several spin-off series, my own most beloved crew is still the first one.  I saw some eternal jesting truth in the dynamics and dialogue of the characters of Spock, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and even that awkwardly hopeful Nurse Chapel, in love from afar with the ever-remote Spock.

There’s a comfort in hearing the well-loved dialogue that says so much more than the text, because it speaks of teamwork, and brotherly love, and honor and the struggle to become better than we are in all the ways that count when you’re out in space with only your highest principles calling for your actions.

Like many other people out there, I would hold this singular feeling that is attached to Star Trek: a wide, strong concept of how I wanted to live.  I wanted to be open to the call to adventure, and to the call to understand the unknown, whether it was through science or travel or listening to people different from me that I genuinely wanted to understand and appreciate for their differences.  I believed we were going somewhere, and it was good—the journey was good and so was the destination.  We would wake up and realize that we are all on the greatest adventure there is, so why not do it right?  Do it with passion and humor and boldly go where no one has gone before.  The show was so inspirational that it was almost magic, and not just for this one weird writer, but for many thousands, perhaps millions, of other people.

However, I hadn’t watched Star Trek in years, and I’d lost that magic awhile ago, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was working on the Harrison Ford show as the latest Star Trek film was about to be released, and learned that three of my friends in camera had worked on the new Star Trek.  When I asked them what they thought of the movie after working on it, they all got this look in their eye.  They were unanimous and sincere when they told me it was going to be fantastic.  These guys were experienced cameramen, not Trekkers, and two were fairly young—too young to have caught the first big Star Trek flight of fandom on television.  But they had that look in their eye—-they’d seen something about that movie that affected them—I would even say amazed them.

When I finally saw the new Star Trek movie myself, three weeks ago, as I sat in the theater watching the end credits for familiar names, I realized I had been utterly re-made.  My psyche was energized with a familiar force I’d nearly forgotten.  Those feelings that Star Trek had created in me throughout college and graduate school inspired the idealism that led me to work with dolphins on interspecies communication, and the hope that we as a species were going to grow and become better stewards of our own planetary life and peace.  Yet all the future that I felt every day as a promise ahead of me, the hope that colored every day, that had begun with Star Trek—had, over time and disappointment, and failure of my own plans under a creeping cynicism, slowly, slowly faded until I just didn’t feel the magic anymore.

And my life suffered for it. For years I hadn’t thought much further out than just getting that dolphin book published somehow, just getting that house sold so I could finally pay some of my credit card debts.  Just making a living.  The point of it all slivered away in tiny increments until I forgot what Star Trek had had the power to do to my perception and energy level and sense of hope and meaning.

But when I saw the new Star Trek, in the space of two hours I remembered everything I had forgotten.  Weeks on, I still feel this brilliant, familiar Star Trek energy.  I’m not a fan so much anymore this time around; I’m not heading out to any Star Trek conventions any time soon, but once again Star Trek has enriched my life and psyche in ways that no television show or movie has ever done.  Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Now I can see, over all the years and various guises, over all the dozens, if not hundreds of writers and directors involved in creating Star Trek, with this latest cinematic creation, the magic still works.