Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545099
18 M PS E . O R G BREAKING ENTERING & I usually did at least one shoot a week when I wanted to. I did a lot of the things nerdy kids my age do: I was on math T\team and in the brass band, I went to Space Camp, took lessons for my pilot's license (several members of my family are military aviators) but by the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to work in film. This coincided with getting my first job, naturally at a movie theater, and getting a weirder, cooler circle of friends who would do things like drag me to midnight movies and get me to record their bands. I arrived at USC Film School just assuming I'd pursue directing. In the late 1990s, half of the students in the program were all making their own versions of Pulp Fiction, while the other half were all waiting for The Phantom Menace to come out and designing TIE fighters in Lightwave. I didn't really feel in-place in either camp; the most aggressive directing and producing students had a level of career ambition I just didn't have. Also, the really successful student directors had people skills I didn't have at the time (or now, let me know), and I noticed even in school that directors tended to spend most of their time pitching and getting rejected. This was not for me, so I bounced around different things: I did editing, I production in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, as a movie theater organist. My mother's parents had met working at a movie theater: Grandma sold candy and grandpa was the projectionist. I got my first real brush with filmmaking from my mother. When I was about 10 years old, she had taken a class with the local public access television station to work on remote shoots, where she would do camera operating, editing and control room stuff; I tagged along a few times and was instantly hooked. Having the ability to just put something on a TV screen and working in a control room with lots of switches and buttons, computers and monitors everywhere was just totally my jam. I never wanted to do anything else. I remember having the thought, at 12 or 13, that one day I wanted to be the director or technical director of Late Night with David Letterman. There was just something so fluid about how the show seemed to emanate, stream- of-consciousness, from Dave, and my exposure to public access made me appreciate how hard it is to create that effect. Public access was an incredible opportunity to get my hands dirty and make stuff. We take this sort of thing for granted today because anybody can post to Instagram or YouTube, but it was very rare to have these resources in the 1990s. And public access taught me things you just won't learn as an influencer or content creator, like how to work on a crew, and how to do the different crew and engineering jobs on location and at the station. And there were so many opportunities to work on a shoot, there was always another city council meeting, or high school basketball game, and "I think (Steve) Flick eventually got me into the union by telling them he needed me to help with upgrades at the office and needed me to do Ethernet installation—something I learned how to do in work-study—and nobody on the Available List had that particular skill." designed a little. However, my work study job in college was in the film school's sound department where I worked as an engineer and Pro Tools tech. I spent most of my time—passably, badly— aligning the school's Nagra machines and 16mm dubbers, helping students figure out why Pro Tools 4 wasn't locking to their S-VHS dubs, trying to keep the Premier 5 installations working, things like that. This gave me a ton of practical experience working with the gear. I also met a bunch of people in the sound department: Addison Teague, Tim Nielsen, Kevin Roache, Angela Hackner, Greg ten Bosch, and Scott Kramer were working there at the time; Tom Holman, Dave Bondelevich, and Midge Costin were teaching there. As a part of my job, I also, naturally, had the alarm code for the facility and could access the studios at any hour of the day or night, without a reservation, and could work on student projects without eating into their budget allocations. People started asking me to do them favors: sneaking into do some sound editing or ADR, music tracking, pulling sound effects off of CDs. It's something I always kept coming back to and by senior year I was pursuing sound work actively. -In May of 2000, I graduated. I don't want to say my first job fell into my lap, but it did come at just the right moment. It happened that Addison had been working as a runner at Creative Café, Steve Flick's company in Glendale, and when he got a job up at Skywalker, he put my name in to take his place. At the time he said, "It would be what I could make of it," and I didn't really understand what this meant at the time, but I'd learn it meant a lot of driving around town making runs, printing and taping cue sheets, and