Guest Blog: Wyatt Weed, ‘Retro Dreams’

Retro Dreams: Director Wyatt Weed ponders the state of film and how he got here.

For most people, dreams don’t come true.

Sure, sometimes you marry your childhood sweetheart, or get the job that you really wanted, the one with the great benefits and the sense of security, but rarely does the childhood dream come true: astronaut, president, secret agent.

For me, the dream has come true – and it is an amazing experience to be aware of it as it happens.

When I was 5, man landed on the moon. I was enthralled, and subsequently committed to being an astronaut for at least the next 6 years – until I saw a movie called “Jaws”, that is. Jaws made me aware of movie making and movie magic, but what I gravitated toward was oceanography. I was obsessed with the study of sharks for at least the next two years of my young life.

Then 1977 rolled around, and with it came the one-two punch that did me in: a little film called “Star Wars”, followed 6 months later by another little number called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

That was it – the pure bolt of lightning that cut into my soul. I borrowed a Super 8 camera from my next door neighbor and began recreating shots from Star Wars. My life soon became all about those 2 minutes and 47 seconds of film that were packaged into those plastic cartridges, 10 dollars to buy and process, one cartridge at a time, month after month, year after year.

I had found my calling, and that was to be a filmmaker, a director, and for years that obsession stayed with me. As a matter of fact, it is what I do today.

I sometimes lament the age in which I was born – I reason that if I’d have been born twenty years later, I would have grown up with digital cameras and home computers, and because of that I imagine that I would have been the next Spielberg by now.

Then in my more calm moments I realize that the reality is quite different. I was a child of the 60’s and 70’s, and that meant that I got in on the last gasp of Hollywood’s Golden Age, in a time when the studios and the networks still made big entertainment.

What do you mean, big entertainment? “Transformers 2” is big, you say, and there are a lot of huge movies out there – Harry Potter, Iron Man, The Dark Knight. Fair enough. But today’s Hollywood is not big in the way that my Hollywood was, my Sunday night television was, my Saturday morning was. I saw 2001 in a theatre in 1968. I sat glued to a television in an age before VCR’s and DVR’s, studying every second of The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, and Ice Station Zebra. I didn’t blink – if you did, you missed it.

I remember The Doors performing “Light My Fire” on the Ed Sullivan show. I remember the last season of Star Trek, the one with William Shatner. I remember Scooby Doo before Scrappy. I remember Sealab 2020 before Cartoon Network re-wrote it and added a “1”. I remember every single frame of Johnny Quest – did you know that Race Bannon’s first name is Roger, and that he was born in Wilmette, Illinois?

Back in that time, an entire family gathered in front of the television, discussed what they saw, and commercials were when you dashed to the bathroom, grabbed an ice cream float, and quickly returned to your spot on the floor. Your attention span was different, your priorities more attuned. There was no pause, no rewind.

You were in the moment. And The Brady Bunch was a show you could actually identify with.

These days, the very technology that has allowed me to have a career is linked to the same technology that allows you to read this very blog, and I find it both a blessing and a curse. I find I don’t watch television as closely as I used to, because with my DVR, I can rewind what I didn’t catch, re-listen to what I didn’t hear. Sometimes I will pause the show and begin a conversation – because I know that I can. And sometimes I don’t like myself for doing it. Similarly, if I miss that movie while it was playing the theatre, I don’t panic, because it will be on DVD in 4 months, cable in a year or so.

But I digress. The point is that digital technology allowed my dream to come true, even as my retro, avocado-green past caught up with me. Allow me to explain…

After going as far with filmmaking as I could in the St Louis area back in the 80’s, I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 and tried my hand at everything – acting, special effects, writing, producing, and directing. In the early acting days I scored a bit on “Star Trek: TNG” and was one of a dozen Predators who faced down Danny Glover at the end of “Predator 2“. As an effects artist I assisted in destroying North Viet Nam in “Flight of the Intruder”, helped Gonzo the Great become one of the “Muppets from Space”, and was responsible for getting Val Kilmer back aboard Mars 1 in “Red Planet”, just to brag about a few. OK, I helped crash the 747 at the beginning of “Mission: Impossible 2” as well, but don’t make any Tom Cruise cracks – he was a good boss. Didn’t try to shove Scientology down our throats once, I swear.

Then came the long-awaited directing career. Hrrrrrm…..

After an aborted attempt to get a science-fiction film off the ground with a company that shall remain nameless, I got my chance to direct a pilot for television. That show, “Star Runners”, was based on the Eclipse Comics title “Fusion”. The finished show was actually purchased by Universal, who promptly shelved it. It is a pilot you will never see, but don’t blame Universal – it was one of those “creative differences” things that you always hear about, one that I’ll explain in detail someday over a beer…

Next came some sweet second-unit gigs for Steve Wang, the creative madman who brought you “Guyver: Dark Hero”, “Drive”, and the current Saturday morning show “Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight”. Steve is the bastard child of Jackie Chan and James Cameron, and I learned a lot from him, surely enough to win my first directing gig on a feature, right?

Wrong.

Raised in the Midwest, I was taught a certain ethic – work hard, do a good job, and you will be rewarded. In Hollywood, if you do good work, they don’t want to move you up because they’ve already identified you with that position, and don’t want to lose you from that position. Plus, if you’re really talented, moving you up could be more of a threat than it’s worth. Add to that the fact that I was well into my thirties, and by Hollywood standards that made me an older guy who couldn’t possibly understand what kids these days would want. Why would you give me millions of dollars?

Sure, if you’re already in there, like Spielberg or Bay or Cameron, you keep working, but when is the last time you heard about a director getting his first film at the tender age of 45?

The 1950’s, that’s when.

So time moved on, and in 2003 I had the pleasure of working with an executive producer named Robert Clark on a feature entitled “Guardian of the Realm”. I was involved as a co-writer, a 1st assistant director, and as an editor and effects supervisor. That digital project taught me a lot – we wrung that Cannon XL-1s for every pixel it was worth, squeezed all of the editing juice out of that G-4, and got that movie onto Showtime and out onto DVD.

Now it’s 2006, and Robert Clark wants to do this again, but he doesn’t like LA. No, Robert wants to make another feature, but he wants to do it back in our mutual hometown – St. Louis. Would anyone be interested? Would I be interested?!?

Oh god, was I interested. In actuality, I had come to dislike LA over the years, and knew that my biological filmmaking clock was ticking, so I bailed on LA.

Actually it was more like I packed up and drove away screaming “I just want to live!!!”, channeling the late Sam Kinison as I did so. In late 2006 I began writing a script about a female vampire with amnesia, and in the summer of 2007 we began shooting a feature in 24p HD with a used Varicam.

Tech heads will get that. The rest of you, look it up. Point is, digital technology allowed me to make my first feature economically and with great control. We edited at home. We shot pick-ups, inserts, and miniatures in the garage. The living room became a photo studio. My bedroom was converted into a sound booth.

Along the way, I realized several things. First, if I had made a feature in my 20’s, I would have blown it. If I’d done it in my 30’s, it wouldn’t have been as good. Making the film in my 40’s, however, I was calm, confident, focused, and studied. I remembered what filmmaking was about, and some days I even enjoyed myself. The final film isn’t perfect, but I’m proud of how it turned out.

The main thing I realized, though, was that I had truly come home – it was my childhood all over, with my sense of joy and wonder returned to me. It was like shooting super 8mm in the backyard, but this time with a better camera and more training. I was capturing the thrill of creation again, pure creation, and loving every long, painful, low-budget minute of it. I was living my Hollywood, with my sense of big, my sense of how the world was…or should be. My old retro lessons had stuck with me all of these years, and now they were serving me well. I had made a film that I wanted to see, and might have seen on Saturday evening creature feature back in the days when the Beatles still played together.

My first feature, “Shadowland”, opens theatrically today at Landmark’s Tivoli theatre in St. Louis. From there it will play other towns, maybe at a theatre near you. If you happen to see it, I hope you feel the hand-made care that we put into it. If not, maybe you’ll like the next one that we do.

Regardless, I sit here a happy camper, looking back across the past 40 years of my life, contemplating the enormous circle that lead me here, to my dream.

And it’s pretty damn cool.