1) From then to now
The original motivation for setting up this site was to put down notes and stories from my time at Industrial Light and Magic where I spent most of my career. I was asked to do this by a number of folks when word got around that I was retiring. I’d like to think this is doing those folks a favor and not a thinly veiled attempt at an awesome if not self delusional professional life autobiography.
This section is about my life before ILM. It might help give a bit of context and if nothing else be a source for my grandkids (and you for that matter) to read about my wandering path getting to ILM . And also so I don’t repeat stories if I bump into you, because I’d forgotten I already told them to you. You can just cut me off saying “Oh yeah I read that on your site”. This certainly isn’t everything but just stories from along the way that later would have some influence on my career. It has turned out to be way longer than I had anticipated so bear with me.
2) Parents
My artistic bent might be genetic but both my parents were orphaned when very young so I don’t have any real knowledge of an extended family history to support that. Mom was an incredible singer but her brothers wouldn’t allow her to pursue that as a career so she settled into it as a hobby of sorts in the church choir and with the Toledo Symphony Choir. Dad was apparently a wild child raised by my Grandmother’s second cousin but he didn’t tell me much about his life before marrying Mom till I was out of college and he felt he could relax his “Dad” persona. He learned printing in a trade high school and then started working at the Toledo Museum of Art which had some connection to the New York Metropolitan Museum and he transferred there before WW2. If the Met had some Matisse or Paul Klee exhibit and they sold lithographs, he worked with the folks that made those collectibles. He fell in with the young folks of the fine arts community in NYC in the 1930’s and rubbed shoulders with folks whose careers would blossom. I mention this because my career evolved in kind of the same way.
All the time I knew Dad he was a mid level business man at a company called Mellocraft in Toledo, Ohio, so he wasn’t in a position, like I ended up with, where he could dabble in art or run into celebrities. However one day I was visiting and we were watching the news and some story about Ansel Adams came up on TV. He casually mentioned that he had helped him out with some of his print making back in the 30’s and Ansel had given him one of them as a thank you. I was like “You have an Ansel Adam’s photo?” He said “Yeah out in the garage somewhere.” Which doesn’t seem like the best place to store fine art but he said it got damaged in storage when he went off to WW2 and it was just a head shot of some actor. He said he knew Ansel before he got famous and to make money Ansel did some portrait work. I said “Was there anyone else I should know about whose art might be shoved in a box in the garage?” He said he didn’t think so but there were a bunch of jazz albums from the 30’s by folks he’d seen in the NYC clubs at the time that had been autographed. The big bombshell for me was he mentioned that years before he met my Mom he had previously been engaged to a girl from a very rich family who lived on Park Avenue in NYC. So lord only knows who he may have bumped into. He had started to tell me a story about them (never got her name) coming back from a party some winter day. He was laughing at the memory and we’d had a few beers so it was a bit disjointed and wandering (not unlike me telling a story). It was quite a fancy party and they were dressed to the nines and quite drunk and somehow came across a dead cat at 4am that his fiancee insisted they take with them to give it a proper burial. They got out of the taxi at her
families apartment building and gave it to the doorman so she could go fetch a proper box to bury it in knowing that her parents or at least the servants wouldn’t cotton to a dead cat being brought into the apartment. Just as she handed it to the doorman it “came back alive” scratched and hissed at the doorman and ran out the front door. At this point of him telling the story my Mom walked in and my Dad changed the subject as he didn’t like talking much about his life before my Mom when she was around. My point of telling this is so you can now guess where my predilection for telling random stories came from. I left Dad shortly after this and he said he would follow up next time with some more NYC memories. Sadly this was the last story he told me before he unexpectedly died, so other than what I just mentioned I know nothing about my Dad’s artistic side.
(This is the Ansel Adams picture.)
3) Education
Academics came pretty easily to me but I wasn’t the most focused student. I did really well in high school because I lived at home and my parents could help keep me focused. (Much like Production did when I was at ILM). When I got to college without their gentle daily prodding I wandered a bit. It took me six years to get my undergraduate degree. I’m including this section because it gets relevant regarding skills and knowledge I would use later. I think because my parents had been orphaned and had to navigate the Depression they tried to keep me focused on getting a degree that would allow me to get a good solid job. Medicine or engineering seemed the obvious choices.
4) St. John's Jesuit High School
Toledo, Ohio
Turns out this Jesuit high school would be the most academically rigorous place I would attend. After St. John’s the college classes seemed easy so I was well prepared for the next step. I nearly fainted dissecting a frog in biology so Medicine was out and I steered towards Engineering. For some reason I had a knack for Chemistry and Fr. Charles Sweeney took me under his wing. He was the first adult (that wasn’t related to me) that believed in me. A great mentor and for my senior science project (Photoluminescence of the CuSO4-NaCl Activated ZnS Phosphor (I know thrilling!!) ) he got me an internship at Owens-Illinois, a multi-national company that made glass. (If you have a 60 story glass building, chances are the glass was made by Owens- Illinois). Through a total coincidence I shared a lab with one of their engineers that made lenses. Although it had nothing to do with my project he was very open to telling me all about what he was doing. My take away was
1) Perfect lenses could only be made in space because gravity affects their creation.
2) Molten glass needs to be cooled instantaneously to make the inherent air bubbles as small as possible.
3) Only a certain number of aberrations can be fixed with grinding.
I didn't know if any of that was true but he showed me all sorts of lenses and I got to eaves drop on all sorts of discussions about their research. I went on to win the State of Ohio Science Fair and go to the Westinghouse National Science Fair. Nina F. Schor (eventually Dr. Nina) made history in 1972 as the first female first-place winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now known as the Regeneron Science Talent Search). Her winning project focused on plant biology and pollution. Who knew research on growing food would be more interesting than stuff that glows in the dark.
The relevance is that I got a ton of scholarship offers for academics and learned quite a bit about lenses.
5) University of Detroit (Mercy)
Detroit, Michigan
I only did a summer session here but I like to include it as part of my college experience because it was my first time living on a campus and one of my first times getting some validation for writing. I was the high school yearbook editor my Junior and Senior year and was sent to Univ. of Detroit as training for that and learning on the college level how to write stories.
My “literary” career actually started when I was about 12 and in Boy Scouts. I was the troop scribe and wrote the weekly update of what Troop 104 was up to for the “Maumee Valley Press”.
I honestly don’t remember much about that summer other than Univ. of Detroit was located in the area where the riots were in 1968 and it still looked a bit “post nuclear war” off campus. Fortunately I found some friends, one of whom had a car so we could pop over to Canada more or less just so we could say we did. The other interesting experience was one night sitting in my dorm room I heard someone in the room above bouncing a basketball. We were told there was some basketball camp going on and we were sharing the dorm with some of those folks. The bouncing went on and on and I finally decided to go up and tell whomever it was to stop. The room was obvious because I could hear the dribbling even better standing in the hallway outside the door. I knocked and pretty quickly the door opened. I was expecting some other high school kid I could yell at but it was 6’8” 225 lb Spencer Haywood who opened the door.
He said “Hey little dude.” I politely said “Sorry, I’ve got the wrong room.” and turned away.
He had been a star player at Univ. of Detroit and had something to do with the camp. He went on to play 14 years in the NBA.
Life lesson learned:
“Someone could be very annoying but also might be one of the best at what he does.”
United States Air Force Academy
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Unfortunately when I was in high school the Vietnam war was going on. My Dad (and a bunch of my uncles) had fought in WWII and knew all too well what war was really like. Dad didn’t want me to go fight in some pointless war. There were ways of getting around the draft. ( It was fairly common to hear of kids paying a doctor to write a note saying something was wrong that would make them unfit for combat (like bone spurs). But that took money. Dad said he didn’t have the resources to do that and thought it best in the long run if I didn’t run off to Canada, which was another fairly common option. My Dad was drafted during WWII and eventually became a Sargent so he had a lot of personal experience of what it was like to be an enlisted man. He said I’d have more choices/opportunities about assignments if I was an officer so suggested I take that tack. The only way to enter service as an officer was to join ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Core) or go to one of the service academies. This approach was a more acceptable way to avoid the draft and just be sent where ever they wanted to send you.
Because of my academic record I got an appointment to the Air Force Academy. My thinking was the folks at West Point were Army so there was a good chance they could be sent to Vietnam. Annapolis was Navy so being on a ship wouldn’t be too bad but the Marines are Navy and those guys would be in the worst of it in Vietnam. I liked the idea of being a pilot and figured at least with the Air Force there would be little chance of me slogging through a jungle.
I went for my pre-Academy physical to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. My group of about 20 candidates had a 2nd Lieutenant who had just graduated from the Air Force Academy to show us around and get us to our appointments. He was my wake up call to what I was potentially stepping into.
One of the first things up was a pretty simple physical including a quick look at an eye chart.
At my Dad’s suggestion I’d gone to an Ophthalmologist to make sure my vision was good. You needed to have perfect eye sight to be eligible for flight school. (“Bad eyes” was an easy way to rule out a high percentage of folks). I stepped up and could see all the lines of the various letters perfectly and read them off. The guy doing the test (I don’t think he was even an Optometrist) said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate. You missed a few there” and he wrote something down on my chart. I was stunned because I know I hadn’t but wasn’t in a position to argue. Later I asked our 2nd Lieutenant about this. He said it was just the start of our class ranking. The rank you had in your class at graduation determined the order you were in for picking an assignment.
He said the way it worked as far as assignments on graduation went, was based on class rank which was a combination of 60% Grade Point Average 30% Military Performance Average and 10% Physical Education Average. So if you had a 4.0 GPA was your Cadet Wing Commander and the captain of the football team you would be ranked #1 and have first choice of available assignments.
However there was also your personal record. He said I could dispute this note about my eyesight and it may very well turn out that my eye sight was perfect. But the note would be that I questioned a superior officer (the dude that did the eye test). So if I had a 4.0 GPA, was also a Cadet Wing Commander and co-captain of the football team. I wouldn’t be a “co” #1, I may drop down the list a bit for questioning authority.
In addition to that there were only so many pilot positions available each year so the further down the list of 1000 cadets in your class the less chance of doing that. Our 2nd Lieutenant’s said he was pretty far down the list. So his assignment choice was running the laundry at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and shepherding recruits. (Not really the stellar service career I was thinking of.)
At some point a Master Sergeant walked by and gave our 2nd Lieutenant a crisp salute. I don’t recall what exact rank he was but he had a lot of stripes. After he left our 2nd Lieutenant said “I out rank him so he is suppose to salute me. But he has years more experience and Master Sergeants actually run everything. I can tell him to do something and he must get all the enlisted men under his command to do it. But I would be stupid to not just let him do his job and ask for his advice on anything he has knowledge of. This particular Master Sergeant runs the motor pool. I could tell him that he needs to change the oil in every truck and he has to have his men do it. However he could come up with all sorts of valid explanations why this will take years and there is nothing I could do about it. This was a good life lesson.
This experienced bummed me out. I could see getting a 4.0 GPA but I wasn’t going to be captain of the football team and probably not the Cadet Wing Commander and with my “crappy” eyes (and/or complaining about them) I wasn’t going to fly. So I resigned my appointment. This meant that I was back in the draft pool.
You had to sign up for the draft when you were 18 but at the time you wouldn’t be drafted till you were 19. Starting in 1969 the way it worked is once a year they would have a draft lottery and oddly it was on TV. It evolved a bit over time but basically it was much like playing bingo. There was a big round plastic barrel with all the days of the year on bits of paper inside 366 plastic capsules. They rotate the barrel and one of the capsules pops out. That day would be assigned #1. Roll again for #2 etc. You were assigned a draft order number based on your birthday. The number of folks drafted depended on the number of people the Armed Services needed each year. I think the highest number ever drafted were birthdays 1-95.
The 19th birthday thing meant most of your high school class was going to be eligible for the draft at the same time. The watch “parties” were pretty weird since some of the folks being drafted were potentially being sent off to die. Anyone with a number below 100 was probably going to be drafted so they would be pretty bummed out, go sit in a corner and drink themselves into oblivion. Anyone with a number over 100 wasn’t going to get drafted so they would be elated, jump on a table, dance and drink themselves to oblivion.
At the time lots of young folks were protesting the war and the draft. The biggest personal action a guy could take was burning their draft card ( girls weren’t drafted). The law was that you had to have your draft card in your possession all the time. There were a lot of protests and most didn’t get out of hand. They tended to be something we could do to make a statement then when it was over go to a party. Often to impress a girl a guy might make a show of burning their draft card. If there was enough of a police presence you’d be arrested and taken off to be processed. Now this was a while ago and the draft cards were pretty simplistic and we did have Xerox machines so you could make a pretty realistic copy of your original and burn that. Then when you went before the magistrate the police would say you’d burn your draft card. You’d say I just was caught up in the turmoil and dragged along but I did not burn my draft card and so
could pull out the original and you’d be let go. You’d catch up with wherever the after protest party was and the girls would be so impressed you’d made such a statement burning your draft card. You’d make up some story about the magistrate being on our side and letting you go with just a warning. This worked a time or two but the girls eventually figured out about the Xerox so we were back to square one with them.
By the time my year came up to be in the bingo lottery the Vietnam war was really winding down. My lottery was held March 8, 1973 but President Nixon basically did away with the draft on January 27, 1973 so the lottery was meaningless thankfully, because my birthday July 5th was #22 so I would have been been in the first group drafted. By this point they had done away with all deferments except “sole surviving son” (which meant any brothers you might have had were killed in service). I went from 1-H (a holding classification) to 1-A which meant I could look forward to a letter.
“Greetings :
You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States etc”
That fortunately never came. Below is the draft lottery bingo machine and Donald’s draft card.
Life lessons learned.
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Sometimes the people in charge don’t tell the truth.
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Just because you are in charge doesn’t mean you can get what you need to done unless you treat folks with the respect they deserve.
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Nixon might have been a crook but he got me out of the draft.
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
With the draft out of the way I could concentrate on just going to college. As I had mentioned, I got a lot of scholarship offers and somehow my parents sorted out how to pay for me to go to Purdue. I decided on going there because it is one of the best engineering colleges in the country. I’d originally thought to pursue aeronautical engineering but decided to lean into my chemistry strength and try chemical engineering. I was pretty naive coming out of high school and not too worldly. I can’t say I had sorted out a good school/life balance. I didn’t realize how much I valued a social life that kind of automatically orbited around my school life at home. Going away to college meant sorting out that balance fell into my lap. Reality hit pretty quickly. The day I moved into the dorm our Resident Advisor had a meeting welcoming us. There was the normal rundown of where to find what and what was expected and then he said. “Don’t expect to date anyone until your junior year. The ratio of men to woman is 75% to 25% and half the woman here are just looking for a husband.” My roommate was from Indiana and he said “Yes that is all true” . He said I should think of Indiana as more of a southern state in its beliefs and life styles, kind of a more conservative place stuck in the 50’s where women just wanted to be wives. Both he and the RA were pretty spot on. The academics were superb but there was 0 coed social life. It was a very Fraternity/Sorority centric campus. It was hard to find anything socially out side of their houses so you had to pledge some fraternity to have a life. Bottom line I didn’t last long.
The classes I took were great but it was also a time of technical change. I was taking some calculus class and our professor said we could use scientific pocket calculators (which had just come out a few years before) for homework but not for tests because they were too expensive for everyone to afford. (A Hewlett-Packard HP-35 in 1973 was about $395.00 (roughly $3,150 in todays dollars). It would give an unfair advantage. But we could use slide rulers, which if you’d taken any advanced math in high school you knew how to use. It is unbelievable to me that we made it to the moon using slide rulers. Below is an example using a slide rule to calculate
2.3 * 3.4 = 7.8. In the picture the center slide is cut off above and below are enlarged images so you can see the 1 index lined up to 2.3 and the cursor aligned to 3.4 pointing to 7.8 on the lower body. Also notice the little π symbol. So it was useful sorting out geometry. So to be a nerd back then (when nerds weren’t celebrated) was a whole level of complexity we don’t have today. This kind of explains the slow plod of technical advances until all the great unwashed had access to cheap calculators.
We had a group calculus class (about 200 people) once a week with a major professor who would go over some concept and the rest of the week we met in groups of about 20 with a Teaching Assistant who would help us sort out how to do the associated transcendental functions to solve some problem. My TA had literally flown in from India the weekend before class started. English was still a distant second language for him. He read a note at the start of the first class explaining that because his English was so poor he would write the first line of the equation we were trying to sort out on the chalk board. Look around and if everyone nodded or said yes he would go on to the next line. If there was any question he would try as best he could to explain it. He was pretty brilliant at calculus and inversely so at English. His big first mistake was writing his name on the board. He wrote and said “My name is Phuck Kajano”. If you understand the equation I’ve written just say “Phuck yes”. If you don’t say “Phuck no”. There was dead silence thinking he was playing a joke on us. He wasn’t. That first day got a bit animated as the hour went on. I wouldn’t say we were shouting but by the end the group was enthusiastically saying “Phuck yes!! or “Phuck no!!. The next day he came to class and all business like wrote on the chalk board and said “My name is Fred Kajano”.
I took a beginning chem engineering class. It was a bit of a combination of sorting out what chemical processes to use and what machine techniques to use to do that at scale. I thought we’d be leaning into solving the world’s problems regarding petrochemicals or medicines. My final exam was setting up a process to make Maraschino cherries. I really liked Maraschino cherries before I learned how they are actually manufactured. (You really don’t want to know.)
Purdue is a great school academically but I hadn’t sorted out how to have a balancing social life so I left.
Life lessons learned.
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Sort out a good work life balance
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Find folks who share similar beliefs and goals
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If you speak a foreign language make sure you know what you are saying.
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Don’t get a job that requires a slide ruler.
University of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio
After I left Purdue I enrolled at the University of Toledo. It was in state (so cheaper) and local to home so I could fall back on more of my high school social connections. I stayed in engineering for a bit but eventually decided it wasn’t for me so switched majors . . . a few times. I forget the order and exactly which ones but I think it was psychology, education and English (which is where I got the writing bug). This went on for a few years and I wasn’t getting any closer to graduation as each had its own set of prerequisites. My Mom finally said “Why don’t you transfer to Mary Manse College while you sort out what you want to do.” (She was on the faculty so it meant I didn’t have to pay any tuition so they wouldn’t waste their money on me.) “You can get your undergraduate there and then you can go onto grad school wherever makes the most sense. (Which is exactly what my sister did going to the University of Wisconsin after Mary Manse.) So after a couple years at Toledo I moved on.
Life lessons learned.
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Don’t waste your parents money while you try to sort out what you want to do with your life.
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This writing thing might be the way to go.
Mary Manse College
Toledo, Ohio
Mary Manse had been around for about 50 years. Most of the time as a small (about 1500 students) all women’s Catholic college run by the Ursuline nuns. My Mom graduated from there before going onto the University of Michigan for grad school. I transferred over in September 1974. It closed due to bankruptcy in June 1975. I was literally the last student accepted there. I swear for years there were nuns mad at me for being the straw that broke the camel,s back. I know the nuns would never pray to have anything bad happen to me but I honestly don’t understand what mystical powers they might possess so I’ve worried about this somewhat ever since.
I wasn’t there for too long but had some great English classes and fell into a love of writing. I was also in love with Barbra Streisand. This was back in the time that all news came from just a few sources. 3 networks plus PBS, newspapers & magazines. I read every article I could but it never seemed to be enough. I got it into my head that she should write her autobiography. Obviously she wouldn’t have the time so she could use a ghost writer. “Me!” I tracked down her agent Marty Erlichman and sent him a letter proposing to do just that. (I lost a bunch of old letters and copies of letters in the many moves over the years so I don’t have and don’t recall what I wrote.) Oddly enough a few weeks later I got a very encouraging letter back from Marty. I really wish I still had that one because whatever it was convinced me he wanted to have a meeting in New York about it. I sorted out a trip staying at the New York Hilton Midtown. After I checked in I called the office and talked to a somewhat confused secretary. She said she would have to call me back. A bit later I got a call back (I think only because I was staying at the Hilton so they thought I must be someone) saying, “Sorry for the confusion. Ms. Streisand feels she is too early in her career to be doing an autobiography so she is passing on the offer.” I’m sure Ms. Streisand never heard a word of this and so somewhat sheepishly I wandered back to Ohio. I only mention this story because it comes up again just before I make a decision that ends up with me being at ILM.
With Mary Manse closing I needed to move onto someplace else. One of the younger faculty was Kate Chapman (Timko). I forget what she taught but she also was the girls basketball coach. There weren’t many guys at the college but she got some of us to help out at the practices. She was a great older sister type to me and took me under her wing. She had graduated from Ohio State and still had friends going there. She took me along on a visit or two to see them so I got somewhat familiar with the campus. Ohio State is huge and had every major you could imagine. My Dad said he thought I should go there. It was in state so the tuition would be reasonable and if I wanted to continue to change majors I wouldn’t have to change schools because they had everything. The other reason I wanted to mention Kate is she got me a summer job at Camp Starlight in Starlight Pennsylvania that I went back to for a number of summers. It was there that I made some New York actor and theater friends and years later I would meet Laura Wachter who would become my wife.
Life lessons learned.
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Don’t piss off a bunch of nuns.
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Read letters as they are and don’t try to read between the lines.
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You never know who might ending up pointing you to the love of your life.
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
After the summer at Camp Starlight I started at Ohio State. I went back into engineering because that is where most of my transferred credits were. My heart wasn’t in it though and I started looking around again. After my 4th year as an undergrad, bless my Dad, he said “Jon, we were planning on a four year undergraduate timeline. We have limited resources and it seems like what you really like to do is be a professional student and the time for us to help you with that has run out.” Fortunately tuition was pretty low. (About $270.00 a quarter) I’d had odd jobs all along so this wasn’t a deal breaker. I quit a beloved bartending gig at the Char Bar and got a job at one of fanciest (for Columbus, Ohio) restaurants. One Nation was on the 38th floor of the Nationwide Plaza building. It wasn’t a Michelin Star level restaurant (it was corporate owned) but it had the best view in Columbus and a great cocktail lounge. On the restaurant side I swear you could almost see to West Virginia. It was only a couple blocks from the state capital building so we got lots of lobbyists and celebrities. (Some of whom will come up in later posts.) However on the employee break room side you could look down into the Ohio Penitentiary built in 1834 and made Alcatraz look like a luxury hotel. Quite the dichotomy. The tips were pretty good but it was only a part time job so I looked for stuff on campus as well.
Computers were still in their somewhat early years and would take up an air conditioned room but had less capability than your phone does today. If you were an engineering student and had, had a few appropriate classes you could get a job doing simple programming and data input. I worked for the Psych department doing some rudimentary assembly language and fortran but mainly data input. This was back when you typed out thousands of cards. It wasn’t my thing but it helped pay the bills and taught me some skills that would help when I actually had a career.
Having wandered through a number of majors I finally settled into what was the Photography & Cinema Department at that time. Somehow OSU had lured a few professors from USC for a time and we were intertwined with the theatre department so it was a little Midwest Hollywood.
My time there was a little pre-video so everything we did was on film. Fortunately the OSU football team was somewhat better funded than a lot of NFL teams at the time. The football team would hire film students to make the game films. This was not meant to be a creative task. It was more like news gathering so the coaches and team could review the game the next day and maybe feature some star player. The point of me mentioning this is the team could afford Arriflex 16mm cameras. If it wasn’t game day the film students had access to them. There wasn’t a film lab in Columbus but we could piggyback on the team’s connection to a lab in Detroit. Because the football team needed to edit down the game films there were some Kem flatbed editing machines exactly like what was used in Hollywood. The Department also had an Oxberry animation stand we would use when we did the animation courses. And finally some Prostar black and white film processors so we could develop our tests locally and not have to wait a few days for the Columbus>Detroit>Columbus turn around. The department was nicely set up but it was expensive for a student to make a film with buying the raw stock, processing it and paying for prints.
I had to take some theater classes for my major so got to meet a bunch of those students.There isn’t a lot of call for actors in Columbus so a lot of them moved to New York on graduation. I made a point of visiting them a bunch so although I was on the periphery I got a lot of insight into productions, agents, tryouts etc in the real world.
For one of my classes I was involved as a stage hand in a production of “The Bacchae” by Euripides. I mention this because they had a practical effect that was pretty off the charts. It was a set of steel bars welded together to represent Olympus. It was about 30 feet in diameter and about 20 feet high with random platforms for the actors to stand on. It was kind of like looking at a big angular set of monkey bars. What was remarkable was they had a pneumatic system set up that when turned on sent compressed air to the feet of the structure which made it float maybe 1/2 inch off the ground. When this happened one of the actors (who was playing a god) could move and rotate the whole “mountain” by themselves. I know this sounds impossible but I have a 30 ft boat that weighs about 7000 lbs. Floating in the water my 8 year old grand daughter can push it around with not much effort so this was a variation on that physics. It was a real insight into some of the practical effects I’d bump into in my career.
Photography was a big part of the degree. A cheaper way to learn how to use a camera and lenses than a movie camera. I took a ton of photos for school projects but also did head shots (involving my inner Ansel Adams of my Dad’s time) for the theater students, wedding photography in the pre-Photoshop days where I airbrushed away a lot of the brides’ imperfections and found if I slimmed down the mother and mother-in-laws a bit in the group shots I’d get some extra bonus cash and recommendations. I did a little bit for the football team including the picture below of Woody Hayes coming off the field. He was nice enough to sign this one for my Dad. I did some local ad work as well. Also below is a self portrait I had to do for a class. My girlfriend at the time said it looked like I could use it in an ad to promote myself as a boy toy.
So I finally got the appropriate 196 quarter hours credits that I need out of the 276 quarter hour credits I collected in my wandering academic career. At my graduation my Dad passed along a tremendous insight into my next step. He said, “Jon, they don’t make a lot of movies in Ohio. You should move some place that they do."
Life lessons learned.
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Working at a fancy restaurant (for Columbus, Ohio) lets you meet a number of celebrities whom you get comfortable chatting with so you learn to have normal conversations with such folks.
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Learning the basics of programming can really open opportunities as that field grows.
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Going to a university that has a very rich football team can give you access to professional level gear that you wouldn’t otherwise learn how to use.
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Touching up wedding portraits to hide blemishes and imperfections of midwestern women is no different than touching up images to hide blemishes and imperfections of movie stars in visual effects shots.
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Having friends who live in New York City that allow you to occasionally crash at their apartments allows you to have some pretty incredible social and theatrical experiences you’d never have in the midwest.
Los Angeles
It took me a couple years to realize my Dad was right. After one last summer at Camp Starlight I packed up and moved to Los Angeles with my girlfriend (now wife) Laura (Rosie). In my infinite wisdom I moved out there during the 1980 Actor’s Strike so nobody was working in the film business. This did kind of turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I sent a ton of letters with resumes out to anywhere I could find a lead. The blessing was that since no productions were going on I got a lot of interviews with producers who needed something to fill their days. Walking into a job interview knowing you aren’t going to get a job because no one is working allows you learn how to do job interviews. You really have nothing to lose so you can try stuff. I initially got a pretty tepid response. I thought what I should do since I had a pretty limited resume was come up with a somewhat outrageous cover letter to catch their attention. I remembered a story that Barbra Streisand in her first biography in Playbill for “I Can Get It For you Wholesale” claimed she had been born in Madagascar and raised in Rangoon because saying you were from Flatbush in Brooklyn didn’t sound as intriguing for someone who wanted to be a Broadway star. I was leaning into getting a job either writing or doing some camera work so I wrote a bit about both. I had a couple Woody Hayes stories to wrap the camera work around and I told the hilarious self deprecating story of my botched attempt to ghostwrite Barbra’s biography. My thought was to send it to producers because they would have the broadest understanding of available jobs. The clever cover letter was to get it past their assistants. One of the producers was Ray Stark. He was married to Frances Brice whose mother was Fanny Brice who the movie “Funny Girl” was about which Ray Stark produced so he would know both Barbra Streisand & my old friend (well acquaintance) Marty Erlichman and that worked. I got a nice personal rejection letter from Ray but was pointed to Warner Bros. and got an interview with one of the head writers. The thought was when the strike was over I would join a writer’s room and they would see where that would go. I’d be the low man on the totem pole running out to get the coffee etc. but it would be a foot in the door. I just needed the strike to end.
Life lesson learned.
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Sometimes you can turn what was a failure into an opportunity.
Below are Marty Erlichman and Barbra Streisand (sigh . . .) and Barbra Streisand (another sigh . . .) and Ray Stark
Calico
Not wanting to have all my eggs in one basket I kept looking while waiting. This was the early days of video games and one of my favorites was “Space Invaders”. We lived in Santa Monica and there was a great game arcade down on the pier that had that one among others. I got to the point where I thought I should probably be looking more for a job than playing “Space Invaders,” so one day I picked up a copy of the LA Times from a stand right outside the arcade. Scanning through the want ads I saw one. Calico Creations was looking for an animation camera operator. A camera operator of any sort is pretty high up the pecking order in Hollywood and generally a Union job. The ad said it was a small non-union shop. To me that meant I had a chance, so I got an appointment.
Calico was located up in the San Fernando Valley in Northridge. The office was in an industrial park much like the one ILM was in when located in San Rafael. Tom Burton one of the owners met me at the door. I’d done so many interviews by that time I was pretty comfortable and ready to walk into his office and plead my case. However Tom didn’t want to talk. He gave me some animation line up sheets and a stack of animation cells and pointed me to one of their animation stands. Coincidentally it was exactly the same model Oxberry that Ohio State had. He showed me where the dark room was with some black and white film and where their Prostar was so I could develop what I shot. He said “Just give me a yell when you finish.” I really wasn’t expecting this but was very happy that all the equipment was familiar. To be honest his test shot was easier than my final exam shot from my animation class at Ohio State. Took me maybe a half hour including developing it. I gave him a yell and he put it up on one of their Moviolas. Looked at it a few times and said, “You’ve got the job.” I was dumb founded. I said “Don’t you want to talk about my resumé at all.” He said “No. I’m from Illinois and I saw you were from the Midwest as well so I figure you have a decent work ethic to come all the way out here looking for a job. More to the point you are the seventh person that has come here looking for this job and the first one that could actually run the camera. I’m tired of talking to folks who think they can talk their way into job and be trained up.”
Tom his wife Claudia, Ken Leonard & Lee Mann were the four partners that owned Calico. Tom, Claudia & Ken had worked at Filmation doing Saturday morning cartoons before leaving to start Calico. They could draw and animate anything. Honestly they are some of the finest artists I’ve ever worked with. It was a pretty small company at the time. I was the seventh or eighth one hired. They mainly did commercials mixing live action with graphics. The graphics were mostly by hand or animated on film animation stands as computer graphics were very simplistic at the time and personal computers were practically nonexistent. I honestly forget exactly what we had but I think eventually we got some IBM PC (Model 5150s) and later some Hewlett-Packard printers. In general the approach was to generate elements that would be composited together on a non linear editing system like Quantel’s Harry. The goal was to sit with the client in an edit suite and deliver a final shot including sound and music.
Hal Winn was the main music producer they collaborated with. Hal was a bit of a legend from the sixties helping folks make hits through his various production companies. I heard some of his music before I ever met him. Some incredible wild electric guitar riffs and I envisioned a crazed rocker jumping around the stage when performing them. In reality Hal looked like he could have been a banker. When you watched him play a riff, the music could be crazy but he’d just be sitting there and his hands were moving but the rest of him looked like he was reading a book. Tom had a bit of a background in music so he was a good mix with Hal. Tom had been in a pretty good band in his high school and early college days but felt he’d have a better chance in LA and moved there to attend UCLA. After he left Illinois some of the folks in his old band reorganized and became REO Speedwagon. Sometimes you never know.
Look for this documentary on Youtube if you are curious about Hal.
Youtube >>>>> Behind The Legend: Joseph Hooven & Hal Winn
“Psychotic Reaction” was a hit in the 60’s and is one of the songs Hal produced. Look for that on Youtube as well. In particular view the venue version that has girls dancing on stage. It will give you an idea of Hal’s musical style and what your mother or grandmother was really like back then. A psychotic reaction also could be a way to sum up my time in LA.
Youtube >>>>> New Psychotic Reaction - Count Five {DES Stereo} 1966
Your Grandmother dancing back in the 60's
Hal Winn
Tom hired me because they needed another camera operator. They had just landed a big job updating the WNEW (New York) graphic designs that would introduce their various shows. The designs Tom, Claudia & Ken sold them on were pretty ambitious for a small company. You could do a lot of the camera movements by hand but that did take a while. Their idea was to add some motion control to the rigs to help automate that process. Rob Burton (Tom's brother) had been working on some variations of machine tool controls. Machine tools like lathes were (are) incredibly accurate, the problem was how to adapt that to a camera as it needed multiple motors. 1) camera drive 2) camera focus 3) camera zoom 4) camera fade 5) animation bed movement north/south 6) animation bed movement east/west 7) animation bed rotation 8) peg bar animation. So an 8 axis system. Rob’s approach was also pretty code intensive. He would drop the code to tapes that would run the rudimentary controllers. Calico found a company in Atlanta that had a 4 axis system for $100,000. Ignoring the fact it was half the motors we needed to move, it was too expensive on a $400,000 budget.
In 1980 there weren’t that many visual effects type companies and that meant a constant migration of people going from job to job, so if you were working on a problem word got around. One day out of the blue Bill Tondreau came knocking. He said he had an 8 axis system for
$10,000. Tom politely kicked him out figuring it was a scam based on a known company asking 10 times as much for half the capability. Bill had a set up at a company in Venice. Rob suggested they should go down and see it. If it was true we were set. If it was a scam they could at least have lunch at the beach. Turns out Bill was a horrible salesman. His set up performed way better than he had tried to explain. Calico bought a system (then more over time). They also gave Bill some space to work in at Calico so they could keep current with any updates and we could be a test bed for anything Bill might come up with. Eventually Bob Able (pretty much the premiere commercial production company at the time) lured Bill away. I remember at the time the Cinematographer’s Union was dead set against motion controlled cameras because they thought it would take work away from their members. ILM’s motion control rigs were a bit of an anomaly because they had the backing (and $$$) of George for their development. The availability of a relatively low cost version of ILM’s motion master did just the opposite of what the Union feared. It didn’t do away with jobs it created them. Motion controlled camera rigs could do so much more then ones just run manually. Bill won a couple Academy Tech awards and then in 2004 was given a full statue for his significant advancements in the field of motion control technology for motion picture visual effects. His Tondreau/Cooper Control systems were the industry standard.
Bill with his Oscar
This is me working on Calico's down shooter
and flatbed motion control animation stands.
At that time flying graphics and “2001: A Space Odyssey” type effects were popular. The problem was there weren’t user friendly interfaces to do this. My coding days from college helped but I honestly don’t recall which language we used for what. The Tondreau stuff was set up so we were just using spreadsheets so no actual programming. Bill kept how he drove the motors to himself because under the hood that was what made his stuff so much better than others. We wandered through Basic G-Code Programming, MBasic, Pascal, C, C++ Pascal, Fortran, Cobol.
Below is a scan of part of the code for some animating graphic thing I did to give some idea of the hell we were living in. The next image is a 2d graphic version of stars. The next image is positioning it in 3d space. The fourth is a “3d model” of a basketball court. All pretty crude by today’s standards but put a glow on it and fly them around and you were as good as it got back in 1980.
The slitscan effect Doug Trumbull did for “2001: A Space Odyssey” is really mind blowing since it was an entirely mechanical pre-computer process. The Tondreau system allowed us to duplicate the process at a fraction of the cost and time. It is an interesting rabbit hole to go down if you look on line for how Doug did the slitscans for “2001”. Basically you are playing with how the film gets exposed. Instead of a shutter you use a narrow slit. You have some artwork you want to manipulate. You scan the artwork left to right with the slit while you move the camera. A simple zoom in while you are doing this will put perspective on a title for example. The less graphic the artwork, the more “artistic” the image will be. Below is the slit. The white line would just be a clear section of an animation cell. The next piece of “art” is just a noise pattern. That could be made by dabbing black paint on a clear animation cell with a sponge. You drag this art across the slit. Because it is just a random noise pattern and we are zooming in on while we rotate you get the third image we made using a blue gel to cover the slit. Trippy! Rob and I took this technique to ILM when we went there.
Calico did about 50 projects a year with a small staff. We got moved around on projects depending on the need. I could end up helping building sets as well as doing camera work and a lot of graphic programming. I also often, late in the evening, dropped off the day’s film to be developed at Technicolor or CFI because it was “on my way home”, especially if I had the late night munchies and was going to stop at Irv’s Burgers. (Irv’s was a known rocker’s hangout on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. Sadly I never crossed paths with Linda Rondstadt there.)
The film labs closed about 11pm. We mainly used Technicolor in Burbank and CFI (Consolidated Film Industries) in West Hollywood. I don’t recall why or when we used one or the other. Technicolor was more dependable for the short film runs we had. CFI seemed more geared to running out thousands of feet at a time for the studios. CFI was kind of unreliable for the small amounts we put through. (We referred to them as “CFI Care”). One of the advantages of CFI was that it was really close to the Black & White lab we used, so I kind of got two drop-offs for one trip. I cannot remember the name of the B&W lab and its location has been redeveloped into a giant apartment complex so I can’t even get a street view photo of the old building. It was a small lab but did really high quality work for optical printer work for example. They had set up in what was probably a retail dress or shoe shop originally. I say that because the entrance was recessed between two big display windows like you used to see displaying shoes or dresses in stores along the street. The drop off was just their mail slot on the front door. That area of West Hollywood was a bit sketchy at night. It was where women or men of “negotiable affection” would set up shop. There were definitely streets for one or the other. The B&W lab was in the “mens” area. One night I just pulled over to the curb in front of the lab to pop out and drop off the film. I looked over and a drag queen had set herself in a pose in the very favorable entrance lights. I quickly drove off. I sat about a block away hoping she would move on but she didn’t. After about 10 minutes I decided to face my fears and try again. I drove back to the entrance and started to get out. She sashayed toward me and I said “I’m just dropping off some film.” She said “Oh honey don’t worry I can drop it in the “slot” for you.” I didn’t really trust her so walked around her and dropped the film through myself. On my way back to the car she just said “Well have a good night” and I drove off. We didn’t have black and white film runs every day but when I went back a few days later she was there again. As I slowed to a stop she sauntered over and said “Oh you’re back! Did you miss me? Have anything to put in the slot tonight?” I kind of chuckled because she was so over the top. I said, “No just dropping off film.” She said “I can do that for you. Don’t worry you can watch me walk over. That’s my best side anyway.” So I gave her the film and she walked over and dropped it through the mail slot, turned around, gave me a little wave and said “Night honey!” And I drove off. I saw her a few more times on drop offs and then she was gone. This photo isn’t her or the B&W lab but pretty much exactly what I was up against.
I mentioned that Calico was in an industrial park. It had a real mix of businesses. There was a machine shop right next door which was real convenient for getting very precision movers made. Across the parking lot down a few buildings was a clothing manufacturer. All these buildings were built like warehouses. Open spaces with 15 or 16 foot ceilings. Each company added offices or remodeled the interiors depending on the company. This dress company was literary about 40 seamstresses working at sewing machines. They turned out pretty high quality kids clothes. To fit them all in there the owner had made a two story metal grid. This was pushing it for the interior height of the building. He really couldn’t have two 8 foot floors which is pretty much the norm for ceiling height. With the supports and floors he was lucky to get 7 feet on each level. I don’t know if it was intentional but most of the people that worked there were about 5 foot tall Hispanic women. Mostly they were sitting at their sewing machines but if they walked around they had plenty of head room. The only reason I know this is because often they had the front garage door open so you could see inside. They also blasted Mexican radio stations so the parking lot often sounded like a party.
Across from the two buildings was a porn company. This was back in the days when porn was on video cassettes. It was mainly a distribution warehouse. Every day two Rolls-Royces would drive up (the owners) and occasionally a UPS truck would do a pickup. I was never in the building but there was apparently some small stage in there. About once a month some actors would show up and shoot for a few days. The only reason I know this is that all the businesses shared a roach coach that made a stop between the buildings a couple times a day. He’d play his truck horn when he arrived and that was the signal for all of us to pop out to get coffee, soda, a sandwich etc. The porn actors would throw on robes and come out as well. This was pretty much a real life version of “Boogie Nights”. Sharing a wall with Calico was an editing company. It seemed that he mainly was editing porn but he had a vision to become a director and helped out occasionally at the place across the parking lot. He'd be very excited about how his artistic vision was being presented. For example by having the "actors" lying on a glass topped table and shooting from below. "Art not Porn" he'd say. A few years back I ran into Paul Thomas Anderson and mentioned all this. He said he thought he knew who I was talking about because there were some well known porn producers and editors in Northridge back in the day. I did say the actors I met at the roach coach weren’t as attractive as those in his movie "Boogie Nights". Regarding the roach coach, it was owned by an old hippie. He sold food off the back but pot (& roach clips) from the glove compartment up front. Ah! LA in the 80’s. Calico's porn neighbors were pretty much at the epicenter of the 1994 6.7 Northridge earthquake. Not sure this is entirely a coincidence.
In Calico’s second building they shared a wall with a practice studio. Every once in a while music groups would show up to practice before going out on tour. Most I didn’t recognize but one time the guys from “Three Dog Night” used it. It was a bit past their prime at that point but they had a reunion with most of the original band. The coolest thing about it was they all drove to the studio in these vintage 50’s & 60’s cars. Michael Jackson also used the studio in his run up to “Thriller”. This studio was a place where, whatever the band was that was going to go out on tour could get used to playing together. The Calico down shooter I worked on shared the wall so you could hear a muffled version of whatever they were playing. However if there was heavy bass you could feel that pretty well. Michael was there for a while so I heard a lot of the songs on “Thriller”. But it wasn’t like the album. It was practice so stops and starts and any noise on our side of the wall muffled what they were doing. However when the album finally came out the bass parts felt very familiar.
Below is a Publicity page that shows the variety of things Calico worked on. They ramped up to be doing about 50 projects a year and were moving back to doing Saturday morning cartoons, producing “Denver the Dinosaur” and “Widget”. One project I totally forgot about before unearthing this flyer is “Sex in the Cinema”. This was a Playboy production where they were going to present various films on the “Playboy TV Channel”. The wanted a generic introduction. When we first heard this was going to happen we (the guys in particular) were excited that we would probably be shooting some of the Playmates or club Bunnies. Word came down from Playboy execs that they didn’t want any girls in the piece. It was going to be all graphics. We worked on probably the only production Playboy ever did that didn’t have one girl in it.
I worked at Calico for about 5 years and the folks were wonderful and gave me lots of opportunities and I learned a ton. In my time there I got married and we had two kids. My wife and I decided that Los Angeles was not the place we wanted to raise a family so I started to look around for other opportunities. Calico was doing well at this time but was almost too busy. Tom Burton was the creative lead and his brother Rob was the technical soul of the place. They started to have disagreements about business stuff. Rob decided to move on as well. He told me he needed a brother more than a job. That is one of the most profound things anyone ever had said to me, and became a real foundation about how I thought about work going forward. It is easy to obsess about jobs because you have to pay the bills but life really comes down to family and friends. A job will never give you a hug.
I owe my career to Tom and Rob. Tom for giving me the opportunity. Rob for showing me how to do it. Rob is one of the most brilliant, intuitive, programmers and camera operators I’ve ever known. Sometime after I left Calico ILM hired Rob.
This is an old polaroid of the Calico folks when I worked there.
Washington D.C.
We moved to Washington DC and I worked on a couple projects. One was for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was a short movie to be shown in a special exhibit about the life of women in 1776 in the U.S. . It was mainly shot in Colonial Williamsburg, the recreated 18th century village. The exhibit also had recreated rooms from that time. The Smithsonian has the ultimate “attic”. The Museum Support Center is a 1.4 million square-foot warehouse that holds just about anything you can think of from American history. If you wanted an umbrella from 1776 that a woman would carry they probably have 20 or so to choose from.
This is a photo of one of the aisles with a bunch of the drawers pulled out.
My other D.C. project was for the US Army. A recruiting movie about the history of “Army Nurses”. This was mildly problematic in that before 1901 there were no formal Army nurses. Before that time the Army used anyone they could and a lot of them tended to be the camp followers, many of which were those women of negotiable affection. So we glossed over the earlier “volunteers”. One of the problems in creating any programs in D.C. was that there were few video editing companies and folks like National Geographic would book months at a time. Small producers tended to be out of luck. However the Army could get us in one they used whenever we wanted. It was owned Sun Myung Moon of the cult Moonies fame. Moon was a known conservative and Reagan was president so we just went with the flow and never really inquired how connected the Army was to the Moonies. And regarding nurses and my future connection to ILM. The first Duty Station for Army nurses in 1901 was at the Presidio in what became the Letterman Army Medical Center which is literally where ILM stands today.
It was tough scrounging up jobs in Washington D.C. for the small place I was working. I didn’t really see a long range future there. Mildly odd/ironic that the last project I worked on in D.C. ended in the Presidio when out of the blue on that day Rob called up and said ILM was looking for a Tondreau camera operator. Was I interested?