The Two-Ton Pencil

A film shoot always involves a lot of people. On this particular day we were on an old ILM stage, Kerner Studios in San Rafael. A huge roll-up door was open to the May sun outdoors, but most of the cavernous stage was dark. In a room next door, a small theater,  the child actors and their mothers studied. On stage, the art director worked to deploy a science fair set. The two-minute film to be shot would dramatize Smart Skies, a flight simulator game written by NASA allowing kids to use math to change speed and trajectory, controlling planes as they came in for a landing.

Don was center stage, directing the lighting, rehearsing the camera operators and working with the assistant director who brought in the actors when everything was ready. Don wrote, produced and directed this short film. In his story, kids vied with each other to play, finding the game exciting.  So many people were involved. After planning for weeks, casting the actors, hiring crew and production people, Don learned that the last $1,000 of the budget (with which he intended to pay himself) would be chewed up by the administrative fees of a payroll company. 

I was there too, my only responsibility to corral the principals, the NASA people who wrote the game, the executive producers, and Don himself, into a “making of” short, asking them questions about how it all came to be. I had my own small camera crew. We could work, off to the side, until “quiet on the set” was called. 

When filming began, I took up a position to watch. Don looked like a magician in the blue light at the middle of the swirling cauldron of people, relaxed and comfortable. This is his element. The kids he cast were good, the camera operators a bit uncertain on the new Red cameras they were using. But everything worked. By the end of the day, Don had what he needed. Given good editing, a few special effects, the resulting film would spark interest in a somewhat pedestrian game. You can see it here.

The seam between the inner picture, the filmmaker’s vision, and the chaotic outer world is very fragile. So many elements involved. And it seems to be true that a film does have an author (auteur, as the French would say), someone who conceives of the project and guides it to fruition. It is usually the director. Some, such as Alfonso Cuaron, in his recent picture Roma, nail down every last piece, because, as he said, “I am the one who knows.” It was a re-creation of his childhood and he wanted it to be “right.” Others, like Robert Altman for M*A*S*H or The Long Goodbye, allow all hell to break loose on the set, giving his actors freedom in the frame. Altman was happy with the results, changing his vision to accept what had been added to the story.

The bringing together of so many people, of technology and weather and sound, into an approximation of what the filmmaker imagined in his mind’s eye is what makes filmmaking hard. “It’s like writing with a two-ton pencil,” one of Don’s friends said. Nevertheless the medium compels both makers and audience, drawing them in with its immersive magic, all of our senses engaged.

Thirty years ago, when I met Don, I considered myself a writer. I was finishing up one novel and working on another. I felt the written word could be a more powerful voice for change than film, precisely because film cost so much. Films were slower to appear. But I could not deny the indelible traces some films leave in memory. Almost as if they were your own. And, slow as it is to work its way into public consciousness, visibility plays a huge part in our current culture. As much as history does. Movies are good at time, but also at showing us the faces of people all over the world. Important movies become part of shared culture, exemplifying characters and referred to in conversation.

Don, thirty years ago, styled himself “Don Starnes, Film and Tape.” In order to stay in the film business, he channeled his gifts into being a Director of Photography, shooting on film, videotape when he had to, but almost immediately becoming involved in the new digital cameras which are now ubiquitous. What I saw, however, and still do, is a filmmaker, someone who is a great writer and audio engineer in addition to his prodigious visual talent. He also has the leadership to stir the bubbling cauldron of a film and the tenacity not to give up on any of these gifts.

Within a year or two of meeting Don, I too found myself on film shoots. As a production assistant, an extra, or babysitting. I loved the sense that at a certain point, just as a camera lens collects everything in its purview and makes an image of it, the whole film crew brings its concentration to what is in the frame and records it. When the media was film, requiring chemical processing, the director had already made many choices and knew what he wanted to get. Once digital cameras came in, however, and the consequences of shooting too much were less dire, it is more common to shoot everything in sight, “hosing the place down,” as they say. Too many choices without a clear vision, however, make the editing process more cumbersome, if it can be done at all.

I got hooked on film. I went to a year of film school, an introductory session in Denmark, designed to be international. When I got back, Don and I began writing scripts together. And I made a small movie of my own before realizing that I had started too late to make a living in one of the carefully defined roles of the profession, such as script supervisor or location manager. I retreated to my own strength, to my long-planned fiction writing.

We expect a lot of films. Mostly that they move us, seated as we are in the dark, allowing them to become our reality for a couple of hours. The best ones distill something from life, put a frame around it and hold it up for our consideration. Film buffs watch a director’s work over time. What was he or she trying to say? Did they make their point? Did a piece of the culture, not so far seen, emerge in the telling? The buzz around Parasite by Bong Joon-ho two years ago is a good example: a serious film, rife with comedy, beautifully made and nailing the horror of income inequality in its picture of two families.

We have all become critics, quick to complain if we don’t recognize any part of ourselves in the movie. Culture has, for a long time now, focused on the 10% of ourselves which differs from each other, rather than the 90% of the humanity we share. I look forward to movies which dig deep into our humanity, showing our vulnerability, but also the extraordinary ways in which we are knit together.

And in fact, the whole process has become democratized. Everyone carries a powerful video camera in their pocket, and most of us are quick to participate in the “A to D conversion,” anxious to translate our analog lives to the mammoth digital databases in the sky. This leaves plenty of room for filmmaking, nevertheless. Most of us “take” pictures, i.e. shoot without thinking much about it, grabbing images in front of us as if it were our right. Filmmakers “make” images commensurate with an inner directive. And Don? Though he has made thousands of images, he and I are convinced his best work is yet to come.