The Year of Being Naked in the Street

Once a month at the church I attend we open the microphone up to anyone in the congregation. We call it a Fast and Testimony meeting, and the idea is that the first Sunday of every month is a day we abstain from food and water to focus less on temporal things and more on spiritual things. With that spiritual mindset, we are invited to the podium to speak. Anyone and everyone.

I don’t usually get up, mostly out of suspicion of my own motives for doing so. Who, after all, lifts themselves up of their accord to be seen and heard of men (and women)? Narcissists. Attention seekers. Those riddled with self-importance.

I am all of those things. I am trying to be none of them.

So, when I do get up, like I did last week, it’s got to be for a good reason. “Good reason,” in my case, means “I have something to actually say and something outside of me telling me to say it.” I won’t get up otherwise.

This is a battle with myself that has gotten increasingly easier with age. I’m more bored with myself than I’ve ever been, and I’d prefer to listen to others. Not that I don’t love the rush of new ideas and thoughts when I do speak, but getting older can be described as the increasing awareness of your own idiocy. So, speaking comes with no small amount of risk and potential for reliving a bad word choice or ill-expressed thought late at night ad nauseam when I’m trying to fall sleep. When I was younger, I was pretty brilliant. Now, I’m a fountain of aged wisdom, and wisdom usually tells me to shut up.

What brought me to the microphone last week? This year. This whole. Massive. Year.

I was talking with someone just the other day about The Shift who didn’t know the history of the project, but who knows a thing or two about filmmaking. He also knew the movie comes out December 1^st, but asked, “When did you shoot it?”

“February,” I replied.

And his eyes went real, real wide. “That’s insane,” he said. I nodded.

This year has challenged me in a way I’m not sure any other ever has. To take The Shift from an idea to a finished product in the space of less than 12 months has required something of me that I, naively, never once thought of as the key factor…the main ingredient…the sum total of what is necessary to come out of all of this with anything that is of any kind of quality and still remain an intact, healthy human being:

Humility.

Not talent, not knowledge, not skill, not money, not power. None of that, in the end, matters so much as recognizing that for all of those things, I really have nothing.  

The strength of my own arm is nothing. I am not talented enough and I am not smart enough to do this job. I’m just not. How could I be? My experience going into this was a couple short films and some grunt work and light producing on other films. It was a leap of faith to try to make my own feature film in the first place, and a leap of faith for all our investors and all the actors and all the producers and the studio and everyone. Every single person who has contributed to and put work into this project has taken a leap of faith.

On the film, yes, but let’s face it, the biggest leap of faith, well…that was on me.

And I’ve always known that. And I’ve gone forward confidently anyway because my leap of faith was always towards one thing, and it wasn’t me. It was towards Him. I didn’t get into all this—all 8 years of it—because I wanted it so badly. I did it because I seek His will in all I do and I came to understand that this is what He wanted me to do.

And if He wants me to do it? Well, he whom God calls, He qualifies. That’s a truth I’ve clung to all these years, and it was what I repeated to myself every day before I headed to set.

Those were the salad days. When a little pep talk to myself carried me through telling Neal McDonough to try it again a different way or asking the Production Design team to flip the room or telling Costumes to scratch that dress and make a new one. The harder days, those were still ahead.

Because once a movie is in the can, there’s really no going back. And when there’s no going back, that’s when you second guess yourself.

When opinions are many and options are few. When the stakes rise and rise the closer to the release date you get, and every decision becomes more final because there’s less time to course correct. When your movie is ripped away from the thing you thought it was and becomes what it is going to be.

It’s when all the mistakes you’ve made are laid bare.

When you, as a creator, are laid bare. And for someone like me who has put his whole soul into this work? It’s when I am laid bare. Me, as a person.

I have been stripped naked and paraded in the street for all to see. The spare tire I can’t get rid of? Laughed and pointed at. The baldness my hat usually covers? Opened to the shine of the sun. The hunched back bent by scoliosis? A curiosity to be whispered about.

And I as I walk that road, exposed and stared at, I know one thing very, very well: I am weak. I am nothing.

And that’s when I become strong.

That’s when I become smart.

That’s when I become talented and the ideas flow and the spark turns to flame and I get a freakin’ shirt and pants because no one wants me naked in the street.

How?

This is humility, I think: strength through Christ.

Actual humility is not modesty. Modesty can feel kind of false, even if it’s real. Actual humility is a true recognition that you are low, that there is not enough strength in your own arm, that you can’t do the thing, and only through Him is anything possible.

That’s what I got up and talked about last week. Not all this movie stuff, but just the very basic idea that this year I have been shown my weakness, and I have even been overwhelmed by it. And it has caused me to recognize the need for my Savior in a brand new way.

We are not supposed to do this thing—life, work, family, you name it—alone. We are supposed to be weak. We are supposed to not be enough. We are supposed to fail.

Because if we didn’t do all of those things, then we would have no reason to reach for Him. And when we reach for Him, He makes us more than we could ever be.

This is the great truth of Christianity. Our weakness is our greatest strength. Or, rather, our acknowledgement of our weakness is our greatest strength. This is why Moses couldn’t talk. Why Joseph was left to rot in prison. Why Samuel was called at 10 years old. Why you are (fill in the blank).

Because He’s trying to get you to rely on Him. Because He’s designed mortality to offer us only so much so that we will seek Him to get a taste of what awaits us beyond it.

And once we have that taste, He hopes we’ll be greedy for it.

(There’s a drug metaphor here, but I’ll stop now before I get there.)

I have been humbled by this year, is what I’m saying. And that is no bad thing. These are the moments that can make me a better husband and father and son and friend and, yes, filmmaker.

I try to welcome humility. I think it’s less something we put on and more something we submit to. Because life will always, always humble us. Circumstances–bullies, a crap job, too much to do and not enough time, fluctuating weight, etc.—will always combine against us. It’s inevitable. It’s by design.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Where is your strength?

And I submit: It’s not in your arm.

Is Making Movies a Real Job?

My fingernails are still dirty from the work I did here this morning. Once a year, I join hundreds of volunteers to harvest grapes for the relief of the needy at our church vineyard. It’s the kind of sweaty, dirty, backbreaking work that makes me think, “Oh yeah, this is what a real job is like.”

As if picking grapes is so much harder than what I do. I make movies (being optimistic with the plural, just go with me on it). Physically, no, I’d say picking grapes is a fair sight harder, but in just about every other way, I don’t think it is.

The truth is that making The Shift is one of the HARDEST things I’ve ever done. And I’ve learned a foreign language as an adult, gotten a bachelor’s degree, raised kids, faced down years of unemployment, faced more rejection than I care to admit, etc. And making movies? Yeah, it’s up there.

Anyone who makes a movie, that person has worked HARD to make it happen. They have likely suffered mentally, emotionally, and physically for it. It’s not as physically punishing as picking grapes in 90-100 degree heat, but in every other way I’d stack making movies right alongside any challenge.

There’s a reason they say every movie is a miracle. The whole thing can—and usually does!—fall apart at any moment! Now, imagine the stress and the work it must take to pull off that miracle while being not so much God. You must produce a miracle, and you are not God.

It shouldn’t really happen. And yet, movies do happen. Not all of them are good, but all are miracles. Trust me. Everything is working against them and nothing for them. The world does not want them. People do, but not the world. Movies defy the natural order.

It was an honor to witness and be part of the harvest again today. A sky like that, that’s a miracle, too. Picking grapes served as a good reminder that, as tough as this job of making movies can sometimes be, outside of my family life it is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m lucky to have it.

Originally published on Facebook on 9/9/23

On the Contradiction of Inspiration and Revision

While it’s true that I’m always working on The Shift, that’s not all I’m doing. As I’ve talked about before, it would be unwise to release a movie and then look around and say, “Okay, now what should I do?” By then, it’s a little late.

I’ve been very quiet about my other projects, but of course my hope is that one day you see them in all their glory–and then I will be very much not quiet. Besides my ongoing comic side project, The SuperFogeys (don’t let the ridiculous name fool you–it’s a story with as much pathos as anything I’ve written), there are two scripts sitting on my computer just waiting to be turned into fully realized feature films.

You’re going to have to forgive everything that comes next in this post as it might be a little indulgent. After my recent visit to the Screenwriting From the Trenches podcast, I find myself thinking a lot about writing and the mechanics of it, and how inspiration–even divine inspiration–is both tangled up in it in an exceptional way, and also must not be taken too seriously.

But, before I get into that, I offer this: even if you find this boring, I am going to reveal a little more about the other projects I’ve been working on. So, there’s that.

The first script I wrote after writing The Shift is an adaptation of my published memoir, “The Other Side of Fear,” about the growing up I did between my father’s two shootings. I wrote it in a matter of weeks after completing final edits on the book because I figured it was never again going to be so fresh a thing in my brain and writing a screenplay would not require outlining or extensive notes.

I was right about that. I flew through the first draft so quickly that I often became suspicious of what I was writing. Was it too much like the book? Was the story only understandable to me or others who had read the book?

The answer to both questions, I’ve since concluded, was yes. In that first draft, I did kind of…sort of…land on a new angle into the story that is not in the book, but I failed to properly support that angle with additional story beats.

“But wait,” I can hear you say. “How can you add story beats to a true story? Doesn’t that make it…not a true story?”

Kind of (memoir is what you call “creative non-fiction”–look it up), but a movie is an adaptation. You’re allowed to compress and combine and still call a thing true. The weirdest part was using my own name and the names of my family members in the script. In a memoir, that makes sense. But in a movie? Where the fictionalization gets taken a step further? It felt kind of wrong.

And that’s where inspiration gets in the way. If I was inspired to write the book in the first place as I did, should I not then protect the form of it as much as possible on its way to the screen? Isn’t changing things too much a betrayal of that inspiration and a risk to whatever power and value it has?

Maybe. You can rewrite things too much. Clint Eastwood famously insisted on using J. Michael Straczynski’s first draft of his movie “Changeling” because he felt it was plenty good and didn’t want it to get diluted.

Clint Eastwood is also famous as a director for moving on after one take if he likes it, so he’s kind of crazy.

I’ve known of other storytellers who are resistant to any and all feedback because they feel they and they alone are God’s vessel for the story being told. I wonder if they ever second guess themselves. I wonder if their rewrites have any real teeth to them. I wonder if they rewrite at all.

I’ve come to understand inspiration as an iterative process. The story, the movie, the book, the comic reveals itself line upon line and precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. I may be completely convinced that some element or twist or line of dialogue is sacrosanct in the moment–and I must to commit it to paper–but I must be willing to reconsider it all later when the moment of inspiration is left behind in order to receive new inspiration.

Inspiration can follow inspiration, and they can contradict each other. 99% of the time, the new inspiration is correct.

Because, I have come to realize, while many ideas can seemingly develop ex nihilo, others–some of the very best ones–must have a foundation first. And perhaps several. That doesn’t mean I was wrong before so much that I needed those first ideas to get to the better ones. Those first ideas may even have been bad ones! But I had to see the bad to understand the good.

This doesn’t mean I was uninspired in the first place, it means God (or the universe or however you term what lights the creative spark) was kind and patient enough to lead me through it.

Case in point: my screenplay adaptation for The Other Side of Fear. After four drafts of using real life names, I grew so uncomfortable with the intrinsic narcissism and strange-to-cinema convention (seriously, has any filmmaker written about his own life using his own name? I’m sure it’s happened, but I can’t think of any examples) that I did a fifth draft with all of the names changed. All of the sudden, the story possibilities opened up in a new way. I found myself freed from the constraints of what I knew happened in real life and allowed myself to change and alter according to what best served the telling of this story in this new medium–movies.

It flowed. For the first time, the story flowed. The heart of it is still there and it’s still true and recognizably what I lived through, but changing those names allowed me to crack the code of adaptation.

And, as a bonus, I finally, FINALLY figured out what the title of the story should be. I’ve never liked “The Other Side of Fear.” It’s interesting, but generic. A title settled upon when I ran out of time to decide and a seeming rip off of another (far more popular) title in its genre.

For the movie, for this new envisioning, I’m calling it “Twice.” And that title ONLY came after I went through that re-envisioning process.

Even if the movie never gets made, that’s a great title. (One word titles really do work best in movies, unlike books). Iterative inspiration. It’s a real thing.

Furthermore, most people think the story about my dad is about forgiveness, but it’s not. I mean, in a lot of ways it is, but, as I said, I found a new way into it. Forgiveness is still a strong undercurrent and a big part of the story, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main theme. If we’re talking one word themes, the theme of Twice is probably “purpose,” or “a life’s purpose.” And that’s probably a surprise to anyone who’s read the book, but it fits. Maybe you’ll get to see that one day.

The Shift, also, in a lot of ways, is about forgiveness. Not the main theme and not explicitly so, but insofar as it’s about guilt and repentance (and it definitely is), it cannot help but be about forgiveness.

I think I’ve secretly been working on a forgiveness trilogy. The other script I’ve written–and the one I’m most excited about and is probably most likely to see the light of day–is explicitly and blatantly about forgiveness.

It’s called “Glide.”

Forgiveness is a well-worn topic both at the pulpit and in film–particularly films that don’t shy away from faith. I’m excited about Glide because I think I’ve found a unique way into the topic, leading off from an oft-quoted verse of scripture that I honestly don’t think gets enough representation in our discussions on repentance, or in our stories. It’s a verse I’ve really struggled to understand and, for some reason, my way to that understanding was working it out in this screenplay.

And yet, despite its roots being so firmly entrenched in the New Testament (that’s a clue about which verse I’m talking about), more than anything else I’ve written, Glide is accessible to a broader audience. I’m really happy with it and really, really excited for you to see it.

And I wasn’t always and Glide had to grow and change and iterate into what it is. And it will grow and iterate more on its way (hopefully) to the silver screen. As difficult as its been to bring The Shift to life (the most difficult thing I’ve ever done? probably), I’m looking forward to doing it again with this one.

Like I said, this post is indulgent, but if you’ve gotten this far, let me offer this:

A bad idea and a good idea, in the creative process, both have the same value in that they have equal power to lead you to the right idea.

I really, truly believe that.

And there’s no greater example of that than the part of the moviemaking process I’ve been swimming in for months now: editing. It’s a lot like writing except you have a LOT more restrictions.

But that’s a post for another day.

Originally published on Facebook on 8/27/23

The Burden and the Joy

One of my favorite movies is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. It’s an epic about the, duh, last emperor of China, Puyi, who was raised as a child in the Forbidden City and enjoyed all the advantages, riches, privilege, women, and catering to one could hope for, only to see it all fade away and be taken from him as the world changed and communists took over.

For all the beautiful imagery in the film (and it’s STUNNING), the image that sticks the most is of the emperor’s final days as an old man tending to his garden. The end of his life could not be in starker contrast to the beginning. It’s the boy king brought low, his fingers dirty and clawing at the one bit of soil he still commands.

And he’s happy.

The movie was released in 1987 and I first saw it on home video a few years later. I was young, is what I’m saying, and the impression left by that final scene of the old, deposed emperor was lifelong. I couldn’t understand it. After everything he had–all that power and all that fame and all those rich experiences–how could he be happy as an anonymous old man?

I couldn’t understand it because I wasn’t equipped at that time to understand such a thing. I didn’t know what lay ahead in my life, but whatever else my hazy, formless future held, I knew I wanted it to be big. That it should be big. And important. And significant in some way. How could anything else be satisfactory?

One of the first jobs I ever held was working at a Trap and Skeet club my father managed. I complained to dad constantly about the sweaty, menial labor he required of me: hauling hay, restocking shelves, moving heavy boxes, etc.

It wasn’t that it was beneath me, it was that it was all such a distraction from…I didn’t know what, exactly. I just knew that these everyday, repetitive tasks were not in any way important. And I wanted to do important things.

As you can imagine, this meant I wasn’t very good at things like cleaning my room, taking out the trash, and keeping up with my chores generally at home. Those are all unimportant things. Meaningless.

How could the former emperor of China be happy tending to a garden?

My life now is much different, and quite a bit different than I ever imagined. It took me a long time to figure out what “important” thing I was supposed to be doing.* And now that I’m finally here?

*(“Importance” being a relative and debatable thing; what I was really struggling towards was a thing suitable to my talents and tastes, but in our ego-driven youth we often imagine ourselves not just the hero of our own story, but of every story.)

I kind of like doing the dishes.

I don’t garden, and I never will. But I do the dishes and I take out the trash and I clean the house and I vacuum and I, most of all, take care of Cami.

Cami is 18 years old, our second daughter, and she has some special needs. Because my work is most often done over the internet or on my laptop, I serve as her primary caregiver (unless I’m out of town, in which case it falls to my wife). My work day doesn’t start until I help Cami out of bed, help her with the restroom, administer her medications, get her dressed, fix her breakfast, clean her up afterwards, soothe her if he’s irritable, and try to divine her wants from signs only those closest to her can interpret (Cami is nonverbal). And that’s just the morning. A lot of this repeats throughout the day. It’s the kind of work that is beyond routine for me at this point.

I never talk about it, but it’s a big part of who I am and what I do. Never imagined that would be the case, but here we are. This makes my day a constant study in whiplash. In my work, right now, I’m approving VFX shots, meeting with producers, reviewing budgets and marketing materials, and just generally conducting the business of being a director of a feature film. And If I’m not on Zoom, I can almost guarantee you I’m on headphones and doing all this concurrently with fixing Cami a sandwich for lunch or helping her find just the right show on Disney+ or trying to get her shoes off her feet because she’s pointing at them and I know what that means.

And, I’ll be honest, for a long time now all of these tasks have been a bit of an irritant. I love Cami dearly, but she is also a burden. A burden I and my wife have always happily borne, but a burden nonetheless. To say otherwise would be maddening. And not true.

The divorce rate for couples with children with special needs is over 80%. You don’t make it through without (sometimes brutal) honestly. So, I’m bad at pretending.

Cami is a burden, but she is also a joy. And the particular joy I have found of late is in all the tasks I once disdained. The everyday, once-thought meaningless work that is essential to our family’s sustainability and to making life function on a basic level. The “unimportant” stuff.

That stuff is my refuge now. My break from the pressure and the grind and the BIGness of moviemaking.

But it’s not a simple matter of contrasts. I think, through doing this work that I’ve always regarded as so important (even when I didn’t know what it was), I’ve come to realize that, no, the other stuff really was more important than I gave it credit for all along. Maybe not MORE important, I don’t know, but up there. Maybe it doesn’t even shake out into gradations like that as though there’s some imaginary scale where this work is more special than that work. After all, none of us really know the impact of what we do.

So, it’s more than that. I think I’ve come to understand that work has its own intrinsic value, regardless of the relative value of the task. It’s the working, not the work. And, when that is the thing, the simpler the task involved the better because the reward—an addition and a bonus to that intrinsic value–is immediate.

There is a joy in a work completed, a task conquered. The dishes come out clean. The trash is removed. The daughter is happy.

Chores are not a chore, they are quick victories I can snatch from the jaws of a hurried life.

There is no way my younger self could make heads or tails of this essay, so it’s possible you’re having that experience, too. I’m just trying to put into words a feeling I’m having with increasing frequency, and I suspect I’m still at the beginning of fully grasping it. This may be clumsy.

But.

When I think back on Puyi tending to his garden now, I get it. I get the pleasure he must have gotten from that after the hurricane of his life had all played out. Simple, “unimportant,” repetitive, even-if-it’s-hard work can satisfy in a way big, “important,” constantly changing, highly difficult work cannot.

(I couldn’t find a good still from the movie, but I didn’t find this photo of the actual former emperor.)

I Love Sequels. I Hate Sequels.

I love sequels. And also, there’s something dirty about them.

I love to revisit favorites as much as the next person, but has there ever been a sequel with as much value as the original it’s coming from? I’m not talking about whether or not there’s ever been a sequel better than the original (there’s been lots), I’m talking about whether it’s possible a sequel could hold as much intrinsic VALUE–culturally, historically, artistically, etc.–as an original that comes firing on all cylinders out of the gate and makes you say “I want more of that.”

And movies are a business, so it’s like…yeah, you do want more of it, but why are they giving it to you? Why build a new wing on an old building when you could just build a new building and get a cool little town going? And the answer is, of course, because they think they will make more money this way than the other way. The other way being: giving you something untested, untried, and unknown in the hopes that you respond to it the same you did the last time they gave you something untested, untried, and uknown.

So, instead, it’s “Here you go, again.”

But we’re smarter than that, aren’t we? “You can’t just give me the same thing again!” we say. “Make it better!”

And they say, “We don’t even know how we made the first one so good in the first place. You don’t understand! Movies are a crapshoot! We hope this stuff works, but we don’t really know until it comes out.”

And we say, “Give it to me again. And you better not screw it up.”

And they say, “Okay, okay…” and then they go back into their gold-plated studio and they talk it out amongst themselves and they say, “We may not be able to guarantee it’ll be better, but we sure as hell can make it bigger, right? Might fool ’em. Might even work.”

It’s a bit craven, isn’t it?

THEM: Here’s that thing you liked before…again! Bigger, bolder, and now with more sidekicks. More explosions. A retcon or five. And a pet monkey. Maybe there were no monkeys in the first film, but this one–it’s got all the stuff you loved the first time, we promise–but now it’s also got a monkey and it dances. Everybody loves dancing monkeys. Especially when he hops on the shoulder of that old man without the teeth who ad libbed that one line you laughed at so much the first time and is now back to deliver that line again, this time with a wink so you feel like you’re on the inside of something even though this is, like, 100% the most pandering, fan service-y thing we could do. Gosh, you love that old man. And now he’s sharing the screen with the monkey? How are you not loving this already?

US, A FEW YEARS AGO: I am SO loving this already. Where’s the Funko Pop?

US, THIS YEAR: No thanks.

I think the most exciting thing to happen in cinema since the inception of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as a longtime comic nerd, sorry, 2008 was seminal) is happening this year: audiences are rejecting sequels. They are rejecting the dancing pet monkey and embracing original films again. Finally.

Barbie. Oppenheimer. Sound of Freedom. Elemental. Crud, you can kind of lump Super Mario Bros. in there.

All massively successful films. A couple billion dollar earners in there. All gambles in one form or another.

And the sure-thing failures in their wake? Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Fast X. The Flash. Mission:Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Yeah, there have been some sequels this year that performed decently well (Guardians, Spider-Verse, etc.), but all of the above films underperformed in a big way. And some of them are really good movies! (Do NOT sleep on the new M:I film–one of the best in the series) But, audiences sent a pretty clear signal this year with what they chose to support:

“We don’t want the same thing but better or bigger again. We’re bored of it. Give us something new.”

And, thankfully, a few really good films were able to step up to the plate and say, “Okay!”

It’s awesome. We needed this. I love sequels, but I’m so glad for this.

The box office feels a little less dirty these days. It’s not JUST a business, after all. Movies are our most universal art. They’re important. They say something about who we are. And I love it when they say more than “Monkey = money.”

This year, the dancing monkey is napping. How cool is that?

And, on a personal level, yeah, as the guy behind a little movie coming out later this year that’s got a pretty strong streak of originality, I’m encouraged. The entire time I’ve been developing The Shift Film, it being a completely original film has been a knock against it. Its most obvious weakness.

But now? Now, I’m thinking its originality might be one of its biggest strengths.

I hope so, I really do. I hope December audiences maintain the spirit of the Summer and give The Shift a chance to do something new and different. I hope they’ll give themselves over to a film that isn’t going to be quite what they expect because it’s NOT the same thing they loved before. Even in the faith film space we’re butting up against, The Shift is not going to go the way you think.

And I hope you, the audience, will forgive the lack of monkey. An oversight, I assure you.

Gonna fix that in the sequel.

Originally published on Facebook on 8/10/23

My First Taste of Hollywood

I’ve been in a reflective mood lately, thinking about all the events that added up to equal all that’s happened this year. I directed my first feature film, and that’s not something I ever thought I would do.

To get to that point meant a whole lot of time on other people’s sets doing all sorts of jobs. I’ve been on horror films, short films, trailers, commercials, and even spent a couple weeks on The Chosen set shadowing Dallas.

All of it has been helpful, and all within in the past 8 years. My actual first time ever on a set was many decades earlier, when I had not one single clue what my life would become.

And if you had told my 13-year-old self visiting that set that one day he’d spending his every day doing everything he could to be on set for the rest of his life…he’d have been really disappointed by that.

Just for fun, here’s an excerpt from a book I wrote, The Other Side of Fear: A True Story of Murder, Forgiveness, and the Peace Only Faith Can Bring (available on Amazon, naturally). This is my honest first reaction to the inner workings of making a show.

(A little context: My dad was shot in armed robbery 13 times and lived. This was deemed worthy of recreation on television. You can find the result on YouTube, if you’re curious.)

From Chapter 12 – HOLLYWOOD

Rescue 911 was a network television program that featured true stories of people in trouble who had been saved by the miracle wrought by Alexander Graham Bell and a magical three-digit number. The show struck

a dramatic yet celebratory tone, hailing the work of police and rescue services across the United States. Three reenactments of traumatic and inspiring events were staged a week, buffeted by on-camera interviews with those involved. It was a lot like America’s Most Wanted, except you didn’t pee yourself afterward for fear of home invasion and death by multiple stabbings.

Most rescues ended happily. The show’s sensibility was generous toward both its subjects and its viewers, refusing to dole out guilty, vicarious pleasures by exploiting the victims and their families for cheap emotional drama. It was a reality show before the term was coined and rendered connotatively crass. We watched together as a family, though sometimes it was all too real and Mom felt compelled to leave the room.

To host this weekly exhibition of everyday peril and frantic phone dialing, the producers enlisted the aid of the most talented and powerful duo in all of Hollywood. Together, they had smoked up the small screen for years in such classics as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and T.J. Hooker. They’d even put out an album or two. Only William Shatner and His Glorious Hairpiece had the skills to guide viewers in and out of the commercial breaks. The Shat. Captain Friggin’ Kirk. It was as though the Rescue 911 producers were gunning for the coveted Bill Heasley demographic.

The show found the subjects of its segments by calling local police stations across the country. Since 911 focused so much on casting local law enforcement and paramedics in a positive light, the Fresno Police Department was quite eager to have this nice, friendly faction of Hollywood swing on by. Even nearly a year later, after hundreds of murders and robberies had made their way through the news pages, the Fresno PD knew exactly which story to pitch to the producers.

For Dad, this pretty much constituted what he imagined to be the greatest thing ever. His longtime devotion to all things Shat and Kirk

finally found its nirvana in the now single degree of separation between them. His first question for the producers wasn’t “How much will we be paid?” or “Will the shoot be catered?” It was, “Do I get to meet William Shatner?”

The answer was, “No, but you do get an autographed picture.”

Good enough.

Dad’s second question was if he could play himself on camera. The producers were adamantly against it. The last thing they needed was a guy who hadn’t properly dealt with his trauma freaking out on set. Dad’s eerie calm, instead of being reassuring, concerned them all the more. There

were many things to worry about during the one-week shoot: filming in multiple locations, interviews with over a dozen of the people involved, and complicated special effects and stunt work. Nowhere on the schedule was there room for recording proof of Dad’s need for therapy.

Dad found their worries to be, quite frankly, stupid. He was tired of other people telling him how he should and should not feel. He begged and pleaded and reassured the production company, the on-site producer, the director—he would have taken his case to the guy holding the boom mic if he thought it would have done any good. Eventually, through measured persistence, reservations were set aside.

Though it’s a scant three hours away from Los Angeles, Fresno is mostly useful to Hollywood as shorthand for Podunkville, USA, in lazily written late-night talk show jokes. With its flat streets and squat, unadorned buildings, there’s just not much about Fresno that’s immediately cinematic. A production crew in town was a big deal. Someone had actually dared to turn a camera on our “little” town of nearly half a million people. They completely took over not only The Shop, but also our house, our lives, and what we talked about at the grocery store. For the entire length of the one-week shoot, we were either on the front page of The Fresno Bee or the top story on the local TV news. At church, a friend took to humming the mostly tuneless Rescue 911 theme song, following me around like a puppy, and asking questions about movie stars I had no connection with.

The men and women in the production crew were something of a disappointment. We had expected egotistical, acerbic Hollywood types chomping on cigars and asking Dad if he would mind having a pet monkey to provide comical reaction shots as he’s shot to pieces. Instead, they were perfectly respectful, lovely people. They took seriously the responsibility to not cheapen the gravity of Dad’s situation while still maintaining some sort of broadcast standard. They wanted us to have nothing but a positive experience and catered to our every need and desire (by which I mean we ate a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken).

Our every day and night was commandeered by the filming. My regular, half-hearted homeschooling routine was upset so badly there was no need for even the pretense of doing my schoolwork. Hollywood, evil influencer of children, successfully destroyed any lingering ambition I may have had to finish my giant work packet of death. A real-life motion picture show was in town. Now that was something to study.

My father, to his everlasting credit, had instilled in me a deep love and appreciation of all things cinema. He didn’t pore over movie magazines like Starlog or scour the Scholastic book orders for anything movie or (better yet) Star Wars related like I had obsessed myself into doing, but he was known to “work late” now and again. Then, the next day, he’d tell us all about the movie with the confusing title we all had to see together.

“Trust me, Brock,” he said one day in early August of 1985. “You’ll love Back to the Future.”

Even then, I didn’t completely understand what we were in for. I knew that the making of a segment on Rescue 911 would hardly be representative of the experience of what it must be like to shoot a big studio film, but all of the essential ingredients—cameras, lighting, a director, a producer, the sound guy, makeup artists, even a stunt man—were there.

I found out rather quickly that a television shoot is mostly about the waiting. The real work wasn’t in what anyone did while cameras were rolling—that was actually the smallest part of it. Our drab, overly brown living room was transformed into a pleasing, dynamic space through what seemed like endless hours of prep work by the lighting guy and the sound guy and everyone else who pulled on that drapery or closed that window. It took forever. If you blinked, you missed the actual seconds when the camera rolled. But, no worries. Wait some more and soon the scene or the interview or the insert of a car driving down a dark road would be filmed again. And again. And again. Each minute piece of action had to be repeated multiple times to accommodate different camera angles

and the mysterious, punishing demands of the totalitarian director who ordered “Again, one more time,” over and over again.

As bored as I sometimes was by the process, Dad was very much the opposite. Take after take, his smile and stamina never waned. When the time finally came to perform THE moment, the director gave Dad one last chance to back out. If ever he was going to have any psychological or emotional difficulty with the recreation, this was the scene during which that would happen. He would be required to again watch as two men, with guns, kicked in his door and fired their weapons at him. Tiny charges tucked away inside of the glass display cases were ready to blow apart in concert with the blanks fired from the guns. Other charges on Dad’s person would mimic the bullets that hit him. The impact would be nothing like what he felt on the actual night, but there would be strong,

abrupt sensations in the same places and he would need to react and fall to the ground with precision. And without having a freak-out. That it wasn’t real might not matter in the moment.

The stunt man, on call and ready, grabbed a donut and sat down. If anybody was gonna go down in a red haze of colored corn syrup, it was gonna be my dad. He’d bled for this once already and this was his reward. Everyone else could worry about him if that was what they needed to do, but no one would be taking his acting debut away from him. In the spring of 1990, fifteen months after he was shot, my father giddily reenacted his real-life action hero experience.

Logan and I were forced to go hang out in the trailer across the street from The Shop, far away from the psyche-damaging pretend violence. Because of the multiple set-ups and the fact that their screen time was brief, the two actors playing the shooters were already in there, waiting. So, for most of the night, right up until it was time for them to go into The Shop and play their parts, it was just the four of us.

“Hey, hey,” the one closest to the door said as we opened it. “Who’s this now?” They both sat at a little table in what looked very much like my grandparents’ motor home. “Who we got?”

“I’m Brock, and this is my brother, Logan.”

“Well, all right,” the other one said. “Pleased to meet you both. I’m Carl, this is Will. You fellas enjoying the shoot?”

“Yeah!” Logan said.

I wasn’t so sure. “It’s okay,”

“Pretty boring, right?” Carl said. “I feel ya, I feel ya. You know who’s having all the fun is your dad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wanna see but they won’t let me.”

“Just as well,” Will said. “They’re gonna run through it thirty times before they’re ready for us. Be glad you’re in here with the pretty faces.”

“‘Pretty?’” Carl asked. “That why we’re wearin’ masks in this scene?”

“Nah, man. We wearin’ masks because we’re too pretty. They don’t want us outshinin’ their dad, the star. Look at this mug, huh?” Will jutted out his chin and stroked it so we could get a good look. Logan and I just grinned. “Why else anybody wanna hide that?Obviously, I should be the guy behind the counter, not the guy with the machine gun. Don’t tell nobody this, but I’m really more of a gentle soul.”

“Fool, look at you,” Carl said. “You hear this guy? Man, their dad is straight up white. You think you’re so good you can play white?”

“Maybe. I got style, man. I’m versatile.”

“You ain’t that versatile.”

“Whatever. Why you gonna bring me down like that?”

“Why you—why you don’t look in mirrors?”

They both laughed uproariously at this, and we laughed with them. It was entirely possible I was looking at the two coolest people I’d ever met. “Hey, you dudes want some Twinkies?” they asked.

How was this a question? “Sure!” I shouted. They invited me and Logan to take the seats beside them.

“We got a lot of ’em. Have as many as you want!”

I couldn’t help but think about how unusual it was to be alone with two adult black men. I’d never had any real interaction with black adults before. At school, my friends had many different skin colors and were from countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce, but I’d never met any of their parents. These men didn’t seem all that different from anyone else I knew, except for the fact that, perhaps owing to their occupation, they were quite a bit funnier. And, they had Twinkies. Lots and lots of Twinkies. Being sequestered in the trailer? Not so bad.

Our family was going to be a piece of entertainment, and I happily broke unnaturally colored bread with the villains. What had been tragedy was now fun. What had been scary was now pretty much amazing. The wait in the hospital, the many visits to the ICU, the day after day of cleaning out Dad’s bullet wounds—none of that seemed to matter as we laughed and ate ourselves into early diabetes with the two men who would try to “kill” my father later that night.

Originally published on Facebook on 7/18/23

You can purchase The Other Side of Fear on Amazon right here.

(Photo credit: Kris Kimlin. From Day 1 of Production on The Shift)