As I have touched on before, my big obsession in my mid-teenage years was to be a famous movie director just like Steven Spielberg. My directorial debut was an obvious tip of the hat to Spielberg--an 8mm movie in which a shopping cart chased my friend Tom Foster around my house.
I imagined this movie would just be the first of dozens of great film projects over a prolific career of cinematic greatness. But as it turns out, it was pretty much the only film I ever made.
You see, by the time I reached my junior year of highschool making movies about things that chase you around the house started to clash with this emerging desire not to be a dork. When the weekend came it seemed like all everyone wanted to do was go to parties and get drunk and get laid. (Either that or they had to do a benefit car wash for the Latin Club). It was very hard to get people to commit to being in one of my movies.
Nevertheless, I boldly decided to start my own filmmaker's club at the beginning of my junior year. I imagined this extremely creative and ambitious group of people that I would organize and lead. We would make cool movies and have film festivals and eventually become famous directors in Hollywood.
At the same time, all the other school clubs were inviting students to join their respective programs. The most coveted clubs were these pre-college fraternities like PDA (Power Drinkers of America) LTE (Livin' on the Edge). The whole deal with these clubs is that you would all get a T-shirt with the club initials on them and then you would get together and drink and make other people feel bad for not being in the club. These little pre-frats had their own hazing process for new members. One of the most memorable hazing rituals was "butt-fuck push-ups". This is where two hopeful pledges had to get on the ground and do push-ups on top of each other. This was done right in the middle of the crowded hallways at school and it made it look like the two guys were fucking each other.
So anyway, on my flier for my filmmaker club, I said that you wouldn't have to do any butt-fuck push-ups to be a member. All you had to do was show up and be ready to make films. I announced a time and place for the first meeting where I would preview what the club would accomplish.
Before I knew it, the first meeting for my filmmaker's club had arrived. I remember I sat kind of nervously watching these few dorky looking dudes wander into our meeting room and sit down. I particularly recall this one goonish, pasty faced kid with big lips and a moronic slack-jawed expression who was wearing a jeans jacket. He sat down with three or four other dorks and waited for me to get up and start the film maker's club.
At last I decided that the three or four people who had showed was all I was going to get. So I got up in front of these dudes and made a little speech.
"This is going to be a club where we all make movies," I said. I looked down and saw the slack jawed goon with the big lips looking up at me vacantly. "So come up with some good movie ideas between now and the next meeting," I said.
And that was pretty much the end of my film maker's club. We may have tried to meet a couple more times, but I don't remember. I spent most of my free time for the next two years hanging out and drinking beer. I made some skits with my video camera and a couple of my friends, but it was nothing spectacular.
My application to UCLA film school was rejected and I went to FSU in the fall and did pretty much nothing.
Epilogue: A couple of my friends actually ended up going to film shcool once they graduated. My friend Jack Taylor was admitted to NYU's prestigious program and got a degree in film. But then he went on to work in a spiritual book store in California. Now he has his own online book store that specializes in Zen, and other Eastern arts and religions. My friend Howard Pryor went to some film school in the mid-west that I had never heard of before. On one of his trips back to St. Pete he stopped by my little apartment with some friends and we watched his student film. It was just a couple of dudes walking around in the woods. There was this red blanket that kept flying around and disappearing. Then everything with his friends and the blanket went in reverse. Howard laughed at his film like he knew it was pretty stupid. Then I pulled out my shopping cart film that I had made when I was fifteen. It was actaully a lot more entertaining than Howard's student film from the unheard of film school in the midwest. At the end of my shopping cart movie screening everyone clapped and cheered. This kind of made me happy and sad at the same time.
9:40:31 AM 
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my emotional spectrum